Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I guess this means that we're wasting our time trying to communicate anything, or educate anyone. The proletariat has become so stupid that they can no longer perform their role of changing history. That role has now fallen to us, as Leporellos of the ruling class, to destroy it by subtle strategems of mockery.

I'm a great admirer of Leporello, especially

Voglio far' il gentiluomo,
e non voglio piú servir.

I find it tempting too, sometimes. But I think there's case to be made that lumpen pwogs and lumpen wingnuts are the result, not the cause, of this anti-republican illiberal anti-democratic system. Their leadership is representative in the narrowest sense, and is probably hopeless, but outside the toxic political scene, most of the rest manage their lives quite well.

This reminds me of another Carlin bit. Last one, I promise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk

Although I don't actually agree with the 'lost cause' thesis, it seems pretty clear that there is something amiss with the American electorate as of late. I had attributed it to 9/11 hysteria, but obviously it goes beyond that. As Al has pointed out, it seems like the result of decades of undemocratically decided policies, rather than the original cause of them.

Fascinating. A common theme lately, that the ones supposed to develop the awareness to resist authority end up as the ones least likely to oppose it.

So Al is blaming it on the "leadership" not the people. But that means we have passed beyond democracy into totalitarianism, where citizens are only simulacras of citizens, not even genuine sufferers of the forces that oppress them and incapable of understanding them.

Semeca,

Does your vote in any way alter your material conditions? Does it in any way alter the structure of power?

This is what democracy looks like because this is the only form it's allowed to take. And I'm not sure it's lack of intelligence so much as some unfulfilled, desperate psychological needs that lead to this result (like what causes people to be religious).

John Taylor Gatto might say the system has produced the citizenry it was designed to produce.

"The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you....the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real."

The media and the Carnegie/Morgan/Rockefeller/Ford designed education system seem to have perfected the production of human cogs. Trouble is most of the cogs are no longer needed.

If I were blaming the leadership for the lumpen condition of their supporters, I'd do so directly, rest assured. As it is, I don't think they have the wherewithal to cretinize whole blocs of the population. I do think they're sociopathic opportunists. Hence, hopeless, as far as salvaging them goes.

As for democracy, it's only ever been a formalism in this country. A rubber stamp for elite consensus. Voters can pick and choose amongst limited choices. If they don't like it, they can stay home and forego a say in how they are governed. There's no protection for them beyond what elite consensus will or will not tolerate.

You can't have a republican system when the majority has no more security than their patrons will bestow. There's no element of consent. Gaggles of hysterical and servile pwogs and wingnuts are a "normal" outcome of that. They have no experience of self-governance.

Wow. Seriously?

If that was my analysis, I'd most certainly quit do anything but entertaining myself and protecting my kid.

This is a totalitarian system. The administration is simply competitive and systemic, rather than centralized and personal.

The 500-ton elephant in the room is commercial television, to which 95 percent of the population is addicted, and has been for decades. Not only is it the ultimate divide-and-conquer and bread-and-circuses machine, it is the vehicle for election-by-dollars. It has been far, far more lavishly funded than any other social control strategy in history.

And now we're blaming the audience?

For shame, all of you!

P.S. The whole train wreck is a mile wide, but only inches deep. Tea Partiers want to keep Medicare. Deluded peaceniks really do want peace. They simply don't have choices.

While I agree with Mike's post, count me as one of the people who thinks 9-11 was an inside job. Can I prove it? Do I have indisputable evidence that it was an inside job? No. What I have, is an official story that is so full of massive improbabilities and near impossible coincidences that it can't possibly be anything other than pure bullshit. If the government needs to bullshit us with such a bizarre and far-fetched conspiracy theory as the official 9-11 story, there can be only one reason: they are covering up the truth.

How thinking people can accept such an off-the-wall story from the same cabal of sociopathic scumbags who have damn well lied about everything else in the last 5 decades is beyond me.

Well... how can it NOT be the fault of people? They don't choose to be distracted? They're automatons without choice? They have to bear some of the blame, don't they? Do they all have such sub-sub-normal intelligence that they can't think at all? All of them have such poor intelligence? Such inability to think?

Gatto's got a good aim on it too, saying the educational system is no help.

Of course those who purvey disinformation bear a large part of the blame. It's hard for me to imagine the all-encompassing truth of the "market" argument in which the "market" merely responds to what people want. Looks to me like the "market" is full of people creating wants, then creating the response to those wants.

Isn't the psychological game played much more elaborately and subtly now? Are people really telling governments what they want without influence?

There's a lot of blame to go around. Seems to me that's what Mike's cartoon is suggesting.

But maybe I'm just a dumb dirt-eater.

Michael Dawson,

Whether or not television has shaped society to the point that laboring classes no longer recognize themselves as laborers (a la Debord), it still follows that they remain governable.

I don't think addressing the cause changes the effect under discussion. We can outline one of the primary causes to we all end up corpsified casket dwellers, but that won't change the effect one bit.

"til we all end up"*

* proof, jack, proof y'idiot

Ox, did I say anything, ever, anywhere that said the percentage of blame on the masses was zero? Meanwhile, are you one of the long series of peckerwoods, including all too many "leftists as well as every single ad-man in history," who take 10 percent as an explanation for the whole 100 percent? Christ on a stick.

And Jack Crow, nice rejection of the entire purpose, method, and benefit of science. "Let's not dwell on the causes, as we all know the results are what count." Beautiful, lovely, terrfic.

What the fuck is happening around here? Jesus Palomino!

The study of human behavior, and human society, is not a science, Michael. At best, we can make an art of its study.

All the same, I think you're confusing others' reactions as to effect with your own focus on cause.

I didn't remotely suggest that caused ought not be understood, for what it's worth. I just don't see any reason to pretend that one factor in a set of causes, if we fully understand it, will change an *already existing effect.*

"you can’t possibly imagine the thrill and relief when I finally realized that, yes, I’m not the only one thinking that the number one problem is, in fact, The People"

h.l. M -Oid indeed
only without the splendid slap dash prose

md i'm with u on this

"The study of human behavior, and human society, is not a science."

Oh, my gods. Seriously? Seriously? Seriously?

Why the fuck not?

