Harvest WAS Re: [Upd-discuss] The Challenge of Law in the Wave of Ideas

Fri, 26 May 2006 12:38:05 +0100

Hi Micheal,

Thu, 11 May 2006 08:45:19 -0700 (PDT) Michael Hart wrote:

> So, you think the terror of Big Brother is less than of Ghengis Khan, etc?
> 
> If so, I can only presume that is because Big Brother has hidden himselves
> and his tools so thoroughly among you that you have been fooled into going
> about your business as if he weren't there, but obeying the rules, without
> enough thought about being revolting to get Big Brother's attention.

If you are saying that i am not revolting then thanks for the compliment  ;)

But, back to your point, i've been hearing echoes of big brother for a
long time now ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1441333,00.html

-- Thanks

> Thanks!!!
> 
> Give the world eBooks in 2006!!!
> 
> Michael S. Hart
> Founder
> Project Gutenberg
> 
> 
> On Thu, 11 May 2006, cacophonix wrote:
> 
>> Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:19:21 -0700 (PDT) Michael Hart wrote:
>>
>>> The truth is that the public domain is becoming an ever shrinking 
>>> domain,
>>> containing a smaller percentage of the world'd information, from an 
>>> older
>>> and older portion of history.
>>>
>>> We live in an era in which we get more and more information THEY want US
>>> to be exposed to, and less and less information of the grand total.
>>>
>>> Wasn't there a post WWII distopian story about such a world?
>>>
>>> The powers-that-be provided you with more and more information that was
>>> basically what THEY wanted US to know, but kept the real stuff hidden
>>> away for themselves?
>>>
>>> And something about anonymous cigarettes?
>>
>>  "Now he's doing horse, it's June" - Prince : Sign O' The Times
>>
>>
>> The Harvest of the Seasons
>> --------------------------
>>
>> We cannot hope to recapture today
>> the terror
>> that the mounted horse struck
>> into the Middle East and Eastern Europe
>> when it first appeared.
>>
>> That is because there is a difference
>> in scale which I can only compare
>> with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939,
>> sweeping all before them.
>>
>> I believe that the importance of the horse
>> in European history has always been underrated.
>>
>> In a sense,
>> warfare was created by the horse,
>> as a nomad activity.
>>
>> That is what the Huns brought,
>> that is what the Phrygians brought,
>> that is what the Mongols brought,
>> and brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much later.
>>
>> In particular,
>> the mobile hordes transformed the organisation of battle.
>>
>> They conceived a different strategy of war --
>> a strategy that is a war game;
>> how war makers love to play games!
>>
>> The strategy of the mobile horde depends on manoeuvre,
>> on rapid communication,
>> and on practised tactical moves
>> which can be strung together
>> into different sequences of surprise.
>>
>> The remnants of that remain
>> in the war games that are still played
>> and that come from Asia,
>> such as chess and polo.
>>
>> War strategy is always regarded by those who win
>> as kind of a game.
>>
>> And there is played to this day in Afghanistan
>> a game called Buz Kashi
>> which comes from the kind of competitive riding
>> that was carried out by the Mongols.
>>
>> The men who play this game of Buz Kashi are professionals --
>> that is to say,
>> they are retainers,
>> and they and there horses are trained
>> and kept
>> simply for the glory of winning.
>>
>> On a great occasion three hundred men
>> from different tribes
>> would compete,
>> though that had not happened now
>> for twenty or thirty years,
>> until we organised it.
>>
>> The players of this game of Buz Kashi
>> do not form teams.
>>
>> The object of the game is not
>> to prove one group better than another,
>> but to find a champion.
>>
>> There are famous champions
>> from the past,
>> and they are remembered.
>>
>> The President
>> who supervised this game was a champion
>> who no longer played.
>>
>> The President gives orders through a herald,
>> who may be a pensioner of the game,
>> though less distinguished.
>>
>> Where we should expect to see a ball,
>> there is instead a headless calf.
>>
>> (And that macabre plaything says something about the game,
>> as if the riders were making sport of the farmers' livelihood.)
>>
>> The carcass weighs about fifty pounds
>> and the object is to snatch it up,
>> defending it against the challengers,
>> and carry it off through two stages.
>>
>> The first stage of the game
>> is riding off with the carcass
>> to the fixed boundary flag.
>> and rounding the flag.
>>
>> After that the crucial stage is the return;
>> as he sweeps round the flag,
>> constantly challenged,
>> the rider heads for home and the goal,
>> which is marked in the centre
>> of the mêlée.
>>
>> The game is going to won by a single goal,
>> so no quarter is given.
>>
>> This is not a sporting event;
>> there is nothing in the rules about fair play.
>>
>> The tactics are pure Mongol,
>> a discipline of shock.
>>
>> The astonishing thing in the game is
>> what routed the armies that faced the Mongols:
>> that what seems a wild scrimmage
>> is in fact full of manoeuvre,
>> and dissolves suddenly
>> with the winner riding clear to score.
>>
>> One has the sense that the crowd
>> is much more excited,
>> and more involved emotionally,
>> than the players.
>>
>> The players,
>> by contrast,
>> seem committed but cold;
>> they ride with brilliant and brutal intensity,
>> but they are not absorbed in playing,
>> they are absorbed in winning.
>>
>> Only after the game
>> is the winner himself carried away by the excitement.
>>
>> He should have asked the President
>> to sanction the goal and,
>> by missing that point of etiquette in this uproar,
>> he has jeopardised the goal.
>>
>> It is nice to know
>> that the goal was allowed.
>>
>> The Buz Kashi is a war game.
>>
>> What makes it electric is the cow-boy ethic:
>> riding as an act of war,
>>
>> It expresses the monomaniac culture of conquest;
>> the predator posing as a hero
>> because he rides the whirlwind.
>>
>> But the whirlwind is empty.
>>
>> Horse or tank,
>> Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin,
>> it can only feed on the labours of other folk.
>>
>> The nomad in his last historic role as war maker
>> is still an anachronism,
>> and worse,
>> in a world that has discovered,
>> in the last twelve thousand years,
>> that civilisation is made by settled people.
>>
>> ....
>>
>> The fifth of the heirs in succession
>> to Genghis Khan
>> was the sultan Oljeitu,
>> who came to this forbidding plateau in Persia
>> to build a great new capital city,
>> Sultaniyeh.
>>
>> What remains is his own mausoleum
>> which later was the model for much Muslim architecture.
>>
>> Objeitu was a liberal monarch,
>> who brought here men from all parts of the world.
>>
>> He himself was a Christian,
>> at another time Buddhist,
>> and finally Muslim,
>> and he did
>> -- at this court --
>> attempt really to establish a world court.
>>
>> It was the one thing a nomad could contribute to civilisation:
>> he gathered from the four corners of the world the cultures,
>> mixed them together,
>> and sent them out to fertilise the earth.
>>
>> It is the irony of the bid for power
>> by the Mongol nomads that when Objeitu died,
>> he was known as Oljeitu the Builder.
>>
>> The fact is that agriculture
>> and the settled way of life
>> were established steps now
>> in the ascent of man,
>> and had set a new level
>> for the form of human harmony
>> which was to bear fruit into the far future:
>> the organisation of the city.
>>
>> -- Jacob Bronowski : The Ascent of Man
>>
>>    Chapter 2 : The Harvest of the Seasons
>>
>>
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