FOUND TREASURES WE SHOULDN'T LOSE:
The Winnipeg Free Press has recently (Friday, Jan 5th) reported on the latest plans for the City of Winnipeg to divest itself of the railroad that it owns under the Water and Waste Department. The railroad was originally built to provide access to Shoal lake from which Winnipeg draws its water supply in 1914. In its early years the line named 'The Greater Winnipeg Water District railway' offered not just access to the construction site and the aqueduct but also access to Winnipeg for rural communities, a supply line for products of the Shield and an opportunity for Winnipeg residents to go on excursions to the Lake. When present Mayor Sam Katz came to power he was reportedly "shocked" to discover that Winnipeg actually owned its own railroad, and, like the bell ringing in front of Pavlov's dogs, the reflex action of "sell it" came to mind. to this date the city tries to concoct a different way of maintaining the aqueduct without a railroad. Sounds sort of hopeless to me. The line runs through country inaccessible by any other route, but the effort persists in trying to find a way to do the impossible- let alone do it cheaper than what exists. Seems that some "conservatives" have forgotten the meaning of the word "conserve", let alone common sense prescriptions such as "don't fix what isn't broke".
Now Molly was "surprised" herself to find that the City has its own private choo choo, but even as an anarchist it doesn't offend her moral sensibilities--so she is not "shocked". As a matter of fact she sees it as an opportunity rather than a liability for the people of this city. Something that should NOT be torn up in favour of some crackpot scheme devised by a porkbarrel consultant. Something that should NOT be sold off for the ideological illusion-contrary to simple economic principles- that a private profit making firm will ALWAYS provide a cheaper service.
But much more on this later. It's still new to our good cat, and there is much to be explored. Unlike the bureaucrats that Sam demands to produce some way to fulfill his dream I'll charge nothing for my services as the study goes on. I haven't formed a full opinion yet.
Molly on the cheap.

LINKOMANIA:
I've added another link to this blog under the 'Other Interesting Links' section. This is the UrbanRail.Net site mentioned in the previous post. The obligatory explanation follows.
There is little doubt that "technology" has its own dynamic, forcing society to follow certain paths even as the form of society determines what technologies will be developed and which neglected. A pretentious Marxist would style this sort of interplay of causation as "dialectical" so as to a)appear very smart and b)to obscure some other rather less savoury point that the Marxist wants to make. Both this sort of mutual determination, usually referred to in non-ideological circles as complexity and more formal "circular causation" are part of normal intellectual discourse and hardly need a buzzword such as dialectical to obscure their meaning.
The sociology ! of both Marxism in power and as an academic assembly line, as well as how "dialectic" became the butt of popular jokes in Eastern Europe under Stalinism gives more than a slight hint of how this obfuscation is much more a matter of a weapon of class rule or the aspirations of a would-be ruling class than clear thinking. It's always far better to say what you mean than to hide behind a pseudo intellectual phrase.
Be that as it may there are people in this world who are even fuzzier in their thinking than Marxists. I'll leave aside the neo-cons whose rule of the American Empire seems to be coming to an end and how they were captives of their own abstractions. That is an entirely different post (or 50). I speak, unfortunately, of some of my own "comrades" . There's a trend in modern North American anarchism popularly called "primitivism" that imagines that it has uncovered a much more basic form of "oppression/misery/hierarchy/etc..etc.,etc" than any classical anarchists have.
Some of these people(but unfortunately too few) have read their antecedents such as Shumacher, Illich and Ellul, but they haven't taken the lesson of the first two. They tend to follow in a debased form the manner of the latter. The first two always criticized "particular technologies" and often advocated alternatives. The latter usually based his writings on such a high plane of abstraction that he basically "meant nothing" in most of what he said. The saddest part of this trend is that some of them claim the "individualist anarchist" mantle via a presumed interpretation of Stirner. Now, I've read 'The Ego and His Own' more than once, and I can say two things. One is that Stirner should have been given an award for being an even poorer writer than Marx. It takes some doing. The second is that his book could have easily been boiled down to a few pages that basically stated that people are captives of their abstractions. Stirner called them "spooks".
