Carnival of Anarchy

Another case of much ado about nothing

2011-05-12T04:43:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I met a Sufi master whose profound understanding of Islam truly impressed me.

But before I continue with this story, let me state that almost all the Muslims with whom I have had close friendships have either been Sufis - or were gravitating towards a mystical interpretation of Islam. The mystical approach is experiential and private; whereas ritualistic religion is regulated by public behavior and therefore tends to be tribalistic in nature.

I find it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with fundamentalists of any persuasion - whether Muslim, Christian or whatever. This is because fundamentalism is antagonistic to intelligence. Wherever violence erupts over religious differences, fundamentalism is invariably the root cause. Brawn and brute force override brain and heart when independent thinking is suppressed.

Looking up the word "fundamentalism" in my trusty digital dictionary, I found this concise summary:

"Islamic fundamentalism appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries as a reaction to the disintegration of Islamic political and economic power, asserting that Islam is central to both state and society and advocating strict adherence to the Koran (Qur'an) and to Islamic law (sharia), supported if need be by jihad or holy war."

There you have it. Fundamentalism is basically an outward manifestation of ego insecurity. An entire tribe or nation can suffer from ego insecurity and seek refuge in hardline dogmatism and fanaticism. You could say it's a pathological condition and, as such, can be quite easily cured - once the hidden hand behind the reactionary forces is revealed and surgically amputated.

In every case you will find that the chief puppetmaster isn't even a believer. He cynically exploits the gullibility of the mindless mob and manipulates its collective pain-body through control of the mass media and law enforcement.

Coming back to my Sufi friend who enlightened me about the essence of Islam. He pointed out the significance of a triconsonantal syllable in Arabic and Hebrew which expresses peace, harmony and wholeness: the Arabic SaLaM and Hebraic ShaLoM are the commonest embodiments of this key to being truly muSLiM.

Sin-Lam-Mim (Arabic: س ل م‎ S-L-M; Hebrew: שלם‎ Š-L-M) is the triconsonantal root of many Semitic words, and many of those words are used as names. The root itself translates as "whole, safe, intact."
[Wikipedia]

Note that this triconsonantal syllable forms the root of the words "Islam" and "Muslim." This places the frequency of peace, harmony and wholeness at the very core of Islam and any sentient being that consciously aspires towards attunement and harmonization with the Whole of Existence is intrinsically Muslim.

When one has embraced the essence of Islam, no other rules apply. All observances, injunctions and rituals (specific to a historical and sociocultural context) immediately become irrelevant and meaningless and fall away of their own accord. As such, Islam in its pure, essential form can be said to be the ultimate guide to attaining cosmic equilibrium and liberation from illusion. This is precisely the teaching of wu-wei found in the Tao Te Ching and it corresponds perfectly with the highest aspirations of Zen Buddhism. It also resonates effortlessly with the concept of yoga or sacred union with the Godhead or Source.

What about the name "Allah"? Does it have a special meaning? My learned friend explained that the word, written as Al-Lah means The Great Void - or The Nothingness from which Everything was born. In other words, Source.

Every Tibetan Buddhist aspires to return to and consciously merge with The Great Void. The Nothingness is a key element in Chaos Theory which postulates that Order (structured existence or an actualized state of being) emerges either randomly - or as a focused expression of desire and will from the Primordial Chaos (Infinite Potentiality). It all makes perfect sense to me.

The mystical understanding of Allah and Islam frees us from a narrow and limited distortion that can only lead to divisiveness and discord. Indeed, the way my Sufi friend explained Islam made me instantly receptive and I realized that this was truly a sophisticated philosophy with universal appeal and cosmic wisdom. No compulsion, no harsh and punitive rules, no exclusivity.

Alas, the crafty hoodlums who rule over unthinking mobs must of necessity opt for the most demented, inane and constricted interpretation of any belief system in order to have any control over the untutored passions of their flock. They will set up formal councils and academies to determine the parameters of belief and behavior and vigorously persecute (and even execute) anyone who preaches any form of "deviancy" from the orthodox doctrine.

We have seen what the Spanish Inquisition (which lasted from 1478 till 1834) was really about - the brutal and violent suppression of religious dissent and heresy for the benefit of a corrupt and greedy ruling elite. In this day and age we need a Malay Inquisition like we need a hole in the pocket.

Allahu Akbar! The Nothingness is All! So why so much ado about NOTHING?

[First published 1 February 2010]

Wikipedia Does it Again.

2010-06-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

I read a comment on facebook quoting an article from Wikipedia on superliminal communication in quantum physics. The article is here. My response followed in the comment trail. My points are in red italics.

Wikipedia is not a good source for scientific data even basic mistakes in electronics are visible. Here is part of a discussion from a physics forum on entanglement.

The confusion about "information transfer by entanglement" is probably because there are communications protocols, involving entanglement, but not as an information channel In short, if you have an entangled pair of qbits between users A and B, and also a supplementary communication channel between them (classical), then A and B can communicate securely by a mixture of classical communication and operations/measurements on their qbits. Example: they share a pair of entangled spin-1/2 particles, and A performs an operation on his/her qbit, then sends a message to B with instructions which basis to perform a measurement in, to "read" the message. The actual speed of information transfer is limited by the classical channel; however, an eavesdropper with access only to this and not the entangled qbits, cannot possibly decipher it - hence secure communication! (we hope) This is a frequently-discussed topic (related to quantum teleportation) and may explain the common confusion about this being "information transfer" - which it is not, sticking to standard terminology. Usually we talk about "correlations" between the states of the entangled qbits in different places and times.

I think this is like the argument that superliminal communication is possible as long as no information is transferred. You can't escape relativity any more than you can get "outside" the known universe.

Ethical Employers ... Yeah sure.

2010-06-12T10:47:00.000-07:00

Huffington Press gives a run down on the 12 most unethical corporations in the world including the "usual suspects" from the oil and gas industry. You would think that people with boundless resources would occasionally see the "bigger" picture and rein in their excesses. Actually I've worked for a so called ethical company and this was pretty grim in some ways. The west in particular is deadened by the legacy of "new age" thinking and "progressive" corporatism. My employer was an otherwise competent engineer who used to hang around with useless psych-major types and had some odd religious ideas. Saskatchewan can fuck anyone up. Add in the fundies ... well. I pointed out to one of the denizens of Lumsden that conservative areas always seem to have the highest crime rates and the answer I got was "oh its the Indians". Duh. The left of course isn't any better. I argued with a social worker at a bus stop that a guaranteed annual income would be a practical solution to poverty ... her response " they would just abuse it". Left wing, right wing, chicken wing it's all the same shit out here.

Dealing with Law and DisOrder

2010-06-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I hear kids crying in the small library I'm in now. Not screaming just ordinary little kid stuff. I feel sorry for them like I do for most people with rubbles of some kind. One person I should have never have felt any real pity for was W.V. a local professional mental patient in this city whose entire life was dedicated to emasculating his guilt ridden Catholic family, avoiding work at any cost and collecting welfare for an entire lifetime!! ... another person I should have avoided in this "timeline". It's true he seemed like a really nice guy to begin with but one bad thing leads to another I suppose. Leaving this place and leaving such people alone would have been the better course of action. Generally normal people do not live in Regina. They leave or go bananas. Yeah, too bad I woke up at such a late age. Anyway a shrink in Montreal told Warrenski there was really nothing wrong with him. Naturally he came back to Regina where crooked doctors are easily found, etc., etc.. Too bad actually.

Speaking of real evil here is an item from that Greyhound bus murder a couple of years ago. From the Free Press this speaks volumes about the difficulties that anarchists will have convincing the general public the state is unnecessary. Conservatives will always always appeal to these fears until functioning anarchist communities/groups can demonstrate in practical terms that "less is more" where social control is concerned.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/keep-li-locked-up-conservatives-demand-95395424.html

Newsweek: Anti_Depressants Don't Work

2010-05-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

Here is another article on the dubious benefits of psychiatric drugs. Hasn't anyone figured out that personal problems are caused by the events in people's lives, bad choices, oppression class based and otherwise. Occasionally situations can arise where "adjustment" options have run out. There is nothing facile or "weak" in this recognition although it suggests a bleak prognosis.

The Depressing News About Antidepressants

Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a placebo. In fact, they may be worse.

Although the year is young, it has already brought my first moral dilemma. In early January a friend mentioned that his New Year's resolution was to beat his chronic depression once and for all. Over the years he had tried a medicine chest's worth of antidepressants, but none had really helped in any enduring way, and when the side effects became so unpleasant that he stopped taking them, the withdrawal symptoms (cramps, dizziness, headaches) were torture. Did I know of any research that might help him decide whether a new antidepressant his doctor recommended might finally lift his chronic darkness at noon?

The moral dilemma was this: oh, yes, I knew of 20-plus years of research on antidepressants, from the old tricyclics to the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that target serotonin (Zoloft, Paxil, and the granddaddy of them all, Prozac, as well as their generic descendants) to even newer ones that also target norepinephrine (Effexor, Wellbutrin). The research had shown that antidepressants help about three quarters of people with depression who take them, a consistent finding that serves as the basis for the oft-repeated mantra "There is no question that the safety and efficacy of antidepressants rest on solid scientific evidence," as psychiatry professor Richard Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College recently wrote in The New York Times. But ever since a seminal study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month, that evidence has come with a big asterisk. Yes, the drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill—a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.

Hence the moral dilemma. The placebo effect—that is, a medical benefit you get from an inert pill or other sham treatment—rests on the holy trinity of belief, expectation, and hope. But telling someone with depression who is being helped by antidepressants, or who (like my friend) hopes to be helped, threatens to topple the whole house of cards. Explain that it's all in their heads, that the reason they're benefiting is the same reason why Disney's Dumbo could initially fly only with a feather clutched in his trunk—believing makes it so—and the magic dissipates like fairy dust in a windstorm. So rather than tell my friend all this, I chickened out. Sure, I said, there's lots of research showing that a new kind of antidepressant might help you. Come, let me show you the studies on It seems I am not alone in having moral qualms about blowing the whistle on antidepressants. That first analysis, in 1998, examined 38 manufacturer-sponsored studies involving just over 3,000 depressed patients. The authors, psychology researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein of the University of Connecticut, saw—as everyone else had—that patients did improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that dates from the 1950s. This improvement, demonstrated in scores of clinical trials, is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work. But when Kirsch compared the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills—clinical trials typically compare an experimental drug with a placebo—he saw that the difference was minuscule. Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs. Put another way, three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect. "We wondered, what's going on?" recalls Kirsch, who is now at the University of Hull in England. "These are supposed to be wonder drugs and have huge effects."

The study's impact? The number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.

To be sure, the drugs have helped tens of millions of people, and Kirsch certainly does not advocate that patients suffering from depression stop taking the drugs. On the contrary. But they are not necessarily the best first choice. Psychotherapy, for instance, works for moderate, severe, and even very severe depression. And although for some patients, psychotherapy in combination with an initial course of prescription antidepressants works even better, the question is, how do the drugs work? Kirsch's study and, now, others conclude that the lion's share of the drugs' effect comes from the fact that patients expect to be helped by them, and not from any direct chemical action on the brain, especially for anything short of very severe depression.

As the inexorable rise in the use of antidepressants suggests, that conclusion can't hold a candle to the simplistic "antidepressants work!" (unstated corollary: "but don't ask how") message. Part of the resistance to Kirsch's findings has been due to his less-than-retiring nature. He didn't win many friends with the cheeky title of the paper, "Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo." Nor did it inspire confidence that the editors of the journal Prevention & Treatment ran a warning with his paper, saying it used meta-analysis "controversially." Al-though some of the six invited commentaries agreed with Kirsch, others were scathing, accusing him of bias and saying the studies he analyzed were flawed (an odd charge for defenders of antidepressants, since the studies were the basis for the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the drugs). One criticism, however, could not be refuted: Kirsch had analyzed only some studies of antidepressants. Maybe if he included them all, the drugs would emerge head and shoulders superior to placebos.

Kirsch agreed. Out of the blue, he received a letter from Thomas Moore, who was then a health-policy analyst at George Washington University. You could expand your data set, Moore wrote, by including everything drug companies sent to the FDA—published studies, like those analyzed in "Hearing Placebo," but also unpublished studies. In 1998 Moore used the Freedom of Information Act to pry such data from the FDA. The total came to 47 company-sponsored studies—on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexa—that Kirsch and colleagues then pored over. (As an aside, it turned out that about 40 percent of the clinical trials had never been published. That is significantly higher than for other classes of drugs, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco; overall, 22 percent of clinical trials of drugs are not published. "By and large," says Kirsch, "the unpublished studies were those that had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug.") In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, he and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants—not the 75 percent he had calculated from examining only published studies—had also been achieved by a dummy pill.

The extra effect of real drugs wasn't much to celebrate, either. It amounted to 1.8 points on the 54-point scale doctors use to gauge the severity of depression, through questions about mood, sleep habits, and the like. Sleeping better counts as six points. Being less fidgety during the assessment is worth two points. In other words, the clinical significance of the 1.8 extra points from real drugs was underwhelming. Now Kirsch was certain. "The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong," he told me in January on the eve of the publication of his book The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-depressant Myth.

The 2002 study ignited a furious debate, but more and more scientists were becoming convinced that Kirsch—who had won respect for research on the placebo response and who had published scores of scientific papers—was on to something. One team of researchers wondered if antidepressants were "a triumph of marketing over science." Even defenders of antidepressants agreed that the drugs have "relatively small" effects. "Many have long been unimpressed by the magnitude of the differences observed between treatments and controls," psychology researcher Steven Hollon of Vanderbilt University and colleagues wrote—"what some of our colleagues refer to as 'the dirty little secret.' " In Britain, the agency that assesses which treatments are effective enough for the government to pay for stopped recommending antidepressants as a first-line treatment, especially for mild or moderate depression.

But if experts know that antidepressants are hardly better than placebos, few patients or doctors do. Some doctors have changed their prescribing habits, says Kirsch, but more "reacted with anger and incredulity." Understandably. For one thing, depression is a devastating, underdiagnosed, and undertreated disease. Of course doctors recoiled at the idea that such drugs might be mirages. If that were true, how were physicians supposed to help their patients?

Two other factors are at work in the widespread rejection of Kirsch's (and, now, other scientists') findings about antidepressants. First, defenders of the drugs scoff at the idea that the FDA would have approved ineffective drugs. (Simple explanation: the FDA requires two well-designed clinical trials showing a drug is more effective than a placebo. That's two, period—even if many more studies show no such effectiveness. And the size of the "more effective" doesn't much matter, as long as it is statistically significant.) Second, doctors see with their own eyes, and feel with their hearts, that the drugs lift the black cloud from many of their depressed patients. But since doctors are not exactly in the habit of prescribing dummy pills, they have no experience comparing how their patients do on them, and therefore never see that a placebo would be almost as effective as a $4 pill. "When they prescribe a treatment and it works," says Kirsch, "their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment." Hence the widespread "antidepressants work" refrain that persists to this day.

Drug companies do not dispute Kirsch's aggregate statistics. But they point out that the average is made up of some patients in whom there is a true drug effect of antidepressants and some in whom there is not. As a spokesperson for Lilly (maker of Prozac) said, "Depression is a highly individualized illness," and "not all patients respond the same way to a particular treatment." In addition, notes a spokesperson for Glaxo-Smith-Kline (maker of Paxil), the studies analyzed in the JAMA paper differ from studies GSK submitted to the FDA when it won approval for Paxil, "so it is difficult to make direct comparisons between the results. This study contributes to the extensive research that has helped to characterize the role of antidepressants," which "are an important option, in addition to counseling and lifestyle changes, for treatment of depression." A spokesperson for Pfizer, which makes Zoloft, also cited the "wealth of scientific evidence documenting [antidepressants'] effects," adding that the fact that antidepressants "commonly fail to separate from placebo" is "a fact well known by the FDA, academia, and industry." Other manufacturers pointed out that Kirsch and the JAMA authors had not studied their particular brands.

Even Kirsch's analysis, however, found that antidepressants are a little more effective than dummy pills—those 1.8 points on the depression scale. Maybe Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and their cousins do have some non-placebo, chemical benefit. But the small edge of real drugs compared with placebos might not mean what it seems, Kirsch explained to me one evening from his home in Hull. Consider how research on drugs works. Patient volunteers are told they will receive either the drug or a placebo, and that neither they nor the scientists will know who is getting what. Most volunteers hope they get the drug, not the dummy pill. After taking the unknown meds for a while, some volunteers experience side effects. Bingo: a clue they're on the real drug. About 80 percent guess right, and studies show that the worse side effects a patient experiences, the more effective the drug. Patients apparently think, this drug is so strong it's making me vomit and hate sex, so it must be strong enough to lift my depression. In clinical-trial patients who figure out they're receiving the drug and not the inert pill, expectations soar.

That matters because belief in the power of a medical treatment can be self-fulfilling (that's the basis of the placebo effect). The patients who correctly guess that they're getting the real drug therefore experience a stronger placebo effect than those who get the dummy pill, experience no side effects, and are therefore disappointed. That might account for antidepressants' slight edge in effectiveness compared with a placebo, an edge that derives not from the drugs' molecules but from the hopes and expectations that patients in studies feel when they figure out they're receiving the real drug.

The boy who said the emperor had no clothes didn't endear himself to his fellow subjects, and Kirsch has fared little better. A nascent collaboration with a scientist at a medical school ended in 2002 when the scientist was warned not to submit a grant proposal with Kirsch if he ever wanted to be funded again. Four years later, another scientist wrote a paper questioning the effectiveness of antidepressants, citing Kirsch's work. It was published in a prestigious journal. That ordinarily brings accolades. Instead, his department chair dressed him down and warned him not to become too involved with Kirsch.

But the question of whether antidepressants—which in 2008 had sales of $9.6 billion in the U.S., reported the consulting firm IMS Health—have any effect other than through patients' belief in them was too important to scare researchers off. Proponents of the drugs have found themselves making weaker and weaker claims. Their last stand is that antidepressants are more effective than a placebo in patients suffering the most severe depression.

So concluded the JAMA study in January. In an analysis of six large experiments in which, as usual, depressed patients received either a placebo or an active drug, the true drug effect—that is, in addition to the placebo effect—was "nonexistent to negligible" in patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression. Only in patients with very severe symptoms (scoring 23 or above on the standard scale) was there a statistically significant drug benefit. Such patients account for about 13 percent of people with depression. "Most people don't need an active drug," says Vanderbilt's Hollon, a coauthor of the study. "For a lot of folks, you're going to do as well on a sugar pill or on conversations with your physicians as you will on medication. It doesn't matter what you do; it's just the fact that you're doing something." But people with very severe depression are different, he believes. "My personal view is the placebo effect gets you pretty far, but for those with very severe, more chronic conditions, it's harder to knock down and placebos are less adequate," says Hollon. Why that should be remains a mystery, admits coauthor Robert DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania.

Like every scientist who has stepped into the treacherous waters of antidepressant research, Hollon, DeRubeis, and their colleagues are keenly aware of the disconnect between evidence and public impression. "Prescribers, policy-makers, and consumers may not be aware that the efficacy of [antidepressants] largely has been established on the basis of studies that have included only those individuals with more severe forms of depression," something drug ads don't mention, they write. People with anything less than very severe depression "derive little specific pharmacological benefit from taking medications. Pending findings contrary to those reported here … efforts should be made to clarify to clinicians and prospective patients that … there is little evidence to suggest that [antidepressants] produce specific pharmacological benefit for the majority of patients."

Right about here, people scowl and ask how anti-depressants—especially those that raise the brain's levels of serotonin—can possibly have no direct chemical effect on the brain. Surely raising serotonin levels should right the synapses' "chemical imbalance" and lift depression. Unfortunately, the serotonin-deficit theory of depression is built on a foundation of tissue paper. How that came to be is a story in itself, but the basics are that in the 1950s scientists discovered, serendipitously, that a drug called iproniazid seemed to help some people with depression. Iproniazid increases brain levels of serotonin and norepinephrine. Ergo, low levels of those neurotransmitters must cause depression. More than 50 years on, the presumed effectiveness of antidepressants that act this way remains the chief support for the chemical-imbalance theory of depression. Absent that effectiveness, the theory hasn't a leg to stand on. Direct evidence doesn't exist. Lowering people's serotonin levels does not change their mood. And a new drug, tianeptine, which is sold in France and some other countries (but not the U.S.), turns out to be as effective as Prozac-like antidepressants that keep the synapses well supplied with serotonin. The mechanism of the new drug? It lowers brain levels of serotonin. "If depression can be equally affected by drugs that increase serotonin and by drugs that decrease it," says Kirsch, "it's hard to imagine how the benefits can be due to their chemical activity."

Perhaps antidepressants would be more effective at higher doses? Unfortunately, in 2002 Kirsch and colleagues found that high doses are hardly more effective than low ones, improving patients' depression-scale rating an average of 9.97 points vs. 9.57 points—a difference that is not statistically significant. Yet many doctors increase doses for patients who do not respond to a lower one, and many patients report improving as a result. There's a study of that, too. When researchers gave such nonresponders a higher dose, 72 percent got much better, their symptoms dropping by 50 percent or more. The catch? Only half the patients really got a higher dose. The rest, unknowingly, got the original, "ineffective" dose. It is hard to see the 72 percent who got much better on ersatz higher doses as the result of anything but the power of expectation: the doctor upped my dose, so I believe I'll get better.

Something similar may explain why some patients who aren't helped by one antidepressant do better on a second, or a third. This is often explained as "matching" patient to drug, and seemed to be confirmed by a 2006 federal study called STAR*D. Patients still suffering from depression after taking one drug were switched to a second; those who were still not better were switched to a third drug, and even a fourth. No placebos were used. At first blush, the results offered a ray of hope: 37 percent of the patients got better on the first drug, 19 percent more on their second, 6 percent more improved on their third try, and 5 percent more on their fourth. (Half of those who recovered relapsed within a year, however.)

So does STAR*D validate the idea that the key to effective treatment of depression is matching the patient to the drug? Maybe. Or maybe people improved in rounds two, three, and four because depression sometimes lifts due to changes in people's lives, or because levels of depression tend to rise and fall over time. With no one in STAR*D receiving a placebo, it is not possible to conclude with certainty that the improvements in rounds two, three, and four were because patients switched to a drug that was more effective for them. Comparable numbers might have improved if they had switched to a placebo. But STAR*D did not test for that, and so cannot rule it out.

It's tempting to look at the power of the placebo effect to alleviate depression and stick an "only" in front of it—as in, the drugs work only through the placebo effect. But there is nothing "only" about the placebo response. It can be surprisingly enduring, as a 2008 study found: "The widely held belief that the placebo response in depression is short-lived appears to be based largely on intuition and perhaps wishful thinking," scientists wrote in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. The strength of the placebo response drives drug companies nuts, since it makes showing the superiority of a new drug much harder. There is a strong placebo component in the response to drugs for pain, asthma, irritable-bowel syndrome, skin conditions such as contact dermatitis, and even Parkinson's disease. But compared with the placebo component of antidepressants, the placebo response accounts for a smaller fraction of the benefit from drugs for those disorders—on the order of 50 percent for analgesics, for instance.

