Anarchy Isn’t The Answer

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In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a massive super computer is asked for a simple answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It spends 7 and a half million years to determine that the answer is 42. Of course, the realization is quickly made that a simple answer to an extremely complex question, or more accurately many difficult questions, is ridiculous on its face. The real answers to all the big problems are not easy, however badly we may desire them to be. (more…)

The Golden Porcupine

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Help me get mine! The Golden Porcupine is awarded to any Free State Project member who manages to recruit three or more people to participate in the FSP. The idea is that if everyone currently signed on were to recruit three people, we’d more than reach our goal of 20,000 signers. I’d like to do more than that though. I’d like to be the #1 recruiter! That’s going to be tough competing with people like Ian and Mark of Free Talk Live with thousands of listeners across the country, but it won’t keep me from trying.

Did you find out about the FSP from Anarchy In Your Head? Were you encouraged to join by the comic? Make sure you tell Phil Denisch. If you haven’t signed up yet, why not? Go sign up now and put Dale Everett as the person who referred you.

Failing to See the Trees for the Forest

There is no forest. There are only trees. The “forest” is a human fabrication, an abstraction that exists only in our minds. Abstractions serve a purpose in human communication, certainly. Let’s not try to deny that. However, we must never forget what they really are and that they only exist in our minds.

If you take a particular cluster of trees and establish boundaries in your mind and decide to name it Fangorn Forest, then until you tell others about it and they agree with you, Fangorn Forest exists only in your mind. Even when you do tell people about it and perhaps draw some boundary lines on a map, some may agree, some may disagree about what the boundaries are, or may want to call it something else, or may not want to acknowledge it at all. Even then, Fangorn Forest exists in some minds but not others. At no point has reality ever actually been altered. The “forest” does not exist. The forest has only abstract existence and even then it exists only to the extent that various people consent to it and to the extent that they agree on its properties.

(Read on…)