Alliances and obfuscations

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, pages 49-50:

Ultimately, this mounting class conflict [in the 13th to 15th centuries] brought about a new alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, without which proletarian revolts may not have been defeated. It is difficult, in fact, to accept the claim, often made by historians, according to which these struggles had no chance of success due to the narrowness of their political horizons and the "confused nature of their demands." In reality, the objectives of the peasants and artisans were quite transparent. They demanded that "every man should have as much as another" (Pirenne 1937: 202) and, in order to achieve this goal, they joined with all those "who had nothing to lose," acting in concert, in different regions, not afraid to confront the well-trained armies of the nobility, despite their lack of military skills.

If they were defeated, it was because all the forces of feudal power--the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie--moved against them, united, despite their traditional divisions, by their fear of proletarian rebellion. Indeed, the image that has been handed down to us, of a bourgeoisie perennially at war with the nobility, and carrying on its banners the call for equality and democracy, is a distortion. By the late Middle Ages, wherever we turn, from Tuscany to England the the Low Countries, we find the bourgeoisie already allied with the nobility in the suppression of the lower classes. For in the peasants and the democratic weavers and cobblers of its cities, the bourgeoisie recognized an enemy far more dangerous than the nobility--one that made it worthwhile for the burghers even to sacrifice their cherished political autonomy. Thus, it was the urban bourgeoisie, after two centuries of struggles waged in order to gain full sovereignty within the walls of its communes, who reinstituted the power of the nobility, by voluntarily submitting to the rule of the Prince, the first step on the road to the absolute state.

[Citation references Henri Pirenne's Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.]

This passage describes a phenomenon I think most of us are familiar with, but perhaps in a historical context some of us (me, for one) might not have placed it in before. Anyway, it's always useful to be reminded of it. We're always told (with varying levels of directness) that we should point ourselves "upward" in our aspirations and allegiances, and "downward" in our hatred, blaming, and (again with varying levels of directness) our violence. And in some ways, it makes pragmatic sense to go along with this--as Federici points out, if the bourgeoisie hadn't aligned itself with the nobility, there's a very good chance that the lower-class revolutionaries would have been successful--i.e., that there wouldn't be a bourgeoisie anymore.

Of course, this pragmatism is a false one; if the revolutionaries had actually been able to enact a world where "every man [sic] should have as much as another," which they may have been able to with genuine bourgeois assistance (which would have also been, by its nature, anti-bourgeois assistance), I can't help thinking that not just the revolutionaries but everyone, bourgeoisie included, might be living better, fuller lives now. In Federici's account, the bourgeoisie's (and the Church's) alliance with the nobility abetted the creation of the absolute state; what might it do now?

Federici is talking about classes of people, but how do we learn from this and apply those lessons to our behavior as individuals? I don't for a minute fool myself that I, and most people who will read this, don't fall into any reasonable definition of "the bourgeoisie," but as individuals we can behave counter to the pattern of our class. Our actions determine whether we're the bourgeoisie in this case. When push comes to shove, you and me and others like us need to remember that our allegiance should always be to those with less power than us, not those with more, despite what short-term pragmatism might seem to indicate.

The first paragraph, by the way, describes one very powerful technique frequently used to mystify and dismiss opposition to the status quo, which is to call that opposition "muddled" or "narrow-minded." "Those silly peasants think that everyone can live like the King, how confused they are!" "Those feminists are only concerned with problems that affect women, not problems that affect everyone!" Sometimes these accusations can be accurate--for instance, I don't think it would be wrong to say that the bourgeoisie's allegiance to the nobility was and is narrow-minded--but whenever people start slinging these attacks, it's probably going to be useful to step back and really think about it, because they are a very effective way of confusing people into exactly the kind of wrong allegiances I was discussing above. With the two (cartoonish, but no less common for their cartoonishness) examples I gave, a moment's thought reveals the problems, i.e., surely no peasant thinks that everyone can or should live just like the King does, maybe I should try to see what they're actually arguing; obviously, any problem that affects half of the population cannot help but affect the rest--and even if it didn't, it's still a problem for a huge number of people!

