When we were finished eating we went to see James Hill at a small venue in Sherwood Park. The Park is a suburb of Edmonton, to the East. I hardly ever go there although it is on the way to where I live.
James Hill is a ukelele player, his girlfriend plays cello. It was entertaining, they played for about 1.5 hours mostly original material. They did cover a Michael Jackson song, it was entertaining. They ended the show with a singalong. We had a good time.
I stayed at Sylvie's last night, a good thing as I was beat. I woke up this morning and had coffee with the girls. They were speaking about books. They read a lot. An awful lot. I don't read that much!
I research for work, which involves a lot of web site reading. Having Kindle on my iPad has been great, I actually read a lot of books, that I probably would not have read. It is a lot easier to take your book(s) with you.
With all these books going to vapourware I wonder where we are going to be in 10 years. Everything stored online and then we have a massive power meltdown or rationing. Does that mean we will take a giant step backwards. I think that is what they are addressing in the TV show 'Revolution' I am not sure though.
Got into a discussion on Twitter this morning on the balance of state and person. The other person was an anarchist, I am not.
I believe that governments are tending to overreach their mandate or authority. That is why I think it is good to have organizations such as Anonymous and Wiki leaks. I am not that paranoid to think that the Government knows all we do or could ever.
In my job, I research stuff. I looked up an organization which is perceived to be a terrorist organization in the country where it is operating. Well I found the organization on Google.
A Google comment. I like it and I hate it. I hate it as it appears to be heading into your privacy, it can track what you are searching for and it records where you go to. So in my job, I go to a lot of places. If a think tank was tracking me they'd wonder what the hell I was doing. Way back when the internet was new, there were lots of search sites to use, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and some others. Now there are Ask, Bing and Google. The first two are useless for my job. I compare the information I get returned on a search and it is not even close to google. In fact some of the time I get one return and it is not even related. So I am on google.
Google of course is storing where I am going, even at work. This is kind of a dichotomy for governments at all levels. They can figure out who does what at IP addresses by the types of searches they are doing. I am sure you can apply this to your job, a Fire Safety officer for example would be searching for a lot of information related that job. The Google handler, if there is a such a thing, would become very knowledgeable on fire safety after checking his web history. They'd also know where he gets his jokes and possibly something about his personal interests. Depends on what searches the guy does at work.
This isn't for just the fire guy, or you, or me, this is for everyone. I realize you have to trade somethings to get some things. Google isn't charging for this service and they have massive data centres. They must be making money some how.
I think I have got you to the point of where anarchist guy is, but if not, just ponder, medicate on what your browser knows about you.
Anarchist guy is worried about the state, all states. His ideal is no government. People work together to achieve a goal. This is all well and good, but to me this is an ideal, Plato's definition of the perfect world. Unfortunately we are 6 billion people and we all have needs. We all cannot satisfy all of our needs. Man has learnt this over the years. They have built delivery systems. A lot of this was done by industry, some of it was done independent of government.
The Hudson's Bay Company and the railroads are business examples in Canada. They helped to explore the whole country and to unify it. Canada would not be what it is today without the major roles played by these companies. The government (state) came along later, first it was the British, then they sort of pushed us to independence. We built our own systems and living in a democracy the people assisted in their creation.
When I took Political Science and was studying different systems anarchy was examined. Other than communes there are really no examples of an anarchy in the world. The conservatives use the term negatively, to generate fear; to be fair, I think liberals and democrats use the word as a weapon as well.
First why is it negative? A lot of people are not explorers, I am figuring this is over 70% of people, but that is an arbitrary number, it could be closer to 90% or as lot as 55%. I really do not think that there are near 50% of the people on the planet who want no systems.
In my conversation with this guy I mentioned Andorra. This country, settled between Spain and France was believed to be as close to an anarchy as you could get. I guess I was taught wrong, it has some kind of parliamentary system. The country has existed since 928, but it has only had a constitution since 1993. Anyway, if it was an anarchy when I went to school, it isn't anymore.
What I learned in school. In an anarchy the people are responsible for themselves, Libertarianism on steroids. If Farmer A wanted a road to Farmer B's farm, he'd build it or he'd get together with Farmer B or a whole pile of other Farmers and build roads all over the place.
While I was typing this a horrible thought occurred, who the hell gave the Farmer's their land? Who owned it before hand? I sure hope to God Anarchists aren't Atheists or the whole 'we petitioned God for the land' goes up in smoke.
