Anarchists From The United States

"Police violence is very frequently over-determined — promoted from above and supported from below. But where it is not actually encouraged, sometimes even where individuals (officers or administrators) disapprove of it, excessive and illegal force are nevertheless nearly always condoned. Among police administrators there is the persistent and well-documented refusal to discipline violent officers; and among the cops themselves, there is the “code of silence.” Police brutality does not just happen; it is allowed to happen. It is tolerated by the police themselves, those on the street and those in command. It is tolerated by prosecutors, who seldom bring charges against violent cops, and by juries, who rarely convict. It is tolerated by the civil authorities, the mayors and the city councils, who do not use their influence to challenge police abuses. But why? The answer is simple: police brutality is tolerated because it is what people with power want. [...] It is merely the normal functioning of the institution; it is just that the apparent conflict between the law and police practices may not be so important as we tend to assume. The two may, at times, be at odds, but this is of little concern so long as the interests they serve are essentially the same. The police may violate the law, as long as they do so in the pursuit of ends that people with power generally endorse, and from which such people profit."

"Riots are communities defining what counts as police brutality and to set the limits of authority. It is here, not in the courts, that our rights are established."

"We’ve been here before. In the first hours of 2009, police boarded a Bay Area Rapid Transit train, responding to a call about a fight. They detained several young men, most of them Black, among them one named Oscar Grant. As Grant was lying facedown on the platform being handcuffed, one officer, Johannes Mehserle, drew his gun, shot him in the back, and killed him. The entire incident was recorded on video from multiple angles. Several witnesses were filming with their cell phone cameras when Grant was shot; afterward, they hid the cameras from police, and then posted the footage on the internet. Within days, demonstrations were organized in Oakland, and quickly escalated into riots — beginning with an attack on a police car parked in front of the BART headquarters. More than 300 businesses and hundreds of cars were damaged in the unrest. Police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, an armored personnel carrier and more than a hundred arrests, but demonstrations continued for weeks. A year later, Mehserle was tried and convicted, but of manslaughter rather than murder. Rioting resumed. Damages were estimated at $750,000. While clearly a limited victory, the Mehserle verdict remains remarkable. Looking back over the fifteen previous years, the San Francisco Chronicle could find only six cases in which police were charged for on-duty shootings, and none of the thirteen officers involved were convicted. "If there’s one lesson to take from this," a participant in the unrest was later to conclude, "it’s that the only reason Mehserle was arrested is because people tore up the city. It was the riot — and the threat of future riots.""

"Magic makes for a slippery concept. Like "gender," "race," or any other term that can be picked apart as a social construction—which of course means all of our terms, every attempt at producing order through language and —the word "magic" does not simply express a straightforward, self-evident reality, but rather creative reimagining on the part of everyone who uses it. Magic's meaning is continually shaped and reshaped by changes in our knowledge, values, and prejudices. Scholars writing about magic today, when confronted with the matter of definitions, often chose to simply admit the incoherence and uselessness of the topic and then move forward with their projects."

"A willingness to engage in the give and take of argument displays a commitment to cognitive egalitarianism—the proposition that all people should be treated as intellectual equals, and that no individual can legitimately claim a privileged immunity from the burden of proof."

"Through inculcating the notion that sacrifice is a virtue, Christianity has succeeded in convincing many people that misery incurred through sacrifice is a mark of virtue. Pain becomes the insignia of morality—and conversely, pleasure becomes the insignia of immorality. Christianity, therefore, does not say, ‘Go forth and be miserable.’ Rather, it says, ‘Go forth and practice the virtue of self-sacrifice.’ In practical terms, these commands are identical."

"When conformity is required, as it is in Christianity, what are the results? To begin with, the sacrifice of truth inevitably follows. One can be committed to conformity or one can be committed to truth, but not both. The pursuit of truth requires the unrestricted use of one's mind—the moral freedom to question, to examine evidence, to consider opposing viewpoints, to criticize, to accept as true only that which can be demonstrated—regardless whether one's conclusions conform to a particular creed."

"The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy."

"The Christian theologian will never find a contradiction between the propositions of faith and reason, because it is his job to interpret them out of existence."

"Reason is not one tool of thought among many, it is the entire toolbox. To advocate that reason be discarded in some circumstances is to advocate that thinking be discarded—which leaves one in the position of attempting to do a job after throwing away the required instrument."

"If acorns start growing into theologians, or if women begin turning into pillars of salt, then we may wish to hypothesize about a supernatural influence. But until such time as nature becomes hopelessly unintelligible and unpredictable, we need look no further than nature itself for explanations."

"Intellectually, every man is an island unto himself; no man can assume the responsibility of thinking for another. The virtue of rationality thus entails intellectual independence and the willingness to assume responsibility for one’s beliefs, choices, and actions."

