Anarchist signatures research question: There is an “H. W. Koehn” who appears frequently in the pages of FREE SOCIETY ca. 1902, both as a letter-writer and also responded to by the editors. He describes himself as having been a “comrade and chum” of Dyer Lum’s, wrote some letters against the need for expropriation, made some criticism of state socialists as having a too narrowly materialistic view of life, and was classed by Ross Winn et al. amongst the “philosophic” anarchists (at a time when those folks both used this term as a by-word for Tuckerites, but also as a put-down for anti-insurrectionists, which didn’t necessarily mean the same groups of people). Anyway, question is: is this H. W. Koehn possibly Herman Kuehn, later of Instead of a Magazine, etc.? Or is there some other clear candidate for who it might be?

had a dream last night that involved explaining the technicalities of my position on stateless public property and why I reject Hoppean covenant communities under market anarchy, apparently to my work contact at a recent web development client? I normally don’t remember much of my dreams, but I guess this is the kind of thing that sticks with me.

So I am thinking about starting a new series of zines for ALL Distro which is intended to put out interesting and potentially somewhat idiosyncratic writing from within the individualist, mutualist, & market anarchist conversations. Similar in format to the Market Anarchy Zine Series but aiming a bit less at being broadly representative of M@ tendencies and educationally focused, more aiming at putting out idiosyncratic views that any given individualist will hopefully find interesting but also will be as likely as not to disagree / want to argue with, and certainly where it will be presumed that I as editor probably disagree with at least something in everything that I am publishing. Occasionally historical, probably mostly contemporary material. Here’s a question I’ll throw out to y’all: (1) is this the sort of thing you’d be likely to be interested in checking out? (2) Any awesome ideas for a good name for the series? Something like “Individualist Perspectives” or “Individual Liberty” would be an accurate title for the series but I am trying to think of things that don’t you know sound totally fragging boring.

I see that my introductory post on “Libertarian Anticapitalism” has been re-posted over at Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS):

Libertarian Anticapitalism

“Well. Whether or not something comes off as ‘ironic’ depends upon your expectations; and on this point, I guess it may not be surprising that my expectations are not the same as those at the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I would say that a story like that of the Times Square zoning code is not only not especially ‘ironic;’ it’s really paradigmatic — a illustratively typical example of how large-scale, in-your-face commerce typically works in these United States, and how it interacts with the corporate economy throughout the world.”

Georgists always want to tell me that all of the absolute worst features of the State would be OK as long as they were accompanied by the Single Tax. “Borders? Oh, they’ll be fine as long as there’s a Single Tax to pay out to those who have been excluded.” “Eminent Domain for urban development? Well of course it will be fine if it comes with a Single Tax to compensate those deprived of their property.” I expect some day I am going to do a post about the bombing of Hiroshima and some Georgist is going to leave a comment saying “Well of course that was horrible, but the real problem here is that the dropped the atom bomb without a Single Tax to compensate the people in Hiroshima for the locational rents that they were deprived of. If locational rents were being collected from the non-atom-bombed parts of the world, there’s nothing you could object to, right?”

Dear LazyWeb: I am looking for Wiki software to experiment with, where the back-end data store would be based on a git repository rather than a relational database such as MySQL. I’m open to trying out most things but an ideal case would be something that supports templates and transclusion in a way at least kinda-sorta similar to MediaWiki. Any suggestions?

is off to home-make some tortillas.

is in the process of shifting over most of my aggregator websites to another cloud server, for various reasons (mostly to prevent problems that may come up with them from, which they do from time to time, affecting other websites that I run that don’t have such problems).

This server will be named Ungoliant, of course.

Random research question for those who may have some insight on the evolution of anarchist lingo. So by the first decade of the 1900s, “Social Science” was clearly established as a common by-word in the u.s. for radical political theory, and anarchism in particular (e.g. the Philadelphia and New York “Social Science Clubs,” subtitle of MOTHER EARTH as “Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature,” etc.).

Does anyone have a bead on how early this usage first entered communist Anarchist writing? (Within the u.s. or outside of it.) Candace Falk’s notes on “Social Science” and “Social Science Clubs” in Emma Goldman: A Documentary History say “around the beginning” of the 20th century, and cite Anarchist-heavy “Social Science Clubs” going back to 1898. Any of y’all know of earlier uses of the terminology in communist or collectivist circles?

Shawn P. Wilbur Robert Helms

Dear Facebook: So I do appreciate that when I used the “X” button to beg you to get Ronald Reagan’s ghoulish presidential mugshot out of my Facebook “Sponsored” column, it was then replaced by a photograph of some delicious-looking popsicles. All the flavor, hold the fascism please.