Thursday, November 25, 2004
Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday. In its first incarnation, it was set apart as a day upon which early European settlers in North America thanked Providence for the bounty and good fortune they'd discovered in the "New World." Later, in the midst of a terrible war which wracked this same continent, President Abraham Lincoln decreed observance of the last Thursday in November, 1863 to give thanks for an abundant harvest and for Union victories on the battlefield. While that war has thankfully long ended (although the benefits and injuries resulting from it have not), the holiday persists. At Rational Review News Digest -- and at ISIL -- we strive to serve the needs of an international movement, not all of whose participants may be familiar with, or celebrate, Thanksgiving. And we place our own interpretation upon the day's meaning. Our celebration is not exclusive to a region or to a religion, but to an idea: The idea that freedom and abundance are worthy of celebration and that those who fight for liberty are worthy of our thanks. This means you. At a point in history when liberty seems to be in retreat around the globe, we take heart in the fact that so many of you have committed yourselves to holding the line against creeping -- or charging -- statism and to winning the day for freedom. We believe that that victory will come, and offer our sincere thanks to you for your part in bringing it about. Rational Review News Digest will be back tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers. Yours in liberty, P.S. As always, your support is key to the continued publication of Rational Review News Digest and operation of ISIL. We thank you for that support, and hope that you'll choose this time to express it with a much-needed financial contribution. ----------------------------------------------------- Support publication of RRND (not tax deductible) Support ISIL and Free-Market.Net (tax deductible)Thanksgiving greetings
Dear readers,
Thomas L. Knapp, Publisher, Rational Review News Digest
Vince Miller, President, ISIL
RRND is published every weekday except on holidays. Forward freely.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit:
http://www.rationalreview.com/news
http://www.rationalreview.com/news/subscribe.html
http://www.isil.org/store/membership.html
Thomas L. Knapp ..... Publisher
Mary Lou Seymour .... Editor
Steve Trinward ...... Editor
R. Lee Wrights ...... Editor
As you will have noticed, the above is a quotation in full of today's Thanksgiving greetings of RATIONAL REVIEW NEWS DIGEST and FREEDOM NEWS DAILY to their readers. And as I could not agree more with what Tom and Vince say when they are talking turkey about liberty, I thought that I might simply add my name to those greetings, thus, to talk bowling slang,
making it a turkey (= three strikes in succession).
It's always better than aping Americans and stuffin' myself with turkey or joining the European discussion whether Turkey should or should not become a member of the EU, when the real question is: Should there be an EU in the first place? To talk theater, I hope it'll become a turkey... With less turkeys out there, there might still be hope. :-(
It's also a great occasion to congratulate ISIL for the new start of Free-Market.Net's FND and RRND's new cooperation with FND! And I wish that many of last month's 15,976 unique visitors to my site will want to subscribe to this premier source of prime information, in either incarnation.
As I wrote to Tom a couple of days ago: "What a nice choice you offer here, where else can one choose between paying taxes and not paying taxes?!... It's almost really existing libertarianism. ;-) The poor will no doubt donate to you and the rich to ISIL. :-)"
What about those in between? There's always a third way. Not always, but often the best solution, like in right or left and libertarian. A suggestion. Keep those birds (= turkeys) alive! And me too! :-)
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 12:28 PM GMT+1 [Link]
Friday, November 19, 2004
Open Mind Festival 1986 18 years ago, in November 1986, took place the now legendary Open Mind Festival at Kerpen-Manheim near Cologne, Germany (lasting from November 18 to November 23 ~~ I and my tomcat Raffi stayed there even longer than those 6 days and nights!). I pity all those who did not experience this Forum for Social and Individual Evolution at all or even not all of it. First-class speakers, first-class audience, but really varied and international, the crème de la crème of the most radical you could find among the libertarian-minded. We managed to completely get along without any American speakers. This is just not done... ;-) It's at Kerpen that I first met John Zube, I knew his father slightly though from before. As this event is to be considered one of the main inspirations for my personal, largely anarchist, development as well as for my later web pages (though my anarchist development at that time already had a very long history, but it sort of got consecrated then and there), I will have to return to the subject very often and in much detail in the future, also to become intellectually somewhat less dependent on the USA, trying to widen the, as we have to admit, after all sometimes very narrow, above all American-nationalist, horizon of libertarianism. The festival had been organized by the equally legendary FREENETWORK. Its founder, André Spies, when about to head for other activities, actually had asked me and given the permission to continue his work with this, but then circumstances had changed so quickly in such a way as to make an already difficult job even more difficult, so that I have not yet been able to deal with the huge task, but I will have to get back at this also in