Comments Elsewhere

MBH:

I come to find that the most powerful so-called “anarchists” in the world have a certain way of advancing their corporate interests. …

“So-called” by whom?

Desi: You can’t honestly say any employer would pay a minimum wage if left to themselves.

But who’s suggesting that bosses be “left to themselves” to set wages? The question is how to get bosses to pay a decent wage. Statists suggest doing that through the political means — by coercing bosses into abiding by a price floor on labor. Anti-state leftists don’t say that bosses should just pay whatever they feel like paying; we suggest that workers should use non-coercive, social or economic means to ensure that bosses pay decent wages. Not through the State, but rather through consensual social and economic organization. Rather than counting on government to protect us through laws, we suggest that fellow workers should exercise our rights to freely associate, share information, pool resources, unionize, slow-down, strike, and in general create a rich set of voluntary labor unions, co-ops, mutual aid networks, fallbacks, and alternatives to wage-labor.

Gene:

I don’t think so — polytheists have a hard time being fanatical (about religion, anyway)

Really? Try telling that to Justin Martyr, or Saint Sebastian.

It’s true that intolerant polytheists rarely get very exercised about the things intolerant monotheists get exercised about — in particular, the fact of worshipping gods other than their own — they usually either accept that there are more gods out there; or else interpret your cult as the worshipping of the gods they already know, only under a different name. But they do easily get exercised if you refuse to worship the gods that they worship, or do things that they consider desecration towards the things that those gods hold sacred. Some of the most famously syncretic pagans, such as the Romans, were also some of the most ultraviolent — the pagan Roman state was constitutionally a theocracy — since the Emperor was both supreme pontiff and held to be literally divine. (*) Those who refused to worship the Roman civic gods (e.g., Christians), or who practiced other religions considered to undermine the supremacy of the official Roman religion (e.g. “Egyptian rites” and various mystery cults) could be persecuted with extreme violence, including round-ups, massacres, and all kinds of gruesomely inventive ways of torturing people to death for their religious convictions.

(*) Caesars were routinely deified after their deaths; “Son of God” was among Augustus’s official state titles (referring back to the posthumous deification of Julius Caesar). Domitian and Diocletian went so far as to demand to be venerated as living gods during their own earthly reigns.

... I suppose that this is going to depend, in part, on an evaluation about what sorts of technological developments are most significant and most threatening.

... Kevin, Well, at this point we'll need to separate out at least three issues -- (1) content of the policy; (2) enforcement *capacity*; and (3) actual

... Well, for some people, yes; for other people, no. The 1950s -- the age of Jim Crow, J. Edgar Hoover, Urban Renewal, the military Space Race, and the

Scott Haley:

What is not being recognized by many is how the new Fascists fit into the Globalization phenomenon. The goal is the virtual elimination of national borders …

Man, I wish they’d hurry up on that one. Somehow even with all this effort to virtually eliminate nation-state borders, my undocumented (“illegal”) friends here in Las Vegas are still living in fear of nighttime knock-on-the-door raids from all those virtually eliminated ICE agents, and “Ihre Papiere, bitte” treatment from the virtually eliminated U.S. Border Patrol (whose expansive notion of the virtually eliminated U.S. borders apparently includes the Greyhound station at Lake Mead and LVB). I hear there are some other folks in similar predicaments. Meanwhile, my own efforts to get outside of those virtually eliminated national borders for a scant two weeks have cost me over $200 and a few months of calendar time solely for government paperwork processing — not including all the hidden costs and administrative red tape built into my airline tickets, etc.) If those globalist fascists want to virtually eliminate the despicable and dehumanizing institution of arbitrary nation-state borders, then that’s at least one good thing you can say for them. However, if that is what they want, they’re not doing a very good job of getting it, are they?

James Madison Fan:

I would offer the staunch support of illegal immigration by the advocates of the right to “free movement” that write prolifically for the Freeman such as Becky Akers are playing into the hands of Globalists that Mr. Haley warns of.

I agree that “illegal” immigrants are undermining national sovereignty. That’s why I like them. “National sovereignty” is a statist code word for massive government surveillance and violence against peaceful and productive people, on the basis of arbitrary political boundaries drawn on the basis of statist conquests, and all of it enforced by means of a “Papers, please” border-police state that affects all of us, immigrant and native alike — from I-9 forms, to interstate and bus-terminal checkpoints, to endless Customs and Immigration queues, to increased demands for IDs and proof of citizenship at everything from basic travel to college applications, along with government’s ever-increasing demands for even more rigorous forms of National ID (for “security,” natch). People who violate such manifestly unjust and destructive laws are to be praised for their courage and their practical contribution to routing around the damage created by nation-state collectivism.

If borders are arbitrary and national sovereignty a fiction then title is too

I agree that land titles which derive from feudal land grants and statist conquests are a fiction, and ought to be abolished. Those which derive from honest labor and homesteading are not, and ought not be.

How much this will affect any given person’s land ownership depends on how much they have honestly worked the land they are on, and how much they have simply depended on the government’s arbitrary claims to a political Land Monopoly to exclude other potential homesteaders.

The authority to purchase the land is the same authority that allows them to divide it, sell it, grant title to it, and regulate access to it, including removing an uninvited guest from your living room if I choose to ignore your “arbitrary” property line the same way foreign nationals choose to ignore our [sic] “arbitrary” national borders.

Of course, nobody objects to you being able to remove uninvited guests from your living room. What I object to is your claim that you, through the United States government, has a right to remove invited guests from my living room, if they don’t meet your approval, based on the government’s borders. (They’re not my borders; I never wanted them. Maybe you’ve decided to adopt them as yours, but if so you ought to speak only for yourself.)

I did know of a few others in town — the two-story classroom building at the high school had one, for ADA compliance purposes; I just never rode on it, as far as I can recall. I presume there are probably similar elevators for accessibility purposes in some of the other two-story buildings around town. I guess the new football condos that they built during the real-estate bubble probably also have elevators for the tenants, although I’ve never visually confirmed that.

... The article is O.K.; certainly, it's better than immigrant-bashing or pro-Border Patrol articles. But, in the interest of constructive criticism, I'd say

... Well, there is making sense, and there is making sense, isn't there? There are many kinds of "making sense" other than some sort of generic naturalism