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> complete disregard for her oath.

She didn't take an oath you stupid Republican liar. She isn't in the military, and she isn't the President yet. Maybe you took one, but that doesn't mean everyone else did. Why do you Republicans constantly project? You think just because your kind is stupid and violent that everyone else must be. Well, we aren't. We are not you. Not. No way. Not in any way. And, stop with that spew of lies about Hillary. It is very telling that she is so innocent that you have to lie to try to attack her.

As usual, Republicans have nothing on her so they make-up ridiculous fantasies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVxLzs4YQPY

This links to footage of Hillary Clinton taking the oath of office as the Secretary of State

https://www.gutenberg.org/
https://mises.org/library/books
https://www.marxists.org/archive/index.htm
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/index.html

Here you go kid. read some books learn something

Here is a book you need to read: Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. It is extensively footnoted so you can check out all the references if you desire. Lenin's benevolence was a myth created after his death. Hell, check out the Kronstadt Rebellion - people rebelled against the Communists in 1921. Lenin accused them of being imperialist stooges because they were starving and wanted to eat. He crushed them utterly, killing most and executing the rest.

I'm curious how this is consistent with http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Zuckerman_on_Atheism.pdf which makes a convincing case that religion in an area is correlated with more social primes, including more crime. Putting these together it looks like more religious countries generally have more crime and violence, but controlling for religiosity levels, belief in hell is correlated with a reduction in crime rates. But clearly more research needs to occur.

- 3 points, further reading, and a thought on the Internet as a tool for DD -

1. Direct democracy has only been objected to on two grounds worth discussing - the impracticality argument and 'the crowd is stupid' argument. The former is no longer valid and the latter it is only proven true in specific circumstances.

2. People are not necessarily dumb. Yes, people in North America are dumb en masse. However, there is no systemic pressure to educate because it's not easier to get elected (manipulate the masses) if voters are well-informed and educated. There may not be any mass conspiracy to keep people stupid but there's no incentive to educate them.

3. Crowd-sourcing is the BEST solution for certain types of political-arena questions. Any decisions requiring predictions surrounding complex systems, for example, are best tackled through crowd-sourcing. E.g., Prediction Markets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market)

Some reading/viewing:

O’Mahony, S. & F. Ferraro. (2007). The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community. Academy of Management Journal. Vol. 50, No. 5
(link to article about the above article: http://www.techforce.com.br/news/linux_blog/scientific_study_about_debian_governance_and_organization)

Tetlock, P. (2005). Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
(link to above: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7959.html)

Surowiecki, J. (2007). Power: 2012. Presented at the NewYorker Conference 2007: 2012: Stories from the Near Future , New York. Retrieved December 8, 2008,
(link to above from: http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/surowiecki)

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
(link to above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds)

Esser, J.K. & N.R. Ahlfinger. (2001). Testing the groupthink model: Effects of promotional leadership and conformity predisposition. Social Behaviour and Personality: An International Journal. Vol. 29: No. 1.
(link to slideshow discussing above: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~hfairchi/courses/Spring2011/p103/ErinKomplin.pdf)

Fleeger, W. E., & M. L. Becker. (2008). Creating and sustaining community capacity for ecosystem-based management: Is local government they key Journal of Environmental Management. Vol. 88: pp. 1396-1405.


Final thought
In group decision making and consensus building, indirect processes are often used to alleviate some of the exogenous influence that social dynamics can have on the decisions reached. Information communication technologies (ICTs) have potential to mitigate effects of power stratification within communities by acting as a mediator of inter-personal relations, buffering the effect of power influence between community members. However, they are often viewed as second-rate communication options, with face-to-face being the ‘gold standard’. While ICTs certainly have weaknesses, they are currently under-utilized as participatory mechanisms and their potential in mitigating power effects in collective action and decision making has, to date, gone unacknowledged and under-explored.

There is evidence that ICT's can alleviate
-- Power Stratification
-- ‘Groupthink’

Unalienable rights are self-evident. How many Louis Armstrongs existed before slavery ended? Remember that the reason for the economic collapse was (white?) Wall Street traders making $2 billion bets against the toxic assets they sold you while telling you "it's okay, we have a $6 million stake in it too!"

