Practicing
One of Walter Mosley’s novels begins:
Ghetto Humor
“Daddy, why do black people kill each other?”
“Practicing.”
I guess that’s black black-humor. It also has a big grain of truth. People do most what they practice and practice most what they do… practice here meaning rehearsal or repetition, not a generalization of practical effort. Hair cutters cut hair a lot; secretaries type; ditch diggers dig; paper shufflers shuffle papers; carpenters saw and hammer; bosses boss.
We also practice our attitudes, even though we apparently have little awareness how our culture inculcated those attitudes.
Yesterday I met Linda Farley, a local pastor, at the community donation garden to pick up some material s for a local upcoming event. While we were talking, she suddenly exclaimed delightedly bout the garden, that it was in motion. And it was. The breeze was making the plants dance, the birds were diving in and out, the butterflies were doing take-offs and landings, as were the bees. Bees apparently love the flowers on bolted broccoli.
There for just a moment, we both stopped and did a little joy. Earlier that day I was somewhat distressed that the content mill publisher where I make a little money is about to yank the carpet out from under its writers to take their money and run. I can’t look for a job until the beginning of November, because we are closing on a house and I have work to do there. My father-in-law is very ill and in and out of the hospital. My daughter, who stays with us along with her 17 month old daughter, is unhappily unemployed and looking in vain.
I’ve practiced worry all my life, so I’m really good at it. I haven’t practiced joy all my life, so I need a lot of practice.
Somewhere recently, I’d heard that part of reclaiming our lives from worry is the practice of gratitude and joy. In the Gospel of Matthew, I read that worry is a lack of faith.
When I stopped to think about it yesterday, I realized that I have a great deal to be grateful for. I know that raises the question for my agnostic friends about gratitude to whom; but I have an answer for that and I leave others who will at least acknowledge that gratitude is warranted (for butterflies, good health, a pleasant breeze, a well-cooked egg, a comfortable bed under a sound roof, grandchildren, etc.) to figure out where to direct that gratitude. Before my conversion, I had adopted the habit of saying thank-you into space for at least three things every night before I went to bed. (Caution: this was one practice that contributed to conversion.) The point here, though, is that I began – in a small way to practice gratitude.
Every time I take a moment to admire a brilliant half-moon, feel the embrace of a child, take heart from the smile of a stranger, I have an opportunity to practice moments of joy.
In a culture that is based on simulation that makes it untrustworthy, scarcity that makes it competitive and envious, and alienation that makes its individuals lonely and angry and lost, we all have plenty of practice worrying, feeling put-upon, being amorphously agitated, driven, inadequate, confused (but fronting that we have it together), and out of touch with the Now.
As we are, for the most part, I believe we can have 20 things about which to be grateful and 20 opportunities for moments of joy in a day; and if we have one thing to worry about or one thing that is saddening or angering, we will forget the rest. We practice what we do, and we do what we practice.
Even those of us who have taken on the role of world-changers now and again have copped to the idea that if we can only change the world, our hearts will change too.
I’m not at all sure of that any more. If we are to reflect forward a better world, one where love is the currency and peace is the setting, then that projection has to be one that we embody as a living example. We have to practice gratitude and joy. Then we can form associations, even communities, where the people in them are practitioners of gratitude and joy. And those communities can reflect forward – subverting the world of simulacra, alienation and scarcity – into a better world.
DeAnander:
Debunking the Catharsis Theory
OK I am in a rush (ace mechanic coming in 15 minutes to fix longstanding issue) but I need to connect a couple of dots hastily, on the fly. First, the ‘practise’ or ‘patterning’ theory makes way more sense to me than the ‘catharsis’ theory. It explains for example why propaganda and hate speech (and other forms of advertising) actually *work* — and can I just mention ‘mirror neurons’ here! — they help us to rehearse, in our brains, the hatred and/or envy/greed/acquisitiveness that the propagandist desires us to act out in reality.
