cheese it, the cops!

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

So if Zombie Ayn Rand eats the brains of vampiric Ted Cruz...

For Crispin and Co....Merry Baby Jesus Birthday and stuff....

Speaking of which, here is the offical Crusader AXE position on CIA torture and such abominations. While I think it's a pretty good piece as these things go, as often happens with VetsToday, the comments are the best part. When a column gets that response, I feel like Sheldon Cooper, doomed to spend my life teaching evolution to fundamentalists in east Texas. On the other hand, they're pretty funny, if you don't mind feeling amazed at the stupidity of a hunk of the American population. Here's a personal favorite --

Since the massive Rhine meadows slaughter of 1.8 million Germans after WWII by your Rat Bastard leader Eisenhower torture has been a part of the US military efforts ever since! You rat bastard Yanks are far worse than the NAZIS ever were they were using these techniques for maybe ten to twelve years You Yankee Rat Bastards have been at it for 200 plus years and you Rat Bastards are proud of it! How long will you Rat Bastards remain in the sewers and latrine pits of humanity? 

Enjoy! good luck! and all that stuff...

 

 

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.