Contrast the Dayaks of Borneo, of whom Kropotkin writes in Chapter 3 of Mutual Aid :

"As regards morality, I am bound to assign to the Dayaks a high place in the scale of civilization.... Robberies and theft are entirely unknown among them. They also are very truthful.... If I did not always get the ' whole truth,' I always got, at least, nothing but the truth from them. I wish I could say the same of the Malays" (pp. 209 and 210).

      Bock's testimony is fully corroborated by that of Ida Pfeiffer. "I fully recognized," she wrote, "that I should be pleased longer to travel among them. I usually found them honest, good, and reserved... much more so than any other nation I know."

Consider also that money is kept artificially scarce by bankers who fear they can't get attention otherwise.

Freedom of press and of meeting, inviolability of home and all the rest, are only respected if the people do not make use of them against the privileged classes. But the day the people begin to take advantage of them to undermine those privileges, the so-called liberties will be cast overboard.

- Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel -

Wow, that all sounds pretty neat and mostly a lot of "hard fun".
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

And related:
"Mortgage Free!: Innovative Strategies for Debt Free Home Ownership"
http://books.google.com/books?id=U8olv7h0of4C
"How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle"
http://books.google.com/books?id=ImmgMBhdeHkC
"Life After the City: A Harrowsmith Guide to Rural Living"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Fmq19Hv1fqYC

We live in a somewhat passive solar home, and do a bit of organic gardening (but we can't bear to cut down the beautiful trees where we are to have a bigger spot to garden or more sunlight, although I agree with you about the economics of that -- plus, doing stuff outdoors also saves on entertainment expenses and, as you allude to, gym memberships. :-)

Karl Marx and his fans (like Simon Clarke in "The Global Accumulation of Capital and the
Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form")
http://www.riff-raff.se/en/furtherreading/clarke_global.php
predicted an extension of credit to keep capitalism going just before it collapsed (whatever one can say about his proposed cures, a lot of Marxian diagnosis of problems with capitalism was accurate).

Someone just recently sent me this summary about Simon Clarke's writings: "The stages he addresses and ultimately rejects as being too vaguely defined to be considered as true periods are: Mercantilism, Liberalism, Imperialism, Social Democracy, and Monetarism. He identifies (in 1992 or before) monetarism as either being a new phase or (as it turned out) a reassertion of free-market Liberalism that will cause overaccumulation, the solution to which will be imperialism and extension of credit, which will only delay a deeper recession or depression. That's nearly a 20-year-out economic prediction that turned out to be very accurate! (Granted, he didn't offer dates, but he predicted some of the most critical events.)"

I'm adapting the following from a reply on that.

Just one more datapoint on that predicted "extension of credit":
"Debts Rise, and Go Unpaid, as Bust Erodes Home Equity"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/12debt.html?src=me&ref=business
as "capitalism hits the fan" (a talk by a Marxist economist)
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/

So, agreeing with others, it is a good diagnosis by Marx and fans, up to a point, but poor prescription for current day events, as this essay says from 1971 by Murray Bookchin (someone more into decentralization):
"Listen, Marxist!" by Murray Bookchin
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/listenm.html

A fan of Charles Fourier suggested to me that everything good about Marx came from the earlier Fourier. And Fourier was more into self-reliant living (though at a village level).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier

Here is a document I put together forty years after Murray Bookchin wrote, and two hundred after Charles Fourier:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
The document suggests that there are four majo

I'm posting supporting stats before /. archives the story, to prove how culturally independent from company commitment the US is. I just wish I had stats for Japan, which is supposed to have a high loyalty rate and very personal tie between work life and personal life, where your kissing up to the boss after hour is expected. Anyway, age apparently drives people to be loyal; it's either a generational gap, or the likely fear of older people putting family mouths in danger by moving around or switching careers.

From the lion's mouth (US Bureau of labor statistics) is an interesting document on tenure for employees
Only 27% of US workers 16 or older were at their employer for more than 10 years. For people over 55, more than 50% have 10 year of tenure. "The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2008." You can imagine the curve joining these two endpoints, or just read the first couple pages of the report above, which is all I've done.

