I don’t support Ron Paul’s candidacy, then, because my own talents, proclivities, and commitments lie with the Agorist and left-libertarian projects, and I value the promotion of those projects over the short-term benefits that Paul’s candidacy might gain at the expense of those projects. But I can’t see that this preference is compulsory for everybody. Even if every libertarian ought to be an Agorist and a cultural lefty (and so they ought! – there are limits to my Aristotelean pluralism), it seems to me that it does not follow that every libertarian ought to make the trade-off between those long-run projects and the possible short-run gains from Paul’s candidacy the same way I do.

I’m all for people changing their mind or revising their assessments, but in light of Rod Long declaring that he will run for the LP Chair in Alabama, I can’t help wondering if he no longer values agorist and left-libertarian projects over politics.

A shift in time preference may be afoot.  Perhaps the left-libertarian capital stock has been depleted, and long term projects have to be abandoned by the master builder.

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One such item is the excommunication from the anarchist blogosphere (yeah, think about that) of a fella named Keith Preston. Seems Keith wrote some things that upset some people, namely Charles Johnson, Brad Spangler and Kevin Carson, amongst others.

I had never heard of Keith Preston until I saw this post on No State, and it intrigued me, because I have recently been cutting ties with paleos who are more conservative than libertarian.

So yesterday, I finally got around to giving the offending post by Preston a rigorous examination with a clear mind and a critical eye.

The article is approx. 7700 words, excluding the three quotations that lead it off but including quote blocks in the post proper.

NoState points out a 68 (give or take) word section as offensive.

Do we really attract more people into our ranks by having so many self-hating whites, bearded ladies, cock-ringed queers, or persons of one or another surgically altered “gender identity” in our midst? Is this really something the average rebellious young person wants to be associated with? Could we not actually attract more young rebels into our ranks if all of this stuff was absent? I believe we could.

Ironically, most of the post indicates out how Keith  could care less about people’s personal preferences, but when he singles out specific stereotypes (admittedly, in an inflammatory manner) it’s implied to be hate speech, when it clearly is nothing of the sort.  I don’t know if being gay or bisexual is a choice or not, I assume some people could choose to have those sexual perspectives, but Keith makes a fantastic point about the conflation of gay rights with racism, and I can see that in how the PC crowd begins to extend discrimination so widely, it is nearly impossible to remark without self-censorship.

Keith seemed to be making clear that he wasn’t comfortable with alternative agendas and preferences leading because he doesn’t think that is good for big tent anarchism.  And it probably is not, because fringe anarchists and cultural preferences don’t have a mainstream appeal, and in the blogosphere in particular, there seems to be a drowning out of alternatives to alternative  ideas and preferences.

It’s interesting to read the responses to Keith’s post, overlooking all of the good, for a paragraph or two of inflammatory rhetoric.  I don’t think he could have done much more to qualify his statement in advance, dedicating what seemed like half of the very long post to laying out his own ideas, experiences and preferences.  He could have toned down his rhetoric, but if he is as frustrated as I am with certain parts of the libertarian and anarchist left, then I can understand his questionable judgment.

Brad Spangler;

The first thing that came to mind for myself was that Preston’s colorful call to purge the queers reeks of the influence of the sort of strutting leather-boys with way to much Fallschirmjäger memorabilia who think that they’re not gay as long as they’re always the top.

Seems Spangler didn’t notice the comment (mid-post) about gays that Preston respects

For instance, I’ve gone out of my way to promote the work of Justin Raimondo, not because Raimondo is gay (who cares?), but because Raimondo is one of the very best critics of U.S. imperialism to be found. One of the very best critics of the police state is Glenn Greenwald, a gay man. One of my favorite political writers is Gore Vidal, who is a homosexual.

and (emphasis mine)

As for homosexuals, let them be evaluated according to what they actually contribute to our movement rather than simply for their status as homosexuals. We need the likes of Justin Raimondo or the late Alisdair Clarke. I’m not so sure we need some of these others.

So taking the previous comments into account with other statements in the post, Preston has no issue with gays (ie. “who cares?) and states that he appreciates and respects several gays, but wants anarchists to be evaluated on their merit, not their social preferences.  That is significantly different than what has been criticized by Spangler.