I also have to make the connection to pornography as a form of hate speech and my deep skepticism about the perennial argument for catharsis. When men repeatedly and routinely consume images of women being humiliated, punished, hated and abused, they train and condition their brains to hate and despise women. Propaganda is propaganda is propaganda and I don’t care how much it’s dressed up in Nekkid Ladies (in fact the *use* of nekkid ladies to sell stuff is just another layer to the propaganda!)…
What we eat becomes part of our bodies and what we read, watch, sing, listen to, attend to becomes part of our brain-furniture.
Custody of eyes and brain
but I’m not really joking. What we rehearse, we internalise and become.
I note that the author (above) doesn’t go near the question of pornstitution; he notes in passing that “venting sexual tension feels good” and then goes on to talk about the venting of anger as if they were utterly and completely separate issues — as if anger, dominance, and sexuality were not inextricably entwined in patriarchal ideation, as if “the act” were not (as common parlance and common praxis reveal it to be) a venting of anger as well as sexual tension for large numbers of men… and as if the experience of using sex as a vent for anger were not self-reinforcing and as problematic as other anger-venting strategies he describes.
6 October 2011, 11:53 amC.C.:
Practicing…
How Aristotelian. MacIntyre, is that you?
I’m sure that the art of practice as a virtue predates virtue ethics, but I couldn’t help but make that association.
BTW, Stan, how are you doing on the study of MacIntyre?
6 October 2011, 4:50 pmStan:
I am re-reading God, Philosophy, Universities right now. The old fella is hard on universities, but fairly so as one who still loves the vestiges of collegiality. Been on about this practice thing even before MacIntyre. But MacIntyre brought a lot of threads together for me. Illich was a fan as I understand it. I also enjoy that deadpan sense of humor (eg. “The one thing that Marxists and Thomists agree upon is that Marxism and Thomism are incompatible.”)
@De, as always (sigh) we can’t seem to get past the idea that sex is a floating signifier (when it takes place in a world inscribed by power). Privilege blindness and propaganda work… to conceal and reproduce power.
6 October 2011, 5:25 pmC.C.:
And De,
I just read your post (I also was in a rush, thus only reading the original thread from Stan). I find it interesting that the author does not say anything about crying as appropriate catharsis. I suspect that since crying is not a macho thing to do, the author probably did not really think of it as an option. (As a side note, I find that crying fits the etymology of “catharsis” better than violent actions because actual biological fluids are expelled when one cries)
He also doesn’t even mention verbal venting (unless I completely missed this part in my hasty reading) as a healthy option for “letting anger out”. I guess “talking things out” isn’t so macho either. If I had a nickel for every time I hear, “Goddamn it. Quit being such a bitch! You also wanna talk about feelings and shit!”…
I don’t want to ignore De’s point about pornography. I can definitely say that I did not start out in life seeing women as sexual objects. I even remember a time when I had a curious and somewhat bashful notion of women’s bodies before I started to heavily watch porn. Not to idealize my youthful curiosity, but that curiosity had definitely formed my initial view that a human body is something to be respected. Fast forward to high school and college, where my thoughts on women greatly degraded in respect and admiration after years of porn (not to mention a healthy dose of being a high school football player, college student, and later a soldier).
The point is that I definitely had to PRACTICE in misogyny.
6 October 2011, 6:05 pmC.C.:
Correction: “… You *always* wanna talk about feelings…”
I have a bad habit of not proofreading. I just get so excited when I post!
6 October 2011, 6:08 pmDeAnander:
“You have to be carefully taught…”
6 October 2011, 6:51 pmC.C.:
You’ve lost me, De. I’m not very familiar with Rodgers and Hammerstein.
6 October 2011, 11:06 pmDeAnander:
The point of the song (from S Pacific I believe) was that we are not born hating the Other, but have to be “carefully taught” to dehumanise and despise other people.
7 October 2011, 12:41 amDan:
“Before my conversion”…
Conversion to what? Metric?
