An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
But you're making the same argument as the people who automatically disagree with the hippies... I guess you know that, though... And frankly, people who dress as sea turtles are more fun than the people who mock them (insert mock turtle pun here).
Amen. I want to add, too, that a *lot* of the "dirty hippie" objection isn't, in fact, an objection to the silliness of people's politics. It's merely an aesthetic objection--which makes the objector the silly one. Just because someone dresses as a sea turtle to get some airtime at the WTO protest doesn't mean that their politics (and for that matter, their marketing savvy) aren't quite sophisticated.
God knows that I've been typecast enough as one of those "silly" feminists who, by definition, one prefers to distance oneself from. You don't have to be all that silly, in this culture, to get slotted as a kook. Simply believing that, say, people should have health care is enough to do it in a lot of circles.
The "Jesus Christ you people are embarrassing" reaction to anyone waving a sign is the one I was raised with.
Me too. Back when the war-talk was heating up, I was a university leftist who had recently voted Green, who listened to NPR and read Le Monde Diplomatique, and who was dating a French mostly Marxist artist. Not mainstream.
And yet I thought myself SO much more respectable than the campus Sparticists. Ok, I don't feel bad about looking down on the Sparticists, who are crazy, but you know what I mean. I'm really fond of the puppets, even though I know they've become a target of mockery. Billionaires for Bush are awesome street theater.
This reminds me that for the next big march, I really need to come up with a slogan for a sign. I've failed to summarize my complaints the last few times and so went empty-handed. Gotta try harder.
I make fun of the hippies as much as anybody, but I will admit that one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had was carrying one of those big-ass puppets in a protest march in DC back in 2002. They're good folk, by and large.
LB -- I am picturing your parents as a leftwing Archie and Edith now.
Also, you want embarrassing? Try being in a strike. Waving a damned sign and chanting "the people, united, will never be defeated" in front of your students.
(I spent some time in college thinking of a group name that would have a cool acronym (Progressive Union of Columbia Students), and carried a puppet (of sorts) in a demonstration, and do not consider myself to have been serious in my political thinking.)
I also hated the puppets at demonstrations. Like, really, really hated them. (Not the people but the puppets as a symptom of the lack of actually persuasive expression. And in normal life I ADORE puppets.) I distinctly remember being surrounded by the thousands of people who nominally agreed with me in oopposing the war, and almost tearing up b/c I felt so very alone. I don't have anything against hippies in general----I grew up surrounded by them----but I am also deeply skeptical of many stereotypical hippie modes of thinking, exactly b/c I'm intimately familiar with them.
And in the end, I kinda want to say a pox on both their houses, but of course more on the house of war. B/c this is just a great example of how style can be the most distracting, useless, irrelevant, shallow consideration ever. And a pox on the house of puppeteers for not being able to contain their wanking self-expression for the most serious issue, and a pox on the house of war for acting like it mattered when it mattered not one little bit.
/end surprisingly bitter rant.
sometimes `silly' just means a different value system, that you misunderstand, too.
A bit, although for my mother as a young woman you want to lean more toward Laverne.
But you're making the same argument as the people who automatically disagree with the hippies... I guess you know that, though... And frankly, people who dress as sea turtles are more fun than the people who mock them (insert mock turtle pun here).
No, that was the point of my last paragraph. If you're disagreeing with people because they're silly, you're disagreeing randomly, because there are silly people who will take any position you can name. If you've got to be making knee-jerk decisions, doing it on the basis of which side people are on rather than how esthetically embarrassing they are is much likelier not to lead you astray.
And whoever posted 1 should be ashamed of themselves. You don't know archy the cockroach?
I don't understand what people have against the puppets. They are often pretty, and make the demonstration more visually interesting than an angry mob. I also have no idea why anyone would take the puppets have any argumentative weight for or against the views of the puppeteer.
Perhaps we all have our different pet peeves about the fringe elements that movements attract. I *loathe* the Marxist cults like the RCP and the Sparticists (although I haven't had much dealing with the latter.) Most of my reason for hating them, though, is not aesthetic, but epistemological. I know poisonous group think when I smell it. The marxist cults are a different species of fringe element than the homeopathic hippy or the crusty punk, though.
Also, no one on the right ever abandons a view because it is shared by embarrassing klansmen. Why should we waste our time distancing ourselves from this or that part of the coalition?
If you're disagreeing with people because they're silly, you're disagreeing randomly, because there are silly people who will take any position you can name.
I suspect this is behind a lot of political views on both sides of the aisle. I wanna be liberal, and cool, and for the student union, because I'm not The Man... yet. I wanna be successful, make money, have a nice living, so I don't want to be antiwar because that's where the hippies are. I'm pro-war, because I want to be strong and like Jack Bauer, and also because I hate protest rock.
You get the idea. People tend to pick the group identification over the policy. It may be silly, but it's very, very common.
I read a lot of RCP stuff when I was in college. They really are bad people.
In all honestly, when I examine my own rage and bitterness, I probably feel as Ile Has does in 9. The puppets and sea turtles and inchoate multi-messaging of every cause from left to lefter was kind of wonderful during the anti-globalization protests. There were a lot of facets, a lot of causes wrapped up into those movements.
But the demonstrations against the war in Iraq should have been much more specific. Time was really limited, and protest was already marginalized; the sea turtle costumes probably should have stayed in the closet on those occasions. Of course, the moms with strollers and the respectable-looking grandparents totally overwhelmed the anarchists and Free Mumia! t-shirts, but we should have all known how press photographers like to focus in on puppets.
Biohazard's around, I don't know about Emerson or the women, but I for one am old enough to have been one. There were, of course, many different and contradictory beliefs among the tribes, although there was a general live-and-let-live tolerance among them. People were drawn to different aspects. I was in favor of free love on principle, but never experienced any, much to the disappointment of older guys who asked me about it. What most appealed to me, and to my sister, was the do-it-yourself aspect. I made clothes and fixed all manner of things—yes, glasses— virtually rebuilt a series of Volkswagons, and helped a lot of other people with their cars. I still do that.
My dad was an articulate cold-war leftist. He only gradually turned against the war, and was never comfortable with the "New Left." Michael Harrington was his hero. On the other hand, he thought the lifestyle was amusing and harmless.
I *loathe* the Marxist cults like the RCP and the Sparticists (although I haven't had much dealing with the latter.) Most of my reason for hating them, though, is not aesthetic, but epistemological. I know poisonous group think when I smell it
I actually have an uneducated softspot for the Sparticists, because one spent a year hanging around my high school trying to convert people at lunch and after school, and he was such a schlub. I think Sparticist and I think hapless and pathetic. But yeah, any group that hasn't managed to firmly distance themselves from Stalin is pretty awful.
The funniest/most absurd thing about the "don't want to be associated with those people thing is that, instead, you were aligning yourself with the most bloodthirsty, war-hungry, hateful, and intolerant people in the country. Like, "Little Green Footballs and James Dobson are bad, but at least they don't want to free Mumia."
And of course, the other stupid thing is how apparent it was that the street protests were 75% non-hippies. But hippiness is like black blood - just 1/16 makes you impure.
Oh, and one other thing: the sea turtles got famous at the Seattle protests. Well, 8 years later, Paul Krugman, who mocked the anti-globalists with the best of them, is now closer to the sea turtle people than he is to the average tenured economist. In other words, LB is right: when in doubt, side with the dirty fucking hippies.
My parents are both hippies, I suppose. Or were. We lived in a caravan in the grounds of a ruined farmhouse when I was a baby, my dad had long hair, and so on.
But my Dad was also an ex-Marxist turned anarchist, who'd grown up on the most notoriously hard estate in post-war Glasgow, and been in the army. So airy-fairy homeopathic granola hippiedom wasn't big in our household. Thus, I grew up with lefty politics but of a fairly class-centred, working class strain rather than 'liberalism' in the contemporary US sense.
The lifestyle elements of 'hippiedom' I hate are all the trustafarian, middle-class-crusty bits. Can't stand 'em. Purely on chip-on-shoulder class grounds.
The DIY stuff that IDP refers to, self-sufficiency, experimental living, and so on, is all cool.
I was careful to go to the UFPJ protest instead of ANSWER, and even then there were problems: when my 86 year old Jewish grandfather wants to march against the Iraq war he should not have to hear tirades against Zionism (he's anti-Likud; this was a more one sided sort of thing.)
Before that, my husband tried to go to a thing in Boston, and was so frustrated with the street theater that he ended up going shopping instead. (I gave him no end up crap about that: "War is sad! Let's go shopping!")
Some of this is aesthetic snobbery. I will NOT chant "hey, hey, ho, ho," and you can't make me...on the other hand, if they're alienating me, aren't they alienating other people a lot more? I definitely prefer savvy strategists like the folks in the nonviolent civil rights movement.
But that's a reason not to go to a protest sponsored by one of these embarrasing organization's, at best--it's not a reason to *support* the war. And the onlyreal solution to embarrassing antiwar groups running the protests is for the nonembarrassing ones to organize better protests.
I think I recently accidentally offended a hippie by poking fun at believing in ghosts.
I really need to come up with a slogan for a sign.
I'm still proud of my hand-lettered sign saying "FEED THE POOR, NOT THE WAR." Although it does rather reek of dirty hippieness, especially since I made the 'W' a different color.
English is not a good language for chants, unfortunately, and for this reason American protests are doomed to have their focus scattered.
That was something that I never figured out. All the protests I heard about were 'sponsored' by ANSWER, which is legitimately awful, but tiny -- within a statistical margin of error no one at the protest either supported ANSWER, or had even heard of it. Why was it so hard to find a protest that wasn't sponsored by a Stalinist group?
Similar things happen here with the Socialist Worker's Party. Who organize a lot of marches and do a good job of getting placards prominently featuring their name distributed.
Because protests are anti-American, obviously.
"Bikes, not Bombs!" is my favorite. "Books" works too.
Isn't "dirty hippie" the shorthand Atrios uses to hold a mocking mirror up to hawks, instead of something the hawks ever said?
The phrase is Atrios's, but I've seen the thought process admitted to by actual liberal hawks, and from arguing with people at the time I talked to people who certainly seemed to be thinking that way.
For me, the problem I've always had with DFH's (or more accurately, I guess, "knee-jerk leftists") is their refusal to engage in the world as it is with shades of gray in much the same way as the 'for us or against us' brigades of the right. This was particularly infuriating because I tended to agree with them in broad policy terms, but when we got into specifics and I didn't immediately and irrevocably sign on to the most radically-left view, I was an enemy of the Good as well...
If Marxism wasn't fully discredited by that point, I'm sure I would have been instructed on my "false consciousness."
The next set of big protests is going to be Jan. 27, by the way. I don't know which unacceptable groups are sponsoring them, but I'm sure Stalinists can be found within a few degrees of separation. I'll be there, and I'll be carrying some sort of stupid slogan-bearing sign. Come on out with me!
30: Yeah, Richard Cohen recently had (several dozen) columns to that effect. I'm reasonably sure that both Ezra an Yglesias have admitted that their pre-war views were tainted by distaste for hippies.
"This war has always been a disaster and a lie"? Too wordy, I guess. "Bush is a walking catastrophe"?
Michael Harrington was his hero.
As well he should be.
