"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 20, 2010

Clustered Sitdowns, Management Has Spoken

BDR:

"...These clusterfucks, the romantic egoist in me wants to believe them the awesomest clusterfucks ever, but I wonder, doesn't every generation think their time the clusterfuckest ever? Are humans fundamentally shittier than ever or just as shitty with enhanced surveillance capability? Here, let me type anti-Corporate invective into googleblooger and plunge send.

In any case, those patdowns in airports are training whacks on your snout to
sit the fuck down and STFU when told to sit the fuck down and STFU. Our overlords are busy negotiating the terms of our complicity too..."

There is a service we can provide here, if so inclined. Get. This. Message. Out.  

The internet may be going pyramids and skyscrapers, soon - but it still has its back alleys and speakeasies and a lot of us chill on the doorsteps and fire escapes of both. Spread it by way of poor man's balconies; whisper it on the doorsteps. Spread it beneath the street lights. Spread it.

We have other complicities available to us. Ones which the bosses can learn to fear.

6 comments:

Randal Graves said...

I don't like this sneakin' about by The Man. I was promised jackbooted thugs, goshdarnit!

Jack Crow said...

Jackboots for Crisis, for transition - The Arms of Krupp, Daimler, Bayer, et al thankfully, wistfully remind us...

Jackboots for transition, and Boeing will back a cake...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

The major outcry about the pat-downs is because the policy is largely affecting prosperous white folks, and it was put into place by the Kenyan Usurper. Where were these people when warrantless wiretaps were going on under the Bush maladministration? Would these people complaining about the TSA searches protest stop-and-frisk policies in largely poor, black neighborhoods?

Dumb, deluded cobags don't realize that poor minorities are the canary in the civil liberties coal mine.

Anonymous said...

Pardon the distorted uses of "liberal" and "conservative" here, but I am reminded of the idea that my friends used to toss around when I was in my 20s. It goes like this:

a "liberal" is a "conservative" who has had his first negative encounter with the police.

while

a "conservative" is a person who hasn't ever had a negative encounter with the police.

Now, the little parable clearly distorts "liberal" because it gives them too much awareness and actual purpose. Most liberals I know aren't anything but friends of the government and its enforcers, and they're among those whose default is "if you get pinched for it, you deserved it."

mike flugennock said...

Good one, Oxtrot.

Sounds sort of like one of my own faves, which sprung to mind during the Seattle Rebellion and A16:

An anarchist is a Liberal who's been pepper-sprayed by the police.

miguel said...

Would these people complaining about the TSA searches protest stop-and-frisk policies in largely poor, black neighborhoods?

Actually, yeah. But not most. In fact, most black people happily get on board with rulers who want to herd them into prisons. People generally don't participate politically, even in their own interest. I admit, I'm mostly tasked with making a living, but I probably take racial issues into account more than some of my Clinton and Obama-worshiping black neighbors. Can I please have moral exemption from a cavity search?

This idea of the pat-downs as paybacks to affluent, indifferent conservatives is beyond stupid. You either oppose the jackboot and truncheon or you don't.

The revolutionary who gleefully contemplates gross encroachments on anyone's personal liberty on the supposition that the object has been insufficiently broke, brown, left, activist or otherwise the equal of some lameass masturbating blog troll is as revolutionary and useful as Stalin. He's also an idiot.