Which returns us to the moral dilemma. In any year, an estimated 13.1 million to 14.2 million American adults suffer from clinical depression. At least 32 million will have the disease at some point in their life. Many of the 57 percent who receive treatment (the rest do not) are helped by medication. For that benefit to continue, they need to believe in their pills. Even Kirsch warns—in boldface type in his book, which is in stores this week—that patients on antidepressants not suddenly stop taking them. That can cause serious withdrawal symptoms, including twitches, tremors, blurred vision, and nausea—as well as depression and anxiety. Yet Kirsch is well aware that his book may have the same effect on patients as dropping the magic feather did for Dumbo: without it, the little elephant began crashing to earth. Friends and colleagues who believe Kirsch is right ask why he doesn't just shut up, since publicizing the finding that the effectiveness of antidepressants is almost entirely due to people's hopes and expectations will undermine that effectiveness.

It's all well and good to point out that psychotherapy is more effective than either pills or placebos, with dramatically lower relapse rates. But there's the little matter of reality. In the U.S., most patients with depression are treated by primary-care doctors, not psychiatrists. The latter are in short supply, especially outside cities and especially for children and adolescents. Some insurance plans discourage such care, and some psychiatrists do not accept insurance. Maybe keeping patients in the dark about the ineffectiveness of antidepressants, which for many are their only hope, is a kindness.

Or maybe not. As shown by the explicit criticism of drug companies by the authors of the recent JAMA paper, more and more scientists believe it is time to abandon the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of not digging too deeply into the reasons for the effectiveness of antidepressants. Maybe it is time to pull back the curtain and see the wizard for what he is. As for Kirsch, he insists that it is important to know that much of the benefit of antidepressants is a placebo effect. If placebos can make people better, then depression can be treated without drugs that come with serious side effects, not to mention costs. Wider recognition that antidepressants are a pharmaceutical version of the emperor's new clothes, he says, might spur patients to try other treatments. "Isn't it more important to know the truth?" he asks. Based on the impact of his work so far, it's hard to avoid answering, "Not to many people."

I'd like to suggest that eliminating poverty, indignity, and moreover the STATE would help a great deal more than frying neurons. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that clinical depression is an attempt to force changes in behaviour a feeling which used to be listed under the heading of "conscience". God , how I hate newspeak.

Joke of the Week Dept. It's Back to the Future .... part ...??

2010-05-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

StarDate 10-05.7. It has been brought to our attention that within the planetary archives for early twenty first century earth the following message was discovered within the wreckage of an intradimensional scout ship (must have been an early model). Time travel like communication between parallel universes is a costly affair which only recently became practical after the demilitarization of all federation and nearby territories. (The efficiencies of parecon economics have been well known for centuries but try telling that to the average "blimp" to borrow a phrase from old twentieth century Britain.) A converted battle cruiser making an "archeological" expedition recently landed at the above date.

Somewhere in the multiverse there is another W.S. who had the sense or fortune to leave Regina in the early 1970s. His depersonalization which lasted forty years in this timeline ( causing the lose of several worthwhile friends from that time including Wayne M from Coldwell Road, P.M. from the cathedral village area and a few others ) disappeared after a few months of working for his uncle in Ontario, getting married and picking up a first degree at Toronto. Eventually worked his way up to a PHD in engineering and this moment having a pint with an ambulatory Stephen Hawking.

Meanwhile W.V. the professional mental patient in this timeline ("wah wah give me a pill" , "wah wah, the conspiracy doesn't want me to get a job" ) escapes his guilt ridden Catholic family, gains some generosity of spirit and becomes a faculty member in the comp-sci department. His sociopathic brother is killed in Iraq ... or not? Whoops, the Catholic church was abolished 100 years earlier so he's an only child. The other W.V. also gets married although a little later in life. Runs into the other P. M. near the beginning of the twenty first century. All three retired to a research colony in what used to be called the west of England, nation-states having been rendered superfluous after the libertarian general strike in Europia circa 1984.

Post Modernism and the Decline of Liberty.

2010-05-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

Americans are often decried as illiterates and morons especially in areas based in the natural sciences. It is true that only a fool would still try to oppose natural selection but is there perhaps some truth in the fears that ordinary people have about wizards in white coats? Sure opposition to vaccination is pretty ridiculous. However if post modernism had not triumphed in public classrooms (as a reaction to the more obvious nastiness of the 1950s) would state "managers" be able to peddle the ADHD racket? If psychiatrists did not bully the miserable and the poor would Scientology have a leg to stand on? Getting your brain fried is probably worse than getting a slap on the hand. I don't like either but a mosquito bite is tolerable compared to cancer. The following attachment is authored by a conservative ( I think) yet the point of view would be supported by most libertarian socialists or at least the ones I have met. Everywhere a more libertarian outlook is taking hold which may explain why ALL governments feel under seige. He blames "feminism" in general for the current situation. I would argue there some aspects of statist feminism that deserve this criticism. Anyway see what you think.
http://antimisandry.com/chit-chat-main/debunking-adhd-fibromyalgia-dyslexia-part-1-a-19330.html

Also read 'Confessions of A Right Wing Liberal' from the tory Mises Institute. It's sickening to realize how close we were in the late sixties.

http://mises.org/daily/1842

Social Workers Kill People. One More Reason for a Basic Income

2010-04-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

I found this item about social workers operating in the UK. The same issues would apply in this country. That author can't understand why bullies come into social work. Really? Years ago I met a couple who told me the following story. Actually the two had just broken up and the boy friend told me the woman was now on "welfare" and recently had her children kidnapped by the department of social 'services' . Apparently she did not have enough money to support two small children and couldn't work. These "workers" admitted she could not live on the money "they" were giving her. The children were taken to one of those "homes" that are always being advertised on Regina television. There was a fire in the house and the two children burned alive. The mother and her ex-partner tried to find a lawyer who would work pro bono against the state agency. No chance, folks. It's funny we hear stories about kids topping themselves because of school bullying but nothing about the role of brainless "helping persons" in speeding vulnerable people to their graves. Now if you dear reader had to crawl for every dollar or small favour and did not want to reduce yourself (as some others have done) to the role of a lazy, whining, narcissistic professional mental patient and couldn't function without economic support what would you do??? THAT dear reader is one more GOOD reason to replace the Canadian welfare state with a guaranteed annual income. Then these scumbags with their psych "slash" basket weaving "slash" women's studies bullshit degrees would have to get jobs in keeping with their real abilities like pumping gas at Domo. Death where is thy sting?

"Arrest the Pope" Campaign Taking off.

2010-04-16T12:48:00.001-07:00

I've found several sites on facebook covering the developing struggle against the Vatican. "Arrest the Pope", " Jail the Pope" , "Time to Arrest the Pope Now" carries many articles from the BBC, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and other major magazines, and a lament published in the Irish Times from a theologian who with Ratzinger attended Vatican 11 between 1962-165. Some articles go back decades such as Rat's 1985 letter defending Rev Stephen Miller Kiesle a San Franciso priest who in 1978 was found guilty by civil authorities on a charge of tying up and molesting two young boys. Below is the text of a article published by the (no shit) Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute making a legal case for possible prosecution under ICC guidelines. Now these people did not get to the top of the pile by acting against their own interests. Some liberal insiders are hoping that Benedict will step down and allow the College of Cardinals to elect a "conciliator".

ATPATPATPATPATPATP

UN Judge Says Pope Should be Prosecuted at International Criminal Court

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) In London last Friday, a high ranking United Nations (UN) jurist called on the British government to detain Pope Benedict XVI during his upcoming visit to Britain, and send him to trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “crimes against humanity.”

Geoffrey Robertson touted his status as a UN judge in an article he published last week claiming that jurists should invoke the same procedures that have been used to indict war criminals such as Slobodan Milosevic. To try the Pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church who is ultimately responsible for sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

Robertson is one of five select jurists in the UN’s internal justice system responsible for holding UN officials accountable for corruption and mismanagement. His article was published in both the United States and Britain and reported on by the Associated Press.

Professor Hurst Hannum of the Fletcher School at Tufts University told the Friday Fax that it would be a “real stretch” to use the ICC since that court’s jurisdiction is mainly reserved for crimes during war. More likely, Hannum said, is that Robertson and likeminded experts would invoke the principle of “universal jurisdiction” so that national courts all over the world could detain the pope whenever he stepped foot on their soil. Critics say the principle, already used in practice, is a violation of sovereignty as it is enshrined in the UN Charter.

Yet Robertson insisted that the ICC could be used as long as the Pope’s sovereign immunity was waived and as long as jurists can show that the sex abuse scandal was carried out on a “widespread or systematic scale,” the way that child soldiers were used in the wars in Sierra Leone and the way that sex slaves are traded internationally.

Robertson, a tort lawyer, argued that prosecution at a higher level of the Church is necessary to get more money for victims of clergy sexual abuse in cases where dioceses have gone into bankruptcy. He specifically pointed out the fact that the diocese of Los Angeles has already paid $660M in damages and Boston has paid $100M.

One prominent law professor told the Friday Fax, “Without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the alleged offenses of Catholic priests, it would be a grave mistake to the laws of human rights to permit a trivializing of the responsibility to protect, and to play into the hands of American contingency-fee lawyers.”

Another human rights lawyer told the Friday Fax that the article could be part of a broader campaign. Robertson has long campaigned to strip the Holy See of its permanent observer status at the UN, and has publicly referred to the Holy See “the world’s largest NGO.”

When a campaign was launched to oust the Holy See from its status in 1999, UN Member States rallied around the Vatican, and in 2004 the General Assembly voted unanimously to expand that status. It is unclear whether UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon knew about Robertson’s leanings before appointing him to his current position.

Another good site deals with that ultimate Vatican scam ... the "Missionaries of Charity". Check this out.

"Was Bach an Atheist" and Other Historical Whatifs ...

2010-04-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

Some historians like to ponder on changes which might have resulted if certain past events had not occurred. If the German officers plot had been successful in 1943, (out of 42 attempts to kill Hitler) would WW2 have ended fairly quickly? If the British had not entered world war one .... would France and German have simply given up after a couple of years with the result that Leninism and fascism would not have "devolved" out of widespread demoralization and economic chaos. In the early nineteen fifties magazines like "Popular Science" accurately predicted the development of the Space Shuttle ( called "Dyna-Soar" at that time) and the manned moon landing of 1969. Unfortunately no one realized the economic downturn of the 70s would have long lasting effects on scientific progress in many areas. The optimists five decades ago also believed that a Martian colony would be built by 1992. But let's get really serious. Go back a few centuries and here courtesy of Kenneth Humphries' JesusNeverExisted.com (home page) are some interesting tidbits on the role of Christianity in the decline of empire, ruination of the classical world and the near decimation of Europe. Could a secular Rome have developed into a modern "liberal" society with all the pluses and minuses we see in the early twenty first century? Could industrialization have come about many centuries before our time? Space travel in 1592??? Here is a portion from "the Ruin of Public Health" by Humphries

JNEJNEJNEJNEJNEJNEJNEJNEJNEJNEJNE

The triumph of ecclesiastic terrorism (see Death on the Nile) signalled the end of Alexandria as an intellectual centre. From the early 5th century onward this greatest metropolis of the Hellenic world dwindled into a Christianised backwater.

With Christian dominion in Egypt came the burial of the dead and the loss of a practical knowledge which, for millennia, had been gained from the mummification of corpses. The victory of religious fanatics signalled the impending closure of the academies of secular study and with it, an end to the formal training of doctors. Any residual knowledge of ancient medical wisdom, passed on by practitioners, was condemned as 'sorcery' and this censure extended to attacks upon herbal remedies.

With the victory of Christ, cleanliness and hygiene were themselves suspect. The Church condemned public bathing (as immoral and sinful) as energetically as it did the theatre, and encouraged the closure of the baths which had done so much to preserve public health in the great cities of the Roman world.

'A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind.'

(C. Freeman, p238)

Thus spoke the 'ascetic Paula', a Roman aristocrat and Christian zealot, to the nuns she had gathered around her. St Jerome, Church luminary and author of the Vulgate Bible, echoed her sentiments:

'He who has bathed in Christ does not need a second bath.'

Church Father Tertullian found even shaving offensive to God. It was:

'... a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the creator.'

(Gibbon, ch. 15)

But the Roman habit of daily bathing, such a quintessential feature of their culture, took centuries to die. During the 6th century reign of another Christian hero – Justinian – Constantinople's public baths still functioned. But the numerous baths dated from an earlier age and they had never matched the spectacular structures of pagan Rome.

In the largesse of Justinian's early years the Bath of Zeuxippus was embellished and another built in the district of Hebdomon. But throughout his reign the Christian monarch's preoccupation (and the empire's wealth) was taken up with the construction of a plethora of costly churches, monasteries and convents.

There were no 'Baths of Justinian' – Godliness came before cleanliness.

Wars and civil turmoil interrupted urban water supply (and not only to the baths) throughout the Roman world. Starved of funds and with no new engineers being trained sophisticated maintenance of the baths became impossible. During the 7th and 8th centuries, all the grand baths went out of use completely, their fabric pillaged for Christian churches.

Church prudishness, which viewed the human body not as a thing of beauty but rather as a temptation, had no regrets about the loss.

Biblical Guidelines –

God's treatment for leprosy:

Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient's right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering.

(from Leviticus 14:2-32)

Skin diseases – the notorious 'boils' and 'leprosy' of the Middle Ages – became the norm rather than the exception. Until modern times, almost any disfiguring skin complaint was classed as 'leprosy.' Untreated, permanent damage would spread from skin to nerves, limbs and eyes.

Lepers themselves were total outcasts. Once a charge of leprosy was made the hapless soul was banned from towns, markets, even churches. Forced to live outside the main settlements, the leper had to carry a clapper or a bell to warn passers-by of his coming.

Christian 'charity' occasionally established a lazar house, not to effect any treatment to the sick but to confine the victims away from other folk. Condemned to this living hell (lepers were known as the ‘dead among the living’) these desperate souls still had their uses. For a certain breed of pious Christian 'caring' became an end in itself, the means by which the carer earned his own salvation in the world yet to come.

But at least the sufferers were close to God.

A shorter version of this article is included on my facebook page for anyone interested.

As for the title "Was (JS) Bach an atheist" one commentator suggests that this major name in music of the baroque era was himself the victim of ecclesiastical terrorism and was simply 'doing his job and keeping his mouth shut', so to speak. Well that's a little far fetched I would say, but it is notable that this guy's music improves greatly the further the subject strays from superstition. Only pious artsies and priests make an issue over the B minor Mass while many people like the Brandenburgs or the Inventions. It's a bit like Einstein and the atomic bomb ... another genius served up on a plate to the state. Makes you wonder about all the people who got fucked up before they even made it out of the starting gate, pathological upbringing, debts, and whatever.

German "Anarchists" Promise Free Beer

2010-04-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

For anyone old enough to remember the joke candidates and parties of the 1960s and 70s the following should bring back a few memories. This group is situated in Germany. My, how things have changed. Don't you think their parteifuhrer and future Reichskanzler looks a little fried? But I like the idea of theme parks for nuts and nazis. Well, I know they still sound like prisons. Oh, yes the new liberal Germany.... but folks its still better than the good ol' days.

The Anarchistic Pogo Party of Germany (German: Anarchistische Pogo-Partei Deutschlands, or 'APPD') is the self-declared party of the Pöbel (mob) and "social parasites". It was created in 1981 by two punks in Hannover and took part in the 1998 election to the Bundestag with the promise to pay the voters with free beer. The official communication organ is the paper Armes Deutschland ("Poor Germany") (former Asige Rundschau ("Asocial News")).

The party took part in the German federal election with their chancellor candidate Wolfgang Wendland, who is also the lead singer of the German punk-band "Die Kassierer" ("The Cashiers").

Aims

Right to unemployment with full salary
Youth pension instead of retirement pension
Abolishment of compulsory education
Creation of centers for physical love, so-called Mitfickzentralen (literally "fuckpooling centers")
Abolition of police
Legalization of all drugs
Abolition of the right to demonstrate with prior announcement (abolition of distinction between permitted and not permitted)
Totale Rückverdummung ("total restupidification") and balkanisation of Germany
Reconstitute the German borders from 1237 (a satire on the aim of some german extreme-right parties to restore the German borders during the time of Nazism an WWII)

History

The party was founded in 1981 by two 17-year-olds with the nicknames "Zewa" (a leading facial tissue brand) and "Kotze" (vomit). In the following years it was joined by many punks and organized many demonstrations, which were sometimes ended by the police, often leading to arrests. The party was dissolved in 1986, but was recreated in 1994 and soon chose to participate in elections. In the 1997 Hamburg city elections the APPD received a stunning 5.3% of the votes in St. Pauli and thus became the fourth-strongest party in that district. In 1998 the APPD ran in the Bundestag election with Karl Nagel as its candidate for the chancellorship, and using slogans like "Labour sucks" ("Arbeit ist Scheiße") and "Drinking, drinking, every day just drinking" ("Saufen! Saufen! Jeden Tag nur saufen"). The APPD failed, however, to gain the 0.5% of the votes needed to pay to the voters in the form of a promised large party with free beer. With approximately 35,000, or 0.1%, of the votes, the APPD outperformed Lyndon LaRouche's "BüSo" and also the German Communist Party DKP. Finally the party was dissolved in 1999. In December 2000 the APPD was reestablished in Munich, but did not participate in the Bundestag election of 2002. A sufficient number of signatures were collected for participation in the European election 2004, however these did not arrive because the German Postal Service declined to forward them to party chairman Christoph Grossmann. In the following year, the APPD took place in the Bundestag election of 2005 with little success. As a result, the party split into two parties in 2006 - the APPD and the Pogo-Partei. Both parties plan to run in the next elections for the Bundestag and European Parliament in 2009.

Theory of Pogo-Anarchism

The concept of Balkanisation is introduced to split up the country into different parts:

"Asoziale Parasiten-Zonen" (APZ, asocial parasite zone) for pogo-anarchists and other asocials, who prefer not to work and rather drink, do drugs and have sex.
"Sichere Beschäftigungs-Zonen" (SBZ, safe occupation zone) for strait-laced workaholics who will finance the good life of the people in the APZ. This is a pun, since the SBZ in West-German use (used till late into the Willy Brandt-era by the conservative press) meant the Sowjetisch besetzte Zone (Soviet Occupied Zone) or Sowjetische Besatzungszone (Soviet Occupation Zone), the predecessor of the GDR.
"Gewalt-Erlebnis-Parks" (GEP, violence theme parks) for incurable violent offenders, cops and Nazis with special areas set aside as ethnic theme parks for cultural minorities (such as lederhosen-wearing Bavarians), to avoid too close contact between these pogo races lest the pursuit of what each considers necessary for happiness suffers. These parks will be surrounded by very high walls and are located in former East Germany.

The APPD propagated the idea of a "youth pension", to replace the existing old-age pension. The idea was that people should enjoy life first, and work later.

9/11 Conspiracy Crap

2010-03-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

The conspiracy nuts are at it again. How do a few people with backgrounds in anything but engineering or physics manage to "prove" that 9/11 was a put up job? Some people thought Jack the Ripper was an illegitimate son of Queen Victoria and THIS was a cover up. This and the fact of corruption in the London police led to riots in that city in the 1890s. Conspiracy theories make everyone who is "radical" look like a fool. Maybe that's the idea? Check this out... http://layscience.net/node/124. also http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/cockburn. NOW some of these characters are being labelled as "subversives". Is this the modern version of the Reichstag fire? Clowns are being put forward as legitimate enemies of the state and the nuts will bloom like penicillin in a dirty petri dish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2310BCfoYw

There will always be an England ...

2010-02-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

For most of the people who have contributed to this blog in the past the item below doesn't really convey much new information. For the casual surfer who has little knowledge of or has the usual misconceptions about anarchism it could be useful as an antidote to fashion.

One of the sore points between libertarians of left and right revolves around that funny word "socialism". ( let's forget the "C" word for now). Below is a link to a variety of left-anarchist sources and thinking. Basically left-libertarians believe control over everyday events in our lives should remain in the hands of the originator. Anything else is dishonest. Voluntary associations that do not violent this general condition in a significant way are acceptable ... cooperatives, some unions, hobby and sports groups and so on. The open marketplace is not a central problem as it appears to be for Marxists and other statists since the overall relationship between producers and between producers and other "user" groups would be distorted if the backdrop was not " neutral", what used to be called "fair play".

Libertarian Socialism

(Please also see this web site: Anarchists Against Nationalism and National Socialism)

Libertarian Socialism is a term essentially synonymous with the word "Anarchism". Anarchy, strictly meaning "without rulers", leads one to wonder what sort of system would exist in place of one without state or capitalist masters... the answer being a radically democratic society while preserving the maximal amount of individual liberty and freedom possible.

Libertarian Socialism recognizes that the concept of "property" (specifically, the means of production, factories, land used for profit, rented space) is theft and that in a truly libertarian society, the individual would be free of exploitation caused by the concentration of all means of wealth-making into the hands of an elite minority of capitalists.

Why "Libertarian"?

It is recognized that there are authoritarian systems and behavior, distinct from libertarian, or non-authoritarian ones. Since capitalism's early beginnings in Europe, and it's authoritarian trend of wage-slavery for the majority of people (working class) by a smaller, elite group (a ruling, or, capitalist class) who own the "means of production": machines, land, factories, there was a liberatory movement in response to capitalism known as "Socialism". In almost every case, the socialist movement has been divided along authoritarian, and libertarian lines. The anarchists on the libertarian side, and the Jacobins, Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, and reformist state-socialists on the authoritarian side. (And liberals more or less split down the middle.)

There was also a movement called "Propaganda by deed", around the late 1800's to early 1900's, in which some anarchists (Such as the Italian Anarchist Luigi Galleani (1861-1931)), believed that violence was the best strategy for opposing the state. This proved a disaster, alienating anarchists from the general population and exposing them to negative characterizations by the press... the "bomb-toting anarchist" is for the most part a creation of the corporate media- before this stigma anarchism was recognized as an anti-authoritarian socialist movement.

Many anarchist groups and publications used the word "libertarian" instead of "anarchist" to avoid state repression and the negative association of the former term. Libertarian Socialism differentiates itself from "Anarchy" as a movement only in that it specifically focuses on working class organisation and education in order to achieve human emancipation from the fetters of capitalism.

Why "Socialism"?

Socialism, in it's traditional and true definition, means "the workers democratic ownership and/or control of the means of production". Such a definition implies that rather than a government bureaucracy for managing such means, there is a focus on highly democratic organisation, education and awareness, and every individual is encouraged to become an active, rather than passive participant in that which effect their lives. Only the workers themselves bear the knowledge of what their own freedom and liberty means, and only they know what is best for themselves, ultimately. Advocates of the state, be they on the left, or the right, have repeatedly defined the meaning of "socialism" to mean arbitrary rule by a set of "leaders", or a political con-game in which socialism is no more than capitalism with a few token adjustments for bearability.

