[ Dancing ]
by Auriel on Oct.21, 2011, under Dance, Music
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ~ Nietzsche
[ Phoenix Protesters Join ‘Occupy Wall Street’ ]
by Auriel on Oct.10, 2011, under Revolutionary Woman
Phoenix, Arizona, October 15th 2011
Occupy Wall Street is an international movement which began with only a few people and has quickly spread to dozens of major cities. On October 15th, those fed up with the collusion between the government and financial institutions are all invited to join the occupation and have their voice heard in a General Assembly Meeting. The pre-occupation march will begin October 14th at 3pm at Downtown Civic Space Park, the next day, October 15th at noon, the occupation kickoff will begin at Cesar Chavez Plaza.
“The top 1% own more than 50% of all assets in the U.S. They own more than 70% of all financial assets. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of wealth holders own a mere 3.5% of all the assets in the country. The bottom 40% own nothing.” – commondreams.org
The OccupyPhoenix movement will be taking a stand against the corruption of our government, in solidarity with the millions who are demonstrating across the world in protest of the unjust actions of a criminal few who have abused our financial system, the trust of the American people, and people worldwide. All concerned people are encouraged to show up and be a part of history.
Through the use of direct democracy, Occupy Phoenix is working to define and solve the problems of: an opaque and exclusive government, unduly influenced by a Wall Street which has lost its way, resulting in a state struggling to guarantee basic human rights. Everyone is invited to join this conversation about reforming how business and government operate. In the coming days and weeks, Occupy Phoenix will persist in advocating the need for change, defining the change we need, and reaching out to policy-makers, business leaders, and the people of our Republic in this mission. The group consists of lawyers, public workers, students, teachers, and people from all walks of life marching in unity to create a social change.
If you’d like more information or to schedule an interview, please contact media@occupyphoenix.net 480-744-OPHX (6749)
[ Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders v7 ]
by Auriel on Sep.25, 2011, under Revolutionary Woman
WPATH Mission Statement
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), formerly known as the (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, HBIGDA), is a professional organization devoted to the understanding and treatment of gender identity disorders.
As an international multidisciplinary professional Association the mission of WPATH is to promote evidence based care, education, research, advocacy, public policy and respect in transgender health.
Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders @ Wikipedia
Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders v7
[ Homophobia ]
by Auriel on Sep.25, 2011, under Revolutionary Woman
[ The Education of a Libertarian ]
by Auriel on Jul.18, 2011, under Op-Eds
This article was authored by Peter Thiel on April 13th, 2009
Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal, a venture initially designed as an independent, non-governmental currency. He is president of Clarium Capital, a highly successful hedge fund, and was one of the early investors in the social networking site Facebook.
Thiel has also supported a wide variety of nonprofit ventures, including the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which aims to control and perhaps reverse biological aging; the Singularity Institute, which promotes the development of artificial intelligence; and the Seasteading Institute.
Thiel holds a J.D. from Stanford University.
Peter Thiel @ Wikipedia
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means. I started a student newspaper to challenge the prevailing campus orthodoxies; we scored some limited victories, most notably in undoing speech codes instituted by the university. But in a broader sense we did not achieve all that much for all the effort expended. Much of it felt like trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I; there was a lot of carnage, but we did not move the center of the debate. In hindsight, we were preaching mainly to the choir — even if this had the important side benefit of convincing the choir’s members to continue singing for the rest of their lives.
As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.
As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.
Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:
(1) Cyberspace. As an entrepreneur and investor, I have focused my efforts on the Internet. In the late 1990s, the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real. The open question, which will not be resolved for many years, centers on which of these accounts of the Internet proves true.
(2) Outer space. Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.
(3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the questions about whether people will live there (answer: enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage point, the technology involved is more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel. We may have reached the stage at which it is economically feasible, or where it soon will be feasible. It is a realistic risk, and for this reason I eagerly support this initiative.
The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.
[ The Litany Of Words ]
by Auriel on Jul.10, 2011, under Revolutionary Woman
From the cutting of our first marks,
there has been no greater invention
than the artifice of recorded thought.
Forged of our relic memory,
the tools of the scribe have given our species
the visionary power to speak
with the living, the dead and
the unborn generations to come.
Copyright © Auriel Kitsu 1989 -2011
[ Faith and Reason ]
by Auriel on Jul.10, 2011, under Revolutionary Woman
I suggest that systems of belief based on faith instead of reason must not be given any greater or lesser due deference than any other form of artistic expression.
Let’s Quit the Drug War
by Auriel on Apr.15, 2010, under Op-Eds
by David Boaz
March 17, 1988
David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer.
An anti-war song that helped get the Smothers Brothers thrown off network television in the 60′s went this way: “We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.” Today we’re waist-deep in another unwinnable war, and many political leaders want to push on. This time it’s a war on drugs. About 23 million Americans use illicit drugs every month, despite annual federal outlays of $3.9 billion. Even the arrests of 824,000 Americans a year don’t seem to be having much effect.
