No problem.
Er, I should point out that, at 53 myself, I was being a tad sarcastic about ‘advanced age,’ because to hear StS talk sometimes (like in this thread, with his apparent experience with stone-age technology), he apparently believes being in his forties to be advanced in age.
I think we’re just having a definitional problem because I lazily used the phrase “anarchist canon,” when I meant something more like “those books commonly read by and recommended to others by anarchists to persuade them about anarchism.” For example, if you go to an anarchist lending library, or IWW friend’s house, you’re sure to hind a handful of books. You’ll find The Conquest of Bread, Pacificism as Pathology, Manufacturing Consent, Rogue States, maybe some Paulo Friere, some Emma Goldman, etc. Which is not to imply that, say, Friere is an anarchist or advocates anarchy.
I didn’t mean–and I can see how this would be terribly confusing–those books that make up the intellectual foundation of anarchism. I agree that Chomsky is by and large not part of the canon understood that way.
Gotcha. I agree. There’s no doubt that plenty of anarchists read Chomsky’s work.
No, he won’t smash the Canadian (sorry, but I hate spelling errors) state. He’s a long way from doing so. Most of what he protests against, and takes to court, is well-settled law, despite his protestations to the contrary. (And if not, Smash, you need to tell your lawyer to give you the straight dope because he’s obviously not doing so.) There simply is no question about the issues that he takes to court; he will lose, and I would imagine that he knows that well. What he is trying to do (IMHO) is to get a lot of publicity, and in so doing, raise knowledge of his cause. Certainly even here, in western Canada, we know of the efforts of [insert name of various eastern Canadian activists here] in trying to change the way this country works. Locally, our friend is dismissed as just another eastern crank and/or crackpot. Sorry Smash.
That being said, I think the board would be a much worse place if Smash were to leave. No, I do not agree with his arguments; but to his credit, he appears to be informed and aware of the issues–he certainly is not an undergrad newly-released from his parents’ supervision who has decided that anarchism is what would upset his parents most. He’s obviously put a lot of time and thought into his positions. If he’s not exactly bang-on in his assertions; well, we’ve had posters like that before, and some are still here. We can learn from him–and perhaps, he can learn from us. Time will tell.
Ron White was correct:
It’s not a spelling error. That particular poster is spelling the name that way intentionally in a rather pathetic attempt to appear clever. What it does is show that he has no valid argument against the Canadian government.
I know what he’s doing. With respect, Monty, I still regard it as an error. It may play well with the radical undergrads who look for any excuse for a day off from class protesting; but I’d suggest that it’s scoring no points with the ordinary working Canadians whose support he needs in order to achieve his goals. As one of those, I’d have a lot more respect for his position if he spelled the adjectival form of our nationality correctly. As it is, by using such a spelling, he makes himself out to be little better than a pissed-off college student–which, as I implied earlier, he appears to not be.
Klever…
-XT
That’s the enlightened thinking I’ve come to love and cherish from anarchy.
One does wonder if the Yanomamo panhandlers need unionization…
The OP is an idiot.
However, this is a high quality (or at least well-deserved) Pitting. I mean, how the fuck is he supposed to know that “file sharing has always been a sensitive issue [here]” if he’s only been here for ~six weeks?
Bad Giraffe! Bad!
Indeed, if he has been here only six weeks…
Exactly my point. Good Giraffe! Good!
You’re a fucking moron.
I’m not a DeLeonist. And as I mentioned before, there are plenty of socialists (that is, members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties) in the IWW. We have no beef with them or with industrial unionism insofar as they exist to help workers secure better wages and working conditions. We don’t agree that industrial unionism alone can lead to an effective social revolution.
I’m sure I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
Look, I don’t agree with the posters who heap scorn upon your political ideas. I do think that you are sincere about them, I think there is a great deal that is good and correct about them, and I applaud you for your efforts in organizing panhandlers and the unemployed. However, I do think you need to lose the attitude. You’re not doing yourself or your cause any favours by acting so snidely and hatefully. And keep in mind this is coming from someone whose Party is famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) for its “hostility clause”, which mandates a position of hostile opposition to all other political parties. We are tactful enough to differentiate between being hostile to political ideas and being hostile to the people who happen to hold them.
