Ash and Other Evil Dead, Philosophy, Anarchists, and Travel

[tcpip]

Delightful Saturday evening with Brendan E., who is a arthouse tv expert without realising it. The Throways was a much better film that most reviewers suggest, and Ash vs The Evil Dead was quite hilarious. It is interesting from a retrospective that Ash Williams has become such a arthouse culture icon (Number 1 Greatest Horror Movie Character according to Empire Magazine); he's a complete idiot, but sufficiently brave and tough to make up for it. Apropos I have currently working on reviews of the presentation of the undead in Dungeons & Dragons with Libris Mortis (3rd edition) and Open Grave (4th edition).

Sunday was a gathering of The Philosophy Forum, another good turnout. Grame Lindemeyer presented on Data, Information, Meaning, Intelligence and Consciousness - rather overlooking the importance of language in all this I'm afraid. After the presentation chaired the committee meeting of the RPG Review Cooperative and covered a lot of ground, before running the second session of Eclipse Phase which has seen the PCs end up as agents for Firewall. Tonight was our mashup between The Secrets of Cats and Call of Cthulhu.

Last night attended a presentation by Laure Akai, Secretary of the International Workers Association, on the practice of anarcho-syndicalism. Quite well attended, it was a potted tour of the various small chapters around the world and their very modest successes with direct action methods. It was organised by the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation of Australia which I may have sympathies with their end goals, but their purist restrictive membership means that it is not possible for me to join. Overall it reminds me why I am not involved in what are ineffectual and purist anarchist political groups.

Work goes well; swapped out some long-overdue dead disks on the storage array, cleared the stale NFS handles on some compute nodes, and now have Edward running with more processors and with more jobs on it than I've ever seen. Have also finished by presentation for Multicore World next week in New Zealand. Work keeps on making noises about wanting to send me to the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas.

Comments

[ecosopher.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I couldn't join the Anarchists either. I guess I'm just too much of a socialist. Also abolishing or ignoring the sociopolitical infrastructure we already have seems like such a waste of energy, which would be better spent improving said infrastructure.

Looking forward to Ash vs The Evil Dead. Have heard good things about it :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I think many anarchists tend to overlook the level of liberal-democratic reforms that have occurred in the past hundred years. Yes, the system is conservative, entrenched, and powerful but that does mean that the fight can only occur by building outside of it.

As for joining/not joining the membership of the ASF actually prohibits me from joining - as a very minor office bearer of an existing political party (treasurer of a local Labor Party branch). There is also the interesting restriction on prohibiting office bearers from religions; whilst I grok the 'No Gods, No Masters' mantra, this would also prohibit people from non-theistic religions.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Overall it reminds me why I am not involved in what are ineffectual and purist anarchist political groups.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Whilst more based on the Trotskyist sects rather than the anarchists (who do have a modicum of acrimonious splits of their own , I nevertheless always felt a little sorry for Reg in that scene. :)

Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies.
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the
fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually
have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the
Romans', but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to
have babies, brother. Sister, sorry.
Reg: (pissed) What's the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he
can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I think I made some remarks in December about how I thought having a card-carrying LPA member in Isocracy seemed a little novel but at least potentially promising, if everyone put some effort into it. It occurs to me that this whole purism angle might have something to do with it. I think I am instinctively suspicious of excessive purism and naturally prefer broader coalitions of interests. This may be cultural bias. (And obviously one must draw a line somewhere or groups lose cohesion.)

I think this is at least partly responsible for my tendency of late to look for points of mutual interest with social-democrats and for my decision to vote more often for moderate Social Democratic candidates. It's not novel -- I have difficult-to-define political views and I'm a swing voter, so I've leaped left often enough -- but these days I'm much more active about it.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

But you have to admire Judith's ability to mediate and move things on.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall she was like that through the entire film :)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I am not at all an anarchist. I am amused that their membership guidelines do not require you to be [insert title here] so long as you agree to [do all things associated with the title anyway].

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's not very inclusive is it?