High Achievement

Would anyone care about Aaron Swartz's flight into corporeal oblivion if he was not the son of a white businessman, if he was not a "prodigy" and a golden child attending a prestigious elite university which itself exists to funnel high achievers into government, academia and the corporate world, where they will trade on an artificially scarce skill set while capturing wealth for those who lord over the rest of us?

Isn't the essential back story here that he was a young man who's been cast in the role of hero posthumously for doing nothing more than violating the minor expectation that, being upper class, he'd act like a dickish member of the ruling class all of the time?

And yet, that is why he is valorized and lionized by academics, so-called radicals and the rest of the middle and upper class white world which hadn't heard of him until he'd done spectacularly what rich kids do ordinarily. He checked out, and left other people to clean up his mess and make excuses for his actions.

His revolutionary act? Making academic papers available to the kind of people who can afford them in the first place.

Hacking a pay wall. Can't you just feel your groceries bills getting smaller already?

"Information will be free" is the mantra of people who don't have to worry about the cops, doctors' costs and hunger every single day. It's the kind of slogan you can expect from people who take a computer, an automobile and a college degree for granted. Its validity as a principle exists in direct proportion to the height one occupies in a social hierarchy.

For most of us, everything costs. All of it. All of the fucking time. Free stuff isn't revolutionary. It's unreliable good luck. It's what happens when the rich get lazy and bored and want to prove to each other that all that money makes them special. You don't count on it, because you can never count on the wealthy to keep their end of any bargain. They're rich because they learned how to live with using others as tools, how to betray and call it an economy - or they learned to live with inheriting that stolen labor as privilege and property.

So what if his name wasn't Aaron Swartz, but was instead something vaguely black sounding, like Vontaze Washington? What if he hadn't "liberated" a bunch of data that only matters to academics, white people with free time and Lawrence Lessig, but had instead come out of an underfunded public school, in a neighborhood where the cops and the bureaucrats start off assuming that your melanin per square inch exists in a causal relationship to your capacity for intelligence and moral value? What if, facing no chance of gainful and steady employment, he began to supplement his meager income by going into time debt to the crushing tyranny that is an illicit drug distribution pyramid? What if all he could afford to liberate was a few hours each week to help his mother with the laundry and the groceries, and that the almost inevitable outcome of his "choices" was that one day some suburban douchebag was going to give his name to the cops after getting busted at a college party? And while the future business major gets a warning and a "boys will be boys," young Mr. Washington gets the full penalty of the law?

Or, what if young Mr. Swartz was not Mr. Washington but was instead a young miss Hernandez? What if what she was trying to quietly liberate was her autonomy - not the assumption of it, nor the probability of it as an intellectual exercise, but an autonomy so normal and unquestioned that no man would ever assume that her freedom came at the cost of his needs and labor? What if her act of liberation wasn't hand waved away at every turn? What if her expected existence was not an endless grind of male possessiveness and weakness masquerading as attraction, a social norm which establishes from the day she is born until the day she's predictably reduced to a statistic that she owes an explanation and a justification for her every decision, else she's a whore, a bitch, asking for it, stupid, should have been more careful, had to have given mixed signals, provoked her attacker, tempted her harasser, learned her lesson?

What if?

We wouldn't know their names. That's what.

So, what?

Some rich high achiever offing himself after he's treated like a working class woman, a migrant worker or a black man could only seem astounding to white people, to libertarians and climbers and merit liberals, because the cops, management and the law fucking with their worlds daily is precisely out of the norm. Their everyday is a base line deference, an assumption that they will do good in the world and that the social order exists for their benefit. They depend upon it. It's the air they breathe. It takes some kind of chutzpah heavy self-absorption - maybe even an "epistemic closure" - to discover in Aaron Swartz's fate a monumental tragedy.

So that's Mr. Swartz's high achievement, as his history is forgotten and his myth commences. He got a bunch of white liberals and libertarians to congratulate themselves over their shared outrage at his bathetic end.

(Crossposted at High Achievement)

Crow Falls Down

Crow Falls Down

Resistancies

It's not that you've caused a person to doubt a narrative, that alienates him. It's that you've shown that he can no longer trust how he arrives at belief, or knowledge. Undermine faith in the certainty that an opinion was arrived at correctly, and you knock out one of the buttresses of the over-wrought and too-expensive cathedral of self.

Self is epiphenomenon. All of the chemistry of experience occurs before the emergence of thought and identity as a kind of cast shadow, or echo.

Societies function in this way, as well. You don't provoke stasis by attacking them head on. This strengthens the fiction of unity. You get their constituent parts to see that the single personality disorder that is culture is contrived not of falsehoods, but of untrustworthy conclusions.

Hello

Wife has cancer, looks like she's beating it. I have an auto-immune disease, which is how two years of poor health has finally resolved into a diagnosis. Doesn't look so good. I don't have any living tissue lymph nodes left in my lungs, and the inflammation has spread to my arms and arm pits. Don't know why I care to post this, mostly because I don't care. Can't say that I miss the blegh. But, sometimes it approaches amusing to have a chat with strangers.

Am glad that our kids won't be orphaned. It's weird to write that, but for a couple of months, we had to have this conversation between us. Not intellectually stimulating, but it requires a certain vigor which neither of us would have identified before.

World is still shit. Don't need me to tell you that.

Reckoning a personal apocalypse isn't necessarily liberating. I was pissed, mostly. Now, it's easier to let go. I don't want to let go. I'm not young, I'm not old, but I still cast a shadow.

Want to keep doing that.

Die At The Right Time

CT scan not promising. Have to learn to live with this reality. Ride well, for as long as you can, folks.

Cause and F/X

This is a living person. This image is not digitally altered. This appearance was accomplished with surgery, and daily by hand:



It's not my place to speak to her personally narrated reasons, or whatever justifications she's used for her own self. But, I think when feminists are discussing what they mean by conformity to femininity, this is a good illustration. It's not so much that it's extreme, it's that it's an extremely obvious example of an otherwise pervasive, but less obvious set of phenomena.

In a not unrelated pique of literary melange, a quote from Elizabeth Bear's deliciously excellent Sci-Fi novel, Carnival:

"...'The only significant natural predator that human women have is heterosexual men...Traditionally, the responsibility for safety falls on the victim. Women are expected to defend themselves from predators. To act like responsible prey. Limit risks, not take chances. Not to go out alone at night. Not talk to strange men. Rely on their own, presumably domesticated men for protection from other feral men - in exchange for granting them property rights over the women in question.''..."

