cheese it, the cops!

nothing succeeds like excision

you know, people have made fun of contemporary secessionists. but secession in itself is never the wrong idea. now, i think that if you live in blue america, with your delicate sensibilities, latte, and metrosexuality, you might seriously entertain seceding from the reds. remember, radical abolitionists were as much in favor of separating the country as were the slavers. each nation can continue to divide from there until we're down to the secession of each consciousness from itself. that's my prediction for 2013!

eyeofthestorm's endorsement in the greek elections

i believe if i were voting tomorrow in greece, i'd vote for syriza, the left party that might end up taking greece out of the euro. first of all, i'd certainly want fresh young faces. second, even if there's more pain in this direction, i'd be thinking that my country needs some sort of return to self-determination, instead of being a tributary state to germany. you know there is a lot to be said against political consolidation and centralization, and the bigger the political/economic unit, the further any piece in it is from freedom or democracy, for example. the greeks are in a situation in which they essentially have no input into the decisions that affect their lives; but that's true in various dimensions of all of us who live in a modern mega-state. this is why the idea of world institutions - banks or environmental regimes, for example - gives me the willies. honestly, once you give up the fiction that the institutions are all of us, you see that every actual person loses any sort of autonomy; that distant bureaucracies into which no single person can have much input control the environment of every single person. indeed it's gotten to the point that whole nations have no inout: a kind of post-colonialism. this is why you should think about what 'progress' means for actual human beings. your own currency might not be worth much, but it might be a sign that you intend to run your own life.

this is a test

i think if rick perry gets into the race, he'll have a reasonable chance of getting nominated (though i don't withdraw my prediction of pawlenty). as sympathetic as i am to his notion of splitting up the united states, which is long overdue, the fundamentalist hyper-right christianity would make him an extremely disconcerting president. then there's cain's call for a straight religious test for office. it's funny, but one of the world's most famous religious skeptics could get elected president of the united states in 1800. now there certainly is a de facto religious test. maybe atheism needs a political party.

one reason the world should disintegrate politically rather than consolidate is because we need a much greater variety and many more experiments in sovereignty. the range of actual political systems in the world is mind-numbingly unimaginative. this is itself a problem with sovereignty, which often represents our supposed intelligence at its most banal; if there were a "general will," it would be, of course, an average will, a will with the funk averaged out.