Slashdot Mirror
Trying to Untangle Anarchist Attacks On Scientists
bricko writes with an analysis at New Scientist of recent violence by self-described anarchists against scientists or scientific establishments, including the non-fatal shooting in Genoa in May of the head of a nuclear energy company. That attack "was the latest in a series of alleged anarchist attacks on scientists and engineers, including the attempted bombing of nanotechnology labs in Switzerland and Mexico. This wave of politically motivated violence has raised the question: why do anarchists hate science? Beyond the unsubtle threat of brute force, there are deeper issues that merit attention." The "hate science" line is just a line; the author is under no illusion that there is a single conspiracy, or that all who claim the "anarchist" mantle have identical (or even similar) views of science. "Despite the recent attacks and propaganda, anarchists actually have a complex relationship with science and technology. Some leading figures from anarchist history were scientists, notably Russian biologist Peter Kropotkin. Many hacktivists are anarchists who embrace technology; fiction authors sometimes look toward a future 'technotopia' based on anarchist ideals."
anarchists != Anonymous.
Where in TFA does it mention anonymous?
"Anarchist" is just a catch all label for a whole range of people. Lets not forget all the Christians, Jews, and Muslims that don't agree with some kind of tech/science and protest/legislate against it.
Perhaps the thing they hate isn't science, but corporatism. That would seem more in character than some general "hate science" rationale.The Genoa shooting was of the head of an energy company, not a scientist. Even nonprofit research labs are often funded and influenced by powerful corporations. Corporate control of science gives corporations a great deal more power, both directly and indirectly, than many other areas of interest.
TFA talks about establishing: "anarchist science" to make science conform more to what the anarchists can identify with.
This sounds like having the scientific community embrace "creation science" in order to conform more to what the creationists can identify with.
Could be that 'anarchist' is just one label that stupid, uneducated, violent people who are nonetheless bright enough to want to label themselves as being something better than 'garden variety scumbag'?
I've lived in some rough inner city areas in my time, and if I had a dollar for every "bohemian", "artist", or "anarchist", I'd be a rich man.
I've never met an "anarchist" who hasn't been a drug-fucked high school dropout.
Anarchy is the least stable form of government. As soon as one person says "Hey, let's...(x,y.z)" and some others say "OK", it's broken; there is now a leader and followers.
Because they're Luddites, not anarchists. They call themselves anarchists because it sounds cooler and they probably don't know what a Luddite is.
Anonymous are anarchists, thats kinda the whole point. However, you are correct that not all anarchists are "Anonymous."
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
In "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, a detective infiltrates an anarchist meeting and finds out that he is a more persuasive anarchist than the anarchist leaders, and gets elected leader. He goes on to find out that most of the other anarchist leaders are also undercover cops, trying to infiltrate the organization.
So... since fiction is always true, I contend that anarchy is probably just a bunch of people who are trying to infiltrate anarchy.
"God does not play Minecraft with the world." - Albert Einstein
This subject was covered most exhaustively earlier in the year by nature: http://www.nature.com/news/anarchists-attack-science-1.10729. I think that both articles miss a point. Although these attacks may seemed linked, or claimed to be linked, I doubt it. This violence may be carried out by as few as two people - a motorcyclist and a gunman, yet both articles paint this as a huge sideswipe by an organised Anarchist (paradox alert) movement. For all we know these attacks may be carried out by a handful disgruntled ex-employees claiming an antiscientist rhetoric to intimidate their former employer, or, in a fit of self-delusion, jump on the anarchist bandwagon to give some sort of paper-thin reasoning for their violence tendencies. "The Olga Cell", "sorcerer of the atom" "LONG LIVE THE CONSPIRACY OF CELLS OF FIRE"? Surely anyone who has a few Anarchist cliches and stereotypes to call upon could write this stuff?
If I had to guess why anarchists hate science, I'd say it is likely because science is increasingly being used by governments and corporations against the people. Ultimately, government and corporations are what anarchists really hate and who's got all that expensive and massively patented science on their side anymore? Certainly not regular folks.
anarchists != Anonymous.
Where in TFA does it mention anonymous?
