Re: Idea for a business... not entirely OT.

Tim Streater <timstreater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell) wrote:

[snip]

<shrug> Britons didn't use much writing before the Romans turned up,
but the druids did have hundreds of cryptographic alphabets that they
were all expected to learn, and they used Greek for daily record
keeping. The Romans utterly destroyed that culture by slaughtering
almost all the druids.

Rubbing out the intelligentsia is a typical invaders' trick.

Not that I've heard of. Rubbing out the intelligentsia is a trick
played on your own people - c.f., Pol Pot and everyone's favourite
uncle, Joe Stalin[1], are my two favourite examples.

The druids were not a problem because they were the intelligensia. They
were a problem because they were opposed to Roman rule and were in
charge of the religion.

The Romans like their subject peoples to keep their religions - but only
under Roman supervision. They couldn't control the druids. They also
liked clever people running things (no use having idiots in charge) -
but only if they were on the same side as the Romans. The druids
weren't.

*AND* the druids had been whipping up some pretty fierce opposition to
the Romans, so the Romans slaughtered pretty much the whole lot of 'em
at their annual peaceful meeting on Anglesey. The druids and all the
other Brits were unarmed - it was a time of truce. The Romans turned up
loaded with everything. It was a vile and bloody act of mass-murder,
what the Romans perpetrated back then.

(The Roman upper classes did have the traditional upper class English
suspicion of `clever people'. I'd like to know if English inherited
that, or if it's just something that turns up inevitably when the people
running things aren't too bright or terribly well-educated)

That is why anarchy is not such a bad idea. A properly run anarchy need
not be nihilist, as you seem to think it has to be.

A "properly run anarchy"? What kind of talk is this?

<puzzled> Normal talk, surely?

What kind of talk is this from you, that you question in that hostile
fashion a perfectly sensible point made in a perfectly sensible fashion?

And who gets to
decide how its gonna be run, anyway?

Everyone - who else? The idea is that a society of people working
together for the common good can easily deal with the small fraction of
troublemakers whom you assume would take over instantly.

No-one would be able to take over or act in seriously antisocial
fashions for very long in the face of collective action from the
majority.

Where the bully-boys take over with their small gangs of thugs, it's
because social and political factors have denied `the people' the
opportunity to do so. In a properly run anarchy, `the people' would not
be so denied.

Two seconds after you have anarchy, the mobsters, crooks, and spivs move
in.

In the very few anarchist societies that I've read about, that is not
what has in fact happened in practice. Have you ever read about an
anarchist society that's actually operated at all in practice?

It's hard to find out about them, because almost everything written
about anarchist societies is political propaganda either for or against
anarchism - and mostly against.

That's when you better hope that there's a not-too-nasty robber
baron under whose protection you can put yourself. Probably in exchange
for your daughter, of course.

That's not anarchy - that's more like a nasty form of feudalism.

No, I think the rule of law gets you a much better society.

The rule of law has produced very bad results in many cases. Draco
wrote some bad ones, hence `Draconian'. Stalin engineered mass famines
ruling his people with laws - just what you think it best for people,
starving them to death by the million but it's got to be good because
it's all under the rule of law, right?

Anarchism has almost never had an opportunity to be tested, so I don't
see how you can make any comparisions.

They seem to
have anarchy in some parts of Africa, enforced with the machete.

Actually, they don't have anarchy at all. I don't know what the word
for what's going on there might be. But it's no anarchy at all. `The
people' have no power and are controlled by laws and treaties and armies
- all supported by governments.

No sign of anything like anarchy, I'm afraid. Total bloody chaos, yes -
but that ain't anarchy.

Rowland.

[1] Whose real name was Djugashvili[2], an embarrassingly Georgian name
if you want to be leader of the USSR.

[2] Or so I've previously read. Wikipedia gives it as:

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

It's still definitely Georgian. And when I found out about that, I had
only a vague idea where Georgia was and thought that its existence as an
independent nation state had been permanently extinguished. Seems I got
that wrong...

Bloody Bosnia-Herzegovina has come back from the dead, even. Argh.
Why'd I say that? I `did' 19th century European history at school. The
map of Europe is looking a bit 19th century now. Thank god for the EU,
that's all I can say. The damned foolishness in the Balkans we had most
recently did /not/ turn into a re-run of 1914-18... *that* is why I
said `argh'.

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