(A reminder--I found Federici's book extremely important, so I'm going slowly through the quotes I copied onto my Commonplace blog and discussing each of them one by one. None of these posts is comprehensive in any way, nor is it intended to be--none of them will be comprehensive on the larger topic involved, on the subset of that topic that I choose to discuss, or even on the implications of the particular Federici passage discussed. Obviously. And if you want to see all of the quotes I copied before I discuss them, they're here.)

FYI

In case you were wondering, Isaac Asimov:

I thought maybe you could do that with human beings too. You could tell what huge masses of human beings would do, provided they didn't know what the predictions were so they couldn't distort their own behaviour, and provided you had a large enough number, and I felt that with the galactic empire you'd have a large enough number. I don't really believe it's going to work, but it made a good background for the stories, and I was always able to use my "psychohistory" to show how things became inevitable, economically or sociologically and so on. It made for interesting historical novels.....

Not only are there not enough people, but actually their behaviour is far too complicated. They're not like individual molecules. Molecules have limited modes of behaviour and human beings are far less limited, so that human history is more chaotic. In fact, so chaotic that it probably can never be predicted, and in my later Foundation novels I dragged this in. But of course when I first started I didn't know anything about this new theory of chaos.

was much smarter--and vastly more humane--than Paul Krugman:

It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists—the “psychohistorians,” who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods—the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

Taxes: an anecdote, with digressions into potholes and libraries

If Rhode Island is famous, it's famous not for you but for potholes. Last night the Baronette and I were driving down a street in one of the Less Desirable neighborhoods of Providence and encountered such potholes as I, a native, have never seen. The weather this winter has been hell on the pavement. We're talking covering-entire-lanes-of-traffic-or-more, literally over a foot deep, people having to take turns going different ways because if you go into this one you're not coming out potholes. Then, later on, we were driving down a street in one of the More Desirable neighborhoods and, lo and behold, there were no potholes.

The Baronette turned to me (while keeping one eye on the road) and said something like this: "I wonder how people who are apologetic for the power, for the current order, justify this kind of thing?"

I happen to know how they justify this kind of thing. Once upon a time, I worked briefly at a small business owned by a professional, educated, Subaru-driving, lesbian, NPR-listening,* capital-L Liberal of the first order, who also just happened to live on literally the wealthiest street in the city.

*I once mentioned that I didn't like NPR partly because they were too conservative (misleading word I know) for me, and she was shocked. "But it's the most liberal news source out there!" she exclaimed.

One day over lunch I brought up some work I was doing with a group fighting to keep the then-endangered branches of the Providence Public Library from being closed by the greedy assholes on its governing board who wanted to sell off the properties to developers. (The situation, by the way, is much better now; the branches are operated by a community organization whose interest is actually in keeping the branches running, and while there are still problems--like for instance the fact that the old board still owns the physical buildings and is putting up a stink about turning them over as they agreed to which means that urgently needed renovations have been delayed--they are slowly but surely being resolved.) I mentioned in passing, naïvely expecting a quick nod of agreement and recognition, that of course the branches that weren't threatened with closure were primarily the branches serving the richer parts of the city.

At this point, though, the Boss had something she needed to say. Like many, she was under the impression that the Providence Public Library system was operated by the local government,* and so she said, "Well, if there's a money problem, we** should get priority, because we pay so much more taxes."

You don't get more liberal than that.

*As most public libraries are. However, the PPL and the current PCL are both considered, with differing degrees of accuracy, private non-profits).
**The first person plural, which encompassed no one in the room but herself, was conjured up by her, unbidden.

When I wrote up my model recently, one of several inspirations for it was my having one of those weird realizations where it's not like you suddenly understand anything you didn't already, but you just suddenly put words in an order that clarifies things to you in a way new to yourself. In this case, my realization was that modern taxation grew naturally out of tribute; in other words, the system of requiring lots of people to pay (whether in money, concrete resources, or services) directly to the ruling forces has never fundamentally changed. Only the stated justification has: now, we're told that we pay taxes in exchange for government services.

