In the real world, it’s obviously not – especially since many of the US’ “endless wars” actually were against brutal totalitarian regimes. . . .

Shame how all those dead civilians kept getting in the way of the brutal totalitarian regimes the U.S. government was fighting wars against.

U.S. bomber wings show up over Tokyo, planning to firebomb a “brutal totalitarian regime,” and somehow instead they end up killing 100,000 men, women and children in a single night, who were not part of the regime and had no control over it. They show up over Hiroshima, and in Nagasaki, expecting to drop atomic bombs on a “brutal totalitarian regime,” and somehow instead they end up dropping them on cities of hundreds of thousands of people, wiping out about a quarter million civilians in the process over the course of just over 72 hours. Years later, the U.S. government comes to Viet Nam, intending to wage war against a brutal totalitarian regime, and somehow by the time they leave, the brutal totalitarian regime is still flourishing there, but 4,000,000 other Vietnamese no longer are. A man with less perspective might think that this sort of thing was a sign that the U.S. government, like every other government, doesn’t actually wage war against “regimes;” rather that it wages wars on countries and peoples who are inevitably become the overwhelming majority of the victims of the war. Perhaps this was done in the hopes that by doing it, they might somehow get at the regime hiding behind those people in those countries. If so, then the question of justice here certainly turns on something more than just the quality of the ends for which these megamurdering means were deliberately chosen.

But it’s good of you to note that this massacre of millions has, on occasion, every now and then, in spite, of course, of the countervailing considerations, in the full light of objective reevaluation, led to wars which were in some sense unjust, and therefore worthy of condemnation, even if not worthy of being mentioned or remembered in the same breath as the victims of the U.S. government’s geopolitical enemies.

@facebook-1702318862:disqus : “May Day is now primarily associated with state communism,  …”

By whom?

That seems to be what you primarily associate it with, but I have to wonder how widespread you seriously believe your associations to be.

In the two communities I’ve lived in for the past several years (in southern Nevada, and in eastern Alabama), May 1 seems primarily to be associated with street protests in favor of immigration freedom.

@facebook-1702318862:disqus : “May Day is now primarily associated with state communism,  …”

By whom?

That seems to be what you primarily associate it with, but I have to wonder how widespread you seriously believe your associations to be.

In the two communities I’ve lived in for the past several years (in southern Nevada, and in eastern Alabama), May 1 seems primarily to be associated with street protests in favor of immigration freedom.

Also — for what it’s worth — previously discussed at BHL, in “I’m against Free Trade Agreements because I’m for free trade”.

Also — for what it’s worth — previously discussed at BHL, in “I’m against Free Trade Agreements because I’m for free trade”.

Jason Brennan : "May Day is now primarily associated with state communism,  ..."

By whom?

That seems to be what you primarily associate it with, but I have to wonder how widespread you seriously believe your associations to be.

In the two communities I've lived in for the past several years (in southern Nevada, and in eastern Alabama), May 1 seems primarily to be associated with street protests in favor of immigration freedom.

Jason Brennan : "May Day is now primarily associated with state communism,  ..."

By whom?

That seems to be what you primarily associate it with, but I have to wonder how widespread you seriously believe your associations to be.

In the two communities I've lived in for the past several years (in southern Nevada, and in eastern Alabama), May 1 seems primarily to be associated with street protests in favor of immigration freedom.

> Off topic question but is he [S.E. Parker] even alive anymore? Pains me to say, but I'm completely not sure? As far as I can tell his writings have made it out to a lot of folks but I haven't had, and as far as I can tell, nobody on the Internet has ever had, much success in collecting hardly any personal information about him. If he is still alive he would now be in his 80s. I don't know that he's written much, or that anyone I know of has had much success in contacting him, in about the last decade or two. > Off topic again, are you a subscriber to them [The Sovereign Self]? Not yet -- so far I've just picked up copies as I've seen them -- but I plan to subscribe when I next get together some money to send their way. Besides the fact that they publish interesting articles, the typography is just too beautiful for me to pass up.

> Off topic question but is he [S.E. Parker] even alive anymore? Pains me to say, but I'm completely not sure? As far as I can tell his writings have made it out to a lot of folks but I haven't had, and as far as I can tell, nobody on the Internet has ever had, much success in collecting hardly any personal information about him. If he is still alive he would now be in his 80s. I don't know that he's written much, or that anyone I know of has had much success in contacting him, in about the last decade or two. > Off topic again, are you a subscriber to them [The Sovereign Self]? Not yet -- so far I've just picked up copies as I've seen them -- but I plan to subscribe when I next get together some money to send their way. Besides the fact that they publish interesting articles, the typography is just too beautiful for me to pass up.

> Most consider him an anarchist, I was using him as an example. I get that, but if you put someone forward as an example it seems odd to complain when people take him as one. That said, what I wrote above was deliberately framed in terms of general criteria (i.e., that bit about affirming or denying that "an Anarchist" is a "socialist") rather than a specific claim about Stirner because I didn't intend for it to rest on any claims about Stirner's being or not being an anarchist, and I'm quite familiar with some of the nomenclature problems involved. > I can name various others who would be unknown outside of the individualist anarchist and egoist anarchist community. Well, sure. You get some very explicit statements on this from folks like Sid Parker, or the crew at The Sovereign Self, for example. > Socialism itself has a common idea that is central to it's beliefs, Maybe. But I don't know that that needs to be the case. "Socialism" may be a family-resemblence concept, or a number of distinct family-resemblence concepts, rather than just one thing. > specifically it has a sort of morality. Well, I don't know about that. Do you mean that "Socialism itself" is based in an explicit appeal to morality, or that it does this on the sly, without acknowledging that that's what it's doing? Because if you mean the former, there certainly are people who want to call themselves socialists, who would specifically deny that -- Marx and Engels being a couple of obvious and notable examples. A lot of syndicalists, too. (M&E wanted to claim that their predecessors were more or less all moralists, but that certainly wouldn't be the first ridiculously inaccurate claim they made about their predecessors.) > I've yet to see a definition of socialism that one can apply to Stirner, if one ever comes about I'll gladly say that he fits under that definition but I wouldn't label him one for the single fact he never called himself one. O.K., fair enough. So just to be sure I understand, your reason for thinking that he doesn't qualify for, say, Tucker's understanding of "Anarchistic Socialism" is because you think he doesn't show enough concern for (macro-scale?) economic issues to think that that was really a live question for him? Or something like that?