They're not even real anarchists, anarchists want to deconstruct government, not science. These are actually bat-sh!t loonies.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
These illiterate fools just don't know what anarchist means.
Anarchists thrive on chaos. Therefore, they don't like science. Apart from chemistry of explosives, of course, but this is an example of science that is designed to bring forth chaos anyway.
Ezekiel 23:20
He got it. He just missed the other ingredient: capital. Welcome to the era of techno-economical enslavement. Another thing: the man who got shot in Italy is a manager for a company (Ansaldo) tied to Finmeccanica (weapons). He's not a scientist despite his technical background. Again: people who shot the guy claimed themselves anarchists. Is it true? Or there's a message between the lines, considering the importance of the soon-to-be privatized companies?
I find it most amusing that the Anarchists have an organization... In point of fact it is tough to really wrap my brain around Anarchists becoming united against anything.
And yet he uses it, adding the myth that all anarchists hate science to the myth that all anarchists advocate violence.
"Why are are journalists jerks?" Don't be offended: I am under no illusion that all journalists are jerks. It's just a line.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
for governments killing off scientist who are solving real world problems, so governments can continue fabricating their own dictatorships technology is undermining.
Or that's one facet of application of the abstract word/term anarchist. For others see MSM
These people don't know what Anarchy really means, and they're just using it as cover for their own ends.
If they would just describe themselves as Republican, they'd be a lot more accurate.
Think of all the grief we hackers have taken over the past 30 years because of self-described "hackers"
I always thought scientists *are* anarchists. I mean, science is set up with small groups or individuals coming together to do stuff and then breaking up and doing other interesting things. Occasionally they come together to do big cool stuff (LHC), occasionally they lurk around doing wacky research into nonsense (philosophy (joke)), occasionally they do wacky research into nonsense that turns out to be useful (lasers)...
Anarchist is a worthless term except to attract attention on fliers. Ancap, ancom, ansoc, syndacilists, mutalists, illegalists, they all have claims to be anarchists. Historically ansocs and ancaps have the best claim to the term with ansocs foaming at the mouth and calling ancaps heretics whenever they call themselves anarchists without adjectives. It's all rather hilarious. Though, I will weigh in and say that ancaps seem to be the less zany and ancoms are completely disconnected from reality.
Came for the nanotechnologists,
And I did not speak out because I was not a nanotechnologist.
Then the anarchists came for the computer scientists,
And I did not speak out because I was not a computer scientist.
Then the anarchists came for the machinists,
And I did not speak out because I was not a machinist.
Then the anarchists came for the blacksmiths,
And I did not speak out because I was not a blacksmith.
Then the anarchists came for the farmers,
And I did not speak out because I was not a farmer.
Then the anarchists came for the people who whittled pointy sticks,
And I did not speak out because I did not whittle pointy sticks.
Then the anarchists came for the people who used rocks,
And I did not speak out because I did not use rocks.
Then they came for me,
Which was okay because my cold dark cave was getting kind of boring anyway.
