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May 2013

Stockpiling inmates

I was unaware that Sarah Palin was still a meme, but the Democratic Party is apparently still using her to raise money and build their email lists. Apparently, because who cares enough to look it up, the former Alaska governor said the US government is "stockpiling bullets" to use against the public. And so a petition has been launched by the Democratic Governors Association to demand an apology because that is important:
Accusing our government of actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people is not only offensive and wrong -- it's downright dangerous. For Sarah Palin to insinuate that the United States is similar to the tyrannical governments in Syria and Iran who do carry out those types of atrocities is completely reprehensible.
Good on the governors for looping Iran into the mix, rather than a Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. President Hillary may have to bomb them someday, so it's important to lay the groundwork now. Sarah Palin and Iran: Bad. Got it.

Of course, the unfortunate thing is that the US government is "actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people" (no one cares about it using them against other people). You don't end up with 2.3 million Americans in prison cells by asking them nicely. You force them in at the point of a gun. The FBI alone gets over $8 billion a year to do this. Federal prisons get over $8 billion to keep them there.

Is that the same as the sort of political repression that goes on in Syria or Iran? No, it's different. The people getting shot in the streets by security forces are usually Black or Latino. And no one has anywhere near the size prison population that America does.

(via @FireTomFriedman)

she does me like . . . wait, what?

obviously i am in reactionary mode right now. hard to tell why. maybe it's because i've been hanging out with my mom and reading richard rorty. while i'm at it, i've been listening to eric church. now, he's one of many male country singers who are basically working in a modified traditonalist vein and basically singing about the joys of getting drunk (well, hip hop, pop, my ex-wife, etc seem to be in an extremely drunken mode these days. party unto death, y'all.) the model is kenny chesney, which is quite unfortunate, though the boy can sing a country song and had good moments early on. also the thing with new male country stars is that they are emerging in this 'man-candy' era. so, you know, luke bryan takes longer getting into his jeans or having them painted on than beyonce. florida-georgia line is another example of the approach.

but i feel that eric church is a cut above: a bit better songs, a bit better singing. also, there is a twist of weirdness. what is up with his religion is interesting, and he throws jesuses around very cavalierly, saying that we need a country music jesus, or even more astonishingly that his woman loves him like jesus does. now, that really makes you wonder how jesus does love people, and also how people love jesus. on the other hand, i've also concluded that 'like jesus does' is an amazing song: both beautiful and interestingly bent. he has a lot of good songs, actually, and if i were predicting, i'd say that he's sort of an emerging george strait or alan jackson.

on man-candy: i guess we rather enjoyed our scopophilia before we got a bad conscience, so y'all knock yourselves out. i feel old and ugly, though. ah well, we deserve that too!

 

i don't know what you think about country music, but it's certainly the only genre where any major artist could sit down in front of a mic with a guitar at any time and blow you away. 'She knows the man I ain't/She forgives me when I can't." that is good.

 

that is classic country, and at least registers the other side of all the happy drunk songs.

 

 

yeah i wish i didn't have a heart.

Tagged with: ,

Reconsidering Self-Care

1c

Self-care has become a popular buzzword in activist circles. Yet until recently, it has inspired little critical discussion. Do “self” and “care” always mean the same thing? How about “health”? How has this discourse has been colonized by capitalist values? And how could we expand our notion of care outside the common stereotypes?

In this analysis, we identify the normative tendencies in conventional self-care rhetoric, discuss how to undo the unequal distribution of care in our society, and explore the potentially transformative power of illness and self-destructive behavior.

This is the first text in a collection of essays about care that we will publish shortly. We look forward to more dialogue on the subject.

Read the feature.

