I do not believe it is fair to equate hard work as the reason why people get rich. Housekeepers at hotels, cashiers, people who do crap work often work harder and longer than those who own those companies. People have to do what they can to survive, true; but that is a far cry from "accepting ones' fate" because by implication it shifts all responsibility to the individual, which is inherently unfair. The system produces winners and losers as much as personal motivation does.
Forget the billionaires, the exceptions for a moment. Lets look at the norms. Here is an obit from Tue's NYT: William Schreyer, 83, Merril Chief, Dies
A large spread for a 'captain of industry'. Forget FTM, that Merrill tanked in '87 due to mortgage-backed securities, rinsed-n-repeated in 2007. Forget that he served under Don Regan, the man who, like Greenspan, printed money like no tommorrow, bringing on the S-n-L crisis. Here's his memorable obit quote: "The pessimists are correct at any given points in history, but never over the long term" WTF? Tell that to the family who loses their livlihood, to the miner with black-lung disease.... Just WTF?
His unguarded optimism belies the fact that he and his will never be touched by the affliction of basic wants and needs. His kind litter the back hills of Westchester and Fairfield counties in their gated communities. By what stretch of the imagination are his offspring entitled to the free pass that will come their way? The BMW's at 16, the million or so to blow before comming of age?
I do not have money envy. Just the opposite in fact. And, I accept the 'suchness' of what life is as our own personal challenge.
But that does not mean injustice is acceptable or that the current state cannot be improved upon. Allowing generations of people who did nothing to earn their wealth the opportunity to preserve it at the expense of the rest of society borders on criminal. In some (too often many) cases, it is criminal.
"... where workers collectively manage the means of production without bosses or owners."
And, as such, its not as much about the product as the organization producing the goods. It is about not having such a great need for leadership roles and giving the stake-holders more room at the table.
I would like to make the case that we no longer need representives in D.C. - that tech exists which eliminates the reasons why the 'house' has to exist at all. We can still keep congress, but the function of these critters is by-gone from times when distance from home district to D.C. was a considerable factor. That no longer is the case and the electorate would be better served by a different (open-n-transparent) process, by referendum.
That, to me, is an anarchistic alternate approach. Eliminate Senatorial and Congressional elections in your State. Have a mixed panel of R-n-D's that disseminates pending federal legislation and presents it in clear coherent ways to the citizens, then let them vote on it on a given day. Give every resident a "voting card" that can be swiped (once) at a gas station, library or ATM. Swiping means 'yes', not swiping (not voting) means no. A certain percentage implies passage.
That's an anarchistic alternative that works for me; take the elections, all the campaigning, the PACs and the Parties completely out of the picture. Just stick a 20" display in the chair with a big thumb that goes up or down and let the people at home decide directly using an open and transparent process.
I am not anti-capital, I believe in commerce and economies. What we have now is corruption beyond shame. Anarchy has less to do with economic model as with social organization; or 'social ecology' as the term currently in fashion.
There's a lot of thought regarding this in my neck of the woods. Not saying all that input is necessarily better, or less fraught with unintended consequence, but it can't be worse than the sorry state we're in now.
In closing, I'd like to note that every idealistic notion branded as 'wishful thinking' today usually becomes the only pragmatic solution of tommorrow.
Hello: I live in a state with a lot of social ecologists. Deffering to your knowledge, I look forward to being stood corrected; but my understanding is that "Goldman, Bakunin, Zerzan, Berkman, Bookchin, Kropotkin, ect..." anarchists believe in governence, but not the necessity for 'leaders' in the political sense. That people have the capability of leading themselves; that everyone has a human right to survive, that homesteading is the purest form of responsible living.
Your timelines suggest that the movement was rooted in the Left, but got usurped by the conservatives around the time of Goldwater (his speechwriter, whose name i don't recall)
Ignoring the definition of libertarianism FTM, how has the definition of anarchy changed? Has the extreme right and extreme left found a bridge they can meet on?