So with that (obvious, but new-in-form) clarifying thought in my head, I responded to the Baronette's question (remember that?) with my story about my former boss. And I think it can be instructive to keep all of this stuff in mind when liberals talk about taxes, because liberals love taxes, and I think one reason why is that it's a way to quantify how much they feel like they deserve. Yes, they do a lot of talking about social safety nets or whatever, but if there's a money problem,* they should get priority because they pay so much more taxes.

*By the way, I feel honor-bound to mention that there was no money problem, demonstrably, inarguably, factually, in the case of the PPL, despite its board's claims.

Which amounts to saying that they've done more prostrating before power, that they have served power better. Meanwhile, they will go on and on about teapartiers who are "too stupid" to realize that under Obama their taxes have gone down rather than up, because they don't understand that there's more to taxes than what shows up on your pay stub.

Because your tribute will be extracted one way or another. What you get in exchange for that tribute depends entirely on your social standing and, more importantly, the whims of the people you're paying it to.

Sometimes one clause is enough to know you don't need to read any more

In this case, it's "Israel’s wars have evolved from existential to territorial over the last sixty years."

WARNING: Above link leads to Obsidian Wings. Brace yourself.

Oh, what the hell, I'll turn this into a liberal roundup.

Yglesias says "if WalMart manages to 'drive mom and pop stores out of business' by selling affordable groceries to under-served urban neighborhoods, that’s what I would call a triumph for human progress." Yeah, it's great, because then mom and pop can join the ranks of the "under-served," too. And, hey, maybe one day every single person in the country can be underpaid by the same company that's the only one they can afford to buy necessities from. Honestly, do people like him really think that some people are "under-served" and others aren't for just no reason at all?

Suzie posts on Echidne defending Clinton, the person, against those wikileaks revelations that her office spied on UN officials. And I like that blog in a lot of ways (the series on the so-called science of gender difference that Echidne herself wrote recently was great), but this, like an unfortunately high proportion of posts there, is liberal insanity of the first order.

Shakesville poster PortlyDyke follows up on McEwan's coding post (which we discussed here) with a post that's kinda-sorta interesting and kinda-sorta not-entirely misguided, but she also just casually throws off one of the howlingly inaccurate applications of the gender coding model that some of the commenters on my earlier post were concerned about: "Imperialism/Masculine Nationalism/Feminine."

Not too long ago in comments I promised bonobo an agonizingly sincere self-examination essay on why I'm so obsessed with the stupid things liberals say, and I promise it's coming. Those selfish Egyptians went and had themselves a revolution and distracted me.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Updated with one I forgot to include originally: To this point, I have been making a rather straightforward, even banal point about the simplification, abstraction, and standardization that are necessary for state officials' observations of the circumstances of some or all of the population. But I want to make a further claim, one analogous to that made for scientific forestry: the modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage. The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of observations.
pages 81-82

The image of coordination and authority aspired to here recalls that of mass exercises--thousands of bodies moving in perfect unison according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and participants with its display of powerful cohesion. The awe is enhanced by the fact that, as in the Taylorist factory, only someone outside and above the display can fully appreciate it as a totality; the individual participants at ground level are small molecules within an organism whose brain is elsewhere. The image of a nation that might operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the apex--and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus reduce to that of ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and self-confidence of the elites.
page 254

A great many nations, some of them former colonies, have built entirely new capitals rather than compromise with an urban past that their leaders were determined to transcend; one thinks of Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey, Belize, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Malawi, and Tanzania.¹²⁰

120. One political advantage of a new capital is precisely that it does not belong to any existing community. Founding a new capital avoids certain delicate, if not explosive, choices that would otherwise have to be made. By the same logic, English became the national language of India because it was the only widely spoken language that did not belong exclusively to any particular traditional community. It did belong, however, to India's English-speaking intelligentsia, which was enormously privileged when its "dialect" became the national language. The United States and Australia, with no urban past to transcend, created planned capitals that represented a vision of progress and order and that were, not incidentally, in stark contrast to indigenous settlement practices.

