Around the Capital of Magic with the Bikemob
August 29, 2004 | People & Society
Ted Ernst will love this. "I had a truly exhilarating experience last night. The beautiful Juliette Powell and I biked over to Union Square and connected up with roughly 5000 bicyclists for tour of the city."
Carnival
August 25, 2004 | Arts & Culture
For anyone who wonders what it's like to go to a large rock and roll festival these days - not a corporate branded affair, but a middle-of-nowhere major-committment visionquest TREK, you could do a lot worse than to spend half an hour at:
http://www.sover.net/~hackmohr/captive.htm
This is a day-by-day journal by a local resident of Coventry, VT - site of the recent Phish "end-of-band" concert. 70,000 people travel to a town with a poulation of 1,012. The rain and mud were so bad that they were using tractors to tow cars INTO the parking lot! Between 20,000 and 30,000 people had to ditch their cars on the interstate highway and WALK between 12 and 15 miles, with all of their camping gear, (and food and beer, etc.) to get to the show.
This website demonstrates both why I couldn't bear to go to that show ("too much end-of-the-world behavior," I told friends) and why I wish I went (shared sacrifice builds community). While reading I laughed out loud several times and smiled the whole time. Good God - youth devoted to music. There's hope for the world yet.
What's Wrong With Conservatism
August 16, 2004 | People & Society
An very important essay by Phil E. Agre. Link and distribute far and wide. Excerpt:
Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.
Problems with the free market
August 9, 2004 | People & Society
An article on neo-liberalism by Henry Giroux. He says: "Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world, and it is a market ideology driven not just by profits but by an ability to reproduce itself.... Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, the welfare state, and non-commodified values."... [philosophy.com]
