This is religion’s Blasphemy Challenge. I want one for statism. Bring that to me, would you, and all the gold in Persia, would you, dear?

I am engaged in a battle.

It is an intellectual battle… one that I have been engaged in for at least the past 25 years.

It is a battle of the real against the unreal, of the accepted versus the virtuous, of the valid against the irrational and of the unrepentantly bad against that which would, perchance, ought be good.

This battle takes place inside me every day. It is a battle where questions are never answered, where truths never come riding, radiant over the horizon to dispel falsehoods. It is a battle which requires that one man, atomized and alone, stands firm against an irresistable tide of lies and insanity. When I face this battle, as the one clinging to the bit of solid ground against the tsunami does, it is pure, it is fine and it is enough to just hold on.

When I look around, sometimes, though, I find ones I value cheering the destruction and insanity which rages around me.

And that really bothers me.

Isn’t this one of the biblical signs of the approach of apocalypse?

I’m delighted to have been asked to host this month’s edition of the Market Anarchist Blog Carnival, organized by Francois Tremblay.

If you would like to submit a post, please do so here. Carnival rules and an archive of links to past editions are located on Franc’s blog, here.

The deadline is October 29th, so fire away with your most market-y and anarchy-y post of the month!

By Black Bloke, via Rorshak (1313) @ Bureaucrash social:

Yes we can!

Discuss.

I am honored to have been interviewed by Martin Rojko, a journalist covering real estate markets for Slovakia’s Trend news magazine and a libertarian fellow-traveler.

The interview is online at Martin’s blog, Súkromné vlastníctvo (Private Property). Unlike his usual writing, which is published in the Slovak language, the article, “Mike Gogulski interviewed: ‘The Seed of Agorism Grows in Every Person’” is provided in English, and consists largely of my own ramblings without much embellishment or framework.

Ďakujem, Martin!

Some folks really can’t take it when they see their sacred cows being gored.

Almost 20 years ago, at the muddled dawn of my political awakening, I took a road trip from Orlando, Florida to Washington, DC with a few friends intent on joining one protest or another against the first Gulf War. My car was literally festooned with anti-war, pro-peace graffiti, bumper stickers and slogans — a rolling billboard for anti-war protest.

Late at night during the journey we stopped off for food and a break from the road at a Waffle House or Shoney’s in a tiny little town in South Caroline called Paxville. The perfect stopping place, one might think, given that the Latin word “pax” means “peace”, and wasn’t that just what we were after?

So we ate our meals and drank our coffees. About mid-way through, a small group of young men came in to dine as well, looking at us suspiciously and having conversations with a waitress in hushed tones. Cold stares all around. One of my friends noticed an insignia or patch on something one of the guys was wearing that suggested he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. Potential conflict ahead, and under the surreptitious appraisal and venomous looks we finished our meals quickly, full of tension that this group might decide to provoke some sort of conflict.

We got back in the car and made ready to continue the long drive to DC. As I pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, one of my friends said that the CAP guys were hustling out of the restaurant and piling into a Camaro. I got us out onto the deserted, dark county road, heading back for the highway, but about 500 yards from the restaurant I and my friends spotted the Camaro’s headlights behind us. The CAP guys were accelerating quickly to close the gap between us. I made a snap decision to evade them; if they wanted to start trouble out here at 4 o’clock in the morning without another soul in sight, we would likely have our faces pulped and the car damaged. Spotting an unfenced field filled with tall grass and weeds ahead, I switched off my headlights and plunged into it, with the Camaro now maybe 200 yards behind. A short, reckless, bumpy ride into the field in darkness, and I used engine braking and the hand brake (to avoid brake lights betraying our position) to bring us to a stop a goodly distance off the road. I shut off the car, and we watched the Camaro pass slowly, take a U-turn a ways up the road past our location and circle back looking for us before making a final U-turn and continuing on their way.

After catching our breath a while and agreeing upon what had just happened, we all shared a laugh about the name “Paxville” and got ourselves back on the highway to continue on.

This close encounter with violence was part of a tapestry of counter-protest that we experienced nearly everywhere. “Support the troops, oppose the war” on our side and “America, love it or leave it!” on the other, backed by the barely-controlled fury of some in the opposite camp eager to bait us into violent confrontation.

I was just reminded of this old tale of Paxville on discovering and reading another follow-on fisking to my “Fuck the Troops!” article. It’s by one W.B.B. Johnson and entitled “OUR TROOPS…MY HERO’S! DON’T LIKE IT…THEN GO TO HELL!“. A long screed with a surfeit of apostrophes and all-caps invective ends on this note:

No one (especially our troops) likes war. Atrocities (which no one wants to have happen) do happen in war… IT’S WAR!! To call our troops murderer’s… is TOTALLY… UNACCEPTABLE and beyond reason! The cracker-ass-joker that wrote this article: http://www.nostate.com/77/fuck-the-troops/, would have been hung for treason against AMERICA… had General George Washington been here today!

What Mr. Johnson doesn’t seem to get is that if I were transplanted into the history he romanticizes here, I might indeed be hung for treason — by the British.

It is one measure of the relative success of the American state’s indoctrination program that so few would be able to make that qualification correctly.

Hat tip: BK Marcus