Decisions in this most influential country on earth are made without much expectation of being there to account for them. For anyone with a little time, poke around the historic values for 2006 and 2004.

PS: Some later searching shows that recent stats are paywalled by academic sites. There is the short pdf (tables around [scanned] page 726) with data from 1979, showing japan had a mean of 8 years (4 for the US) and 25% tenure for 10+ years, compared to 15% in the US. Google books shows that Japanese workers were the highest tenured in 1990, followed closely by Germany, France and Spain. The US was last in a list of around 10. I also found a forum comment citing that the Phillipines have the 2nd highest turnover rate in Asia-Pacific, which is bone-chilling seeing how we think Indian callcenters suck, and how Americans are switching away from India to cheap pinoy labor. I could not confirm if India has the highest rate or not, but it still gives me a chill.

As a bonus, since I'll refer to this in the future, here's a short general article on employee retention and company culture.

I'm confused. Why are we discussing depictions of education in Star Trek as though they actually indicate anything?

I used it as a single example and people replied. I guess I struck a nerve. The point is that imaginative fiction like Star Trek speculates wildly on all sorts of aspects of human civilization. Star Trek in particular isn't about what the future is going to be like, but about issues current since the 60's. They speculate on all sorts of transformative technology like universal translators, subspace communicators, transporters and on and on - and yet from the original series up through the recent movie they never considered any style of education aside from the academy. For instance, why not create a school on the holodeck? One answer might be that all the creative individuals associated with Star Trek over the years recognize that students benefit from actual human contact.

Regarding the rest of your comments, there are increasingly more alternative college options, e.g.: http://www.evergreen.edu/, http://www.pitzer.edu/ or http://hampshire.edu/ There's nothing wrong with appropriate use of technology, but one has reason to be skeptical of corporate motivations when discussing the future of educational institutions.

I read it in Russian, so I do not know about the quality of this translation.

It sounded very convincing. What it has to do with supercomputers? Try to read the text. The answer is there.

You know what would be funny? Giving all you liberalists a state of your own to put all that theory into practice and seeing where it would lead. Judging from the amount of comments on slashdot there's definitely a market for it. Your own sovereign state...wouldn't that be nice? Of course all the existing infrastructure would have to be stripped out first, since it was probably put there by some sort of government, but that would only create demand for new stuff, so that's all good.

Well, we've tried, but as soon as things start to look good, we get a healthy dose of OVERWHELMING MILITARY FORCE from abroad, often thanks to the U.S. government, which never saw a threat worse than the thought of a good example. Freedom (tm) is a USA brand, and anyone who looks to be manufacturing a better supply can expect a little napalm in their cornflakes tomorrow.

  As for how a free market could work in health care, I direct you to Roderick Long's Mutual Aid: Medical Care That Worked (Until Government Fixed It) a pdf pamphlet which describes the great health care crisis of the 20's, when health care was too cheap and too widely available, and government stepped in to make it more expensive and exclusive. Up until then, a working class joe could get complete medical care for a year, at the cost of about one day's pay. I sure am glad those days are over, thanks to government, aren't you?

Honestly, true liberalism/free market anarchism has about as much of a chance at success in the 21st century as pure communism did. At some point the sledge hammer of reality always crushes ideology.

Well, then, it's a good thing anarchism isn't based around ideology, then. It begins as a materialist philosophy, not an idealist one. It starts by looking at the real, the concrete, the measurable, and proceeds from there to accomplish the ends that idealists, working backwards from the perfect to the real, have failed again and again to achieve. (Failed for reasons set out by Bakunin in God and the State. An excellent audioboook is over here at ) This is why both sides of the cold war, and nations all across the modern world are so afraid of us, and sought to kill us wherever we appeared ascendant, whether Spain or Mexico or South Korea.
  It'll be interesting to see whether Greece's ruling class gets "help" from outside should the current anarchist uprising prove successful.

  - mantar

The Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910 included original research, Kropotkin on Anarchism.

Of course, that was nearly 100 years ago.

