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

by | Dec 18, 2010 | 12 comments

Radio TowerHere 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

by | Dec 17, 2010 | 208 comments

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

by | Dec 17, 2010 | 19 comments

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. (more…)