This is what I was afraid would happen to OWS

A common class background made it a little easier for working class youth – employed and unemployed, housed and homeless – to come together across the color line. This unity is complicated by the dominance of petty bourgeois folks in these occupations. The petty bourgeoisie are small shop owners, as well as professionals who serve in a managerial capacity, such as cops, judges, bosses, transit security, etc. Many of them are losing their jobs, houses, and businesses, and are being thrown into the ranks of the working class, so they are joining this movement. They are part of the 99%, but they have had very different experiences than the groups we have discussed so far, and this shapes their political outlook. Many higher paid workers are not petty bourgeois, but they still share petty bourgeois outlooks and ideas, especially the illusion that they are part of the “middle class”.

I had hoped this time it would be different. This time we’d keep our focus, be smart and not alienate people who it would be profitable to have on the side of the angels. Then I saw this and I knew, just knew, that OWS is doomed. I hope that before it tears itself a part in an orgy of “more-left-than-thou” accusation and counter accusation, somethings get done. I hope that before it alienates educated professionals that income inequality, joblessness and the fact that corporations are not people in any sense gets pushed to the front of the national consciousness enough that it won’t be at all easy to pretend, in six months, that it never happened and for the Beltway media to revert to “What joblessness? The deficit will kill us all!” But I knew that inevitably it would come to this, the inevitable ‘we must smash capitalism’ talk.

Later, in a demonstration that they only love certain *kinds* of working class people--those who aren’t, for instance cops or soldiers--there’s this bit:

They lecture working class youth when we chant “fuck the police” or “cops, pigs, murderers”. They don’t understand that we face police brutality all the time, and we’ve been struggling against it for a long time. Unlike us, these folks (used to) own property , and are used to the police protecting it. They have not yet learned that being part of the working class means owning nothing of significance, it means being dispossessed, and that means getting pushed around by the police who function as enforcers of the rule of the 1%. The police exist to make sure we don’t steal the luxury cars of the wealthy- or occupy the factories that make those cars.

We lecture you because cops ARE working-class people! We lecture you because the cop who deters you from stealing the luxury car is *also* the cop who deters some rapist from breaking into your house at night and violating you or someone you love.

We need to reach out to everyday people in our communities, those of us who are people of color, who are unemployed, who are mothers working more than 1 job to care for our children, who are workers and students. We do not need self-appointed leaders, more interested in their bureaucratic positions, and politicking, than in our collective liberation from white supremacy, police brutality, patriarchy and capitalism.

Best of luck with that.

It is difficult to speculate about where this movement is headed.

Actually, no, it’s not at all difficult to speculate about it. To the degree that OWS listens to this kind of campus radical bullshit the movement is doomed. Capitalism is not going to be overthrown and a whole lot of people aren’t going to trust anyone who is talking about overthrowing capitalism. Some of us--the writers of this piece are not among them--know some history and know how the movie that starts with people shouting about the glorious day when all will own everything in common turns out. It turns bloody and brutal and resembles nothing like a free society. It does not become more equal and just. Rather it becomes more unjust. It didn’t work in Russia. It didn’t work in China, or Cambodia, or Vietnam or North Korea or anywhere else.. It always went wrong, it always turned oppressive. We know this movie.

Earlier in the piece the authors say:

When we work, we produce goods and services to sell for profit, not to meet each others’ needs and desires.

Yes, in fact that’s precisely what we do. I do not go to work because I love my CEO. I do not work hard because I love the people who own the company. I go to work because when I do, I get paid and I can then take that money and buy the things I need and pay others who then go and buy the things they need and so on. There is nothing inherently wrong with that system. It should be a regulated system, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it. They are not going to do away with capitalism and they aren’t going to get all that many people to WANT to do away with it. The authors seem to forget that OWS started out as a protest about jobs. People who want to be able to work aren’t trying to ‘smash the system’ but to reform it so that they can be part of it.

To the degree that OWS buys into this campus-socialist crap it dooms itself to irrelevance. It breaks my heart, though, I so wanted it to be different this time. I wanted my side, the side that is for the people and not for the rich and the powerful, to be smart. Alas, it isn’t so.

The whole sorry thing is posted at People of Color Organize!

Herman Cain thinks we're that embarrassing uncle at the BBQ

Some people go through a struggle and make it out on the other side and think, "Man, that was hard. It shouldn't be so hard for people. I made it, but think of all those who didn't. We need to change our system so that it isn't holding people back, but instead making things fairer for everyone."
Then there are those who experience something similar and think, "I succeeded because I was special. You're not special. You don't deserve what I have because you weren't willing to do what I did to get it. You're weak and you make excuses. I did it, so why can't you?"
The above is from the very excellent blog, The Black Snob in a post riffing on the always brilliant Leonard Pitts column on Herman Cain. Both authors make excellent points about the psychological bag of rocks all black people carry around with us. We all have it and we should probably admit this. If you are a black person who is at all successful, who did well in school, you’ve probably had some period of life where it started to get you down.

For me, it started in junior high school. I started hearing ‘why you trying to be white’ and it was coming from other black students. I was psychologically prepared (or so I thought) for that kind of sentiment coming from white students and even white teachers. I was not at all prepared for that sentiment to come from my own people! Some of that was probably being sheltered in amongst a horde of black academics and white-collar professionals in the Sacramento area in the 1970s. Our AME church was not someplace anyone was going to say that those of us who were doing well in school were trying to be white. The adults had all struggled too much to say it and any youth who thought to speak that way to another young person was not going to have a pleasant go of it should their words fall into the ears of an adult. The extended family in California were all middle-class or upper-middle class so the expectations on us were the same. The extended family in Alabama and Louisiana didn’t necessarily get my sister and I and they probably resented us because our parents provided us with a level of material comfort my aunts and uncles (particularly on my father’s side) didn’t. But again, no one would have dreamed of discouraging academic excellence. The young black families who rented from my parents wouldn’t have dared to say anything about trying to be white. My sister and I were cheered on as the vanguard of what was going to be a glorious generation that, when we were adults, would march forth and really show America a thing or two!

