Posts by Russell Brown
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They are using the law rather better than before.
It's in the nature of the news media that we're always treating the present as a crisis.
I recall leaving through back issues of Playdate , New Zealand's first pop magazine in the 1960s, and seeing ads touting the potency of gutrot like Gimlet and Screwdriver -- which basically there to get young people really pissed.
And back then, of course, everyone drove drunk and the road toll was crazy.
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Rather than changing the law, use the provisions and use them hard. Revoke liquor licences permanently on a second offence. Suspend for a week on a first offence. Levy maximum fines on everyone who's found breaching the law.
Fewer laws, more strictly enforced. It has a bit going for it.
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True. But isn't that one of the usual criticisms of collectivism, that it discourages innovation and creativity as if Aristotle, Leonardo or Arthur Miller hadn't been funded by the respective states?
I don't really buy the line that state funding procures you a less vital creative work (apart from anything else, that would make me a hypocrite right now). And it lets people make art that is anathema to the market. It's not so good for art that is anathema to the state.
But weren't we going to smash the state anyway?
And if a non-market based entity can sustain invention, industry, the arts, why couldn't it run everything else?
Just possibly not nearly as well. Would the personal computer you're using be anywhere near as good if its technologies had not been forged in the contest of a market? Would we have even known that people wanted computers for their personal selves? We didn't know that until one was offered for sale and somebody bought it.
The libertarians hate the idea of network neutrality, because telcos should be able to use their networks as they wish, including anti-competitively. The rest of us would argue that unless the networks are available non-discriminatively you'll lose both the market of new ideas and the market of new products and services (or, as they say "the next Google"). Both markets matter.
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but collective disapproval can get very ugly and coercive.
Ask any witch.
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Beat that with the largest stick at your disposal.
I wouldn't dream of it -- it sounds like a great organisation. Squatting culture was one of the things I always liked about living in Europe, and it seems that the social centres have a unique place in Italian society.
But Leoncavallo is an arts society and community centre. They're nearly always run by committees, whether anarchist in philosophy or not.
It''s not quite the same thing as an economy that makes things and sustains billions of people. Have the social centres, for example, built any of the venues they occupy?
Markets are just another form of the wisdom of crowds; they're a way of making decisions. We get together in modern democracies and make laws as to what they're permitted to do -- and what things we will do in the name of the public good -- but we value and rely on them.
I also value the social role of people at the other end of the anti-authoritarian spectrum -- the doctrinaire libertarians -- but they're not exactly helping my life.
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Um, a consortium of publically run not-for-profits; you might call them things like the `Post Office' or `British Telecom' or whatever. Like the BBC, but with more democracy.
But those are ordained and maintained by governments, which are like, authority ...
I'm pretty sure that the anarchists have answers to this one.
I'd be interested to see them. Perhaps I'm just being grumpy, but modern anti-capitalism doesn't seem to trouble itself much with coherent solutions.
I can never seem to get a good answer to basic problems: like, what do you do with people who don't see things like you do -- and, say, insist on making things and selling them for a profit? Shoot them?
What do vegan anarchist utopians do to people who insist on eating animals? Pass a law against it?
Essential infrastructure is traditionally non-market anyway, so...
Yes, but the hardware and technology still comes from commercial manufacturers, and they still have management structures, legal status and all that other authoritarian stuff.
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__The interesting thing about the process of Grey Lynn going "wet" after its licensing status was changed by popular vote in the 90s is that the residents there were willing and able to use the consent process to control what happened next.__
This is a good point, but it is Grey Lynn Do residents in, say, Wesley or Otahuhu or Otara have the time and resources to bring off similar results?
Oh, absolutely. That was what I was getting at really.
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Say what? The Soviets had phones, and satellites, and radios and tvs, you know. I'm picking that if they hadn't spent so much money in running their army, they could have kept the whole populace in iPods too.
And I'm saying that's precisely where they fell down. They had plenty of big iron for the enforcement of policy, but people starved, and even when they weren't actually starving, they didn't have a great many of the consumer goods that those of us in the West took for granted throughout the 20th century. That wasn't just because they were spending money on guns, but because a command economy was a really shitty way of running things.
JK Galbraith's take on the fall of the USSR was that it was less about a desire for liberty than people wanting washing machines.
But the USSR, which relied on crushing authority -- and, consequently, had the trains run on time -- isn't really a good comparison for the anarchist/anti-capitalist utopia.
I just don't see how a revolution that does away with both capitalism and all authority gets undersea fibreoptic cables laid.
Seriously, Russell, et tu? Doesn't the Web open pretty compelling vistas on how people can and could organise if the demands of the marketplace didn't get in the way?
Call me crazy, but I see a place for both the freedom of markets and freedom from markets.
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On a different topic, I'm a little confused about your utterly random 'facebook' crack about anarchists, both here and in the comments at The Standard.
I find the arrogance, and breathless eagerness to declare enemies, of self-professed anarchists and anti-capitalists a bit wearying, frankly.
I was referring to the part of the linked article from the Economist about people organising and posting trophy videos on Facebook and, more so, that monument to corporate wish-fufillment, Second Life. I just found it a bit ironic that people who are all about smashing capitalism and ending authority rely on publicly-listed companies.
Seriously, when we've done away with capitalism, who runs global telecommunications?
What's going on Russell? You're clearly not an anarchist, but why the disdain for people who hold a different political/economic view?
Seriously? A droll one-liner in response to someone holding forth with grand rhetoric makes me some kind of political brute? I think you need to lighten up a bit, Nick.
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But has anyone ever documented this very serious charge by providing actual quotations, in context, showing one single media case, much less a consistent pattern. in which mainstream supporters of Israel have equated mere criticism of Israel with Nazism?
Freedland himself did as much when he noted an article by the odious Melanie Philips, about the group Independent Jewish Voices (whose members include Mike Leigh and Stephen Fry), which she chose to characterise as Jews for Genocide.
And, of course, had a stronger stomach, I could find many more tracts like this from the prominent US conservative website Free Republic:
During World War II, there were Jewish "kapos" in Nazi concentration camps who were forced by the threat of immediate death to collaborate with the Germans and performs jobs involved in the murder of other Jews. We should not be too fast to judge them, given their dire circumstances and desperate desire to stay alive.
There are today, however, Jewish leftists who would like nothing better than to assist Jew-hating Arabs in creating a Second Jewish Holocaust, and their slavish and servile collaboration with genocidal Islamo-fascists has nothing to do with threats to their own lives.
Almost every self-hating Jew on the planet capable of banging on a keyboard is today either a columnist for the anti-American web magazine Counterpunch, run by Alexander Cockburn, or is an object of Counterpunch’s celebration. Counterpunch runs Norman Finkelstein, whom even the Anti-Defamation League has declared a Holocaust denier. It regularly runs the anti-Israel lecturer Neve Gordon, a deep admirer of Finkelstein who has turned out dozens of articles attacking Israel for Cockburn, as well as Israel’s Lord Haw-Haw Uri Avnery, and dozens of other anti-Israel Jews.
There really is a lot more where that came from.
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