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comfy-introvert · 4 years

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There are multiple layers to one's politics, or at least there should be. The times, like the seasons, are constantly changing. There is a certain cycle of birth and decay and rebirth in history that has been described as:

Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times create strong men.

While, in reality, history and the present do not have such a clear-cut good times-bad times dichotomy, there is a fundamental truth to it. To emphasize this point, I can see three parts of that cycle happening today — Good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, and hard times creating strong men. Perhaps we are more centered on the "weak men create hard times" phase, but I'm not sure.

The modern day American conservative movement can be traced back to multiple different eras of history. I want to call attention upon the strain of conservatism that emerged in the Post-World War II United States. In the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, the hard times created strong men and after World War II, the strong men created good times. As a result of this sort of golden age (and in opposition to the Soviet Union as well), conservatives flocked to ideas like liberty and freedom. In many ways, it was the root of certain libertarian tendencies the Republican Party has today. It instilled the values of small government, the veneration of the constitution, the idea that all Americans deserve the same rights regardless of whether or not they use those rights for right or wrong, and the idea of "taking the high road."

Despite most of my political posts being attacks on that exact philosophy, that's not to say I think they're the worst ideas in the world. Nor are they inherently bad ideas. But ideas are subject to the world they are created within and an idea that is sound and good in principle is not sound and good in every situation. Ideas are like tools to solve the problems of today and as the problems of today change to new problems or remain the same problem with more intensity, it's time to switch tools. That's not to say the previous tool wasn't good at what it was supposed to do, it's that the previous tool shouldn't be used for this particular situation.

I think the American Right needs to embrace certain ideas that were, in previous generations, considered "Leftist thinking." The size and role of government, for example. Historically, the American conservative movement believed the government should be small and that its role should be as non-intrusive as possible. It should be something that the people don't notice it even exists. However, when one side of the aisle doesn't believe in taking government action and the other side does, the side that believes in taking the government by the reins will win in every single situation in the long run.

Imagine you're in a car and fighting with the driver like some sort of action film with the two of you switching places in the driver's seat. The enemy keeps turning the car left but the moment you get in the seat you say "Well, if I turn the car right to stay on the road, I'm no better than him." or even more bizarrely "Well, if I turn the car right to stay on the road, what's stopping him from turning the car left when he gets in the driver’s seat?"

*crashes into a tree off the side of the road*

The government is bad because of the people in it, not because of the system it uses. Government action is usually bad because of how it's used, not because it was used at all. I see people criticizing Joe Biden for using a ridiculous number of executive orders. I could care less that he's using executive orders, my problem is what's in the executive orders. If a Right wing president ever takes power again, they need to do as many good executive orders as possible to steer the car back onto the road.

And maybe when some semblance of normalcy is restored, it will be crucial to return to the higher ideas from before. A big government controlled by the people will not remain in the hands of the people in perpetuity which is where the importance of shrinking the government after doing what needs to be done comes in. I recognize that the cycle is unstoppable and good times will eventually create weak men all over again. Which is why one’s politics may be a layered ideology. Quite simply, some American conservatives need to know that each idea has its time and place for each part of the cycle.

#comfy-thoughts #politics

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eretzyisrael · 4 years

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What Islamists and 'Wokeists' Have in Common

Adherents of both pursue ideological purity, refuse to engage in debate and demand submission.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Wall St. Journal, Sept. 10, 2020 Editor's note: I will write something myself about 9/11, but this article -- unfortunately behind a paywall at the Wall St. Journal -- was so powerful and important that I am doing a special mailing to make it available to those who do not have a subscription to the WSJ.

A leftist demonstrator protesting President Trump steps on a burning American flag outside the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, January 20, 2017.Photo: AFP via Getty Images

There were many American heroes on 9/11, but the greatest were the passengers and crew of Flight 93. Not only did they avert what al Qaeda planned—a direct hit on the White House—but they also embodied Patrick Henry’s credo “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Do those words still have a meaning in the America of 2020? For two decades, I have opposed the fanatical illiberalism of those strands of Islam that gave rise to al Qaeda. I broke with my Somali family and ultimately with their faith because I believed that it is human freedom that should be sacrosanct, not antiquated doctrines that demand submission by the individual.

So implacable are the proponents of Shariah that I have faced repeated death threats. Yet I have always consoled myself that, in the U.S., freedom of conscience and expression rank above any set of religious beliefs. It was partly for this reason that I moved here and became a citizen in 2013.

It never occurred to me that free speech would come under threat in my newly adopted country. Even when I first encountered what has come to be known as “cancel culture”—in 2014 I was invited to receive an honorary degree at Brandeis University and then ungraciously disinvited—I didn’t fret too much. I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus leftists and Islamists as a lunatic fringe.

But the power of the illiberal elements in the American left has grown, not just on campus but in the media and many corporations. They have inculcated in a generation of students an ideology that has much more in common with the intolerant doctrines of a religious cult than with the secular political thought I studied at Holland’s Leiden University.

In the debates after 9/11, many people sought materialist explanations for the attacks. American foreign policy in the Middle East was blamed, or lack of education and employment opportunities in the Arab world. I argued that none of these could explain the motivations of the plotters and hijackers, who in any case were far from underprivileged. Their goal was religious and political: to wage jihad against their kin if they didn’t accept a literal interpretation of Islam, to denounce Arab governments as corrupt and their Western allies as infidels, and ultimately to overthrow the established order in the Middle East and establish a caliphate.

American policy makers preferred the materialist explanations, as they implied actions to solve the problem: invasion, regime change, democratization. It was unpopular to suggest that the terrorists might have unshakable immaterial convictions.

Nineteen years on, we see a similar dynamic, only this time it is within our borders. Naive observers explain this summer’s protests in terms of African-Americans’ material disadvantages. These are real, as are the (worse) socio-economic problems of the Arab world. But they aren’t the main driver of the protests, which appear to be led mainly by well-off white people.

Their ideology goes by many names: cancel culture, social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality. For simplicity, I call it all Wokeism.

I am not about to equate Wokeism and Islamism. Islamism is a militant strain of an ancient faith. Its adherents have a coherent sense of what God wants them to achieve on earth to earn rewards in the afterlife. Wokeism is in many ways a Marxist creed; it offers no hereafter. Wokeism divides society into myriad identities, whereas Islamists’ segmentation is simpler: believers and unbelievers, men and women.

There are many other differences. But consider the resemblances. The adherents of each constantly pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude. Neither Islamists nor the Woke will engage in debate; both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist.

The two ideologies have distinctive rituals: Islamists shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to America”; the Woke chant “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe.” Islamists pray to Mecca; the Woke take the knee. Both like burning the American flag.

Both believe that those who refuse conversion may be harassed, or worse. Both take offense at every opportunity and seek not just apologies but concessions. Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.” Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”

Islamists despise Jews; the Woke say they just hate Israel, but the anti-Semitism is pervasive. The two share a fondness for iconoclasm: statues, beware.

Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate—and often glorify—violence carried out by zealots.

This Sept. 11, then, let’s dismiss the fairy stories about the enemies of a free society. Their grievances aren’t merely economic and they won’t be satisfied with jobs or entitlements. Their motivations are ideological and they will be satisfied only with power.

I cling to the hope that most Americans are still willing as a nation to fight and, if necessary, to die to preserve our freedoms, our rights, our customs, our history. That was the spirit of Flight 93. It was the spirit that ultimately defeated al Qaeda and Islamic State. But it is not the spirit of today’s “woke” protesters. And it is time that we all woke up to that reality.

Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003-2006.

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arcticdementor · 5 years

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Sohrab Ahmari, who previously wrote a decent takedown of the exemplar of nominative determinism Max Boot, but who I’ve otherwise never heard of before, wrote an article in First Things opposing “David Frenchism,” a “persuasion or a sensibility” that he names after the National Review writer who Bill Kristol named as the ideal #NeverTrump candidate for president.

The “Frenchist” disposition, according to Ahmari, is a nice, liberal one. It sees politics as a matter of procedure, institutions, and ‘decency’; it seeks to defend the conservative cause by appeal to the liberal logic of autonomy, and it inherits from its English nonconformist roots a “great horror … of the public power to advance the common good,” leading it to insist that political challenges be solved by the depoliticized measures of “personal renewal” and somehow-organic cultural change.

…

But the apparent endorsement of far-left political violence by American Interest writers is a manifestation of a broader failure on the right: its agreement to the now-bipartisan rule of pas d’ennemis à gauche, pas d’amis à droit. David French is quite willing to endorse intersectionality in the pages of Vox; but Donald Trump is too far. (As Liel Liebovitz pointed out, David French endorsed the Russiagate conspiracy theory.)

