"...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

Jun 21, 2011

A Nugget of Unavoidable Truth

There is this really simple explanation for why the ruling factions in the capitalized world don't do anything about pollution, food shortages, infrastructural decay, looming oceanic extinction, niche collapse or the human crises which follow upon environmental degradation. They don't have confused priorities. They're not backwards. It's not about balancing budgets or redirecting energies towards job creation and a revitalized manufacturing sector. They're not misguided. It's not because they're liberals, or conservatives.

It's just that...

...they don't care.

They don't care.

They don't care.

They don't fucking care. 

I'd even wager that they're banking on surviving as they reshape economies to triage the rest of us. Austerity is triage.

Austerity and militarization are about heading off our numbers before we really, truly believe we've got 'em going for us.

In the face of this observable condition, pacifism is moral abnegation. I'm not suggesting that non-violence is always useless. But, as Arundhati Roy sagely observed,

"Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

The people against whom non-violence would be waged, in the "developed world," won't be moved by it. The non-participants who might change their minds won't be allowed to see it happening. Or, worse, when a successful and largely non-violent movement does succeed in effecting a change in politicians or ruling factions, it will be diverted away from social and economic alteration.

The produce of our collective labor is already being diverted from human welfare towards the dronification of the "homeland" because the people who write the laws and pay the bills intend to more directly police both their captive populations and the growing numbers they're already excluding. Labor works more for less, the rich get richer and their uniformed protectors receive larger budgets every year. It's naked expropriation, and they're getting away with it like never before.

Let's beat this fucking horse corpse to glue already: our earthly masters won't cut the war and police budgets because they need a corps of men with a proven ability to ignore their own humanity, who are receptive to belief systems which allow them to kill on command, and who have developed the capacity to harm others and justify it according to prevailing mythologies.

They need sanctioned killers because we are no longer essential but haven't the decency to just fucking die already. They need armed staffers because they don't need our mouths or our superfluous flesh and extraneous labor.

We aren't necessary anymore.

We aren't necessary anymore.

We aren't necessary anymore.

The last six generations of our labor have allowed them to construct a production, exchange and distribution system which will enable them to liberate themselves from our hungering stomachs, unskilled labor, the legions of urban poor and any lingering moral obligation to remedy the suffering of a burgeoning population of waste peoples.

This is war. It's war. It's a goddamned fucking war.

We have always had this war.

It's only now that they can really win it.

Please, please understand that if we fail to respond collectively, and soon, they will hand manage our annihilation. Or let the collapse of entire ecosystems do it for them.

They aren't dealing with the material and environmental consequences of the expanding capitalist closed system because they don't have to. We are the price they are willing to pay to negotiate their survival of their own onslaught against nature and humanity.

We are the bride price. We are the fucking dowry.

And they are going to pay it.

I swear to you, they'll fucking do it.

So what are we going to gods-be-damned do about that?

Some fucking protest theater? Some electioneering? Maybe a vote recall or a puppet parade? Pose for the police portrait takers? Beg for time on the teevee?

Or are we going to wake up before it's too late and treat our mortal enemies in a manner befitting...

...mortal fucking enemies?

Because they will triage the lot of us. And worse.

They really fucking will.

25 comments:

Poppy said...

You have won me over.
But what do you propose we do?
I'm just a shitty musician,
My writing capability is weak, doubt I would make a good message song.
But the people need to hear, something productive needs to be done, takes one person to stand up and lead.

Jack Crow said...

It's easier to beg people to ask the questions, Poppy, than it is to answer them.

I'm okay with illiterate ragey angst.

I'm not so good with solutions. I hope you'll spot me until the morning to do better than my usual, that I might try to answer your question at least adequately.

And without putting my custody of my children at too obvious a risk until I can better safeguard them.

That's my complicity and weakness on display, right there, Poppy.

David K Wayne said...

Like the way you cut the shit with this stuff. They really, really don't care. History proves this, and given the chance they can put maximum effort into caring even less.

BTW if that Roi quote is from her Guardian interview, it really pissed me off how they tried to belittle her sincere efforts to defend flesh-and-blood human beings from hideous oppression. The whole angle was "You should return to your true calling! Fuck the peasants and go back to entertaining me and my dinner party guests!"

BTW - that's the third time you've had a porno word verification. This time it's "nailnob".

Anonymous said...

Nice, JC. Now go over to Crooked Timber and give JQuiggen hell.