My wife says that the politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small. I think this holds for anarchists and socialists, too. Clearly the fight against the state isn’t getting anywhere; maybe you can fight one another instead? There’s an enemy your own size!
Anarchists and most modern socialists agree about 90% of the issues (ending private property, reducing police power, increasing civil liberties, annihilating poverty, etc.). Anarchists and most modern liberals agree on about 50% of the issues. Rather than focus on those agreements, however, some anarchists define themselves in opposition, so they focus on the disagreements.
psychonaut, I’d admire StS’s organization of panhandlers, except that I read what he considers successes in this organization effort. It consists of things like having incoherent chalk graffiti stay up for months. He doesn’t believe in doing unglamorous things that actually improve the lives of the poor; instead, he believes in tilting at windmills and then patting himself on the back for slaying giants. It’s frankly contemptible. If he does a single thing that actually helps a single poor person, I’ll revise my opinion.
**Psychonaut **- I’d like to say something, if you don’t mind.
The reason I dragged you into this debate (and I apologize for doing so) was to prove a certain point. Other than your admirable commitment to non-violence, your views and those of **Smash **are virtually identical to the vast majority of SDMB members. And yet, when you presented your ideas in the linked thread, you may not have found many people here who agreed with you, and some may have responded to them with a certain degree of mockery or scorn, you saw little of the outright hostility that **Smash **has encountered since his first day on this board. I believe - and I’m sure you’d agree with me - that this is a result of the calm and civilized manner in which you presented your opinions, and not their very nature.
In other words, Smash: it’s your attitude, not your beliefs. I won’t say that people will take you any more seriously you if you wrote like Psychonaut, but as things stand now, there’s no way they can take you any *less *seriously.
You have no idea what our organization does except the (very) few things we’ve done specifically for the purpose of getting media attention – which obviously succeeded.
Our organization has existed for some five years now, and I assure you that those years have been extremely busy. Would you like a small sample of the sort of things we do?
One of our members was severely beaten by three rent-a-goons at the largest shopping mall in downtown Ottawa, the Rideau Centre. We assisted him in documenting his injuries, obtaining a lawyer, and suing the Rideau Centre in Superior Court for $70,000. Through our links with the larger IWW we assisted him in providing seasoned labour negotiators to talk with the mall’s management. We then applied pressure through various direct actions ranging from postering with photos of the post-beating injuries to shutting down the shopping mall for exactly one hour by occupying the street outside during a busy Saturday afternoon. Eventually the shopping mall cracked and agreed to settle out of court for a sizable sum of money.
A meathead steroid case in the local police department was notorious for dragging street kids into secluded parking lots and putting the boots to them. We occupied the street outside the police station and shut down traffic while a horde of street kids chanted for the officer to resign. We then assisted them in filing police complaints en masse and warned the police we would be back if they didn’t get rid of the officer. They didn’t, so we did, and the second time we marched right in and occupied the lobby of the police station with banners and flags, and read out demands over a megaphone while angry cops swarmed around us. This time the got rid of the cop. (They promoted him to detective to get him off the street because it’s easier to promote them than fire them; that’s fine with us, as long as he’s off the street.) There’s video of the action available, but I’m loathe to post it here and expose the forum where it’s hosted to the sort of infantile mockery this places produces.
One of our members is an engineer and has a degree from the old Soviet Union, but it’s not recognized here. He is attempting to update his credentials by taking classes here. He also has schizophrenia and as a result he is often homeless. From time to time he becomes unstable enough that he requires hospitalization. The last time this happened, the hospital would not permit him to leave during the day in order to attend his classes because they were worried they could be held liable for his behaviour. We found volunteers among our members to escort our member to and from his classes and sit with him during the classes so that the hospital would agree to release him – after a visit from us and a bit of political arm-twisting. (We waited for more than three hours in the lobby while the doctor in charge avoided us, but we managed to buttonhole him when he tried to sneak out after his shift and convince him that it was easier to take a small chance by releasing him than deal with the headaches of protests and pickets.)
