Political fiction:

B. Traven, widely considered one of (if not the) best political fiction writers of all time, most famous for 'The Treasure of Tierra Madre'. Edited a German anarchist magazine (The Brickthrower), escaped from a number of prisons (while writing books!), and finally settled in Mexico, still wanted by four countries.

George Orwell, famous for 1984 and Animal Farm which exposed fascists red and brown for what they were and forever entered political discourse in frankly a rather tired way. Fought alongside anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and wrote a book about his experiences, 'Homage to Catalonia' (Catalonia being the anarchist province)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, where he depicted the endline of consumerism. In 1984 Big Brother watches you, in Brave New World you watch Big Brother, as Neil Postman put it. Later, after suffering endless comparisons to 1984 once that came out, reissued Brave New World with A Brave New World Revisited, a nonfiction essay in which he calls for 'a Kropotkinesque federation' (Kropotkin being the founder of Anarchist communism).

John Steinbeck, about whom I have no specific anarchist relations, but his books are damned libertarian socialist. Read Cannery Row.

Tolstoy, who never actually wrote political fiction while an anarchist, but to exclude him would be a travesty of any list of anarchist writers.

Political commentary:


Besides the explicitly anarchist folks (people who spent most of their time writing about anarchism, ala Mama Emma or Papa Kropotkin), and the many many people I don't know, since political commentators rarely gain much attention outside their home countries, there's been:

Paul Goodman, a omgomgomg wikipedia is down doom doom death 2 me oh well he was a 60s theorist, one of the big shakers back then. And an anarchist, of course.

Howard Zinn, most famous for A People's History of the US, a very anarchistic history of the US. A libertarian socialist, but more, as RMS (maker of GNU, 'leader' of the Free Software movement, instrumental to Linux), speaking of himself put it, 'A cross between a liberal and a left anarchist'. Zinn was on the board of the Green Party for Nader's 2000 election.

Noam Chomsky, 'the most quoted intellectual alive', who writes the best selling political analysis (excepting schlock like Moore or Coulter) in the US and probably the world. Anarcho-syndicalist, though, like Zinn, reformist, and on the board of the Green Party 2000.

Someone or the other said that sex is political, and if that's so than Alex Comfort tops the list of political writers. The Joy of Sex brought sex down to the level of ordinary people, showing that fun sex was something anybody could do with its famously normal people. He also was a doctor, an author of both fiction and nonfiction books that had nothing to do with sex, a poet, and, of course, a dedicated anarchist.

Music:

Too numerous to mention. Suffice to say, punk. And avante-garde. And folk. None of these would be anywhere near the same without anarchists (and the former probably wouldn't even exist).

Anarchists...

...predicted that Social Democrats would become indistinguishable from the capitalists (Tony Blair, leader of a party that still reguarly sings The Internationale, has been a leading force for globalized corporatization. He is nowhere near the only/worst example)

...predicted the Leninists would be cruel dictators, even worse than bourgeois democracies.

...predicted the nationalists would fight amongst eachother (WW1, WW2), though this was frankly not hard to guess. Nor, of course, were the others, but few did, oddly enough.

...fought against sexism, against racism, against heterosexism, against classism, for free love, for drug legalization, all before they were popular.
6:41 AM

Heehee...this guy called me an idiot for insisting that the kernel isn't hardware.


(for those of you who are not simply incapacitated with laughter, the kernel is more or less the equivalent of the Operating System. It's the lower level, the subconscious. In Windows the upper-level (GUI) and the lower level (kernel) are integrated, you can't just mess with the kernel. In Linux there are a number of differnet GUIs (Gnome and KDE being the big rivals), and the basic Linux kernel, which can be individually compiled as needed. Anyway calling the kernel hardware-let alone insisting on this to the point of calling someone else an idiot-is just hilarious. It was all I could do to not burst out laughing. )

He also implied we were just saying his computer was messed up to get the humongous thirty dollar restore fee. This, he feels, is how we make our money. Sure we host some integer percent of the internet and the number one reason for customers leaving in my experience is being pissed off about needing to get restores, but it's all just an intricate racket. Heehee. Upset people are funny. If he whines to CS he'll get a free restore, he can move the data over from the last hard drive, and if he's good enough he can have the site back up within an hour or two of restoring.

