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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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
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.