Our Product

Never let it be said that we ignore our newbies. Since several saw fit to impugn my dedication to the advance of People of Gender, I thought it would be justified to lay out a few basic principles of anarchofeminism, such as it is.

To critique patriarchy is to move necessarily in the direction of anarchy, since the state is finally patriarchy manifested as a political economy, yet there remains a propensity among many, perhaps most, feminists of my acquaintance to view the ascension of this or that woman to a position of importance and influence within the state apparatus as a general good. Thus it is taken, with caveats, as a sign of progress that Condoleeza Rice is the Secretary of State, or that Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, or that Hillary Clinton is a prominent contender for the Presidency of the United States. In reality this isn't advancement, but retrogression. It's like claiming J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn as examples of queer advancement.

TGGP recently reminded me of a classic Spooner article called ""Against Women's Suffrage." A brief excerpt:

If the women, instead of petitioning to be admitted to a participation in the power of making more laws, will but give notice to the present lawmakers that they (the women) are going up to the State House, and are going to throw all the existing statute books in the fire, they will do a very sensible thing[.]

Yet there remains a belief that the mechanics of political power and broader admission to the political process are necessary precursors to gender equality. The truth is that women will never be equal in the nation-state. To agitate for the bait-and-switch comforts of Title IX psuedo-equity is to ask for a more comfortably furnished cage.

As a proponent of queer rights, I have long found myself at odds with soi-disant queer activists who persist in believing that judicial and legislative remedies will for the basis of sexual equality. There are certainly queer radicals and anarchists, as there are feminist radicals and anarchists, but we are in the substantial minority, especially when compared to the political-activist class. Queer agitation for "gay marriage" is a perfect example of ideological fecklessness: admission to a state-run, mutual-contractual obligation doesn't constitute advancement toward sexual equality, unless of course you accept that the ne plus ultra of equity and justice consists of a series of enumerated state grants to individuals.

In the interests of its own stability, our state has occasionally consented to extend participatory rights to women, racial minorities, sexual minorities, etc. This should not be confused with "progress."

you must recall, sir, when Senator Buford made that big hassle about our deterrent lacking credibility.

So I was going to say something about Hillary Clinton promising to obliterate Iran if Iran launches a nuclear assault on a nation with an actual, extant, and therefore superior nuclear arsenal, a nation with which the United States does not have any sort of de jure mutual defense pact. I was going to point out that not only is it far-fetched to presume that such an attack is in the offing, it also signifies a goofily sophistic homicidal psychosis at the heart of the American imperium, for on one hand the Iranians are supposed to be some sort of marginal, long-suffering people held down under the bitter weight and tight yoke of their cruel government oppressors, yet on the other hand, if this tyrannical, dictatorial government should engage in an act of aggression, we will kill all of the Iranian people. But you know, I think that YouTube commenter FatOgreHead covers it with greater alacrity when he avers: "I hope she gets raped by a deinonychus talon in the ass!"

Crank Yank

Hi, is your refrigerator running?

God Laughs at People Like Us

We don't want freedom. We don't want justice. We just want someone to love.

Yes Means No

One of the ways that democracies flatter themselves is by proposing that they, uniquely among forms of government, operate via the "consent of the governed." But consent is something that must be given or withheld, and have you tried not paying your taxes lately? You can do it, but you're not free to do it. Certainly it's possible for small numbers of citizens to expatriate themselves, but in practical reality most of us are forever prisoners of our nationality--it is one of the inescapable aspects of our existence. Implied consent is one thing in minor matters of verbal contracts, say, but the idea that emerging from the uterus within the political borders of the United States of America implies that one consents to our rickety-rapacious system of governance is a stretch. And by a stretch, I mean a howler, because it's perfectly evident that no consent is involved at all. Walk down to the nearest federal court and inform the fine folks there that you hereby withdraw your consent to the Constitution, statutes, and common law of the United States of America and its individual states. Better yet, walk down to the nearest police station.