A lot of modern day primitivism has a genealogy that traces back to an ill digested version of situationism, and, like the sits, they move in a world of thought where the real world rarely intrudes. At its best situationism is good poetry. At its worst it is word spinning in a self referential world that means nothing except the attempt of a self defined "elite" to "prove" how superior it is.
How this relates to "technology" is pretty obvious to be. There is no such thing as the "technology" in the abstract that primmies like to demonize while advocating other technologies and techniques. This is a "spook" in the full Stirnerite meaning of the word. The anti-technology rhetoric becomes a badge of distinction-and that is ALL that it is. When they lower their exalted selves to actually propose something they end up tailing ! so many of the people that they like to feel superior to. Growing a garden is great. This is despite the fact that the average primmie has far less experience and knowledge about same than a vast number of the normal people that they despise. Practically everything they propose is little more than a signpost for someone outside of their cult to notice their inferiority in practical knowledge.
That's all "individualist" stuff, and it certainly makes me hold my nose when reading their nonsense. What may be more important is that they have little-and usually nothing- to propose about how their dreams may become a social reality. Beyond joining their cult, of course. The whole matter reeks of religious proselytism rather than politics.
Which finally brings me to my point. The crowd cheers-the speech will finally be over. I have listed many scientific references in this blog for the simple reason that science is nothing more than amplified common sense. There's little doubt that there is a "sociology of science" that describes how theories come and go, but science has a little ace up its sleeve. It is one of the few-perhaps the only- human enterprise that has worked out a method of collegial self-correction. This method certainly contrasts with the methods of political theory, radical or otherwise where mistakes are usually not corrected but only explained away- at best.
Science's daughter "technology" certainly is so important that it has to be both noticed and commented upon -notice I don't use the buzzword "critiqued"; I have nothing to prove. But to be useful, or even interesting at all to people outside of a cult, the matter has to be specific. "Which" technology in which social setting ? I find the idea of urban rapid transit fascinating because I assume that people will continue to exist in their present numbers in the foreseeable future and I have no genocidal fantasies of reducing their numbers. I also assume that, while I might favour a population balance more screwed towards a rural dispersion that people have good reasons for choosing an urban living space- as almost ALL primmies do even while they spout their rhetoric. To me that's a given. retirement is when I move back to the country. Hence my liking for more rational-in many ways- methods of moving about a city. Urban rapid transit!
To my mind such a technology is libertarian in a much more fundamental way than jeremiads about the evils of our modern society. It CAN be accomplished. In the future I hope to find more such examples and highlight them here. "Technology" is neither good nor bad. it simply doesn't exist outside of the minds of ideologues. Certain techniques CAN be either good or bad. That is what anarchists should turn their attention to.
The crowd cheers and puts down its rotten fruit. The speech is over, and it lasted less than 1 50th of a Castro speech. Everybody files out, hopefully having learnt something. The speaker packs up and returns to the night, pleased with a attempt at style variation.

The Prague (Praha) Subway:
One of the most enjoyable experiences in the city of Praha is the efficiency, safety and comfort of its subway system. Praha is a city of about 1.2 million people ie a little less than twice the size of Winnipeg, but its public transport is about 10 to 20 times better than that in this city. The Praha subway consists of three lines complemented by a number of trams to outlying areas. The stations themselves are mostly a single platform system serving both directions ie no making a wrong turn and finding yourself staring across the tracks to the train going the direction you want to go. During rush hour there are only two or three minute intervals between trains. Maps of the system are clearly posted in numerous locations, and one can easily locate which train to take in the station by further maps hung from the ceiling. During non-peak hours the trains run about every 5 to ten minutes. Waiting is never a pain.
One of the things that amazed me about the subway system was the quality of the announcement system. In airports and bus depots here in Canada the overhead announcements are usually incomprehensible in two official languages. In parts of Europe they may be garbled in up to 4 languages. The best you can do is listen for your own name and hope they don't garble it too much. Every last word and syllable on the Czech subway system was clear and distinct, every place and every time. I have no idea how this magic was achieved, but it sure was different.
