The license analogy can be put the other way around as well. The right-wing "libertarians" want to reserve property rights. Libertarian socialists want to abolish them as well along with everything else that creates hierarchy, property being the primary source of hierarchy. So GPL is a right-wing license in that it relies in property rights to be enforced, while a BSD license gives everyone all the rights. Now, for a minority not to profit of the work of others in a society that uses BSD licensing, you need people who will not support such behaviour, people who really want to be free and won't tolerate others exploiting them -- you need anarchists, anarchism being a movement that has always been strictly anti-capitalist (and anti-property and anti-state).
As for Chomsky, he's a libertarian socialist or "anarchist", and it is these libertarian socialists that used the term "libertarian" long before the right-wingers adopted it in the US. (Same with anarchism and "anarcho"-capitalism -- what an oxymoron.)
> 2) Experience shows that anything the state touches, it corrupts.
No. Power corrupts. Every system based on hierarchical authoritory is automatically corrupt and oppressive against the general public. That includes especially corporations, where there is not even the faint trace of democracy.
What the right-wing "libertarians" indeed want is just private states for the wealthy.
A true libertarian society is <a href="http://anarchistfaq.org">anarchist</a> i.e. libertarian socialist.
Re:intellectual property is artificial
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
A farmer is entitled to possess such amount of land that he can farm himself. If wage slaves would be needed to farm all the land, he clearly no longer uses the land himself and thus may not claim it as his. Multiple farmers with _equal voice_ could of course form a cooperative/syndicate farming a bigger plot of land.
Re:intellectual property is artificial
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
Property, as in something you "own" but do not use yourself, is also artificial and theft. It is something that must be enforced by the state (public or private) to exist at all, and is a means of oppression. (Capitalists own but do not use the lands and factories and so the others must sell themselves to them for livelyhood.) Only "personal possessions" -- the items and tools you use a lot of the time, the house you live in, the land you cultivate -- are in any way natural.
At least my phone comes with software (albeit winblows-only) to convert normal midi tunes to the limited format the phone wants. Then you can transfer them to the phone with whatever expensive cables they sell or by IR, or by putting the tune on a wap-enabled apache server.
Re:KDE and Knome infect X ?
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I must second you here. I fear that, say, ten years from now there will
be no easy way to switch to window managers like
Ion,
ratpoison, larswm, the newer clones
of these, and whatever new innovations might happen during that times.
WIMP policies will have been so deeply integrated into the basic
windowing system. X (which is just a graphical input/output protocol!)
and the ICCCM are excellent in that they don't dictate policy too much
and thus allow for this kind of experiments and research without the
system having to be rewritten from the ground up. Research into new
interaction techniques must not be forgotten and WIMP considered the
final evolutionary step of GUIs. (Infact, it was just the first step!)
LyX is too limited. TexMacs looks more promising (although I hate the anti-aliasing). However, I do know LaTeX and love the markup in general... it's just that there are all these hundreds of special cases with different packages doing their own interpretation etc., and so you can't parse it without knowing the semantics of it. This causes problems with conversion to other formats. There should be no special cases of underscore usage (just let it always stand for subscript), \verb etc. could be gotten rid off and special character should jusut be escaped (with \\ standing for \ and so on). The same applies to the <pre> tag in HTML. Such special cases are ugly. E.g. latex2html can't handle the listings package as it has not been implemented for it and it has macros similar to verb and environments similar to the verbatim environment.
And while latex sucks in many respects, it is still the best thing out there for making serious documents. Sigh. We need a non-turing complete alternative with as simple, but more consistent syntax so that it is more easily converted to HTML etc. without having to implement for every single package in the converter as well. But the world is concentrated on making absolutely unusable WYSIWYG crap instead of a decent human-readable structural markup language for serious documents. XML based formats are too verbose to be written or read by humans, and a any beats any bloated well-of-course-one-size-fits-all word processor in editing capabilities.
