Without the state

Quote of the Day

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

    Good Omens.

[via: slacktivist]

The Labour Party has sold its soul...

I don’t means that it has abandoned socialism – although it has – but through its continued obsession with social control. Blair and his cohorts apparently believe that no principle is immune from their dreadful mantra of modernisation. The truly chilling aspect though is that they seem to believe it themselves.

Liberty cannot be modernised, only compromised. Blair’s Brown's modernised ‘liberty’ is not liberty but its antithesis. The possibility of dissent, the ability to say NO was once the foundation of our liberties. We are well on the way to losing that right:

CCTV

ID Cards

NHS Computerisation

ASBOs

With every chip the foundations are eroded.

Originally posted Dec 6th 2006.

Have things changed? For the better?

I didn't think so...

links for 2008-01-31

• Local Links- developing active networks in local communities
  Common Purpose piloted ‘Local Links' to improve neighbourhood networking, support, skills development and information sharing for local decision-makers and active citizens in four Yorkshire areas. The aim was to assist them to be better informed, empowe
  (tags: Community neighbourhoods networking information skills)

links for 2008-01-30

• Neighbourhoods: Local Links - let's hear it for informal networks
  (tags: neighbourhoods networking Community)

[Idiotic] Quote of the Day Decade

[‘Renewable resources’] are not renewable… Taking energy from winds and tides irreversibly enervates the weather system and slows the rotation of the Earth

Steve Reed (Chairman, UKIP Wells and Weston-super-Mare branch) in Yorkshire Post, 5 August 2004 (via Richard Corbett MEP)

A thought experiment

The rather bizarre furore over 'presumed consent' for organ donations no doubt still rages, but I haven't gone looking for it so I cannot be sure what idiocies it has reached. I don't intend to add fuel to the fire but instead to illuminate one aspect - the moral and philosophical case for donation - by considering a variation on a common thought experiment.

Imagine you have a button in front of you. If you press that button, someone, somewhere will receive life saving medical treatment. It won't cost you anything and your own health will be unaffected. You will not know who they are, what is wrong with them or anything at all about them andfd they nothing of you, other than that some anonymous person has helped them. Your only contact is that button.

Do you press it? I can't imagine any (rational) circumstance in which the answer would be no. So why don't we do it? I say we don't do it, because unlike most thought experiments, this one is realistic. That button exists - at least metaphorically. It is a Donor Card.

500 years of women's portraits

A beautiful YouTube video (thanks Ronni)

links for 2008-01-19

• Social Policy: An Anarchist Response: Books: Colin Ward
  Social Policy: An Anarchist Response
  (tags: anarchism society policy)
• Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction: Books: Colin Ward
  Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction
  (tags: anarchism philosophy politics)

Quote of the day

All forms of government have this in common: each possesses more power than is required by the given conditions.

Martin Buber

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

Gustav Landauer

both quoted by Colin Ward

Backward Christian Soldiers

From New Humanist magazine.

We are facing a national security threat in this country that is every bit as significant in magnitude, width and breadth internally as that presented externally by the now-resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda. And it is the destruction of the US constitutionally mandated wall separating metaphysical and physical, spiritual and non-spiritual, church and state, in the technologically most lethal organisation every created by humankind, which is our honourable and noble military. I’m here to report to you today that that wall is nothing but smoke and debris. We are facing an absolute fundamentalist Christianisation – a Talibanisation – of the US Marine Corps, Army, Navy, and Air Force.