the coming months and years. Now to the occasion and my reason for drawing your attention to the Open Mind Festival precisley today: On this very day, 18 years ago exactly, Stefan Blankertz had given a lecture at the festival, which, like so many others, had strongly impressed me and he had handed me the text of the lecture before running off to an urgent other appointment. I had kept this text over all those years in a simple suspended folder which would rather have deserved to be called a treasure chest. My life after that left me little time to rummage in treasure chests and make full use of the treasures, as it had much more profane things to boot on my neck. But all this time the desire and intention to publish precisely this text had never left me. At first the times were still pre-Internet, but now the Net makes it more easy of course. So I recently wrote to the author, who had given me such pleasure all those years with his publications, his particular style and way of thinking, to ask for permission to reprint. It turned out that Stefan Blankertz did not remember the circumstances (so much had happened since then), did not even have the text anymore, so that it would have had to be considered missing, had not some crazy collector and fan like me kept it carefully. Now then, the text is as good now as it was then, it did not age, and I consider it to be very very topical, on the one hand because that raping EU Constitution is about to be ratified in some countries (for instance Luxemburg) by referendum, on the other hand because here in Hamburg on Saturdays the pedestrian areas are swarming not only with scientologists (with an s like in snake oil), but also with green advocates propagandizing the introduction of referendums, with their red stripes or borders... Rape is nothing new: Starting with the QUOD LICET JOVI NON LICET BOVI and via the IUS PRIMAE NOCTIS a straight path is leading to our present situation, where everything is forbidden which is not explicitly allowed, except of course for the masters and big shots. Any crime is legitimate if perpetrated by the State and its servants and accomplices, murder, robbery, theft,... you name it. The German essay bears the title "Noch ein Tschernobyl, wenn das Volk es Wyhl!", which means "Another/one more Chernobyl if people want it!". The pun cannot be translated; the German word for want here is will, but the author spells it Wyhl, which sounds almost the same, rhymes with Tschnernobyl if you put the accent on the last syllable (in German normally it would be on the second last), and is also the name of a town in the southwest of Germany, in a region which is the warmest in whole Germany, therefore well known for its wine, fruit and also tobacco. Wyhl used to be a centre of the tobacco industry. Some astute readers no doubt will establish a relationship between this changeable element and the author's Gestalt. :) Wyhl became famous though in the seventies of the last century when it had been chosen to be the location for one of the new nuclear plants to be built then, but numerous citizens' initiatives from the whole of Germany, but mainly from the south of Baden and nearby Alsace in France, had succeeded in preventing this, thus saving a unique landscape of Auenwälder (a type of wood growing alongside rivers on regularly flooded leas). The essay is here, more information about the author is here. But I would like to complete the latter with the following: Dr. Stefan Blankertz took a doctor's degree in sociology at the university of Münster (Prof. Christian Sigrist) with a thesis on Paul Goodman (Title: "Kritischer Pragmatismus. Zur Soziologie Paul Goodmans", Wetzlar 1983: Büchse der Pandora). His postdoctoral thesis for lecturing qualification bears the title "Legitimität und Praxis. Zur erziehungswissenschaftlichen Relevanz angelsächsischer Schulkritik". He has produced numerous publications and lectures on subjects dealing with criticism of the state, anarchism and classical liberalism, which, of course, I cannot mention all here. What do we have all those bookstores and libraries for? :) He was already then German representative of Libertarian International as well as one of the founding principals of the Institut für Handel und Wandel, Berlin, and also co-founder of the Herwig Blankertz Institut für pädagogische Forschung, Münster. Today he is the German representative of ISIL, the International Society for Individual Liberty. Open your mind! |
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 12:29 AM GMT+1 [Link]
Friday, November 5, 2004
Or better a colon: As always, in all fields, America has been the leader. Should anyone, due to the above, not have understood: I am talking about the voters' crime, the election result. Now then, we will have an increase in intelligence. Namely the thus called services. The half-wit is not Bush, the half-wits are the majority of the American populace. So they will get their deserved next 9/11. One can only wish it to them, the majority, not the rest. And even then, those believers will not stop praising to the skies their Ayatollah Bush. The nation voted for OBL, not against him. Minority, prepare for the exodus. So that outside that prison of stupidity you can, like CARE® parcels, send in some brain. If you do not know how to do that, here are the instructions. I just noticed that on November 3, the day after the election catastrophe, this site, which last month had the highest number of visitors ever, on that one day had 50 percent more visitors than the daily average of last month. This seems to indicate that people expected or wanted to find some new comment on the topic. The last one was from the day before. But there was nothing. I was so tired and exhausted from staying up all night (to be able, due to