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On the particular part you quoted, check out the writings by John Taylor Gatto (a New York State Teacher of the Year) on all the things schools and prisons share in common, and how much damage conventional age segregated schooling with a fixed curriculum and standardized testing does to developing minds. You can find a book he wrote online here: The Underground History of American Education.

By the way, I agree with you some on the sweeping generalization on feminism (which in some variants is more liberational) but I think his point still stands -- that reconstructing the nature of work is to my (perhaps incomplete) understanding not typically an aspect of mainstream feminism -- especially when that was written (1985?) -- just deciding who does the work or who supervises it or who benefits from it monetarily or otherwise. But as a piece of rhetoric, I still think that paragraph is compelling in showing how people refuse to think systematically about what work needs to be done in society and how best to do it from various points of view.

E.F. Schumacher made similar points in his essay on Buddhist Economics if you want to read an author who is more well known.

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/song_m akhnovtchina.html/

I question why you think that justifies the blood of 10,000 innocent people on our hands. Is it your argument that Saddam Hussein would have slain 10,000 more people in this time period?

Before the invasion, Chomsky claimed that the sanctions on Iraq had killed 1.5 M people. and so the sanctions must be ended.

So would you rather 10,000 died or 1.5M more died?

Of course, the 1.5M figure is probably B.S.. Even if is closer to 100,000, it is more than 10,000 (which is probably another B.S. figure, got a source, and a break down of how many were killed by "combatant rebels"?).

McSweeneys perhaps one of the last bastions of American wit.
Anarcho sometimes goes off on tangents but he should be more accesible to you than McSweeneys.

Read up on current American Foreign Policy, and try to stop following herd mentality. Just becuase someone that likes somone acts a certain way does not entail that everyone that likes that person acts that way.

It's his way of thumbing his nose at patriotism.

Nationalism and jingoism are not the same as patriotism.

Also, Woodie Guthrie was a communist so I hardly feel he could be considered anti-government; he was just anti-capitalist.

"Communist" is a broad brush. Sure, Stalin was a great statist, but Marx's idea was that the state would wither away eventually. (Sadly, he didn't understand that when the workers form the the government, they cease being workers and start being rulers - power corrupts.) And there's Libertarian Communism, "a society organised without the state and without private ownership." I don't claim to know Guthrie's stand on the question of how much and what kinds of power the state ought to have.

Guthrie was one of the greatest craftsmen of words this country ever produced, but he was also kind of an arrogant jerk

He was passionate and commited, which many people often confuse with arrogant jerkness (see also RMS). He also suffered from a degerative neurological condition in his later years, leading to sometimes erractic behavior.

Yes, there are (at least) 2 schools of thought in anarchist theory. There's the libertarian socialist branch, stemming from people like Bakunin and Kropotkin. More recently, and more strictly american, an individualist (and sometimes even capitalist) branch has developed, the originator of which is Max Stirner.

The latter has devolved and been co-opted by punks (in both senses of the word) who just think it's cool to spray paint "A" on things and wouldn't know who Proudhon was if you hit them with a copy of Qu'est-ce que la propriété. An elegant dismissal of such tactics can be found in "You can't blow up a social relationship.

If you would like to learn more about serious, thoughtful anarchism, I'd recommend reading Kropotkin's article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Anarchist FAQ at infoshop. Personally however, I think the finest, most consice, and most persuasive statement of the ideals of anarchism can be found in Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.

Socialist thinking is the basis for the following craven, idiotic, hoary, red-white-and-blue assertion that infects our society from the ground up:

The issues you're screaming about have nothing to do with socialism. Regulation != socialism.

(And, hmm, since you don't understand that, the weight of your reason is less, therefore according to your own argument you should be disenfranchized. So please don't wote this year.

(What's that? You don't trust me to make the decision as to who's reason is less weighty? Well, who do you trust to make that decision, to decide who are the superior group? Or maybe should we stick with the "one man, one vote" and "equal protection under the law" idea after all.)

when was communism ever tried in reality? i believe you're referring to a system called state capitalism that has often been mistaken as "communism" in the west.

if you want to discuss communism, i'd suggest you first investigate catalonia from '36 to '38.