Jack Crow said...

Thanks, Wayne.

You know, I think the struggle to hold ground is more visible on your side of the pond because the language of the dispute is by comparison more honest than here, Stateside.

Anonymous,

I don't read CT. Not sure what I was getting into, and I'm not finished yet, but...

...in reading the comments to the second post (I'm working my way backward) by Quiqqen, this stood out for me:

"...the history of Western Marxism – the Marxism that developed independently from the party line of the Eastern Bloc – could be written as the history of increasingly sophisticated attempts (beginning with Englels himself) to theorize what came to be called the relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure from the economic base. Everyone agrees that the constraints on the superstructure are loose and distal."

I'm sure the commenting party knows what he means to convey with this paragraph. I think I can suss it out mostly, as well. For all that I know, it might be relevant and true.

But, I cannot imagine using this language with the clerk who takes my gasoline money without getting looks of derision, disbelief or both.

This is ruling class and managerial language (and the unreal gods know it's an affliction I'm working to remedy myself) and I think most people who hear and read it can ken that almost immediately.

As I'm still reading both the originals and the comments, I don't think there's anything I could possibly add that hasn't already been said.

And it's the constant saying it, perhaps, which is the problem. We've developed the habits of evangelicals, who must reduce every call to repentance to a formulaic demand for a formal confession of compulsion or obedience.

It's talking and arguing amongst ourselves, in echo chambers, which makes this shit so unappealing. We aren't developing a general set of comprehensible terms for wider use in a dispersed population of overlapping communities. We're continuously refining our language reflexively, to suit a tiny fraction of disputants and true believers, barely realizing, I think, that the more we act as evolutionary pressures upon each other, in such a isolated population of outlook, the less we make sense to the outsiders for whom we ostensibly speak.

The left, anarchists, agorists, socialists and the nine Bolshies left in America resemble nothing more than the Ezra Kleins and Matthew Yglesiases, trading familiarities and shared beliefs between one another, all the while doing so as if the rest of the world is paying attention and responding with self-edification.

I think it's time to stop debating and talking, which might go some of the way to answering Poppy's opening question.

Theory is academic, disparagingly.

Instead of debating the "intersectionality" of "distal" influences, I think we ought to share methods for surveying, tracking and dispersing information about police surveillance and crowd control techniques. I think we ought to be developing cadres of field medics. I think we should share techniques for storing food caches. Or meet up to develop fitness and food regimens which provide calories and exercise with the least possible dependence on "the system."

Or, I could be wrong. It's something I'm especially good at, this error shit.

Justin said...

Jack, your comment at 12:15 AM is more meaningful to me than the sum of the post, I wish you would have concluded with that.
Here is the latest (and, again, hopefully the last) chapter in my little online book project, where I speak directly to your post. I think.

http://conepost.blogspot.com/2011/06/civil-disobedience.html

I guess what I trying to say is that if we continue accepting the premise of violence as a legitimate resolution for spiritual conflicts, conflicts about how we are using the earth's resources, how we relate to one another in that context, then we are only ensuring a changing of the guard. What we are attacking is not individuals or their beliefs about who they are or who we are, but about how they believe they should relate to us, about how we should relate to one another.

I don't disagree with you that as fucked as things are, violence will likely become what appears to be an unavoidable alternative, but a resolution predicated on violence that appears to be a victory for 'your' side is less than half a loaf, now the winner has learned the wrong lesson unless they keep the bigger problem in mind. I am personally preparing myself to be able to survive and end violent conflicts with minimal damage to all parties. I am personally trying to ready myself not to be dependant upon and embedded in our techno-capitalist system. In that, I may have to hit some people, and I may get hit, but my own commitment to nonviolence says to me that in either case, its not a legitimate resolution to the conflicts I am fighting.

Jack Crow said...

Justin,

I reject default pacifism. It condemns others to suffer for our cowardice. Pacifism is cowardice. It doesn't matter how many frocks and collars we dress it up in, it's still cowardice in the end.

The pacifist gets to congratulate himself on being morally superior, and the people with the guns and the property and the seized wealth of the world go to bed at night still in possession of all of it. Smugly, confident that their poisonous and unbalanced ruling class ideology of non-resistance to power is out there, in the heads of the colonized, policing resistance into empty gestures and harmless agitation.

They aren't afraid of pacifists, Justin. That communicates something.

I refuse to reject violence, because we live in the world we have, not the world the best of us might want.