the time difference with Europe, to closely follow that election), that I could not write anything. And I was disappointed of course. All that loving hope had gone, the months long tense stress was over, the balloon had finally been pricked by destiny's torturous needle and the wind that came out flew me to bed. So I am obliging today finally, after having got some little rest, shedding those damn politics off my back like dandruff a couple days. The campaign had been plain stupid, not what Michael Badnarik did, NOT AT ALL, not what so many great devoted participants in the campaign did, NOT AT ALL, NO, in spite of all the professionalism that could be noticed, IT WAS WHERE THE MONEY WENT! This had struck me a few days before the election, upon receipt of one of the press releases ("We are running targeted ad campaigns in 'battleground' states to make the Libertarian Party a factor in the election's outcome.")[source upon request], and I immediately wanted to write an editorial about that, but gave it up, fearing to damage the campaign. It was too late anyway. And I confess to not having understood all this early enough. The campaign has let itself to be completely instrumentalized by Bush and Kerry. The campaign should have been aggressive, not defensive. It was a wrong application of the Zero Aggression Principle. :-) It was not the legitimate purpose of the campaign to make Bush spend more money: "Campaign communications director Stephen Gordon is quite confident that Badnarik's TV ad strategy and targeting of swing states caused the Bush campaign to spend over a hundred thousand in ads it otherwise would not have had to." [source] This is laughable and childish. It would have been better if Bush had not spent that additional money in swing states and would thus maybe have gotten a few less votes and the Badnarik campaign would have spent its meager money in their own strong places or in safe states like California, not in the swing states. It is not the legitimate purpose of the Libertarian Party to play spoil-sport and be the finger of God in swing states, the mover of the pointer of the scale. ("For instance, we just learned that we are polling at 3% in Arizona. Therefore, we are pumping another chuck of advertising dollars into the Grand Canyon State. Since Bush and Kerry are currently 5% apart, this advertising may make the difference in the outcome of the election in this key state. We are pursuing similar activities in Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico, as well.")[source upon request] This is an abdication in favour of the wrongful two-party system. Unless one really wants to vote for a lesser evil, which can be the one or the other of the donkephants. I am quite convinced that more libertarians voted for Bush than for Badnarik. Those stealth Republicans! Where does this lack of critical spirit and of carping mind of the majority, this fear of dissenting stem from? Like in any organization which has become too large, conformity and disinformation spread. America is too big, too centralized, too brainwashed. Their standardized processed worthless food may have accelerated the production of congenital morons, the federal state school system completing the wonder. The wonders of ignorance. And prejudice. Against gays or Old Europe. How should they know? They don't travel anymore (or live abroad). The dollar is too weak to make that easy as it once was. Distances to the different are too great. When did you last meet an American student or young hitch-hiker in a street in Europe? Maybe an occasional blue rinse. And that's it. I talked to a few of those recently. Affluent ones, just off a cruise ship. Their ignorance was just lethal. They don't speak languages. They have no comparison. Even in former communist East Germany people were more intelligent. They read a lot and could compare their TV with the West German one. They all knew at least one second language. They also travelled to other cultures, Hungary, Poland, Rumania etc. They succeeded in a peaceful revolution I doubt the Americans will now, as it has become so necessary, repeat, as they don't even read their Bill of Rights. Bill? That's the name of one of their neighbours or cousins or of Monica's ex. Rights? That's the plural of the side or part that is on or toward the right side... "Bush is such a good man!" (American housewife calling C-SPAN) Goodbye, America!Intelligence has decreased worldwide
Period.
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 02:30 PM GMT+1 [Link]
Tuesday, November 2, 2004
The Left Is Calling Collect!
Like they always have, past, present and future. They want it, others should pay for it. JDM is of a different kind, the generous one. He is giving, not taking. Today, on occasion of the United States Presidential Election, noblesse oblige, he is giving double. But different from the Boot On Your Neck duopoly. Two excellent columns (#200 and #201, a jubilee!) at the same time, the latest even sort of a stroke of genius. Thankful congratulations then!Jonathan David Morris
I'm Throwing My Vote AwayJonathan David Morris
The John Kerry Telethon
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 09:08 PM GMT+1 [Link]
Monday, November 1, 2004
You are against voting? How I can feel and side with you! But read that great article "Want Liberty?" published today! YOU WILL BE CONVINCED! STOP AMERICAN IMPERIALISM! KERRY IS FOR UNITED NATIONS IMPERIALISM! BADNARIK WILL BRING THE TROOPS IN 135 COUNTRIES HOME TO TRULY DEFEND THE COUNTRY! Halloween at home would have been so much nicer than the true horror in Iraq!Vote!
Repeat with me:
DISGRACEFUL LAW TO GIVE UP RIGHTS
REAL MEN FOUGHT SO HARD TO GAIN
ARAB-AMERICANS AND MUSLIMS, DON'T!
VOTE FOR BADNARIK!!!
Posted by Christian Butterbach @ 01:04 AM GMT+1 [Link]
