Year: 2005

[ezcol_2third] Apparently, i’m not the only one who can’t make sense of the whole war narrative. Tom Shanker has an interesting piece in the New York Times today, called “All Quiet on the Home Front, and Some Soldiers Are Asking Why.” It begins: The Bush administration’s rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war. Overall, it hasn’t been the cheeriest news day, and the Times features stories on […]

[ezcol_2third] My library is nearly unpacked, after the move, and i’ve been sifting through material, trying to get a handle on things, so i can proceed in a more or less orderly manner. Because i want this manuscript to be useful as a broad history of mutualism, and as a tool for orienting more specific studies (both my own and others’), i’ve decided to organize it as on a year-by-year basis (or as close to year-by-year as the material requires.) I’ll combine reports of relevant publications, organizations, births, deaths, and career highlights of prominent folks, with historical context and general […]

[ezcol_2third] Just a follow-up to yesterday’s post: it seems there is a kind of basic contradiction at the heart of most government sponsored civil defense efforts. Such programs are necessary because, when push comes to shove, government resources alone are not sufficient to provide security in severe crises, so citizens are prepared to take over important government functions during those crises. Everything depends on making the standing government resources unnecessary, under certain very limited circumstances. Governments are reluctant to delegate authority, of course. To tell people that they can get along more or less by themselves, precisely at the moment […]

[ezcol_2third] Since the London bombings, the question has been raised again – just what sort of response should anarchists have to acts of terrorism? Actual responses have been a little weird sometimes, among the weirder ones the suggestion that anarchists shouldn’t get themselves worked up about such things, as that only plays into the “spectacle” of the “War on Terror.” The problem with that sort of response is that the victims of all aspects of the current world conflict are not merely “spectacular,” though it’s harder and harder to maintain their concrete reality and specificity within the context of mass-mediated […]

Contr’un Revisited: There’s a remark in a later post—about the time I moved west, I think—about how the next reshuffling of priorities would leave some projects by the wayside, without anyone really noticing, since their moment and their likely audiences had moved on. To be honest, even I only have a faint memory of this particular proposal for a history of mutualism, so I probably wasn’t far off. We’ll see if What Mutualism Was, my current attempt at a short history of mutualism, manages to appear within its window of opportunity. I’m in the process of finalizing plans for my […]

But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear. That’s Nicolai Ouroussoff, in yesterday’s New York Times, talking about the redesigned Freedom Tower. Read the rest of the article, as it gets straight to the heart of at least some of the absurdities of the project. The Freedom Tower will rest on a 200-foot-tall, nearly windowless, cement pedestal, gussied up a bit […]