SeaSteading or how rich guys want even more freedom and privilege

Db024 Comments

The Sea is mostly free right? So why not turn it into property where the rich can have even more luxury? Fuck the rest of the world.

I am annoyed. I get annoyed when I read shit like this, telling us how some rich white guys are not happy enough with their (really well-off) lot in life, and just need some way to escape all their (multi-million) misery by founding their own nation of absolute freedom.

What a load of dicks!

When we have a world that is fast going down the drain, with millions of children starving every year, with hudreds of millions of workers surviving in subsistence wage and 16-hour workdays, with all the shit that is happening around us, creating untold misery and suffering, these amazingly lucky and  privileged people can only think of how to make their life even better.

Fuck the rest of us. It’s not like their wealth had anything to do with the rest of society. It was all created from the sweat of their brows.  So they have every right to take their ball and go (make a new) home.

For someone like me, who would like to see everyone in the world be better off, this kind of attitude makes me want to punch some rich geeks in the face. It makes me ashamed to even be in the same sector as them.

As always however it shows us that the ones who really support this bullshit ideology are the minority of lucky people who are quite better off than the vast majority of humanity and are quite happy to never help the rest. What else can you expect from shameless individualism of course. This is why the classic attempts they make are always escapist. From building new land they can use, to floating cities to taking over states.

But there’s also one more thing that bugs me about this Seasteading which goes back to the Libertarian right core concept of Homesteading that is necessary to avoid moral implications for their accumulation of wealth. The idea that one has the right to claim any territory that is not already claimed by anyone else. Can someone explain to me from where this right comes from and why I should accept it?

Anyway, I just needed to rant a bit after reading on how the rich feel so oppressed that they have to throw parties on floating restaurants to discuss how to escape their tragedy. And then they go for a fucking kayak trip.

The freedom to amass Capital breeds inequality and exploitation

Db016 Comments

Allowing people to accumulate is one of the main reasons why there is such a difference of power in the world. You’re granting the freedom to take freedom away.

Accumulation
Image by Annemarie Vriends via Flickr

A new member of the audience has asked me to expand on a previous comment I made where I mentioned in passing the phrase that is the title of this post. I think this warrants some expansion.

When we are talking about Capital we are talking generally about non-trivial means of production, factories and the like. These are things which the owner has no capability to use himself but has rather used the laws of private property to prevent others from using themselves.

The sole reason why any person would ever want to withhold a productive facility from being used freely, is if he wishes to force the people who would work there, to be exploited. What, in effect the Capitalist is doing is preventing the use of the factory which creates the passive coercion necessary for people to accept exploitation. To simplify this example, think of it as a person moving into an oasis and buying up the land the water rests in. That person then gives the people who live around the oasis the choice to either work 16 hours per day for him in the nearby coal mines or die of thirst.

Giving people the freedom to “buy the water” so to speak, is what allows them to exploit other people.

The inequality of this accumulation rises naturally in this situation. Under Capitalism money is power and Capital is the only way to turn money into more money. The more Capital one owns, the more money one makes. And when one has more power over other humans, this is inequality. This inequality is what skews all market exchanges and makes them unfair. Unfair to the benefit of those who have the Capital of course. There is a reason why the poor get poorer and the rich, richer and this is it.

It is this inequality that creates the misery in our society, not the bogeyman of the state or the caricature evil of organized religion. Both of these are toothless if no person in life has power over another person. Take away the state and leave the relations of Capitalism intact and almost immediately, new lords will arise, either through force of arms, or through force of ownership.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Epic Bicycle Fa[i/l]l

Db08 Comments

Not only did I crash my bike but I managed to do it spectacularly as well.

Gawd this hasn’t happened to me since I was a teen. Yesterday as I was returning from work with my bicycle, I had one absolutely cinematic bicycle fall, the kinds of which that you just assume have been specifically prepared to make the stuntman have the most impressive drop.

I was on the large area in front of the Opera House and I have my umbrella hanged on the steering handle of the bike. The umbrella was one of those cheap plastic/aluminum ones where they have a hook at the end, so I had put it there to free my hands and I was holding it steady with my hand on top. In retrospect, such close proximity to the wheel was not the best place for an umbrella to be.