This rule, in fact, is part of what ‘Frenchist’ niceness means in practice. Civility and decency are all well and good in the abstract, but who defines them? To what extent can ‘Frenchists’ extricate themselves from the influence of those who insist that the leftist platform is a simple matter of civility and decency? Furthermore, why should the civility among lawyers that French advocates generalize outside the professional realm? What percentage of truly political victories, rather than the legal-procedural ones that French concerns himself with, were won by politeness alone? Our goal must not be to remain unfailingly polite as our losses pile up; it must be to win. Ahmari is right about this: decency is a tactic, and becoming attached to a tactic is a mistake. This doesn’t mean we ought to follow the left in, say, launching coordinated attacks on random children; what it means is that, at least in David Hines’s account of leftist tactics, perhaps those attacks wouldn’t have happened if the journalists had gotten a little more operant conditioning

…

Ahmari’s position, however, is equally untenable. Using the state to forcibly reorder the public square toward the (Christian if not specifically Catholic) “Highest Good” would require a higher level of religiosity, and, more importantly, a higher level of willingness to dispense with old American liberal principles, than can be found in America today, where only half of the population is even nominally Catholic or Evangelical, fewer than two fifths claim to go to church every week, and the single largest religious group is ‘none’. The integralist Adrian Vermeule has argued that the election of Trump demonstrates that the American political landscape can change on a dime; but that doesn’t imply it’s likely to change in that direction. It’s true that the Fifth Great Awakening, or the sixth or seventh ones, could produce mass conversions to Catholicism and usher in an integralist America, but it’s equally true that it could produce the revival of the cult of Tengri and the remythologization of the United States as the greatest steppe empire since the Yamnaya expansion. Get ahead of the curve — buy your cowboy hats now!

…

But what else does the election of Trump represent? Ahmari positioned his article against ‘Frenchism’ as an explication of a manifesto of sorts that he signed after the 2016 election, which he and others took as a sign of the death of the pre-Trump conservative consensus; but this manifesto is less a comprehensive rethinking of American conservatism than a denunciation of free-market ‘fusionism’ by a religious, socially conservative faction of that consensus, which already had inclinations toward economic populism before Trump. Furthermore, Ahmari’s objection to ‘Frenchism’ is entirely concerned with the socon cause — remember what prompted his article!

How can this be said to be the message sent by the election of Donald Trump — who, as French points out, hangs a Playboy cover on the wall of his office? If anything, the case is stronger for the opposite: for a reading of Trump’s election as signifying the complete collapse of the pre-Trump conservative consensus, the bankruptcy of both right-neoliberal Reaganomics and the ‘political Christianity’ of the Moral Majority, and the prospect (albeit a mostly unrealized one) of conservative reorientation toward worker-friendly economic pragmatism combined with social moderation, rejection of the ludicrous and corrosive bipartisan consensus on immigration, and insistence that America was not fundamentally illegitimate before 1968.

…

Establishment conservatism, it seems, is doubling down on its refusal to reckon with the realities of the American political landscape. It’s true that the ascendant left wants to revoke religious liberty, with the goal of subordinating Christianity (specifically Christianity) to the whims of the woke state; but this is only one facet of its platform. It also promotes a view of white Americans reminiscent of the ethnic hatred stoked against market-dominant minorities in certain countries in the 20th century (never mind that white Americans aren’t even the richest demographic!); claims that our country is fundamentally illegitimate; calls for the destruction of our borders; pushes for a credentialist economy in which no one can succeed without first obtaining permission from a committee of progressive priests, who will dispense it based more on loyalty to the cause than on any apolitical notion of merit; advocates for the abolition of the nation-state in favor of a tightly controlled and managed ‘inclusive society’ in which the inevitable ethnic conflict will provide the ruling structure with a bottomless well of opportunities to justify its own expansion; and seeks to subordinate everything, from colleges to corporations to open-source software organizations to knitting groups, to an arbitrary and intentionally byzantine code of conduct, in order to purge infidels from the whole of society. This is not ‘libertine,’ it is totalitarian. And the totality of that agenda must be opposed.

The conservative debate thus far has been premised on the idea that the proper response to Trump, the proper way forward, is to simply revitalize the platform of the Moral Majority. Not only does this fail to address many of the problems facing our country today ⁠— it has little, if anything, to say about immigration, which is necessarily the most pressing issue because its effects are permanent and irreversible — it offers little potential for attaining true hegemony. The conflict between moralists and libertines in America predates the United States itself and is unlikely to result in a decisive victory anytime soon (in other words, it’s Lindy), and it’s sufficiently orthogonal to the main dimension of American politics that there are strains of progressivism that have evolved to accommodate both. Many progressives even oppose drag!

But simply banning drag queens from California’s libraries won’t make America great again. The question of what will remains open, but here are some components of a new conservatism that will be necessary: an end to mass unskilled migration, stricter immigration controls, and an uncompromising defense of borders and the nation-state system; the establishment of policies and culture that support marriage, family formation, and homeownership; a serious drive to retake cultural hegemony from the progressives; a willingness to combat the conspiratorial demographic hatred which casts men as sub-rational pigs and whites as the nefarious, scheming villains of history; and the abandonment of the dead consensus of social conservatism and little else, in favor of a new nationalism that protects both Christian and ‘pagan’ Americans and works to preserve the civilization they have built.

#jacobite magazine #james giuran #david french #sohrab ahmari

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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years

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What do you think about free college in the US? My sister says she’s all for it but I’ve never been on board.

The only way it should ever be considered is if we scrap the extensive bogus courses being offered and restore colleges as a place we go to learn the skills, trades and knowledge required to join the workforce and contribute to society and the economy. Our colleges are churning out the most unskilled, unstable and unqualified people in the country as they have increasingly become less about education and more about creating a holiday resort where their every woe and feeling is pandered to and soothed, and where they can pass their classes by burning the flag or writing ‘black lives matter’ with period blood. I’m not sure that’s something taxpayers will get on board with funding any time soon.

If we offered free tuition to students in the current state our colleges are in, it’s safe to say things wouldn’t be as burden-free and peachy as Bernie sells it. Our schools are already overcrowded, especially in community colleges where they are turning students away so try to imagine how they’d cope with the influx when everyone starts cashing in on their free ride. Massive wait lists would have to be created and further expanded and budgets would instantly become strained. Considering the shitshow of our colleges today, what’s more likely to be cut to cover these overwhelming costs, safe spaces for black queers and stress-relieving puppy visits or whatever respect would be left in higher education?

The problem with everyone being offered free college is the same problem we would have if the government printed more money and gave everyone a billion dollars. If everyone has it, then its value becomes worthless. If everyone is going to college and getting the same watered-down, worthless education with a participation award at the end, then your qualifications no longer make you qualified and I’m not sure if employers can lower the bar any further than they already have for affirmative action and gender quotas.

To realistically manage the masses, there would still have to be some kind of sorting model, which means the “discrimination” they want to rid us from is inevitable. If tuition costs and hard work are no longer factors in managing numbers and sorting people, the only other option is a merit-based system, much like our immigration system should be. This is exactly the sorting mechanism the free tuition nations use, they don’t discriminate on affordability but they sure as hell discriminate on intelligence and academic achievement.

These countries require high school students to know the field they will pursue in college and then have to pass exhaustive tests in order to get in. For instance, Germany is infamous for tracking students into or out of higher education by a test called the Abitur. In France, high school principals decide whether a student gets to be on a college track and the weeklong baccalaureate exam determines if they can go to a college. Finland force children at age 16 to choose a track and many students don’t even get a whiff of college once they fail the academic requirement. So if America follows in the steps of these countries socialists are always pointing to, then how long will it take before it’s branded racist by those same leftists when certain patterns inevitably begin to develop in these academic tests… I have a feeling affirmative action will become very necessary.

Clearly I’m only speaking against those who already ridicule education by flocking to the overgrowing new radicalized and left-wing agenda-driving courses. If we could find a way to make it cheaper for those willing to take real classes and take their education seriously, knowing they will eventually become our doctors, scientists and educators, then I’d probably get on board. Even more, if anywhere needs more support and cheap tuition to incentivize education, it’s vocational and trade schools. Our country is suffering from a great shortage in skilled workers, trades are dying out and it’s making it easier to be replaced by machines. Call me crazy but I think we may need more welders, plumbers and electricians than we need intersectional feminist theorists.

Thanks for the message :) xx

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cyberneticpeoplespolis · 6 years

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Inaction and Liberalism

I write this mainly in response to Ti Lamusse’s excellent On Building a Revolutionary Organisation. Since this was shared as an internal document in Organise Aotearoa I wanted to generalise some of the critiques of organisational liberalism and add some of my own, in order to analyse the inertia that paralyses many left organisations.