So when I ran into this sentiment as a seventh-grade student I didn’t know what to make of it. It was a kind of psychological perfect storm because along with the racing hormones and gangly body that makes the early teens just a cavalcade of fun, the attack of ‘you trying to be white’ hit me in the precise spot I had absolutely no psychological defense for. High school was no more fun than junior high in that respect. It may be hard out there for a pimp but that is a day at the spa compared to the life of a black geek in high school in the 1980s. Dante himself wouldn’t have put such exquisitely sadistic characters in his Divine Comedy. I got angry. I mean really, really angry. For reasons I did not understand at the time, I blamed my black skin. The logic being that if I had not been born black, I might have been a nerd but no one would claim that I was not really white. To this day, three decades on and counting, the term Oreo is like nails on a chalkboard for me. So through my high school years, I tried hard not to be black. I didn’t want to but by the time I was in the Army I realized that wasn’t changing so I had damn well better make peace with it.

Sometime around the early 1990s, after I had come out (which, honestly, was made much easier by being estranged from the black church and the mainstream black community) I had the psychological epiphany that is highlighted above from The Black Snob. I realized that I was lucky, privileged, gifted and special and that with all of that I still had to work harder. I thought of my own circumstances, the ways in which I had to do more just to get the same recognition and I thought of my parents and how much more they had to do and my thought was not “I’m special, you’re not” but “I had so many things going in my favor and this is how hard I have to work. How much harder would it be for someone who didn’t have the advantages I did. Life is hard, anything with a decent payoff is going to require a lot of us, but it shouldn’t be that hard on people. Certainly not for something so completely arbitrary as skin color”. At that point a psychological weight lifted off my shoulders and kept me from becoming the kind of black person personified by Herman Cain and, even more poignantly, Clarence Thomas.

I am not calling either of these men Uncle Toms. I won’t throw that accusation around, certainly not cavalierly. I am saying that both of them seem to be, well, embarrassed by most of the rest of us. It seems as if they believe that if it weren’t for all of us blacks who aren’t conservative Republicans their lives would be substantially better. We are the relatives who are an embarrassment. It’s like there’s them and all the rest of us are that uncle who shows up at the BBQ that everyone knows is going to get sloppy drunk, say something really inappropriate and embarrass your parents.

For Mr. Cain to claim, as he has a couple of times now, that racism just doesn’t hold anyone back any more is not right. It’s not even wrong. I’m not saying that in any given situation where a black person does not get the job, the promotion or the grade they believe they deserve that race is a factor. It may be but it is not always a factor. This isn’t 1957 or, for that matter, 1967. I’m not saying that too many of us are too quick to jump at the racism explanation for our disappointments when, chances are, we’re the cause of our own problem or, for that matter, simple bad luck or timing. When I was laid off from a start-up in 2000 it wasn’t because I was black, it was because the dot com bust was upon us and my timing was, in a word, crappy. It would have been wrong (and demeaning) for me to claim that I was singled out for layoff because I was black when my boss and I were the ones to turn out the lights for the last time. Somewhere in between Mr Cain’s fanciful notions that racism simply doesn’t intrude in people’s lives and the knee-jerk excuse making is the real world. It would be nice if Mr. Cain and Justice Thomas were to join us there but, alas, there is no sign of that happening soon.

It could be worse

Got a nail in one of my tires on the sidewall. Which means I have to replace the tire. Which means I have to replace all *four* tires. Because I have an all-wheel drive vehicle and the way the AWD transmission works either I can replace all four at once or I can eventually have to replace the center-differential on the transmission. Probably going to run about $700 for the set.

Now THIS is the life

It’s a bit past four, I’m streaming Duke Ellington to my iPhone and listening using Bluetooth headphones so if the phone rings I can just answer and immediately put on my tech-goddess hat. I feel like the weight of a certain amount of pretending to believe certain things for the sake of having the community I live in has passed from me because I realized, earlier this week, I couldn’t stop pretending that things that are nonsensical really made sense provided you just didn’t think about it too much or didn’t try to apply it to the real world. If you simply put that stuff to the side, the ideas were as solid as possible.

I also realize that I have been squandering my mental energy and writing talent on message boards for far too long. The ideas that I’ve been trying to communicate over on ButchFemmePlanet are altogether too complicated for a message board format and there is a kind of persistent reflexive pseudo-egalitarianism that I think is, ultimately, toxic to really good, meaty intellectual discussion. Plus it’s all on a message board so it’s never going to be seen by a publisher or editor or blog aggregator or, for that matter, anyone else who might be able to help me move toward publication.

So the energy that doesn’t go into writing my book is going to go here.

There are two projects that I have been going back and forth with (my writing habits appear to mirror my reading habits) committing to neither. One is a sci-fi spy novel set in the Pacific Republic, a Asia-bloc nation that spun off when the United States breaks up. The lead character, Grace Nakamura, is a spy-master who specializes in defections.

The other, the scarier book, is non-fiction. What I am after is nothing less than to show, from the point of view of one of the people who is supposed to benefit from the postmodernist/deconstructionist ideas that have seeped out of the left-leaning academy and made it into the mainstream of left-leaning (but not necessarily liberal) thought. There are a whole lot of ideas and theories that have been bandied about, most of which do not appear to have been checked to see if reality was at all in agreement. The goals of postcolonial thought are the right ones, from my estimations. The methods, on the other hand, I know won’t help.

