James A. Donald wrote:

That is it. This is the ghost of cypherpunks.

Or maybe its counterpart fossil. As GK Chesterton said about most nominal Christianity in the world in his day - the original had rotted away leaving a space of the same shape and size. Like the impression of a leaf between two layers of mud which harden into stone leaving a fossil that has something of the shape and pattern of the original but none of its content.

Cypherpunks always was a self contradiction - a political group pushing a fundamentally non political attack upon the state, and thus upon the very existence of politics.

Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a state? I'd have thought the opposite is true. Most states actively prevent most people participating in politics. And even the more benign ones relieve people of the responsibility of doing politics - or maybe the realisation that what they are doing *is* politics. Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all the time, and all public acts are overtly political.

-- From: ken <bbrow07@students.bbk.ac.uk>

Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a state? I'd have thought the opposite is true. Most states actively prevent most people participating in politics.

The more authoritarian the state, the more in compells people to participate in politics, making eveything they do or think political, for example the endless meetings in Cuba and Mao's china,

Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all the time, and all public acts are overtly political.

So when I buy coffee, that is political? Surely the non state area of our lives is the non political area of our lives. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG OHqLH7EFCEVGI5CkHzpWzDH3Iyd7w5T1TSE3dyUB 4HvAcBSrD8JQfPtYDs3hHfuCbQWprTcJhov+r6b1+

At 2:03 PM -0400 9/17/05, Damian Gerow wrote:

You're damn right it's political.

Especially if you're a Marxist, or some, shall we say "homeopathic" variant thereof: after all, "the personal is political", right? Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

At 2:31 PM +0100 9/19/05, ken wrote:

Assuming that you mean feminism is a variant of Marxism, what exactly do you mean by Marxism?

Exactly what you do. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

On 9/19/05, James A. Donald <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote:

like Ben and Jerry's rainforest crunch, where by buying overpriced and extra fattening icecream, you were supposedly saving the rainforest and preserving indigenous cultures .

--shrug-- It's better than directly contributing to most "causes". At least this way you get some ice cream for your money. (I've done a lot of IT consulting for a lot of not-for-profits in the US, most notably on their accounting systems. I haven't expressly pried into the numbers, but I kept my eyes open and couldn't help but notice that the overhead consumption was uniformly really high. And in the case of the charities and the PACs, the overhead numbers reported by the accounting system were generally much higher than those given in the annual disclosures.) -- There are no bad teachers, only defective children.

James A. Donald wrote:

-- From: ken <bbrow07@students.bbk.ac.uk>

...

Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a state? I'd have thought the opposite is true. Most states actively prevent most people participating in politics.

The more authoritarian the state, the more in compells people to participate in politics, making eveything they do or think political, for example the endless meetings in Cuba and Mao's china,

That seems almost the opposite of politics to me. The actual politics - the arguments, the decisions - has been done in some smoke-filled room beforehand. The public meeting is nothing more than the product launch.

...

Where there is no state everyone is a politician, all the time, and all public acts are overtly political.

So when I buy coffee, that is political?

Well, yes. If only because the buyer and seller are both extending the reach of their lives to influence others to behave in the way that they want. Using money in this case rather than votes or threats, but still in a sense a kind of politics. And of course on a large scale more obviously what is more conventionally called politics - that small transaction, a dollar for a cup of coffee, multiplied by millions can cause armies to move, can set up and tear down governments, induce luxury in one place, famine in another. If we can say that war is politics carried on by another means we can also say that markets are politics carried on by other means.

Surely the non state area of our lives is the non political area of our lives.

Not unless we are living as hermits. Our entire lives involve rubbing up against other people and negotiating our relations with them. Which is basically what politics is