Get The State OUT Of Marriage

Look at the trouble it’s causing. The gay “community” ( I always put ” community” in scare quotes nowadays ) want to call their partnerships marriages, and of course some people are all for it, and some are against it, but what they are all calling for without exception is for the all powerful state to change it’s mind about what a marriage is.

Well I’m sorry, but that’s bollocks.

A marriage is a contract between consenting adults. It is a promise to share lives and wealth until death, said in front of witnesses and associated paperwork signed and witnessed. The state has no business in dictating the terms of such a contract, dictating where it may be agreed to or dictating who may sign it. Full stop. (A libertarian may here interject that the State may have some role in enforcing contracts but I’m an anarchist, so they can bugger off).

This whole debate amounts to one side saying “please sir, please sir, those people want to say they’re married but I don’t WANT them to” and the other side saying “Oh, but SIR, you simply MUST agree that we can call it marriage too or it’s just so UNFAIR!” Grow the fuck up. You love each other so why do you care what sir thinks? Or the other crowd? Get the state OUT of marriage altogether and the whole debate simply fades away. Sign a contract, find somewhere to hire out to celebrate it (and somewhere else for a proper party afterwards ) and have done with it.

And don’t get me started on religious freedom. What about Muslims and Mormons and anyone else who fancies a bit of polygamy? I hear a lot about one man and one woman, two men or two women but what if you fancy two wives or three husbands? Or a wife, two bisexuals and a tranny? If they all agree then why shouldn’t they be able to enter into contract?  And call it marriage or whatever else they want?

And “advertising standards” can kiss my arse as well. It’s a contradiction in terms anyway. Next time you see “x% of y women agreed” do the maths, see if it comes out to a real number of women. That’s just more corporatism, right there.

Odd One Out

Reason: Why We’re Losing http://goo.gl/mag/tm6ki

They’re right, alas.
I’ve often characterised people as ‘anti -bees ,’ in that bees are individually quite useless but as a collective are amazing, but people are wonderful as individuals but as collectives (or mobs ) are stupid.
The trouble is, as humans are a pack animal they have a propensity to collectivise, and, as a pack animal they also have a large beta contingent which is always compelled to defer to “the boss. ” In a democracy, you can see how this works. It is a perpetual duking -it -out between two or three bosses but the idea of 60,000,000 bosses never arises. And I fear it never will.
You may have noticed I started referring to humans in the third person there, that was deliberate. I don’t really play well with authority, I’m not a joiner or a beta male but I’m not an alpha male either. I usually end up in de facto leadership roles, deferred to by others, but I’m not comfortable with it. I just want to be left alone.

I’m a “don’t tread on me ” anarchist. Not a ‘big anarchist movement ‘ one. So I don’t really fit the primate social model. I don’t actually count myself as “human” anymore. Humans like order, they like hierarchies, they like to know who’s in charge and that they deserve to be in charge because they are “doing something.” They like this because they are a pack animal, like the wolf.
Are YOU human? 

Fat Dog Goes On Diet

Slow news week in Kent, obviously…

Still Here

I’m currently working my way through many of the worthy publications available in various formats at the Mises Institute website. Normal (that is to say, intermittent) service will be resumed shortly.

Bravo

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dailyanarchist/blog/~3/wbklEtI2zHU/

Paradox

Compare and Contrast:

Actually, that was a bit of a trick question. The first video is from the Virtual Business School, the second is from hacktivist collective ‘Anonymous’, and yet… both have the same message, both are aimed at the same people. One is a learning tool and one is a threat but the message of both is the same. The world has changed and there is no going back.

I had the privilege of seeing Professor Obeng (the man behind the first video) speak the last week, and he showed us that video on a big screen. Aside from being a very energetic and engaging speaker he also has a message that makes absolute sense. People are more interconnected now -they talk more now- than at any other time in history and organisations that don’t adapt to this new reality -be they corporations, governments or anything else- are doomed. Smart businesses are harnessing this phenomenon, encouraging networking among their front line staff, crowdsourcing decisions amongst the people who will be implementing them and finding innovative solutions from nets cast as wide as possible -making the most of their talent and engaging their staff at the same time.