As these thing always do, the inevitable happened and at some point the tip of the umbrella managed to get too near to the spinning spokes and “sucked” in to the point where in jammed next to the fork. I didn’t really see that though. What I did see, after a short “I can see my house from up here” moment, was the ground coming up to meet me and say hello. I even did a satisfying grunt when I was ejected from my seat just because the jerk was so sudden.

I managed to land approx 1 meter away from my bike

Fortunately my years as a bumbling youth have conditioned me to fall as gracefully as possible and I managed to put my hands down first which meant that my right wrist took a nice strain, and then fell flat on my chest, which all things considered is not a bad falling location due to the amount of area the force can spread to. The initial pain was minimal and nothing was sprained or broken but I still have lingering pain on my wrist and chest now. Could have been worse I guess.

Of course such an event could not turn out without victims and in this case it was the unfortunate umbrella who dared to investigate the shiny-spinny thingies. After I managed to extricate it from its stuck location, I ended up with a vaguelly umbrella-shaped object which whished to become the greek letter Sigma “Σ” in the next life.

Once I had fallen, I turned around to shake my head at my misbehaving bicycle and noticed that a family around 50 meters ago had stopped to look at the undoubtedly humorous event. They didn’t look for long and moved along as soon as I got up. At this point some young guy approached me to ask (I guess) if I was ok. As I was a bit too stunned to decode his German at that point that is what I assume he was saying, although in retrospect I think he may have been saying “That was fucking awesome dude“. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, so I said what was on the top of my mind at that moment:

“EPIC Fail!”

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Quote of the Day: Typical Liberals

Db0

A quote from Hal Draper (a socialist) on Liberalism

Quote Hal Draper

But the typical liberal, who cannot break with the ’system, has to settle for something else: protesting the best of intentions (sincerely) while being dragged along by the system he supports, or busying him­self with filing off the sharp corners or rough edges on the towing chain which drags him; and meanwhile congratulating himself on doing an indispensable smoothing job which the callous powers-that-be are too heartless to attend to.

I sincerely start to believe that Hal Draper was one of the best socialist thinkers of the last century. Read the whole thing, quite enlightening.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

A break for gaming

Db03 Comments

Time to leave aside all the heavy socioeconomic and philosophical stuff and play some video games. I’m in the Demigod beta and Sins of a Solar empire is quite cool as well.

Announcement image
Image via Wikipedia

I’ve toned down my blogging lately because my interest in gaming has been rekindled. As some may know already, I was a huge gaming enthusiast in my earlier days and now and then, the urge takes me once more and I dive into it for a short while.

This time my interest of choice has been Demigod, a upcoming RTS/RPG hybrid following on the succesful footsteps of DotA, which is quite a smart move as they get to milk an untapped market for this type of gameplay which has an already proven popularity. In Greece for example, the DotA popularity in Netcafes is immense. Day in and day out, people will tune in for this game and Counterstrike, both of which, incidentally seem to be more popular than their original game types (Warcraft 3 and Half-Life respectively).

[youtube]0vd8an0P5LI[/youtube]

I always wanted to play DotA but I didn’t have a copy of Warcraft3 available and I couldn’t be bothered to buy one just for it, so it was a nice solution that Gas Powered Games came out with a commercially developed game of this type since they also created another one of my recent favourites, Supreme Commander.

The good thing is that I could go in and join the beta simply by pre-ordering the game. This is a unique take on beta testing, which I think has a lot of potential, which is to allow everyone to join in simply by promising to buy the game. That way, you don’t have to rely on random selection and you insure that satisfaction is granted to those most excited about it.

So I’ve been playing the beta recently and I like what I see, although it still has a way to go before it is balanced and keeps up the interest for more than 20 games. From what I hear the beta testers don’t really see the whole enchelada so we probably see the the worrying trends resolved in the full version. Unfortunately we’re all eagerly awaiting the much advertised patch to fix the huge network issues that mutliplayer suffers from currently which make online play an annoyance more than anything else. After playing mostly against the AI for 1.5 week, I decided to wait until the patch comes out until I attempt any more MP.

So, as I was browing what Impulse had to offer, I noticed another game called Sins of a Solar Empire which seemed interesting although the screenshots didn’t really amaze me. Nevertheless I kept hearing positive things about it so I decided togive the demo a try.