Some good info here (especially the Green anarchism and Anarcho-naturism sections):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_schools_of_thought
was the late 1800s. this was a period of workers demanding rights, as the gilded age saw the plutocrats consume all of the productivity of society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anarchism#The_First_International_and_Collectivist_Anarchism
so now we see another uptick in anarchism, in a new gilded age, as worker's rights sink lower and lower and the predatory make off with vast sums of money
it's a pendulum in history, swinging back and forth
the next step, if we see historical parallels, is the rise of communism again
of course, social darwinistic capitalism, and communism, are both absurd brutal ideologies, on either end of a spectrum. the intelligent ideology is the middle road: socialism with capitalist engines attached, or capitalism with social safety net. but the communist see any sort of capitalism as a vile evil, and the free market fundamentalists see any sort of common sense social policies: healthcare, education, etc., as a vile evil, and so the middle road does not prevail, depending upon the politics of the day. either one or the other extreme leads to suffering, and the pendulum experiences pressure to swing back the other way
so, if the historical parallels play out, anarchism is really just the initial indicator of a change in direction of the pendulum, a sort of groping for some sense, what is the point of civilization? the point according to the predatory corporatists: enrichment of a moneyed class, is obviously not a valid meaning of existence. anarchists don't have the right answer, but they do have the right sense to know what is happening now as plutocrats gobble up everything is not right, the plutocrats enabled by this ridiculous quasireligious faith of free market fundamentalist fools who are blinded to the simple fact that markets without rules leads to dominance by a monopoly/ oligopoly, and society and the common man suffers
the ideal would be a society that locks in some simple rules: social darwinistic capitalism, and communism, are two extremes that both destroy society. therefore, economic and social policies must always hew to a middle road. but we will never get this common sense, as long as the fools who fervently believe in the extremes of capitalism (on the upswing now, in the past dormant) or communism (dormant now, on the upswing in the past, and perhaps the future) are allowed to exert influence. until the fools on either end of the pendulum are clamped down on with governmental rules about the kinds of economic and social policies that can be passed, we will constantly suffer this historical pendulum swing back and forth, back and forth, creating nothing but pain for us all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Parent troll is not entirely wrong. There is a stream of anarchist philosophy about the benefits of living without a government. That philosophy is completely ignored by the vast majority of people who call themselves "anarchists".
Anarchists in fact, as opposed to theory, are violent braindead hooligans who are only interested in destroying whatever mainstream society finds beneficial, either as a protest against the very notion of trade or just to show how tough they are. "Anarchy" has become a tribal identity of war against the people for no specific cause, with the claimed cause fluidly changing to whatever is trendy at the moment. "Anarchists" happily wave Communist flags, endorse Islamic fascist movements like the Palestinians and the Iranian government, promote foreign state-controlled media as "alternative", and shout totalitarian slogans without any sense of cognitive dissonance. "Anarchists" protest the social influence of megacorporations by smashing the windows of locally owned coffee shops and Chinese restaurants. "Anarchists" oppose it when the police lawfully and peacefully arrest people who commit crimes, because their "FUCK DA POLICE" attitude requires them to oppose anything the police do whether it is good or bad. "Anarchists" oppose the notion of copyright but get angry if anybody republishes information from Wikileaks or takes GPLed code closed-source. "Anarchists" support the "occupation" and destruction of Berkeley's research into sustainable, organic, non-GMO farming, and if you ask why the hell did they do that, they'll say they destroyed the organic farm to promote sustainable, organic, non-GMO farming.
Ever seen an anarchist protest? Ever read an anarchist website? It is all agitprop rhetoric and questionable or easily disprovable facts. They're idiots.
Who says they're anarchists? The dude in Genoa could easily have been shot by his wifes secret boyfriend. The only way to get ALL the money is if he's killed... but they needed to make it look like some crazy people killed him... oh, I know... anarchists!
Why not, it would make as much sense (except it doesn't serve a current political agenda).
If you want to read what actual anarchists think, try here.
Personally, I think it's a stupid term, but there are some who cling to it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
All hot chicks are crazy, but not all crazy chicks are hot.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Bakunin pretty much lays it out for you:
(NB: I'm not endorsing Bakunin, just relating what one of the first anarchists had to say about it. Keep in mind that he was reacting to communism, a political system that claims to use scientific principles as the basis of government.)
Here, let me fix that for you. Why do *some* anarchists hate *some* science. The original question was in a similar vein to : why do slashdotters hate sausages?
They're idiots.
Of course they are. (Actually, anyone who uses the word "hacktivist" with a straight face pretty much is as well, but I digress...) But ever since Alan Moore made mass murder romantic with a comic book and iconic Halloween mask, geeks have had a soft spot for confused and cowardly killers who hide in crowds. So this discussion -- Anarchists Hate Science! -- promises to be an entertaining one.
It'll be kind of like a discussion on "Religious Fundamentalists Found to Be Early Open Source Adopters!"
If 'Anarchist' attacks against scientists are on the rise, wouldn't this be further validation of Raymond Kurzweil's predictions? I seem to recall a newspaper article recently citing a lack of anti-technology violence as one piece of evidence questioning Kurzweil's accuracy.
mises.org is an anarchist website. Find me someone stupid there.
