Without the state

links for 2007-11-30

• Stumbling and Mumbling: Incompetence & the crisis of the Left
  For years, one big political question has been: what should the state do and what should the market do?
  (tags: politics state markets)
• Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark s clock | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
  For a year from September 2005 under the nose of the Panthéon s unsuspecting security officials a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building s famous dome. Under the supervision of group mem
  (tags: art crime culture europe France society urban Architecture clock paris)

Only white lights for Christmas

From The Coloradoan - www.coloradoan.com

If the city's [Fort Collins, Colorado] Holiday Display Task Force has its wish, city staff will not put up Christmas trees outside city buildings or on city property beginning in 2008.

Instead, the group will recommend the city's outdoor displays include white lights, secular winter symbols not associated with any particular holiday - such as snowflakes and icicles - and unadorned swaths of greenery.

A "Holiday Display Task Force"!! We're doomed, I say we are all doomed!

Jesus Kitsch

Jesus Kitsch, originally uploaded by darkhairedgirl.

from flickr

links for 2007-11-23

• Fla. Companies Forbidding Smoking In Private Lives - Orlando News Story - WKMG Orlando
  Westgate Resorts, the largest private employer in Central Florida, has banned smoking and won't budge from a policy of not hiring smokers and firing employees who do smoke.
  (tags: freedom health politics privacy smoking)

A real test for libertarian thinking...

Libertarians often argue - I think with good reason - that the arrangements people make for marriage should be nothing to do with the state. However as this post from the Australian site Catallaxy demonstrates, defining marriage is not simple...

One area where the LDP is different to other parties in the current election is same-sex marriage. During the course of the current election, both the ALP  and Liberals have reaffirmed their opposition to same sex marriage.

By contrast, the LDP has highlighted it’s supports for permitting same sex marriage and devotes an entire section of it’s web site to explaining it’s policy position and the principles behind it. In brief, the LDP position seems to be that marriage is a private matter between those involved and that the government’s role should be to register the marriage, and not to dictate it’s terms or who may marry.

If this is the principle for the LDP’s support of same sex marriage, one may ask wether the LDP is also prepared to recognise the right of people in polyamourous relationships to engage in multiple simultaneous marriages. In short - is there room for Poly folk in the LDP bed?

Christian charity

I did a craft/art fair on Saturday that was over an hours drive away (in Cheddar). Attendance was very disappointing, with long periods when no-one came in. Everyone was puzzled by this, since previous events at this venue have apparently been well attended. All was revealed late in the day however, by one visitor who quite openly admitted that because her local church was having a Christmas Bazaar on the same day, church members had been going around taking down the small posters publicising the fair, in order to reduce competition. It became clear that of the 130 signs erected, only 30 were left, when the organiser went to remove them at the close of the show...

So - thank you whoever you are, I'm sure you would like to know that thanks to your Christian charity, most of us made a thumping loss on the day.

Towards a living art - a digital manifesto

Digital tools can make Art that is accessible; Art that everyday people can afford to take home and live with, and discard when they want to move on to something new. "Archivability" is a scam...a way to exclude...a lame excuse to charge more money. We can't possibly know that any one of us is making artwork that someone will want to pull out of an hermetically sealed drawer in five hundred years. Digital artwork is much more akin to the Japanese print makers of the 1700 and 1800s. No one questioned if those prints were going to last three hundred years. Those colorful, masterful, fast moving commodities served a different purpose all together...a living purpose. A purpose that was inextricably bound to expanded creative and commercial bandwidth brought about by new tools and techniques. The market for those prints roared with the life of mass approval not exclusion based on price or snobbish philosophy. This is where a Manifesto of Digital Art should carry us.

I liked this bit too:

Like all good manifestos our's must call for the death of something or other. Usually, this death is wished upon an oppressor or an oppressive idea. I can think of no greater oppression than the concept of "limited editions". One of the things nailed into your head while attending the finer art schools is that the artist owes it to buyers, agents and your future estate to limit your output of a certain image. The argument usually is that too many copies drives down the prices and scares off your "investors". But, who really profits from this? Not the artist. This is the art agents' way of guaranteeing that after you die everyone else will profit.

and this:

If I were to guess as to how future art critics might describe this period in the development of digital media and the effect it will have on the world of Fine Art, I might venture to say; "The turn of the new century was a heady and revolutionary period in the development of Art that saw, through the introduction of digital tools, a great democratization in art making and began a period of time wherein the cracks in the dam of the traditional Fine Arts world began to show."

Pass the dynamite.

links for 2007-11-19

• Neighbourhoods: Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect
  Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect
  (tags: children childhood play safety risk asbo respect)

links for 2007-11-17

• Edgar Kahn via Senscot
  Co-Production requires A partnership on two levels: between professionals and those that they serve And between two economies: the monetary economy and the core economy The first is monetarized and has 2 major components: the private, market economy & the
  (tags: socialenterprise co-production economy partnership philanthropy family)
• Utopian Thinking and Historical Imagination by Geoff Boucher
  (tags: utopia blogposts politics)

links for 2007-11-16

• Anarchism and the welfare state: the Peckham Health Centre
  (tags: anarchism alternative health healthcare mutualism mutualaid Peckham)
• Hidden History of Housing
  (tags: anarchism plotlands selfhelp selfbuild alternative squatting housing)