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Showing posts from February, 2020

Weathering With You: An Agorist Perspective

If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w

Book Review | As We Go Marching: A Biting Indictment to the Coming of Domestic Fascism in America – John Flynn

In modern America, the terms "fascism" and "fascist" has come to take on a vague meaning to describe anyone whom one considers abhorrent or disagreeable, and any technical understanding of the terms appears now to almost exclusively be held by scholars in the fields of history, political philosophy, and economics. Not only has these terms long lost their meaning among the public, but given the frequent comparisons with Hitler directed against politicians or other figures, it appears that the memory of the horrors of Fascism in the 20th century has been numbed down so much that it to many merely amounts to the minimum surface-level of Fascism = Bad. To be fair, there wasn't a widespread understanding of the term in Allied nations even during WWII. In 1944, John Flynn published the book " As We Go Marching ", in which he noted that even at that time there was a very limited understanding of what Fascism actually means, and ventured to clar

How the Market Incentivizes Us To Be Better People

Many people might be familiar with Milton Friedman's argument on the market's ability to help marginalized people. A quick rephrasing of it follows as such, a grocery store owner might discriminate against hiring a black person in a neighborhood of racist, but who can know the race of the man who grows the wheat for the bread on the shelves? Essentially, he argues that even in a racist society, oppressed people will have incomes through specialization and integration. But does the market do more to help oppressed peoples? Can it change a racist society into a less racist one? I will argue that the market incentivizes us to be less xenophobic, less sexist, less transphobic, among many other things. First, and most obvious, racism will affect firms. If a firm refuses business to a particular group, they will almost immediately lose the money of the individuals in this group. This can be a motivator to be more inclusive but will have a relatively small effect si

Incognito Mail Deliveries - Still a Dream

The digital age has brought dissidents closer and the exchange of ideas goes much faster when you can do it with fingers dancing over a keyboard or speak into a microphone, hit send and spread the ideas far and wide. We can build online libraries and give everyone that wishes a library card to get hold of more text, sound or video they could ever hope of consuming. But what about goods and services in the real world? Are we close in matching that feel and abundance of the digital space? Painting within the State Controlled Border Lines “The United States Post Office and the United States Postal Service have both failed to commemorate Lysander Spooner, the first man in American history to do something about high postal rates and win.” - Sherman Lee Pompey, ‘ Father of the 3-cent Stamp ’ (Free PDF) The internal mail delivery system is far more easy to keep private and anonymous, in most cases, compared to its crossing-borders cousin. There is too much traffic, too many