Tagged with:

education and equality

the other day i was being confronted yet again for the craziness of my anti-statism, and someone asked me: do you think people have a right to an education? well, i don't know. sure. problem is that no one has the right to educate them under compulsion. to read their right to be educated as your right to form their consciousness by force just shows everything dishonest and evil about your political philosophy, which is basically a bunch of la-di-da euphemisms for coercion to create a hierarchy with people like you at the top. your claim to know what they should know and how they should think is an attitude of incredible arrogance and elitism. the political philosophy of american liberalism is as hierarchical or more hierarchical even than, say, laissez-faire capitalism or hereditary aristocracy. but here is one difference; on the leftish side, the extreme enthusiasm for hierarchy is justified by egalitarianism. that is an amazing cognitive accomplishment.

Categories: Politics
Tagged with: ,

the tea party is back

if the tea party continues to protest the common core curriculum, they can expect me to join right up. one thing about the tea party: somehow it literally makes liberals insane. they start arguing that dissent is never legitimate in a democracy, and then they just go crazed ad hominem: just throwing insults and shit like that's a reason. they can do this because they're only talking to their own demographic, where everyone nods along. right, these are ignorant white people. you fucking trailer trash! oh no actually they are the middle-class servants of capitalism. well, on this matter they are opposing bill gates, exxon-mobil, and so on. probably you who condemn them think you are yourself opposed to capitalism, which would indicate that you literally have no idea what you're doing or why. actually, we don't live in a capitalist society, we live in a squishy totalitarian state/corporate merger. but it is capitalists who are driving this thing: they want to churn out american children as a uniform product; it's quality control. i picture the next generation as an army of sexually and racially diverse yet intellectually cloned bureaucrats who make rurality a crime and who literally are incapable of understanding how or why anyone could possibly disagree with them. no particular person among them will have to think at all, because they'll all be thinking together!

Tagged with: ,

Who Will See To Our Needs?



       While our millionaire political playboys keep re-assuring us that they are on the right track to economic recovery, the figures just don't stack up. In the 17 nation Euro Zone, unemployment has reached a new record high, in fact the highest since the EU statistics office started collecting data in 1995. Unemployment in the Euro Zone is sitting at 12.2% with several countries well over that average. Unemployment of young people in Greece is now over 60%, while Italy is facing the highest unemployment in 36 years, with the young of that country having to live with more than 40% unemployment. France, the second largest economy in the Euro Zone is also facing a new record in unemployment. At the same time the Euro Zone is faced with the longest recession since 1999. Green shoots of growth??? 
       Of course all those committees of economic experts have grand plans, they will oscillate between deeper austerity and printing more money. To discuss this as an economic problem will keep the answers in the economic bracket and so will go round and round on how to cut the debt, how fast to cut the debt, to forget the debt for a moment and print more money to spend. All of which means more of the same for you and I, a life of struggle. 
      Also to keep the discussion in the economic field masks the real problem, it is a human problem. In Greece what does 62.7% unemployment mean to the young people of that country? What does the future hold for that 40% of unemployed young Italians? Are they suffering because we in Europe do not have the material resources to see to their needs? Are we saying that as a continent we don't know how to use the potential energy and skill of all those young people? Or is it that the system is geared to making sure that the wealthy continue to stay wealthy at the cost of the future of our children and our grand children.  

 
     Europe is an extremely wealth continent, well capable of supporting all its people, there is food in abundance, there are things that need doing, there are people willing to do them, but unless there is a profit in it for that over fed, pampered bunch of parasites that sit in the ivory towers of control, then those young lives can go and rot in some dingy back street. 
       The real problem is the system, capitalism cannot see to the needs of all our people, it wasn't set up to see to the welfare of the people, it wasn't started to see that everybody got a job, it wasn't set up to improve the well being of the ordinary people. It is doing what it was set up to do, create wealth for the business class and at the moment it is doing that very well indeed, so don't look for any real changes from that bunch. To see to the needs of all our people the present economic system has to go, and the change will have to come from the people, only we ourselves can and will set up a system that sees fairly to the needs of all our people.

ann arky's home.

Lee Rigby And 1381 Peasants Revolt.


