Just to know...I'd like to have a band, one day, that talk about social issues dear to me (but in a particular way...) and play the best kind of music, the IT.
and dyna your English is fine ,its just our humour round here is a bit exotic at times .
You are right the talking and good company is a big part of the fun
I'm not so sure that Irish traditional music and anarchy would make comfortable bedfellows. If you are not subservient to master musicians who precede you, you will never get it.
"I'm not so sure that Irish traditional music and anarchy would make comfortable bedfellows. If you are not subservient to master musicians who precede you, you will never get it."
Well, as usual, you started the name-calling. Imagine that, you can use the word intellectual. Now define it. Hell, why waste the time? It would be wrong, anyway. All you lefties are good for is name-calling and whining. And if you want me to crawl under a rock, try stuffing me there.
Here's me trying to figure out what a "rock dipstick" is. Is it something to do with the manufacturing process of that lettered rock you get in seaside towns?
Sorry... "Crawl back under your rock, dipstick." Better? Or "Hey dipstick, crawl back under your rock." I know, a dipstick combined with a rock is a mixed metaphor, but I kinda liked the way it tripped off the tongue.
I'm still trying to figure out "fagboy." The guy seems to have "issues" with sexuality .
At least there was no ambiguity with "fagboy" though. No problems with the punctuation or anything. The meaning of what he wishes to express is absolutely crystal clear
Aye lad. That is true. Perhaps I should have said what I really meant to say, but I seem to remember that there are language filters on this site. Correct?
I know. It's difficult when you want to say something like "eff off you effing c", and you know that if you type the full words they will be censored and filtered. I suppose you just have to make do with saying nothing at all
Yeah, you know me. If I've got something to say, I'll say it. Sometimes you just have to find a way of getting the message across in a polite and gentlemanly way
Technically, Ron Foreman started the name-calling with the "Osama Obama" bit. A bit of nasty venom that should get this thread deleted shortly. Also really completely out of place here.
Let's take bets on how long he lasts on this site before Jeremy loups in him out onto the street. "Ye're barred! Don't fvcken come back here!"
Anyway, Dyna, would you be into Italian trad music? Mostly diatonic accordion stuff, but lovely nonetheless. I think so anyway.
What does "fagboy" mean? Cigarette child?
Just kidding.....even though I live in the United States (where "fags" are called cigarettes), I do know that cigarettes are sometimes called "fags" in other English speaking countries. I have also heard cigarettes referred to as "coffin nails" and "cancer sticks".
I've never heard anyone say that they are about to smoke a coffin nail.
I disagree with Michael, I think that ITM and Anarchism are perfect bedfellows. They fit neatly into raging against the machine. No-one will make me love any kind of government and no one will make me listen to Rihanna. I can play my tin whistle and feel nice and rebellious.
KML, you seem to forget that the problems in Zimbabwe were created by the same imperialist clowns that are currently occupying the land that I live in......think on...what is Mugabe doing today that they didn't do much, much worse over the centuries. I don't support his actions but I can see where he got the ideas.
I have never heard a cigarette called a "lung buster". I do like that nickname. I used to smoke and quit eight years ago. Smoking was one of the bad habits I learned when I was in the military.
With respect, KML, the tiny white minority owned virtually all the arable land. I don't want to get into a fraught political debate on here but let's just say that the lands should have been returned to the rightful owners.
Neither do I and I agree with you. But it remains a fact that Zanu-PF mismanaged the country but blamed Britail for their mismanagement. Ok let's leave it at that.
"but let's just say that the lands should have been returned to the rightful owners."
ok, strayaway, seeing as this is a dead thread walking....hmm, same goes for USA, most of S. and Central America, Australia, Canada, N. Zealand, etc, etc.
"I think that ITM and Anarchism are perfect bedfellows"
Make that GREEN anarchism, and I'll agree
Mugabe is not a nice man. He fits the profile here
There is no room for rebellion in Traditional Irish Diddley music. To play it well you have to respect and defer to your betters. If you are not subservient to the master musicians who precede you, you will never get it.
Another meaning of "fag" is - was - a junior boy at a British public (meaning, of course, private) school who had to do daily chores like cleaning and tidying studies and public areas and making the odd cup of coffee / running the odd errand or performing the odd service for his "studyholder". Lurid myths and legends abound regarding the treatment and duties of fags, sometimes not entirely without foundation. I went through the system when this was still in operation. It was a reasonable way to ensure that very crowded living areas did not become a tip. With agreeable people it was an agreeable stage to pass through; with a bully in the system (usually just a bit higher in the pecking-order) it could be miserable.
Anyway, this American asks this British interviewee:
"Tell me, do you know James Ponsonby-Chetwynde?"
"Of course I do, I was his fag at Eton."
(Longish pause)
"I must say - you British are sometimes appallingly frank!"
IMHO, anarchism means taking responsibility for one's own life and values and behaviour, rather than remaining in an infantile condition accepting the authority of a parental Govt. Part of being an adult with human dignity is self-discipline. We should have our own code of behaviour that tells us what's right and wrong, IMO. Anarchism is a social, political, philosophical position. To the extent that has anything to do with ITM, I don't see why it would be importing rebellion into the music, llig. Learning a musical instrument needs a lot of dedication and self-discipline. If there is a link between ITM and anarchism, I'd see it as being one of the rare aspects of life and musical genres that you can pursue on your own terms, unlike, say, opera, which is favoured by the elite, or mainstream pop which is controlled by corporations.
Thank you for the explanation of another meaning of the word "fag", Nicholas. British slang is interesting to this American who has more than enough difficulty with American slang.
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
True anarchists observe no authority save that which forms naturally from basic, human interaction, meaning, Fathers, Mothers, Grandparents, and yes, senior musicians in the community you are seeking to join and study with.
It's those artificial forms of control which we reject, the State and all its evils.
...besides, what's more anarchist then coming to a website to rail against organized forms of artificial control which seek to dictate to a natural Traditional musical form?
Picking and choosing who you would like to rebel against is hardly anarchic. And while self discipline is important in any form of music (except punk of course, the only anarchic musical form), Traditional Irish Diddley music must be persued on its terms, not your own.
So you reckon that a rebel should rebel against everything? even rebellion? I am a left wing anarchist, and I reserve the right to choose what I rebel against. Watch me.
Michael, you are confusing two distinct definitions of the word.
1. 'anarchy', as used by politicians and trashy newspapers to describe situations which threaten their control, merely a synonym for chaos.
2. 'anarchy' or 'anarchism' as a political stance, with a long and noble history, being the view that people can sort out their own affairs, rather than be dictated to be a tiny ruling elite.
Michael - I hate to break it to you that I actually know what I'm talking about. Anarchist communism is my political stance - of course I call myself "left wing" like the rest of them. And it makes complete sense - to me anyway. I don't call myself an anarchist because it's fashionable or because a metal band told me too.
"When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.
The mere fact that these forces--inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence."
"Anarchist communism advocates the abolition of the state and capitalism in favor of a horizontal network of voluntary associations, workers' councils and/or commons through which everyone will be free to satisfy their needs."
All types of music need a little bit of anarchy, otherwise it dies. But not too much, otherwise it dies. Totally anarchic music is basically just white noise. And all white noise sounds the same. Rules evolve for a reason: because they work. Rules that are formulated or made-up generally don't. Thankfully, the rules that make up ITM are very bendy, and that's why it's thriving (it is thriving).
I don't think ITM is anarchic at all. It's just good music. Nobody's saying you should listen to the Killers, Mehitabel. I don't know why people get so hung-up about "The State", or "The Media". How can something made up of millions of pretty normal people be innately bad?
(Another thing that gets me is how "Society" is always wrong, whereas "The Public" is always right. It's the same people in both!)
Anyway, rant over. That was me rebelling against rebellion.
And the trouble with "Anarchist Communism" is that it would only work with computer-generated, idealised people. Real people aren't like that. They have hopes and ambitions, aspirations, intelligence. Ants and bees and termites live in that kind of society, and I guess it suits them. But it couldn't suit us.
The entire world (yes I'm working on a big scale). The rich are so very rich and the poor are so very poor. You've been to SA, Joe, you know that. I don't get how people can see this massive rich-poor divide and put it all down to luck, chance, work ethic and human nature. There is clearly a major flaw in the way society is structured or these atrocities wouldn't happen!
??
What country and time zone are you in, Mehi? I'm sure Bath isn't that far away from London...
Anarchist Communism only works if everyone is entirely equal (and not just on the inside, as in "all men were created equal", but on the outside, too), and nobody's in charge, but people have aspirations of power. Not all, but quite a few. People want to rise above other people. Other people will take advantage of the system, using others' trust in the system to get as much for themselves as they can (it's made up of voluntary associations, after all). Even if none of this happened, and it went ideally, people would start to feel like ants, as if they could never become anything more than what they are currently.
"The entire World", Mehi, is not an organisation! It is not in the least bit structured! Maybe that is "society"'s major flaw. Do you want to organise Society?
Human nature is a problem, isn't it, Joe CSS. But are you saying that what we have now is good, or the best we can hope for ? Seems to me that what we have got is designed to bring out the worst in people...
I guess that's a deadly, unsolvable dilemma, really. For the World's problems to be sorted, the World needs to act as one entity. However, that would mean that the person in charge would be the Ruler of the World. Would you trust anyone with that job?
Well, I think we've covered that. Hopefully we're all a bit more educated now and can release the mass media's control on our minds which forces us to think that anarchism means rebelling against everything. How horribly simple-minded.
Your logic doesn't hold up, Joe CSS. People don't need the "one person in charge". That's fundamental to anarchist thinking. We've had thousands of years of "one person in charge". They are mostly evil monsters or incompetent disasters. I'd make an exception for Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. They weren't "in charge", more like foci for a movement of people. Anarchism, IMHO, means realizing you got to do it yourself, not wait for some power-seeking leader to turn up and tell you what to do.
Maybe it's the cynic in me (whom I thoroughly dislike), but I can't help thinking that in any society, someone will always rise to the top. Even in small groups of people, there's always someone the rest look up to for guidance. The larger the group of people, the more the "guidance" becomes "orders", and eventually, "laws".
Occasionally, you will get someone like Nelson Mandela, who was basically the best thing that could ever have happened to South Africa, but more often than not, you will get someone like Stalin or Mugabe.
Joe CSS, there are a few slightly optimistic examples, especially smallish tribal groups which govern themselves by consensus. But on the whole, I have to agree with you that there has always been a percentage of what I consider to be psychopaths, who put gratification of their own power lust above all else, and who don't care how much suffering and death they cause. And if you want to stop them, you're usually forced to become as ruthless as they are...but looking to the wisest for guidance and advice is okay, isn't it ? That's a lot different to having to 'obey my orders or else', because anyone is free to reject advice.
wyogal, yes, Lord of the Flies is an excellent example. But it's an instance of young (males) without any social or cultural context or support. If you look at examples of smallish tribal groups (before they get overwhelmed by Western culture) they have highly sophisticated methods to prevent the Lord of the Flies syndrome, such as initiation and rites of passage.
Government is raising children, just on a larger scale.
If you use violence and the threat of violence to control your childrne, or your population, you create children/citizens who only know how to respond to threats and violence. Simple.
If you use reason, enlightenment and good examples to raise children or lead people, then you will create children/citizens who are also reasonable and enlightened.
Still waiting for reasonable and enlightened government. 200+ years and counting since the Age of Enlightenment...
Small, egalitarian groups sure do sound idyllic. It can even work for a session, sometimes. But if you want to build something complicated like a plane or a hospital, it’s useful to have a few leaders about.
And please, remember that Lord of the Flies was a fictional story written by a poet from Cornwall (and KML in a past life) – hardly a authoritative, definitive (or even true) statement of the human condition.
It's probably got a lot to do with scale. If you live in a community of a few thousand where people want to fit in and be helpful and respected, that's a lot different to anonymous cities of millions. But it's also culture. Seems to me, in this soceity here, the only rites of initiation from child to adult are being legally permitted to drink and drive.
Seems to me, that just as people can make and honour taboos against certain types of anti-social behaviour, they could, theoretically, disapprove of individuals who try to seize power (Joe CSS's point, above).
There's an example of such wisdom here, called Wiske
Thanks wolfbird, I really appreciate your input, and SWFL fiddler also.
"Think globally, act locally" - I take this to heart more than most and hopefully if I get into UWC next year (www.uwc.org) I'll be able to implement it even more than I already have.
Joe - the "hopes and ambitions, aspirations, intelligence" you speak of is catered for perfectly in anarchism. One government for all will *never* work, IMHO. That government is going to essentially be biased towards people of similar standing to themselves - naturally. The best answer is no government. Each man can be trusted to take care of his own assets.
PEOPLE INDEED DO have aspirations of power, and if you ask yourself WHY IS THIS it is because we have been brought up in a society (ultimate disrespect to society meant) where power over others is seen as something to aspire to. And the reason communism hasn't worked so far is that we have all been brought up with a work-for-wage, each-according-to-his-works mindset. If this can be mitigated, and I indeed don't believe in inherent human nature, I hold firm the belief that communism can work.
Anarchist communism is not designed in the case of everyone being equal. Each man according to his need - this allows for whatever inequalities there may be. Frankly at the moment we all have too much. For a small time in my life I lived in what western society would consider poverty, despite the fact that we had everything we needed, and indeed a goat outside (called Honey, for anyone who is interested) so I feel qualified to firmly believe that the world harbours enough resources for everyone to have *everything* they need.
"Seems to me that what we have got is designed to bring out the worst in people..." - totally agree with you wolfbird.
"For the World's problems to be sorted, the World needs to act as one entity." - couldn't agree more.
"However, that would mean that the person in charge would be the Ruler of the World" - you seem to have misunderstood the whole concept of anarchism...
Thank you wolfbird, but nonsense! I just pay close attention...
That's very true, the point you make. The problem is that when you have generation upon generation thinking that the only right way to be governed and to raise children is with threats and violence, it becomes harder and harder to break free.
Then, over time, threat power and violence becomes the norm, and it's simply too 'radical' to imagine doing anything else BUT that. "What do you mean, rehabilitate criminals? Huh?" Sigh.
Large masses treated with reason and enlightenment instead of threats and violence would work just as well as small groups, they simply haven't been taught to do it that way.
I found it very interesting to look at the natural anarchistic tribal systems the native Americans used.
No, SWFL Fiddler, I meant it as an honest compliment.
You know, it's hard work to think for one's self. Most people just repeat what someone else has put into their head.
I think that all systems can get into feedback loops, which can be negative or positive, and the generation after generation thing you mention is one of those 'lose/lose' situations. It's difficult to break the cycle and change it to win/win. All those guys in prison in the USA ! It's insane. everybody working has to pay for all those guys to do nothing but get more angry and embittered. Same in the UK.
Seeing we're talking idealism, it's not to difficult to design a perfect soceity on paper. Utopians have been doing it for centuries. But say you set up the ideal egalitarian community, from each whatever they can contribute, to each according to their needs, and every body is living in harmony and eco-friendly bliss. But, the next door tribe gets taken over by a power-crazed maniac, who takes the communities wealth and uses it to pay for an army of thugs...before you know it, you're back into the familiar tales from history...
You know, most things have been tried, one time or another, over the last few thousand years. the mainstream modern Western Imperialist military industrial Leviathan which dominates all our lives cannot continue much longer because it's destroying the biosphere and making the planet uninhabitable...I think we have to dig around amongst all the old ideas, listen to wisdom of minority groups, like the Kogi of Columbia, like the Amish, use our ingenuity to put pieces together and come up with new solutions...
Every time I mention society/govermental reform on the internet I get called a troll and blocked!
I think reform is extremely urgent but far from imminent and I worry that it will be too late before anything will happen. Generation X, I trusted you guys! Now it's down to Generation Y and I hope we can stay afloat until then...