So if we disregard the minor issue of who owns the land.....let's accept the fact that there are independent entities known as farms, in Andorra's case it would be over 180.55 square miles and roughly about 90,000 people. Not very much land for all those people (and this is a small country). Canada is the opposite, 33 million people living on 3,854,085 square miles.
So you have no state, in either country. Farmer A and Farmer XYZ are best friends, but when the great land grab occurred they wound up living at opposite ends of the country. They tried to move next to each other but that wasn't happening.
This is a world with no state. There is no easement around the farms, no public thoroughfare, there is one farm touching another. Some farmers decided to build a road on their farms to trade their goods. Farmer B may allow Farmer A to cross his land to get to Farmer C and trade or Farmer B could say, no you sell it to me and buy my product, which I have bought from Farmer C. There is no state, so this would be 100% negotiation. If the price wasn't acceptable Farmer A would either do without or he'd find another Farmer to trade with. The problem would be how to get to the other Farmer's farm. Maybe the Farmers on the other sides of him would be more agreeable.
I could see this working in Andorra. Maybe the negotiation process involved Farmer A taking Farmer B behind the wood shed and beating the crap out of him or even worse, killing him and taking his land. I think the last method occurred has occurred in more than one country.
Take this system and apply it to Canada. This would be a gong show. Add in weather, geography, population densities and you get a mess. Try this in China, India or the United States and you have a disaster. This is the fear that the establishment is selling.
I think it is a reasonable fear. A lot of people like their houses, the fact it has water, they have healthcare for when they are sick, roads to drive on and a sense of security for themselves and their property. They are willing to give some of the money they earn to an organization to monitor all this. The fact that they have some control of that organization is a good thing.
Problems occur when that organization (the state) decides to over reach their authority. That is why checks and balances have been created. The US has made this a part of their system, they like to think theirs in the best in the world, but I believe a lot of the West has similar types of systems.
Anarchist guy was of the opinion that any state involvement was suspect. So the schools and universities only teach the party line. It gets better, all media and information released to the people is screened and edited. We only know what the state wants us to know.
I believe that the centre is the natural place for government, although we almost always never reside there. The pendulum swings left and right and then left again, never residing for too long on either side.
Looking at Canada the majority of governments have been Liberal throughout history. That changed about 8 years ago and we got a Conservative government. The Liberal party imploded after that, we may be stuck with the Conservatives longer than we want, but the nature of the party will violate the nature of the citizens. Eventually they will be booted and we will swing left.
Bring into this another pendulum, one with Anarchists on one side (little to no government) and lets call them Organizationists on the other side. The best example of these people are in the military, they do not want to do or organize things themselves, they want it done for them. They want to wake up in the morning and have their whole day planned, in fact they want their whole life planned. People in monasteries and convents would also be included.
I guess there is a centre for these ideologies and when the government starts to control people too much, then the pendulum goes the other way. But I strongly believe there are parameters on how far the pendulum will swing past centre; in either direction.
The Libertarians are the perfect example of this, sometimes what they say makes a lot of sense. It's great woot woot! Until you actually think about it.
Take the Paul's they want to repeal the US Civil Right Act (of 1964) in effect if a store owner or restaurant did not want to serve a group of people, they should not be forced to: It is their business. If it is a bad business model, their income would suffer and then they would change their policies to generate more income. A nice thought if there were no minorities or anything else to skew the marketplace.
We are due for a correction in rights of the person vs rights of the government. Maybe this is the tyranny that the gun nuts in the US are screaming about. But a lot of them are fuelled by bad thought. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are only dealing with their crews, they don't want these rights for everyone, just for whomever they pick. I think the picking is determined by how much they donate. Or show up at rallies with misspelt signs shouting that they want the Constitution back.
I have to think about this some more, maybe on a treadmill.
I wanted to leave you with one thing, the government may have a pile of information on all kinds of things, they don't have even the first inkling of a clue of what to do with it. They can't use it due to their own rules. They will try. They will recruit the Beck's and the Limbaugh's to help get the changes needed, but they will fail. There will always be an Anonymous and the pendulum will always swing back to centre. And there will always be public servants that start on time, go to break on time and don't venture outside the box and are beat down everytime they try. Add to this austerity programs and more data than you could ever imagine (increasing exponentially).
The world is safe for awhile. IMHO anyway
But maybe an Anarchy can exist, maybe it already does and it is a secret and the media/government/police are ensuring you do not know about it. When the secret is near to coming out, the powers that be organize an event like Newtown, Columbine, Aurora etc to keep the peeps down or even have planes........
Have a great day!
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