Perhaps it should be emphasized that anarchism is opposed to _hierarchical_ authority, but you're seizing upon definitions of words. In direct democracy no single person has authority (power) any more than anyone else. (It should also perhaps be noted that anarchists are not opposed to authority of the sort specialists have in their fields if that does not give them ruling power.)
Anarchist theory isn't opposed to communes (or groups of them) forming protection syndicates as long as such they are directly responsible to the democratic control of the commune (instead of some authority who couldn't care less of the people, as is the case with the current system).
Really shitty jobs could be compensated by having to do very little anything else. Would you clean a roadkill if that's all you had to do for a year?
And as for name change, there is already another name close to what you proposed for the most common variant of anarchism: libertarian socialism.
* Some people may indeed try to grab as much as they can, but the rest of the society will not allow it. If they do, then apparently they did not want anarchy after all. You can't force it down people's throats, they (most of them) must want it.
* If somebody plays stereo loud, and the rest of the commune I live in condones it, then so be it, and I'll find one that suits me (assuming I did not like that particular behaviour). If, on the other hand, the rest of the commune also does not like that, the commune will persuade the noise maker to stop such anti-social behaviour. It is as simple as that.
* As for big groups of people fighting each other, most people do not want to get into a fight. They will try to find a peaceful solution. And if you happen to live with a group of maniacs that will not talk, they're dangerous to your health in any society despite any law enforcement agencies that only appear after the harm is done.
* People will do "shitty" jobs if they don't have to spend the whole of their lifes in them. And there's so much unemployment and people doing totally pointless work in the modern world, that there are many hands to do the work. That means more free time. I for one would welcome e.g. some farm or other physical work, say a week a month, as opposed to being forced to do some totally uninteresting, boring and irrelevant office work 8 hours every weekday for the rest of my life.
* People will also like all kinds of work more when they manage themselves instead of being told by an higher authority what exactly to do.
Real anarchism, the most common variant of which is also known as libertarian socialism, has nothing to do with these vandals that the media so much likes to call "anarchists" -- it is in their interests to do so.
And other people will organise and also grab whatever armament they can get their hands on an nuke you out for anti-social behaviour, if that's what you want. No state does not mean no rules, just the absence of written "dead" (as opposed to evolving custom) law and a violence machinery to enforce them. Social pressure can be a very powerful weapon, and even the free software community has proved that some times when some corporations have tried to steal our works. Also the state doesn't protect us of little wealth as we can't afford to go to court.
There is no such things as what you describe as "free market" if there's property. When there's property, those with the largest amount of it will always call the shots, and the rest will be oppressed and exploited. It is very difficult to enter a market dominated by a megacorporation. Are there any laws that protect the status of Microsoft? Then why isn't there any significant commercial competitors?
Communism must come from the will of the people, not of a ruling elite. Otherwise it will just be a "state capitalism", and that is the case with the so called "communist states" of today. It's all just one giant evil of an megacorporation. Both the so called "communist states" and corporations are: hierarchical, authoritarian, oppressive and exploitative. There is no democracy in either, and the elite that "owns" the "property" calls the shots.
All that needs to be done is to abolish property and the state (which is the ruling elite's machine to protect their property), and the rest will take care of itself. When there is no state to protect "property" (i.e. production machinery and such, not personal possessions), there will be no authoritarian hierarchical society (as capitalism is), to the top of which to attempt to climb to. When the majority of the people reject the concept of property, there is no way to exploit and oppress others.
And once the majority of the people are not coerced to wage slavery or unemployment (as under capitalism) and have most of their time off to do what they want to do in addition to what little is needed to produce the basic essentials of life, everyone will be much better off. And to make people work, no oppression machinery like the state is needed, just social pressure.
