From FireDogLake:
"The nearly two week occupation of a New York park near Wall Street known as Occupy Wall Street, initially undertaken by a few, has grown into a significant mobilization of people."
(emphasis mine)
Stupid word, mobilization.
Armies mobilize. Armies are mobilized. Industries mobilize workers. It's a hierarchy thing. Boss wants bodies moved. Bodies do what they're told. Mobilization takes orders.
People, especially free ones, gather.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Sep 30, 2011
US Assassinates Own Citizen
And?
How is this different from any other day?
How many drug offenders died in prison yesterday?
How manypersons defined as claimed subjects and property of the state citizens died of exposure, untreated illness, hunger or police violence, following upon the direct consequences of state policy, yesterday?
How many will die today?
Yes, muscular squirrels are pleased by the specific killing of a thing.
Yes, Barack fucking Pendragon Obama arrogated a newly un-enumerated power to command his spokesperson to hold a press conference to better brag about the premeditated killing of things.
But, in case we're unclear on American history, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. States have claimed the power to dispense with the lives of their subject-property for as long as there have been states. Some of them pretty up the process with rituals of surrender and sanctification. Some execute their power to kill on the installment plan, taking twenty or forty years to do what a hangman's noose would do in five minutes.
States kill. It's what they do.
Notice all the men in uniforms with state issued weapons?
They are not for show...
How is this different from any other day?
How many drug offenders died in prison yesterday?
How many
How many will die today?
Yes, muscular squirrels are pleased by the specific killing of a thing.
Yes, Barack fucking Pendragon Obama arrogated a newly un-enumerated power to command his spokesperson to hold a press conference to better brag about the premeditated killing of things.
But, in case we're unclear on American history, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. States have claimed the power to dispense with the lives of their subject-property for as long as there have been states. Some of them pretty up the process with rituals of surrender and sanctification. Some execute their power to kill on the installment plan, taking twenty or forty years to do what a hangman's noose would do in five minutes.
States kill. It's what they do.
Notice all the men in uniforms with state issued weapons?
They are not for show...
Sep 29, 2011
Cornucopia; Thank You
More, not less.
***
To respond to the conditions created by the inequality of wealth, of distribution, and the application of power with a call to asceticism is to provide the wealthy with a weapon against the poor and those with declining fortunes. The wealthy need fewer weapons, not more. Taking what they have, with an eye to not getting caught up in their systems of justice: a good start.
Their wealthy is complexified. It takes forms which defy the needs of their victims, and their throwaway surplus populations. You can't eat a yacht. We can't shelter beneath an iPod. You cannot dress yourself in game code.
Complexity and diversity aren't problems which can be solved. They are conditions, and comparisons. A puzzle, or a society, or a distribution system, is not complex in and of itself. It is more or less complex, by comparison to other systems.
A system created by people - be it social, or mechanical or digital, however limited or expansive - is a tool. Some tools are techniques. Some tools are objects. A justice system is a tool, often encompassing both objects and learned skills. A set of social mores is a set of tools and techniques.
A complex system will likely have a larger number of tools and techniques, some interlocking, some in conflict. A simple system may have a number of tools and techniques, but fail to arrive at comparative complexity because those tools are used according to methods and cross purposes which contribute to frictions and the wasting of energy. The system does not complexify because its energy is captured in its own decay. (There's a lesson in that.) Some systems remain simple because simple works. Until it doesn't.
There are also techniques which generate friction and disruption in order to police behaviors and govern responses to behaviors in others. As a way of preserving the benefits which accrue to the operators of large, complex systems. Think: masculinity, homophobia, "rugged individualism," drug interdiction, racial and economic isolation. Think: faggot, bitch, cunt, whore, nigger, gook, spic, wetback, kike and retard. Think: the effort and time which goes into cultivating people who must defend masculinity, homophobia, "self-reliance," using their own colonized and compromised minds and bodies as tools against others.
Let's consider: many of these techniques are learned young, from people who learned them young; it doesn't have to be planned. People devote considerable time and effort into reduplicating themselves in their children, without a master plan. Still, these are tools and techniques. And they serve the masters of a complex system which not only tolerates the disruptive friction of social war and conflict, but encourages and rewards it. Men are elected to office on platforms of bigotry, while glamoring crowds with "rugged masculinity." Companies market to identities, and sub-demographics -
A man buys a gun because an Other moved in next door. Maybe he buys it because he cannot make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compestela, and likes the feel of a holy relic in his hands. Or, his fears take hold of a commodity. He buys a piece of death itself.
A teen aged girl exchanges a plastic permission slip for some slip-on fucky.
A child is caged because he acts out, and becomes a feast of profit for peddlers of drugs, and peddlers of therapy.
Withdrawing into the identities which serve the maintenance of the system is not unlike advocating asceticism and puritanism in the face of inequity. It has a preservative function. It keeps the oppression fresh, by validating the forms and norms repression and oppression create. Identity re-directs and captures the energy and effort which, when used against the system, might degrade its functioning.
Identity, like poverty, constrains. It is a straight jacket. A prison cell. A gangland turf which, undefended, becomes subject to the need for a stout defense. Personality is given over to safeguarding identity; it is weaponized - until the identity subsumes the personality, and the experience of the world from a unique vantage is lost to the conformity of the identity. It becomes unbearable to tolerate "appropriation"; the personality embraces the poverty, demanding replication in others who share the markers of the identity created by tensions, frictions and oppressions. It reduces itself.
This reduction has an effect, even when lacking purpose.
The system generates new perpetrators: those who enforce the oppressions, and those who enforce the identities which capture personae in the struggle against oppression. Persons become levers. They become tools.
To demand asceticism (which is usually also disguised as "simplicity") - of persona or conduct - is to command others (or self) to whittle personality down into a sharp object or a blunt instrument. It is an insistence on an evangelical submission to a persistent affliction: the single personality disorder. The experience of the world becomes instead the experience of a self which submits to the constraints* of an identity that rejects complexity and diversity in order to preserve that same experience of a single personality self from the frictions, contradictions, conflicts and horrors of a less than fully human existence.
The fully human existence is not an absolute. It is not universal. For the sake of brevity, but not simplicity, the fully human existence can be understood as "how the wealthy live." In a society without concentration of wealth or authority, it would probably be something else. Something truly "new upon the earth."
It might even be a cornucopia. But, to fashion that un-system of flourishing selves and unconstrained existence, it might do well to remember what asceticism and defended identity accomplish.
Let's just say the advocates of each do not understand "truth in advertising." There's no blame to them. Look who made them. And who made them. And so on.
All the same, isn't it worth a try?
Can you imagine the sort of people produced by this kind of society?
Can you fathom the person who takes shape under those conditions?
A wonder, I think. A wonder for the ages. And not one built of lies, suffering and slave carried stone...
***
Perhaps there is no more insidious phrase than "Thank you."
"Thank you" is an enforcement. It is a recognition of inequity, and a submission to it. Gratitude requires the grateful to participate in their inequity, and by doing so, to validate it.
A clue as to why it's so damned important to force children to say it all the time?
There's no good reason to be thankful for the demonstration of inequity. Unless you have a vested interest in rituals of submission.