The Left in America needs a reset, which is the working title of the book. I intend to call it Reset. Sometime last night or perhaps this morning I had an epiphany. If I took all the little scraps of writing I did when posting on those message boards, sometimes casting--forgive me for saying it--pearls before swine, and redirected it into my actual writing I could get this book to a place that I’d feel comfortable trying to find a publisher. So that is my goal. I’m either going to write a spy novel (which I’ve always wanted to do) or I’m going to write a non-fiction book (which I’ve also always wanted to do).

I’m about to go mix myself a cocktail, in 37 minutes I can log off the phones and then take a nice hot bubble bath to just let it all go and then spend a weekend with my wonderful and beautiful wife. Damn I’m a lucky woman.

Good bye, good luck and I tried to warn you

We used to be on the same side. I used to sit next to you and thought we were all rowing in the same direction. I have to leave you now because I cannot ally myself with the Left any longer. For twenty years I tried to ignore the evidence of my own eyes and ears. I tried to tell myself that the things I read that seemed nonsensical did make sense but I didn't understand them. I was wrong.

I thought that the Left, more than the right, wanted to build a society where people would not be judged, as much as is humanly possible to do so, on the basis of their skin color. I thought that the Left wanted a society where a black woman and a white man were seen as having the same legal and political rights. I thought that the Left wanted a society where anyone who worked hard and play by ’The Rules’ would not be left behind unless things had gone wrong for everyone. I thought that the Left conceived of the problem as being a matter that a qualified woman could only rise so high in corporate America. Instead I found that they thought the problem was that people had jobs in corporate America at all.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came today when someone on a message board where we were discussing race posted the following from Russell Means:

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I've said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European, I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture. 

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them "apples"--red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their "oreos"; Hispanos have "Coconuts" and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I'm not sure what term should be applied to them other than "human beings."

This idea that the people who disagree with you, particularly if they share your skin color, are fair game for slurs like apple, Oreo or coconut was a bridge too far for me. Perhaps that is because I well remember the stings of being called that because I did well in school and read for pleasure The same argument was made ‘you’re black on the outside, but you think like a white person’. If we took those words and put them in the mouths of a white man, there isn’t a person anywhere on the North American continent who calls themselves Left, Socialist, Liberal, Progressive, or anti-globalist who would not, in heartbeat, condemn the speakers. But since the speaker was not a white man but an American Indian, no statement he could make would invite condemnation.

I can no longer call myself a woman of the Left because to do so puts me in bed with people who, while claiming to be against racism, cannot bring themselves to call it bad or wrong. This raises the question of whether or not we should care about racism if we aren’t ready to put a judgement on it and call it wrong. If it’s not bad, if it has no more moral or ethical weight than whether one likes science fiction or mystery novels then there’s no point in expending energy about it. Who cares? Racism should only concern us if it is bad behavior but on the Left we have decided that there are very few actual bad behaviors.

Being a conservative is bad behavior and being a Republican is just this side of homicide to the Left. But racism? No. Not bad. Something that white people do and should feel guilty about, yes but not bad. Capitalism? Yes, that’s bad. We don’t much like that on the Left.

This is disingenuous. Either racism is actually bad--in which case we should be prepared to stand up and say that it is unacceptable behavior or it isn’t. If it really is bad but we’re not going to say that it is so that people will ‘feel heard’ or ‘feel listened to’ when they make racist statements we are lying. We are pretending that our motives are noble and in this case we will do rather ethically dubious things in service of our agenda. There is very little concern about that behavior.

The list could go on and on. The Left likes to mock right-wing populists for their creationism and for their denial of climate-change but they are no more pro-science than those they oppose. The following, again from Russell Means:

"This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive. "

This was plucked out and posted to the thread by someone who claims to ‘love science’ but that is because he has mixed up actual science for New Age interpretations of quantum physics. Those interpretations have as much to do with actual science as Neo-Nazi historical revisionism has to do with actual historical study of Germany during the Nazi period. The language is the same but the methods could not be further from one another.

I used to see these right-wing populists on the message boards, screaming at people because they felt liberals were hypocrites. I still think they are out to lunch but I have a bit more sympathy for them. I don’t think they’re out to lunch because liberals aren’t hypocrites, I think they’re out to lunch because they’re solution was to buy into ideas that are no more grounded in reality than the Leftist idea that quantum mechanics means that we can wish ourselves rich or other such New Age nonsense.

The Left is going to go into 2012 with a profoundly confused mindset. They are not going to know what hit them. No small number of people on the Left will, ultimately, vote for a Green candidate or not vote and encourage others not to vote as a way of “teaching Obama a lesson”. Obama is going to lose next year and they will wake up January 2013 and will then try to ignore the fact that President Perry is being inaugurated. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing. Then they will paint their signs and fire up the chants of “Hey hey! Ho ho! Capitalism has got to go!” If they have other designs for 2012, I wish them luck.

So, I’ve said good-bye and I’ve wished good luck. Now, the part where I say I tried to warn the people who I was formerly allied with.

I am a reasonably intelligent woman with an ability to turn a phrase from time to time. I have a very analytical mind and am a formidable debater. The Left does not want me on the other side. For a while now, I’ve hinted that I may turn my back and if I do, I will be disgusted and if I am, I will write about it.

For all those anti-racists who are actually okay with racism, as long as white people aren’t the one’s being racist, for those who think that we should not even try to have moral conversations about what is right and wrong or what is the best way to live, to those who are willing to stand up and applaud the most racist, sexist, homophobic statements provided that the speaker is non-white I tried to warn you. I tried to tell you that this path was troublesome and ill-conceived. But you loved your Foucault and Derrida too much to realize what they were actually on about. You enjoyed your anti-Western, anti-European posturing so much that you got into bed with any non-white person with an anti-imperialist cause even though, at the end of the day, they would happily take your queer ass to the gallows. If you are of the Left, if you believe that the West is the cause of the world’s problems, if you believe that it is nothing more than imperialism for American feminists to condemn the fact that Saudi women can neither vote nor drive, you have--through your own ideologies and defenses of them, sloppy and nonsensical as they were--created an adversary. Well done. I did try to warn you.