This is called anarchism; see http://anarchistfaq.org
You're wrong in your argument that "communiwho would rather ssm" (in its purest form, anarchism or "libertarian socialism") would never work. People will do what needs to be done when they're arsed enough, and social pressure can be very persuasive to make those who would rather slack off to work to produce the basic necessities of life. And since there even currently is lots of unemployment (a tool of the capitalists to make workers accept bad working conditions and pay; "any work is better than unemployment"), and as much of the so-called "work" in capitalism is totally unnecessary for the society to function, it is clear that in an anarchist society, if everyone was expected to (but not forced as there would be no such thing as a state to coerce people) work, people would have much more free time at their hands compared to the current wage slavery. I would rather work do, say, a week a month of even physical work to produce the basic necessities of life and have the rest of the time off and all off the society's products ad my disposal than spend the whole of my life in wage slavery (or unemployed in poverty) coding and doing other totally mindless things that are of absolutely no value to me. Wouldn't you?
There are examples of anarchism working very well even in modern times, albeit those examples were during revolts and in the end were suppressed. And of course the fact that many aboriginal societies were essentially anarchist can not be ignored.
For more information, see e.g. http://anarchistfaq.org/ or apt-get install anarchism.
There hasn't been a single communist nation on earth. The so called "communist states" would be better described as "state capitalisms". True communism can not coexist with the state. Even Marx agreed that the abolition of the state was necessary, but unlike the anarchists, the communists thought that a state was a necessary intermediate step in the communist world revolution. But the state is the by definition the authoritarian violence machinery of the ruling elite, and thus anti-libertarian and anti-socialist.
As for free software, it is indeed a fine example of libertarian socialism i.e. anarchism at work.
Some months ago I tried setting up swish and swish++ to index my HD. The results weren't that good. The problem with searching the HD is that there isn't link structure between the files on the HD as in the web to rate the documents well. It is like using the worse search engines there were before google.
Since the files are accessed locally, maybe some other ratings based on usage statistics and such could be devised, but of the top of my head I can't think of anything that would work all that well. More research needed.
Slashdot Mirror
The license analogy can be put the other way around as well. The right-wing "libertarians" want to reserve property rights. Libertarian socialists want to abolish them as well along with everything else that creates hierarchy, property being the primary source of hierarchy.
So GPL is a right-wing license in that it relies in property rights to be enforced, while a BSD license gives everyone all the rights. Now, for a minority not to profit of the work of others in a society that uses BSD licensing, you need people who will not support such behaviour, people who really want to be free and won't tolerate others exploiting them -- you need anarchists, anarchism being a movement that has always been strictly anti-capitalist (and anti-property and anti-state).
As for Chomsky, he's a libertarian socialist or "anarchist", and it is these libertarian socialists that used the term "libertarian" long before the right-wingers adopted it in the US. (Same with anarchism and "anarcho"-capitalism -- what an oxymoron.)
> 2) Experience shows that anything the state touches, it corrupts.
No. Power corrupts. Every system based on hierarchical authoritory is automatically corrupt and oppressive against the general public. That includes especially corporations, where there is not even the faint trace of democracy.
What the right-wing "libertarians" indeed want is just private states for the wealthy.
A true libertarian society is <a href="http://anarchistfaq.org">anarchist</a> i.e. libertarian socialist.
A farmer is entitled to possess such amount of land that he can farm himself. If wage slaves would be needed to farm all the land, he clearly no longer uses the land himself and thus may not claim it as his. Multiple farmers with _equal voice_ could of course form a cooperative/syndicate farming a bigger plot of land.
Property, as in something you "own" but do not use yourself, is also artificial and theft. It is something that must be enforced by the state (public or private) to exist at all, and is a means of oppression. (Capitalists own but do not use the lands and factories and so the others must sell themselves to them for livelyhood.) Only "personal possessions" -- the items and tools you use a lot of the time, the house you live in, the land you cultivate -- are in any way natural.
At least my phone comes with software (albeit winblows-only) to convert
normal midi tunes to the limited format the phone wants. Then you can
transfer them to the phone with whatever expensive cables they sell or
by IR, or by putting the tune on a wap-enabled apache server.
