Reviews and Comments

"organize with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love, and instead of starting up new ideas/organizations all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, and grow through fusion, not competition."

"evil flows where it flows. Through gaps and loopholes and human beings. Indifferent to legislation and policies. Nothing halts it, except, sometimes, a sacrifice."

"Patriarchy is just like racism, a glutton for power it won’t share, for sharing power means loss of power to them, a form of weakness—if we give them space, where will we sit? What will we do? Who are we, then? Fear, the most poisonous animal that stands between them and enlightenment."

"Coöperism does not favor growth at all costs; it embraces a more holistic definition of growth that takes sustainability and the environment into account. There is room within coöperism for healthy debate on the question, though it leans toward location-specific analysis. Rather than focusing on GDP, it focuses on GPS. What might best fit one wealthy industrialized country may not be appropriate for another less privileged country..."

"We’re not only losing the power of our bodies, we’re losing the privacy our minds. What will be taken next for the sake of safety? This microchip protects our city, but it’s the husbands’, the city’s, the government’s tool to get inside us. My husband has the upper hand in our marriage, because I’m the one with a criminal body."

"A political theory of coöperism seeks, first, to extend existing forms of cooperation to other dimensions of our lives, but second, and perhaps more important, to concentrate cooperation. (...) Coöperism privileges and promotes those forms of cooperation that are most beneficial and combines them to create an integrated network of cooperation."

"Where the capitalist class sees education as a means to an end, the vectoralist class sees it as an end in itself. It sees opportunities to make education a profitable industry in its own right, based on securing of intellectual property as a form of private property. It seeks to privatize knowledge as a resource, just as it privatizes science and culture, in order to guarantee the scarcity and their value. To the vectoralists, education is more “content” for commodification as “communication.”" #066

"If something did go terribly wrong in human history — and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did — then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history."

"Those ideas about liberty had a profound impact on the world. In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today."

"Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory — just within a much smaller territory than a nation state."

Escutei o livro em duas pegadas, enquanto dirigia por dois dias. Estória interessante e diferente, mas acho que não se decidiu entre ciência ficção e fantasia. Os diálogos da protagonista são as vezes irritantes e repetitivos, a estória chega num final meio rápido demais, mas eu fiquei bem vidrado na estória.

"Governable spaces arise when social and technical infrastructures enable participants to deliberate, make decisions, and enact those decisions through accessible, transparent, and just ­processes."

No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration -- or indeed, any form of ruling class. (...) We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as ‘simple’, but in fact these citizens of Omelas were ‘not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.’ The trouble is just that ‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.’