Damn, I love this site! Email-n-Archive. Yesterday's news never grows stale:); just increases the potential for on-going dialogs destined for dusty bins in the wastelands of cyber-space. I seldom post, sometimes reply, enjoy reading doc_ruby when he chooses to comment. But. I'm 2 days past on this thread and expect no one to even make it this far down the line; I know I'm stopping somewhere short of 100th post. So, this is probably no more than referential afterthoughts for my internet SERP. First, I havent come yet to any reference to copwatch (google them), but those folks have been fighting this battle for some time now. Join and support their efforts, for starters. Freedom to record should not be analgous with freedom to monitor. I despise, ok, dislike, the idea of surveilance keeping people honest, let alone the injustice of it's present one-sideness. I also remember that th e root of this evil was to allow the discretion and better judgement 'being there' provides. Otherwise, talk about an indifferent asshole creating machine! Like Rockefeller and 3-strikes carved in a stone. Robocops. Robocourts are bad enough. I can see how cameras could be the delta that bridges both extremes; sadly so.
But talk here fails to recognize that the act of photographing law enforcement (er, pubic-safety) and being willing to suffer the indignity of the experience come what may, is a close as it gets to having that velvet revolution! (batteries not inclued, some hackery required)
I'd like to believe in my heart that most cops can be fair and do not like being in adversarial
situations any more than I do. But they need to stop being seen as a Revenue Stream more than public servant. From the DMV to ICE to the CCA. Removing laws that cannot be uniformly enforced, holding everyone equally accountable to those that remain; with punishment measuring up to the damages incurred. Seems simple to me.
If that happend then, as others have stated earlier on, we could better isolate actual behavior from presumed intent, separate disorderly from intoxication, and maybe get back to a place where you actually feel safe calling for a cop when you need one. Might as well rant on - so good luck with that.
You may think: "what's this guy on? I hold LEA in the highest regard, donate to their charities and trust their better judgement in tight situations." To which I'd reply: "You need to get out more, find out if you are who you think you are." Cuz the fact is that Santa's making a really, really, big list; his.com gnome-spys have passed it around twice. The poor are naughty and the (entitled) rich are nice! It's coal for us peons to stay warmed in the night Cuz the database says so and Infragard is always right.
This is not the country i remember or even think it is. Its upside-down land, all expertly manufactured and wrapped in pretty colors. FOX world as Greek tragedy. I'm glad I chose no kids; i'd surely be a horrible parent: Question Authority! "Is it true?", "Think for yourself!" They'd probably never fit in until maybe 20's and what a bleak reality they would probably face.
Can a legion of/.'ers and netizens stop this train? You betcha! Will they be willing to do it before they themselves feel the pain? Not likely. How is GMAC getting cherry-picked by Cerberus related to big profits in GM's.ch factories? Why are the fundamentals of corporatism intended to devalue your labors to 0? Hello Globalism. Good-bye American Dream. Privatization peddlers:1 commonweal:0 30 years of blatant corruption and greed, nickle-n-dimed into insolvancy. Slowly bled-out, a frog in the stew-pot.
I've been doing the simple thing for the past 8 years; nearly homesteading. People are comming together, slowly, to find alternatives. Think local, discover your roots, get dirty. Try conscious eating, try killing your next meal. Re-learn what it means to be independent vis-a-vis your relationship with the land and all its inha
>DRM systems are defective by design Yep, but it's because there are more holes in it than swiss cheese:) My understanding is that these copy protections introduce bad sectors in the DVD, and set top players are supposed to just ignore them So, while streaming them to linux may not be possible, it's trivial to snailmail the DVD and rip it: ddrescue -n -b 2048/dev/dvd/tmp/dvd_rip.iso dvdbackup -M -i/tmp/dvd_rip.iso/tmp/dvd_structure mkisofs -dvd-video -o/tmp/clean_dvd.iso/tmp/dvd_structure/DVD_NAME mplayer dvd:// -dvd-device/tmp/clean_dvd.iso presto!
I suggest you read "confessions of an economic hitman", because if you had you would not have made such an incorrect assertion as: "you imagine the usa has these vast powers over governments and people outside its borders that simply. do. not. exist. really, they don't exist"
That's what makes these leask interesting; looking for evidence in which those attached to the mission act on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce and its constituency.
I think openness works best with a gpg key:) Funny that; all the USG PHB's talk about increasing security; none of them mentioned why the cables were in cleartext.
Simply put: It's not the System, or the "Law", but who it serves. I always enjoy reading your posts. It re-inforces my faith in fellowship. Keep up the good work!
