What we’re going through right now, both in America and throughout the West, isn’t just any economic or political crisis but a moral crisis first and foremost. Get with it and act accordingly!
I’ve been sensitized of late to a troubling disconnect on the part of the modern human between morality (and moral language) and everyday life. This disconnect is all the more troubling because it seems to be shared by the educated and the simple folk alike. More so by the former, I’d venture to say, if I were a betting man.…
Article comments
326 - Cindy
Worth knowing:
How Egypt Justifies Its Brutal Crackdown: Occupy Wall Street
Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military's attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown.
"We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state," an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday (as translated by the indispensable Sultan Sooud al Qassemi; bold ours).
327 - Clavos
I read your NPR link, Roger.
What I get from it is that Evo Morales is taking land (and that's the right verb) from the people who have owned it for generations to give it to his constituents, and NPR's account of this cloaks that act in lofty terms that basically legitimize it.
But it's still armed robbery.
328 - zingzing
"NPR's account of this cloaks that act in lofty terms that basically legitimize it."
funny. to me, npr seems to point out that both sides have a point. still, some of that land was given to the current owners by the previous regime. those families (like the one that the npr story references, but you missed or ignored or something,) who have owned the land "for generations" surely don't deserve to have their land taken away... however, those that were given the land by the dictatorship are on more shaky ground.
329 - handyguy
Newt Gingrich at last night's 'family values' [i.e. 'pandering to religious nut jobs'] GOP candidate debate in Iowa:
"All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything," Gingrich said at the Thanksgiving Family Forum in Iowa. "They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they don't want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything.
"That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" continued Gingrich, to loud applause from the audience.
330 - roger nowosielski
@327
I don't know, Clav, it's a rather touchy subject. Land ownership in a primarily agrarian economy?
The Gracchi brothers were assassinated for land reforms, and Caesar himself, had he lived, was thinking along the same lines. There are two ways of writing this story.
You can't on the one hand complain about the majority of population living in abject poverty and then bitch when something's being done about it --especially of the original land grants were bequeathed, feudal style, for political favors.
Do you have reliable information about the Spanish conquest of Bolivia and the events that followed?
331 - roger nowosielski
Was Newt trying to endear himself to the Christian Right or that's his actual stance?
Got to give credit to Romney, though, for skipping the Thanksgiving dinner.
332 - roger nowosielski
@326
And indeed, we're such a fine example.
333 - roger nowosielski
But that's OK, Cindy. The pepper spray fiasco at UC Davis will act as a trigger. I was wondering what the faculty at our "fine institutions of higher learning" was so slow in registering its support for the OWS. It surely wasn't so in the sixties during the height of the antiwar movement and Kent State "incident." Goes to show the extent to which most of our universities and colleges are in the pockets of corporate America.
Well, I believe we should see our campuses as the next battle ground in the immediate future -- and it's a natural.
334 - roger nowosielski
Here's a Wiki's account -- History of Bolivia.
I don't know of course how accurate it is with respect to all the details, but it seems to confirm the accepted narrative.
335 - handyguy
Newt's comments are always made primarily for effect. He has no discernible 'real' convictions, except, "I want to be rich and famous."
336 - roger nowosielski
@326
The video in the article linked tells the whole story. The fucking cop spraying the protesters in a cavalier way as if he were exterminating the roaches.
And then, the fucking cops are huddled and slowly retreating, their rifles at ready, a bunch of cowards concerned with their safety.
This ain't going to sit well with the middle class, especially the parents who send their kids to school.
These aren't hippies or stinking homeless, which are always so easy to ignore and their one's blind eye on.
337 - roger nowosielski
I was just being facetious. There was a time when he was a speaker I had some respect for him. No longer.
338 - roger nowosielski
... and turn one's blind eye on.
339 - roger nowosielski
Chris Hayes on the lobbyist firm's proposal to ABA to develop negative narratives on OWS.
340 - roger nowosielski
Interestingly, videos linked to in #326 bear advertisements for Police Academy, saying, "Want to become a police officer?"
The height of irony.