25: Well, the reason is this: organizing protests is boring. Protests can be fun, but calling people and sending press releases and putting up signs and doing all ten million things associated with them is hard work, time consuming, and often needs to be done during the business day. The Sparts and the other crazy-left types WORK HARD. They're nuts, but they do a huge amount of work and put in a lot of their own money for loudspeakers and making signs, and that's why they run the protests. I mean, the Other Left can step up the the plate any old time.
As a dirty hippie, I guess I get frustrated with the "Hm, a lot of dirty hippies actually have degrees and read a lot and know what they're talking about and work for a living, but there's a few stupid nineteen-year-olds with trust funds who run their mouths a lot, so I will just ignore everything "they" say" routine.
While I'm complaining, let me say that I'm so very sick of the relentless disapproval of dirty hippies for our various low-consumption lifestyles. "Ha-ha, you spend $100 on a fair trade skirt? That's crazy! You must be some kind of bourgeois poser! Why, I would never spend that much on a skirt; I'd spend it at the steakhouse and on my iPod instead! You MUST be stupid or a hypocrite because you're spending your money to create an alternative economy!" And the contempt for the no-fur, vegetarian ("But meat tastes good, LOSER!"), bike-riding ("Get a CAR! Get a LIFE! Get out of the way!") type stuff too. (And I mean, I eat sushi and have a second-hand coat with a fur collar myself) Like, what the hell is so great about buying a lot of stuff and paying all that car insurance? If you like it, I guess, but I get tired of the rhetoric where people try to put me in the wrong because I actually don't like television or something. (And I would point out that I seldom bring this stuff up in conversation--partly because the response is invariably incredible hostility.)
Peter Bagge (an anti-war libertarian) did a very good comic strip about his experiences at an anti-war protest.
My co-blogger remarked in comments to a post of hers about the same subject: "I felt like Bagge and I must have gone to the same march or something. Even down to the [pro-war] mullethead. I laughed, I laughed...then I felt kind of bad. Then I laughed some more. It's true...it's all so true."
Is it worth asking what this sort of mass demonstration really accomplishes anyway? Do they really have any traction or persuasive power? Strictly anecdotally, people seem to have seen that movie already, you know?
18: See: trolling high schools for converts. Looks more like pedophilia than grass roots activism.
17, 20: The DYI & experiments in living stuff is one of the most compelling aspects of the left for me, in both its hippie and punk incarnations. Notice that this is *exactly* what people anathematize when they shun the "dirty hippie" left, though. These are the people who are *culturally* different in the deepest respects.
hippiness is like black blood - just 1/16 makes you impure. Exactly. And wanting to be able to say "I'm left, but I'm not like those people" is precisely the same kind of internalization of objectionable views that people express when they talk about being "x, but not *capital* X" (feminist, but not man-hating; black, but not a nigger; a woman, but not girly; an immigrant, but not lazy; etc.).
29: "Dirty hippie," or some version of it, is just like "politically correct" in that respect--a term of self-mockery that we all use that, when invoked semi-seriously, demonstrates a kind of internalized identification with bigots.
"So how does it feel to have been thoroughly outsmarted by a bunch of dreadlocked potheads?"
Biohazard's around ...
And old enough to be LB's father. I went a bit right in my teens because my father was CIO left, and I've been drifting ever leftwards since and much more rapidly as the right took a sharp turn on to the Nutsville Turnpike.
I've always thought Far Anythings were silly no matter how they costume themselves but I won't pick a position simply in opposition to that. I guess, and I'm fumbling for the right words, my political philosophy is Pragmatic Utilitarian Existentialism. I want identified problems solved efficiently and with a minimum of evil side-effects and I don't worry much about whether the solution fits any particular ideology.
OTOH, having done a fair bit of the "oh, shut up, vegan; meat is good" type of baiting myself, I know that a big part of why people do it is reaction against perceived sanctimony.
Which, ironically, is the same reason people dress up as sea turtles, you know.
The lifestyle elements of 'hippiedom' I hate are all the trustafarian, middle-class-crusty bits.
"It's got to be the first picket line in history where everyone's in North Face, Uggs and Diesel and drinking Starbucks while protesting that they don't get paid enough."
-jaded undergrad on the grad student union.
Protests have to be disruptive to have any good. It seems that anti-war protesters are unique in not wanting to be disruptive. Why would you march through the financial district on a Saturday? Are you trying to make sure nobody notices?
41: Too long to fit on a sign, Apo.
Not really a commentary on the DFH angle, but I have the same wonderings of Pooh in 38. Who is supposed to be convinced of what by a mass protest, and does it ever work?
Yeah, the Poll Tax only got squashed in the UK after riots, rather than peaceful protesting.
French protests all seem to have an air of "We will, no shit, burn this city down if we don't get what we want." American ones don't these days. If we did, we might be more convincing.
38: Demonstrations have different kinds of persuasive power depending on the issue and the nature of the protest. Sometimes they're useless, true.
A really big protest often gets media and gets the issue onto front pages/websites/whatever. Sometimes a small but persistant protest on a niche issue does the same thing.
On an international front, protests can legitimate the group who calls them--for example, the Zapatistas. (Who are really great, rather than being the eighties-South-America-retreads that some might assume) The Mexican government knows that when the Zapatistas call a protest, roads in Mexico will be shut down; consulates and embassies around the world will be slowed down by lots of protesters; and news media will to a degree write things that reinforce the "Mexico=corruption and violence" stories that dissuade the tourists.
In the long term, some protests on some issues build a movement and help change the political climate--but that's really long term. AIDS research comes to mind. Right now, lots of research funding is being slashed, but AIDS dollars are still (mostly) there. That's not because our government loves teh gays and teh Africans; it's because a discourse about AIDS was created in large part by activists who used protests as one of their tactics and as a result there's a huge, morally-charged funding apparatus. (Which should not be taken as an uncritical endoresement of AIDS research as it exists.)
Protests also help people see that others are on their side. (of course, if you're the kind of person who doesn't want to be associated with dirty hippies and/or is put off by a few crusty punks this may not help.) The anti-globalization movement really took off after Seattle, and a lot of good stuff has come out of that. (Details upon request.)
Protests can be stupid or pro-forma or useless, and some people just don't like them. I have a low tolerance for crowds, so I really have to nerve myself up to go to them.
At this particular moment, a big-ass peaceful demonstration might have two political uses I can think of. One: it might stiffen the spines of some of the Democrats who are ambivalent about making forceful moves against the escalation. Two: it might solidify the various anti-war coalitions into a self-conscious political contingent.
36: Yeah, that is bullshit. It is for some reason (and I did some of it myself in the post) very acceptable to make fun of anyone who associates themselves with a leftist/anti-consumerist lifestyle, because, you know, they're just funny.
Making fun of rednecks instantly makes you a bigot, though.
"This war has always been a disaster and a lie"
That would make a pretty decent T-shirt, actually.
So you all, are you willing to go to a really militant protest if it's not held by the Sparts? I mean, the militant people I know usually try to tone down their tactics in the hopes of courting the lawyerly/teacherly crowd. And the people who are most willing to really mix it up, if yanno what I mean--those people are the dirtiest of dirty hippies. (My street-fighting years are well behind me by now, but I do know what it was like to go into a protest knowing you were going to be beaten and knowing you were going to fight.)
I think that an anti-war protest would be more effective if it was held on a weekday and if the march wasn't pre-approved by the city.
But then nobody would show up because they don't care enough to skip work and risk arrest.
Um, I'm scared of violence. I'd probably be willing to get arrested, if that were on the cards.
49, 50: Yeah, the advantage of that kind of protest is that it can scare the government into doing things. The disadvantage is, well, every decade or so the whole city gets burned down.
French protests all seem to have an air of "We will, no shit, burn this city down if we don't get what we want."
Mmm, that depends. In the summer, some neighborhoods get two or three manifs per week, I kid you not. Those are formal stagings, designed to create pressure on budget decisions.
And then every once in a while, you get the serious protests: the Brinks truckdrivers who shut down the ATMs for a week, the semi-regular Metro strikes (which can bring down governments), and whatever the hell was going on in the schools last year.
48 and 50:
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. At one point "taking to the streets" was certainly a good way to draw attention - though how much of the attention was due to the reaction, (fire hoses, German Sheppards, etc.) rather than the protest itself - but it's become old hat. I mean PCU sent up the protest culture pretty well a decade ago. People have a degree of outrage fatigue, and there is a fairly high bar to clear before the urge to simply say "sit down and shut up, you silly person" can be overcome.
To my mind, the more effective form of activism is things like the Lamont campaign. That got 'their' attention pretty well, I think, because it hit 'em where they live.
53: Nah, both are perfectly acceptable. But I could just be saying that since I'm mostly a hipster, and our entire lifestyle is a joke anyway.
The anti-globalization movement really took off after Seattle, and a lot of good stuff has come out of that. (Details upon request.)
Actually, if you and the other people here don't mind, I'd like to hear. Especially since it seems to me that globalization has been continuing rather nicely in the past 5-7 years, with generally pleasant results worldwide. The major blows these days seem to come from government actions (nobody trusting the US, no developing country budging on farm subsidies) rather than mass protests.
I knew a guy with dreads to his ass who grew pot for a living and sneered at dirty hippies. Point being, dirty hippies are those to the left of yourself. "Over-the-top starts to the left of me!"
60: Well, everything old is new again, I guess, because it sure seems like protests do achieve things on certain issues on a regular if not constant basis.
I guess I don't like to be too sweeping in ruling out tactics. There's a time and place, as the poet says, for a command from the Emperor and a time and place for a letter from the third bursar.
You can certainly anthropologize or satirize the culture of almost any group, but that doesn't mean the group is exhausted or that the group's culture can't achieve anything. I mean, if that was all it took, the Christian right (so easy to lampoon, so easy to categorize) would be exhausted, decadent and ineffective right now...heck, it would have been exhausted and decadent in the early twentieth century. But it, like its nominal head (or like Osiris or Barbarossa, I guess), rises again.
Plus, people on the left like to make fun of the left...just like anarcho punks like to make fun of drunk punks, or crusties like to make fun of pop-punk types. We produce a lot of this analysis and satire ourselves.
48: Sure it can work. The Coalition of the Willing was so small -- and didn't include NATO allies like France, Germany and Canada -- at least partly because many of the countries involved had massive throngs of people in the streets saying "stay out of Iraq." Enormous immigrant protests have arguably been a very effective tool against the latest Republican anti-immigrant drive, though that story is still playing out.
It's not always [i]predictable[/i] that it will work, and it's usually a good idea to save it as a tactic for moments when it can be most politically effective -- as when other means and media have already generated widespread outrage about whatever you're protesting. The stage needs some setting, as it were.
I think much of the American anti-war protest movement expected too much of rallies -- for many people, it was their first time in a protest movement -- and were unwarrantedly demoralized when they failed to stop the war.
I doubt you guys get anywhere close to the illegal immigrants' protest numbers from last year.
Charlie from Obsidian Wings, or is the name just a horrific coincidence?
60: "but it's become old hat."
Yeah, it was old hat in Susan Anthony's time, old hat for the Veterans in 1932. No point to street theatre.
actually, I blame Savaronela and Botticelli.
66
:(
As they say in the opening credits of "12 Chairs," hope for the best, expect the worst.
