10 Comments

1. (Boer) Tom:

   I’ve come across several individuals who are doing this kind of thing online, although the emphasis is less on the trade centre attacks, and more on e.g. Honduras (“brunowe” on alternet.org pushes a slightly softened version of the Wall Street Journal line that Honduras heroically and democratically resisted US efforts to reinstate Zelaya, complete with some lefty-liberal catch-phrases), although this might be due to personal belief / indoctrination / “education”. I’ve done more to dispel notions of false-flag attacks on the trade centres on that forum than all the prim-and-proper types (e.g. brunowe, guitarbill) – these folks usually just shout the truthers down, and care little for science – the same holds for their lack-lustre support for global warming science – I agree with Chomsky that they’ll find certain conspiracy theories too useful for distraction purposes to bother opposing. Generally, if one does one’s homework, and puts in the effort to make the science, history or other matters accessible and useful to lay people, those guys will accept defeat through non-interference – no effort was made to defend the USA government behaviour since 04 in Haiti on alternet the last while, although the usual white supremacists showed up – a more promising tactic for your government would be to send in white supremacists, which tend to scare off the lefty-liberal crowd (until that crowd grows a bit of a spine and tells them to put a sock in it – one or two good books on the lack of variability of crime reported in anonymous surveys usually does it). Likewise, they are so far stuck on DU munitions. The Canadian government did try to shut down the Criminal violations against Haitian Households paper by pressuring The Lancet, so they might try that to reduce the availability of credentialed knowledge of their crimes. Right now, I’m not seeing any especially well-thought new tactics, other than bullying, and most blogs have tags to link comments directly, thus allowing one to show previous bad behaviour – in order to do advocacy, one must establish some credentials, even such informal credentials as a continued online identity, to meaningfully communicate – one can readily show previous bullying, and changing one’s identity works against previously built credentials. I’ve just finished reading their paper – they speak of diversifying the information that people are exposed to – the irony is that that only works when verifiable information is present, and that leads to critical inquiries. I think in practice, they’ll stick to bullying, propaganda and censorship.

   17 January 2010, 1:29 am

2. Stan:

   I rest my case.

   18 January 2010, 6:56 pm

3. Stan:

   There was an article yesterday in Asia Times that speculated about the political fallout if the jobless recovery lasted, alongside the war, for another six years. It has a certain prescience about it imo, and even captured – in an offhand but accurate way – the masculinizing dynamic of political reaction. The piece simply projected existing trends then did some educated speculation.

   Michael A, who frequents this space, also interrogated me about Costa Rican politics, forcing me to take a few minutes to familiarize myself with some of the background of the upcoming election here. I can now note with more assurance that middle-class (as it exists here… it means people with something to lose, but little control over the actual system aside from their voting blocs) anxiety is being easily translated into xenophobia as a mobilizing political issue that instigates a political race to the bottom.

   Then today I read about the Massachusetts political upset by the Republicans, about which Andrew Cockburn penned a scathing and – unfortunatley – also accurate commentary on Couterpunch yesterday entitled A Richly Deserved Humiliation.

   On Facebook, which I reluctantly started using recently, I have approved more friend requests than I can count, which gives me a long list of political twitches each day from “progressives,” and which has been very educational. I am constantly being invited to join virtual groups and support virtual causes and sign virtual petitions, which I dutifully ignore… not out of animosity, but because I have profound doubts about their ultimate relevence, and the suspicion that this kind of push-button joinery gives us permision to continue our dreaming somnambulence.

   These posts share one thing with political web sites that decry all the tragic minutiae of our conjuncture, and that is the brutally entrenched faith that there is a solution available “if we just get together,” whatever that means, which is usually neither thought out nor articulated… and which defaults to running and electing political candidates.

   There’s little to no account of the fact that in the US, these elections are in the hands of the axious and bewildered 52% of the population that lives this precarious middle-class existence in the suburbs and exurbs of America, with the electoral/legislative/propaganda apparatus in the hands of the richest 1%.

   Whomever can entrain this demographic with the most manipulative lies and promises wins, which is definitely a class phenomenon, but is also a phenomenon that leaps over itself into autonomy as it did in pre-Nazi Germany some years back. Ruling classes can become the captives of their own bullshit, and history bears this out.

   Obama’s election has now neutralized an African America that is still largely under the powerful influence of its own comprador bougeoisie – of whom Obama is a part, whether he or anyone else likes it or not. So there is no significant potential political counter-force left in the US as we watch the escalation of the Energy War into Pakistan and Yemen, as the economy is handed back to the speculators who ran it into the ditch the last time so they can skim us one last time before the deluge, and as the working/middle classes of America break free of the duopolistic inertia of the current political system, freed up to be attracted by their anxiety toward the newly emerging pole of ex-military/mercenary, tea-bagger, etc., wingnuts who are forming the basis for the only viable third-party in the US today… led by Lou Dobbs perhaps, or Stanley McChrystal and “Jerry” Boykin.

