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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.

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  1. Sameul Haque

    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.

  2. littlehorn

    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.

  3. Rad Geek

    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 profits 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 scene 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 scene has not yet attracted very many give me anarchy, but not yet, anarcho-social-democrats quite yet, who are, at least in my experience, often the major source of this kind of problem.

  4. Kelly W. Patterson

    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.

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