Civil wars are not “power vacuums.” They are power plenums. The problem isn’t that there’s too few people wielding power within the territory; it’s that there are even more people than usual wielding power, without leaving any room for any other kind of sociality. And they are all wielding power in a death-struggle to see who can hold onto it at the end of the day. When the Wehrmacht and the SS rolled across Poland, there was a violent contest as to who would control central Europe, and a lot of people didn’t know from day to day which government would be in control of the area where they lived; but if you think that the war was an example of anarchy, or of a “power vacuum,” then it seems to me you are using words without much meaning.

I was reading some idiotic border-nationalist thing from a self-described “libertarian realist” (they are actually neither). Then I watched this contribution to global human civilization, and I immediately felt immensely better about people and the world in general. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/world-order-welcome-to-tokyo_n_4065994.html

War on the Informal Sector (Cont’d) “This hearing was necessary because Mayor Kasim Reed had ignored two separate rulings by the court that make clear Atlanta’s [street vendors] have a right to vend on public property, just as they have done for decades. Instead, Mayor Reed and other city officials illegally shut down all public-property street vending and threatened vendors with fines and jail. “In 2009, then-Mayor Shirley Franklin signed an exclusive twenty-year contract that handed over all street vending in Atlanta to a multi-billion-dollar Chicago company, General Growth Properties (GGP). Atlanta vendors joined with the Institute for Justice and filed suit to strike down the vending scheme, which would have thrown them out of work — or forced them to pay thousands of dollars to GGP. In December 2012, Judge [Shawn Ellen] LaGrua struck down the scheme and the law that authorized it. Rather than accepting the court’s ruling, [Kasim] Reed illegally shut down all street vending citywide, throwing dozens of vendors out of work right before the Braves’ opening day and the NCAA Final Four. . . . Reed’s crackdown has kept vendors from working a single day this baseball season. . . . “. . . on July 2, 2013, the Fulton County Superior Court [clarified its ruling], making clear that its December 2012 order had reinstated the pre-existing vending law that vendors had worked under for years. The ruling came just one day after vendors and civil-rights activists engaged in a widely publicized protest on the steps of city hall. But . . . Reed disregarded that decision as well, resulting in today’s court order, which is the third judicial ruling instructing the city to allow vendors to get back to work.”

To-day @ Rad Geek People’s Daily [radgeek.com]: Small-government conservatism (Facebook Macro edition) http://radgeek.com/gt/2013/10/10/small-government-conservatism-facebook-macro-edition/ Nationalism is the death of liberty.

Oh, God, Nina Simone, “Trouble in Mind.”

is getting ready to chop up and upload images of a couple volumes of FREE SOCIETY and FREEDOM (London), picked up during last weekend’s combined ALL Distro / Fair Use Repository pilgrimage to Michigan.

Old English typography for ðe ƿynn.

Another assault on teenagers’ freedom, and another massive increase in the police’s power to harass, punish and detain young people, from the Las Vegas city government. This is a shameful measure, and it ought to be ridiculed and defied.

Two items of note from this recent exchange: http://networkedblogs.com/PHuE6 1. Davi Barker is pretty rad. 2. Wow, the UGent racists are really, really racist. Not just racist, but specifically and literally genocidal. (In this exchange, a member of the UGent crew specifically states that the Non-Aggression Principle *does not apply* to members of Muslim “cultures” and that they can be attacked collectively simply because they are Muslim. This is of course an appalling assault on human rights; it is also a contribution to a culture of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant state violence in the name of an explicitly collectivist authoritarianism. Seriously, y’all, give it up and GTFO. #NaziPunksFuckOff

Cop-speak is a non-standard variant of English in which “authorities” is a first-person plural pronoun. In addition to some variant vocabulary, many simple verbs are, notably, replaced by passive constructions and gerunds without missing or unclear subjects; these are part of a systematic grammar preventing the possibility of attributing any form of moral responsibility to the speaker. For example, in cop-speak you might write: “Washington (CNN) — Police near the U.S. Capitol opened fire on Thursday on a car being chased by authorities, hitting a woman driving the vehicle that also contained a child, an intelligence source told CNN.” Whereas standard English would require: “An intelligence source told CNN that police near the U.S. Capitol chased a car with a woman and a child in it. Then they shot their guns at the car, and hit the woman driving it.”