Because the object of analysis is difficult?

OMFG x 1000

People are revealing. And this ain't pretty. How dare you criticize anybody, for anything, if this is your view?

Science is a method and a goal.

And permit me to say that you once again restate your irrationalist position there, JC.

"I just don't see any reason to pretend that one factor in a set of causes, if we fully understand it, will change an *already existing effect.*"

What if ____ had drawn that conclusion?

Fill in the blank with thousands of scientists. Jonas Salk being one.

Jesus Palomino x 100!

Michael,

You are fishing for something to hook on your line, but it's not *my* premise.

I can only kindly suggest that you understand that I'm not stating that an analysis of a cause is useless, but that it does not change those effects which have already occurred.

Time doesn't rewind.

You can identify television as a culprit from a million different angles, but this identification won't undo the damage *already* done.

If you think this is "irrationalist," then I point you gently towards a dictionary.

Respect,

Jack

Yes, science is a method - but not merely and exclusively so. I did not state that the scientific method was suspect. I stated that the study of human social interactions did not produce a science, instead preferring the more honest characteristics of an "art."

In much the same way that economics, where it is not outright mysticism and fraud, cannot rightly be understood as a "science," since the subject matter of its inquiry, where any inquiry actually occurs, is not as quantifiable as the study of the properties of matter, or light.

If you object to this division of inquiry into what can properly be treated as science, and what instead by seen as art (however practical or experimental), that is your business.

But your assumption that you have a monopoly on the terms is itself substantially suspect.

Good luck to you, with that.

Less respect, now,

Jack

MD, harking back up the thread a ways, I was noting a condition, not laying blame on the home audience. Their more outrageous political displays are a normal outcome of a systemic blighting. And as I also noted, in most other circumstances most of them manage their affairs pretty well. It's well within the realm of the possible that they could manage their politics quite well too, if they ever had a chance to do so. Their leaders, not so much. I wouldn't trust Obama to run a tractor, never mind a country.

That said, clear the cities, confiscate their remotes, rusticate the lot of them and hand them over to cadres who will teach them the rural virtues. It's the only way. In previous attempts along those lines, mistakes can be said to have been made. There were excesses and insufficiencies. Admittedly. But those mistakes were clearly a function of bourgeois sentimentalism, and not an indictment of the plan.

"undo the damage *already* done"
what damage ??
to the meme weavers in the brains of flugs "people" ???

what of everything becomes its opposite
or the negation of the negation

the brain is not a coke machine
human concious action builds a party
but not an insurrection

flugs people thru time and interaction
with themselves and their "context"
can quite unintentionally
--and perhaps undiscoverably --
become something quite different...no ??

okay one might need these people to produce a new or even a few new generations
hey who's impatient here ?
some and only some
among a few billion little
self reflexive systems
each one a project of les then 115 years duration..( auto-program self-limited)

more time => misery ??
ya ..so ???
certainly not Clio's sweat eh ??

She's got all the time and resources she needs

the sun doesn't seem to be cooling that fast eh ??
and if we cinder mother earths skin
create a byronic darkness
so much the better to sublate ourselves

keep your shirt on and "work with it"
or convert to an ideology
that instills
the for the rather solipsistic notion
of death as tragedy
to say the marvelous
...miraculous even
meme over matter trick
of personal ego immortality

"clear the cities, confiscate their remotes, rusticate the lot of them and hand them over to cadres who will teach them the rural virtues. It's the only way. In previous attempts along those lines, mistakes can be said to have been made. There were excesses and insufficiencies. Admittedly. But those mistakes were clearly a function of bourgeois sentimentalism, and not an indictment of the plan"

always st Al
u devil of a PB rascal u
u must mock
a big pure vision of purification
and with out fail
just to irk me ...your comrade

and and and
must u always jab at my fallen idol ???
http://www.psywarrior.com/PolPot.jpg

"Their leadership is representative in the narrowest sense, and is probably hopeless"

dah queen bee ain't nuffin
but a worker bee dat got spoilicated
wiff to much jelly

Owen, I consider leadership in its conventional form a pathology. It's possible that the major and minor surplus value harvesters could turn their back on exploitation and self-aggrandizement, but the only ones I've seen do so didn't have an expectation of state terrorism to backstop their bailouts. Once they get a few tastes of that reptile pleasure, it's very hard for them to turn away.

"the only ones I've seen do so didn't have an expectation of state terrorism to backstop their bailouts"

ah yes u touch on the very origins
and necessities
of the state within "class".... civilization

i withdraw my honey bee analogy

to talk of hucap/hu -capone exploiters
in that "frame"
as if these men into monitor lizards
process ....these certain
institutionalizations..
these "learned " human "behaviours"
are
'modeled' by the BEES

why it's a damnable grotesque libel
on the 'rock of ages 'like activities
of these noble eusocial insects

err
the great mandeville not withstanding

On the teabagger right:

I HAVE seen signs that say "Where's the Birth Certificiate" or "The Public Option is Socialism".

On the Conspiracy driven right/Counterpunch Left:

I've ALSO, quite obviously, noticed signs that say "9/11 Was an Inside Job".

On the mainstream Democratic Obama supporting Left:

I have NEVER seen a sign that says "We're Voting for Obama Because He's Black" or "Scared Liberals for Obama".

I think I'll make up my own sign:

"Bitter Old Leftists Who Hate Obama Because He's Black".

In other words, the signs the cartoon depicts for the rightests are real signs.

The signs the cartoonist depicts for the liberals are made up strawman signs.

"...in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them, division of labour in the interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in kind. "

"The analogy appears most indisputable where there is an invisible bond uniting the various branches of trade. For instance the cattle-breeder produces hides, the tanner makes the hides into leather, and the shoemaker, the leather into boots. Here the thing produced by each of them is but a step towards the final form, which is the product of all their labours combined. There are, besides, all the various industries that supply the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker with the means of production."

" Now it is quite possible to imagine, with Adam Smith, that the difference between the above social division of labour, and the division in manufacture, is merely subjective, exists merely for the observer, who, in a manufacture, can see with one glance, all the numerous operations being performed on one spot, while in the instance given above, the spreading out of the work over great areas, and the great number of people employed in each branch of labour, obscure the connexion. "

"] But what is it that forms the bond between the independent labours of the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker? It is the fact that their respective products are commodities."