341 - handyguy
339: Note that the lobbyists' proposal included attack ads against Democratic politicians who express agreement with OWS. The proposal was rejected by the ABA, but there are probably lots of others that weren't leaked to liberal journalists.
342 - roger nowosielski
Sure I'm aware of that, but also against those Republicans who might't take a definitive enough stand.
343 - roger nowosielski
Cindy,
For one thing, I find the "community board" cumbersome. It doesn't allow me to register by positing my url.
344 - Jordan Richardson
Hi Cindy,
I've seen all of your links from 325. Appreciate them, thanks. Rabble is an excellent site, by the way. I always turn to them for insightful commentary.
I was interested in who was stating the thing about the homeless because we had a municipal election yesterday. Some tried to make the "handling" of Occupy an election issue, but the public wasn't buying it for the most part.
345 - Cindy
Worth watching:
One day after pepper-spraying, UC Davis students silently, peacefully confront Chancellor Katehi
346 - Cindy
There are civil liberties lawyers already preparing lawsuits. Apparently that military grade pepper-spray, even when used "correctly" needs to be used at a minimum of 15 feet from the human being who is being oppressed.
I read an article that Lt Pike (Capt Pepperspray) knew the protesters by name, had chatted with them at a previous event, they'd gotten him food and coffee.
Maybe these bastards just want to be featured on John Stewart or The Colbert Report.
347 - handyguy
At least the officers have been suspended. It's only a first step, but it's better than bullshit such as "they were acting in self defense."
348 - Cindy
troll,
I was just reading the morning news. This is for you:
Un-Occupy Portland counters Occupy protestors at downtown rally, march
349 - troll
Death to Prior Agaendas
350 - troll
(doesn't work well misspelled...it would confuse drivers as they pass by on their way to work)
351 - roger nowosielski
@345
The most powerful message thus far.
352 - Igor
Pepper spraying passive demonstrators is the everyday application of torture. That refutes the claim (by aspiring torturers, one might assume) of the "ticking bomb scenario". Torture is applied simply as coercion (and for the jollies of the torturer, one might assume).
353 - roger nowosielski
An eye-opening report from NPR on recent election results in Spain -- a conservative technocrat defeats the Socialist party for the office of the Prime Minister.
It's ironic that it happened in Spain. Have these people forgotten the civil war against Franco?
They're in dire need of elementary refresher courses in Marxism and anarchism.
This demonstrates the ultimate failure of a welfare state, for it does make people dependent on their government for practically every aspect of their lives.
And thus a pendulum swings back and forth, from socialism to financial capitalism, both forms of extreme statism, whereas the only solution is anti-statism.
354 - Cindy
A little funny I liked for you all.
That and this:
Congress has declared pepper-spray to be a vegetable*. Thus, its application to protesters is actually good for them. Some got a full day's supply in one serving.
*assumes you know that Congress just declared pizza to be a vegetable
355 - Dr Dreadful
When members of Congress declare themselves to be vegetables, then we'll be making some progress.
356 - Jordan Richardson
If they do that, I hope they season themselves thoroughly.
357 - Cindy
LMAO!!!!
358 - zingzing
"the only solution is anti-statism."
is that a solution? seems like being against something is not something in particular.
yes, you're against something, but what are you advocating? you have the doing away, but where's the replacement?
if you have an answer for that, please, do tell.
359 - troll
zingzing - take a look at the Zapatista applications of the concepts of snails - civil society - and governing councils for examples of positive anti-statism
360 - troll
- you could also view the occupy movement with its GA structure(s) as an attempt to develop anti-statist decision making techniques on the ground
361 - Igor
Troll is right, the Occupy movement has devised an excellent strategy by refusing to offer up specific agenda items and specific leaders, thus pre-empting both agenda-quibbling and leader-compromisong techniques of historical establishments. Occupy refuses to give lines along which they can be cleft by a divide-and-conquer strategy. Instead, they seem to say "you know what is wrong and you know who the malefactors are, so do something about that. And if you want to speak and argue then come to our GA."