Organisational Liberalism:

No doubt many of On Building a Revolutionary Organisation’s critiques of liberalism within the party come from Mao’s seminal Combat Liberalism directive of 1937. You don’t have to be a Maoist to recognise this as a vital resource for any organiser, and a good source of self reflection for anyone who worries about their ego influencing their activism. Combat Liberalism’s central message is that there are multiple forms of Liberalism. The Ideological strain is something most socialists are already intimately familiar with, and can be generalised as the ideology of individualism. Political and Organisational Liberalisms stem from this ideology, and they can paralyse any organisation in a number of ways. Mao identifies eleven types of organisational Liberalism:

Inability to criticise friends when they are wrong.

To gossip rather than make public criticism.

Playing it safe and ignoring things that don’t affect us.

Finding our own opinions more important than those of others.

Engaging in personal attacks.

Ignoring incorrect views

Forgetting we are Communist and never agitating.

Allowing the masses to be harmed, and doing nothing.

Working half-heartedly, without plans.

Considering ourselves better than others out of pride.

Being aware of our own faults and doing nothing.

To say that organisational liberalism infects the left isn’t a personal criticism of anyone. Everyone internalises liberalism to a certain degree, as liberalism is a reflection of the cultural hegemony of capitalism. It is a creeping influence of petty competition and personal interests into politics, and the only defence is mindfulness and introspection, along with robust democratic structures when that is not enough. Organisational liberalism can take the form of members taking on too many responsibilities at once. What at first appears to be selfless devotion of time and energy to organising can in truth be an inability to see our own weaknesses and limits due to pride. This kind of liberalism easily takes hold in a left where a small group of organisers have to spread their energies very thinly across multiple projects and movements. It can be the inability of activists to criticise their own parties because of the social pressures and benefits of being in such a tight-knit group. Looking to the party for our social and emotional needs goes hand in hand with this, as does the problems that come with cadreism - the idea that the party must be incredibly cohesive, small and ideologically pure.

Finally, Liberalism can take the form of “cultural problems” within an organisation. An uneasy atmosphere of unspoken party lines, ignored arguments and domination by unelected leaders. A lack of criticism and introspection allows for these problems to occur. Note that freedom to criticise is different to the “Freedom of Criticism” that Lenin spoke against - he was specifically railing against the treatment of all criticism (especially ideologically liberal criticism) as equal to radical criticism.

Fetishising Membership

Treating the desire to gain members as a form of Liberalism may seem odd when Mao’s 7th form of liberalism is “To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation.”

However the fetishisation of membership is much more of an issue in the modern context of a socialist movement divided along historical lines that date back a century or more. There are points that many of us will never agree on, and they are not invalid arguments simply because they are old ones. But the vast majority of these historical questions - what happened in 1863? 1905? 1929? 1968? - are extremely distant to the majority of working people today. There are deep contradictions in the socialist movement, and a lot of them will be worked through only in practice, experimentation and struggle, but to not work with other tendencies wherever practical is liberalism. Our own parties are not as important as the broader task of raising consciousness. Gaining members is not as important as raising consciousness, and ultimately basing the success of the party on membership deeply misunderstands where our appeal lies. Two people blocking a small path between police and an oppressed group raises consciousness more than a party of thousands that submits to reformism and liberal infighting. A party in its naive infancy can embolden workers in a city much more than a bigger organisation that has long since alienated themselves from workers and fellow activists, through infighting and toxicity. Ultimately having members counts for little if members aren’t utilised well, with sound theory and a culture that fights organisational as well as ideological liberalism.

Members aren’t drawn to a party through a thousand text messages and the feeling that they are a contact that the organisation desperately needs in order to perpetuate a revolving door membership of burnt-out students. Members gravitate towards parties that inspire through their actions. Organise Aotearoa appeared to have instantly gained a highly respectable number of members when it first formed, only to find that many lost interest after months of inaction.

Democracy

Any activist would do well to read Jo Freeman’s (Joreen’s) The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It’s an excellent dissection of how anti-democratic structures take hold in unstructured organisations, and how a set of seven principles is necessary to ensure equality. It pairs well with Combat Liberalism and when reading both it is easy to see how many of the problems Joreen describes originate in organisational liberalism, as the egocentric individualism of liberalism easily leads to tyranny in unstructured parties. The seven principles Joreen describes are:

Delegation: assigning authority through democratic procedures.

Responsibility: delegates need to be responsible to the other members

Distribution: authority needs to be spread evenly to prevent monopolies.

Rotation: authority can’t be permanent and should be subject to recall.

Allocation: roles should be assigned based on skills, which members develop together.

Diffusion of Information: every member should be told as much as possible.

Equal Access to Resources: every member should be able to request resources.

Since a certain degree of liberalism is unavoidable when working under a capitalist society, it’s important to have processes in place that prevent the liberal tendencies of members from subverting the organisation. Structure is essential in keeping organisational liberalism from flourishing, and anywhere that structure isn’t clearly visible and observed by members, liberalism will find a way.

Aotearoa’s leftist organisations seem to do a particularly poor job of principles four and six. Speaking from personal experience, transparency and clear structure are the main things that make left parties appealing to me. Any party that doesn’t clearly tell you who is in charge, and how their power is limited, probably has something to hide.

Internet Socialism

This is a more minor point, but a concrete reason as to why our leftist parties are so inactive. Internet activism offers a lot in the way of catharsis and aestheticised politics (more on that later), so much so that it’s easy to feel as though a lot has been accomplished without any real movement. Meetings are much more useful, democratic and deliberative spaces for discussion than the internet. Facebook’s structure in particular leads to anti-democratic structures in the form of unelected admins, facilitators and regular posters who can drown out anyone else. I’m no luddite, but until we make our own digital architecture, the structure of our groups will be defined by the enemies of our movement. Until such a time comes that we can fight against the de-neutralisation of the internet, it can only supplement rather than replace our in-person organising.

The depoliticisation of aesthetics.

This is perhaps the most esoteric of my arguments as to why we’re gripped by inactivity, and yet I see this as a recurring theme in what I’m told by people who are relatively new to left activism. We should be listening to new activists most of all as they have the most to tell us about what radicalises people in the present moment.

If there’s one thing that marxist meme pages have taught us, it’s that aesthetics, specifically aesthetics that are appropriated by politics, actually radicalise people. This makes a lot of sense in the context of Walter Benjamin’s work on the aestheticisation of politics, which he described as a fundamental precursor to fascism. Conversely, the appropriation of aesthetics by politics is a redeeming factor, a radicalising factor that marxists can utilise. Fascists obscure politics from the material plane by turning it into an art form, and we need to respond by bringing materialism into art. I keep hearing from new leftists that marxism should be fun, vibrant, and with defined aesthetic sensibilities. This is often ignored by the more serious voices in the room who take it as the naivety of newcomers, when it actually scratches at deeper truths about what brings people to politics. We are artistic beings and we need to bring politics to where people are. The art world has already degenerated into an elitist agent of gentrification, so we need to democratise and politicise art in response, allowing it to infiltrate every space in the same way that capitalist art (advertising) infiltrates every corner of our field of vision.

Just this week I watched as a new leftist, a trans marxist who recently joined the DSA in the US, created a facebook frame that said “Communist Cutie” with a little love heart, and a hammer and sickle. The frame did the rounds so quickly that a council communist on the other side of the world, with no connection to the creator, had applied it to their own profile within 48 hours. That is the power of politicised aesthetics, and it is very telling that it was a new leftist that best exhibited this. Aesthetics is how we normalise our politics, how we make the depoliticised think about us in a new way.

There is no excuse for inaction. There are so many tools available to us that the only question is where to begin, and really, anywhere would do.

"Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes"

#Jo Freeman #mao tse tung #liberalism #liberal #walter benjamin #aotearoa #leftism

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tyschwoeffermann-blog · 4 years

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Subject: Oregon Intervention From: Ty S - Oregonian Date: 24 Nov 2020 To: the new Biden Administration Attention - the honorable Cedric Richmond Senior Advisor to the President Greetings elected officials, diplomats, and honorable people, Last time I wrote my elected officials it was under a circumstance of distress. I'm pleased to say that my experience with that situation was resolved with the help and assistance of some good people in public service. I dont write these letters often because Im often not feeling up to putting the kind of energy it requires to express the situation in terms that are solution oriented. But I seek solution oriented strategies often to remedy strife and stress that people in my community live with. It appears to be a time once again to update on the latest issue that we need serious intervention. My name is Ty S I live in Portland Oregon with my wife and son. The experiences as a high school student was quintessential to a Black man growing up in Oregon but my story is unorthodox. My trajectory in education was similar to phil knight of nike as I share two of the four schools he attended: Cleveland High and U of O. So Im as Oregon as the swoosh, Powells, and the Rudolph sign. Politics is my life mostly having been involved in the Oregon students of color coalition and OSA in 2004 and Urban League in 2009 before going on to serve in the Oregon Health Authorities Transformation Center and the Oregon Advocacy Commissions. I'm particularly proud of my community organizing in the between 2004-2016 which includes electing Obama, helping Black Activist run for office, and building a grassroots community health worker project called We Are Health Movement. Once Trump came to power things changed dramatically for the worse in Oregon. Nearly all of my activism ended as a powerful racist insurgency became more visibly violent and threatening to the Black community. Events of Portland Oregon 2020 require intense analysis. Im not a total alarmist about our situation like our media has gaslit and painted Oregon as a place on fire with leftist anarchists extremists. Please recognize that intervention can only be settled diplomatically at this point. We have lived and walked and witnessed a very violent escalation since 2016. Look at the evidence of tracking hate crimes in our state https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map?year=2016&state=OR . We should not be on this list. We have such a small populations of minorities including Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native populations and the many immigrant cultures are very small in overall numbers. The story behind these hate crimes is a way more then just isolated incidents there is a large scale and spreading networks of organizations that only purpose is to antagonize, disrupts, hate, punish and resort to violent intimidation and terrorism. Hate groups in Oregon have dramatically grown in the last four years and as a political, social, and defensive response people have responded in a counter activity to keep those movements from growing further and pledge to end their reign of terror. It started in mid 2016 when Jeremy Christian a pre-radicalized activist with the Proud Boys murdered in 2 people on the Max Transit system (which is like our rail car). Jeremy Christian is part a new movement of internet organizers that have particularly recruited young white men to organizations like the oath keepers, 3 percenters, and inspired by the Bundy occupation movement of 2016. They are living in the shadows of Waco movement. Out west they love that shit and 2016 opened the door for growth of these right wing extremism. Oregon responded initially in Portland by counter protesting against the groups that would gather in various parts of the city including on the Federal freeway 213, Downtowns Terry Shrunk Plaza, and Tom Macall Park. Each of the events in the summer of 2016 organized by violent right wing extremists involved heavy confrontation from counter protesters. This included verbal, physical, and organized violence. This was warfare in a small scale. But many things escalated. This history must include a contextualization of the types of organizations that began to sprout and grow on the opposition which I will categorize as the organized left until I describe it more fully. In Portland initially the ecumenical faith community, the non-profit activists, labor, and a variety of socialist organizations. Some of this coalition of organizations had previously collaborated against neoNazis in the 80s as resistance to hate before. The events of Jeremy Christian galvanized a large scale opposition that sought to resist racialized terrorism of that kind in our community. As events and confrontations continued to persist summer after summer after summer we are now where we are today. As the events continued the city of Portland often utilized the Portland Police Bureau as a referee of sorts to prevent wide scale violence. But there were many instances where people of Portland felt that Portland Police were more favorably protecting the right wing groups more and more the activists involved from the left lost favor with the city government, Police leadership and elected such as Ted Wheeler. The impasse really escalated between the city representatives and diplomats in political actions, contract negotiations for the police union contracted are included as a source of the strain and political tensions escalating. The summer of 2020 was by far the most chaotic situation because the global movement for justice for George Floyd and Briana Taylor tied with Oregons #BLM picked up a new confrontation with the Police and state officers in downtown Portland. Oregon activists like many other states have been fighting for justice for many unarmed black men and women and those with mental illness shot and killed by the Portland, Vancouver, and Gresham police. Local movements converged it was a mashing of black activism in a new generation of young and emerging people for Black Lives with the Oregon defenders and anti fascists who had basically been in battle with right wing extremists continuously for 4 years. The combination produced energy seen no where else in the country. The City saw had over 130 days of continuous protest in a call for anti racism, justice for police murders, and anti capitalism oppression. Now I do not need to detail all of these events and how they were organized and what happened between the night to night. I do know that a lot has happened and most documenting and historicizing these events can tell that story. My purpose today is explain that there is a diplomatic intervention needed. We are desperate in this city for a focus of attention that doesn't involve us looking down the dark hole of a barrel. There needs to be a peace tribunal set up in our city (similar to south africa). The need is so great out here. No convening, No conversations, Nothing seems to be working. Please help us out here and we don't need photo ops, only real commitment and work can solve anything we got out here. The pain is deep and the grievances are so numerous that our community might not heal for a generation. We need peace in this city. We need peace. Peace between police and protesters and between the right wingers. There are some clear changes needed. Here are my suggestions that will give people a part of power. Total and complete overhaul of the law enforcement in this country in the first step we must examine. The Portland Police contract needs a total revamp. All of there leadership needs to be changed. There is a certain segment of Portland that wont setter for less. The many proposals by thousands of activist in portland none of which has happened in the more then 4 years of advocacy: https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2020/06/09/28519183/all-of-the-... We need to accelerate these changes locally and nation wide. We are not an outlier here it is part and parcel of similar movements that started in Furgeson. Even if you or your office got involved and moved the needle on any of these issues Portland still will need to grapple with its right wing violent extremism problem, because it is growing out of control with reports of continuous recruitment in the suburbarbs and nationwide show this. Oregon is the theater of a national program targeting this state as battle ground for the clash of extreme ideologies. What should we do about that? Well my feel is that its not important to most law enforcement or it really feels like it. The law cant really keep up with the type of warfare that is just as much virtual as it is physically in the streets. It will have to be part of a robust strategic initiative on a large scale organized nationally coordinated and well resourced. No longer can cities afford to build volunteer resistances to hate groups. There needs to be a common societal agreement on this in a new contract of acceptance of what is right and wrong in our communities. It is appropriate but it will also need alternative opportunities to get people out of those groups. Violence is not ended here and we expect next year will be worse then this one and we live in fear for our lives. Black people in particular fear that violence is eminent in any outing, they must use precautions to protect themselves in this kind of violent political and social environment because your skin tone and or your social status is often the determinant factor. Hate crimes need national attention to end. We need a nation wide movement to end racism. Many of the right wing extremists are entrenched in their ideology and need an counter narrative that is stronger to inject alternative perspectives. But it might be too late for that here in Oregon we are at the point where violence and counter violence are yearly occurrences and it becomes a matter of desperation to even reach out to the federal government for help and support. Oregon is my home that I spent most this year has required a high level of alertness and protection of my home and family. This is the first year we have seriously discussed leaving the United States because really feel unsafe for us to live here and thrive. I hope this country can do something about our situation with both Policing and Hate before we dissolve into non stop tribal warfare and violence. This call to action and support will go to the high courts of international conflict. Please help me forward this letter to leaders of every civil society.

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culturewarconversation · 4 years

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Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ have much in common. A generation has been inculcated with an ideology that has much more in common with the intolerant doctrines of a religious cult than with the secular political thought. By AYAAN HIRSI ALI

There were many American heroes on 9/11, but the greatest were the passengers and crew of Flight 93. Not only did they avert what al-Qa’ida planned — a direct hit on the White House — but they also embodied Patrick Henry’s credo “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Do those words still have a meaning in the America of 2020? For two decades, I have opposed the fanatical illiberalism of those strands of Islam that gave rise to al-Qa’ida. I broke with my Somali family and ultimately with their faith because I believed that it is human freedom that should be sacrosanct, not antiquated doctrines that demand submission by the individual.

So implacable are the proponents of sharia that I have faced repeated death threats. Yet I have always consoled myself that, in the US, freedom of conscience and expression rank above any set of religious beliefs. It was partly for this reason that I moved to the US and became a citizen in 2013.

It never occurred to me that free speech would come under threat in my newly adopted country. Even when I first encountered what has come to be known as “cancel culture” — in 2014 I was invited to receive an honorary degree at Brandeis University and then ungraciously disinvited — I didn’t fret too much. I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus leftists and Islamists as a lunatic fringe.

In the debates after 9/11, many people sought materialist explanations for the attacks.

American foreign policy in the Middle East was blamed, or lack of education and employment opportunities in the Arab world.

I argued that none of these could explain the motivations of the plotters and hijackers, who in any case were far from underprivileged. Their goal was religious and political: to wage jihad against their kin if they didn’t accept a literal interpretation of Islam, to denounce Arab governments as corrupt and their Western allies as infidels, and ultimately to overthrow the established order in the Middle East and establish a caliphate.