Someone once said to me they wanted to reform soceity along anarchist lines. Personally, I don't think that can happen. There are too many people with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Any radical change is a threat which they resist and try to prevent. But the way I see it, anarchists are like the spices in a meal. Only a tiny proportion of the whole, but they can change the flavour.
There is an anarchist (hippy) village called Tipi Valley near here. When they began, 30 odd years ago, living in wigwams, everybody was hostile and outraged. But now they are accepted and respected and seen as wise and far-sighted. They were trying to discover lifestyles that didn't harm the planet.
Those folks followed their own dreams, instead of the ones advertised on the television every night. It's a difficult thing to do.
Wow! Tipi Valley, near Llandeilo? That's the stuff of legends. I might go and live there during exeat, if I end up living in Llantwit Major next year...
A trouble maker? Me? I am also surprised at how long this thread has survived but I've found it highly interesting all the same.
Anarchism won't take over, for a while anyway. You guys just wait until WE run the country
Gen X?!? Wait a second, mehitabel, what about the Baby Boomers? How about our alleged "Greatest Generation" which forged the modern military industrial complex? You want to start blaming folks you've got a lot of historical work to do!
Best to simply change your own self. Start with your own mind, then move onto to the next one. One at a time, keep the conversation going, that's all any of us can do.
We're just looking for that 100th monkey, keep on looking!
"The hundredth monkey phenomenon refers to a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly "critical mass" point is reached. The idea of the hundredth monkey phenomenon comes from Dr. Lyall Watson in his book Lifetide (1979). Watson, who has a Ph.D. in ethology for work done at the London Zoo with Desmond ("The Naked Ape") Morris, was writing about several studies done in the 1960's by several Japanese primatologists of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). Watson alleged that the scientists were "reluctant to publish [the whole story] for fear of ridicule." He writes that he had "to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened." So, wrote Watson:
I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened. In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. . . . Let us say, for argument's sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiyama..."
This all seems pedantic and pretentious-- not to mention purely academic i.e., hypothetical or theoretical and not expected to produce a practical result.
PatrickJWK.....there's *literally* millions of people involved in this kind of stuff, all around the planet, from battling with the police to building hobbit houses...you're obviously the 101 monkey...
see the link I just posted. they've been doing it almost twenty years, defying all the authorities who've tried to shut them down. That's a practical result, IMO
Michael, organising anarchists, or trying to get them to agree what anarchy is, is worse than herding cats, but if you leave 'em be, they just get on with it... doesn't matter what it's called
Sorry if I've seemed purely academic and hypothetical. But I just resent being taken for a rebel-without-a-clue teenager who hates TEH MAN. We obviously have difference of political opinion (no sh*t...) and I don't like this unspoken implication that I'm confused and clueless. Pfft.
Well, mehit, it's up to you if you want to re-define systems ... to theoretically mould your own version of anarchy so that it fits your idealisms.
However, does your belief that, "ITM and Anarchism are perfect bedfellows, as they fit neatly into raging against the machine," sit easily with you NOT wanting to "Stick it to the Man"?
Far be it for me to merely imply anything, your confusion is your own doing.
Dear me, trouble at mill. Two of the most corrupt countries in the world are Ireland and the UK and I live in both of them!
Handy for getting two passports however, just in case you get into trouble abroad, or the Americans invade your holiday haven.
But, "Fagboy?" Now that is a disgrace and should not be tolerated. If we are content to put up with homophobia we might as well have sectarianism, racism, sexism, ageism and all the rest.
I don't mean to jump on you question for mehit, Llig, but I know why the music satisfies the part of me that was once a young urban rowdy on a skateboard with a Bad Brains T shirt, many many (too many, Gen X many, and not Billy Idol either, ack) moons ago.
Tradition, in our modern world, is a form of revolution. With all the standardization going on via the mass media, first and foremost with musical forms, the homogenization of culture has resulted. If there were vast quantities of money to be made from the music, it would be exploited like any other form, and don't we all complain a bit about that on here when that happens in the limited forms that it does?
People sharing tunes, having tunes, is central to the tradition, playing them with each other. It's immune from any attempt to pervert it in the hearts of those that love it. It's literally idealism embodied in a way that anarchism can never be, well, at least when you have those 'magic' sessions once in a while where it all clicks.
Personally it fulfills for me the need to reconnect with ancestry who played the music which I've only heard second hand stories of. That, however, is in the same vein of tradition being an antidote for the ailments modern 'culture' can inflict upon people.
Whew. That was exhausting. I'm going to go play some tunes.
Yes indeed the geezer Ron Foreman is without doubt out of order. "Fagboy" is a nasty nasty one indeed. It's the invoking of homosexuality with subservience and cowardice. very very nasty. There was a time, 70 or 80 years ago where such nastiness was mainstream - remember the cowardly lion in The Wizard of OZ? "I'm afraid there's no denyin', I'm just a dandy-lion, a fate I don't deserve." But zero tolerance to such stuff now please.
I agree with Joe CSS. Nothing like a good row to stretch the brain cells at this early hour. However the petty insults are not great, I agree with bliss + llig in that respect.
Llig, I'm sorry if I haven't made myself clear. Indeed part of my philosophy is rebellion against TEH MAN. I just wanted to emphasise that it's not blind rebellion with no awareness of the implications or alternatives.
I wanna make clear that I'm not an emo teenager who sits in my room and cries about the unfairness of the world while plucking a single string on my black acoustic guitar. Nor am I a punk poet. Joe CSS, back me up here.
Damien Mullane used to have an emo haircut...they can't be all bad
Haven't followed all of this, but good thread lads. Interesting spectrum of ideas expressed. In contrast to the petty insults as you call them, which show a total lack of any thought, just intellectual laziness; so if you disagree with someone just lash out with an old tried and tested insult, yet one that is discredited and most people here find abhorrent these days. As yet no sign of an apology.
On my cycle into work this morning I was musing on what would be lost if society was reduced to small groups of self sufficient co-operatives.
The list is very long indeed, but basically falls into these categories:
Technology. (including medicine. not hippie stuff, I mean rigourously double blind tested and accredited medicine)
Communication. (including books and education)
The argument goes that we don't "need" any of this. And in the strict sense of the word, it's true.
I have mused often on the same subject also Michael, and the limitations of total self sufficiency.
As long as people have faith in medicine, I can't see the Amish-style life working any time soon. It's about getting the balance right...mega-global corporations, and indeed massive countries, will not work forever, and the solution to this seems to split into smaller divisions and work toward self-sufficiency at that level. But then, every municipality cannot have its own hospital, etc.
"And the reason communism hasn't worked so far is that we have all been brought up with a work-for-wage, each-according-to-his-works mindset."
Not at all - the reason communism hasn't worked so far is because no-one has ever implemented it in the way Marx and Engels envisioned. The USSR and China posited themselves as being communist states, but in reality they were (and in the case of China still are) dictatorships intent on exploiting the workers using the most brutal means possible, for the ends of small, corrupt leadership (whilst I can get on board with much of what Marxism is about, Leninism turned me off as I can't agree with the imposition of a system of government by violence).
Anarchist-communism will never work in any existing state because it would need the commitment of all the people, and as the old mustard board shows, getting people to agree is royal pain in the a*se. I like the idea of anarcho-communism but could never see it working on a global scale (although I think it closely mimics the society of our ancestors pre-Roman invasion) because we are all far too attached to our material possessions (at least could we wait until after I've collected my new Joe Foley bouzouki next year before starting the revolution).
Winstanley is a personal hero of mine - a man so far beyond his time he still is in many ways. He recognised that the capitalist/feudalist system would ultimately end up disenfranchising the ordinary people of their most basic and fundamental right - their connection with the very land they lived on. And look where that has led us all over the years.
"The USSR and China posited themselves as being communist states, but in reality they were (and in the case of China still are) dictatorships intent on exploiting the workers using the most brutal means possible, for the ends of small, corrupt leadership"
I agree Mr Sugarfoot. In fact, there's no agreeing about it - that's a fact, pure and simple. But what I mentioned is another barrier that prevents communism from working.
Anarchist communism will not work at the moment because people have a materialistic nature - and I firmly believe that this is not inherent human nature. Maybe it won't work at the moment, but fifty years down the line (assuming that the ice caps haven't melted yet) it could be a possibility. (fingers crossed)
(BTW, I concede I was mistaken, re my thoughtless 'terms' remark. You're right. One should pursue this music on it's terms, not one's own.)
I assume you are thinking 'what if ?' and then imagining various scenarios and what the results would be.
The 'what if everyone reassembled in self sufficient communities, therefore...' doesn't stack up though.
Firstly, for such a project to work, the members have to really want to do it. It's a difficult thing to do, even for idealists. People who were forced or conscripted would easily wreck any community. Most people will not want to live in a co-op. They'll prefer living alone or in a nuclear family, doing their jobs building aeroplanes, running hospitals and power stations and offices and all the rest of the stuff that mainstream soceity uses.
Secondly, there's no hard and fast rules that say how co-operatives or communities should be structured. They don't need to attempt self-sufficiency, although some do. Some larger groups, like the Amish, operate very successfully within the larger social system, and just reject stuff they don't like, such as cars and telephones.
Third point is, that you're speaking as if there is a choice, between hospitals and education and something without them. That may not be the case in the future. People will probably jump on me for doom-mongering, but IMO, I'm being coldly realistic and reading the evidence. The way is see it, this whole edifice which we call 'civilization', is going to collapse all around us. (One reason being that it's entirely dependent upon cheap fossil fuels, which have peaked. There are plenty of other reasons, but that's a diversion). If I'm proved correct, there will not be any choice re hospitals, etc, and the the best place to survive will be in self-contained communities.
However, the communities I know about don't hold together because they are intent upon surviving catastrophe. They hold together because they believe that the mainstream system forces them to act immorally, forces them to deny their own deepest insights into why we exist. So they seek for alternative, more satisfactory ways to live. I think that everyone should have that right, as a basic human right.
When the romans left Briton around 400CE, the art/craft of making pottery was lost for hundreds of years. Astonishing when you think of it. when you think of the sophistication of British pottery throughout the Roman occupation.
Yes michael, time for a reality check for some people here.
All this stuff about human rights - I believe such rights have to be earned. How many people actually take political responsibility?
I don't mean affiliating to just left wing, green or anarchist groups or parties - it could be Tory, US Republican etc., if that's what you believe in. Only 64% of the US electorate voted at the last elections, and only 61% in UK. This is less than a century after women fought to get equal voting rights in the UK. And don't tell me there's nobody worth voting for - there are hundreds of minority parties. How many people ON HERE actually take political responsibility?
How many people even take personal responsibility for eg their health? ie, can they even look after themselves before thinking about looking out for other people, or polemicising about looking out for other people?
What percentage of people in the West are obese while there are millions starving elsewhere?
What about people who smoke, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, take psychotogenic drugs like cannabis? Is that taking responsibilty?
Come back and tell me about taking political responsibilty and polemicising about puting the world to rights, once you start taking care of yourselves, and I might begin to take you seriously.
Why do you assume that we don't take political responsibility, KML?
It's interesting what you say about taking personal responsibility for health. Is it therefore irresponsible to drive, as driving is dangerous and can pose a threat to health? Is it irresponsible to use an internet wireless connection - as it hasn't been around long enough for us to know if it has any health implications? Are body modifications irresponsible, as they could become infected? A line's gotta be drawn somewhere! Where would you draw it?
Being sixteen means that I can't vote but I still consider myself politically active, and I actually practice what I preach - as I'm sure do many people! If it weren't for such things as GCSEs (thank you, government) I would be on the next plane to Ethiopia...
I have to take responsibility for everything in my life, because there's nobody else anywhere near. The only time I'd ask someone for assistance would be maybe if I broke my leg or the house caught fire or some other major emergency like that.
Couldn't you cycle to Ethiopia?.....
Ok seriously though, yes, you're right about driving - there's far too much of it around, as I notice daily, cycling to work. I don't know about wireless broadband's health risks, but I bet you'll see a massive increase in Alzheimer's, Pick's and Parkinson's Diseases in 20-30 years time from the microwave radiation given off by mobile phones, literally slowly frying peoples' brains. As for bdy piercings and tatoos, personally I abhor them and yes there are health risks associated with them. The line drawn - what do you mean, by legislation, and drive tatoos underground? Even education fails as (the point I forgot to make in my post) people know the dangers of such and such activities but still insist on doing them. That's why I don't think all those grandiose schemes involving people being responsible for them selves never mind each other will ever work. People are inherently faulted. Greed, obsession, selfishness ego and lust are what motivate most people, not civic duty or civic pride. Blame the "media" if you want, and yes they pander to those faults, but essentially the media just magnifies what is already within most of us.
GCSE's? - get as many and as good ones as you can get. That's the smart thing to do. Then you might be armed with the knowledge to tackle as best you are able problems in places like Ethiopia, although Darfur in Sudan or the Congo are in much wosre predicaments right now. Never miss a chance of ANY education.
Wolfbird - I looked at the link and I like the idea. Unfortunately, the internet, antibiotics & other medicines, the national health service, motor vehicles (by which means I presume you moved the timber to build your tipis) and other modern "luxuries" were not invented and developed in tipis.
If I could cycle to Ethiopia I would, Key. But I fancy that tackling the Maghreb on a bike is even more irresponsible than getting a plane to Addis.
I'm in your camp as far as driving and microwaves are concerned. But body modifications? I love them. I made a metal detector go off in Addis. It kept going off. They took me into a side room.
I don't agree that people are inherently faulted (apart from...let's not go into religion now). I would love to blame "the media" but unfortunately that phrase has come to mean nothing. It's just the attitude of our society (and everyone in it) that has become deeply rooted within all of us since birth, but I retain the hope that one day the cycle will be broken. It might take something huge for that to happen but it *will* happen.
I will get as many GCSEs as I can. I will get my IB. I will get whatever else. Darfur and DRC (not to mention Tindouf) are of course in a worse state than Ityoppya at the moment but as I stand currently I'm only equipped with the language skills and cultural knowledge to help there. Elswhere I'd be a hindrance.
KML, you're right to swing a frying pan ends abruptly, about three inches away from my head
" People are inherently faulted. Greed, obsession, selfishness ego and lust are what motivate most people, not civic duty or civic pride. "
I don't agree with this, that people are born with 'Original Sin'.
I think we are born with a set of basic instinctive drives and emotions. We have to learn to adjust those as we grow up, so that we can get along with other people, and I think that's where the trouble starts and then things just keep getting worse, because schools and soceity in general are screwed up...I don't think that people are naturally, intrinsically, greedy and selfish... for an example of what people might be like if they grew up in a more natural soceity, there's an interesting, if rather intellectual, article by Sorenson here :
Hey, KML, *I* do not live at Tipi Valley, nor do I live in a tipi. I live in a cottage, built of stones and mud, about 1787.
I'm not arguing that anybody should go and live in a tipi. I'm arguing that people should have the right and the opportunity to do so, if they want to, as an example of anarchist or communist or communal living.
Also, you wouldn't need any motorvehicles to move timber for tipis. Everything can be done by hand.
The National Health Service is a peculiarity of the UK, not found elsewhere, and I'm talking general principles, not local details. (Not to say it's 'bad', because I owe my life to it). Motor vehicles are something else. They are now competing directly with humans for food, and winning.
Not sure about the tipi thing in Wales. No dogs? The human/dog relationship is very ancient and goes very deep, so that puts me off.
Also, what's with this imported religion stuff when you're deep in Wales? Plenty to go at in the indigenous tradition if you know where to look without resorting to playing Indians.
I do like the basic values they aspire to though,,and their basic model to living. You should always take your wellies off when entering another house . . .
