RE: Democracy: Tricking the Profoundly Gullible
For funizes, here's an example of the type of comments I get from my more philosophically minded friends when I share your stuff:
This may be a horrible comparison, but on an intellectual-rational-conversation level, (to me) Larken comes across as the "Ray Comfort" of Anarchism; not interested in real dialogue, understanding of the issues from various perspectives, critically analyzing one's own tenets of faith, etc. Rather, just more dogma repackaged in new mantras, easy to digest for the faithful to reinforce and regurgitate the same message without really examining it.
After looking at a bunch of Larken's stuff, that was my conclusion. I hope to be surprised by him in the future, but we all have our priorities in life, and I respect him for pursuing his own.
Take it for what you will. :)
Whenever we put our ideas out there we'll gather critics. At least it means people are giving up some attention to hear us out.
I don't know who wrote it, so this might be an unfair impression, but since we're trading impressions...
He sounds like one of those libertarian eggheads who is more concerned with being in the "cool" and "informed" MINORITY, so they can look down their noses at everyone else, while converting exactly NONE of the general public to the concepts of self-ownership and non-aggression. Yes, I keep the concepts simple, and write in terms that anyone can understand. This is because the FUTURE OF THE FUCKING WORLD depends on getting enough people to give up their statism, and it takes something other than thousand-page treatises on Austrian economics to do that.