Recent research indicates that organic farming can feed the world, and is actually making a significant difference everywhere. In the United States and Europe, universities are reporting that organically produced food will address the problems of hunger and poverty facing the world’s growing population. This is not a surprising finding for organic farmers and advocates of organic agricultural production. The American worldview of agriculture is, in fact, making a radical shift…

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Every day I get to FB, it opens on a pageful of the most recent shots from that growing list of ‘friends.’ This is actually very educational, even if it is far from a representative sample of anything out there in physio-world. One can go through these posts and fsairly easily identify the baseline shared assumptions among these affinity groups. That’s what provoked me to write that long December rant on ‘Why I Don’t Call Myself Progressive.’ The category ‘progressive’ was just automatically assumed among nearly everyone; and once the little critical bug had gotten in my head about this term, I could no longer overlook it as a mere annoyance. It meant more, as examining it revealed, a lot more, and much of it very troublesome.

Well, now another annoyance is percolating, and this one has to do with the notion of ‘equality,’ which is closely related to something called ‘justice.’ In fact, they are used as a singe term, equality-and-justice… a lot.

So I got to thinking, what does equality mean?

Because, when you look at the two components of people’s status - and here I risk stimulating the tedious nertcher-naytcher thing again - are (a) gifts (natural or God-given, take your choice) and (b) privileges. Neither of these can be cited as equal, because persons, ecologies, and cultures are all different. That is, not the same. If things are not the same then they can hardly be equal; in fact no determination of equality can every be made except between things that are the same.

I know, I know, that’s not what people are talking about when they use the term ‘equality,’ or equality-and-justice. But this is exactly my point. If that’s not what we’re talking about, then what exactly do we mean by ‘equality,” the thing so many of my FB companions claim to champion?

See, if we start with the apparent fact that some persons are taller, shorter, stronger, more easily taught this or that, more or less sensitive, etc., then we have to dump equality-of-gifts at the beginning. We can measure height, for example, assign it a normative figure in inches, centimeters, etc., then compare to see if X equals Y.

So, for the sake of argument, I’m going to say that there is no equality-of-gifts. I mean, equality means =, a mathematical concept, a quantitative measure; and since persons, cultures, and ecologies are qualitatively different, you can safely say that equality can never be established between any of these, except by manipulating the finite aspects that we pre-reduce to numerical measurements.

Like rationing: each person gets 10 bits of whatever. It’s far too finite to be meaningful except at very specific, tightly controlled, times and places.

So if we’re not talking about math, then what are we talking about? I actually think that we are talking about math, without thinking of the consequences of our paradigm, and that’s why this gets so twisted up and paradoxical… but I’ll come back to that.

Does this equality mean equality of privilege? I suspect many will answer in the affirmative, so I’ll just get the contentiousness out there in the open: If privilege has a history - this person had these advantages growing up, and this person didn’t - then how does that get ‘equalized’ when we can’t rewind the film? If these advantages accrued for this person based on where s/he grew up and where s/he lives in the world - Sweden? Japan? Haiti? US? Boston MA or Blue Eye AL? - how does that get equalized?

For that matter, how does it get measured without excluding every phenomenon that is not quantifiable?

And if gift and privilege - or relative lack of either - combine, then how can equalization occur, even if we could hypothetically (which I doubt, profoudly) equal-up the material consequences of privilege, when the gifts are still qualitatively different? Or should we? Should someone who can speak three languages only use one until everyone else can speak all three?

As noted, the reason we get twisted around the axle with this is that contradiction between equality - a quanitity formula - and what we are imagining - which we’ll get to by and by - that is qualitative, or else it is meaningless in the larger scheme of things unless one is imagining some sterile and frankly scary Brave New World.

And here’s where we hit the escape hatch, by taking the phyisical concept of equality and turning it into a metaphor: equality of opportunity, or equality before the law. These reifications - shared throughout the realm of secular liberalism -have attained a quasi-religious acceptance as a Good.

