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Showing posts from June, 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

That Bread is Mine, Too

Okay, so the State was smashed yesterday morning. Now what? Obviously, everybody will go his/her own way and make oodles of gold. Some of it will be spent on protection agents and arbitration. And we shall be ever-vigilant against the return of the State! But what are we going to do if someone wants his money back? Such a question is far from academic, for one’s view of justice seems to determine one’s revolutionary tactics. Robert LeFevre, the anarcho-pacifist, pursues a purely educational route because he has foresworn the use of defensive restitutive force. What else can he do? Murray Rothbard, enamored with “temporary” political expedients, pursues popular fronts with rightists, then leftists, then partyarchs. With his “double restitution” or “restitution plus punishment” theory, he finds himself allied with the Penal Institution crowd regardless of other alliances. Ayn Rand seeks unlimited restitution, and since infinity can only be achieved mystically she must

Riots are Inevitable, Not Justified

Beginning Note: I do not condone the riots against or the looting of private citizens or private property . This is not a defense, it is an attempt at an explanation. Across US cities, there have been protests to call for reform of the police and legal system that is responsible for the brutal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. While the overwhelming majority of these have been peaceful events, much of the news coverage and government reaction has been in response to the rioting and looting that have become adjacent to the calls for justice. Many are shocked at the almost complete breakdown of law in cities across the country. But these should not shock anyone. They are an inevitable product of our current legal system: a monopoly. The government and police claim to have a monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and when this monopoly is shown to be counterproductive to the preservation of law--that is the protection of person and private property--we can onl