362 - Anarcissie
In regard to #327, one should be aware of how land tenure was generally established and maintained, especially in South America. Even in recent times, large tracts of land formerly used by the indigenes 'since time began' have been simply grabbed by governments or directly by ruling classes as soon as it becomes accessible. (Something similar happened in the U.S., of course, but in the U.S. most of the victims and their descendents were exterminated, so the issues are somewhat different.) Accusing Morales of 'armed robbery' must be placed in the context of a state which is based on continuous armed robbery.
363 - roger nowosielski
Comments #359 thru 361
The Argument.
(1) Apart from the rather superficial (conceptually-impoverished) aspect of “belonging to the same species,” moral dimension is the only commonly-held human trait, and the most significant one, too, which cuts across all invididual and cultural variations.
(1a) Whatever cultural variations there may exist with respect to morality is no argument on behalf of moral relativism. These are but different cultural manifestations of the same “moral instinct.”
(2) Moral language (game) and values therefore trump all other language games and values if the latter are found to be in conflict with the former.
(3) Our morality serves therefore as the basis for the claim that absolute sovereignty is proprietary to individual persons, each invidivual person, and to no other entity â€" be it another individual, a group of individuals, an institution, or the State. And in those cases in which our sovereignty as individuals is voluntarily conferred to any such institution or group of persons, it can be just as readily withdrawn.
(4) All forms of statism â€" from totalitarianism or fascism to “enlightened socialism” as the extreme termini of the spectrum, to include all middle-ground positions (best represented here perhaps by the hybrid of so-called “benevolent welfare state” â€" are forms of tyranny against the individual, whether overt or covert. In the latter case, the tyranny is not immediately apparent because it’s disguised, but it’s tyranny nonetheless:
(a) on the one hand, reducing however few able-bodied individuals to the condition of dependence upon the State (however well-intentioned the idea) deprives those very individuals of their sovereignty by taking away from them the responsibility to act as full-fledged moral agents;
(b) and on the other, in order to provide this kind of assistance (to some), the State perpetrates another, more direct form of tyranny against the rest, whether in form of income distribution or taxation.
(5) Anti-statism, and one form is a mixture of communism and anarchism, emerges therefore as the only kind of social arrangement/form of organization which restores to each and every individual their inherent sovereigty, which is in accord with the primary status of all humans as sovereign moral agents.
(5a) The fact that anti-statism in whatever form is but a conceptual possibility is no argument to the effect that it’s not practicable or eventually doable. I can’t think offhand of examples that would disprove the transition from theory to practice. (As a matter of fact, one of the most important lessons of history, in spite of its frequent pendulum swings back and forth, is that, if we assume rationality on the part of human agents, flawed practice invariably end up to be refined, replaced, or simply abandoned for having become obsolete.) On the other hand, the converse, which amounts to saying that a flawed practice serves as an insurmountable obstacle to realizing what’s conceptually possible, is definitely false and is a prime example of flawed and constipated, rather than imaginative, thinking.
(6) “Troll” has already suggested, and Igor seconded, the many ways in which statism can be circumvented and anti-statism solutions developed and eventually put into practice.
I wouldn’t expect my many liberal friends to go along with this argument, especially since even my comrades-in-arms, communists-anarchists themselves, for any number of reasons, haven’t seen fit to comment on the content and import of the subject article. [As a matter of fact, only Anarcissie had the insight to perceive some important connections by commenting on the article directly, but providing an extreme counterexample of how moral dialogue can be shortcircuited and come to an abrupt end (extreme, in that her case posited a kind of dialogue that would most likely ensue between a bona fide moral agent and, say, a Nazi).] But that’s hardly a surprise, for as I stated in the opening lines of the subject article, there is a serious disconnect, insofar as the modern human is concerned, between moral language and our everyday affairs and modes of thinking.
As to some others who, I suppose, might be sympathetic to my argument but, for reasons of their own, have elected not to comment on it â€" I can’t speak to their state of mind since I’m not a mindreader. But such people as Baronius, Clavos, Dreadful and Joseph Cotto come more readily to mind than some others.