I don't know if this is Bear's personal opinion, and I don't think it matters. She's using two (not randomly homosexual) characters' discussion to lay out the logic of a matriarchy they've been sent to undermine.

I can't help but see that the picture above, and Bear's character's observation below are intimately, intricately related.

Entirely Avoidable Outcomes

If you don't want to die in a US embassy or consulate, don't work in one.

If you won't want your death to be used to by (a) a fuckhead Mormon Republican, to justify drone wars and Hellfire missile attacks on Iranians who had fuck all to do with your summary execution at the hands of putative allies, or by (b) a callous, rat bastard Democrat, to justify sky death robot bombings and Hellfire missile attacks on Libyan non-combatants, in the name of retaliation, don't put your silly little self in a position to die in a US embassy or consulate.

If you don't want Diane Sawyer staring moon eyed into the camera, whisper voiced and falsely solicitous, while she discusses how you were a gentle ally of the Libyan people, and a peacemaker, examine whatever decision tree it is you use to plan out your next five or ten years. If it leads you towards a job with the State department, and an assignment to the CIA riddled gutter hole that is post-Qaddafi Libya, you get what you get. Plus, there's good money on the wager that Diane won't remember your name in passing three weeks from tomorrow. You're a prop. This was avoidable.

If you don't want your kids to sit in an overcrowded class room, it painted in prison grey and pysch-ward eggshell, being taught on entirely excusable autopilot by an overworked public school teacher who's already picking up the tab for most of the in-class materials, the next time your town or city has an official choice between further militarizing the cops, or hiring more teachers - perhaps your first thought shouldn't whimper along about "rising crime" and "criminal elements."

If you don't want so many people to hate your admittedly underpaid profession, learn to hit back hard enough to make the mayor's head crack on the wall behind him. Nobody likes a loser. More importantly, nobody trusts one. That pity thing? It's always laced with contempt.

If you can't remember what it's like to sit in a hot classroom while the autumn winds beckon, and play, play, play winks at you from behind a distant cloud or hill top, you probably won't avoid a simple failure to understand why a healthy child hates school. Children learn when they play and overcome. They remember when they're boxed into classrooms.

If you don't want to deal with the ramifications of Republican anti-women measures, or the Democrats' anti-labor ones, and you don't want to have to put up with the election season, practice swinging blunt objects. If you aren't willing to make a rat fuck in a suit worry for the security and integrity of his hide and vital organs, he's going to occupy himself with yours.

If you don't think that violence works, please explain the defense department's budget. Please explain the President's Praetorian Guard. Please explain why it is that those who rule can never agree with each other about how to fuck over their subjects, but there's no discord between them on the subject of how to keep them scared and running.

If you let a wrong go unrequited, somebody will always notice. If you don't like the conclusions they draw, about you, learn to requite a little. If the opponent isn't calculating what he can't predict about your possible conduct, he's already moved on to how he's going to take what's yours.

If you don't want to believe that whiteness and maleness are constructed out of the historic victories had over those who are defined by their exclusion from the winner's circle and its inheritances, that's your business. You shouldn't be surprised when people reach the obvious conclusion that you are well off, white, male and blind to fact that you were one of the inheritors. Think for a moment: what would all that unpaid labor look like, in terms of real capital and property, were it not taken from the not-male and not-white people who had to produce it, but could not decide how it was handed down, or what was built, sheltered, hidden away and protected by it. Think about unpaid household labor.Think about all the failures to remunerate. Actually, think. There's no spirit. There's no will. There aren't any numina. It's all just stuff, and stuff made into stuff. So, what would whiteness and maleness look like if it wasn't backed up by violent, brutal, deceitful misappropriation so bold and grand its called History? If you can't answer that question correctly, it's probably fairly unavoidable that you're a dude with pink skin.

Not Nothing

Men and women differ, fundamentally.

You can read this assertion from any number of pick up artists, anti-feminists, evolutionary psychologists, traditionalists, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, holybookers, perennialists, conservatives, manarchists, Marxist-Leninists, anti-liberals or misogynist lawyer douchebags who really don't like Jews, homosexuals, "girly men" or the reality that some people identify with government because for the last thirty or so years it's been the wolf which has kept equally nasty wolves more or less at bay.

To be fair, Maoists (despite their many flaws) tend to be amenable to women who make decisions. Kind of.

I don't feel like linking to an example of each, so I'll just refer you generally to Manboobz, and the last year of output there. Seminal work, that.

An equally common complaint resolves to this: feminists are working mightily, from their lofty perches atop the human universe, to undermine, well, everything; but, especially the natural-supernatural-scientific gender differences that keep the cosmos in balance.

And you can tell this to be true, the argument's variations assert, because the universe is out of balance. Things aren't right. They aren't natural. If let be, the human norm would find itself again. Men would be men, women would be women, governments would wither away, corporate executives would self-defenestrate, markets would be fair, bigness would gave way to local smallness and motherfuckers would decide to be nice.

The problem, for these pitiable worm complainants, isn't that status quo ante is bad for most of the people stuck in it - it's that it isn't natural. (See also, primitivists, greenies, eco-pagans, democratizers and abolition democrats.)

Almost every assertion to naturality is, upon even rudimentary observation, a claim from transcendence. It's supernaturalist, because it attempts to impose from without definitions of right conduct, and wrong, which apply then to the within, also called "nature." The person staking that claim may not believe in gods or numina or dialectical historical planning committees, but he is demanding from the rough stuff of life an adherence to a norm which almost always suits his tastes, temperament and often enough, early childhood experiences.

But, contained within the complaint itself, is the concession what negates it.

The argument follows thus: if only [insert bête noir] didn't exist with its unnatural impact on human relations, [insert outcome clucked out disapprovingly] would not occur. If feminists weren't teaching women to be lesbian amazon man killers, girls would realize that they need to market themselves to men as better, more efficient sex toys. If the atheists hadn't taken over the schools, people would still know and love god. If the liberals didn't control the media [you are, of course, invited to scoff here], people would know that the government has violated the Constitution. Et cetera.

This seems like a simple enough declaration of cause and effect, but it's not. What it concedes immediately is that culture isn't a given, and that personality isn't merely inherited. That there is no natural, correct way to be human. If there was, there would be no reason to restore it. If the perennial were actually such, it would establish itself by virtue of its cosmic coherence.