7 October 2011, 11:00 amm.c.:
I looked up God, Philosophy, Universities and quickly scanned the Index in the back. Macintyre only mentions the Franciscans(order of little friars) on three pages. Francis of Assisi and his followers probably lived closest to the life of Jesus(if we conclude that Jesus lived a very Buddha-like life.) The Jesuits don’t like to mention Francis much because it erodes their Authority/Money/Real Estate with a Big A.
Note: There are Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical, and non-denomenational Franciscans.
7 October 2011, 1:11 pmDan:
Any room for hardcore (happy and joyful, full of wonder) atheism in this discussion?
7 October 2011, 1:44 pmStan:
St. Francis wasn’t the subject of the book, though. It was a kind of genealogy of philosophy. The vast majority of the book is devoted to describing that genealogy. Francis was a saint; but he is not seen as a practitioner of philosophy. There is more about Aristotle there than I ever thought I would need to know, my biggest surprise in reading MacIntyre is learning about philosophy in a way that makes someone as long-dead as Aristotle interesting and relevant.
Just picked up “Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?” at the local bookstore. It’s sitting there like a hot blueberry pie. (-;
Oh, already on page x in the preface, a quotable quote: “The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect on our culture.” (Note the name of this blog!)
I’ve never thought of Jesus as having a Buddha like existence. Quite the contrary actually, he did not sit out history in a search for blessed nothingness; he was engaged in a very direct way as a laborer and peasant before his mission, and his mission had a powerful and intentional political aspect. He was executed, after all, as a political criminal. He hung out at wedding parties (we know what those can be like), ate with local ne’er-do-wells, put his hands on people who were deemed untouchable, subverted gender with pacifism, discredited positions in the political establishment of his time, mocked the powerful, prophesied doom to the rich, and staked out love as a practice of political resistance.
I do like St. Francis, too, though. He is kind of the ecology saint now, as a lot of Christians are beginning to understand theologically what they know to be a problem in the world – that the current design of society is doing very bad and unpredictable things to the regions of the planet that support our existence.
***
Okay, back again. Thinking now about the army. Practice – intense practice – in the forge of basic training is designed to create a certain kind of person; and to a very large degree it does exactly that. The army gets mimesis-to-understanding through practice. When you are commanded to give every reply in the form of an angry shout, you are being directed to practice voicing anger; and if you don’t it well enough, some drill sergeant will tell you to “sound off like you got a pair of balls.” (I know, I know, I know…. oh do I!)
But there is one part of basic training that is often a turning point for many recruits: bayonet training. I don’t even know if they still do it (I suspect they do). When I was in the army, bayonet training was the part of basic training where a bunch of recruits suddenly ask for administrative discharges from armed service. There is something about having a real bayonet mounted on a real rifle and repeatedly practicing how to slash and stab with it on a life-like dummy that makes the purpose of the armed services suddenly and starkly clear. The instructors talk about the blade getting stuck in bone and how to kick back against the weapon to dislodge the stuck bayonet before plunging it again into a torso, face, or neck.
Recruits are ordered to shout “Kill!” with each step of the choreographed katas of bayonet training. “Kill! Kill! Blood makes the grass grow!” Parry and thrust! Slash, butt stroke, thrust, kick back!
In the beginning the action causes you to feel a little revulsion, but with repetition and the obligatory shouts of angry ecstasy (Kill!), it becomes a kind of possession after a while. Over time, very little time, you have people who will kill.
***
Back again. Adrian is called the city of maples for very obvious reasons. Autumn is all over the place with colorful leaves blowing everywhere, the trees lit up like a kaleidoscope of yellow and orange, the sumac everywhere a fire engine red. It was a clear, moderately windy day, and the temperature has been around 75. That’s a nice thing I noticed today, a joy. I also found my driver’s license and military retirement ID after having left them in a copy machine… something to be grateful for. (-;
7 October 2011, 1:46 pmC.C.:
I went to basic training in March 2008. They still do the bayonet training. Not much has changed. *sigh*
8 October 2011, 12:54 amKim Sky:
today i practice by writing an article. tomorrow i practice by making a painting. today, tomorrow and until the bitter end, i will participate in our local occupation movements in as positive a way as i know how, we now have TWO …
just completed article about the second occupation – R2D2 – Right to dream too:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2011/10/411110.shtml
an excerpt:
BASIC NEED TO SLEEP IS DECLARED
What they will be able to offer is a very small space to enable people to have “their own spot where they can be comfortable and happy. If you’re in your own environment, you can lay back and say, ‘I need to do this, I need to do that, this is what I can do, this is what I can’t do.’”
