All snark aside, that really sucks :(

Bombing In Bloomsbury.

It is the plot of a sensationalist novel. Virginia Woolf meets John Le Carre reimagined by Jackie Collins. There used to be all sorts of bookshops in those streets just a few minutes away from the British Museum and British Library with its Reading Room and the University. An Albanian bookshop, a Chinese Maoist bookshop which always had the complete works of Mao in stock – on a top shelf in plain covers. A bookshop must always be the front for something. It is where emigre London with its foreign ideas seduces and manipulates genteel London in its desire to manipulate the world.

I now have a picture in my head of Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs Dalloway planning a very different kind of party. I didn’t want that to happen.

(It should go without saying, of course, but to be clear, this is not to advocate the destruction of books by any means, even if that is far preferable to the destruction of lives. Rather, it is to admonish the making of sloppy retorts which distort the words of others in a way that inflames the passions.)

Oh I mis read your statement. Call me the kettle. I appreciate what you are saying. It is a good point. I dont think insurance as it is now is very rooted in the community helping itself out of a problem. Their way of doing it, asking for help from the locals and customers, is a sort of insurance like you are talking about. A recognition that ownership is a convenient idea that requires some adjustment in hard times. The spirit of anarchy is that organizations spring up as needed and disappear when not so loyalties and inertia don’t create “need” where there isn’t any, such as insurance companies staying in business.

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp12102002.shtml

But the majority of comments here make assumptions about anarchism that even 10 minutes on the “Anarchism” wikipedia page could dispel.  I mean, I’m not asking people to have read huge tomes of political theory…but surely it’s reasonable to expect people to at least understand the basics of the subject before spraying criticism everywhere?

Anarchism on wikipedia.  Seriously, everyone go have a read.  You’ll learn a lot – I know I did.

Of course, that’s not the reason these guys protest.

On the specific point of how it deals with people who would perpetrate violence like the firebomber, how do anarchists typically approach it? Would most still advocate a police force, a court system, and imprisonment of some kind, but run in a more open and democratic manner than the present system?

Time to bring on the wrecking ball

also, insurance is totally compatible with anarchy. it is a form of distributed risk which means that individuals and individual organizations do not have to be enormous to cope with adversity. Obviously in reality most insurers are backed by very few underwriters so the system is more hierarchical than it needs to be, but theoretically a large group of small housing associations can pool risk amongst themselves so that none are vulnerable to the occasional fire etc. This is basically the history of the mutual.