" What, on the other hand, characterises division of labour in manufactures? The fact that the detail labourer produces no commodities. It is only the common product of all the detail labourers that becomes a commodity. "

" Division of labour in society is brought about by the purchase and sale of the products of different branches of industry, while the connexion between the detail operations in a workshop, is due to the sale of the labour-power of several workmen to one capitalist, who applies it as combined labour-power. "

"The division of labour in the workshop implies concentration of the means of production in the hands of one capitalist; the division of labour in society implies their dispersion among many independent producers of commodities."

" While within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality subjects definite numbers of workmen to definite functions, in the society outside the workshop, chance and caprice have full play in distributing the producers and their means of production among the various branches of industry. "

"The different spheres of production, it is true, constantly tend to an equilibrium: for, on the one hand, while each producer of a commodity is bound to produce a use-value, to satisfy a particular social want, and while the extent of these wants differs quantitatively, still there exists an inner relation which settles their proportions into a regular system, and that system one of spontaneous growth;"

" and, on the other hand, the law of the value of commodities ultimately determines how much of its disposable working-time society can expend on each particular class of commodities."

" But this constant tendency to equilibrium, of the various spheres of production, is exercised, only in the shape of a reaction against the constant upsetting of this equilibrium."

" The a priori system on which the division of labour, within the workshop, is regularly carried out, becomes in the division of labour within the society, an a posteriori, nature-imposed necessity, controlling the lawless caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the barometrical fluctuations of the market-prices. "

"Division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, that are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him. "

"The division of labour within the society brings into contact independent commodity-producers, who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in the animal kingdom, the bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all – Hobbes] more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species."

" The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist. "

"It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organisation of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory"

From the article:

Oh, and, what percentage of black voters went for Obama – 90%, something outrageous like that? – even though he never made any commitment to actually improve life for black Americans, though nearly every campaign speech he ever gave was designed to reassure white America that he wouldn’t cause any trouble (especially that horrid Fathers’ Day speech)? It’s as if everybody totally forgot what King and Malcolm X were trying to teach us about house slaves and field slaves, and how to spot a “player”, and how we should judge people by the content of their character rather than their color. They didn’t give a damn’ about his being a corporate tool; they only cared what color he was.

The above also slouches towards Glenn Beckism.

The actual facts look like this.

Black voters have supported every Democratic presidential candidates since FDR.

They supported Truman (white). They supported Stevenson (white). They supported Kennedy (white). They supported Humphrey (white). They supported McGovern (white). They supported Carter (white). They supported Mondale (white). They supported Dukakis (white). They supported Clinton (white). They supported Gore (white). They supported Kerry (white). And they supported Obama (black).

Cynthia McKinney was also black. But black people didn't vote for her because she never put on a credible effort to campaign.

I saw her "campaign" at a 9/11 Truth event in Manhattan. There were only about 20 people there, mainly because the McKinney campaign never even tried to publicize the fact that she was in town, not even in the local "left" press like NYC Indymedia.

Until 3rd Party campaigns become something more then resume padders and fund raising scams, people (both black and white) are going to continue to vote for the "lesser of two evils".

"If, in a society with capitalist production, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in that of the workshop are mutual conditions the one of the other, we find, on the contrary, in those earlier forms of society in which the separation of trades has been spontaneously developed, then crystallised, and finally made permanent by law, on the one hand, a specimen of the organisation of the labour of society, in accordance with an approved and authoritative plan, and on the other, the entire exclusion of division of labour in the workshop, or at all events a mere dwarflike or sporadic and accidental development of the same"

"[It can ... be laid down as a general rule that the less authority presides over the division of labour inside society, the more the division of labour develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single person. Thus authority in the workshop and authority in society in relation to the division of labour, are in inverse ratio to each other]"

Owen,

Of all the crap Lenin cooked up, the "negation of the negation" is the worst.

It's junk. It's meaningless.

Here's the point I was trying to make to Michael:

If John hits his unfortunate wife Mary, blackening her right eye, no amount of study of John's behaviors, no amount of inquiry into how he became an abusive jerk will erase the punch that caused her black eye, or remove the bruise itself.

jack

kool off !!!!

what possibly led you to believe
your stuff was hard to understand ???

you might not have been the object of my comment

blaming "the people "
for the present society
leads on to the efficient origins of their behaviour somewhere in their heads

are those heads damaged ???

notice their heads not the targets
of their actions

btw
the negation of the negation comes from engels
mediation of hegel
please leave ole vi out of it
he has enough to account for as it is

Dawson, I really don't recall saying "I'm responding to Dawson here."

I've read my post again now. Yep, that's right. I'm not responding directly to the exact words of Michael Dawson, and I'm not aiming my response at Michael Dawson.

But thanks for aggrandizing yourself and injecting yourself in my mind. NOW I can respond to Michael Dawson, and give him the attention he craves. Yes, SMBIVA readers, I'm responding to Michael Dawson here. Got that?

And I'm saying that my first post in this thread was NOT aimed at whatever Michael Dawson posted.

OP,

I'm not "hot," to need to cool off.

"Negation of the negation" actually predates Engels or Lenin, and can be found in Hegel, and in a primitive sense, in Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysus.

But, as far as its used in a political, economic and social sense, it owes its pedigree to Lenin, in a ridiculous pamphlet where he also tries to treat a man as Man.

Nor do I suspect that I'm so obscure that I need to re-explain myself.

I was simply trying to clarify MD's misreading, and you took your opportunity, following that, to offer some op-poetry, to which I later responded.

The signs the cartoonist depicts for the liberals are made up strawman signs.

Watch, as "jtf" blindly ignores the posting sentiments of liberals and progressives around the interwebtoobz.

Watch, as "jtf" pretends he knows every single lib-pwog that Mike F knows, and knows how those lib-pwogs talk.

Watch, as "jtf" assumes that nobody but "jtf" matters here!

And watch, as yrs trly says directly to "jtf" that I, the poster using the handle Charles F. Oxtrot, know many, many self-described liberals and progressives who offer the very sentiments Mike puts on the placards.

