Fraudulent?
The problem is not so much that one third of Karzias votes are "fraudulent" ,as Ambassador Kenneth Galbraith insists, it's the other third of the votes that a warlord named Dostum "suggested" his Uzbek minions cast. C'mon, heroin, refugee camps, tribal/ ethnic civil war, who are we kidding? Most of my neighbors, thats who! ( Beak and the other pragmatists would insist they have a firm grasp of what serves their own interests) Why aren't I in the streets trying to explain this, getting arrested, speaking out? Perhaps it's the unbearable loneliness or exhaustion or disturbing groundhog day-like quality of it. Besides, with all this unemployment, sending 40,000 young patriots off to fight in the Hindu Kush might make it easier for me to find a job.
The problem isn't so much that Manuel Zelaya is held up in the Brazillian embassy, it's that even if he gets his job back the Honduran elite will loot the place and abandon it. And the people don't have oilfields like in Venezuela.
The problem isn't so much that there will be no "public option" in the health reform bill but that Glen Beck has 30,000,000 viewers each night who feel a little better about their lives for the hour they hang on his every word. Or that John Stewarts fans need and get the same catharthic reprieve.
The problem isn't the frozen banks or the melting ice caps, it's not Operation Enduring Freedom or "bad paper" or Supersized Happy Meals, it's not that God is dead or that Oprah gained all that weight back.
The problem is Joe Hill isn't coming back and Quinn the Eskimo isn't showing up either. Jesus has run into unexpected delays and the "blood dimmed tide" is rising fast. Either we organize ourselves or we will have it done for us. To that end I want to make a pitch for ZNet and ZMag, they need some money and support and participation. They are re-building (yet again) the site and it is an amazing resource and could be a fabulous organizing tool.
posted by troutsky @ 8:23 AM
15 comments
15 Comments:
While you admit none of the mythical heroes are going to return to save us from the problems you see, your solution is to organize — as if that wouldn't require some kind of inspirational, paradigm shifting prophet behind which to gather. Do you see no possibility that ethical individuals could recognize the value of and adopt the same good idea you would build an organization around for personal behavior without having to become a member of anything?
Yodood - I am with you in theory... but unfortunately humanity comes with a membership card... it is just a matter of with whom you associate.
Trotsky - I am afraid we are already 'done for'... I mean, Beak is only one angel of darkness in a world of shadows... His position is the dominant myth... as Daniel Quinn said so aptly in his novel Ishmael... It is the myth we live and breathe, it is the air that surrounds and sustains us... it is almost impossible to question...
This is even the case when the architecture seems to be crumbling, the streets are decaying, the scaffolding holding up the facade is loosening... and yet, those in charge, the masters of our civilization, just keep patching up the holes, and telling us that we just require a few fixes, a new coat of paint, maybe a solar powered car. and all will be well with our dream.
Although I hold out hope for real transformation, I do not expect it; I do not think one can organize for it; and I am not sure if change would be real change.
Beck, Limbaugh, Oprah, NY Yankees, Dallas Cowboys, these are all symptoms of the illusion!
I know the sad history of charismatic individuals and political organizing but refuse to believe we are doomed to repeat each and every mistake or that such flaws are intractable. We see transformation all around us.Dylan reminds us "don't follow leaders ,watch the parking meters!"
This idea of being hardwired sounds too much like the doctrine of Original Sin.The "groundhog day" effect can be shaken or we accept the End of History. Call me crazy,I can't abandon those who have laid down their lives in struggle before me.
Trout, The transformation you see around you is happening to individuals who've weaned themselves of leaders and well aware of the meters that make their wallets bleeders.
I'm not sure what the "hard wired" applies to, but if the founding fathers had had to live the drafting of the constitution over and over until they got it right, ala Groundhog Day, we'd still be living with the original inhabitants while the powdered wigs realized the fallacy of intending mass control, dried up and blew away.
"Yodood - I am with you in theory... but unfortunately humanity comes with a membership card... it is just a matter of with whom you associate."
Agreed kultur. And membership has a binding quality to it in an activist sense...my experience working in a "non-membership" group that came apart like a ball of twine rolling downhill last spring has convinced me of that.
Charlie,
"Non-membership" group, plastic silverware, jumbo shrimp, deafening silence, and original copy are all pretty ugly examples of words used to obfuscate the fact that they nullify each other and make the object defined disfunctional.