Every argument about the shaping of hominid brains into bodies-with-personae recognizes immediately that what we call the "human self" is a made thing. It's an artifact, if you will. And that no right nature defines it.

Sometimes this self succeeds brilliantly, for its time; often, it collapses completely. Sometimes it doesn't sync with the body it inhabits, because it was shaped not for the body, but for needs of those around it. Very commonly, a single body houses several incompletely formed stages of one, in various degrees of struggle and accord. More often than soul-believers would care to admit, the self is in fact a multiplicity.

What matters here, though, is that it's made. It's a shaped thing that learns to shape itself. It's a shaped shaper. What this means - and it's a doozy given our larger culture, religious assumptions, scientistic premises and technological framework - is that everything and everyone are always up for grabs; the experience of self is not stable over time, because there is no norm for it.

The conditions which shape bodies into persons are always changing because there's no one correct way to accomplish this end, and truth has little to do with success or outcome.

The anti-feminists know this, perhaps without using this set of phrases exactly. Their complaint, reduced to its essential terms, suggests a basic awareness: women, like men, are made into self-referential genders. It's why these types constantly return to their tired, familiar refrain - that feminists violate nature in merely attempting to carve out the smallest of spaces where women can take some control of their own shaping. Where they can attempt these experiments without the unrelenting cultural subjection to men who have very strong notions about the proper uses of women. Not for nothing, anti-homosexuals and salvationists make the same concession - it's why they struggle so mightily to dominate the schools, the airwaves and the political contests which define acceptable and verboten.

So, here's this - and for what it's worth, I make no claim to revolutionary insight - there's no observable reason to believe in progress, given how often we all tend to regress, but it says something that the various traditionalists, paternalists and supernaturalists no longer argue as if they're right. They argue, right out in the open, as if they know it's all about who controls the story-making.

The RCC didn't use to have to try and persuade. It ordered, the Holy Orders obeyed. People burned and kings took a knee. Heads of state didn't use to have campaign. The cops didn't have full time public relations staff. People who used others as mere instruments didn't use to have to come up with market slogans and palliatives and misinformation.

The world was assumed to be, mostly by all, the best and only possible world. It was, you know, just natural and right that it was the way it was.

Most of us, I imagine, find that notion at least suspect, if not outright unnatural. Nietzsche called this the death of god. I won't be so bold, and rather refer to it instead as a kind of liberty. Our times are labile. The people trying to force human events back into the neat categories of caste, gender, faith, obedience and rigid class...well, they are trying to force things back.

Genies and bottles, cats and bags and all that.

They could definitely still win. They've got most of the loot and idiots who take orders under arms. But they're fighting from a distinct disadvantage, and one which doesn't require the rest of us to have so much loot, or armed staffers, or access to stable forms of power - they've already conceded, like the anti-feminists, that what they're really trying to do is to program the next generation, and the next, in ways which will re-establish "the right" and "the natural."

They've admitted, out loud and in public, that they're really just one more set of contestants, roughly aligned, in the struggle to define what is acceptably human.

It's a really big fucking deal, if you think about it. It's not that we're evenly matched. We're not, obviously. It's that, acknowledging that things are shitty as they seem, and worse, and that forces aligned in favor of reaction are well armed, they still have to regularly concede that "the natural" and "the right" are no longer a given.

They have to struggle to constantly maintain their claim on what is human.

There's an opening there. In fact, there are dozens of them.

And that's not nothing.

Premise

Expectation does not alter function.

The expectation of an outcome will not change the function of the tools used to achieve it.

The desire for an outcome bears little resemblance, upon close scrutiny, to the expectation for that same outcome. Training and memory produce expectations. An expectation premises that certain behaviors, plus a given number of tools and techniques, will result in a set of conditions which share overlaps and similarities with prior ends and conclusions, as promised by memory.

Organic memory lacks the reliability often associated with it. Cultural and exosomatic memory do not exist in a separate plane or protected bubble, untainted by organic memory. It takes organic memory, conditioning and perspective to interpret those memories stored outside of the body.

In every personal history, desire predates awareness, training and memory. Desire does not even presuppose awareness, though awareness would not likely develop without the recording of the memories of the satisfaction or thwarting of desire.

Awareness maps environment, but it does not take the same form in every person, or across every region or age. In order to identify awareness, memory must function, and feedback to and upon itself in a loop. No memory, no self awareness.

But, memory lacks reliability. Memory has no built in reward for enduring accuracy. Memory does not demand perfection. Memory rewards success, which definition itself does not remain stable over days and months, never mind years and ages. Memory, like desire, exists for outcomes which do not obligate truth, and which patently award error, so long as error results in the satisfaction of needs and desires.

Desire functions with memory, retaining its effect through memory's mapping of success and failure, strengthening and waning according to expectation - but memory will not record perfect facts separate from the feelings of reward, pain, pleasure or other strong emotions.

Desire reminds of need or want, but does not itself satisfy either.

The desire for an outcome will rely on memory to promise its satisfaction, or warn against failure, but memory - especially untrained memory which stumbles about unconditioned by an alternate and uncommon set of skills associated not with self-preservation and gross satisfaction but instead with self-regard and even vanity - will not reliably predict the conclusion of behaviors and choices if the satisfaction of desire or need forms the greater part of the feedback loop of awareness.

No person escapes desire. Not one.

And this adheres especially to the desire for outcomes associated with the use of tools, techniques and human memories.

Social communities function as tools, in part, for their members. They exchange persons as organisms into persons as resources. Every form of society or community, however enduring or temporary, obligates the use of unreliable memory, in order to map out relations of power, skill sets, persona, likeability, adversity, enmity and fealty. These memories lack both stability and permanence, as well perfectibility.

These memories form the basis of all hierarchies. A hierarchy functions as a trainable, and learned, set of responses to others by way of the repeated and reinforced forging of memories - establishing dominance not as a natural or supernatural condition* of existence, but as damage to memories already susceptible to error.

A person may expect the satisfaction of desires which that person cannot achieve as a repeatable outcome precisely because that person's memories produce patterns of errors which reinforce the likelihood of programmed blind spot, bias or self-betraying behavior.

A person raised within a hierarchy will very predictably and regularly reproduce these errors from the exercise of desires continuously thwarted by abused memory. Only those persons in the power positions of a hierarchy retain successful behaviors, because their skill sets allow them to train memory to preserve the hierarchy while still allowing them to see how it functions to reproduce in its support layers - and victims - the behaviors that keep them from seeing what those in power see. They learn to maintain a system which they must also actively conceal.

