Gay Marriage

Marriage? Who in their right mind would want one?

VioPac is opposed to State recognition of homosexual marriage unions. Yes, you read that right. VioPac is also opposed to State recognition of heterosexual marriage unions. In fact, VioPac is not only opposed to State recognition of anything, VioPac is opposed to the State itself.

Now, if Catholics want to define marriage a certain way, who are we to force them to do otherwise? Hell, we have our own definition of "Catholic" and it's none too complimentary. Likewise, when the Episcopalians down the street decide to define it differently, we can see no ethical or moral justification to compel them to behave like the Catholics.

If you are a homosexual man and a Catholic, aside from other doctrinal problems you face, you're out of luck if you want a Catholic Church Wedding. This arises out of a choice you made (the Church, not your sexuality) and you get to deal with the consequences of that. You have no moral authority to compel the Church to marry you to a man when it is against Church doctrine to do so.

However, as a male homosexual Unitarian, you can have the Unitarian Church marry you to the man you love, and enjoy the satisfaction of telling the Catholics to get bent if they try to interfere. They're fond of interfering but without a Militant Theocracy to back them up you can pretty much ignore 'em nowadays. We certainly do.

The Environment

The meek may inherit the Earth, but they won't get the mineral rights.

We at VioPac believe in stewardship, conservation, and basically leaving a place better than you found it. We do not believe that the State will do a better job of this than you and I will. For ages, conservation and wildlife preservation were the domain of hunters, fishers, hikers, and campers (pretty much in that order)--and they did a fine job. Now that the socialists have taken over the "environmental movement", we see environmental disasters everywhere we look.

Example: it was State (mis-)planning that led to the recent Arizona wildfires. Sensible people would have let parts of that underbrush burn off, but because the State felt that might make some trust-fund "environmentalist" cry, they let all that dry tinder build up for years until our very pissed Mother Nature decided to take care of the job herself.

Fires are natural, but try telling an electorate that. Clearly the State has no business directing our relationship to our resources.

Gun Rights

Dismiss, disarm, destroy

When a government wants to curtail the liberties, freedoms, and value of its citizens, it begins to disarm them. The weak, self-hating, hand-wringing Professors of Socialist Implosion (or whatever they're calling anti-humanism this week) at the local Marxist temple will happily jump on the bandwagon, falling for the easy propaganda and facile arguments of the disarmament crowd: that guns cause robbery, murder, hate, and evil in the world.

Let's get one (albeit anecdotal) thing straight: I have never so much as pointed any of my firearms at another human being. Hate, evil, murder, and robbery have existed, and will continue to exist, regardless of whether there are guns about.

The question is not, "should we allow (!!) people to have guns?" but "why should we interfere with the right of the individual to defend himself?"

It ought to be completely obvious at this point, but for the sake of clarity and any journalists in the audience: VioPac opposes any and all regulation of weapons. (VioPac opposes any and all regulation by the State, period). If you don't want 'em in your house, that's fine. We do.

We'll leave this issue by quoting another Government mandate, made into law the day following Kristallnacht, 11 November 1938:

§1
Jews (§5 of the First Regulations of the German Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 1333) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.

§2
Firearms and ammunition found in a Jew's possession will be forfeited to the government without compensation.^[1]

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? "The People", "The Jews"... at this point we're arguing semantics.

Taking Orders

...but absolute power is more fun

Some believe that, as Anarchists, we won't take orders from anyone or work for an employer. They interpret our opposition to the State as opposition to authority. Let's be perfectly clear here: we do not oppose authority, we oppose the compulsion to obey authority.

Anarchists oppose force, compulsion, and the absence of choice. We support the individual right to self-determination and voluntary association as absolutes, unregulated and inalienable. We believe in value, free markets, and celebrating the heroic possibilities inherent in human beings. We despise the grey-faced bureaucracy and humorless inertia of Government, and the callous, insatiable, and fundamentally anti-human philosophies it demands. We are Anarchists. We are Capitalists. We love life, music, dancing, drinking, reading, shooting, sailing, jumping, fucking, laughing, climbing, crying, building, profiting, painting, working, and trading.