"While the popular understanding of anarchism is of a violent, anti-State movement, anarchism is a much more subtle and nuanced tradition then a simple opposition to government power. Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation." [The Politics of Individualism, p. 106]

"since it was thought that government was necessary and that without government there could only be disorder and confusion, it was natural and logical that anarchy, which means absence of government, should sound like absence of order." [Anarchy, p. 12].

"Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity." [Ibid., pp. 12-13].

Yes that is exactly what leftists, like Mikhail Bakunin, want. You have no idea what "leftist" means.

Umm, I was in agreement with you until the last one. An organized peaceful anarchy is possible. In an anarchist society, it is possible to be organized (worker and community groups) and peaceful.

Find out more by reading a Q&A with Noam Chomsky.

For a life without government why not start here

There's no such thing. It's a contradiction in terms.

Just call it what it is--laissez-faire capitalism or objectivism (depending on your flavour) and be done with it.

Here though, is the question no socialist or liberal can answer: Given the choice between a politician, a businessman, and yourself, who do you think is more concerned with your well-being?

Good question! The answer, of course, is "me". Which is why I want a true democracy and not a representative democracy. And which is why the people that work in company should own the company.

Does this make sense? It's called anarcho-syndicalism

My favorite thing about that movie when I was thirteen years old was the triple-breasted whore (a sly reference to Eccentrica Gallumbits?).

My favorite thing about Total Recall now is the fact that the movie never says whether Arnie is still in a vacation or not. He uses Rekall to acquire a vacation where he's a secret agent who saves Mars. He then wakes up, realizes he IS a secret agent, and then goes to save Mars.

Perhaps five minutes after the credits roll, he wakes up, and pays Rekall for his most-excellent 'vacation.'

Well, there's two points I want to make about this rant of his:

1. No open source project is ever truly dead. I don't think I have to explain why this is, but this is one of the best parts of free software.

2. The author of the project is completely justified in feeling bitter that he's having a hard time putting food on the table. However, this is not (and he does point this out) totally the fault of open source. Honestly, in today's post-dot-com market, do you ever think he could have gotten anywhere had he built this project from the ground up as a proprietary system? All by himself? With a few employees, maybe?

No, something's wrong here, and it ain't Linux. (Randroids beware, vicious attacks on the market coming...)

The fact of the matter is that the market is a horrible, horrible place for brilliantly useful ideas to thrive if they aren't (tadaaaaa!) marketable... If they can't turn enough of a profit to not only feed you, your employees, your landlord (if you're brick and mortar), and your shareholders, then it's not gonna play.

COUNTER-ATTACK: No, this does not mean that I feel that State direction would be a better means of producing things. The market may suck, but the government gives new meaning to the term 'fucked up piece of shit.'

We're gonna have to figure things out quick, because situations like this are going to become more and more prevalant. The first part of figuring things out is admitting that the dot-con boom helped out open source tremendously. First off, a lot of excess money floatin' around means it's easy to grab a bit of the overflow. Second, ridiculously high paying jobs that are easy to come by means that we can easily work on open source projects on the side. And third, due to the omnipresence of incredibly stupid middle managers who don't know the difference between TCSH, BASH, AND M*A*S*H, means we can work on this stuff while on the company clock, and nobody's the wiser.

But that sweet deal is gone, boys and girls, and it's probably never coming back. Because open source is invincible (meaning it can't be killed, not that it can't be hurt) means that it survived the fallout a lot better that many proprietary systems. But that doesn't mean it's gonna become a whole lot harder to develop.

However, the catch-22 is that, as the economy gets shittier, the more people need cheap software.

So how do give the people (and ourselves) what they want, while at the same time, having enough money to eat and pay rent? (*)

I never said I had the answers, though. But it'll be interesting to see what comes out of it all.