RadGeek in response to another commenter at NoState;

I dunno, dude, when someone starts complaining about “cock-ringed queers,” “bearded ladies,” “pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair,” and “persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity,’” quote-unquote, and states, without any qualification, that fewer such people ought to be “in our midst,” in order to make the kind of person he thinks of as the “average young rebel” (who, we can glean from the textual evidence, is supposed to be white, male, straight, and not an immigrant) more comfortable joining up — well, I get the impression that he does care, and moreover that he expects other people to care. Not so much about the fact of sexuality per se, but more about how far one is open about sex and gender in a way that makes things uncomfortable for those who believe in a very rigid set of gender norms.

If RadGeek has read the entire article (he may have) then I don’t know how he can draw some of the conclusions he stated in the above.  Keith makes clear he cares about what gays contibute, not what sort of sex they participate in, because it is irrelevant.

Textual evidence is nonsense, in that Preston infers that what is desirable and missing from anarchism is more racial and sexual diversity.  The textual evidence is RadGeek’s hangup about Preston’s views on immigration, which are a testy second-best issue for many libertarians, present company included.  No need to shift the goalposts.

And the last sentence is a strawman, in that Preston makes clear that sexual preference is not the issue at several points in the post.

Kevin Carson;

But while I could respect your willingness to tolerate loathsome people on pragmatic grounds, I can’t remain neutral when you advocate purging the anti-state movement in order to appease those loathsome people.

He’s not talking about appeasing anyone.  Note to readers, anytime someone uses the word appeasement, they are trying to portray another party in a weakened or submissive state.  Cheap rhetorical trick.

You have “evolved,” if you can call it that, from a willingness to share a tent with racists and homophobes for the sake of defeating Empire as the primary enemy, to promoting an active purge of anti-racists and gays from the anti-Empire movement because the majority of your anti-state coalition might find them offensive.

I bolded the two strawmen.  Nowhere did Keith call for a purge of gays and I’m not sure he called for a purge of anti-racists either.  I also don’t recall that any purge was necessary to appease the current coalition, but that the elements he thinks should be purged, are hindering the growth of anarchism from the outside.  And if the various left anarchist groups, coalitions and think tanks are any indication, I would have to agree.  The cultural-leftism is a big turnoff to massive swathes of libertarians, almost all minarchists, conservatives and anarcho-capitalists.

The “cultural left” as Carson goes on to talk about, is ridiculous anyway.  Cultural norms, personal preferences, and value are all subjective. I don’t care about the preferences of others as a matter of justice, as long as they conform to the NAP.

Now all of that said, I don’t know the body of Keith Preston’s work, so maybe this post was dishonest, and he really hates gays and loves Nazis.  But with regards to the comments on this particular post by prominent market anarchists [sic], I don’t see where he crossed a moral line.

Anyway, that’s my 3 cents on the matter.

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This is from the June 1971 edition of The Libertarian Forum.  I removed the original emphasis and added my own.

The question of whether a future free society will be “coop” or communal or capitalist brings up the most disturbing problem about the anarcho-syndicalists and communalists. This is the famous “question of Auban” – the question that “Auban”, the individualist anarchist hero of John Henry Mackay’s novel The Anarchists, put to the left-wing anarchists. In essence: would you, in your proposed anarchist society, permit those who so wished to have private property, to engage in free market transactions, to hire workers in “capitalist’ relations; etc.?[¹] The communist anarchists in Mackay’s book never answered the question clearly and lucidly, and neither do any leftwing anarchists that one may encounter today. (For the Auban speech from Mackay, see Krimerman and Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy (Doubleday, 1966), pp. 16-33.) Generally, the left-anarchists reply that, in their Utopian society, no one will be so base as to want to indulge in private property or in capitalist social relations. [²] But suppose they do? one persists. The answer is generally either a repeat of the Utopian answer or an evasive silence.

