That slight elation

I have had a brief brush with fame.

Oh, I don't mean this one.

If you watch, you can see the back of my head. Apparently it is recognizable enough that I've had several people be like, "I saw you in that Chamber of Commerce video! At least, I think it was you..."

Yes, it was me. Yes, I knew they were filming. I gave them permission to film the back of my head while I ordered a salad from Cafe Diem. They had some cool-looking gear and I asked them about it.

Anyway, that's not what I was talking about.

I follow some libertarian bloggers, one of whom I really enjoy reading who calls himself (or herself?) Bionic Mosquito. I like his stuff because he is a thin-libertarian who very much enjoys debating, analyzing, reading about, and applying libertarian principles.

Libertarian principles, at their very least (thinnest), involve three rights and one principle. Most people just list the principle, but I believe the rights are implied if not usually directly included in said principle.

You have the right to your life, to your freedom, to your property. The principle is called the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), which is that you (and everyone else) must not aggress against anyone else's aforementioned rights. And thus we obtain peaceful anarchy where every man rules his own frontier and respects his neighbor.

Except that we are human. And we are aggressive. And therefore a lot of libertarian theorists talk a lot about how our peaceful anarchy would be maintained. I tend to find this stuff fascinating, but I'm always secretly scared that I'll encounter something that makes me believe that I just can't be all on board for libertarianism. So far, I've stuck to the our-system-sucks-currently-so-freedom-would-be-better-even-with-problems position.

Anyway, Bionic was talking about his theories around governance, the social glue that would help maintain our society. It isn't part of libertarianism exactly, as libertarianism is ONLY a political philosophy. It isn't meant to be religion or charity or family. Freedom means you provide your own rules for your own way of living. And so, governance. Someone in his comment section of a post asked what he meant by governance, and Bionic responded with several examples, but I didn't feel really a definition, which could have been what the commenter was asking for. I understand Bionic's arguments decently well by then, so I attempted to distill it in the comment section in form of a definition.

And then I was reading through another post one day.

Look at the conclusion. Bionic quoted me. He's been thinking about, reading, and discussing things with people like Walter Block, big name libertarian theorists, and he quoted me.

I am ashamed of my grammatical errors. Aside from the "e" he added to "wherein," I noticed I didn't put a period after "etc."

But he said "something exactly like that" to my summary of his idea.

I admit it. I got little thrills. Showed David. Sent it to my dad.

I'm such a nerd.