← All posts tagged English

O01eg
USA Kickstarter comics English kickstarter.com
"Glow is an ongoing comic series by Ray Chou and Vincenzo Ferriero with art by Anny Maulina and Dia Jia.
Glow takes place in a world where magic catalyzed both industrial revolution and nuclear holocaust. Half a millennia ago, an ancient and powerful empire known as Nymera developed a means to channel and store magical energy into a sticky blue substance known as anima, storing them into massive Towers across the world."
O01eg
economics прекрасное history сталирасты English У Неандертальцев был крупнее мозг, сильнее тело, но они были первобытными коммунистами. Кроманьонцы были слабее их, но они были первобытными капиталистами. Как всегда, рыночек порешал. Вымершие неандертальцы — вот до какой исторической черты коммунисты хотят деградировать людей: fee.org
"In the blockbuster 2015 book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari pointed out that our species has conducted intergroup trade for tens of thousands of years, but that other species of hominids never did:
“Archaeologists excavating 30,000 year old Sapiens sites in the European heartland occasionally find there seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. In all likelihood, these shells got to the continental interior through long-distance trade between different Sapiens bands. Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade. Each group manufactured its own tools from local materials…”
He argues that this is what gave homo sapiens a decisive competitive advantage over our distant cousins, who in some cases actually had bigger brains than us.
However, Harari is not the first to make this argument. In his 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley made and elaborated on the same point and the same argument. Ridley also noted the archaeological evidence of far-flung trade networks among homo sapiens.
Ridley helpfully distinguishes between true trade and the other kinds of reciprocity that occur throughout the animal kingdom:
“I am not talking about swapping favours — any old primate can do that. There is plenty of ‘reciprocity’ in monkeys and apes: you scratch my back and I scratch yours. (…) Such reciprocity is an important human social glue, a source of cooperation and a habit inherited from the animal past that undoubtedly prepared human beings for exchange. But it is not the same thing as exchange. Reciprocity means giving each other the same thing (usually) at different times. Exchange — call it barter or trade if you like — means giving each other different things (usually) at the same time: simultaneously swapping two different objects. In Adam Smith’s words, ‘Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.’”
Inventing inter-band trade was quite an achievement, Ridley remarks, especially given:
“…the homicidal relationships between tribes. Famously, no other species of ape can encounter strangers without trying to kill them, and the instinct still lurks in the human breast. But by 82,000 years ago, human beings had overcome this problem sufficiently to be able to pass Nassarius shells hand to hand 125 miles inland.”
Ridley compares the trade networks of our ancestors to the isolationism of Neanderthal bands:
“This is in striking contrast to the Neanderthals, whose stone tools were virtually always made from raw material available within an hour’s walk of where the tool was used. To me this is a vital clue to why the Neanderthals were still making hand axes, while their African-origin competitors were making ever more types of tool. Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty. The remarkable thing about the moderns of west Asia is not so much the diversity of artefacts as the continual innovation. There is more invention between 80,000 and 20,000 years ago than there had been in the previous million. By today’s standards, it was very slow, but by the standards of Homo erectus it was lightning-fast. And the next ten millennia would see still more innovations: fish hooks, all sorts of implements, domesticated wolves, wheat, figs, sheep, money.”
Neanderthals were individually stronger than us and had bigger brains. They were clever enough to make tools and weapons, to speak, to think conceptually, to create art, and to develop culture. But, they were incapable of trade relations outside the familial band, and that doomed them to many millennia of economic and technological stagnation."
O01eg
economics прекрасное history English humanprogress.org
"African poverty was not caused by colonialism, capitalism or free trade. As I have noted before, many of Europe’s former dependencies became rich precisely because they maintained many of the colonial institutions and partook in global trade. African poverty preceded the continent’s contact with Europe and persists today. That is an outcome of unfortunate policy choices, most of which were freely chosen by Africa’s leaders after independence.
Like Europe, Africa started out desperately poor. The late Professor Angus Maddison of Groningen University has estimated that, at the start of the Common Era, average per capita income in Africa was $470 per year (in 1990 dollars). The global average was roughly equal to that of Africa. Western Europe and North Africa, which were parts of the Roman Empire, were slightly better off ($600). In contrast, North America lagged behind Africa ($400). All in all, the world was both fairly equal and very poor.