Anonymous is attacking those speaking out against them! We must stop this MENACE! lol
The funniest thing in the world is that people think they know what's going on, while accepting intermediaries for versions of events, that have a vested stake in the narrative. When this is explained to them in any way, the situation is dismissed as "conspiracy theory" or "wingnuttery".
Have you ever considered these "Science Hating Anarchists" to be targeted assassinations by corporate/state actors who choose to smear an "anti-state" movement - which almost doesn't actually exist? :-)
Operation Gladio
Operation Paperclip
Operation Mockingbird
Those are just a few of the "limited hangouts", admissions that hide greater sins. Get yourself at least a little true skepticism!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yes, the total disconnect from reality comes from the failure of the ancoms to recognize a person's right to own property. It grates on common sense to such an extent that no sane person can realistically believe in and subscribe to it. They are basically just thieves trying to justify their thievery.
"Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful,[1][2] or alternatively as opposing authority and hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Proponents of anarchism, known as "anarchists", advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical[3][9][10] voluntary associations."
That is the definition of anarchism (see wiki). The one youn gave is the idealized one teenies have. The sad reality is that without hirarchy and governement we are indeed all equal in "rights" : we have all NONE. Which means that it then fall down on the law of the strongest, the one with the msot resource which can build an association and beat the shit out of anybody making an obstacle to him/her : indeed since there is no law no right nobody can oppose or punish without suffisent strength. that is the truth of anarchism not the ideal description you gave.
Back on topic : I met a lot of green which attacked scientist, but rather than "damage" the reputation of their group describe themselves as anarchist. Although there are those which do not even bother to do that like the Terrorist group ALF.
The ancom line against property is hardly even really radical, historically. They have basically the same view that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had: that personal possessions are natural property in a sense, but beyond that, e.g. when we're talking about owning hundreds of acres of land as an absentee landlord, "property" is a social construct that can only exist through the power of the state, and should be judged by its effects.
Here's Benjamin Franklin, one of the more prominent early American scientists, with the view that you allege "grates on common sense to such an extent that no sane person can realistically believe in and subscribe to it":
It's interesting that this was already evident to people who thought carefully about the matter in the late 18th century, before Proudhon and the more in-depth anarchist critique of property even came on the scene.
The main differences between Franklin and anarchists are on policy grounds, not philosophical grounds. Franklin was basically a moderate liberal, who thought that, although property is a state-created fiction, it's a useful fiction to a certain extent, so long as we ensure that it's instituted for the benefit of the general public. Whereas, anarchists think it's a harmful fiction.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There *might be* more than one scientist in the bunch.
Yes, there are violent people who call themselves anarchists. There are anarchists who oppose a caricature of science (in my experience, they're much-confused about the history of science, especially the Enlightenment). Ask yourself these questions: How much violence has been done by self-proclaimed Christians and capitalists? How many Christians and capitalists have tried to attack or twist science?
Although "anarchist" has become a byword for "bombthrower", it derives from anti-labor propaganda in the 19th Century and (apparently) continues up until today.
And let's not forget that anarchism may be much closer to the heart of the free software/free culture movement than many would like to admit.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Damnit! I just spent my last mod point on modding something funny. Sorry buddy, no "insightful" for you this time. (not sarcastic, in case you were wondering)
Nearly all apes are perfectly capable of conspiring against each other. Even the ones taht don't walk upright.
Rethinking email
There are anarchist who seek ways to make the society work without being more or less a tyranny of a more or less permeable oligarchy.
Then there are useful idiots who went some frustration and give the authorities a tool to discredit their opponents.
About Religious Fundamentalists as Open Source Adopters in many cases you'll see that the same blindness that makes them fundamentalist means that they prefer to use pirated copies of proprietary software. Free Software activist even when somewhat blind are far to vocal about irking things like freedom of expression, tolerance, etc... and not only are proprietary software vendor completely uninterested in any ethical issue, but pirating their software enables the fundies to feel righteous since they are "hitting the enemy for the cause...." (till they happen to be forced to pay...)