Non-violence is not a universal. And it does not work, in the end, because it relies on the forbearance of people who have none.

Millions took to the street in Egypt. And the army still rules that country.

Millions took to the street in 2002 and 2003. George Bush invaded Iraq anyway.

Millions marched with Dr. King. Jim Crow was renamed "The War on Drugs" and Nixon used the Southern Strategy.

Tens of millions walked with Gandhi. India has nukes and a trigger finger for war.

Non-violence doesn't make them give up their property, their weapons or their networks of control.

It gives them shivers of delight. It's a sideshow. Like recalling governors of Wisconsin. Or chaining oneself to the White House fence, to persuade the drone lord to let some gays take bullets for Uncle as well...

David K Wayne said...

No such thing as 'spiritual conflicts' really. The most 'fanatical' religious terrorists, governments or ideologues are fighting over valuable resources, labour and wealth. The Congo is hell on Earth for shit we have in our phones and laptops. Afghanistan has untapped trillions in minerals - along the droned Pakistan border. Crazy-ass Hitler knew that enslaving Russia could supply enough energy for an invincible Reich. All the assassinated madmen/sleeper agents are the midway, carny barkers distracting the rubes from the accountants behind the tents. Do you think Castro would have lived this long if he had cobalt and oil to plunder?

Wars are always over property, resources and mega-moolah. That's the truth of vulgar Marxism. The big boys have shown time and time again how they'll build torture chambers, mega-prisons, or wipe out whole societies to seize it.

Michael- said...

Every word of this post is strait fucking truth Jack. wow.

What shall we do next?

Brian M said...

Wow...this post is scary as hell...but we all know you are too correct, Jack.

Justin: I admire your actions and your pacifism (you have done far more than I ever have), yet I look at the corruption of Thai government and society...or the often oppressive nature of traditional rural villages, and the ineffectiveness of the Joe Baegeant approach, and I wonder if that is the solution either.

I have no ideas myself.

Soma said...

Our underground operatives have been hijacked. All the best hackers have been bought out to operate under the power structure while our masters propagate fear of the rogues by selling threats of identity theft.

We aren't coordinated, as U.S. society has been groomed to individualistic ends.

Perhaps we could stockpile weapons, reclaim land, and operate a framework off the grid, but that requires strategic soldiers, and any militia isn't well maintained or large enough to work around the odds.

We can't fight a guerrilla war of attrition because the power has gone global. What can a handful of citizen infantry do against satellite surveillance and drone strikes? Or, even garnering small victories, how can they deal with the spin that any noncombatant will be swayed to see them as a terrorist threat?

No-- the only thing left to do is lay down and die, or to be saved by our alien overlords. And I'm not so sure the ET's want to do that.

Justin said...

Jack, you misunderstand me. I don't reject violence, I reject the premise of it, or its threat, as a means of ordering a system of equals. If I have to knock someone's teeth in who is insisting that he has the right to hurt me right now, then I will do so. But I don't accept that as a satisfactory answer, whether I knock him down or he knocks me down. Provided I survive, and whether I win the fight or not, I'll be right back again tomorrow arguing the same point.

I can't fight everyone in the world until they agree with me, in fact, most people are in more agreement with your conclusions than you imagine. We are all looking at the same world, we can't all miss it. A lot of us pretend that we don't see, or we accomodate ourselves with misgivings. People do this because they have accepted that any alternative is doomed to personal destruction, either of the mind, spirit or body, and the alternatives so often offered are destructive, either personally or to others. To attack that is to start finding alternatives, just like the physical fight, it does not matter if you win or lose, or if you take lumps. It matters that you are trying it out, hopefully finding things out.

We shouldn't have learned from hippies that we should ridicule them for goofy ideas or music, but that walking away is not some extended spiritual bliss, but hard physical work. We also learned that creating a conformity of nonconformity to use as pressure against individuals as social control is just as bad as uniform conformity. So we should get tougher, to handle the physical work, and get smarter about community relationships.

Yes, if someone gets in my way and tries to hurt me, I'll hit back, but I don't accept whatever the outcome as victory or defeat.

Justin said...

