America is designed in such a way that the forces in charge actively weaken democracy in order to maintain short term profits. That’s not a conspiracy.
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Interesting thought. I wonder if a signal to noise value, such as AICc can be applied.
Wait for it folks, tRump’s first day at school is going to be a doozy.
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I’d really like Corey’s take on this:
Ignore Assange’s personal antics. Is imposing a secrecy tax even close to a good idea? Why or why not?
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Why is there only one?
I wonder if Snowlark would be so kind as to define what are leftist causes and what are rightist causes? I think attaching those labels to people’s concerns clouds our judgement.
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I agree that ‘left-right’ is a false dichotomy and damn me for invoking it like that. Not being sarcastic; it was a tic of speech.
Not only does it cloud discussion, it also declines to acknowledge those who, in an earnest effort to solidify their own political views, have taken the time to analyze and discuss these issues.
Good correction. These habits of language are hard to kick so I’m glad you spoke up.
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This is a still from a video I shot in 2013; I happened to walk out of a store when a free Manning march happened by. Note the final banner bringing up the rear. Can’t believe no one in the march told them to go screw.
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To quote Saul Alinksky’s Rules for Radicals, a book I really wish movement/community leaders and organizers would bother to read:
[A] single issue drastically limits your appeal, where multiple issues would draw in the many potential members essential to the building of a broad, mass-based organization. Each person has a hierarchy of desires or values; he may be sympathetic to your single issue but not concerned enough about that particular one to work and fight for it. Many issues mean many members.
Occupy’s failure wasn’t because of having too many issues. They never developed specific, immediate and realizable ones. What Occupy had was an amalgamation of problems, complaints and ideals. Because of that, they had no way of ever claiming a win as they never gave their opponents a way to give into any of their demands.
Of course there were a whole lot of other problems including tactic fatigue and not keeping the pressure on by switching up tactics, but that’s a longer discussion.
BLM at least has actionable issues. They come out when someone gets shot, at least one of their actionable issues is getting the police officer fired or prosecuted. They can claim a win when things go their way which keeps fuel on the fire until the next issue comes around for them to pounce on.
Edit: Oh I should note that the Tea Party (well FreedomWorks) actually followed Rules for Radicals - while demonizing Saul Alinksy and linking him to Obama (a tactic that fit right in with the Rules themselves).
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I don’t have a solution to the Russia problem or the China problem or the home front mad-dog neocon problem. I just want to see a better class of propaganda, at least here on Boing Boing. If I want crap propaganda, I can always read The New York Times or the Washington Post.
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It’s already been imposed by authoritarian power structures on everyone else, so I think that, on balance, imposing it back on them can only be a good thing.
I think this is accurate. You either need an action plan to work within the system or one to replace it, and Occupy never really built enough momentum around either.
Some people called Bernie Sanders a sellout for working within the Democratic party but I think he realized that the party, flawed as it was, was still the most viable path to creating positive change within our current system.
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c.f. Jill Stein.
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Shunning the traditional system of coalition-building in lieu of a homeopathic approach to voter support.
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I’m not sure that symmetry is called for.
I used to think that private individuals should have privacy, and public institutions should have publicity, but perhaps that’s a little simple. People have power when they organize-- and full transparency can make forming a collective strategy very difficult. Imagine if the membership of the NAACP was known to the Citizens Councils?
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I’m really talking more about governments here.
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You missed the beginnings of the Tea Party. Originally it was Dick Armey using Koch money to astroturf the various deficit-hawks and anti-tax folks into a “grassroots” movement, but it quickly got all the various other right-wing crazies thrown in alongside them. That let it do a lot of dirty work for the Republicans by bashing Democrats without the Party needing to take any responsibility for what they said, but it also had the effect of keeping anybody who actually still cared about the budget out of the way, lumping them with the extremists instead of letting them demonstrate what was basically a centrist position (“don’t be stupid with money”.)
(The deficit, of course, had been no problem at all until 2008, after Bush had tripled it by funding his wars on mostly off-budget credit while cutting taxes for the rich, and making sure Obama didn’t restore taxes on the rich to pre-Bush levels was the core of the GOP’s fiscal policy for the next N years.)
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“Don’t be stupid with money” is an apolitical idea, not (just) a centrist one.
The Tea Party’s implementation of it (spend less, lower taxes, no exceptions), was right wing though.
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One of Occupy’s big mistakes was having Stalinists/Trotskyists and Ron Paul supporters (as well as just about everything in between] in the same group and expecting them to agree on anything. Some of the groups also insisted on having consensus before doing anything.
Sometimes there just isn’t any common ground.
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