Explaining in more detail the kinds of difficulties a houseless person endures, Ibrahim explains that, “If you’re looking for a place to sleep for eight to twelve hours — not only a place to sleep, but in Portland, a dry place; and not only that, but a dry, safe place — because you have a situation where there are people going around beating up homeless people, raping homeless women, police taking their stuff and moving them around and mistreating them and imposing unjust laws on them because they’re having a difficult time in life. If they have their own place and their own environment, they can think and become a better person… . What do you expect when you have of a person who hasn’t had any sleep walking around like that? People having no sleep, looking at that person, ‘oh, he must be on drugs, something is wrong!’ What do you expect? Because when you’re sleep deprived, you cannot figure anything out”
8 October 2011, 8:54 pmEric:
Thanks Stan. Good, simple stuff. I’m grateful for hot running water. For my continued good health. For my family and my extended family, in all of our dysfunction. For my sobriety- 5 years, but who’s counting? I’ve heard it said that fear, too, is a lack of faith. I raise my coffee mug to a life of gratitude. And joy.
9 October 2011, 11:51 amLara:
Well, well; what a surprise! Blow me over with a feather! Or as Kristol would say ‘mugged by reality’. I been thought-speechless for a response, but decided today was the day. How else to honour a modern day Paul Kruger?
I must say I’d almost given up on [XR] TigerSkullValleyMtns ~ BearSnakeHorseBay; sharing with me his kinesthetic simple language knowingness about sex and war.
Radical Honesty culture theory and practice teaches that joy is one of the most feared emotions. I am not talking about fake joy, that we substitute for the real thing. Fake joy of consumerism being an excellent example of the use of psychology to manipulate the citizens subconscious for corporate profits. Brad’s thoughts is that we fear real in your gut joy: by that I mean striving for something with a huge amount of purpose and thinking it can never happen, and then it does; because we subconsciously know that if we do accomplish that joy high; like a rollercoaster, it is accompanied by depth of lows.
So we avoid experiencing, really in our being, the highs of joy and sorrow and pain, because they are so painful; and instead simply get on the kiddies rollercoaster, where we have fake highs and fake lows, for which we can proscribe some pill, and so for the most part we are ‘stable’.
I had this Jewish professor friend: I luved him allot. He taught me so much. He was afraid of many things, but not joy or sorrow. He was a Professor; and yet he would on many days be so overcome with childlike joy, he would put on his huge angel wings, and wander downtown with me; or take me to tea or a drink. When his wife died, he would not cry with pain, but howl, with sad classical music and cry and cry and sob and sob. It was painful to hear; but he knew as a good psychologist he had to let himself feel his pain.
Brad would say that is was because he was capable of experiencing his pain, his sorry, feeling it to the fullest and not hiding it, or trying to be tough; that he was able to experience the other extreme’s of his emotions; such as his joy.
10 October 2011, 7:21 amJack:
Stan,
This is totally unrelated to the above thread, but I figured you might be able to help. I am writing a paper for my Latino American History class for my BSN, and I am trying to focus on the federal governments counter insurgency that Chicano activists faced during the 60′s-70′s. Aside from the COINTELPRO papers, do you have any knowledge of where to start- good primary source or secondary source info or just a starting point. Any war college papers or declassified .gov stuff that you would recommend?
Thanks for any help,
Jack
STAN: Try Bill Gallegos at billgallegos@cbecal.org – good luck
10 October 2011, 10:26 pmr graves:
jack- brian glick’s “the war at home” is a great primer, i’m sure you could find him on email and get some good leads.
12 October 2011, 9:46 amJack:
Thanks guys!