page 259, note on page 413

It is worth emphasizing the degree to which oral cultures, as opposed to written cultures, may avoid the rigidity of orthodoxy. Because an oral culture has no textual reference point for marking deviations, traditions currently in circulation vary with the speaker, the audience, and local needs. Having no yardstick like a sacred text to measure the degree of drift from its Ur-tradition, such a culture can change greatly over time and simultaneously think of itself as remaining faithful to tradition.
page 332

Belated

Barack Obama, recently:

From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

It sure is a good thing that keeping (American) children out of factories didn't "unduly" hinder business, or else they'd still be right there fitting their little hands into the machines. Luckily, business could just get other children in other places.

His other examples are so ludicrous that I won't even mention them.

Stop it

Digby thinks that describing, first, a fraction of the US population who self-organize based on shared opinions and, second, the population of an entire country reduced to the actions of its government, in the same terms is hilariously clever.

I could have said that better, but I got tired of rewriting it.

By the way

I didn't write anything about Martin Luther King, Jr., because a) what he stood for was more important than a state holiday, and b) all I could think of writing about was liberals predictably under- or mis-representing him, and what he stood for was more important than making fun of liberals, too, so since I couldn't come up with anything more worthy than that, I figured I would shut up and maybe link to Marisacat from back in August again.

UPDATE: This.

Yglesiology

This is a Matt Yglesias post. It's interesting.

At first, it's pretty sensible!

I imagine in the wake of this Arizona shooting that there’ll be a move to deliver more security around members of congress as they travel in-state. I think that would be a real mistake. As horrible as what happened this weekend is, the fact of the matter is that political assassinations are extremely rare and it’s simply not the case that the country faces some kind of systematic assassination problem.

Yglesias and I, having different understandings of people in power's motives, use the word "mistake" differently, but other than that, yeah! Very sensible! To hear most mainstream liberals say it, you'd never know that we're not in the midst of an assassination epidemic. Smart, clear-headed guy, that Yglesias.

What’s [sic] we do have in the United States is an unusually high level of violent crime across the board, but pulling police resources off their day-to-day work and onto personal security for politicians is going to make that worse.

I...well. I wouldn't disagree that we have an "unusually high level of violen[ce]" in the United States. But "pulling police resources off their day-to-day work" would be an excellent way to combat that violence! In fact, Yglesias has made me realize that exactly what we should do is pull police "resources" (aka, human beings who are police officers, by the way) off their day-to-day work and onto personal security for politicians. Man, how awesome would it be if every single goddamn cop was off the streets and forming bristling armed circles around all the members of Congress instead? Get the army involved, too. That way, the politicians could make whatever laws they wanted, but there'd be no one left to enforce them, and we and the rest of the world could just get on with our lives. Throw in the prison guards while you're at it and it's the best idea I've heard all year.

UPDATE: I had originally intended to note here that, of course, in the real world the increase of security on the powerful will not result in the decrease of police harassing people on the streets; rather, it will lead, just like everything else the powerful do, to an expansion of the police state.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST

The change that we ought to be making, however, is an institutional one relating to the question of what happens if someone shoots a United States Senator.

Yglesias has a habit of using the first person plural in perplexing ways. Who is this we that ought to be making this change? Anyway, wow! Is Matt Yglesias really arguing for prison reform? Maybe he's even arguing for prison abolition!

I think it would sit poorly with all of us if assassinating a senator led to a change in partisan control of the senate via gubernatorial appointment, but many states’ laws leave the door open to that possibility. Senators ought to be replaced, in my view, either through a special election or else through an appointee pre-designated by the Senator as a legitimate proxy for his or her approach to politics.

Oh. Well, that's less exciting.

This use of "us" following after the "we" in the previous sentence has me even more confused. With whom would a change in partisan control sit poorly? Certainly not with me! Nothing in my life has ever changed due to a change in the partisan control of the Senate. Certainly my life is less good than it would otherwise be due in part to the existence of the Senate, but the composition of the body matters not a bit to me. Anyway, if I did care about the partisan balance of the Senate (and may I reiterate that I surely do not!), I don't think a system of powerful people appointing their own successors would make me feel better about it.