   These trends are in motion, and imo there is little that can be accomplished by continuing to inhabit the impotent echo-chambers of progressive internet politics, or the leftist calls from the deepest canyons of obscurity for “revolution now.”

   Given my premise – which no one is obliged to share – that electoral/policy solutions are chimeric, and the premise that no coherent political base exists (that is more than ideological) as a counterweight to the increasing forces of reaction, this is a pretty grim and frustrating scenario. There’s no play here.

   It suggests, in the face of a nerve-wracking impatience, that we have to go back to the drawing board and have a lot of fearless discussions about what cannot be done before we try to do something.. whatever that may be.

   Dig in. It’s going to a long decade.

   21 January 2010, 1:42 pm

4. Kim Skay:

   LIBERAL.

   I am a bit lost with this discussion about progressives. For me, it was important to hack through the meanings of “liberal”, as I have friends on all sides of the fence. I transcribed parts of an interview with Chomsky, so, below is not word for word.

   Chomsky was asked a question, something like, what’s a liberal? He proceeded to explain how the term functions in this country…

   CHOMSKY:
   “Liberal” means the “guardians of the gates”. So the New York Times is “liberal” by, what’s called, the standards of political discourse, New York Times is liberal, CBS is liberal… They’re not totally subordinate to power, but they are very strict in how far you can go. And in fact, their liberalism serves an extremely important function in supporting power. It’s saying: “I’m guardian of the gates, you can go this far, but not further.”

   So take a major issue, like say, the invasion of Vietnam. Well, no liberal newspaper ever talked about the invasion of Vietnam; they talked about the defense of Vietnam. And then they were saying, “Well, it’s not going well.” Ok, that makes them liberal. It’s like, it’s if we were to say, that going back to, say, Nazi Germany, that Hitler’s general staff was liberal after Stalingrad because they were criticizing his tactics: “It was a mistake to fight a two front war, we should’ve knocked off Englad first,” or something. Ok, that’s what we call liberalism, saying, “well it’s not going well,” you know, so, “maybe it’s costing us too much” or you know some may say even “maybe we are killing too many people.” But that’s called “liberal.”

   …What was called “the extreme critique of the war,” let’s say right at the war’s end, you go too way, what’s called the “far left” of the media, maybe Anthony Lewis and the New York Times, outspoken, liberal, the “extreme”. He summed up the war in 1975 by saying the U.S. entered South Vietnam with, I think his phrase was, “blundering efforts to do good.” “To do good” is tautological. Our government did it so therefore by definition of what’s “to do good” and try to give evidence to that, he doesn’t because it’s a tautology, it’s like saying two plus two equals four.

   The right wing… I really suggest listening to talk radio. I mean, if you just listen to what the talk hosts are saying, they sound like they are lunatics. But put aside your disbelief and just listen to it. Put yourself in the position of a person, sort of an ordinary American, “I’m a hard-working, god-fearing Christian. I take care of my family, I go to church, I, you know, do everything ‘right’. And I’m getting shafted. I did everything you’re supposed to do, but something’s going wrong to me. Now, the talk show hosts have an answer, nobody has an answer, I mean, there is an answer. The answer is, you know, the neoliberal remaking of the economy, among other things. But nobody is giving them that answer.

   And the answer that the talk show host is giving them is convincing, in its internal logic. It’s saying, “what’s wrong is the rich liberals own everything, run everything, they don’t care about you; therefore, distrust them” and so on. What did Hitler say? He said the same thing. He said “it’s the Jews, it’s the Bolsheviks… their view is that the corporations are liberal. Their appeal to the population is, “the country is run by liberals, they own the corporations, they run the government, they own the media, and they don’t care about us ordinary people.” And there’s an analog to this: late Weimar republic, it’s very reminiscent of the late Weimar republic. And this mass appeal has it’s similarities to Nazi propaganda.

   21 January 2010, 2:55 pm

5. Christian Stalberg:

   Well of course! Some of us have known about this for quite sometime. Read this

   ‘Why Bush Hasn’t Been Impeached: CIA Infiltration and Mass Media’

   http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=5719&show=votes#allcomments

   21 January 2010, 3:01 pm

6. ld:

   Razor-sharp analysis, Stan. That’s the most historical materialist thing I’ve seen from you for a while. (Not to denigrate your other explorations these last two or three years.) Does your recovery of this mode of analysis have anything to do with your relocation to Costa Rica, or am I grasping at straws or being presumptuous?