What of gifts, and courtesy between lovers and friends, you ask?
What is freely given can be freely received, no?
What purpose does the ritual of submission serve between free and freely equal persons?
Well, is it really always about submission?
Of course not. And sometimes the word "cunt" isn't used to humiliate...
* - which are often also manufactured
***
To respond to the conditions created by the inequality of wealth, of distribution, and the application of power with a call to asceticism is to provide the wealthy with a weapon against the poor and those with declining fortunes. The wealthy need fewer weapons, not more. Taking what they have, with an eye to not getting caught up in their systems of justice: a good start.
Their wealthy is complexified. It takes forms which defy the needs of their victims, and their throwaway surplus populations. You can't eat a yacht. We can't shelter beneath an iPod. You cannot dress yourself in game code.
Complexity and diversity aren't problems which can be solved. They are conditions, and comparisons. A puzzle, or a society, or a distribution system, is not complex in and of itself. It is more or less complex, by comparison to other systems.
A system created by people - be it social, or mechanical or digital, however limited or expansive - is a tool. Some tools are techniques. Some tools are objects. A justice system is a tool, often encompassing both objects and learned skills. A set of social mores is a set of tools and techniques.
A complex system will likely have a larger number of tools and techniques, some interlocking, some in conflict. A simple system may have a number of tools and techniques, but fail to arrive at comparative complexity because those tools are used according to methods and cross purposes which contribute to frictions and the wasting of energy. The system does not complexify because its energy is captured in its own decay. (There's a lesson in that.) Some systems remain simple because simple works. Until it doesn't.
There are also techniques which generate friction and disruption in order to police behaviors and govern responses to behaviors in others. As a way of preserving the benefits which accrue to the operators of large, complex systems. Think: masculinity, homophobia, "rugged individualism," drug interdiction, racial and economic isolation. Think: faggot, bitch, cunt, whore, nigger, gook, spic, wetback, kike and retard. Think: the effort and time which goes into cultivating people who must defend masculinity, homophobia, "self-reliance," using their own colonized and compromised minds and bodies as tools against others.
Let's consider: many of these techniques are learned young, from people who learned them young; it doesn't have to be planned. People devote considerable time and effort into reduplicating themselves in their children, without a master plan. Still, these are tools and techniques. And they serve the masters of a complex system which not only tolerates the disruptive friction of social war and conflict, but encourages and rewards it. Men are elected to office on platforms of bigotry, while glamoring crowds with "rugged masculinity." Companies market to identities, and sub-demographics -
A man buys a gun because an Other moved in next door. Maybe he buys it because he cannot make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compestela, and likes the feel of a holy relic in his hands. Or, his fears take hold of a commodity. He buys a piece of death itself.
A teen aged girl exchanges a plastic permission slip for some slip-on fucky.
A child is caged because he acts out, and becomes a feast of profit for peddlers of drugs, and peddlers of therapy.
Withdrawing into the identities which serve the maintenance of the system is not unlike advocating asceticism and puritanism in the face of inequity. It has a preservative function. It keeps the oppression fresh, by validating the forms and norms repression and oppression create. Identity re-directs and captures the energy and effort which, when used against the system, might degrade its functioning.
Identity, like poverty, constrains. It is a straight jacket. A prison cell. A gangland turf which, undefended, becomes subject to the need for a stout defense. Personality is given over to safeguarding identity; it is weaponized - until the identity subsumes the personality, and the experience of the world from a unique vantage is lost to the conformity of the identity. It becomes unbearable to tolerate "appropriation"; the personality embraces the poverty, demanding replication in others who share the markers of the identity created by tensions, frictions and oppressions. It reduces itself.
This reduction has an effect, even when lacking purpose.
The system generates new perpetrators: those who enforce the oppressions, and those who enforce the identities which capture personae in the struggle against oppression. Persons become levers. They become tools.
To demand asceticism (which is usually also disguised as "simplicity") - of persona or conduct - is to command others (or self) to whittle personality down into a sharp object or a blunt instrument. It is an insistence on an evangelical submission to a persistent affliction: the single personality disorder. The experience of the world becomes instead the experience of a self which submits to the constraints* of an identity that rejects complexity and diversity in order to preserve that same experience of a single personality self from the frictions, contradictions, conflicts and horrors of a less than fully human existence.
The fully human existence is not an absolute. It is not universal. For the sake of brevity, but not simplicity, the fully human existence can be understood as "how the wealthy live." In a society without concentration of wealth or authority, it would probably be something else. Something truly "new upon the earth."
It might even be a cornucopia. But, to fashion that un-system of flourishing selves and unconstrained existence, it might do well to remember what asceticism and defended identity accomplish.
Let's just say the advocates of each do not understand "truth in advertising." There's no blame to them. Look who made them. And who made them. And so on.
All the same, isn't it worth a try?
Can you imagine the sort of people produced by this kind of society?
Can you fathom the person who takes shape under those conditions?
A wonder, I think. A wonder for the ages. And not one built of lies, suffering and slave carried stone...
***
Perhaps there is no more insidious phrase than "Thank you."
"Thank you" is an enforcement. It is a recognition of inequity, and a submission to it. Gratitude requires the grateful to participate in their inequity, and by doing so, to validate it.
A clue as to why it's so damned important to force children to say it all the time?
There's no good reason to be thankful for the demonstration of inequity. Unless you have a vested interest in rituals of submission.
What of gifts, and courtesy between lovers and friends, you ask?
What is freely given can be freely received, no?
What purpose does the ritual of submission serve between free and freely equal persons?
Well, is it really always about submission?
Of course not. And sometimes the word "cunt" isn't used to humiliate...
* - which are often also manufactured
Sep 26, 2011
Advice For Children, Unsolicited
Do not trust knowingly decent people. It isn't their native temperament. They want more than simple kindness, or good faith. They want security, the promise of reward, or to pretend that they can have them, and that eventually means: the cops. A person who cultivates good manners wants something. He wants it from you, and doesn't have enough respect or regard for you to just come out and ask you for it.* He doesn't even have the honesty of the thief, or the mugger.
Actively suspect the man or woman who demands decency of others. Suspicion is a healthy reply - perhaps the only one - to the insistence on polite discourse and the manners of civilized company. It's an extraction: show good breeding, and we won't treat you like barbarians. The school mistress and the proctor are working for the boss. Always. Don't take my word on it. Look at the signature on their checks.
Hate - and with every possible flavor of that word - the preachers of good manners and polite discourse. They would have the world be what it is not, in favor of a world that never was. Also, they want to kill you. Or have you be an animated corpse. The world doesn't behave. Look out the window. The cloud doesn't obey a law of fluid dynamics. It is dynamic. The law at best describes what is no more. People are more and less complex than the interplay of water vapor and air currents. A person who insists on decency, who preaches politeness, wants the stone of suffering to hit the waters of memory and leave no ripple, no wake and not even the sound of its drop.
Laugh at the boldly indecent. Or with them. It doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't. The jester can toss a bauble, or slip poison into the drink. Especially when she's faking it...
* - Gracian would disagree. Or maybe it's that he agrees with me. Gracian instructs, like Machiavelli. You can read Machiavelli in order to raise a prince. Or bring him down.