It might help to explain where some/all of the missing 9 billion dollars went; nearly 1/2 of Bremmers' piggy-bank that just evaporated. That would be a start to accountability the taxpayers could wrap their heads around.
I'm curious (and apologize for the poor wording) : If your comment got modded +100 informative (valuable) and your words are yours and not property of/. and are not CC granted and I copy/paste your post into a newsletter that people subscribe to (pay for) and I give attribution to you for your quote; Am I stealing from you? If so, then what if I changed your words but retained the jist, wouldn't that be just as bad? I ask only because I see a lot of this spread around the net.
try E17 if you can get it. Enlightenment is by far the best WM out there. All new dev is making it lighter weight for mobile use. I've been using it (1st as E16 with gnome now E17 exclusively) for 10 years now and it works beautifully.
desktop is the wrong analogy. It's more full-on computing vs appliance/device computing; regardless of form-factor. Currently about 6-in-10 people use computers. More than 1/2 are barely comp literate and would drop the learning curve for anything easier that came along. Combine that with the remaining 4-in-10 that mfgs are trying to drag into the modern electronic world and the result will be less emphasis on OS and more on app-stores; device size notwithstanding. Cheers
Posted to/. on 31DEC2008 by me (and also submitted to ted)
"Can Geeks and Nerds Help Prevent Genocide on Wednesday December 31, @06:07PM riondluz Comments: 0 Submitted by riondluz on Wednesday December 31, @06:07PM "
s/Can Geeks and Nerds/How can Technology/ and I think it becomes equivalent;
e.g. small devices, crowdsourcing, etc.... 10M would easily cover the basics and its perfect for what tech should be able to achieve.
yes there are more people in slums than in villages, but the impact of micro loans in the countryside is really having a greater impact than in the slums. This is because it is a better enabler for people and groups who have the resources (and desire/initiative) but lack means and education.
This is why you may find the likes of venture capitalists (Vinod Khosla) in the cities while people like Bunker Roy setup successful programs in the countrysides
"...every major economic center in the world was once a slum, and expanded over time, pushing the slums away from the center, until they became the cities that we now know."
Sure, but only after the city became less of an industrial center and more of a financial center that attracted more gentrification.
"...misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government..."
Cannot speak to the def of Libertarianism, but my understanding of anarchy is the fundamental belief that there should be no "Leaders"; not no "government".
Anarchists, as I know them, believe groups of people are capable enough to iron out their differences and work out solutions without having to be represented by a figurehead who, more often than not, reflects only the interests of a select few.
Boil it down to this: who do you trust? The generals in the pentagon and their ring-knocker, ass-covering cohorts; or the grunts in the field whose boots on the ground provide eyewitness accounts?
One of the biggest problems and greatest opportunities of this day is the realization of the 'many' (a la tea-baggers) that the government they trusted and believed in, the establishment and its systems and institutions, have lied to them, do not have their interests at heart.
Many on the fringe or on the other side of the bayonette have know this since forever. Most of them are closet anarchists ("the next time I enlist will be when the enemy is my own backyard -type). Local participatory governence - that's anarchism at it's conservative, emma goldman, roots. Leaders are all too often self-important, self-entitled flacks puppeting some hidden agenda. Everybody deserves a voice (see sociocracy).
Backasswardly I suppose, I'll visit the longnow site after i finish reading more comments. But I suspect that its all about the end of civilization and the industrial age of oil. That subject is familiar to me, and I believe Brand is simply (i hope) trying to say that we should look at slum residents as a guide for how to be resourceful; not that we should all move to slums.
Resourcefullness, resiliance, better collective organization, without the need for big (State,Federal,City) government to feed, clothe, house, heal, etc.. This is also the echoe's of TransitionTowns across the U.S. and world today.
I see this not as much about cities/slums as about local communities. He could just as easily be speaking about Haitian towns running their own lives without the meddling/interference of big, corrupt, government or the 'investors' it brings into town that tells them what they can and cannot have or do.
Small, local, close-to-the-earth/land. That is what will survive the longnow. Cities are and have always been unsustainable if left to their own expense.
"Cities existed long before governments became powerful or ruthless enough to keep people there against their will."
