Friday Lazy Linking
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
- Embracing Traffic From Those Darn Aggregators. Techdirt (2009-10-29). Next up, somebody is going to be surprised that the Associated Press and Reuters somehow manage to get by OK even with folks like Martin Nisenholtz shamelessly reprinting all their content in full. (Linked Thursday 2009-10-29.)
- Acoustic Kitty. Best of Wikipedia (2009-10-29). Today at Anarchist Cafe, one of the less productive questions that got asked was, without government, what would keep totalitarian governments from taking over and ruling forever. The simple answer to this question is that it wildly overestimates the efficiency and competence of government to maintain itself in power. I mean, look, dude, bad-ass James Bond government spy agencies spend $20,000,000 trying to train a spy cat only to have it get run over by a taxi. These guys aren’t as omnipotent as they’d have you believe. (Linked Thursday 2009-10-29.)
- How Is the Free Market Going to __________? S¢â’¶++, Everyone's Blog Posts – FR33 Agents (2009-10-12).
I’m sure everyone gets that question. But see, that’s the beauty of it. You yourself don’t have to know how the free market will solve any given problem. Entrepreneurs will assess the problem and come up with solutions. And you don’t even have to pick one solution, you can have…
(Linked Thursday 2009-10-29.) - Wikileaks Decides: If The US Gov't Won't Create A Real Shield Law, We'll Shield Journalists Instead. Techdirt (2009-10-30). Of course, if you wanted to be “practical” you could waste years of your time and millions of dollars trying to vote away the problem or trying to out-lawyer the Department of Justice at the Supreme Court. Or you could just do this instead.
Counter-economics gets the goods. (Linked Friday 2009-10-30.) - HOW OBAMA CAVED TO BIG PHARMA. UNDERNEWS (2009-10-30). In which the new sheriff in town turns out to be a lot like the old sheriff in town. (Linked Friday 2009-10-30.)
- My New 10-Year Old Hero. Dispatches from the Culture Wars (2009-10-30).
How about a 10 year old kid in the 5th grade from Arkansas who refuses to say the pledge of allegiance and got sick and tired of having a teacher push him to do so every day and “talked back” to her? Their son told them last weekend he had…
(Linked Friday 2009-10-30.)
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What we have the United States is essentially corporate government as opposed a true democracy. Only people with views in certain specified range are actually allowed to participate in government. Oppose Iran sanctions? Oppose sending weapons to Israel? Sorry, you’re out of luck. The fact is even if this what polls suggest most people want, it is only because they are fed lies by the government and the media regarding who are the actual aggressors in the Middle East. Iran may not be a democracy, but at least it is not a nuclear armed apartheid state. If you check the polls lately, most people would actually like to disband Congress and have no faith in the lies their being fed by the media. Over time I think things will change. People are smart. They’ll eventually figure out who the real aggressors are in the Middle East. Until then, we just have to be patient.
I got exactly the same kind of questions several times by anarcho-collectivists; one saying how would you have universities; another mentioning trains.
In my replies, I usually do not use the term ‘entrepreneurs,’ as I want to live in order to have a family at some point. I just say, well if people actually need something, aren’t they going to feel the need and get it ?
I’m curious about all this, cause it’s usually something you get from statists. Why do anarcho-collectivists believe they would get whatever, but not free marketeers ? This is weird.
littlehorn, for what it’s worth, the question at A-Cafe was not from a social anarchist but rather from a conventionally pro-capitalist libertarian type, whose main worry has to do with what I think is an overweening faith in the competence and staying-power of totalitarian governments. (The specific question was what would happen if, say, immediately after World War II, the U.S. government simply disappeared; what would keep Stalin from rolling on the tanks and ruling the world? Well, I dunno; what kept the Soviets from ruling Afghanistan? Power has natural limits, both logistical and strategic.)
I do think that many social anarchists have trouble working out things like, say, roads, or pharmaceutical production, or cell phones, or what have you. And, just to tip my hand a bit, I think this is part of the reason why so much of the anarchist discussion of technology over the past couple decades has been dominated by the greens and the primitivists — because of the number of Reds who don’t feel comfortable just saying that if the local gift economy or worker’s community planning committee or the local cluster of worker-occupied factories or whatever don’t suffice to produce these things, then entrepreneurial workers in some other town will find it profitable to get together and make and sell these things, because of the market opportunity that the lack of pharmaceuticals, or cell phones, or whatever happens to represent. If you’re not willing to explain anything by means of entrepreneurial profits (whether or not these have to be in the conventional cash nexus, mind you, and using whatever form of words you want to explain the concept), then it pretty quickly becomes the case that you can’t see how much of anything would work above the level of local food production and the occasional barn raising. And there’s plenty of primmies who are happy to rush into that explanatory gap in order to explain why you shouldn’t even want food production, let alone cell phones, you domesticated workerist drone, blah blah blah.
But I haven’t run into that problem very much in talking with social anarchists here in Vegas, for whatever reason. (My suspicion is because the local anarchist here is young enough and not firmly formed enough that (1) anarchos here are generally not very set in a particular set of ideological ways, and (2) the has not yet attracted very many anarcho-social-democrats quite yet, who are, at least in my experience, often the major source of this kind of problem.
That cat story is great. They would be better off sticking with frickin’ sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their frickin’ heads in the future.