Dominion
Anarchist FAQ

* NOTE: Money to eat and pay rent does not imply that _any_ of us deserve to eat at five star restaurants and live in $1800/mo studio apartments. Let's get off our high horses. We lucked out for a few years in the 90's, but it's ridiculous to assume that we could be a part of that club for very long. And it doesn't really matter, anywhere with cheap rent and good burritos is gonna be infinitely more interesting than any yuppie enclave where the street musicians have been put in jail and everybody goes to sleep at 9:00pm.

I don't know what you were thinking, but the opposite of anarchy is not civilization. The opposite of anarchy is monarchy or dictatorship. There was a tremendous anarchist movement during the 30's in Spain, which looks to have been an exceedingly civilized affair.

Oh my! you're told you're a poor member of the world community!
If third world countries don't do what they're told, they get sanctioned economically or sometimes even worse. It's a complicated topic to discuss like this, and besides we got way offtopic already.
Here's an article that sort of summarizes my opinion in this matter:

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws99/imperialism5 8.html

While Douglas Adams - of Hitchhicker fame - may not be the sci-fi writer who has studied this in most detail, he does infact touch upon this very idea in his book 'Mostly Harmless'. Instead of giving a robot a spesific piece of programming on what to do in every concivable circumstance, a simple chip (well, I think it'll be a darn complex chip, but still) determines weither or not a certain condition has been meet or not. If it has, the robot is happy - if it hasn't, the robot tries to become happy.

Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches."
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, "Ah! A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot.
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they had actually discovered was "boredom", or rather, the practical function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went on to discover other emotions, Like "irritability", "depression", "reluctance", "ickiness" and so on. The next big breakthrough came when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for study, such as "relief", "joy", "friskiness", "appetite", "satisfaction", and most important of all, the desire for "happiness'.
This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.
The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was particularly happy when it could see other things moving about, particularly if th

And the greens want MORE government, not less.

A fundamental Green principal is decentralization of control, including governments: "Decision-making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens." I think that's something Greens and Libertarians could agree on, no?

Perhaps you should base your criticism on facts?

Most geeks are actually libertarians, though the geeks on slashdot seem to be mostly socialists

The two are not incompatable, indeed the "libertarian" label was used by socialists first before it was stolen by capitalists.

I thought the point behind capitalism is that the best product/service wins, without any help from having an illegal monopoly?

You can proclaim you are a god, but it won't make you one, the same holds for your attempt to hijack the word Libertarian.

Hey, you're the one who has the god complex, here, not me: IIRC you're the one who said he was "objective" - something which, as every philosophy teacher will tell you, is only an utopic goal for mere humans.

In the 19th Century the word "Liberal" ment someone who beleaved in freedom from state controls. In the 20th Century Statists hijacked the word for political purposes and are ready to toss it away now that Liberal dosen't confuse people anymore, and are trying to pull the same scam on the word "Libertarian" which was coined for the ideas that Liberal represented 100 years ago.

Yes, we have hijacked your precious word and we will kill it if you don't give us William F. Buckley, bound and gagged.

Give me a freakin' break! That word doesn't belong to anyone, much less a buch on laissez-faire fanatics who can't stand governments but don't seem to mind that we live in a dictatorship of the transnationals. You just don't like you oppressor to be elected - you want to be a rich boy's bitch instead, that's fine with me. But don't delude yourself if you think that word belongs to you. I'm a Libertarian Leftist, deal with it. I'm not trying to confuse anyone: I believe people are intelligent enough to judge me on what I say, not base the correctness of my discourse on what I call myself. Same for you, you call yourself an objectivist, when it's clear for anyone who reads your drivel that you're just another anarcho-capitalist, a Reaganoholic who's ready to let the whole world be guided by Milton's Invisible Hand - all the while history teaches us that unregulated markets are not self-correcting, and that they eventually crash.