The origins of global inequality, which saw Western Europe and, later, North America, power ahead of the rest of the world, can be traced to the rise of the Northern Italian city states in the 14th century and the Renaissance in the 15th century. By 1500, a typical European was about twice as rich as a typical African. But the real gap in living standards opened only after the Industrial Revolution that started in England in the late 18th century and spread to Europe and North America in the 19th century.
In 1870, when Europeans controlled no more than 10 per cent of the African continent (mostly North and South Africa), Western European incomes were already four times higher than those in Africa. Europe, in other words, did not need Africa in order to become prosperous. Europe colonised Africa because Europe was prosperous and, consequently, more powerful. Appreciation of the chronology of events does not justify or defend colonialism. But it does help explain it.
Africa’s fortunes under colonial rule varied. Much progress was made in terms of health and education. Maddison estimates that in 1870, there were 91 million Africans. By 1960, the year of independence, the African population grew more than threefold – to 285 million. The OECD estimates that over the same time period the share of the African population attending school rose from less than 5 per cent to over 20 per cent. On the down side, Europeans treated Africans with contempt, and subjected them to discrimination and, sometimes, violence.
That violence intensified during Africa’s struggle for independence, as the colonial powers tried to beat back African nationalists. As a result, African leaders took over countries where repression of political dissent was already firmly established. Instead of repealing censorship and detention laws, however, African leaders kept and expanded them.
It was precisely because colonial rule was so psychologically demeaning to Africans in general and nationalist leaders in particular that post-independence African governments were so determined to expunge many of the colonial institutions. Since rule of law, accountable government, property rights and free trade were European imports, they had to go. Instead, many African leaders chose to emulate the political arrangements and economic policies of a rising power that represented the exact opposite of Western free market and liberal democracy – the Soviet Union.
[...]
Africa’s love affair with socialism persisted until the 1990s, when, at long last, Africa started to reintegrate into the global economy. Trade relations with the rest of the world were somewhat liberalised and African nations started to deregulate their economies, thus climbing up the rankings in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report. That said, even today, Africa remains the least economically free and most protectionist continent in the world. That – and not free trade – is the problem."
O01eg
говнорашка прекрасное English Проснулись наконец. Очень длинная, но очень качественная статья о России без каких-либо альт-райтовских иллюзий (даже про Кадырова и Дугина вспомнили): reason.com
"Russia's Global Anti-Libertarian Crusade
How Vladimir Putin's desire for domination and acceptance is scrambling American politics.
One of the surreal twists of the past year in American politics has been the rapid realignment in attitudes toward Russia. Democrats, many of whom believe that Russian interference was key to Donald Trump's unexpected victory last November, are now the ones sounding the alarm about the Russian threat. Meanwhile, quite a few Republicans—previously the keepers of the anti-Kremlin Cold War flame—have taken to praising President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader and Moscow as an ally against radical Islam. A CNN/ORC poll in late April found that 56 percent of Republicans see Russia as either "friendly" or "an ally," up from 14 percent in 2014. Over the same period, Putin's favorable rating from Republicans in the Economist/YouGov poll went from 10 percent to a startling 37 percent.
The dominant narrative in the U.S. foreign policy establishment and mainstream media casts Putin as the implacable enemy of the Western liberal order—an autocratic leader at home who wants to weaken democracy abroad, using information warfare and covert activities to subvert liberal values and to promote Russia-friendly politicians and movements around the world.
In this narrative, President Donald Trump is like the French nationalist Marine Le Pen, whose failed presidential campaign this year relied heavily on loans from Russian banks with Kremlin ties: a witting or unwitting instrument of subversion, useful to Putin either as an ideological ally or as an incompetent who will strengthen Russia's hand by destabilizing American democracy.
At its extremes, the Russian subversion narrative relies on a great deal of conspiratorial thinking. It also far too easily absolves the Western political establishment of responsibility for its failures, from the defeat of European Union supporters in England's Brexit vote to Hillary Clinton's loss in last November's election. Putin makes a convenient boogeyman.