We believe that human activity and achievement are fundamentally valuable (even heroic), and we like getting value in return for that. Of course we don't have a problem working for another person, or taking orders, or operating in a corporate hierarchy--if we choose! If I am a stonemason and you are building a library, not only would I happily work for you to do so, but I'd likely be hiring people myself, who would work for me.

The point here is that we voluntarily enter into into a business relationship and make no moral claim to the exclusive right to initiate force to get our way.

Taxation

Sure things: Death, taxes, and death by taxes

Hell fucking no.

The United States Constitution

Congress shall make no law.

Here's the part that sticks with a lot of Libertarians out there: if we are opposed to Government, aren't we opposed to the Constitution as well?

At VioPac, we like the Constitution. It's a damn good framework for determining how people are going to interrelate with each other. It was put together by some very smart people and it is the best example yet of the "limited government" philosophy.

It is not, however, without its flaws.

The first that comes to mind, of course, is slavery. There are no provisions against the most traditional (and most degrading) use of force our planet has been witness to: human slavery. The slave is de-humanized because they have no value to offer in exchange for their labor. They are uncompensated for their time, their work, and their lives and as such are not human. It is force that keeps slaves in slavery, and it is force that makes new slaves.

This is fundamentally inhuman, and this oversight cost between 618,000 and 700,000 more human lives during the American Civil War.

(Sidebar: there is an amendment to the constitution banning slavery, but who's to say there won't, like Prohibition, be another one later on making the 13th Amendment null and void?)

Further, even as a brilliant example of an attempt at rational government (and, as such things go, our favorite), it is still a set of directives granting one group of people a monopoly on force and the presumption to moral authority--a moral right to compel you to behave in certain ways and believe in certain things. There were, no doubt, American slavers who treated their slaves well, even luxuriously. That doesn't change the fact that these people were still made slaves. Likewise the Constitution is a great example of how people can draw up a charter for how they are going to work together, but the fatal flaw, developed over time, is that it is enforced upon you and not a voluntary association, that regardless of your approval you still have to pay for it. Ultimately, just like you cannot have "a little slavery", we will not accept being "mostly free".

Religion

GOD HATES FIGS

If this sorta thing works for you, great. It doesn't for us. Seriously, it's utterly absurd. You have a choice between Religion (behave this way or Big Daddy will come home and hurt you; right and wrong exist by fiat) and Philosophy (understand that your actions have consequences; right and wrong do exist and can be proven rationally) and most people run to the protection of the Sky Bully.

VioPac opposes the degredation and humiliation of Man, whether it is modern art (their word, not mine) trying to remove the observer and itself from the art experience, modern philosophy, where the more absurd and depressing an idea is the "truer" it becomes, or Religion teaching people to hate themselves inherently for their evil, sinful nature. We believe Man to be an heroic, giant figure capable of accomplishing whatever she sets her mind to, and deserving the sole credit for having done so.

Having said that, if Religion is truth to you, have at it. Let no one compel you otherwise; coerce no one to believe as you believe. We'll get along just fine under those circumstances.

Software and Music as Property

Imaginary Property.

We are Capitalists. By now you will understand that we believe in offering something of value in exchange for something of value, a fair trade among equals. We don't steal and we don't force people to give us things. We pay our own way.

When it comes to software, most of us at VioPac use Free Software exclusively. This is software that is released under a license granting recipients the freedom and ability (through source code) to do what they want with it, so long as they agree not to prohibit anyone else from doing so.

Free Software, as is often said, is "Free as in speech", not "free as in beer".

Tangential to software is music. We like buying music at VioPac and have an extensive, private music and video filesharing service on our internal net. We believe in compensating artists we enjoy, and so we end up with a lot of CDs.

We also believe that no entity can claim an exclusive moral right to our culture, and art is a direct expression of our culture. It is our contention that there exists no moral compulsion to pay for each MP3 we download or share, but there is a moral duty to compensate the artists (assuming they are still alive) for their efforts if we enjoy their work. So we end up on filesharing networks and Amazon quite a bit.

Too, there is no moral justification worth listening to that would compel an artist to pay for sampling and recontextualizing. If you want your artwork out there in the public sphere, one of the consequences you accept is that some people may not like it, may recontextualize it, and/or may make something completely different (or better!) out of it. Welcome to the real world. If you don't want people to experience your work, don't let people experience your work.