Consequently, the simple act of exposing them to critical scrutiny is likely to provoke a defense of them against the assumed alternatives, inequality of opportunity and inequality before the law, which is how we describe many odious practices in the past… and now. Access to the franchise for racial minorities or women, for example.

So let me reassure whoever is reading this, that is not where I’m going… advocating a return to the bad old days, or advocating the abandonment of power struggles from below.

In fact, I want to suggest that the notion of equality, because it is so contradictory, is more manipulable by dominators than the dominated. Because it is false, and falsehood is very useful in retaining dominance, especially in gaining a degree of consent from the dominated.

Antique hereditary and sexual hierarchies gave way to notions of abstract equality (equality of opprotunity, equality before the law), the contradiction of quality-quantity allowing no other reasonable interpretation of this notion except the abstract (liberty, equality, fraternity - yes, it was always and remains a boy-idea). Since then, the actually measurable indices of social stratification have been driven much further apart in the aggregate. Actual inequalities have increased, not decreased, at least with regard to consumption and property entitlement patterns. Examine the differences in energy-consumption per-capita between the top 10% in the world and the bottom 10%, as one example.

The new heirarchies that rose up after the collapse of the hereditary ones, of course, resolve the issue with an ideology: meritocracy. The idea that yes, there will be inequalities, but that they will be sorted out not by hereditary privilege but my intelligence, hard work, initiative… pick your favorite.

It’s psuedo-darwinism. Raw as a bloody steak.

In response, we have seen the emergences of various social democratic ideas about equality, that articulate various schemes to create something approaching ‘equality of consumption and entitlement’ - at least an idea that tends toward the quantifiable. Nonetheless, the routes favored to arrive at this fuzzy destination have inevitably ended up operating on the meritocratic field.

So equality of opportunity is the deal; allow the meritocracy to work without interference.

Then we end up the the fight between Candidate Barack Obama, the meritocratic hope of some, and Candidate Hillary Clinton, the meritocratic hope of others, then in conflict. The background, naked ambition, machine politics, the imperial state, the worship of power… all swallowed up in this quest for probative equality - the quest to prove… what?

As MacKinnon points out, “[M]en persistently confuse procedural and abstract equality with substantive equality.”

MacKinnon sets aside the quality-quantity contradiction in using the mathematical term equality to denote anything in human relations at all, in order to point out how the further abstraction of the idea - via an ahistorical legal equality - actually serves to strengthen existing dominance hierarchies.

The famous quote by Anatole France immediately comes to mind:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor from begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread.

In a similar way, we see how the abstraction “freedom of speech” combines with this abstract equality between people on different ends of dominance hierarchies, to protect the campaign contributions of the rich and name that equality of access.

It’s a very slippery slope, and not simply because equality needs to be tweaked, but because it can’t escape the quality-quantity contradiction.

Equal presupposes sameness, or it is meaningless. But people, cultures, and ecologies are different and the same. By that I mean, we are having a dialogue here… I’ll put this stuff out there, then you (or y’all) will respond. If we were identical, there would be no reason for me to say anything at all to you. (This is Ellul 101.) That we have a dialogue recognizes that I need to explain myself to you, and you to me. But it also means we have something in common, or there would be no possibility of success in our interaction. (The insidious aspect of media, advertizing, propaganda is that it is one-way; dialogue is shut down in advance of the relentless message.)

So what are your thoughts? (:

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy.

That’s how it’s gone with the British 2009 documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it hasn’t been released in the U.S., primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the director (Tracy Worcester, who spent four years making the film) by the film’s main villain, Smithfield Foods. The world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries, accruing annual sales around $12 billion. The UK’s Channel 4 ran the film last summer despite four letters from Smithfield threatening litigation, but since no U.S. insurer would back the film’s release here, it has become essentially a black-market film. Score another one for corporate censorship…

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Apparently, she has become hugely influential, so I want to pass along this article about her personal hero in real life:

Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

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The Man the Hunter theory was largely developed by the South African hunting nut Raymond Dart and by Nazi anthropologists, partly as a misunderstanding of Darwin’s theory of struggle for survival. On archaeological sites, often the only things that survive are weapons and bones, giving the false impression that all these people did was use weapons to kill. Recently, isotope studies of prehistoric skeletons and coprolites have shown that most prehistoric peoples ate large amounts of plants and not that much meat. Some of the tools found in Africa were not used to kill animals but to dig up tubers.