The full name of the Nazi party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
So if you imply that because a group claims to be an Anarchist cell attacks one specific person who is NOT a scientist should taint all people who present themselves as anarchist of with anarchist sympathies you can just as well hang the shoah on:
- All nationalist (called patriots in the US)
- All socialist (from "new labour" to "North Korea")
- All German (even the one born 50 years after the period and whose parents where opponents of the regime)
- All Workers (much better not to work anyway....)
First item of interest: the victim most probably did have a scientific training and maybe did research at some point in his career, but currently he is the CEO of a component provider in the nuclear industry, nor doing nuclear physics research.
So if somebody shoots a gun shop owner should the headline be "irate client hate physicians/mathematicians specialized in ballistics" ?
So what is really remarkable is the lack of depth of the article.
i think I'll go to night to pee on an official building, and will send tomorrow a letter saying "europe sucks, signed patriot", and hopefully the NewScientist will publish an "in depth" study asking "why does All US hates All Europe and want to dissolve it in urine"...
Foo are Idiots, My proof? they would not be Foos if they weren't mentally challenged...
- hum ambiguous
Creative Geniuses are Idiots, My proof ? they would not be creative geniuses if they weren't mentally challenged...
- yeah that makes sense, must be a real scientific proof!
A few friends of mine who are philosophically-grounded, kind of hyperliterate anarchists have adopted alternative names for their positions because of those associations. 'Anti-statist' is a good one. A moderate friend of mine with strong anarchist sympathies calls himself a 'minarchist'.
I actually have seen a handful of anarchist protests. Here in Arizona, they're pretty recognizable because they march together in all black clothing, a loose sort of uniform. Sometimes anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists are included, but I don't think I've personally ever seen them with a communist flag. 'Round here they serve an especially nice function as (often armed) counter-protesters during Neo-Nazi rallies, to whom the police are sometimes, astonishingly sympathetic (although most of the time it's pretty clear that they're just trying to keep the peace and prevent the white supremacists from being injured by angry crowds).
Like they say, stop paying your taxes and see how much time it takes you to figure out that _your_ property has actually been the state's property all along, just loaned to you.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Exactly. I'm not sure why the new Slashdot heads are on an "anarchists hate science" kick. A similar story was posted a month ago.
The scare headline in the blurb is "violence by self-described anarchists against scientists or scientific establishments". Then we read the story and see this happened not to a scientist, but to a business executive. "Scientific establishment" conjures up people in white lab coats studying the Higgs boson, the person shot was head of a military contractor. He was head of a company that made weapons that kill people. None of this is mentioned.
I mean, this is straight propaganda. The guy is a business executive for Finmeccanica, which makes guns, tanks, nuclear stuff, and that sort of thing. He lives by the sword, and got a bullet in his leg - maybe a bullet made by his company. What does Slashdot say - "violence by self-described anarchists against scientists or scientific establishments".
If people are so concerned about violence against nuclear establishments, the US and Israel unleashed Stuxnet against Iran's nuclear program. A program the U.S. has endorsed in the past. Nuclear scientists in Iran have not been shot in the leg but actually killed by foreign intelligence services, probably Israel. We see multiple outraged headlines on Slashdot when some nuclear executive for an Italian military contractor is shot in the leg, why don't we see outraged headlines about the Iranian nuclear scientists who are being assassinated?
>endorse Islamic fascist movements
Everytime you, whose name is Legion, are using an ideological slur against Islamic political movement by comparing it to an almost universally negatively perceived movement I immediately notice positive things about that movement.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"Up to date" economists have brought us to the bring of the oblivion that those "baseless hogwash" policies lifted us from so long ago.
Modern economists are the very incarnation of the term "baffle them with bullshit". It's all lies hidden in complex math that literally no-one understands. You can prove this empirically by asking a set of so called modern economists to predict the future of the economy given the current state of affairs. They will come up with dozens of proposals, and all of them will be wrong. Ask any number of Austrian economists to do the same and you will get a much more unified answer, and it will be right most of the time. Once the event they predicted has occured, you will be able to trace it back to the reasons they used to make the initial claim. This is why Ron Paul was able to talk about the housing bubble in 2002, and why all those "Peter Schiff was right" videos are so popular.