And then every once in a while, you get the serious protests: the Brinks truckdrivers who shut down the ATMs for a week, the semi-regular Metro strikes (which can bring down governments), and whatever the hell was going on in the schools last year.
Now, I'm sorry, I know this will piss off a fair number of pro-union people in this town, but my first thought at a couple of these strikes is that scabs are necessary. How do people deal with constantly losing their transportation and/or access to their money? Why should all that rage be directed at a government or a bank when they're not necessarily those at fault? Gah!
Jeez, this is the only site that is stuck on "bobmcmanusb" I don't have to check on the other ones, so I don't pay attention.
Probably a sign.
67: Bob, I think that's overly dismissive. Perhaps due to changes in technology, everyone has simply seen many more protests then in times past, so they start to became background noise.
ack, s/b "than in times past". I hate when I do that.
You're an incredible tool, and persuading you to go away promises to be annoying. I hope you at least brought cake.
69: Yes, that should piss off the pro-union people, and rightly so. There are few things sillier than the "unions should only strike when it won't cause inconvenience" meme. The whole point of strikes is to demonstrate what happens when you don't have workers at those jobs. Like Brinks trucks supplying ATMs.
If you like. The requirement for bringing baked goods only kicks in once you get annoying here.
What amazed me in Paris was that it wasn't until the fourth day of the Brinks drivers' strike that my more yuppie-ish friends started to make nasty noises.
This might be interesting, I've yet to see this dynamic play out in the mineshaft. Should I invest in popcorn or earplugs?
Three posts already qualify as "annoying"? Is this some kind of left-wing echo chamber?
Back on topic: protests aren't going to work. Short of impeachment (of both Bush AND Cheney), there's no stopping the troop increases. What I really found funny was the NON-BINDING Senate resolution. What a hoot!
I don't see any reason to fuck around with half-measures, LB.
Nah, I like reserving actual banning for the actually insane. If you aren't purporting to be fair to people, trolls aren't terribly difficult.
Civility rears its ugly hear once again . . .
I think much of the American anti-war protest movement expected too much of rallies
I don't think rallies mean much now but polling numbers and donations (or the lack of those) do. There's nothing that concentrates a politician's mind more than the thought of having to find another job.
What's effective is solid information handed out to the undecided in an effective way. For me it was the combination of the unfolding facts and those short bios of the US troops and Iraqis killed that kept showing up as I surfed around that did it.
My main thought during the big LA immigration rally was how to avoid getting stuck for hours in traffic tho' I'm in favor of a fairly loose immigration policy.
You should get that hear looked at, Charlie.
But he's certainly met the requirement for bringing cake. Or cookies, I'm not fussy. Something with hazelnuts, maybe?
Just keep in mind that January 20th (day after tomorrow) is the last day you guys can get rid of Bush and keep then-President Cheney from running for TWO more terms. Good luck!
61: Well, actually, the revolution is going to happen tomorrow starting nice and late at about 10:30 so that everyone can sleep off their buzzes. We've got it all taken care of. Years of secret planning have produced an underailable plan.
No, seriously--"anti-globalization" isn't a term I use a lot in activist circles, since "globalization from below" makes a bit more political sense.
I'd be the first to admit that, yeah, nasty evil globalization-from-above is still winning. It has a lot more people and a lot more money.
Things that I can think of on the spot that are related to protests against g-from-a: democracy movements in Mexico (indigenous activism, unions) ; material aid (computers, radio, know-how, money) to those movements from groups in the US; the legitimation of a bunch of things advocated for years invisibly by anti-g-from-a types (microloans, affordable AIDS treatment in Africa); increased awareness of (and practice of) local food initiatives; and, honestly, the most recent round of GATT negotiations did NOT go how the US was hoping that it would. And GATT majorly, majorly sucks--or at least a lot of the proposed provisions do. Even the IMF has had to engage in some self-critique, or at least the IMF self-critique document that I saw a few years ago in a researcher's office here seemed to indicate so.
(We might usefully, I think, talk about legitimation here.)
Now, this isn't an "Al Gore invented the intertubes" argument--I'm not saying that because of a single protest in Seattle the University where I work holds a farmers' market. I am saying that Seattle crystallized and made visible a critique of globalization and people have responded to that critique. Some of them are activists who send radio components to Mexico. Some of them are foodies who arrange for local supplies of arugula. Some of both groups go to protests, watch left documentaries, etc.
I know that's inadequate in the face of globalization from above, but I think that there are good initiatives going on because of the critique that became visible in Seattle. (I, by the way, wasn't there.)
The thing is, people held that protest for a reason--there were already the stirrings of a critique of g-from-a. That critique moved some people to protest; some people to read articles in the Nation; some people to donate money to the Sierra Club--and of course, some people to do absolutely nothing.
"Dirty hippies" aren't actually thatdifferent from the culture they inhabit. The things that move them move a lot of other people too, but to greater or lesser extent. If there are a huge number of dirty hippies (using that term in its broadest sense) doing something, they are doing it because it's a reasonable response to the times we live in, not because it's some random irrational corollary of dirty-hippiedom.
I mean, yeah, children die from preventable diseases because big pharmaceutical companies want to make a profit. Forests get chopped down. OSHA gets dismantled. And merely holding a protest doesn't stop that.
But when we hold a protest, and actually do some stuff (oh, that reminds me, there's waaaaaayyy more fair trade stuff around than there used to be, and that's totally about making consumers aware.)...well, when we hold a protest and do some stuff, I find it disappointing to get the response of "Oh, I don't want to help you, but you must be pathetic because you've only achieved a few things on your own rather than disabled globalization and brought about utopia."
Maybe this is all stupid and I'm no better than your average faith-based idiot, but that's the way it's going to be.
71: I think it is about violence. When I studied the suffragettes in England of the early 20th, I was shocked at how extreme and destructive some of the Pankhursts were. And 9of course you had Russia and socialist/anarchist violence all over Europe.
When you have a half-million marching on the Pentagon in combination with an extreme fringe blowing up Mathematics buildings and kidnapping Patty Hearst, the MAN gets scared and looks for compromise. My study of the history of social democracy, shows that though we allf course frown on the violence, the violent extreme wing empowers more centrist reformers and revolutionaries. MLK looked good when you had Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
I don't know that much about India, but considering what happened immediately after the war, I would be very surprised if there wasn't violence denounced most firmly by Gandhi
That's certainly something. One thing you can say about the internet is that a whole lot more people are giving small political donations than ever were.
This all reminds me that I should really make one of these cakes.
Chuck, that is some seriously weak stuff. I mean we're unmoderated here and that's the best you can offer.
How about chocolate and macadamia?
75: But here's the thing: it's supposed to be an argument between management and the workers. Customers have no business being caught in the crossfire. For virtually any private company, it works out just fine because the business loses a lot from being shut down while their competitors prevent the customers from being left out in the cold. I'm not going to cross a picket line at a Jewel when there's a Dominicks only a half-mile further walk.
But when you're a monopoly provider, such as the public transportation workers, you're just cutting off everyone in the entire city for your own benefit. Not only that, but you're agitating for a pay raise that the entire population has no choice but to pay. At least if a private business gives in to union demands that seem outlandish, customers can just go elsewhere. So they screw over all the people in the city earning half as much (or less) than they do per hour because they want some more of the taxpayer's money, and somehow the government gets blamed? It seems like a very different scenario from most union strikes.
hmmm. i like hippies. a lot of my friends are hippies. it's good to know them because they know where to get the good stuff. the good hummus, that is. i don't know what they think about the war, because we don't talk about that stuff.
and now you know.
Shit, he's turned into an acronym. He's unstoppable now!
I thought this was Charlie Whitaker (who sometimes drops his family name). Nope. Sorry Charlie.
91: That's an interesting variation on the Overton Window. Certainly plausible. But if memory serves NoI came to prominence well after SCLC and other groups had started making real progress.
93 -- a little late for that isn't it?
I went to a few lefty puppet-carrying protests in the runup to the war and amused myself by chanting, "The people, united, are usually defeated" and similar. I dislike mobs, even when I agree wholeheartedly with their goals. Milan Kundera speaks eloquently on this in Immortality, I think it was.
But sorry, 97 is very off-topic and likely to spark something massive. I was venting, so if everyone would just like to ignore it that would be more than fine with me.
hear = head = Jackmormon
UNCOUTH. Pistols at dawn.
103.--It is, but then, I'm neither Catholic nor French...
Liz:
Technically, it's an "Initialism" rather than "Acronym" ; )
Is it worth asking what this sort of mass demonstration really accomplishes anyway?
I think they create a sense of community and of shared concern among the marchers more than anything else, and that this is very valuable and A-OK. When Ashcroft was in Durham to speak to a bunch of law enforcement folks about the PATRIOT Act as part of his big road show, Rah and our then-roommates and I went out to a pretty impromptu (there was only notice of the local chatter variety for a couple of days beforehand) protest across the street and I was amazed at how many people were there (somewhere in the low hundreds, but still definitely in the hundreds). That was heartening. That did a lot to make me feel like I wasn't nuts for thinking that the government is nuts.
On the puppet topic, Rah is fond of the saying that the revolution should be more fun than what we were already doing. I can get behind that, but I think the purpose of the gathering itself needs to be taken into account when the general atmosphere is created. If it's a rally-the-troops sort of march designed to let activists know there are people who care about the same things they do, great, party on. If the goal is to convince apathetic strangers of the justness of a given cause, much as it will sound like middle-class compliance and softness to say it, it's probably best to look like the people you're trying to convince in the first place. People are dumb and yes it's this very mindset we should ultimately work to bring down, but people are going to be swayed by people like them(selves?) before they're going to be swayed by someone very obviously different. Giant puppets are fun and entertaining and awesome and artistic and I think they are probably a turn-off to people who look at the news and think surely those people have nothing worth saying.
That sucks, yes, and I disagree with it, yes, but it's a fact. If tomorrow every tired and short-sighted form of conformity were to fall by the wayside, every hour on the hour, the last one to go would be that people are more likely to listen to someone they perceive as being like themselves and it would be stupid to pass on the chance to use that for our own ends. The fact is that sometimes you just have to go to someone where they are and guide them by the hand away from whatever it was they were thinking because they weren't thinking at all.
At said anti-PATRIOT Act protest, my sign read "What Would Sheriff Taylor Do?" I figured an allusion to Andy Griffith and the whole idea of the officer of the law who policed by being a part of the community rather than above it would have a chance of striking a chord with someone, hopefully someone in a uniform. An angry guy near us demanded at one point to know who Sheriff Taylor was, was he local, and I said, "No, you know, Sheriff Taylor? The Andy Griffith Show? Deputy Fife? The lawman without a gun? You know, our state, North Carolina?" He didn't get the reference and was pretty steamed in general and reacted in some negative way that I can't remember well enough to quote and what I wanted to say, but didn't, was, "Look, mack, I'm not here to convince you."
105: Yeah, we amused ourselves at the anti-Iraq war protest by chanting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" and "NLF is gonna win/London Paris Rome Berlin"....well, quietly chanting. Although on one memorable occasion we derailed the Maoist-led singing of "All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance" (Again! Get some new songs, for pete's sake!) by whinging and refusing to sing. And got glared at by a woman from Code Pink (who I quite like, generally) as a result.
Crap, 70 comments appeared between the start and finish of typing that comment. I hope it doesn't sound even more stupid now.