I must second you here. I fear that, say, ten years from now there will be no easy way to switch to window managers like Ion, ratpoison, larswm, the newer clones of these, and whatever new innovations might happen during that times. WIMP policies will have been so deeply integrated into the basic windowing system. X (which is just a graphical input/output protocol!) and the ICCCM are excellent in that they don't dictate policy too much and thus allow for this kind of experiments and research without the system having to be rewritten from the ground up. Research into new interaction techniques must not be forgotten and WIMP considered the final evolutionary step of GUIs. (Infact, it was just the first step!)
LyX is too limited. TexMacs looks more promising (although I hate the
anti-aliasing). However, I do know LaTeX and love the markup in
general... it's just that there are all these hundreds of special
cases with different packages doing their own interpretation etc.,
and so you can't parse it without knowing the semantics of it.
This causes problems with conversion to other formats. There should
be no special cases of underscore usage (just let it always stand for
subscript), \verb etc. could be gotten rid off and special character
should jusut be escaped (with \\ standing for \ and so on). The same
applies to the <pre> tag in HTML. Such special cases are ugly. E.g.
latex2html can't handle the listings package as it has not been
implemented for it and it has macros similar to verb and environments
similar to the verbatim environment.
And while latex sucks in many respects, it is still the best thing out there for making serious documents. Sigh. We need a non-turing complete alternative with as simple, but more consistent syntax so that it is more easily converted to HTML etc. without having to implement for every single package in the converter as well. But the world is concentrated on making absolutely unusable WYSIWYG crap instead of a decent human-readable structural markup language for serious documents. XML based formats are too verbose to be written or read by humans, and a any beats any bloated well-of-course-one-size-fits-all word processor in editing capabilities.
... and extremely fragile. Repeat after me: HD is bad. Once it takes a hit, it becomes shit.
(Signed, "one fourth of my hdd mp3 is now bad sectors after having accidentally dropped it")
But the real question is... can they headbang?
Perhaps it should be emphasized that anarchism is opposed to _hierarchical_ authority, but you're seizing upon definitions of words. In direct democracy no single person has authority (power) any more than anyone else. (It should also perhaps be noted that anarchists are not opposed to authority of the sort specialists have in their fields if that does not give them ruling power.)
Anarchist theory isn't opposed to communes (or groups of them) forming protection syndicates as long as such they are directly responsible to the democratic control of the commune (instead of some authority who couldn't care less of the people, as is the case with the current system).
Really shitty jobs could be compensated by having to do very little anything else. Would you clean a roadkill if that's all you had to do for a year?
And as for name change, there is already another name close to what you proposed for the most common variant of anarchism: libertarian socialism.
* Some people may indeed try to grab as much as they can, but the rest of the society will not allow it. If they do, then apparently they did not want anarchy after all. You can't force it down people's throats, they (most of them) must want it.
* If somebody plays stereo loud, and the rest of the commune I live in condones it, then so be it, and I'll find one that suits me (assuming I did not like that particular behaviour). If, on the other hand, the rest of the commune also does not like that, the commune will persuade the noise maker to stop such anti-social behaviour. It is as simple as that.
* As for big groups of people fighting each other, most people do not want to get into a fight. They will try to find a peaceful solution. And if you happen to live with a group of maniacs that will not talk, they're dangerous to your health in any society despite any law enforcement agencies that only appear after the harm is done.
* People will do "shitty" jobs if they don't have to spend the whole of their lifes in them. And there's so much unemployment and people doing totally pointless work in the modern world, that there are many hands to do the work. That means more free time. I for one would welcome e.g. some farm or other physical work, say a week a month, as opposed to being forced to do some totally uninteresting, boring and irrelevant office work 8 hours every weekday for the rest of my life.
* People will also like all kinds of work more when they manage themselves instead of being told by an higher authority what exactly to do.
Real anarchism, the most common variant of which is also known as libertarian socialism, has nothing to do with these vandals that the media so much likes to call "anarchists" -- it is in their interests to do so.