I take it you have never had a group of ancoms come onto your property and steal food from your storehouse, then.
Ancoms aren't so limited as you think in their disrespect for property rights.
If Ben Franklin really said that, then fuck him. That does not fit with the America that was created, and indeed is a recipe total destruction of a state. Property is absolutely NOT a state created fiction. Try going into someone's home at night and see the natural result. Try stealing someone's land in a stateless society and see the natural result. Property is REAL. Land can be owned by mixing it with one's labor and improving it, and once it is owned it can be sold. Though it can be abandoned, this is not the same as continued ownership by an absentee landlord. He might be a logger, who comes by once every twenty years to clear his land and sell the wood. If he found that someone else had cleared the land and was grazing cattle on it, he would be justifiably upset, and violence would be the result in the absence of an arbitration authority (which both sides can agree to in a state of anarchy).
Your post doesn't really seem to be responding to Franklin's views. He supports possessions, which he (elsewhere) defines as basically what you can actually, in fact, possess around you: your house, its contents, your work tools, your personal effects, etc. What he considers state-created is property that rises to such sizes that it can only be maintained via a central state registry. For example, if your uncle dies and you inherit 10,000 acres in Texas, and you've never visited that land, there is no real sense in which you possess that land. If you indeed "own" that land, it's solely by virtue of a state property register that has that land marked out as being owned by some faraway person who has never seen it. In a stateless society, if you "stole" land from someone who had never in his life been within 1,000 miles of the land, nothing would happen, because the person isn't there, or anywhere close!
It's in this sense that ownership is a matter of social consensus: you own that parcel in Texas because society has agreed that we should recognize you as doing so, via a set of rules (property registers, title, etc.) that are intended to produce smooth functioning of society, improvement of the economy, etc. Franklin is just pointing out that we should ensure the rules actually do have that effect: they aren't god-given rules, but man-made ones, and should be changed to different ones if they turn out to be suboptimal.
Thomas Jefferson had similar views, incidentally, that property above a certain size, especially absentee property, could not preexist society. There is some evidence that these views among the Founders are why the Declaration of Independence says "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", and not "life, liberty, and property", which was the more common formulation at the time. Jefferson and Franklin did think that the state maintaining a system of property ownership was a good idea, but on consequentialist grounds; they didn't think it was a natural right or could preexist the state.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t8NZhl-ogoY
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The real question is: Why do people who hate science call themselves anarchists? True anarchist philosophy is about the individuals right to do what they want without hurting others,and the groups obligation to support the individual, see anarcho/libertarian socialism. What is really happening here is the "earth first" and PETA type morons shouting anarchist to get attention. As someone who considers himself an anarcho-socialist, I find these guys infuriatingly dumb.
FFS. A bunch of premitivists with a Zerzan induced concept of 'lets all magically move to stonage with 7B people' claim to be anarchist becouse the've no idea what it actually stands for (self organised *working class*). Just drop the anarchist part...
Can you say something less superficial, with even the slightest amount of substance? Specifically, what is your issue with it? You don't have to tell us all of your problems with it, just name maybe the top 3-5.
Alan Moore did nothing of the sort. The V from the comics is shown to have very personal motivations for his killings.
The Wachowski brothers, on the other hand, achieved that by writing a completely twisted version as a screenplay, which loses all the context of the character and of country's situation.
The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history. (...)
[The movie] has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives â" which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England.
-- Alan Moore
Dilbert RSS feed
Like the war on drugs and like the war terrorism there is an unseen war and its against control networks. The people in the know that dont understand what the problem is are who this post is directed. "Anarchrists" in western canada sounds more like the Miyazaki, Yakuza. This entire thread was meant to bait me into posting this. Control networks promote homan research, eugenics and aid in a secret euthanasia industry that the pentagon keeps secure under wraps. Outside of canada these acts are simply imitations to show the support of the yakuza by the establishment. This is not a political and intellectual point and these things are real. Why would i deliver this message? I invented something so importland that no one in the government can sanction me. I was psychic from the original cerebral team (codename bobbi fischer). Dorthy Fischer greets to f00
Mises was not an anarchist hence it is very unlikely that mises.org is an anarchist web site.