Nonetheless, there is a real Russian effort to counter American—plus NATO and E.U.—influence by supporting authoritarian nationalist movements and groups, such as Le Pen's National Front, Hungary's quasi-fascist Jobbik Party, and Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Today's Russia is no longer just a moderately authoritarian corrupt regime trying to maintain its regional influence. Cloaked in the mantle of religious and nationalist values, the Kremlin positions itself as a defender of tradition and sovereignty against the godless progressivism and the migrant hordes overtaking the West. It has a global propaganda machine and a network of political operatives dedicated to cultivating far-right and sometimes far-left groups in Europe and elsewhere.
Tom Palmer, vice president for international programs at the Atlas Network, has been actively involved in projects promoting liberty in ex-Communist countries since the late 1980s; he has taken to warning against a new "global anti-libertarianism." Writing for the Cato Policy Report last December, Palmer noted that "Putin, the pioneer in the trend toward authoritarianism, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting anti-libertarian populism across Europe and through a sophisticated global media empire, including RT and Sputnik News, as well as a network of internet troll factories and numerous made-to-order websites."
Slawomir Sierakowski of Warsaw's Institute for Advanced Study and Emma Ashford of the Cato Institute have also warned about the rise of an "Illiberal International" in which Russia plays a key role..."
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говнорашка прекрасное English В коем-то веке команда Навального вспомнила про иностранную аудиторию: fbk.info
"The Anti-Corruptions foundation’s documentary “Don’t call him Dimon” made Alisher Usmanov so furious that he recorded two video appeals to Alexey Navalny in a matter of just two days. He refutes all of the accusations talking in highly arrogant manner: he didn’t give bribes to Medvedev and other government officials, he has no real criminal past, all of the cases against him were fabricated. He is outraged and filed a lawsuit against Navalny for accusing him of rape.
The ACF worked hard and found new documentary evidence. Yesterday Alexey Navalny presented them in the new video (with English subtitles).
Mr. Usmanov diligently avoid answering the question about his first big money. Official version sounds like this: he manufactured plastic bags, then sold cigarettes, then went bankrupt, and then established a company called Interfin, in which his partners invested $10 million each, believing in Usmanov’s genius business acumen. Interfin company really did exist since 1995. But fortunately for the ACF from the moment of its establishment 40% of Interfin stock was owned by the British company Middlesex Holding PLC. The ACF read the accounts of this firm, and others, associated with it, for the last 20 years — that’s more than 2,000 pages. Those documents are a pure treasure as they show a real story of the Soviet asset privatization.
In 1997 Usmanov crept into Gazprom and used Gazprom’s money to buy his own shares in the British company, and then, a bit later, sold them back to himself, but for less money. This was the moment that Usmanov and Dmitry Medvedev became such a good friends. Medvedev was the Chairman of Gazprom’s Board of Directors at that time and these scheme wouldn’t be possible without him.
A lot was said about the honest taxpayer Usmanov. He brought to the budget half a billion dollars in the course of 10 years. Among all of his properties only his yacht costs this sum. He should’ve paid several times more. The entrepreneur Alisher Burkhanovich doesn’t sell Russian raw materials directly, but uses his own offshore intermediaries and sell through them with more than two-fold price difference. This tax evasion scheme is called transfer pricing.
Alisher Burkhanovich repeatedly said the he is developing the internet. When in fact he took over the largest Russian social media Vkontakte after the regime wrestled it from its founder Pavel Durov. Durov refused to provide the security services with the personal information of users in groups that criticized the regime. Usmanov in turn introduced censorship and now we see weekly attempts to sentence people for likes and shares.
And lastly about the lawsuit. Rape was among the accusations recounted by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray. On his website one can find these lines: “Alisher Usmanov is a vicious thug, criminal, racketeer, heroin trafficker and accused rapist.” Mr. Murray was a public officer, who due to his position communicated with everyone in the leadership of Uzbekistan, had access to all the secret information and continues to insist on his statements. But somehow Usmanov didn’t take ambassador Murray to the British court and is trying to settle this case in Russian one where he can easily bring a suitcase with cash.
Alexey Navalny: “I recommend that everyone watches it till the end, because this is an important story about how Russia is set up, how oligarchy is set up, and how officialdom is set up”."