Most people in the power positions of a hierarchy will receive the correct training which allows them to duplicate its existence into future generations. By accident or by the seemingly random development of necessary character traits, some will climb, lie, flatter or claw into better positions. These types often present an initial danger to that hierarchy, unless its training allows for their easy assimilation, or expulsion.

A hierarchy functions as a social tool.

The use of a tool obligates the experience of an outcome of its use. Tool use will result in an outcome in every imaginable circumstance, because tool use alters environments - but that outcome will not necessarily match expectations or memories of the tool's user or users.

A person should not perhaps expect that the use of a hierarchy will result in outcomes for which that hierarchy does not function.

A good way to illustrate this, maybe, would involve brushing one's teeth with a chainsaw. The desire for clean teeth exists. The expectation of the outcome, also. But not every tool will produce the outcome expected and desired.

A person can apply a chainsaw to his teeth.

We might all find it rather surprising if this decision to so actually cleaned them.

Perhaps equally surprising, all the same, is the very persistent conviction that hierarchies which function to preserve the power and wealth of their members, by subsuming others into them as less-than-human instruments, will somehow magically produce fairness, universal prosperity, rights, accord, peace, liberty and justice for all...



* - despite the claims of perennialists or their liberal adversaries, the meritocrats...

America

I had a temptation to write, "Americans have forgotten the feel of war," but truths in the need of telling, that sounded a lie in my head, before I ever wrote it.

The last two wars fought hard on this continent produced a triumphant, and yet equally morose religiosity, coupled feverish and desperately with a stern national faith in the right to expand limitlessly; two senses of life clutching at each other like a pair of illicit lovers tucked into a piss soaked alley, more grappling for dominance than making love.

The War For Slavery and the Indian Wars. And Americans still stamp the seemingly endless ramifications of those contests upon the skins of others.

But, we don't know war.

We don't understand the wake of death and chaos, the sundering of families, the breaking of heart and spirit, the degradation, the shattering of human perspective, the hardening of hatred.

We can't even remember it, because our faiths have no roots in memory. They burrow, instead, into the morrow, nematodes of belief seeking out new flesh and new victims for our devotions.

If you don't hate this America, this complex of ideas and beliefs and redemptive, holy violence, I say to you that you should know firmly now what side you've chosen. And that you should suffer it.

I want nothing more fervently than for war to come home. To tear this nation of 300 million predators and prey animals into tattering shreds. I want us to learn what it's like to be an Iraqi child, who watched her mother scurry towards the market, wincing at bomb blasts in the distance, and who never saw her come home. I want us to feel Hiroshima, Dresden, all of Vietnam, the Philippines, the Lakota, Arapaho, the Comanche, the Colombian and Argentine peasants shackled to the needs and ugly urges of Catholic putchist paramilitaries, Africa savaged Africa, to feel what we never even managed to learn to forget: war.

Until no more America ever lends its name to even a square inch of earth.

Even that would not come close enough to what we've taken wheedled, wrought and bought - returned in due and debts paid.

We have nothing worth saving. We should dream of no pale reflecting wings of angels, come to redeem us. Had we humanity at all, we would raise the white flag and let world have its vengeance, passive witnesses to our earned destruction, mute and without complaint.

But we lack that humanity, we Americans. We do not strangle our bosses and cops where they sleep. We do not take to the streets or the beaches, to echo even the flimsiest of French protests. We certainly have no Greek in us. The young of Egypt shame us, and they struggle against a reactionary Islam and capital's endless succession of martial juntas.

And we do not walk away.

So, war should come. And come, and keep on washing over us until we've left so little to remind our victims of the days of our dominion, that they can raise their heads and pity our remnants.

Or not

I have less to say, and fewer words with which to say it. I feel healthier for the first time in several years. I've managed to shed forty-five pounds since January, thirty-five of them since the first of May. I have my runs up towards the double digits, which has taken almost forever since a pair of fairly awful ankle injuries and a tumble down the side of a tall hill.

My kids still have to put up with me, and my wife is still foolish enough to go to bed next to me most every night.

The world still sucks.

And the fucking rich keep getting fucking richer.

But, being healthier does change the outlook some.

More on that later. Or not.

Recommendation

Please take a moment to read Jonathan Versen's "Fixing Health Care Good." It's one of the better summations, and is nothing short of an antidote to nauseating shit like this: "If you love him, be proud of him."

Sitting Vigil

My wife's mother has lived a life worth living. This must be written, repeated and said again. A generous, patient, wonderful woman, who transformed a life always on the edge of poverty into three daughters and a son who adore their mother.

That her children have had to sit vigil and watch her die slowly, over the past three days, because some god-sots think it's the penultimate evil to ease her impending death with a little extra chemistry - I cannot wrap my head around this. There is the cruelty of the torturing-small-animals variety, and then there is the methodical, institutional, traditional malice of the enforced vision of correct humanity. I'd rather deal with the cat killers than with the moralizing didacts in control of vast systems. You can always punch the budding lone sociopath in his motherfucking face.

How in all the unchrists do you negotiate with a sanctimonious, callous culture?

The "culture of life" is anything but, those overripe and self-righteous prick motherfuckers. Sure, they may not be as breezily hypocritical as Obamaphiliac liberals, or as comfortably compartmentalized as the Clinton fans who've embraced a spectacularly academic cognitive dissonance as their operational norm - but, right now I don't fucking care.

Watching my wife watch her mother die slowly, gasping for breath, with an inhumanely small dose of dilaudid seeping into her from the skin patch is fucking unbearable. It's wrong.

And it cannot stand.

Sixty Three Point Five

...million. That's the mountain of money spent to engage in electoralism in order to strengthen Governor Walker's control over the Wisconsin political machine, propel him into the national spotlight, and transform him into an icon of the austerity movement.

Most of that was raised for Walker - a sum he would not have been able to accumulate if the unions, protesters and activists who sidetracked themselves with electoralism had decided that the better way to handle government is opposition.

Obviously, not everyone is willing to accept the basic outline or tenets of the anarchist outlook. But, it should go without saying that wasting energy, time and treasure in order to leave one's enemy in a stronger position is more than just this side of stupid.