I've heard of "national socialism"... does that have anything to do with "libertarian socialism"?

Definatly not. The National Socialist, or NAZI party controlled by Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1930's used the word "socialist" in their party name because of the strong awareness workers there had of class divisions and socialist theory at the time. The National Socialist Party was actually a right-wing fascist movement that sought to win over working class people from the left. Workers were basically tricked into believing that the NAZI party would solve their countries economic problems by eliminating Jews and other minorities, and expanding the country. The end result was mass murder of millions of people and a totalitarian dictatorship. Some modern NAZIs and "national anarchists" or "national libertarians" have claimed that there was a "good" version of national socialism associated with Otto & Gregor Strasser... but this national socialism was still racist and exclusionary, and ultimatly led to a madman like Hitler taking power. Now days there are people who call themselves "national socialists" who attempt the same tactics of fooling people... hopefully they will never succeed again. If a national socialist party ever came into power it would be bitterly and ferociously opposed by libertarian socialists all over the world.

What about the American "Libertarian Party"? Don't they already use the word "libertarian"?

The word "libertarian" has been widely used in conjunction with the word "anarchist" and anti-authoritarian strands of socialist organisations, groups, and individuals since the turn of the century. For example, in the US, Sam Dolgoff started the still-running anarcho-syndicalist publication "Libertarian Labor Review" in the late 1980's, and Noam Chomsky has repeatedly spoken about a libertarian socialist solution to the oppression of workers worldwide. In France (Paris, Nanterre, and Bretagne), Italy, Lebanon & Belgium there are separate anarchist publications and/or groups all currently using the name "Libertarian Alternative". In London, England the Soliderity group published a series of periodicals since 1960, one of the most recent entitled "Soliderity: A Journal of Libertarian Socialism", and George Woodcock wrote "Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements" in 1962 (some 9 years before the creation of the US Libertarian Party.) In Cuba in 1959 there existed an anti-capitalist, anti-state organisation called the "Libertarian Association of Cuba". In the 1950's George Fontenis published "The Manifesto of Libertarian Communism". In New York City, July 1954 Russell Blackwell, Esther and Sam Dolgoff formed the Libertarian League, of which for a short time Murray Bookchin was a member. Erlier, in 1949, Gregory P. Maximoff initiated the Libertarian Book Club just before he died in 1950.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) a coalition group called the United Libertarian Organisations (ULO) was created with the intent of spreading truthful information about the revolutionary anarchist activities in Spain. The organisation consisted of groups publishing Cultura Proletaria (Spanish), Il Martello (Italian), Delo Truda (Russian anarchist), Il Proletario (Italian IWW), Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Jewish Anarchist Federation), the American anarchist publication, Vangaurd, as well as the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union and General Recruiting Union of the IWW, and the Spanish Labor Press Bureau (administered by the CNT-FAI representative in the United States and Canada, the Chicago anarchist Maximilian Olay). The official organ of the ULO was called Spanish Revolution (now available in facsimile from Greenwood Publishing Corporation). Examples of articles are: Rural Collectives in Graus and Imposta; Peasants Build a New Economy; Statistics on Industrial Socialization in Catalonia; Organising the Textile Industry; Industrial Democracy; Running a Department Store; Telephone System Run by Workers; Peasant Communes in Aragon; etc. Anyone interested in constructive economic and social achievements of the CNT-FAI in revolutionary Spain should consult the pages of Spanish Revolution.

In Spain in 1932 Issac Puente wrote the pamphlet "Libertarian Communism", and the CNT adopted libertarian communism as its goal at the 1936 Saragossa conference on the eve of the Spanish Revolution. In France in 1926 the Dielo Trouda group of anarchists who had fled Russia wrote the hotly debated "Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists".

"Sebastien Faure, who founded Le Libertaire in 1895, is often credited with having invented the word 'libertarian' as a convenient synonym for 'anarchist.' However, Joseph Dejacque's use of the word as early as 1858 suggests that it may have had a long currency before Faure adopted it."
[George Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 281 (footnote)]

The term "libertarian" goes back at least to the 17th and 18th century religious debates regarding free-will versus pre-destination, and was used at that time to refer to persons who believed that individuals had full liberty to act as they saw fit.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known usage of "libertarian" was in 1789 as part of "Belsham's Essays", in which he appears to use the term in opposition to "necessitarian". It's hard to say whether there was a direct connection with other uses of the term.

An early socialistic libertarian movement (in deeds if not in name) had it's roots as far back as the French Revolution of 1789 in the poor serfs who saw through the authoritarianism of the Jacobins (and the bourgeoisie in general) who had used these serfs to overthrow the monarchy. [Further information is available from Peter Kropotkin's The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793 (pub: 1909)]

An earlier movement of "libertarian revolutionaries" were a movement from the mid-1600's called "The Levellers". Though they did not use the term "libertarian", they clearly had a libertarian orientation. They had a socialistic and individualistic aspect like the mutualists (mentioned below), and there was an even more socialistic movement called "The Diggers" or "The True Levellers". (There was also a group in San Francisco in the 1960's called The Diggers.)

It should be noted that there were two branches of libertarian socialists in the nineteenth century... the communist libertarians, and the mutualist libertarians. Both accepted the Labor Theory of Value, and the worker's right to the wealth which he or she produces... but they supported different means of achieving the goal of universal equality and freedom for mankind. The mutualists included people such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, and the like. There was even a mutualist libertarian organisation (which came along still later than the French and Spanish socialist's use of the term "libertarian") called the Libertarian League in the 1920's. These people were clearly "Social Revolutionaries" in that the interests of the "working man" were of prime importance to them, though the more communistic libertarians might have called the mutualists "gradualist", they were still, at heart, socialist.

There is ample proof from writings from the mid-1800s that indicate that before the capitalists borrowed the term "libertarian", it was already in use in a political context that one could loosely describe as "pro-socialist". It was not until the 1950's that the capitalistic use of the term came into vogue.

While a number of pro-capitalist "Libertarian" organisations and publications tend to have recently appeared in the United States and a few other countries, these entities serve the interests of small business owners, landlords, investors and some upwardly-mobile professionals. Essentially secular neo-conservative organisations, with strong inspiration from the writings of the ultra-capitalist Ayn Rand, economist Murray Rothbard, and science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein. Typical of these advocates of the sacredcy of private property is a distortion of the theories of the moral individualist philosophers of the 19th century (Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Henry David Thoreau, etc.) who respected the rights of the individual but were highly critical of the concentrations of wealth and power which led to capitalism and economic oppression since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Due to the elite privilege for the few over the many inherent in a 'pure' capitalist system, "libertarian" capitalism is un-democratic and anti-libertarian. For more information see the essay "Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy", by Peter Sabatini, and a TV interview with Noam Chomsky.

The Libertarian or sometimes-called "anarcho-" capitalist movement was a reaction from the political right-wing against US president FDR's sweeping social democratic laws passed as a response to a powerful labor movement in the 1930's. The libertarian left had little interest in nationalizations or state-social-programs, arguing that they placed power into the hands of elite managers and not the workers themselves. The destruction of the original libertarian movement in the United States, (by mass deportations and imprisonment), as well as in Europe (The Fascist victories in Spain, Italy and Germany) left a vacuum in which was possible for one Dean Russell of the capitalist "Foundation for Economic Education" to write an article in the FEE publication, "Ideas on Liberty" of May, 1955 entitled "Who is a Libertarian?" which advocated that the right should "trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word 'libertarian.'" In other cases, conservative Science Fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson used the term in their writing to depict fictionally virtuous forms of capitalism. It should be noted that these writers and others like them (Ann MaCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye, Keith Laumer, etc.) supported the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. For more information see the article "Starship Stormtroopers" by Micheal Moorcock.

What these people did not know or chose to ignore was that at least two US libertarian socialist organisations already existed, one formed in July 1954 called the Libertarian League, started by Russell Blackwell, and the other formed in 1949 and called the Libertarian Book Club, an idea initiated by Gregory P. Maximoff, and formerly established by a number of anarchists, including: Bill & Sarah Taback, Joseph & Hannah Spivack, Joseph Aaronstam, Ida Pilot (a professional translator) and her companion Valerio Isca, and Esther and Sam Dolgoff. The Libertarian League of the 1920' was a simmilarly socialistic organization, but no longer existed. The Libertarian Book Club is based in New York City, and is still active today.
(This information is from the book "Fragments: A Memoir", by Sam Dolgoff, Pub. 1986 Refract Publications, Cambridge, England)

In Webster's New International Dictionary, the definition of 'Libertarian' is stated to be: "One who holds to the principle of free will; also, one who upholds the principles of liberty, esp. individual liberty of thought and action." Clearly, in comparison to the authoritarian Soviet Union and Red China of the 1940's and 50's, liberal capitalism could be made to appear more "libertarian" than socialism if one were to accept that China and the USSR were the definitive examples of "socialism". But, if one were to have listened to the original socialistic libertarians (the anarchists) all along, it would have been clear that both the "socialism" of so-called "Communist" countries, and the idea of a "libertarian (or anarcho-) capitalism" were a farce.

Finaly, it should be noted that most of the modern pro-capitalist "libertarian" writing suffers from a severe defect: they overlook the fact that capitalism in every form ever tried throughout history is inherently authoritarian (i.e the boss/worker relationship), and thus incompatible with libertarianism in any form. However, if you ignore and skip over those portions that talk about capitalist ideas, there are some really eloquent arguments for individual rights, liberties, and responsibilities in these writings.

Unlike right-wing Libertarians, Liberals and Social Democrats, libertarian socialists reject participation in the mainstream representative voting process. Libertarian socialism is, in effect, a revolutionary theory and approach to political life. Libertarian Socialism's anti-state stance might even give it the label "Laissez-fair socialism"- if a politician (or capitalist) were to approach some anarchist workers in France and ask them what it was he could do for them, they would reply, "Laissez-nous faire."- essentially, "leave us alone". Libertarian socialists understand that it is the workers who create and maintain everything in the world, and they do not need leaders to direct them in the affairs of their lives. What is the least a government could do for workers? Keep the Government and capitalists off their back-- but it is far better to avoid the need for "politricksters" and capitalist rulers in the first place.

What about individual liberty?

Libertarian Socialism is an anti-authoritarian form of socialism and the main principles are liberty, freedom, the right for workers to fraternize and organise democratically, the absence of illegitimate authority and the resistance against force. Libertarian Socialists hold that the people can make the best judgments for themselves when given enough information and therefore stress education rather than regulation. In current society, the individual worker is separated from her or his fellow workers and not permitted to organise against his or her own exploitation... the state is the force which permits this lack of freedom to continue.

Libertarian Socialists see humankind divided in a struggle between different social classes: the property-owning class, and the working class. Libertarian socialists are against all forms of coercion, state and capitalist, and do not seek to regulate human behaviors by way of the state, including such issues as possession of firearms, drugs, sexual conduct between consenting individuals, and related issues.

Libertarian Socialists see such things as gun control, "speech codes", drug, alcohol, pornography and prostitution prohibition as a waste of time, and an unnecessary violation of individual choice. Most of humanities woes arise from the inherently coercive, undemocratic and un-libertine capitalist and state systems which human society is currently forced to follow. The answer is not regulation or limitation, but organisation and education with a working-class emphasis. Libertarian Socialists reject the "social democratic" solution of keeping the state & military apparatus around but raising taxes to support social programs. These are merely "band-aids" for problems which under capitalism will never go away, and always threaten to get worse. World problems will not be solved by "professionals", free-market entrepreneurs, the ruling capitalist class, politicians or stateist bureaucrats. Only the people, organised and educated, can solve their own problems.

Libertarian socialists believe in a form of the free market - but a truly free "market" (of ideas and aspirations, not money and wealth), not the capitalist construct that exists today which is based on a minority controlling the world's resources and the rest forced to work for them or pay them rent. A free market where workers are free to organise unions without fear of repression, and where exploitation of workers through profits does not exist. People who run their own individual businesses (or trades) without exploiting anyone would be left alone.. but large projects would be based on mutual free associations, which would last for the duration of the project - where each member affected would have an equal say in how the project is carried out and what wages are paid. Instead of huge government or corporate structures, individuals would truly have control over their lives when working together, or alone. In a true free market, production facilities would be owned and controlled by the workers themselves, not capitalist bosses or government bureaucrats. Libertarian communists specificly wish to abolish money, the basis for the concentration of power (wealth).

What do Libertarian Socialists feel about Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia?

It has always been impossible for workers to challenge capitalism effectively so long as divisions of people based on gender, skin color, or sexual orientation have continued. Racism in particular has been used from the start as a way of dividing workers along an arbitrary basis and weakening any chances for solid organisation. So long as there is always someone being looked down upon, someone forced to accept lower wages because of their low status in society, wages in a competitive system can always be pushed to what the lowest and most desperate will accept. It should also go without saying that there is no scientific proof of the existence of separate human "races" which are truly incapable of getting along, nor is there scientific proof that women are inherently physically weaker or less intellectually capable than men. The issue of "hate speech" and pornography must always take into account the importance of artistic freedom and the necessity to criticize what one disagrees with. When it is clear that a conscious effort is being made to denigrate or divide a group of people from another, with some economic or political goal as it's motivation, libertarian socialists would resist such actions on the basis that they would divide and weaken any chance for eventual liberation from capitalism. Finally, so long as any group is prejudiced against, humanity will wage war against itself for irrational reasons, using such divisions as a means to an end when seen fit. If people understand that they too can be discriminated against, based on ANYTHING about them, it should be obvious that such discrimination, like any other human activity, has potential to be self-destructive in it's consequences.

What libertarian socialist organisations exist?

Currently the most prominent organisations along libertarian socialist lines are the International of Anarchist Federations (IFA), and the syndicalist union known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association (IWA), and various anarchist organisations & groups world-wide.

Are there any major libertarian socialist theorists?

Aside from the significant number of anarchist theorists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Alexander Berkman, some important contributors to libertarian socialist theory and philosophy would be Noam Chomsky, Daniel Guerin, and Murray Bookchin.

Ministry of Peace is getting a little worried

2010-02-24T12:41:00.000-08:00

The United States is getting a little worried about attitudes towards the empire in some of the provinces. Air Strip One seems to be secure for now but parts of Eurasia seem to be losing heart. From the NY Times

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has long called European contributions to NATO inadequate, said Tuesday that public and political opposition to the military had grown so great in Europe that it was directly affecting operations in Afghanistan and impeding the alliance’s broader security goals.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at the National Defense University at in Washington on Tuesday.

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.

A perception of European weakness, he warned, could provide a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression” by hostile powers.

The meeting was a prelude to the alliance’s review this year of its basic mission plan for the first time since 1999. “Right now,” Mr. Gates said, “the alliance faces very serious, long-term, systemic problems.”

Mr. Gates’s blunt comments came just three days after the coalition government of the Netherlands collapsed in a dispute over keeping Dutch troops in Afghanistan. It now appears almost certain that most of the 2,000 Dutch troops there will be withdrawn this year. And polls show that the Afghanistan war has grown increasingly unpopular in nearly every European country.

The defense secretary, putting a sharper point on his past criticisms, outlined how NATO shortfalls were exacting a material toll in Afghanistan. The alliance’s failure to finance needed helicopters and cargo aircraft, for example, was “directly impacting operations,” he said.

Mr. Gates said that NATO also needed more aerial refueling tankers and intelligence-gathering equipment “for immediate use on the battlefield.”

Yet alliance members, he noted, were far from reaching their spending commitments, with only 5 of 28 having reached the established target: 2 percent of gross domestic product for defense. By comparison, the United States spends more than 4 percent of its G.D.P. on its military.

Dana Allin, a senior fellow with the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, called Mr. Gates’s remarks “very striking.”

“Whether this is a conscious statement to sound a real sharp warning, there’s no question that the frustration among the American military establishment is palpable regarding coalition operations in Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr. Gates did soften his message a bit, noting that, not counting United States forces, NATO troops in Afghanistan were to increase to 50,000 this year, from 30,000 last year.

“By any measure,” he said, “that is an extraordinary feat.”

More sobering, he said, was that just two months into the year, NATO was facing shortfalls of hundreds of millions of euros — “a natural consequence of having underinvested in collective defense for over a decade.”

NATO’s problems — greatly magnified by the expansion of its mandate beyond European borders, following 9/11 — called for “serious, far-reaching and immediate reforms,” Mr. Gates said.

Indeed, the secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, last month turned to an unlikely source — Russia — to request helicopters for use in Afghanistan, arguing that this would help reduce the terrorism threat and drug trade on a border of the former Soviet Union.

Mr. Rasmussen, speaking at the same meeting as Mr. Gates, said that NATO’s members needed to better coordinate their weapons purchases. The European Union and NATO should collaborate on developing capabilities like heavy-lift helicopters, he said, and avoid “spending double money.”

2010-02-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

Kevin Annett, beaten, exposes role of Canada's police and churches in sex crimes and child trafficking

Kevin Annett, human rights activist beaten in Vancouver on Wednesday, released a new article today exposing the role of Canada's police and churches in sex crimes and child trafficking, including the abuse of Native women and children.

Kevin Annett, a community minister, was assaulted by two men in Vancouver's downtown eastside on Wednesday, Jan. Jan. 6, 2010, just two days after he published an article on church and government complicity in child trafficking on Canada's west coast.

Annett suffered cuts, bruises, and at least one broken rib as a result of the unprovoked beating by two men, one of whom is linked to a downtown church agency.

Today, after being beaten, Annett released a new article on the role of Vancouver police in sex crimes http://www.censored-news.blogspot.com/

Annett begins the article with this quote: "Ten of the last dozen women to be taken to the killing site at Piggy's Palace were accompanied by Mounties or regular cops. You think it was just Willie Picton who was killing them?"

The article continues, "She told me the man's name, a senior RCMP officer, and then said, 'Who doesn't matter. They're all doing it. It's called the ‘hooker game'. The Vancouver cops will pick up girls off the street, drug them with scopolamine and film them as they f--k them, in a cop club downtown on Georgia street . Then sometimes they kill the girls and film that too, and sell it for $25,000 as a snuff film."

Annett has exposed the rape, torture and murder of Native children in Canada's residential schools, through church documents and interviews. In one case, a Native girl was raped and the infant she gave birth to was thrown into the furnace. The abuse of Native children in Canada's residential schools mirrored the abuse in aboriginal boarding schools in Australia and BIA boarding schools in the United States.

Annett is now exposing the role of the church and Canadian government in sex crimes, including the disappearance of Native children in child trafficking and murder of Native women.

Annett also released a statement today about the attack.

"I have waited to comment on the attack because of my need to rest and recover, but concerns from many people have prompted me to go public with what happened to me.

"Last Wednesday, January 6, at around 9 am, I was assisting a woman facing eviction collect her belongings at a rooming house at 566 Powell street in Vancouver's downtown eastside. Two men suddenly burst into the room, and one of them, a tall, strongly built Caucasian man named Dave who apparently is the manager of the building and a former employee of the Union Gospel Mission, began punching and kicking me. I received severe bruises on my neck and back, and a bruised and possibly broken rib because of this attack.

"At no time did he or his accomplice, another strongly built Caucasian man who witnessed the beating, say why they were attacking me. The woman who I was assisting is a former sex trade worker who is now homeless, and who in the past has provided me with information concerning the disappearance of women in the downtown eastside.

"This assault occurred just two days after an article I wrote entitled 'Child Trafficking in Beautiful British Columbia' in The Agora newspaper was widely disseminated in the downtown eastside of Vancouver. The article describes the documented complicity of churches, the police and the government in the trafficking of children in protected pedophile networks in B.C. I therefore believe there is a connection between the publicizing of this story and the attack made on me. This incident represents yet another case of repression aimed at community activists by the 2010 Olympic security forces and police, and other unknown parties," Annett said.

Meanwhile, the oppression in Canada toward those who speak out against the 2010 Olympics was exposed when border guards recently detained and interrogated Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Although Goodman had not planned to speak out about the Olympics, the harassment at the border backfired and exposed the ongoing oppression of those in the movement: "No Olympics on Stolen Land."

Annett, who for fifteen years has led the campaign to bring to justice the churches and government responsible for genocide in Canada's Indian Residential Schools, made international news in October 2009 when he held the first memorial service for missing native children outside the Vatican in Rome.
Rev. Annett, school survivors and native elders have also led high profile protests and occupations of churches in Vancouver and Toronto since 2005, and on many occasions Annett has been threatened by church officials and police, according to a statement from Hidden From History.

Annett said he will be returning to Rome and Europe in April with residential school survivors to confront Pope Benedict over the fate and buried location of thousands of children who died in Catholic Indian schools in Canada.

William Annett, Kevin Annett's father, wrote to the Prime Minister of Canada to demand justice.

"You are fully aware who Reverend Kevin Annett is. In case you've forgotten, I remind you that more than any other individual, it was his work and sacrifice over 17 years that made inevitable your 'apology' to the victims and survivors of the Indian Residential Schools, which you delivered in the House of Commons in June, 2008.

Annett's father described the attack and said, "I cannot accuse, because we cannot identify the source of this brutality. But I do know -- and you have the means of discovering -- who those responsible are. Certainly, the perpetrators exist somewhere within the following organizations, these sanctimonious Canadian institutions (still shielded by your government) who have ostracized, vilified and persecuted Kevin Annett, trashing his life since 1992, and aided in default by the gutless Canadian media who have known the truth since 1907: The Canadian Government/ the Department of Indian Affairs; The United Church of Canada; The Anglican Church of Canada; The Roman Catholic Church; The RCMP; The Vancouver Police Department; Certain Tribal Councils and Chiefs (establishment Indians.)"

"This will not happen again," William Annett said in his letter to the Prime Minister.

Annett's website is Hidden From History: http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org

UPDATE***

From the Files of the Community Task Force on the Disappeared - Downtown Eastside of Vancouver

Memorandum on Eyewitness Evidence of the Organized Abduction, Torture, Exploitation and Murder of Women and Children on Canada's West Coast
Synopsis

1. An organized system of abduction, exploitation, torture and murder of large numbers of women and children appears to exist on Canada 's west coast, and is operated and protected in part by sectors of the RCMP, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), the judiciary, and members of the British Columbia government and federal government of Canada , including the Canadian military.

2. This system is highly funded and linked to criminal organizations including the Hell's Angels, the Hong Kong Triad, and unnamed individual "free lance" mobsters from Vancouver and the USA . It is funded in part by a massive drug trade, with which it is intimately connected.

3. This system is decades-old and has been supplied for many years with women and children from aboriginal reserves and residential schools, with the paid collusion of lawyers, clergy and officials of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, along with state-funded aboriginal leaders and officials of the Department of Indian Affairs.

4. This system is international in scope, Vancouver being one spoke in a wheel of pedophilia, sex slavery, human organ black markets, "snuff" films and violent child pornography that has outlets throughout the Pacific Rim world, particularly in China and Thailand.