The point is though, other encyclopaedias can check the credentials of their authors ("original researchers"), and decided whether or not to include them.

Wikipedia has no real verifiable method of know who is who. Even if I say that I am "apathy maybe", the only real and honest "apathy maybe", Wikipedia can't know that if I only say that on Wikipedia.

If I say here, "my Wikipedia account is 'apathy maybe'", and then I say on Wikipedia, "my Slashdot account is 'apathy maybe'", then that provides some level of verification. Except, who verifies all these links?

Wikipedia isn't like any other encyclopaedia.

It's really interesting that The Anarchist Cookbook is neither anarchist nor a good "cookbook" (as the parent post noted).
The book contains nothing about anarchist political beliefs or history. There is no mention of Lao Tzu, Kropotkin, Bakunin (yes, that's the name they used for the guy with the Russian accent on Lost, but I'm talking about the original), Proudhon, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin, the Anarcho-Syndicalists of the Spanish Revolution (specifically, the anarcho-syndicalist organization and administration of Catalonia), or Food Not Bombs. There is no mention of the centuries of anarchist thought and political philosophy. There is no mention of the Haymarket Affair, which was used to give anarchists the image of bomb-throwers, nor of the fact that of the eight Haymarket anarchists (labor leaders), four were executed and one killed himself in his jail cell before Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned the three survivors when he investigated and found that there had never been any proof of the guilt of the "Haymarket Anarchists," and that the jury had been stacked to guarantee a conviction even in the absence of evidence. Altgeld's Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab is worth reading. Follow the link and you can read it free.
Also, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook apparently knows nothing about the subjects covered. He (or they, if it's not really one author) apparently just copied stuff from a bunch of different sources. If you read the explosive section, you'll see a given explosive mentioned on one page as being relatively stable and safe, and on another page the same explosive will be described as being very unstable. It appears that a lot of the information was just copied from other sources without any analysis of what was being copied. Further, it appears that the chunks of text copied are sometimes incomplete. It may be that The Anarchist Cookbook is somebody's idea of a practical joke, making gullible kids do things ranging from goofy (like trying to smoke banana peels to get high) to deadly (like blowing off limbs or burning their skin and eyes with chemicals when trying to follow the explosive and drug recipes). It has been suggested that the book may have been put in the market by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO program. To me that seems a bit tinfoil hatty, but some of the things the FBI actually did in that program really were bizarre, and a person describing them without showing proof (and yes, the proof of some really scary stuff in COINTELPRO does exist) might sound like a tinfoil hat type.

So The Anarchist Cookbook may be nothing more than a sick joke, but even if the book actually contained any useful information, the idea of banning books about how to make arms is not new. Governments want that for the same reasons they want to ban firearms: to keep the people easier to control. The overblown "threat of terrorism," when you consider how few people are killed by terrorism each year, is just the tool governments an

If you don't know what anarchism is, please at least google for it before making a fool of yourself.

You may want to look at this: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html

And maybe even this: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/

anarchists fail to see society as "one big family."

On the contrary, only a small portion of those who identify themselves as anarchists would have us all acting out applied Ethical Egoism. You may be thinking of the Anarcho-capitalists and such. The more traditional anarchists understand for the most part that without societal cohesion, any attempt at a classless, rulerless world would be utterly pointless and be usurped almost immediately. Bakunin and the Collectivist anarchists are a good example of this, as are Anarcho-communists, Anarcho-syndicalists, et cetera.

I apologize for the pedantry, by the way. As for the gist of your post, I would tend to agree.

It was wrong even at the time of our grand(-grand-)parents. The role of the state in left/socialist theory (and praxis) has been disputed since the beginning. (e.g. Bakunin vs. Marx in the 1870s)

There are a lot different flavours of socialism. In the US you had Murray Bookchin a libetarian socialist. Then you have different anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist flavours all around the earth and they were and are strictly anti-state/anti-government and leftist.

And to your Empire I would like to add at least John Holloway's works.

That leftist are pro-state pigheads stuck in early 20th century ideology is just FUD.