GP: Oh good. We could have an anarchist society on the mustard board.
I would love to live in a tipi community (and indeed have done, at a drunken glastonbury many years ago :P)
But *more* than I want that, I want to run far away and live in the greater Middle East or East Africa (or work as a Doctor on phelophepa :-p). This I believe will be more helpful to the world than shutting myself away in a Tipi.
Though many of my friends would probably disagree and think that the only way that I can benefit the world is by going into a tipi and never coming out
"Haven't followed all of this, but good thread lads. Interesting spectrum of ideas expressed. In contrast to the petty insults as you call them, which show a total lack of any thought, just intellectual laziness; so if you disagree with someone just lash out with an old tried and tested insult, yet one that is discredited and most people here find abhorrent these days. As yet no sign of an apology."
KML, surely you aren't implying that I am "intellectual lazy," and that I should apologize for being brash about the "Osama Obama" slur. After nearly 8 years of enduring the likes of Mr Dipstick being given a platform through nearly every channel of communication here in the good ol' USofA, I no longer have any patience for his "POV." I fired one off the bow and felt damn good about it. The time for "politeness" with regard to the Mr Dipsticks of this country is over.
Tally Ho!
BTW, I've been following the thread. Interesting conversation as usual! The level of intelligence on the mustard board is impressive. Makes me think the music has something to do with it...
I don't want to get into brain development here as it's a complicated subject, but human personality is a mixture of nature and nurture, in ways that are more complex than just getting the right ingredients for a cake, sticking it in the oven, then out comes a cake half an hour later.
There are many triggers and switches timed to go off at crucial points during development, and which must receive the appropriate stimulus or the faculty in question does not develop - Hubel and Wiesel's experiments on the lateral geniculate nucleus in kittens were the first to demonstrate this. Genes get switched on and off and interact with each other all the time during development. The infant brain has many more brain cells than the adult, but most are undifferentiated, subsequently undergoing planned cell death, apoptosis. To just say "we are born with a set of basic instinctive drives and emotions" is just really simplistic and uninformed to be brutally frank.
It may have sounded that I implied that when I said the thing about greed and selfishness etc. What I did say was that people are *motivated* by those...things....abstractions or whatever they amount to. And I still think they are. Thus motivated.
2007 was a historic year for humanity. In that year more of the human population lived in cities than not in cities. So we are now a species that now lives predominantly in cities, globally speaking. That's the reality we will in future have to deal with, not tipis. Cities need to regain a sense of purpose, community and civic pride, otherwise the selfish etc motivation of which I spoke earlier will make them unpleasant places in which to live and bring up the next generation (even more unpleasant, I hear some of you say......not me though. The best sessions are in cities!)
I forgot that you are a biologist/geneticist/brainologist, Mr Key!
I hear what you're saying about the nature/nurture mix. "Environmental factors and inherited factors" (thank you AQA biology). If anything is in our inherent nature, why is there such diversity? I cannot think of two common personality traits. Is our motivation influenced by nature or nurture? I'm erring toward nurture, but what do I know.
2007 was a historic year in the sense - we are now a truly urbanized world. I love living in a city but the rich poor divide that I wrote about yesterday ^^^ is much much more apparent in cities, which makes me wonder. Why is this?
" "The Man" does not usually refer to a specific individual, but instead to the government, leaders of large corporations, and other authority figures in general, such as the police. The Man is colloquially defined as the figurative person who controls our world. The Man is also often used as a symbol of racial oppression, as well as the boss of a blue-collar worker, and the enemy of any counterculture."
Thanks M now I know what you mean...heres one some of you might like ..."Guy Fawkes ....the only person to enter Parliament with honest intentions" ...and another..".No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in." am surprised this thread not deleted cheers P
"To just say "we are born with a set of basic instinctive drives and emotions" is just really simplistic and uninformed to be brutally frank."
Be as frank as you wish to be, KML. I'm not uninformed on this subject, just presenting the idea in the simplest fashion I could manage for a general readership.
The question appeared to be whether human nature is such and such, and we just have to cope with it. Or, human nature is the result of the environment that we inhabit. As you rightly state, it's a mix of both, an interplay between the two.
But we can also ask, what was the actual nature of human beings before they became domesticated, just as we can ask what was the nature of wild jungle fowl before they got bred to become battery chickens.
The evidence that I offered, from the Sorenson link, is that when people lived in a soceity with plenty of space, and other conditions, they appear to be very different creatures, with none of the unpleasant characteristics re greed and selfishness and so on.
Presumably, THAT is our real true nature, the creatures we all once were, the creatures we had evolved into, before we got into an unnatural environment. The same point can be illustrated by the marked differences between a baboon colony in the wild, and a baboon colony caged up in a zoo.
IMO, contemporary soceity produces pathological individuals. The medical profession says that about a quarter of UK suffers from mental illness. Obviously, the rest are likely to also have aberrant behaviour, just not to a degree that gets them into treatment. I don't accept that happy balanced humans are motivated by greed or selfishness. They're more likely to enjoy being generous, because it's a buzz to make other people happy.
You have, yourself, obviously adjusted to city life. I don't think I could ever achieve that. I have spent brief spells living in cities, perhaps 3 months being the longest, and hated it. I'm a country boy. There's no street lights, so i can see the stars. There's no traffic noise or slamming car doors...if I get get even further away from 'civilization', I would, but it's difficult on this crowded little island.
"I don't accept that happy balanced humans are motivated by greed or selfishness. They're more likely to enjoy being generous, because it's a buzz to make other people happy."
I have found no greater joy or meaning in life then when I became a father, and learned to love something more than I loved myself. Giving one's self in service to another out of love is truly magic.
Human illness is being unable to see that.
I think there was this nice Jewish carpenter lad who said something about that once. Nice guy from India too said it, skinny fella, though the Chinese seem to think he was really chubby. Then, 2,500 years later, India had another skinny chap saying all those things, wore robes all the time, round metal frame glasses, no hair? Good man.
I love sessions because they cram as many people and musical contraptions as possible into the smallest snug available, and "aberrant behavior" ensues....
Actually, the whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" credo is just common sense, codified by most religions, but it surely predates any sort of institutionalized morality. I suspect basic ethics are a natural outgrowth of (a) being alive and (b) being aware that we (and other organisms) are alive (as opposed to dead or inanimate).
Funny how many session players seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They want everyone to hear what they play, but they don't listen to others.
"Session with others as you would have them session with you."
I want to hear responses to that ("I don't accept that happy balanced humans are motivated by greed or selfishness. They're more likely to enjoy being generous, because it's a buzz to make other people happy.") People are seeming to take it as a given that humans are inherently greed, selfish and lazy, and using that as a reason that communism, anarchy etc. can't work. But why should this be a given?
It's a vicious cycle. The shape of society can't change until the shape of our minds changes! (and vice versa) Catch 22...
I think you're right, Will CPT. I think that the human species evolved for several hundreds of thousands of years, living in fairly small groups where careing for each others well-being was essential for survival, and that's the basic genetic package we inherited.
Then we began to live in larger groups, the first cities in Sumeria, around 8000 years ago, and hierarchical soceities formed, with rulers, soldiers, priests, workers, and our original natural human characteristics began to be distorted by a man-made social structure.
Religions co-opted our inbuilt ethical knowledge. I mean, every little child can tell you if the cake has been shared out fairly or not. They don't need to appeal to any civic or religious law.
But, right up to date, we have the modern highly technical industrial soceity which reduces all human to parts in its machinery. Just like putting wild Indian Jungle Fowl into a battery cage factory farm.
People try to cope with the stress that causes them, in all sorts of ways. Some kill themselves, some binge drink, some over eat, some go mad, some get depressed, some dream about the lottery as an escape ticket, some escape into videos and music, and so on...
But, IMO, this isn't some accident, or something inevitable. We could organise our lives and culture differently. American and UK and other industrial capitalist countries have deliberately set up systems to produce the kind of people required...compliant workers who cannot think or act from their own initiative, (so it's a bit unfair for KML to blame the victims, when they don't vote, don't know how to take care of themselves).
"Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about."
Exciting! So has the conclusion been reached that the school system is structured to produce robots (or "bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete" humans)?
Forget all about Communism, could we not try a little Socialism, as in making a better society, where taxes go towards health, education, and an all round better society? Sweden is a good example. You can be mega rich and be a socialist. All that is required to create such a society is a slightly better distribution of wealth.
Most people would be overjoyed with an extra £10,000 a year, they do not require ten million. This can be achieved by taxing the extremely wealthy. In the UK Labour are now taxing the poor, to the benefit of the rich.
Now the rich can still scrape a living on ten million a year without undue hardship.
Capitalism inevitably destroys itself as the rich get richer, the poor poorer, and therefore an unequal society. Look at Premier league football to see this, you don't need to study politics or philosophy.
Such hypocrisy as "Tesco" having a vouchers for computers for schools competition, while avoiding paying one billion in tax by moving accounts to the Cayman Islands or whatever should be highlighted. How many computers, hospitals, schools could that billion buy?
In the UK some 12 billion tax is avoided every year by big business. And don't start me on Coca-cola, and their doings in India and Columbia, Mexico and elsewhere.
Tax exiles like Tom Jones, Lewis Hamilton and their ilk make me sick. In Ireland J.P McManus is a hero for donating 3 million to build a hospital in Limerick, instead of paying six milliuon in tax, every year. Footballer John Terry in England "helps" to raise money for disabled people, and is then fined £60 for parking in a disabled space, rather than walk 50 yards.
There are thousands of examples. Unfortunately the western world is now full of people totally dedicated to themselves, a triumph for Thatcherism/Reaganism.
Just remembered my holiday starts today, so why am I still working?
USA look out next week.
And as for the Pope trying to upstage me by going at the same time.....................
Well, both Jesus of Nazareth and Siddharta Gautama (the Buddha) were urbanites, allegedly.
I admit I did not read the link you gave Wolf, it seemed too verbose and I was busy at work (doing a stock inventory of phase contrast microscope objectives, would you believe! - how interesting!), but it looked interesting.
Still without reading it, I will bravely or foolishly make a further comment on what you said above.
"..when people lived in a soceity with plenty of space, and other conditions, they appear to be very different creatures, with none of the unpleasant characteristics re greed and selfishness and so on."
Yeah fair enough...maybe.....
2 things:
As I said above most people don't - we're mostly urbanites now.
This assumes that our genotype hasn't changed since we have started to lead a so-called "civilised" way of life. Our "civilised" society has existed for a few millenia now - maybe 1 or 2 in Europe and up to 6 or 7 thousand years in the Middle East - even more in Iraq, in the Fertile Crescent. If a new generation arises say every 25 years, that's 4 per century. This amounts to 40-80 generations of "civilised humans" in Europe and as many as 280 generations in the Middle East. Human selection is rarely by environmental or survival selection, but by sexual selection, ie if you are attractive you're more likely to get a shag, and thus procreate. The factors involved in sexual selection are undoubtedly very different from those involved in survival selection... particularly in an urban environment. More "civilised" traits will be selected for. Surely urbanisation/the process of civilisation will thus have an effect on the gene pool?
So even "human nature" will have changed in the process! Which surely makes the idea posited by yer man Sorensen redundant. That said, I'll read it later............
KML, there's no doubt that the human genotype has changed over the last few thousand years. The best example I can think of, off the top of my head, is that some of us have developed the ability to digest dairy products from cattle. Presumably, those are the ones descended from pastoralist herdsmen since the domestication of cattle. Other ethnic groups get ill if they drink cows milk.
So, I agree, there will have been some genetic selection for people who survive in very densely populated cities. Whether it's very significant or not, I don't know. Maybe someone has researched it, but I have never come across such studies.
But that's not really the point. The point is more a philosophical one than a scientific one. That is, 'what was human nature like, in its original form, pre-civilization and urbanization and all the cultural overlay which has lead to our present predicament ?'
Further up the page was a reference to W. Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'. Some people are of the view that, without strict control, human behaviour descends into that kind of barbarism. But it's a fictional account, as is it's child, A. Burgesses' Clockwork Orange. But unfortunately, the common events, of lads kicking people to death for fun or going on shooting sprees, of old ladies being raped, of children being tortured, all that horror, is not fictional.
I'm arguing that, such behaviour is not our real, true nature. It's pathological behaviour produced by culture. That is, it's the nurture, not the nature, that produces the psychopathology.
BTW, I don't think Jesus or Gautama could be considered urban, in the modern sense. Cities in those days were a few thousands, just small towns in modern terms, and both spent long periods in the desert or the forests. Not that it matters. I don't think that wisdom or virtue has much to do with where a person is located.
Bliss, you're arguing for redistribution of wealth, and I agree that a fairer distribution is desirable.
However, the systems we have are designed by the rich and powerful for the rich and powerful. And whilst not all rich powerful individuals are evil and ruthless, their positions and lifestyles make it hard for even generous socialist ones to understand what it is like to be in extreme poverty.
For the system to work, it requires the stick and the carrot. The carrot is, that if you are obedient and diligent and contribute all you can to the machine, you will get a salary, a pension, a mortgage for a house, a plasma screen, a week or two holiday in the sun, and so on.
The stick is, that if you don't chase after the carrot successfully, you can be out on the street with nothing, or maybe just enough so you don't starve to obviously.
The theory is, that without the carrot and the stick, all those masses wouldn't go to work to produce the profits.
My personal position is that I don't want to play that game, thanks very much. I'd rather be poor and free. I only get this one lifetime and I have more interesting ways to spend it than helping any elite raise funds so they can have big yachts, build ballistic missiles, conquer countries, and all the other crap that's been going on for hundreds of years.
I'm glad Sugarfoot mentioned Winstanley. What a hero ! and Thoreau is another favourite of mine, along with William Blake, Godwin, Shelley, Emma Goldman, John Zerzan....I don't think anarchists make good socialists. They don't like the endless committee meetings
"Freedom is a value held dear by people throughout history, across all cultures. Governments of all varieties promise it to their citizens, regardless of the actual policies they support. Men have died by the millions believing that they were struggling for it. In nations around the world, great and small, flags are lifted and voices raised in tribute to it. Freedom has been described as the universal desire of the human spirit.
But if freedom is so dear to the mind of man, we must expect that those among us who wish to dominate others for their own ends will be well aware of this"
>what was human nature like, in its original form, pre-civilization and urbanization and all the cultural overlay which has lead to our present predicament ?'
Yeah fair enough you've answered that - but what does that prove? I thought the point to discuss would be what is the nature of modern "civilised" humankind, what we have not going back 5 or 10 thousand years.
what stick? I thought it was crack we were after. I'm for whichever system is more conducive to playing more tunes more of the time - which looks like socialism to me. Work less (than in the US anyway) and not have to fret all the time about ending up sleeping under a bridge because some unforseen health debacle emptied your savings. It sounds great. Communism seems like it's more about making a lot of people feel guilty about contributing their fair share so they don't feel like they can relax and have fun. Actually though that, being somewhat rebellious, that might inspire me to play more in fact...
Well, I've lost track a little, KML, but I thought it was my response to your point that everybody (or was it most ?) are motivated by greed, lust, etc.
Well, I read the sorensen thing, Wolf. I quite liked it - this bit stood out to me, referring to when he witnessed the abrupt end of a traditional society in the Andaman Islands:
When the mental death had run its course, when what had been was gone, the
people (physically still quite alive) no longer had their memory of the
intuitive rapport that held them rapturously together just the week before,
could no longer link along those subtle mental pathways. What had filled
their lives had vanished. The teensters started playing at (and then
adopting) the rude, antagonistic, ego-grasping styles of the encroaching
modern world, modeled after films and then TV. Oldsters retreated into
houses, lost their affinity to youngsters, who then turned more to one
another, sometimes squabbling (which did not occur before).
and in particular:
The teensters started playing at (and then adopting) the rude, antagonistic, ego-grasping styles of the encroaching modern world.
