Mechanical Alchemy

[Cain]

For anyone whose survival at the top of the food chain in an anarchical situation is not highly assured, I would think.

[BADGE OF HONOR]

Suicide is for quitters.

I am a quitter.

[Jasper]

Aah, you're no fun. 

[BADGE OF HONOR]

I swore I'd never play Monopoly again after realizing I've never won a game of it in my life.

[Jasper]

Neither have I, but it's still worth my time frustrating the people who focus more on winning than enjoying themselves.

[Thurnez Isa]

Monopoly ruins relationships!

[BADGE OF HONOR]

There is no possible way to enjoy Monopoly.

[Thurnez Isa]

I am a quitter.

you worry me

[Jasper]

There is no possible way to enjoy Monopoly.

Only if you follow the rules.

Thurnez, welcome to teh jungle.

[East Coast Hustle]

I love Monopoly.

and I sometimes emerge victorious. It's a beautiful feeling.

[Jasper]

I prefer the likes of scrabble, upwords, and ninja burger.

[Triple Zero]

Who amog us is willing to turn down that kind of wealth in favor of continuing to advance our agenda in the face of increasingly stiff resistance to our attempts at "spreading the message"?

Me for one and prolly a whole bunch of others too.

KLF kind of did that right? and .. well .. i dunno where it went wrong actually.

also, once you keep your leg stiff and do not accept the "offer you shoulnd't refuse", i'm pretty certain the CoN will start with the next level of threat-management. of course, at first we seem free and we seem to have these possibilities but nobody's taking them, but that only holds as long as we play nice puppies. as soon as we refuse to take the puppy-treat in return for playing the game, the CoN will stop playing "nice".
first step will probably be all kinds of legal action (see for example the lawsuits against filesharing companies, REAL worldwide free filesharing would be an unimaginable free media market, real hard to "buy out", so it needs to be killed in the budding).
next step will be slander, it will be dubbed as "conspiracy nuts", "tinfoil hats", "extremist", "activist" or just plain "terrorist" (or some other negative connotations, depending on the medium/subject/topic/realisation). then, it will be perceived "dangerous", "illegal underground", "unhealthy", associated with all kinds of bad things.
if your underground network/media thing will get past these stages, you have accomplished quite a bit. you got a solid grounding, and this is probably the moment you can and should get out of view, unless you want to be a martyr, because then the CoN will really get dangerous. fortunately at this point, if you played it right, the movement should continue regardless of that.

disclaimer: i'm just thinking this up from the top of my head. cain seems to be actually studying this kind of stuff, so compared to that, i might be deadwrong in my guessings

[Cain]

Character assassination, followed by legal action, followed by intimidation, followed by infiltration of instigators, followed by more legal action, followed by explicit threats, followed by attempts at killing you.

Thats the normal way.  Incidentally, if you ever get a phone call saying "we can no longer guarantee your safety", don't worry.  It means MI5 are going to botch an assassination on you.

Thats why I think the Hagbard Celine point about saying no and taking the consequences is important.  You are given alot of chances to back off, because the fear of the threat is a powerful weapon.  People who don't care, don't back off.  And that makes them dangerous.

[Triple Zero]

cain: character assassination = calling a group "nutcases" etc?

also,

knows that growing and hunting my own food, making and reparing clothes and shelter, and staying warm and disease-free would literally use every waking hour.

hmm from what i read about people who actually tried this* they were working 20 hours a week or something, depending on the season of course.

as far as i know, the number one problem about this way of living is that - especially if everybody did it - there might be no medicin/healthcare.
for the rest, there's not nearly as much problems as you envision. we've come a long way since the historical farmers. even without electricity, there's a whole lot of (seemingly simple) technology that would make life a lot easier.

also, i would see getting decent healthcare in such a society more as a challenge than a straight-out impossibility. i will ask a friend of mine about this, she recently came back from a few months working as a doctor in Malabi (africa). (most of the medical difficulties according to her story were not because of lack of equipment or technology, but of care. a different lifestyle. she witnessed a baby birth probably getting permanent braindamage because nobody had prepared sterilized equipment for cleaning out the nostrils resulting in two minutes of oxygen deprivation.)

* (the people in this book didn't quite actually completely did *without* capitalism or the rest of society for that matter)

[Cain]

Yes.  You may not have that idiom, but it basically means to call into doubt that person's credibility.  In Christian dominated parts of America, for example, showing that they had an affair, or sex before marriage may work.  In the UK, show that they belonged to some nutcase group etc etc  Its essentially the ad hominem attack.