This is the kind of thing that we tend not to think about until after it’s happened, but by that time it’s too late. The political system itself needs to be made as resilient as possible to attempted violent interventions.

"Too late" for what? Has the political system itself crumbled as a result of this shooting?

And, finally: am I the only one who thinks that it's funny when Democracy True Believers argue for making the system itself as resilient as possible?

MEANWHILE: Sky robot murder, starvation austerity, war powers expansion, occupations and escalations, coups d'etat, wetwork, black ops and the militarization of public space continue apace. (Thanks to Jack for the excellently condensed list of horrors.)

Hack hack hack

Little Digby, spin and spin:

The intertubes are screeching with right wingers insisting that despite his obvious mental problems, anti-government rhetoric and Paulite goldbug obsessions, the fact that he cited "To Kill A Mockingbird" "The Communist Manifesto" and "Main Kampf" means that Jared Loughner is a left winger.

Let's just say that we don't really know much right now and anything's possible, but the fact that he shot a Democratic congresswoman in the head argues just a little bit against that interpretation. It's not as if there aren't any right wingers in Arizona.

(As always with semi-literate diggles, apply [sic]s as needed, because I didn't bother checking)

Digby is of course one of the most absolutely incompetent writers in the world, completely independent of her status as one of the most absolutely incompetent thinkers in the world, but I like how she implicitly poo-poohs, here, the suggestion that "despite his obvious mental problems...Jared Loughner is a left winger." Deliberate? Or the result of shit writing? Who can tell?

The idea that hating a democrat enough to try to kill her makes you a "right winger" is of course too ludicrous to even discuss. Barring unforeseen developments after the collapse of civilization, I will never kill a human being as long as I live, but the dems piss me off at least as much, often more than, the repubs. I don't think I'm exactly a left winger, but I am certainly not a right winger. However those useless terms happen to be defined at this moment.

As I've said before, being a partisan hack makes you completely unable to understand why anybody does anything, let alone anything else in the world. When everything has to fit into a demsaregood rethugsarevil mold, you have to do a lot of awkward shoving and cramming.

(As far as what she's responding to, I also love the definition of identity based on commodities--in this case books--consumed.)

Evil as the sincere non-ironic attachment to a belief

I'm still sorting through stuff that accumulated in the past few weeks. Back before Christmas, Aaron linked to this comment on Metafilter*. The poster, AlsoMike, responding to that silly Bruce Sterling piece about Julian Assange, makes some very good points about Wikileaks' actually stated goals (boiled down: justice), rather than the ones people state (in this case: transparency for transparency's sake), though I wish he wouldn't conflate Wikileaks with Assange, since that's almost as serious a misconception as the ones he's debunking.

*Which is one of those very internetty sites that I never look at because I don't understand them** so I'm glad of the link. I also admit I haven't bothered to read any of the rest of the thread. If you do and it's worth reading, point me at it.
**And, probably, vice versa.

Anyway, right now I'm more interested in this part (disregarding the embarrassingly worshipful opening), which comes after:

Assange sticks his head above this bland crowd of empty slogan-chanters and dares to stand for something, and this cannot stand, liberals and progressives shout him down because they've accepted Hollywood's ideological framing of evil as the sincere non-ironic attachment to a belief. Every movie villain believes in a cause, the good ordinary people ultimately defeat him, but not in the name some other true belief, but simply to preserve the status quo, so that the neoliberal capitalist system should continue unmolested.

Hah! Wonderful bit of cultural criticism! I'd like to meet that man, shake his hand.

I don't know, maybe it's not that big a deal to anybody else, but I love it when I read something like this. When I do, it's like there's almost an audible click of things falling into place.

For further reading on related matters, an excellent addition to my favorite of Justin's modes: the multi-subject, stream of consciousness, lucidly discursive essay. This one is about New Years, drugs, identity based in consumption, hipsters, irony, judgmentalism, conformity, nonconformity, not taking other people's abstentions personally, sincerity, and much much more.