American policy makers preferred the materialist explanations, as they implied actions to solve the problem: invasion, regime change, democratisation. It was unpopular to suggest that the terrorists might have unshakeable immaterial convictions.

Their ideology goes by many names: cancel culture, social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality. For simplicity, I call it all Wokeism. I am not about to equate Wokeism and Islamism. Islamism is a militant strain of an ancient faith. Its adherents have a coherent sense of what God wants them to achieve on earth to earn rewards in the afterlife. Wokeism is in many ways a Marxist creed; it offers no hereafter. Wokeism divides society into myriad identities, whereas Islamists’ segmentation is simpler: believers and unbelievers, men and women.

Both believe that those who refuse conversion may be harassed, or worse. Both take offence at every opportunity and seek not just apologies but concessions. Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.” Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”

Islamists despise Jews; the Woke say they just hate Israel, but the anti-Semitism is pervasive. The two share a fondness for iconoclasm: statues, beware.

Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate — and often glorify — violence carried out by zealots.

This September 11, then, let’s dismiss the fairy stories about the enemies of a free society. Their grievances aren’t merely economic and they won’t be satisfied with jobs or entitlements. Their motivations are ideological and they will be satisfied only with power.

I cling to the hope that most Americans are still willing as a nation to fight and, if necessary, to die to preserve our freedoms, our rights, our customs, our history.

That was the spirit of Flight 93. It was the spirit that ultimately defeated al-Qa’ida and Islamic State. But it is not the spirit of today’s “woke” protesters. And it is time that we all woke up to that reality.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003-2006

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mutualhighmaintenancemachin-blog · 5 years

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I need a fix cus I'm going down

Made the mistake of appraising myself sufficiently healthy to attend a bonfire with normal decent tax-payer type folks. Stood up too fast in my chair and blacked out completely, hit my head on concrete. When I came to i had no earthly fucking memory of having driven to the bonfire, nor could i really recall the names of the three concerned hipsters perched over my limp doughy abscessed jaundiced shit heap of a body. Told them it was a problem with blood sugar, i had forgotten to imbibe my afternoon orange juice! Translation-haven’t slept in four days, taking in roughly two hundred calories a day all in ginger ale. Meth heads opt to sustain themselves on a diet of paranoid resentment in lieu of proteins and grains. The cook gets super spun and lectures us like we’re babes about the dark leftist forces presently waging war on the masculinity of the white man-for one thing, he's convinced that jews run the porn industry and that fucking pornhub is riddled with overtures both overt and subliminal intended to brainwash white guys into identifying as weak and feminine and to associate men of color with heroism and strength. He also believes that soy causes gender dysphoria. All of these batshit crazy delusions act like stars in the broad constellation of the cooks worst dystopian fears-a workforce with no room left for traditionally male-centered leadership characteristics dominated from top-down by a host of future ladies who make their trade in creative collaboration, rather than fear and theft of other peoples ideas. Without a need for a provider, our nazi-bespectacled methamphetamine cook envisions a new sexual economy in which women will jettison their attachments to the family structure in favor of like, industrialism, i guess, and men will have no other resort but a desperate turn to cross-dressing and dick-taking and i guess maybe stitching scarves. It was at this point that i was really tempted to tell the cook something he needs to hear-if you really believe that large shadow societies are orchestrating history just cus they want to make you some dudes boyfriend, its probably cus part of you wants to be. I get that, sucking dick is a blast. if you’re terrified that you can’t compete in a post-modern job market, it might just be because you aren’t. There’s no place left for cowboys or outlaws or methcooks cus those professions only make sense in the context of an insanely violent frontier. You feel obsolete and useless because you are, but make no mistake, that hurt has nothing to do with the world everything to do with your soul being severely malnourished. I know cus mine is too! Real moral christian courage is showing up to your crucifixion with a smile on your face ready to graciously thank the romans for every nail they put through your wrist. You feel empty because your a paranoid fascist meth cook, i feel bad cus I'm a junkie. We are bad. The nazi pilots who blitzed france in two sleepless, speed-fueled nights probably felt fucking fantastic, as if they were aloft on the trade winds of history itself and their momentum across europe must have seemed like proof enough of the moral righteousness of the german cause. But then the morning comes and the meth wears off and your skin smells like piss and your back aches and you can’t stop grinding your jaw and the first wave of survivors begin to trickle out from the camps and presumably in that moment a few nazis had the epiphany-that the very same starved beaten traumatized jewish women and men and children they had aspired to extinguish from human memory were now going to tell the story of what had happened. Power loses, grace is its own kingdom, etc etc. Furthermore those german officers who managed to transition back to civilian life and start families must have experienced a very strange new parental dynamic-can you imagine a family at a dinner table and the proud head of household instructs his small son to finish his vegetables and after pausing to mull it over for a few moments his son turns to him and says Father having thought about it a great deal i don’t think ill be following your instructions-after all you were only following instructions yourself when you helped to engineer the greatest cruelty in human history! To which ostensibly the father mumbles to clear his throat and asks his wife to pass the potato salad. Not even to invoke the possibility that the Fuhrer himself Mr. Adolph Hitler probably died surrounded by a swarm of shadow people, fucking hilarious just the thought, him yelling in that distinctive manic patois of his that he’s the leader and the abeyance of his will is sacrosanct blah blah blah while the little invisible mites under his pale skin shift and swell and scratch and the shadow people dancing around his peripheral vision taunting and cajoling and ridiculing him and the absurdity of his final solution and because he didn’t know speed the way we now know speed he probably didn’t know anything about the shadow people at all from his perspective they might just as well have been the ghosts of his victims come to taunt and ridicule him in his lowest hour pointing and laughing and daring him to pull the trigger!

The same entitlement motivates the mass shooter who imagines a world full of seven billion perfect strangers as an attack on his rightful pursuit of happiness. No one will sleep with him and he can’t make sense of his place in a world built on fucking so he begins to indulge in fantasies of coercion, revenging himself on the very public space he so craved Now if our hypothetical douchebag had any pretense of self-awareness he might have looked into the possibility of adopting several dogs, and in turn coming to see his life as a story about caring unconditionally for animals. That’s a helluva life-Saint Francis got into the catholic hall of fame for doing not a whole lot more. Or perhaps he could adjust his expectations of intimacy in consideration of the countless plain-to middling-to ugly folks who are forced to come to terms with the truth early on that all of our bodies are grotesque and hideously deformed billboard advertisements for our big beautiful impossibly dense souls-come see a kernel of divine inspiration made self-aware, shimmering in the glory of creation, just two exits past the tits and chin and ankles and all the rest of our faulty parts.

Now a discerning reader(however unlikely you’d be to find one in an audience consisting of absolutely fucking nobody lol) might have already begun to detect a certain heady strain of hypocrisy in this authors conclusion. Because while I'm not much of anything the one thing i certainly am is a self-destructive drug addict. So maybe its one thing for me to make fun of the cook for his wrath-filled flu-stricken infants tantrum of a way of viewing the world, assigning to his solipsism a generation-hopping solidarity with his nazi forefathers who came before and identifying in his politics the germinal seed of fascisms future, a politics so personal and self-contained that every divorce will be debated as if it were a stand in for larger cultural decay, every morning hangover a portent of spiritual decline, the vitals of the stock market remeasured and reassessed each time someone finds on the sidewalk a loose dollar bill. Political assemblies with real largesse exclusively devoted to trolling the instagram of a nebraskan man named doug’s now ex-wife for pictures of her maui vacation with husband number two drinking mojitos on a beach with sand bleached white as bone and both of them grinning with surgical precision an opulent almost confrontational kind of public grinning Doug couldn't recall that bitch ever having felt for him and the kids off playing in the surf and well how could any concerned and conscientious citizen fail to see the basic threat to democracy that whole scene represents? Donald Trump is probably the loneliest man in the world. He’s never met another person. He spends his time wandering the halls of his head checking for reoccurrences of his own reflection, a lifetime spent pathologically re-telling the same story about how he came to be the most powerful person in the world, so that by the time he really became who he had always pretended to be, the most influential figure in the free world, he had long-since bought into his own fraud to such a great extent that even the real thing couldn’t compare. Only a selfishness and self-centeredness as grandiloquent as his could explain the mindset of the modern mass shooter and the micro-politics informing him. He confuses his head for the world and then becomes enraged when it won’t do as he wishes, cursing the rain for its cold lash against his shoulder where he’d rather there have rested warm summer glow, furious at the thought of all the people he would never meet in far-off places he would never see who never paid him any attention whatsoever. Playing peek-a-boo a little bit of cheating peer through chubby fingers arrayed like a geisha’s fan and for the first time see that objects don’t disappear without our gaze to ontologically anchor them to earth. What a hurt. Now it might be technically correct that my addiction does to my loving family what the selfishness of the mass shooter does to public space. It intrudes like an alien thing and turns the air chilly in our childhood home and it transforms the medicine cabinet into a contested territory in need of defensive fortification and now that Cassies marriage has crashed on the rocks of addiction nobody could blame her if she never allowed another addict to darken her doorstep again and there was the sight of Jan opening my trucks passenger side door and a few rigs fell out onto the floor and all the spoons in the house have one side burnt-and-bruised like a black-eye you say you got from falling down a flight of stairs despite body language that says something entirely else why is it we don’t have a single spoon in the house what ghost spends all night punching the walls full of holes