The fact that nobody "jtf" knows carried such placards anywhere is not the point. Mike's not offering a doctored photograph, "jtf."

Whose sock puppet is "jtf"? The illogic suggests it's Michael Dawson's.

"Bitter Old Leftists Who Hate Obama Because He's Black".

jtf

was that a wise crack or just silliness ???

" the mainstream Democratic Obama supporting Left"

quite a bramble that conjunction ...no ?

mainstream
Democratic
Obama supporting
left

i guess i can make
two some what distinct
and more stable sub categories
out of that

obama supporting
mainstream Democratics

and

obama supporting
leftists

obviously this site only
enrages the second of those two sub sets

starting with
my beloved
old time browder pop fronters
turned gene dennis
anti monopoly new dealers
turned
anti reactionary hard right monoply cap
gus Hallites
over at CPUSA

give or take a few momentary
swerves back to
overt class confrontation
third party gung ho ing and general own nut crunching

j crow
i'll eat your last name
if that resolves the contre temps

obviously nothing of substance
emerges between us here on the damage point
merely criss crossed references
and i'll still contend a trace of roughed prickles

i thought everyone here after a few pass thrus realized i'm not writing poetry

i just have a word arrangement lisp

can't stand paragraphs
hate punctuaation and capitals
can't spell
type poorly
write in fugres too much

none of which conclusivelt establishes my intention
as poetic
but rhetorical

affectations aside
i think phrases need liberation

now we're paperless
and more generally post hard copy
we no longer have space economies
to deal with

the guttttttenberg constraints are gone

ps

we'd all stand to reduce our attempts to appear all knowing
AND
simultaneously
oracularly declarative

authority has to be earned every time and by tediously detail argumentation=> persuasion
not
administrative measures
of the nuclear form:
"that's an order take it or leave "

something mr vladimir negation of the negation was pretty good at

been reading a lot of leon bronstein lately

he had this oracular "hang up "
quite a problem for him intra party
particularly in a blood scrap
since like the pope and john marshall
he had zero divisions

"old time browder pop fronters"

I know who that is
"Radical Soap Opera"
Just read that chapter

vladimir relied
on the power of his patient dogged unrelenting
point by point argumentation
one on one he argued until he got a majority of conversions
when outvoted he either split with his converts
in good order and privately in good humor
or stayed
till the majorities actions proved him wrong
or events
in their ceaseless passing
required him
to move on to a new battle front

leon
basically played
"here's the course comrades
follow me or be damned "

oxy
don't play too much
man to man defense here

those of us who visit frequently
are all mates ...no ??

--------

"Whose sock puppet is "jtf"?
The illogic suggests it's Michael Dawson's"

that makes no sense to me at all ...

clearly jtf is a critter
from the pro ohbummer "left"

a comet that sprinkled some sky dust on smbiva as it passed on it's way
to better and bigger
things

sadly side swiped innocent:

Pseudo-Dionysus

Here's my problem:

Flugennock says, "It’s bad enough that the “election” process itself is rendered illegitimate by the Party’s dirty tricks, distortions, half-truths and corporate cash-whoring"

Jacob Weisberg says, "the Senate filibuster... has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation."

If the election process is illegitimate, how can you blame the results on the voters? If we're freely admitting that a small number of Senators from less popular states can crush "any important legislation", then why should we assume that the legislation we get follows the wishes of the majority of voters?

Because you saw somebody say something stupid once on the TV?

Both men simultaneously complain that our democracy is too good at getting the people what they want, AND a complete failure at getting the people what they want.

By the way, an offsite correspondent suggests I might have offended Comrade Flugennock by referring to "Juvenalia". Note however that this is not the same as "juvenilia."

Going back to the beginning: "We support him because he's Black"

I think that that is a true sentiment but I doubt very much that that appeared on any sign ever. jtf's criticism of the drawing's signage is fair IMO, except for the Darfur sign, perhaps. The jtf-invented sign smacks of Sambert, Melissa's agent.

I remember feeling uplifted (though I blush to recall it) when Geraldine was nominated for the VP slot in '84. What a difference 24 years makes! Clinton, F, versus Obama, B, and I felt no uplift at all. WJ Clinton's support of NAFTA and welfare reform, etc. cleared all the 'uplift potential' out of the DP for me.

But about TV as circus (though not bread): the provenance of the phrase "bread and circuses" demonstrates that the TV is nothing new in this regard, however 'new and improved' its manipulation seems to escapees like Mr. Dawson. It is already being superseded by fresh modalities such as the one we are using just now, and this one sports its own improvements which may isolate us from each other as hyper-sectarian cul-de-sacs. How easy it is to forget that we are "all mates".

For me, unresolved is the problem of the relationship of the escapee vanguard to the bulk of humanity. Change must come from below. How else does change avoid becoming one person's or a few persons' design preferences?

The criticism of Mike's signage is too literal-minded. Clearly the Pwogs' signs represent Mike's own analysis -- quite accurate, by the way -- of Obama fans' thought processes, rather than their self-advertised reasons.

Though in passing it might be said that I know plenty of people quite willing to admit that they voted for Obama because he was black. In fact that always seemed to me the least illogical of all the reasons I ever heard advanced for pulling the O lever.

But c'mon, folks, it's a political cartoon, not a purported depiction of some actual political rally. A woik of ahht, y'know, a product of imagination, reflection, and judgement, an instance of symbolic discourse.

MJS, it's a cartoon plus a verbal explanation. The verbal part is the problem.

Ox, your repeated projection of the will to aggrandizement onto me is exactly that -- projection. And you are simply dishonest. I posted the first reply that mentioned the issue of management and distraction. You were clearly replying to that post, liar.

And I didn't misread anything, Jack. You have tried several ways of saying the same thing, which is that causes don't matter. You final position is just as irrational as any of the others. It's even more illogical, though. The question at hand is the division of blame for outcomes, not whether outcomes exist. Do you blame the woman for her black eye because it exists?

I had thought Frankfurter patrician gloom and closet elitism were dead. Apparently not. Scratch a post-commie, find a cynical irrational mob hater.