Welcome to Britain, a breeding ground for talking hate

Welcome to Britain, a breeding ground for talking hate: "

The British convince themselves that they loathe extremism. Continental Europe experienced the devastation caused by fascism and communism in the 20th century, but Britain has not had a revolution worth talking about since the 1640s. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National may well be the runner-up in the 2012 French presidential elections as her father was runner-up in 2002. In this year’s British local elections, the pathetic BNP managed to win just two council seats, while in the 2010 general election Labour took the sole parliamentary seat held by Respect, George Galloway’s alliance of the white far left and Islamist religious right.

The success of the mainstream in vanquishing the fringe has reaffirmed a cheering stereotype. Dear old Blighty may not be the most exciting place on Earth, but it is a steady, sensible and, above all, safe country. Yet although extremist parties fail as badly in Britain as they have always done, Britain has become the European capital of extremist ideas.

More

"

The level of not even wrong here is magnificent

My honey pointed this blog out to me. It is such a virulent piece of anti-gay propaganda that it cried out for a full-throated response.

http://infrequentatheist.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/the-homosexual-conspiracy-and-black-atheism/

Listen, homosexual friends, everything’s not okay. Don’t do that in the name of black atheism. If you are of African descent, then you accept the values, customs, and traditions of traditional African people, and homosexuality is not a traditional African custom. It is a European Graeco-Roman social custom. [That's how Europeans greet each other.] This is a historical fact. I’m not a bigot. This is not prejudice. Traditional African society prioritizes reproduction and protection of children.

No, IA, you are a bigot. What is more, you are a--wait for it--fascist. You are a fascist in the sense that you have a ‘blood and soil’ mentality. You essentials a genetic fact--that one has recent African ancestry--and make it into something that compels you to, as you put it, accept the values, customs and traditions of traditional African people. Now, you do not explain why it should be so that a particular pattern of genetics, based upon parentage, should compel you to accept the values, customs and traditions of people living in a completely different culture. What is more, you merge all sub-Saharan African people into a single cultural group when, in fact, they are not a monoculture. The cultures represented on the African continent are as varied as those spanning from Paris in the West and Beijing in the East. Could you talk about a single, monolithic culture running along the entire length of the Eurasian continent? Not hardly. In the same way you cannot speak of a monolithic culture in Africa, even if you confine yourself to the sub-Saharan part of the continent. When I call you a fascist, I am saying that because you believe that blood and the soil it is from, make an inescapable bond and that one *must* (you have no qualifiers in the statement above) obey the dictates of that blood and soil.

What is more, the argument you are making about Europeans does much the same thing. Yes, there is a civilization one could call Western European and yet, that civilization still manages to encompass places as diverse as Poland, Brazil, England, France, and Mexico, Chile and the United States. Again, not a monoculture by any stretch of the imagination. Yet you try to collapse all of that cultural diversity into one thing “European Graeco-Roman” entity that you can then dismiss as the source of homosexuality.


Homosexuality is a by-product of western individualism [like Broke Back Mountain?]. It’s me, me, me, me, me [unlike heterosexual relations, where we are selflessly thinking only of our partner's enjoyment]. I don’t believe in God because of scientific reasons. When the topic of homosexuality comes up, I always bring up the Law of Reproduction. [This is one of those inviolable Laws taught in every biology class.] You’re not born that way. To say you’re born that way violates the scientific Law of Reproduction. It has nothing to do with religion. We’re not anti-homosexual. If you’re European, if you’re white, that’s their thing. If you go to their history books, they’ll tell you, we’ve been doing it for years; for centuries; this is our custom. They’ll let you know they have sex with animals. [Actually, I had been trying to hide that. These guys are just too perceptive.]

There is no “Law of Reproduction”, sir. None. I am willing to bet my academic background in molecular genetics over what you think you’ve understood by reading Dawkins et. al. Yes, sexual reproduction happens but that does not make it a ‘law’ in the strict scientific sense--and you are claiming thins ‘law’ is taught in every biology class. However, sexual reproduction is not the *only* way living organisms propagate themselves. What is more, in the ape brain--humans are apes whether you like it or not--sex and reproduction are not *necessarily* connected. We don’t have sex to reproduce, we have sex for pleasure. That is nature’s way of encouraging us TO reproduce. However, that is our species. There is no ‘law of reproduction’ that applies to our species. In fact, this idea you appear to have--and your argument assumes this--is that all living things reproduce themselves. That is not the case nor is it something that would be workable if it were. The vast majority of all things that have ever lived will leave around no descendants--none. For humans, non-trivial numbers of males have left behind *no* descendants. That does not mean that these men did not have sex, but it does mean that they did not leave around any descendants. In fact, one of the axiomatic statements of evolution is that there is competition for mates and that some individuals lose that competition. Your ‘Law of Reproduction’ is repealed by Nature and Nature *always* has the last vote.

What’s more, you are as much a product of Western civilization as any homosexual. You are not ‘traditionally African’ unless you were born in Africa and grew up in that culture. If that is the case, you’re not in exactly the best position to tell black Americans who or what we are. Chances are, though, is that you did not grow up in Africa you grew up in the United States. You are a Westerner and any things you’ve picked up that you believe are ’traditionally African’ are no more authentic than the blonde haired, blue-eyed second or third generation Americans, whose grandparents came over from Norway at the end of WW II, and suddenly discover that they are 1/16th Cherokee and start styling themselves Running Wolfwater or some other such rot. Your argument is a Western-style anti-gay argument. Your attempt to back up your anti-gay bigotry--and you are, after all, a bigot--with a patina of scientific respectability is very much a Western rhetorical tactic. You are no more ‘traditionally African’ than I am and I have maintained, since I first started hearing this Afrocentrist tripe 30 years ago, that any meaningful cultural connection between blacks in America and blacks in Africa died when the last person, born in Africa and transplanted to America, died. After that, we were on our own.

