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...

Malcolm Gladwell came to Fort McMurray last night and I was definitely excited to hear him speak. I've read three of his books 'Blink', "The Tipping Point' and 'Outliers' and found his lecture last night was more of the same; insightful, engaging, witty, and exuding a sort of gentle intellect. The thrust of Gladwell's speech was to give us McMurrayites some insights into community building based on a number of stories and case studies he had come across. One of the case studies he used was Roseto a small community of 3000 people located in the isolated hills of Pennsylvania. Roseto is remarkable according to Gladwell because in the 50's while other Americans were dying of cardiovascular and other diseases, in Roseto people were dying of old age despite bad diets, smoking and lack of exercise. Gladwell suggests that this is because of the strong sense of community that he painted a beautiful picture of with his prose. I have no reason to doubt hi...

Every time there is a tragic shooting somewhere we have the same debate occurring between people with a left wing brain and people with a right wing brain. Essentially a left wing brain was exposed to a primarily matriarchal family environment and the right wing brain was exposed to a primarily patriarchal family environment. Understanding this about oneself is important, political preferences are usually formed by our experience of family rather than reasoned out from first principles. Predictably the debates that occur between people who do not understand this about themselves are emotionally charged and irrational. On the left we have gun control advocates who are scared of guns and want to exert matriarchal power over the family (the state) and want guns removed, and on the right we have those who want to exert patriarchal control over the family which means they want to be able to use guns to protect against tyranny. The debate that ensues is es...

I recently came across an online discussion on a libertarian site about what the libertarian view should be of a big Chinese state-owned corporation (CNOOC) owning a piece of the oil sands. For those that don’t know a libertarian is generally someone with a political position that revolves around the non-aggression principle (NAP) which says that no person has the right to initiate force against another person. It got me thinking about what development of the oil sands might look like if the NAP was adhered to strictly by a tipping point of people living in the oil sands region so here is my thought experiment. Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions or how you think things might work in an environment of adherence to the NAP. First of all strict adherence to the NAP means that government goes away and interactions are regulated by individuals engaged in voluntary relationships. Note this is slightly different than the typical libertarian position that concedes a cert...