crimthinc...

[dirty_rotten_squatter]

i'd be more into a discussion, if it were it in real life. i just feel like im discussing with a box with a picture on it.

I get what you mean..my fingers are getting kinda tired anyhow lol

 

[Ravie]

lol true. its harder to put thoughts together while typing too. are you going to the stp gathering in portland?

 

[eatmonksus]

maybe. i was in portland, but i got picked up, and my friends had to bail me out, and they stole me back to seattle...

 

[Ravie]

well you have a month and a half to get back there haha but if you do go i will see that we drag this convorsation on.

 

[eatmonksus]

definitely. i dig these conversations. i just wish i was stoned. i come up with some crazy shit...

 

[Ravie]

you should hear my theory on evolution haha

 

[veggieguy12]

CrimethInc is an umbrella group for various people who may be associated, or may not be connected at all but simply agree on an outlook - if not totally, at least enough to share the label when publishing and distributing.

I don't know how the "convergences" are organized or publicized or how locations are decided, and I haven't been to one. (You can see a story here on StP of how NickCofphee and I tried & failed to make the June '08 one in Milwaukie, WI area.)

I really quite appreciate CrimethInc's propaganda and perspective on the world; I think I'd be friends with most kids involved with CrimethInc.

 

[IBRRHOBO]

We do info clearinghouse work and pubs outta our own cell here. CrimethInc. comes in many 'flavors'. In that, is the beauty. The SF Bay area cell is a pretty classic case-in-point. We're autonomous just as each and every cell is as such.

As for being educated, I guess if u call prison educated, so be it. As to money, well, I run sign periodically still to help pay my bills.

Addressing the poly sci debate: I am curious as to whether we are discussing anarchy as a political dogma or pure, unadulterated anarchy. You see, either way, no more internet, no more spanging, no more trains, no more hitchhiking, no more dumpstering, no more running water, no more ... well you get the point. Yeah, I suppose the Black Flag is cool to wear and shit. The simple reality of the 21st Century is that it is good coffee shop debate. It is more en vougue than applicable as an institution. Spare the rhetoric before it starts. Now, addressing areas of class war, et al., which unfortunately become thrown in the pile of the phrase 'anarchy' this is the furthest thing from the truth. You're dealing more w/socialism. Not bad ideas really; however, probably impediments to a modern society.

A good primer for those who think anarchy is plausible outside the mosh pit would be the Putney Debates or perhaps a simple skimming of Leviathan. I would, though, invite a thorough debate at one's leisure. A nice summation there provided by my 'education'! lol

 

[sweet potatoe]

but if you think about the way you put it, it is, in the end it's own govornment by demanding a certain way of living (tribes) or whatever it may be. in the end the human race craves orginised leading. just as anarchists dont want a central govornment it seems the majority does, and by forcing the thoughts of the minority on the majority it eventually causes chaos.... wich leads me to calling anarchy chaos because (believe it or not) anarchists are the minority and if you really think about it it would be just as fucked up to force the idiots who live in a centralised gov to live as anarchists do as it is for anarchists to live as they are. in the end no one wins in politics.

well i used to say alot that if anarchists could live on their own terms away from government, an then anyone who needed that structure could stick with the government, like bringing together the likeminded peoples, but that would be quite boring as it would be kind of a monocultural society or place for awhile. then youd also have alot of people still seeing that other, governed part of the world killing things, and doing whatever evils. while the governed people may see the anarchists as another people to conquer. haha

contradicting circles are great
and despite whatever contradictions i still beleive in anarchy.
and some of crimethincs writings can be beautiful, even if some of the more fucked up parts arent written about. maybe some of us or someone can get together and write something that includes th good shit and the bad?

 

[Ravie]

*sigh* in the end we just disect and review, but it allways ends the same. what a shame humanity is...

 

[bote]

some of the writing is hard to swallow, but I´m glad they take the time to disseminate it as they do.

 

[griffjam]

I love crimethinc. But yeah, the first time I read Days of War I didn't understand it and thought it was asking too much, and reading Evasion depressed me about half way through but I think that was more of the alienation of our current consumer society more than it was the protagonist's traveling alone because I didn't like On the Road when I read it for a school project. I like Off the Map much better, but that could be because I just like Europe. All in all crimethinc. is just a publishing collective, publishing Evasion doesn't mean they're saying, "Nihilist escapism is the way to go!" just like if Scholastic published a book on the Spanish Civil War doesn't make them anarchist. They published Evasion to attract people who are already apart of the traveler subculture, and it was unpolitical because they didn't want it to come off preachy.

