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Showing posts from July, 2019

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: The Market Loves You | Jeffrey Tucker

As both a libertarian and a student of praxeology, I was somewhat perplexed from the title of Tucker's new book The Market Loves You . Only man acts, in the sense of utilizing means purposively to achieve certain objectives, as the praxeological axiom goes; the market as an aggregate of individuals cannot by itself act, and it is, therefore, meaningless to anthropomorphize the market and to attribute to it certain human characteristics such as the emotion of love or the act of loving. Despite the soundness of this argument, however, one realizes through reading the book that it misses Tucker's point. As a diligent disciple of Ludwig von Mises, perhaps the first discoverer of praxeology, he must surely have a firm understanding of this methodology, and he rightfully commends Mises' masterpiece Theory and History  first published in 1957, which delineates incredibly deep insights derived from praxeology (I was coincidentally reading the two books "simultaneousl

Fill a Pothole: An Examination of Personal Action vs. Political Action

This past June, companies across the western world decided to “celebrate” pride month with the LGBTQ+ community. Some see this as progress to a more tolerant society, others were quick to point out how the changing of logo colors does little to actually help marginalized groups or causes. We can see the same phenomenon after tragic events; people post their sympathies or change profile pictures, but many point out how ineffective this really is when it is unmatched with actual donations to a charity or volunteering to help. Why is it that we are so quick to see through the virtue signaling of companies and Facebook users, but so often fail to point out the ineffective action of politics? Much of American politics today is little more than asking the government to handle our most important issues. This transfers the responsibility of action away from the individuals and local communities and onto the government. We now undervalue personal action and replace it with lower-cost p

Bitcoin's Best Endorsement Yet

The federal government is concerned about the role cryptocurrencies play in the drug trade - just not enough to hand over the bitcoin they confiscated from the Silk Road. They’re concerned about unlawful behavior - but not enough to close down their concentration camps. The dollar’s hegemony is apparently of concern as well - but only after they’ve extracted 98% of it’s value. Based on the president’s tweet storm below, it’s clear: The federal government is concerned about the subversive effects of cryptocurrencies. Well, no shit. That’s the whole point. The President's illiterate rambling in it's entirety For over a century they’ve forced us to use trash as a currency so they can pilfer our livelihoods to make war in distant lands and force dependability on our family, friends and neighbors. It’s been a profitable racket to say the least. Generations of parasitical politicians have successfully relied on a cartelized banking sector to finance re-electi

Nothing Personal...Except Your Freedom

What is freedom? How do we protect it? As a libertarian, anarchist, agorist, minarchist, collapsatarian, or whatever liberty-minded label your strut from this radical spectrum, it's easy to get bogged down attempting to differentiate between human rights (civil rights/personal freedom), and property rights (economic freedom). Many seem to make the mistake of conflating the two, and how each rely on the other. This is a fundamental principle of the liberty movement that I believe anyone who is passionate about liberty and educating it to the masses should be 100% comfortable with articulating. The truth is, you can't have one freedom without the other. It's a part of our creed of self-ownership, and property rights. It is undeniable that the basis of the libertarian creed stems from the Non-Aggression Axiom/Principle, and property rights. To exert aggression on someone is a violation of their right of property: be it their car, laptop, or punching them square in th

The State as a Business & Incentive Structure

During the millennia governments have existed, the core of their nature appears to hardly ever have been properly investigated or their legitimacy questioned. It's no rare phenomenon to see objections that the institution holds too much power at a given moment, or that it should not take on additional functions, but that's usually where the questioning ends. Even the American founders were deemed revolutionary for seeking to establish a government solely limited to the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and they did, in fact, go far enough with this as to open up for the possibility of abolishing it if it ever grew beyond these functions. It's a tragic occurrence, therefore, to witness that same nation taking on more and more characteristics in line with historical empires like Rome rather than a society based on tort law like Celtic Ireland and the Commonwealth of Iceland. Few libertarian movements existed before the most recent centuries - most

Using Your Bitcoin

So we've got a wallet, we've invested in it, now what? Honest answer, start looking at all of the avenues to use your crypto. You will quickly realize that it's a lot like walking through your favorite store with $1000 cash in your pocket, the potential is limitless and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. First and foremost, run a quick search for "vendors accept Bitcoin", what do you see? A relatively impressive, broad, and tempting list of companies. The list has grown substantially since around 2014, and includes a number of sites that appeal to the type of cyber enthusiast who would be attracted to crypto in the first place, places like The Pirate Bay, Newegg, and ExpressVPN. Additionally you can order Domino's Pizza, buy knick knacks off Etsy, or shop on Amazon. For those who can't find a preferred vendor that explicitly accepts Bitcoin, well there are other options. For one, you can get a cryptocurrency debit card. Most operate on one of t