Especially Cotto’s latest two articles carve out a possibility for politics which derives from predominantlymoral concerns if only by extension. And on Cotto’s version of it, politics emerges as a kind art in conflict management or conflict resolution â€" although consensus building would be a better, more positive term.
Which, btw, puts into serious question the topic recently introduces by Mr. Eden on the community boards â€" that or “representation.” It’s a truncated type of topic for having been denuded and conceptually-impoverished, because to speak of represenation suggest a model of conflict and conflict management (rather than that of co-operation), the very model we should be doing our darnedest to discard. The concept of representation is an empty one because it’s indebted to that model, and must therefore be enriched to mean first and foremost, the building of consensus.
But I’ll have more on that in the upcoming article.
364 - troll
I have removed the blog on representation for lack of participants and will ask my question in a more productive forum.
I appreciate Anarcissie's comments which I post here for anyone who might pick up on the ideas:
I suppose, in order to re-present a group, one would have to have a notion of eliciting the will of the group. The group could then 'willfully' select a mode or means of re-presentation which might be acceptable to the party (-ies) to whom the group wanted to re-present itself, rather than merely present itself. To me the trickiest question here is the notion of group will.
Posted by Anarcissie to REPRESENTATION Working Group at November 17, 2011 9:04 PM
Producing the will of a group presents itself as a recursive problem, because deciding how to produce the will of the group is itself an act of group will. (This is assuming one believes such a thing exists. Since humans are highly social animals and have existed in cooperative groups since long before they were human, we can probably assume it does.) As presented, there does not seem to be any way the recursion can bottom out. However, I can think of two possible escapes from this predicament: (1) we could suppose that there was some genetically-specified mechanism for coming to agreement, at present mostly masked -- Goffman's experiments with concord and discord in small groups come to mind; or (2) we might try to start with any rough approximation (voting, say) provided the approximation was non-final.
Modern methods to produce at least consensuses go back at least to the early Quakers, so it's not a new problem.
Posted by Anarcissie to REPRESENTATION Working Group at November 20, 2011 5:35 PM
365 - roger nowosielski
I posted my problem re: the community board site (#343) but no one cared to respond.
366 - roger nowosielski
Yes, Anarcissie's remarks are well-taken. I don't think it's all that necessary (at this point) to posit a hypothesis on behalf of the "pro-sociality" trait in humans, not from conceptual standpoint (although I find it interesting only now she echoes some of the themes articulated in David Sloan's work on neighborhoods, the topic of my incomplete Mao's Red Book series.)
Further, I don't think we need to make things too complicated. Group will invariably starts with the individual will. A perfect example, my recent failed attempt to secure your and Cindy's acquiescence to participate in my project. It wasn't any reading comprehension that accounted for the failure, only your refusal, for ours was a battle of wills, not a failure of understanding.
Hence, the reaching of consensus is the first act on the part of the individual to, let's say, in order to exercise their influence (and use it as a catchall). A two already make a group.
Anarcissie was skeptical about reaching consensus online except for those situations in which the purpose is rather technically-defined, narrow, and agreed-upon (my caricature of course). But of course the same principles apply to more important things -- agreement on shared values. Which is why you need pre-selection in order to get any such project off the ground.
I fact, I would argue that the glue which holds OWS together and accounts for its success is precisely a tacit agreement on values (regardless of how differently this agreement gets manifested at times).
367 - Cindy
Sorry I never got back to the group. I have been reading a bit of Zapatista literature, before I went back. But I haven't finished yet. I found the snail thing, troll. Reading that now.
368 - Cindy
The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.”
From the English Dept Website at UC Davis.
369 - troll
not a problem Cindy -
I put the question of representation up for discussion online if anyone wanted to address it (practically speaking that is)...up for two weeks + with little response and I sure don't want to babysit a blog long term...(all comments are stored and available)
my opinion is that representation is one of those relationships that will remain with us for a while though substantially transformed through praxis in the process of creating radical democracy
370 - ozarkmichael
The problem you describe is a real one. I disagree with what you think are the causes.
371 - roger nowosielski
Thanks for visiting, Michael. If you do have another narrative, I'd surely like to hear it.