[youtube]e2Pv7TtV8js[/youtube]

I was hooked pretty quickly from it and as soon as my playtime expired in the demo, I bought the game through Impulse to continue. I won’t go much into details as you can easily find much more complete reviews of it if you’re interested but I’ll say that if you’re a fan of both RTS games and 4X games (Masters of Orion series, Galactic Civilizations etc) then this is certainly going to appeal to you as it merges aspects from both giving it an epic scale for an RTS and a fast-pace for a 4X.

What I didn’t like about it is the lack of a campaign mode, which although something standard for 4X games, is something always available for RTS’. I will try to work around it by playing on huge maps with lots of player but unfortunately this makes it a bit lacking as you only have the choice of 3 differents races to choose from and all of them have basically the same unit types (the only difference is that they get them at different points of the research tree). This makes the whole thing look a bit bland as you’re mostly playing a rock-paper-scissors game with your fleet compositions, since each ship type is basically designed to deal explicitly with another ship type.

On the other hand, they’ve done a wonderful job of merging RPG aspects into the game as well, where your capital ships are absolutely impossing and capable of earning experience and levels, giving them more special abilities and the like. In effect, the Capital ships play the role of Heroes in Warcraft 3.

Unfortunately the graphics are not as good as I would like, but I think that may be because Hegemonia spoiled me

[youtube]JBPChUimXvQ[/youtube]

As it is now, I’m going to start playing with a huge map and try to act as if that is a campaign. There are expansions coming out (I already bought it with the first one) and eventually a campaign is going to be included in the first major expansion. Lets hope my interest is held until then.

Anyone up for a game?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

2008 was an interesting year for USA…at least according to this guy

Db01 Comment

A humorous review of 2008

Even though not a U.S. American, this Year in Review is still quite funny.

The games themselves are dominated by swimmer Michael Phelps, who wins eight gold medals, thus putting himself on a sounder financial footing than the U.S. Treasury. China wins the gold-medal count, although critics charge that some of China’s 11-year-old female gymnasts are under the minimum age of 16. Chinese officials refute this charge by noting, correctly, that they have tanks.

Check it out 🙂

(h/t to the Barefoot Bum)

Planet of Anarchy

Db04 Comments

The Division by Zer0 has joined the Anarchoblogs, a new planet centered around Anarchism. This is my introductory post to it.

Anarchism
Image by anarchosyn via Flickr

I have just joined Anarchoblogs ((h/t to Rad Geek – he goes into more details on this, check it out!)), a new aggregator focusing on all kinds of Anarchism (yes, even the oxymoronic “Anarcho”-Capitalism) who took over after the previous such attempt stopped being updated. This is basically the same thing as Planet Atheism but for Anarchism but further than that, the person behind it has interesting plans for the future.

As anarchism can fall anywhere from the left to the right of the political spectrum and with members all over the world (primarily outside of english speaking countries), the owner decided to create various hubs which can be separated by interests or language (initially, in the future there are plans for location specific ones etc). At the moment there’s only a few of them and I have been added to the english speaking hub.Of course, the main site displays all content from all hubs together.

I find that this separation into hubs is actually a good idea and perhaps Planet Atheism can copy it and organise Atheists to specific groups, to make the whole thing more manageable and allow the members to subscribe to only the topic that interests them.

So this is my introductory post for Anarchblogs and also a way to spread awareness to all who might have anti-authoritarian, anti-statist leanings. If you fall low on the y-axis on the political compass, then you should consider joining as well.

How come the Division by Zer0 has joined you might ask? Well, the more I read, the more I learn of how much Capitalism fails and also how much the modern state is designed to protect the interests of the wealthy. I find it impossible to avoid sliding towards the libertarian left more and more. And since lately I’ve been blogging especially much about Capitalism and Communism it seems like a good place be.

For those of you who might discover the Division by Zer0 from there, welcome and I hope you enjoy your stay. I won’t ask you to subscribe as you’re probably be seeing my writings through the aggregator, however I thought I might post a few of my older posts with Anarchism related content.

I have generally had not much presence from anarchists around here (unlike AnCaps to my dismay) so I’m hoping that this might present me with some views from a different perspective than usual.

Here’s to a brighter future and to more voices raised high.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Monstrous fun in Reddit /Atheism/

Db01 Comment

A meme breaks out in the Atheist subreddit of Reddit around giant symbols of religion. The titles are simply hilarious.

The reddit religious monstrocity memeThe titles of the posts speak for themselves really

And last but not least

Ah, reddit memes. How fun they can be!