If one thing should be clear by now, it's that blackface or a pair of tits is perfect camouflage with which to hide a warmongering, opportunistic fascist scumbag of the DP variety. I remember laughing when I saw Obama for the fist time on TV and they were talking about how this nobody from nowhere was a potential presidential candidate. Pretty damned obvious he was an anointed one, and I thought how clever that they got a black guy for the role, because there's nothing that's going to get a certain brand of liberal pissing themselves with righteous glee than the thought of being all enlightened and progressive and voting for a black guy, even a ruthless hack like Obummer.

Predictably, anyone who pointed out the obvious about this clown was denounced, then and now, as a racist, and there was of course a lot of staged racist incidents to create the illusion that poor Blackbush O'Bummer was under attack by evil white males and needed the support of his enlightened an oh so very un-racist supporters. They happily ignored any and all evidence that he is and always has been a Bush clone for that little jolt of narcissistic supply which you can never get from voting for a pale male.

Of course no one carried a sign to that effect, but that's hardly the point. The results are obvious, with so many liberals completely oblivious then and now to what this guy really is.

I agree with the idea that the mass media is largely responsible for the degree of political ignorance and illiteracy in the American populace, but I question whether the people can really be held responsible for this. It's not as if there was a red pill/blue pill moment in everyone's life where they had to make a moral choice between remaining in blissful ignorance or waking up to a harsh and terrifying reality. If you find yourself awakened, or partially awakened, then recognize you are merely an accident of fate and with slightly different life circumstances, you might have found yourself drooling over Glenn Beck at this point in your life.

I'm not interested in playing some left-wing Cotton Mather and assigning judgment and blame to anyone but the people who created this system. It is counterproductive to follow the grand pwoggie tradition of demonizing the working class for their alleged ignorance and propensity to "vote against their own interests," particularly when there is rarely a party or candidate on hand which truly works for the interests of the people.

We should be brainstorming ways to reach out to our fellow citizens and educate them without putting them down. People are a helluva lot smarter than the elites of both the Left and the Right give them credit for, they simply have never been shown an alternative way of looking at things, so thorough is the domination of the mass media, traditionalism and the education system. We can see with the Internet creating alternative sources of info that many people have in fact begun to wake up and question the system, but there is a long way to go.

"And I didn't misread anything, Jack. You have tried several ways of saying the same thing, which is that causes don't matter. You final position is just as irrational as any of the others. It's even more illogical, though. The question at hand is the division of blame for outcomes, not whether outcomes exist. Do you blame the woman for her black eye because it exists?"

..for sake of all that is fair and just, Michael - you really are misreading me. And I think out of sheer stubbornness, at this point.

I'm not stating that causes don't matter. I've said - time and time again - that knowledge of a cause will not erase an effect. You can analyze how a voting public arrived at relative moral senescence all day long this knowledge, lodged in your memory, will alter the effect not one bit.

It's really that simple.

If you want to blame television, or the misapplication of the dialectic, for the apathy of the American people, go for it. This blame won't change what exists *right now.*

So what if you can identify a cause? I can identify the heat of the sun, the cause of so many terrestrial events. Knowing it doesn't erase the sun's effects.

Furthermore, knowing how something occurred is no guarantee of knowing how to address it.

If you watch Joe stab Jim with a knife, knowing the cause of Jim's wound does not mean you yourself are competent, trained or skilled in the treatment of it.

So, if you cannot just admit that you misread, ranted and went off a tirade, that's fine. But I've been typing the same thing all along.

MJS writes:
...But c'mon, folks, it's a political cartoon, not a purported depiction of some actual political rally. A woik of ahht, y'know, a product of imagination, reflection, and judgement, an instance of symbolic discourse.

Thanks, man. I was about to post an item that said pretty much that, but you beat me to it.

In my Senior year of high school, I was Art Director for my student paper, and did the editorial cartoon, and nabbed national awards for both. In my Journalism class that year, one of my favorite moments came when the teacher read the riot act to all the aspiring reporters, editors and photographers about snickering and dissing my pal and I for choosing political cartooning as a career. She explained the way we do our work better than I myself could; basically, I'm plowing through just as much raw copy, hitting the wire services just as hard, reading just as many op-eds, watching just as much Meet The Press as all the wannabe op-ed columnists but, unlike the op-ed scribbler, I don't get half the page -- I get maybe one-sixth of the editorial page to try and take all my consideration and analysis and formulation and crush it down into a single image that a reader will look at for maybe twenty seconds, thirty on the absolute outside. I don't have a half a page to vomit up a bunch of self-indulgent spewage that readers linger over with coffee. I've got half a minute to get in, say what I need to say, and get out -- kinda like a good old-fashioned three-minute Ramones song.

But, aaa-aanyway, @ jtf: Yes, the Teabaggers' and conspiracy l00n's signs are pretty much the verbatim text -- though I guessed at the misspellings -- of signs I've seen while covering Teabagger events (see http://www.youtube.com/mikeflug ...witnessing the Collapse, so you don't have to.). Yes, in fact, the Liberals' signs are short, minimalistic, placard-length analyses of the reasoning and behavior of Liberals and the (snicker) US Left.

It wasn't really planned that way, it just sort of worked out that way. Everything I've seen on Teabagger placards already is a short, minimalistic analysis of the reasoning of Teabaggers, and so needed only be quoted directly. On the other hand, as awesome as it was to be there, I can't recall a single Leftie placard at any peace mobe or IMF/WorldBank action that contained anything nearly as gob-smackingly entertaining as PUBIC OPTION = SOCALISM. Besides, when I reduced the thinking of Liberals, Pwogwessives and the (smirk, snurffle) Left, I came up with stuff that was equally gob-smacking. I mean, c'mon, it's all true. Huge swaths of Black America went for Obama even though he publicly declared to White America that he wouldn't cause any trouble and, in his Father's Day Speech (spit), he pretty much insulted Black America to its face. The entire "peace" movement stood down and supported Obama, especially the totally-useless UFPJ and the damn-near-useless Code Pink. Pretty much every Liberal and Pwogwessive I knew was going for Obama simply because he was "smarter" than Bush -- my PoliSci-degree-packing wife just couldn't shut up about that -- and because he had a goddamn' little "D" after his name; I'd point out his opposition to same-sex marriage, his support for escalation in Afghanistan, his vile-assed AIPAC speech, and they'd respond like those droids on Star Trek, "I...am not programmed...to respond in that area..." No, really; I mean it, man, their heads would twitch from side to side, and these little spots on their necks would start smoking, and shit... And, mind you, I know this from personal experience; in 2004, my own wife was an Anybody But Busher.

A few other loose ends, right offhand:
If Delusional Peaceniks really wanted peace, they wouldn't be wasting time beseeching politicians, and instead be doing whatever they could to bring this nation to a screeching halt (think San Francisco the first week of Iraq War 2.0, replicated coast-to-coast). They sure as hell wouldn't be dropping everything to help elect someone who, in his ghost-written tome, talks about how much he loved Ronald Reagan, f'crissake.

@ Michael Dawson re: television: Y'know, I'm totally down with you 99% on that point. I say 99% because in spite of its inherent vileness as a mass medium, I'm still thankful to have television in my life for two important reasons:
1. The Beatles Play On The Sullivan Show. Think of how long it would've taken us to realize how great they were if we all hadn't been able to watch them change from a rock'n'roll band into a cultural institution, live in front of our faces.

2. Apollo 8, Apollo 11. When I was eleven years old, I saw the Earth as a whole planet for the first time, as viewed from lunar orbit, on Chistmas Eve, live in front of my face. About seven months later, I had the honor of seeing humans walk on another world for the first time, live in front of my face. These would've still been life-changing events had I had to wait a week for the missions to return and the Hasselblad and 16mm film to be developed and snatched up by Life, but there was something about being able to view these events as they happened that had an effect on me that lasts to this day.

Other than that, yeah -- I think television as a technology is the shit, but Television™ as a mass-consumption medium is simply shit.

Jack, are you or are you not saying that there is no difference between saying "the overclass has addled the masses" and "the masses addled themselves"?

This whole thing is ridiculous to the core, as it tramples on both the diversity of the masses and the many areas of unrepresented popular decency.

And since when has the citizenry of the core imperium ever been un-addled? Our overclass is far and away history's most powerful and deniable. It has kicked the shit out of ordinary Americans.

Nevertheless, ordinary Americans are NOT a complete loss or utterly stupid.

And, Mike F, why aren't YOU out in the streets then, chained to something? The answer is that social movements are damned hard to start and maintain, and there are issues of timing, coordination, and simultaneity always at play. You have to know that a majority of the population disapproved of Obama's Afghan escalation, right?

What an unfortunate penchant for defeatism and nearsightedness we lefties have.

Michael,

I'm not typing in code. When you stated that telly was a factor, I merely responded by noting that the knowledge that tee-vee shits people's brains won't erase the *already existing effects* of television.

If you shoot an arrow at a target, I can analyze your form for errors, the fletching of the arrow, the pound pull of the bow, the straightness of the arrow shaft, the tautness of your string - but none of the knowledge gained makes one bit of difference when it comes to the shot you've already made. The arrow is already in the target. Knowledge does not erase effect. The present cannot undo the past. That was my point.

Perhaps instead of unleashing your head slapping angst, a catalog of assumptions and your Jesus palominos, you might have asked me a question about what I was angling at.

All this analysis of how voters end up being nitwits may give us a firm grasp of cause. I accept that as fact. But knowing the cause doesn't equip us with an ability to undo what is already done, and won't necessarily give us any tools by which to fix the shit that sucks.

I think it's all just navel gazing, like Lenin trying to dialecticize matter itself, and never conjuring up a theory which can include the relative immutability of photons, for example. If Lenin had stuck to trying to comprehend historically material contradictions, instead of wasting time and human lives trying to get matter to obey Hegel's mysticism, who knows if he'd have figured out a way to avoid democratic centralism, or been hip to the awful Stalin.

I think we're just wasting our time searching out who to blame. We know who it is. Done is done. No amount of knowledge on our part will now alter the primacy of the the Boob Tube, and its successor, the Interwebz.

I don't think it's futile, or I wouldn't blegh out my own thoughts, or engage you all in yours. I just don't think it will provide us with solutions, using the old terms and the old valuations.

The solution to capitalism and its discontents is labor, not whimbling about blame.

If we worry the problems of the system in this fashion, we remain stuck in it, like Lenin ended up stuck with the Czarist superstructure, and the Paris Commune with Napoleon Three's New City, like Nepalese and Indian Maoists are stuck trying to manage criminalized frontier zones in an attempt to defend themselves from Western armed and funded urban armies, like FARC is stuck in and around the llanos, reduced to taxing cocaine and shooting provincial judges.

The system is junk, top to bottom - and that includes any number of lumpenproles on the telly dole, and "creatives" who do not know word one about their own alienated labor, who mistake a wage for the produce of their own hands.

None of this lefty study and organization has worked, not since 1848. We are the history of defeat. We are the heirs of a series of failures so complete and total that this is an honor in its own right.

This is fact.

But, by asserting this fact I'm not - and at no point have I been - suggesting that the "masses" are idiots. I just never typed those words, and I certainly don't mean them.

Marx was right. In our own conditions, we can seize our labor's full produce. Not in bourgeois theories (like Lenin's, Hegel's and Trotsky's), not in nationalist mystifications (as offered by Palin) or in the sentimental betrayal of self respect(Obama). Not in Eurozones, or monetary policy.

In work.

In work that serves our own interests, first on the margins. Instead of acting like angry rhinos, ready to bash down the doors of industry and politics, to retake and claim our birthright - I suggest we grow like mold.

In the cracks and interstices. Along the edges. Growing our own food. Crafting our own tools. Threading our own cable, or tight beam communications. Fashioning passive solar (see Gaviotas) that costs $200 to make, when purchasing a solar panel from GE can break the bank. Quietly building a half world, away from the social and political gravity sinks of power.

This, I think, will work.

Not trying to fix or save people from "the system."

But by creating, together, that which will replace it when it runs hard and terrible into the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I read Jack Crow's repeated plaint as something along the lines of "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it." I don't see why it should mean that understanding why things have gone the way they have, though, is useless to the process of figuring out how to fix them.