Adding one last thing, I'll concede the theoretical point that I am not arguing, that you are right, that violence is the only answer that will work. If that is the case, how prepared are you to exercise violence? How are your self-defense skills? How good are you at not just shooting, but maintaining weapons? That's not enough though, because there are consequences to those actions, which include jail and losing what you have. I know from what you have written that you are tough enough to endure those things. If you truly believe violence is the only answer to the problem of our self-created destruction, then I'd expect you would want to get yourself as ready as you could to be a violent person, which means effective violence, and a willingness to face those consequences. If you cannot face them now, then figure out why you cannot, and start working backwards.

That is my point, get ready for whatever the costs, consequences, and personal requirements that you envision will be the answer to these big questions.

Where we part, from my eyes, is that I am too much of an optimist to accept that violence and destruction alone will lead to the conditions of long term solutions for our species, even if they become necessary short term requirements for survival.

mp said...

pacifism's a choice not to engage the enemy on his own violent terms. morally, it's the rejection of power, intimidation, force. it's also a recognition that a violent fight with the USA is unfair in very real terms. any serious violent revolution's going to bring drones overhead. what can we do about any of that? besides that, revolutions often end up in the most organized, vicious party's hands. they seize power for themselves and, you know. what can a pacifist do? what many of us are doing--helping folks in communities, quietly spreading ideas about peace, disengaging from the whole voting deal, living peacefully.

obviously, all this shit's out the window when the drones are actually overhead, or when i see more concrete plans.

Everythings Jake said...

Denial (individual, collective) may turn out to be the most powerful force ever. On the one hand, it allows us to soldier on (it could be seen as an evolutionary advantage); on the other hand, it prevents us from seeing that we are marching to our doom.

Jack Crow said...

Wow. There's a lot here. My oldest wants more time to continue making fun of my "bookshelf of insecurities." So there's that. I mentioned that I was a chocolate mess. He said, "No, Dad. You're too organized for that. You're more like a bookshelf of insecurities. One you built yourself. And you know where every book is..."

Gods, I love that kid. If I had Lyme Disease and was almost a foot shorter than my peers, I'd have become an overcompensating asshole by now. Oh, wait. Never mind.

Anyhow.

I have a reply or two in me tonight, and then the rest for tomorrow.

Wayne, we're in complete agreement. That's leaves me with little else to say. I don't trust the spiritual framing because I don't like the word "spiritual." Justin and I had an exchange, earlier, which I think helped me understand his use of god/religious terminology. In the end, it just doesn't work for me. I like the fiery Anabaptist thing. Just without all the mysticism.

Jack Crow said...

Justin,

There's a lot here. Almost too much to encapsulate in a single reply. I'm condensing, so please forgive me in advance. I'm not offering an either/or. I'm not suggesting either pacifism or only violence. I just don't trust pacifists. They're dolts. A pacifist cannot be relied upon because he or she is moral purist. I know that places me closer to our mutual opponents than to the camp of the angels, but I fucking hate angels. I don't trust the ethical posturing of spiritually self-involved superiors.

Which isn't commentary on you. This isn't a sideswipe. It's a personal dislike with a type I've met over the years. I don't believe that describes you, and my reply (again) is not personally directed.

I see pacifists the way I see vegans and PETA assholes: prolonged adolescent sons and daughters of privilege who take moral postures out of a sense of superiority, personal spiritual hygiene and bootstrapper bourgeois idealism. You cannot count on them when the ruling class strikes back because they're more concerned with their salvation and purified identities than they are with suffering...

Jack Crow said...

...I was once tempted by the walk[ing] away from Omelas," as well. It was, for years, my default but interim position, because I didn't know how to reconcile my own history with the violence all around me.

I just don't think pacifism or withdrawal actually work in the light of the facts of our actual existence. Oceanic collapse and pollution won't be stopped by going off grid. And the people we need on our side cannot afford to punch middle class tickets or hand them in for a prolonged walkabout or vacation.

They're trapped.

Fuck it. It's not even a "they" thing. I'm part of that We, now. Tonight we split two sweet potatoes, because I could save a dollar ten by not buying all four. The one vacation we've ever taken, in the almost two decades we've been a family only happened because my wife's employer (an obstetrician) let us use her vacation condo for free.

We cannot opt out or walk away. Our kids will starve right up until the point where the State of NH takes them away from us.

Pacifists and other purists have no answer for that. People who think we can opt out as enlightened individuals and bootstrap an alternative have no gods-be-damned answer for that.