12 October 2011, 11:58 amMichael Anderson:
http://paulcienfuegos.com/
Heard a lecture by this man on Alternative Radio last night, about local ordinances enacted to prevent corporate malfeasance/infringement, locally; Pittsburgh being the most notable example. Was interesting, but I wonder….
Would this fall under the “main thrust” theory, or can this be classified as truly local action?
One thing he DID stress was the fact that we (the people) will have to band together across ideological lines and work together, often with people we previously thought we had NOTHING in common with. I believe Stan has mentioned this a time or two…
12 October 2011, 12:46 pmLara:
Stan,
You were recommended for consideration as a possible candidate for the Melzhidek Corps; by Rear Adm. Patrick H. Brady, Commander of Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), as part of Lords of War JCS Joint Force 2020 AUSA Twitter Townhall Meeting.
Further info available at: [RHS777INT:007]: DRAFT3: DARwin’s JAGUSCMDYE Buck Stops Here JCS Joint Force 2020 Future Options: FICCOW & FICROF; should you be interested informing yourself so as to make a fully informed decision on the matter.
Honourable questions welcomed; if I have access to an answer, I shall provide as crystal clear as possible; without any consideration for any PC bullshit.
Lara
13 October 2011, 7:51 amMichael Anderson:
Speaking of “practicing”—this IS for real:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/cerabino-lawmaker-wants-state-to-reinstate-dwarf-tossing-1898183.html
Some news on the job-creation front in Florida.
A state legislator has found yet another example of government regulation getting in the way of job creation.
So Rep. Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, filed a bill this week to bring back “dwarf tossing,” the barbaric and dangerous barroom spectacle that was imported from Australia and thrived briefly in Florida before it was outlawed in 1989.
“I’m on a quest to seek and destroy unnecessary burdens on the freedom and liberties of people,” Workman said. “This is an example of Big Brother government.
“All that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they would be happy to get,” Workman said. “In this economy, or any economy, why would we want to prevent people from getting gainful employment?”
13 October 2011, 12:37 pmBittu:
@Lara
If this is a joke, it is in very bad taste. Petraeus for President???
From the linked website-
“What this means is that the world population is slowly getting dumber and dumber as those of lower intelligence continue to multiply like rabbits, outbreeding their intelligent and educated counterparts.”
Please describe who do you mean by “those of lower intelligence” and “intelligent and educated counterparts”?
14 October 2011, 12:54 amAndy:
@Lara
What is this site? It’s difficult to follow this blogger’s train of thought. It looks like a mish-mosh of the kinds of subjects discussed here, yet mixed in with right wing ideas. But then, this another proof for me that the more radically viewpoints move on the Left-Right continuum away from the center (whoever defines that), the closer those radicals seem to come overlap to their opposites. I admit this is not well thought out, since the Left-Right paradigm is one that is narrowly defined and recently invented. I’m still learning to see things differently.
15 October 2011, 11:25 amMichael Anderson:
I once saw a diagram back in the 80′s of political/cultural viewpoints represented on a circle—it has resurfaced in various forms recently on mostly right-wing or conservative sites.
One side of the circle could loosely be described as “live and let live” (“liberal” perhaps), or, as I heard it described by a German friend, the “golden middle”.
The other side of the circle is where extreme left and right met. One of the defining characteristics of both is their willingness to use violence to achieve their aims.
There is so much propaganda out there–from both sides. I’m glad that we talk about a “third way” here. Or, perhaps, a myriad of ways—to both prosperity and conviviality.
15 October 2011, 12:09 pmLara:
Bittu:
I am not joking at all. Why do you think Petraeus is not qualified to be President? Because he has been willing to give his life to defend the constitution; a document many liberals think is only worthy of wiping your asses with?
A document many liberals think is only worthy of using to censor anyone who criticises their precious little pet retarded blacks and brown monkeys from criticism about how they breed like rabbits on viagra and treat each other worse than any clansmen ever treated them.