And that's electoralism in a nutshell: stupidity. It's distraction, a legerdemain. Sure, the enforcement of laws equals something like results, and getting control of a temporarily captive hierarchy - such as a state government - buys an opportunity to enforce laws. 

None of that changes the basic social environment for the better, since it strengthens the position of those hierarchies, and they are always most easily captured by the people with the loot, the armed staffers and the resources.

In other words, the rich.

Fighting them on their ground is dumb.

Which isn't to suggest that they should not be fought, if that's the sort of thing a body needs to do and accomplish.

Just be fucking smart about it, already.

Get 'em while they're sleeping in their beds and make it fucking count. It's that, my friends, or what comes next. And next is the part where they start to triage us (the name of the austerity game) on the way to planning our obsolescence.

The class war has entered a new phase. It's plain to see if you want to see it. The factions of the ruling class are no longer trying to discipline labor, corral us into captive populations, nationalize our sentiments, Church us up in order to get us to police ourselves or crush rebellions.

They don't have to do any of that anymore. They won that series of battles, and we now live immersed in spectacular society. Our chains are affordable and they've persuaded us, from early universal education onward, through the ubiquity of product placement and television advertising, to absorb the cost and the weight of those bindings ourselves. We don't have them placed upon our lives involuntarily, as did the peasants and rough burgher dwellers of long departed ages.  We are not bound up in the thrall of continentally uniform salvational anxiety, ministered and managed by Holy Mother Church, or the Confucian bureaucracy.

We pay for our own servitude, and call it lifestyle and standard of living. Our anxiety is wholly situational.

That's the spoils of their victory, and they've been reaping it for the better part of two generations. They have more of the loot, all of the land, most of our minds, and many of our fears bundled into a stage show economy that keeps afloat, in large part, because we pay to eat to rent to fuck to sleep to breathe to drive to live and...

...that has kept them in riches right up to the point where the Second Law refuses to budge. Which is where skimming off some of the excess factors into their policies and agenda.

We bought them their independence from a dependency upon our labor, or the greater share of it. We've entered a new theater of war. And it is war. It's fucking war, and please don't think otherwise or forget it. There's no longer even the intimation or pretense of a division of competence, skill, equality or treasure. They have it all. And austerity is about their revolt against our labor. They don't need it anymore. They don't need us.

We've moved beyond the struggle for class dominance. It's done. It's fucking over. Now, we have a war of extermination, and that's not easy to see, because it's being fought within the confines of our expectations. It has the appearance of our enculturated normality. It looks like what surviving is supposed to look like, in conformity with our learned and education programmed anticipation.

It's anything but that.

They're counting on the majority of us being too weary, wary, distracted, stressed and burdened to figure it out. Really, they are. That's the point of spectacle. Because, for a while yet, we have the one thing they lack.

We have multitude. We are multitude. Disorganized, selfish, venal, shortsighted - all certain, and predictable. That's how we've been raised, and that can only change with time and practice. But numbers and numbers, we've fucking got those; there aren't enough uniformed thugs to prevent every knife struck in the dark of night, or every kind of cooperation. The knife must strike, but the food must also be handed from palm to palm, and back again. It must be taken. Because it doesn't belong to them. Nothing they have is theirs. It's ours. It's our labor. These are our children they want to strike from forever.

This is a world made by our hands.

We've got a fuck load more than sixty three million of them. The hand is potent. It's a promise between companions, and it's the first of all weapons.

Especially when the hand is red with the realization that we're long past the point of no return, and there's less and less to lose. They don't know it yet. And neither do we, not between us. But, their revolt is also our liberation.

And it won't cost sixty three point five million dollars to start getting it. Their future isn't secure yet. The governments are still being transformed. The armies, halfway through reconfiguration. Their costs are still high enough, that adding to them can break them.

Open your hand, and pass the plate. Close it into a fist. Grasp a hoe and plant an acre. Show a friend how to hold a knife. Take fruit without paying for it. Punch a motherfucker in the face. Hold a thousand of them up and block the cops from reaching their destination. Shield a child.

Sneak up in the night and make the motherfuckers pay.

The past is as unmovable by mind as are the stars.

1. The stars are the past. They happened before. This is not figurative. It is literal. We are constrained by relativity. The night sky is the lingering lost, part of our present because the "past doesn't go anywhere." Perhaps a fool would argue that the stars mean nothing: they mean everything. We are seeded by their dying. But... Scrying the night sky and the stars for signs and wonders, for clues to the fate of the universe, is no more effective than shitting in one's pants and flushing the toilet anyway. The past is prologue, sure. Also, it is not. Interconnectivity is myth. It's a story told against the inexorability of death, a facile consolation. Things come apart. What happens in Boston may never matter to the child starving in Dhaka. The stars don't care. Events accumulate and the child is forgotten.

Photons do not decay, in the human lifetime. Photons do not decay, over the course of terrestrial ages. We decay. We are brief. Staggeringly meaningless, from the vantage of photons and stars. A single life can be suffered, until waking is work, and breathing too much a burden to bear. A photon feels nothing. And the past, these photons forming wave fronts against our eyes, still didn't go anywhere. Every molecule bound together to make a body is the past made present. We can study them, learn. Make predictions, record data. We do it with cells, we do it with the stars. Awareness and memory, nonetheless, are not morality. The past does not teach. It does not evolve. Progress is fiction, dialectic is deception. Photons do not arise from synthesis. Trees grow by bifurcation. As do crystals, and human memory. Things split, to grow. They do not encounter their opposites and unite. The past tells no stories, it has no narratives. Events expand, they layer upon the memory, and most things happens without a mind ever knowing it. There are seven billion human bodies. Not a one of them can tell you the complete history of a square meter of soil.