And my family at least still gets to eat every day because my wife still has marketable labor. No one will hire me, after five years of unemployment, and no prospective employer has yet proven willing to take me at my word that I have, in fact, been a homemaker for the last five years. We make it to our next tomorrow because my wife does a job that's slowly eating away at her kindness and capacity for forgiveness. I'm paying for serious and debilitating dental and medical expenses "out of pocket," because I used up my entire "benefit" before the fifth month of this year had ended. I'm in hock for the first time in my life, and to G fucking E financing, because if I can manage to scrape up two hundred dollars every two weeks, I might be able to pay them back before the punitive interest kicks in.

And this wasn't to buy a new teevee or a whole foods lifestyle of arrogant veganism. This was to prevent a really severe infection in my jaw from spreading into all those oral blood vessels and killing me.

What does some privileged shit opting out to hand craft himself a life of boutique moral superiority do for me?

What does it do for the billions of people who have it worse than my wife, kids and me? Because, hell, I still have this six year old computer and electricity.

How does people opting out in ones, two and threes stop oceanic dumping? How does it shut down nuclear power plants? How does it prevent Barack fucking Obama from sending his air legion of sky death robots to blast Libyan children into blood, dust and bone bits?

That's my problem with pacifism and "opting out." It's a new monasticism for the second and third sons of privilege. It's a function of our monetized aristocracy.

Just like those fucking no good dopers who got trippy on Daddy's blood money, forty years ago, while the poor kids died in Southeast Asia, their tombstones the purchase price to guarantee Sonny's stock portfolio and inheritance.

Anyway.

I'm not suggesting, "violence alone." I'm stating as plainly as possible that when push comes to shove, the pacifists and boutique moralists are on the same side as the lawyers, guns and money. They're just less honest about it.

The stock broker knows it's lies and predation which buy him his four weeks in the Keys.

But the fool who thinks that monastic retreat will become a tide of moral renewal and non-cooperation can only do so because he willfully refuses to see the direct relationship between his extended vacation and the suffering of those whose labor actually pays for it...

Justin said...

Well, all I can say is that its not about being able to retreat or go off the grid. I don't consider my planned and current course of action to be some platonic ideal to strive for, its about at the limit that I personally do given my current life situation, made possible in large part by the woman I am with. If I did not have her, though, I would be trying something else.

I also do not consider what I am doing going off the grid, nor would I say that is what anyone should strive for generally.

My point is that whatever the ultimate outcome you believe will come of our present circumstances, there is SOMETHING you can do to prepare yourself for that, or for what you think you will have to do when that day comes. From what it sounds like you have said, you have done that in part by raising intelligent children who are able to make sense of things are on their own terms, who are not awed or blinded by authority. My particular set of choices is not what I am saying you should do, so I hope that is not what came across.

My main argument is that for any of us, we can do more to prepare ourselves to take whatever it is that we think we are going to have to do when the system either falls apart under its own weight, or must be dismantled less it self destruct us all.

Living off the grid is not preparing for the problems we face, it is avoiding them. I am not trying to get off the grid, I am trying to stop contributing to imperialism and industrialized dependence as best I can given my present circumstances. I am somewhat surprised at how far I can go, but I have no intent on just walking away. My intention is to figure out how to get by with less and still be happy. Part of that is defining what makes me happy, and part of that is figuring out how to get by without industrial dependence. As someone pointed out, I am not taking the perfect path. I am still under the domain of a corrupt government, but at least it is not one that is bombing and occupying other people. And once I get situated there, then I will hopefully get to a point where I can take my next step, and so on.

The comment above about rejecting violence, even if you have to use it to defend yourself when the drones are in the air, is very much in agreement with what I am saying. I am learning how to fight with my hands, how to have a chance at disarming someone with a weapon, and eventually how to use various types of weapons. Not because I think those are legitimate, because other people still think they are, and its a possibility that they will try to use them against me within my lifetime should the system collapse sooner than later.

However, I am also trying to learn how to exist without this system in an arrangement with others based on equality and cooperation.

I don't think its important that I get all the way to my destination, the important thing is to get as close as possible. And, provided people here accept the premise of systemic collapse or unsustainability, there is no doubt that all of us could do more to prepare for whatever we imagine that will entail for us personally. its just a matter of hobbies and interests to support that, or of what we teach our children and so on. Walking away is really not the solution for everyone, there is no solution for everyone. But what everyone can do is get a little closer to being prepared for the worst or best of what they expect could happen when the ship goes under. And no one can figure that out except for each person individually, because only they know their circumstances best.

Justin said...