108: OK then. Well you can bring it along to the meetup, and we'll all have cake! Despite C.h.a.r.l.i.e.'s failure to come through with the goods -- I feel bad about shifting the onus of pastry-procurement onto your shoulders just because we got a fuckin lazy bunch of trolls around here, but WE MUST HAVE PASTRY.
Robust:
You were including COUNTER-demonstrators in your "low hundreds" count? As I said above, no protest is going to stop troop increases already on the way.
Civility rears its ugly Jackmormon again?
The contortions, just thinking about it.
Thesis: The U.S. is too big for effective protests.
when you're a monopoly provider, such as the public transportation workers, you're just cutting off everyone in the entire city for your own benefit.
You're right, but there isn't much of a way around it for public employees. If you work for a private company, striking gives you leverage by financially hurting the company. The government doesn't respond to that sort of pressure, so the workers get leverage by causing constituents to complain. The only way to do this is by inconveniencing them. It sucks (temporarily) for everybody else, but short of banning the workers from striking (which is actually what's done for the U.S. teacher's unions) it's pretty much inevitable.
Cala:
I think your thesis is dead on. You also did see Jackmormon's post above: "I don't see any reason to fuck around with half-measures" right?
JAC, you might enjoy reading Timothy Burke's entry about the Philly transit strike in 2005.
91:I have encountered "Overton Window" several places this week without a clue as to what it means. Don't worry, I am headed to Wiki.
I think "incivilty" is the key when you desire radical change. That can express itself in various ways, from communes to hunger strikes, but you have to feel generally alienated from civil society. MLK may, may have been in tune with America as a whole, but he was a massive "Fuck You All" within his context of the 60s South.
The hippies are the real thing. People who want a 25% reduction in defense spending and a slight expansion of Medicare are just going to get war and dead babies in the ghettos.
I have been known to appear generally uncivil.
Yes, the NYC subway workers strike, for which, mercifully, I was out of town, was technically an illegal strike, since there's a law against public services workers striking. The union managed their strike poorly, I think: subway strikes go over a lot better with the public in June or July than they do in late December.
Huh, huh, huh, JM said "fuck"...
bob:
When did the REVEREND King, Jr. ever curse in public?
123: And it's giving Charlie the vapors...
Sorry, I can't resist 97, but I'll try to make this my only response: But here's the thing: it's supposed to be an argument between management and the workers. Customers have no business being caught in the crossfire.
If the workers are providing an essential service, they're well within their rights to dramatize the importance of their work over the short term in order to prevent much more serious service shortages (and attendant consequences) in the long term.
And I don't see what the problem is supposed to be with workers expecting to be paid commensurately with the importance of the service they provide. Yeah, okay, public transportation workers can strike and "force" people to pay higher wages for them. So what? They're providing a significant service that most people either use or benefit from indirectly. Why that should be a sticking point in a society that pays outlandish money to CEOs and entertainers just boggles my mind.
Technically, it's an "Initialism" rather than "Acronym"
Uh, no.
126: Yay, the real Charlie is here to sort us out!
89: Thanks, I never really thought about those protests bringing a lot of the Organic and Fairtrade movements closer to the mainstream.
I think you're really overestimating the effects on a lot of the aid, though. Actually the Bill Gates money on its own damn near doubled spending in a lot of AIDs, TB, and other research on tropical diseases. Plenty of the anti-AIDs movement also started in the 90s when entertainers first started coming out with their diagnoses and the whole Red Ribbon movement.
As for microcredit and other somewhat alternative forms of aid, those have been around in fairly large-scale programs since the 70s and 80s (with fairly mixed results, unfortunately).
And as for communication in the third-world, that's been largely improved thanks to the billions invested by for-profit telecoms, which have started up all over the poorer areas of the world and are some of the most successful existing businesses throughout central Asia and sub-saharan Africa.
I'm going to be biased, absolutely, but a lot of the actual good movement toward helping the poor in the past couple decades seems to have come from either improved trade, new technologies being implemented worldwide, or the new crop of philanthropists who are dedicating billions toward helping the poor in major public-health and infrastructure kinds of ways.
Does anyone else find someone trying to intentionally threadjack an Unfogged thread freaking hilarious?
We all so desperately want to return to our dispassionate wonkery...
(yes, yes, s/b wankery...)
I'm with Dr. Slack. The employers have an implied agreement with their customers to be available to provide services. If the workers aren't happy with what they're being paid, on the other hand, the 13th Amendment has been law for a long time. They don't have any obligation to show up to work.
126: Yeah, I was worried about jumping on the troll and then finding out it was you. Just be sane, and we shouldn't have any trouble keeping the two of you straight.
bob:
I just searched the collected works / speeches of MLK Jr. and, shock as it may be, the word "fuck" never came up even once:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
the immigration protests were effective, no? Helped kill that godawful House bill.
people apparently called the immigration court and suggested to the clerk that we go out and arrest all of them. I said she should have started cursing the caller lously in Spanish (they hired a lot of bilingual people so they could double as translators if needed).
97: I don't think that works when the workers are service employees. Whether it's TAs or bus drivers, employees don't *have* any leverage against management that doesn't go through the customers. Wanting the public to not be inconvenienced by a strike is pretty naive.
Which kind of leads me to a response to 58: for a lot of people like us, who are basically pretty invested in "the system," protests are really supposed to be symbolic. The fact is that most people who aren't directly and personally affected by issue X are *not* going to be willing to be arrested or beaten, or even pepper sprayed, for it. We look back nostalgically at the 60s and think that "real" protests were Big and involved The Cops, but I've got video footage of my folks at Vietnam protests that were essentially small, street theaterish things. With puppets, even. It may well be true that its things like attack dogs and firehoses that change public opinion, rather than puppets. But I suspect that the willingness of the public to at least symbolically protest something is a pretty good measure of, well, public opinion.
130.--Yeah, but those protests were bolstered by an entire intellectual movement. The kids from Seattle maybe went on to grad school, where they were more likely to study with people doing post-colonial work, or international development projects, or free-trade management. Or maybe they didn't go to grad school; instead they became organic farmers or water-management engineers (with an interest in global projects) or socially responsible investment portfolio managers. These are thinkable careers today (I know people about my age doing all of those); they didn't use to be.
I think the troll is trolling himself.
130: It may depend on how you measure the efficacy of the protests. Protesting alone probably won't get the pharmaceutical company to release its drugs more cheaply. But bringing the problem to the attention of someone with enough power and money and sensibility to do so? Perhaps.
Also, 120, thanks, that was a pretty interesting blog post and really summed up most of my thoughts on the issue. Well, those and my first thoughts upon seeing the CTA and MTA pay scales being "Where do I sign up to get a bus driving license?".
Not at all, Cala. I'm simply probing bob's thesis that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a "massive 'Fuck You All' within his context of the 60s South" that's all.
I already said that I agreed with your thesis.
But you still haven't brought cake, Danish, or anything.
130: Well, actually I did mention the AIDS activists in another post, but there was a HUGE difference between what they were working on and the intiatives that are being started in Africa now. (I'm not actually a fan of a lot of those initiatives--I think they're short-sighted and insufficient--but if you're the person who gets the drug cocktail when you would have died otherwise, you're probably pretty glad.)
See, I don't think that there's this firewall between "activists" and philanthropists/corporate aid. Quite the contrary--one reason to do activism is to generate enough publicity that some progressive rich people will kick down a lot of money because they're moved by the situation or because it will make them look good. This has, of course, a lot of drawbacks.
I think my examples weren't clear, because I was trying to give different types. The "radio components for Mexican democratic movements" one was about radicals helping radicals and about a changing concept of media production. It wasn't about massive changes in telecommunications; in fact, the need for stuff like that is in large part because of the expense and inadequacy of globalized telecommunications.
To reiterate: I don't think that microloans are happening now because there was a protest in Seattle. I do think that there has been a change in the mainstream discourse about globalization that derived substantially from Seattle and that legitimates and publicizes microloans, making more of them available. (And honestly, I have mixed feelings about microloans as well, since they seem to benefit only the most functional among the very poor.)
What I was trying to get at in a jumbled way was this too: First, when there's a big change in how the world works (like globalization) lots of people are thinking about it and working on it at a given time. They're all doing different stuff. There are many different goals, and projects that emphasize very different things.
So, second: Bill Gates isn't interested in globalization because the hippies pointed it out to him; both Bill Gates and the hippies are interested in globalization because it's happening and it's important.
Therefore, third: a big event like Seattle can change the popular discourse on something that is already in the popular consciousness, especially if it's something that people are already worried about.
And fourth, tangentially: A big enough difference in quality is a difference in kind. You can write a history of globalization which posits globalization as a smooth, uninterrupted flow from ancient times til now (which can actually be a great way to shake up your thinking) but it can be just as useful to investigate those situations where globalization speeds up, or new technologies become widely used, or new laws open up new terrain.
Which makes me think of this, fifth: I would frame the matter of globalization as something that changes and picks up speed through the seventies and eighties so that there is substantial impetus for Seattle by the mid-nineties.
And concludingly, sixth: It's really hard to develop a theory of why things happen, and the meta-theories like "trade and development alone make things better" versus "trade and development need to be moderated by protest, community organizing and law in order for things to improve"--well, that's largely a matter of faith.
"So" since I agreed with your thesis, but disagreed with bob's thesis, I thought I'd spend some time asking him the questions. Not sure where you got the idea I was trolling myself -- do you think I am bob mcmanusb too?
137: But (at least from my perspective) that intellectual movement from Seattle mostly went along the lines of No Globalization! A lot of the improvements that we're talking about are currently being implemented through the market, through global trade, and thus in a manner somewhat contrary to the original protests.
But to the extent that those protests got some people to think of the environment or of the situations of the international poor, I applaud them. I never really thought that people could be ignorant enough of these realities that they needed protests to awaken them (though the anti-globalization movement at that time did indirectly lead me to Adbusters magazine, for which I thank it).
133: Yes, I noticed you hesitated for almost a whole minute there before going for a few pre-emptive insults just in case.
So actually I'm now going to speak up in favour of silliness. If only because I've noticed that people can't really win: they try to 'express' themselves and some condescending sociologist says they're 'individuating' and assigns them to some tribal category or other. And then the advertisers have a go ...
There was a naked cycle ride in London the other day - not seriously undermined by silliness. The police looked silly because they were clothed. The two anti-war marches I went on in 2003 (dressed soberly in my grey city overcoat) had a fringe of colour, but weren't much undermined by silliness. On the other hand, Bush's 2003 London visit was very much characterised by folksy protest traditions - a lot of people were banging drums and blowing whistles all night. Would be nice to think he didn't get much sleep. Pissed Blair off something terrible too: I suspect he's had it in for 'the British people' ever since.
Sane?
I never really thought that people could be ignorant enough of these realities that they needed protests to awaken them (though the anti-globalization movement at that time did indirectly lead me to Adbusters magazine, for which I thank it).
See, here I think you're wrong, and protests are useful. Remember the conversation in the other thread about how much attention you had to have been paying to realize the case for war was fishy? Most people aren't paying attention at all to anything political, and the protests are useful.
136:"But I suspect that the willingness of the public to at least symbolically protest something is a pretty good measure of, well, public opinion."