What’s more, the giants--the real and true demigods of our intellectual tradition in the West--almost to a person through the 19th and most of the 20th centuries recognized that to look to Africa was folly. You are not an African, you are an American. If you are British or Canadian or Australian you are STILL not an African. If we drop you off with some tribe of !Kung you will enjoy the first week. Then you’ll start to miss your laptop, just like anyone else.

Fascism is a very ugly human ideology. One of the most ugly and deeply disturbing ideas ever conceived by the mind of humans and we have come up with some truly diabolical ideas! it reduces people to cardboard cutouts, not even extras just background scenery in our own personal movies. When you are talking about gay people, you aren’t talking about the tech support person you spoke to, or the phlebotomist who drew your blood, or the pilot who just landed your airplane. No, you were talking about this amorphous mass called ‘homosexuals’ and in just a few paragraphs try to tie homosexuals to both bestiality and child abuse--neither of which has any meaningful or causal connection and, in fact, do not even correlate with homosexuality! Yet, as you proclaimed yourself to not be a bigot, you made statements that if some Rush Limbaugh were to make those same statements about blacks you would be up in arms, calling for his firing and banning from the airwaves. You do the very same thing with Europeans. I won’t even speculate how many other groups you fool yourself into thinking you feel superior to.

As I said at the head of my response to you, you are a fascist. Since I’m reasonably certain that you will try to deny that you have anything in common, ideologically, with fascists you’ll forgive me if invoke a European, Umberto Eco, who has the benefit of knowing fascism when he sees it since he grew up in Mussolini’s Italy.

        1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
        7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.
        12.        Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
        14.        Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Of the fourteen points, these are the seven I think most germane to this discussion. The whole thing can be found at http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf

It is from Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco.

Whither the American Spring?

An online acquaintance asked me a very troubling and penetrating question yesterday in email. My initial response, which I still stand by, was not much more than a skeleton while the question has quite a bit of muscle, sinew and flesh to add to the bones. This blog post will attempt to explore why there has been no general uprising in America. In Greece, Ireland, England, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Libya and Syria there have been general uprisings against either governmental corruption or harsh austerity measures. Now, while the “Arab Spring” uprisings have been of one character--people rising up against dictators who have oppressed their people, the outpourings in the Western nations have all been about draconian cutbacks to the social safety net. And what of America? There seems to be some signs of life in Wisconsin and Ohio, a little in Michigan but not a widespread expression of dismay at the dismantling of the middle-class or sweetheart deals given to corporations that then use their legions of lawyers to write legislation and battalions of accountants to use every tax dodge possible.

Even as our infrastructure disintegrates to such a degree that it becomes impossible to even maintain the illusion that we have the best, the biggest, the fastest, the newest and the shiniest things of any nation, Americans passivity deserves some scrutiny. We are caught between essentially four different political factions all of them some degree of bad.

They are:

• The Democratic party -- timid to the point where mere cowardice looks like Spartan heroism in comparison.
• The Republican party -- enthralled to a meme they are no longer capable of even evaluating. They have placed themselves beyond considerations of evidence, beyond reason. They have one agenda--the destruction of the Democratic party. If that means burning the country to the ground in order to achieve their Ayn Rand dreams, so be it.
• The Tea Party -- the zombie spawn of pure Ayn Rand economic libertarianism mixed in with a generous measure of Christian theocracy.
• The Green Party -- They have a political program, of a sort, but it is not a program that has anything to do with this nation or this species. Instead of social democracy, they pursue socialism even though there should be no doubt that socialism qua socialism does not turn out well.

Only one of those parties, the Democratic party, has enough actual grown ups to be allowed to rule. The GOP, the Tea Party and the Greens are in no position to rule. The last one because their ideas simply are not workable in any nation that can still call itself free. The next to last because, well, they simply do not believe in governance. That’s right, the Tea Party while talking about ‘local control’ has no interest in governance. They view government as a very limited exercise in, essentially, protecting the propertied and moneyed classes from the democratic impulse. If they would just be old-style aristocratic Tories that would at least have the virtue of honesty. The GOP cannot be allowed to rule as long as they are in sway to the Tea Party’s memes and the Democratic party can be trusted to rule, just so long as no one expects them to stand up for what they believe in.

So why no revolution? Some of the reason is that the Right has no need of one as they are on the side of the oligarchs and the plutocrats while masquerading, quite well thank-you-very-much, as populists. That isn’t really the interesting question, though. The really interesting question is why the Left hasn’t stepped forward. Here there is a quartet of problems, all of them due to very pernicious memes. The problem for the Left, is that we have no program other than a vague Marxism that no one wants to follow. To add insult to political injury we also lack do not believe anything. I understand that we think we do but, in reality, we don’t. I say this because of the corrosive effect strong cultural and epistemological relativism has had on the Left. If the Left believes anything at all (and it is questionable if they do) it is that all cultures are equally valid, all descriptions of the world are equally valid, and that the United States is the single biggest bad actor ever to have its moment upon the world stage. The Left has spent most of the last two decades in thrall to the meme of identity politics which makes effective political action (as opposed to political theatre) well nigh impossible. Lastly, American culture as whole is in the grips of the ‘self-help’ meme of ‘The Secret’ which is just a warmed over, slightly more multicultural