Of course it fell apart, only viable entities honoring intrinsic values can fight entropy. Would an investment in membership dues make the members more faithful, virtuous or successful when the intended function of the group is trying to push a chain?
The original membership groups, the family, the tribe, the clan... based upon kinship relations. Beyond that it becomes a matter of associating with strangers, and expecting them to care for you as their own brethren. The motivations of associating strangers are privately tempered and hatched... even the langauge, the slogans of brotherhood and common purpose are forged upon words whose meanings long ago beame hollowed out by the masses and their teachers.
Ask the revolutionaries of the world who have suffered at the hands of their colleagues, their associates, their brethren... ask them about organization, about civil memberships!
OK - maybe the most effective membership organization in the modern world is an army, a fighting force like the US marine corp. However, the more effective armed group would be the tribal groups of the Taliban... the Americans are just starting to learn what the Russians already know about tribal membership in Afghanistan.
Am I understanding then that beyond blood their can be no meaningful social relations? Putting aside the dysfunction of an incredible number of families I know, organization is a term for a group, whose individual members obviously express many different subject positions,and who operate in a coordinated form towards a goal. Don't get hung up on totalitarian "unity" every time someone mentions the words collective purpose.We are social beings and affinity groups, well beyond the limits of clan, have been successful in the past.
I'm not romanticizing these groups, or indigenous peoples, but "membership" ( like the card says) has it's perks! Individualism is the religion which poisons the well, in my opinion.( as the denial of the social)
Medea Benjamin the leader of Code Pink, came out against immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the same time Obama is moving the war, more towards Pakistan. Someone tell Medea, that the US is not there for the women.
Besides objective conditions, you do need the right person, in the right place. Without Lenin and Trotsky, there wouldn't have been a Bolshevik Revolution.
Trotsky
Dysfunctional families today are a consequence of the stunted development of most adults, resulting from the skewed mythology of civilized ontogeny.
Kinship does not require blood relationships, but it may involve totemic identification in the later Paleolithic.
Social identify is not impossible, it is just limited in civilized society because of the fracturing our ability to identify and bond in a more natural way.
I've got a belly button, what else am I 'sposed to join to improve my existence beyond that for which I, alone, must be responsible? It is the bile of disappointment inherent in our expectation of others to suppliment our individual irresponsiblity that poisons our honest symbiotic relationships with the userer/used malady that is killing society.
Yodood, you and I have gone around in the past over Ayn Randian objectivism but this is still what this navel gazing approach suggests to me. autonomy, ok, that I can see.
Trout, You got navel gazing and Ayn Rand out of that??!!!
I guess we are fated by our symbols to never actually communicate — whose, remains for each to decide.
On my part, what I said is the clearest expression of a viable human life that has percolated to the surface in our discussions. Without individualism there can be no autonomy, without autonomous individuals there would be no viability for a collective to function around. So far as I can tell, your idea of Ayn Randian Objectivism is the same as the userer/used sickness I mentioned being the poison of dependence.
Kultur
You may almost be as dumb as Troutsky
and the Lunchroom Lenin Renagade Testicle. Maybe you should ditch the philosophical gas, stop hanging out with bug eyed death cultists and dope addicts.
You are talking to DEATH CULTISTS who venerate a war criminal messiah. People must be sacrificed so the bug eyed cultists can create utopia that is less real than Neverland. Communists are on a par with Nazis and Jihadists.
Indigenous people are not indigenous when they are Jews. Colonialism is fine so long as it is non Western or is sanctioned by Marx. Indigenous people are to be pissed on when they are inconvenient like the Indians in Nicaragua or Venezuela commies pretend are happy to be herded into collectives that are less free
than reservations in the USA.
You excel in your role as useless idiot of the death cult crew. Maybe when Renegade Testicle builds
his gulag you can be a snitch.
When are the Death Cultists going to vote with their feet. It is time for those who advocate Cocaine
Crackpipe Communism to live under it 24/7.
In the demented world of Renegade Testicle all the Jews who fled Caracas tell identical lies just to entertain government officials.
How these identical stories are told to multiple officers remains a great mystery.
Funny we see exponentially more Colombians and never hear a single bad word about the government.
VS Naipul was quite correct about the integrity of people who align themselves with causes like Communism or Islam having to prosititute the truth to fit their agenda.
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