"Christianity cannot erase man's need for pleasure, nor can it eradicate the various sources of pleasure. What it can do, however, and what it has been extremely effective in accomplishing, is to inculcate guilt in connection with pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure, when accompanied by guilt, becomes a means of perpetuating chronic guilt, and this serves to reinforce one's dependence on God. ** p. 308"

"The leap of faith is a strategic impasse that confronts every Christian in search of converts; and, as he sees the matter, there is no wrong way to become a Christian. It is the end that is important, not the means; it does not matter why you believe, so long as you believe. For the philosopher, in contrast, the paramount issue is the justification of belief, not the fact of belief itself."

"Government should only protect individual; beyond that it should leave individuals free to cultivate themselves, and thereby generate spontaneous cultural order."

"It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself."

"The academic who lives comfortably in his professional enclave, secure in the belief that his corner of the cognitive world is the entire universe, has little need for philosophy, which he regards as a descent into idle speculation. Philosophy, for this academic, is an irritating enterprise, one that might call into question his most cherished assumptions."

"Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man’s mind and knowledge."

"In the late nineteenth century, liberals in Europe and America discovered that they were victims of a linguistic coup. They found that they were no longer regarded as liberals per se but as old liberals – a qualification that had bed foisted upon them by self-proclaimed new liberals."

"[G]overnment should only concern itself with matters of justice (i.e. the protection of rights) while leaving more tangential matters to the voluntary decisions and actions of individuals."

"It is clear that 'social Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' were intended by Obama to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. It is highly doubtful that Obama knows anything about the history of these ideas, and it is even more doubtful that he cares. A concern for truth is not the coin of the political realm."

"A theory of necessary conditions will tend to generate a model of the open society, whereas a theory of necessary and sufficient conditions will tend to generate a model of the closed society. These conflicting models result from the inner logic of ideas. To offer a sketch of what is minimally necessary for a good society is to leave considerable room for diversity, variation, and change. But the available space for individuality will progressively decrease as additional details transform what had been a sketch into a veritable blueprint for the good society."

"To enumerate the particular details—the sufficient conditions—of a good society is effectively to prohibit individuality and social change. A planned society, a society in which sufficient conditions are politically determined and coercively imposed, is ‘closed’ to the spontaneous innovations of free association. We see this in the utopian writings of Plato and his many admirers. A utopian society is a perfect society, one that has been carefully designed by a wise and beneficent lawgiver. Any deviation from perfection must necessarily be for the worse, so social change—which in this scheme is but another name for social degeneration—must be arrested at all costs. And this, in turn, requires the suppression of individuality. The individual’s pursuit of happiness—that powerful and unpredictable agent of social change—must be subordinated for the sake of a good society, as specified in the utopian blueprint of sufficient conditions."

"Taxes, then, are a necessary means for the maintenance of political power, so the laws, first and foremost, must enforce compulsory taxation."

"There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life."

"Author George H. Smith can either be considered a forerunner of the New Atheist writers so popular in the late 2000s, or as someone supplying a summary and capstone to their work. Readers should not let the decades that have passed since the original publication dissuade them from an enlightening read."

"According to this approach, legitimate disagreements may occur between subjects and rulers when alienable rights are involved, but no such disputes are justified over the question of inalienable rights. Government cannot claim any jurisdiction over such rights, because inalienable rights, by their very nature, could never have been transferred to government in the first place."

"This version of social contract theory stipulated that the king could continue to demand allegiance only so long as he fulfills his part of the agreement. If he violates his trust—as Americans believed he had with the Coercive Acts—he ‘unkings’ himself and releases his subjects from their part of the deal. His subjects are thereby cast into a ‘state of nature’—that is, a society without government—and are then free to form a new government of their own choosing."

"We can see why Jefferson focused on inalienable rights in his effort to fasten the charge of tyranny on the British government. The violation of inalienable rights was a defining characteristic of a tyrannical government, and only against such a government is revolution justified."

"According to [Peter L.] Callero, ‘Freedom of choice and self-determination are virtuous principles, but when selfish individual interests threaten to destroy the common good, the limits of individualism are exposed.’ Unfortunately but predictably, Callero is vague when it comes to defining ‘the common good’—a catchphrase with many variations that has been used by murderous dictators throughout history. May we therefore say that the ‘common good,’ when pushed to extremes, results in the likes of Stalin and Hitler?"

"Ironically perhaps, key elements in the Marxian criticism of differs little from a popular conservative complaint (though the same point is typically used for different purposes)."

"Americans feared the Townshend Act for another reason: revenues raised form it were to be used to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges. This proposal struck at the heart of a revered American tradition. Although the Crown appointed governors in all 11 colonies, their salaries were paid by the colonial legislatures. This ‘power of the purse’ enabled American assemblies to check the power of the governors and judges by withholding their salaries."