2. It is stupidity to read the past, to build up and fascinate with the meager, mean stories of this or that notion, trend, government, commodity or faith, to map what is not by what came before. Events happen, and it's equally stupid to pretend they do not. Learn them, or not. You'll still need to eat, shit, sleep. You will still die. That's how most of us live, and we are not the lesser creatures for it. The past is as immovable by mind as are the stars. It hasn't gone anywhere, and most of what was made within its fluctuating contours will outlast the lot of us. By millenia. Some still have a need to know, a compulsion to draw value and validity from the pursuit of the past, forward into its consequences for the dimly understood present. It is a compulsion, an obsession. It can be useful, or not. Knowing the that red giant will nova does not prevent its destruction. Studying historical trends will not obviate their development. History is an astrology. Fiddle with it, if it makes you happier. Mostly, it will not. The termites will chew the wood, the roaches will scatter, mold will weaken the beams, water will find the cracks in the concrete, winter will come, and the housing unit will one day fall in on itself. A child will grow up elsewhere. She will be different from what she might have been, but might have been never was.  The now, the current, is always passing and memory barely maps the hint of it. It is the arrogance of a self-obsessed stupidity - a mind as its own mirror, imposing a fragile order on a world which does not obey it - to assert the primacy of history, to shelve lives like books and demand from the future a conformity to a past which doesn't care because it never was as we imagine it and never went away, anyway. Events happened, but our stories barely tell their impact. We are encompassed by our ignorance. It's too soon, far too early, to tell ourselves that we know enough to fix, fashion and shape into permanence the best of all futures.

The outlines drawn by the mind, the old gods and constellations, depend upon the distance between the stars, not their proximity. Most of history is the told in the same way. It is outline, making sense of the impossibly dense and unknowable by fabricating snippets and cataclysms into fables. Coincidence occurs, and these stories overlap with patterns in the memory, accumulations from experience that suggest a rightness, but which only communicate the appearance of similarity.

3. The past is not right or wrong. Neither is the present. The future, on the other hand, is almost always peopled with moralities. We arrive to find it fleeing us. Disappointed, abandoned, injured by its inevitable faithlessness. Our achievements fade: memory and bad conscience conspire to form a despotism. Over and over again, we resolve to promise ourselves a better tomorrow. Perhaps it's uniquely human to treat disappointment as a goad, and the goad as a call to be better, to perfect, to be more good. It is from this belief in betterment, this urge to improve, that most human evil is done. It's never enough to discipline one's own memory, is it? The bombs fell on Belgrade and Baghdad because men thought that they could profit by it, that in profit they would improve. A mass obsession for an age of mass spectacle.

School, church, temple, masjid, courtrooms, cop dramas, prison cells, op-eds, fairy tales, movie scripts, television plots, sermons, advertising campaigns, expectations humble and grandiose - they all fix into place the fascination with improvement. It's not enough to learn and let go. It's never enough to wander. Meaning is added, belief is confirmed, narratives are introduced to too-young brains. Poisonous, pervasive, spreading like plagues and killing frosts, following the merchant princes, the politicians, the generals and royal scientists, the urge to improve the whole of the face of the earth until every life is fitted into its place, if only at first by name.

4. The past tells no stories. We tell them. We have the capacity to tell them differently. There aren't many freedoms, really - but this is one of them. I don't know if it's enough to begin with a rejection of improvement, with the morality that demands a singular futurity. Maybe not, and that's okay with me.


Epilogue. I'm also okay with the guillotine, the noose and their use as an answer to the inflicters of widespread suffering, so grano salis, if you need it. Violence does not cure, and most acts of vengeance make things worse for somebody unintended as its recipient. There is no perfection, and we already have to live with with our contingency, conditionality, limitation and mortality. I do know, in moments of some provisional clarity, that compassion is one of the more finely made lenses through which to watch, as long as it tempered by the ability and capacity to resist, to strike and to elude those who would harm.  Moral pacifism, like national militarism, Christianity, or evangelical veganism, is an attempt improve others for one's own benefit, to collect them up and constrain them by belief. It's an urge to cure, and a reasonable person has a thousand reasons to mistrust it on that account alone. It does not follow that retribution makes anything better, either. Retribution does not improve. But, it can remove. And that is a tool which should not be discarded lightly.

Musings, after ocean's edge...

Went to Hampton Beach with the family today. People watched with the wife. Some (probably commonplace) observations:

1. Beach wear for women differs fundamentally from that for men; it is even opposed. Male beach clothing emphasizes by what it does not cover, signaling the male as natural. Female beach wear draws attention to what is covered, forming the female figure as that which can only be revealed by hiding it. The conventions of dress carry a heavy load: the female is created by artifice, the man by revelation. This is what, I think, feminists mean by patriarchy. It's no wonder that, pervasive as this underlying etymology of self is, societies continuously reproduce the idea of woman as a vessel of sin. Since correct womanhood is fabricated and manufactured, within these cultures, any woman who cannot abide by the norms (and this is nearly all of them) must not only be lacking, compared to men, but morally and spiritual deficient. She is, according to the rules of behavior, formed wrong; it is her native state: consequently, she must be governed and corrected, lest she produce more sin, and perhaps even more egregiously, sinful children.

2. Small children do not understand states, as ways of relating, until they are taught to internalize rules and rule structures. The state is not simply or automatically native to human existence. It is a replicator. A small child will play with what's at hand: stones, waves, dogs running and frolicking. She will dig holes or kick sand or give chase. A child is a war machine before he is acculturated to the community in force.  Small children play games by revision. They adapt to environment, even in conflict. Rules are not vital because play is immediate. It may have outcomes, but it does not have objectives. It is only when the child is taught to play within the field, to build walls for the sand castle, and to respect the property and victories of other players (especially adults) that the child begins to understand the self as a state of existence, as a pattern which must be repeated in order to be experienced. This is, I believe, the fundamental vector by which the state is replicated: the self gains an interior which is governed by repetition. It becomes a kind of disorder.