recently went to an Alanon meeting to sneak a glimpse of how the other half lives...this lady said my addiction is to loving my addict. Bawled rivers out from red raw-rubbed rubber eyes and said my addiction is to my addict Not her person or qualifier or partner but her addict. Syntax almost seeming to suggest that something about the existential plight of the addict gets her intoxicated dizzy on pain. It’s quaint though cus that sort of sentiment is for fucking rookies-guarantee you no ones crying over me like a romantic. Not anymore. My thing these days is of a distinctly more shakespearian strand of tragedy, with wittgenstein and derrida’s influences also undeniable. I’m sick now in a way where people stop crying and praying you’ll find God and change and decide instead it’d be easier to just cross the street. Schizophrenics lost in a chorus meant only just for them, apocalyptic street preachers who stand on soap boxes while reeking of shit and give voice to visions of an America not our own, an alternate dimension where european arrival at the shores of the new world stalled out somewhere halfway across the pacific ocean on a wave so tall it scraped the heavens and America grew up a nation of nomads who set their watches to the rumbling migration of herds of buffalo and not even the highest priest could dream of a more beautiful idea than that of motion, movement without cease, the only acceptable fixed still frozen property being the burial mounds where the dead went after all their motion had gone-if they could view us on the other side of the looking glass stolen away in our own personal homes they would almost certainly come to the conclusion that this place where we live is just the land of the dead, a negative photograph of everything vital and good. Who would i be to disagree though, right?

The point is anyway that some alchemical reaction of A. Mental illness and B. Amphetamine abuse has more or less stranded me in words. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs in place of sky and grass. What Fredric Jameson called the prison house of language. Where derrida’s difference goes to play for eternity, never quite meaning what it had meant to say. What shook wittgenstein speechless. The president’s rhetoric so hollow that you can almost see him suffering a kind of dementia or spiritual torpor that results from the badness of his faith. Chewing and chomping consonants and sounds till they all are made to mush and shearing syllable after syllable off the network of signification until all that’s left is one satellite pinging a distress call hello is anyone there off of its own side. It’s own side like Adam plucked Eve from his rib and said put on this dress-after they ate the fruit and God cast him/her out to walk the world alone reportedly God said have fun all alone you worthless slut. Imagine trumps final state of the union-i am very sick, i have been alone for as long as I can remember, i wish i hadn’t lied so often, i wish i had occasionally told the truth, i would trade all of it to have known just one person.

Anyways, barring that miracle of political theater, the body gets sick and dissolves while the spirit is lost in words. I’d like to die in a bathroom stall in haughville with a rig stuck in my arm and the words I'm sorry stuck at the tip of my tongue and God decides to show some compassion and makes me a deal says you were never much good to people didn’t believe in a thing but you sure could do some impressive vomiting up of nonsense words and so what ill do is your soul will dissolve and turn into ink and for the rest of eternity you’ll be a naughty joke or a half-scribbled doggerel scrawled on the wall of a piss-soaked bathroom stall in the ghetto or you could say call this number here for a good time and don’t forget to ask for large marge and nobody’d ever suspect you were trapped in there or maybe a joke like this favorite of mine about my son it goes something like Jesus Christ was a God-awful carpenter, couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. Christ was a God-awful, couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. Couldn't pull a nail. Christ was God-awful. Couldn’t nail his own couldn’t save a carpenter terrible couldn’t pull god-awful a terrible carpenter he couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. I can’t pull this nail to save my own life. It’s right there sticking out of my wrist, but for whatever reason I just can’t find the right words to pull it out he was a carpenter who couldn’t pull a nail even if his life depended on it couldn't save his own life he couldn't-

For a good time call this number 1-555-555-5555 and don’t forget to ask for-

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gravitascivics · 4 years

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THE LACK OF DEMOCRACY CHALLENGE, PART II

Citing the work of Jonathan Rodden,[1]the last posting begins sharing what that political scientist reports on the undemocratic nature of American governance. Using the standard, “one man/woman, one vote,” the US Constitution provides certain provisions that defy that standard. For example, the fact that each state has equal representation in the US Senate illustrates these counter democratic provisions. In that body, the 600,000 citizens of Wyoming with the 40 million citizens of California have equal voice.[2]

Now, the aim in that posting was not to share anything new with civics teachers. They already know about these inequities. In addition, any news-watching citizen surely has heard from time to time references to this and other undemocratic aspects of the American governmental arrangement. That posting’s aim is to set the stage for what is to follow.

This posting, for example, focuses on another provision which adds to this less than ideal democratic processes; that is, how the system draws representative districts and the utilization of gerrymandering. But as one investigates gerrymandering, one finds that that provision is not so central in denying democratic equality. While gerrymandering does have an effect, when one compares the US system to others, one sees that another quality plays a more determinate role in creating the undemocratic results.

Rodden claims that there are various practices that nonurban forces (mostly rural, conservative area factions) use to deprive urban areas equal representation and further indicates that the role of location is central to this overall condition. This can get a bit complex and the best way to appreciate these less than democratic practices is to compare the US system to that of European systems.

There the common approach in choosing representatives is for the representative districts to be large and to have multiple representatives be elected for each district. That means, the system is not a winner-take-all approach. Also, the various parties are represented in such a way that their numbers reflect their share of the vote within each district.

The way that system arranges representation, therefore, guarantees that a party will be given that number of seats reflecting how well it did on election day. And to keep the number of representatives to a reasonable number, the districts are much larger than most districts in the United States, especially those in US states with sizable urban areas.

Here, in the US, there is a “majoritarian” system in which districts are smaller and a single winner wins a single seat. If one party has most of its voters concentrated – “bunched” – geographically, such as Democrats do in mostly urban areas, many of those votes are “wasted.” They are wasted even if the districts are not gerrymandered. As soon as the system has a winner-take-all set up in small geographic districts, a party that has its supports so bunched will be underrepresented compared to its opponent.

To understand this system and how it has become so undemocratic, one needs to look historically at its development. Given Rodden’s analysis, there seems to have been a qualitative shift (reflected in quantitative election results) with the advent of the New Deal under the Franklin Roosevelt administration. For example, Woodrow Wilson’s victory in 1916 showed no difference between urban and rural support that Wilson was able to garner. Yet, by 1960, Kennedy’s victory was strongly aligned with urban vote totals. That bias reached extreme levels with Hillary Clinton’s vote and her support in urban counties vs. rural counties in 2016.

This well-entrenched urban bias is noted not just in vibrant, new information-based economic centers (e.g., Seattle), but in both postindustrial cities (e.g., Detroit) and medium-sized cities (e.g., Reading, PA). Of importance here is that while some cities are losing populations (such as in postindustrial cities), across the board, cities are gaining population which is further intensifying the underrepresentation of these peoples’ political views.

So, these disparities have become an integral aspect of the polarized political landscape. In terms of having legitimate political sentiments being adequately represented in policy-making bodies, this underrepresentation of urban interests promises to further destabilize the politics of this nation. As things stand, as a glaring consequence from Republicans’ overrepresentation, it gives shape to the volatile urban-rural sectionalism, a growing aspect of contemporary politics.

But when one compares the US system to other democracies, this gerrymandering attribute is limited to the American system. But that is not to say that an urban-rural divide only characterizes the US. Countries derived of British colonization and Britain itself all have single-representative systems. That is, they have winner-take-all districts.

The other “Anglo” nations also have marked underrepresentation of urban areas as compared to their rural counterparts. In addition, one can find that labor or progressive parties are associated with urban interests and as in the US, their elections pit more cosmopolitan and postindustrial city interests against traditional rural sentiments. And even without gerrymandering practices, their vote results and resulting representative allocations resemble that of the US.

To support this, Rodden points out that British parliamentary elections since 1950 show that the Conservative Party (the right of center party) received 41% of the vote while the Labour Party (the left of center party) received nearly 40%; one can judge this as fairly close results. Yet, Conservative rule garnered 63% of the representative seats during that time (1950-2017).

