Elon J Lerlow

I keep seeing these "Elon Musk is a genius" posts. Educated professionals are stating, literally, that he's a genius. Is that the same Elon Musk who said "the coronavirus panic is dumb", who supports Kanye West for president of the US, and who named his child "X Æ A-12"? Is it the same Mr. Musk who has spent more $billions on blowing up rockets in an attempt to get a super-privileged few to live on Mars, after they've made life so intollerable through the environmental damage they've caused for the rest of us on Earth?

The choice between indvidual freedom and "the common good" is a false dichotomy.  There is no necessary opposition between an individual's interests and the interests of the community.  However, we live with a system that often forces us to apparently make a "choice" of deciding between the individual and community or family.  Examples are when we decide to emigrate, or sacrificing everything reaching for a dream, which invariably fails to materialise.  This illusion of choice is nurtured by a ruling class and their media who benefit from purporting the fallacy that the individual should work hard for themselves, that greed is good, and that good things will come to those who wait (and work hard in the meantime).  In this way, we become like Drogo at the Bastiani Fortress, trapped by the expectation that something will happen, that never does (1).     Conversely, it seems obvious that what's good for us all is good for you and I as individua...

There is not a form of left-anarchism or revolutionary socialism which states as its aim the strengthening of the state. This is a consistent fallacy propogated against socialism, the aim of which, ultimately, is the “withering away of the state”. The state is necessary, in the final analysis, to maintain the status quo where there is inequality and class division. So capitalism, despite everything the right-wing claim to say about “big government” desperately needs the state and its various institutions for its very survival. We see this in times of economic crises, when private banks and corporations look to the state to save them. We also see it most obviously through how the state maintains an army and police whose force is used in the interests of expanding / defending profit making markets and private property respectively. The aim of many socialists (and not all socialists and anarchists agree with each other on this) is to take control the state in order to us...