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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?
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.
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.
Anarchist = left-wing Libertarian
LIbertarian = right-wing Anrachist
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
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
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?
Anarchist is a label for people who refuse to be constrained by society's limits. And one of those limits is not to kill.
Wrong, Anarchism in it's truest form is closer to socialism than chaos. Anarchism and lawlessness aren't the same. Anarchists don't want to abolish government so that they can go push old ladies down the stairs, that's a rebllious teenager's point of view. Anarchists just want everybody to be equal no person above or below any other in terms of power or pull. An anarchistic society would still have rules, but they would be decided by the community, there would be no police because the people of the community are responsible for it, every man, woman, and child. Please don't comment on things you know nothing about.
Libertarianism is anarchism for rich people.
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.
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.
Anarchists like order just as much as anyone. We only recognize that order enforced by violence is no order at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
While classical anarchists were considered close to socialism, that was in a time when everyone who didn't want monarchy was called leftwing. In fact, they were kicked out of the First International fairly quickly. In practice, anarchists are basically very radical liberals. True, that is a rebellious teenager's ideology, but most anarchists are teenage punks so I don't see a contradiction.
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.)
In other words you view of Anarchism is the same for everyone? You use that as a Label to explain your vision of a Utopia...
There is a fruit tree, I climb the tree and get the last piece of fruit. I now have a piece of fruit and you don't have a piece. I am hungry so I plan to eat the fruit. You are hungry too. We are no longer equal.
I currently have more power over you.
Now the choice you have?
1. Ask for the fruit from me. You are now in a position where you conceded power or pull and asking for mercy from me.
2. Steal the fruit from me. To accomplish this you will need to assert more power then I have to take the fruit... I may fight back and assert additional power too. So we end up fighting.
3. Bargain for the fruit. Now you will need to convince me that you have something that I will value more then the fruit. This may be something else of scarcity, that gives you additional power. Or you choose to be subservient for some period of time (hence relinquishment of your power to me)
4. Go Hungry.
For me I have more power. I have something you want.
1. I can choose to share.
2. I can give it to you.
3. I can fight you
4. I can choose to accept or reject your bargains.
5. I can just leave you to go hungry.
Say I choose options where I still maintain the power of having the fruit. I have eaten it and it has gave me more energy. This extra energy may be used to help me find more fruit, and give myself the means to have more power over other people.
Now we have a community to determine what we should do?
If they say I must share. (A Tax) Then we need to take into account that I was the one who did the work and got the Apple.
If they say I must give it away. Then I have expended energy in a fruitless endeavor (Pun indented) and the community has pulled power away from me.
If they say that you must steal it from me, and I have to fight to keep it. We are both using extra energy and we both loose.
If they say I must accept particular bargains, if these are not fair then I will go underground (Black market) or hoard fruit.
If they say I can do whatever I want. Then I have more power then you.
Now if I decide to break the community rules. People who are physically stronger then me, or in some other ways who have collective more power then me will need to find a way to stop me. Being that these people over time will be good at stopping people who break the rules, they will be compensated for doing such actions as it causes them from doing other things they may need to do.
But right now we live in a world of rules. People who feel these existing rule, and the people who follow them, are unfair, will try to exert more power to get what they want. Anarchist who live in a world that is different then from their ideals, is under a lot of stress and would like to change it. Murder is often effective.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You're both wrong. Anarchist is a label to try to instil fear and give some false sense of an organized group of people with the same motives. It's just people pissed off for one reason or another that don't really have any sort of common ideology other than a rejection of "something".
The article is stupid in trying to group all "self labelled anarchists" together into one group, as if they have conventions, vote on what "the anarchists should do next", or are organized. All these people have in common is a label, and possibly an attitude. That's pretty damn flimsy connections to be worth considering. The news media wants to sell eyeballs, an "anarchists" always make good press because you can basically make up the story as you go along since the whole this is illusory to begin with.
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!"
Anarchist is a label for people who refuse to be constrained by society's limits. And one of those limits is not to kill.
Wrong, Anarchism in it's truest form is closer to socialism than chaos. Anarchism and lawlessness aren't the same. Anarchists don't want to abolish government so that they can go push old ladies down the stairs, that's a rebllious teenager's point of view. Anarchists just want everybody to be equal no person above or below any other in terms of power or pull. An anarchistic society would still have rules, but they would be decided by the community, there would be no police because the people of the community are responsible for it, every man, woman, and child. Please don't comment on things you know nothing about.
Correct. People seem to be confusing anarchy with nihilism; they are not the same.
mises.org is an anarchist website. Find me someone stupid there.
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..."
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
Please don't comment on things you know nothing about.
Yeah, because that would lead to anarchy!
I'll be here all week.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
no...a community is deciding that they're communal rules are more important than yours
Sounds like government to me!
"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.
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
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
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What happens with your society when those who "fall to the bottom" become violent?
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
The fundamental nature of anarchy is that it is a heavily localized and the society that emerges will only reflect the values of those who form it.
That's trivially true, and in fact is a null statement - every form of society reflects the values of those who build it.
So we're already anarchists, everywhere in the world! And you can't say we aren't, because who are you to tell us what to think? You can't even tell us not to follow centrally-planned state orders, because we've obviously chosen to do that, and your opinion has no moral right over our choice.
This is why anarchism needs more thought. It claims ideological purity, but in its pure form it means absolutely nothing.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC