The world seems to be cracking open with violence and unrest not just in places like Syria. Swell spots like Cape Town and Seattle are explosive. But there seems to be an unfortunate pattern behind all of this few will speak openly about. It appears in many cases police are instigating riots undercover. There does seem to be a pattern.
I suspect that this is not actually a global conspiracy in the way people might imagine, rather similar circumstances playing out around the globe. Financialization and the crises of capitalism have eaten from almost all public budgets, except military and security budgets. Not every cop is a moron, or unaware that their buddies in the firefighters, public hospitals, and so forth are looking at shrinking budgets. Sadly the "proof" that security forces are necessary may often be a pre-planned riot made at the expense of peaceful protesters.
This violence against people masquerading as violence from within people is yet another part of the despicable upside down post-modern world we live in like the new paradigm of the boss who pretends to be your friend; but inverted and armed.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=356343461181561
I suspect not only are the security forces instigating violence, they are making sure they are the only ones doing it. I have been involved in many leftists protests, and annoyed at how ridiculously unanimously pacifist they are. When the state is violent and dishonest, it's surely not a coincidence that leaders continuously preach nonviolence. Granted, I would never act violently due to the personal moral convictions I hold...but I wonder if this is always the right tactic. Nonviolence would seem appropriate when you can garner lots of media attention and sympathy. On the other hand, when your story is decidedly a non-story in the eyes of everyone, like the homeless families in America being increasinly harassed by the police...maybe strategic limited violence is called for a la francaise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6NlGGe6GI
Friday, October 23, 2015
Sunday, October 4, 2015
And now for real equality....
I'm getting kind of annoyed by all the rainbow flags on facebook. My 'yeah' for marriage equality is cynical and sarcastic..because I know full well gay marriage isn't really about equality at all. Of course I believe any two individuals should be able to marry. I also believe any three or four individuals should be able to marry. But let's be clear, gay marriage or plural marriage are about giving rights to people who are different from normative couples.
If we ever want equality, it's incredibly obvious if politically avaunt guard, that we actually need to start taking rights away from people. It may not sound kind or even democratic, but it is the only way towards a true equality for all Americans, married or not. In a world where everyone is respected equally, everyone could define their own relations as they see fit. If people see fit to sign up for sacred rights thousands of years old no one should stop them. Nor should anyone stop me from noticing that many wedding contracts are essentially the sale of a woman or in an even grimmer twist some families pay to get women off their hands. But giving extra rights to people for having some sort of religious and/or legal contract seems strange. No one even denies it is discriminatory, although few use the language of discrimination. Instead proponents trot out all kind of nonsense words like sacred, consecrate and so on which lack specificity not to mention reality. What marriage really does, as gay activists have spent over a decade pointing out, is give couples rights they would not get otherwise. These rights span from banal financial issues like taxation and retirement rights, to family issues like rights to visiting ones children when a partnership splits to just as important fuzzy rights like social respect. Over the course of a couple's lifetime this fuzzy issue of social respect has all kinds of implications on them and the children they produce. To this day it is not uncommon for people to refer to children conceived outside of marriage as illegitimate, or to discourage unmarried women from having children. The social stigma of singleness has a profound real negative effect on the lives of single people, although at it's base marriage is a legal agreement. As far as an actual argument for marriage, the most important one would seem that without it everyone would have to hire lawyers to negotiate the terms of their relationships...and hiring lawyers is almost never a good thing. Theoretically marriage harnesses traditions so old they won't go away, and bundles them with a bunch of benefits thereby encouraging marriage. If marriage is assumed to make people happy, then this is supposed to help everyone. Except it doesn't work that way. By bundling all these things together marriage is actually being discouraged in a larger and larger part of the population.
As society becomes more unequal, the real marriage equality issue is rapidly becoming who can afford to get married at all. While anyone can go to city hall and sign paperwork, the poor have some pretty strong disincentives from marriage. Just ask a recent university graduate. Women, in particular, have found that student loans, the price of education for almost anyone below the upper middle class function as an anti-dowry. But if those below the upper middle class fail to get a college degree or specific vocational training many of them are looking at a lifetime of precarious low paid work. Historically poverty has been almost defined by miserable working conditions: low level agricultural peonage leading the typical occupations of the poor. Now a growing number of the poor in the Western world do not actually work at all. As the sexual revolutions has slowly led many to equate marriage with family formation; the poor face an increasing issue. If their wages are so low and so insecure they could never afford a family, why marry at all? And in fact, many do not. So many do not that in American women in their twenties most babies are born to unmarried women. As one enlightened trophy wife told me "Marriage is about money and property and inheritance and if you don't have any money, well..." Marriage has become a tool through which upper middle class people cement their status in society and pass advantages on to their children. Marriage has also become a tool of certain kinds of women who want to duck out of actually pulling their own weight in society. Who in their right mind, if they actually belong to the progressive left, can stand for this? It doesn't take a sociologist to look around and realize how unfair this is. But then again, I'm probably overestimating the ability of observation among average people. A well educated man I know, a PhD in Physics no less, recently remarked to me "How do they do it?!" When I described a religious Israeli woman I knew with five children and no job. "No." I replied "The question isn't how they can do it, the question is how I the working single taxpayer can do it, because in some sense it's my job to support these kids because chances are, neither of their parents work." Seriously, how do we hard working single women drudge between our tiny apartments and long hours in usually rather joyless lives while not resenting married women, much more socially approved, who play with Popsicle sticks all day. The answer lies in the illusion of choice. But increasingly marriage is not a choice available to everyone. For the truly poor marriage is often an unfortunate choice to pin yourself to someone who might tip you over the edge financially. For truly poor men, even that might be a luxury. I am unfamiliar with the statistics, but if I had to guess, a truly impoverished man is probably many times more likely to end up in jail in the USA than a stable marriage.
People who really believe in social equality need to realize which fight is winnable. One potential fight would be creating a society in which people have anywhere nearly equal very good chances of marriage - a near impossibility considering some people are disabled in certain ways that make marriage unlikely. The winnable fight, is just taking the rights around marriage away. Everyone will have to grow up, fin for themselves, and come to personalized agreements over their property and life. Does that sound so awful? Why hasn't anyone encouraged this before?
If we ever want equality, it's incredibly obvious if politically avaunt guard, that we actually need to start taking rights away from people. It may not sound kind or even democratic, but it is the only way towards a true equality for all Americans, married or not. In a world where everyone is respected equally, everyone could define their own relations as they see fit. If people see fit to sign up for sacred rights thousands of years old no one should stop them. Nor should anyone stop me from noticing that many wedding contracts are essentially the sale of a woman or in an even grimmer twist some families pay to get women off their hands. But giving extra rights to people for having some sort of religious and/or legal contract seems strange. No one even denies it is discriminatory, although few use the language of discrimination. Instead proponents trot out all kind of nonsense words like sacred, consecrate and so on which lack specificity not to mention reality. What marriage really does, as gay activists have spent over a decade pointing out, is give couples rights they would not get otherwise. These rights span from banal financial issues like taxation and retirement rights, to family issues like rights to visiting ones children when a partnership splits to just as important fuzzy rights like social respect. Over the course of a couple's lifetime this fuzzy issue of social respect has all kinds of implications on them and the children they produce. To this day it is not uncommon for people to refer to children conceived outside of marriage as illegitimate, or to discourage unmarried women from having children. The social stigma of singleness has a profound real negative effect on the lives of single people, although at it's base marriage is a legal agreement. As far as an actual argument for marriage, the most important one would seem that without it everyone would have to hire lawyers to negotiate the terms of their relationships...and hiring lawyers is almost never a good thing. Theoretically marriage harnesses traditions so old they won't go away, and bundles them with a bunch of benefits thereby encouraging marriage. If marriage is assumed to make people happy, then this is supposed to help everyone. Except it doesn't work that way. By bundling all these things together marriage is actually being discouraged in a larger and larger part of the population.
As society becomes more unequal, the real marriage equality issue is rapidly becoming who can afford to get married at all. While anyone can go to city hall and sign paperwork, the poor have some pretty strong disincentives from marriage. Just ask a recent university graduate. Women, in particular, have found that student loans, the price of education for almost anyone below the upper middle class function as an anti-dowry. But if those below the upper middle class fail to get a college degree or specific vocational training many of them are looking at a lifetime of precarious low paid work. Historically poverty has been almost defined by miserable working conditions: low level agricultural peonage leading the typical occupations of the poor. Now a growing number of the poor in the Western world do not actually work at all. As the sexual revolutions has slowly led many to equate marriage with family formation; the poor face an increasing issue. If their wages are so low and so insecure they could never afford a family, why marry at all? And in fact, many do not. So many do not that in American women in their twenties most babies are born to unmarried women. As one enlightened trophy wife told me "Marriage is about money and property and inheritance and if you don't have any money, well..." Marriage has become a tool through which upper middle class people cement their status in society and pass advantages on to their children. Marriage has also become a tool of certain kinds of women who want to duck out of actually pulling their own weight in society. Who in their right mind, if they actually belong to the progressive left, can stand for this? It doesn't take a sociologist to look around and realize how unfair this is. But then again, I'm probably overestimating the ability of observation among average people. A well educated man I know, a PhD in Physics no less, recently remarked to me "How do they do it?!" When I described a religious Israeli woman I knew with five children and no job. "No." I replied "The question isn't how they can do it, the question is how I the working single taxpayer can do it, because in some sense it's my job to support these kids because chances are, neither of their parents work." Seriously, how do we hard working single women drudge between our tiny apartments and long hours in usually rather joyless lives while not resenting married women, much more socially approved, who play with Popsicle sticks all day. The answer lies in the illusion of choice. But increasingly marriage is not a choice available to everyone. For the truly poor marriage is often an unfortunate choice to pin yourself to someone who might tip you over the edge financially. For truly poor men, even that might be a luxury. I am unfamiliar with the statistics, but if I had to guess, a truly impoverished man is probably many times more likely to end up in jail in the USA than a stable marriage.
People who really believe in social equality need to realize which fight is winnable. One potential fight would be creating a society in which people have anywhere nearly equal very good chances of marriage - a near impossibility considering some people are disabled in certain ways that make marriage unlikely. The winnable fight, is just taking the rights around marriage away. Everyone will have to grow up, fin for themselves, and come to personalized agreements over their property and life. Does that sound so awful? Why hasn't anyone encouraged this before?
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
UN Schmoon...
When I first read that the Saudis were heading a UN body on human rights, I thought I was reading a parody. Saudi Arabia, isn't it the country where women can't even drive, and are just now being granted the right to vote in 2015? Saudi Arabia where people don't even bother registering female births so they can more easily kill them later if they get out of line? Saudi Arabia where they execute people by beheadings even for nonviolent crimes? Where they have a brand of Islam so extremists they gave us 9/11? Yes...
So it turns out all the Jewish conspiracy theorists are right? The UN is basically a big corrupt body bizarrely biased towards the Arab world...
I actually just feel sorry for anyone who had any faith in this sorry body of nonsense anymore. They can't handle refugees. They can't stop miserable wars. They can't fight for human rights...and they just sit around hating Israel all day long. Oh, but how could I forget 'him for her' a supposedly feminist campaign spearheaded by an actress and underwear model. Excuse me while I vomit.
Can someone please come up with an alternative body to help the world? This is a rather sad mess.
So it turns out all the Jewish conspiracy theorists are right? The UN is basically a big corrupt body bizarrely biased towards the Arab world...
I actually just feel sorry for anyone who had any faith in this sorry body of nonsense anymore. They can't handle refugees. They can't stop miserable wars. They can't fight for human rights...and they just sit around hating Israel all day long. Oh, but how could I forget 'him for her' a supposedly feminist campaign spearheaded by an actress and underwear model. Excuse me while I vomit.
Can someone please come up with an alternative body to help the world? This is a rather sad mess.
Monday, September 28, 2015
What to think of luck
In a world this sad
Does art even have a place
But in a world this sad
Is art the only hope?
In a world this sad
Does any thought matter anyways?
Slavery, murder, oppression
2015 brought back 1014
Child brides
Poverty
ISIS
American Capitalism
State sponsored murder
The failure of everything
But insanity and smiling
Smiling a little, ignoring the reality
Are we cruel? Are we crazy?
Are we colonists
Us in the candy box
Us in the white frothy crest of the world
We fought our way in, we think
Until something reminds us
It was all luck of birth
Monday, September 21, 2015
The Jerusalem Paradox
I'm a bit sad that the recent surge in refugees has been seen as a monumental and exceptional crisis. Africa and Asia have had more refugees for far longer; yet this was never a "crisis." Once again the world media and governing bodies are showing us that something only counts as a real problem if it affects white people. One truly aware of history would not be surprised. The savagery of the Western world has been on full display for centuries. Should anyone be surprised that the people who brought the world global colonialism are indifferent to the plight of supposedly lesser people?
The problems of the world seem eternally stuck. Equality, of the type dreamed of in the Haitian revolution or the French revolution, seems to be some pipe dream only a few pot smokers will cling to. The real question is how would equality even be enacted between very unequal populations. Are we, the non-Western, inherently savage, as savage as those who stomp on us? Has our lack of education and resources made us so idiotic that a psuedo-colonial rule is inevitable, if only to maintain some level of decency? Forgetting how we got into this situation, in which those above us are almost completely to blame, we should ask if we are better off running ourselves as a matter of practical survival.
Several of my acquintances are whimsically hopeful for the day the British will march back into the Levant and take over Israel again. For them as Israel born Jews, decades of liberation and self-rule have been somewhat disappointing. Yet they are sure there is one possibility even worse. They are deeply racist against Arabs...
From the Palestinian Arab perspective the original Zionists were a new sort of colonialist, even if in fact they were throwing off a type of colonialist opression themselves. And yet paradoxically, the more the supposedly colonial entity controls, the better the situation on the ground for many people. Haifa, a city of relative peace and near equality, is under full civil control of Israel. The polar opposite would be Gaza, where due to a combination of the Oslo accords and withdrawal, there is a fair amount of autonomy. There is also now a near total vacuum of human rights and dignity. Forgetting the question of blame- which lies with several parties including Israel- there is a more important question of how the madness will stop, how things can get better.
Paradoxically every "correct" move towards the autonomy and freedom of the people there seems to result in less freedom and autonomy. I am sure that if tomorrow Israel were to withdraw all interference from Gaza and grant it autonomy, we would welcome the world's 23rd or 24th Islamic dictatorship, with the requisite total death of hope for human rights, within less than two weeks. What moves towards democracy and autonomy did, most notably the Oslo accords, was unfortunately to increase the misery of those supposedly being liberated. No one seemed to notice that in a practical sense the Oslo accords cut millions of people of from getting decent education and health care because of their ethnicity. A few decades later, a radical turn for the worst, towards fundamentalist, shouldn't surprise anyone.
The question of the future of Jerusalem is in some sense a miniature question of the issues in the entire world right now. As radicalized religious militants are allowed to turn the area into a religious conflict zone, sadly few will remember that underlying this mess were cold political calculations about populations. Such calculations happened for the population of Jerusalem, and they happened in terms of entire national populations in the middle East. Not all variables were taken into account by anyone.
In 2015 some cynicism about the future is required in any calculation. Gone are the days when the world could look upon brave new ideologies for salvation. Every revolutionary who did not become a tyrant became sad. Simon Bolivar said he had plowed into the sea. Emma Goldman admitted she was just plain wrong. All that is left for it's great trial and subsequent failure is anarchism. And yet inherent in mass rule, is us the savage masses...and the question of whether we are capable of anything good. The stage for the trial of anarchism will probably not be Jerusalem. Under the eyes of the UN, the international media, the PA, the Israeli government, the global interest, and so on, Jerusalem will be anything but a throwing off of rules. The first failures of anarchy will happen unnoticed on the very edge of empire in places like Kurdistan...but the failure will probably come larger for those at the very center of civilization. Yet slowly the failures may bring a certain limited kind of progress in some cases. Hope, like savagery and injustice, springs eternal.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Parallel Time
Was actually a pretty awesome play. I just saw it with Hebrew translation. So glad I did. The play really made me think about the brutality of certain regimes, and prisoners in general.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
The Wisdom the Klu Klux Klansmen
Sometimes, even people you hate say something remarkably true. I was recently watching a video of some white nationalists in the USA. Some sort of amalgamation of klansmen and neo-nazis that listen to metal rock music with fascist lyrics. They argued that while they seem fringe, lots of people agree with them. Well on that, I couldn't agree more. The young facists nailed it: lots of people are racists.
America is at a moment where it will have to face reality. We are a country that elected Obama; but we are also a country where whites in Louisiana voted for an avowed Klansmen by a sizeable majority less than two decades before.
As I sat in a government office in Israel, a news banner ran on the bottom of the screen. It mentioned burnings of black churches. It took over a day for major US newspapers to run headlines on the issue. What was really sad was to see news outlets like FOX news try to twist the recent church burnings into some biblical religious nonsense i.e. the people are persecuting Christians...when everyone knows exactly what is going on, because the same thing has been going on for about 500 years. When Juan Ponce de Leon hit what is now Florida it took only a few years for a slave society to follow and take root. In 1522 the first massive slave revolt in the new hemisphere took place, and the man has been trying to keep us down while living in constant fear of revolting blacks ever since. Liberal Massachusets was the first colony (later to be a state) to officialize and legalize slavery...which only illustrates a point entirely lost on so many people: that the only "North" and "South" that truly deeply matters in terms of racism is being south of Canada and north of Mexico.
Racism is many troubling things. The worst side of racism is how it shortens lives. How average lifespans for persecuted groups inevitably average lower due to everything from state sponsored killing to medical neglect. But racism is also a media that fails to bring insight into domestic terrorism. That fails to state the obvious about burning black churches. That can't connect the dots for younger generations unaware of the connection between black churches and civil rights. Racism is also a media that has decided our stories do not matter.
America is at a moment where it will have to face reality. We are a country that elected Obama; but we are also a country where whites in Louisiana voted for an avowed Klansmen by a sizeable majority less than two decades before.
As I sat in a government office in Israel, a news banner ran on the bottom of the screen. It mentioned burnings of black churches. It took over a day for major US newspapers to run headlines on the issue. What was really sad was to see news outlets like FOX news try to twist the recent church burnings into some biblical religious nonsense i.e. the people are persecuting Christians...when everyone knows exactly what is going on, because the same thing has been going on for about 500 years. When Juan Ponce de Leon hit what is now Florida it took only a few years for a slave society to follow and take root. In 1522 the first massive slave revolt in the new hemisphere took place, and the man has been trying to keep us down while living in constant fear of revolting blacks ever since. Liberal Massachusets was the first colony (later to be a state) to officialize and legalize slavery...which only illustrates a point entirely lost on so many people: that the only "North" and "South" that truly deeply matters in terms of racism is being south of Canada and north of Mexico.
Racism is many troubling things. The worst side of racism is how it shortens lives. How average lifespans for persecuted groups inevitably average lower due to everything from state sponsored killing to medical neglect. But racism is also a media that fails to bring insight into domestic terrorism. That fails to state the obvious about burning black churches. That can't connect the dots for younger generations unaware of the connection between black churches and civil rights. Racism is also a media that has decided our stories do not matter.
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