How did Mario Savo and free speech at Berkeley become the March on the Pentagon in a few years?
How did Rosa Parks turn into the Washington Mall?
Of course the draft created a direct interest, but we all have a direct interest in the deficit and health care and abortion? How does general disgruntlement or issue advocacy turn into mass civil disobedience and revolutionary change?
By connecting the issues. By saying civil society is racist, imperialist, patriarchal, and robber-baron capitalist etc, and all these issues are inextricably tied together, and everything must change. Everything.
And then you get a lot of people who will be...uncivil. And maybe you get a little change.
Frowner:
What do you think about this plan: http://www.purposedriven.com/en-US/HIVAIDSCommunity/HIV_homepage.htm
bob:
Are you calling for civil unrest?
But (at least from my perspective) that intellectual movement from Seattle mostly went along the lines of No Globalization! A lot of the improvements that we're talking about are currently being implemented through the market, through global trade, and thus in a manner somewhat contrary to the original protests.
Right, but the take-away from a lot of the protests (even for some of the protestors) wasn't that The Form of Globalization is Bad but Looky, Here Be Bad Things Wrought by Globalization. That people knew about the bad things and then brought whatever tools they had (capital, fair trade, rich philanthropists, etc) to fix the Bad Things just shows that the result of the protest wasn't what the protestors anticipated.
Yes, I noticed you hesitated for almost a whole minute there before going for a few pre-emptive insults just in case.
But they were conditional pre-emptive insults! I had room to back down if I had the wrong guy!
And I suppose a distinction should be made between being silly and acting silly. I've known some leftists (and many non-leftists, of course) who were silly people -- they didn't think through their positions, focussed on unimportant things, and so forth. But perfectly sensible people can do silly things (blow whistles all night, dress up as sea turtles) either for fun or because they're effective even if silly.
151: I wouldn't call the type of unrest bob's looking for 'civil', exactly.
146: See, this is sort of like, um, the thread topic. If you're reading Adbusters for the anti-globalization, yes, you will encounter "No Globalization", just like if you go down to the Green Anarchist group house you're not going to get any dairy products with your dinner. But that's not the sum total of the movement. If that's all you encountered, of course, then that's what you'd have to build your opinions on, just as I have a bunch of fair-trade/anti-sweatshop/local production or well-compensated international production types as my experience of the movement.
The other thing is that small things can be bigger than you think, so to speak. I volunteer at a progressive bookstore staffed by a bunch of goofs. It's always struggling to stay open, and some of the volunteers are just plain rude to customers (although we've waged a campaign on this and it's gotten a lot better). While demoralized one day, I was thinking "Well, hell, so what if it closes? What good does it do?" And then it occurred to me that we provide affordable meeting space for a couple of really worthwhile (on anyone's terms) groups, and we have a committee that sends massive amounts of miscellaneous used books to women in prison and this committee, legally, can only operate as part of a commercial bookstore. We hold events with touring authors who attract a reasonable audience but don't make enough money to be able to appear in larger venues. We sell a lot of small press stuff that you just won't see in a chain store and might not stumble across on the intertubes. People also find new activism from the store. The thing is, a small but stable institution can affect a lot of people, even if it can't provide lots of resources.
So I was thinking that all these small fair trade co-ops that have sprung up (and you can buy work boots from the Zapatistas, for example)...well, they're small and maybe kind of unsatisfactory, but I suspect that like the bookstore they are not negligable.
144: I'd say we're pretty much in agreement then, or at least I can really see where you're coming from with all this. I'll just say that I'm a bigger fan of the current disease-fighting initiatives in poor countries than you probably are because so many of the good ones nowadays are working on the public health infrastructure that's so vital for vaccination and fighting malaria, TB, and all the other nasty ailments aside from AIDs.
148: You're almost certainly right. I still have residual eye-rolling left over from when the protests were going on because I'd spent a good deal of my lifetime going to Uganda, Vietnam and other countries where my parents were working with local public health professionals, so most of the valid complaints seemed obvious to me. Since I was a know-nothing 15 year old, I figured everyone else would know just as much.
Also, the anti-trade tone generally turns me off most of these protests.
148: Most people aren't paying attention at all to anything political, and the protests are useful.
I don't think that's necessarily true. I certainly knew a number of people in 2002 whose support for the war was in some sense predicated on, as you said in the OP, the sense that the protesters were embarrassing and they didn't want to be associated with them. Worse, they then used them as an excuse not to listen to me -- lil' ol' me, about as non-hippie as bolshie folks come -- when I kept trying to make the anti-war case. IOW, while the protests helped people realize that some folks didn't like the war, the mere fact of the protesting, let alone the wackier elements thereof, was often spun as an excuse to dismiss anti-war arguments altogether.
155: And sorry if I was unclear, I do like Adbusters mostly for the art, and because I have a residual warm feeling for the notion of Detournement even if I disagree with most of their economic perspectives.
155: One thing I do bang on about is the difference between a small amount of influence and no influence. You meet a lot of people who fudge the two (i.e. people who are trying to explain why they don't vote).
Yeah, that's the mental error I was arguing against in the post, and I don't know what to do about it other than trying to talk people out of it.
150: As an atheist who grew up in a left-leaning Christian home (See! Leftism does lead to atheism!) I have contradictory feelings about faith-based initiatives.
I think that if Christians are out there helping the sick and orphaned and making sure people get medication where possible, then roll on, Christians.
Ultimately, if I'm working with pro-life (like these folks seem to be) Christians on an issue, there's going to have to be a parting of the ways--because I don't expect them to change their core beliefs and I won't change mine, and if we work together long enough on enough issues this will start to matter.
I mean, like a lot of people who try to think seriously about solving global problems, I know that you muddle along and work on funny coalitions, and sometimes the coalitions get too funny and you have to leave, but if you're careful you can do that without messing up the work you've done and you don't do it until you have to.
(Or at least I assume that you linked to a Christian (and I think pro-life) anti-AIDS initiative because it's something that dirty hippies are unlikely to embrace?)
And... umm... I gotta leave work for class right now, so I won't be able to comment in greater depth on any of the Public Workers Union bits that I incited. Suffice it to say that Timothy Burke mostly covers it in his blog when he says that he judges strikes on their individual merits. For most of the public workers strikes that I've seen recently, the pay looked pretty near obscene for the jobs that were being done, so I didn't really see much reason to support the workers as they screwed over the millions of poor who rely on them to get to their jobs. If the workers were poorly treated or working horrendous shifts or paid a low wage or not recieving a good retirement plan or not recieving a health plan, I could probably scupper up some sympathy. But as it is I instead hoped for scab labor to break the paradox mentioned by LB (city owes transport to its citizens, but the workers can't fairly be forced to do their jobs).
Thanks for being nice to me in opposition, everyone.
163: Well, with the transit strikes around here anyway, the issue isn't usually the pay and benefits per se--it's management's attempts to weaken the union. Management is always thinking strategically (cunning bastards!) and they know that if they can introduce tiered benefits (new workers don't get as good as older, usually), or start putting a lot of work on parti-timers, or similar, they will erode the union and in the long run they'll be able to do all the other crappy things that they want to do, like freeze wages, get rid of pensions, substantially cut benefits, etc. They're not thinking about just one contract negotiation, and neither is the union.
That's why a strong union will sometimes strike over something that looks like a luxury ("Why are they striking when they make good wages and all that management wants to do is cut benefits for new hires?"). It's because they want to win when they're strong, not fight a desperate campaign against a big abuse when they're weak. (Says the member of a weak union who has seen several things like this recently--you wouldn't believe some of the stuff that's starting to happen.)
The thing is, you can't legitimate abuses just because they are "good for the poor". It's like Wal-Mart. If you're really poor, Wal-Mart is great, sort of--cheap toilet paper, etc. But in the long run, WalMartization produces more poor people who are more vulnerable, so even though fighting to reform WalMart seems like it's striking a blow at the source of cheap toilet paper, it's actually kind of neccessary.
164..."parti-timers"...I wonder is that more like "party-timers!" or more like "parti-colored"?
Transit workers on strike: well, when the ones on my line strike, it's Brian Souter of Stagecoach Plc. who loses money, which means also Pat Robertson, who Souter donates to. And frankly, the service his shitty company provides couldn't be any worse.
157: I certainly knew a number of people in 2002 whose support for the war was in some sense predicated on, as you said in the OP, the sense that the protesters were embarrassing and they didn't want to be associated with them. Worse, they then used them as an excuse not to listen to me -- lil' ol' me, about as non-hippie as bolshie folks come -- when I kept trying to make the anti-war case.
Yeah, but if these people's decision-making process about war was shallow enough that being "embarrassed" by the sight of protesters was enough to decide the issue for them, evidently they didn't need much as an excuse not to listen to you, right? Compare and contrast that with the number of people who went out to those demos who had never dreamed of doing anything like that before. Really, you can't expect protests to reach people who have already shut themselves off; you can hope for them to reach people who would be receptive but might otherwise not pay attention.
Management is always thinking strategically (cunning bastards!) and they know that if they can introduce tiered benefits (new workers don't get as good as older, usually), or start putting a lot of work on parti-timers, or similar, they will erode the union and in the long run they'll be able to do all the other crappy things that they want to do, like freeze wages, get rid of pensions, substantially cut benefits, etc.
This is really something labor needs to explain to the public more loudly and clearly. It's a huge, huge issue, but it's really not obvious -- I get it from when my mother was on strike over the same issue at TWA back in the day -- and I'm not surprised that plenty of reasonable people don't see it.
Looked u Overton Window on several links, and doesn't quite apply.
We just had a MLK, and I celebrate it here by saying the Natonal Review was right about MLK, at least in part. And the Burkes are right, both Edward and Tim, at least in part. And MLK and Gandhi were wrong.
The National Review said that MLK was bad because once you decide which laws you may or not obey, and make it you personal choice. you have just completely abandoned civil society. It will spin into the Terror, and the Partition Wars, and the Detroit and Newark Burnings not in spite of your good will and best efforts but because of them. There is a strong sense in which Rosa Parks/MLK cause the Wisconsin bombing, or at least cannot fully evade a small part of the responsibility. The illusion and desire to keep things under control, the good intentions count for little. If you as a leader or example abandon liberalism, then all things become possible. Thinga may go completely out of control, or just fizzle out. It ain't your call. You don't get to say"The SLA went too far, wrong laws, their conscience doesn't matter"
I differ from MLK and Gandhi in accepting that responsibility. And while for the record I abhor the Terror and race riots and and Gulag, I think the historical benefits of temporary conscious illiberalism have on balance outweighed the costs.
I myself had been seeking the principium individuationis.
170: Oh, cmon the letter from the Birmingham jail is a joke that only PC liberals can enjoy. "Now, only unjust laws of course." Nah, there are no potential problems with that philosophy and action-plan.
And Gandhi waving his hands in the air and saying:"Why can't we all just get along now that the British aren't oppressing us?" How many millions died?
Or Lenin abandoning the worker councils. Or Sistani in Iraq demanding quick elections.
If you start a fucking revolution, don't try to escape the responsibility for it spinning out of control.
172: Didn't the American Revolution start from the premise of disobeying unjust laws, yet manage to (mostly) retain a working legal structure? Seems to me that's a bit of a working counterpoint to TNR.