Is your contention that this parallel semi-world will attract "converts" over time more surely than proselytizing will?

The natural response to Flug's observation is something like "then elect a new proletariat," and it becomes a hopeless elitism. "We're trying to save them, but they're too stupid to listen!"

There's a whole system devoted to keeping people in the dark, so it's no surprise we're crazy as a people. This is what a lot of people doing the best they can under the circumstances looks like, and yeah, it sucks. Like Sean, I don't think it's that people decided to take the blue pill, it's that the opportunity never arose. I know for sure I didn't come to my beliefs as a result of pertinacity or special insight into nature; it was all right place, right time.

Unfortunately, I personally really am a dirt-eater, because I looked up that "negation of the negation" thing and instantly got dumber. It looked a bit like another way of saying the "synthesis" bit of the "thesis—antithesis—synthesis" triad, but then I found a chapter of the Anti-Duhring and lost all confidence. Better to start from the beginning?

PS: "Pubic option" is the funniest phrase I've seen in a good long while.

StO,

I really didn't intend this long drawn out side conversation when I wrote, "Whether or not television has shaped society to the point that laboring classes no longer recognize themselves as laborers (a la Debord), it still follows that they remain governable.

I don't think addressing the cause changes the effect under discussion. We can outline one of the primary causes to we all end up corpsified casket dwellers, but that won't change the effect one bit."

I never suggested that we shouldn't understand how we got here, only that this understanding wouldn't change anything, in and of itself.

I have since elaborated that I think it can become a reflexive trap, where thinking about thinking replaces labor.

"If Lenin had stuck to trying to comprehend historically material contradictions, instead of wasting time and human lives trying to get matter to obey Hegel's mysticism, who knows if he'd have figured out a way to avoid democratic centralism, or been hip to the awful Stalin"

my entertainment for the day
thanks

" Growing our own food. Crafting our own tools. Threading our own cable, or tight beam communications. Fashioning passive solar (see Gaviotas) that costs $200 to make, when purchasing a solar panel from GE can break the bank. Quietly building a half world, away from the social and political gravity sinks of power."

you've got quite a sense of humor jack
who are you mimicking/mocking now ??

active small cell autarky

passive "socialar" panels

may the man made sun
of universal labor
shine on u

render unto ceasar
that which is pizza

MJS writes:
By the way, an offsite correspondent suggests I might have offended Comrade Flugennock by referring to "Juvenalia". Note however that this is not the same as "juvenilia."...

No offense taken.

It's sort of like when my wife refers to certain styles/genres of comedy as "stupid"; like, when I'm watching the Three Stooges on TCM, or the Venture Brothers on Adult Swim, she'll always respond with "god, that's stupid". My counterpoint to her is that all comedy is "stupid"; that's why it's funny. I mean, you remember that old Monty Python sketch about the two old prole wives arguing over whether or not Marcel Proust's work was an allegory for Man's search for commitment who then decide to take a raft across the Channel to visit Proust in Paris to ask him personally? Sure, it looks all smart and intellectual on the surface, but really, man, c'mon... it's Cleese and Chapman dressed as women, talking in silly squawky voices about Marcel Proust, and that's just stupid as shit, man -- and brilliant.

I'm still confused on a number of points, Jack. I don't understand where seeking to address the problem that exists precludes understanding cause and effect. Obviously any form of thought or action can become fetishized, but that's an ongoing contradiction in human thought and interaction, isn't it? Seems to me it's the puzzle we're always trying to unravel in our students and in our own thinking as teachers.

Obviously the public education system plays a huge part in the current levels of public obfuscation, but since the only way some of us got away from the general mess was through the education system, it's not such an easy target, at least so far as I'm concerned. I know lots of teachers who hate the current incarnation of public education more than some of the people who post here do, myself included.

This morning at work, for example, we have a limited teeny tiny forum concerning the growing tension between African immigrant students and African American students. Now, that sounds like an all school forum to me, since it's one that effects the learning community, and it's one every student in the school should be participating in via arts, statistic exercises, history, etc. Such a forum wouldn'tbe one that can solve the overall problem- which obviously is one that exists outside the school doors- but if the faculty can be seen engaging at a concretely theoretical level with a question that is important to the student body, it builds us credibility. There are great short readings by Fanon, Baraka, Reed, Patricia Williams, music by artists like KRS-One on this stuff. But do you suppose we'll do that? Not a chance, because such a process builds a self-defined learning community- and the ruling class hacks who oversee our schools these days believe that ultimately, test scores and data constitute academic rigour. That way, when numbers fall, they've got the numbers and "science' that underwrite the decision to close one of the last open forums in U.S. society.

Finally there may not be much more than arty social science to sociology, Jack, but most of the scientific thinkers I've found intersting- in the end think of any science as another branch of the arts, i.e., subject to revision where results don't line up with what creative and critical analysis is able to take in via the everyday. And I think marxism, and creative use of dialectical materialism in particular, as arty social science, acquits itself over and over again in terms of how it helps us understand cause and effect. Obviously I agree with you that what's decisive is what we do with what we are theorizing about, but roadmaps which are proven are always handy. I don't like to throw a compass out if it's offering a useful generalization in terms of direction.

Lenin's pamphlet, Jack? Are you talking about Materialism and Empiro Criticism? Yeah, it's pretty flawed on some levels I suppose, but also fairly perceptive in that the same battles on the left are going on today, except Lenin's machists now call themselves postmoderns. I've found the pamhlet uproarious, his humor is so caustic all the way through it, and I've struggled through it twice now. Is that the one you're talking about? I think it's a gem, very funny. And if you want to read something that's even funnier (though probably unintentionally so)read B. Avakian's "development" of its major points. But there but for the grace of the nutty hoodoo go we. May none of us ever be so long in the tooth or bored that the only thing we can think to with our time is create personal cults around ourselves.

I like the "Society of the Spectacle' train of thought that's running through here. It's difficult as hell to get any engagement at the actual situationist sites, where they're so busy creating plausible situations that no situations ever get created. And so it goes.

"you've got quite a sense of humor jack
who are you mimicking/mocking now ??"

Hell no, Owen.

