Blog surfing

I'm too busy at the moment to think of cool or interesting things to write, but I do have to time to surf the blogosphere a bit every day. Here are a few posts that I felt like acknowledging.

James Leroy Wilson recently jotted down some ideas about parties and ideas, more specifically about how terms like liberal and conservative have little relevance to the American political landscape. An excerpt:

The history of American parties and politics seems rather to be of ever-shifting alliances of four ideas: progressivism, populism, individualism, and mercantilism (Wall Street interests). Parties that win the allegiance of two or three of these groups tend to win elections.

The Salty Pig has taken up the torch to criticize members of the left who rightly criticize institutions such as NAFTA and the WTO, but falsely equate them with laissez-faire free trade. An excerpt:

you know that whiny fag character edward robinson played in the ten commandments? that's what this boozer sounds like. NAFTA and WTO are not laissez-faire. it's the same straw man routine that was pulled in the california energy "deregulation" debacle.

but put that aside a moment and simply look at his assumptions, which basically fall into the same category of fallacy as most economic state-licking BS: that which is seen, and that which is not seen.

Over at the Porcupine Blog, Larry Gambone discusses the role of plants in human evolution. From reading the following excerpt, it seems as if he plans on writing more about this subject in the future, which I look forward to.

A society with closer social bonds and a better communication system (language) would have an edge on societies that lacked these. (*) I suggest that mutual aid was further advanced thru bonding and language, and thus was partially a result of the ingestion of these plants. Mutual aid, in turn, furthers bonding and also cultural and technological development.

A thought that I would like to return to at another time has to do with the hostility of authoritarian systems toward psychedelic plants. Authoritarianism destroys mutual aid and the social, replacing these with bullying, exploiting hierarchies of power. In essence the authoritarian system is a form of de-evolution, stripping us of what made us human to begin with. Thus it is natural the authoritarian (the sub-human) would wish to prevent the use of plants which stimulate the imagination and the social.

Kevin Carson has recently pointed out that Gambone has published a pamplet titled "The Primal Wound" which also deals with the degrading role authoritarianism plays in the human condition. You can read it online here, or you can order a hard copy from Red Lion Press. I'm ordering a hard copy myself since I also wish to check out some of the other Red Lion pamplets.