(no subject)

Where, in the Boston area (or on the internet, if shipping is cheap) can one get a decent custom desktop computer built, or buy the parts? I've looked around and found a few decent standard possibilities, but i figure i'm not l33t enough to know about the really *cool* places... so i'm soliciting recommendations. I'd like to spend less than $300 if possible and want to maximize my return on that; i don't need a hard drive (or operating system), a CD drive/burner, a modem, or network card, i can cannibalize these from my existing system.

(no subject)

No wonder i'm a sceptic, i'm basically a muggle.

say you want a revolution

During my very productive conversation with daoistraver here, i wrote this:

i don't see any way to prevent an aristocratic power-grab from happening in the absence of a population-wide regulatory structure to keep them from taking everything. That's why i'm a socialist and not an anarchist. Even then the people at the upper echelons find ways to manipulate the existing system, including government, to suit their purposes -- which is something i agree with you completely on -- but on balance i think the population as a whole are better off with welfare and regulation enforcement, however corrupt, than they are without that at all... unless someone could prove to me that the next revolution would be permanent and would not just result in yet another class stratification.

For about a year i've been looking for a way to formulate what i saw expressed quite succinctly yesterday: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which i summarized in yesterday's post: "all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies."

I see this as a serious problem, perhaps THE serious problem: all revolutions are in their turn either suppressed, or are undermined and appropriated and become the oligarchs' key to our hearts and minds -- they cannibalize us while making us think it's in our best interest. This has happened so often and so faithfully that imperialism and kyriarchy have been seriously proposed by biosociologists as the natural tendency of our species.

So, how do we solve it? What slogans, principles, ideologies, churches, movements, chants, protests, guillotines, etc., will not eventually be turned around and used against us? We can storm the boardrooms and congress and subvert the media and march in the streets, but to what end, if a generation or so from now, we've got the same status quo all over again, but using the name of "revolution" as happened in Russia?

We need a revolution not just of people in the street (though that might be a component of it too); we need a revolution that erects an eternal fountain of compassion and loving-kindness in each person.