(Thanks to Al Schumann for the window to the muse's fountain...)
Actively suspect the man or woman who demands decency of others. Suspicion is a healthy reply - perhaps the only one - to the insistence on polite discourse and the manners of civilized company. It's an extraction: show good breeding, and we won't treat you like barbarians. The school mistress and the proctor are working for the boss. Always. Don't take my word on it. Look at the signature on their checks.
Hate - and with every possible flavor of that word - the preachers of good manners and polite discourse. They would have the world be what it is not, in favor of a world that never was. Also, they want to kill you. Or have you be an animated corpse. The world doesn't behave. Look out the window. The cloud doesn't obey a law of fluid dynamics. It is dynamic. The law at best describes what is no more. People are more and less complex than the interplay of water vapor and air currents. A person who insists on decency, who preaches politeness, wants the stone of suffering to hit the waters of memory and leave no ripple, no wake and not even the sound of its drop.
Laugh at the boldly indecent. Or with them. It doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't. The jester can toss a bauble, or slip poison into the drink. Especially when she's faking it...
* - Gracian would disagree. Or maybe it's that he agrees with me. Gracian instructs, like Machiavelli. You can read Machiavelli in order to raise a prince. Or bring him down.
(Thanks to Al Schumann for the window to the muse's fountain...)
Sep 23, 2011
Amem, or...er, ahem...
I was going to attempt to Fisk this from Bill Clinton:
"Former President Bill Clinton weighed in on capital punishment on Thursday, saying courts need to slow down appeals processes to consider DNA evidence that could potentially prove a defendant is innocent.
Clinton's comments came less than 24 hours after the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man convicted of shooting an off-duty police officer. Davis' case sparked protests around the world from supporters who believed he was innocent, due to a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven witnesses recanting their original testimony.
'In any case where there's any chance that any DNA evidence could change the outcome of the trial -- I think that -- this is just me now -- I think that the appeals process has to be slowed down and organized so that any evidence of innocence can always be presented and then acted upon,' said Clinton..."
But, I realized this does it better:
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
"Former President Bill Clinton weighed in on capital punishment on Thursday, saying courts need to slow down appeals processes to consider DNA evidence that could potentially prove a defendant is innocent.
Clinton's comments came less than 24 hours after the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man convicted of shooting an off-duty police officer. Davis' case sparked protests around the world from supporters who believed he was innocent, due to a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven witnesses recanting their original testimony.
'In any case where there's any chance that any DNA evidence could change the outcome of the trial -- I think that -- this is just me now -- I think that the appeals process has to be slowed down and organized so that any evidence of innocence can always be presented and then acted upon,' said Clinton..."
But, I realized this does it better:
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996
Sep 22, 2011
Counter Messaging
"Organised with Verso Books, eight leading thinkers will be discussing 'Communism, A New Beginning? at Cooper Union on the weekend of October 14th-16th.
Entry will be by ticket only. Tickets will be $20 and will be on sale via this site at the end of this week—please check back. There will be a limited number available."
(emphasis mine)
Source.
Heh.
Entry will be by ticket only. Tickets will be $20 and will be on sale via this site at the end of this week—please check back. There will be a limited number available."
(emphasis mine)
Source.
Heh.
Sep 21, 2011
Sep 20, 2011
Blood Debts and Death Magic
If all goes as planned for the government of the State of Georgia, on Wednesday, September 21, at approximately 7pm (tomorrow, from the writing of this post), Troy Davis will be poisoned until he is dead.
Should this occur, he will pay a blood debt to no one, upon the completion of an act of death magic which has no effect but the production of a corpse.
People who consider themselves human will applaud this exercise of power, no small number of them braying (and believing) that the poisoning to death of Troy Davis will by an explicit act of death and blood magic restore society to a greater good.
Troy Davis, like Cameron Willingham, will be poisoned until he is dead in the name of a life he very likely did not end. Even if he was the taker of that life, poisoning him to death will not now or ever restore it. Society will not now or ever be improved by the act, because the past can never be recovered.
No act of vengeance, punishment or judicial magic can change the past. At best, it can pretend to satiate the need to see another suffer.
Vengeance* is human, in so much as shitting and eating are human.
But, coupling vengeance with power or with the stupid belief in a propitiating sacrifice is not unlike shitting in one's own mouth and swallowing it. Because, and this is a rather simple concept to grasp, blood does not pay debts. Where one corpse or wounded body was, now there are two. Or more:
The death penalty is human sacrifice.
It’s the persistence of blood magic, the ancient and nearly perennial belief that the spilling of blood expiates crime.
To believe that poisoning a man to death will compensate for his deeds is magical thinking – that the past can be redeemed or altered, and that epiphenomena can be animated, by the doing of current deeds.
The death penalty is human sacrifice.
At the risk of reading as a broken record, it’s an attempt at blood expiation, at rewriting the unalterable past by way of present actions, at “righting the order of the world.” Perhaps the gods aren’t invoked as often, but the same “balance restoring” logic is still employed: if the Gods/State/Society aren't expiated with a blood offering, more bad people will [insert unexplained magical mechanism] arise.
People who believe that the social order depends upon this sacred or mystical balance, and also believe in the human sacrifice** that is the death penalty will go to great political lengths to preserve that order.
A believer in the death and blood magic of the "ulimate penalty" has to ignore the disconnect between the arguments about functionality, process or legal merit and the ineluctable fact that the executed person’s death does not and cannot alter the past. Human sacrifice might feel good (that’s the emotional point of vengeance and its lawyerly cousin, punishment – to feel good about hurting someone with the sanction of peers, to get away with violence against those who “deserve” it). It might allow the beneficiary of that violence, or the one committing it, to feel as if order is restored. But it doesn’t erase the actions which allegedly merit punishment. Because we cannot alter the past.
No debt is paid. No balance is restored. No past acts are eliminated or erased. It’s just another de-animated corpse where a person once was. Because, while the magical thinking is real, the magic itself is not.
* - which is no commentary on whether or not some people ought to die; I see little reason to suffer a rapist to live, though I have no faith that punishing him achieves anything but his death.
** - incarcerating a twenty year old for ten years, or the rest of her life, because she turned plants into narcotics is also human sacrifice; it's just on the installment plan.
Should this occur, he will pay a blood debt to no one, upon the completion of an act of death magic which has no effect but the production of a corpse.
People who consider themselves human will applaud this exercise of power, no small number of them braying (and believing) that the poisoning to death of Troy Davis will by an explicit act of death and blood magic restore society to a greater good.
Troy Davis, like Cameron Willingham, will be poisoned until he is dead in the name of a life he very likely did not end. Even if he was the taker of that life, poisoning him to death will not now or ever restore it. Society will not now or ever be improved by the act, because the past can never be recovered.
No act of vengeance, punishment or judicial magic can change the past. At best, it can pretend to satiate the need to see another suffer.
Vengeance* is human, in so much as shitting and eating are human.
But, coupling vengeance with power or with the stupid belief in a propitiating sacrifice is not unlike shitting in one's own mouth and swallowing it. Because, and this is a rather simple concept to grasp, blood does not pay debts. Where one corpse or wounded body was, now there are two. Or more:
The death penalty is human sacrifice.