A document liberals think is only worthy of creating legislation to enslave blacks and browns with welfare and to encourage them to breed more enslaved blacks and browns, to destroy their families; so you can keep them as codependent slaves on your liberal welfare nigger plantations; without even having the guts to be honest about how you use them as your vote nigger slaves?
Have you ever read Tragedy of the Commons?
What part of it did you not understand?
As for persons of lower intelligence: Anyone from any tribe, race, religion who fits any one or more of the following Kaffir definitions:
[i] ‘Kaffir Behaviour’: Cultural Beliefs and Procreation Behaviour Definition: Individuals who either independently or as a result of their cultural value systems, are incapable of, or unwilling to, practice sexual restraint and procreation responsibility; who consequently breed cockroach-prolifically without personal financial or psychological responsibility to, or emotional concern for, their offspring; and/or who abuse women and children as sexual or economic slaves procreated for such purpose; and/or whose cultural ideal of manhood endorses non-consensual sex (rape) as their sexual slavery entitlement, etc.
[ii] ‘Kaffir Etymology’: Original Etymological Definition for ‘Kaffir’: The word k?fir is the active participle of the Semitic root K-F-R “to cover”. As a pre-Islamic term it described farmers burying seeds in the ground, covering them with soil while planting; as they till the earth and “cover up” the seeds; which is why earth tillers are referred to as “Kuffar.” Thus, the word k?fir implies the meaning “a person who hides or covers”; To conceal, deny, hide or cover the truth.
[iii] ‘Kaffir Legislation’ = Inalienable Right to Breed’ Poverty, Misery and War legislation; pretending it advocates for ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’. Kaffir Law/Legislation provides citizens with the Inalienable ‘Right to Breed’, but demands that Citizens need a Licence to Own a Gun, a Licence to Drive a Car, a Licence to Practice Law, a television licence, a credit licence, a licence to earn a living, a university exemption licence, a licence to fish, a licence to hunt, a liquor licence, a business licence, a marriage licence, etc, etc. Kaffir Legislation covers up that an ‘Inalienable Right to Breed/laissez-faire birth control policy + No Social Welfare policies or practices provides for an equilibrium carrying capacity; whereas Inalienable Right to Breed/laissez-faire birth control within a welfare state, results in Runaway Growth, and ultimately greater misery, poverty and war.
15 October 2011, 3:47 pmLara:
Andy:
I don’t understand your question. Can you be more specific please?
15 October 2011, 4:03 pmJosiah:
Wow. Lara, I hope that your far-right, white-supremacist and apparently apartheid-nostalgic ranting stays confined to the internet, and that you aren’t in a position to put your ideas into practice (i.e., move from hate to committing hate crimes). Moderators?
15 October 2011, 4:08 pmMew:
@Bittu, Lara isn’t joking, she just wants to test Stan’s pacifism. Christ-on-a-bike.
15 October 2011, 4:09 pmDeAnander:
Please do not feed the troll.
15 October 2011, 10:18 pmTom:
I just want to let Lara know that if she’s going to use “clansman” as she did, it needs to be spelled, “Klansman.” If you’re going to be an idiot, at least spell your terms correctly.
16 October 2011, 1:55 pm(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
17 October 2011, 5:05 amThis is your blog, so rather than go over your head, I’d like to ask permission to feed the troll – specifically to supply the widely available data and references that make mash of the claims presented. If you feel strongly that this should not be done, I’ll accept it, but my experience is that I can get these trolls to shut up when the data tear their claims apart.
DeAnander:
OK Tom… if you’d like to do some careful refutation, it’s your time and energy
so long as you can refrain from personal invective, go ahead.
I’m still reeling from this gender panic attack over at TOD. “Revolution requires testosterone” — what a great slogan, very Strangelovian… but how depressing really. So much preposterousness, so little time.
18 October 2011, 12:25 am(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
Sometimes gentle mockery is far more effective than reason.