And when the left-anarchists can be pressed for an answer, the response is disturbing indeed. Take for example one of our most distinguished socialist-anarchists, Professor Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our “right-wing” libertarian movement; apparently he is – I am afraid unrealistically – concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute “the greatest tyranny the world has ever known”. (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? than Ghengis Khan?) Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an “anarchist” at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an “anarchist”. And I very much fear that the same can be said for the other varieties of left-anarchists: communal, syndical, or whatever. Beneath a thin veneer of libertarian rhetoric there lies the same compulsory and coercive collectivist that we have encountered all too often in the last two centuries. Scratch a left-wing “anarchist” and you will find a coercive egalitarian despot who makes the true lover of freedom yearn even for Richard Nixon (Arghhl) in contrast.

If this analysis is correct, as I believe it is, then it makes all the more absurd the hankering by so many of our “left-wing” for an intimate comradely alliance with the anarcho-left. [³] Beneath superficial agreement in rhetoric, there is nothing in common between genuine libertarians and collectivist “anarchists”. Superficially, we both oppose the existing system – but so too do monarchists, Nazis, and those who hanker for a return to the Inquisition – scarcely enough for a warm and comradely dialogue. It is indeed fortunate for Liberty that the left-anarchists have about as much chance of victory as some of our Conservatives have to restore the Bourbon dynasty. For if they did, we would soon find that the embrace of left-anarchy is the embrace of Death.

1. Left-anarchists are not anarcho-capitalist fellow travelers when it comes to non-aggression.
2. Thick libero–utopian-arianism.
3. The obsession with reaching out to the statist and anarcho left as superior to the statist and anarcho right alienates a great many people through false characterizations (vulgar this, vulgar that) and partisan/adolescent clique games.

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The star of the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” whose career roared back to life when he played the assassin-turned-victim in Quentin Tarentino’s “Kill Bill,” was found dead Thursday in Thailand. A published report said he committed suicide.

In the conflict of man vs. nature, sometimes man wins.

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Sometimes statists or people unaware of a deeper philosophical argument will propose a strawman such as,

“But under anarchy, anyone could hurt anyone, and steal from anyone, and it would be chaos and we need a government to keep people from causing harm!”

Now on it’s face, involuntary government survives on ideology but acts through coercion. So the argument that government can stop coercion is false because it’s only tool is coercion.

But take two anarchists, in the absence of a government. If they maintain the right to sovereignty, that neither has an involuntary obligation to the other, then that principle or premise, removes any rational justification for coercion because they would be undermining the very premise they claim allows them to act in the first place.

Now certainly, some anarchist could be a hypocrite or only an anarchist because no one recognizes his authority, and he has given allegiance to no one. A statist without a state. And he could use coercion on another stateless person, but to do so, he would have to reject his right to his freedom.

Freedom is no endorsement of coercion anymore than coercion is an endorsement of freedom (lifeboat scenarios).  Life boat scenarios are frequently emotive appeals to do an end run around the non-aggression principle.

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This post is brought on due to this article, which was linked at LewRockwell.com in the blog, then strangely removed.

The coming evangelical collapse

And this is the author credit,

Michael Spencer is a writer and communicator living and working in a Christian community in Kentucky. He describes himself as “a postevangelical reformation Christian in search of a Jesus-shaped spirituality.” This essay is adapted from a series on his blog, InternetMonk.com

Even if you are an atheist, you might want to give the article a read.  If you are a theist, you might want to check out the InternetMonk blog, on a quick perusal, I found it fairly interesting, considering it’s really not my cup of tea.

But back to the title of this post, the bankruptcy of evangelicals, baptists, catholics, protestants, lutherans, whatever is tied directly to the fact that as long as they tolerate a state that steals, and a state that murders, then they are bankrupt in their beliefs.  Anyone who advocates murder is not a libertarian.  That goes for your Eric Dondero Libertarian Republicans as well.  It is not acceptable to take one innocent life in a war (even to harm an innocent or their property), morality and justice does not wither under tests of scale, only weakness of character.

The democratic institutions which have harmed Christians and their values, as much as it has teased them with empowerment, are also to be rejected as being in direct conflict with the values of Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven.