READ MORE:
http://censored-news.blogspot.com/201...

Also read and listen: Kevin Annett and Russell Means on Red Town Radio: 'Indian Boarding Schools: Auschwitz in Canada and US'

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2009/02...

Protest Against Homeopathy

2010-01-29T09:09:00.000-08:00

Here's an article lifted from the current issue of New Scientist, the popular British newsmagazine. Look at the money that is being wasted on this garbage. Even the National Health is getting sucked in.

AT 10.23 am on 30 January, more than 300 activists in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US will take part in a mass homeopathic "overdose". Skeptics will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are simply sugar pills.

Many of the sceptics will swallow 84 pills of arsenicum album, a homeopathic remedy based on arsenic which is used to treat a range of symptoms, including food poisoning and insomnia.

The aim of the "10:23" campaign, led by the Merseyside Skeptics Society, based in Liverpool, UK, is to raise public awareness of just exactly what homeopathy is, and to put pressure on the UK's leading pharmacist, Boots, to remove the remedies from sale.

The campaign is called 10:23 in honour of the Avogadro constant (approximately 6 × 10²³, the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a substance), of which more later.

That such a protest is even necessary in 2010 is remarkable, but somehow the homeopathic industry has not only survived into the 21st century, but prospered. In the UK alone more than £40 million is spent annually on homeopathic treatments, with £4 million of this being sucked from the National Health Service budget. Yet the basis for homeopathy defies the laws of physics, and high-quality clinical trials have never been able to demonstrate that it works beyond the placebo effect.

The discipline is based on three "laws"; the law of similars, the law of infinitesimals and the law of succession. The law of similars states that something which causes your symptoms will cure your symptoms, so that, for example, as caffeine keeps you awake, it can also be a cure for insomnia. Of course, that makes little sense, since drinking caffeine, well, keeps you awake.

Next is the law of infinitesimals, which claims that diluting a substance makes it more potent. Homeopaths start by diluting one volume of their remedy - arsenic oxide, in the case of arsenicum album - in 99 volumes of distilled water or alcohol to create a "centesimal". They then dilute one volume of the centesimal in 99 volumes of water or alcohol, and so on, up to 30 times. Application of Avogadro's constant tells you that a dose of such a "30C" recipe is vanishingly unlikely to contain even a single molecule of the active ingredient.

The third pillar of homeopathy is the law of succession. This states - and I'm not making this up - that by tapping the liquid in a special way during the dilution process, a memory of the active ingredient is somehow imprinted on it. This explains how water is able to carry a memory of arsenic oxide, but apparently not of the contents of your local sewer network.

The final preparation is generally dropped onto a sugar pill which the patient swallows.

Homeopaths claim that the application of these three laws results in a remedy that, even though it contains not a single molecule of the original ingredient, somehow carries an "energy signature" of it that nobody can measure or detect.

Unsurprisingly, when tested under rigorous scientific conditions, in randomised, controlled and double-blind trials, homeopathic remedies have consistently been shown to be no better than a placebo. Of course, the placebo effect is quite powerful, but it's a bit like justifying building a car without any wheels on the basis that you can still enjoy the comfy leather seats and play with the gear shift.

Last Comment revisited

2010-01-29T08:43:00.000-08:00

There is supposed to be a Sufi legend about the difference between heaven and hell. A meal is prepared in hell where a dish of food is placed at the centre of a circle. The guests are seated around the circumference. Each guest takes a long spoon to eat. The spoons are too long to handle and the result is mayhem, food spilled on the floor and very hungry people. Next the same meal is prepared in heaven. There each guest uses his spoon to fed the person next to him/her. The result is a well fed group and general happiness. This story is contained within the following video from the one of the Grundeinkommen (basic income) sites in Switzerland. Audio is in German with subtitles in English.
http://dotsub.com/view/26520150-1acc-4fd0-9acd-169d95c9abe1

Talking the Not-So-New Age Blues

2009-08-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

An epic freestyle poem by Antares

"What's truly funny is that something momentous is happening, and it's so real that the media can't see it. Here it is, the biggest story of all time, and it goes unreported. If you're continually focused on this and that media event, the latest celebrity scandal, the scattered wars of duality, the deceitful maneuverings of selfish politicians, and the shifting state of a false world economy, you just might miss the greater story. And this greater story is why we are here and what gives our lives meaning."
- Solara, How to Live Large on a Small Planet, 1996

Here are a few questions you could ask
(If you haven't already done so ages ago):
How old is the New Age?
Is it really NEW?
Huh? WHAT New Age?
Isn't it always "A New Age" every time a century turns?
How about a stiff shot of HISTORY (while it lasts)?
Because serious rumor in the mystery circles says
History ends when we break through the Veil of Time
And find ourselves (our True Selves, I mean)
Beyond Euclidean Space.

TWENTY TWELVE, the Daykeeper nods, consulting his cosmic
Calendar, the Mayan Tzolk'in. (Turn the world around and you'll
See Linear Time's expiry date: 21 DECEMBER 2012.)
And then what? GALACTIC SYNCHRONIZATION!
We reconnect to the core of the Milky Way,
Though what that means I cannot say.

"Excuse me, Sir, I am begging to differ," declares Mr Thambyvelloo,
"Actually our Tathu Year will be TWENTY FOURTY-THREE."
But Mr Gopala Das interjects: "Nonsense! MY calendar says 5113!"
"FOURTEEN THIRTY-THREE is how WE put it,"
smiles Professor Haji Abuhasbin.
"Nevertheless we conduct business by the International Calendar."
"In other words," Pope Gregory grins, "you mean 2012 A.D."

Doesn't matter WHEN, it's happening NOW!
Though it may not be happening to everybody
At the same time.
Or in the same way.
But as the Beatles say:
"Having been some days in preparation
A splendid time is guaranteed for all."

[A QUICK SCROLL DOWN THE SCREEN
TO SEE HOW LONG IT'S BEEN...]

A New Age might have been in sight
When Pharaoh Akhnaton ruled Egypt,
Thirty-three hundred and seventy-nine years ago
(If historians are correct) in 1370 B.C.
But alas it was not to be,
For the King was poisoned in his palace
By ruthless generals and greedy priests
Before his mission was complete.
Akhnaton's task was to prepare the world
For the arrival of Lord Sananda,
The Cosmic Christ foretold.

And so, fourteen centuries down the line,
Another attempt was made in another land
To restore Love as Law and the Path of Light
Upon this Earth: Palestine under Roman rule,
Where corruption and hypocrisy reigned supreme.
Some middle-class Jews were put to shame
When the Messiah came and castigated
The merchants in the temple.
"Oy vay, don't rock the boat!" they pleaded,
And as their pious petitions went unheeded,
They charged him with subversion and
Crucified him with unholy haste.
And once again all hope of a Golden Age
Was brutally laid waste
(Even if, as some aver, the Crucifiction was
Just a Catholic joke in very poor taste).

However, the Christ Seed had been planted
In the human gene pool - though it must have felt unwanted.

Rewind the tape of time five centuries or so
To ancient China, where "Old Boy" Lao-tze
(Archetypal wild sage of the mountains)
Successfully summed up reality in 81 verses
Called the Tao Te Ching.

While in Greece Pythagoras held the Beam
With his mathemagickal mystery school,
Using tools like the Golden Mean
And hypotenuse rules, even as he danced
To the Music of the Spheres.

In India Queen Maya bore a Prince:
Siddhartha was his name. Instead of fortune and fame
He sought enlightenment and freedom from the game
Of personal karma. As Buddha he taught us the dharma,
That this illusory world is just 4D melodrama.

Rather than beat an ignominious retreat
Sweet Socrates (that old pederast)
Took his hemlock neat (and his die was cast);
To his health we shall drink eternally.

All these heroic individuals have been named
As Keepers of the Sacred Flame
That came through the Sun
From beyond the stars: they were
Beacons of truth and harbingers
Of an approaching New Aeon.

Bold troubadours in post-Arthurian tales
Sang to us about the Quest for the Grail:
How the valiant Knights of the Table Round
Sought the greatest treasure to be found -
That pot of gold at the Rainbow's End -
The descent of the Dove
And the Rule of Love,
As enemies turn to friends.

The most fleeting glimpse was all we were shown
As we drew the sword of intelligence from the stone;
And then the vision of the Holy Grail
Vanished behind a misty veil
Of nightmarish mayhem and massacre.
Rival factions plunged the world into bloody war,
Screaming, "Dominion over others by fang and claw!"

Meanwhile in the Middle East the stage was set
For yet another crusade on this poor planet.
The portals of belief saw heavy traffic.
As images of love turned pornographic.
The Spanish Inquisition was thrown in purely for luck,
To ensure that the status quo didn't come unstuck.
"Nine Hells have arrived," Aztec priests cried,
"Exactly as Quetzalcoatl prophesied."

Came the Renaissance, a brilliant flash
Of inspiration, giving rise to a dream
Of a world reborn through Alchemy, Science and Art.
The Word now passed from ear to eye
As scriptures were read instead of heard.
The past age of spiritual darkness and doubt
Gave way to Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo -
Who advocated logic, reason and laboratory testing
As the most reliable method of finding out
What Life on Earth was all about.

Angels and demons filled the atmosphere,
And spoke to Michel Nostradamus the famous seer.
They told him of the long dark night
Of humanity's soul in its headlong flight
Towards the final Apocalypse.

Mountebanks and sorcerers, mystery men and mages,
Took their turn upon the stage of history:
Cagliostro and Saint-Germain,
Eliphaz Levi, Messrs Kelly and Dee
Held sway in the courts of Europe,
Hinting of a New Jerusalem and the
Rebuilding of Solomon's Temple.

Christian Rosenkreutz published the Rosicrucian Manifesto,
Heralding the advent of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality;
While in 1776 Adam Weishaupt of Ingolstadt
Founded the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria -
Whose illustrious members, apparently,
Included the likes of George Washington, Tom Jefferson,
And Ben Franklin - progenitors of the American Dream
Of Novus Ordo Seclorum - a New World Order, no less:
A New World for a New Age -
Governed by a global Freemasonry!

Another page turns in the Book of Changes:
America the Dream goes to Hollywood,
Gets hijacked and featured in National Geographic,
Serialized in Reader's Digest;
And now the movie rights are owned by Walt Disney,
While the Bill of Rights waits at the Gates
of Heaven.

In Persia the Bab was born: and in May 1844 proclaimed
The imminent approach of the Imam Mahdi,
Ultimate prophet of God - but the Shah had him shot
For disrespect towards Worldly Authority.
Then his followers established the Baha'i movement,
Which advocates world government on a Unified Earth,
And a new age of Universal Justice.

Newton, Darwin, and Faraday were an ad agency for
Progress through Science: understand how the universe works
And a New Industrial Age begins.
It all started with a Big Bang and everything since
Has been winding down like a clockspring.

At the height of our collective infatuation
With Machines and Automation,
Blavatsky, Leadbeater, and Olcott - NOT your typical firm of
Chartered Accountants - went to India and Tibet where they met
Ascended Masters of the Trans-Himalayan Brotherhood,
And were assigned the task of introducing
Ancient wisdom to the modern world.
Proclaim the advent of a New Aeon, they were told,
And groom Jiddhu Krishnamurti for the role
Of planetary savior.

Their Theosophical Society was inaugurated
In 1875 and found an eager following in the West,
While in the East the Sun still rose
And shone upon the sleeping millions.

Secret Societies sprouted like mushrooms
In the moldy moral ground of Victorian times, and
Ritual magic enjoyed a fairly brisk trade.
Messages from the Spirit World
And all varieties of psychic phenomena
Caught the fancy of bored housewives and
Wayward intellectuals.

The Who's Who of arcane knowledge and esoteric lore
Included names like W.B. Yeats and Claude Debussy,
Victor Hugo and Conan Doyle, Bulwer-Lytton and Liddell Mathers,
Aleister Crowley, the Marquis de Sade, and many more.
"Practitioners of Evil, Satanists, Lucifer's Friends, and
The Antichrist" were epithets flung at some of these pioneers.
But the tide of evolution was rising fast:
It spawned the glamorous Order of the Golden Dawn
And magickal offshoots like the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis) and
Argenteum Astrum (the Silver Star).

Some followed Rudolf Steiner into Anthroposophy,
And joined the tug-of-war between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
Others were captivated by G.I. Gurdjieff and his school
Of Modified Sufi Dance, but found themselves bewildered
By his Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: a rambunctious and
Somewhat Rabelaisian dissection of the human experiment
Seen through the extraterrestrial eyes of a former
Colonial Administrator of Earth.

Adolf Hitler and Company had their ill-fated Third Reich:
Hoping to govern the world by high-tech voodoo and
A fanatic belief in Aryan supremacy.
But the Fourth Reich (propounded by Wilhelm,
Psychoanalyst and discoverer of Orgone energy
Who authored Function of the Orgasm)
Might have been a lot more fun
If Dr Reich hadn't been hounded out of Europe
By his erstwhile colleagues in the psychiatric profession,
And finally assassinated in a US prison by
What he called the HIGs - Hoodlums In Government.

(We're not talking ancient history here:
This happened in the 1950s!)

Anyhow Reich tried to alert the US Air Force
To the suspicious activity of UFOs - only to be subjected
To intense harassment by the FBI and the MIB
Who, for some reason, wanted to see Reich discredited or dead.
In retrospect, it appears that Reich was perceived
As a significant threat to Dwight D. Eisenhower's covert program
Of "scientific collaboration" with the Zeta Reticulan Greys -
A technically advanced but spiritually retarded race,
Desperately seeking a cure for terminal infertility
Before their species became extinct.

Which brings us to the era of Star Trek, Star Wars,
Close Encounters, ET, X-Files and Virtual Reality.
Also crystal gazing, holistic healing,
Wheeling and dealing gurus,
Group meditations, Earth activations,
Celestine Prophecies and TM levitation,
Swift mutations and transmutation...
Hey, are there any experts left with reputations?
When there are more Channels than TV sets,
You find more confusion than the United Nations.
What you believe is what you get;
Anything goes these days.. who knows?
Anything can happen yet!

"Oh, the Sirians will save us!" some Brethren shout.
"No, only Jesus Christ can!" the Born-Again spout.
Others laugh: "It's the Pleiadian Plan - a total rout!"
"Save our streams before there are no more trout!"
The angelic anglers scream.
So is the New Age just a dream
From which Old Age awakens
With a terrible hangover?

Wait and see, nothing will change -
That's what the so-called Realist thinks.
Life will always be unfair,
You gotta be quick and grab a chair
(Let the rest drop dead, it's their affair!)
Money, not love, makes the world go round -
Excuse me, can I convert my ringgit to pounds? -
Gotta ride that crazy merry-go-round
Till you're six feet underground.
Let me ask you: is there any proof at hand
That God can also be a Man?
You say every woman is the Goddess,
But all I care about is the size of her bodice.
And I wanna know just how many Harmonica Virgins
Blew their minds at Harmonic Convergence!

Don't talk to me about Tectonic Plates,
Electromagnetic Grids, Pole Shifts, Zionist Plots,
Precessioning Equinoxes, Photon Belts, and
Why your paternal grandma was a Celt.
Do you wanna know when I last cried?
It was the day my pet canary died.

Well, well, well, what have we here?
Keep your mind and heart open
And have no fear.
The worst that could happen is...
NOTHING.

What the New Age really means is a Quantum Leap -
From Global Village to Local Galaxy at the sound of a beep.
Better get ready or go back to sleep...
Carry on, Mr Accountant,
Count your sheep.

[June 1996]

First published in the Magick River blog 2 August 2009.

2008-12-21T20:08:00.000-08:00

THE MEANING OF WHAT IS HAPPENING IN GREECE TODAY:

Well unfortunately it seems like it all comes down to individual initiative agains, and I'm totally willing to put my foot foward here. I don't know if this will fly, of if peoplehave lost all interest in this board, but here goes. The following is reposted from Molly's Blog, and it may or may not get replies here. As I say below, these are preliminay thoughts, doubtless to be modified by events.

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INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-GREECE:
RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE INSURRECTION IN GREECE:
Sooner or later you have to give your own opinion. Molly is "semi-familiar" with Greece, having visited the country a few years back, having a slight acquaintance with the language, and having followed events in that country for some years. I do not claim to be an "expert", and neither do I claim any precognition as to how events will play out in that country, with its complicated politics and with the inability of other countries to intervene at this time. All these caveats, however, don't say that one can't apply common sense to what is happening in Greece now, particularly insofar as it has "world importance" outside of the borders of Hellas- which indeed it does. Here are a few of my preliminary thoughts. Further developments may prove these right or wrong.
NEW FORMS OF REBELLION:
What is unique about the present rebellion in Greece, as compared to other previous uprisings in Europe, is the role of present technology in its development. After the original police murder the first protests were brought together within hours via such things as text messages. people gathered to protest without any organization that claimed to give out the call. This is, of course, very anarchistic, but what it does, in reality, is merely compress the "time frame" that has been evidenced in previous rebellions across the world. All previous revolutions have been the work of ordinary, non-aligned people rather than the work of conscious revolutionary organizations. Even the Russian Revolutions were, at first, a totally spontaneous uprising. The October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power depended on their alliances with other forces such as the Left SRs and the anarchists, and this "revolution" would be better described by the term "coup d'etat" rather than "revolution". The actual "revolution" that the Communists set about forthwith to destroy was being made in the factories, the regiments and the rural estates of Russia by the people themselves. The "signals" were carried more by foot than by any other method. Trains and telegraphs, of course, spread the rebellion faster than word of mouth could, but the speed was still much slower than it is today.

This has meaning which has to be taken account of. The immediate success of the Greek rebels has, perhaps, given them an illusion of effectiveness that isn't justified by subsequent events. The best illustration of this is the call for an international day of solidarity on the 20th of this month. this was given with a very short notice. The illusion was that if, protests could be organized in Greece within hours that they could be similarly spread internationally within a day. The call was responded to, but, outside of Germany and France, it gathered few numbers and those only from the anarchist activist "scene".

The whole point is that the apparent success of the rebellion in Greece is predicated on a technology that has its limitations. It allows immediacy, but it also fosters the illusion that considered thought is unnecessary, and allows the participants to imagine that their own situation is the same as others. These sort of illusions can be forgiven when radical politics is a matter of "game-playing". they are unforgivable in situations where real goals are at stake.
THE NEW AND THE OLD:
The rebellion in Greece is already passing into history, and it will be compared to other such events in European history in the past half century. How does it compare to such events as the French uprising of 1968, Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980-81 and the Romanian Revolution of 1989. In one sense it is best equivalent to the latter. The first two had positive programs ie an idea of what was to replace the old order. The latter, much more violent than the events in Greece today, was also an inchoate uprising with no clear goals, and, of course, it was taken advantage of by those who had such goals. Nowadays in Greece those who would want to use the rebellion as a stepping stone to power, the socialists and the communists, have, like in France in 1968 been appalled by what has been unleashed. They are presently doing their best to restrain the movement, and have pretty much abandoned their own power seeking goals. The sheer persistence of the movement has astonished them and also frightened them. it has escaped their control.

The closest equivalent in modern history to what is happening in Greece today is France in 1968. The differences are instructive. In Poland in 1980-81 the rebellion was a trade union one, by definition a rebellion of the average person, of the population as a whole. In France in 1968 the rebellion was triggered by students, as a caste separate from the general population. Yet, the working class joined in, inspired by the goal of "self-management". Today in Greece this goal has barely been articulated. No doubt the phrase has been debased in the past few decades. It is presently one of the ideological shibboleths of those who have absolutely no intention of ever implementing it in reality, of social democrats, of Trotskyists, of communists and even of the most vicious and dictatorial of all- the Maoists. All of them use it as a slogan, but none of them mean it. They all try and confuse the matter, as the present Caudillo in Venezuela does, by pretending that control by state bureaucrats is the same as that of control by the workers themselves in an enterprise. No...it is fucking not, and that is obvious !!!!

Yet, no matter how long the young people in Greece can "hold out" and continue with their protests they cannot succeed unless the general population joins in. Quite unfortunately the present movement in Greece is very much driven by disgust with the present government, and, unlike France in 1968, there are few indications of a positive idea of an alternative. This will condemn the movement to eventual defeat, no matter how heroic it may be. This is where the movement fails- its lack of a program.
THE NEED FOR ORGANIZATION:
As I have said "revolutionaries don't create revolutions". Such events are far beyond the control of sects and parties. They happen when a population is really and truly fed up with an intolerable situation. What "revolutionaries" (amongst whom Molly does not count as belonging) can do, however, is to provide a clear idea of "what to do" to the people during such times as the people themselves rebel. This is predicated on a long period of organization before such uprisings and clear and careful thought as to the perennial question of "what is to be done". It also depends on a clear and non-rhetorical idea of what is possible or not in a given situation and time. It also depends on recognition that you may get half-way there and be much further ahead than if you go for an end goal that is unachievable.

In Greece today there are organizations that have presented something of a "final goal" ie the anarchosyndicalist ESE and the Greek platformists. What they have failed to do is present anything like a way in which movements can be advanced towards such final goals and how temporary gains can be stabilized even if they fall short of the final goal. They have also, and this is no fault of their own, considered how rebellions of "triggers" such as the students can be generalized into the full gun of a revolution. This is hardly the task of small groups, such as anarchists outside of Spain are today. It is, however, something to think about for the future. Hopefully the present events in Greece will lead to a deepening of the anarchist understanding in that country and a growth of those anarchist organizations that can actually point to a realistic way forward. At the present time Greece is in the vanguard of the struggle for a libertarian society. What is needed is time, organization and clear thinking.

No doubt the political horizons of many participants in the protests in Greece today hardly go beyond putting handcuffs on Greece's admittedly brutal police or, at best, forcing the conservative government to be a little less brutal in its policies. Having seen the Greek riot squads marched up and down streets uselessly Molly has little respect for their "size" as compared to the average Canadian cop, but I'm sure that they make up what they lack in stature by sheer meanness if they can corner an isolated victim- but I also have to admit that they aren't great at maintaining formation when it really matters.I sit in wonder as one or two cops chase a group of rioters down a street. Stupid, stupid. stupid. It's a tribute to the ineffectiveness of the rioters that more don't get taken down. But these, of course, are sheerly military comments. Politics are what counts. In this our Greek comrades are both brilliant and deficient. Hopefully we can learn from them, and they will learn from what they are doing now. That is for the future.
More thoughts later as the situation develops.

2008-12-19T20:27:00.000-08:00

RISE OH LAZARUS:

Larry Gambone, of the Porkupine Blog, has suggested over at Molly's Blog that we resurrect this forum to discuss the recent events in Greece. How come ? Well because the present situation in Greece happens to be the most important event in terms of the anarchist project in decades. It shows the immense creativity of a people in rebellion and also the limitations of a totally spontaneous rebellion. The events in Greece may be a forerunner of other rebellions in many other countries as the present economic crisis takes hold. many sources in the mass media are of precisely this opinion.