Update: Honorary mention: His Noodly Appendage Is The Only Just God Hovering Over Gaza

It's all about you, baby

Db013 Comments

My first audience query to find what you like about the Division by Zer0, what you want to read more about and what you want me to get rid of.

What's that thing you're pointing at me?
Image by frozenminds via Flickr

Old time readers of the Division by Zer0 (heh, riiight…) might have noticed that the site as of late has been more and more exploring subjects related to Socialism and Capitalism from various perspectives. This isn’t really a surprise as this blog has always been quite personal and the subject matter tends to follow whatever draws my interest at any point in time.

This being a personal blog (or at least that’s what I keep saying to myself) I’ve been quite surprised that I’ve managed to exceed a hundred subscribers. I assume that this is mostly because I’ve stopped writing about “boring” real life stuff so much and have a taken a more philosophical blogging style.

I can’t say that I’m not glad that at least a hundred people consider me interesting enough to follow and this is why I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that keeps you coming back. I think its impossible that there are so many of you with exactly the same interests as me so it’s certain that I often write about things you do not care about. Thus I think there’s no better way to discover what’s going on, than to ask you directly.

What  do you like and/or dislike about the Division by Zer0?

At the moment I have quite a few subjects I’m (fairly) often blogging about but I think that the ones I’m most often visit are Socialism and Criticisms of Capitalism, Free Software, Blogging, Philosophy (mostly from my own (I hope) unique perspective but some social subjects thrown in as well), Project work and finally the occasional personal stuff.

Out of these, are you returning for anything specific or do you enjoy that I switch between them often? Is there any in particular topic you don’t care to read about? Any that you prefer? Why? I like to delude myself that some people find me interesting because I’m fresh and unique compared to the rest of the atheosphere  so feel free to rain on my parade.

But what about other things? Is there anything non-topic related that you (dis)like? My writing style? My dull wit? My Greek Geek perspective? My luxurious long hair? The speed of the site (Hah!)?

So yeah, I’m curious and I hope you will take a bit to let me know. I’d mostly appreciate comments if you can spare the time but in case your busy schedule prohibits it, I’ve setup a poll to allow you to give a hint quickly (note that you can select up to two choices)

[poll id=”5″]

But I’d really much rather hear what you have to say instead.

Oh, and happy new year as well 😉

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

I just realized I need to read Marx's Capital

Db06 Comments

We are always told that Marx’s economic analysis is obsolete and not worthy of consideration but in truth, it is as current as ever. just very very ignored.

I have already realized how important it is to be able to undestand Capitalism before you can argue for the need for socialism. That is because one needs to be able to show that Capitalism is flawed, breeding exploitation and inequality and against that Economists Engineers Capitalism proponents will be more than glad to argue.

One of the most classic and basic arguments I hear to this regard is that the Labour Theory of Value is obsolete and irrelevant. That Marx got it all wrong and that Neoclassical economics and especially the Austrian school have shown that it’s all about the Subjective Value. I have already made a small attempt to prove that the LTV still plays a role (imho the most important) and that have actually a dualist system with both Subjective and Objective values.

I was truly under the impression that Marx has somehow missed the subjective value of the equation and thus his argument seemed easy to refute and dismiss. That was, and I’m ashamed to admit, due to neoliberal propaganda. We’ve had it shoved into our heads by modern economists that Marx has already been proven wrong and he didn’t even get the basics right and the like.

It’s all bullshit. Marx understood very well the existence of the Subjective Value and that too was a very crucial part of his explanation of Value. I only realized this by watching an introduction to The Capital by prof. David Harvey who has been teaching the first volume of it for 40 years(!). Just from introductory session I understood that Neoclassical economics did not disprove Karl Marx, they simply ignored him.

This course is also the incentive I need to actually get down and read The Capital for myself and I believe that with the help of these lectures, I will be able to understand and digest the content much better.

I also suggest that many of you take the time to at least watch the introductory session. It clocks at around 2 hours but I believe it’s worth it at least to hear about it outside from the usual derogatory and propagandistic descriptions. Capitalism is the system that is affecting our lives day in, and day out and yet, so very few of us actually bother to understand how it works. The Capital is not a propaganda piece, it’s a attempt to find the rules that govern our current socioeconomic system, you can read it and make up your own mind on if a socialist alternative is required or not.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]