This is demonstrably false. First of all, Scandinavian countries are overwhelmingly Lutheran. When you are born in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, or Norway, you are by default part of the Lutheran church. Even though they don't attend church regularly, the vast majority identify themselves as Christians and voluntarily choose to pay the optional church tax.

I argue that religion is fundamentally about morals. If you read the Jewish Bible, it's a code of law: what is right and what is wrong.

Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death. (Exd 35:2)

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. [Leviticus 25:44]

Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open. [Hosea 13]

This discussion sounds a lot like the divisiion between Marx's authoritarian communism and Bakunin's libertarian socialism

Funny, it would make alot more sense if you had said "Marx's authoritarian socialism and Bakunin's libertarian communism." I mean, if we're going to make a disctinction between "socialism" and "communism" in the somewhat more classical senses of the terms, then "authoritarian communism" is an oxymoron.

But anyway, you're right. I was thinking the same thing. However, in Marxist theory authority exists to exert the dominance of one class (or more) over another (or more). There are no classes in a free software project, only differences in opinion, skill and expertise. The need for authority in a project like Debian, then, has no simple explanation in Marxist terms and your analogy starts to fall apart. But the old debate would still prove very enlightening to anyone interested in this subject.

Check these places:
Marx and Engels on Anarchism
Marxism, Freedom and the State by Mikhail Bakunin

Yes.
Here's one Syrian who has managed to not have his head chopped off, despite being in the tiny minority of Syrians who say they do not believe in God.

Here are some numbers on atheism in the Middle East:

According to a 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC, 15% of those in Israel do not believe in God. According to Yuchtman-Ya'ar (2003), 54% of Israelis identify themselves as "secular." According to Dashefsky et al (2003), 41% of Israelis identify themselves as "not religious." According to Kedem (1995), 31% of Israelis do not believe in God, with an additional 6% choosing "don't know," for a total of 37% being atheist or agnostic.
A 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC found that less than 3% of those in Lebanon do not believe in God.
  According to Moaddel and Azadarmaki (2003), less than 5% of those in Jordan and Egypt do not believe in God. According to Inglehart et al (2004), less than 1% of those in Jordan and Egypt do not believe in God.
According to Barret et al (2001) less than 1% of those in Syria, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen are secular. According to Johnstone (1993), less than 2% of Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and Kuwait is nonreligious. According to Johnstone (1993), less than 1% of those in Iraq are nonreligious.

So, my point here is that while atheism is less popular in the Middle East, it does exist, even in places like Syria.

Last time I was in Syria, which was Easter of 1995, I did not feel threatened at all because of my lack of religion. People there were a lot like the masses anywhere I've been--- they have homes, they work, they raise kids, they complain about the economy, they gossip. Granted, Syria was probably the creepiest place I had (and have) ever visited, with Assad peering down at me from every corner, and the secret police generally being a nuisance. But that's not anything to do with religion--- that's just a good old fashioned dictatorship.

But what struck me the most about Syria was when the news broke about the Oklahoma City bombing. The initial suspects were of course said to be Islamic militants. At first I panicked, thinking I was somehow behind enemy lines or something. But wherever I would go, groups of men would approach me apologizing for the Muslims who bombed Oklahoma, asking me to see beyond the acts of a few madmen and to consider all the good people of Islam.

I left the country the next day, so I never got to see their faces when they found out the real news.

To identify my political ideology, I use the term Libertarian Socialist.

Bakunin, Goldman, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and Chomsky...
Anarchy Archives

No, not every country is as religious as you guys in North America seem to be. I live in a progressive northern European country and on the whole we really don't believe in that stuff.

I found this article on the subject:
"According to the 2004 Report, the five highest ranked nations in terms of total human development were Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. All five of these countries are characterized by notably high degrees of organic atheism. Furthermore, of the top 25 nations ranked on the "Human Development Index," all but one country (Ireland) are top-ranking non-belief nations, containing some of the highest percentages of organic atheism on earth. Conversely, of those countries ranked at the bottom of the "Human Development Index" -- the bottom 50 -- all are countries lacking any statistically significant percentages of atheism."

1. Your example may work for bananas, but what about electricity or medicine? I buy out the supply and then sell it back to you at double the cost. Uh oh...

