[New-imc] roll calls ....

[boud]

hi. i'm boud. i'm an international person interested in everything,
and the elite education system pushed me towards the formal attempt to
study everything, known more technically as "observational
cosmology". so i'm about as globalist as you can get ;-) in my "day"
job. though one of the big questions i discovered has *not* yet been
answered by looking through telescopes is whether or not the part of
the universe we can observe is just a tiny, local part of the
unmeasurable whole universe or whether we can really see "around" the
whole universe. this really is a totally open question, but we might
get an answer to it within the next 12 months, more likely the next 5
years. in which case there could be a lot of mainstream media stuff on
this pretty soon, with just as much distortion as for other news
stories.  (including the usual bullshit of claiming that all the
"best" science is done by people in the usa, or occasionally in other
rich countries. i can tell you as an insider: observational cosmology
and high energy physics are about 1% competitive and 99% collective,
and putting names of nations to scientific results is really just
bullshit done for funding requests, very few scientists really take
these seriously.)

i happen to think that it's absurd that we, as a global society, can
make absolutely breathtaking measurements of the history and size of
the universe but at the same time leave problems like hunger, war,
racism, sexism, environmental suicide, etc etc unsolved. so i've tried
to learn what can be done and i've been convinced by people like
chomsky that listening to self-organised, non-hierarchical groups
of local people is probably a good start, and i think that indymedia
is absolutely brilliant. :-)

being an astronomer led me to living in several different places
around the world (well, europe/asia/australia, anyway), so when i saw
the india.indymedia site floundering for six months (1st half of 2001)
i felt that this was absurd and that i had to do something. rich
country activists can learn a hell of a lot from indian
activists. thanks to the open mailing list archives, i was able to get
a feeling for how indymedia runs and make what seemed to be a
contribution. i don't know whether or not my waffling on the imc-india
list helped much or not, but the important thing is that the site is
now being brilliantly handled by the madurai collective (mostly
reposts, but extremely informative reposts) and other locals are
starting to introduce themselves to each other and think about
organising.

as i get to learn about polish culture and language, i'll make efforts
to support local indymedia here, preferably a city site, but this
clearly can't happen overnight. i can only listen to and support
locals.

btw, i should confess to having been active (well, sort of) for a
decade in a rather conservative ;-) organisation which i think needs
no introduction - amnesty international. i'm continuing to be active
here in poland, but it's requiring patience, the damage from *really*
conservative thinktanks like the soros foundation, usaid etc. into
diverting activists into "safe" activities and into brainwashing
people into accepting the "TINA" (There Is No Alternative to corporate
authoritarianism) theme seems pretty deep. even the polish translation
of the amnesty international guide to the organisation admits without
embarrassment that it was "sponsored by the open society foundation",
which is, of course, the soros foundation. :-( but hopefully the
amnesty rule of accepting no more than 5% funds from any source and
the other in-built safeguards will limit the damage. in any case,
amnesty and indymedia are completely independent activities.

btw, imho the new-imc process is on track for responding to evan's worry:

> The second is to filter out groups /
> companies/ sectarian sects, which want to own an imc. 

if there are such groups/companies/sectarian sects applying, then
either they are forced to open up and work non-hierarchically with
other groups, or they quit if they really are sects.

solidarity
boud