Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Sunday links


The "Chasing Shadows" newsletter on Substack discusses Joseph Matheny's Ong's Hat. 

Standard Ebooks has released At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. 

William Burroughs on cats. 

Finnegans Wake group in Venice, California, plans reunion event. 

Libertarian Party presidential debate.

My piece recommending Russian composer Nikolai Sidelnikov. 

3 comments:

Doctor Richard Waterloo said...

Vermin Spupreme was my favorite libertarian candidate. I've given up on the LP since the Mises takeover. They now openly court far right people and even gutted the LP party platform of protections against hate speech and bigotry. I've seen enough of Dave Smith and the new faces of the LP to just be done with their message.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

Hi Richard,

For the reasons you cite, I don't identify much with the Libertarian Party these days, I tend to identify with the Classical Liberal Caucus, which defends immigration, trans rights and other issues that are important to me. That said, I hope someone will get the LP nomination who can move the party in the right direction.

From my point of view, the Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties all seem worse these days than they were a few years ago.

I'm curious what other libertarian-leaning RAW fans think.

Brian Dean said...

Tom: "I'm curious what other libertarian-leaning RAW fans think."

I consider myself a libertarian-leaning RAW fan, but not in the common US sense, which seems fairly alien to me. More in the Chomsky sense of social-libertarian. But it's not an "identity" thing for me - I don't really "identify" with a political label.

Wilson's general usage of the term seems to fit my own - to me at least. He couldn't stand Libertarians who hassled him for being on welfare, etc. I had a look at the Twitter feed of the US Libertarian Party a while ago - not a pretty site (overtly denouncing Democracy as a political principle, posting pics of Zelensky with a Hitler moustache, retweeting adolescent grifters of the Jimmy Dore, Caitlin Johnstone, Michael Tracey mold, etc).

Speak to people in Britain, Europe - even Ukraine - about these issues of liberty and free speech. It mostly looks like an entirely different semantic framing from the US Libertarian approach. But I suspect we have the same desire for peace and liberty?

To quote RAW: "Are we controlled by lines of word and image, neuro-linguistic circuits?" (Trajectories #18)

Also to quote RAW: "Do the Irish and the English speak Working Class in this case because they have several socialist governments, or have they had several socialist governments because they learned to speak the language of the Working Class?" (Undoing Yourself Too)