Lenin was about remaking society, not civil disobedience, and Gandhi was launched into a power vaccuum to deal with several centuries of ethnic hatred stoked by British divide-and-rule... so aren't those kind of different cases?
I mean, it's an interesting point as far as it goes, but how far is that, really?
132
No one is saying public employees can't quit (subject to any contractural obligations they may have) but if they do stop showing up their employer should be able to hire replacements as with the air traffic controllers.
I don't see why we should allow public employee unions to make what amount to terroristic threats in order to extort money from society.
Yet another argument against government health care.
Didn't the American Revolution start from the premise of disobeying unjust laws, yet manage to (mostly) retain a working legal structure?
Yes, but the extent to which it was really a revolution (rather than a dispute between sets of economic elites) is controversial, isn't it?
175: I think it would commonly be classified as a political revolution rather than a social (class-based) revolution.
174: if they do stop showing up their employer should be able to hire replacements as with the air traffic controllers.
And since they have no collective bargaining power, their employer should be able to run employees into the ground at will without reprisal. Because that's totally great for public safety.
177: In that case, I suspect maintaining a working legal structure would be less unexpected than in many other cases of civil disobedience.
So who wants bagels!
Also, what wants donuts.
175:"I think it would commonly be classified as a political revolution rather than a social (class-based) revolution."
Based on the nature of many of the volunteers in Washington's Army...Hamilton for instance, the brilliant bastard of a Jamaican whore....
Based on part of the underlying program and almost immediate consequences...recent lower-class immigrants moving West into Ohio and Kentucky to steal land owned by Native-Americans under British treaty and law...
...the genteel civilized nature of the American Revolution is not so clear.
I'm finally getting around to reading McCullough's "1776" and, while the leaders of the American Revolution were definitely "elite" the vast majority of rebels were not. I agree that was a political revolution as opposed to a social (class-based) revolution.
Who said anything about genteel or civilized? Politics is messy.
Also, what wants donuts.
Not teofilo, evidently.
Did anyone else agree with McCullough's thesis that the American Revolution would have been lost had it been reported the same as the MSM reports on Iraq?
bob mcmanusb:
Did you see my prior questions to you?
180: True. But Bob had the civil rights movement in mind, which if we're going to talk in terms of "revolution" at all would seem basically on the political model, a dispute within the American ruling and middle classes about how to treat the issue of segregation. Actual elements of social revolution were fairly marginal to that, though the rhetoric and influence of social revolutionaries got lots of play.
187: If they'd had blogs, I'm sure there would have been pro-King George warbloggers crying "No End But Victory" long after the Revolutionaries' victory was obvious.
DS:
Instantaneous, real-time, communication sure has changed the world, huh? I still think if the U.S. had elected Strom Thurmond as President, we wouldn't have all these problems today.
"though the rhetoric and influence of social revolutionaries got lots of play."
If the 60s was anything, it definitely included a social revolution that was not really predicted by the left in the early years. We started with Rosa Parks, and ended with Woodstock, gay and women's liberation, abortion, drugs, all the welfare state, environmental and worker protection legislation. It was an utterly different nation in 1970, and different in a more radical way than say 1950 was different from 1890. JFK and MLK probably would disapprove.
The conservatives OTOH did predict the chaos. And hate the 60s to this day.
Reagrding antiwar slogans for Jackmorman, here are some suggestions (btw what is an appropriate word limit?): "Out Now", "Divest Iraq", "America First", "Time to Leave", "Stop the War", "Stop the Waste", "Stop the Bleeding", "Stop Reinforcing Failure", "No More Lies", "No More Nonsense", "Cut and Run", "No Blood for Iraq", "Bring the Boys Home", "Bring the Troops Home", "Know When to Fold", "3xxx Dead for Nothing", "The Fat Lady has Sung", "How Many Dead for Nothing?", "Fight for America not Iraq", "Support the Troops, Bring them Home".
Before the French "surge" in 1781, was the Revolutionaries' victory "obvious"?
194: Well, yeah, but that's not what I meant by "social revolution." Most of those things were enacted by struggles within the middle and upper classes that enacted all the various measures and social trends that the losers in those struggles smarted about ever since. Civil rights got where it did as much because Thurgood Marshall was on the bench as because of MLK, let alone aspiring working-class revolutionaries like the BPP (who were aggressively attacked and successfully sidelined).
I'm not downplayed the importance of the period, I'm just saying I don't think comparing it to Gandhi or Lenin works.
Even after it was "obvious" at Yorktown, note that the war continued on:
Second Battle of Ushant - December 12, 1781
Battle of Sadras - February 17, 1782
Battle of the Saintes - April 9, 1782
Battle of Blue Licks - August 19, 1782
Battle of the Combahee River - August 27, 1782
179
There are alternatives to allowing strikes such as binding arbitration and civil service protections which give public employee unions some degree of bargaining power. Teachers in New York often obtain ridiculously favorable contracts even without striking.
Technically not "American" but fighting continued even AFTER the Treaty of Paris. The Battle of Cuddalore, for instance, between a British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hughes and a slightly smaller French fleet under the Bailli de Suffren off the coast of India near Cuddalore took place on June 20, 1783, after peace had been signed in Europe but before the news had reached India.
Why did frowner and Dr. Slack bring up "revolution" in the first place? Is that what you guys are trying to do with your March on D.C.?
Instapundit on the Battle of Blue Licks: "Remember that American Revolutionary War we supposedly "lost"? Ross from the Queen's Rangers says [url=http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/winter2000/bluelick.html]guess again.[/b] Heh. Indeed. Long live the King."
Well, Frowner actually made a joke about how "we", the dirty hippies, had everything underailably ready for "the revolution", which was going to happen tomorrow morning once we'd all gotten our hangovers under control...Frowner, being a dirty hippie, thinks talking about "the revolution" is kind of funny.
I mean, if we could have a sort of not-very-bloody social democratic limited revolution, I could get behind that--anyone up for one?
169: So wait, are you saying that we all must obey all laws no matter how unjust, because not to do so is to abandon civil society? I tell you what, you get the upper-middle and upper classes to go first, and we'll see what happens.
Or actually, maybe it would just result in a massive slowdown, like "working to rule"--hey, general strike! We'll just obey every single itty bitty law and our whole country will break down.
Or perhaps you were just kidding, because this position seems to suggest that the laws of "civil society" were lowered from heaven on tablets rather than put together by people.
206: I believe bob is saying quite the opposite, in fact.
208: Yes, I blush. I...er...didn't read the last sentence. Stupid Frowner. Unhinged by posting so much today, I guess.
207: I'm not going to explain the joke, goddammit.
I looked up what Tim Russert said about my thesis (borrowed from McCullough) above:
"He said, 'If we had covered it the way we're covering this war, we would have been in the soup, and that would have been it.' There wouldn't have been a successful revolution. This is the reality of war: that there's violence and it's tough and it's terrible."
197:"I'm just saying I don't think comparing it to Gandhi or Lenin works."
It works for me. I am pretty ignorant about India, but I do know that 1935 USSR was very far from what Lenin & Trotsky expected in 1910 or even 1920. MLK's turn from civil rights to Pacifism nd economics was a result I think of a profound disappointment in the outcomes.
I guess the difference is between reformers and revolutionaries. A reformer works within the law, seeks consensus, and expects incremental change in a predictable fashion. I believe all of those elements are required to differentiate reformers from revolutionaries. Abandon any one of them. and you are letting the tiger out of the cage.
Incidentally, Bush and his supporters are revolutionaries (cf Krugman), and have put America into revolutionary conditions again. I have no idea how it will turn out.
For most of the public workers strikes that I've seen recently, the pay looked pretty near obscene for the jobs that were being done, so I didn't really see much reason to support the workers as they screwed over the millions of poor who rely on them to get to their jobs.
This sounds reasonable, except that it basically pits blue-collar workers against other blue-collar workers. If the subway drivers' jobs are *that* necessary for social functioning, then they damn well *ought* to be making excellent money and excellent benefits: pointing out that they're not as bad off as some minimum-wage WalMart worker in effect suggests that anyone who isn't living at a bare subsistience level has no right to try to better their working conditions, which is silly.
206: Well, Abbie Hoffman wrote "Steal This Book" in which, when asked about yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater, yelled "Fire!" I approve of the sentiment.
OTOH, I know very well that lil' ole me advocating violent revolution and massive civil disobedience is very unlikely to inspire LB and hilzoy to start building bombs. This is neither disappointing or comforting.
This is neither disappointing or comforting.
I was under the impression that the McManus worldview had little room for either disappointment or comfort.
187: Charlie, the American revolution wasn't led by a lying dry-alcoholic fratboy moron. Nobody respects Bush any more except Bible Christians and TV zombies. Conservatives only respected him when he was successfully scamming their product for them
The American Revolution also wasn't promoted with an orchestrated disinformation campaign either.
Your comparison is worthless.
215: Yes, Frowner is a careless reader, and is becoming addicted to refering to herself in the third person..I think I had enjoyed disagreeing with people so much today that I was desperately looking for someone else to quarrel with...luckily Unfogged provides lots of such people all the time. Otherwise, I'd be a trembling wreck.
I know very well that lil' ole me advocating violent revolution and massive civil disobedience is very unlikely to inspire LB and hilzoy to start building bombs.
They might be more inspired if you actually bothered to build bombs, Bob. You don't seem to believe in violent revolution either; you simply believe in advocating it.
214: Not buying it. If a business is in a competitve market, labor action by unions will change the distribution of revenue between capital and labor. The capitalists aren't expected to like this, but no one really has much sympathy for them due to their powerful position. When there's a monopoly, the benefits to labor will more probably be extracted from consumers. With the subway driver's union, the consumers are by and large the poor, and the capitalists are the taxpayers. You don't expect stockholders to feel solidarity with the striking workers of the company they own; nor should one expect taxpayers to feel solidarity with striking public sector unions.
Every time I look at the post title I think about a young man I saw trying to drum up support for a protest rally in a downtown park during lunch hour a while back. About 20 years old, haole, dreadlocks, absolutely reeking of pot smoke, in the midst of the downtown lunch crowd with his sign. Most of the passersby probably mostly agreed with him, but that sure wasn't doing his protest much good.
221: This might make sense except that any strike is subject to the same argument--that the capitalists will pass on costs of labor to consumers, directly or indirectly. You'd have a better case if we were talking about legitimate public employees whose salaries and benefits came out of public funds, but even then there's the argument that a strike of needed workers makes a good case that they should be getting a bigger chunk of public pie.
Except that a government isn't a corporation. It's in the interests of the taxpayers of NYC to have the workers in the city unions making a decent middle class wage, because we have to live with them, and it's a crowded city. We are all better off when city jobs pay reasonably well, because comfortable people make better neighbors.
Plus what LB said. I kinda dodged the corporation thing, b/c I have no idea if subway workers in NYC are public employees or if there's some private contractor thing going on.
224 There are all sorts of nice things New York City could be spending money on. I don't see why above market wages for city employees should rank very high on the priority list.