Thanks. A quick aside – I guess the people at TOD don’t understand the biokinetics of testosterone – it is the precursor molecule for estrogen
@Lara
While I do feel a bit uncomfortable with your terminology, I’ll use it (and let my radical friends back home blush):
So by your first definition, “Kaffir Behaviour,” you include more or less the entire world, USA, Canada, France and Britain included. I’m fairly sure I know whom you were trying to finger with the terminology (Kaffir from Arabic for non-believer, mainly black African, as they pointed out to the Portuguese to whom they were teaching the basics of maritime navigation, and who in turn taught it to the Malay Dutch several generations later, when the latter settled around the Cape). I’ve implicated the west, so it behoves me to justify their inclusion: The invasion and subsequent sexual (and other) terrorism in Haiti in 2004 implicates all but Britain; more generally I document the details of their terrorism in the comments (TheBinge) at the bottom of this article. Of course, these empires were sexually terrorist throughout their histories, with the residential schools in USA and Canada being notorious epicenters of pedophilia (and spare me the ‘blame the catholics’ response – the united, lutheran and anglicans were no less involved), and long before the residential schools, institutions were set up that allowed state officials to extract sexual favours in payment for food delivered (after the aboriginal economy was destroyed, mainly by state efforts).
Britain was also sexually terrorist throughout its colonial enterprise, but I’ll stick to a particularly nasty example, namely with the Meru ethnic group during the ‘Mau-Mau’. The area from Egypt to northern Tanzania, narrowing to the southern regions of West Africa (southern Nigeria west-ward), have a practice of which I’m sure you’ve heard, namely FGM. Among the Kikuyu (of which the Meru are a satellite group – they even speak Kikuyu; note that the ‘Mau-Mau’ rebellion was primarily Kikuyu), the practice was historically exercised at age 18 (i.e. a rite of passage into adulthood). As the ‘Mau-Mau’ rebellion relied on oathing (only available to adults within that culture), and as the rebellion relied to a large extent on teenagers, the teenage girls would give each other (surface) cuts so that they could participate (the Mau-Mau rebellion was 30% women by most estimates), but when they turned 18, older women would cut them. To prevent the rebellion from spreading to the Meru, British colonial officials had all girls cut, and pushed Meru elders to cut at age three. See e.g. Politics of the Womb, by Lynn Thomas. A quick aside – it is common practice to deflect insights that arise from studying Mau Mau to claim (correctly) that the rebels killed more blacks (at most 5k, although 1k is more plausible given their poor weaponry) than whites (about 250), while neglecting to mention that the colonial officials killed at least 10k (with strong claims being made that they in fact killed about 50k, at minimum – see The demography of Mau Mau: fertility and mortality in Kenya in the 1950s: a demographer’s viewpoint”. African Affairs 106, Number 423: 205-227 (2007) – and note that he takes the mass starvation occurring at the time as the baseline rather than excess deaths, despite its nature as deliberate long-term policy).
Tragedy of the commons – that is largely understood by now to be a consequence rather than a cause of privatization. I’ll use an example from Kenya again – see e.g. The Elusive Granary, by Peter Little – the same process described there is occurring en masse in Ethiopia right now, and the same disastrous effects should be in in about ten years – privatization is used to destroy pastoralists, and the generally poor agriculturalists (being pushed by exploitation, more often than overpopulation, from their home areas into the pastoralist areas) damage the soils with their inappropriate practices (and typically switch to pastoralism within a generation or two, with the privatization usually being undone – the privatization is usually state funded).
But I’m not done with your first point. Historically, most ethnic and national groups have total fertilities around 7-8. As women gain more access to education and as nutrient intake increase, that number falls, generation to generation. This fall is called a demographic transition. USA’s demographic transition started in the early 1800s. African countries are generally behind in the demographic transition, which is not overly surprising given the colonial history*. But these transitions have begun, and are in many places well underway, including in such war-torn countries as DRC.