"As Herbert Spencer was to point out in the following century, feudal serfs were required to turn over one-third of their produce to their overlord. This means that any citizen who is required to pay a tax rate greater than one-third is worse off in this respect than the lowly serf."

"The physical capacity to coerce others can never generate a moral obligation to obey the dictates of [government] power."

"The Boston Tea Party has often been called a pivotal event that led to the American Revolution, but it would be more accurate to say that the British response was the true catalyst."

"Taxes forcibly transfer wealth from producers to legislators, who justify their expropriations under cover of law."

"Those in government are especially susceptible to the corruption of power, because government is institutionalized coercion."

"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive. Once you realize that's what you're dealing with, everything falls into place. Okay, this guy wants to sell me cancer, he makes money selling me cancer, he knows he's selling me cancer. I'm not going to get him to say that [cigarettes] are cancer, but now I can proceed accordingly knowing that this is going to be about promoting [cigarettes] or parliaments or whatever it is."

"[About the framing of public figures in the media:] If you read a play, a lot of times at the beginning of the play there will be that cast of characters and it will say like 'Jane, a wealthy widow seeking love', 'Thomas, her young paramour'. When they bring a character onto the scene in a corporate news article, it will say 'Joe Rogan, a podcaster known for his history of transphobic remarks', 'Scott Adams, the disgraced...'. They will immediately tell you from their personal perspective how you should feel about this person before they even finish the sentence. And once you spot that this is the technique, you can't unsee it."

"[About the Covid lockdowns:] Intentionally or not, some very very bad pepople got some very useful information of how much the populous was willing to put up with. [...] There was clearly a consideration on the parts of the authorities in each country about 'What can we do and what [can we] get away with?'"

"Here in 2016, when [Donald] Trump got elected, what happened as a consequence was blue-pilled leftists for a long time were taught that the Trump-world view [...] [was this minority]. 'We have sat you down for a year and told you that voting for Trump is completely unacceptable. That to do so is effectively to decree yourself to be aligned with the Klan and the nazis.' [one of the big newspapers] had a front page of Trump called antichrist when the Pope critizised him for something during when he was just merely a candidate. And yet [in November] Americans went in and flicked the leaver for Hitler-antichrist. And they didn't know what to do because in their mind there is very few of these lunatics and now there's enough to elect the president and because they're passing they didn't know who's the bad guy and the good guy. They thought '100 percent of the people I know', but obviously it's not 100. At best it's [60 percent]. So this was [...] a moment of panic: 'Wait a minute! I don't know who these people are anymore!'"

"What corporate media does, which is far more nefarious than the state, is simultaneously it will tell the audience 'These are the issues you should be concerned about today, and [even though we just learned about it five seconds ago] here's how you should think about it.' So very quickly it gives the person, who is often marginally intelligent both the concerns of the day, which is just kind of like a fashion issue, but also the answer so that not only do they look sympathetic and empathetic they also simultaneously seem informed. [...] If you go to [public places] and you hear how these people talk, you realize they are parroting [...] almost verbatim, if not verbatim, the people that they saw on their own screen [...] and when you have that epiphany you realize this kind of conservative model that 'We are just going to teach the population to respect people's rights and in a 100 years we are going to be free.' is really not a tenable one."

"Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them."

"What are presented as the best arguments against anarchism are inevitably a description of the status quo."

"It's really amazing to me how many people [rather than trying to figure out Putin's endgame] are content to say that he's evil and he's crazy. OK. Sure. Well, the Penguin [in Batman] is evil. [...] He wants to get that diamond that is shaped like a bird or that really expensive umbrella. Just because someone is crazy or a bad person doesn't mean that they're not predictable or coherent along with their own internal logic. You know the Zodiac killer wants to kill people. It doesn't mean you have to agree with him or approve of him. OK, let's see if we can figure out who he's last victim is and what it's gonna take to find him."

"I have no interest in reaching the general population. The general population are the people who would have been nazis in the 40s and they would have been jihadis or sympathetic in some of these other countries 20 years ago. So they will always follow the ruling class."

"You have all these choices at the supermarket and then you go to government, which is far more important than what brand of soda you drink, and you're told it's got to be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn. To hell with that! I want my views and I want to live my life and you setting up this false alternative is completely unacceptable. I'm not playing this game."

"When you have a fundamentalist faith you are certain that you are on the side of the angels."

"[On talking to political opponents:] Come at that conversation appreciating that what they're spouting now has become their identity and also has become their status. So you're asking them to give up something both that matters to them on an emotional and values level, but also from an evolutionary-psychology level."

"If you're dealing with a journalist who you perceive as being engaged in good faith, and there's plenty of them, when you explain a particular view that you know is outside of their worldview, ask them to explain it back to you to see that they got what you meant. And if you have that on tape and they try to mis-characterize you, so much the better, now you have evidence that this was done maliciously."