221: I can't quite put my finger on why, but that seems like an inadequate framework. It seems to treat things in a fragmented fashion. I mean, I'm not an economist and all, and maybe this is just faith-based reasoning, but: When there is high-paying work, there's wage pressure on other employers. When unions get broken and labor conditions get crappy in one part of the economy, that tends to press things down elsewhere, both because employers no longer have to compete with each other for good employees as much and because of the psychological effect on the workers. (That is, if there's no pension plan for anyone, then the good employees won't all cluster 'round the pension plan.) So in general, it's in my interest as a secretary-type to support strikes. For the wealthy and the professional classes generally, well, not so much because you-all are perhaps going to be employers and don't really want to have to offer pensions. Yes, it sucks that poor people need to ride the bus and then they don't have other resources when there's a transit strike. I heartily concur. But it would suck much more in my layer of the economic torta if government jobs got as crappy as the Repugs want them to.
222: The trouble is, this all comes down to an anecdote-off: one person offers up a rude remark from a trustafarian, another counters with insults yelled at a mild-mannered civil servant with an anti-war petition.
I might almost wish (but I don't, actually) that the left had enough control over itself that some of us could tell the people who are rude/smelly/stoned when doing outreach work to knock it off, and then have them obey. But because we're, you know, left-leaning and all, we can't keep certain left-wingers from being smelly potheads even if this reflects adversely on those of us who have better sense.
223 and 224 are true, but it's also true that public sector collective bargaining is a different animal than private sector collective bargaining and that public employee unions are no more immune to greed and overreaching than any other group of human beings.
I'm often confused by why the fallback positions on strikes are either "Think of the poor!" (generally from thsoe who don't think of the poor at any other time) and "I'm a consumer and I'm inconvenienced!"...the second one is really more puzzling to me, since while I'm a consumer (and I'm impatient, bad-tempered and loathe crowds, noise and lines at the check-out) my consumption patterns depend totally on my status as a worker. So when I think about strikes I don't think about my ability to buy stamps or get packages delivered; I think about the total economic climate and how wages are doing metro-wide.
Now, I assume you can make a very plausible worker-based (and I don't mean people with their own businesses; I mean people who work for another person or entity) case against labor organizing and strikes. But I don't see why the case always reverts back to the inconvenience of the consumer.
222: The trouble is, this all comes down to an anecdote-off: one person offers up a rude remark from a trustafarian, another counters with insults yelled at a mild-mannered civil servant with an anti-war petition.
I didn't intend to be pejorative, or at least not very. My reaction at the time was a mixture of "awww, how cute" and "maybe somebody ought to talk to this kid about tactics," and I probably wasn't the only one.
I don't see why the case always reverts back to the inconvenience of the consumer.
Because popular economics (by which I mean the way we talk about these things in the public realm) basically revolves around the consumer model. For obvious reasons that have a lot to do with New Republican goals like keeping spending high, saving low, and wages as low as the market will bear. Hence arguments about education and other public goods in terms of "how well they serve the customer," and arguments about public spending in terms of "your tax dollars are paying for it."
229: For me, it's that I'm not willing to be either reflexively pro-union or reflexively pro-management in the public sector. I think you can make a case for a pretty strong presumption that a private sector union is in the right until proven otherwise. In the public sector, I don't think the presumption is as strong. OTOH I think a lot of the problems that get blamed on public employee unions are more the fault of weak management than anything the unions are doing.
232 Management in the public sector often has little authority and it is wrong to hold people responsible for problems they don't have authority to fix.
229: Because people are selfish. It's not that complicated.
233 is bullshit. And you came so close to making sense a time or two the other day.
232: Well, I was being a little disingenous when I said I didn't see...I kind of meant that I could see a poorly-thought-out Republican line of reasoning but didn't think that a person of sense would really fall for it.
Vis-a-vis the poor and mass transit: if one is against transit strikes on the grounds that they hurt the poor, one had damn well better be out there campaigning for better mass transit at other times. Now, it's probably different in New York since I understand that everyone rides the train there, but here in Minneapolis, the poor are very badly served by mass transit, regardless of strikes.
I'm in a funny position because I chose to get rid of my car, so I ride the bus just like a student or a blue collar worker, and what I've seen in the last ten years (From student to flunkey in only a decade!) is cuts to the routes that go through poor neighborhoods and routes that serve people working in outlying areas or on swing shifts. We've put a lot of money into the routes that the middle class might ride for communter convenience or for fun (like the light rail--which is actually great in a lot of ways--which can speed you to the Mall of America or to downtown). Just tonight, I was waiting for the bus that goes from the University to my neighborhood and carries on into a low income part of South Minneapolis, and reflecting that it ran a lot less than when I took it regularly in the late nineties. Also, the express bus from my neighborhood and the other low income area immediately south of it to the U has had its service reduced even though it had an okay ridership.
The thing is, a lot of poor people around here need to get out to our wonderful edge cities where the light manufacturing is, and where the crap service jobs are. But the buses don't go there, or they go once a day, and if you work second shift, tough shit. In fact, better bus service would help a lot of low income people, because it would mean that they wouldn't need to pay for a car but they'd still have a bigger range of possible jobs.
Lest you think I kid, let me tell you how much my car cost me. It was a nice little 98 Prizm, already paid for. For me--a woman aged 32 who'd never had an accident--car insurance in my neighborhood cost $182 a month. So I was paying over $2100 a year to insure my car. Plus about $80 per month for gas when I had a car commute to my old job, so there another $900 and change. Plus getting it serviced twice a year and plus the inevitable minor problems which together would set me back anywhere from $300-$700. And if I still needed a car, I would have had to save up for when my existing car broke for good--say $150 a month. Even without the saving-up and without car payment, owning a car cost me $3500 a year after taxes. If I'd been paying on a car or saving for my next one, I would have been spending over $5000 a year. And that's a massive bite--hell,it would just about break me now, and I have a union job at the university. But I can bus all I like for under $1000 a year.
So if you're worried about the poor and their sufferings during transit strikes, you really ought to fix this car-culture thing we've got going on as well as breaking the bus drivers' union.
236
Well of course one reason I will not give up my car in favor of mass transit is that I don't want to be dependent on the good will of mass transit unions.
236: Amen.
237: Uh huh. As opposed to the good will of road funding, oil companies, and urban planners. Logical.
216:Got my number.
220:"You don't seem to believe in violent revolution either; you simply believe in advocating it."
Let it begin and I will see what I do; I don't know myself. I did favor the Sandinistas. I am an unlikely leader and disapprove of vanguardism in any case.
222:Real hippies, serious hippies are pretty apolitical. Dopers and crazies are found everywhere.
238
Oil companies (gasoline supply) are the choke point but there is more than one oil company.
227: The thing is, in a private sector strike, across the table from the union you have management/ownership, who will have to continue paying carrying costs while their business is shut down and will have to try to get all their customers back when the strike is over, and customers, who while they will be inconvenienced, generally have other options, and will hurt management and ownership by exercising those other options. In public sector strikes usually the recepient of the service is not the person paying for it, and there's not the carrying-cost dynamic. So instead of "you're losing a lot of money, so you should reconsider our demands", it's "these people over here are being hideously inconvenienced, and out of consideration for them, you should reconsider our demands". It's a different moral calculus (in my opinion).
I was at a demonstration last week. While we were waiting for the speakers to get organized, a man with a microphone led us in some cheers: it passed the time, and was a nice bonding experience.
What do we want? Justice!
When do we want it? Now!
Then he started doing it in Spanish. (I was thinking Arabic or Pashto might have been more appropriate, but, well, they do speak Spanish in Cuba, I guess). Ahora!
[I was actually a prop: the people in charge of crafting the visual image had me stand behind the speaker's podium in a line up that interspersed people in orange jumpsuits, mouths covered in duct tape, with people who look like respectable lawyers. There's a YouTube floating around out there . . .]
I'm not sorry I went, even if these things are more like bearing witness than like getting results.
re: 236
Is that how much car insurance costs in the US? Wow!
I pay something like 1/4 of that to insure our car, and that's for fully comprehensive insurance.
It varies a lot. I'm paying $163 for a six-month policy.
217: John Emerson
Is that supposed to be a "no" then? Here's what I asked: "Did anyone else agree with McCullough's thesis that the American Revolution would have been lost had it been reported the same as the MSM reports on Iraq?"
Good morning to everyone else. I have English muffins if that helps.
Is that how much car insurance costs in the US? Wow!
Sounds like 236 was getting really screwed. Over here anyways, it's bad times being a single male under 25.
195: "They say 'America First' but they mean 'America Next' in Washington, in Washington" -Woody Guthrie
it's "these people over here are being hideously inconvenienced, and
And you're getting bad press, and the mayor/governor might find a replacement for you, and your clout in meetings might drop, and you're not going to get the job you're in the running for in the bigger city, and...
It's mulitfactorial. Binary is a convenient way of thinking but the psychological, sociological, and political world doesn't really work that way.
Warm butter melting on those nooks and crannies . . .
167: Yeah, but if these people's decision-making process about war was shallow enough that being "embarrassed" by the sight of protesters was enough to decide the issue for them, evidently they didn't need much as an excuse not to listen to you, right?
There's a difference between looking for an excuse not to listen to someone explaining the truth and being overcome by what I can only call a bourgeois embarrassment at spectacle, and I think it's the latter that dominates. I completely agree that it's shallow but I also think that one's protest tactics need to be modelled around this reality instead of giving it the finger.
[I had this debate somewhat heatedly within my union, who seemed to be laboring under the delusion that we were popular or self-evidently righteous enough to get away with certain things that, frankly, we weren't. And as a result, we got absolutely eviscerated in the press; we were going to end up with a shitty contract anyway, but having public opinion turn on us like that was the nail in the coffin.]
252 is a very important point. Gov. Dean killed his already ailing presidential candidacy with one little sequence -- a sequence that had no significance in and of itself, but gave excuses to people looking for them. And what's truly maddening about this sort of thing is that there really wasn't anything wrong with the 'scream' itself -- if it hadn't been for the exact way the narrative was playing out at that exact moment, the scream would never have been seen outside of the room, and inside the room would have been viewed as an effective motivational technique.
It's obviously very different, but I spend a lot of my time trying to get clients (and their senior people) to understand the need to act strategically; to eschew the satisfying snark on the stand, in favor of just answering the damn cross-exam question, and letting me fix it on direct. (The same dynamic plays out in dozens of different ways over the life of a lawsuit, from discovery disputes to settlement discussions. And getting commercial lawyers to understand that the language in their spiffy little contracts is sometimes no more meaningful than can be explained to a jury by the client himself, taking into account the persuasiveness -- including likeability -- of said client).
The last sentence of 253 is absolutely horrifying. I wil now kneel and thank God that negotiated jury-trial waiver clauses are usually upheld.
Hey, an arbitration clause is absolutely the best way to get the wrong answer fast.
Extraspecially good if one party is a repeat player and the other isn't.
About the car insurance: see, again I'm in an unusual situation because I'm a college-educated middle class person (with some graduate education, as the surveys say) who lives a lot like a much poorer person with much less education and yet is over thirty. I live in a poor, heavily non-white neighborhood (which itself raises issues of gentrification, but I consider myself grandfathered in since I've been here for ten years). My rent is relatively cheap for the niceness of my apartment; I live within walking distance of almost everything I need and biking distance of the rest; and I like the diversity and the number of families with kids around here, as opposed to the white-not-yet-married-yuppie-monoculture of many other similarly located neighborhoods.