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Here is a anthropological research piece on sexual division of labor.

Here is Maria Mies on the man-the-hunter meme.

Robert Sussman is an anthropologist whose written a great deal on this myth.

Fire away.

In the early 1990s, when I was living in northern Ghana, an elderly woman farmer decided that I needed some education. In a rather long lecture, she detailed the devastating effects that the Green Revolution - the first one, which outside experts and donors launched in Africa in the 1960s and 70s - had had on farmers’ crops, soils, trees and lives. She said that the imported seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and tractors, the instructions to plant row after row of imported hybrid maize and cut down precious trees that protected the soils and nourished the people - even the invaluable shea nut trees - had ruined the diverse, productive farming systems that had always sustained her people. When she finished, she cocked an eye at me and asked, with a cagey grin, “Why do you bring your mistakes here?”

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I started out trying to quote this article selectively, but it is information-dense and difficult to excerpt; highly recommended reading. Note the deep involvement of the “philanthropist” Gates Foundation. Note the admission (as yet covert, not open) that the Grand Plan for the Transformation of Africa involves dispossessing the peasants — Haiti all over again. Note the “biofuels” connection and the greenwashing campaign already ramping up.

Once again food, land, and food security are central issues in the big geopolitical game plan. Once again the Great Powers are packaging this recipe for immiseration and slavery as “progress”. Once again, their proposed “solution” is a biotic and social disaster. The question is, will we all be fooled again? Already, millions of hectares of African land have been sold, often without the knowledge (let alone consent) of the smallholders. What next? How can this energy-intensive, long-distance imperial Enclosure be maintained as the fossil fuel gets more expensive and less plentiful? Will Africans take this expropriation meekly?

In the next breath I want to offer another puzzle piece… a recent CP article that Stan flagged on facebook: Human Terrain Systems Dissenter Resigns, Tells Inside Story of Training’s Heart of Darkness. Again, the whole thing is worth a thoughtful read. But the bit I want to highlight is this:

John’s last day of HTS training was the first day of MARDEX, a military role playing exercise designated as “Weston Resolve.” For the exercise, the class was presented with a training scenario in which the fictional nation of “Lakeland” was located in an area to the northeast of Kansas City was the focus of operations. John wrote that,

“In the PowerPoint slide presentation laying out the background for the “operations”, the Wargame role-playing is represented by staff as merging into the real world drug, crime, and environmental “contention” within the community. The whole mission is represented as bringing a military state control of the local population which has recently elected a local government that is a “permissive” (supportive) environment for US Army activities after the previous local government had withdrawn from the US as a sovereign society. Now the US military is taking over the area to reestablish public security.”

The class was then told that the mission they were training to support was one in which the military was establishing order in a setting where environmentalist-separatists had taken over. John explained that in this hypothetical training scenario,

“IATAN, a coal-fired power plant on the Missouri side of the river is one of the main military foci due to “contention within the community” over the environmental pollution it is causing. Sierra Club and other, more radical groups have been active in this area: ELF is one such radical group. Even though there is an elected government and rule of law in Lakeland, there are some ‘insurgents’ who are opportunistic.’ That is why the US Army has moved into this area that has broken away from US control.

Staff Assignment to the several Human Terrain Teams that make up the class of the November Cycle were issued as follows: 1. ‘Find out more details on the criminal activity.’ 2. Find out the best conduits to pass ‘information’(PsyOps and InfoOps) to the local population. 3. HTT is assigned to produce a ‘Research Plan’ to understand the situation at the IATAN power plant – people’s concerns, desires, etc., and identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.