   22 January 2010, 1:14 am

7. Stan:

   Appreciate rhe accolade, but what has happened since we got moved in is I have more time to think and read and write; and I’m not dead tired all the time from a physically demanding job. Don’t know what categories of analysis I may or may not use, but on discerning the what-is-to-be-done question, my own answers are still, generally, nonviolence and relocalization. The only reason I hesitate to call myself anarchist is that sticky problem of the state that refuses to surrender to mere judgement. I actually defer to Paul on that one… obey authorities so long as they are obeying God’s directives to die to self, love the neighbor, love the stranger, and make peace. Nowadays, that means almost never. From my perspective, it’s the state that is in rebellion against the highest authority, not me. (:

   @ Kim, all points well taken. I like Chomsky’s somewhat fuzzy definition of anarchism as the idea that anyone who promotes coercive force – including and especially the state – bears the burden of proof, not those who are on the receiving end of that coercion. Under all this, of course, is th most philosophically vulnerable concept at the core of the whole liberal project, and that is Property. It gets left alone for reasons we really ought to understand more thoroughly, but under any kind of critical scrutiny, Property falls apart like a two-dollar shirt. I again cannot too strongly recommend Carole Pateman’s discussions of social contract as a first step toward getting to the class-, but especially gender-aspects of the evolution of the notion of Property.

   22 January 2010, 7:22 am

8. Kim Sky:

   I included the liberal thing, because I was thinking about — what-is-to-be-done. Perhaps it is only me and my ignorance. I’ve always taken pride in my ability to emote. To listen to someone, delve deeply into the cultural, physical aspects of that person and “understand” their actions. A kind of typical liberal attitude where I can understand say — why so-and-so is a criminal, or why so-and-so killed the neighbor, or whatever.

   Finally! I realized that my emoting abilities were non-existent regarding the main stream right. After spending a lifetime of arguing with my boss, my longest friend, he no longer calls me on the phone in an attempt to evangelize, turn me into a Christian, because he gets too angry. His and many others, always with the mantra, “the media, the liberals …”

   I believe that if we understand what a word means in this culture of ours, we have a standing chance of moving forward together. Instead of arguing with my boss, “the media is not liberal, it’s right wing…” I will be able to move forward on a more positive examination of things.

   Yes, the heart-break of Haiti is such a stark example of propertied vs non-propertied. I can now SEE.

   Thanx for the tip. “Carole Pateman”

   22 January 2010, 2:13 pm

9. FreeDem:

   I find your confusion over what is a Liberal or Progressive quite interesting, in part because in general there is normally no real value based story from which you can determine any policy, and many contradictory ideas on policies some of which no sane person would want. Much of this is deliberate as if you can both confuse the definition and make it an epithet, how can someone argue for the ideal. Classic Orwell.

   So what I have done is to go back to basics and define what I want and have a plan to get there, allowing for knowing that no plan survives contact with the opposition.

   George Lakoff provided perhaps the biggest piece by describing two kinds of families and why similar ideas produce two alternate universes about what you think about them. One(SF) is deeply dysfunctional but focused and personal, the other(NP) more complex and causal but a better outcome when it can accomplish its goals.

   The NP values being Empathy, Empowerment at the bottom, Responsibility/accountability at the top, and a respect for reality as best it can be judged. This Lakoff “razor” is a better judge of a Society, Person, or Policy being Liberal, Progressive, or Socialized than the usual array of definitions or fault finding.

   Another very large piece I have been working on for years looks at any attempt to accomplish a goal by any group of people, noting that there are very few goals that can be accomplished from start to finish by one person.

   While I call the group and goal an “Enterprise” it can refer to any group and any goal, and thus dispenses with the many names that cloud the basic nature of any Enterprise, and puts them on equal footing for comparison, knowing also that the perfect clean case that does not involve other enterprises does not exist. However to exist a basic structure needs to be accomplished and Lakoff’s razor is a good measure of the quality of the result.

   The short version without the proof is that many political ideas make a difference where is is none or deny the need for a basic structure that must then become subversive or blow up the Enterprise all together. Both Anarchist and Libertarian ideals fly in the face of such results.

   5 February 2010, 12:24 am

10. Jim/Omahkohkiaaiipooyii:

    My mother used to define liberals as “the ones whose hearts bleed, so piously, so publicly, so safely, so sanctimoniously, so full of certitude; but it is with the blood of others that their hearts bleed”.

    Bottom line? The lion and the lamb can never lay down together unless the lion becomes a vegetarian. Obama is but a new incarnation, a kind of “Black Hope” in the face of changing demographics that dictate the search for acceptable “non-white” bourgeois and agents of reaction. There is also some evidence, particularly in the biography by David Remnick “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” that this guy is as calculating and predatory as anything the Bush family has produced albeit with some slicker schtick. His mantras like “The perfect is the enemy of the good” are covers for opportunism and planned compromises even before the inevitable give-and-take between parties. He bobs and weaves, turns and tacks, has vitriol only for leftists that see through him, and he basically rolls over at the first sign of conflict or becomes paralyzed trying to figure out the politics of a given policy or action, just vague enough to appear to offer something to all sides, and when the gap between his ego and actual abilities (without a teleprompter), or the gap between his wild promises and real delivery on them widen and deepen, then he just counts on the campaign slogan “At least I am not a Republican or Tea Party freak.”

    Glad to see you are still at it Stan. I’ll be on my way to China in two weeks.

    take care,

    Jim/Omahkohkiaaiipooyii

    4 April 2011, 9:21 am

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