But it does mean that I face a lot of the same problems that actual poor people do--less bus service, higher fees for services, low-quality "mainstream" services, etc. (I mean, I shop at the co-op mostly, but most of the people here have no choice but to shop at the convenience stores or the ding-and-dent grocery warehouse.) Not to mention a craaaaaazy combination of police harassment and inadequate policing of actual crime--like, there's always a cop around to hassle the Somali mom on her porch (Seriously! I saw it happen!) but there's never a cop around to drive off the lurking mugger/dealers who hang out in this one spot.
So yes, I am here representing the proletariat, I guess--it's strange to realize how many people don't know the ways the poor get screwed on basic services. That's why you get low-income people driving without insurance (and ultimately without a license, often)--they can't afford insane car insurance rates. My parents live in suburban Chicago and pay about $70 a month.
I would add, too, that my car insurance covered nothing except if I hit someone or was hit by someone. I was paying $183 a month because the company figured that because I lived in a bad neighborhood I'd be a bad driver, not because I was able to get actual reimbursement for car problems, a smashed windshield, etc. And I did shop around, too--I could have changed providers and gotten insurance for $176 a month instead, but I didn't feel like it was worth the hassle.
245 -- Charlie, I have an answer to your McCullough question. It involves David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere, the battle of Bunker Hill, Jane McCrea, and the Meschianza of May 18, 1778.
Unfortunately, I can't share it on this or any other blog -- on account of my restricted access during work hours (I'm heading to the office right now) -- but would be happy to discuss it with you by email. If you are genuinely interested.
Please feel free to email: clawrence@gmail.com
252: There's a difference between looking for an excuse not to listen to someone explaining the truth and being overcome by what I can only call a bourgeois embarrassment at spectacle, and I think it's the latter that dominates.
Except plenty of people did overcome bourgeois embarrassment at spectacle. Crowds at anti-Iraq War demos were as non-hippie and unthreateningly bourgeois as anything I can recall in living memory at those kinds of events (though of course one could always go through and cherry-pick Che Guevara t-shirts and stupid signs). If someone's so determinedly embarrassed by "spectacle" that they couldn't or wouldn't see that, then their position basically amounts to "I won't talk about it if there are people exercising their rights to assembly and free speech about it." That in itself is basically a species of looking for excuses, IMO.
Which is not to say that people can't always be smarter about how they stage and present themselves at demos, of course they can.
Crowds at anti-Iraq War demos were as non-hippie and unthreateningly bourgeois as anything I can recall in living memory at those kinds of events (though of course one could always go through and cherry-pick Che Guevara t-shirts and stupid signs).
My mom, my dad -- a pair of hippie-scorning bourgeois conformists if there ever were any. (Well, Mom has some hostility issues toward the police, but these go more back to conflicted feelings about growing up Irish in Queens, and family and childhood friends she dislikes, rather than hippiedom.)
At the big Feb. 15, 2003 march in NYC it was too damned cold for crazy costumes, half-naked dancing, or t-shirts. Everyone was grimly clothed in parkas and winter coats, as I recall.
I was paying $183 a month because the company figured that because I lived in a bad neighborhood I'd be a bad driver, not because I was able to get actual reimbursement for car problems, a smashed windshield, etc.
Probably not that you're a bad driver. Probably that according to their tables, you live in an area with a high rate of theft & a higher likelihood of running into an uninsured driver. There's a reason they ask where the car is principly garaged.
And your story could be mine. Car died in 2002. To ensure a 10-year-old car (what I could afford to purchase) would have cost around $2500 a year. Perfect driving record. Add to that the $900 a year in order to park... well, that's why I don't have a car.
265: Nothing in particular, to me. I hate them for the price-gouging evident in Frowner's story (and yes, I know what actuarial tables are), the refusal to pay up in New Orlean's, the out-of-control upward spiral in medical malpractice insurance rates completely out of alignment with any upward trend in payouts, etc. ad infinitum.
Also, you're an asshole and I wish you would stop commenting.l
Oh. O.K. I thought you have your own personal insurance-company vent.
Hey, an arbitration clause is absolutely the best way to get the wrong answer fast.
Of all the true things that have been written on this blog, this is one of the truist.
A truist is one who traffics in truisms?
245: Was I too subtle? Did it look like it might be a yes?
The Iraq War was so fraudulently sold that it had to be won quickly and easily. Buyer's remorse set in as soon as there was any cost at all. Bush also has no gravitas except from a TV zombie perspective. None of these considerations were at work in 1776.
Perhaps not subtle enough. For instance, one could believe all of the following and STILL agree with the thesis:
a) the American revolution wasn't led by a lying dry-alcoholic fratboy moron.
b) Nobody respects Bush any more except Bible Christians and TV zombies.
c) Conservatives only respected him when he was successfully scamming their product for them
d) the American Revolution wasn't promoted with an orchestrated disinformation campaign
e) the Iraq War was so fraudulently sold that it had to be won quickly and easily
f) Buyer's remorse set in as soon as there was any cost at all, and (my personal favorite)
g) Bush also has no gravitas except from a TV zombie perspective.
260: Crowds at anti-Iraq War demos were as non-hippie and unthreateningly bourgeois as anything I can recall in living memory at those kinds of events...
That was certainly my impression, although the ones around here did end up getting "taken over" by ANSWER and a few other local Communist groups. I've no idea how; I couldn't make the first of the three and didn't go to the second two because my friends said deeply unpleasant things about the experience, specifically in re the Communists.
If someone's so determinedly embarrassed by "spectacle" that they couldn't or wouldn't see that, then their position basically amounts to "I won't talk about it if there are people exercising their rights to assembly and free speech about it."
In a sense? Yeah. I said it was a stupid bourgeois thing.
[And I'd be willing to bet a fair number of those people would be completely happy with compromising other parts of the Bill of Rights too, though I confess I never talked to them about it.]
That in itself is basically a species of looking for excuses, IMO.
It is, but it's not specifically directed towards the Iraq War, it's directed (inasmuch as it's directed at all) towards disruptions of the perceived status quo. The latter modifier is crucial: I don't know how the dominant narrative gets fixed, what strange unholy synergy caused the Iraq War to become "the mainstream position" in defiance to all fact, but I think that was key. The other piece of the puzzle seems to be a general fear/embarrassment/dread of True Believers; the mere fact of strong belief in a cause has been so tainted that they're dismissed out of hand as foolish zealotry, regardless of the actual cause itself. See here for something of what I mean.
And in case I'm not being clear: I don't support these attitudes in the slightest, I'm just reporting on what I saw.
As an aside, I knew our union was in trouble when, after fairly hostile coverage in the local news about our attempts to secure health care (including truncated interviews with our stewards and allowing flat-out lies from the state to go unchecked), they cut to the "contrast" portion of the segment and chose... wait for it... a church. A small, three employee church. Who might, conceivably -- I'm not making this up, you know -- have to fire their janitor if they too had to provide him with health care. Whose contribution to the debate, IIRC, was something like "If I don't get health care, why should they?"
bourgeois embarrassment at spectacle
Got it in one.
I think Slack's misunderstanding the issue (as I see it). Yeah, the bourgeois folks showed up at the WTO and at anti-war protests; but having showed up, they then went on to rhetortically distance themselves from the dirty hippies/puppets/looters/whoever. It's the rhetorical distancing that's problematic (albeit probably necessary).
You mean necessary for the strategic/rhetorical reasons discussed above or necessary psychologically for the bourgeoisie?
Part of your response to the puppet tactics will be informed by your beliefs on a) how amenable to considering your views Joe American would be in the absence of puppets b) how many Joe Americans are there to convince.
I'm inclined to think that people would listen, and there's a lot of them, but the puppets and anarchists make it very unpalatable. Maybe they're just stupid bourgeoisie, but if they're courtable, that might be something the protesters might want to keep in mind.
I'm inclined to think that people would listen, and there's a lot of them, but the puppets and anarchists make it very unpalatable.
The problem is that that's impossible. The anti-war demonstrations were hundreds of thousands of quietly dressed bourgeois, and hundreds of people with puppets. Even assuming that puppets necessarily do more harm than good as publicity (which I'm agnostic over), it's simply not possible to purge all of the silly people from any movement of any size. Who are you proposing should have taken their puppets away?
Republicans have a much better sense of this than we do -- while the more reasonable ones disavow the loonies, they don't act as if the loonies in any way discredit the more sensible positions they espouse. (And they're right to act that way: moderate Republican positions are wrong on their own merits, not because you can find the occasional neo-Nazi who agrees with them.)
277: I don't know. Bribe a few reporters?
I'm not saying go around shooting puppeteers, but just that the sentiment that 'If they don't like the way some of our fringe presents it, we don't need 'em and couldn't convince those stupid people anyway' is unlikely to be a winning strategy.
A friend in college used to be driven crazy by this. He protested sweatshops and organized a lot of teach-ins, and went to DC thinking the rally would be focused, and was disheartened by "anarchists" trying to start riots with the cops. Why should he not distance himself from them? He isn't an anarchist.
But he shouldn't treat his desire to distance himself from him as any reason to judge a position on anything but its merits. Again, silly people agree with every position you can find. Shaping your opinions to avoid silly people won't get you sensible opinions.
(I'm not saying he was doing this. I'm saying that anyone who was rejecting the anti-war movement on the basis of looking at a demonstration with a hundred thousand quietly dressed people and ten puppeteers was doing this, and should grow up and quit it.)
"distance himself from him" s/b "distance himself from them".
Shaping your opinions to avoid silly people won't get you sensible opinions.
Absolutely. But that's not what I was saying. And sure, anyone rejecting an anti-war movement on the basis of puppets is silly, but I suspect that's like, most of the electorate. And while everyone's certainly got the right to protest, I'm just wondering if Americans just aren't going to be appreciative of it. (I really think this is because too many people live in suburbs or small towns to really grok a protest.)
My friend didn't reject his sweatshop position, but he did stop going to protests, figuring the time and money were better spent elsewhere.
275: There's no difference between the two.
Practically speaking, that's right, because it's the only reachable voting population. People who feel differently certainly exist, but not in politically significant numbers. Still, it matters for the self-examination points LB is making, doesn't it? She wants to "get over it," the strategist says we can't and shouldn't.
And part of the point is that it's possible for the broader electorate not to be embarrassed by the weirdos on their side. Republicans don't worry about distancing themselves from Confederate nostalgia -- plenty of them wallow in the imagery, while disavowing the crazy shit. But on our side, the merest hint of patchouli is treated as a problem.
Now that Hillary is in, can we all go protest her (she voted for the Iraq war):
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/20/clinton.announcement/index.html
277: ...while the more reasonable ones disavow the loonies, they don't act as if the loonies in any way discredit the more sensible positions they espouse.
But that's largely because their loonies aren't plastered front-and-center in coverage of Republican events -- and when they are, you bet your ass they discredit them as fast as possible. [Fred Phelps, anyone? Rev Moon?] Although sometimes they simply co-opt the story, declare their loonies to be the new mainstream ("Crazy is the new black!") and somehow get everyone to play along. I don't know how, exactly, but I suspect it's largely for the reasons Cala implied: journalists have internalized the narratives to the point where what's actually happening is irrelevant, and the populations have become so large that, pace LB, you're always going to be able to find the crazy if you try.
Not really sure where this leaves us except with a lingering stench of cynicism, but better that than naive optimism, I guess.