Chomsky on Libertarianism

Noam Chomsky was recently asked to describe libertarianism:

What’s called libertarian in the United States, which is a special U. S. phenomenon, it doesn’t really exist anywhere else — a little bit in England — permits a very high level of authority and domination but in the hands of private power: so private power should be unleashed to do whatever it likes. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society. Actually that has been believed in the past. Adam Smith for example, one of his main arguments for markets was the claim that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality. Well, we don’t have to talk about that! That kind of ... libertarianism, in my view, in the current world, is just a call for some of the worst kinds of tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave. It's better to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don’t think you really need an argument for that.

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First take: boudoir photography

IMG_9559 Andrea natural light lo res Steve Grappe of PhotoG Studios offered a boudoir photography workshop Sunday. I attended and learned a lot of about lighting, shooting and posing. The venue was the Cheshire Inn, in STL. Obviously, this is a engaging genre, and it was equal parts fun and work. The woman below, Andrea Fentem, is beautiful in a unique way - she told me that her mother is a blonde haired blue eyed Swede and her father is native American. This photo is one of my favorites so far, though I'm still culling and post-processing the batch. I'll put others on my Flickr site soon. I can't say enough about Steve, who is both an excellent teacher and a great guy to know. I've taken his classes on several subjects over the past year and a half, including low key lighting and post-processing. Before then, I didn't even own a DSLR, so things can move fast in photography.

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Rampant NSA recording of phone calls, not simply metadata

William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA: “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.” This is an excerpt from the U.K. Guardian. I'm still waiting to hear outrage from so-called liberal democrats. All I hear is murmurred "concern" and an unwillingness to speak out. In short, the Dems and the Repubs are aligned on this issue, and this really disappoints me.

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People seek to date themselves.

From FiveThirtyEight Life

People are interested in people like themselves. Women on eHarmony favor men who are similar not just in obvious ways — age, attractiveness, education, income — but also in less apparent ones, such as creativity. Even when eHarmony includes a quirky data point — like how many pictures are included in a user’s profile — women are more likely to message men similar to themselves. In fact, of the 102 traits in the data set, there was not one for which women were more likely to contact men with opposite traits.

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