O01eg
говнорашка прекрасное history сталирасты English "Разница — в форме усов" fee.org
"Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini have become, for many of us today, mere Hollywood villains – generic personifications of evil or (in Mussolini's case) buffoonish authoritarianism. Yet their ideologies were rooted in specific philosophical ideas – ideas which had many respectable adherents in their day.
Dictator Fanboys
One person who understands this is Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2007 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Ten years on, the book still holds up. Goldberg argues, provocatively, that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism.
People often argue over whether Hitler and Mussolini were “right wing” or “left wing.” More to the point is that both men's ideologies had roots in the Progressive movement of the turn of the 20th century.
The Progressive movement was closely tied to the philosophy of Pragmatism: the belief that thought is a tool for action and change. In contrast to the ancient and medieval philosophers, for whom philosophy was the contemplation of reality, the Progressives were animated by the desire to mold reality and to harness knowledge for social betterment. Many in the vanguard of progressive thought initially were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”
H.G. Wells, the popular science fiction writer, was one. In a number of speeches and books he praised the militaristic social mobilization in the new fascist regimes: an entire society moving as a single unit under the rule of a Nietzschean superman.
Complete state control of all aspects of life was seen as highly pragmatic and scientific by many. Nationalism and militarism – elements commonly associated with the Right – were actually key components of the Progressive Era, flourishing in particular under President Woodrow Wilson, as Goldberg documents.
Ideological Twins
Popular wisdom holds that Fascism and Communism were diametrical opposites. Actually, the two ideologies were (and are) so similar that they had to define themselves in opposition to each other in order to survive. At the very least, both were socialistic in origin: Mussolini was immersed in socialism by his father, and the name of Hitler's party – National Socialist German Workers' Party – speaks for itself.
These regimes fostered hostility to traditional religious beliefs and morality (both men despised Christianity), “salvation by science” (as shown, for example, in the Nazi's racist eugenics movement), and state-controlled health and environmental projects (as shown in a Nazi slogan, “Nutrition is not a private matter!”).
All of these elements grew out of the “scientific” progressivism of the early 20th century. Even the Nazis' vÖlkisch ideology—with its nationalist and traditionalist overtones – was at heart a secular religion-substitute which enshrined the Will of the People, a concept which Goldberg traces to the French Revolution.
It would seem undeniable that Hitler and Mussolini, like the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, were revolutionaries and in no sense conservatives or traditionalists. Their ideologies grew out of the avant-garde positivist, progressive, and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century..."
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Libertarian прекрасное мж English Об феминизме: fee.org
"The great intellectual entrepreneur Ludwig von Mises was dedicated to changing this. He knew what it was like to experience exclusion. Despite tremendous academic achievements and access to the great minds of his day, Mises was never able to obtain a position at a university—and he was hardly alone in this plight. It took the completion of a full treatise on money in 1912 to get an unpaid position at the university. Meanwhile he had to pay the bills; he worked first at a law firm and then later at the chamber of commerce.
Even before women were allowed into the program in 1919, Mises taught a course on banking at the university in which most of the students were women from the department of philosophy. It was the excluded professor teaching the marginalized students. This experience must have had a big impact on him: He began writing his book Socialism at this time, in which he addressed (among other things) the way capitalism became history’s major force for liberating women from violence, as well the claim of socialists that collectivism was the only authentic path toward women’s liberation.
Instead of ceding to collectivists the essential conversation about how to overcome cultural and institutionalized sexism, Mises took the problem seriously and offered his own solutions. And Mises's argument on gender equality sounds revolutionary even today.
" Woman's struggle to preserve her personality in marriage is part of that struggle for personal integrity which characterizes the rationalist society of the economic order based on private ownership of the means of production. . . . All mankind would suffer if woman should fail to develop her ego and be unable to unite with man as equal, freeborn companions and comrades."
...
Under the law of violence, writes Mises, the result is subjugation.
" The principle of violence recognizes only the male. He alone possesses power, hence he alone has rights. Woman is merely a sexual object. No woman is without a lord, be it father or guardian, husband or employer. Even the prostitutes are not free; they belong to the owner of the brothel. The guests make their contracts, not with them, but with him. The vagabond woman is free game, whom everyone may use according to his pleasure. The right to choose a man herself does not belong to the woman. She is given to the husband and taken by him. That she loves him is her duty, perhaps also her virtue; the sentiment will sharpen the pleasure which a man derives from marriage. But the woman is not asked for her opinion. The man has the right to repudiate or divorce her; she herself has no such right."