Any Christian who lectures on any social values, while supporting the corrupt, immoral, and sinful state and it’s lies, violence and theft, has no credibility at all

I’m an atheist, but I was a theist at one time.  All that changed, is that I understand that morality doesn’t have to originate with divine decree.  It can be self-evident, that the rational path, the most productive path, is peaceful, voluntary, free market relations.  The likes of which Jesus of the Bible, advocated through his disciples’ writings.

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Mike termed it elitism, but it’s not the exclusive domain of elites to do this.  It is very human to believe your own press and to assume that past performance is predictive of future profit.  We take our relationships for granted, we take our jobs, careers for granted amongst other things.  Part of this is that we rely heavily on observation, which eventually becomes an avalanche, burying critical thinking as entropy increases.

The other part is that success is like a drug, changing our perspective.  Failure qualifies as well, but we don’t usually lament the irrationality of people who fail because their failure already discounts their opinions.

For whatever reason, we respect people with money, fame, notoriety.  We rely on these observable traits or conditions to judge or enhance the veracity of their opinions.

I think this is very apparent, as Mike shows, that during economic booms where the stock market is always going up, credit is cheap and easy for expansion of long term capital projects.  It doesn’t take much intelligence to invest in something that continues to generate a profit, even if you don’t know the names of all of the firms you have invested in, let alone what they do, or how their books look.  Hiring 10 senior manager experts may look like a big time move, but it doesn’t guarantee big time results.

Confirmation bias caused by credit expansion and a boom economy definitely forms a key component of Sunshine Capitalism.

Perhaps it tells us something more about ourselves, our flaws and follies.  The easier things get, the harder it is to retain our “A” game.  Maybe humans are hard-wired for creative self-destruction.

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As readers of this blog know, stickK (shameless plug) is a commitment store that helps you stick to your goals. We’ll elicit support from your friends. We’ll nag you if you want. And most uniquely, we’ll let you put your own money at stake. It’s still hard for me to believe that in just over a year, people have been willing to put at risk more than $1 million in their contractual commitments.

Yeah, people have been willing to risk their money to do what they already consider to be the right thing.  Is this an efficient use of capital?
It gets better,

Economists tend to think of information and incentives as the core drivers of human behavior. But Cialdini and Positive Energy have me thinking that smiley faces may also play a useful role.

What would this scam be without an appeal to anti-intellectualism?  It’s based around collectivist confirmation rather than individualistic self-discipline.  Basically, you can’t succeed on your own.  Success is being as similar to your peers as possible.

As an aside, I’ve recently had to confront how I do business, and decide whether to pursue a lucrative but exploitative path, or a less lucrative and less exploitative path.  I chose not to take advantage of people with high time preferences.  For now.

Lew posted the Top 10 Podcast link today.

1. $2000 Gold and the Break up of the US: Gerald Celente
2. The Biggest Bubble in the History of the World: Ron Paul
3. America’s Slow-Motion Fascist Coup: Naomi Wolf
4. The Greatest Depression in History: Gerald Celente
5. Thanks for the Inflationary Depression: Peter Schiff
6. How the Government Wrecked the Economy: Peter Schiff
7. The Panic of ’08: Lew Rockwell interviews Ron Paul
8. The Crash of ’08: Lew Rockwell interviews Jim Rogers
9. Stop the Bailout!: Lew Rockwell on the Michael Reagan Show
10. There Is Hope: Ron Paul

My favorite of this lot, is the amazing Naomi Wolf interview.  Perhaps I have listened to too much Ron Paul, Peter Schiff and Gerald Celente (who are all excellent btw), but the Noami Wolf interview was a great gateway to the left, and a really special moment where it turned into a conversation between two intelligent people sharing information and ideas.

Sadly, the left-libertarian doorstops (they have to be good for something) haven’t seemed to have done much to help promote it.

Some of my other favorites include (in no particular order)

28. What is Neoconservatism?

65. A Libertarian in the USSR

32. Intellectual “Property”

13. The Old Right

15. Democracy: The God That Failed

68. Are You an Anarchist?

8. The Scam Called the State

I hope more libertarians blog about and share these around.  They appeal to all sorts of different groups, from anarchists to Reagan republicans, antiwar protestors to wall street observers.

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Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.