3. Marxists will never let the state wither away, because they are statists. Like Christians, they can only conceive of the conclusion of the revolution (an attainment of heaven) as achievement of a fixed end which must then immediately be shielded from the consequences of an absence of fixity inherent in material existence. Despite rhetoric and theory to the contrary, every Marxist attempt to produce communism has resulted in a state in which every subject must subsume itself or be rendered into enemies. The Marxist answer to the problems presented by entropy, contingency, friction, uneven distribution and conflict is spiritual. It is, in contravention of every claim to historical materialism, the distribution of obedience by way of force, according to rules which would be supernatural in the hands of an imam, rabbi, cleric, monk or priest. The Marxist, as a rule, demands a set of behaviors, hoping to reconstitute society according to a plan which must result in a single possible future, or else be betrayed. It is not surprising that Marxists, taken generally, lack the vitality and adaptive capacities of their capitalist opponents and masters. Capitalist relations form a sense of self which assesses its relations to others and its environments according to costs and labor, reshaping the sand kicking child into a buyer-seller through the disciplining rules and enforcements of family, education and workplace discipline. This means that the capitalist formed self is an operating platform which allows for an interior. The self so shaped must have a fixed fictional center, or it cannot trade its labor, expect reward or calculate costs. It needs this imaginary independent agent which can manage the limits imposed by matter without believing itself subject to them. To relate to others as commodities, a portion of self must be secure enough to resist economization and subsumption. It must shield the single personality* as a compartment which can not only buy and sell, but see others as consumable units of labor without collapsing inward under the weight of its own contradictions. Unlike the child who has not yet calibrated its memory to reproduce the relations of the state, first in the family and later in school, the capitalized self demands a protected inner life. In response, and by way of development in the standing pools of oblivion and despair in which it evolved, the Marxist and Leninist conception of self attempts to abolish this interiority by making it utterly subject to the revolution and the state it subsequently produces. The Marxist body has no imagined interior because it demands the creation and recreation of the state in all interactions, totalizing the self as the subject of each and all. Despite Marxist theory to the contrary, the interiorized capitalist self, with its private memories and trade-able experiences and labor, will not arrive at the Marxist self by way of some spiritual synthesis.This capitalist self, the Marxist rightly understands, is an abomination: it no longer remembers how to run into the waves without producing first a reason to do so, with objectives defined, and benefit to be taken. Sadly, the general Marxist solution is even more monstrous: it is a self which has the state as both its interior and its exterior, replicating obligation into every interaction, until the human world is only chains.

4. The anarchist, as a type, presents any number of problems, not the least of which is a studied refusal to believe that men will do their worst, despite crafting a worldview which rejects the concentration of power, and hierarchy, because men are always doing their worst. All the same, the anarchist can offer an alternative to the capitalist and Marxist states, and the selves they reproduce over and over again. The anarchist is kinetic, potential. The anarchist cannot produce a program of action, a plan for the future, or a schema for correct human behavior; instead, the anarchist can play a way towards a number of possible futures, by acting as a corrosive. The anarchist can simply refuse to obey. This takes the anarchist closer to the nihilist than is comfortable for most workers in light and doers of good (be they liberal, conservative, Marxist or libertarian**). The anarchist can remind those trapped in the memory-shaped selves of our society that the state dissolves at contact with with the waves at ocean's edge. That it can be dismembered by remembering to forget it.



* - we should say, single personality disorder...

** - the libertarian is silliest of all; he thinks the ruling factions who manage the appearance of states will remain contained within those advertised limits, will obey their own marketing campaigns and propaganda, so long as men do good and speak honestly one to the other...

No Escape

This one is by request, if somewhat revised. So, for d. mantis:

It does no good to underestimate the widespread human capacity to burrow deeper into hierarchies and their controlling systems, in the name of escaping them.

Our libertarian fellow travelers are especially fond of asserting, as a characteristic of that entire American school of thought, that governments are awful. In this they are largely correct, since governments exist to serve the needs of those who can afford to constitute them, run them, maintain them and benefit by their operation. Unfortunately, this libertarian willingness to generalize about the organization of governments as thinly disguised protection rackets does not extend to the necessary and inevitable concentration of power, wealth and bad faith in those successor organizations which would follow the collapse of the state-as-Leviathan. Intent as they are upon dismantling and escaping one obvious despotism, libertarians at the same time rather studiously ignore the more direct consequences of the weakening of the welfare functions of the states we have now; chief among those ramifications is the accelerated transfer of wealth, armed staffers, expertise and training functions to corporations, transnational exchange regimes and market affiliations, a one way flow which would result in the eventual reconstitution of states and state-like hierarchies from within corporate associations.

Then there are the liberals.

The entire liberal discourse - the "progressive" expansion of rights - which followed from the so-called Enlightenment and is only very recently in any danger of collapsing into its own singularity of self-contradiction, depends upon a belief in an absurdly unrealistic core conviction: namely, that those who inhabit the higher reaches of hierarchies can be persuaded to relinquish their advantages. It is only by accident, or that curious admixture of happenstance and callow opportunism, that the democratic-seeming states' histories have coincided with the increase in the number of permissions (usually, called "rights") allowed to the educated and professional castes and classes, which factions cling most religiously to this ridiculous notion of permissive rights. That coincidence has had a profound effect upon their beliefs about the power of "the masses," the value of the allegedly isonomic individual to those with power, and the degree to which lower level chattering and nattering filters upward to those who rule. But, because we live in the last decades of universal education - the one true victory of the middling castes - their "rights" dogma has become the universal doctrine foisted upon the multitude, shaping their discourse, if not their everyday conduct. That the lowest orders of our current society live as if rights are unreal is a testament not to the failure of universal education, but to the brutalizing and liberating agoge that is daily contact with the sharp end of police powers and the clerk's faceless bureaucratism.

The ruling class and its factions don't hear the middlers, and don't care about their problems, in equal measures. They have nonetheless fashioned a clever political apparatus, whereby they pretend to listen to their support classes by taking their money and distracting them with elections. It is a banal and unremarkable observation, but: the middle classes are obsessed with it.

By comparison, our earthly lords and masters can be expected to be "persuaded" with violence, but only in so much as it gets their attention by threatening their wealth and property.

Since violence against one's better armed betters is always a dodgy prospect, at best, and generally a ticket to press gangs, prison houses and cemetery plots, as a norm - it should probably surprise no one that the compensatory middler response, the reemergence of the repressed, if you will, is the aforementioned belief that rights matter, and that yammering at the people with guns and money gets their attention.

Sparagmos

I wanted to punch the young dude in the face the first time I saw him. It wasn't rational; I didn't have mystical hunches or anything, but I felt a demiurge towards violence. I saw his creepy, vaguely Tartar blue eyes, and I had to choke down a strong, pleasing compulsion to punch him in the peepers until he bled from his ears.*

Lots of motherfuckers could use a punch to the face bones; it's not like I think I'm the one who has sanction to deliver the fist shaped gift.

My wife, upon meeting him several weeks later, told me that she was pretty sure there was something wrong with him. "Dead eyes," she said. "Dead motherfucker inside."

I told the weary boss man, a friend of more than two decades. He chuckled a bit, but I could read the perturbations in his brow. Shut up, shut up, shut up broadcast in forehead wrinkles.

"There's something about him," I said.

"Nah. I think he's a good kid."

"Nope. I'm telling you, he's all bunched up wrong inside."

"Leave it alone, Jack."

"Okay, man, but..."