I should add, humbly, that when you say you have tried walking away, and all that, I recognize something in what you say in my own life. I don't delude myself in thinking that I have the ultimate answer, just that I am keeping moving toward something rather than relaxing into resignation. In that sense, you are farther along than I am, I am much younger than you in this sense. So, if I read as arrogant, please know that is not how I feel. I am trying something that you have already tried, in my own way. Knowing that you have found the approach wanting, or doomed to personal destruction, does not dissuade me from trying it in my own way, but I recognize that I am not the first, nor the last to go a different route, nor will I be the first or last to find failures and successes in my own way. Just wanted to throw that out there, in this sense, I have more to learn from you than you from me, and you should know that I understand that.

Michael- said...

thinking about what to do: Former CIA op suggests open source P2P revolution

Justin said...

Jack, respectfully, my longer form response
http://conepost.blogspot.com/2011/06/man-and-god.html

I guess my answer to you is that we may not shut down things in our personal actions, of course we won't, all we can do is provide drag, slow them down, or figure out new things that work. We may try and fail, probably will. The only way to do any of those things is to steel ourselves for unavoidable failures. The only way to do that, is to begin mitigating the risks of failure and preparing to accept the costs of failure, by bettering our persons, making us more autonomous and better suited for adaptation. That is generalized, because each individual is responsible for figuring those questions out on their own given their own personal context.

That's just my thought. I figure no matter who you are, you can do this. If you are just a shitty musician, become a shitty something else along with that, and keep moving along until you no longer are constrained by being a shitty musician. Even if its just becoming a shitty plumber or something along those lines. I don't think the way out of our industrial mess is to just renounce all of the tools currently available to us, but to use them as a way out. For instance, if you want to know how to make water potable, you probably are going to have fire, learn some things about filtering. If you first have to use things like lighters and other stuff, no big deal. You can later figure out how to make fire without a lighter, and so on. It doesn't mean every glass of water you ever drink has to be made potable by your hand, in a process of filtering water and rubbing sticks together to create a fire to boil it, or else you won't have time to acquire other bits of knowledge and adaptability. - What you are really studying is how to become adaptable, how to not just have a few tools that have to be tailored for a specific task, but to become adaptable, to exist outside of the system's context and rejecting the false choices of gas lit and provided heat or cold. To have a general comfort level outside of the system is the only way to begin dismantling it.

Fixating on the larger picture, and specifically our what appears to be meaningless contribution to it, is preventing us from preparing for what that larger picture is telling us. Instead of fretting over how to maximize our impact, or whether it will be felt, we should focus on whatever our impact is. i.e. asking what can I do that will matter as opposed to what are you doing right now that already matters.

Like all my ideas, it could just be totally unworkable bullshit.

Jack Crow said...

Eyes are bad today. Will get to the rest as soon as I'm not seeing spots.

Unknown said...

It's talking and arguing amongst ourselves, in echo chambers, which makes this shit so unappealing. We aren't developing a general set of comprehensible terms for wider use in a dispersed population of overlapping communities. Because herding Lefties is like herding cats..too many ways to swing when you are left of the center. Take for example, the protests..the left allows all comers..including the extreme leftwing nutters that believe all sorts of conspiracy theories. That takes away from our message on most occasions. But what is the alternative?

The Rightwingers walk in lockstep..that is why they are so good at what they do.

And if any of the 23 comments above me says roughly the same thing..sorry but I don't have time to read them all. This is a great discussion however..good blog dude!

Anonymous said...

If I had Lyme Disease and was almost a foot shorter than my peers, I'd have become an overcompensating asshole by now.

Foo-kachte! You are Alan Dershowitz?

(Derescewicz)

***********************

Justin and Jack both have excellent points.

As a strategic analyst (my stock-in-trade) I say Jack's correct in suggesting only violent threat, actual use of violent power, will unseat those who hold power with violence.

It's like those fuckstick "economics" wonk-wankers argue: if you're talking about social justice in America, it's got to be clothed in an "economic analysis" of the type that Koksukker Krugman and Fellator Friedman utter from their exalted chambers of Political Puffery.

That's why things stay mired: triangulation is distinctly American; direct action is decidedly UNamerican.

Personally I find the wiser course to jump ship and leave America to the looters. I'd rather watch the Civil War from afar. I have no vested interest in reclaiming America. I think the place sucks rotten eggs. The only worse place on the planet is Israel.