The Marxist problem is two-fold. Firstly, the Marxist project failed and failed in a definitive manner. This means that the Left that advocates a Marxist program is pushing forward a program that almost every nation that actually experienced Communist rule abandoned as the curtain rang down on the twentieth century. Secondly, the insistence that we need a Marxist solution to the problems in the USA makes the Left look pathetically out-of-touch. It could be no more deserving of pity if it were a Japanese soldier who came off some island in the Pacific only to discover that his nation lost the war sixty five years before. What’s more, it causes those of us on the Left to have to distance ourselves from the Old Left which not only failed to put sufficient daylight between itself and the Stalinist regime in the USSR or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or Mao in China, and it makes all claims of that, for instance, health care is a human right (an argument that I think has some meat on its bones) empty. No movement prepared to make excuses for Pol Pot, Stalin or Mao (not to mention Hugo Chavez) is in any kind of position to make any claims about human rights that won’t risk the audience collapsing in peals of laughter. It is bad comedy almost to the point of giving offense so monstrous were the crimes of the three major Marxist regimes.

Not that we need worry overly much about the modern American Left making any claims about human rights as human rights. Not because the Left doesn’t use the phrase, it is used in abundance. It is that the Left no longer believes human rights exist! Human rights is just a buzzword, a meaningless and empty phrase with no more weight than hydrogen holding it to the ground. Human rights implies that these apply in all places and in all times to all people under most any circumstances. The Left has abandoned this language as a project and it is now a mere rhetorical vehicle. Rights, as the Left now construes them in both the high-theoretical and popular senses, adhere to groups. As a black lesbian I have rights that adhere to me as a woman, as a member of a racial minority and as a member of sexual minority. I do not have rights that adhere to me simply because I am a human being that navigated the dark passages of my mother’s birth canal. Those don’t exist. The reason they have become rhetorical devices and not limits upon governmental, ecclesiastical and commercial power which cannot be violated is that the former does not compel the Left to condemn or even notice the crimes of, say, a Hugo Chavez. The latter is not a negotiable position--the crime of female genital mutilation is wrong whether it happens in suburban Detroit or in the heart of Riyadh. But that is a terribly inconvenient position to take. It might require us to learn something about a culture and then make a judgment upon that culture. This we must never do because to do so is to embrace racism and advocate imperialism. So we abandon human rights and talk about group rights instead. We have elevated cultures to a place where they now stand above any given individual who might be subject to that culture.

This is a problematic stance, to say the least. While it would superficially appear to put the Left on the side of the angels these are more like angels as portrayed by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Kevin Smith’s beautiful (if vulgar) sermon Dogma. These are not gentle angels. They are violent and callous angels, concerned primarily for their own well-being. It is also a rather humorous instance where the faction that speaks of privilege to the point of numbness shows its own privilege. If you can pick up and leave the culture of, say, the American South then it may seem that cultures are not that oppressive. Viewed through the eyes of someone who, in her lifetime, may never travel any further distance from her home at once than I do in a single week of commuting to and from work, the tyranny of culture can look like a prison so inescapable that it might as well be in orbit.

Back to GoogleWorld

For most of the last three years, I’ve been using .Mac/MobileMe as the nexus of my online life. Now that MobileMe is going away in favor of iCloud I’m moving back to the Google-verse. That said, I’m pretty impressed with Google Reader. I think the thing that really did it for me was Google+ which is Facebook without being, well, Facebook.

The Pakistan killings are not about blasphemy

The difference between Islamism and the rest is that liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with the wet blanket of political correctness. They do not confine themselves to saying that, of course, society must protect people from being murdered for their religion, as Slobodan Milosevic murdered the Bosnian Muslims, and punish employers who refuse jobs to members of creeds they dislike, as Protestant employers in Northern Ireland once refused to hire Catholics. They maintain it is illicit to criticise religious ideas. Thus, along with the admittedly faint fear of violence, western writers who want to provide arguments against religious misogyny, homophobia, racism and censorship must also live with the fear that their contemporaries will accuse them of orientalism or Islamophobia.
The world may pay a price for the monumental blunder of treating religious ideologies – which are beliefs that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject – as if they were ethnicities, which no man or woman can change. Not the smallest reason why the Arab revolution is such an optimistic event is that al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood have been left as gawping bystanders. Their isolation cannot last. Eventually, if Arab states move towards democracy, there will be a confrontation with political Islam. Arab liberals, like Pakistani liberals, will search the net for guidance. They will discover that far from offering strategies that might help, timorous western liberals have convinced themselves that it is "racist" to criticise raging fanatics who no longer even bother to pretend that they are anything other than liberalism's mortal enemies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/06/nick-cohen-blasphemy-laws-liberals-islam

Yes, we very well may pay that price sooner rather than later in the United States

Incoherent thinking and political impotency

My vote for the most condescending sentence in the English language would be “that’s true for you”. One can almost feel the pat on the head when someone says it. It’s a way of saying “well, I think what you’re saying is bloody silly but if you want to believe in such foolishness, more power to you”. Since we’ve decided--particularly on the American Left--that the key to civility is simply never to disagree with someone, we’ve adopted this stance that anything anyone believes to be true actually is true--for them. This is a deeply incoherent position. To see why one need look no further than the “Birther” conspiracy theory.

There are people who believe, with all sincerity, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Now, if we grant that this is 'true for them' then, for them, a person is in the White House who is NOT the legitimate POTUS. Not simply 'not the person I voted for' but someone whose very presence does violence to the Constitution of the United States. If it is 'true for them' the national priority should be to remove that person from office, by any means available up to and including a coup d'etat. However, Barack Obama wasn't born in Kenya he was born in the United States. It is simply incoherent to say "oh, you believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not the legitimate POTUS? Well, I guess that is true for you." If it is *actually* true, then we should treat Mr. Obama's Presidency the way we would if, at the height of the Cold War, Nikita Kruschev had declared himself the POTUS. Do you believe that it is possible for Barack Obama to have been born in more than one place? In other words, do you think it is possible that he was born in Hawaii AND in Kenya? If not, then how can it possibly be 'true' for someone to believe that he was? If he was born in Hawaii (and he was) then he can't have been born in Kenya. What would it even mean for it to 'be true' for someone that he was born some thousands of miles from his actual birthplace? As ridiculous as the 'Birther' conspiracy is, we cannot and should not dismiss it lightly. Almost a third of one of the two major parties believe something that is false--I'm sorry, I cannot dignify obviously false beliefs as being 'true for someone'.