As I thought about what was being done in this activity, and the way it adapted COIN strategy for Afghanistan/Iraq to be applied by the US military in situations in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order, I began to think back on stories that circulated among the ant-war movement in the 1960s-70s, about concentration camps being developed just for imprisoning such protestors an “problem-causers”. And I wondered who would be working on the Human Terrain Teams to enable the US military’s actions against unruly segments of their own countrymen; perhaps Afghan and Iraqi anthropologists who had specialized in US ethnography?”

Human Terrain Teams practicing training scenarios set in regions actually within the United States bring the very notion of “human terrain” back home to its domestic counterinsurgent roots. As anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez documents in his book, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, the very phrase “human terrain” grew out of domestic counterinsurgency initiatives. Gonzalez describes how in 1968 the US House Un-American Activities Committee released a report entitled “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States” which warned that the Black Panthers and other militant groups threatened the country’s political stability. HUAC warned that “irregular forces…possess the ability to seize and retain the initiative through a superior control of the human terrain.” The clear implication was that the control of civilians in America’s cities was vital to winning the counterinsurgency struggle at home.

Sorry about the lengthy quote. My point is that the US military is even now, even as we speak, being trained and prepared for COIN operations against environmentally-motivated “breakaway” groups (i.e. polities, regions, villages such as Transition Towns attempting to secede formally or informally from the fossil/consumer economy). “Environmentalists” are being defined as a potential enemy/subversive group to be defeated. Nothing new in this of course; the fossil lobby more or less is the government and hence the armed forces more or less are the Pinkertons of the fossil industries. But this training scenario (which surely violates posse comitatus no?) brings into sharp focus the degree to which relocalisation, sustainability, alternative energy, polyculture/permaculture, local currencies and all the other tools with which we might try to soften the crunch at the end of the cheap fossil energy era … are being regarded by our military/industrial complex as threats to national security, warranting training exercises and COINTEL planning. And public opinion on these issues is being regarded as a legitimate target for black-ops and psyops: US armed forces are seriously and openly considering themselves as an armed and dangerous PR agency for the fossil fuel lobby.

Or so I read the tea leaves. I’d sure like someone to convince me otherwise.

Just throwing mud on the wall here, but combining these two for a study-discussion might be interesting as a kind of long-term discussion. If I’d seen that elsewhere, I’d have been a serious lurker. It was attempted on as couple of sites for Hudson, but they were such doctrinaire and sectarian leftists that the discussions quickly devolved into Tralin-Stotsky debates and other such religious arcana.

So here’s trying. Have a good read. Maybe we can teach each other.

Peter Gowan’s “Globalization Gamble”
Michael Hudson’s “Super Imperialism”

Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?

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The question of how Hollywood constructs collective memory is worthy of a thread.

What is meant by the term “industrial murder”?

On The Hurt Locker he heaps his invective:

Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

And this teaser:

By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, “Redacted,” is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by American soldiers. There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma. The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was ordered that their faces be blacked out “for legal reasons,” De Palma said, “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about ‘Redacted’ is that it was redacted.” After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.

And on, ahem… Avatar:

Non-American (or nonwestern) humanity is not deemed to have box office appeal, dead or alive. They are the “other,” who are allowed, at best, to be saved by “us.” In “Avatar,” James Cameron’s vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na’vi need a good guy American soldier, Sgt. Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are “good.” Natch.

Read ther parts on Invictus, a film I’ll avoid as long as possible, because it takes its name from a paen to egoism written by William Earnest Henley - maybe one of the worst poems ever written by my lights.

And Pilger’s disturbing description of Up in the Air:

The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is “Up in the Air,” which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking people and collecting frequent flyer points. Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women. There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is “a movie for our times,” said director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked people. “We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy,” said he, “then we’d fire them on camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism.”

What say y’all?