Meteorology

A coworker asked me who I voted for today, and I said that I didn't vote. She asked me why not, her disapproval being frankly palpable, and I told her I didn't vote for the same reason I don't always come to complete stops at stop signs: the act reeks of undue deference to constituted authority. The presumptive obligation of each citizen to vote is one of those goofy tenets of the democratic civic religion. Like most religious precepts and practices, we continue to valorize it even as we abandon it. Well over half of us now abstain. Even Catholicism is in better shape. I actually will haul myself into a booth if there's a seat on the city council at stake, because, fuck, man, the potholes. On the opposite end of the scale you get instead the idea that if you aggregate the binary decisions of millions of people you will produce some aspirational avatar of The People, The Country, whatever . . . some pure representative of the collective will and the Direction We're Going In and so forth and so on. Most political discourse is infected with the plainly insane notion that there exists a sort of ineffible national political consensus which political leadership must tap into, like a bunch of psychic mediums, in order to Get Things Done, Bipartisanly. "The American People want . . ." begin many such ponderings. Naturally, the American People don't want anything in particular, because there are 300 million of them. We live, as we dream, alone, says Conrad. What any given soul desires at any given moment of any given day is the impenetrable business of that person uniquely. All else is obfuscation of the essential randomness of individual existence--we are but slaves to fate, etc.--usually in the servie of keeping those who are better fed and better paid than you better fed and better paid than you. Participation in the maintenance of a political order is a sucker's game. It's a beautiful day in Pennsylvania. Go outside. The sun doesn't give a damn who's president.

Gourmetrol

The cost of food is rocketing through the roof, and in some countries, food riots may yet bring down governments. Insofar as I am for bringing down governments, I consider it a salubrious political state for our world; insofar as I believe that the world's excess human population should be reduced gradually, over several generations, through the thoughtful, widespread application of homosexuality, rather than by starving poor people to death, I consider the situation sad. It is worth nothing that we are in fact starving poor people to death--that their starvation is proximate result of First-World desires for personal transportation, lettuce in the winter, etc.

Oil really is remarkable stuff after all, an astonishingly portable energy source that--be careful with that hybrid car, Eugene--is not going to be replaced in the near future. Lots of calories, little volume. It's so astonishing that for a time it made it cheaper to supply food around the world via international, transoceanic supply chains than it was to grow it locally. Grown on a vast factory farm in the United States or Europe or Brazil, harvested, loaded into trucks, transferred onto ships and planes, shipped around the world, all because oil is such a goddamn cheap and efficient means of producing motive power, which also ran the machines that made it possible to farm on the immense scale of the industrial farm, which also formed the chemical basis of fertilizers and pesticides necessary to grow it all and keep the bugs off.

But it turns out there's only so much of the stuff in the ground. All good things, etc. Between the loss of any excess capacity, growing demand from expanding Asian economies, and the fact that the United States has royally fucked any hope for Mideastern political equilibrium, the price of petrol is way up, and the cost of growing the food and packing the food and shipping the food has gone up commensurately. Such increases would be difficult but bearable were it not for the fact that America's foremost mainline environmental minds appear to be mostly concerned with finding cheaper, uh, "sustainable" means to run our vast fleets of trucks and automobiles, for the Lord hates rail with a fervor he usually reserves for pedestrian communities, and have decided that "biofuels" are the ticket, thus fomenting the coversion of immense tracts of arable farmland previously dedicated to the production of staple food crops into fuel depots, although of course the mechanized farming that produces plant matter for biofuels requires the same oil-driven infrastructure as regular industrial farming in order to (barely!) operate efficiently enough that the total potential energy output of plant-based fuels exceeds the energy input required to produce them. These facts conspire to reduce staple crop harvests dedicated to food use. Besides cars, the First World also loves meat, especially beef, and since we consume it in extraordinary quantities, it must be grown and fattened industrially, which means that ever-increasing amounts of grain must be allocated to fattening unhealthy cows as quickly as possible.

But IOZ, you ask, can it really be true that production efficiencies and low fuel costs alone allowed international agribusiness to undercut local farming througout political and economic system based on free markets, founded on the notion that competition is best ensured by massively subsidizing already profitable industries in order that they can cut wholesale costs without affecting their profit margins, far undercutting any potential competitors. The wisdom of the market then determines that this is an insufficient competitive advantage, and so through its ineffible processes, the market causes Western governments to impose high tariffs on agricultural imports. The wisdom of the free market then causes entitites like the IMF and the World Bank to demand that poorer nations in receipt of aid monies and loans reduce and remove any tariffs they've previously established to protect their own indigenous industries and farms, because, after all, tariffs are a barrier to free trade. This is what Adam Smith called the invisible hand.

Change You Can Reprieve In

Having decided to blockade myself in the house with nothing but weed, cocaine, a couple bottles of wine, and a bottle of scotch until Hill and Barack get the hell out of my city and state, I'm emerging only for the sake of pointing out that Barack Obama's constant invocation of King's "the fierce urgency of now" has got to be one of the most tawdry bits of political bowdlerization in memory. I mean, here you have the revolutionary cry of America's one great radical, and it's become an applause line in a stump speech! In primary season no less. It's as bad as that time I heard "Baba O'Reilly" on a Nissan commercial.