...
Mises was one of the few men in a leadership position who actively promoted young female intellectuals. Lene Lieser, Marianne Herzfeld, and others wrote their doctoral dissertations under his supervision. Lieser, Herzfeld, Ilse Mintz, Martha Stephanie Braun, Elisabeth Ephrussi, and others were regular members of his private seminar. It is true that he could get none of them a professorship—he could not do this even for his male students, or even for himself. But he could help some of them to obtain one of those coveted jobs that earn a living while allowing the pursuit of intellectual interests. Again this was the case with Herzfeld and Lieser, both of whom were employed at the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers.
..."
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Libertarian прекрасное English Defending Discrimination & Deportation, by J. Neil Schulman ncc-1776.org
"I’m a writer. Words are what we writers use to communicate. I’m using words to communicate with you right now. So the defined meanings of the words we use matter because differences matter.
The word “discriminate” was originally used to mean an ability to recognize core differences and render judgment. A person who exhibited discriminating taste for fine food and wine, for example, would have taken the sentence, “You discriminate” as a compliment, because a judgment was being rendered between food and wine which was more enjoyable to food and wine which was mundane or disgusting.
But, as often happens for reasons of propaganda, this use of “discriminate” was replaced by a sinister meaning: to render an unjust distinction. The original use was largely buried.
Dr. King wanted the original meaning of “discrimination” to be present in the future world he fantasized about. He wanted people not to refrain from discriminating judgment, but to make such distinctions based on character, which is a measure of moral worthiness, instead of ancestry or appearance, which is largely meaningless to judging a person’s worth.
Dr. King was teaching a moral lesson, one he’d learned from his background as a Christian and from fairly recent to him exemplars of moral philosophy such as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau. These moral lessons transcended politics. Thoreau was a philosophical anarchist, Gandhi an East Indian nationalist, and King, himself, a Christian democratic socialist.
I call myself a libertarian when that term is not conflated with electoral partisans. I’ve frequently called myself an anarchist when that term is not conflated with vandals, arsonists, communists, or nihilists. I’ve called myself an Agorist since I was closely involved with launching that individualist-anarchist free-market movement founded by my friend and mentor, Samuel Edward Konkin III. Since I consider many calling themselves Agorists are instead stealth communists, I’ve recently considered newer labels such as Konkinist or—pinning it down with my own brand—Alongside Night Agorist.
But whatever label I use, I’m attempting to narrow the meaning to a moral philosophy based on natural law, natural rights, and making meaningful moral distinctions between individuals.
Be clear: the libertarianism I hold to is judgmental. Tolerance is not necessarily a virtue. It depends on what one is tolerating. My friend, author/filmmaker Brad Linaweaver, will be writing eventually about “That Hideous Tolerance,” expanding the concept from the title of his favorite C.S. Lewis novel, That Hideous Strength.
Nonetheless the libertarian moral judgment is narrowly drawn. Taste alone, such as the food and wine connoisseur’s discrimination, allows for one’s individual choice but does not allow for imposing one’s individual choice on unwilling others. So it is within my individual choice what I eat or drink but I may not choose what others may eat or drink—well, at least so far as I’m not holding cooks at gunpoint or murdering other people to drink their warm blood or eat their tasty flesh.
Rendering such moral judgments does require study, thinking, and discussion."
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прекрасное English avva.livejournal.com
"... the visual system of the brain has the organization, computational profile, and architecture in order to facilitate the organism's thriving at the four Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction."
"... зрительная система мозга обладает организацией, вычислительными способностями и архитектурой, необходимыми для того, чтобы обеспечить успешное участие организма в четырех П: пожрать, побежать, подраться, заняться размножением".
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USA прекрасное English Дотянулся проклятый Трамп: dailycaller.com
"Liberals seeking to move to Canada because they are unhappy with the election results are finding that Canada won’t take them because its immigration policies exclude those who won’t contribute to the economy.
One of the policies of President Donald Trump that has some Democrats claiming they want to jump ship is his pledge to limit immigration from people whose lives in America would be dependent on welfare. Trump promises “extreme vetting” before accepting immigrants or refugees.
