Keene representative Chuck Weed introduces HCR 1

December 30, 2010 by Skeptikos · 59 Comments
Filed under: News, Politics

A RESOLUTION urging the congressional delegation to begin the process for a constitutional amendment establishing that human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights.

Whereas, government was established to provide a social contract between naturally born persons; and

Whereas, the founders of the U.S. Constitution and Republic clearly and emphatically intended freedom of speech to mean freedom to communicate with and by natural born persons either directly or through the free press; and

Whereas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on January 21, 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations have the same first amendment rights as people, and that they can spend unlimited amounts of money on elections; and

Whereas, the Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law, because in a democracy, the people rule; now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives, the Senate concurring: Read more

FIXED: User Registration Emails

December 28, 2010 by Ian · 9 Comments
Filed under: Announcement, Update

Apparently a wordpress plugin had broken the registration email process here on the blog. New registrants were not sent initial registration emails but should the person have requested a password reset, it did send that out. Anyway, it’s fixed now and so if you have registered for an account and did not get the email, please try the password reset. If you have not yet registered for an account, you can easily do so now. Please use the login widget in the top right sidebar.

Andrew Carroll: “Thank You”

December 27, 2010 by Ian · 229 Comments
Filed under: Politics, Update

From Andrew Carroll’s blog:

It’s been several months since my campaign ended and while it has left me decidedly agnostic on some issues (i.e., what to call myself, politically), or has changed my mind on others (i.e., talking with liberals in Keene has helped me re-discover many of my liberal tendencies), it has only strengthened all of my prior faiths that made me fall in love with New Hampshire over two years ago.

And as I sit here in sunny California, visiting my sorely missed friends and family for Christmas, I am left with an even greater longing to step foot again in snowy, downtown Keene, dressed in suit and tie and equipped with as many door hangers as my impoverished budget could afford…

and knock on doors. Read more

Video: The Story of Our Unenslavement

December 26, 2010 by Ian · 24 Comments
Filed under: Personal Freedom, Video, Your Evolution

Want a peaceful future in a voluntary society? Move to NH and help make it happen! Video courtesy of Stefan Molyneux and Think Twice News:

The January Issue of the Free Keene Press is Online

December 23, 2010 by James Schlessinger Jr · 5 Comments
Filed under: The Free Keene Press

To view the .pdf version click here.

This issue recognizes the volunteer efforts of Dale Everett and Heika Courser. The blog brief returns with a recap of the blog posts over the last year. Check it out!

Fixed :30 Move to Keene Promo

December 20, 2010 by Ian · 13 Comments
Filed under: Outreach, Video

The audio dropout has been fixed:

WKBK’s “Talkback” Highlights 2010-12-11

December 18, 2010 by Ian · 12 Comments
Filed under: Audio, Issues

Radio Tower Here are highlights from a recent Talkback on WKBK. Fred Parsells sits in for Cynthia Georgina and has in Mark Edge from Free Talk Live as a co-host. They discuss the school teacher busted for cannabis, the drinking age, bike registration, and the homeless shelter. Fred and Mark also admit to performing civil disobedience!

Grab the archive.

Please join us for our weekly chat and calling sessions on Saturday mornings from 9a-12p. If you’re in the Keene area you can tune in to WKBK 1290 AM or 104.1 FM. The Talkback discussion thread is here on the Free Keene Forum.

Comments Now Require Logging In

December 17, 2010 by Ian · 208 Comments
Filed under: Announcement

It is with some regret that I make this announcement. You may have noticed that Free Keene has been going through some growing pains recently with a tremendous amount of nastiness coming from anonymous trolls in the comments section. This is to be expected as the site has grown significantly and now exceeds over 50,000 visits per month. With that popularity comes trouble from the haters. For a long time the hateful trolls were tolerated, but some were saying they were driving people away from the site. My websites have always welcomed dissent and open discussion and that will still be welcome here – it’s just that now you’ll need to be logged in to the site to comment, in the same way that you need to be logged in to the Forum to post there

This should still allow the people with serious critique to contribute while preventing the “drive-by” anonymous posters of vitriol. In order to facilitate you signing up and logging in, I’ve added a login widget to the right panel of the site. Make sure to check your spam filter if you don’t see the verification email after you sign up.

Each user having accounts should also eliminate the problem we have had with three different “David”s posting on the same comment thread, making it very difficult to discern who-was-who.

Hopefully this change combined with the new comment voting feature will help skew the comments more in a constructive, conversational direction rather than the troll slugfest that it has been recently.

Where I Stand, Structurally

December 17, 2010 by Skeptikos · 19 Comments
Filed under: Essay, Introduction

Summarizing my political views is hard. In the forums, I’ve been calling myself a “liberaltarian” — because I’m too libertarian to call myself a liberal, and too liberal to call myself a libertarian. (I posted an essay here, at Blue Hampshire, where I discuss particular policies and describe how I reached this position.)

But in this post I want to focus on a more interesting aspect of my views.

Beyond policy lies another level of politics. This is the structural, or institutional, level. Institutions determine, not individual policies, but how policies are chosen. When New Hampshire Democrats and Republicans fight to make it harder or easier for college students to vote, they are making crude forays into structural issues. Campaign finance reform would be a structural change.

While straightforward republican democracy has been working relatively well in America, it suffers from well-established flaws. Special interests and voter biases, in particular, create the most obvious problems. Anarchists (of whatever variety) and communists are unique in that they actually propose an alternate set of institutions to deal with these flaws. No other major political philosophies do this.

In opposition to anarchists and communists, however, I would like to see more structural experimentation: let a thousand nations bloom. Read more