Tim Moen

Part I - Lessons Learned My graduate thesis looked at self-organizing emergency response teams. I wanted to look at things like firefighter team dynamics and effectiveness through the lens of self-organization and see what could be discerned about things like leadership and why some teams were more effective than others. I became interested in looking at this because I noticed that teams that were led by autocratic leaders seemed to run into far more problems and be far less effective than other teams. These are the lessons I learned about self-organizing systems and how leaders/change agents can create real change in systems. All Systems are Self-Organizing When I started researching my thesis I had a difficult time finding a clear definition of what a self-organizing system was among scholars. How would I know whether I idnetify a team to be self-organizing or behaving in a self-organizing fashion if I didn't know what criteria to use? In the end I identif...

Anarchy simply means "without rulers" and so all anarchists by definition agree with the non-aggression principle; the idea that people should not harm other people. I am writing this article because I continually run into arguments in liberty and anarchist circles between "left" anarchists and "right" anarchists. The problem is that as a so-called "right" anarchist, I rarely find I disagree with "left" anarchists when it gets right down to it. In fact more and more I am convinced that our positions are identical and we simply understand language differently and that the language we use when talking with each other prevents us from effectively communicating with one another. The main disagreement seems to be generated over the word "property". Leftists will often tell you that property is coercion. When I ask them to describe what property is and why its coercion I usually find myself in agreement with them. They might say ...

One Billion Rising is a noble movement that seeks to end violence against women. Violence against women is a terrible problem that needs to be addressed and many millions of men are raising their voices for this worthy cause. Where are the voices raised for men? Violence and trauma against men is arguably a much bigger problem than violence against women. Yes 1 in 6 American women will be sexaully assaulted compared to 1 in 10 American males, however this is only one type of violence. Males are murdered at a rate 3.2 X greater than women and commit suicide at a rate of 4 X greater than women. What about the fact that 75% of assault victims are men and 97% of workplace fatalities are men? Why is it that 90% of the homeless are male? Where are the voices raised in shock and outrage over the violence done to men? Why is it that between breast and prostate cancer, two diseases that take about the same amount of life, breast cancer gets twice the federal funding, four times the char...