     The latest from Circled "A" Radio passes an opinion on the murder in Woolwich of the soldier Lee Rigby, and a recounting of the events of 1381, the Peasants Revolt, plus some really good music. Well worth a listen

Circled "A" Radio:

ann arky's home.

»Meine Briefe bleiben auch künftig militärfrei«

erschienen in der Tageszeitung jungeWelt (www.jungewelt.de) am 31. Mai 2013 - Die Post will eine Bundeswehr-Briefmarke herausbringen – Gegenaktionen von Friedensaktivisten. Ein Gespräch mit Roland Blach - Roland Blach ist Geschäftsführer der »Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft – Vereinigte KriegsdienstgegnerInnen« (DFG-VK) Baden-Württemberg Das Bundesfinanzministerium gibt am 6. Juni Sonderbriefmarken mit olivgrünen Silhouetten von Menschen und dem Schriftzug »Bundeswehr – Im Einsatz [...]

Tagged with:

“Conspiracies don’t exist!”

There is a bizarre belief amongst skeptics and other supposed rationalists that there is no such thing as conspiracies and that anyone who believes in conspiracies must be a crackpot. Certainly there are a lot of crackpots who adopt conspiracy theories. There are also a lot of crackpots who talk about physics, but this does not mean physics is all bunk. To make that equation is a use of the genetic fallacy (not that the examples on that page are very good). The merits of conspiracy theories are not to be evaluated by their most crackpot proponents.

Actually there are a number of social, corporate and political conspiracies recognized as real, all of which are matter of public record. Corporations and political entities, and private individuals involved in both, come to agree to perpetrate atrocities under a veil of secrecy all the time. Indeed, they would be rather limited in scope if they didn’t commit atrocities, as they deal largely in establishing and maintaining power imbalances. Neo-liberalism is a vast conspiracy to destroy second and third world economies for Western power elites and their cash flow.

So the question arises, why are people indoctrinated to not think about conspiracies, if conspiracies are such an important part of our political and economic life?

The smartass answer would be that it’s a conspiracy (hah), but I don’t think that’s really the case. I think it’s a natural result of the suppression of conspiracy theorizing by governments and corporations. Skeptics mainly come in after the fact, confirming the “absurdity” of this or that conspiracy theory without really doing any work. In contrast to that lazy attitude, we have activists and researchers, whose job it becomes to uncover and grasp the scope of the conspiracy (Naomi Klein, with her exposé of neo-liberalism in The Shock Doctrine, is a good example).

I imagine skeptics will reply that the things I am talking about are not really conspiracies, that a conspiracy must necessarily be a world-spanning, evidence-all-suppressing shadowy organization of evildoers which organizes smaller groups of evildoers. This is what is called a “superconspiracy theory,” the kind of worldview advocated by people like David Icke (the reptilians are controlling everything!) or antisemites (the Jews are controlling everything!). But most conspiracy theories, including ones that are about actual conspiracies, are much more mundane:

A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.

If we accept that there is a power elite and that this power elite has divergent interests from the rest of us, then conspiracy theories are not extraordinary claims at all. There’s nothing extraordinary about the proposition that people who have power over others and who have divergent interests from them will secretly try to fuck those other people over. For atheists, the concept that religion has motivated people or groups to plot against unbelievers or believers of the “wrong” religion is pretty mundane (just to name two recent examples, the Wedge Document exposed an Intelligent Design conspiracy to take over the education system, and Scientology has been illegally imprisoning some of its top officials in secret prisons).

Skeptics may argue that a conspiracy cannot last, because someone will tattle. But a conspiracy doesn’t have to last forever, it just has to last long enough for its goal to be accomplished. It may even be preferable for a conspiracy to be revealed once it has run its course, as in the case of a coup, to intimidate possible dissenters.