The Praha subway also gives new meaning to the phrase "rapid" transit. It beats any car hands down, even excluding circling to find parking. I must admit that I am not a great connoisseur of subway systems, but from what I have seen Praha's system is definitely cleaner and safer than that of Montreal, Barcelona, Vienna and Athens. The later is especially significant as many upgrades were done in preparation for the Olympics. it must be admitted that the floods of August 2002, also led to a lot of new construction in Praha as many of the lines and stations were flooded out. But still...a much better job was done in the Czech Republic than in Greece.
The subway system in Praha, like that of Wien and the boat transit in Venezia (and I suspect a lot of Europe) operates on the "honour system". There are generally no ticket takers nor electronic gating systems in any of these three cities. I saw ticket checkers in operation on a few occasions at stations in Venezia, but they were rare, and the system operates efficiently ONLY because there is no such gating to hold it up. I believe that I have already mentioned the roving spot checks of "transit police", and how you don't want to get on their wrong side, but these people are hardly common.
I was quite astonished to find out that the construction of this ultra-modern and pleasant system actually began under the Communist dictatorship in 1967, and the first section was opened in 1974. Maybe it shouldn't be so astonishing if one stops to consider that Communism may never have been able to supply good toilet paper (nor most other consumer goods) in necessary quantities, but the buggers actually could build good bloody engines. The Moscow subway is apparently close to being one of the wonders of the modern world, both for its engineering and for its design. Even today one can find not just beautiful almost baroque art in its caverns but even historical relics of socialist realism. What can one expect from a country where 'Love Song to a Tractor' was #1 on the hit parade for 6 months in 1955 and made another comeback in 1966 (just joking).
The Praha subway was designed after the Moscow model, and it is one of the few valuable things that Communism left to the country. The Czechs, however, certainly contributed their own skills to its construction. After East Germany the Czech Republic was the most industrialized area of the Eastern Bloc, and there was a vast pool of skilled labour for construction. Unlike in the Soviet Union, only a small minority of the workforce would be falling down drunk on the job at any given time (see Czech Beer and the difficulty of getting drunk on same, and compare to the effects of vodka). The result is that, while the Moscow Metro may be more magnificent you are far safer riding the sub in Praha than in Moskva, even to this day.
Actually something like "industrial archaeology" might reveal that the former Communist rulers of the former Czechoslovakia were truly obsessed with the train. Perhaps it served the same iconic purpose as the tractor did under Stalin in the USSR. The beauty,cleanliness and efficiency of the rolling stock in the Praha subway contrasts with what we saw on the rail line from Praha to Wien. No doubt the Czechs could and do build locomotives of excellent design. But under Communism they OVERBUILT them. The line leading south seems to be a wilderness of crumbling smokestacks of factories no longer in production, abandoned railway stations and AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT of dead rolling stock. I swear that there isn't as many dead locomotives and railway cars of all descriptions gathering rust in "railway graveyards" in the whole of Canada as there were visible along that one short line. Some of these mortuaries were huge beyond anything seen anywhere in this country. It's beyond my comprehension why these sad things aren't crushed up for scrap, but there they sit and probably will for another 30 years.
The abandoned railway stations are the saddest thing as they attest to a time when the train was the major form of transport, and they are much more numerous than the same things in Canada.
The pleasant experience of the Praha subway contrasts not just with the industrial decay in the south but also with the sad state of our own public transport here in Winnipeg. Waiting underground for 5 minutes for a train in Praha is a more than slightly more pleasant experience than waiting 20 minutes at 30 below in January for a bus in Winnipeg. For anyone interested there is a website detailing comparative urban rapid transit systems across the world at http://www.urbanrail.net . Look through it and see that many cities that have smaller populations than Winnipeg have functioning rapid transit systems. It's an eye-opener. But it leaves me with the question of how an "honour system" could possibly operate in a city like Winnipeg. But that's may be a question for deep philosophers rather than little cats.
Mollymew