So..."what should be done ?". What can be done ? Is the anarchist project doomed to be the tool of more organized political forces during the coming crisis ? If not, what should we do ? What should we advocate ? Is it time to go for the golden horseshoe or should we aim for more limited goals ? What are our strengths and our weaknesses ? Hey, the questions are endless. What do you think ? Post your opinions here, either as comments or as new article.

Rise up oh Lazarus and speak once more !!!!

March for Sex Workers' Rights

2008-12-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

An injury to one is an injury to all. We may not, through good or bad fortune, work the same trade as our sisters and brothers, but we share the same world, the same humanity, and face the same systems, which push violence and robbery in the name of morality and justice. There were about 100 of us marching in DC. I'm not sure how many marched elsewhere.

See the Sex Workers' Outreach Project and DC Indymedia here. I don't have any photos today, but hopefully other people can provide their photos and stories.

P.S. More from DC Indymedia here.

P.P.S. And more from DC Indymedia. Feel free to describe other events in the comments.

Grounds Above All

2008-12-07T19:11:00.000-08:00

Charles Johnson, Roderick Long, and others have defended thick libertarianism, which embraces considerations above and beyond the non-aggression principle. Among other considerations, they discuss grounds thickness.

Charles Johnson describes grounds thickness in negative terms:

Some bundles might be consistent with the non-aggression principle, but might undermine or contradict the deeper reasons that justify libertarian principles in the first place. Here it would be claimed that the you could accept libertarianism without the thicker bundle consistently, but that you couldn’t do so reasonably, because rejecting the bundle means rejecting the grounds for your libertarianism. Call this “grounds thickness.”

I do not believe that Charles Johnson or Roderick Long go far enough. In Charles Johnson’s conception, libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, different grounds can justify the non-aggression principle, and other grounds can contradict or undermine the non-aggression principle.

I think we need to focus on anhierarchism at least as much as libertarianism. Anhierarchism is a set of grounds, including personal growth, personal expression, voluntary relationships and egalitarian relationships. All four of these depend on each other, so it is impossible to separate these into distinct, self-contained grounds. We may take the first two for granted, but it is clear that involuntary relationships are inegalitarian ones, and inegalitarian ones take away the voluntary choices of those who are excluded from society or subordinated to others in society.

As a personal note, I had been a left-Marxist before turning to syndicalism and mutualist anarchism. I had embraced unlibertarian means in order to achieve anhierarchist ends. Others, including some classical anarchists, have embraced libertarian means, on the whole, in order to achieve hierarchical ends. Proudhon favored anhierarchism among Frenchmen, but, as quoted by Jenny d’Herricourt, also the subordination -even subjection- of Frenchwomen to Frenchmen.

Why do I focus on anhierarchism instead of libertarianism?

First, there is a natural connection between anhierarchical ends and libertarian means. The separation is arbitrary and borders on self-deception. (I say this as someone who once embraced state-socialist means for anhierarchical ends - who once deceived herself.)

Second, our ends are stable. They are not unchangeable, but they tend to endure unchanged through changing circumstances, changing self-understandings, and changing worldviews. Our means are not. We may question ourselves and each other. Our means are far more amenable to rational discussion than our ends can ever be.

Discourse among people who share common ends can be fertile; discourse among people who have opposing ends is all but sterile. When the defenders of hierarchy claim to support libertarianism, the opponents of hierarchy are less likely to look into libertarianism and more likely to fall for state-socialist arguments. I know...

The Olympics are Finally Over

2008-08-25T01:07:00.001-07:00

Here are a few reflections on the Beijing Olympics. Across the political spectrum many bloggers, mainstream commentators, and even late night television comedians have (to their great credit) been blunt in their condemnation of this farce. I hope there is a special circle within the Inferno for the International Olympic Committee. We've all heard the baloney about the how the games would help to improve China's record on civil liberties ... dream on. The Boston Globe put it this way:

"The Games have certainly had a lasting effect on one part of Chinese society - the 1.5 million men, women, and children expelled from their homes in Beijing to make room for the construction of Olympic facilities and urban beautification projects. To clear them out, the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions found, Chinese authorities resorted to "harassment, repression, imprisonment, and even violence." Demolitions and evictions frequently occurred without due process. Many dispossessed residents were not compensated; those who were usually received a fraction of the amount needed to make them whole."

"Beijing skies are so polluted that Chinese authorities are planning emergency measures for the Olympics. For example, protesters will now only be run over with hybrid tanks."
Jay Leno

The Olympics are over. At least we won't have to look at those ugly "cute" avatars that Google has attached to its search engine page. Little pictures of bunnies and ponies will not hide the fact the Beijing Olympics was a propaganda vehicle for a totalitarian government. Check About.com for more Beijing jokes. The games may be history but the dictatorship soldiers on. One local note: I have yet to see much in the way of criticism from Regina's local paper the "Leader Post" on the Beijing Olympics. Well what would you expect from a paper where a former editor and sports writer, years ago, remarked that "legality equals morality"?

"China has announced that during the Olympics, protesters will be allowed to assemble in designated protest areas. Yeah. Or, as they're commonly called in China, jails."
Conan O'Brien

Here is Amnesty International's summary of the so-called improvements in human rights in China. How about jailing an elderly woman who tried to make use of the official "protest" sites near Beijing or an activist like Ye Guozhu who was held in police custody during the Olympics after already completing a four-year prison sentence in connection with his attempts to draw public attention to alleged forced evictions in Beijing due to Olympics-related construction? Amnesty received reliable reports that police beat him with electroshock batons before his trial and he was subjected to further beatings in prison. AI's branch in Australia had this to say:

China, which has more Internet users than any other country, has the most extensive, technologically sophisticated and broad-reaching Internet filtering system in the world.

And the major overseas Internet companies operating in China – Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google - have, in one way or another, facilitated or colluded with the Government’s censorship practices.

Yahoo! has given authorities confidential information about its users; Microsoft admitted shutting down a blog because of a Government request; and Google has launched a censored Chinese version of its international search engine. (I've tried various "bounce" tests using the Chinese version of Google and this and other blogs to see if these can be reached from inside the "Great Firewall". It's an "on again, off again" experience. During the last two weeks there was some improvements though I don't expect this to last).

Policies ignored

All three companies have shown a disregard for some of their own policies. They made promises to themselves, their employees, their customers and their investors; it is questionable as to whether they are upholding these promises in China’s environment of huge profits and Government requests.

In defending their actions in China; Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google say they’re obliged to comply with local law. And they argue although it’s not an ideal situation, their presence in China has a positive influence. They say even if they weren’t operating in China there would still be censorship, and that censored information is better than no information.

Sanctioning censorship

But China has had the Internet for more than a decade, which means these companies can no longer be considered to be helping bring a new technology to China. Instead, they are trying to gain an increasing share of a rapidly growing market, with the knowledge that it will expand without or without them.

Effectively their actions are facilitating and sanctioning censorship rather than challenging it.

Read more about Yahoo!, the first major foreign Internet company to enter the Chinese market, Microsoft, which has the best access to the upper echelons of the Chinese Government, and Google, which set up the Chinese version of its search engine relatively recently.

Gruesome Murder on Canadian Greyhound

2008-08-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

Yet another story from the peaceable kingdom. Most of the world knows about this one by now judging from the results on google. The allegations and theories are flowing fast and furious. The loony was a "schizophrenic" as if that tells us ANYTHING. Sort of like saying the "nut was a nut". One site claims that the sleazy hollywood movie, a remake of an old TV show called "Zorro" , shown on the bus caused the problem. Something about a villain keeping somebody's head in a jar. That one's probably no worse then some of them. Apparently the scumbag did have a history of paranoia like going off on bus trips to "buy land" even though he had no money. The only thing he said, after appearing in court for an arraignment, was to the judge "Please Kill Me". Well he'll probably get something worse than death in some "mental health" facility though I doubt this will be any consolation to Tim McLean's family and friends. Below the picture is an item I posted on my own blog.

>><<

The general level of violence in western Canada has always been higher than the national average but this story still seems unbelievable. Last Wednesday night near Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, on a greyhound bus, one of the passengers a 22 year old was murdered apparently for no reason. Tim McLean was on his way home to Winnipeg. He was listening to music and sleeping in his seat when he was stabbed to death and then decapitated by Vince Weignuang Li. Both originated from Edmonton. The mass media is peddling this story as the latest "hot" item and the sickening details are now available to anyone capable of using a search engine. There are now eighteen facebook groups set up for the victim. One of these has seventy-two thousand members. News agencies and comment trails are producing predictable results. The usual mainstream stuff includes ghoulish interviews with passengers along the lines of "how did it feel". Some normal people are calling for more policing of passengers, metal detectors on buses (maybe a good idea) while others make reasonable observations about the costs associated with an airport style "security state". This would be difficult ... travelling on the bus is an informal business. The "dog" stops at many small towns, most without a bus depot ... sometimes it's just a gasoline station or a wider spot along a highway. Passengers tend to be working class people, students and the young. The relative low cost of bus travel makes this the only affordable means for many of these people. The bus drivers union wants greater security but admits the costs associated with this would be resisted by the companies. Using cameras on buses has been suggested but, as in the case with England where video surveillance is at Orwellian levels, there is really no proof this would be helpful. A few people have suggested putting guards on buses. It used to be common practice to have conductors on urban transit buses. Simply having someone walking around the bus, selling tickets, making sure that passengers were on safely, etc was considered a normal procedure in the past! When I travelled in the UK in the nineteen sixties the common sense view was still that the driver did nothing other than control the bus!! The conductor signalled when to stop/start and otherwise looked after things. The expense of a "permanent" passenger, possibly armed, on interurban schedules shouldn't be that much. And just the suspicion that there is some "big guy" at the back of the bus with a nine millimetre under his coat might be a restraining factor on the nutbars who seem to be attracted to this vulnerable form of transport. The cops wouldn't like this very much since they want to maintain their monopoly on "deadly force". What was interesting was the relative common sense displayed by passengers, the driver and a passing truck driver who stopped to help. Passengers ran off the bus and despite their fear were able to help the two professional drivers keep the loony-tune locked inside the bus until the police showed up. The murderer tried to take off with the bus but the driver managed to disable the engine (mounted in the rear fortunately). Quick thinking.

>><<

Tributes Coming in for Construction Worker ... Dead at Fifteen Years

2008-07-29T00:49:00.001-07:00

This story doesn't have much direct bearing on our current "topic" of discussion ... the general failure of C of A. But tales from everyday life might help us to see more clearly what is wrong with this world and perhaps " speak peace unto" those who claim a desire to improve things. Anyway it's hard to forget something as awful as the construction site accident that killed Andrew James at Stony Mountain, Manitoba, Canada. This is a small community north of the provincial capital of Manitoba which is known throughout the Great White North for its single industry ... a jail! James was buried under a truckload of asphalt which came down from a truck where the load wasn't secured correctly to restrict the flow. The teenager had just turned fifteen a week before the accident. Manitoba labour laws forbid anyone under sixteen working on construction sites. Most industrial accidents involve younger workers who lack the skill to avoid injury. I've known younger labourers who have been in some near misses. As one of them told me this is the reason older workers seem to be kind of slackass at times ... you know "the four city workers watching one guy shoveling" story. Back in the sixties my first job involved working for the city of Regina waterworks department. On payday afternoons our foreman and crew of two used to spend the afternoon in the Romanian club redistributing our ill gotten gains for the greater glory of Molsons and Carlings breweries. BUT we were still one of the most productive crews on the payroll! Let's hear it for self-management/autogestion! Anyway there's at least a hundred listings under Google on this evil story. Here's one more from the Globe and Mail.

STONY MOUNTAIN, Man. — Tributes began flowing Saturday for a 15-year-old boy killed when he was buried under searing-hot asphalt on a job site the day before.

About 125 people had joined a tribute page dedicated to Andrew James on Facebook, a social networking website.

“I love you baby brother. I will see you again one day,” wrote his sister, Sabrina Ellison.

“He cared for everyone and was always there to lend a hand for anyone,” wrote Brittany Sulyma.

Other people wrote of the teen's strong work ethic and his ability to make people laugh. The page mentioned how James “loved the outdoors, especially camping with his papa.”

“You touched many lives, worked hard, and were a friend to many,” wrote his aunt, Kim Ellison. “We love you Andrew, and will miss you.”

James, who was too young to work on construction jobs under Manitoba labour laws, was part of a paving crew working on a parking lot in the Winnipeg bedroom community of Stony Mountain.

“I believe [the truck] dumped off way too much asphalt unexpectedly,” said Stony Mountain fire Chief Wallace Drysdale.

“I was one of the first members on scene and we just saw the hair sticking out of this individual. It was extremely hot asphalt. Our crews, when we were digging out, had to shuttle different members in and out in about four- or five-minute intervals because our feet were burning.”

2008-07-13T17:03:00.000-07:00

WHY ANARCHIST PROJECTS FAIL/PART 2-THE GENERATIONAL QUESTION:

The following is part 2 of 'Why Anarchist Projects Fail', copied from Molly's Blog. One hopes that it will not elicit defensive reactions from childish American Maoists as part 1 did.But who knows. Silly people such as that are not the real target that I intend to insult. They have condemned themselves to irrelevance already by their choice of cult, and I am much more interested in getting under the skin of people who are a "real threat" to the development of a realistic anarchism. So onwards..
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ANARCHIST THEORY;
WHY ANARCHIST PROJECTS FAIL PART 2/THE GENERATIONAL PROBLEM:
The medieval woodcut on the left by Cornelis Anthonisz depicts the 10 stages of life, from infancy to death. On the left a baby lies in a bed. On the right a man sits with his legs dangling over the grave. Each stage of life is accompanied by a representative animal. The symbolism is thought provoking, and we should examine the question of "generations" in the anarchist movement today in relation to "why anarchist projects fail". This is the second instalment in the series of "why anarchist projects fail".
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To begin with there are very few countries in the world where there is a living continuity of generations in terms of anarchism. We are hardly in the situation of pre-Civil War Spain where families such as the Urales family passed their anarchism on from generation to generation. The conditions of modern totalitarianism, either fascist or communist, basically exterminated such families. In my own family I had a grand-uncle who fought with Nestor Makhno, but he was killed by the Nazis in his "refuge" of Germany after fleeing the Soviets(his family language of a mixture of French/German/Russian persuaded him that Germany was a good place to go to-silly guy). My mother became an anarchist in her old age after both studying Russian and reading Kropotkin. But still...my basic upbringing was left social democrat, as per the politics of my Irish father.This sort of upbringing made it actually quite easy to transit to the type of gradualist anarchism I hold to today.

Only France and Italy preserve the real continuity of anarchist generations, unaffected by mass extermination. When I visited Spain and the offices of the CNT in Barcelona there was a collection of quite elderly men in the "meeting room" in one section. The editor of Solidaridad Obrero was somewhat younger than me, and we tried to communicate through our mutually bad French. What I noticed was an absence of "middle-aged people" on the premises. The headquarters of the CGT in Barcelona was a little bit better, with a better mix of generations- but not by much. The youth of the staff was quite obvious. Well, and good. What does this mean, especially in the situation of most of the world where anarchists are overwhelmingly young, as in Canada.

Anarchism is in the throes of a revival, and it is to be expected that most of its adherents will be quite young. This has both its good points and its bad points. Let's travel through them.
..................................
THE SPRINGTIME OF ANARCHY:
People generally come to anarchism when they are quite young. This may be as little as 13 years. It may be as late as graduate school. The complaint that the vast majority of people who adopt anarchism as a younger age are not anarchist in a few years is actually quite ancient. Emma Goldman commented on it almost a century ago, and she waved it away (as she waved away so many things in her life-yes, Molly has never liked Goldman) with the snappy one-liner that "we have had the best of them". Insofar as this goes it is true, but it obscures many things.

When people first come to anarchism they usually infused with "the light of conversion". Their enthusiasm is boundless, but so are their expectations. They far too often imagine that all they have to do is present "the idea" , and huge numbers of people will flock to the banner. When this, inevitably, doesn't happen they are left with stark choices. One of them is to adopt a rational long-term view of the anarchist project. A small minority-the best- take up this option. They may adopt any number of long term strategies. One of the most popular today is the "platformist" option. Another is to simply wipe the whole commitment off their memory and go on to different things. This is the option of the vast majority of ex-anarchists. Their choice may indeed be rational, especially if they have seen the worst of the anarchist movement close up. A third, the worst option, is to take their emotional frustration as a guide to action and enter into what Molly calls "kindergarten terrorism" under the false assumption that more militant actions will impel the "masses" that initially rejected them to join them. A pretty silly delusion actually, as the vast majority of such wanna-be terrorists usually pick ideological positions that are rock solid guaranteed top be rejected by the ordinary person.

Whether it be the end of civilization or neo-Maoist nostalgia in terms of crime "in the name of" racial minorities the end result is the same. The ordinary person sees them as one more "urban nuisance", and applauds the police actions against them with the same emotions that they applaud city actions against other pests such as mosquitoes. The comparison is quite apt as the actions of such groups are on the level of "increased insect populations", not the "great threat to the rulers" that they imagine.

It is hardly surprising that "student anarchists" will rethink their ideological position after a few years. Their life situation is, of course, inherently unstable. For the majority it lasts 4 years, and then they go on to what is sadly called "reality". In developed countries the majority of young people attend some sort of "institution of higher learning", whether it be university or a technical college. It is there where they first meet anarchism, but it is an anarchism that is specific to their circumstances. It is rootless and ahistorical, lacking any long term perspective. It imagines great things can be accomplished in a tiny bit of time. Some will go on from this apprenticeship into the opportunities offered by the "established left" after their graduation. Insofar as they "remain anarchists" they will eternally compromise their original ideals.

Sometimes they will lie about such compromise and claim that they haven't changed their opinions at all. This tactic, traditionally associated with (ex)Trotskyists, depends upon the modern illusion that anarchism is no different from fashionable leftism. If Molly were to give a "corrective" to this I would suggest that every would-be "anarchist" adopt at least ONE position that is at variance with the leftist subculture and defend it vigorously. The actual content doesn't matter. The reaction of the leftists will be the education that is needed. Adopting such a position would provide a bridge to maintaining anarchist opinions in the world that faces a person "after graduation", if for no other reason that it would provide training in "being contrary".
THE HIGH NOON OF ANARCHISM:
As I said above there are very few "middle-aged" people active in anarchism in most countries today. This may be understandable as people enter their reproductive and career-building stage of life. Nobody who hasn't had children can appreciate the great, humongous time-sucking commitment that this requires. To be quite frank it is entirely understandable-and admirable in Molly's view- that the preservation of one's genetic heritage should take precedence over any political ideology, anarchism included. The alternative is a cancerous growth of belief that would lead to immense suffering, as the disastrous career of murderous Marxism has proven in the last century.

Still, it is sad that so few of our younger recruits manage to carry their anarchism on into their further life- beyond that they decide to extend their adolescence into middle age (cheered on by a tiny minority of evil people ensconced in the anarchist movement who encourage such actions for profit-you know the type). THIS is a failing that a mature anarchism will eventually correct. Whether it be by the gradual building of anarchosyndicalist unions that offer people an opportunity to carry their anarchism forward into the real world- something that is being done as we speak. Whether it be by the formulation of long term plans such as the platformists are trying to do today. Whether it be by the gradual growth of other anarchist alternatives that aim for long term growth. All these things come together, and they are considerations that anarchists should think about if they are not enraptured with the illusion of "revolution" or, worse, simply sticking their finger up the nose of ordinary people as certain primitivist and "post-leftist" sectarians do.
THE AUTUMN OF ANARCHY:
We all eventually reach this point, and many who first came to anarchism in the late 60s/early 70s, have done so already. Such is Molly's sad situation. As such she gets to observe such atrocities as "presumed elders" of the anarchist movement who have been alive less than the time that she has been active advocating the continuation of silly, self destructive tactics that, incidentally, will rebound to the financial benefit of the advocates. The advantage of age is to be able to cynically recognize crooks because one has seen their like dozens of times before. The disadvantage is that we get stuck in the thought patterns of our youth. Memory is not thought. It may be an advantage to recognize patterns that were great and gross failures before, and the same "justifications" that are offered for them today which are the same as those offered years ago. The example of "kindergarten terrorism" was mentioned before.

What is sad is that there is little "opportunity" offered for older people in anarchism today. Most older anarchists, when retirement finally comes about, immerse themselves in the struggles of ordinary people that have little connection to anarchism. In some ways this is a great thing, as they carry the struggle into exactly where it should be, amongst people that younger anarchists are often too snotty to approach. The gradual growth of anarchism means that there will be an increasing number of such people who will spread the anarchist idea in a much more efficient way than flashy demonstrations can. But it is still sad that there is so little interchange between this older generation-who now exist in greater numbers than they did when I first became an anarchist-and the younger people who come to anarchism imagining that it was invented with punk rock.

So what does this mean in terms of "why anarchist projects fail" ? The limitations of projects initiated by younger people whose life situations are inherently unstable should be obvious. To make them survive the "graduation" of their founders requires exquisite planning that often-usually- is not possible. The limitations of anarchism in "middle-age" are also obvious, and they will only be overcome by gradual growth, something that younger people don't see as necessary. As to older anarchists one may say that they should very much carry on as they do now, but perhaps they should make a greater effort to reach out to (and if necessary argue with) younger anarchists who are in need of their experience.
Labels: anarchism, anarchist theory, why anarchist projects fail

2008-07-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

WHY ANARCHIST PROJECTS FAIL:

This project has obviously failed, and there is little doubt that the reasons are many. But it has, at least, inspired me to start a series over at Molly's Blog about the subject of why, in general, anarchist projects have such short life spans. Sometimes this may not be such a bad thing. The following is copied from Molly's Blog as installment # 1.

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WHY ANARCHIST PROJECTS FAIL-PART ONE:
This series of posts has been inspired by the recent lack of interest in The Carnival of Anarchy, an attempt at a "blog carnival" dealing with this, that and the other thing revolving around the subject of anarchism. This first installment will hardly be applicable to the CoA, but others in the future may be.

Molly has been playing this game since the early 70s, and she has certainly seen her share of "ex-anarchists". Most of these can be put into the "bought-off" slot. It is entirely possible that anarchism is very much like Trotskyism and the Jehovah's Witnesses in that there are far more ex-members of these two groups than there are present members(by perhaps a factor of 10 to 1 at any given time), and this has been true for many decades. It is also possible that the basic outflow is the same. In the case of the Trots this is obviously true as the "general left" affords infinitely more career possibilities, whether they be in social democracy, the unions, the NGOs or whatever, than Leninist sectarianism offers. There is also little-or none- barrier to a Trot becoming an ex-Trot and still believing that he or she hasn't changed his or her beliefs at all. One would assume that there should be a "crisis of conscience" when anarchists get bought off in this manner, but our present situation is quite different from that when Molly first became an anarchist back in the Mesozoic. The advantage that anarchism has gained by basically becoming the ultra-left has been bought at the cost of the dilution of what anarchism means. It is entirely possible that an anarchist could as easily become a functionary today as Trots have always been able to do. But there are worse things to become than a sell-out.

