Go into business for myself, huh? If you must know, I do have a self-generated income. I also do pervasive work with numerous NGOs, as well as local volunteer groups and collective spaces. You can do both.

I have to say you've been using a heavy tone of condescention throughout your letters and I don't really appreciate being talked down when I've done nothing like that to you. You also seem to have a pretty limited idea of what an anarchist can be and have apparently already made up your mind that anyone who doesn't agree with you is somehow uneducated or a simpleton.

In my experience the most surprising people can be anti-authoritarians, teachers, anthropologists, biologists, engineers and even accountants. A lot of them don't shout their opinions from the rooftops but their beliefs have metasized into their lives and are reflected in all their actions and moral choices.

Look, I just think this comes down to a fundamental difference in our ideas of what people are capable of. Scarcity was for most of our history an issue that drove us to competition and selfishness out of a biological neccisity, but it also drove us to seek social company and produced the drive for sharing and solidarity. Currently our society, in my opinion, is illogically geared too much for the competitive and selfish aspects of our nature and our drive for group existence is channeled into ineffective and often unrewarding directions.

Wow, I just read Ebert's blog on watching the film. Yikes! This sounds like a movie that will either mark Trier's final descent into madness or his breakthrough into ordinary narrative after about 15 years in the "goofy concept" ghetto.

Everyone take cover! With that magic word, Brightstar is sure to hit in another spectacular display of female-hatred.

What a typical liberal journalist, always on the precipice of action, always poised to actually effect change but never making the leap. Too comfortable and self-satisfied with a sense of intellectual superiority to bother actually following through with your line of thought, lest it lead to some sort of personal reform. Just putting out half-measured articles which only begin to address the problems before baulking at the enormity of the issue. Wishing for some kind of solution but never proposing even the beginning of one. Content to sit on the bow of the Titanic and say "we're sinking".

What's your point? That Liberal Representative Democracy is a good idea in theory but leads to serious problems in practice?

Welcome to the 20th century!

I'm reminded of that old parable of the grasshopper and the ant. Only the grasshoppers are in a massive majority these days. We need more ants.

That wasn't a typo. Criticisms and theoretical debates over the viability of Liberal Representative Democracy have been going on for at least as long as the 1900s.

After the nightmare that was your poorly written/argued TDK review I was ready to write you off entirely as a wannabe Kael-crank, but your insight into this movie was very refreshing. I suspect I enjoyed this film somewhat more than you did, (though I agree that it is certainly overlong), but you criticized the film honestly and offered clear EVIDENCE for your opinions, rather than relying on vague suggestions, or worse, bald ad homenim.

Good stuff.

Are you doing some kind of performance art piece, mocking the syntax and style of the typical Salon letter writer? Because you've got that kind of moronic arrogance locked down tight.

Word to the wise, don't tread on this guy's internet toes! Verbose, punishing overreaction is his game.