Observation, obvious

Whenever a mainstream liberal argues for the greatness of a given political figure, the liberal's evidence will almost invariably be a speech given or statement made or article written by the political figure, and almost never an actual action taken by that figure.

HELLO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom...
-pages 120-1

Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.
-page 168

It is taken for granted that a beggar does not "earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic "earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a high-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideals, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice no one cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it?" Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately.
-pages 173-4

Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy was the man who was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!) hanged him.
-page 189

Not retreating, still mocking liberals

Yglesias:

I have mixed feelings about a lot of different aspects of this, but there are two key points. One is that the leaker here (presumably Bradley Manning, but that’s not yet been proven in a court of law) has broken the law and needs to be punished.

Listen, you utter piece of shit: Bradley Manning has not been tried, and he doesn't need to be punished--he is being punished. Not just that--he is being tortured.

Even someone with the twisted, authoritarian point of view required to be an establishment liberal, even someone as painstakingly idiotic as fucking Matt Yglesias, should have a goddamn big problem with that.

Temporary retreat into liberal-mocking

Jacob Davies brings us some more of his patented brand of obfuscity.

Blah blah blah voting

So, there's no election I know of coming up or anything (though I'm sure there's one somewhere), but my slow-processing brain has been filtering through some discussion that happened in the build up to the recent one in the U.S., both in the blogonoosphere and in real life.

Fans of voting talk about non-voters as if they are by definition unengaged. They're usually pretty disparaging about it in one way or another; they'll talk about how so many people "don't even bother to vote," or they'll say that if you don't even vote, then you have no right to "complain" about the way things are. There's always that "even" (or something equivalent) there, implying that voting is somehow a minimum threshold for involvement, that if you don't even vote, then surely you can't be doing anything else.

Which is of course nonsense. It is, shockingly, very easy to not vote while simultaneously working towards meaningful change. On the other hand, in my experience many people find it even easier to just vote and think that that takes care of their responsibility to "get involved." The reality is that voting is like going to church in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is this: you can do it or not do it, according to what makes you feel best, but either way it doesn't make much difference here in the physical world. It's everything else you do in your life that matters.

So, I've been thinking about this stuff, and in the midst of my thinking came a bunch of posts about Ralph Nader. And I have no particular fondness or, uh, disfondness for the man, but it occurred to me that most of the people who get all het up about voting are staunch Nader-hating Thanks Ralphers, and that a lot of these same people have a fetish for grudgingly allowing that they would have a lot more respect for the guy if he would do anything in between elections, that just running for office every four years and not doing a single other thing just makes him seem hungry for attention*. Which is a lot like that whole thing about "Well, you don't hear any Muslims denouncing 9/11 now do you?" in that what you know is limited by what the media is willing to tell you and by what you're willing to seek out beyond that, and also in that it's an observation really only very tangentially related to anything important. But aside from that it's just awfully goofy coming from this crowd of voting-is-a-holy-obligation sanctimony machines.

So, I have to vote, or else it means that I just can't be bothered to care or to get involved. But if anyone worth voting for** comes along, they need to stop presenting themselves to be voted for and do other things that really matter.

Moral of the story: shut up and endorse existing power.

*Unlike, for example, Obama.
**You know, in a hypothetical world where this is a possibility

Wikileaks #1: Warm-up

There's a lot to say about Wikileaks, so I thought I'd start gently and easily, by making fun of liberals.

A lot of the more radical blogoëlements recently have been talking about how many liberals are frothing mad about Wikileaks, revealing yet again their basic fealty to Power. And it's true--many liberals are reacting that way.

What's more surprising to me is the number of otherwise deeply bland liberals who are all for it. Take PZ Myers, who, the day before the start of the recent round of releases, was thrilled. He doesn't even equivocate about how governments must be allowed to keep some secrets, like even some of his commenters do, and when he says that "we're about to discover the degree of skullduggery that's been going on" he doesn't bother to specify "during the Bush administration," like he and most of his ilk normally would reflexively. For this, and for the present perfect progressive construction of the verb in the last clause of that sentence, he deserves a (teensy) little bit of credit.*

The last part of his post, though, is a pretty hilarious return to form:

It is to be hoped that every major newspaper with some respect for its job has got people going over these documents carefully. The description above is correct: if we're to deserve the title of democracy, we must have an informed citizenry.