This refusal to dignify false beliefs as being ‘true for someone’ puts me at odds on the Left. Many, perhaps even most, of my fellow liberals have completely swallowed a meme that there are different truths for different people. What is so deeply hypocritical about this is that they are entirely inconsistent about it. If a person is a political conservative--of almost any stripe, social or fiscal--then that’s person’s reality is not ‘true for them’. Global warming deniers don’t have a ‘truth’. Anti-gay activists don’t have a ‘truth’. Racists don’t get a ‘truth’. Those who harbor anti-Muslim sentiments don’t get a ‘truth’. Hell, those who believe that there are such a thing as standards (it used to be universal standards now it is standards period) don’t get a ‘truth’. Yet, many Liberals behave as if they behaved--if not believed--as if these boogeymen of the Left did get their own truth. The problem is that our inability to actually take a stand on the Left has made us completely ineffective.

Imagine two teams meeting on a soccer field. One team has a lean and hungry look. They want to win. The other team isn’t really into it. The minute that they realize they’re going to have to run up and down the field, half decide that’s too much work to be fun and head for the sideline. Would you place a bet against the lean and hungry players? This is where American Liberals find themselves. We, as a group, just don’t believe we’re right. We may know, at some abstract level, that the science is clear that anthropogenic climate change is happening. Not about to happen but is happening now. Yet, I think that if you were to ask a random conservative climate-change denier and a random Liberal that you would find that the conservative knows that climate-change isn’t happening and is willing to go to the mat over her beliefs while the liberal will be more likely to hem and haw.

If you only half-ass believe what you’re spouting you will lose to the person who believes with their whole and complete being. It is as certain as the tides or the changing of seasons. Yet this is where we are on the Left.

When Left met Right at the UnSchool

I’m a Liberal. I’m a social democrat. Hell, I will go so far as to call myself a creature of the Left. This means I care about what people on the Left are saying and pushing forward because I also believe in grassroots movements. Memes move both vertically and horizontally and so it’s interesting to keep something of an eye on what elites are telling one another and what grassroots people are telling one another. Here is something that is being told on the Left about education:




The first thing to note is that instead of a critique of why we have a society where young women are being encouraged toward self-loathing the schools are to blame. If it were not for the schools, it seems, we wouldn’t see young women with body issues. There is no consideration of a need to reform the culture of schools, simply removing students from the public school system will be enough.



Several things leap to mind here. Firstly, there is a studied ignoring of the fact that mathematics, the hard sciences and engineering take a lot of specialized training as do medicine and law. If one is going to be an artist or a naturopath or a musician then yes, one can ignore higher education and the rigors of it. However, if one wants to be a neurosurgeon or study, say, quantum field theory one is going to need to have some practice in rigorous study, some of which one might not have the greatest enthusiasm for to put it mildly. What’s more, there is this unspoken--but present nevertheless--Rousseauian assumption about the nature of the child that, I think bears deeper scrutiny. I think that the crux of the above quote, however, is the last sentence. Why learn something that you do not need to do what you want to do. Not what need be done in order to be a good citizen or prepare for a job but what one wants to do. That is the most Rousseauian statement and the wellspring from which the philosophy springs.

As Stephen Pinker observes in “The Blank State”, Rousseau argued that “Children are noble savages, and their upbringing and education can either allow their essential nature to blossom or can saddle them with the corrupt baggage of civilization.” A large swath of the argument in favor of Un-schooling is predicated on this belief.



Something else that seems to be overlooked is the function of the public school system as a means of civic bonding and the creation of citizens. At some point the Left--and my parochial concern here is with what is being promoted in the name of core liberal values--seems to have abandoned the idea that we are citizens. In doing so we have lost the ability to speak to people who may not have our privileged perspective on things. Noble as the sentiment is that we are people of the world--and I consider myself aspiring to be a woman of the world--we are also citizens of localities. On the Left we like to say “think globally, act locally”--acting locally means being a citizen. As citizens of the United States of America, we are inheritors of a history, a tradition and an ideal. In fact, it is the loss of the goal of attaining that ideal that concerns me here. One of the geniuses of the public school system is that it is a place where young Americans come together to learn to be, well, Americans. Our first exposure to the Constitution is in public schools. Most of our education in civics that we will ever have and large swaths of American history will come from our experiences in the public schools. If we are ever going to be exposed to the great books, the place that most people will meet Shakespeare or Melville or Austen or any of a number of authors will be in public schools.

It is ironic that at the outer reaches of the Left and the Right, they meet a point of agreement. Now, they end up sounding as if they are saying different things but if you really listen closely you hear them singing in harmony. Someone from the Left might look at my saying that people should be exposed to Shakespeare, Austen and Melville and point out that all three of them are white. Where are the ‘third world’ authors, they will cry. Someone from the right might look at that same list and consider it elitist that I think that there are books or authors that people should be exposed to. However, both are substantially agreeing with one another--that the idea of a canon of books or authors that should be taught in school is fundamentally elitist and wrong is something they both espouse. The issue is where the emphasis lies not with whether it should be done.