Please name one or two. Cities began as feudal extensions and were run by overlords. They kept slaves. There was a merchant class, sure; but your cities were mostly collection points for what could be extracted from the surrounding lands. People moved to the cities because they were displaced from all the warring and ravaging and burning out in the countryside.
Cities become populated either because of land-grabbing and theft of resources or because they were staging areas for immigrants to move on to newer territories.
Despite the rise of "culture" and "arts" and all the things we use to define "civilization", it has come at great price. Cities, for the poor working stiff, have always been what we term slum conditions and still are. And those who have become comfortably well-off enough to enjoy urbanity rarely possess the skills needed to survive their own waste-streams.
I really think your position is inaccurate, historically and currently.
"The city had become the driving force behind agricultural development. Not the country."
Food comes from the countryside. Forcing people off their land to make way for conglomerate ownership (AOT collective ownership) to supply food to these newly displaced persons (who moved to the cities, or to reservations) may be your idea of agricultural development; to me it's agricultural piracy. Think about how the indigenous Indians were forced from their lands (or exterminated) to make room for the cattlemen. That was all about supplying beef to rich city-folk in the East and Britiania (London). Sure, that was Ag dev insofar as stockyards and processors; but was killing 50million buffalo and replacing them with cattle any improvement of sustainable practices? I think not. No more than Monsanto pushing terminator seeds in rural India or Indiana.
Rural communities can do fine if left to themselves. They can hunt, grow food to sustain themselves, raise livestock on a bit of land; provided they have that opportunity and are not feudal. Most city-folk wouldn't have a clue how to feed themselves except at the point of a gun.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello:
I do not believe it is fair to equate hard work as the reason why people get rich. Housekeepers at hotels, cashiers, people who do crap work often work harder and longer than those who own those companies.
People have to do what they can to survive, true; but that is a far cry from "accepting ones' fate" because by implication it shifts all responsibility to the individual, which is inherently unfair. The system produces winners and losers as much as personal motivation does.
Forget the billionaires, the exceptions for a moment. Lets look at the norms. Here is an obit from Tue's NYT:
William Schreyer, 83, Merril Chief, Dies
A large spread for a 'captain of industry'. Forget FTM, that Merrill tanked in '87 due to mortgage-backed securities, rinsed-n-repeated in 2007. Forget that he served under Don Regan, the man who, like Greenspan, printed money like no tommorrow, bringing on the S-n-L crisis. Here's his
memorable obit quote:
"The pessimists are correct at any given points in history, but never over the long term" WTF?
Tell that to the family who loses their livlihood,
to the miner with black-lung disease.... Just WTF?
His unguarded optimism belies the fact that he and his will never be touched by the affliction of basic wants and needs. His kind litter the back hills of Westchester and Fairfield counties in their gated communities. By what stretch of the imagination are his offspring entitled to the free pass that will come their way? The BMW's at 16,
the million or so to blow before comming of age?
I do not have money envy. Just the opposite in fact. And, I accept the 'suchness' of what life is as our own personal challenge.
But that does not mean injustice is acceptable or that the current state cannot be improved upon.
Allowing generations of people who did nothing to earn their wealth the opportunity to preserve it at the expense of the rest of society borders on criminal. In some (too often many) cases, it is criminal.
Be well, be of good cheer regardless.
"... where workers collectively manage the means of production without bosses or owners."
And, as such, its not as much about the product as the organization producing the goods. It is about not having such a great need for leadership roles and giving the stake-holders more room at the table.
I would like to make the case that we no longer need representives in D.C. - that tech exists which
eliminates the reasons why the 'house' has to exist at all. We can still keep congress, but the function of these critters is by-gone from times when distance from home district to D.C. was
a considerable factor. That no longer is the case and the electorate would be better served by a different (open-n-transparent) process, by referendum.
That, to me, is an anarchistic alternate approach.
Eliminate Senatorial and Congressional elections in your State. Have a mixed panel of R-n-D's that disseminates pending federal legislation and presents it in clear coherent ways to the citizens,
then let them vote on it on a given day.
Give every resident a "voting card" that can be swiped (once) at a gas station, library or ATM. Swiping means 'yes', not swiping (not voting) means no. A certain percentage implies passage.