It’s the persistence of blood magic, the ancient and nearly perennial belief that the spilling of blood expiates crime.
To believe that poisoning a man to death will compensate for his deeds is magical thinking – that the past can be redeemed or altered, and that epiphenomena can be animated, by the doing of current deeds.
The death penalty is human sacrifice.
At the risk of reading as a broken record, it’s an attempt at blood expiation, at rewriting the unalterable past by way of present actions, at “righting the order of the world.” Perhaps the gods aren’t invoked as often, but the same “balance restoring” logic is still employed: if the Gods/State/Society aren't expiated with a blood offering, more bad people will [insert unexplained magical mechanism] arise.
People who believe that the social order depends upon this sacred or mystical balance, and also believe in the human sacrifice** that is the death penalty will go to great political lengths to preserve that order.
A believer in the death and blood magic of the "ulimate penalty" has to ignore the disconnect between the arguments about functionality, process or legal merit and the ineluctable fact that the executed person’s death does not and cannot alter the past. Human sacrifice might feel good (that’s the emotional point of vengeance and its lawyerly cousin, punishment – to feel good about hurting someone with the sanction of peers, to get away with violence against those who “deserve” it). It might allow the beneficiary of that violence, or the one committing it, to feel as if order is restored. But it doesn’t erase the actions which allegedly merit punishment. Because we cannot alter the past.
No debt is paid. No balance is restored. No past acts are eliminated or erased. It’s just another de-animated corpse where a person once was. Because, while the magical thinking is real, the magic itself is not.
* - which is no commentary on whether or not some people ought to die; I see little reason to suffer a rapist to live, though I have no faith that punishing him achieves anything but his death.
** - incarcerating a twenty year old for ten years, or the rest of her life, because she turned plants into narcotics is also human sacrifice; it's just on the installment plan.
Sep 19, 2011
One Word
An internet friend brought attention to this piece:
One Word Turns the Tea Party Around
For reasons which I hope are fairly plain to my 2.3 regular readers, I don't personally buy into one half of the argument, because I don't see any reason to separate the modern state from the modern corporation. They are not seamless, but the are nestled together pretty and neat.
Still, it cuts through the glibertarian bull shit fairly well, and that's something.
One Word Turns the Tea Party Around
For reasons which I hope are fairly plain to my 2.3 regular readers, I don't personally buy into one half of the argument, because I don't see any reason to separate the modern state from the modern corporation. They are not seamless, but the are nestled together pretty and neat.
Still, it cuts through the glibertarian bull shit fairly well, and that's something.
Sep 16, 2011
The Cat's Wail
Katzenjammer.
Four ridiculously talented women.
Enjoy:
("Ain't No Thang)
("Gybsy Flee")
("Shepherd and Princess")
("To The Sea")
("Mother Superior")
("Demon Kitty Rag")
("Hey Ho")
("A Bar In Amsterdam")
("Wading in Deeper")
("Virginia Clemm")
("Lady Marlene")
Four ridiculously talented women.
Enjoy:
("Ain't No Thang)
("Gybsy Flee")
("Shepherd and Princess")
("To The Sea")
("Mother Superior")
("Demon Kitty Rag")
("Hey Ho")
("A Bar In Amsterdam")
("Wading in Deeper")
("Virginia Clemm")
("Lady Marlene")
Just This
Some people should die. Like rapists. Or slavers. Or torturers. Also, Harvard and Yale graduates. And people who want the chief executive job at a PR firm, or to head up an army. Or run a country. You know, the demonstrably reprehensible sorts.
Which doesn't mean they ought to be killed. It's just that, if the universe were just and fair and actually coded to promote human happiness (which it is not, natch), those people would die. Or at the very least, suffer from debilitating vertigo and glossolalia. They could have every possible desire to rape, kill, enslave, govern, rule, torture and generally be the sort of dick who gets off doing all that shit. But they'd be too permanently dizzy and creepily off-putting to ever be able to pull it off.
And as a back-up, they'd also have to suffer from chronic, stinky, highly audible meteorism. At the least. At the very least.
It might not be a perfect cosmos - because: asteroids, and planet frying quasar pulses, and viruses, and stuff - but claims to categorically imperative justice would have merit. They don't, obviously. Because the universe is unjust. Or, more to the point, because "justice" is at once a conceptual imposition on a universe which is neither just, or unjust, and it is the bloody hand of power.
As in, criminal justice.
Which happens when shitclowns who like to tell other people what to do, and generally make living between the two poles of darkness a miserable affair, devote a portion of their ill gotten gains towards the enduring project of caging, poisoning, abusing, raping and otherwise dehumanizing people who break their rules. Sometimes the rule breakers are also shitclowns, as in the cases of rapists, child molesters, wife killers, slavers and fuckwits who get wasted and then operate motor vehicles.
When shitclowns punish fuckwits for being too obviously fuckwitted to put on a suit, get elected to office or appointed to position and then do miserable things to other people for a profit within the sanction of the law, nobody actually wins but the shitclowns in suits.
It's incidental, if you catch my meaning. The coppers aren't locking up the rapers because the President, or the governor, or the mayor has a personal loathing for rape. Maybe he does personally loathe rape. It doesn't really matter. The cops aren't locking up rapists because rape is one of the worst things you can do to someone short of killing her or him, or as is often the case, because rape is a violation of a person so devastating that it can and does prove to be worse than murder. The cops are locking up rapists because their bosses have to repeatedly demonstrate that their protection racket is a net benefit to their client populations.
Client populations, you get?
That doesn't necessarily mean you. Or any of us. It might, if you have the right certificates. Or breeding. Or daddy. Or it might not, if you have the wrong concentration of melanin per square inch, place of origin, or religion. Universal justice and equality before the law are chimeras. And not the poetic variety, which transform a futile gesture into a memorable adventure.
Nope.
Universal justice is a fool's dream. A deliberately cultivated one.
Don't believe me?
It's all good. Let's take a break. You get your hands on a civics, American history, law, ethics or philosophy textbook. We can wait while you flip through their pages.
Drinkers, now's the time to quaff another draught. Smokers, you dirty smelly fuckers, light another one. Ronpaulians, I believe this is your cue to break out the hookah, the pipe or the bowl. Smackers, shoot one on the house. I don't judge. Whatever gets you through the night, right?
Here's a song, for the rest of us, while we wait:
There we go.*
That was a nice break, no? If you haven't had the delight of an introduction to the music of Lhasa before, it was my honest pleasure to acquaint you.
But, I'm also an asshole, n'est-ce pas?
So, the textbooks...
You see all those paragraphs wherein the text repeats, over and fucking over again, that law and justice are universal, or at least ought to be? See where the fancy ones discuss isonomy and the dumbed down ones go on and about "rights and responsibilities"? Go on, take a moment. Note how often these planned and designed study guides mention democracy, human rights, equality before the law, one man one vote, et cetera. It's like a catechism, or a sales pitch, or a call to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, or some shit.
If you care to spare another minute or two, flip back and forth to all those sections which make mention of struggle for equality, democracy, rights, and universal human behavior. Even the whitewashed versions which get the imprimatur and the nihil obstat of the mandate schoolmarmers end up contradicting the claim to universality, don't they? I mean, if history is the record of people with power resisting giving it up or losing it - and it is, this royal history we're still learning in the age of Democracy™ - then you almost have to wonder why these same rulers insist on mandatory schools in which the opposite is also taught.