Yeah well, as I was saying.
Many of these societies described so idyllically seem to be on the periphery of the modern world. Maybe it needed an Ice age or something to get people to huddle together in cities, but it came as a wee bit of a surprise to the Conquistadors to find a city in the middle of Mexico (as it would soon be known). A huge city, as big as any in the Old World. Yet built by a completely different...civilisation, or culture. So, is city building the natural course for human social evolution to follow? They didn't get built in pre-conquest Australia or in the other places mentioned in the link. Human social evolution took a different course there...or maybe had yet to occur?
BTW,
>it's a bit unfair for KML to blame the victims, when they don't vote, don't know how to take care of themselves
oh please - spare us all that, thank you. You call them victims if you want. I call half of it self-inflicted. I couldn't sit through an episode of...seinfield...or whatever it's called. Let them compliantly switch on the telly and watch the garbage - THEY DON'*WANT* YOUR HELP!! So why do you call them victims?
In the USA workers do work long hours with little holidays, in comparison to Europe. Anything most of them achieve is well earned. The long hours and such is probably because the bosses shot a lot of Trade Unionists, which Coca-Cola are still doing.
I honestly believe two things;
1. The minimum wage should be £25,000 per annum
2. This is easily achievable simply by redistributing wealth, and still leaves the rich with loads of money.
And then we can write songs and tunes about winning the struggle and keep everyone happy.
It's the bit where all you guys say "this is the way it should be and it's easily achievable" that have a problem with. I didn't have that problem when I was 16. In fact I thought I would be in the Vanguard of the Revolution when I was that age.
I forgot to add this bit in sorenson's conclusion:
This sophisticated development of human mentality may be realizable only in preconquest settings like those described above. There is no evidence that it is a universal, benevolent nature common to all early humankind. It would be unreasonable to assume that human mentality evolved the same way everywhere during prehistoric times. Less altruistic types also evolved. It appears that at least one such combative type in Mediterranea progressively demolished its earlier preconquest type of life.
What struck me particularly was when a group of lads from one tribe met a group from another for the first time. They actually made friends, and that lead to both tribes intermingling and even developing a new language, taken from the two distinct languages.
Quite a contrast to a tv film I saw of Glasgow gangs, where kids from five to fifteen were chasing each other around estates with iron bars, fighting over territorial boundaries, etc.
"Many of these societies described so idyllically seem to be on the periphery of the modern world."
Yes, of course. There are only a few hundred thousand left, and they are vanishing fast.
"Maybe it needed an Ice age or something to get people to huddle together in cities,"
I don't think it had anything to do with an Ice Age. Probably, the first city appears in Sumer (approximately Basra, Iraq) because they could easily make mud bricks, because they had fertile land to grow crops, so no need to hunt and gather, but it flooded regularly, so they needed organisation to remake the canals and ditches, and so on.
"but it came as a wee bit of a surprise to the Conquistadors to find a city in the middle of Mexico (as it would soon be known). A huge city, as big as any in the Old World. Yet built by a completely different...civilisation, or culture. So, is city building the natural course for human social evolution to follow? They didn't get built in pre-conquest Australia or in the other places mentioned in the link. Human social evolution took a different course there...or maybe had yet to occur? "
Yes, it's an important question. There's several competing theories, and I'm not going to stick my neck out and provide any definite answer, but I'd like to know the answer.
"oh please - spare us all that, thank you. You call them victims if you want. I call half of it self-inflicted. I couldn't sit through an episode of...seinfield...or whatever it's called. Let them compliantly switch on the telly and watch the garbage - THEY DON'*WANT* YOUR HELP!! So why do you call them victims?"
I can't help anybody, even if I wanted to. I take responsibility for myself. But you've missed my point. The quote is from a critic of the *education system* that turns out people who cannot read, who watch Seinfeld, etc. (I have never seen it.)
What I'm saying, to use the analogy of the chickens, is, that if you look at battery hens, (3 in a square foot of cage)
and they are pecking each other to death, and can't stand up, and if you take them outside they're blinded by daylight and seem completely lost, you shouldn't blame the chickens. That's not what 'chickens' are really like.
If you want to know what chickens are really like, look at the Red Jungle Fowl, from which they are all descended. Then you see what their inherent characteristics truly are.
I'm saying, the same goes for humans. You put them into a crazy artificial restricted environment, their true nature becomes distorted, they behave in the perverse ways which you suggested, i.e. motivated by greed and selfishness, etc.
Of course half of it is self-inflicted. But are you saying that a healthy happy person is going to inflict self-harm ? That makes no sense. Its a symptom. They are apathetic, obese, unable to read or write properly, etc, because of what has happened since they were born. They are the product of, the victims of, that experience.
The redistribution of wealth eventually puts a stop to gangs chasing each other with iron bars and such, does away with much inner city crime, and generally would reduce crime by a considerable percentage.
But that would mean some poor git scraping a living on 15million a year instead of 576 million a year. Couldn't have that, could we?
And Danny, the biggest problem is that most of us get brain washed as we get older, and accept the system as unbeatable. Some of us do not.
Looks like I am getting dismissed again for having an "attitude" at work. Mind you, it won't happen as I would win a case on the grounds that it was due to my trade union activities. It would have to be, I don't do anything else at work, although a senior manager did ask if I could pretend to work for a half hour a day.
Ha, ha, bliss, your "don't do pretend" made me laugh
When I was learning to be a carpenter/joiner, rather long ago, a guy told me that he learned the trade in the navy. He said his teacher told him, on the first day of apprenticeship that the most important lesson to learn was 'how to do nothing'.
This surprised the apprentice who naturally asked 'why?'
The answer came, "Because most of the time at sea there's nothing for us to do. But if an officer comes along and finds you're doing nothing, you'll be in big trouble. So, the trick to doing nothing is, ALWAYS have an oily rag in one hand and a hammer in the other. Then, when an officer comes along and finds you doing nothing, you've always just come from doing something, show him the rag and hammer, or just on your way to doing something...that's how to do nothing "
I accept the system is unbeatable. But I have never let it beat me yet. I think it will implode in the next few years because it's unsustainable.
My laptop is my oily rag and hammer, always close at hand. All I have to do when someone comes snooping is put down my fiddle or flute and starting tapping these keys.....
>The redistribution of wealth eventually puts a stop to gangs chasing each other with iron bars and such, does away with much inner city crime, and generally would reduce crime by a considerable percentage.
Bliss - I don't think so. I don't think it's to do with material wealth. Some rich kids round here are just psychopathic spoilt little b@stards. Kids here have got more now than they ever had, and yet it's shootings and stabbings all the time.
Maybe wolfie's chicken thing is nearer the mark after all.
The better society is created by the distribution of wealth, because young people rebel at the society around them.
As an example take the Swedish penal system. Now you just tell the guards that you are nipping down to the pub for a heavy date and will be back in the morning, and this is allowed. Some 3% re-offend, simply because the Swedes are able to ask offenders "Why do you want to be doing things like that in such a nice society" and help to rehabilitate people.
Our society is all about punishment, and our prisons turn out hardened criminals, determined to get even with a harsh society.
I like your bit about the navy Wolfbird. Alas I am actually too busy doing union work, due to bad management, that I have no time to "pretend" to work at the business.
Okay, I have the limitation of being asleep while all this above me went on. But I read it all. the first thing that comes to mind is - I'm all for the redistribution of wealth, but £25k a year??? Sorry a lot of swear words come to mind. Who the hell needs that much??? The only way the world has enough resources to sustain everyone on it is if we all cut back on nearly everything we had. In an ideal *egalitarian* society we'd be living on £5k a year, no less, no more, and we would stop buying sh*t we don't need (an end to mass consumerism..), hooray.
Good morning, mehitabel23. I think that bodhran bliss has noticed that approximately 400 richest people on the planet have wealth equal to half of all the rest us (approximately 3 billion).
Personally, I'm more baffled why anybody would want hundreds of millions of pounds, but I assume it's so that they can walk into a casino at Monte Carlo and enjoy the prestige amongst their peers of losing a few millions in an evening without being at all bothered. But I've never mixed in those circles so they remain a mystery.
Or, another possibility is that their wealth depends upon paying off a lot of people, the mafia model. I think many people love power above all else. Money is just a tool.
I can easily understand why someone would want £25k. The way the system is presently designed, if you need a car for your job, if you want to get married and raise children, if you want to buy a house, etc, £25k doesn't go very far.
You've got one problem. How do persuade the person with hundreds of millions of pounds to part with it ? You'd be challenging their power, and that's what they like, so they can win and defeat you. That's the buzz of having so much wealth.
And you've got a second problem. How do you persuade the guy who's worked hard to get qualified to get a good job, whose ambition is to have a nice new car, new house three kids, ponies, holidays in the Algarve or a cottage in Cornwall, to settle for £5k which won't get any of those things ?
But people have no problem looking at TV pictures of people (including my best friend and her family) who are living on $2 a day and telling them that there simply isn't enough money to go around.
I know. There's always plenty of money for planes and bombs and all kinds of nonsense, but as I tried to explain to b bliss above, the theory is that if you give easy money to poor people you're taking away the stick that forces them into the mega-machine. The capitalist market wants cheap labour, not wasting money on helping people.
There's a guy here who chooses to live without money
There's another point. If you live in a warm climate where you can live outside, where fruit and veg grow easily all year round, it's a bit easier to do without money.
All very well - and I'm sorry to do this to you, mehitabel23, but I don't like the apparent hypocrisy. Where does all the money come from for all of your various instruments that you own and play? For the reality TV you like to watch? For computers and all this internet access? And, more particularly, for that nice school of yours? Assuming you're a day student, that would make it approximately £9k per year, *plus lunch* just for that alone. Obviously, nearly £17k if you board.
All of the above wouldn't be possible on £5k, or £25k, or even £50k per year. Do you feel like giving it all up? And where, in the UK, would you live for £5k per year, even before you start thinking about food?
Sorry to be old, but my immediate impression, after the anger subsided, was 'She'll grow out of it'. And you will. I hope that, when you do, you still find a more practical way of making the world a better place, for all sorts of people, including those friends of yours on $2/day. We need people who want to do that.
anarchist musician
anarchist musician
are there, in italy, anarchist TIMusicians?! ...
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by dyna
Re: anarchist musician
Why do you ask?
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by rob_handel
Re: anarchist musician
There is an exactly 1 in 88 chance that there will be one near Trieste next year. And I mean this absolutely seriously.
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Dyna, do you have a brother called Rod?
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by maxF
Re: anarchist musician
Many of the ITM musicians I know are antichrists. I don't know if it's the same in Italy.
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by grego
Re: anarchist musician
Could do with some anarchists in Zimbabwe just now.
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Just to know...I'd like to have a band, one day, that talk about social issues dear to me (but in a particular way...) and play the best kind of music, the IT.
sorry for my bad english
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by dyna
Re: anarchist musician
Lots of people apologise for their 'bad English'. It always seems pretty good to me.
... but maybe that's because English people's English is so bad ...
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by benhall.1
Re: anarchist musician
KML its been chaos for years who would notice ?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by bazouki dave and the real tooty flutey
Re: anarchist musician
chaos and anarchy are not synonymous ...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by pavlf
and dyna your English is fine ,its just our humour round here is a bit exotic at times .
You are right the talking and good company is a big part of the fun
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by bazouki dave and the real tooty flutey
Re: anarchist musician
but who would notice anarchy among chaos ?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by bazouki dave and the real tooty flutey
Re: anarchist musician
It does help if your fellow musicians are in tune with your politics.
Let's hope the Tories get back soon in England. Someone in labour read about taxing the rich, and implemented it the wrong way round.
Al;l the best Dyna
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by bodhran bliss
Re: anarchist musician
I'm not so sure that Irish traditional music and anarchy would make comfortable bedfellows. If you are not subservient to master musicians who precede you, you will never get it.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
"I'm not so sure that Irish traditional music and anarchy would make comfortable bedfellows. If you are not subservient to master musicians who precede you, you will never get it."
Vive les Maîtres de la musique!
LOL!
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
>>Could do with some anarchists in Zimbabwe just now.
# Posted on April 2nd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad <<
How's that? Is peace accidentally breaking out or something?
Bliss: I heard somewhere that Osama Obama is talking about taxing the Brits if he gets into power. I think he is geographically challenged.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Ron Foreman
Re: anarchist musician
"...I heard somewhere that Osama Obama..."
On Rush Limbaugh's oxycontin laced talk show no doubt. Crawl back under your rock dipstick.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
Up yours, fagboy.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Ron Foreman
Re: anarchist musician
Ah, an intellectual!
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
Well, as usual, you started the name-calling. Imagine that, you can use the word intellectual. Now define it. Hell, why waste the time? It would be wrong, anyway. All you lefties are good for is name-calling and whining. And if you want me to crawl under a rock, try stuffing me there.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Ron Foreman
Re: anarchist musician
"...you started the name-calling " That's right dipstick, but I'm missing the "whining" part.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
Here's me trying to figure out what a "rock dipstick" is. Is it something to do with the manufacturing process of that lettered rock you get in seaside towns?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Dow
Re: anarchist musician
Sorry... "Crawl back under your rock, dipstick." Better? Or "Hey dipstick, crawl back under your rock." I know, a dipstick combined with a rock is a mixed metaphor, but I kinda liked the way it tripped off the tongue.
I'm still trying to figure out "fagboy." The guy seems to have "issues" with sexuality .
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
At least there was no ambiguity with "fagboy" though. No problems with the punctuation or anything. The meaning of what he wishes to express is absolutely crystal clear
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Dow
Re: anarchist musician
Aye lad. That is true. Perhaps I should have said what I really meant to say, but I seem to remember that there are language filters on this site. Correct?
Tally Ho! [ also highly ambiguous
]
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
I know. It's difficult when you want to say something like "eff off you effing c", and you know that if you type the full words they will be censored and filtered. I suppose you just have to make do with saying nothing at all
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Dow
Re: anarchist musician
As I know you well understand, sometimes saying nothing at all is just SO hard to do
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
Yeah, you know me. If I've got something to say, I'll say it. Sometimes you just have to find a way of getting the message across in a polite and gentlemanly way
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Dow
Re: anarchist musician
...and sometimes not so polite and gentlemanly when dipsticks are involved.
(After a quick Google search I see that "dipstick" has some alternate meanings in the land down under too
)
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
you mean like junk in the trunk?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Bodhi
Re: anarchist musician
Technically, Ron Foreman started the name-calling with the "Osama Obama" bit. A bit of nasty venom that should get this thread deleted shortly. Also really completely out of place here.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by TaoCat
Re: anarchist musician
Let's take bets on how long he lasts on this site before Jeremy loups in him out onto the street. "Ye're barred! Don't fvcken come back here!"
Anyway, Dyna, would you be into Italian trad music? Mostly diatonic accordion stuff, but lovely nonetheless. I think so anyway.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
What does "fagboy" mean? Cigarette child?
Just kidding.....even though I live in the United States (where "fags" are called cigarettes), I do know that cigarettes are sometimes called "fags" in other English speaking countries. I have also heard cigarettes referred to as "coffin nails" and "cancer sticks".
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by fauxcelt
Re: anarchist musician
and lung busters.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Duijera Dubh
Re: anarchist musician
I've never heard anyone say that they are about to smoke a coffin nail.