As an aside, Webster's definition of Libertarian:
1 : an advocate of the doctrine of free will
2 a : a person who upholds the principles of absolute and unrestricted liberty especially of thought and action b capitalized : a member of a political party advocating libertarian principles

I don't see any reference to Adam Smith or any of the early liberal thinkers here. In fact I believe you are quite mistaken about the meaning of the word. It means a lot more than the narrow definition you would give it. Et cela est encore plus apparent dans d'autres langues que l'anglais; en français, le mot "libertaire" est en fait plus associé à la gauche qu'à la droite.

BTW your admission that yo use words to mean anything you want them to was a mistake. Now it's apparent that nothing you say is trustworthy

What the hell are you smoking? I did nothing of the sort - you interpreted something to that effect, I imagine. Which doesn't surprise me, my discourse being leagues above your pitiful excuse for a political paradigm. Ergo, as with all your previous posts, you don't actually challenge any of my arguments. None. Rather, you try to associate me with political philosophies I abhor, you insult me, you try to distort my words and you refuse to acknowledge simple facts. In other words you are a Troll. Thanks for wasting my time, Troll.

Just out of curiosity, how old are you? Your lack of arguments and tendency to rely on blatant distortions, prefab definitions and personal attacks show that you haven't really been doing this for long. I'd say, what 18? 20? You've still got a lot to learn about the world, son... Here, try these few Liberterian Leftist sites:

Movement of the Libertarian Left

A People's Libertarian Index

Critiques of Libertarianism

In the real world, a word's definition is derived from its general usage, not according to the desires of those, like you, who would hijack it (and accuse others of doing it when they want to revalidate the broader meaning of the word). It's quite obvious, looking at just these few web sites, that Libertarian is used both for the left and the right. So it seems that you have lost: the word is broadly recognized to describe both political options. But of course that's beyond your intellectual reach. Work on it, you'll get it eventually...I already know how you're going to respond to this, so I say to you: goodbye, Troll. I wish I could say this had been fun but you're just not up to task. Crawl back under your bridge and try to actually make a point instead of attacking your interlocutor. It might actually make other people take you seriously.

Would be a long, long wait in most of the UK... like until we get a change of government.

Or a change in society.

The problem is that the bastardized movie incarnation of Starship Troopers is not only vastly inferior to the printed subject matter, it actually perverts Heinlein's message in the book. [...]

What Verhoeven and his cronies did with the movie was turn the Federation into an actual fascist state.

I would suggest you all consider NOT shopping at Walmart -- for anything at all -- read this please

It is very sad that this story is also posted on May Day, which is (as another /. headline states) Labour Day everywhere else in the world but Canada, USA and SouthAfrica. Did you know May Day became Labour Day because of the American Labour Movement? Read a little history here

I agree with most of what you write, but I think that you should emphasize the fact that there was a /hell/ of a lot more than "several towns" where people had decided anarchism was the best way to run their lives. In fact Catalonia and Aragon were almost exclusively anarchist and Barcelona itself was anarchist predominantly.

The other important thing that you don't emphasize is that Communists were active in trying to destroy the anarchists, there was a non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin and Uncle Joe wanted to keep Europe re-assured.,

It's also important not to forget the trotskyist POUM which was a small but active presence and also suffered from the May Day purges.

Or something... I'm confused...

Well, "owned by the workers" is a slightly misleading description since it will be controlled by the state ...

Only in state socialism. Other arrangements are possible.

See some of these sites for more information:

http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/libsoc.html

http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/polemica.ht ml

http://www.impropaganda.net/old/zenarchy.html

The deficiency is about Europeans carping about American ignorance while they still manage to elect governments with strong Neo-Nazi elements.

No, the deficiency is about Americans carping about European ignorance while still electing governments with strong racist elements. [1], [2].

Perhaps, but we are still talking about a Europe intent on ignoring a European government bent on genocide a mere two years ago.

No, we're talking about an America that supported brutal dictatorships all over Latin America and still deprives its aboriginal population of their treaty rights.

Shouldn't Europeans be free to listen or watch whatever they please?