If they have to teach it, and if it takes them ten or twelve years to get children to believe it - it really isn't so universal, is it?. That shit is indoctrination. And a sales pitch. Like a Budweiser commercial for childhood expectations, where after ten years of relentless campaigning, the target demographic finally begins to associate coded terminology with a set of unrealizable assumptions about what it is the bosses and owners do with all their horded loot. Budweiser invests in getting twenty something fuckwits with jobs to associate a swilly alcoholic "beverage" with boobs and vomit-free, project-managed Ken-doll camaraderie. The text books aim a wee bit higher. Or lower. It's all a matter of perspective. They want the little ones who will become consuming big ones to believe that every one gets a fair shake.
Because - and I hope I don't have to point out how obvious this it - almost no one gets a fair shake. Let's be frank: almost the only people living fully human lives are also exactly the same people who can afford to earmark a share of their stolen treasure towards persuading everyone else, and especially the children, that the evidence available to them everywhere and free of charge by way of some really nifty senses - well, that it is false. Hell, they know it. And they know you know it. When the teevee phase shifts from a formulaic girl-as-prize "comedy" to a 30 second spot introduced by Starving African Child Music, the ad agencies for the lords of all creation are playing it up.
The point of the indoctrination, and the sales pitch, isn't to elide all sensory input and feedback. That's not possible. Sargon's first ever anointed priest had already figured that shit out, thousands of years before universal public education, ad campaigns and manufactured consent. Mother Church has already conceded the point, to the chagrin of Cathars and Bogomils. The host is a piece of bread. Or a stale cracker. The blood tastes like wine...because it is wine.
The investment in indoctrination doesn't pay back its investors by erasing the evidence of the senses, or by overcoming the thorny and nearly indestructible human capacity to observe events with relative capacity and then communicate those observations to others in a shared tongue. Its return - and this stock splits with predictable regularity - comes from defacing them.
Which is how we end up back at justice, perhaps one of the more lasting and damaging defacements of sense, and sensibility. Justice obscures, because it insists on a universality which cannot be demonstrated, and which must be believed, right at the intersection between real pain and loss and the application of power.
Justice is a false proof...
...with real consequences, as Duane Buck and Troy Davis may soon discover. (And as Cameron Willingham found out.) That is, right before someone poisons them to death in the name of that false proof.
And you know how we can tell rather quickly?
Because without some dude in a black robe, neither man would be isolated in near-solitary confinement, awaiting a poisoning to death. And without the intervention of a dude or two in black robes, neither man will escape that poisoning to death.
But Barack Obama, who has admitted in public to ordering the murders of people he has never met, will close out the year with a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and all the pretty people for his friends. Because dudes in black robes say it's okay for him to do so.
Maybe Messrs. Davis and Buck murdered other people. Perhaps they did not. The case against Mr. Davis is certainly far shakier than the one against Mr. Obama. Mr. Davis maintains his innocence and the cops and prosecutors who made the case against him are lying abusive bullies who intimidated witnesses, appear to have falsified evidence, and generally embody a perfected douchebaggery. Mr. Obama - also a perfectly embodied douchebag, and proudly so - signed a confession. In public. Without coercion. And to waves of applause.
One week from now, Troy Davis will likely be dead. Barack Obama will have raised another million or so dollars in his attempt to recapture the most powerful office on the planet.
Because there is no justice. Because the law does not apply to everyone equally. Because, in fact, the very ideas of justice and punishment are themselves colonizations of our memories, scripted and refined over the last five thousand years in order to get us to police ourselves in expectation of reward. Because the law doesn't exist, anywhere or when, without force or the threat of force.
Because, most significantly, while some people perhaps ought to suffer or die for their unending forays into pillage, depredation, rape and murder, the ones doing the bulk of the suffering and dying are their victims.
I don't know exactly how that can be changed so that everyone has it easy, and the number of people who want to boss up and make others suffers reaches an all time low.
But a good place to start, I imagine, is with a challenge to the indoctrinated belief in a universal and equalizing justice.
Actual existing justice is anything but...
...which is a bummer, in the short term. And for that reason, it's a damned good thing there was ever a Lhasa de Sela:
* - here's more evidence that "justice" is false: Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer last year, but - Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany...
Which doesn't mean they ought to be killed. It's just that, if the universe were just and fair and actually coded to promote human happiness (which it is not, natch), those people would die. Or at the very least, suffer from debilitating vertigo and glossolalia. They could have every possible desire to rape, kill, enslave, govern, rule, torture and generally be the sort of dick who gets off doing all that shit. But they'd be too permanently dizzy and creepily off-putting to ever be able to pull it off.
And as a back-up, they'd also have to suffer from chronic, stinky, highly audible meteorism. At the least. At the very least.
It might not be a perfect cosmos - because: asteroids, and planet frying quasar pulses, and viruses, and stuff - but claims to categorically imperative justice would have merit. They don't, obviously. Because the universe is unjust. Or, more to the point, because "justice" is at once a conceptual imposition on a universe which is neither just, or unjust, and it is the bloody hand of power.
As in, criminal justice.
Which happens when shitclowns who like to tell other people what to do, and generally make living between the two poles of darkness a miserable affair, devote a portion of their ill gotten gains towards the enduring project of caging, poisoning, abusing, raping and otherwise dehumanizing people who break their rules. Sometimes the rule breakers are also shitclowns, as in the cases of rapists, child molesters, wife killers, slavers and fuckwits who get wasted and then operate motor vehicles.
When shitclowns punish fuckwits for being too obviously fuckwitted to put on a suit, get elected to office or appointed to position and then do miserable things to other people for a profit within the sanction of the law, nobody actually wins but the shitclowns in suits.
It's incidental, if you catch my meaning. The coppers aren't locking up the rapers because the President, or the governor, or the mayor has a personal loathing for rape. Maybe he does personally loathe rape. It doesn't really matter. The cops aren't locking up rapists because rape is one of the worst things you can do to someone short of killing her or him, or as is often the case, because rape is a violation of a person so devastating that it can and does prove to be worse than murder. The cops are locking up rapists because their bosses have to repeatedly demonstrate that their protection racket is a net benefit to their client populations.
Client populations, you get?
That doesn't necessarily mean you. Or any of us. It might, if you have the right certificates. Or breeding. Or daddy. Or it might not, if you have the wrong concentration of melanin per square inch, place of origin, or religion. Universal justice and equality before the law are chimeras. And not the poetic variety, which transform a futile gesture into a memorable adventure.
Nope.
Universal justice is a fool's dream. A deliberately cultivated one.
Don't believe me?
It's all good. Let's take a break. You get your hands on a civics, American history, law, ethics or philosophy textbook. We can wait while you flip through their pages.
Drinkers, now's the time to quaff another draught. Smokers, you dirty smelly fuckers, light another one. Ronpaulians, I believe this is your cue to break out the hookah, the pipe or the bowl. Smackers, shoot one on the house. I don't judge. Whatever gets you through the night, right?
