Recent content on a northerly anarchist's ranting space
The idea that the news media is not, in fact, a perfectly reliable source of information on politically divisive or sensitive subjects, even in societies we broadly consider to be free, is not a new one. Criticism of mainstream media has long been a feature of the unruly left in the old western block. Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, is a full book going to great…
In the past few days there’s been a lot of argument over things that should be a lot simpler. A government with all the hallmarks of fascism took power in the United States, immediately followed by protests from a lot more people than celebrated. This is the good part. The bad part is in how some people have reacted to some of the protest. You see, an out-and-out neonazi was punched.
I am a perfectionist. What’s worse, I’m the sort of perfectionist that really should know better. The title here is a reference to a well-attested, old phrase: “The perfect is the enemy of good.” It’s a phrase that’s been used in countless variations. Its basic message is simple. If you always wait until something is perfect, it will never, ever be finished. You might have done something good, but…
For more than two years, the only thing served from this domain was a single statement, occasioned by my receipt of some legal documents from Google. That statement is preserved, more or less in its original form, below.
“Chirality” is a fancy way of saying “handedness”. It describes something that, when mirrored, can’t be made to fit with itself. Like so many other inordinately precise terms for everyday things, it springs from mathematics. The easiest example to name – indeed, the example that gives it its name – is your hands. Left and right, almost the same, but not exactly. A friend of mine recently used the…
Social science is, at present, divided into a bunch of different disciplines, all pretending their particular branch of human behaviour can be understood quite apart from everything else. (Well, some of them *cough*economics*cough* seem to think everything else is just a variant of their own, but that’s a different story.) This is the model for academia at the moment. Economics, political science,…
About a year ago, I planned a sequence of blog posts on the subject of intelligence organisations. Not in the usual “that’s the CIA and that’s the NSA and that’s GCHQ and over there you have ГРУ” way. (Although, admittedly, ГРУ tends to be scary enough that people avoid mentioning it at all.) No; my plan was more ambitious: A theoretical look at the work an intelligence organisation did, the…
First thought: Probably best I stop thinking of this as a place to get more-or-less well-formed ideas into the open. It’s not like anyone reads it, so I should be safe throwing out half-formed nonsense. I think. The real problem is a psychological block I need to deal with. Second thought: “International Relations” as a distinct discipline makes so little sense it’s not even funny. Or maybe that’s…
The origin, structure and development of the institution typically known as “the state” is my chief interest. This is not because I consider the state to be a particularly worthy institution; quite the contrary. Every indication is that the state arose from violence and represents nothing whatever except the efficient organisation of exploitation. It is not necessary, and its abolition is vital…
Class. Hooo-boy. There’s a term that gets the blood boiling in most cases. Who’s rich and who’s poor; aren’t we all middle-class? Isn’t the industrialised west as a whole the global rich, while the south of the globe gets the short end of the stick? Can we talk about a class-divided society without invoking the spectre of class warfare? One interesting thing about class is that people tend to…
Everyone gets the revolution they deserve.1 A curious statement, if ever there was one. It was made shortly after references to the lawyer from Arras and the (very real) threat of a western uprising going very wrong indeed. Now, as it happens, I have an interest in revolutions; both generally and particular ones. And though I say so myself, I’m not the worst-informed about the French Revolution,…
I did not say that I do not want rules and regulations. I said to you that I don’t want a Government, and by government I mean a power that makes laws and imposes them on everybody.1 Anarchists have a somewhat … tense relationship with the concept of the rule of law. Depending on how you understand the concept, its applicability in an anarchist society ranges from non-existent to being an absolute…
The Internet is the single largest artificial construct ever built. In its current form, it encompasses virtually the whole of the globe’s telecommunications infrastructure, a vast digital computer network. TV is probably the largest hold-out, but the way things are developing it won’t remain so for long. It took a while, but today the Internet Protocol suite lies at the heart of a technical…
Yes, it’s a dry title. It captures the main point of my argument, however, and so it will stand. I am a historian, but I also have a fair background in computer technology and the physical sciences. This is, it seems, a rather unusual mixture. That’s a messed-up situation, because my experience is that awareness of both “fields” (as it were) enables you to approach things in a much more powerful…
Greetings. I’m going to see if I can get some sort of bloggery going here. Essentially, I’m first and foremost an analyst who hasn’t been doing much analysis in the last year or so. For reasons that should be perfectly clear, I’m going to try and stay away from talk about WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks here. Instead, the focus will be on fairly high-level political analysis, from the level of what such…
Who’re you? My name is Herbert Snorrason. I’m from Ísafjörður, which is in the northwest of Iceland. I’m a historian by training, and have also managed to flunk out of a master’s program in international relations twice. This is because I managed to get myself involved with some pretty odd stuff while trying for it. In 2010 I wound up volunteering for WikiLeaks for a couple of months,…
A work-in-progress bibliography, giving full details of works cited by the posts and articles. It no doubt needs to be expanded a lot.
This is where I keep links to stuff I’ve written that’s closer to conventional forms of writing than it is to web stuff. These are mostly short essays, written without the use of hyperlinks. (Pointless, I know, but some people still insist…) In English Á íslensku
Interesting people Interesting organisations Interesting places