As one example, I read that when Jurassic Park was released, it was playing in one-quarter of all the movie theatres in Paris. How many French films are playing in your town?

Let me also suggest flag.blackened.net for a more thorough introduction to the philosophy.

Daniel

Let's not forget that setting a price on a good or a service, and thus setting its value is a necessary precondition for *any* economic system to work right.

There's no reason why a system based on labor can't have a market that sets prices! Socialism does not necessarily imply a command economy.

Not all socailism is state socialism. Read up on libertarian socialism.

Not at all!!! It is about loosing control to state and corporate entities. Once you start to loose options, you start to loose your ability to choose, which in turn means you begin to loose your freedom.

Um, you seem to be laboring under a mighty misapprehension about the word "pagan". (Or maybe you're a lame-ass troll, but for the sake of potentially being educational I'll assume not.) Might I suggest ESR's Neopagan FAQ?

You're also laboring under a mighty misapprehension about the word "socialist", for which I'd recommend some reading about libertarian socialism.

And if I were afraid of gun owners I'd be unable to look in the mirror without my knees quaking.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Really, I do.

The Undernet was a place that I was able to use like the proverbial Roman agora, shaping a lot of my political arguments and testing them against people who otherwise would not have dealt with me.

I was 15 years old and an over-bright geek girl when I discovered #debate on Undernet, which I had joined due to my recent accession to the Debate Team at highschool. I, a new anarchist, met some of the great folks who were making up the famous and oft-mirrored The Anarchist FAQ . Some of the issues I discussed -- and was forced to research at a level far higher than would have been required at school -- included prisons and imprisonment, the decentralization of utilities, and other supposedly "boring" questions of public policy that I learned, early on, were fascinating to me. Like other geeks I specialized early and Undernet was my venue to this specialization.

I argued with long time anarchist theorists as well as libertarians, Democrats, Republicans, and government employees and politicians with decades of experience in politics and policy. Nobody gave a shit- or knew, without a lot of work- that I was young, Jewish, Yankee, and female. It taught me that mentality was key and that I could do anything.

I then joined up in #politics, which is slanted much further to the right and is often very silly and vapid- but still often contains some of the best and most informed argument on the Net from time to time. People have discussed foreign policy, economics, ecology, cryopreservation, and lots of other issues in there.

I have gotten jobs and close friends through Undernet. I will be a lifelong inhabitant of #politics as long as it exists and isn't overwhelmed by script kiddies or other idiots.

My congratulations to IRC's staff for keeping it up so long and my hopes that Slashdotters can help them, loan them the brains, time and other resources necessary to fend off this idiotic attack.

No. True communism is the exact opposite. People having direct control over the decisions that affect them (cf the workers collectives in Spain in the mid 1930s), not managers (or shareholders, these days) running companies for their own profit, or kings fighting wars for their own personal glory.

The "Communist Party" system originally adopted in Russia and China was meant to a temporary system that the Leninists believed was a necessary evil, as they believed that the people were not ready to govern themselves, because the current system had kept the masses from being educated to a state where they could make informed decissions. Once the structures of a more anarchist (in the real sense - no central government, not chaos) system, such as universal education, workers collectives etc were in place, the party was meant to dissolve itself.

Unfortunately, with the party system that was assembled, it was very easy for a dictator (eg Stalin) to take power and hold on to it.

If you really want to find out about "real" socialism, do a search for people like Bakunin or Durutti. Quite a good starting place is Anarchism in action

Okay. Find out for yourself then. Do the research, and post here what you find.

Research? Is this the euphemism for what the US has done in places like Central America and the Caribbean, where they give women untested pills that result in their giving birth to deformed babies? Or when the expose political prisoners to strong doses of radiation?

A stupid man will believe everything someone tells him. Another stupid man will not believe anything anyone tells him. An intelligent man will find out the truth.

Precisely. Which involves knowing history, and knowing the nature of technology, and, more importantly, the nature of the technologies constructed by capitalism. This is the essential truth you have failed to grasp.