Here's a song, for the rest of us, while we wait:
There we go.*
That was a nice break, no? If you haven't had the delight of an introduction to the music of Lhasa before, it was my honest pleasure to acquaint you.
But, I'm also an asshole, n'est-ce pas?
So, the textbooks...
You see all those paragraphs wherein the text repeats, over and fucking over again, that law and justice are universal, or at least ought to be? See where the fancy ones discuss isonomy and the dumbed down ones go on and about "rights and responsibilities"? Go on, take a moment. Note how often these planned and designed study guides mention democracy, human rights, equality before the law, one man one vote, et cetera. It's like a catechism, or a sales pitch, or a call to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, or some shit.
If you care to spare another minute or two, flip back and forth to all those sections which make mention of struggle for equality, democracy, rights, and universal human behavior. Even the whitewashed versions which get the imprimatur and the nihil obstat of the mandate schoolmarmers end up contradicting the claim to universality, don't they? I mean, if history is the record of people with power resisting giving it up or losing it - and it is, this royal history we're still learning in the age of Democracy™ - then you almost have to wonder why these same rulers insist on mandatory schools in which the opposite is also taught.
If they have to teach it, and if it takes them ten or twelve years to get children to believe it - it really isn't so universal, is it?. That shit is indoctrination. And a sales pitch. Like a Budweiser commercial for childhood expectations, where after ten years of relentless campaigning, the target demographic finally begins to associate coded terminology with a set of unrealizable assumptions about what it is the bosses and owners do with all their horded loot. Budweiser invests in getting twenty something fuckwits with jobs to associate a swilly alcoholic "beverage" with boobs and vomit-free, project-managed Ken-doll camaraderie. The text books aim a wee bit higher. Or lower. It's all a matter of perspective. They want the little ones who will become consuming big ones to believe that every one gets a fair shake.
Because - and I hope I don't have to point out how obvious this it - almost no one gets a fair shake. Let's be frank: almost the only people living fully human lives are also exactly the same people who can afford to earmark a share of their stolen treasure towards persuading everyone else, and especially the children, that the evidence available to them everywhere and free of charge by way of some really nifty senses - well, that it is false. Hell, they know it. And they know you know it. When the teevee phase shifts from a formulaic girl-as-prize "comedy" to a 30 second spot introduced by Starving African Child Music, the ad agencies for the lords of all creation are playing it up.
The point of the indoctrination, and the sales pitch, isn't to elide all sensory input and feedback. That's not possible. Sargon's first ever anointed priest had already figured that shit out, thousands of years before universal public education, ad campaigns and manufactured consent. Mother Church has already conceded the point, to the chagrin of Cathars and Bogomils. The host is a piece of bread. Or a stale cracker. The blood tastes like wine...because it is wine.
The investment in indoctrination doesn't pay back its investors by erasing the evidence of the senses, or by overcoming the thorny and nearly indestructible human capacity to observe events with relative capacity and then communicate those observations to others in a shared tongue. Its return - and this stock splits with predictable regularity - comes from defacing them.
Which is how we end up back at justice, perhaps one of the more lasting and damaging defacements of sense, and sensibility. Justice obscures, because it insists on a universality which cannot be demonstrated, and which must be believed, right at the intersection between real pain and loss and the application of power.
Justice is a false proof...
...with real consequences, as Duane Buck and Troy Davis may soon discover. (And as Cameron Willingham found out.) That is, right before someone poisons them to death in the name of that false proof.
And you know how we can tell rather quickly?
Because without some dude in a black robe, neither man would be isolated in near-solitary confinement, awaiting a poisoning to death. And without the intervention of a dude or two in black robes, neither man will escape that poisoning to death.
But Barack Obama, who has admitted in public to ordering the murders of people he has never met, will close out the year with a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and all the pretty people for his friends. Because dudes in black robes say it's okay for him to do so.
Maybe Messrs. Davis and Buck murdered other people. Perhaps they did not. The case against Mr. Davis is certainly far shakier than the one against Mr. Obama. Mr. Davis maintains his innocence and the cops and prosecutors who made the case against him are lying abusive bullies who intimidated witnesses, appear to have falsified evidence, and generally embody a perfected douchebaggery. Mr. Obama - also a perfectly embodied douchebag, and proudly so - signed a confession. In public. Without coercion. And to waves of applause.
One week from now, Troy Davis will likely be dead. Barack Obama will have raised another million or so dollars in his attempt to recapture the most powerful office on the planet.
Because there is no justice. Because the law does not apply to everyone equally. Because, in fact, the very ideas of justice and punishment are themselves colonizations of our memories, scripted and refined over the last five thousand years in order to get us to police ourselves in expectation of reward. Because the law doesn't exist, anywhere or when, without force or the threat of force.
Because, most significantly, while some people perhaps ought to suffer or die for their unending forays into pillage, depredation, rape and murder, the ones doing the bulk of the suffering and dying are their victims.
I don't know exactly how that can be changed so that everyone has it easy, and the number of people who want to boss up and make others suffers reaches an all time low.
But a good place to start, I imagine, is with a challenge to the indoctrinated belief in a universal and equalizing justice.
Actual existing justice is anything but...
...which is a bummer, in the short term. And for that reason, it's a damned good thing there was ever a Lhasa de Sela:
* - here's more evidence that "justice" is false: Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer last year, but - Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany...
Sep 12, 2011
Spartacus
I don't normally write about television. Because it's television. I don't get criticizing shows for their lack of [insert your preferred demographic], or their failure to be properly [insert your preferred cause] because telly shows are produced to sell shit to people who cannot afford to buy that shit.
Some are well written. Some are not.
I started watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "just to laugh at [it] and stayed with because [I] couldn't stop watching" it. I thought it would be a poorly written, soft-porn train wreck.
It's not.
What it is is a surprisingly well produced, acted and even more than occasionally well written passion play. Perhaps most significantly, it is unrelenting in its portrayal of the upper classes of late Republican Rome - and by rather obvious imputation, the wealthy in general - as a venal, grasping nest of asps and climbing spiders. Spartacus is unforgiving in its depiction of the ruling and upper classes. Every choice made by a slave owner, magistrate, legate or equestrian merchant overlord results in surprisingly well sketched degradation of an immediate and identifiable gladiator, house slave or commoner. The connection between power and violence done to the lower classes and the slaves is drawn in stark imagery; and it is done to characters the show's producers have invested considerable talent in persuading the audience to embrace. No sexual act between the rulers and the ruled is ever treated as voluntary. No exchange or bargain offered by a Batiatus, Ilythia, Lucretia or Claudius to a slave is ever kept honestly, or honorably.
The message, written in blood and betrayal, is stark: the poor may be brutal, because they are brutalized, but the wealthy cannot ever be trusted.
That's refreshing, for English language television, especially here in the States, where we get a choice between Noble Cop, Noble Doctor, Noble White Teacher, the Noble Magic Negro or the Noble Spy Who Must Unfortunately Kill Brown People.
So, it's sort of sad (in a way I would not have expected) to learn that the star (Andy Whitfield) who gave the fictionalized Spartacus such compelling life has died from the cancer which forced him to leave the show.
Thirty-nine is too young for anyone.