But Democrats looking to move from the U.S. to Australia, Canada and other wealthy English-speaking nations are learning that those nations already have similar policies."
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гендерное прекрасное мж English Objectification, objectification everewhere: aeon.co
"Why sexual desire is objectifying – and hence morally wrong
Once desire becomes suspect, sex is never far behind. Kant implicitly acknowledged the unusual power of sexual urges and their capacity to divert us from doing what is right. He claimed that sex was particularly morally condemnable, because lust focuses on the body, not the agency, of those we sexually desire, and so reduces them to mere things. It makes us see the objects of our longing as just that ­– objects. In so doing, we see them as mere tools for our own satisfaction.
Treating people as objects can mean many things. It could include beating them, tearing into them, and violating them. But there are other, less violent ways of objectifying people. We might treat someone as only a means to our sexual pleasure, to satisfy our lust on that person, to use a somewhat archaic expression. The fact that the other person consents does not get rid of the objectification; two people can agree to use one another for purely sexual purposes.
But don’t we use each other all the time? Many of us have jobs – as cleaners, gardeners, teachers, singers. Does the beneficiary of the service objectify the service provider, and does the service provider objectify the recipient by taking their money? These relationships don’t seem to provoke the same moral qualms. Either they do not involve objectification, or the objectification is somehow neutered.
Kant said that these scenarios weren’t really a problem. He draws a distinction between mere use – the basis of objectification – and more-than-mere use. While we might employ people to do jobs, and accept payment for our work, we don’t treat the person on the other side of the transaction as a mere tool; we still recognise that person’s fundamental humanity.
Sex, though, is different. When I hire someone to sing, according to Kant, my desire is for his or her talent – for the voice-in-action. But when I sexually desire someone, I desire his or her body, not the person’s services or talents or intellectual capabilities, although any of these could enhance the desire. So, when we desire the person’s body, we often focus during sex on its individual parts: the buttocks, the penis, the clitoris, the thighs, the lips. What we desire to do with those parts differs, of course. Some like to touch them with the hand, others with the lips, others with the tongue; for others still, the desire is just to look. This does not mean that I would settle for a human corpse: our desire for human bodies is directed at them as living, much like my desire for a cellphone is directed at a functioning one.
But, one might object, don’t we do sexual things because we love our partners, and want them to feel pleasure? Of course we do. But if we did so when we didn’t want to in the first place, then we do not do it out of sexual desire. And if we don’t do it out of sexual desire, then the problem of objectification does not present itself. We can enjoy sexually pleasing someone else. But you can think of the other person as a sophisticated instrument: to give the maximum pleasure, we have to please it. Just because I have to oil and maintain my car for it to work does not mean it is any less of an instrument.
Sex doesn’t just make you objectify your partner. It also makes you objectify yourself. When I am in the grip of sexual desire, I also allow another person to reduce me to my body, to use me as a tool. Kant saw this process of self-objectification as an equally, if not more, serious moral problem than objectification directed outwards. I have duties to others to promote their happiness, but I also have a duty to morally perfect myself. Allowing myself to be objectified opposes this precept, according to Kant..."
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Libertarian English Cult Of the Individual; A play in One Egoistic Act
by J. Neil Schulman
ncc-1776.org
"This play was performed in a table reading at Samuel Edward Konkin III’s Agorist Institute in Long Beach, California, with Konkin reading Dan Conrad, J. Neil Schulman reading Joel Rosenbaum, Victor Koman reading Vincent Andrews, Bob Cohen reading Mark Levy, and J. Kent Hastings reading Peter Braun..."
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Kickstarter comics English kickstarter.com
"Greetings! My name is Mary Cagle, and I'm the creator of the webcomic Let's Speak English.
Let's Speak English is an autobio comic about the 2.5 years I spent teaching English to elementary students in the rural town of Kurihara, Japan.
The original webcomic was hand-drawn and published online at Marycagle.com during my stay as a teacher, and covers all kinds of topics — from dealing with language barriers to learning how to be an adult. The strip naturally ended with my return to America, and I'm finally ready to assemble my journey as a book.
I had an amazing time in Japan with all my adorable students, but creating comics has always been my passion. Now that I'm back in the US, I'm making the transition to full-time comics work! This book will be one of my first big steps as a professional comic creator.
