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Comment by deeproot on November 15, 2011 at 0:25

Diana
Yes lets look at the poitin In the early days of the internal combustion engine practically every farm used their farm waste to make alcohol which was used in the farm engines and trucks or cars if they had them. The so called Temperance movement was used to close down all these stills and to allow for laws which only permitted alcohol to be produced for consumption and in recognized distilleries and the engines were designed to only work on crude oil derivatives. All local illegal alcohol production in present time is for consumption. How many self-sufficiency followers have learned to make alcohol from the waste vegetable matter for use in their cars etc?

Comment by Howard Crane on November 14, 2011 at 23:00

Amen.

Comment by Diane, Denizen on November 14, 2011 at 22:32

http://freemanireland.ning.com/forum/topics/ccgs-community-cohesion...
This is why I think this is important. This thread is seriously off course, but I think this is a good thing and there has been a lot of constructive discourse. We have to stop pussy footing! We don't have to change our principals one bit, not one little bit even! All we need to do is get together with friends locally and make swapping arrangements, a bit of jam for a few spuds and so on. The PTB know this would happen and this is why Codex is what it is! We have to gain ground or all will be lost. We have been at this self sufficiency lark for 16 years, but where we have not made progress yet is in barter, but we will. LETTS fails mostly because not everyone brings something to the table, we must start trading in real value items. Basically, we have to grow up and stop expecting something for nothing! If everyone starts trading in real goods then the PTB will not have a hope-they can not police it, hell look at the poitin that is still sold around the country! Think about it before it is too late.

Comment by Howard Crane on November 14, 2011 at 20:59

That pipe dream sounds nice. Good luck with it. I'll contribute my Light as I see fit, "Voluntary Association", and I'm keeping my weapons - Thank You.

Comment by deeproot on November 14, 2011 at 20:44

Howard Crane.
I agree that we should only remove all aspects of trading which do not serve our needs and the needs of all who share this planet with us and indeed the planet herself. We need to turn our minds to exploring ways of living together in harmoney. This probably means accessing and developing food water dwellings and resources and trading, through community based and owned co-operatives. If we can include a debit based monetary system where money can only be earned for services to other men and women and the other inhabitants of the planet and the planet herself this would be a sound basises for a blueprint for a sustainable future. It would also help us to remove weapons designed to kill man from our new culture for we could not be paid for creating or manifacturing such weapons.

Comment by Howard Crane on November 14, 2011 at 20:02

Deeproot:
Well... yeah... That's an aspect of money we can transcend as a community. It's not the ONLY "danger", if you will, that comes with money as Ragnarok pointed out - it goes further back than usury.

The best we can do is live the way that serves ourselves the most without harm to others, and the community at-large will heal itself. But in the meantime, let's keep discussing what parts of our monetary system doesn't fit in with our vision of our lives. That was my initial point to Ragnarok.

Comment by deeproot on November 14, 2011 at 19:46

Howard Crane.
Real money may be a useful means of exchange so you do not have to carry lumps of gold or silver or clutches of chickens or other cumbersome items with you and trade them for other items untill you have a tradeable item for to get your weed or milk or whatever but money which changes it's value because it is treated as a tradeable commodity is not suitable for that purpose. Add usury to the mix and now you have money which allows the owner to creqte money out of nothing and charge interest for the use of that money for whatever purpose. Now you have the power to eventually take possession of all the resources on the planet.Does this sound familiar? If we can have real money which only acts as a means of exchange and has an agreed fixed value which must not be dependent on any commodity and is controled by a network of local communities and all forms of usuary (charging interest on mony for any reason)are not permitted. Then we have an acceptable means of exchange. In the abscence of such money the only means of exchange which serves man and planet is barter.

Comment by Howard Crane on November 14, 2011 at 17:53

Ragnarok:
Thanks for your insight. And I'm sorry for being a cynical piece of shit and stamping on your dreams.

Granting all the observations you've made:
Money is still, in my eyes, a very effective tool. What if I don't want to huddle together with a bunch of people I'll know all my life? What if I really did want to take the liberties a medium of exchange would open up to me? Like, sell my dwelling in one place, and go live in another.
If I'm traveling the globe I can be almost sure to run into people who aren't as intelligent as we are (apologies but I must "beckon you back to reality" here, once more). There will be people on this Earth for the foreseeable future who are retarded enough to fall into servitude regardless of what economic or political system they have the the blessing of being born under.
But they're still my brothers and sisters. So if they're unable to recognise the gifts I can bring to their community, they simply don't want them, not everyone wants them, or I can't possibly supply that one thing to everyone - I'm in a very sour position. I might have lodging for the night and maybe breakfast, but my quality of life would be limited severely.

When evolution occurs in consciousness, our relationship to the artifacts in our world changes. Like the mode of Rationality; when consciousness evolves it does not reject Rationality - it transcends it.
Can we not transcend "money"? Not to get rid of it, but become true self-empowered adults. We may not use "money" as our central economic treasure. We may trade what we have directly and when that modality fails we pull out some gold and silver coins.

I was at a friend's house one night, and I gave him a bud of weed, for which he gave me a line of speed. This was an exchange between two adults. We were quite aware of this. What we were also aware of was that if we wanted to go to the corner shop to buy some milk, we couldn't expect the girl behind the counter to take our weed or speed. If we all traded what we had with this shopkeeper, she'd need twice as much storage space to keep the things she was given then she'd need to display the things she's giving away.

Now, am I talking total crap, or does this make sense?
I don't particularly want to be stuck in this cold Post-Calvinist nightmare anymore than you do. My only objective in this conversation is to find some mutual understanding.

Comment by Ragnarok on November 14, 2011 at 10:18

You see right there howard you have fallen into the trap of telling me to leave my dreams aside and be real about it. Just one of the many ways we have been programmed to limit our expectations and return to the fold.
If you think you need money to retain your 'sovreignty' or somesuch, well then you obviously do. Have we really gone that far that we cannot imagine a world in which human interaction occours without some sort of intermediary.

As for money being a corrupt idea. Well, here goes. If you look at the earliest coin usage in Anatolia and India you repeatedly find that the coinage was introduced in order to more efficiently tax the relevant subject populations. This tax was mainly used to raise a force of soldiers to protect the king, his state and his power at the expense of the people funded it for him. Now, understanding that early civilisations were NOT co-operative efforts, no matter how much the academics would like us to believe it, money is revealed as a corrupt idea from the start.
Men and Women extensively wandered the face of this earth for millenia without the 'benefit' of money, and they will do so again, if they can remember how to use their legs.

Your second paragraph highlights something which we had, but lost, or rather had taken away from us. Small communities in which everybody knew each other intimately and largely trusted each other. It was done before, it can be done again.

There are too many who want to change or dismantle the present system, whilst keeping some 'benefits' of said system. It doesn't work like that. All of these so-called benefits are just little pieces of the apparatus that is being employed in shaping our thoughts and actions, and ultimately ourselves.

Comment by Howard Crane on November 13, 2011 at 17:15

Ragnarok, I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. I have full confidence in you to empty and dry that damn bath, but when you talk about money being a corruption in of itself - I think you have some proving to do.
How else does a community adequately share their efforts? Dreams aside, and focusing on what Humanity is capable of and has been in the past.

How does a man maintain his sovereignty without money? For a man to collect every item and service he needs every day he either needs a medium of exchange or he has to be on a seriously intimate level with the providers of every one of those things. They have to TRUST each other.

Could you imagine a man any more enslaved than one piled up ontop of other men like some quasi-macro organism? Unable to travel because he's afraid he wont be as warmly provided for in a village in say, Florence or Azerbaijan?

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