The grossest example of this was perhaps provided by the disintegration of the late (and unlamented-in Molly's view) Love and Rage Federation. The decision to "sell out" is actually an act of intelligence, with a rational calculation of self interest as its basis. The decision to go from one leftist sectarian organization to another of considerably less intelligence, moral rectitude, aesthetic appeal, sophistication, etc. is another matter entirely. This is neither rational nor intelligent. In particular it depends upon a lack of what Molly styles as "emotional intelligence" which is something quite separate from "book-learning" (often quite superficial amongst leftists) or even common sense(though a good modicum of common sense should provide a barrier to such religious impulses). It has to be admitted that many of the people who initially joined Love and Rage were quite juvenile to begin with, and that set the stage for the organization's eventual disintegration. The "left" that they couldn't see was different from anarchism was far different from the left of our day. The Maoist illusions, particularly in the USA, were far more prevalent than they are today, and they were reinforced by a sort of cultish guilt-mongering that, while it still exists today-once more especially in the USA-is far weaker today. The brutish decision of some of the split-offs from Love and Rage to adopt neo-Maoism as an ideology or to hanker after a cultish religion of "race-politics" would hardly be repeated today except in the worst shadowy corners of modern anarchism. The majority are now immune to such bizarre delusions, because of the march of history.

Anarchism has certainly produced its own share of monsters over its history, but I cannot think of anything so ultimately silly as what some of Love and Rage became. Other examples such as the advocacy of Spaniards such as Pestaña with his Syndicalist Party and Garcia Oliver's eventual conversion to conspiratorial quasi-Leninist politics at least preserved some connection to reality. Going from anarchism to Maoism is no such thing. One can be comforted that such stillbirths are very much dependent upon their national milieu, and they will hardly be common outside of the USA.

So...stick with us as we explore the question of "why anarchist projects fail" in greater length in future posts.

You Are The Patient, I Am The Real Person

2008-05-08T06:59:00.001-07:00

Health and Single Payer in the United States

2008-04-26T20:40:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of our subject here below is an item from Scientific American, March 31/08, outlining that for the first time the majority of doctors in the United States now support a national health service or "single-payer" as it is called here in Canada. Of course this is hardly anarchism but it demonstrates that sanity is beginning to take hold down south among thinking people. Whether this will lead to a kind of "rational authoritarianism" (as opposed to the current quasi-theocracy) built along the lines of current European practice remains to be seen. My guess is that an American social democracy will be at best inspired by a "gradualist" social gospel in the tradition of Martin Luther King. But this possible train of events could depend on many things. If the United States continues to decline economically then things could get uglier. A welfare state is no guarantee of civil liberties as experience in the United Kingdom has demonstrated although is it also true the decline of liberty in England has gone in step with the weakening of reasonable state services like the NHS. Germany had state medicare with total coverage for "citizens"beginning in 1935. My "second approximation", and hope, is that an American NHS would be a cadillac service which Americans would come to see as a moral equivalent to their post office ... and last I heard the US postal service is fairly well regarded by citizens.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and fewer than a third oppose the idea, according to a survey published on Monday. The survey suggests that opinions have changed substantially since the last survey in 2002 and as the country debates serious changes to the health care system. Of more than 2,000 doctors surveyed, 59 percent said they support legislation to establish a national health insurance program, while 32 percent said they opposed it, researchers reported in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. The 2002 survey found that 49 percent of physicians supported national health insurance and 40 percent opposed it. "Many claim to speak for physicians and represent their views. We asked doctors directly and found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, most doctors support national health insurance," said Dr. Aaron Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who led the study. "As doctors, we find that our patients suffer because of increasing deductibles, co-payments, and restrictions on patient care," said Dr. Ronald Ackermann, who worked on the study with Carroll. "More and more, physicians are turning to national health insurance as a solution to this problem."

PATCHWORK

The United States has no single organized health care system. Instead it relies on a patchwork of insurance provided by the federal and state governments to the elderly, poor, disabled and to some children, along with private insurance and employer-sponsored plans. Many other countries have national plans, including Britain, France and Canada, and several studies have shown the United States spends more per capita on health care, without achieving better results for patients. An estimated 47 million people have no insurance coverage at all, meaning they must pay out of their pockets for health care or skip it. Contenders in the election for president in November all have proposed various changes, but none of the major party candidates has called for a fully national health plan. Insurance companies, retailers and other employers have joined forces with unions and other interest groups to propose their own plans. "Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care, and a majority now support national insurance as the remedy," Ackermann said in a statement. The Indiana survey found that 83 percent of psychiatrists, 69 percent of emergency medicine specialists, 65 percent of pediatricians, 64 percent of internists, 60 percent of family physicians and 55 percent of general surgeons favor a national health insurance plan.

A Short Rebuttal of Hobbes

2008-04-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

Freedom, Democracy and the Delusions of Power

For all his faults and the faults of the endeavour he was involved with, Jefferson was right on the essential point, in terms of political theory, which is the rebuttal that lays waste to Hobbes, the fantasy which still imprisons our minds and world, and that is: "If you can't trust men to govern themselves, how can you trust them to govern others?"

The core premise that I am addressing, the premise that you can't trust human beings, is the root of the Hobbsian fallacy. There are strong reasons to disagree with this premise, and I do, but let’s accept it for the moment for the sake of argument. Assuming, for the moment, that you can't trust people, who then, do you propose to govern people? The argument put forth by Hobbes, and accepted by so many scholars, politicians and business men, though it is clearly ridiculous, is this. You say you don't trust people, therefore you give some people enormous power. This should strike us as patently absurd, if not simply delusional. If you do not trust people with a little power, the power over their own lives, then why would you entrust them with overwhelming great power? Is not Lord Acton more sensible here? “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I think there is a great deal of confusion surrounding the issues of power in society, and the implications - as we have seen in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, China, Russia, Cambodia, and across the "Third World" in so many brutal, soulless, self-serving dictatorships - are extreme.

It seems to me that if you are afraid of people, if you take it as a basic assumption that you cannot trust people, then you have basically two choices - assuming there is no place to go to get away from people, or that you choose not to do so.

One choice, is the path of Hobbes: seek, cozy up to, or align yourself with some great power, in order to feel safe(r). But as we saw with Stalin, to name just one example, cozying up to power is no guarantee of protection, and as we see in all dictatorships or tyrannical regimes, of either right or left, seeking the protection of such powers leaves one in great danger from the very same powers. And seeking power oneself, when it is not a cozying up as a courtesan underling, or a mousy tugging at the coat tail for protection from above; when it is a grasping at the highest level of power, ie: becoming top dog oneself, this too is fraught with the greatest of danger, both from external and internal threats. The latter course leads generally to a life of paranoia, as it is always a reality that such power is impossible to guarantee, and even powerful emperors and empires fall to dust, invariably.

Therefore, the three variations on the first strategy - seek, serve/cozy up to, or align with a great power, is totally unreliable, and cannot ensure safety - far from it. In fact, this strategy opens the doors to even greater dangers.

The alternative to looking to power - your own or someone else's - to protect oneself, which is the essence of the Hobbesian hypnosis, or delusion, is to disarm - both oneself and others. This is what Jefferson aimed to do, I would say. And this is the basic premise of classical liberal democracy. (Jefferson was simply more coherent and consistent with regard to such views than many others at the time or since – though he too had his contradictions.)

To make an analogy: if you are afraid of people, you can get a gun - better yet, become a mob boss, a big gun - or you can lick the boots of the mob boss who has the guns, hoping he'll protect you, and won't get angry for some unforeseen reason one day and feed you to his dog. This is basically the power-seeking/power cozying-up/protect me mister powerful man set of patterns. Become a mob boss, or lick the boots, or whatever else is required, of the mob boss, and hope this strategy keeps you safe. It doesn't. And moreover, it should be repulsive to anyone to do either.

The alternative to becoming a mob boss, or licking the boots of the mob boss, is to eliminate the mob bosses - to disarm the threat. This is the basic gist of constitutional democracy, when intelligently applied, and particularly to that more robust form of constitutional democracy which is Jeffersonian democracy. Do not seek to gather power or align with centers of power, but rather, seek to distribute power and empower all, so that none have such excessive power that it could easily be abused.

To make another analogy, in a world where you perceive danger everywhere, as Hobbes did, you can start an arms race, hoping that great power will protect you, or you can work toward mutual disarmament. The former path is the one we have been on for some millennia now, and it has been a path of disaster. At this time, our weapons have grown so powerful that to continue down this path is a virtual guarantee of self-annihilation. The path of mutual disarmament is now the only viable path for human survival. This applies not only to the obvious aspects of disarmament, such as the universal elimination of all weapons of mass destruction, but to the more essential point of dissolving excessive concentrations of power in society, distributing power more broadly, and empowering all in equality, so that none have the means to terrorize or oppress others. Jefferson thus was far more sensible, more rational, and simply more sane than Hobbes.

Ultimately, the kind of elitist thinking which Plato and Hobbes represent, forms the basis of both feudal and fascist orders. Liberal democracy is antithetical to such notions, and libertarianism - left libertarianism, to be clear – is the most consistent application of this line of thinking which rejects elitist and authoritarian social structures. This is where Jefferson, for example, intersects with Chomsky. Jefferson understood the need to keep power decentralized politically in order to prevent its abuse, and understood equally well the need to place firm checks and limits on the powers of corporations, and what he called “the new monied aristocracy.” Jefferson, were he alive today, would be aligned with the libertarian left.

Chomsky put it remarkably succinctly when he said, ultimately, “you’re either an aristocrat or a democrat.” In other words, you either believe in rule by an elite, or you believe in rule by the people. The monarchies and aristocracies of feudal times were forms of elitist rule. The Caesars and Pharaohs and Babylonian kings represented forms of elitist rule. The theocracies of the Ayatollah Khomeini or the Taliban were forms of elitist rule. The reign of local thugs and war lords in parts of Africa is a form of elitist rule. The regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mussolini and Hitler were forms of elitist rule. And the emerging de facto world government, as the leading business journal, the Financial Times calls it, seated in Davos, Switzerland, is of course another form of elitist rule. All of these are antithetical to democracy, antithetical to freedom, antithetical to human rights, and antithetical to human dignity. They are a crude form of barbarism, masking itself, as always, as the salvation of the world. And there is now a powerful and dominant faction of the world’s business elite who want to create a most thorough form of elitist and authoritarian rule. We should shudder, and of course, defeat all such adolescent and dangerous dreams of self-deification. It would be very unwise to think that such infantile grandiosity, delusions of grandeur, or fantasies of total power have gone away, are a thing of the past, or can be dismissed as minor concerns. There are always a few who dream of complete domination, and will go to the greatest of lengths to attain their goal.

Plato became disillusioned with democracy after the council of Athens sentenced his teacher, Socrates, to death. Famously, he advocated a society ruled by philosopher kings. It sounds good in principle, but in reality it has almost without exception turned into a nightmare. Elite rule has almost universally brought oppression, tyranny, irrationality, stupidity and destruction upon humanity – over and over again throughout five thousand years of recorded history. Shall we try again? Have we not repeated this pattern enough? At present, the global business elite is planning the same routine, once more, and working fiercely and consciously to create Plato’s dream. They have decided that they are the wise kings, and want a global rule, with them in full control. Sounds like a recipe for total disaster to me, as I’m sure it does to most people. Yet here we go again. If we do not oppose the current trend, that is, if we do not reclaim our power, we will have a global feudal fascist order, and soon.

It is time we dispensed with our Hobbesian delusions, and decentralized power. Authentic democracy, freedom, human rights, and even human survival, now requires mutual empowerment and the dissolution of excessive concentrations of power in society. This would mean greater power for individuals, families, communities, states and provinces, joined together in federations of shared power and mutual aid and protection; and diminished power for national governments and large corporations. It would require firstly, however, a dismantling or opting out of investor rights agreements which transfer real power to unaccountable and undemocratic transnational centers of power, namely the global business elite. NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, the WTO, IMF, World Bank and SPP all concentrate real power in society in the hands of a few international business elites, as does the current global monetary system. All of these therefore are anti-democratic and incompatible with a future of social justice, democracy or freedom.

In order to decentralize power and reduce the possibilities for power to be abused or become oppressive – as Jefferson advised and even urged - the power of the nation state and national democracies must first be strengthened however, for it is the power of the nation state and national democracies which are one of the powers potentially available to people to fend off and reverse the growing concentration of power in the hands of a global investment elite. To save democracy, the global business elite must first be put in check, their powers limited and rolled back to a level where they can no longer dominate national governments, communities and the lives of virtually all of humanity. Once this is accomplished, and it will be, then we can look to decentralizing power further, in order to take democracy and freedom to new levels of maturation and fullness. I think I’m safe in saying that three of the thinkers I respect most, Chomsky, Jefferson and Thoreau, would all agree on this. First reduce the power of the global business elite, and return power to national democracies. Then we can talk about a future of sanity, sustainability, justice and peace. Until then, we are on the road to serfdom and slavery, if not self-destruction. It is time to take the power back.

Thomas Paine was right. The central issues of power in society are not so very complicated. Ultimately, it is largely a matter of common sense. The primary obstacles are fear, disempowerment and illusion. The answers therefore are clear. They are courage, empowerment and a basic clarity of mind. These three elements are all within our reach.

The future is in our hands.

J. Todd Ring,

February 13, 2008

Essential reading:

The Chalice and the Blade – Rianne Eisler

The Ecology of Freedom – Murray Bookchin

Mutual Aid – Petr Kropotkin

Escape from Freedom – Eric Fromm

The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude – Etienne de la Boitie

On Civil Disobedience – Henry David Thoreau

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Friere

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Max Weber

Powers and Prospects – Noam Chomsky

Year 501: The Conquest Continues – Chomsky

Necessary Illusions – Chomsky

Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

The End of America – Naomi Wolf

Trilateralism – Holy Sklar

The Collapse of Globalism – John Ralston Saul

The Great Turning – David C. Korten

Writings of J. Todd Ring

Wordpress: Writings of J. Todd Ring

YouTube - Prajnaseek's Channel

May 08: Anarchy + Health : Health + Anarchy

2008-04-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

Next Blog Carnival?

2008-04-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

So I guess the next Carnival will be on anarchism and health. So who is going to host this?

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy: Best of 07

2008-04-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

My favourite posts from last year [belated]:

1]

2]

3]

Anarchism and Health

2008-04-14T06:06:00.000-07:00

I don't want to keep hogging the moderator's chair on this blog but seems if someone doesn't occasionally step forward then nothing much gets done (Eugene where are you?). Anyway, last December, Venus suggested a topic about anarchism and health. Any thoughts on this one?

A Scandal in Bohemia ...aka Saskatchewan

2008-04-07T01:35:00.000-07:00

The following post was just sent as a letter to our local Regina newspaper, the Leader Post. It concerns the mounting scandal over a compromising videotape discovered by the provincial opposition party, New Democrats, while cleaning out an office. The tape shows a bunch of Saskatchewan Party (aka conservatives) and a future Conservative federal member of parliament getting drunk and making remarks about "fags spreading diseases" among other goodies. Right now there is even talk about the Premier of Saskatchewan attempting to sue Canadian Press(!!) for circulating the story. Boy is this guy dumb! I'm getting off this month's topic (again) but this thing needs telling especially since I don't have much faith in the Leader Post to print anything of significant value in its "letters" column (unless this is presented by someone "in authority") So I ask for your indulgence. The guy in the picture is MP Tom Lukiwski in 1991.

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By now everyone in Saskatchewan has heard about the videotaped comments which federal member of parliament Tom Lukiwski made about gays back in the nineties. The Leader Post devoted several pages based on an audio transcription of the tape. What is interesting is the general level of intelligence displayed by the subjects of this video. At times it is almost impossible to follow what was being said although alcohol only made things worse. Nothing really surprising there. What is notable are the Conservative and Sask Party supporters who are starting to whine about the "NDP fishing for dirt". Maybe they are but who really cares? How does the presence or absence of the NDP change the fact that that Lukiwski actually made the remarks on the tape to a chorus of ethic slurs and other childish babble. A better question is why our local neo-cons were dumb enough to actually put this stuff on tape in the first place? Naturally Lukiwski has gone through the motions of apology but what does that really prove? American politicians of the far right have gone through similar genuflection in the direction of Martin Luther King a man who laboured for the dignity of blacks in the United States and for a social democratic regime in that country. Considering the general disdain for anything which could be labelled as "socialist" or even "liberal" this would seem to suggest that politicians everywhere are con-artists capable of adjusting their rhetoric to the needs of the moment. That is hardly new for any political party.

Our idiot premier just announced that he would not try to sue Canadian Press for deformation of "character". Go Bubba.

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Martin Luther King Talks about Poverty

2008-04-04T16:16:00.001-07:00

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the American civil rights movement, was assassinated on 4th April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee while lending support to a sanitation workers' strike. He was shot by James Earl Ray at approximately 7:05 P.M. Ray's bullet struck King as he was standing on his balcony at the Lorraine Motel; King died approximately one hour later. Martin Luther Day, the third Monday in January, is one of four federal holidays celebrated in the United States based on the life of a single individual. Below is a short portion of a posting I did earlier in March highlighting MLK's views on poverty in the United States.

Here is an excerpt from the late Martin Luther King Jr 's last book. It was called Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). In a chapter titled "Where We Are Going" King states his support for the guaranteed income policy.

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In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one. Hence a housing program to transform living conditions, improved educational facilities to furnish tools for better job opportunities, and family counseling to create better personal adjustments were designed. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty.

While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at a similar rate of development. Housing measures have fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies. They have been piecemeal and pygmy. Educational reforms have been even more sluggish and entangled in bureaucratic stalling and economy-dominated decisions. Family assistance stagnated in neglect and then suddenly was discovered to be the central issue on the basis of hasty and superficial studies. At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing -- they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote, in Progress and Poverty:

"The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased."

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would hgave to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability.

This proposal is not a "civil rights" program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.

Our nation's adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.

John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as "not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam."

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

PintofStout's Favorite Post of 2007

2008-04-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

First, thanks for the invite to participate and post on the Carnival of Anarchy (two words I find kind of humorous together for some reason) blog.

Picking favorites is hard, especially when choosing amongst your own creations. I've done two "flashback" posts where I tried to pick some of my best posts to highlight, but end up having to remove many to avoid picking almost all of them. I picked this post on account of the subject that I touched on and hope to expand on in the future. It also got a few good comments and is generally pretty satisfactory. So from May 8, 2007 at Murphy's Bye-Laws:

Tearing Down the Wall Between Church and State

I first came across the writing of Christopher Hitchens in the forward of Choice: The Best of Reason. I recall him coming across as not particularly libertarian, though enough to qualify as a celebrity in libertarian circles at the time perhaps. It would be hard for me to gauge since I was rather new to the libertarian philosophy. What really grabbed my attention about Mr. Hitchens was his atheism. Since atheism was my channel into philosophy before I cared to engage in any thought about politics, this aspect of his writing stuck out.

Upon further reading of Mr. Hitchens I found him to be moderately libertarian and definitely passionate and outspoken. Then came 9/11 and Iraq and, like so many strong advocates for limited (or no) government, he was scared out of his wits and jumped on the war wagon. This hawkish shift was further emphasized by the fanatic religious nature of the “War on Terror.” Hitchens beat the anti-Muslim drum into battle sounding like a pro-government tyrant in the process.

So when I saw on Slate.com that he had a new book out, not about the wars but about religion in general, I was hopeful that he’d put down his drumsticks for a while. Based on the excerpts on Slate, there is some justification for that hope as he peels away the cake and icing of Islam and Mormonism to reveal the rancid creamy middle. For some reason I read those first and so didn’t notice the general essay on the evil of religion until after taking in a few specifics. Overall I can concur and agree with him on the vast majority of his points. In fact, I would only disagree on a matter of exclusion; an oversight maybe. Take this excerpt, for example:

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock…

Every point in the quoted passage may be true of atheists in a spiritual sense of belief - I know it holds true for me, but every point also directs you to a different belief, maybe even a faith: that of the state. No need to gather at regular intervals for auspicious days to grovel and declare ourselves unworthy? Try every two years on Election Day. Can’t run your own life? Well, just shoot on down to the polls and elect someone to do it for you! No priests or hierarchy above us to police us? What is the purpose of the police then, or the entire leviathan hierarchy of government above us? Sacrifice abhorrent to an ardent war-hawk?!! Say it ain’t so! The entire functioning of our government from Election Day to a day of debate in Congress and right on through to every single press conference to denounce this or that is a ceremony of epic proportions. Some of these very same atheists probably hold dear the US flag, the founding documents or the presidents of the past and present in a worshipful attitude. And the entire last sentence flies in the face of any nationalist – Pagan or Christian or Jew. Is Hitchens advocating human sacrifice to protect his sacred atheism or his precious nation(s) (not sure if he is British or American. Does it make a difference?) which host his superior western culture?

All these assumptions he makes regarding the nature of atheists are like Humpty Dumpty sitting on top of the imaginary wall built between church and state, dangling his feet over one side and completely ignoring what lies behind him. This is the wall that needs torn asunder, not because a theocracy is preferable, but because we already have a theocracy that rests belief in itself rather than a deity. We separate one belief system from the rest in order to elevate the chosen belief above the criticism of faith. Does it make a difference that we can see the government and prove it exists, where gods don’t enjoy that luxury? Not one bit; that would be conflating the church with the belief. Somehow the wall prevents scrutiny of the core beliefs that the church of state rest upon, and therefore needs taken down to see what foolish belief this particular church rests upon. Besides, walls can be dangerous; just ask Humpty.

At one point in time, the two were together as they should be. Kings were granted authority by God. When the paths diverged something was lost – or hidden in plain site: the origin of authority. When civil government shook god loose, it was able to put in its place other bogeymen which didn’t seem nearly as ethereal, but turn out to be just as groundless. It would be similar to saying that some particular holy book gave the authority to rule without ever acknowledging the contents or origins of the book. When the separation of church and state in the minds of the believers is eliminated, the nature of government will be exposed to the same criticism and crumbling non-foundation that spiritual religion is, rendering it only an old foolish belief subject to incredulous ridicule in many extreme cases. So I say, “Mr. Hitchens, tear down that wall!”

Anarchia's favourite post of 2007

2008-03-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

So, I keep forgetting to contribute to this site, but I'm gonna try to do better this year, I promise! My favourite post of 2007 on my blog, Anarchia, was originally written for a conference reader for an Aotearoa (New Zealand) anarchist conference held in July in Auckland (you can read a report-back on the conference here). In addition to the post below, I did a follow-up post not long afterwards, entitled Further Thoughts On Aotearoa Anarchist Organisation, and I've also done a follow-up of sorts, which is more of an expansion on some of the political reasoning behind my politics, in the last few days, entitled For Revolutionary Struggle, Against Activism. Enjoy!