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. Steven Keen has some very interesting and troubling things to say about modern economic theory. No wonder we are in such a mess, and I bet they don't adopt his sensible strategy until it is way too late.
Bitter and proud of it.
Rather than idiots, I would say they never had the privilege of a proper education (Not schooling, but education in the Mark Twain way). The same applies to religious fanatics, specially creationists. A proper education focuses on reasoning instead of just memorizing a list of facts that lack relevance in the real world. If we want people to stop behaving in a violent way, teach them the consequences of both being violent and being civilized. I know is a long term solution, but educational systems (Feels like an oxymoron) have been decaying for decades, in the process producing automats rather than individuals.
Awwww! Isn't it cute how you're projecting :D
Also See Noam Chomsky, or Gustav Landauer.
Riddle me this, you smug clowns.
Thomas Jefferson had similar views, incidentally, that property above a certain size, especially absentee property, could not preexist society.
Given that many libertarians are extremely fond of Jefferson, I find this very interesting. Can you give any specific references to his works, or works of others where he is thus quoted? I personally subscribe to the same views regarding property as you've described - that personal property is natural, but private property is a societal construct but I thought that those have originated from the anarcho-socialist camp (even if I don't share their conclusion that private property ought to be abolished). Now that you point out that there were others preceding them that have explored that angle, and whose conclusions are far more in line with mine, I want to explore that further.
Clearly you're not a scientist, otherwise you'd know how stupid you sound.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
lol, so now you are going to start going on about how much you love the founding fathers? Give me a break.
I would examine this phenomenon within its historical context. Remember that they were dealing with people who had been given land by a King they no longer recognized. From that point of view, there is no conflict with the concept of the homestead and subsequent transfer of property.
If someone stole my uncle's land that belonged to me, you can bet there would be repercussions. You are just making an assumption, and a convenient one that allows you to enrich yourself at the cost of someone else. You know, like an anarcho-communist.
I don't care a single bit about the whole "Founding Fathers" fetish. I'm not an American, anyway; why would I idolize long-dead politicians of a foreign country?
However, Jefferson in particular wrote a lot of interesting stuff, even if some of it I definitely disagree with. If he also wrote some stuff that I would find myself agreeing with, that makes it even more interesting.
In "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, a detective infiltrates an anarchist meeting and finds out that he is a more persuasive anarchist than the anarchist leaders, and gets elected leader.
At the risk of Godwin's Law, I will remark that Hitler did a similar thing. He joined the early form of the Nazi party as a spy for the German Army. This was just after WWI and it was a revolutionary underground movement at the time. He was persuaded to its cause and ended up as its leader. The rest is history.
Anarchist is a worthless term except to attract attention on fliers. Ancap, ancom, ansoc, syndacilists, mutalists, illegalists, they all have claims to be anarchists. Historically ansocs and ancaps have the best claim to the term with ansocs foaming at the mouth and calling ancaps heretics whenever they call themselves anarchists without adjectives. It's all rather hilarious. Though, I will weigh in and say that ancaps seem to be the less zany and ancoms are completely disconnected from reality.
There are members in the Tea Party who don't like science and who don't believe in evolution.
Are they not right wing anarchists? They hate the government too!
Why can't we just call them that?
The scientists are just doing a job just like everyone else. They don't run Monsanto. They aren't the shareholders.
I think it is a little more complex than this. When things are going on that we do not like, there are many ways to deal with the conflict. In the US, for instance, we have a process to deal with problems using non-violent means. We can get laws passed, we can appeal to the courts, we can have people arrested who break the laws. Of course no everyone believes in this process, and the only mean of change for them is violence, terrorism, intimidation. For instance, many religious folks do not seem to have a lot of faith in the process of democracy, so the resort to violence, shooting doctors, intimidating people who disagree with them, calling such people names and ridiculing beliefs that do not agree with their own. They live in fear of those of think differently.
