Emma Goldman Annotated

I started the process of creating a nicely formatted edition of Emma Goldman's "Anarchism and Other Essays" with annotations of historical figures. It will look similar to "The Enchiridion", but it is a significantly longer work. You can preview the current draft now and I'll drop notes here when there are updated editions. The style of my annotations are all about saving you time looking up historical contexts whenever people are places are mentioned in passing in these older documents. Read on to see examples.

Why I Do Not Vote Anymore

I don't vote anymore. Impossible to get a viable third party to compete against the two leading political brands because over many decades they've modified the system to stifle competition. By the time any True Believer climbs the ranks in any political brand they're owned by wealthy special interests. I've become an anarchist who sees that humanity avoids thinking about its animal origins (evolution, whut dat?) and believes in a fairy tale of infinite growth for everything (population overshoot, whut dat?).

h/t to radicalglasgowblog for this gem

Not voting solves a source of most of the political stress I have. Some would say to vote is to choose your masters, and it is something I don't do anymore. Not one of my votes has ever had an effect on the policy of what America does. No one has asked me if:

• America can torture [y/n]?
• America can indefinitely detain prisoners without trial [y/n]?
• America can go to war? [y/n]? (again? [y/n]) (again again? [y/n])

And they won't. Politicians run for office to be able to run for office—so they'll tell the people anything they want to win. What they do in office after they win is largely up to what their handlers (the special interests that funded their campaigns) decide. I concentrate more mental effort writing for Offline Societies where you can learn how to take care of yourself and your "tribe" with minimal government interference. I use the time saved from politics to apply to learning, planning and teaching.

True-believer syndrome is a term coined by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia. Keene used the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal event or phenomenon even after it had been proven to have been staged.

Essentially, Obama's campaign was a paranormal-event (wow, a whip-smart person who doesn't speak ignorantly?) staged to give people Hope for Change and despite all the evidence that Obama isn't giving it, there will be people who continue to "true believe" in Obama, just like there are people who "true believe" in Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton or Ron Paul. Doesn't matter which brand (Democrat or Republican) they franchise from, they're always owned by the same special interests.

[From two comments originally posted on Reddit ("Honestly, would you vote for Obama in 2012?")]

The Anarchism Shelf

"Anarchist" is one of those words that has shocked people for generations--most especially when the people degenerate into bouts of social rage, unable to control their lives lashing out at anything that seems to be the oppressor. Vandalism, bombs, etc---if there were angry people, the media and corporations placed them in the "anarchist" box so the rest of the world would ignore them.

In most cases, most people hear the label and tune out. What they never hear beyond the name is that, actually, there have been a lot of people thinking about "no-leaders" for a very long time. What they've thought of has been cast into different variants of anarchism.  For obvious reasons, no public school education directed by the state will ever promote anarchism in the curriculum, it is up to you to decide to pursue it.