2. I don't know what universe you live in, but my universe is finite - finite resources, finite capital, finite time, finite knowledge - this certainly limits the forms and types of investment. Your 70/30 figures are totally unsubstantiated. Futhermore if being in the bottom 30% doesn't concern you, then I will happily take any extra monies that you have that cause you to exceed the bottom 30% of income -- of the entire world population, by the way, not just for the U.S.

3. You naively assume that the consumer has time and resources to correctly find and procure the items that most benefits them. Unfortunatley, that is not the case. Nor can everybody make the initial investments to enter a particular market - telecommunications or electricity for example. This world of unlimited competition, easy entrance into the market and omniscient consumers exists only in your head.

In the end,

"Anarcho-capitalists are against the State simply because they are capitalists first and foremost. Their critique of the State ultimately rests on a liberal interpretation of liberty as the inviolable rights to and of private property. They are not concerned with the social consequences of capitalism for the weak, powerless and ignorant. Their claim that all would benefit from a free exchange in the market is by no means certain; any unfettered market system would most likely sponsor a reversion to an unequal society with defence associations perpetuating exploitation and privilege. If anything, anarcho-capitalism is merely a free-for-all in which only the rich and cunning would benefit. It is tailor-made for 'rugged individualists' who do not care about the damage to others or to the environment which they leave in their wake. The forces of the market cannot provide genuine conditions for freedom any more than the powers of the State. The victims of both are equally enslaved, alienated and oppressed."

source: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/dward/newrightanarchoca p.html

I don't see how they think they have the authority to let the president authorize a first strike. The power to declare war belongs to the Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 limits the power of the President of the United States to wage war without the approval of the Congress.

As usual, the United States says one thing and does another. The history of the US is littered with dozens of undeclared wars and 'military interventions', in a continuous stream all the way back to 1798. George Washington is the only president of the US whose hands are clean, at least in this regard.

I recommend reading A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn. It reveals that the US has been a corporate/militarist state. It is only a widespread campaign of propaganda that makes people think otherwise.

Well in a Libertarian society you actually have property rights. So having an industrial age job isn't necessary to feed and cloth your family. As long as you can have a little plot of land, some rain and some sunshine. Obviously we don't want to go to an agricultural society with a barter system, but it does give you leverage. Nobody should feel like they have to take a job or starve.

But with property tax, business licenses, sales tax, etc the way they are. It's basically impossible for an impoverished person to set up a tent and start a business selling home grown eggplants and cucumbers using the few dollars in capital they got from panhandling.

If you obviously are unable to work, then you can fall on the safety net of one of the many providers of aid (churchs, benefit groups, individuals, etc).

I'm not so sure Libertarianism can be easily reguarded as "crap", when it wasn't the reason for the collapse of the socioeconomic system in chile during the industrial revolution.

If you're wondering what the parent is refering to. Try this article on Anarchism in Chile. Or possibly he was refering to the book After Worlds Collide. Which is either socialist tripe or a fair warning of libertarianism and capitialism.

According to P.J. Proudhon, "Property is Theft" Viewed that way, I'd have to say that IP is indeed property.

It is not in the best interest of the sheperd to raise smarter sheep.

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.

At it's core, Anarchy has a faith in mankind. The general reasoning is that any form of government can become corrupt because the people it is comprised of can become corrupt. The only revolution that will really change things is a social one, one that deals with people. If that can be achieved, then the question of what system of government to use comes down to one of efficiency, which is anarchy. Anarchy is more efficient because it is willing and unrestricted co-operation.

Anarchy is a faith in people's ability to work together without coercian. It is most definitely not disorganisation - just lack of control.