The old command-and-control model is dead, and, barring a worldwide disaster (not necessarily natural) that shuts down the internet, it’s going to stay that way. Which is where we come to the paradox of the title. Sure, we, the freedom lovers use and have been using this new reality to chat, to organise, to meet up and achieve real things in the real world so have the enemies of freedom- the lefties, the groupthinkers, the big corporatist little cogs and useful idiots and sometimes it even looks hopeless. They are too many, too ideologically similar, too on-message but even as they use the electronic ties that unbind they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction, for they are popularising the very tools that make it impossible for their message to be the only message now and forevermore which is absolutely necessary for their system to survive.

Man is finally free, and by Christ he’s starting to realise it. The next few decades are going to be interesting indeed.

 

Fill In The Blank

Galaxy Nexus

I finally took delivery of my smoking hot Galaxy Nexus the other day.
It’s lovely. Once again, I can’t fault Vodafone. Well, the store division, anyway. The online order was placed before Christmas and I received nothing but emails and texts, but once I went into the store and explained how long I’d been waiting they cancelled the online contract and set up a new one in store and I walked away with my new phone the same day. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
I was a little disconcerted to find that Google have disabled USB mass storage in favour of MTP (there are reasons for this, good ones) and as Linux has a little problem with MTP (well, it’s not easy to set up in Fedora (which is on this laptop and used most often) although apparently easier to do in Ubuntu with everything you need in the repos so I ended up transferring my files from the old phone to the Nexus using this method:

High Technology?

Fantastic. ADB you save my arse yet again, although the irony of having to use the command line to sync files to one of the most technologically advanced telephones in the world is not lost on me. Still, I guess most people would be using a Windoze 7 pc which understands MTP straight out of the box, and not need the Cli.

On the other hand rooting was as easy as pie, a simple “fastboot oem unlock” and flash an insecure boot image and install the superuser binary, took about five minutes. Swings and roundabouts I guess.

Racist

seemingly? Even Sun readers are seemingly not immune.
Make no mistake, Abbott’s tweet was racist, there is no ‘seemingly’ about it.
I can divine no logical reason for adding a ‘seemingly’ unless one is labouring under the nagging feeling that Abbott cannot be racist because she is herself black.
In which case YOU are racist.

Poisoning The Well

Just a quickie, as I’m actually building up to a post about Stephen Lawrence (seeing as it’s Racism Week) so I’ll be brief…

OH has a post up about HS2 in which he says:

If business wants a high speed rail network, business knows what it has to do. Raise the capital and build one – build it and they will come. But no, our glorious politicians are FAR too interested in the glory of the State for national infrastructure to be left to people who actually have money to risk

It strikes me that this will never happen, so long as the State is involved. Business may well know that they need a High Speed Rail service across the country, but they simply will never ever build one. Why? It has been pretty obvious since HS1 was mooted that eventually these lines would be built (at taxpayer’s expense) across the country so why bother? Why risk the capital when you can get the cow for free? /metaphormix

Of course, it will be cocked up. If HS1 is anything to go buy, it will be a ghost train, visiting ghost stations as it will be far too expensive for the majority of people to use on anything but the most splendid of occasions (or people being sent by work, on expenses, in which case it would still be cheaper to send them by car. Hell, I’VE been on HS1 on expenses and it would have been cheaper for work to send me by bus and pay the overtime. Or by DHL, come to that) especially as they have ALREADY PAID for the bloody thing. As a government vanity project subsidised by our bottomless (ha!) pockets there will be no incentive to cut prices to make more money through higher use (or cut costs through efficiencies in building and operating it) as there would be in the private sector.

Instead of a useful piece of infrastructure built by entrepreneurs we will get another expensive Blue Elephant. And Yesterday Cameron was taking on ‘Crony Capitalism???’ Don’t make me LAUGH.