LIFE
Letter to Ross: Thank you for Spurring my Recovery
Dear Ross, You have helped a great number people. I do not just mean in terms of saving lives, adhering to principles, or undermining the dark side of the drug war. You certainly contributed in those ways, but there is another potentially unrecognized contribution you have made. You have had tremendous emotional influence. You helped people…
Read MoreHow to Turn a Child into a Monster: The Cycle of Social Damnation
How to turn a child into a monster: Step 1, child-rearing: destroy the child’s emotional circuitry through culturally accepted abuses, including spanking and coercing, which occurs throughout childhood, so the child only knows fear and resentment.
Read MoreThe Cure for Combat PTSD is Prevention and Empathy
Post Traumatic Stress disorder is considered a mental disorder that affects people who have experienced something painful or unnerving. These experiences are usually scenarios that involve witnessing or causing death or destruction. For example, if a man signs up for military service and is spirited away to strange lands to kill strange people—he becomes a likely candidate for PTSD.…
Read MoreTale of a Pharmaco-Zombie Child
When I was a youngster I was diagnosed with ADD. Educators said I could not pay attention. They said I often got lost in my own world. I would not read what they wanted. I read my own material, usually fantasy sagas and other unpopular works of fiction. They constantly had to discipline me and complain…
Read MoreWhat Reading “For Your Own Good” Taught me About Violent Parenting (Part 1)
Insight into childhood and how early trauma spills over into adulthood is an important facet of psychology—one of the most important. I had not previously considered all of the implications of what violent and coercive parenting can do to children from a psychodynamic or Freudian perspective. After reading, “For Your Own Good,” by Alice Miller,…
Read MoreThe Anatomy of Warfare and Terrorism
Tribal Engineering Many people think Islamic Jihadists hate freedom. They are painted as barbarians who despise Western culture, that want to watch it burn, and who want to kill indiscriminately. There is truth to their hatred; but it is not a totally random and arbitrary hatred. That is an oversimplification. Their hatred is partly a product of tribal…
Read MoreDemons in the City of Love
A planned “terrorist” assault hit Paris with force. Over a hundred people were killed during the rampage. The perpetrators, according to news sources (mainstream and alternative), came in with AK-47’s and bombs strapped to their bodies. The worst part of the attack happened at a concert hall. That is where the majority of the causalities took place. The…
Read MoreHow Anarchists can Communicate more Compassionately
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing. -Rollo May, Existential Psychologist I want to emphasize the power of therapeutic and compassionate communication to anarchists. Both online and offline, we often rely on rhetoric lined with insults and hate instead of peaceful dialogue. Employing this language is not persuasive, but I am not suggesting that we should…
Read MoreAn Open Letter to the Military Veterans
Dear brothers and sisters, I am writing to you on this Veterans Day not as foe but as friend. I am penning these words with a heart toward convincing you that any commands you obeyed and the services you rendered were a detriment to you, your brothers and sisters, and all the people of the world. It is not my intent…
Read MoreAnarchy is for Lovers
“Anarchy is all around us. Without it, our world would fall apart. All progress is due to it. All order extends from it. All blessed things that rise above the state of nature are owned to it. The human race thrives only because of the lack of control, not because of it. I’m saying that we need ever more absence of control to make…
Read More