That's an anarchistic alternative that works for me; take the elections, all the campaigning, the PACs and the Parties completely out of the picture. Just stick a 20" display in the chair with a big thumb that goes up or down and let the people at home decide directly using an open and transparent process.
I am not anti-capital, I believe in commerce and economies. What we have now is corruption beyond shame. Anarchy has less to do with economic model as with social organization; or 'social ecology' as the term currently in fashion.
There's a lot of thought regarding this in my neck of the woods. Not saying all that input is necessarily better, or less fraught with unintended consequence, but it can't be worse than the sorry state we're in now.
http://www.freesocietycollective.org./
http://www.homemadejam.org/renew
http://www.anarkismo.net/
http://www.ainfos.ca/
http://www.zmag.org/AWatch/awatch.htm
In closing, I'd like to note that every idealistic
notion branded as 'wishful thinking' today usually becomes the only pragmatic solution of tommorrow.
Be well, enjoy your reality.
Hello:
I live in a state with a lot of social ecologists.
Deffering to your knowledge, I look forward to being stood corrected; but my understanding is that "Goldman, Bakunin, Zerzan, Berkman, Bookchin, Kropotkin, ect..." anarchists believe in governence, but not the necessity for 'leaders' in the political sense. That people have the capability of leading themselves; that everyone has a human right to survive, that homesteading is the purest form of responsible living.
Your timelines suggest that the movement was rooted in the Left, but got usurped by the conservatives around the time of Goldwater
(his speechwriter, whose name i don't recall)
Ignoring the definition of libertarianism FTM, how has the definition of anarchy changed?
Has the extreme right and extreme left found a bridge they can meet on?
Damn, I love this site! Email-n-Archive. Yesterday's news never grows stale:); just increases the potential for on-going dialogs destined for dusty bins in the wastelands of cyber-space. I seldom post, sometimes reply, enjoy reading doc_ruby when he chooses to comment. But.
I'm 2 days past on this thread and expect no one to even make it this far down the line; I know I'm stopping somewhere short of 100th post.
So, this is probably no more than referential afterthoughts for my internet SERP.
First, I havent come yet to any reference to copwatch (google them), but those folks have been fighting this battle for some time now. Join and support their efforts, for starters. Freedom to record should not be analgous with freedom to monitor.
I despise, ok, dislike, the idea of surveilance keeping people honest, let alone the injustice of it's present one-sideness. I also remember that th e root of this evil was to allow the discretion and better judgement 'being there' provides. Otherwise, talk about an indifferent asshole creating machine! Like Rockefeller and 3-strikes carved in a stone. Robocops. Robocourts are bad enough. I can see how cameras could be the delta that bridges both extremes; sadly so.
But talk here fails to recognize that the act of photographing law enforcement (er, pubic-safety) and being willing to suffer the indignity of the experience come what may, is a close as it gets to having that velvet revolution! (batteries not inclued, some hackery required)
I'd like to believe in my heart that most cops can be fair and do not like being in adversarial
situations any more than I do.
But they need to stop being seen as a Revenue Stream more than public servant. From the DMV to ICE to the CCA. Removing laws that cannot be uniformly enforced, holding everyone equally accountable to those that remain; with punishment measuring up to the damages incurred. Seems simple to me.
If that happend then, as others have stated earlier on, we could better isolate actual behavior from presumed intent, separate disorderly from intoxication, and maybe get back to a place where you actually feel safe calling for a cop when you need one.
Might as well rant on - so good luck with that.
You may think: "what's this guy on? I hold LEA in the highest regard, donate to their charities and trust their better judgement in tight situations." .com gnome-spys have passed it around twice. The poor are naughty and the (entitled) rich are nice!
To which I'd reply: "You need to get out more, find out if you are who you think you are." Cuz the fact is that Santa's making a really, really, big list; his
It's coal for us peons to stay warmed in the night
Cuz the database says so and Infragard is always right.
This is not the country i remember or even think it is. Its upside-down land, all expertly manufactured and wrapped in pretty colors. FOX world as Greek tragedy. I'm glad I chose no kids; i'd surely be a horrible parent: Question Authority! "Is it true?", "Think for yourself!" They'd probably never fit in until maybe 20's and what a bleak reality they would probably face.