Somehow, though, I don't think he's good enough.
1:41 AM

This guy calls up, from Africa. Says he represents The African Development Bank. Cool accent. He wants to know if we host adbng.org, which we don't, though they bought the domain from us. But apparently the latter is a scam off the first, and he needs to find out who's hosting them so he can shut it down.

Technically I should've hung up, since he wasn't, you know, a customer. Or at most given him domains@ev1servers.net, which is where we send domain inquiries. But I knew that route would do him no good, and I am inconvienently nice, so I actually went in, got the ip of the server, went to ARIN, put it in, found out who owned the IP, went to their site, and gave him the contact info. And walked him through each step as I did it, though I confess this was in the hope he would pick up the search on his own and say, "oh, wow, thanks, you rock, goodbye!". And in the end all I got was a "thank you very much".

Tonight I've been doing phones, livechat, e-mail, and waiting for (where I watch the tickets waiting for response, and update them when appropriate). All at once. Granted, there's someone else doing phones with me, and someone else doing livechat with me, but still. It's been good, though, I'm able to network it all together. Like, early on I got an e-mail from this Japanese ISP who was having problems connecting to us. I ran it down to the NOC (Network Operations Centre), and they said we weren't blocking them, and the only weird thing was this one ip in the traceroute was a bit off. Still, nothing to worry about.

Or is it!?

Later on I got a guy in livechat who was on his third ticket for the same issue, with people telling him that it's a dns issue. I had him get a traceroute and guess what ip showed up. Yes, the very same. So I took it down to the NOC, and they're working with it.

And then I've so far been able to update two waiting for tickets before the customer, because I'd had the customer earlier in phones or chat, and had written down their password. And I should have had the presence of mind to get a guy in chat to update his ticket, but I forgot to. I also went through and did easy stuff for some n00b because of the niceness inconvienence. I made him promise to learn Linux, though, and he said he wanted to change my ranking to above excellent, to Alex is a GOD. Yes, flattery will get you places.

Actually speaking of that, the only thing better than helping out nice customers more than I'm supposed to is not helping the people I don't like. Oh sure, I do the bare bare minimum, but the minimum is way below the average for tech support. We do a lot of stuff we shouldn't, because we're nice.

BAM just got another waiting for ticket. From the nice guy who calls me Sir Alex, I think because he doesn't know Mr. Also sometimes if I have spare time I'll look up their password from previous tickets, because of the inconvienence.

Anyway, yeah, not helping people is great. I only do it when I've taken a distinct dislike to the person. Like the guy who, when I asked what his name was, responded coldly, "Mr Martin". You want class war? Oh, I'm sorry, that's unsupported! Mwahaha. Actually I helped that guy out anyway, but only vaguely. And then sometimes people will shout or swear at me, which I get a kick out of, not in a masochistic way (I think), just in the general way of knowing I'm right and there's not a damn thing they can do. I think it's that usually I feel real bad when I can't help them, or have to give bad news. But if they shout at me, hey, they can go fuck themselves! Whee!

Anyway, if I'm going to talk about how busy I am I should probably get back to it. Amazingly, despite both the other people being gone, one for coffee one for a short nap, I've gone all this time with no chat requests, no phone calls, just one e-mail and that one waiting for ticket above.
4:25 AM

THE SERVER IS DOWN THE SERVER IS OFF THE SERVER IS DOWN

-the entire text of a trouble ticket.

I feel a real update in me, coming sometime, but just not right now. I've been reading lots, must exhale sometime.

However, if anybody wants to go halvesies on a Salon.com subscription (they're currently 2 for 1, $11.25 a person for one with ads), I might be interested. Though since I don't have a credit card it's going to have to be either you do it and I pay you back or I get my parents to do it and you pay me back, whatever.
4:54 AM