What is to be done?
A proposal for an Aotearoa Anarchist-Communist Federation

By Asher (title stolen from Lenin – after all the bastard did to anarchists, I figure he deserves it)

In this current period of low levels of social struggle, anarchism across Aotearoa is failing to make any serious headway. Worker’s struggle, while possibly beginning a resurgence over the past 18-24 months, is undoubtedly low. Meanwhile, students are pacified with interest free loans and the days of registry occupations seem long gone, and the struggle for Tino Rangatiratanga remains subsumed in the Maori Party and electoral politics.

Anarchists currently engage in a wide range of activity, from explicitly anarchist projects and groups (such as A Space Inside in Auckland and Wildcat and The Freedom Shop in Wellington) to more broad based projects (like the Save Happy Valley Coalition and Radical Youth). Generally, anarchists in each city work autonomously of the other centres, with a limited amount of interaction between Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, mostly based on friendships. Anarchists in Dunedin and smaller centres nationwide are mostly on their own, with only the occasional conference/anarchist tea party or larger protest (like the 2004 anti-racist demo in Wellington) providing opportunities for larger scale communication and cooperation between the centres.

Generally, what little explicitly anarchist activity there is takes place in a synthesist fashion. Synthesist (or “big tent”) anarchist groups can involve people from across the anarchist tradition – from anarcho-syndicalists to post-leftists, from platformists to individualists. Because of this, the activity that takes place and the theory that is developed tends to work within the commonalities between all these wide-ranging facets of anarchist theory – generally confined to an opposition to capitalism and the state. This causes few problems, but what is missing from this is activity and the development of theory towards what we are aiming for – our agreement is generally limited to what we are against and very broad and vague statements of what we are for, but getting any more specific in this will bring to light the differences between our schools of anarchism.

Another issue in Aotearoa anarchism is the lack of intergenerational continuity. Anarchism has gone through several waves, with only a very small number of people staying involved across waves. One of the reasons for this is the activist/protest oriented nature of much of the anarchist activity currently engaged in. For many people, arrests are something that become less and less appealing and worthwhile, especially for anarchists with children or work commitments. At this point, many people drop out, even if their political beliefs have not changed. Additionally, while the number of children increases, it is still frequently a struggle for anarchists with children to remain actively involved. With much of the anarchist community being based on protests and friendship circles, those who find themselves unable to participate in these can easily find themselves left out entirely.

There is a way to move towards a solution to these issues – the lack of Aotearoa-wide anarchist co-ordination and communication, the lack of concrete action and development of theory towards what we are for and the lack of generational continuity. This is the formation of a non-synthesist specific national federation. In this, there are many current examples in other parts of the world that we can learn from, both in terms of their organisational structure and their action. The two examples I will discuss here are the Anarchist Federation (AF) in the UK, an anarchist-communist grouping (1) that is a member of the International of Anarchist Federations (2), and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC) in the USA and Canada, a platformist federation (3). In using these two examples, I don’t mean to say that they are the best examples we could look at, but simply that, as both are English speaking (NEFAC, a bilingual group, also has a French speaking section) and have a decent internet presence, they are comparatively easy to find out about.

The AF is organised into local groups who operate autonomously – having local meetings, writing and distributing propaganda and being involved as a group in other campaigns where they see fit. Nationally, the AF gets together once every three months with 1 day meetings of local group delegates, and once a year for a 2 day national conference. In order to join the AF, you need to agree with the aims and principles (4), make a commitment to be active in your local group and pay dues (a small percentage of your income) to fund the Federation. Nationally coordinated AF activity includes putting out two publications – the monthly bulletin Resistance (5) and the more in depth twice yearly magazine Organise! (6). Additionally, some local groups produce their own regular news sheet. As individuals, AF members are also involved in a wide range of other projects, such as agitation in their workplace and anti-fascist organising with Antifa (7).

Like the AF, the basis of NEFAC is in its local groups (collectives), spread across the north-eastern part of North America. NEFAC also has individual members in areas where member collectives do not exist, but “individual membership can only be seen as a temporary measure. It is the individual’s duty to join or form new groups, and the individual will have all the help of the Federation to this end.” Members (whether individuals or collectives) are those who agree with the aims and principles (8) and position papers (9) and commits to fulfilling the member responsibilities (10). If these conditions are met, the person then becomes a trial member for 6 months, and can only become a full member by means of a vote at a NEFAC conference. As well as members, NEFAC also has supporters (both individuals and collectives), who agree with the aims and principles and wish to work with NEFAC but either do not wish to or cannot fulfil the member responsibilities at the time. There is at least 1 NEFAC conference a year, focussing either on “internal organisation and theoretical development” or on “our intervention in the struggle of our class and our plan of action”. NEFAC produces a number of publications in both English and French, including the English magazine Northeastern Anarchist (11), and is also involved with the online platformist news and theory website Anarkismo (12). Collectives and individual members are also involved in local anti-war organising, workplace agitation and a range of other activities.

The creation of an anarchist-communist federation would be an extremely positive step in the development of anarchist theory and practice in Aotearoa. National co-ordination and communication could come from annual Federation conferences, and electronically via a Federation email loop and regular video-conferencing between mandated delegates from each local group. With a strong anarchist-communist basis, the local groups could organise self-education sessions, in the form of talks by one of the members or reading groups, and they could co-ordinate on a theoretical Federation publication. A more regular newssheet could also be published and distributed more widely. The permanence of the Federation would hopefully lessen the dropout of anarchists as they get older and/or have children, providing plenty of options for activity that can fit with people’s lives, and a ready-made place for the sharing of knowledge and experience between older and younger anarchists.

The existence of a nationally coordinated Federation of local groups would also be an effective organising tool when events occur that anarchists would want to be involved in. Last years lockout of Progressive Enterprise workers in Auckland, Palmerston North and Christchurch is a good example of this. There were a number of anarchists who spent a good deal of time at the picket lines in Auckland with the locked-out workers, and organised and took part in solidarity actions around the city. In Wellington, anarchists helped raise thousands of dollars for the workers, travelled the 3 hours to Palmerston North to support the workers there and blocked scab trucks. Christchurch anarchists were involved in creating a support group for the workers which picketed, leafleted and fundraised. This extensive anarchist involvement however, was mostly done on an individual basis, and outside of individual conversations with workers on the picket lines, our politics remained hidden. If there had been an Aotearoa Anarchist-Communist Federation during the lockout, we could have mass-produced our own leaflets supporting the workers for use during leafleting and fundraising. We could have put out a special issue (or issues!) of our newssheet with details of the lockout, interviews with the workers and details on how people could get involved in supporting them and distributed it across the country via our local groups. We could’ve used our resources to organise public meetings with locked-out workers speaking to raise money for the workers who spent a month without pay.

So, assuming there are people reading this and nodding their head in agreement, how can we create an Aotearoa Anarchist-Communist Federation? If there are, for example, a handful of people in each of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and perhaps in other centres, then all that is required is for us all to link up in our centres into local collectives with a commitment to working together to work out the details of how the Federation would function. In this we have the examples above to learn from, and there are plenty of other examples only a website away. If you are interested, visit http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/aacf and subscribe to the list to be involved in the discussion.

“Though strong local groups and initiatives are the basis of an effective national organisation, co-ordination and sharing of ideas must happen on the widest level if we are ever to organise a revolution. In addition, this organisation must be permanent, in the sense that it continues to exist and be active regardless of what big events may be taking place or how active particular individuals are. We need an organisation that can continue to exist, regardless of whether some individuals drop out or become less active.”
Anarchist Federation (UK)

(1): Anarchist Federation - http://afed.org.uk/
(2): International of Anarchist Federations - http://www.iaf-ifa.org/
(3): North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists - http://www.nefac.net/
(4): Aims and principles of the AF - http://afed.org.uk/aims.html
(5): Resistance, AF monthly bulletin - http://afed.org.uk/res/
(6): Organise, AF magzine - http://afed.org.uk/org/
(7): Antifa - http://antifa.org.uk/
(8): Aims and principles of NEFAC - http://nefac.net/node/104
(9): Position papers of NEFAC - http://nefac.net/node/26
(10): NEFAC member responsibilities - http://nefac.net/node/106
(11): Northeastern Anarchist, NEFAC English magazine - http://nefac.net/node/110
(12): Anarkismo - http://www.anarkismo.net

What is Objectivity .. Another Look

2008-03-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favourite "little" postings. In the past, the dim past for some, left wing people were noted for their dislike of scientific inquiry ... for a variety of strange reasons in my view. This was an unfortunate weakness which the "other guys" were always willing to exploit. Things today seemed to have changed in large measure although I still see the odd anarchist claiming that "global warming" is an establishment plot. The old "New Left" attitudes are now prominent among religious conservatives although in their case the products of science are generally accepted (if not always with enthusiasm) but not the methodology behind them. The best that can be said here is that some of these "feelings" are the result of fear, in addition to a vague sense that the products of technology are in some way a source of "moral decline" in everyday life. The so-named New Age movement was a contributing factor in the triumph of relativism which made things that much easier for the evils which followed as I tried to point out below:

Just discovered this short article originating in an old issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. Considering how extreme ideological "preferences" can interfere with worthwhile communication I thought this segment on pedagogy should be reprinted.

Scientists have beliefs and expectations about their work. Scientists are humans: They have professional egos, research projects to defend, and commitments to pet theories. While scientists often experimentally refute their own hypotheses and readily toss their theoretical failures into the trash bin, they sometimes strongly believe a hypothesis and truly hope it passes the test. Researchers usually have expectations about the probable success or failure of a hypothesis even in the absence of string commitments or opposition. Most students know scientists have biases, and some students, perhaps influenced by the epistemological relativism of the New Age movement, conclude that science is no more objective then personal experience or mythology. They fail to understand that the presence of beliefs and expectations among scientists does not mean that scientific research itself is biased. Scientists are trained to work with experimental procedures that, by and large, prevent their beliefs and expectations from influencing experimental results. Bias cannot be eliminated from science, but it can be isolated. When we speak of objectivity in science, we do not mean that scientists are completely free from bias; rather, we mean that good research utilizes experimental and data analysis procedures and standards that prevent bias from influencing the outcome of tests. Ideally, any personal beliefs the researchers have about the eventual outcome of the experiment should play no role in the outcome. Researchers with totally opposite preconceptions should arrive at the same results upon following the same procedures.

Michael Mussachia
"Objectivity and Repeatability In Science" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Nov/Dec, 1995)

Below is yet another video clip, this time from a lecture given by Richard Dawkins in reference to his book " The God Delusion". He notes that historical improvements in moral consciousness have not come about because of the influence of religious beliefs. There is simply no evidence for this. We can see that advances in the standard of knowledge and the corresponding standard of living are most notable in the last hundred years which moves "in parallel", to borrow from RD, with belief systems. Shag particularly likes the quotations from 'Abe' Lincoln and H.G. Wells illustrating how racial chauvinism was commonplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The "good old days" were a 'bit' more simple but they were not necessarily better. In many parts of the world horse sense is gaining ground over nonsense.

THE JOY OF BEING WRONG

2008-03-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

We should always remember those times when we were wrong about how we saw the world unfolding. It is from our errors that we learn. Hence this is my personal favorite of all my blog posts.

I was wrong about the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas. When the EZNL first made it into the headlines back in 1994, I though, "Oh no! another Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group." The worst thing that could happen to the liberation movement I felt, would be the re-birth of Leninist ideology in Latin America. Such a rebirth would spur imitators in the First World and any hope for a re-implantation of libertarian socialism would be if not over, at least made very difficult.

I am so pleased that I was wrong about the Zapatistas and they turned out not to be Leninists after all. No matter what the original intentions of the small group of Maoists who entered Chiapas in the early 1980's, the movement they helped create went in another direction. And they went with it - truly "learning from the people." Rather than Leninism, they turned to the peasant anarcho-populism of Emiliano Zapata, which never really died out.

Rather than allying with Leninists, the Zapatistas have close relations with the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. Rather giving rise to centralized authoritarian groups they have , by their existence, spurred the creation of mass social movements, one of which , The Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magón is a member of the international anarchist network, International Libertarian Solidarity

Discussing this development with an old friend at the recent Montreal Anarchist Book Fair, he said that it would be unlikely for indigenous people, given their culture and social organization, to be attracted to an authoritarian political movement. I think this has a lot to do with it.

I was also wrong about the end of "traditional" anarcho-syndicalist unions. After an initial burst of enthusiasm in the late-1970's - early '80's, unions like the CNT of Spain, French CNT and IWW lost members or split into hostile factions. I felt that these unions were finished as important instruments of working class struggle and that the essential ideas - self-management, local control, direct democracy and delegation - would arise elsewhere in new forms. This was already happening with the COBAs or base-committee organizations which developed in Italy and spread to France and Spain.

But out of the broken pieces of the old movement a new and revitalized syndicalism arose. The Spanish CGT now represents a million workers, the French CNT went from 100 members to 5000, the Italian syndicalists are gaining new members, the IWW has doubled its membership and is organizing once more. Anarcho-syndicalist groups are now found in virtually every European and Latin American country. And in Europe they work happily side by side with the COBAs.

May I continue to be wrong when I am pessimistic.

For more information see: Alternative Union Movement

The Best of "Venus Cassandra": Year 2007

2008-03-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

I put my name in quotes, because I am probably going to change it soon.

Anyhow, I am posting one of my more important anti-militarist pieces from 2007. It's especially relevant in the current context of increased chances of war against the Iranian nation-state. Though, I imagine the Bush admin. would insist they'd merely be targeting the evil Iranian government.

Just don't pay attention to their talk of using tactical nukes, and you might find the above to be a good defense.

Friday 10 Aug 2007

Make the Phones Ring Off the Hook and Fill the Inboxs

I was feeling increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of warding off the potential campaign of mass murder being planned against Iran, yet a post by Arthur Silber led me to realize that there might still be hope.

To quote the post:

Perhaps people think that nothing they do at this point can alter what seems close to inevitable. It may be that even large-scale, continuing public protest would change nothing — but we don’t know that. Since it hasn’t been tried, it is impossible to predict what the effects might be. And permit me to offer a recent example, an instance where activism on the part of a large number of “ordinary” Americans did in fact change an outcome of some significance.

In terms of substance, I view the example as a profoundly unfortunate one, for it has to do with the defeat of the immigration bill. I viewed that bill as a terrible one, but for reasons directly opposed to those offered by its loudest opponents — for their opposition was obviously racist in nature. Of course, they denied their objections were racist, but they all finally resorted to discussions of “demographics,” and what they viewed as terrifying changes in our “culture” and to “way of life.” Such coded words fool no one, and this kind of viciously disapproving attitude toward immigrants has a long and awful history in the United States.

But with regard to the following observations, I am not concerned with why opponents of the immigration bill fought it so vehemently: I am focused only on the fact that they opposed it so strenuously, and that their opposition had the intended effect. I’ve mentioned that I listen to far too much talk radio, in part because I don’t have television. I listened to a number of conservative talk radio shows during both recent periods when the immigration bill came up for consideration: Limbaugh, Hannity, Al Rantel here in Los Angeles, Mark Levin, and several others. On both occasions, all of the shows talked about the immigration bill all the time. They discussed what they viewed as its inevitable awful results, why it was “unAmerican,” how it would destroy our country, and included the other standard rightwing talking points on this subject.

And they all did something else: they told their listeners to call and email people in Congress, and to call and email various Republican organizations, including the Republican National Committee, and to take all these actions repeatedly. They provided phone numbers and email addresses, and they indicated the general message that should be conveyed. They didn’t do this only once in one show: they did it throughout their shows, on every show, for over a week both times. The message was unceasing and unrelenting. It was repeated over and over and over. You couldn’t listen to one of the major conservative talk shows without hearing it within five minutes of tuning in. It went on all the time.

One part of the message deserves particular note, and all of the shows I heard made the same point: they condemned those Republicans, including Bush, who supported the bill without mercy. They told people to inform the RNC and all the appropriate Congressmen and Senators that they would receive no further support of any kind, including financial support, unless the bill was defeated. In their view, support of the bill was a betrayal of core conservative principles. They therefore maintained that any such alleged “conservatives” did not deserve to be in office. As one, they said that these betrayers of the conservative faith should not hold power any longer — and that the principles they believed were imperiled were more important than the continuation in power by the Republican party.

Why not encourage a similar campaign when it comes to the Democratic base? Or anyone who is concerned about the prospect of military action against Iran. The idea would be to try planning some kind of sustained series of mass emailing, postal mailing, and phone calling days. It would be even better to see if enough people could be convinced to do these types of actions on a daily basis. I’ve decided to speak to as many individuals as I can in an effort to get them to take part in the above. I’ll ask them to speak to as many people as they can and see if some kind of chain reaction could be sparked. I also intend to devote more blogging time to the issue, so I can reach those who are not already convinced of the need to deter such an attack. I am asking anybody else reading this to do the same. It may be possible to deter the gang in Washington from another act of aggressive war via this kind of leaderless grassroots resistance.

Some other ideas:

- The college students reading this could try to see if they could organize some kind of teach-in on campus.

- The anti-war/left-libertarian/progressive/anyone concerned about this issue blogosphere could advertise these mass action days.

- The Center for a Stateless Society could publish op-eds that encourage opposition to war with Iran while simultaneously tying its origins to the existence of the nation- state. I have a piece started that will make such an argument.

The present context of horrific approval ratings for the Bush administration is ripe for a sustained information and call to action campaign. It would be positively and wonderfully dialectical! : -)

The link to the contact information page for the Senate is here, while the listing for the House of Representatives is here. It’s also possible to use this page to contact the folks in Washington. It’s never too late to start letting the governing class know that your electoral support for them is jeopardized by their heinous policies. They may not care about the victims of the warfare state, but a threat to their power is something that would be a cause for concern to them.

Correction: I don't think Bush has stated that the use of tactical nukes is being considered. It's an allegation made by journalist Seymour Hersh. You can read the article by clicking on this link.

A New Subject ...

2008-03-21T18:51:00.000-07:00

It's more than half way through March. How about this for a new subject? Take your best posting from your own blog or personal website of 2007 and reprint it here? Maybe say what was your source of inspiration. Any thoughts?

Nobody for President

2008-03-05T18:15:00.001-08:00

Once again I'm adding an item that is not quite within the subject "outline" we've agreed upon. Yet I feel that the issue of elections and the general refusal of anarchists to take part in them is an important moral and therefore personal consideration. It is vital that "justice be seen to be done" at all times if we are to be deemed worthy in the eyes of normal people. Below is one of best general statements of the traditional anarchist anti-election position I've seen courtesy of the good comrades at Anarkismo.net. For those Canadian anarchists who are bemoaning the Conservative election victory in Alberta with a total voter turnout of 41.3 % (about what I had expected) I suggest you think this over carefully. You can't have things both ways! If you claim that parliamentary elections are merely a source of confusion we can't just turn around and arbitrarily deny these principles just when things don't seem to be going "our way". The regime in that province is bad but this is not fascism, and whatever happens in that province for the near future none of it can be really blamed on "leftists" .

Why I Won’t Vote for Obama...

...Or for Hillary, And Certainly Not for McCain, And Not Even For Ralph

In the United States, there has developed an enthusiastic movement of support for the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama. Besides the large forces he appeals to, especially among young adults, he is overwhelmingly supported by the left: liberals, social democrats, and Stalinists. I appreciate the movement-like aspect of his popular support, yet I personally will not vote for him. I do not try to persuade individual friends, family members, and co-workers not to vote for him, but I would like to change their attitudes. It is typical of liberals, etc. that they start elections by declaring the Democratic candidate to be the “lesser evil” (which admits that he or she is an evil). But as the election gets closer, they become convinced of the great goodness of the candidate. (In psychology, this is called the operation of cognitive dissonance. After all, who wants to believe of oneself that we are supporting someone evil? So we persuade ourselves that the evil politician is actually good.)

Let me give some anecdotes about the real Obama. In the left-liberal journal, The Nation (2/18/08), Christopher Hayes wrote a pro-Obama article, “The Choice.” He recalled, “For the Chicago left, his primary campaign and his subsequent election to the Senate was a collective rallying cry….Young Chicago progressives felt…He is one of us and now he is in the Senate (p. 20).”

And yet…. “That’s not, alas, how things turned out,” writes this supporter of Obama. “Almost immediately, Obama…shaded himself toward the center….His record places him squarely in the middle of Democratic senators (same).” This is a typical story of a young idealist becoming corrupted by playing the game of bourgeois electoral politics.

Hayes suspects that this was due to Obama having “an eye on national office.” But there were other corrupting forces. For example, Obama has boasted to campaign crowds in Iowa that he had passed a law to increase regulation of nuclear power plants. Specifically this was a response to the Exelon Corp. which had failed to inform the public about radioactive leaks at one of its plants. Senator Obama scolded both Exelon and federal regulators. He presented a bill to force nuclear power companies to disclose even small leaks. On the stump, Obama stated that this was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed. I did it just last year (New York Times, 2/3/08, p. A1).”

However, this was a lie. Obama had introduced such a bill, but it was repeatedly weakened until it no longer imposed any demands on the nuclear power industry…and then it was dropped. Obama never got any law regulating the nuclear power industry passed. Why did he cave in? The New York Times reports that Exelon was “one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money (same, p. A17).” Since 2003, Obama has gotten more than $227,000 from officials and employees of Exelon. Two of the top executives are among his biggest donors. Obama’s chief political strategist has been an advisor to Exelon.

In short, good intentions (I assume Obama had good intentions and that it was not a fraud from the start) were overwhelmed by the influence of big business. Of course Obama is a supporter of the capitalist economy. He hopes to be the top administrator of the capitalist economy. In no way is he anti-business, no matter how many unions endorse him. No doubt he would deny that there are necessary conflicts between labor and business. The bringing together of clashing forces is one of his central ideas. For example, rather than fight for a single payer health insurance plan —which would alienate the insurance industry— he proposes a health program which would include the insurance companies, providing them with lots of cash. But like his nuclear regulation bill, the insurance companies will do all they can to water down his original plan and then to kill it if they can.

Perhaps to most people, Barack Obama’s biggest appeal is his opposition to the Iraq war. Unlike Senator Hillary Clinton (let alone John McCain), he opposed the war in the beginning. But this does not make him an anti-war candidate. He proposes that most U.S. troops withdraw, but that a significant number (precise amount unspecified) will remain to guard U.S. personnel, to train forces of the puppet Iraqi government, and to “strike at Al Qaeda.” What he would actually do in the face of a collapse of the Iraqi government is anyone’s guess.

But whether or not Obama will continue this particular war, he remains a supporter of the U.S. empire. This empire has military bases in approximately 150 countries and military alliances around the world. Despite its decline, it still dominates the international economy and drains wealth from every continent. Obama is for this empire , which he discusses in terms of the “national interest,” meaning the interest of the U.S. ruling class (including the executives of Exelon). Because he supports this empire, he is most likely to remain in this war and to get into other wars. In interviews, he has already said that he might bomb Pakistan and that he would consider military action against Iran.