As i try to make clear over my way, I've got a real disdain for any theory which requires seizing a broken machine in order to magically transform it into a justice manufacturing factory of infinite usefulness, with no chance of it ever being turned back into a broken machine again.

Michael H,

I have not precluded cause and effect. I've only stated that knowing what caused effect A won't alter the fact that effect A has already happened, and therefore cannot be undone.

My concern is with the study of study, and the thinking about thinking which preoccupies so much of leftist theory - and I think it owes a whole lot to the aforementioned fixation on detailing causes of past facts.

What I have never argued is what Mike Dawson seemed to think I stated, that we shouldn't understand causes or how they ramify into effects.

The problem with leftists, in general, is academic. Literally, it's the damned bourgeois academics. Most of those right bastards are quite honestly not working class, and that means that their jargonized inquiries, even where they make useful insights, are lost on those for whom amelioration and justice are intended.

They are outsiders, Michael.

Outsiders trying to impose "revolutionary consciousness," or whatever, onto an unwilling and deliberately ill defined mass of ungrateful recipients.

So while it might very well be illuminating to study how the idiot box came to dominate American culture, and how this domination led to such and such social and cultural deterioration, the possession of this knowledge on its own fails to address the fact that the domination of television (or cell phones, or boy bands, or the internal combustion engine) *has already happened.*

It's done.

My problem, I guess, is that too often those who've learned how some set of circumstances combined to arrive at our shared present are ill equipped to do anything past the point of the present, because the very lives they lead are divorced from the people they study and analyze.

They are like astronomers who may know everything there is to know about an extrasolar planet, but who have no way of getting close enough to land on it, because they way they live their lives might be essential to the study itself, but it grants them no advantage in getting there.

*
Is there no purpose served by opposing in any fashion at all the concentration camp that is Gaza? Let Clio deal with it! We have important forex hand waves to choreograph, classical fragments to translate.

TV is a swamp. People have been warped by it. Their children therefore must be warped by it in exactly the same manner, forever unto the nth generation. Except for the lucky few who have miraculously escaped TV's influence who must waste their time forever throwing feathers at it. Hard.

If it double posted it's b/c I'm outta practice.

jack's das kapital

its a broken machine fellow ghost dancers
return to your hamlets

jack's das kapital

"its a broken machine fellow ghost dancers
.... return to your hamlets "

You're spilling orgone out your love wounds, Owen, and missing the whole of the target, the field it sits in, and the reason why you've got the bow in your hand...

Is this a great country or what?

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0511/poll-ten-percent-americans-environmentalists-intentionally-caused-oil-spill/

you aren't claiming the machine built
by capitalism is broken ???

you really are mocking
the back to
good soil and
the nuclear unit farm movement ??

jack you become to clever by half if so

how else might one read this
but as an RX
along the lines of return to your hamlet

"Growing our own food. Crafting our own tools. Threading our own cable, or tight beam communications. Fashioning passive solar (see Gaviotas) that costs $200 to make, when purchasing a solar panel from GE can break the bank. Quietly building a half world, away from the social and political gravity sinks of power.
This, I think, will work."
do u ???

"Not trying to fix or save people from "the system."
but by creating, together, that which will replace it when it runs hard and terrible into the Second Law of Thermodynamics"
meaning the machine must break again...no ??

which i interpolate into this

"I've got a real disdain for any theory which requires seizing a broken machine "
capitalism's frankenstein monster

"in order to magically transform it into a justice manufacturing factory of infinite usefulness"
despite some excessive compression
i think that's fairly clear
anti endless 5 year plans
to industrial utopia talk
and taking your rhetorical tricks
into account and doing some cautious assuming

i take it this " with no chance of it ever being turned back into a broken machine again."
suggests you expect the opposite
a definite rebreaking

then again in light of this exegesis
i ....may.... miss the target ...perhaps
because ....you move it
to suit your purposes
whatever they might be

until i'm corrected i must assume

jack's das kapital

"the suystems broken
don't believe em if they say it ccan be made
into utopia
head for the grassy margins
cause the mother peak of all the peaks
is hovering near

"You're spilling orgone out your love wounds"

an oddly ....ripe image jack

hey my only "reason" is to find out where you're at
and in that light let me add
my operators are standing by
eager to receive from you
your new co ordinates

meanwhile i'll ready
the smbiva " revenge weapon"
for another friendly firing http://farm1.static.flickr.com/25/60661526_b10c3130a0.jpg?v=0

Read it however you want, Owen. But, wanting to avoid taking over the machinery of the state does not equal wanting to build utopian hamlets.

that's your leap
not
mine

now i get it

the state is the broken machine here

not modern corporate "industry"
not the technical spiral driven by the profit motive

THE STATE and hierarchical CLASS SOCIETY !!!!!!

"the social and political gravity sinks of power"

POWER!!! the absolute abuse of man by man
AUTHORITY !!!
the hypnotic substance
of personal submission

and this :

"In the cracks and interstices. Along the edges. Growing our own food. Crafting our own tools. Threading our own cable, or tight beam communications. Fashioning passive solar (see Gaviotas) that costs $200 to make, when purchasing a solar panel from GE can break the bank. Quietly building a half world, away from the social and political gravity sinks of power"

isn't any thing but self reliance

communal or solitary

hippie drop out stuff
or frontier fremont

hi tech but self built
out of fair traded for green parts
i guess
and operated strictly lean keen and green

living off the universal labor store mostly
ie off the accumulated know how of past generations
the trechno culture suitably modified for sustainable livin'

not necessarily " we be the collective crusoe club "
jusyt one way or other
living the life sustainable
free as pigeons in a park

sorry if i called that "half world"
amaking itself out there
hamlet life

st Al calls it hobbit life

Hamlet might have called it a nunnery

and the notion is i guess
you wait out the corporate state
like a wounded polar bear
eventually it will fall down dead
either starved of natural resources
or simply swallowed up
by its own social contradictions

meanwhile you live the best existence
personal liberty intentional tuning out
and crafty ingenuity can provide

obviously there's a choice like that
for any of us ....somewhere
and if by chance there's not
u can build
your own special choice
for yourself

others have done it
for as long as states
have existed on this planet

with mixed results