I disagree with Michael, I think that ITM and Anarchism are perfect bedfellows. They fit neatly into raging against the machine. No-one will make me love any kind of government and no one will make me listen to Rihanna. I can play my tin whistle and feel nice and rebellious.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
I'm glad to say that there is no "rage" in Irish music
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
KML, you seem to forget that the problems in Zimbabwe were created by the same imperialist clowns that are currently occupying the land that I live in......think on...what is Mugabe doing today that they didn't do much, much worse over the centuries. I don't support his actions but I can see where he got the ideas.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by strayaway
Re: anarchist musician
Hey strayaway, AND the country I came from. Don't think I support imperialism. But Mugabe is just using that as an excuse for incompetent mis-rule.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
I have never heard a cigarette called a "lung buster". I do like that nickname. I used to smoke and quit eight years ago. Smoking was one of the bad habits I learned when I was in the military.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by fauxcelt
Re: anarchist musician
With respect, KML, the tiny white minority owned virtually all the arable land. I don't want to get into a fraught political debate on here but let's just say that the lands should have been returned to the rightful owners.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by strayaway
Re: anarchist musician
Neither do I and I agree with you. But it remains a fact that Zanu-PF mismanaged the country but blamed Britail for their mismanagement. Ok let's leave it at that.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Britail? hmmm....
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Han, Britailia!
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by joesmith
Re: anarchist musician
"but let's just say that the lands should have been returned to the rightful owners."
ok, strayaway, seeing as this is a dead thread walking....hmm, same goes for USA, most of S. and Central America, Australia, Canada, N. Zealand, etc, etc.
"I think that ITM and Anarchism are perfect bedfellows"
Make that GREEN anarchism, and I'll agree
Mugabe is not a nice man. He fits the profile here
http://www.ponerology.com/
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Mugabe blames colonial rule for Zimbabwe's problems (of course you all knew that already), so why does the west assume that it knows better?
Don't hit me, for all you know, I could be playing the devil's advocate. Or I could be deadly serious.
And llig, I meant rage as in rebellion. Rather than rage as in mindless smashing-up of things.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
wolfbird...green anarchism it is...!
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Woohoo !! Love and Rage !!
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
There is no room for rebellion in Traditional Irish Diddley music. To play it well you have to respect and defer to your betters. If you are not subservient to the master musicians who precede you, you will never get it.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
>so why does the west assume that it knows better?
Who's asuming?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Another meaning of "fag" is - was - a junior boy at a British public (meaning, of course, private) school who had to do daily chores like cleaning and tidying studies and public areas and making the odd cup of coffee / running the odd errand or performing the odd service for his "studyholder". Lurid myths and legends abound regarding the treatment and duties of fags, sometimes not entirely without foundation. I went through the system when this was still in operation. It was a reasonable way to ensure that very crowded living areas did not become a tip. With agreeable people it was an agreeable stage to pass through; with a bully in the system (usually just a bit higher in the pecking-order) it could be miserable.
Anyway, this American asks this British interviewee:
"Tell me, do you know James Ponsonby-Chetwynde?"
"Of course I do, I was his fag at Eton."
(Longish pause)
"I must say - you British are sometimes appallingly frank!"
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by nicholas
Re: anarchist musician
IMHO, anarchism means taking responsibility for one's own life and values and behaviour, rather than remaining in an infantile condition accepting the authority of a parental Govt. Part of being an adult with human dignity is self-discipline. We should have our own code of behaviour that tells us what's right and wrong, IMO. Anarchism is a social, political, philosophical position. To the extent that has anything to do with ITM, I don't see why it would be importing rebellion into the music, llig. Learning a musical instrument needs a lot of dedication and self-discipline. If there is a link between ITM and anarchism, I'd see it as being one of the rare aspects of life and musical genres that you can pursue on your own terms, unlike, say, opera, which is favoured by the elite, or mainstream pop which is controlled by corporations.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Thank you for the explanation of another meaning of the word "fag", Nicholas. British slang is interesting to this American who has more than enough difficulty with American slang.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by fauxcelt
Re: anarchist musician
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford
http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=3328
http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=494
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1725975,00.html
http://www.bullnotbull.com/archive/chalmers-1.html
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
KML: who's assuming? everyone who's ever dissed Mugabe is assuming. that includes me.
Llig: not rebellion against the masters of ITM...rebellion against the media that tells us that we should be listening to The Killers.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
True anarchists observe no authority save that which forms naturally from basic, human interaction, meaning, Fathers, Mothers, Grandparents, and yes, senior musicians in the community you are seeking to join and study with.
It's those artificial forms of control which we reject, the State and all its evils.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
...besides, what's more anarchist then coming to a website to rail against organized forms of artificial control which seek to dictate to a natural Traditional musical form?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
Picking and choosing who you would like to rebel against is hardly anarchic. And while self discipline is important in any form of music (except punk of course, the only anarchic musical form), Traditional Irish Diddley music must be persued on its terms, not your own.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
So you reckon that a rebel should rebel against everything? even rebellion? I am a left wing anarchist, and I reserve the right to choose what I rebel against. Watch me.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
My dictionary has an anarchist as: a person who promotes disorder or excites revolt against any established rule, law, or custom. "Any custom"
"left wing anarchist." Ha, you daft eedjit. You don't even realise the contradiction. An Anarchist with allegiance to a political ideal? Ha.
Girl in a bar: "what are rebelling against, Johnny?"
Johnny (Brando): "What have you got?"
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
Michael, you are confusing two distinct definitions of the word.
1. 'anarchy', as used by politicians and trashy newspapers to describe situations which threaten their control, merely a synonym for chaos.
2. 'anarchy' or 'anarchism' as a political stance, with a long and noble history, being the view that people can sort out their own affairs, rather than be dictated to be a tiny ruling elite.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Thanks wolfbird.
Michael - I hate to break it to you that I actually know what I'm talking about. Anarchist communism is my political stance - of course I call myself "left wing" like the rest of them. And it makes complete sense - to me anyway. I don't call myself an anarchist because it's fashionable or because a metal band told me too.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
"When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.
The mere fact that these forces--inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence."
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Essays/independence.html
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
"Anarchist communism advocates the abolition of the state and capitalism in favor of a horizontal network of voluntary associations, workers' councils and/or commons through which everyone will be free to satisfy their needs."
thank you wikipedia...my faithful friend
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
All types of music need a little bit of anarchy, otherwise it dies. But not too much, otherwise it dies. Totally anarchic music is basically just white noise. And all white noise sounds the same. Rules evolve for a reason: because they work. Rules that are formulated or made-up generally don't. Thankfully, the rules that make up ITM are very bendy, and that's why it's thriving (it is thriving).
I don't think ITM is anarchic at all. It's just good music. Nobody's saying you should listen to the Killers, Mehitabel. I don't know why people get so hung-up about "The State", or "The Media". How can something made up of millions of pretty normal people be innately bad?
(Another thing that gets me is how "Society" is always wrong, whereas "The Public" is always right. It's the same people in both!)
Anyway, rant over. That was me rebelling against rebellion.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
"The State" as such isn't wrong. It's just the way the damn thing is organised, imho.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
anarchist communism was my political stance too when I was 16
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Bren
Re: anarchist musician
Excellent. So I'm not alone. Or I wouldn't be alone, if time was not a dimension.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
"left wing anarchist." Ha, you daft eedjit. You don't even realise the contradiction. An Anarchist with allegiance to a political ideal? Ha.
who is the daft eejit now llig?
Not mehitabel23 anyway...but you, sir, YOU
ha
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by woD
Re: anarchist musician
And the trouble with "Anarchist Communism" is that it would only work with computer-generated, idealised people. Real people aren't like that. They have hopes and ambitions, aspirations, intelligence. Ants and bees and termites live in that kind of society, and I guess it suits them. But it couldn't suit us.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
what makes you come to that conclusion, Joe? (i'm not following your argument...it's late in the week and early in the morning)
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
What is your political stance now, Bren, now you're so much older and wiser?
What State is badly organised, Mehitabel? All of them? It would seem that way, from most people's opinions of their own State.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
The entire world (yes I'm working on a big scale). The rich are so very rich and the poor are so very poor. You've been to SA, Joe, you know that. I don't get how people can see this massive rich-poor divide and put it all down to luck, chance, work ethic and human nature. There is clearly a major flaw in the way society is structured or these atrocities wouldn't happen!
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
"They have hopes and ambitions, aspirations, intelligence."
That's why the smart ones opt for anarchism, because all other systems reduce humans to mere cogs in their machine.
http://www.tlio.org.uk/issues/legacy/index.html
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
??
What country and time zone are you in, Mehi? I'm sure Bath isn't that far away from London...
Anarchist Communism only works if everyone is entirely equal (and not just on the inside, as in "all men were created equal", but on the outside, too), and nobody's in charge, but people have aspirations of power. Not all, but quite a few. People want to rise above other people. Other people will take advantage of the system, using others' trust in the system to get as much for themselves as they can (it's made up of voluntary associations, after all). Even if none of this happened, and it went ideally, people would start to feel like ants, as if they could never become anything more than what they are currently.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
"The entire World", Mehi, is not an organisation! It is not in the least bit structured! Maybe that is "society"'s major flaw. Do you want to organise Society?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
Human nature is a problem, isn't it, Joe CSS. But are you saying that what we have now is good, or the best we can hope for ? Seems to me that what we have got is designed to bring out the worst in people...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
"The entire World"
Think globally, act locally.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
I guess that's a deadly, unsolvable dilemma, really. For the World's problems to be sorted, the World needs to act as one entity. However, that would mean that the person in charge would be the Ruler of the World. Would you trust anyone with that job?
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
I would and in all modestly like to put myself forward for that post .
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by bazouki dave and the real tooty flutey
Re: anarchist musician
Anarcho-Communism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
Anarcho-Capitalism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalists
Libertarian Socialism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
Anarcho-Syndicalism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism#Anarcho-syndicalism
Mikhail Bakunin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakunin
Anarchist Schools of Thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_schools_of_thought
Well, I think we've covered that. Hopefully we're all a bit more educated now and can release the mass media's control on our minds which forces us to think that anarchism means rebelling against everything. How horribly simple-minded.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
Your logic doesn't hold up, Joe CSS. People don't need the "one person in charge". That's fundamental to anarchist thinking. We've had thousands of years of "one person in charge". They are mostly evil monsters or incompetent disasters. I'd make an exception for Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King. They weren't "in charge", more like foci for a movement of people. Anarchism, IMHO, means realizing you got to do it yourself, not wait for some power-seeking leader to turn up and tell you what to do.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Maybe it's the cynic in me (whom I thoroughly dislike), but I can't help thinking that in any society, someone will always rise to the top. Even in small groups of people, there's always someone the rest look up to for guidance. The larger the group of people, the more the "guidance" becomes "orders", and eventually, "laws".
Occasionally, you will get someone like Nelson Mandela, who was basically the best thing that could ever have happened to South Africa, but more often than not, you will get someone like Stalin or Mugabe.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
Lord of the Flies...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wyogal
Re: anarchist musician
Joe CSS, there are a few slightly optimistic examples, especially smallish tribal groups which govern themselves by consensus. But on the whole, I have to agree with you that there has always been a percentage of what I consider to be psychopaths, who put gratification of their own power lust above all else, and who don't care how much suffering and death they cause. And if you want to stop them, you're usually forced to become as ruthless as they are...but looking to the wisest for guidance and advice is okay, isn't it ? That's a lot different to having to 'obey my orders or else', because anyone is free to reject advice.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
wyogal, yes, Lord of the Flies is an excellent example. But it's an instance of young (males) without any social or cultural context or support. If you look at examples of smallish tribal groups (before they get overwhelmed by Western culture) they have highly sophisticated methods to prevent the Lord of the Flies syndrome, such as initiation and rites of passage.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Government is raising children, just on a larger scale.
If you use violence and the threat of violence to control your childrne, or your population, you create children/citizens who only know how to respond to threats and violence. Simple.
If you use reason, enlightenment and good examples to raise children or lead people, then you will create children/citizens who are also reasonable and enlightened.
Still waiting for reasonable and enlightened government. 200+ years and counting since the Age of Enlightenment...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
Small, egalitarian groups sure do sound idyllic. It can even work for a session, sometimes. But if you want to build something complicated like a plane or a hospital, it’s useful to have a few leaders about.
And please, remember that Lord of the Flies was a fictional story written by a poet from Cornwall (and KML in a past life) – hardly a authoritative, definitive (or even true) statement of the human condition.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by fidkid
Re: anarchist musician
You are wise, SWFL Fiddler
It's probably got a lot to do with scale. If you live in a community of a few thousand where people want to fit in and be helpful and respected, that's a lot different to anonymous cities of millions. But it's also culture. Seems to me, in this soceity here, the only rites of initiation from child to adult are being legally permitted to drink and drive.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Seems to me, that just as people can make and honour taboos against certain types of anti-social behaviour, they could, theoretically, disapprove of individuals who try to seize power (Joe CSS's point, above).
There's an example of such wisdom here, called Wiske
http://noblesavagery.blogspot.com/2007/03/against-his-story-against-leviathan_12.html
Wiske never really goes away, but every time that aspect of human nature pops up, it's dealt with so that it doesn't get out of proportion.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Thanks wolfbird, I really appreciate your input, and SWFL fiddler also.
"Think globally, act locally" - I take this to heart more than most and hopefully if I get into UWC next year (www.uwc.org) I'll be able to implement it even more than I already have.
Joe - the "hopes and ambitions, aspirations, intelligence" you speak of is catered for perfectly in anarchism. One government for all will *never* work, IMHO. That government is going to essentially be biased towards people of similar standing to themselves - naturally. The best answer is no government. Each man can be trusted to take care of his own assets.
PEOPLE INDEED DO have aspirations of power, and if you ask yourself WHY IS THIS it is because we have been brought up in a society (ultimate disrespect to society meant) where power over others is seen as something to aspire to. And the reason communism hasn't worked so far is that we have all been brought up with a work-for-wage, each-according-to-his-works mindset. If this can be mitigated, and I indeed don't believe in inherent human nature, I hold firm the belief that communism can work.
Anarchist communism is not designed in the case of everyone being equal. Each man according to his need - this allows for whatever inequalities there may be. Frankly at the moment we all have too much. For a small time in my life I lived in what western society would consider poverty, despite the fact that we had everything we needed, and indeed a goat outside (called Honey, for anyone who is interested) so I feel qualified to firmly believe that the world harbours enough resources for everyone to have *everything* they need.
"Seems to me that what we have got is designed to bring out the worst in people..." - totally agree with you wolfbird.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
"For the World's problems to be sorted, the World needs to act as one entity." - couldn't agree more.
"However, that would mean that the person in charge would be the Ruler of the World" - you seem to have misunderstood the whole concept of anarchism...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Thank you wolfbird, but nonsense! I just pay close attention...
That's very true, the point you make. The problem is that when you have generation upon generation thinking that the only right way to be governed and to raise children is with threats and violence, it becomes harder and harder to break free.
Then, over time, threat power and violence becomes the norm, and it's simply too 'radical' to imagine doing anything else BUT that. "What do you mean, rehabilitate criminals? Huh?" Sigh.
Large masses treated with reason and enlightenment instead of threats and violence would work just as well as small groups, they simply haven't been taught to do it that way.
I found it very interesting to look at the natural anarchistic tribal systems the native Americans used.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
No, SWFL Fiddler, I meant it as an honest compliment.
You know, it's hard work to think for one's self. Most people just repeat what someone else has put into their head.
I think that all systems can get into feedback loops, which can be negative or positive, and the generation after generation thing you mention is one of those 'lose/lose' situations. It's difficult to break the cycle and change it to win/win. All those guys in prison in the USA ! It's insane. everybody working has to pay for all those guys to do nothing but get more angry and embittered. Same in the UK.
Seeing we're talking idealism, it's not to difficult to design a perfect soceity on paper. Utopians have been doing it for centuries. But say you set up the ideal egalitarian community, from each whatever they can contribute, to each according to their needs, and every body is living in harmony and eco-friendly bliss. But, the next door tribe gets taken over by a power-crazed maniac, who takes the communities wealth and uses it to pay for an army of thugs...before you know it, you're back into the familiar tales from history...