Another major appeal is his race. Just by being himself, an African-American, he makes the point that it is possible for People of Color to rise in our society, even to be president. However, this distracts us from the real problems of U.S. racism. Most African-Americans will remain at the bottom of society, impoverished, last hired and first fired, and subject to police violence. This will not change by having a cool Black man as president. True racial change will require a social upheaval, not just the election of one person.

When pressed, many liberals and social democrats will admit that Obama, like Hillary Clinton, is a candidate of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. But, they argue, he is far less of an evil than Senator John McCain. In McCain the Republicans have put their best foot forward. Unlike the inept Bush, he is intelligent and witty, a war hero, and he sometimes shows some humanity (as in opposing torture, before he caved). He is still hated by the far right, which does him credit. Yet for all that, he is pledged to carry on the Iraq war, if necessary for a “hundred years..” In general he will continue the programs of the vile Bush regime. It is important to oppose him. Since the U.S. population is far from ready to support a socialist (or anarchist) alternative, it is argued, we must support Barack Obama as the lesser evil.

In response, I accept that the Democrats, however evil, are indeed the lesser evil. I only doubt that the greater evil can really be defeated by supporting the lesser evil. After all, liberals, unionists, the African-American community, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the GLBT community, etc., etc., have been supporting the Democrats for decades, generations. And yet the Republicans have moved more to the right, and the Democrats have also moved to the right (but remain just a little bit to the left of the Republicans). Lesser-evilism has not worked very well.

Instead of comparing the Democrats to the Republicans, I propose a different standard: What is necessary to save the country and the world from disaster. Does the candidate have a program which will prevent the economic crisis we are sliding into? Will he solve the danger of ecological/ environmental/ energy catastrophe? Will he reverse the spread of nuclear weapons before there is a nuclear war? To claim that Obama (or even Ralph Nader, the independent) reaches this standard is absurd.

No one person can be an effective chief administrator of a unit as large as the United States. On the other side of the coin, any one person’s vote does not make a difference, considering the size of the country. This is just too big a social unit. We need vibrant local democracies, political, economic, and social, more than we need an imperial president.

People argue with me: But what if everyone (or if a lot of people) had your (my) negative attitude toward elections or for supporting pro-capitalist candidates? My response is: Great! Then there would be a mass movement.

The gains of the thirties labor movement were won mainly through sit-ins in the factories as part of mass strikes. The gains of African-Americans in the fifties and sixties were won through mass civil disobedience and urban uprisings (“riots”). The struggle against the Vietnam war was fought through massive demonstrations, student strikes, and a virtual mutiny in the army.

The gains of most social movements have been won through non-electoral means, not by electing lesser-evil politicians. Independent electoral actions, such as that of Ralph Nader or the Green Party, have never been very useful. If successful (as in some European countries), they will also be corrupted by the pressures of electoralism, money, and the need to administer a giant capitalist government.

My goal is not to persuade individuals to not vote. It is to raise the idea of independent mass struggle. A single general strike in a U.S. city would do more to advance the struggle for freedom than any number of Obamas.

It is exciting to see the popular response to Obama, especially by young people. This lays the basis for a new New Left, a new wave of radicalization. But that will be based on recognizing the truth and telling the truth, as best as we radicals can see it — not by capitulating to the illusions which others still have. A new radicalization will develop when people are disillusioned by Obama and the Democrats. And this will happen. Or we are all in big trouble.

I had the television on just now
so let's add this famous speech
from the voice of "every man"

American Surgeon General Criticizes "Mental Health" Scams

2008-03-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

Since we still seem to be talking about personal psychology and whatnot here is an item I tripped over while looking for new material. I posted this on my own blog but thought it might be of interest over here. The article's source is Insight on the News which appears to be a left-liberal news service. My copy-and-paste originates from Bnet-Business Network News. The first is embedded in the second as far I can see. Anyway the article was printed in 2002 so the information is somewhat dated in some aspects but still worth reading. It demonstrates a belief the Shag has held for some time that news sources directed to a ruling audience are sometimes fairly capable, even honest. Certainly they're ahead of what we usually see on television or the "popular" press. The subject matter deals with a real opinion held by some intelligent portions of the health bureaucracy (in this case American) concerning attempts to "medicalise" psychological problems. Of course anarchists should not be surprised by any of this although I still see some left libertarians using terms like "mental illness" as part of their "critiques" of everyday life. Bad habits die hard I guess. For one Canadian "take" on this issue here, again, is an item which I lifted from the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry on the etiology of depression.

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U.S. surgeon general admits diagnoses of psychiatric mental disorders is not science

A child who doesn't like doing math homework may be diagnosed with the mental illness developmental-arithmetic disorder (No.315.4). A child who argues with her parents may be diagnosed as having a mental illness called oppositional-defiant disorder (No.313.8). And people critical of the legislation now snaking through Congress that purports to "end discrimination against patients seeking treatment for mental illness" may find themselves labeled as being in denial and diagnosed with the mental illness called noncompliance-with-treatment disorder (No.15.81).

The psychiatric diagnoses suggested above are no joke. They represent a few of the more than 350 "mental disorders" listed in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the billing bible for mental disorders which commingles (good term) neurological diseases with psychiatric diagnoses. Whether the described diagnoses are real diseases or subjective speculation, science is at the heart of the debate about whether lawmakers will require employers and insurers to cover "mental illness" (my quotation marks) on the same level as physical disease.

Advocates of the Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act of 2002 (S 543), and its sister proposal in the House (HR 4066), are seeking to expand the 1996 "mental-health parity" legislation. It mandates employers with more than 50 employees and that offer mental-health coverage to provide insurance benefits equal to those of standard health care, such as surgery and physician visits.

The psychiatric diagnoses suggested above are no joke. They represent a few of the more than 350 "mental disorders" listed in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the billing bible for mental disorders which commingles neurological diseases with psychiatric diagnoses. Whether the described diagnoses are real diseases or subjective speculation, science is at the heart of the debate about whether lawmakers will require employers and insurers to cover mental illness on the same level as physical disease.

The pending proposals would expand the 1996 legislation to require that caps, or limitations on coverage, be the same for mental illnesses as those provided for medical illnesses, in the name of so-called mental-health parity. When it comes to "mental illness" and "medical illness" however, there is no scientific parity between the two schools of thought. That is, only one is based in physical science.

Proponents of mental-health parity believe, and have for the most part successfully convinced lawmakers, that the mental illnesses described in the DSM-IV are medical diseases. For example, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is considered medically equivalent to, say, measles or anemia.

But critics patiently explain that the psychiatric "mental illness" as described in the DSM-IV is a subjective diagnosis that lies in the eye of the beholder rather than in proved medical science. How this issue is decided, these critics say, likely will determine whether millions of American families will be priced out of health insurance.

Fred Baughman, a San Diego neurologist and leading critic of the alleged mental illness called attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (see picture profile, Feb. 18), tells INSIGHT the question that must be answered before a mental illness can qualify as a disease is this: "Where is the macroscopic, microscopic or chemical abnormality in any living patient or at death/autopsy?"

Baughman explains: "No one is justified in saying anyone is medically abnormal/diseased until such time as they can adduce some such abnormality. This, by the way, would apply to a person suspected of having diabetes or cancer."

The fact is, Baughman adds, "There is no psychiatric diagnosis for which any part of this question can be answered in the affirmative. In other words: no abnormality; no disease. There is no confirmation of abnormality in the brain in life or at autopsy for any of the psychiatric diagnoses. And they [in the psychiatric community] don't say this because it's part of the propaganda campaign to make patients out of normal people. The findings at autopsy would be very specific and would reveal whether it is a diseased brain and, if so, which disease it is. There is no proof in life or at autopsy of any of the alleged psychiatric mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, OCD or ADHD."

Here is Baughman, an internationally respected neurologist, denying there is any such thing as an authentic diagnosis of psychiatric disease at precisely the same time that Congress appears to be getting ready to mandate equal and comparable coverage of psychiatric and medical diseases as the same thing. Perhaps lawmakers haven't asked for the supporting science, or perhaps it has just been withheld from them.

To try to find out which, INSIGHT sent carefully prepared questions about mental illness to the APA and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the two leading advocates of mental-health parity. Here are those questions:

* How many disorders that are listed in the DSM-IV are curable?

* What documentable, confirmatory, diagnostic, physical abnormality is found in schizophrenia, ADHD and depression?

* What confirmatory, diagnostic tests are available and currently utilized to detect a chemical imbalance?

The APA would not respond to the questions and the NIMH, which claimed not to get involved in policy issues, deferred to a psychiatrist who refused to speak on the record. Both groups did, however, suggest reviewing the 1999 Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, which INSIGHT promptly read. The report contained the remarkable statement that, "in the United States, mental disorders collectively account for more than 15 percent of the overall burden of disease from all causes and slightly more than the burden associated with all forms of cancer."

But nowhere in the surgeon general's report was there any reference to a single confirmatory, diagnostic test that proves any physical abnormality in any psychiatric diagnosis. More importantly, several chapters into the report the surgeon general admits what Baughman and other neurologists have been saying for years: "The diagnosis of mental disorders is often believed to be more difficult than diagnosis of somatic or general medical disorders since there is no definitive lesion, laboratory test or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify the illness"

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Perhaps this is the reason George Bush wants to force "mental health" examinations on the entire American population. Seems a bit strange coming from a "conservative" administration which bellyaches about "big government". This issue was brought up in the British Medical Journal (June 19,2004). The BMJ also pointed out the support which the pharmaceutical industry gave to the so-called "Texas Algorithm" and Bush electoral campaigns. The usually overworked term "fascism" would probably apply here.

More recently there have a wave of news items proclaiming that popular anti-depressants of the SSRI type basically do not work. Here is one from the Independent in England concerning a study of the efficacy of these drugs done at the University of Hull. Part of
this is reproduced here.

"In the study, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth. The results showed the drugs were effective only in a very small group of the most extremely depressed.

Two drugs were excluded from the study because of incomplete data. A third drug, chemical name nafazodone, has been withdrawn from the market because of side-effects.

Professor Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, who led the study published in the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine , said the data submitted to the FDA would also have been submitted to the licensing authorities in Britain and Europe. It showed the drugs produced a "very small" improvement compared with placebo of two points on the 51-point Hamilton depression scale."

Sexual Anarchy

2008-03-01T12:58:00.000-08:00

My posts on Anarchism and sexuality.

What’s Love got to do with it?

An Anarchist Response to The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Whose Family Values?

Marx on Bigamy

Paul Goodman

The Sexual Revolution Continues

Polygamy is NOT Polyamoury

A Little Eros For Valentine's Day

Money And Emotion

2008-02-26T19:22:00.000-08:00

From an interesting blog called Money and Values I read a post dealing with the psychological effects of sadness on spending money unnecessarily. The blog owner describes herself as "connecting personal finance with ethics, values, and priorities: frugal living, socially and eco-conscious consuming, and other financial choices for a fulfilling and meaningful life". Working my way through a number of links I've found a source for studies which have been going on for most of this decade. Some this seems fairly obvious but still it's interesting to look at.

A research team finds that people feeling sad and self-focused spend more money to acquire the same commodities than those in a neutral emotional state. The team’s paper, “Misery is not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More,” will be published in the June 2008 edition of Psychological Science and will be presented at the Society for Social and Personality Psychology’s Annual Meeting on Feb. 9.

The new study follows up on earlier research that established a connection between sadness and buying. Researchers Cynthia Cryder (Carnegie Melon University), Jennifer Lerner (Harvard University), James J. Gross (Stanford University), and Ronald E. Dahl (University of Pittsburgh) have now discovered that heightened self-focus drives the connection – a finding that expands understanding of consumer behavior and, more broadly, the impact of emotions on decision-making.

This latest study found that participants who had just watched a sad video were willing to pay almost 4 times as much for a water bottle than those who watched a neutral video-- and yet they didn't think that the video or their sadness had anything to do with their decision. The study found that the sad subjects were willing to pay $2.11 on average for the water bottle, compared to $0.56 on average by the neutral subjects. Their analysis also found that among subjects with low self-focus, their sadness level did not have a significant effect on what they were willing to pay, and they hypothesize that the findings are caused by the increased self-focus that usually results from feeling sad.

One of the issues here should be that any form of diversion will tend to mitigate milder forms of depression. Watching old John Candy movies is probably a cheaper way to go. As the mothers of older generations used to say " Dear, I think I'll just go out and buy a hat". This study suggests something similar. There is also, in my view, a possible connection between these observations and the honest signaling theory to which evolutionary biologists are beginning to subscribe ( and psychiatrists dislike). Depression may result in increased generosity as a mechanism of "reaching out" ... part of a bid to enforce sincere reflection. Moreover some unpleasant emotions generated largely by politicians and other "helping persons" as they attempt to remove citizens from the results of their own actions (or inactions) can and are being "mined". "Learned helplessness" is an analogue to the medical condition known as pica or "depraved appetite". The whole business of "co-opting", a poor expression perhaps, can be used to reinforce greater levels of state control. We usually call this effect, in common language, as "plotting" a "Reichstag Fire" . In other words the conditions of our lives tend to exaggerate certain responses to levels which may be less than ideal from the point of long term survival but might be understandable as expressions of fear and worry. Generous feelings and hostility combined together can be seen in certain aspects of "redneck "culture and even back in the "Hippie" subcultures of the Vietnam era. A popular icon like country singer Willie Nelson is an example of a "cross-over" between these old and new forms of "basic" protest.

Comrade Matt Jenny Comments on Gender Roles

2008-02-26T15:19:00.000-08:00

Sorry if my use of the word "Comrade" dredges up memories of the Soviet Union. I've just really loved using it lately.

Anyhow, I present to you a very anarchristically flavored take on gender roles:

The following is a translation of a post that I wrote for the German left-libertarian group blog paxx:blog. Even though I've already gotten some feedback on the German version (among others, not necessarily justivied allegations of social constructivism), I haven't changed the contents. Feedback is very welcome!

Guercino: Venus, Mars, and Cupid

In my view, one of the greatest merits of the Russian American philosopher Ayn Rand is how she uncovered false dualisms, in the language of Rand expert Chris Sciabarra. [1] Following Rand's method of (social) analysis I will show in what follows to what extent the still predominant gender roles, which are probably best expressed by the thousand years old archetypes of Venus and Mars, are so-called "anti-concepts" and "package deals" and why we should---especially as libertarians and anarchists---disperse with the Venus/Mars-dualism. I will concentrate on the normative aspects of established gender roles, irrespective of any discussion about a possible biological foundation of these roles. [2] Furthermore and to simplify matters, I will confine myself to heterosexual gender roles. Similar demands which can be found in heterosexual gender roles can also be found in homo- and also in bisexual gender roles.

Roderick Long summarizes the Randian notions of "anti-concepts" and "package deals" in his essay "Rothbard's 'Left and Right': Forty Years Later" as follows:

Rand used to identify certain terms and ideas as "anti-concepts," that is, terms that actually function to obscure our understanding rather than facilitating it, making it harder for us to grasp other, legitimate concepts; one important category of anti-concepts is what Rand called the "package deal," referring to any term whose meaning conceals an implicit presupposition that certain things go together that in actuality do not.

I contend that the conepts of the typically female and the typically male are exactly these kinds of package deals. This becomes particularly apparent once we become aware of the normative demands, which are implied in these concepts. They demand from women and men to accept roles which, from a moral perspective, are full of inner contradictions. Furthermore, these gender roles wrongly suggest that the female and the male exclude one another and that a woman cannot have any typically male character traits and vice versa.

Let us first consider, which adjectives are associated with the archetypically female. On the one hand, we have adjectives such as "sensual", "empathetic", and "caring". On the other hand there are adjectives such as "irrational", "hysterical", and "maternalist". We find an almost mirror-inverted image when we find the archetypically male. On the one hand, it can be described through such adjectives as "rational", "independent", and "strong", but adjectives such as "unemotional", "aggressive", and "antisocial" describe it too. [3]

To reveal the inner contradictions and the one-sidedness of these six respective descriptions and demands, we will next look at an apparent dualism which advocates of a freed market are very familiar with: cooperation vs. competition. Many statists associate the peaceful, the orderly and the social with ("humane") cooperation, while they link ("cold") competition to violence, chaos and "the law of the jungle." That is why they demand competition to be surpressed or at least controlled to protect cooperation. Some of those statists recognize that this is only possible through the use of force but few of them are bothered by this contradiction.

One of the errors of this analysis lies in the failure to recognize that both cooperation and competition are generally possible in an aggression free but also in a totalitarian context. It is also not recocnized that cooperation and competition require each other in order for each of them to be realized and that their full realization is only possible in the absence of aggression. Thus, those who wish to maintain peace, order, and society are not given the choice between cooperation and competition but between liberty and aggression.

The picture is similar regarding gender roles. As we have seen, the female and the male can be described through both positive and negative adjectives -- through adjectives that support peace, order and society, but also through adjectives that oppose peace, order and society. But a humane, cooperative society with a healthy amount of competition requires both sensuality and rationality, empathy and independence, and care as well as strength.

These two respective concepts require each other: rationality needs to guide sensuality and vice versa; empathy is only possible with a certain amount of independence while empathy is also needed to guide independence; and finally, care requires strength while strength can only be achieved through care. And hysteria, irrationality, maternalism, lack of emotionality, aggression and antisociality all stand in the way of peace, order and society.

Thus, what we need is an anarchist Cupid, which internally brings together the better half of Venus and the better half of Mars in each person, instead of a statist Cupid, which tries to externally unite the contradictory package deals of Venus and Mars.

Or in other words: From a libertarian point of view it would be helpful to abandon the traditional Venus/Mars-dualism, as it is interpreted above, and to replace it with an idea of humans which unites the best traits of both archetypes, regardless of gender -- or of sexuality.

[1] See Sciabarra's monumental study Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical for a detailed discussion of Rand's methodology.
[2] I will only say this much: As a layman, I don't think much of the biological/biologistic arguments.
[3] Again for simplicity's sake, I have concentrated on character traits in a narrow sense, irrespective of the normative-aestetic demands which the established gender roles imply.

You can view the blog post at this link

Something is Very Right in the State of Denmark

2008-02-18T02:37:00.000-08:00

I realize this is off topic and whatnot but it's such a good thing; I wanted to say this out loud as far and wide as possible. Long ago and not so far away I wrote a comment on the infamous Winnipeg (Canada) Indymedia site which among other things provided a link to those Danish cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. I was denounced as a racist, of course, and my stuff was deleted. (I wonder sometimes who is exactly behind that site and whether they have anything to do with any political parties in this country. Just a guess that). Actually I took this as a kind of a compliment, although perhaps not with much relish (or even ketchup). Or in the words of another Great Dane (woof) the theologian Søren Kierkegaard " At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference".

Copenhagen (AP) -Five major Danish newspapers have reprinted the controversial cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The newspapers are publishing the cartoon in response to the arrest on Tuesday of three people who allegedly were planning to kill the artist who drew the cartoon, Kurt Westergaard. The suspects are a Dane of Moroccan origin and two Tunisians. The publication of the 12 Muhammad cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten two years ago led to angry demonstrations in many Islamic countries; some 150 people were killed.

Anarchism and Sexuality/Gender Issues: Let's Get It On!

2008-02-13T21:10:00.000-08:00

I hereby invite the carnival members to participate in a discussion on the topic of anarchism and sexuality. After posting that Goldman essay on jealousy, I decided that this would be a good thing to talk about.

I encourage people to be as creative as possible in coming up with ideas for posts, but here are some suggestions:

1. Talk about the relation between anarchism and feminism. You'd probably be hard pressed to find a left-wing anarchist who doesn't consider themselves a feminist, but there are Rothbardian influenced libertarian anarchists on here too. I am not sure if all of them would say they are feminists. I know Roderick Long is one though. And some would say that Rothbard wasn't even an anarchist. If you want to hear my take on the issue, then just email me.

2. Is monogamy or polyamory more consistent with the anarchist ideal? Does it really matter? Is jealousy innate, and does that undercut notions of "free love"? Is polygamy or polyandry compatible with anarchism?

3. Does the existence of patriarchy provide the ideological basis for the existence of the state? Does matriarchy also do so? If not; why not?

4. What can anarchist philosophy help us understand in the area of gender and gender roles?

Please start posting your responses on the 29th of this month.

Happy Writing!

Results of Melbourne and World Scientology protests

2008-02-12T03:39:00.000-08:00

EPIC WIN.

Melbourne Anonymous and Anonymous around the world, I applaud your efforts.
We have begun the first phase of our strike and to educate the public.
We have found many who wish to join anonymous in their fight, and I have planted seeds for the lady in many various forms.
More later, I'm dissapointed in the lack of media coverage for the melbourne raid, so I intend to do a personal report.

Till then, pictures of melbourne raids here.
http://melbraid.110mb.com/

For a great world report, head over to Popular front of Discordia.

A Few Notes on Global Warming

2008-02-11T19:31:00.000-08:00

I received a comment on my blog from someone whose point of view represents what has come to be called "climate change denial" by enthusiasts of the "pro" point of view. I have pointed out in previous postings that some aspects of the global warming issue are being "tapped" by statists who see every public issue as an excuse for greater managerial control (like Kyoto) but it is still not reasonable to believe that current warming is just "weird luck". Arguments about the Little Ice Age and so forth are a comparison of apples and oranges. Current warming trends have simply happened too fast to be due to luck. But even if this weren't true what real difference would it make anyway? The obsession with wasteful consumption is a poor way to live but we don't need government busybodies to tell us this or provide "solutions" on their terms. Here is a small example of how some 'conservatives' (in the bad sense of that word) manage to convince the public of the climate "conspiracy" . From the Inter Press Service News Agency last year:

TORONTO, Aug 16 (IPS) - Scientists warn that climate change tipping points are imminent, and will lead to potentially catastrophic events like a seven-metre sea level rise. Meanwhile, conservatives in the North American media are focusing on a NASA admission of a climate calculation error.

First the error. U.S. and Canadian mainstream media and Internet news sites devoted tens of thousands of words over the past week to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies admission that it made a calculation error ranking 1998 as the warmest year on record in the United States when it should have been 1934.

While the difference is only a few hundredths of a degree, the climate change deniers variously cite this as evidence of NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) incompetence and cover-up, and more proof that global warming is a hoax.

The neo-conservative U.S. network Fox News reported Aug. 9 that "the discovery of an embarrassing temperature error rained on their (the 'alarmists') parade." Canada's National Post on Monday said the reasons given for climate change "hysteria" were "no longer true".

The Washington Post and the Toronto Star both noted the reaction of conservatives in the media and in the blogosphere, including outspoken radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who said: "We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA. The man-made global warming is in the scientific community with false data."

Forgotten in all this is that U.S. temperatures are only a small part of the global mean average temperatures, which remain unchanged even with NASA's re-calculation. Nine of the 10 hottest years globally have occurred in the last decade, although that is not the case in the United States, where there were several very warm years in the 1930s.

Wow...