While waiting for trial on a disturbance charge, one of our members was denied bail and forced to spend time at the local prison. (I note that he was denied bail because he had violated his bail conditions on another charge; his conditions forbid him from being near the homeless shelter where he lived, and he was thus forced to violate those conditions. Rather than arrest him the first time they saw him, police kept track of the number of times they saw him there, and when they had 20 violations, THEN they arrested him to be certain the judge wouldn’t let him out.) Our member has post-polio syndrome, and while at the prison, he was put in the general population and denied the use of his wheelchair. He was literally forced to crawl on his hands and knees to use the bathroom or shower, and otherwise confined to his bed. The prison authorities claimed the wheelchair could be used as a weapon, so could not be allowed in general population. They said they would give him a wheelchair if he agreed to go into an isolation cell where he would have no radio, no television, no contact with other human beings, and no access to reading materials – where he would not need a wheelchair anyway. We paid a visit to the prison and explained to the wardens that this was a clear violation of our member’s civil rights, and that if he was not provided with a wheelchair within a week, they would have a picket line right outside the gates of the prison. Presumably they pressured the court, because our member was released on bail two days before the deadline.
I could go on, but there are literally hundreds of stories like these. THIS is what we do. It’s not very interesting to anyone but us, so it doesn’t get reported in the newspapers. I don’t give a flying fuck at a tumbling bagel what people say about me, personally, but it really pisses me off when people start taking shots at the OPU. I am immensely proud of the work we’ve done, especially since it’s all being done with a budget of almost zero and by people who are largely homeless, substance-addicted, and/or mentally ill.
So he got a raise and a more prestigious position, but that’s a victory because he’s “off the street”. Yup - everybody knows that detectives just sit in their offices and eat doughnuts, they’re never on the street investigating crimes. :rolleyes:
No–I got them from the Wiki page that someone, I’m guessing you, wrote about your organization.
I’m not convinced, but let’s stipulate both that this happened, and that the mall settled because of you. Well, good, I guess. It would’ve been far better if you’d demanded improved training for the mall’s security force, but at least you helped out one guy.
Are you shitting me? Getting a kid-beater promoted is a victory? And you take credit for his promotion? That’s fucking ridiculous. If your action had any effect on the promotion, which it almost certainly didn’t, what you succeeded in doing was saying to other potential kid-beaters, “Hey, look–kick around enough kids, and you’ll get paid more!” Good job, Gandhi.
Good, I guess, as long as this guy doesn’t actually hurt someone while he’s out. You forced a doctor to go against his better judgment in releasing someone who’s potentially dangerous to himself and to others. If you’d said, “We convinced the doctor that our volunteers were reliable and would minimize any threat the engineer presented,” I’d seriously consider this a good one. But your business about threatening the doctor into the decision makes it pretty questionable.
Again it borders on megalomania to take credit for this. You really think a prison gives a shit about a picket line? Really? Take out your gorillalike chestbeating over the picket line and I might believe that you convinced the prison officials that the guy should receive some consideration for his illness. But if your approach really was as you described it, there’s no way a prison is gonna say, “oh noes, a PICKET LINE! Release the prisoners!”
Nevertheless, you’ve provided a couple of examples in which, buried behind your machismo and fuzzyheaded thinking, you’ve actually done some good in people’s lives, unlike the representation at the wiki page. So I change my opinion: sometimes your group does appear to do some good.
Edit: the wiki page I referred to above. Note it’s not on Wikipedia, but rather is a wiki on anarchopedia.
This Thread: TLDR (tho I did read. Eh)
SmashTheState: Not a troll
Giraffe: DICK
That is all