As in the case of Vietnam- and Prohibition, another unwinnable war- many politicians can’t stand losing a war. Instead of acknowledging failure, they want to escalate.
Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York suggests that we strip search every person entering the United States from Mexico or Southeast Asia. The White House drug adviser, Donald I. Macdonald, calls for arresting even small time users -lawyers with a quarter gram of cocaine, high school kids with a couple of joints- and bringing them before a judge.
Where will we put those two-bit “criminals?” The Justice Department recommends doubling our prison capacity, even though President Reagan’s former drug adviser Carlton. Turner already brags about the role of drug laws in bringing about a 60 percent increase in our prison population in the last six years. Bob Dole calls for the death penalty for drug sellers. Like their counterparts in Los Angeles and Chicago, the Washington D.C., police are to be issued semiautomatic pistols so they can engage in ever bloodier shootouts with drug dealers. Members of the District of Columbia Council call for the National Guard to occupy the city. We’ve already pressed other governments to destroy drug crops and to help us interdict the flow of drugs into the United States. Because those measures have largely failed, the Customs Service asks authorization to “use appropriate force” to compel planes suspected of carrying drugs to land, including the authority to shoot them down.
It’s time to ask ourselves: What kind of society would condone strip searches, large-scale arrests, military occupation of its capital city and the shooting of possibly innocent people in order top stop some of its citizens from using substances that others don’t like?
Prohibition of alcohol in the 1920′s failed because it proves impossible to stop people from drinking. Our 70-year effort at prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, and heroine has also failed. Tens of millions of Americans, including senators, Presidential candidates, a Supreme Court nominee and conservative journalists, have broken the laws against such drugs. Preserving laws that are so widely flouted undermines respect for all laws.
The most dangerous drugs in the Unties States are alcohol, which is responsible for about 100,000 deaths a year, and tobacco, which is responsible for about 350,000. Heroine, cocaine and marijuana account for a total of 3,6000 deaths a year- even though one in five people ages 20 to 40 use drugs regularly.
Our efforts to crack down on illegal drug use have created new problems. A Justice Department survey reports that 70 percent of those arrested for serious crimes are drug uses, which may mean that “drugs cause crime.” A more sophisticated analysis suggests that the high cost of drugs, a result of their prohibition, forces drug users to turn crime to support an unnecessarily expensive habit.
Drug prohibition, by giving young people the thrill of breaking the law and giving pushers a strong incentive to find new customers, may actually increase the number of drug users. Moreover, out policy of pressuring friendly governments to wipe out drug cultivation has undermined many of those regimes and provoked resentment against us among their citizens and government officials.
We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war- billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom- is too high.
This article originally appeared in the The New York Times on March 17, 1988.
Libertarian Party
by Auriel on Apr.15, 2010, under Revolutionary Woman
The Libertarian Party is a United States political party founded on December 11, 1971. In the 30 states where voters can register by party there are over 225,000 voters registered with the Libertarian Party, making it the third largest of America’s parties. Hundreds of Libertarian candidates have been elected or appointed to public office, and thousands have run for office under the Libertarian banner.
The political platform of the Libertarian Party reflects that group’s particular brand of libertarianism, favoring minimally regulated, laissez-faire markets, strong civil liberties, minimally regulated migration across borders, and non-interventionism in foreign policy that respects freedom of trade and travel to all foreign countries.
The Libertarian Party
http://www.lp.org/
April 15th of 2010 I officially registered as a member of the Libertarian Party
Libertarianism: A Primer
by Auriel on Apr.12, 2010, under Books
Tens of millions of Americans, from Generation X-ers to baby boomers and beyond, are rediscovering libertarianism, a visionary alternative to the tired party orthodoxies of left and right. In 1995 a Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans said “the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses a threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” Later that year, The Wall Street Journal concurred, saying: “Because of their growing disdain for government, more and more Americans appear to be drifting—often unwittingly—toward a libertarian philosophy.”
Libertarianism is hardly new, but its framework for liberty under law and economic progress makes it especially suited for the dynamic new era we are now entering. In the United States, the bureaucratic leviathan is newly threatened by a resurgence of the libertarian ideas upon which the country was founded. We are witnessing a breakdown of all the cherished beliefs of the welfare-warfare state. Americans have seen the failure of big government. Now, in the 1990s, we are ready to apply the lessons of this century to make the next one the century not of the state but of the free individual.
David Boaz presents the essential guidebook to the libertarian perspective, detailing its roots, central tenets, solutions to contemporary policy dilemmas, and future in American politics. He confronts head-on the tough questions frequently posed to libertarians: What about inequality? Who protects the environment? What ties people together if they are essentially self interested? A concluding section, “Are you a Libertarian?” gives readers a chance to explore the substance of their own beliefs. Libertarianism is must reading for understanding one of the most exciting and hopeful movements of our time.
