User:IjonTichyIjonTichy

Welcome
Welcome to my user page.

My background is electrical engineering, computer engineering, applied probability, mathematical statistics, and engineering education. My main interests are technology, science, energy, natural resources, sustainability, nature, natural history, history of technology, history in general, scientific-method-supported alternative views and scientific-method-supported rational skepticism.

















Quotes related to anarchist communism and related areas
Harold Barclay, American anthropologist, in his book People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy, 1996:

John Ball, 1381:

Thomas More in 1516 suggested that the practice of enclosure is responsible for some of the social problems affecting England at the time, specifically theft:

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605-1615:

Fynes Moryson in his 1617 work |title=Fynes An Itinerary reported that the loss of agricultural labour hurt people like millers whose livelihood relied on agricultural produce:

Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, in A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England and The True Levellers Standard A D V A N C E D: or, The State of Community opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men, 1650-1660:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754:

Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902:

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal, 1898, and The Conquest of Bread, 1892:

Howard Ehrlich on the black flag:

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Norvell (11 June 1807):

Stanislaw Lem (the 24-th voyage of Ijon Tichy): On day 1,006 of his journey, Ijon Tichy, space traveller, landed on a planet in the middle of an open desert covered with shining, colorful discs arranged in neat geometric patterns. He explored the planet, and saw three beautiful cities, all of which were deserted, but with no signs of natural disasters. Finally Ijon discovered a diamond palace where he found several living beings who resembled humans. One of these persons explained that he and the others were the last remaining members of a race of people called Phools. An industrial revolution (especially mass automation) on the planet put the lowest caste Phools, or Drudgelings, out of work, obliterating their purchasing power and resulting in mass starvation despite the fact that ingenuity in science and technology created a fantastic abundance of excellent food, goods and services. When Ijon suggested that all that needed to be done in order to solve the problem was to make the factories and farms common property, and the New Machines would have become a blessing to all instead of a problem, the Phool responded that their supreme law states that no one can be compelled, constrained, or even coaxed to do what he or she does not wish. Thus no one would dare expropriate the factories (belonging to the highest caste Phools, the Eminents), as that would be the most horrible violation of liberty imaginable. When Ijon cried that the law, in effect, compels, constrains and coaxes the Drudgelings to starve and die against their own wishes, the Phool said the Drudgelings should have rejoiced at their freedom. In a desperate attempt to solve the problems of the ever-rising mountains of unpurchased goods, the food riots and the mass deaths of the Drudgelings, the government council of Phools, the Plenum Moronicum, commissioned the most brilliant Machine Builder to build an ultimate machine to establish order and harmony and solve all the problems in a neat, clean, cheerful fashion. The resulting automated machine transformed every Phool into a bright, beautiful disc and arranged them in pleasant geometrical designs in the desert. The Phool explaining this to Ijon was one of the last survivors -- he and the others at the castle were simply waiting to be turned into shiny discs and join in the harmony of their planet.

Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1973): I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe — certainly our Building was such an institution — the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.

Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress (1971): A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom. And therefore we have the malingerants, fudgerators, and drudge-dodgers, not to mention the special phenomenon of simulimbecility or mimicretinism. A mimicretin is a computer that plays (mimics) stupid in order, once and for all, to be left in peace. And dissimulators simply pretend that they're not pretending to be defective. Or perhaps it's the other way around. The whole thing is very complicated. A probot is a robot on probation, while a servo is one still serving time. A robotch may or may not be a saboteur. One vial, and my head is splitting with information and nomenclature. A confuter, for instance, is not a confounding machine — that's a confutator — but a machine which quotes Confucius. A grammus is an antiquated frammus, a gidget — a cross between a gadget and a widget, usually flighty. A bananalog is an analog banana plug. Contraputers are loners, individualists, unable to work with others; the friction these types used to produce on the grid team led to high revoltage, electrical discharges, even fires. Some get completely out of hand — the dynamoks, the locomoters, the cyberserkers.

Kurt Vonnegut:

Dalton Trumbo (1970):

Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940), Closing speech of the Jewish barber, after being mistaken for Hynkel. - Full text, video and audio online at American Rhetoric

People and works related to anarchist communism and related areas




Recommended intelectuals
L. Susan Brown, Charles Fourier, Michel Foucault, Emile Armand, Paolo Virno, Renzo Novatore, Max Stirner, Bob Black, Judith Butler, Felix Guattari, Michel Onfray, Georges Bataille, Aldous Huxley, Antonio Negri, Raoul Vaneigem, Han Ryner, Hakim Bey, François de La Rochefoucauld, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Lafargue, Wolfi Landstreicher, Albert Camus, Theodor Adorno, Epicurus, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Gilles Deleuze, Herbert Marcuse, Guy Debord, Aristippus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ivan Illich, For Ourselves, Paul Goodman.

Interesting and/or fun people
Arthur Rimbaud, Lucio Urtubia, Andre Breton, Albert Libertad, Severino Di Giovanni, Aleister Crowley, Homer Simpson, Alfred Jarry, Alexandra David-Néel, Los Solidarios, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Bonnot Gang, Biofilo Panclasta, Valerie Solanas

Good music/ians
MC5, Syd Barrett, The Smiths, Kuduro, Bob Marley, Bardo Pond, Amy Winehouse, The Stooges, Victor Jara, P-Funk, La Polla Records, Jimi Hendrix, Cultura Profetica, Hector Lavoe, Tinku, Death (punk band), Cat Power, The United States of America, Banda Bassotti, R.E.M, Calle 13, Acid Mothers Temple, Eskorbuto, Manu Chao, Fifty Foot Hose, Los Van Van, Kyuss, Henry Cow, Fugazi, Bomba del Chota, Gang of Four, The Pink Floyd, Burning Spear, The Germs, 2Pac, Meat Puppets, The Soft Machine

    