In this one case, it's too young for a man who'd taken a "laughable" sexed up Starz original show and turned into in a story of pathos, revenge and even moments of high art.
Some are well written. Some are not.
I started watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand, "just to laugh at [it] and stayed with because [I] couldn't stop watching" it. I thought it would be a poorly written, soft-porn train wreck.
It's not.
What it is is a surprisingly well produced, acted and even more than occasionally well written passion play. Perhaps most significantly, it is unrelenting in its portrayal of the upper classes of late Republican Rome - and by rather obvious imputation, the wealthy in general - as a venal, grasping nest of asps and climbing spiders. Spartacus is unforgiving in its depiction of the ruling and upper classes. Every choice made by a slave owner, magistrate, legate or equestrian merchant overlord results in surprisingly well sketched degradation of an immediate and identifiable gladiator, house slave or commoner. The connection between power and violence done to the lower classes and the slaves is drawn in stark imagery; and it is done to characters the show's producers have invested considerable talent in persuading the audience to embrace. No sexual act between the rulers and the ruled is ever treated as voluntary. No exchange or bargain offered by a Batiatus, Ilythia, Lucretia or Claudius to a slave is ever kept honestly, or honorably.
The message, written in blood and betrayal, is stark: the poor may be brutal, because they are brutalized, but the wealthy cannot ever be trusted.
That's refreshing, for English language television, especially here in the States, where we get a choice between Noble Cop, Noble Doctor, Noble White Teacher, the Noble Magic Negro or the Noble Spy Who Must Unfortunately Kill Brown People.
So, it's sort of sad (in a way I would not have expected) to learn that the star (Andy Whitfield) who gave the fictionalized Spartacus such compelling life has died from the cancer which forced him to leave the show.
Thirty-nine is too young for anyone.
In this one case, it's too young for a man who'd taken a "laughable" sexed up Starz original show and turned into in a story of pathos, revenge and even moments of high art.
Sep 11, 2011
Commemoration
...on the day in question, I was a member of the New England Confederation. Three days later, we no longer existed as an active organization. No one thought our non-violence manifesto - the Lowell Declaration - would protect us against the assumed coming dragnet. Non-violence didn't protect New York cabbies, or anti-war grannies. It didn't take a genius to foresee how the federal State would use the toppled towers to get itself some more "sweeping powers." So we rolled up shop, in spite of growing interest in our aims (the secession of the six New England States), especially in New Hampshire, Vermont, Western Massachusetts, Adirondack New York and Maine. Since then, the rump of the NEC has been given a half undeath by glibertarians and free-staters, but the original NEC had a strong leftist contingent, to which tendency I was drawn, in spite of just wrapping up my last major Republican campaign.
It would be untrue to say that I miss the NEC. We really didn't have the cache, organization, popular support or loot necessary to make real our secessionist fantasies. But, we were always getting inquiries. Even from Massachusetts. We were a barometer placed in a neglected field, or some shit.
I don't recall any of the NEC members who wanted to be part of that barometer when it was stepped on and broken up into little bits. The fear was appropriate. Osama bin Laden wasn't turning airplanes into piloted missiles on account of us, but the federal police weren't known for caring, or for making the sort of distinctions which separate pacifist separatists from Salafi suicide kings.
Nein Eleven™ didn't change human behaviors. It didn't alter American discontent with the feds, or American naivete with regard to the suffering of the billions of people who aren't Americans. It didn't kill the bootstrapper mythos, or provoke a crisis in labor. It didn't create unity ponies, or expose new divides in the so-called body politic. It was just a grand scale murder used as a pretext for a war that both Republicans and Democrats were already in agreement upon, anyway.
The best way to commemorate that, in my humble estimation, is to recognize, in body and voice, that the time for fear and a rational cowardice has passed. The pretext was given. The advantages taken. Our lords and masters have spent a decade accelerating their theft of the Commons we made, doing murder in our names, and much worse, under the cover of a false explanation, and a reasonable fear of their power. It has to stop.
It's time to give Republicans, Democrats, rich people, federal cops, local poombahs, and anyone else who knowingly benefits from imperial machine a reason to lose sleep at night.
Well, maybe not just a single reason.
More like - millions of them...
Sep 9, 2011
Ron Paul Hates Israel
This is probably not true. But, since we're wasting bits and bytes on "meme" experiments...
He probably has a Jesusy love affair with the notion of "biblical Israel." I'm sure he's fine with this sentiment, all things being equal:
"...An east wind from the LORD will come,
blowing in from the desert;
his spring will fail
and his well dry up.
His storehouse will be plundered
of all its treasures.
The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open."
(Hosea 13:15-16, New International Version, Zondervan)
He probably has a Jesusy love affair with the notion of "biblical Israel." I'm sure he's fine with this sentiment, all things being equal:
"...An east wind from the LORD will come,
blowing in from the desert;
his spring will fail
and his well dry up.
His storehouse will be plundered
of all its treasures.
The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open."
(Hosea 13:15-16, New International Version, Zondervan)
Ron Paul Is Not A Libertarian
The title has nothing to do with anything. But, following the bleghal recommendation of Mr. BDR, I stumbled across this piece. Seemed like an interesting experiment
Also, in the comments, someone suggested a title like, "..would Ron Paul be an existential threat to Israel?"
Seems too wordy and syntactically complex for a proper search chain. So, I'm going to refine it a bit. See next post.
Also, in the comments, someone suggested a title like, "..would Ron Paul be an existential threat to Israel?"
Seems too wordy and syntactically complex for a proper search chain. So, I'm going to refine it a bit. See next post.
Sabots and sans-culottes
When I wrote this externalized dialogue in my head, I had something almost exactly like this in mind:
"U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton said Thursday afternoon there are legitimate issues between the union and EGT Development, owner of a $200 million superterminal in Longview. But he told the union's lawyers in a hearing that 'you are the messengers' and that they must get control of their clients.
The hearing came after the long-simmering labor dispute turned violent about 4:30 a.m. Thursday, and as Longshoremen stayed off the job in Anacortes, Tacoma, Everett and Seattle. Port spokesmen said they have no information about when Longshoremen may return to work.
At least 500 Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview and broke out windows in the guard shack, according to Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha. As men wielding baseball bats and crowbars held six guards captive, others cut brake lines on boxcars and dumped grain, according to Duscha."
I understand that cautious and temperamentally conservative people will argue that rash and intemperate actions endanger labor's position in our brutal and simultaneously complacent society. Others, especially those possessed of a need to chase the meth high of dialecticism, might insist that everything must occur at its appointed hour, when conditions have ripened and proper historic and revolutionary awareness has developed.
To which I write - labor has never been weaker. Theory has never been less likely to persuade actual workers* with actual concerns to act/wait for the right moment.
I don't know if that's a cause for celebration. Probably not. I personally don't subscribe to the school of thought predicated on the belief that if conditions continue to deteriorate, good and noble souls will rise up to right the wrongs. Then again, I think Jefferson was also wrong about the "natural aristoi," so...
Here's what I know: some longshoremen "cut brake lines...and dumped grain." They've also shut down ports in the Northwest. And that a judge hearing the time-wasting and spectacular portion of the longshoremen's dispute with ownership is pissed enough to chastise union suits for failing to keep their flanneligans under proper control:
"In court Thursday afternoon, Leighton said the violence, vandalism and threats must stop now.