So here it is, the 100-page(ish) softcover book of Let's Speak English!"
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Libertarian прекрасное English facebook.com
"It has somehow become “en vogue” to conflate libertarianism with market economy, open borders and globalism. To the point that everyone who dares to oppose immigration or trade is colored authoritarian and anti-freedom. I want to accentuate what libertarianism stands for and challenge the idea that open borders when implemented by the government promote freedom.
Libertarianism is not about government policies. It is not even about being fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Sure, It's a neat buzzword to toss around when you need to quickly explain that all you want is to leave people to their own devices. But somewhere along the way a lot of libertarians started to take this adage literally and began to rally behind it as if it defined libertarianism.
So, at the risk of losing a few friends, I want to reiterate what libertarianism stands for and what it repudiates.
Libertarianism only concerns itself with the question of the legitimate use of force. When libertarians say something is wrong, they mean the following only: Someone initiated aggression against someone else or his “legitimately owned” property. That’s it. Libertarianism is thus concerned with the ethics of the use of force and is completely agnostic on the issues of open borders, tradition, religion and culture.
This entails that no matter how abhorrent someone’s choices may seem, if they are not coercive they shouldn’t be treated any less than something you find commendable. Homophobic baker who refuses to serve gays is exercising his free will, your “liberal” friend who wants to have the baker prosecuted is the oppressor. Your racist uncle who wants to send his kids to a private, whites-only school is oppressed by the people who made it impossible for him to do. Your insufferable mormon neighbor who home-schools his children about God is less authoritarian than your cool atheist professor who wants to force them to study evolution. Even the Amish community is more in line with libertarian principles than Hong Kong, because their refusal to engage in trade or accept “liberal norms” comes from a place of a voluntary association and not government coercion.
Transgender bathrooms, drugs legalization, teaching kids evolution, all the hot topics that are traditionally associated with individual freedom are not inherently libertarian issues. They are choices. Wherever one's personal preference may lie, every non-coercive choice is just as good as the other one. If you believe that in some instances moral interest of one person or group overrides that of another, you have no business calling yourself a libertarian.
This leads me to the contentious topic of immigration. There appears to have been a schism that divided libertarians into leaning towards the alt-right and the yet unnamed alt-left. But while I’ve read plenty of libertarian critiques leveled at the alt-right, almost nothing is being said against the alt-left, despite its globalist version of the world being just as, if not more coercive.
The argument for open borders usually goes something like this: Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations, borders are enforced by the government, thus libertarians must support open borders. This, however, is a fallacy, because it removes the issue from the context of the pervasive government coercion and treats it like an isolated incident.
It doesn’t take into account that as long as people in the recipient country are denied freedom of association, open borders constitute the assault on their freedom. Until the civil rights act and similar laws in Europe are repealed, opening borders benefit one group at the expense of another. It’s the opposite of everything libertarians stand for. It is government coercion..."
O01eg
Libertarian USA English heavy.com
"According to the latest results, Johnson brought in 4,042,291 votes. That’s a huge jump over his 2012 campaign, when he brought in 1.2 million votes. Unfortunately, his current number of votes comes in at 3.2 percent, just shy of the 5 percent he needs to qualify the Libertarian party for federal funding in the next election. He did not get any electoral votes.
His highest percentages were in New Mexico at 9.3 percent and North Dakota at 6.3 percent. He also had a few states coming in at over 5 percent.
Johnson may not have gotten 5 percent, but he’s demonstrating that the Libertarians are on an upward trend. And as some supporters have pointed out, with 4 million votes, if every person donated $5, they’d have $20 million in donations and wouldn’t need federal funding for the next presidential election."
O01eg
USA English jewishpress.com
"... Which is why it was such fun to discover, on the Wednesday morning that Donald Trump became the 45th President Elect of America, that a website called “Who Controls America?” with enlightening articles on how the Jews own absolutely everything (Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, AIG, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve System, Big Media, Hollywood, Television, Music, Radio, Advertising, the News, and the American Civil Liberties Union — to name a miniscule few) — also lists “Donald Trump’s Jewish Cabal.”