Skeptics may argue that conspiracies are irrational because evidence against a conspiracy can always be reinterpreted as evidence for it (“that’s what THEY want you to think!”). But it’s obvious that there are possible disproofs of a conspiracy. For example, a conspiracy involving Chevron or Scientology is plausible, but a conspiracy involving Reptilians is implausible, since Reptilians do not actually exist, or otherwise their influence is not distinguishable from that of human beings. Conspiracies are still made of people, and they can only do what people can do. People can’t create mythical beings.

As for the crackpot argument, I’ve already refuted it. The fact that crackpots often talk about conspiracy theories is no disproof of conspiracies any more than the fact that crackpots often talk about physics disproves physics.

People complain about 9/11 truthers or global warming deniers, but we need people who keep challenging what we think we know. It is through opposition that we define ourselves; even Christian fundamentalists fulfill that role. Without opposition, we become entrenched in our beliefs and there can be no intellectual progress.

People who reject conspiracy thinking, on the other hand, don’t want their ideas to be challenged. Skeptics, for instance, are pretty mainstream politically, mostly liberals, so they have no interest in challenging the status quo. Not only that, but there are people who use the common antipathy towards conspiracy theories to argue against radicals, even though these radicals are not actually using conspiracy theories. I wrote about this in the case of Anarchism, but it is used in other contexts also. Atheists, for instance, are sometimes accused of believing that religious people are out to get them or to do evil.

Instead of being a skeptic, we need to maintain what radfem Mary Daly calls “positive paranoia”: to be aware of patterns in people’s “seemingly disparate” behavior and try to understand how these patterns arise.

One cannot talk about conspiracies without talking about The Conspiracy. The Conspiracy as understood by the Subgenius is not really a conspiracy as such, as much as the appearance of a conspiracy. Subgeniuses don’t actually believe that every Pink in the world is consciously conspiring to deprive them of slack. But the term “the Conspiracy” to describe the confluence and collusion of all the hierarchies that impose on an individual is just too convenient and descriptive to pass up.


Filed under: Mechanisms of control

Seattle and Washington, in relation to the ’90s, WTO, and how things are now

Because it's somewhat different than I think people usually picture it. Not bad, just different. Here's why:

The notion that I had of Seattle when I moved to Olympia, in Washington State, in order to get back to school, was that Seattle and the Northwest were this huge hub of hardcore radical activity, and that the WTO directly came out of that. This was only partially true. The bigger context was that the radical activity that lead to the WTO was a subset of the greater, across the board, counter-culture activity that came with the alternative culture of the '90s. Seattle wasn't just the head of radical culture, but also of fringe culture, conspiracy theories, alt cinema culture, retro culture, punk, other weirdness, you have it.

A good indicator of this is how AK Press and Distribution was even in the early '00s, directly after WTO. At that point, AK still distributed a huge amount of 'zines and fringe culture topics, on top of the anarchism and radical politics. At a certain point, the 'zines may have been a bigger seller than the anarchism. These days, AK publishes lots of solid left books on history and politics in general, but this is actually a shift produced by the increased interest in these subjects that the WTO demonstrations produced.

I think, though I would have to interview a bunch of people to confirm, that the radical organizing and culture that lead into the WTO wasn't the first start of a radical culture coming to the surface, but was instead the end, the crowning moment, of alternative culture, where despite the many tendencies and interests, people came together to make a statement on things that were messed up in the world. And after the demonstrations, I think, but I can't prove, that although progressive organizing continued in Seattle, eventually folks went their separate ways, and the different parts of the counter-culture slowly went back to doing what they were doing before it happened. A lot of politically minded people moved to Portland, and contributed to jumpstarting things down there, although like Seattle, Portland was one of the foci of alternative culture itself.

Because of this, I don't think that Seattle was ever the utopia of radical-ness that folks sometimes made it out to be. It was the utopia of alternative culture as a whole, of which some radical culture was a part, but was not, as I thought when I moved up here, the natural place for the next step for the politics of the country. Instead, the rest of the country most likely did a lot of things that went far beyond what Seattle did.

But the thing is that the alternative culture that existed in Seattle back then still shapes the culture of the place, although separated by the course of some years.