"I'm sure all the anarchists would be much happier if we went back to subsistence farming and raiding our neighbor using clubs when our own crop failed. That is what these anarchists stand for! No rules, no laws, no personal responsibility, no socital responsibility."

Err.. no. Absolute personal responsibility, actually. Absolute responsibility to your society and other individuals in it. And rules that are communally agreed upon. That is what anarchists stand for.

The Anarchist FAQ

HTH.

Oh, and Jose Bove is a french-nationalist media-clown. I know many french anarchists are fairly critical of both his methods and his self-promotion.

Love & anarchy

Ewiz

if I use my car in some way that does not maximize what you perceive to be social gain, then the government can come into my home, beat the crap out of me, and relieve me of my "illegal monopoly" on my car.

Information creation is a public work, like building roads, cleaning up pollution, etc. The government makes sure public works get done by either forcing people to do them or taxing citizens and paying people to do them. Copyright works a little differently; it grants special monopoly privilege to them. The monopoly is artificial, because it exists only at the force of a government and, like taxes, precludes peaceful use of one's own property.

Please see The Libertarian Case against Intellectual Property Rights and Ben Tucker on Copyright

...but nobody has/uses them. If IP had been built from the ground up with a system like freenet with public key crypto this could never happen (or, it wouldn't /work/). But with straight (HTTP|SMTP), anonymity is near-impossible. Even if the Russians use encryption -- and they won't -- their government will know with whom they're communicating and when... And in most cases, that's enough to find out *what*'s being communicated. Try to go to flag.blackened.net and they'll *know* what you're thinking. Sure, it is technologically possible to get around these systems -- with (non-existent) cooperation from sites outside of Russia -- but that doesn't mean squat, because it's not PRACTICALLY possible to get people to use those technological means.

Uh.

FreeBSD Handbook
Mailing list, Handbook and FAQ searches(Years and years worth of mailing list archives)
"FreeBSD for the lazy and Hopeless"
A comprehensive guide to FreeBSD(sort of dated but still applicable)
FreeBSD Tutorials

If you already have hte system installed -- there is probably a bunch of information in /usr/share/doc as well. Now, there isn't as much info on how to get going as linux -- but there is a lot of info for FreeBSD out there (I can't say the same thing for other *BSD's unfortunately). On a side note, 2.2.7 is as BSDish as you can get.
----------

From the article, you'd think that the only people who care about politics are "Tech Bosses" who have enough money to lobby politicians with. Perhaps its just that The Economist think its perfectly acceptable that politics is only who can buy which politicians and why... thats not democracy, its an indictment against the corruption in our political system.

The competing interests they talk about are the competing interests of corporations. How it could ever seriously talk about small nimble companies and the death of big business has got to be some kind of joke. Faster than the Federal government (with continually increasing powers and budget) can bust trusts and monopolies, are they not combining into larger and larger corporations.

About the only thing Big that they were right about getting small is Big Unions. This is largely their own damn fault, becaused they stopped being unions that fought on the job and became political machines, lobbying groups and pension/insurance plans. And, suprise, they never have the money to buy politicians like corporations can. Which is ultimately why efforts like Washtech are doomed as long as they try and compete with corporate money in electoral politics. Ofcourse, anti-democratic practices, corruption, organized crime, capital flight to the third world (GATT, NAFTA and the WTO), and being outmoded by new technology have heart Big Labor alot.

If unions are to ever work for geeks, they've got to be portable, decentralized, democratic, focus on direct action (instead of electoral lobbying), free (like in speech, not beer) and of a generally anti-authoritarian/libertarian culture. They've got to be willing to fight over issues like censorship (remember when the Web turned black against the CDC?), privacy, spam, standards, accessiblity, etc... I only know of couple humble attempts at that.

The complete cyberpunk fake book has a better hold on geek politics than the Economist. Fringe parties... if geeks are in parties are all... are like the Libertarians and the Greens. The number of out right anarchists growing in the industry is pretty astounding.