In the more recent years, due to the way its support is geographically distributed, it, the Conservative Party, has been in the position to form governments while only accruing 37% of the vote. And given the relative power that parliamentary systems give the controlling party – they do not have the level of dispersed powers that federal systems have – one can see how undemocratic that stretch has been. Similar results are found in other Anglo nations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

None of these Anglo systems have gerrymandered districts. Again, as in the US, Rodden attributes these results to geographic factors. As with Democrats in America, the leftist parties abroad, while putting together policy positions that appeal to urban voters, find it difficult to package those messages that appeal to either suburban or rural voters.

Consequently, they win big within city limits, but fall woefully short in the other areas of their respective nations. As with the US, left of center parties find it excessively challenging to become sufficiently unified – remember, this blog has argued that the Democratic Party in the US is much more diverse than the Republican Party. And that diverseness expresses itself here in the US and in other Anglo nations as suffering from ongoing tensions over various issues in which urban voices tend to be ideological and suburban voices are more pragmatic.[3]

These divides can and are becoming quite complex. For example, there is a growing tension between rising “global” cities and declining postindustrial cities. This latter strain is further fueled in multiparty systems in the other Anglo nations where the left of center factions find themselves drifting further apart.

In that sense, polarization in the US might be precluding that from happening here due to the “Schattschneider” effect, previously explained in this blog. That is, Democrats can’t afford to split on this or any issue of substance and still be competitive with the right of center party.[4] But this could be an “incubating” problem that might explode if the current polarized arena is resolved.

That is, Democrats, in a more normal political environment, might find themselves openly fighting over policy: summarily, should it assist the furtherance of global economic activity or should it revert to representing the more traditional manufacturing workers? Pragmatist control the former; ideologues control the latter.

Currently, this is no small issue since many “blue collar,” unemployed workers have been drifting to the Republican ranks as that party has opted to issue identity-based messaging described in previous postings. In other Anglo countries, this divide might be preceding the splitting of Labour type parties and the emergence of newer, further leftist, ideological parties.

So, in short, this underrepresentation of left of center coalitions seems to be a feature of winner-take-all set ups whether they have gerrymandering practices or not. This summary judgement is made by looking not only at the American scene but at all such systems that coincide with the “British” derived governmental arrangements. And that underrepresentation mostly falls to the detriment of advancing urban interests, be they interests reflecting the new information-based economy or the older manufacturing economy.

Obviously, the question begged in all of this is: should these Anglo systems adopt the multi-representation district system employed in European democracies? And if they do, will they become more truly democratic? A lot of that analysis depends on definitions and how one sees one’s interests. It seems to this writer that one needs be on guard against simplistic views to attain democratic solutions to the above concerns. This blog will continue this review in the next posting.

[1] Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019).

[2] Stated another way, just in regard to this factor, a Wyoming voter has seventy times the representative strength than a California voter.

[3] The urban ideological disposition tends to be more affected by critical theory, a current form of Marxian thought. The suburban voice tends to be more open to global, information economic forces and lean toward practical solutions that are conducive to global developments.

[4] Leading into the 2020 national election, the Democrats are exhibiting this condition in that the spectrum of its varied political positioning has been set aside in a fairly unified support for the party’s presidential candidate, the moderate Joe Biden.

#Jonathan Rodden #parliamentary systems #elections #democracy #civics education #social studies

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theleftexplained · 7 years

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A Dramatic Shift in Power

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” ― George Orwell, 1984

I've been looking at the overall trend of history's patterns, and there seems to be a common direction that all societies have moved in. Since the dawn of civilization, society has been organized in a pyramidal structure. In small tribes, this wasn't a problem; in fact, this was a benefit to society as a whole. And, when proper feedback systems are in place, it continues to be a benefit to society.

In society's early stages, even the most mundane tasks required human brains, and there was no way to specialize, because every task needed to be done by every person. As we gained organization, we gained the ability to specialize more and more. The basics of this kind of job diversity goes back to simple hunters and gatherers, who needed different skill sets to do their jobs. As we grew, the specializations grew more specific, and we gained the ability to harness other brains; dogs for hunting and guarding, horses for travel, etc. The "brains" became more and more specific as we started actually making complex tools like looms, steam engines, and more, culminating today in the computer, but by no means finished.

But as our ability to make brains for ever more specific jobs increased, we necessarily needed more of them to do more jobs. A pyramid is a logical structure to organize the ever-increasing brain pool and harness them all for a single purpose - supposedly the betterment of the human condition both in general and specifically. The problem is that “supposedly” modifier; the major difference between a pyramidal society and an actual pyramid is that the ever-smaller number of (organizationally) top brains have a disproportionate amount of power to influence and drive society. Ideally, they drive it for the best interest of the greatest number. In practice, they often use that ability to focus and control society for their own ends. Traditionally, the way they've almost always done this is by having access to more information than those they are directing. Superior knowledge can create the illusion of a superior intelligence. The old saying that knowledge is power is scarily accurate.

However, two things are slowly shifting, both of which are unprecedented in all known history, and both of which have been in the works for a century or two. One is good, one is bad. I'll begin with the bad.

The worst thing that those at the top of their respective pyramids have historically been able to do to those below them is kill individuals, either directly or by sending them into battle. They could cause suffering, but for the most part, only among those they directly controlled. Serving their own interests could do nothing worse economically than impoverish their own subjects. Harming the environment was always against their own interests, because their own wealth and power was based in the output of their farmers' crops. In an agrarian society, to harm the environment was to harm society, and it was seen as such (hence salting your enemy's lands being seen as the ultimate victory from which he could not return). The unprecedented thing happening with this is that, along with the simple ability to harm the environment growing vastly since the industrial revolution began, western culture is gradually becoming less instinctively connected to the land, allowing a disconnect to grow between the land and survival. It also happens that, because fossil fuels are profitable, for the first time in history, it is in the short-term interests of those at the top to harm the environment. With no mitigating forces, this spells the end – certainly of society as we know it, but also possibly of humanity itself.

Now for the good:

As I said before, the way that power was almost always held was by restricting access to information. The disparity of knowledge between the average peon and one of the ruling elite was stark, and provided a good justification for such a strongly slanted power dynamic; it takes a certain amount of knowledge and experience to rule effectively. No peasant was educated more than was necessary to function in their role in society, but the ruling class received the best education available at the time. This was, obviously, in the interest of the ruling class; ignorance is bliss, and the less the peasants knew, the less they could complain about. Books were difficult to make, being hand-written, and therefore necessarily expensive, so reading was a skill that the poor did not learn, not only because the rich didn't want them to, but also because it wasn't practical. But then, as we started to make brains more and more complex and specific, two things happened.

First, the printing press shattered the concept that books were something that only the rich could afford to own, and second, the jobs that had once been done by the peasants were now being done by brains made for the purpose. The common man began to make the shift from being the brain in charge of doing the actual labor to being in charge of operating the brains that did the labor. This, to the discomfort of the ruling class, required educating peasants to the skill level they needed to work the machines. Of course, in the early days, this wasn't much different, requiring only specific instruction on the individual task. However, as machinery became more and more complex, the skill necessary for operating them increased. Just as a chicken cannot return to the egg, progress always moves inexorably forward.

The common man is not actually dumber than the ruling class (no comment on non-relative intelligence) – the disconnect has always been in education. We reached a tipping point where to stop educating the common man would have caused riots, especially because people had become reliant upon the goods created by these ever more complex machines. The unprecedented thing happening here is that people are beginning to be able to coherently resist the influence of the powerful.

Revolutions in the past never really changed the lives of the general populace substantially, because whoever ended up on top would inevitably return to pulling the pyramid however they wished for their own gain. It might make a temporary difference, but a couple of generations of power later (or just right away), they would forget or abandon the promises that put them in power. The novel 1984 demonstrated this perfectly. But Orwell could not predict the internet. Leftist populism, like the strain found in Sweden, Denmark, and the rest of the Scandinavian region, and yes, like what Bernie Sanders proposed, is gaining momentum. People are becoming educated enough to truly understand what will lead to the greatest good of the greatest number. And because we are many and they are few, and because our political system has a mechanic for revolution without violence, the powerful cannot stop us from putting people that will actually serve us – rather than themselves – at the heads of the pyramids.

But here's the scary part. We can do it eventually. Only two questions remain. First, do we have the will to do it? Can we actually follow through? I think yes, but I cannot know for certain. And second (and this is the part that concerns me most), can we do it in time to save ourselves and our habitat? Can we put the right people in charge across the board in time to reverse the damage that will have been done by the time shift happens? I hope so, but again, I cannot know for certain.