For some reason, the website insists on dividing the list of Jews into “Sephardic” and “Ashkenazic,” with the meticulousness of a Haredi yeshiva in downtown Jerusalem. The list is unbelievably long, but it’s not offensive at all. In other words, for the sake of this particular list, none of the participants need be corrupt or sinister in any way, the website doesn’t provide smarmy details about their sins, all they’ve done to be included here is be Jewish.
Here are the Jews of the Trump cabal, in order of appearance. Some are very familiar, like his daughter and son-in-law. Others are billionaires who supported Trump’s campaign, and others yet are not so famous:
Michael Abboud (Sephardic Jew) – Communications Coordinator, Donald J. Trump for President
Paul Achleitner (Ashkenazic Jew) – Chairman, Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank (Donald Trump’s largest lender)
Sheldon Adelson (Ashkenazic Jew) – Endorser, Donald J. Trump for President
Elliott Broidy (Ashkenazic Jew) – Vice Chairman, Trump Victory Committee
Michael Cohen (Ashkenazic Jew) – Executive Vice President and Special Counsel, The Trump Organization
Gil Dezer (Ashkenazic Jew) – President, Trump Dezer Development
Michael Dezer (Ashkenazic Jew) – Founder, Trump Dezer Development
Lewis Eisenberg (Ashkenazic Jew) – Chairman, Trump Victory Committee
Boris Epshteyn (Ashkenazic Jew) – Senior Adviser, Donald J. Trump for President..."
O01eg
USA прекрасное English facebook.com
"I’ve been involved in Russian opposition politics for over 10 years. I saw elections being rigged, had my phone wiretapped and had Russian MP put me on the list of the top 11 online “extremists” in the letter to the prosecutor general of Russia.
My friends were beaten up, shot at and maimed for simply holding the wrong opinion. Dozens were forced to leave the country. I'm the most anti-Putin person you’ll ever meet. And I want to warn you against Hillary Clinton.
If you look past the media spin, you’ll notice that Hillary, not Trump, shares a disturbing similarity to Putin. Hillary, like Putin, is secretive and paranoid. Like Putin, she is ruthless, calculating and has an uncanny genius for intrigue. Like Putin, she made herself integral to the status quo — a common tactic among all budding authoritarians.
She places personal loyalty over integrity and exhibits deep disdain for the press simultaneously wielding control over it. You think Hillary’s not holding a press conference for over 300 days is bad? Putin didn’t have an unscripted interview in over 10 years. If Hillary’s elected president, you better get used to it. This is how it’s started in Russia too.
She’s obsessed with war and clearly prioritises international adventurism over domestic affairs. Like Putin, she’s a champion of the special interests and relies on their support for political power. Just like Putin she made a fortune through politics.
And then there’s Trump. An imperfect candidate but one that can’t be more different from what dictators are actually like. Unlike Putin or Hillary, Trump is an unabashedly public figure. He’s a businessman, Putin never had a job in a private sector. Trump is comfortable in his own skin, Putin is terrified of appearing silly (just like Hillary). Trump has zero support among the establishment, Putin is supported across the aisle. Trump’s whole life, business and family been in the public eye forever. And yet the only thing that media found against him after 6 months of unprecedentedly hostile vetting is that he's vulgar?
How is that in the same league with violating a subpoena or having a mole in the CNN provide debate questions in advance? How is it in the same league with running an illegal server for classified correspondence? How is it in the same league as colluding with the FBI? With lying under oath? All the things that Putin done by the way.
If this somehow doesn’t sway your opinion, maybe this will: media hates Trump. If he becomes the next president, you bet the press will hold him accountable. In your heart you know that won’t be the case for Hillary Clinton. In your heart you know that if she’s elected president, the fourth estate will be further hollowed out until its carcass is indistinguishable from “Pravda”.
The reason I’m writing this is I’m scared of the Hillary’s presidency. Her “Russian reset” encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine that in turn empowered him to crack down on the opposition within Russia. Because of Hillary’s policies, thousands died in Ukraine. Thousands die in Syria. Libya. Yemen. Iraq. I’m terrified that the US is ceasing to be the shining beacon of hope. That we lose you as an example. Peace only comes when America is strong. The world needs you to be strong.
Hillary Clinton is a threat to the great American experiment. Don’t let her win."