How patents fucked up the steam engine…

An object lesson in intellectual property: James Watt: Monopolist

Ironically, not only did Watt use the patent system as a legal cudgel with which to smash competition, but his own efforts at developing a superior steam engine were hindered by the very same patent system he used to keep competitors at bay. An important limitation of the original Newcomen engine was its inability to deliver a steady rotary motion. The most convenient solution, involving the combined use of the crank and a flywheel, relied on a method patented by James Pickard, which prevented Watt from using it. Watt also made various attempts at efficiently transforming reciprocating into rotary motion, reaching, apparently, the same solution as Pickard. But the existence of a patent forced him to contrive an alternative less-efficient mechanical device, the “sun and planet” gear. It was only in 1794, after the expiration of Pickard’s patent that Boulton and Watt adopted the economically and technically superior crank.

Say NO to government health care!

There is a sad minority of people who claim to be Anarchists and who also fight for State control over more and more of our economy and social lives. These people need to be strongly refuted because they communicate to people that Anarchists are just politicos like everyone else, and want to impose their vision of society in the same way that neo-liberals and neo-conservatives impose their vision of society and press their immoral consequences on innocent people.

We have to be especially skeptical of self-professed Anarchists who support government monopolies and programs which have a clear role in the power elite structure, because there’s little doubt that they know what they are doing and what they are proposing. It should be obvious to all Anarchists that giving control of our institutions to the government instead of the people is an important net loss to society as a whole. No matter what small gains are hypothesized, they remain small compared to all that the power elite stands to gain as a near-certainty.

A good example of this is socialized health care. The movie Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices really drives the point home on this one: socialized health care is a subsidy for the corporate elite. Wal-Mart exploits this flaw in the system by underproviding health care so their employees are forced to use the State’s health care system, thus saving Wal-Mart a great deal of money. “[The] everyday low prices [and therefore Wal-Mart profits] are based on taxpayer subsidies,” either in the form of health care or welfare. In the end, therefore, we are all paying for something that should be coming out of Wal-Mart’s pockets.

It is a great naivete on their part to believe that government wants anything but to pursue a policy that favours their own power and that of their plutocratic friends. No “populist” policy has ever been enacted. Every policy enacted by government, even the best-sounding ones, aim to fleece, pacify, monitor, impoverish and enslave. There is no doubt that the government taking over health care and dictating the kinds of care people can or cannot receive aims to control people’s lives and the use of medical technology.

The choice between HMOs and profit-driven health care on the one hand, and despotic policy-driven government health care on the other hand, is a rather unsavory one (and one which seems to be less and less distinct as time goes on: government health care is becoming more and more profit-driven, and HMO care is becoming more and more policy-driven). Fortunately, we have an alternative, which is Anarchist mutual aid. This alternative would require us to break the guild monopolies, the medication monopolies, and all the other monopolies that loom over any current system and prevent affordable health care from being made available, and would empower the people with deciding on which values the health care system should pursue. This is, then, a less accessible alternative, but the only one worth taking at all. To preach any of the others goes in the wrong direction of where we want to go as Anarchists.

Public education is pretty much the same thing. We all know why public education really exists: for the purposes of indoctrination, churning good unquestioning workers, and keeping poor people uneducated, and more recently mass drugging of our children. Nothing fails like public schools. And yet even people who do know this still fall in the “but without public education there’d be nothing left for them” trap. Of course the State wants you to believe it’s essential, and it’s a lie. In fact, the multiplicity of kinds of education we could have in a free system is absolutely astounding.

Some may reply that what I’m saying may be true under an Anarchist society, but not under the current one. That under this system, we must have some public health care or public education, or people will get sick and get poorer. Well the poor people are already getting sicker and poorer. The ruling class will always take resources away from us and make life harder for the average subject. That doesn’t mean we should support this sick and corrupt process. As all attempts at gradualism demonstrate, taking the “pragmatic approach” always leads straight to Hell. It plays right into their hands.

It’s not the concept of public health care or public education that I object to. Obviously, if we mean “public” in the Anarchist sense of being managed by a community, I fully support those things. But we’re talking about ruling class control. As such, I’ve got no objection over choosing public health care or public education over private health care or private education: either way, you’re putting money in the same hands. So who cares? What I care about is what some Anarchists are promoting and associating our ideology with. I have always said that our greatest strength as a movement is that no one runs any risk of associating us with politics or political means, and thus will not see us as “just another faction fighting for my money,” but these bozos are doing exactly that.

Anarchists need to stop promoting ruling class bullshit and need to stop putting money in the pockets of the politicians as well as the corporations that stand to gain from a growth in public health care or public education. None of these people should have any more of our money, they already have more than enough as it is. What Anarchists need to be promoting is the abolition or circumvention of the abundant monopolies that exist in all those areas, and talk about setting up mutual aid systems. That’s my opinion, anyway.

What was that you said about the freedom to protest?

I thought that what made “this country the best country on Earth” was that we had the (futile) right to protest. Whatever’s going on with that, by the way? Talk Radio Host Charged with Talking/Blogging. Gee whiz, I wonder what he was talking about that got him arrested?