 

[ReturnTrip]

i don't mind crimethinc too much...some of there ideas can be far fetched but i feel that they mean well. sometimes they spawn the kind of people that turn into preachy elitist anarchist/crusties, regardless they have a disclaimer at the front of days of war that says that you can believe whatever you want to believe and to take whatever they say with a grain of salt.

i don't know..maybe i'll post here when i'm not drunk

 

[FreeBHamster]

My two cents is basically that crimethinc is at least a step in the right direction. They opened me up to some new ideas. Nothing wrong with that.

 

[ReturnTrip]

My two cents is basically that crimethinc is at least a step in the right direction. They opened me up to some new ideas. Nothing wrong with that.

i completely agree

 

[mkirby]

Yeah crimethinc might be made up of rich kids or whatever...but you can't help what you're born into. They've got some good ideas and projects. If they change the way people think even a little bit, they're a good thing.

 

[veggieguy12]

Yeah crimethinc might be made up of rich kids or whatever...but you can't help what you're born into.

Where does this idea come from, that CrimethInc'ers are 'a bunch of rich kids'? I hear this all the time, but aside from the one guy who's thought to have written Evasion while he was on the lam from the FBI - and I believe that one of the CrimethInc groups merely got his zines and put them into book form, I don't believe he was otherwise or previously associated with CrimethInc. - I don't know if anyone acutally knows anyone who's written their stuff or sent website orders out from their main distro center in Salem(?). So how does anyone know enough to keep mentioning them as a bunch of rich kids? God-damn!, that's so cliché.
Whatever money anyone's folks might have, I'm sure the CrimethInc anarchists aren't driving BMWs or eating at The Cheesecake Factory nightly, y'know?

*sigh* in the end we just disect and review, but it allways ends the same. what a shame humanity is...

Humanity is quite a large species which has many variations of living styles, ethics, customs, etc., within it; the screw-up experiments in human history or the failed societies are no more the essence of homo sapiens than the Nazi Party are the essence of the German people/nation. I think civilization - the extraction of mineral and fuel sources for power, the domination of all non-humans (plant & animal), the supremacy of agriculture to provide exclusively what we want to eat and the exclusion of what other species need or what the diverse landscape provided after millions of years evolving prior to human intervention - these things are pretty obviously not going to last forever, it's a self-destructive system. I can't say if it will last another 10 years only or maybe another fifty, but it won't take long to fail - just look at the ecological crisis it has brought about it in a very short time (considering the 5 billion years of the planet and the 65 million years that mammals have been evolving to the 2.5 million years of upright-walking apes from which we evolved & branched-off about 200,000 years ago).

Addressing the poly sci debate: I am curious as to whether we are discussing anarchy as a political dogma or pure, unadulterated anarchy. You see, either way, no more internet, no more spanging, no more trains, no more hitchhiking, no more dumpstering, no more running water, no more ... well you get the point.

I should say that I'm not much for theoretical "anarchy", the stuff of long talks filled with abstract jargon. I prefer to define anarchy by actions or motivations, and anarchists by their principles and conduct.
Having said that...
Why would the absence of governors mean that nobody begged for money, or that trains didn't transport materials or people, or that people didn't beg for a lift roadside as others drove past? Why would salvaging the throw-aways end, why would the plumbing and aquifers and reservoirs be abandoned?
If you think these changes would be unpleasant, I suspect most people would agree - thus, I figure people would make an effort to maintain these things to function similarly as now, without a threatening government to regulate or protect the operation.

It's like when I mention secession of regions or states from these United, and people say "Well I don't want to show a passport every time I go to ____". Okay, I hear that all the time, so nobody wants to do passports - so ya don't do it!, isn't that obvious? You do what you want. That is anarchy: you aren't coerced or obliged, you exercise your own power.
"Do as thou wilt... that shall be the whole of the law." - Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Y'know, if we think to the government's potential today, it is to serve people (arguably only for show, anyway); but in the last eight years, and more obviously over the early 1900s, government was plainly and without any veil in service to industrial barons and their wealth, securing it from the riff-raff public masses.
Anarchy is achieved simply when laboring, lower-claste people realize that they really don't need to support another institution which works with their enemies more than with them.

A good primer for those who think anarchy is plausible outside the mosh pit would be the Putney Debates or perhaps a simple skimming of Leviathan.