Can a legion of /.'ers and netizens stop this train? You betcha! Will they be willing to do it before they themselves feel the pain? Not likely. .ch factories?
How is GMAC getting cherry-picked by Cerberus related to big profits in GM's
Why are the fundamentals of corporatism intended to devalue your labors to 0? Hello Globalism. Good-bye American Dream. Privatization peddlers:1 commonweal:0
30 years of blatant corruption and greed, nickle-n-dimed into insolvancy. Slowly bled-out, a frog in the stew-pot.
I've been doing the simple thing for the past 8 years; nearly homesteading. People are comming together, slowly, to find alternatives. Think local, discover your roots, get dirty. Try conscious eating, try killing your next meal.
Re-learn what it means to be independent vis-a-vis your relationship with the land and all its inha
>DRM systems are defective by design /dev/dvd /tmp/dvd_rip.iso /tmp/dvd_rip.iso /tmp/dvd_structure /tmp/clean_dvd.iso /tmp/dvd_structure/DVD_NAME /tmp/clean_dvd.iso
Yep, but it's because there are more holes in it than swiss cheese:)
My understanding is that these copy protections introduce bad sectors in the DVD, and set top players are supposed to just ignore them
So, while streaming them to linux may not be possible, it's trivial to snailmail the DVD and rip it:
ddrescue -n -b 2048
dvdbackup -M -i
mkisofs -dvd-video -o
mplayer dvd:// -dvd-device
presto!
I suggest you read "confessions of an economic hitman", because if you had you would not have made such an incorrect assertion as:
"you imagine the usa has these vast powers over governments and people outside its borders that simply. do. not. exist. really, they don't exist"
That's what makes these leask interesting; looking for evidence in which those attached to the mission act on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce and its constituency.
Its my private and secret hope that Obama is the leaker:)
I think openness works best with a gpg key:)
Funny that; all the USG PHB's talk about increasing security; none of them mentioned why the cables were in cleartext.
Simply put: It's not the System, or the "Law", but
who it serves.
I always enjoy reading your posts. It re-inforces my faith in fellowship. Keep up the good work!
It might help to explain where some/all of the missing 9 billion dollars went; nearly 1/2 of Bremmers' piggy-bank that just evaporated. That would be a start to accountability the taxpayers could wrap their heads around.
can i quote you on that?
I'm curious (and apologize for the poor wording) : /. and are not CC granted and I copy/paste your post into a newsletter that people subscribe to (pay for) and I give attribution to you for your quote;
If your comment got modded +100 informative (valuable) and your words are yours and not property of
Am I stealing from you? If so, then what if I changed your words but retained the jist, wouldn't that be just as bad? I ask only because I see a lot of this spread around the net.
Read in friday's NYT that the carlyle group is buying up IT security companies as fast as they could snatch em up!
try E17 if you can get it. Enlightenment is by far the best WM out there. All new dev is making it lighter weight for mobile use.
I've been using it (1st as E16 with gnome now E17 exclusively) for 10 years now and it works beautifully.
desktop is the wrong analogy. It's more full-on computing vs appliance/device computing; regardless of form-factor. Currently about 6-in-10 people use computers. More than 1/2 are barely comp literate and would drop the learning curve for anything easier that came along. Combine that with the remaining 4-in-10 that mfgs are trying to drag into the modern electronic world and the result will be less emphasis on OS and more on app-stores; device size notwithstanding.
Cheers
Don't forget "InfraGard", our corporate 'perfect citizens'
I believe you are 100% correct.
Posted to /. on 31DEC2008 by me (and also submitted to ted)
"Can Geeks and Nerds Help Prevent Genocide on Wednesday December 31, @06:07PM riondluz Comments: 0
Submitted by riondluz on Wednesday December 31, @06:07PM
"
s/Can Geeks and Nerds/How can Technology/ and I think it becomes equivalent;
e.g. small devices, crowdsourcing, etc....
10M would easily cover the basics and its perfect for what tech should
be able to achieve.
looks like you did a cut/paste from FOX news:)
Lets look at facts:
Cuba's #1 export - Doctors who educate
USA's #1 export - guns to anyone who can pay
take head from butt and see sunshine!
yes there are more people in slums than in villages, but the impact of micro loans in the countryside is really having a greater impact than in the slums.
