Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Shiny, Al. Thanks for that.

I read that post and wound up kicking myself. Of course what they (some, all, many?) are pursuing is a living thing.

It's trite enough to observe that every being has been put through a social wringer; some of the wringers so brutal that lasting hate is appropriate; some softer and subtler, of the kind that fit people for writing columns in Slate. All the wringers have a common denominator: the inculcation of a crippling moral cowardice.

So what to do? Keep trying, and failing, and trying again and trying to learn from the failures, as anguishing as that may be.

****

Anonymous got ahold of some of the docs on the national security programs for monitoring of political "social media". What will the monitors make of passages where people talk in terms of eros and philia and agape? History tells us they'll reduce it to a crude and jealously lascivious pathology. The hired gun socio-biologists will pounce and publish and a decrepit monkey-molester or two will get paid for appalling reductionism. The psychopath anthropologists—the "human terrain specialists"—will look for wedges.

Fuck 'em. If they do stuff this back into specimen bottles and hamster wheels, the people who keep their hearts and heads more or less intact will learn to dance better.

" Anonymous got ahold of some of the docs on the national security programs for monitoring of political "social media". What will the monitors make of passages where people talk in terms of eros and philia and agape? History tells us they'll reduce it to a crude and jealously lascivious pathology. The hired gun socio-biologists will pounce and publish and a decrepit monkey-molester or two will get paid for appalling reductionism. The psychopath anthropologists—the "human terrain specialists"—will look for wedges.

Fuck 'em. If they do stuff this back into specimen bottles and hamster wheels, the people who keep their hearts and heads more or less intact will learn to dance better "

bares a repeat

The only thing more irritating than the 'No strategy' critics, are the 'too cool for demands' bloggers who think that the hipster asshats of OWS have some coherent, thought through anarchism.

I am pretty sure that the blogger has no more familiarity with the sad goings on of OWS than the statist left he is so very much cooler than.

OWS makes demands all the time, like, Stop, Stop and Frisk, for instance. They just haven't formulated anything that's likely to engender the 'mass' in mass movement.

That people so much want to love the disappointed, middle class, fundamentally liberal narcissists that constitute the 'vanguard' of this 'movement' is a testimony to people's desperation as well as their desire to have someone do class war for them.

Everyone is America is full of shit, not least the poseurs of OWS, one more sinkhole of dissent.

'Prefigurative politics' is just New Age affirmations made into an agenda: we'll act like the state doesn't exist and then it won't exist! Strategy Schmategy!

This makes sense for anyone who has actually participated at ground level and learned firsthand the extent to which OWS is more New Age religious movement than class war.

virtualexpat, I've read all sorts of critiques that don't jibe or only partly jibe with my personal experience of Occupying—and previous movements, and offshoots, and experiments, and fitful, delusional dead-end bursts when it comes down to it. I concede the presence, and in most cases the dominance, of "disappointed, middle class, fundamentally liberal narcissists" in almost every last one of them.

In addition to the disappointed, middle class, fundamentally liberal narcissists, I've encountered psychos, cultists, grifters, rapists, thieves, snitches, professional provocateurs, dilettantes, bullies, all manner of selfish opportunists, experts in the black art of creating "let's you and him fight" scenarios and people whose warped empathy makes them really, really good at making other people feel like shit. I think, given my own experience, that objectively speaking you'd have to be crazy to take a chance on any social movement.

Welcome, then, to the nut house. Oh, and the blogger you shat on has more than paid her dues in poverty and working class hell.

Liking a good deal of the heat and substance of virtualexpat here, I don't concede that "everyone in America is full of shit."
A completely crappy politics, a dead left, an empire of destruction and deceit, ridiulous work and social functions, granted, but it's also a purchasing wonderworld. The entertainment choices we gripe-spewing nihilists are presented with here are insane, my man!
So far, it's a pretty comfortable, stimulating place for a dissident, compared to the (Mexican? Canadian? German?) alternatives, all of which are kind of old-school.
After all, we here in the US of A can get Dr. Jodi Dean to monologue to us about the glory and the wonder of the "hipster asshats" for free!

What would happen if dissenters went into dissent with the knowledge that they were going in as flawed people, who would be trying to work with flawed people, and they didn't have the answers? Learning by doing is all they have. It seems cheap and easy to ridicule them. Maybe they'll fuck it up. If so, there'll be plenty of opportunity for the excoriation experts to rub their noses in it.

I have the feeling that I've been too nice.

mjosef, no amount of nihilist projectile diarrhea can lend so much as a veneer of substance to virtualexpat's infantile misanthropy, which is nothing more than the disappointment of a middle class, fundamentally liberal narcissist who probably lost a pissing contest somewhere and came here to get cheap compensatory kicks. It's an asshat hipster response to a lack of immediate revolutionary gratification.