What do you think?

I have a patreon where you can give me money to do what I do anyway! Check it out here.

#Politics #our revolution #justice democrats

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clubofinfo · 7 years

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Expert: Personally, I don’t think “the left” ultimately represents much of anything coherent, but rather constitutes a historically contingent coalition of ideological positions. Bastiat and other free market folks sat on the left of the french assembly, and while we might try to claim that as part of a consistent leftist market tradition, we should be honest that one’s position in that particular revolution — much less revolution in general — is hardly indicative of very much. There are always revolutionaries who desire systems far worse than our own, and similarly there have been many broadly recognized “leftists” whose desires were utterly anathema to liberation. It’s popular these days to paint the left and right as egalitarian versus hierarchical. But not only is this an imposed read on a far messier historical and sociological reality, but it’s honestly quite philosophically contentless. No one is particularly clear on what egalitarianism means, or even hierarchy, and many interpretations are not only mutually exclusive, they reveal supposedly identical claims as actually deeply antagonistic. Does egalitarianism mean everyone gets precisely the same wealth (however that’s supposed to be measured)? Does it mean mere legal or social equality in the abstract realm of relations before The People or The State’s legal system? Does it mean equal opportunity for economic striving or does it mean equal access to the people’s grain stores? Does equality supersede all other virtues like liberty? Is it better to all be oppressed equally than to have some achieve greater freedom? I’m not being facetious. We paper over these deep issues with “well but common sense” and the wishful assumption that our comrades will come down on the minutia the same way we would, sharing our intuitions on various tradeoffs, but that’s empirically not the case. We constantly differ. People talk about “collective direct democracy” as if something being the near unanimous will of some social body constitutes an egalitarian condition. And, sure, it does under some definitions. But the moment I see some collective body trying to vote on my life I don’t want to “participate” I want to chuck a bomb at it. Leftists use both the slogans “power to the people” and “abolish power” — this should be an intense red flag to everyone that completely different conceptual systems and values are at play. It’s delusional in the extreme to suppose that if we sat down and talked about things we’d all end up on the same page. The assumption of pan-leftist solidarity or a shared common goal is a comforting lie. The left isn’t defined by some set of axioms in ethical philosophy that we can all agree on and than argue about derivations of strategy or implementation from. The left is a historical coalition thrown together by happenstance. As with revolution we tend to self-identify as the underdogs and build our coalitions from the classes we recognize as underdogs against the classes we recognize as ruling but this leads to all kinds of contortions. We are for the right to choose because women are the underdogs in patriarchy. But at the same time we’re pro vegan because animals are the (sometimes literal) underdogs in human domination. Wait, do we value all living things? What counts as a discrete living thing? Do we value them equally or is the level of consciousness/sentience important? Is it the level of dependence or strain it places on another person? Suddenly the responses we have in situations with family members versus the overdogs of christianity seemingly start to come into conflict with the responses we have in situations with disabled people (underdogs!). I’m not saying there isn’t a way to thread all these dynamics, to find a core ethical guide and nuanced attentive implementation — I think there is one (although my particular approach of ultimately recognizing a vast spectrum of sentience/consciousness between zygotes/nematodes and anyone remotely close to a conscious human is denounced by a number on the left as “unegalitarian”). I’m pointing out that our responses rarely arise from an ethical analysis but from instinctual responses to any appearance of an underdog. The left is rarely a philosophy, more often a coalition, with theory tacked on to serve the goals of binding that coalition together. One could easily imagine universes with different historical paths where outlawing abortion is a core leftist plank, seen as deeply interrelated with opposing queerphobia, patriarchy, ableism, etc. Or the left could oppose legal sanction, but support and build grassroots social and cultural sanction against abortion. (Again, for the record I’m pro-choice.) Underdogism is a really dangerous approach to the world. It’s a good “rule of thumb” but if you know anything about me it’s that I abhor such heuristics and see them as the opposite of radical analysis. Underdogism is how you get things like zionism, leninism, poc nationalism, TERFs, SWERFs, etc. Its failures are manifold. There’s a good case the left is nothing but underdogism — in which case fascism is almost always leftist. MRAs don’t approach politics like a reactionary on the right side of the French Estates General, consciously seeking to preserve an established ruling structure, they see themselves as the underdogs. Sure, they’re not (in almost everything besides some fringe contexts like some bits of divorce law), but fuck it they’re potential underdogs, and that status is more than enough to reproduce much of the standard structures of underdogism. One might interject that the problem with underdogism of the alt-right is not just their misidentification of underdogs but their hunger for power, and this is certainly broadly true (although a fraction of the alt-right actually seem less in it for power but more in it to drink outgroup/”overdog” tears). But this certainly applies to much of the left in good standing. Certainly many authoritarian leftists have hungrily latched onto underdogism as a potential ladder to power. I’ve met feminist writers who openly admitted to me they’d be patriarchal if they were men, or own slaves if they were antebellum rich whites. Yes, any set of smart persons who recoil at clear instances of oppression are gonna broadly converge on a number of positions or analyses. But the way they reconcile or hold together these things may differ dramatically. Just because the left is a stable coalition in our present context doesn’t mean aspects of it that seem in perfect harmony won’t break in wildly different directions should certain conditions change. I have repeatedly encountered leftists who’ve claim that valuing some things above other things is hierarchical and thus right-wing (leftism being in their minds representing something more like stoicism or buddhism). Similarly you find epistemic pluralism common in the most heads-up-their-ass sectors of left academia who think thinking some models of the world are more true than others is “unegalitarian” or even “totalitarian.” It’s tempting to just laugh about hippies and move on, but these sort of horrifically bad definitions of “egalitarianism” will sometimes come out of the mouths of smart people who generally have their heads on straight the moment they move to a context they’re unused to. Now I hate the NAP, but everyone laughs at the NAP these days for being “unpragmatic” and this has increasingly become tied to a casual indictment of all ethical philosophy itself. A turn that has been encouraged by the twin interrelated scourges of the modern internet far left: tankies and nihilists. This makes sense if — as per social justice — you see the point of the left to create a social framework of etiquette and loose ideology that can bind a coalition of underdog classes together. Thus the increasing refrain of “you can’t compare!” that happens whenever someone tries to tease out commonalities or contradictions between various claims, positions or planks. There is, from this perspective, no common root or unifying ethos to the left and we should not look for one lest the whole project fall apart. Philosophy, ethics, and core values or principles become the enemies, as does both methodological individualism and universalism. There are neither individual experiences nor universal ones, just relatively simplistic classes of people with incomparable experiences. And we bind them together into common cause by badgering, social positioning, poetic affective appeals, and threats of violence. The left isn’t unified by anything. Marxism is half discredited by idiocy and monstrosity and the half that survived became a wildly contradictory mess more preoccupied with obscurantism, irrationality and anti-realism to hide its own failures than getting anything done much less charting a path. Most of the concerns of the left refer to opposing mythologized superstructures that we are left flailing in the absence of or whenever their composition and behavior change. The left is, in short, utterly allergic to radicalism. Fending off its inadequacies with short puffs of extremism instead. As social and ideological complexities compound through the runaway feedback of the information age these internal tensions and the laughably frail taping over we’ve done will only become more clear. There is still hope for a radical anarchism that is willing to root its discussions of freedom and ethics concretely and explicitly. But this will necessarily involve casting off from many allies who we share some limited intuitions or momentary prescriptions with. Or at least dissolving the comforting delusions of a deep camaraderie. The only reason the lie of “the left” has persisted for two centuries is that its grand Manichean narrative of two more or less uniform tribes — one enlightened and one indecipherably morally corrupt — enables a sense of community that provides psychological comfort to many. To many on the left (as well as on the nationalistic etc right) a hunger for “community” is actually their primary motivation. When chatting at the bar it’s better to not look too deep into why you both oppose capitalists lest you discover something that sunders rather than binds. But the format of present internet technologies has had the reverse effect. Inescapable contact with The Enemy has led us to put up hostile discursive walls that naturally end up cutting out our traditional allies too, causing both right and left to fracture in desperate attempts to find purity, trustworthiness, or some kind of deeper binding. The happenstance points of unity that worked when we had little choice in who to befriend are now fracturing in all directions. This is largely a good thing, the last two decades have seen all manner of horrors lurking among our own ranks exposed. But the process that brings to light our lack of commonality with the anti-science leftist deep ecologist who wants to kill all humans is also a process that will ultimately rip “the left” to unsalvageable shreds. This ship is sinking. And just because many of the rats are fleeing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t either. http://clubof.info/

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