It's rather cruel to post a geocities site on /. but for the lucky first hundred or so, you can find some interesting information on Anarchy here. And more is here

Perhaps you should read a little from the Anarchist FAQ. Such as: Is Capitalism Hierarchical? How Does Capitalism Affect Liberty?, and Is Captalism Empowering and Based on Human Action? You may find many of the cited works at the Anarchist Archives

Agreed, which is why we should abolish both private property and the government. Read up on some Proudhon, Bakunin, or Kropotkin. All available at the Anarchy Archives

Exactly! apple makes the whole widget: the hardware, the software, the basic peripherals - the whole shebang. the widget is designed to work as a widget and is, thus, less susceptible to incompatibility failures.

dumbing them down a bit

well, i would submit that that is what we call "better design". saying the mac is "dumbed down" implies that it is less capable than comparable wintel systems. not true. my mac shipped with awk and sed and gcc and vim. i submit that that's not "dumbed down".

damn anarchist

Beat me to it. Coincidentally, I've been reading utopian novels for a month or so, including More's "Utopia" and Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward". Both of these have, in my opinion, appalling authoritarian overtones, from the vantage of the early 21st century. Especially the latter, with talk of "mustering" people into the "industrial army". Yikes! But More's society required travel permits for leaving your neighborhood, and depended on slavery. Not so easy building a utopia.

But I digress. "The Dispossessed" gets mentioned in the same breath as these. I'd already read it three or four times growing up and since. I think the key feature which the above summary misses is that from which the title is taken: citizens of Annares do not acquire or keep personal possessions. The other world is more or less like ours, politically and economically. This was in LeGuin's heavy dualist period, shortly after "Left Hand of Darkness". It owes much to LeGuin's admiration for Paul Goodman.

For what its worth, every time I reread it, I find the language more beautiful and the human conflicts (whichever critic claimed it lacks them needs to read it again--or perhaps for the first time) more rivetting.

I would have thought Morpheus users were stealing intellectual 'property' from record companies, who had already stolen it from the musicians.

Just remember, 'Property is theft' (Proudhon).

No, you get it right.

China and other so-called communist countries (the Eastern Bloc, Marxist Africa, Vietnam, etc) are not true communism, as envisioned by Marx. They are state-capitalist countries economically, and facist politically. For a quick primer on what communism is supposed to look like, I suggest the works of Emma Goldman, although she would term it Anarchism. Basically China is going about its communism much the same way as its gone about liberating the suffering people of Tibet. And I hope you see the sarcasm in that statement.

PS: I don't believe in Communism personally, but I felt the need to correct your, ahem, facts.

When it comes to running computers safely and productively, protecting the interests of the users (us), who should we trust, Microsoft or ourselves?

Communism is where you must share what you have produced, with a gun to your head. If you refuse, you are thrown into jail or killed.

It's amazing how ignorant Americans are about politics. The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics never claimed to be a Communist state; it claimed to be a state which aspired to, and sought to work towards, Communism. The particular flavour of Communism which it sought to work towards was Marxist, but Marx didn't invent Communism as an idea; it had wide currency in his period (see e.g the Paris Commune, and comtemporary papers by Anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin).

In Marx's time Communism was already over a thousand years old, and had been a feature of many of the heretical groups of the middle ages, and of extreme factions during the English Civil War

So, in summary, 'Communism' does not mean the Soviet system; 'Communism' does not mean Marxism-Leninism; and 'Communism' does not mean having a gun held to your head.

Is Open Source a communist idea? Yes, I'm perfectly sure it is. But it is most certainly not a Soviet idea or a Marxist idea.

What you have just described is not Anarchy, it is Nihilism. Classical Anarchy, as a political philosophy, began when Michael Bakunin, an early colaborator with Karl Marx, split with Marx on the issue of implementing a communist society. Bakunin coined the term "Red Bureaucracy" to describe the Marxist proposal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and predicted that such an institution would outdo the evils of any tyrant (he seems to have been correct). Anarchism holds that the only way to achieve the ideals of Marx is to eliminate all power structures between people. This would include government and corporations as some of the first structures to be dismantled. In order to survive, however, an anarchist society would require a high degree of (voluntary) cooperation between citizens -- nothing like the social darwinism proposed by Nihilism, but very close to the ideals of Free Software/Open Source.

bosnia-herzegovina is definitely not anarchy, and iirc somalia is in a state of warlordism. warlordism is *not* anarchy. read some of the writings of Mikhail Bakunin before you try to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia are anarchist.