...Wandered in to work, end of last week, trying to figure out how I managed to get an extra shift on the next few weeks.

Mr. Creepy was off the schedule. Staff talking in euphemisms. I didn't want to know. I don't need clutter in my brain space. I get results on Friday, maybe a death sentence. I don't need to care about why a fish-eyed leerer isn't coming to work anymore. Whole shift passed, and I manage to elude the whispered gossiping.

"Matter of public record," a co-workers tells me, today. I don't normally have to work Thursdays. Was trying to get ahead of the deliveries, figure out what I needed to do different. Mr. Heebiejeebies comes up, 'cause I'm covering a shift for someone covering his shifts.

"I don't want to hear scuttlebutt," I said. "Don't care. Don't want to know." But I can feel it's something. Something which validates the original need to break his face into puzzle pieces of former facial features.

"Matter of public record."

Fuck me. I know I'm going to google-fu his name, the minute I'm told.

I get through my day. Youngest to karate we can't afford. Oldest harangued into playing his instruments. Me, finishing laundry.

All the chores done, kids to bed, wife off her feat and trying to sleep - I sit down to type his name into little window with the magnifying glass, top right on the screen.

Rape. Of a minor younger than thirteen. Forcible rape. Assault and battery. On a child. Rapes which go on for four years. According to the court documents, it takes her a decade to work up the courage to report him. It takes another six years for the case to wind its way through the courts, until a decision is reached which allows him to be prosecuted. Six more months before he has to go home to face his accuser.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years that girl had to wait to seek the pale shadows of justice and make her peace with the leavings left to her.

I'm an anarchist. I don't think in terms of cops and judges and lawyers and calibrated punishment. I prefer the unmediated. The immediate. I reject the sham of justice, the same way I dismiss the damaging fictions of gods and money and the State. Believing them makes material, but that doesn't mean they're concrete.

Fifteen fucking years.

Fuck that. That shit is cruelty made flesh.

Maybe I'm too facile about violence, but fucking aye, I can't help but believe that giving her the space and the acceptance for whatever retribution suits her needs is so much better than sacrificing more than half of her life in the pursuit of a fiction of justice. She ends up the sacrifice, that way. That's the way of justice. To sacrifice the victims again and again, as a justification for the power accrued to those who arrogate for themselves official punishment.

She has had to endure, while he wanders free.

He got fifteen years of respite and reward. She got what?

I know some of what she's had to face. The way it weighs down on the medulla itself. How thoughts and emotions are reshaped around the seed of violation. Living with the death of trust. With the intimate knowledge that nothing is restored. Love transmuted into vigilance. Vigilance always sharing a border with violence. Playful touches faked, because it's all so much labor.

It took her a decade to accuse.

That can't be held against her.

But his fifteen years of unearned life can be held against him. They ought to be. Maybe not with prisons and worm eaten words about justice.

I'm thinking the guillotine. Or a noose. Or being repeatedly run over by a forklift.

Maybe, instead: a sacred place. Made holy by its profanity. A place where victims can bring their violators. Where they can, like Maenads, tear Pentheus limb from limb over and over again. A single Pentheus. A thousand thousands of them.

A whole new religion, even. 

Spreading like spilled wine and wilding fires.



* - in the interests of disclosure, he is belligerently Jewish. You know the type. Militantly Hebrew. With anti-drug paraphernalia on his personal items of clothing. A straight edger Zionist. But that doesn't usually fill me with the need to launch an uppercut. I write about the justifications for violence, but I'm fairly shy, retiring and measured out in the meat life of public existence. Angry Jewishness doesn't offend. It embarrasses, like a bad joke told poorly and with no sense of timing. Comedic schadenfreude might follow, but not violence.

Make Me A Sandwich

"Make me a sandwich."

"Huh?"

"That's the new bro thing, dad."

"At school?"

"Yeah. And elsewhere. It's the new put down."

"Like, 'make me a sandwich' is a dismissal? Why? Is it because..."

"...girls make sandwiches for boys, Dad. It's a 'women belong in the kitchen' and 'bitches make sandwiches' thing, Dad."

"But it's said by dudes to other dudes?"

"Yeah, Dad."

So, yeah. Let's be clear. These are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year old boys. Future grown ass men. Future boyfriends, husbands, bosses, rapists and abusers. And just like last year, and the year before, and all the way going back to the first Sumerian priest-landowner's decision to mark a symbol for cattle in clay and trade out his daughter for the right to own more cattle in the future...it's the same as it ever was. And the way boys reinforce their place in the hierarchy is by treating their presumed inferiors...

...as women.

No surprise in that, of course. But it is nonetheless amusing to read, witness and watch men, dudes, broheemers and anti-feminists deny the pervasiveness of a nearly ubiquitous idea, that "woman" defines "inferior," and in doing so, sets the value for "governable."

Answers

To answer the questions and responses given in reply to the "Interrogatives" post below:

What differentiates victim and victimizer? The violation. It's a clear enough demarcation that we have separate words for the two poles of the relationship.

What justifies revenge? The choice to seek it.

What limit should a victim have imposed upon vengeance? None. There is no spiritual component to the universe which demands proportionality in retribution, or which punishes an over-reaction. If a person does not wish to have his dick chopped off for being a raping raper, for example, he should (a) not rape, (b) throw himself into a wood chipper, (c) self-defenestrate from a tall building or (d) drink a gallon or two of antifreeze, and then chase it with a glass or three of methanol.

Of course, this may seem to imply that victimizers should know better, but it does no such thing. A person does not have to know that others believe his actions to be characterized by wrongness in order for those actions to have consequences. In fact, I would submit to you that intentionality is a useless bellwether for judging the outcome of choices. Observationally, a rapist has raped regardless of his reasons. He doesn't have to know better. He has only to not rape. He has only to choose not to inflict harm.

And if that's the case, retribution is justified not by any urge to punish, correct or edify (which are silly Judeo-Christer obeisances to notion of sin)  - but by the simpler, cleaner and more manageable desire to requite harm because the original violation hurts.

Pain makes valid the victim's response, so long as he or she refuses to accept that pain should ever have been inflicted. Pain, in a cosmos where life is brief and nerve endings tuned to suffering, is the only justification a victim ought to require for herself.

Did he hurt me?

Yes?

Then I may and perhaps even ought to hurt him back...

Ethics?

Can ethics be collectivized without compulsion?

If not, what's the point of them?

If so, how? As in, what are the mechanisms?