Leaving aside the deliciously meaningless cliché salad in the second sentence, do you see how, even when given a huge cache of primary resources, the scientist and the liberal prefers to "hope" (and I've written--or, more accurately, juxtaposed quotes--about that kind of hope before) that he can trust newspapers to sort through it for him and tell him what parts are important?

*Incidentally, I don't mean to imply here that viewing Wikileaks entirely positively is the only stance on the issue I am willing to accept. I do view them very positively--in fact, I'm more excited about them than I have been about pretty much anything in a good long time--but I can definitely understand some types of objections. I should be discussing all of this soon, but it's more complicated; hence this warm-up.

TANGENT linked only by liberal-mocking: it appears that digby has finally figured out that the Democrats actually want to do the terrible things they do. But don't worry: the understanding doesn't go even a centimeter deeper than that, and anyway I'm sure she'll forget by tomorrow. You'd think that the motives of a bunch of millionaires deciding not to raise taxes on millionaires would be pretty easy to figure out, but apparently not!

I'm pretty sure I've said this before...

...but it still confuses me, so I'll say it again.

I was just reading one of the liberal blogs I read for amusement, and they were going on and on about Bush (because he's conveniently back in the public eye, ready to distract, right when even the blandest of liberals are really pissed at Obama), and they were talking about all of the horrible things his administration was "responsible" for--wars, economic disaster, and so on.

And here's my thing--even if you accept the premise (which I don't, obviously) that there is some kind of huge difference between Clinton (in this example) and Bush, and their respective administrations, or similar differences between any two consecutive administrations in our political system, and you think that those differences can lead to wars that kill millions of people and economic crises that impoverish millions more, and so on and so on and so on...

...then doesn't that mean that democracy, especially in a country as hugely powerful as the U.S., is a horrible way to run things? I mean, I don't disagree, as far as that goes, but I think most liberals would at least say they did.

News from the corporate world #4 should be coming shortly.

I'm sincerely recommending that you read a Melissa McEwan post

Or, actually, don't read it. Just look at the pictures.



It's pictures she took from a kind of Chick Tracts alternative promoting Halloween themed Christianity*. The art is kind of incredible, and actually, though I hate to pay McEwan a compliment, improved by her photography; the angles and colors and distortion and so on all add up to create a legitimately bizarre aesthetic that I respond to pretty strongly.



McEwan, of course, is too busy being a liberal to appreciate any of this, which is why I recommend that you look at the pictures and skip the text. Her need for outrage (or "contemptuousness" as she generally prefers we pretend it to be) does not allow her to say "The message is a bit silly, but the execution is beautiful." Everything, for a liberal, is goodthinkful or ungoodthinkful, with no other possibilities admissable (with the exception of occasional bouts of excruciating self-righteous ambivalence, as with the soul-wrenching experience of watching movies featuring actors who signed the Free Polanski petition, say).



The nice thing about realizing that all this "culture war" nonsense is just such a crock is that you gain some distance. Look, liberals. This booklet thing is goofy. No child who gets it in their Halloween sack is gonna be convinced by it. They won't even be interested in it except insofar as they'll be pissed off that they can't eat it. So it's in your hands. Sure, make fun of the message. But can't you just stop being terrified of the evil Christianists for long enough to realize that the thing is kind of cool?



After all, if it isn't, why did you take so many pictures of it?

*I'm behind on my internet life, so I'm only getting to Halloween now. Sometime around January I may write something about election day.

Quickly

I don't even remotely disagree with the substance of the post in general--of course the guy who stomped on that lady's head is reprehensible (it's not acceptable to do that to anyone for any reason, even MoveOn people), but jesus christ Melissa McEwan what?!?!

Yeah, see, except the police don't arrest people who haven't done anything wrong

You are insane.