This is because it is a better enabler for people and groups who have the resources (and desire/initiative) but lack means and education.
This is why you may find the likes of venture capitalists (Vinod Khosla) in the cities while people like Bunker Roy setup successful programs in the countrysides
"...every major economic center in the world was once a slum, and expanded over time, pushing the slums away from the center, until they became the cities that we now know."
Sure, but only after the city became less of an industrial center and more of a financial center that attracted more gentrification.
"...misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government..."
Cannot speak to the def of Libertarianism, but my understanding of anarchy is the fundamental belief that there should be no "Leaders"; not no "government".
Anarchists, as I know them, believe groups of people are capable enough to iron out their differences and work out solutions without having to be represented by a figurehead who, more often than not, reflects only the interests of a select few.
Boil it down to this: who do you trust?
The generals in the pentagon and their ring-knocker, ass-covering cohorts;
or the grunts in the field whose boots on the ground provide eyewitness accounts?
One of the biggest problems and greatest opportunities of this day is the realization of the 'many' (a la tea-baggers) that the government they trusted and believed in, the establishment and its systems and institutions,
have lied to them, do not have their interests at heart.
Many on the fringe or on the other side of the bayonette have know this since forever. Most of them are closet anarchists ("the next time I enlist will be when the enemy is my own backyard -type). Local participatory governence - that's anarchism at it's conservative, emma goldman, roots.
Leaders are all too often self-important, self-entitled flacks puppeting some hidden agenda. Everybody deserves a voice (see sociocracy).
Backasswardly I suppose, I'll visit the longnow site after i finish reading more comments. But I suspect that its all about the end of civilization and the industrial age of oil. That subject is familiar to me, and I believe
Brand is simply (i hope) trying to say that we should look at slum residents as a guide for how to be resourceful; not that we should all move to slums.
Resourcefullness, resiliance, better collective organization, without the need for big (State,Federal,City) government to feed, clothe, house, heal, etc..
This is also the echoe's of TransitionTowns across the U.S. and world today.
I see this not as much about cities/slums as about local communities. He could just as easily be speaking about Haitian towns running their own lives without the meddling/interference of big, corrupt, government or the 'investors' it brings into town that tells them what they can and cannot have or do.
Small, local, close-to-the-earth/land. That is what will survive the longnow.
Cities are and have always been unsustainable if left to their own expense.
"Cities existed long before governments became powerful or ruthless enough to keep people there against their will."
Please name one or two. Cities began as feudal extensions and were run by overlords. They kept slaves. There was a merchant class, sure; but your cities were mostly collection points for what could be extracted from the surrounding
lands. People moved to the cities because they were displaced from all the warring and ravaging and burning out in the countryside.
Cities become populated either because of land-grabbing and theft of resources or because they were staging areas for immigrants to move on to newer territories.
Despite the rise of "culture" and "arts" and all the things we use to define
"civilization", it has come at great price. Cities, for the poor working stiff, have always been what we term slum conditions and still are.
And those who have become comfortably well-off enough to enjoy urbanity
rarely possess the skills needed to survive their own waste-streams.
I really think your position is inaccurate, historically and currently.
"The city had become the driving force behind agricultural development. Not the country."
Food comes from the countryside. Forcing people off their land to make way
for conglomerate ownership (AOT collective ownership) to supply food to these newly displaced persons (who moved to the cities, or to reservations) may be your idea of agricultural development; to me it's agricultural piracy.
Think about how the indigenous Indians were forced from their lands (or exterminated) to make room for the cattlemen. That was all about supplying beef to rich city-folk in the East and Britiania (London).
Sure, that was Ag dev insofar as stockyards and processors; but was killing 50million buffalo and replacing them with cattle any improvement of sustainable practices? I think not.
No more than Monsanto pushing terminator seeds in rural India or Indiana.
Rural communities can do fine if left to themselves. They can hunt, grow food to sustain themselves, raise livestock on a bit of land; provided they have that opportunity and are not feudal.
Most city-folk wouldn't have a clue how to feed themselves except at the point of a gun.
"Let me turn this around: who decides just how limited the government should be, and why?"
BAE, because they can.