*I’ll use the example of Kenya again, as it is such a well-documented example. During WWII (where many of the early Mau-Mau rebels got their initial training), 90% of Kikuyu draftees were rejected as soldiers for being too malnourished and stunted, yet the colonial office wanted to get rid of the English aristocrat colonialists for being too unproductive in their farming – the colonial state was hyper-taxing the black and Indian population of Kenya (the former more so), so as to force (especially Kikuyu) blacks to work on the aristocrat farms (the Afrikaner Hans-Kakies – collaborators with the British during the Anglo-Boer war – who came to Kenya were generally too poor to afford wage labour, and thus worked their own farms), yet they (Kikuyu and other black farmers) still managed to outperform the English aristocrats in agricultural productivity, even when renting small parcels of land from their employers (which destroys the notion that the lower productivity of the English aristocrats in Kenya was due to the poorer soil of the White Highlands). See e.g. Economic and Social origins of Mau Mau by David Throup, The Dedan Kimathi Papers, Squatters and the roots of Mau Mau by Tabitha Kanogo etc. I can probably give you more references later, but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. Angola is even worse on this account, as chattel slavery persisted until independence (1975).
I find myself unable to extract anything coherent from your third point, except the business about TV licenses (are you a South African?) – the nats brought in the TV licenses, not the ANC – I’m old enough to remember (mid 80s when I first paid attention to such things in my environment) about TV licenses, and apparently, the nats had them from the get go (1976).
But perhaps I should get off my high horse, and engage in some race-baiting as well. Why are most of the graduate students in the sciences in Europe and North America ‘black and brown’? I see mainly fellow Africans, and Indians, Chinese, and Muslim (non-Indian, non-Chinese) Asians, yet precious few whites (except from eastern Europe, but then again, they are in the same economic boat as us, and even more rarely, fellow white southern Africans). If I were to restrict myself to racial hypotheses, the outlook wouldn’t be all that great for whites…
18 October 2011, 8:35 amMichael Anderson:
Thought the “Petraeus” website was pretty silly, but….Damn! You go, Tom!
18 October 2011, 1:47 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Michael
18 October 2011, 4:04 pmIt is always an unpleasant task, but of the variety that is best done early, then often. If you want to do this sort of thing, be prepared to do much boring reading, taking coupious notes (both of white or other supremacist literature and of historical economical and political studies – you’ll also have to ask yourself some tough questions, and not merely reject claims because they are politically repulsive, but actually try to see if they are accurate). Most supremacists don’t have much to show for their lives, so they look for apparently successful people to recruit. You need to be sympathetic toward the supremacist, yet brutally frank, and still think through their arguments (when they have substantial arguments). They rely on cadre (cultist) type activities, which thankfully tends to limit the success of their recruiting efforts, but which does give them a cultural legitimacy (compare the popularity of Marxist understandings, despite the popular revulsion toward Marxist groups, that rely on cadre type activity). It helps to think of the activity as a counter-recruitment effort – why do Europeans have low birth rates? – probably because Europe doesn’t produce most of its own food, and thus doesn’t need as much farm labour, and because the population is much more urbanized – and notice that the birth rate is not constant (i.e. birth rate alone is not destiny, the website notwithstanding).
Stan:
Hard to figure trolls. They hide behind fake names, sometimes totally fake identities. They might be whites posing as blacks, males posing as females, young people posing as old people. Their agendas, however, can usually be inferred… Lara, likely not his name, is all over the place as Lara Braveheart, Lara Zhivago, etc, running amok with his laptop, feeding in venom and flattery by turns, feeling clever and provocative.
As for testing pacifism, well… the best way to test pacifism is to raise kids. Vague internet provocations are so not up to the task. (-:
Bye “Lara.”
19 October 2011, 8:52 amEric:
have you folks seen this yet? http://youtu.be/6gkIiV6konY
21 October 2011, 2:28 pmMichael Anderson:
I know that MoDo from NYT is frowned upon here, but this quote from referenced column having to do with the recent Catholic persecution of nuns struck my as articulate, as well as a highly relevant zinger at “faith IN Jesus” vs the “Faith OF Jesus.”—and the frailty of human practice:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/dowd-here-comes-nobody.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120520
“Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because it’s enforced?”
22 May 2012, 1:44 pm