You know, most things have been tried, one time or another, over the last few thousand years. the mainstream modern Western Imperialist military industrial Leviathan which dominates all our lives cannot continue much longer because it's destroying the biosphere and making the planet uninhabitable...I think we have to dig around amongst all the old ideas, listen to wisdom of minority groups, like the Kogi of Columbia, like the Amish, use our ingenuity to put pieces together and come up with new solutions...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Every time I mention society/govermental reform on the internet I get called a troll and blocked!
I think reform is extremely urgent but far from imminent and I worry that it will be too late before anything will happen. Generation X, I trusted you guys! Now it's down to Generation Y and I hope we can stay afloat until then...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Your obviously a trouble maker, mehitabel23
I'm surprised this thread has lived so long
Someone once said to me they wanted to reform soceity along anarchist lines. Personally, I don't think that can happen. There are too many people with vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Any radical change is a threat which they resist and try to prevent. But the way I see it, anarchists are like the spices in a meal. Only a tiny proportion of the whole, but they can change the flavour.
There is an anarchist (hippy) village called Tipi Valley near here. When they began, 30 odd years ago, living in wigwams, everybody was hostile and outraged. But now they are accepted and respected and seen as wise and far-sighted. They were trying to discover lifestyles that didn't harm the planet.
Those folks followed their own dreams, instead of the ones advertised on the television every night. It's a difficult thing to do.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Wow! Tipi Valley, near Llandeilo? That's the stuff of legends. I might go and live there during exeat, if I end up living in Llantwit Major next year...
A trouble maker? Me? I am also surprised at how long this thread has survived but I've found it highly interesting all the same.
Anarchism won't take over, for a while anyway. You guys just wait until WE run the country
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Gen X?!? Wait a second, mehitabel, what about the Baby Boomers? How about our alleged "Greatest Generation" which forged the modern military industrial complex? You want to start blaming folks you've got a lot of historical work to do!
Best to simply change your own self. Start with your own mind, then move onto to the next one. One at a time, keep the conversation going, that's all any of us can do.
We're just looking for that 100th monkey, keep on looking!
"The hundredth monkey phenomenon refers to a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly "critical mass" point is reached. The idea of the hundredth monkey phenomenon comes from Dr. Lyall Watson in his book Lifetide (1979). Watson, who has a Ph.D. in ethology for work done at the London Zoo with Desmond ("The Naked Ape") Morris, was writing about several studies done in the 1960's by several Japanese primatologists of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). Watson alleged that the scientists were "reluctant to publish [the whole story] for fear of ridicule." He writes that he had "to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened." So, wrote Watson:
I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened. In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. . . . Let us say, for argument's sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiyama..."
http://skepdic.com/monkey.html
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
I love the 100th monkey phenomenon. And that's why I keep nagging people.
Generation X I mean in the British sense. Though I guess there is a lot of controversy about who Gen X actually are anyway. So I'll simplify it.
All you born 1950-1975! You never managed to convert the 100th monkey!
But I forgive you.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
I always hated Generation X. Any band that foists Billy Idol onto the world has a lot to answer for. Give me X-Ray Specs any day.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by Floss the Tethers
Re: anarchist musician
If you find Tipi Valley interesting, mehitabel, you'd probably also like these neighbours of mine
http://www.brithdirmawr.co.uk/
yes, the 'critical mass' thing. It's like, you can suddenly feel a change in the social mood...quite mysterious really.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
This all seems pedantic and pretentious-- not to mention purely academic i.e., hypothetical or theoretical and not expected to produce a practical result.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by PatrickJWK
Re: anarchist musician
(yep, silly me ... what an eedjit ... for getting anarchy mixed up with ... well, something that is a bit more organised that anarchy)
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
PatrickJWK.....there's *literally* millions of people involved in this kind of stuff, all around the planet, from battling with the police to building hobbit houses...you're obviously the 101 monkey...
see the link I just posted. they've been doing it almost twenty years, defying all the authorities who've tried to shut them down. That's a practical result, IMO
http://www.brithdirmawr.co.uk/
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Michael, organising anarchists, or trying to get them to agree what anarchy is, is worse than herding cats, but if you leave 'em be, they just get on with it... doesn't matter what it's called
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Oh PatrickJWK, I'm very pedantic and pretentious, as everyone who knows me will testify
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Sorry if I've seemed purely academic and hypothetical. But I just resent being taken for a rebel-without-a-clue teenager who hates TEH MAN. We obviously have difference of political opinion (no sh*t...) and I don't like this unspoken implication that I'm confused and clueless. Pfft.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
" the best way to predict your future, is to create it "
http://www.freewebs.com/samsimillia/ourplanet.htm
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Well, mehit, it's up to you if you want to re-define systems ... to theoretically mould your own version of anarchy so that it fits your idealisms.
However, does your belief that, "ITM and Anarchism are perfect bedfellows, as they fit neatly into raging against the machine," sit easily with you NOT wanting to "Stick it to the Man"?
Far be it for me to merely imply anything, your confusion is your own doing.
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
all this squabbling is upsetting Schrodinger's cat - I opened the box and check on it, but I'm afraid it might die...
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by airport
Re: anarchist musician
"I'd open" (quantum grammar)
# Posted on April 3rd 2008 by airport
Re: anarchist musician
Boomers were born in the years 1946 - 1964 (some say 1960), gen X is after that. I am NOT a gen X'er!
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wyogal
Re: anarchist musician
Dear me, trouble at mill. Two of the most corrupt countries in the world are Ireland and the UK and I live in both of them!
Handy for getting two passports however, just in case you get into trouble abroad, or the Americans invade your holiday haven.
But, "Fagboy?" Now that is a disgrace and should not be tolerated. If we are content to put up with homophobia we might as well have sectarianism, racism, sexism, ageism and all the rest.
Simply a disgrace.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by bodhran bliss
Re: anarchist musician
"pedantic and pretentious"
Yup. That's philosophy for ya.
I don't mean to jump on you question for mehit, Llig, but I know why the music satisfies the part of me that was once a young urban rowdy on a skateboard with a Bad Brains T shirt, many many (too many, Gen X many, and not Billy Idol either, ack) moons ago.
Tradition, in our modern world, is a form of revolution. With all the standardization going on via the mass media, first and foremost with musical forms, the homogenization of culture has resulted. If there were vast quantities of money to be made from the music, it would be exploited like any other form, and don't we all complain a bit about that on here when that happens in the limited forms that it does?
People sharing tunes, having tunes, is central to the tradition, playing them with each other. It's immune from any attempt to pervert it in the hearts of those that love it. It's literally idealism embodied in a way that anarchism can never be, well, at least when you have those 'magic' sessions once in a while where it all clicks.
Personally it fulfills for me the need to reconnect with ancestry who played the music which I've only heard second hand stories of. That, however, is in the same vein of tradition being an antidote for the ailments modern 'culture' can inflict upon people.
Whew. That was exhausting. I'm going to go play some tunes.
Peace and joy be with you all.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
Yes indeed the geezer Ron Foreman is without doubt out of order. "Fagboy" is a nasty nasty one indeed. It's the invoking of homosexuality with subservience and cowardice. very very nasty. There was a time, 70 or 80 years ago where such nastiness was mainstream - remember the cowardly lion in The Wizard of OZ? "I'm afraid there's no denyin', I'm just a dandy-lion, a fate I don't deserve." But zero tolerance to such stuff now please.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
Hear, hear, well said bliss & llig.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
I like this thread. I hope it doesn't die.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Joe CSS
Re: anarchist musician
I agree with KML
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by bazouki dave and the real tooty flutey
Re: anarchist musician
I agree with Joe CSS. Nothing like a good row to stretch the brain cells at this early hour. However the petty insults are not great, I agree with bliss + llig in that respect.
Llig, I'm sorry if I haven't made myself clear. Indeed part of my philosophy is rebellion against TEH MAN. I just wanted to emphasise that it's not blind rebellion with no awareness of the implications or alternatives.
I wanna make clear that I'm not an emo teenager who sits in my room and cries about the unfairness of the world while plucking a single string on my black acoustic guitar. Nor am I a punk poet. Joe CSS, back me up here.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Damien Mullane used to have an emo haircut...they can't be all bad
Haven't followed all of this, but good thread lads. Interesting spectrum of ideas expressed. In contrast to the petty insults as you call them, which show a total lack of any thought, just intellectual laziness; so if you disagree with someone just lash out with an old tried and tested insult, yet one that is discredited and most people here find abhorrent these days. As yet no sign of an apology.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
On my cycle into work this morning I was musing on what would be lost if society was reduced to small groups of self sufficient co-operatives.
The list is very long indeed, but basically falls into these categories:
Technology. (including medicine. not hippie stuff, I mean rigourously double blind tested and accredited medicine)
Communication. (including books and education)
The argument goes that we don't "need" any of this. And in the strict sense of the word, it's true.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
I have mused often on the same subject also Michael, and the limitations of total self sufficiency.
As long as people have faith in medicine, I can't see the Amish-style life working any time soon. It's about getting the balance right...mega-global corporations, and indeed massive countries, will not work forever, and the solution to this seems to split into smaller divisions and work toward self-sufficiency at that level. But then, every municipality cannot have its own hospital, etc.
The mind boggles.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
"And the reason communism hasn't worked so far is that we have all been brought up with a work-for-wage, each-according-to-his-works mindset."
Not at all - the reason communism hasn't worked so far is because no-one has ever implemented it in the way Marx and Engels envisioned. The USSR and China posited themselves as being communist states, but in reality they were (and in the case of China still are) dictatorships intent on exploiting the workers using the most brutal means possible, for the ends of small, corrupt leadership (whilst I can get on board with much of what Marxism is about, Leninism turned me off as I can't agree with the imposition of a system of government by violence).
Anarchist-communism will never work in any existing state because it would need the commitment of all the people, and as the old mustard board shows, getting people to agree is royal pain in the a*se. I like the idea of anarcho-communism but could never see it working on a global scale (although I think it closely mimics the society of our ancestors pre-Roman invasion) because we are all far too attached to our material possessions (at least could we wait until after I've collected my new Joe Foley bouzouki next year before starting the revolution).
Winstanley is a personal hero of mine - a man so far beyond his time he still is in many ways. He recognised that the capitalist/feudalist system would ultimately end up disenfranchising the ordinary people of their most basic and fundamental right - their connection with the very land they lived on. And look where that has led us all over the years.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Sugarfoot Jack
Re: anarchist musician
"The USSR and China posited themselves as being communist states, but in reality they were (and in the case of China still are) dictatorships intent on exploiting the workers using the most brutal means possible, for the ends of small, corrupt leadership"
I agree Mr Sugarfoot. In fact, there's no agreeing about it - that's a fact, pure and simple. But what I mentioned is another barrier that prevents communism from working.
Anarchist communism will not work at the moment because people have a materialistic nature - and I firmly believe that this is not inherent human nature. Maybe it won't work at the moment, but fifty years down the line (assuming that the ice caps haven't melted yet) it could be a possibility. (fingers crossed)
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Interesting points, llig.
(BTW, I concede I was mistaken, re my thoughtless 'terms' remark. You're right. One should pursue this music on it's terms, not one's own.)
I assume you are thinking 'what if ?' and then imagining various scenarios and what the results would be.
The 'what if everyone reassembled in self sufficient communities, therefore...' doesn't stack up though.
Firstly, for such a project to work, the members have to really want to do it. It's a difficult thing to do, even for idealists. People who were forced or conscripted would easily wreck any community. Most people will not want to live in a co-op. They'll prefer living alone or in a nuclear family, doing their jobs building aeroplanes, running hospitals and power stations and offices and all the rest of the stuff that mainstream soceity uses.
Secondly, there's no hard and fast rules that say how co-operatives or communities should be structured. They don't need to attempt self-sufficiency, although some do. Some larger groups, like the Amish, operate very successfully within the larger social system, and just reject stuff they don't like, such as cars and telephones.
Third point is, that you're speaking as if there is a choice, between hospitals and education and something without them. That may not be the case in the future. People will probably jump on me for doom-mongering, but IMO, I'm being coldly realistic and reading the evidence. The way is see it, this whole edifice which we call 'civilization', is going to collapse all around us. (One reason being that it's entirely dependent upon cheap fossil fuels, which have peaked. There are plenty of other reasons, but that's a diversion). If I'm proved correct, there will not be any choice re hospitals, etc, and the the best place to survive will be in self-contained communities.
However, the communities I know about don't hold together because they are intent upon surviving catastrophe. They hold together because they believe that the mainstream system forces them to act immorally, forces them to deny their own deepest insights into why we exist. So they seek for alternative, more satisfactory ways to live. I think that everyone should have that right, as a basic human right.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Joe, I don't have a "stance" any more. I'm no longer afraid to change my mind.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Bren
Re: anarchist musician
Not the Hundredth Monkey myth again! Here is a thorough and well -deserved debunking.
http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~ronald/HMP.htm
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by dafydd
Re: anarchist musician
When the romans left Briton around 400CE, the art/craft of making pottery was lost for hundreds of years. Astonishing when you think of it. when you think of the sophistication of British pottery throughout the Roman occupation.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by llig leahcim
Re: anarchist musician
Yes michael, time for a reality check for some people here.
All this stuff about human rights - I believe such rights have to be earned. How many people actually take political responsibility?
I don't mean affiliating to just left wing, green or anarchist groups or parties - it could be Tory, US Republican etc., if that's what you believe in. Only 64% of the US electorate voted at the last elections, and only 61% in UK. This is less than a century after women fought to get equal voting rights in the UK. And don't tell me there's nobody worth voting for - there are hundreds of minority parties. How many people ON HERE actually take political responsibility?
How many people even take personal responsibility for eg their health? ie, can they even look after themselves before thinking about looking out for other people, or polemicising about looking out for other people?
What percentage of people in the West are obese while there are millions starving elsewhere?
What about people who smoke, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, take psychotogenic drugs like cannabis? Is that taking responsibilty?
Come back and tell me about taking political responsibilty and polemicising about puting the world to rights, once you start taking care of yourselves, and I might begin to take you seriously.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Why do you assume that we don't take political responsibility, KML?
It's interesting what you say about taking personal responsibility for health. Is it therefore irresponsible to drive, as driving is dangerous and can pose a threat to health? Is it irresponsible to use an internet wireless connection - as it hasn't been around long enough for us to know if it has any health implications? Are body modifications irresponsible, as they could become infected? A line's gotta be drawn somewhere! Where would you draw it?
Being sixteen means that I can't vote but I still consider myself politically active, and I actually practice what I preach - as I'm sure do many people! If it weren't for such things as GCSEs (thank you, government) I would be on the next plane to Ethiopia...
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
mehitabel23, are you a Rastafarian then?
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by yhaalhouse
Re: anarchist musician
I have to take responsibility for everything in my life, because there's nobody else anywhere near. The only time I'd ask someone for assistance would be maybe if I broke my leg or the house caught fire or some other major emergency like that.
http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/index.php?fld=super_region&val=Wales&one=dat&two=det&sel=tipivill
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
No, I'm not rastafarian, which may come as a surprise to some of you
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Couldn't you cycle to Ethiopia?.....
