Lysander Spooner was an anarchist, writer, and legal theorist who died in 1887. [wik] [wc]
During the big government shutdowns in the Clinton Administration, I remember thinking, “what a great way to get rid of government. Just stop paying for the useless !*!&#!!”
As I mentioned [stderr]: Fuck his highness Vajiralongkorn of Thailand.
My dad once told me (I was complaining about ageing) that it’s normal to experience a culture-shift as the people who lived through a time with you start to die off, and things that were facts of your life are now unusual and alien to them. For example, I grew up when there were still Horn and Hardart automats: places you could buy food from big slot machines, sort of a primordial form of fast food.
This is not the first time, nor probably the last, that I will take you to visit the words of Étienne De Boétie. In 1549, De Boétie wrote one of the great essays in political philosophy[text] – a self-admittedly meandering piece that pondered the question why people follow dictators.
The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, the there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state.
When does authoritarianism shift to totalitarianism?
Politically, authoritarianism is a system in which the state asserts its supreme power over a region, then uses that power to dictate rules and behaviors. There are a variety of authoritarianisms, including Stalinism, Maoism, Putinism, Fascism, Kimism, dictatorship, tyranny, aristocracy, monarchy and so forth.
The fundamental assumption in moral philosophy is that men are responsible for their actions. From this assumption, it follows necessarily, as Kant pointed out, that men are metaphysically free, which is to say that in some sense they are capable of choosing how they shall act.