GeorgesSorel's blog

I saw a movie last night, one that shall remain nameless for this post. It was impressive on quite a few levels, but a few scenes in it made me think about the meaning of anarchy and anarchism again.

They're problematic words, and part of me wishes we could just abandon them and pick another set of terms. After all, they're just nouns, and given the absence of any large, nonlocal, "prospering" anarchist associations or organizations in America, they only serve as placeholders for people of similar sentiment to find one another and conceptualize interventions in the world. They honestly seem to be a hindrance in two major ways. External to the anarchist community, people get scared by the idea. Internal to that community, it looks and feels often enough life a self-reaffirming subculture instead of a movement or even a coherent worldview.

I'm unclear as to the details, but it sounds like the city in its infinitely finite wisdom is trying to shut down Enchanted Forest. Keep up with the news on their websites:

Enchanted Forest myspace
Enchanted Forest

If you haven't been to the Enchanted Forest, it's a sort of art space on two acres of woods tucked near the corner of Oltorf and Lamar. The events are amazing, made all the moreso because of the location. Enchanted Forest is like other aspects of Austin that make it a singular place. There are these wonderful little spots and enclaves slightly hidden around town, in precisely where you wouldn't and shouldn't expect them, and once you're inside you can easily forget you're in the middle of a metropolitan region of 1.5 million people.

There was a fairly recent Harper's article that described the impending doom of the world's oceanic life. It shocked me. I know humanity has been laying waste to ecological health, but the idea that we'll probably live to see the ocean's mostly dead is macabre in its implications.

I was thinking about this and found a nice piece from Conservation Magazine online, describing ways to reduce the destruction of marine ecosystems. They have a list of ten major remediable issues (damn metric system) some of which are very revealing.

Here's the piece:

10 Solutions to Save the Ocean

Worker Coop Credit Union

Some folks associated with the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives are starting a national credit union explicitly targeting worker cooperatives for business startup and expansion loans. This is fantastic- numerous studies have shown that worker cooperatives beat conventional firms in terms of productivity hands-down, but they have extremely limited access to financing. A credit union that funds worker cooperatives is a major necessary step towards building a genuinely democratic economy.

How can you help? The National Credit Union Administration (which insures credit union deposits) requires 3000 pledges* of future membership for the credit union chartering process. Fill out the survey linked above and email it back to help make this thing become a reality.

*Pledges are non-binding.

The new directory of worker cooperatives from the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives is out.

You can download it here as a pdf.

"[Jean] Arp later told the story of how, when he was notified to report to the German embassy, he avoided being drafted into the army: he took the paperwork he had been given and, in the first blank, wrote the date. He then wrote the date in every other space as well, then drew a line beneath them and carefully added them up. He then took off all his clothes and went to hand in his paperwork. He was told to go home."

*stolen from my roommate

You know, speaking for myself, and I genuinely mean myself alone, i Normally hate political music. I absolutely can't stand it. I like two or three political musicians, namely Phil Ochs and Utah Phillips. That about covers it. Maybe some reggae. No reason in particular, I just think of politics as at best a necessary attempt to bring righteousness to an unholy terrain, whereas music ideally taps a person into the divine. I personally don't muddy the two up much. Like I said, personal proclivity, lots of people very legitimately feel the exact opposite way about music.

That being said, this is pretty chill. "Open Letter to a Landlord," by In Living Colour.

There's a lot of discussion among anarchist circles about technology, if it's good, if it's bad, if it's neither, if it's both, if it's going to eat you, if it's going to bake you a cake. I just wanted to toss out this quote discussing open source technology and the fairly profound implications embedded in it.

"One important direction in which the open source experiment points is toward moving beyond the discussion of transaction as a key determinant of institutional design. . . . The elegant analytics of transaction cost economics do very interesting work in explaining how divisions of labor evolve through outsourcing of particular functions (the decision to buy rather than make something). But the open source process adds another element. The notion of open-sourcing as a strategic organizational decision can be seen as an efficiency choice around distributed innovation, just as outsourcing was an efficiency choice around transactions costs. . . . As information about

Freedom only takes on meaning when it is a shared freedom, when it is the freedom to encounter another being as a being instead of a thing to be used and manipulated, or even simply imagined according to our own will or analysis.

This is not the same as simple liberty to do what we wish, though the one does condition the possibility of the other. No, this is experiencing a sort of ontological freedom. Even when we are ourselves unconstrained, when we act so as to oppress another being, or when we encapsulate that other being in a preconceived and static image or impression, we remain a prisoner of systemic determination. Our encounter with the world remains scripted, merely acting out a mechanical part already formed by biases, assumptions, and routine. Or even worse, we simply implement the mandates of power structures in society, structures over which we have little control and little certain understanding.

Single-Payer FAQ

A little more info on health care reform. Clarifying questions and answers on what single-payer health care actually is.