The City of Keene, NH, has brought criminal charges against Ian Freeman, host of (nationally syndicated talkshow) Free Talk Live, for positively reporting on the actions of Andrew Carroll, who issued a press release stating he would be possessing marijuana in public, in order to protest drug laws. Mr. Freeman declared Andrew Carroll to be heroic, and gave positive publicity to his press release and arrest, as well as interviewed him afterwards.

Well darn. I guess you can profess being against the war on drugs, but you can’t actually encourage a criminal. That’s just going beyond the bounds of good taste.

By the way, we set the bounds of good taste, because we’re the ones with the guns. Just so you know.

It’s sort of funny to me, actually. They have absolutely no idea what is and is not dangerous to them. In fact, Anarchists talking against the State is pretty much the single least threatening thing to the State. Talk alone can do nothing. Symbols alone are worth nothing. But of course, they live in a world of symbols and as such can only recognize such threats.

Atheist’s Best Kept Secret

“He was a man of his times”

When trying to explain away an older thinker’s faults, we say things like “he was a man of his times.” This is generally used in a relativist context: whatever was true at the time was true for them, therefore we should simply accept it.

There is some truth to this. Obviously we are all products of a certain set of limitations of thought. The limits of discourse are set by society, the State, religion, what mainstream media exists, the education system in place, and so on. One of their roles is to establish which are the dominant positions and what can or cannot be discussed. A Catholic can debate whether he should eat fish on Friday, but not whether the Pope is infallible or not. A worker can debate whether his wages are high enough, but is not allowed to discuss the validity of the work contract.

Different times will have different limitations, and thus set different limits in people’s ability to reason.

This is also true of Anarchism. In fact, this is especially true of Anarchism. Our concept of freedom is extremely limited, simply because we are so far away from a time where this concept is fully understood that we stand more or less in the same perspective as an ant looking at a human being, or someone thinking about gravity pre-Newton. We have no idea what it really means or how it works, just the general direction to go towards or a general phenomena to look at. Once we get more powerful as individuals (freer, wiser, more confident) in a new form of society, we will be able to look at this issue with a new perspective, unclouded by fear, greed and stupidity, and be able to circumscribe the topic of “freedom” better.

However, I believe we must not use one’s “times” as an all-encompassing excuse. For instance, it does not excuse the inability to follow one’s own ideas to their logical conclusion. Someone “owning” slaves in the early 1800s may be excusable as being “part of their times.” Someone “owning” slaves while advocating an ideology of freedom for all men is not excusable.

Someone who advocates the existence of the State and hierarchies today may be excusable as being “part of their times.” Someone who advocates the existence of the State and hierarchies while also advocating an ideology of non-violence and non-exploitation is not excusable.

We must either admit logic as an absolute of thought, or else make logic relative also, and believe that what people said in the past really shouldn’t make any sense for us at all. I don’t believe most people would choose the second option. There is definitely a sense in which these people who wrote in the past are very much like us, regardless of the society they lived in, and that they should have at least some honesty and courage.

Unfortunately, honesty and courage are not common traits anywhere or at any time. In fact, we actively suppress honesty and courage in our societies, because of the inherent problem of forced cohabitation and the need for tolerence in a democratic melting pot. In a situation where any disagreement with anyone is suppressed, every individual becomes a censor agent for the State. This is the intellectual climate in which we live.

Since the most truthful ideas (such as Anarchism) are those which reject a system of things as being corrupt, and therefore imply dissent with a wide variety of social processes and people, the most truthful ideas must therefore be the most censored. And if that means inventing a stereotype in order to correlate dissent with violence (such as the bomb-throwing hate-filled Anarchist), then so be it. Dissent must be equaled with violence.

Well, don’t you know that atheists have killed the most people in history? It’s true, really, we swear. Hitler and Stalin were atheists, you know. What’s that you say? Atheism is not a moral position? But that’s impossible. Christianity is a moral position, atheism is against Christianity, therefore it must also be a moral position. Since Christianity is good, atheism must therefore be evil. QED, motherfucker!

So am I asking to fault past thinkers for not being courageous enough to go against the status quo? Isn’t that unfair, given that the status quo was more repressive than it is now? I don’t think so. All times have their limitations, and our time is no different. I make no pretense of being a great thinker, but I don’t shy away from saying things that I know are outside of the boundaries of public discourse, even when I am in public. It is true that I don’t stand to be imprisoned for it, and I don’t think anyone should be morally beholden to risk going to prison for his opinions. So there is a line there, a line of risk, that has to be acknowledged.

In the end, I think the issue is a little more complicated than “he was a product of his times” and that we shouldn’t lean on this as an easy way out of embarassing things people said in the past.

How to stump an anti-abortionist…

… with one question. What question would that be?

If abortion was illegal, what should be done with the women who have illegal abortions?

Now watch their faces as the cognitive dissonance sets in. They believe abortion to be murder. Murder deserves severe punishment. Thus, women who have illegal abortions should receive severe punishment — like life in prison or the death penalty. That’s the logical conclusion.

But they can’t accept this conclusion. They know it’s absurd and unfair — which means they know abortion is not really murder.

There’s also a video of anti-abortionists answering the “killer” question (pun intended).

What would Jesus do? Jesus apparently didn’t think abortion was very important, since he didn’t say a thing about it. But then again, he didn’t talk about slavery either. You gotta excuse him, he had a lot going on in his mind at that time…