Stolen from over at PI:

[PPLE]

Frankly, I can't stand air-conditioning, I would love to live in a fricking teepee with no electricity, TV or even computer (gasp!). I can think of a dozen reasons (environmental, spiritual, community, health, etc) why everyone should live like that. Fuck technology, fuck cars, fuck it all!

It took me a long time to realize that my previous paragraph has no political context whatsoever, though. If we do get to a place where we have a fair and equitable economic and political system then what 'the people' want will become much more clear. Information will be less clouded by corporate and political agendas. People will be able to make more honest choices. 'Planned obsolescence' will become...er..obsolete. I'd like to think people would be less wasteful, and fewer foods would contain corn syrup, and we would have more localized food production and energy grids and move away from centralized distribution and homogeneous markets and so on and so forth but that is neither here nor there.

We will never all agree on that kind of stuff and we don't have to.

Thanks, Megan.

[meganmonkey]

Thanks to the many folks who have contributed to my understanding.

[Two Americas]

It took me a long time to realize that my previous paragraph has no political context whatsoever, though. If we do get to a place where we have a fair and equitable economic and political system then what 'the people' want will become much more clear. Information will be less clouded by corporate and political agendas. People will be able to make more honest choices. 'Planned obsolescence' will become...er..obsolete. I'd like to think people would be less wasteful, and fewer foods would contain corn syrup, and we would have more localized food production and energy grids and move away from centralized distribution and homogeneous markets and so on and so forth but that is neither here nor there.

We will never all agree on that kind of stuff and we don't have to.

I think that is very insightful.

"Decentralization" - important for a number of reasons, and overlooked. It isn't something that you need to impose on people in some sort of social engineering experiment. People would rather be self-sufficient and would rather form local cooperative ventures. They need to be allowed to do that, not forced or re-educated, or sold on it. So much of socialism is more like letting water run down hill than anything else. Activists are always trying to roll a rcok uphill.

Example - when I lived in California, there was some sort of funding or incentive - can't remember how it worked - for small businesses to put up windmills. All of these little folks were selling power back to PGE and getting a check rather than a bill every month. The windmill on their roof was not only supplying all of their needs, but they had an excess to sell back. It was great standing there watching the electric meters run backwards and rack up negative watts. That worked great for the little people, but it leaves the big money players out of the loop. So the law was changed to give incentives to people who built massive "wind farms" and all of the little people were back in the same dependent situation. Not dependent on energy, not dependent on the government - forced into dependency on the capitalists.

"Clouded by corporate and political agendas" - yes. That is the problem with the idea activists have of being the "reality based community." The reality they are looking at is distorted and perverted by commercialism, and so everything they think and do is, as well. The more educated, the more knowledgeable people are the more likely they are to have their thinking clouded by corporate and political agendas. not the less.

All of the activist organizations are run by "winners" schooled in the corporate ethic and aristocratic thinking. They automatically reach for the corporate consumer marketing model for setting up and running the organization, defending it as "reality" if we want to "get things done" and argue that "this is the way the game is played." No it isn't. It is the way that THEY insist on “playing the game.” But is that the only game, and the only way to play it? No. Not in agriculture it isn't, to cite just one example that I am familiar with.