Ok seriously though, yes, you're right about driving - there's far too much of it around, as I notice daily, cycling to work. I don't know about wireless broadband's health risks, but I bet you'll see a massive increase in Alzheimer's, Pick's and Parkinson's Diseases in 20-30 years time from the microwave radiation given off by mobile phones, literally slowly frying peoples' brains. As for bdy piercings and tatoos, personally I abhor them and yes there are health risks associated with them. The line drawn - what do you mean, by legislation, and drive tatoos underground? Even education fails as (the point I forgot to make in my post) people know the dangers of such and such activities but still insist on doing them. That's why I don't think all those grandiose schemes involving people being responsible for them selves never mind each other will ever work. People are inherently faulted. Greed, obsession, selfishness ego and lust are what motivate most people, not civic duty or civic pride. Blame the "media" if you want, and yes they pander to those faults, but essentially the media just magnifies what is already within most of us.
GCSE's? - get as many and as good ones as you can get. That's the smart thing to do. Then you might be armed with the knowledge to tackle as best you are able problems in places like Ethiopia, although Darfur in Sudan or the Congo are in much wosre predicaments right now. Never miss a chance of ANY education.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Wolfbird - I looked at the link and I like the idea. Unfortunately, the internet, antibiotics & other medicines, the national health service, motor vehicles (by which means I presume you moved the timber to build your tipis) and other modern "luxuries" were not invented and developed in tipis.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
If I could cycle to Ethiopia I would, Key. But I fancy that tackling the Maghreb on a bike is even more irresponsible than getting a plane to Addis.
I'm in your camp as far as driving and microwaves are concerned. But body modifications? I love them. I made a metal detector go off in Addis. It kept going off. They took me into a side room.
I don't agree that people are inherently faulted (apart from...let's not go into religion now). I would love to blame "the media" but unfortunately that phrase has come to mean nothing. It's just the attitude of our society (and everyone in it) that has become deeply rooted within all of us since birth, but I retain the hope that one day the cycle will be broken. It might take something huge for that to happen but it *will* happen.
I will get as many GCSEs as I can. I will get my IB. I will get whatever else. Darfur and DRC (not to mention Tindouf) are of course in a worse state than Ityoppya at the moment but as I stand currently I'm only equipped with the language skills and cultural knowledge to help there. Elswhere I'd be a hindrance.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
*Ethiopia
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
KML, you're right to swing a frying pan ends abruptly, about three inches away from my head
" People are inherently faulted. Greed, obsession, selfishness ego and lust are what motivate most people, not civic duty or civic pride. "
I don't agree with this, that people are born with 'Original Sin'.
I think we are born with a set of basic instinctive drives and emotions. We have to learn to adjust those as we grow up, so that we can get along with other people, and I think that's where the trouble starts and then things just keep getting worse, because schools and soceity in general are screwed up...I don't think that people are naturally, intrinsically, greedy and selfish... for an example of what people might be like if they grew up in a more natural soceity, there's an interesting, if rather intellectual, article by Sorenson here :
http://www.danbartlett.co.uk/writings/sorenson.php
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Hey, KML, *I* do not live at Tipi Valley, nor do I live in a tipi. I live in a cottage, built of stones and mud, about 1787.
I'm not arguing that anybody should go and live in a tipi. I'm arguing that people should have the right and the opportunity to do so, if they want to, as an example of anarchist or communist or communal living.
Also, you wouldn't need any motorvehicles to move timber for tipis. Everything can be done by hand.
The National Health Service is a peculiarity of the UK, not found elsewhere, and I'm talking general principles, not local details. (Not to say it's 'bad', because I owe my life to it). Motor vehicles are something else. They are now competing directly with humans for food, and winning.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Not sure about the tipi thing in Wales. No dogs? The human/dog relationship is very ancient and goes very deep, so that puts me off.
Also, what's with this imported religion stuff when you're deep in Wales? Plenty to go at in the indigenous tradition if you know where to look without resorting to playing Indians.
I do like the basic values they aspire to though,,and their basic model to living. You should always take your wellies off when entering another house . . .
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Sugarfoot Jack
Re: anarchist musician
I'ld just like to say that I haven't so far contributed tothis debate.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Guernsey Pete
Re: anarchist musician
And I'm thinking of becoming a Green Anarchist, once I've lerned how to spellcheck, that is.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Guernsey Pete
Re: anarchist musician
GP: Oh good. We could have an anarchist society on the mustard board.
I would love to live in a tipi community (and indeed have done, at a drunken glastonbury many years ago :P)
But *more* than I want that, I want to run far away and live in the greater Middle East or East Africa (or work as a Doctor on phelophepa :-p). This I believe will be more helpful to the world than shutting myself away in a Tipi.
Though many of my friends would probably disagree and think that the only way that I can benefit the world is by going into a tipi and never coming out
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
"Haven't followed all of this, but good thread lads. Interesting spectrum of ideas expressed. In contrast to the petty insults as you call them, which show a total lack of any thought, just intellectual laziness; so if you disagree with someone just lash out with an old tried and tested insult, yet one that is discredited and most people here find abhorrent these days. As yet no sign of an apology."
KML, surely you aren't implying that I am "intellectual lazy," and that I should apologize for being brash about the "Osama Obama" slur. After nearly 8 years of enduring the likes of Mr Dipstick being given a platform through nearly every channel of communication here in the good ol' USofA, I no longer have any patience for his "POV." I fired one off the bow and felt damn good about it. The time for "politeness" with regard to the Mr Dipsticks of this country is over.
Tally Ho!
BTW, I've been following the thread. Interesting conversation as usual! The level of intelligence on the mustard board is impressive. Makes me think the music has something to do with it...
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by gw
Re: anarchist musician
I don't want to get into brain development here as it's a complicated subject, but human personality is a mixture of nature and nurture, in ways that are more complex than just getting the right ingredients for a cake, sticking it in the oven, then out comes a cake half an hour later.
There are many triggers and switches timed to go off at crucial points during development, and which must receive the appropriate stimulus or the faculty in question does not develop - Hubel and Wiesel's experiments on the lateral geniculate nucleus in kittens were the first to demonstrate this. Genes get switched on and off and interact with each other all the time during development. The infant brain has many more brain cells than the adult, but most are undifferentiated, subsequently undergoing planned cell death, apoptosis. To just say "we are born with a set of basic instinctive drives and emotions" is just really simplistic and uninformed to be brutally frank.
It may have sounded that I implied that when I said the thing about greed and selfishness etc. What I did say was that people are *motivated* by those...things....abstractions or whatever they amount to. And I still think they are. Thus motivated.
2007 was a historic year for humanity. In that year more of the human population lived in cities than not in cities. So we are now a species that now lives predominantly in cities, globally speaking. That's the reality we will in future have to deal with, not tipis. Cities need to regain a sense of purpose, community and civic pride, otherwise the selfish etc motivation of which I spoke earlier will make them unpleasant places in which to live and bring up the next generation (even more unpleasant, I hear some of you say......not me though. The best sessions are in cities!)
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
Mehitabel what doesTEH MAN please? pardon my ignorance.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by peter wsll
Re: anarchist musician
soz ..I meant what does TEH MAN mean please? ...cheers P
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by peter wsll
Re: anarchist musician
I forgot that you are a biologist/geneticist/brainologist, Mr Key!
I hear what you're saying about the nature/nurture mix. "Environmental factors and inherited factors" (thank you AQA biology). If anything is in our inherent nature, why is there such diversity? I cannot think of two common personality traits. Is our motivation influenced by nature or nurture? I'm erring toward nurture, but what do I know.
2007 was a historic year in the sense - we are now a truly urbanized world. I love living in a city but the rich poor divide that I wrote about yesterday ^^^ is much much more apparent in cities, which makes me wonder. Why is this?
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Oh, TEH MAN is...uhhh....
" "The Man" does not usually refer to a specific individual, but instead to the government, leaders of large corporations, and other authority figures in general, such as the police. The Man is colloquially defined as the figurative person who controls our world. The Man is also often used as a symbol of racial oppression, as well as the boss of a blue-collar worker, and the enemy of any counterculture."
(thank you wikipedia)
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Thanks M now I know what you mean...heres one some of you might like ..."Guy Fawkes ....the only person to enter Parliament with honest intentions" ...and another..".No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in." am surprised this thread not deleted cheers P
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by peter wsll
Re: anarchist musician
"To just say "we are born with a set of basic instinctive drives and emotions" is just really simplistic and uninformed to be brutally frank."
Be as frank as you wish to be, KML. I'm not uninformed on this subject, just presenting the idea in the simplest fashion I could manage for a general readership.
The question appeared to be whether human nature is such and such, and we just have to cope with it. Or, human nature is the result of the environment that we inhabit. As you rightly state, it's a mix of both, an interplay between the two.
But we can also ask, what was the actual nature of human beings before they became domesticated, just as we can ask what was the nature of wild jungle fowl before they got bred to become battery chickens.
The evidence that I offered, from the Sorenson link, is that when people lived in a soceity with plenty of space, and other conditions, they appear to be very different creatures, with none of the unpleasant characteristics re greed and selfishness and so on.
Presumably, THAT is our real true nature, the creatures we all once were, the creatures we had evolved into, before we got into an unnatural environment. The same point can be illustrated by the marked differences between a baboon colony in the wild, and a baboon colony caged up in a zoo.
IMO, contemporary soceity produces pathological individuals. The medical profession says that about a quarter of UK suffers from mental illness. Obviously, the rest are likely to also have aberrant behaviour, just not to a degree that gets them into treatment. I don't accept that happy balanced humans are motivated by greed or selfishness. They're more likely to enjoy being generous, because it's a buzz to make other people happy.
You have, yourself, obviously adjusted to city life. I don't think I could ever achieve that. I have spent brief spells living in cities, perhaps 3 months being the longest, and hated it. I'm a country boy. There's no street lights, so i can see the stars. There's no traffic noise or slamming car doors...if I get get even further away from 'civilization', I would, but it's difficult on this crowded little island.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
"I don't accept that happy balanced humans are motivated by greed or selfishness. They're more likely to enjoy being generous, because it's a buzz to make other people happy."
I have found no greater joy or meaning in life then when I became a father, and learned to love something more than I loved myself. Giving one's self in service to another out of love is truly magic.
Human illness is being unable to see that.
I think there was this nice Jewish carpenter lad who said something about that once. Nice guy from India too said it, skinny fella, though the Chinese seem to think he was really chubby. Then, 2,500 years later, India had another skinny chap saying all those things, wore robes all the time, round metal frame glasses, no hair? Good man.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: anarchist musician
I love sessions because they cram as many people and musical contraptions as possible into the smallest snug available, and "aberrant behavior" ensues....
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Will CPT
Re: anarchist musician
Actually, the whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" credo is just common sense, codified by most religions, but it surely predates any sort of institutionalized morality. I suspect basic ethics are a natural outgrowth of (a) being alive and (b) being aware that we (and other organisms) are alive (as opposed to dead or inanimate).
Funny how many session players seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They want everyone to hear what they play, but they don't listen to others.
"Session with others as you would have them session with you."
Seems simple enough, eh?
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Will CPT
Re: anarchist musician
Love it Ian
And wolfbird. I may quote you there.
I want to hear responses to that ("I don't accept that happy balanced humans are motivated by greed or selfishness. They're more likely to enjoy being generous, because it's a buzz to make other people happy.") People are seeming to take it as a given that humans are inherently greed, selfish and lazy, and using that as a reason that communism, anarchy etc. can't work. But why should this be a given?
It's a vicious cycle. The shape of society can't change until the shape of our minds changes! (and vice versa) Catch 22...
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
I think you're right, Will CPT. I think that the human species evolved for several hundreds of thousands of years, living in fairly small groups where careing for each others well-being was essential for survival, and that's the basic genetic package we inherited.
Then we began to live in larger groups, the first cities in Sumeria, around 8000 years ago, and hierarchical soceities formed, with rulers, soldiers, priests, workers, and our original natural human characteristics began to be distorted by a man-made social structure.
Religions co-opted our inbuilt ethical knowledge. I mean, every little child can tell you if the cake has been shared out fairly or not. They don't need to appeal to any civic or religious law.
But, right up to date, we have the modern highly technical industrial soceity which reduces all human to parts in its machinery. Just like putting wild Indian Jungle Fowl into a battery cage factory farm.
People try to cope with the stress that causes them, in all sorts of ways. Some kill themselves, some binge drink, some over eat, some go mad, some get depressed, some dream about the lottery as an escape ticket, some escape into videos and music, and so on...
But, IMO, this isn't some accident, or something inevitable. We could organise our lives and culture differently. American and UK and other industrial capitalist countries have deliberately set up systems to produce the kind of people required...compliant workers who cannot think or act from their own initiative, (so it's a bit unfair for KML to blame the victims, when they don't vote, don't know how to take care of themselves).
"Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about."
from
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2print.html
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Exciting! So has the conclusion been reached that the school system is structured to produce robots (or "bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete" humans)?
Controversial...
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Forget all about Communism, could we not try a little Socialism, as in making a better society, where taxes go towards health, education, and an all round better society? Sweden is a good example. You can be mega rich and be a socialist. All that is required to create such a society is a slightly better distribution of wealth.
Most people would be overjoyed with an extra £10,000 a year, they do not require ten million. This can be achieved by taxing the extremely wealthy. In the UK Labour are now taxing the poor, to the benefit of the rich.
Now the rich can still scrape a living on ten million a year without undue hardship.
Capitalism inevitably destroys itself as the rich get richer, the poor poorer, and therefore an unequal society. Look at Premier league football to see this, you don't need to study politics or philosophy.
Such hypocrisy as "Tesco" having a vouchers for computers for schools competition, while avoiding paying one billion in tax by moving accounts to the Cayman Islands or whatever should be highlighted. How many computers, hospitals, schools could that billion buy?
In the UK some 12 billion tax is avoided every year by big business. And don't start me on Coca-cola, and their doings in India and Columbia, Mexico and elsewhere.
Tax exiles like Tom Jones, Lewis Hamilton and their ilk make me sick. In Ireland J.P McManus is a hero for donating 3 million to build a hospital in Limerick, instead of paying six milliuon in tax, every year. Footballer John Terry in England "helps" to raise money for disabled people, and is then fined £60 for parking in a disabled space, rather than walk 50 yards.
There are thousands of examples. Unfortunately the western world is now full of people totally dedicated to themselves, a triumph for Thatcherism/Reaganism.
Just remembered my holiday starts today, so why am I still working?
USA look out next week.
And as for the Pope trying to upstage me by going at the same time.....................
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by bodhran bliss
Re: anarchist musician
Well, both Jesus of Nazareth and Siddharta Gautama (the Buddha) were urbanites, allegedly.
I admit I did not read the link you gave Wolf, it seemed too verbose and I was busy at work (doing a stock inventory of phase contrast microscope objectives, would you believe! - how interesting!), but it looked interesting.
Still without reading it, I will bravely or foolishly make a further comment on what you said above.
"..when people lived in a soceity with plenty of space, and other conditions, they appear to be very different creatures, with none of the unpleasant characteristics re greed and selfishness and so on."
Yeah fair enough...maybe.....
2 things:
As I said above most people don't - we're mostly urbanites now.
This assumes that our genotype hasn't changed since we have started to lead a so-called "civilised" way of life. Our "civilised" society has existed for a few millenia now - maybe 1 or 2 in Europe and up to 6 or 7 thousand years in the Middle East - even more in Iraq, in the Fertile Crescent. If a new generation arises say every 25 years, that's 4 per century. This amounts to 40-80 generations of "civilised humans" in Europe and as many as 280 generations in the Middle East. Human selection is rarely by environmental or survival selection, but by sexual selection, ie if you are attractive you're more likely to get a shag, and thus procreate. The factors involved in sexual selection are undoubtedly very different from those involved in survival selection... particularly in an urban environment. More "civilised" traits will be selected for. Surely urbanisation/the process of civilisation will thus have an effect on the gene pool?
So even "human nature" will have changed in the process! Which surely makes the idea posited by yer man Sorensen redundant. That said, I'll read it later............
