Even evil has standards

[sabotabby]

Wow, check it out! Former "center-left" cyclist turned warmongering fascist Charles Johnson has turned again. Colour me skeptical (like someone pointed out on fengi's LJ, it'll take one more terrorist attack to turn him back, but it's almost heartening to read.

I wonder if he'll apologize for his blog being a gathering place for genocidal maniacs for the last eight years.

If he's serious, though: Welcome back to the reality-based community.

Comments

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

Education is no guarantee of cooperative, communal or liberatory lives or community. Though who is doing the educating is important, what is probably more important is determining who gets what, when, why and where. People know that society is authoritarian and exploitive. Knowing, apparently, is less than half the battle. Bakunin had quite a bit to say in regards to red intelligentsia who thought their socialism was "scientific".

Kropotkin is a sweety--for an insurrectionary anarchist who advocated using explosives to assassinate the Czar (to whom he was distantly related).

"That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all--an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied."
Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

All I remember of studying him, apart from that he seemed nice, is that he escaped from prison in his dressing gown at the signal of a violin playing! I knew someone who met him, an old family friend who died a few years ago in his nineties.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

Kropotkin is getting a lot of respect these days from scientific corners as a naturalist. Steven Jay Gould and Frans De Waal to name two recent admirers. Kropotkin also did quite a study of ethics. Believe me, his daring escape from prison is the least interesting thing about him.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I still find it hard to imagine people managing to live without laws and cooperatively without smaller social structures to give them a structure of unwritten or unspoken rules instead of laws that they would stick to, such as not stealing from one another or killing one another. I have never imagined anarchism in a huge community or nation - just not sure how it would work. I suppose that's because I've only read as far as anarchists who envisaged small communities.
My own experience of people is that they tend to lack empathy for most people even within their own families, yet alone people from other backgrounds. Not all people of course, but most.
London is a very nice place to live - only it is hard in England to find anywhere without people or buildings in sight. Perhaps it is just a matter of taste, but it would be nice to have areas of wilderness and forests and other forms of life in abundance, not just houses and people everywhere.
Also there are lots of violent and scary people about, but not just in London - villages seem to have their share of them too, and smaller towns in England seem to have more. I suppose I have often put violence and people being horrible down to urban alienation, but then you get horrible people in villages too. I find it hard to believe people could manage without laws to keep such people in some kind of check, although I would like to think that in happier societies people would be happier so less prone to violence.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Those smaller social structures- structures based around cooperation and free association- are what anarchism is, not some inane Mad Max fantasy.

Definitely read some Kropotkin and Bookchin- defining anarchism by anarchists' words instead of by their enemies' is kind of important.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

That's what I was saying - I thought smaller communities were necessary, but now I've been told (see above) that Bookchin says not necessarily so. I have read Kropotkin but not Bookchin, and I don't know any enemies of anarchism who actually know what it is! What I was wondering was how an anarchist community could work on a large scale, with huge populations in huge cities. I can't imagine it, I think because I see human nature as not that naturally cooperative, or perhaps not since it has developed in huge cities under capitalism - people might need readjustment and re educating, and it might be a lengthy process and they might not want it!

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

But most people I meet DON'T think society is exploitative or authoritarian, so education must be pretty important. Most middle class people think we live in a happy, free society where people just have to work and find nice opportunities. Most working class people I know don't question the social structures around them, but just want to be closer to the top in material terms - having HD tvs and cars and all that. Do you mean that if they were given more material things they would not mind the change in social structure? I think they would need first to understand that life is not necessarily about having more material goods, and that wealth does not make you a cooler or better person. I think consumerism is so entrenched in our culture now that it would take a lot to rearrange society.