http://zyalt.livejournal.com/986385.htmlMAP OF DOWNTOWN KIEV HELD BY PROTESTERS
Red is protester-controlled core commerce area. Blue is government buildings. I didn’t actually realize they had this much of the area under control.
(I live just off the map at about where eleven o’clock would be)
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-27 17:00:00 UTC
KIEV UPDATE
Well the president refused to resign. Made an offer to give the opposition the prime minister’s office. Offer rejected. They want his resignation.
The protesters have seized something like ten or eleven regional government offices. So confidence is spreading.
It looks like they’ve taken over the House of parliament and are just tearing it to pieces in between setting off fireworks inside and out.
Their spirits are very high. You can hear them chanting from my apartment.
Sort of seems the world is finally paying attention.
Cell reception is out over here. Not sure if it’s related.
The russians only gave ukraine 15B. I don’t know how long that will last but it’s a drop in the bucket. Between the banks, and the investments here, Russia pretty much owns whatever the oligarchs here don’t own.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 17:10:00 UTC
THE ANSWER TO UKRAINIAN POLITICAL CONFLICT IN OBVIOUS TERMS
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-25 06:30:00 UTC
LIBERTARIAN SHOULDN’T MEAN “STUPID”
What libertarian means to me is: (a) a preference for liberty above all other political preferences, and (b) that all rights can be reduced to property rights, and (c) that I actively pursue obtaining liberty for myself and other a daily basis by sacrificing my time and effort to pursue it.
LIBERTARIAN SHOULDN’T MEAN “WRONG”
It does NOT mean that I agree with rothbardian ethics. Or that I think rothbard’s strategy of relying on the work of the french anarchist and jewish resistance movements, instead of the process by which property evolved in the high trust societies. In fact, I am pretty confident rothbard was a little bit right, but damagingly wrong.
LIBERTARIAN SHOULDN’T MEAN “FAILED”
So if libertarian means failing, and being wrong, then I’m not libertarian.
LIBERTARIAN SHOULDN’T MEAN “ROTHBARDIAN”
If you mean ‘rothbardian’ then no I am not a rothbardian since that would be irrational.
LIBERTY IS THE PRODUCT OF ARISTOCRACY:
The organize application of violence for the purpose of suppressing all involuntary extractions – including criminal, unethical, immoral, corrupt and conspiratorial actions. All of them.
PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE WHAT’S LEFT ONCE YOU SUPPRESS ALL CHEATING.
Property rights are what remain once we do that. You can suppress less, and have weaker property rights, and suppres more and have stronger property rights, but the velocity of your economy and therefore your wealth is predicated on the degree of suppression of involuntary extraction you suppress through the organized application of violence.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-23 16:03:00 UTC
LIBERTY WITHOUT ROTHBARD: A RETURN TO ARISTOCRACY
I see rothbardianism as a failed amateurish pseudo philosophical ideology, rejected by all but a meaningless minority, disproven by even the least talented of philosophers, contrary to all evidence in evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, anthropology and history, and economically irrational on praxeological grounds alone. And any chance we have of obtaining liberty whatsoever requires that we start with what we have that is supportable: that all rights are reducible to property rights, that the struggle for prosperity is the universal responsibility to suppress parasitism in every possible form, thereby forcing all human cooperation into the market for productive voluntary exchange. – and in doing so reconstruct liberty on its historical aristocratic grounds, such that it is not amateurish, contrary to the evidence, and irrational.
Liberty is on life support. Rothbard gave it cancer. And I’m out to cure it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-23 15:55:00 UTC
URGENT: KIEV CRACKDOWN
The administration is telling local businesses that they will crack down at 8:00PM tonight, drive the protesters from downtown, and that roads will be closed. I suspect it will get out of hand this evening. They started killing people last night. Two men via snipers apparently – via supposed eyewitness.
This is so strange to me, because it is terribly easy to mollify everyone with slow incremental concessions. But that’s not the way they do things in the east.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-23 06:16:00 UTC
AMERICAN POLICY IN A NUTSHELL
American policy (frustratingly) demonstrates rather than explicitly states, that you may have any government you willingly elect. But if you willingly elect a government that does not adhere to the charter of human rights both internally and externally; or if that government acts as a bad citizen in the network of finance and trade, then you and your government will be punished for the choice of the government you have elected, and you will be punished repeatedly and severely until you choose to elect a government that respects the charter of human rights and acts as a good citizen in the network of finance and trade.
They only talk about the carrot, but not the stick. They don’t do much distribution of carrots, but they distribute sticks all-the-live-long day.
That paragraph should be required as a warning label on all US diplomats, messages, goods, commercials, movies, passports, tickets, whatever we export. Just like we require warnings on cigarettes.
The USA is not a country. It’s a corporation. That corporation runs an empire. That empire controls the finance and trade system worldwide. We are all consumers of that system. In the main, it’s a better system than most that have existed. But the quality of that system is declining rapidly.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-22 09:57:00 UTC
ITS TIME FOR IMPEACHMENT.
Crazy as it might sound. I’ve jumped on the IMPEACHMENT bandwagon.
Why? The non-accidental, repeated abuse of executive powers, without the consent of congress, as a means of avoiding congressional consent. The very purpose of divided government is to forbid any government action by any house without the consent of the others. And no priority except the impending threat of war, that presents a clear and present danger, may circumvent the necessity of the consent of the houses prior to any executive or legislative action.
Obama makes Nixon look like a schoolboy prankster. Obama is the worst, most corrupt, president, in our history, and has done the most damage to this country’s government since Lincoln.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-22 06:54:00 UTC
PARLOR GAME, GENTEEL, LIBERTARIAN SURRENDER MONKEYS
Parlor Game, genteel, libertarian surrender monkeys. Gah! You cannot seduce the renters and free riders into liberty. You’re just generating your own reality distortion field in a pathetic desperate hope to surround yourself with crumbs of positive, bias-confirming signals entirely of your own creation.
The truth is radical: liberty is obtained at the point of a piercing metal object, for the good of man, over the vehement objection of those who would choose an easier path through life by parasitic conquest of those of us willing and able to pay the high cost of our liberty.
There is no possible discount on liberty. We cannot obtain it by genteel argument. It is an unnatural if desirable state of affairs. And the lie that humans desire liberty rather than humans desire consumption perpetuates the myth that we can obtain our liberty at a discount. We cannot. They do not.
Liberty is perhaps a matter for ratio-scientific argument on the institutions necessary for its construction and preservation.
But the net requirement for liberty is the same: the organized use of violence by a liberty seeking minority to produce private property rights for their own benefit, and the benefit of others, against the will of those who would seek to construct EXTRACTIVE institutions for the benefits of themselves and the deception of others.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-22 03:01:00 UTC
APOLOGIES TO LIBERTARIANS: BUT WE’RE IN THIS FOR THE SPECIES. 🙂
I know. I’m going to alienate some of my Anarcho Capitalist friends by slaying their false gods, and actively depreciating the value of their intellectual investments.
I’m sorry. Liberty is on life support. We’re in this for the species.
I’m out to reform libertarianism. To return liberty to it’s aristocratic origins. To save liberty from extinction.
The source of property is the organized application of violence to suppress criminal, unethical, immoral, and corrupt behavior.
Property is the result of that organized application of violence in the suppression of criminal, unethical, immoral, and corrupt behavior.
Property is not the cause. It is the consequence.
The greatest act of heroism a man engage in, is the use of violence to suppress criminal, unethical, immoral, and corrupt behavior, such that we possess freedom, property rights, in the absence of criminal, unethical, immoral, and corrupt behavior.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-20 09:17:00 UTC