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
KML, there's no doubt that the human genotype has changed over the last few thousand years. The best example I can think of, off the top of my head, is that some of us have developed the ability to digest dairy products from cattle. Presumably, those are the ones descended from pastoralist herdsmen since the domestication of cattle. Other ethnic groups get ill if they drink cows milk.
So, I agree, there will have been some genetic selection for people who survive in very densely populated cities. Whether it's very significant or not, I don't know. Maybe someone has researched it, but I have never come across such studies.
But that's not really the point. The point is more a philosophical one than a scientific one. That is, 'what was human nature like, in its original form, pre-civilization and urbanization and all the cultural overlay which has lead to our present predicament ?'
Further up the page was a reference to W. Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'. Some people are of the view that, without strict control, human behaviour descends into that kind of barbarism. But it's a fictional account, as is it's child, A. Burgesses' Clockwork Orange. But unfortunately, the common events, of lads kicking people to death for fun or going on shooting sprees, of old ladies being raped, of children being tortured, all that horror, is not fictional.
I'm arguing that, such behaviour is not our real, true nature. It's pathological behaviour produced by culture. That is, it's the nurture, not the nature, that produces the psychopathology.
BTW, I don't think Jesus or Gautama could be considered urban, in the modern sense. Cities in those days were a few thousands, just small towns in modern terms, and both spent long periods in the desert or the forests. Not that it matters. I don't think that wisdom or virtue has much to do with where a person is located.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Bliss, you're arguing for redistribution of wealth, and I agree that a fairer distribution is desirable.
However, the systems we have are designed by the rich and powerful for the rich and powerful. And whilst not all rich powerful individuals are evil and ruthless, their positions and lifestyles make it hard for even generous socialist ones to understand what it is like to be in extreme poverty.
For the system to work, it requires the stick and the carrot. The carrot is, that if you are obedient and diligent and contribute all you can to the machine, you will get a salary, a pension, a mortgage for a house, a plasma screen, a week or two holiday in the sun, and so on.
The stick is, that if you don't chase after the carrot successfully, you can be out on the street with nothing, or maybe just enough so you don't starve to obviously.
The theory is, that without the carrot and the stick, all those masses wouldn't go to work to produce the profits.
My personal position is that I don't want to play that game, thanks very much. I'd rather be poor and free. I only get this one lifetime and I have more interesting ways to spend it than helping any elite raise funds so they can have big yachts, build ballistic missiles, conquer countries, and all the other crap that's been going on for hundreds of years.
I'm glad Sugarfoot mentioned Winstanley. What a hero ! and Thoreau is another favourite of mine, along with William Blake, Godwin, Shelley, Emma Goldman, John Zerzan....I don't think anarchists make good socialists. They don't like the endless committee meetings
"Freedom is a value held dear by people throughout history, across all cultures. Governments of all varieties promise it to their citizens, regardless of the actual policies they support. Men have died by the millions believing that they were struggling for it. In nations around the world, great and small, flags are lifted and voices raised in tribute to it. Freedom has been described as the universal desire of the human spirit.
But if freedom is so dear to the mind of man, we must expect that those among us who wish to dominate others for their own ends will be well aware of this"
http://naturyl.humanists.net/synthesis/freedom.html
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
>what was human nature like, in its original form, pre-civilization and urbanization and all the cultural overlay which has lead to our present predicament ?'
Yeah fair enough you've answered that - but what does that prove? I thought the point to discuss would be what is the nature of modern "civilised" humankind, what we have not going back 5 or 10 thousand years.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
...sorry:
...what we have now, not going back 5 or 10 thousand years.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
what stick? I thought it was crack we were after. I'm for whichever system is more conducive to playing more tunes more of the time - which looks like socialism to me. Work less (than in the US anyway) and not have to fret all the time about ending up sleeping under a bridge because some unforseen health debacle emptied your savings. It sounds great. Communism seems like it's more about making a lot of people feel guilty about contributing their fair share so they don't feel like they can relax and have fun. Actually though that, being somewhat rebellious, that might inspire me to play more in fact...
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by airport
Re: anarchist musician
Well, I've lost track a little, KML, but I thought it was my response to your point that everybody (or was it most ?) are motivated by greed, lust, etc.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
Well, I read the sorensen thing, Wolf. I quite liked it - this bit stood out to me, referring to when he witnessed the abrupt end of a traditional society in the Andaman Islands:
When the mental death had run its course, when what had been was gone, the
people (physically still quite alive) no longer had their memory of the
intuitive rapport that held them rapturously together just the week before,
could no longer link along those subtle mental pathways. What had filled
their lives had vanished. The teensters started playing at (and then
adopting) the rude, antagonistic, ego-grasping styles of the encroaching
modern world, modeled after films and then TV. Oldsters retreated into
houses, lost their affinity to youngsters, who then turned more to one
another, sometimes squabbling (which did not occur before).
and in particular:
The teensters started playing at (and then adopting) the rude, antagonistic, ego-grasping styles of the encroaching modern world.
Yeah well, as I was saying.
Many of these societies described so idyllically seem to be on the periphery of the modern world. Maybe it needed an Ice age or something to get people to huddle together in cities, but it came as a wee bit of a surprise to the Conquistadors to find a city in the middle of Mexico (as it would soon be known). A huge city, as big as any in the Old World. Yet built by a completely different...civilisation, or culture. So, is city building the natural course for human social evolution to follow? They didn't get built in pre-conquest Australia or in the other places mentioned in the link. Human social evolution took a different course there...or maybe had yet to occur?
BTW,
>it's a bit unfair for KML to blame the victims, when they don't vote, don't know how to take care of themselves
oh please - spare us all that, thank you. You call them victims if you want. I call half of it self-inflicted. I couldn't sit through an episode of...seinfield...or whatever it's called. Let them compliantly switch on the telly and watch the garbage - THEY DON'*WANT* YOUR HELP!! So why do you call them victims?
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
In the USA workers do work long hours with little holidays, in comparison to Europe. Anything most of them achieve is well earned. The long hours and such is probably because the bosses shot a lot of Trade Unionists, which Coca-Cola are still doing.
I honestly believe two things;
1. The minimum wage should be £25,000 per annum
2. This is easily achievable simply by redistributing wealth, and still leaves the rich with loads of money.
And then we can write songs and tunes about winning the struggle and keep everyone happy.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by bodhran bliss
Re: anarchist musician
It's the bit where all you guys say "this is the way it should be and it's easily achievable" that have a problem with. I didn't have that problem when I was 16. In fact I thought I would be in the Vanguard of the Revolution when I was that age.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
I forgot to add this bit in sorenson's conclusion:
This sophisticated development of human mentality may be realizable only in preconquest settings like those described above. There is no evidence that it is a universal, benevolent nature common to all early humankind. It would be unreasonable to assume that human mentality evolved the same way everywhere during prehistoric times. Less altruistic types also evolved. It appears that at least one such combative type in Mediterranea progressively demolished its earlier preconquest type of life.
# Posted on April 4th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
I'm glad you read it, KML.
What struck me particularly was when a group of lads from one tribe met a group from another for the first time. They actually made friends, and that lead to both tribes intermingling and even developing a new language, taken from the two distinct languages.
Quite a contrast to a tv film I saw of Glasgow gangs, where kids from five to fifteen were chasing each other around estates with iron bars, fighting over territorial boundaries, etc.
"Many of these societies described so idyllically seem to be on the periphery of the modern world."
Yes, of course. There are only a few hundred thousand left, and they are vanishing fast.
"Maybe it needed an Ice age or something to get people to huddle together in cities,"
I don't think it had anything to do with an Ice Age. Probably, the first city appears in Sumer (approximately Basra, Iraq) because they could easily make mud bricks, because they had fertile land to grow crops, so no need to hunt and gather, but it flooded regularly, so they needed organisation to remake the canals and ditches, and so on.
"but it came as a wee bit of a surprise to the Conquistadors to find a city in the middle of Mexico (as it would soon be known). A huge city, as big as any in the Old World. Yet built by a completely different...civilisation, or culture. So, is city building the natural course for human social evolution to follow? They didn't get built in pre-conquest Australia or in the other places mentioned in the link. Human social evolution took a different course there...or maybe had yet to occur? "
Yes, it's an important question. There's several competing theories, and I'm not going to stick my neck out and provide any definite answer, but I'd like to know the answer.
"oh please - spare us all that, thank you. You call them victims if you want. I call half of it self-inflicted. I couldn't sit through an episode of...seinfield...or whatever it's called. Let them compliantly switch on the telly and watch the garbage - THEY DON'*WANT* YOUR HELP!! So why do you call them victims?"
I can't help anybody, even if I wanted to. I take responsibility for myself. But you've missed my point. The quote is from a critic of the *education system* that turns out people who cannot read, who watch Seinfeld, etc. (I have never seen it.)
What I'm saying, to use the analogy of the chickens, is, that if you look at battery hens, (3 in a square foot of cage)
and they are pecking each other to death, and can't stand up, and if you take them outside they're blinded by daylight and seem completely lost, you shouldn't blame the chickens. That's not what 'chickens' are really like.
If you want to know what chickens are really like, look at the Red Jungle Fowl, from which they are all descended. Then you see what their inherent characteristics truly are.
I'm saying, the same goes for humans. You put them into a crazy artificial restricted environment, their true nature becomes distorted, they behave in the perverse ways which you suggested, i.e. motivated by greed and selfishness, etc.
Of course half of it is self-inflicted. But are you saying that a healthy happy person is going to inflict self-harm ? That makes no sense. Its a symptom. They are apathetic, obese, unable to read or write properly, etc, because of what has happened since they were born. They are the product of, the victims of, that experience.
Anyways, thanks for the stimulation Danny
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
The redistribution of wealth eventually puts a stop to gangs chasing each other with iron bars and such, does away with much inner city crime, and generally would reduce crime by a considerable percentage.
But that would mean some poor git scraping a living on 15million a year instead of 576 million a year. Couldn't have that, could we?
And Danny, the biggest problem is that most of us get brain washed as we get older, and accept the system as unbeatable. Some of us do not.
Looks like I am getting dismissed again for having an "attitude" at work. Mind you, it won't happen as I would win a case on the grounds that it was due to my trade union activities. It would have to be, I don't do anything else at work, although a senior manager did ask if I could pretend to work for a half hour a day.
I don't do pretend so had to reject that offer.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by bodhran bliss
Re: anarchist musician
Ha, ha, bliss, your "don't do pretend" made me laugh
When I was learning to be a carpenter/joiner, rather long ago, a guy told me that he learned the trade in the navy. He said his teacher told him, on the first day of apprenticeship that the most important lesson to learn was 'how to do nothing'.
This surprised the apprentice who naturally asked 'why?'
The answer came, "Because most of the time at sea there's nothing for us to do. But if an officer comes along and finds you're doing nothing, you'll be in big trouble. So, the trick to doing nothing is, ALWAYS have an oily rag in one hand and a hammer in the other. Then, when an officer comes along and finds you doing nothing, you've always just come from doing something, show him the rag and hammer, or just on your way to doing something...that's how to do nothing "
I accept the system is unbeatable. But I have never let it beat me yet. I think it will implode in the next few years because it's unsustainable.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
My laptop is my oily rag and hammer, always close at hand. All I have to do when someone comes snooping is put down my fiddle or flute and starting tapping these keys.....
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by Will CPT
Re: anarchist musician
>The redistribution of wealth eventually puts a stop to gangs chasing each other with iron bars and such, does away with much inner city crime, and generally would reduce crime by a considerable percentage.
Bliss - I don't think so. I don't think it's to do with material wealth. Some rich kids round here are just psychopathic spoilt little b@stards. Kids here have got more now than they ever had, and yet it's shootings and stabbings all the time.
Maybe wolfie's chicken thing is nearer the mark after all.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by Key Maniac Lad
Re: anarchist musician
The better society is created by the distribution of wealth, because young people rebel at the society around them.
As an example take the Swedish penal system. Now you just tell the guards that you are nipping down to the pub for a heavy date and will be back in the morning, and this is allowed. Some 3% re-offend, simply because the Swedes are able to ask offenders "Why do you want to be doing things like that in such a nice society" and help to rehabilitate people.
Our society is all about punishment, and our prisons turn out hardened criminals, determined to get even with a harsh society.
I like your bit about the navy Wolfbird. Alas I am actually too busy doing union work, due to bad management, that I have no time to "pretend" to work at the business.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by bodhran bliss
Re: anarchist musician
I just hope they don't reconfigure the culture so there are hardly any phone booths left.
You've already made the choice. Now you have to understand why you made it.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by Bodhi
Re: anarchist musician
Okay, I have the limitation of being asleep while all this above me went on. But I read it all. the first thing that comes to mind is - I'm all for the redistribution of wealth, but £25k a year??? Sorry a lot of swear words come to mind. Who the hell needs that much??? The only way the world has enough resources to sustain everyone on it is if we all cut back on nearly everything we had. In an ideal *egalitarian* society we'd be living on £5k a year, no less, no more, and we would stop buying sh*t we don't need (an end to mass consumerism..), hooray.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
Good morning, mehitabel23. I think that bodhran bliss has noticed that approximately 400 richest people on the planet have wealth equal to half of all the rest us (approximately 3 billion).
Personally, I'm more baffled why anybody would want hundreds of millions of pounds, but I assume it's so that they can walk into a casino at Monte Carlo and enjoy the prestige amongst their peers of losing a few millions in an evening without being at all bothered. But I've never mixed in those circles so they remain a mystery.
Or, another possibility is that their wealth depends upon paying off a lot of people, the mafia model. I think many people love power above all else. Money is just a tool.
I can easily understand why someone would want £25k. The way the system is presently designed, if you need a car for your job, if you want to get married and raise children, if you want to buy a house, etc, £25k doesn't go very far.
You've got one problem. How do persuade the person with hundreds of millions of pounds to part with it ? You'd be challenging their power, and that's what they like, so they can win and defeat you. That's the buzz of having so much wealth.
And you've got a second problem. How do you persuade the guy who's worked hard to get qualified to get a good job, whose ambition is to have a nice new car, new house three kids, ponies, holidays in the Algarve or a cottage in Cornwall, to settle for £5k which won't get any of those things ?
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
But people have no problem looking at TV pictures of people (including my best friend and her family) who are living on $2 a day and telling them that there simply isn't enough money to go around.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by mehitabel23
Re: anarchist musician
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xd_zkMEgkI
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by Sean Logan
Re: anarchist musician
I know. There's always plenty of money for planes and bombs and all kinds of nonsense, but as I tried to explain to b bliss above, the theory is that if you give easy money to poor people you're taking away the stick that forces them into the mega-machine. The capitalist market wants cheap labour, not wasting money on helping people.
There's a guy here who chooses to live without money
http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/
There's another point. If you live in a warm climate where you can live outside, where fruit and veg grow easily all year round, it's a bit easier to do without money.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by wolfbird
Re: anarchist musician
All very well - and I'm sorry to do this to you, mehitabel23, but I don't like the apparent hypocrisy. Where does all the money come from for all of your various instruments that you own and play? For the reality TV you like to watch? For computers and all this internet access? And, more particularly, for that nice school of yours? Assuming you're a day student, that would make it approximately £9k per year, *plus lunch* just for that alone. Obviously, nearly £17k if you board.
All of the above wouldn't be possible on £5k, or £25k, or even £50k per year. Do you feel like giving it all up? And where, in the UK, would you live for £5k per year, even before you start thinking about food?
Sorry to be old, but my immediate impression, after the anger subsided, was 'She'll grow out of it'. And you will. I hope that, when you do, you still find a more practical way of making the world a better place, for all sorts of people, including those friends of yours on $2/day. We need people who want to do that.
# Posted on April 5th 2008 by benhall.1
Re: anarchist musician
Interesting dis