I haven't read Leviathan, but I did read The Social Contract; I think my current perspective on things says that these thinkers could not have understood their time and place in human history as on the edge of a dead end experiment with a way some humans choose to live, but rather they likely saw themselves as living at the peak of human destiny, fulfilling the divine and honorable role intended for Man.
That would be the first flaw in their assessments.
Maybe you could explain what of Hobbes's positions/statements you think is valid and relevant to our world today, in light of how far science and technology and eco-destruction and overpopulation and anthropology have come since the 17th Century.
Also, Kanye West, they didn't have Kanye West back then.

 

[IBRRHOBO]

Now here's a DAMN GOOD reply by veggieguy! Yeah, sorry couldn't make the StP in April; shit, we'd bum everyone out w/our debates around the fire pit, bottle in hand, and ranting on like madmen!!! lol

Nuts and bolts: why would things change w/o 'governors'? Well, first and probably foremost, unless there is a GENERATIONAL shift (@ least 2 to 3 decades and probably more like five to six) the transition of power and education into the hands of semi-nomadic and semi-literate people would cause the implosion of at least the infrastructure. No logistics, no food. Here I am taking the supposition that 'anarchy' would be implemented in a momentous strike. Let me give an analogy: the widget (supplant hanburger, tofu, internet, porno whatever the fuck). We have a system which requires laws to get the widget from a to b in a timely fashion. If tomorrow we say, "Well, I don't want to make it anymore, or I don't want to transport it, or I want to make a million of them instead of 100 or I want to drive 150 all the way..." then the widget doesn't get to point b. Here, we extrapolate the following: if the widget doesn't get to point b, people die (call the widget medicine or food). Well, ok they die. Yeah, but what of cholera, where do we put the bodies, etc? Hell, let's presume that there would be leadership in anarchy, ah, but we can't as that is antithietical to the premise of anarchy. So, you see, when you state that the plumbing, et al., would continue, I counter that it wouldn't as who is going to tell whom to do what? In anarchy it doesn't work.

Your point on cessation of region/states has been tried and failed. Now, I will concede this: First, I am interested in the finer points of anarchy. Just as I am interested in the finer points of democracy (and actually we are a republic, not a democracy). An inner meshing would be good. My final issue w/application of anarchy is this: if tomorrow we shift, what do you think our foreign adversaries will do? Idly stand by? Do you think that a rag tag band of black flaggers will be more or less effective in defending this country than the, albeit hated, military? Ney, I say.

I believe, in closer examination of your statement of getting rid of the institutions that the masses serve, etc., is closer to a socio-political anarchosocialism.

I had actually brought up the book and Debates as they were opposed to anarchy. Granted, out of date, but history catagorically repeats itself. Go no further than the Oracle of Delphi; for when Socrates asked of her the meaning of life? "Know thyself." In this, you and I debate the same debates which have occured for centuries. And this, my friend IS A GOOD THING! For, when the voices of the masses are silenced, who will speak then? Vincit Omnia Veritas ... Truth Conquers All.

 

[Seldom Seen Smith]

i moved to North Carolina after living down in GA for several years, and the crimethinc people here are annoying and PC as hell. i agree with them on certain things but these people are nothing but dogmatic, coffee shop revolutionaries that do nothing but hang out in there clicks like a bunch of high school kids. if your not privileged like them and misspeak or say something they find offensive they'll just all over you and oust you forever.

the book evasion is stupid too. the damn kid finds bagels in every dumpster he visits.

needless to say i stopped hanging out with those people and would rather work on my own projects.

 

[finn]

I just see it as an alternative publishing company. I didn't like Evasion, though the book was better than the zine. I couldn't get through the first pages of Days of War, Nights of Love, just because of the romantic language it used. I hate pseudo-intellectual writing because it's easy to make a simple idea sound overly complex and hard to make a difficult idea simple to understand. Off the Map, as I understand it, had nothing to do with crimethinc aside from being published by them. I did like that book.

I'd like to see them publish a book that had case studies of collectively operated workplaces (or even just infoshops), so that people are given solid and concrete examples of successful models which they can make a living from, instead of untried concepts and bits of who-knows-how-accurate historical lore.

That's why I'm leaning towards crimethinc'ers being rich kids- pushing the rhetoric instead of putting bread on the table on their terms. They don't go for the important nitty-gritty details and just bask in some imaginary future la-la land of anarchy.