It is clear to me that a core of professional protesters go to universities and recruit vulnerable students into this bizarre counter-society movement. They take people who are concered about the enviroment, conspiracy theorists, vegans, gay and lesbian groups and people who are angry at society and turn them into violent zealots. They are trained to use the media to shape the way the general public see their 'protests' and how to inflame the police

actually, i think there's a school in claremont, ca called pitzer (i happen to go to an engineering school in the same complex) that supplies these morons ... last year their big success was protesting the food supplier for not paying the cafeteria staff enough (although the cafeteria staff was more than happy with their 7.25/hour) which led to the college's decision to hire a new company -> end result: all the retards (literally, they hired retards to wash dishes) and minorities (it's california, voluntary affirmitive action) are now jobless, pointing out the effectiveness of this new batch of overactive protesters.

Jungle Law Governs Interrelations of States.

Every State, whether it is of a federative or a non-federative character, must seek, under the penalty of utter ruin, to become the most powerful of States. It has to devour others in order not to be devoured in turn, to conquer in order not to be conquered, to enslave in order not to be enslaved - for two similar and at the same time alien powers, cannot co-exist without destroying each other.

The Universal Solidarity of Humanity Disrupted by the State.

The state then is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete negation of humanity. It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon earth, and it unites some of them only in order to destroy, conquer, and enslave all the rest. It takes under its protection only its own citizens, and it recognizes human right, humanity, and civilization only within the confines of its own boundaries. And since it does not recognize any right outside of its own confines, it quite logically arrogated to itself the right to treat with the most ferocious inhumanity all the foreign populations whom it can pillage, exterminate, or subordinate to its will. If it displays generosity or humanity toward them, it does it in no case out of any sense of duty: and that is because it has no duty but to itself, and toward those of its members who formed it by an act of free agreement, who continue constituting it on the same free bases, or, as it happens in the long run, have become its subjects.

Since international law does not exist, and since it never can exist in a serious and real manner without undermining the very foundations of the principle of absolute State sovereignty, the State cannot have any duties toward foreign populations. If then it treats humanely a conquered people, if it does not go to the full length in pillaging and exterminating it, and does not reduce it to the last degree of slavery, it does so perhaps because of considerations of political expediency and prudence, or even because of pure magnanimity, but never because of duty - for it has an absolute right to dispose of them in any way it deems fit.

Patriotism Runs Counter to Ordinary Human Morality.

This flagrant negation of humanity, which constitutes the very essence of the State, is from the point of view of the latter the supreme duty and the greatest virtue: it is called patriotism and it constitutes the transcendent morality of the State. We call it the transcendent morality because ordinarily it transcends the level of human morality and justice, whether private or common, and thereby it often sets itself in shared contradiction to them. Thus, for instance, to offend, oppress, rob, plunder, assassinate, or enslave one's fellow man is, to the ordinary morality of man, to commit a serious crime.

In public life, on the contrary, from the point of view of patriotism, when it is done for the greater glory of the State in order to conserve or to enlarge its power, all that becomes a duty and a virtue. And this duty, this virtue, are obligatory upon every patriotic citizen. Everyone is expected to discharge those duties not only in respect to strangers but in respect to his fellow citizens, members and subjects of the same State, whenever the welfare of the State demands it from him.

The Supreme Law of the State.

The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. And since all States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle - a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin, a struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak - and since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against the neighborhood States - it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice.

Unless it's a corporation saying "work for 50 an hour, work for somebody else for the same wage... or starve". Non-coercion? In the absence of labor laws (and other such regulations), the corporations become The Law, and coercion remains part of the equation.

Of course in the absence of the laws that allow corporations to absolve actual human beings of responsibility, (limited liability being the sole reason for the existence of corporate charters) corporations would not exist either!

Since there are no businesses in a socialist world, everyone is forced deal directly with the government for their needs, a violation of that principle.

Actually...there are businesses in a socialist world. Just not corporations.

I have found this thread rather interesting, as I got into Linux mostly because I found a lot of resonances between the way the Free Software/Open Source movement actually worked, and the theoretical works of Kropotkin like Mutual Aid