I can’t do much more right now than quote iceberg:

Thursday, January 11, 2007

R.A.W., R.I.A.

With much gloominess, I learn of Robert Anton Wilson’s transcendence from his mortal coil.

R.A.W. will be sorely missed by all, to use clichéd verbiage, and fnord I not-so-humbly offer my sincerest condolences to his family, close friends, and all his extended readership who are all surely saddened by his passing.

Kallisti, rest in anarchy.

I shared this YouTube video with a friend of mine who is now a college professor in a drama department. Back when we were struggling twenty-somethings, we had enjoyed this bit on TV (see, in the 20th century, we had a sort of proto-monitor called a “tele-vision” or “TV” for short).

He replied:

Remember this?

:D Yeah (God, that’s so well done.) In fact in the play I just directed at MBC, one of the characters talks about watching an Abbott and Costello marathon, and I had to explain to my student actors who Abbott and Costello were. When I mentioned the “Who’s On First?” routine, one of them went, “Oh, the Animaniacs did that!”

For you young’uns, here’s the original:

Murray Rothbard on libertarians and nationalism:

Hostiles: The Libertarians

Libertarians are, by and large, as fiercely opposed to ethnic nationalism as the global democrats, but for very different reasons. Libertarians are generally what might be called simplistic and “vulgar” individualists. A typical critique would run as follows:

“There is no nation; there are only individuals. The nation is a collectivist and therefore pernicious concept. The concept of ‘national self-determination’ is fallacious, since only the individual has a ’self.’ Since the nation and the State are both collective concepts, both are pernicious and should be combated.”

The linguistic complaint may be dismissed quickly. Yes, of course, there is no national “self,” we are using “self-determination” as a metaphor, and no one really thinks of a nation as an actual living entity with its own “self.”

More seriously, we must not fall into a nihilist trap. While only individuals exist individuals do not exist as isolated and hermetically sealed atoms. Statists traditionally charge libertarians and individualists with being “atomistic individualists,” and the charge, one hopes, has always been incorrect and misconceived. Individuals may be the only reality, but they influence each other, past and present, and all individuals grow up in a common culture and language. (This does not imply that they may not, as adults, rebel and challenge and exchange that culture for another.)

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“While the state is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the nation may be and generally is voluntary.”

While the state is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the “nation” may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly refers, not to the state, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised. It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph Bourne’s analysis of the crucial distinction between “the nation” (the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and “the State” (the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one’s nation or country while — and even for that very reason — opposing the state that rules over it.

In addition, the libertarian, especially of the anarcho-capitalist wing, asserts that it makes no difference where the boundaries are, since in a perfect world all institutions and land areas would be private and there would be no national boundaries. Fine, but in the meantime, in the real world, in which language should the government courts hold their proceedings? What should be the language of signs on the government streets? Or the language of the government schools? In the real world, then, national self-determination is a vitally important matter in which libertarians should properly take sides.

Finally, nationalism has its disadvantages for liberty, but also has its strengths, and libertarians should try to help tip it in the latter direction. If we were residents of Yugoslavia, for example, we should be agitating in favor of the right to secede from that swollen and misbegotten state of Croatia and Slovenia (that is, favoring their current nationalist movements), while opposing the desire of the Serb demagogue Slobodan Milosevic to cling to Serb domination over the Albanians in Kosovo or over the Hungarians in the Vojvodina (that is, opposing Great Serbian nationalism).

There is, in short national liberation (good) versus national “imperialism” over other peoples (bad). Once we get over simplistic individualism, this distinction should not be difficult to grasp.

– excerpted from “The Nationalities Question” on Mises.org