'They do no good for their cause' by acting like hooligans, he said of the union members.
'This is a mature process that requires restraint,' Leighton said. 'Your clients have none of that.'..."
When a hundred hands of longshoremen can get a federal judge in such a tizzy that he demands they act with restraint and within a "mature process," they are fucking well doing something right.
And that is worth celebrating.
* - ...yes, "the proletariat" is a symbol/model which is in desperate need of revision...
(h/t I Cite)
"U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton said Thursday afternoon there are legitimate issues between the union and EGT Development, owner of a $200 million superterminal in Longview. But he told the union's lawyers in a hearing that 'you are the messengers' and that they must get control of their clients.
The hearing came after the long-simmering labor dispute turned violent about 4:30 a.m. Thursday, and as Longshoremen stayed off the job in Anacortes, Tacoma, Everett and Seattle. Port spokesmen said they have no information about when Longshoremen may return to work.
At least 500 Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview and broke out windows in the guard shack, according to Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha. As men wielding baseball bats and crowbars held six guards captive, others cut brake lines on boxcars and dumped grain, according to Duscha."
I understand that cautious and temperamentally conservative people will argue that rash and intemperate actions endanger labor's position in our brutal and simultaneously complacent society. Others, especially those possessed of a need to chase the meth high of dialecticism, might insist that everything must occur at its appointed hour, when conditions have ripened and proper historic and revolutionary awareness has developed.
To which I write - labor has never been weaker. Theory has never been less likely to persuade actual workers* with actual concerns to act/wait for the right moment.
I don't know if that's a cause for celebration. Probably not. I personally don't subscribe to the school of thought predicated on the belief that if conditions continue to deteriorate, good and noble souls will rise up to right the wrongs. Then again, I think Jefferson was also wrong about the "natural aristoi," so...
Here's what I know: some longshoremen "cut brake lines...and dumped grain." They've also shut down ports in the Northwest. And that a judge hearing the time-wasting and spectacular portion of the longshoremen's dispute with ownership is pissed enough to chastise union suits for failing to keep their flanneligans under proper control:
"In court Thursday afternoon, Leighton said the violence, vandalism and threats must stop now.
'They do no good for their cause' by acting like hooligans, he said of the union members.
'This is a mature process that requires restraint,' Leighton said. 'Your clients have none of that.'..."
When a hundred hands of longshoremen can get a federal judge in such a tizzy that he demands they act with restraint and within a "mature process," they are fucking well doing something right.
And that is worth celebrating.
* - ...yes, "the proletariat" is a symbol/model which is in desperate need of revision...
(h/t I Cite)
Sep 8, 2011
Arrested
Why is cursing even an issue, here?
...because if you don't show the cops and the bureaucrats "respect," you know, people might start to treat them as if they're bags of floppy flesh, like the rest of us.
That's why.
Quite a story. Kicked out of the public fucking library because she had the wherewithal and foresight to bring along a deck of cards with which to entertain her young son. And he, being entertained, laughed and cooed too loudly.
Rightfully, she resisted. And the rest is predictable history.
...because if you don't show the cops and the bureaucrats "respect," you know, people might start to treat them as if they're bags of floppy flesh, like the rest of us.
That's why.
Quite a story. Kicked out of the public fucking library because she had the wherewithal and foresight to bring along a deck of cards with which to entertain her young son. And he, being entertained, laughed and cooed too loudly.
Rightfully, she resisted. And the rest is predictable history.
Sep 3, 2011
Deprogram Note
Where does the US meddle?
Where the populace organizes or threatens to organize to confront its own state, economic order, or local elite. Where the locals aren't extracting resources for the benefit of the wealthy, or for the benefit of the right factions of wealthy people.
Brazil's ruling factions used to have worry about being structurally adjusted. Now they're so well valued the President of the United State stays for dinner, even when he's getting his war on. Breaking unions, freeing up the currency and creating cosmopolitan ties with foreign investors is like working miracles, or something. You will also note, one hopes, that the House of Saud is as hateful and despicable a client elite as imaginable. You might also observe, just perhaps, that NATO hasn't bombed them or sent in its sky death robots. They didn't threaten to create a pan-African currency backed by protected gold. Maybe that has nothing to do with anything...
Why does the US meddle?
Because the local and regional elites serve an obvious function. They are corporate factors. They are, also, work camp kapos. Sometimes it's cheaper to extract the tin, timber, petroleum, or cheap labor with new local headmen than it is with the too-comfortable older ones. Sometimes the old bosses are no longer useful idiots; or maybe they've doddered off into senility, and have failed to bribe and/or properly oppress their captive populations. Sometimes they're too generous with the bribes. Sometimes they're not generous enough with the captive populations. Sometimes, it's just smart business to use the stick. Power unused is power lost.
Is it our responsibility to obstruct this meddling?
Short answer: yes. We are the collective beneficiaries of it. Our standard of living is not unlike blood money, and we owe the blood debt for taking it. Longer answer: figure it out for yourself. If you don't have what it takes to pay the debt, or if your ideology and worldview leave you pretending to be a lone wolf instead of a human person, you've made your choice by avoiding a decision. When the authorities come around, at least keep your mouth shut. That isn't too much to ask, is it?
How do we obstruct this meddling?
By making it too expensive, at home, for them to meddle so efficiently abroad.
Where the populace organizes or threatens to organize to confront its own state, economic order, or local elite. Where the locals aren't extracting resources for the benefit of the wealthy, or for the benefit of the right factions of wealthy people.
Brazil's ruling factions used to have worry about being structurally adjusted. Now they're so well valued the President of the United State stays for dinner, even when he's getting his war on. Breaking unions, freeing up the currency and creating cosmopolitan ties with foreign investors is like working miracles, or something. You will also note, one hopes, that the House of Saud is as hateful and despicable a client elite as imaginable. You might also observe, just perhaps, that NATO hasn't bombed them or sent in its sky death robots. They didn't threaten to create a pan-African currency backed by protected gold. Maybe that has nothing to do with anything...
Why does the US meddle?
Because the local and regional elites serve an obvious function. They are corporate factors. They are, also, work camp kapos. Sometimes it's cheaper to extract the tin, timber, petroleum, or cheap labor with new local headmen than it is with the too-comfortable older ones. Sometimes the old bosses are no longer useful idiots; or maybe they've doddered off into senility, and have failed to bribe and/or properly oppress their captive populations. Sometimes they're too generous with the bribes. Sometimes they're not generous enough with the captive populations. Sometimes, it's just smart business to use the stick. Power unused is power lost.
Is it our responsibility to obstruct this meddling?
Short answer: yes. We are the collective beneficiaries of it. Our standard of living is not unlike blood money, and we owe the blood debt for taking it. Longer answer: figure it out for yourself. If you don't have what it takes to pay the debt, or if your ideology and worldview leave you pretending to be a lone wolf instead of a human person, you've made your choice by avoiding a decision. When the authorities come around, at least keep your mouth shut. That isn't too much to ask, is it?
How do we obstruct this meddling?
By making it too expensive, at home, for them to meddle so efficiently abroad.
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