And other people will organise and also grab whatever armament they can get their hands on an nuke you out for anti-social behaviour, if that's what you want. No state does not mean no rules, just the absence of written "dead" (as opposed to evolving custom) law and a violence machinery to enforce them. Social pressure can be a very powerful weapon, and even the free software community has proved that some times when some corporations have tried to steal our works. Also the state doesn't protect us of little wealth as we can't afford to go to court.
There is no such things as what you describe as "free market" if there's property. When there's property, those with the largest amount of it will always call the shots, and the rest will be oppressed and exploited. It is very difficult to enter a market dominated by a megacorporation. Are there any laws that protect the status of Microsoft? Then why isn't there any significant commercial competitors?
Communism must come from the will of the people, not of a ruling elite. Otherwise it will just be a "state capitalism", and that is the case with the so called "communist states" of today. It's all just one giant evil of an megacorporation. Both the so called "communist states" and corporations are: hierarchical, authoritarian, oppressive and exploitative. There is no democracy in either, and the elite that "owns" the "property" calls the shots.
All that needs to be done is to abolish property and the state (which is the ruling elite's machine to protect their property), and the rest will take care of itself. When there is no state to protect "property" (i.e. production machinery and such, not personal possessions), there will be no authoritarian hierarchical society (as capitalism is), to the top of which to attempt to climb to. When the majority of the people reject the concept of property, there is no way to exploit and oppress others.
And once the majority of the people are not coerced to wage slavery or unemployment (as under capitalism) and have most of their time off to do what they want to do in addition to what little is needed to produce the basic essentials of life, everyone will be much better off. And to make people work, no oppression machinery like the state is needed, just social pressure.
This is called anarchism; see http://anarchistfaq.org
Oops. A paste mistake above: "communiwho would rather ssm" should read just "communism".
You're wrong in your argument that "communiwho would rather ssm" (in its purest form, anarchism or "libertarian socialism") would never work. People will do what needs to be done when they're arsed enough, and social pressure can be very persuasive to make those who would rather slack off to work to produce the basic necessities of life. And since there even currently is lots of unemployment (a tool of the capitalists to make workers accept bad working conditions and pay; "any work is better than unemployment"), and as much of the so-called "work" in capitalism is totally unnecessary for the society to function, it is clear that in an anarchist society, if everyone was expected to (but not forced as there would be no such thing as a state to coerce people) work, people would have much more free time at their hands compared to the current wage slavery. I would rather work do, say, a week a month of even physical work to produce the basic necessities of life and have the rest of the time off and all off the society's products ad my disposal than spend the whole of my life in wage slavery (or unemployed in poverty) coding and doing other totally mindless things that are of absolutely no value to me. Wouldn't you?
There are examples of anarchism working very well even in modern times, albeit those examples were during revolts and in the end were suppressed. And of course the fact that many aboriginal societies were essentially anarchist can not be ignored.
For more information, see e.g. http://anarchistfaq.org/ or apt-get install anarchism.
Most of the population being forced to work (for long hours in tedious and mindless tasks) is called capitalism or wage slavery.
As for free software, it is indeed a fine example of libertarian socialism i.e. anarchism at work.
I guess I live in an another world then. apt-get install progname vs. click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click reboot click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click reboot click click click click click click click click click click click click reboot click click click click click click.
Some months ago I tried setting up swish and swish++ to index my HD. The results weren't that good. The problem with searching the HD is that there isn't link structure between the files on the HD as in the web to rate the documents well. It is like using the worse search engines there were before google.
Since the files are accessed locally, maybe some other ratings based on usage statistics and such could be devised, but of the top of my head I can't think of anything that would work all that well. More research needed.
Yeah, Valgrind is a wonderfull aid.
> Dream Theater, a relatively recent band in comparison, actually wrote an album that follows a dramatic story arc.
The so-called "concept album" is quite common in prog and progmetal.