Most geeks don't identify themselves with any particularly ideology (and certainly not any party). They have a patchwork of issues they care about, if they vote registere independent or which ever party has dominance so they'll have a better choice during primaries. Political geeks would rather take action, or support their local communities, in the streets. If geeks want to get rid of propietary software, they out evolve it, they don't try and lobby it away; Anarchism Triumphant! If they think corporations have bought up to much radio spectrum, they help people take the airwaves back from FCC sellout. Or take out satellites.

But none of these things are politics, as far as The Economist is concerned. But then, civil disobedience is pretty hard to buy off.

When geeks start applying what they are already doing on other issues to work... then you'll really begin to see something. Syndicalism might get a rebirth for the new millenium yet.

Demand the Impossible!

Socialism is a form of government which runs most essential industries such as medicine, power, and telecommunucations; controls the people's access to these industries; and charges high taxes. Wealth is redistributed by a central government.

Communism is an _economic_ system where the workers own the means of production and the wealth created is shared by all. Any form of government can be involved in a communist economy but it is usually socialist' this is why many people get the two confused.

to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

Yep, that's what the Munich Censorship Summit is really about: scared corporations who understand that the decentralized nature of the Internet is a cheap distribution system which undermines the channels they have dominated for years. There is an interesting sidebar to this in Steve Kettman's Wired report today on the summit titled "Untangling the Web We Weave" http://www.wired.com/news/ news/politics/story/21719.html Pay careful attention to page 3, especially the four paragraphs which start with: "Established publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post would not rate themselves -- it was agreed they would likely consider the ratings demeaning. But a media white list would identify both papers." I live in Washington, DC and occasionally read the Post. It's a crappy paper, no better than just about any other daily paper in the U.S. It's standards for accuracy are no better than any other paper either. In fact, it can be demonstrated that the Post is simply the official organ of the U.S. State Department. The NY Times is little better, as critics like Noam Chomksy have demonstrated. We need to disabuse people of the notion that just because a website is the official voice of a corporation with lots of name recognition, that this means that the site is more accurate OR USEFUL than some DIY site made by Jane Public. For example, would you rather go to some Star Trek fan site, or the one run by Microsoft? The idea that the "papers of record" would be exampt from any ratings scheme shows what the true intentions of the proposals are: to control the Internet and turn it into a contnet delivery mechanism such as television or the distro networks controlled by newspapers (newstand sales, distro trucks, printing plants, etc.) I think they will fail in the long run, because they really don't understand that the Internet is beyond their control, but they will screw it up as much as they can. Lastly, I greatly prefer and rely on the technology news of Slashdot over anything the Washington Post or the NY Times can dish out. Slashdot is a glowing example of how DIY and alternative media can do a better job of providing information to interested readers, once the barriers of money are removed. Against Bertelsmann's gold-plated soapbox, Chuck0 Mid-Atlantic Infoshop http://www.infoshop.org Editor, Alternative Press Review http://flag.blackened.net/apr/

Anarchy is a political system with close ties to socialism. Read more at An Anarchist FAQ Webpage .

This is because all Anarchists post as AC when they are being political.

For more info, http://flag.blackened.net/intanark/faq/ .

http://flag.blackened.net/intanark/faq/secFcon.htm l

Happens to me everyweek... It is kind of reassuring to know that if you don't do it, eventually someone else will.. Atleast you know there isn't just a sea of morons out there... We are all inspired by relatively the same things - and will eventually create the same wonders... Now we just need Socialist Communism (Anarchism). (Just realized anarchism is already sort of the way it works on the internet especially with opensource - noone is oppressed and we get the common good goal accomplished through exchanges of contributions..wow, anarchism rox! Anarchism FAQ)

--
Marques Johansson
displague@linuxfan.com

This page: http://flag.blackened.net/intanar k/faq/index.html has more about this.

See http://flag.blackened.net/intanar k/faq/secJ6.html.

See http://flag.blackened.net/intanar k/faq/secJ6.html.