My concern, however, is for the Left because that is where I live and where my political sympathies lie. We have abandoned the language of freedom and citizenship to the Right. We no longer speak of it and because of that we make ourselves irrelevant. We have abandoned the commitment to integration because we now believe--or say we do--that people of color are such different creatures that the idea that they could or even desire to assimilate is wrong-headed. We have abandoned the public schools as the great leveler of society.

Evening commute

I really need to remember that my commute is made considerably easier if I simply lock my bike up when I hang it on a peg. That way I have a wider range of choices as to seating.

Morning musings 9 Dec

Our iPhones were delivered yesterday. I'm very pleased with it! Picked up a bike computer app and am using it to see how much exercise I'm getting.

Right now I'm listening to The Third Reich in Power. Certain parallels between then and now present themselves.

Tonight I have QRC advisory board.

Test post

See if posting works now

Stupid Email Scams

So here’s the latest Malware scam:

ADOBE PDF READER SOFTWARE UPGRADE NOTIFICATION

This is to remind that a new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader with enhanced features for viewing, creating, editing, printing and internet-sharing PDF documents has been released.

To upgrade your application:

+ Go to http://www.adobe-2011-download.com
+ Get your options, download and upgrade.

Thanks and best regards,
John Watt
Adobe Acrobat Reader Support

Copy rights Adobe 2010 © All rights reserved

Don’t follow the link! Adobe products are available from www.adobe.com and will, generally, tell you when they need updating.

When the going gets weird, the weird get bizarre

A Christian minister in Minnesota said on his radio program that the nation's first Muslim member of Congress was soliciting the support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to implement Sharia law. Follow his logic with us, wouldn't you?

Bradlee Dean of the religious ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide International said on his radio program that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is only supporting LGBT rights as part of a strategy to bring Sharia law to the United States, the Minnesota Independent reported.

"I said time and time again that there is a correlation between the Muslims and the homosexual agenda, and we have a couple of fools in the state of Minnesota that are putting a rope around their neck and they just don't realize it," Dean said on a radio. "Here, let me give it to you this way: Keith Ellison is a Muslim."

Dear reasoned that Ellison's support of protections for the LGBT community (like the Matthew Shepard Act) and for same-sex marriage is part of a plot to overthrow the Constitution and put Sharia law in its place.

"Why is he so adamant about overthrowing the Constitution as it is right now? Because if you pay attention to the plow he's planting the seed," Dean said. "He's trying to come through with Sharee [sic] law."

Because, ya know, every Muslim-Majority nation is a paradise on Earth for queer people.

Whole article in all its strangeness here.

Congrats Democratic party, you screwed yourselves!

the Democrats did this to themselves! Both the elected Dems and every Democratic voter who didn't vote. In the former case, imagine how different this election would have turned out if the following were true:

1) Gitmo went back to being a Marine base and not a detention center.

2) Medicare-for-all had passed

3) Glass-Steagal had been resurrected and Wall Street once again had rules-of-the-road.

4) Warrantless wiretaps had been discontinued.

5) There had been a REAL jobs-program WPA-style.

Would the Republicans have still picked up seats? Probably. But they would have been facing a Democratic electorate that felt that too much had been achieved to let it be rolled back. What's more, the Tea Party/Republicans would have done PRECISELY what they did anyway. If Obama had actually staked out some position so far to the Right that he made Joe Miller or Sarah Palin look like full-on Marxists, the Tea Party/Republicans would have STILL called him a Marxist, they'd STILL call him a socialist, they'd STILL say he wasn't born in the United States and they'd STILL say he was in league with terrorists. There is NOTHING that man could do that would please the Tea Party. The same applies generally to the Democratic party. If the Dems eliminated every single social program, repealed the Voting rights act, passed a law making Islam illegal, repealed the Civil Rights Act and did away with the income tax (or just put it all on the backs of the poor), the estate tax and the capital gains tax, the Republicans would still insist that Democrats were un-American, tax-and-spend liberals who hate America and want the terrorists to win. If the Democrats voted to bomb every square inch of land in an arc from Istanbul to Jakarta the Republicans would still say that the Democrats were 'soft' and 'unwilling to fight'.

So what, precisely, did all of these misguided attempts at bipartisanship get them? Nothing. What did all these compromises get them? It got them beat like a red-headed stepchild that stole something, that's what.

When I was in grade school, I got bullied mercilessly. I got bullied for being black. I got bullied for being gender non-conforming. I got bullied for being a geek. I got bullied because the sun shone light upon my face. I learned, really early on, that you cannot show weakness to bullies. You cannot let bullies know you *care* what they say about you. IF you do, you hand them encouragement and ammunition. The Dems, in deciding that they would care what a party that made it clear that their ONLY real agenda was the defeat of the Democratic party--and if the country has to burn or that to happen, so be it--thought they doomed themselves.

Now, was any of that an excuse to stay home? No. It wasn't. Anyone who thinks that there is no substantive difference between the agenda of the Democratic party and the agenda of the Republican party isn't paying attention to either party platform. The Republican party appears to believe that even if you are raped by your own father, you should be forced to have the baby. The Democratic party doesn't. The Republican party appears to believe that America should be *actively* hostile to homosexuals. The Democratic party does not. The Republican party appears to mean that 'freedom of religion means the freedom to practice whatever brand of Christianity suits your fancy'. The Democratic party believes freedom of religion means just that--the religion of your choice or no religion at all. The Republican party believes that if you just cut taxes enough, you'll increase tax revenues. The Democratic party seems to have some nominal grasp on mathematics.

To paraphrase the Bard; the fault, dear Democrats, is not in the stars but in ourselves.

My ultimate jacket

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted a WW II bomber jacket. Well, yesterday I got one!

Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down - NYTimes.com

I don’t often agree with Thomas Friedman but here is one where he’s clearly gotten things right.

A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers. (Thomas Friedman)



Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/opinion/27friedman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion