@dance you monster Thank you, dym. I wasn't sure how good it was, so it's nice to hear that!

I've basically resolved that I'm going to keep talking about this even if the posts suck because I'm groping. So I'm glad this one didn't suck.

A marvelous post. Looking forward to the next one. I've nothing to add yet to what you've so well laid out so far, but we're getting there, and I just wanted to urge us further. We've been twiddling our thumbs too much with old battles. It's time to get creative.

@Lookout @Lookout I understand how Turgon felt, too! So did Tolkien. He keeps coming back to the love of what one builds with one's hands, which I don't think he sees as bad, and I do think he sees it as natural--but it leads to over-attachment, which leads to a lot of other bad things. Tolkien's attention is fixed on the moral dangers of creation, possibly because he is a creator himself. I think he might believe that over-attachment leads to possessiveness, and once you've gotten into a possessive mindset, all manner of evils are likely to occur.

With Turgon, it's particularly hard, and particularly understandable, because the work of his hands is also his home. Tolkien understands love of place and home better than most, and I think he mostly considers that love a good thing. But attachment can imprison you and encourage you to make bad decisions.

I find this so hard, because in some ways, I feel like you, Lookout: bury me here.

...is a line in a song I wrote 35 or 40 years ago. As you suggest in your Tolkien tale, nothing can really shield us from harm. However, I understand Turgon's reluctance to leave his valley, and instead perish within it.

There is no permanence in a constantly changing world. Humans' gift has been the ability to adapt. I think we may be creating so much climate change that we spell our own demise...just as Turgon burned.

There's a little graveyard on our place...the earliest white cemetery in the area (1790-1810 beginnings). The last marked grave is 1900. My deceased neighbors went to that funeral and rode in the back of an ox-cart to the little hilltop. The cart detached from the yoke and flipped backwards sending them (as young children) tumbling down the hill. I can still hear them tell the tale laughing all the while.

That little graveyard awaits my presence...I hope it waits another couple of decades anyway...for like Turgon, I'm too attached to move, feeling entwined with forests and fields.

At the large stone circle in Avebury...(that's a pub in the center)

Tolkien often sat a wrote under this tree which is still called Tolkien's tree

Thanks for the tales, TAZ, and OT. All the best!

@lotlizard @lotlizard Wow, this is rough. What a visceral example of autonomous zones being semi-permanent.

The problem, of course, is that it's difficult to find places where you can build a semi-permanent autonomous zone, a new Gondolin, when you leave the old one. It's a material, economic, political problem, and that will be the subject of next week's essay.

I wish those people well. I had no idea they existed.

I like the idea of networked small communities. Occupy was almost there. We came so close I could taste it.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2018/06/big-island-hawaiis-last-hippie-holdout...

@smiley7 Thank you, smiley, for your kind words. Enjoy the wilderness! I haven't been out in the wilderness for too long.

especially; a lover of Tolkien from the sixties, friends in London gave me a copy of The Silmarillion around 76, i think its in my treasure chest; pondering Taz is a welcome pursuit, i enjoy this series very much. Thank you.

Off to dog sit in the wilderness for a couple days...

Have a great day everyone!

@Citizen Of Earth @Citizen Of Earth Agreed on marching against those in riot gear!

The thing about Occupy is that it was the right approach--if you understand that approach as merely a first step. Doing something that public is a good idea because it's like sending up a flare: everyone in the culture, indeed, in the world, sees the message and knows where to go to find like-minded people (which is why the PTB needed to take it down). It's a gathering of the tribes.

But there needed to be plans, from the beginning, for what they were going to do once the encampments got taken down, so that the communities would endure and remain networked, when the physical place got trashed and they got exiled.

Did Occupy fail? Or did it succeed to some degree?
Yes the Fascist Pigs descended on the encampments and clubbed the Occupiers bloody like so many baby seals. But Occupy did raise awareness of the Inequality and Injustice of america today. So that moved the ball forward. How much it is hard to say. Did it pave the way for Bernie's bid?

IMO Occupy was the right movement but took the wrong approach. Collecting in an open encampment, thinking the bastards would see the light and become moral humans was obviously flawed thinking. The 1776 US colonies took the stealth approach to fighting the british, laying in wait in the forest and ambushing the british columns. Don't mistake me, I'm not proposing violence. I advocate Graffiti, not Guns. And marching against an army of Fascist Pigs in full riot gear is a bit like suicide. Just my humble opinion.

@Citizen Of Earth Occupy was the most successful protest I've ever been part of.

The goal of a protest is to raise awareness, spread a message, enable like-minded people to find each other. Occupy did all those things in spades; in fact, it even made a permanent impact on the culture, one the PTB are working very hard to eradicate by changing the 99% vs 1% meme into the 90% vs 10% meme.

So yes, it was a very successful protest; so successful that people began to think of it as a movement. Unfortunately, what it takes to make a successful protest is not the same thing as what it takes to make a successful movement.

Ultimately, it was mostly unsuccessful as a movement. Mostly, not entirely; the Rolling Jubilee and Occupy Sandy were late survivals of Occupy, and there may still be efforts going on that I don't know about. But success as a movement, by my definition, would be that those communities formed in the encampments would *mostly* endure and remain networked, so that I, at my current level of connectivity, *would* certainly know about any efforts going forward, and I might, probably would, even know some people from multiple encampments personally and know how to get in touch with them. Without those connections, it's hard to argue that the organism known as Occupy still lives.

My argument here is that accepting the fact that ultimately, the encampments were not going to succeed in the sense of remaining up, would have made the failure of those encampments a part of a larger success going forward. The encampments would have served multiple goals before dying, including creating enduring small communities that were networked together.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, еxcept a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

If we had such networked communities from 2011-2018, who knows what we might have done? I can think of a few things right off the bat.

Did Occupy fail? Or did it succeed to some degree?
Yes the Fascist Pigs descended on the encampments and clubbed the Occupiers bloody like so many baby seals. But Occupy did raise awareness of the Inequality and Injustice of america today. So that moved the ball forward. How much it is hard to say. Did it pave the way for Bernie's bid?

IMO Occupy was the right movement but took the wrong approach. Collecting in an open encampment, thinking the bastards would see the light and become moral humans was obviously flawed thinking. The 1776 US colonies took the stealth approach to fighting the british, laying in wait in the forest and ambushing the british columns. Don't mistake me, I'm not proposing violence. I advocate Graffiti, not Guns. And marching against an army of Fascist Pigs in full riot gear is a bit like suicide. Just my humble opinion.

@detroitmechworks I think one of the side effects of the worker "Mobility" in our culture is that people with like minded ideas are scattered so widely that creating a TAZ in physical space becomes difficult.

This is a feature, not a bug.

In college, I was part of a large group of students in the English department. Most of us were undergrads and some were grad students. We had a lot of interesting ideas about the understanding of literature, ideas that were not widely prevalent in the field. They needed work, of course, but I briefly considered that we could found a new philosophy, a new school of thought.

Then all those of us who were undergrads graduated, and were dispersed to the four winds, to find the best job offer or the best grad school willing to accept us.

The current system mitigates against anything ordinary people try to do other than abuse and kill one another--or make empty threats against the government which make for good TV.

Going to look at your Logos now!

It does remind me that no fortress is perfectly secure. Even NORAD is gonna go down in flames one of these days. I think one of the side effects of the worker "Mobility" in our culture is that people with like minded ideas are scattered so widely that creating a TAZ in physical space becomes difficult. That lack of solidarity and purpose results in good ideas being abandoned because of the inverted pyramid/totalitarianism which only acts to benefit itself.

Just a random ramble. Since it's an OT, I'll plug my new Logos. Polyhymnia. Which Is the muse of Hymns, so I kinda wrote a hymn to the working man.

@enhydra lutris I haven't replied to this because it's too deep and with too many moving parts, all of them significant, to reply to quickly. Answering those questions will probably be the the basis of a future essay.

a scattered jumble needing fleshing out (like a preliminary netwrok, heh).

Sun Tzu. (The Art of War) There is much there, worth many a re-read. As metaphor to much. Water as a key metaphor, water flows where the resistance is less, but it penetrates, seeps and erodes and always gets its way. Stomp on a small puddle and you do not crush it, it explodes away from the impact and forms many lesser puddles, which may or may not coalesce. In a similar vein, Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of Five Rings", but a more personal manual.

In both there is much of the Tao. Again with the water. Query - how does flowing water form networks? Is this a proper question? Dunno. Image of puddles linked by canals and channels with water flowing as needed, throughout the system, to escape a flattened puddle, or reinforce a threatened one. Flow can but needn't be sequential, a to b, b to c, c to d, etc, a can flow through band c to d, disturbing them in the process and perhaps carrying along some of their content too, creating eddys, etc.

Dispersion, dislocation/relocation and disruption occur. Networks are critical, but, in the end they are connections, so connections are critical. Networks may be viewed as nodes connected by links. It's shorthand, and creates problems where the social-sociological meets the mathematical-structural. Network theory exists. There is a ton of stuff on it out there. It may be approached as having grown out of topology and simply looking at the network related parts of recreational topology can bring some insights.

Some considerations - for a TAZ as part of a linked system of TAZs, the links will, in the end, be mostly human connections. They are fragile. Look at your life; what is the length of the average connection, how many survive dislocation and dislocation and what are the characteristics of those long lived ones. If you still retain some connections across geographic space from high school or college, how and why is that so, what are the characteristics.

Some things purely as data:
Consider characteristics of planned versus natural or evolved networks
Linear networks are severed by severing one connection.

Phone trees build an expanding fan, or cascade. This creates rapid multiplication of nodes communicated with, but take out any node and a chunk of the total web goes dark - they must have resiliency based on duplication and overlap. They really are simply lists, which must must be maintained, preferably multiple copies with multiple maintainers who periodically cross update.

A web is more resilient, and we the people have had and lost some communication webs because (????) Before the WWW and to an extent before arpanet/darpanet there was FIDOnet. Why did it die and peter out? Did it fully do so? Could/should something somewhat similar be re-instituted? This probably couldn't/shouldn't be created like a thing or system is created, but should grow and evolve naturally, but how does one seed it? The point of a communications web is communication, but that is a tool and only a tool. Such a web, except on the smallest scale isn't a TAZ, which requires much more than simply communication among the like minded.

Like I said, a scattered jumble needing fleshing out. Should there be some core unifying philosophy? Should it be formalized. Consider the Port Huron Statement and where that got us and what evolved from it and what happened to all that beyond a few surviving isolated sixties radicals.

@Wink You are fucking kidding me, Pyle.

We apologize for our support of NeoLibs.