Look man, if someone changes their name and says they want you to use that new name, just fucking use the new name. It doesn’t matter whether or not you understand their reasons, or sympathize with their reasons, or whether or not you think they’re being weird. People change their names all the time, and people are weird all the time, and this is part of what’s great about people. And if you think that your being weirded out by their reasons for doing so is more important than your showing the most basic sorts of interpersonal respect toward them, then you need to ask what’s wrong with you that this bothers you so much. Not what’s wrong with them.

We have an exciting Fall coming up. It starts in San Diego. We’re looking for help to cover our travel costs, and help bring the ALL Distro, Markets Not Capitalism, and Molinari Institute speakers to the Libertopia Festival, Aug. 30-Sep. 2.

Johnson’s Law: as an online discussion of Anarchism grows longer, the probability of a completely off-topic joke about John Zerzan and telepathy approaches 1. (*) (* I am completely guilty of helping to make this empirically true.)

Seriously, y’all, English has not had an accusative case, or any case system at all, since the twelfth century. If you think the “correct” way to answer “Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?” is “It was they!” then you are wrong. If you think that proper English grammar would be to say “Woe is I,” then you are wrong.

Oh hello, someone just brought up Simon Baron Cohen’s experimental work again in order to try to bolster a point in debate. I can think of no conversation that is not made a little bit worse by the appearance.

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: We know other marketplaces.

Of course he doesn’t. He is a United States Senator; he is in favor of secret government because his job, and his career ambition, is to govern and to keep secrets. If a U.S. Senator ever had less sympathy for the U.S. government and its secrecy laws than he had for their victims, that would be the unusual fact in need of explanation. (This is, of course, why it is foolish to think that making people into Senators is ever going to be a means of achieving greater openness or freedom. By making them a Senator, you give them the strongest possible incentive to take exactly this stance.)

“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history . . .” I predict that this will have exactly no effect at all on how anyone in mainstream political commentary talks about the motives, or the moral status, or the likely outcomes, of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. The very worst offenses of the U.S. government are largely openly-admitted matters of public record, and public-affairs commentary mostly proceeds on the assumption that there is nothing at all to say about that, except to wave it off with a quick segue of “Yes, yes, of course there were certain excesses; but . . . .”

O.K., so basically every caption I have seen that has been submitted to this “overly manly man” image macro ranges somewhere between mind-numbingly unfunny and hideously offensive and vile (including jokes about violence against women, etc.). This is tiresome; and it’s too bad, because it really is a pretty good photo for an image macro. Therefore, I’ll be trying to add a bit of variety; feel free to join. Let’s start with this. http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3vjmmc/

More zesty catch-up from the ALL Distro — chapbooks of Roy Childs’ remarkable “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism,” an off-print of a chapter from MARKETS NOT CAPITALISM.