So this is where I think we are with the anarchists. Obviously these are people who do not base their actions on the process of law and order. If an anarchist does not like the implications of nanotechnology, and I agree some of those implications are frightening, they cannot just go and work within a framework of government diplomacy. They, presumably, cannot even take confort of some blowhard at the pulpit or on a rooftop condemning everyone who does not follow a dictatorial path. So what is the option? Violence, killing, intimidation. As was said, it is not science per se. But it is not corporations either. It is simply egotistical people who cannot imagine that they are so unimportant that everyone would not automatically agree with all of their beliefs.
Be realistic, that process takes a very long time and doesn't work if the elites in your hometown or your nation don't support what you want to do.
To put it simply, the political process is broken. That still doesn't mean it's smart to go killing scientists but honestly this is probably happening because Israel or some other country with an intelligence agency was targeting Iranian scientists. So I'm not shocked that scientists around the world are being targeted now. US allied countries started killing scientists who were doing things the US government didn't like and I wouldn't be surprised if these anarchists aren't controlled by a foreign government.
Consider the fact that the US or Israel or US allies targeted Iranian scientists. Now scientists around the world are being targeted.
Who opened pandora's box?
Anarchy is the least stable form of government. As soon as one person says "Hey, let's...(x,y.z)" and some others say "OK", it's broken; there is now a leader and followers.
So let's chip everyone and make them all into drones. The crime rate would drop to 0%. Everyone would be made to agree with the government or their heart plugs would be pulled.
And anyone who is a libertarian of any sort hates most of all the slave mentality. Nothing causes more suffering than the slave mentality. It's completely counter-intuitive to want to be a slave and it's also completely irrational.
Imagine how much better your life could be when you're in control of it vs not being in control.
Scientists typically are the kind of people who would be targeted in a war scenario with Iran. Why aren't we considering that angle?
I must admit, I'm kind of amused about getting modded "troll" for this.
Some anarchists have apparently discovered the concept of "blasphemy". Ah well. Religions beat you there by several thousand years. :)
mises.org is an anarchist website.
Anarchism is anti-capitalist. Somehow I doubt the folks over at mises.org are anti-capitalist.
Damn you, Kropotkin!
Stick Men
In a stateless society, if you "stole" land from someone who had never in his life been within 1,000 miles of the land, nothing would happen, because the person isn't there, or anywhere close!
Not necessarily true. Yes, you have to have some kind of indirect, multi-personal mechanism for asserting and projecting force to maintain "ownership" of land, but that mechanism doesn't have to be anything resembling a modern political "state". It could just as easily be a multinational corporation like GlaxoSmithKline or Monsanto. It could be a private security coporation like Group 4, Xe or the Pinkertons. It could be an organised crime syndicate or gang like the Mafia, Zetas or Crips/Bloods. It could be a religious/business hybrid like Scientology. It could be a decentralised insurgency like Al Qaeda. It could be a non-state, non-profit, non-religious NGO like Wikileaks. It could be a complex mixture of all of the above, interacting in hard to predict ways.
Arguably we already live in such a world and have for many hundreds of years, at least since the rise of the Dutch and British East India Companies in the 1600s with their combination of state, religion, and private capitalist militias. But if you read history, even the ancient empires used hired mercenaries and were federations of many actors which evolved through complex power shifts over time- there never has been a single unified "state", ever.
The problem I see is that if you don't realise that a "state" is just one of many possible and overlapping forms of human group power-maintainance behaviour, then you might misdirect your energies at toppling Da Gummint while allowing something worse to grow in its place. This is what I think anarchists are most misguided about. It's fine to oppose the human tendency to centralise power. But learn to recognise power abuse in all of its forms, large and small, because small systems of abuse grow into large ones if they achieve dominance.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
There might be repercussions if you're a lawless ruffian, who attempts to use force to defend "his" land as some kind of god-given right of inheritance, sure. I don't see why society needs to accede to your thuggery, though, as natural law does not sanction it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's precisely what anarchists do think, though! That's one of the main things that distinguishes anarchists from libertarians: libertarians are only worried about state power, while anarchists are worried about both state and corporate power. In general, anarchist theory opposes hierarchical power relations, of which the state is just one variety, and capitalist power relations are another.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Thank you!