sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with compassion as solution

I keep coming back to a definition of freedom offered by Marx and Engels: the ability to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, one is not free if one merely has the ability to choose between life-options offered to her by society - one is free if she can live in the world she conceives and acts to bring about.

The riots in London (and in many other places around the world over the last couple of years) have been on my mind, because I dreamed I was involved in the destruction of a concrete park bench as an act of dissenting vandalism, and found myself in the custody of the Archons, one of whom, in the guise of an authoritative-looking man, held both my hands and interrogated me calmly but firmly. "What do you think it accomplished? What good did it bring about? How is the world a better place as a result?" He wanted clearly for me to feel that my participation had accomplished nothing positive, but also seemed genuinely to want to know my thoughts and feelings.

"People need more outlets," I said. Paraphrasing slightly the rest of my reply: "Okay, destroying the bench accomplished nothing good, but I wanted to express my dissent and that was 'the only train leaving the station.'"

Even my wording though demonstrates the enclosure of the word-fence. People need more than "more outlets" to express frustration. They need to be able to change those parts of the world that frustrate them. I believe that the average person is willing to expend honest effort for honest return. I also believe that most people want to feel as though the effort they expend is leading to something meaningful, some eventual good thing that is brought into the world as a result. How many of us get to feel that our daily work lends to some improvement to the human condition?

I propose, though the matter deserves further investigation, that all of us could select tasks that lend to improvement of the human condition, and live in prosperity. So I might turn the Archon's questions back on his own implicit support for the current financial-industrial order: what good does it bring about? How is the world a better place? We have to be free to ask the next question: can we do better? While humankind has achieved many improvements, it is worth asking whether we are getting less than we might be from our efforts. Why do we have a skewed system with endlessly deep pockets for making weapons, while bridges are collapsing from disrepair and schools are crumbling? Stock market tricks so arcane that even people with a Ph.D. in finance can't understand them reward investors with billions in profits while millions of people have no shelter or food security, and while illness is almost guaranteed to bankrupt a family.

As good as we have made things, we can do better. Silent complicity and empty dissent are not the only trains leaving the station. Every day brings anew the potential to reframe the debate.

The brewing consensus among economists is that the economy is entering a "double dip" recession, which is kind of ridiculous from the perspective of the tens of millions of Americans whose lives have already been destroyed between 2008 and now. When you haven't been able to find work in over two years, the bank is taking the house, feeding the children is a weekly struggle, who cares about variations in the GDP?

A couple of years ago I ridiculed a Boston Globe article which offered a very rosy picture of what a modern depression would look like. What the author was describing was a recession, the kind of short-lived economic downturn (1-3 years) that our country is able to weather by means of its social safety net, savings accounts, and credit cards.

That we are "entering" "another recession" is an extremely candy-coated way of saying: okay, you thought the last three years were bad?

This is when it starts to look like a depression. The safety net is exhausted. Millions of Americans have used up their lifetime 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. Cities and states are starting to cut essential services -- laying off teachers, firefighters, police; closing schools on Fridays; literally tearing up paved roads and laying down gravel which is cheaper to maintain, or turning off street lights. The election-year band-aid just drawn up will not even begin to stem the damage, as school districts warily contemplate the utility of keeping teachers on that they will not be able to afford next year. This is what things look like right now and the economy is not even technically in recession.

The US has built its culture and expectation around the nuclear family -- one breadwinner, one homemaker, and two or three children -- as the basic household unit. The problem with this household model is that it relies on continual economic growth, or at least the existence of a safety net to get the household by for a few months during times of recession. (Note that there's no room in this model for single-parent households; such households have had to live as if there's basically always a recession going on.) It's not a model that can easily accommodate the 10-20 year economic downturn we've entered.

The point of this post is not to dwell in doom & gloom; it's to comment on the fact that for many folks our way of life is going to change, and probably in ways that feel like a downgrade. But it's not the end of the world and the future is quite survivable, though we will have to learn how to live cooperatively and stick together in ways that were discouraged when the expensive, high-resource, high-cost, high-maintenance nuclear family model was sold to the American public during the post-WWII boom. My first instinct was to promote ideas like cooperatives, gift economy, and bartering, but I think they will develop spontaneously. It will be interesting to see what role the internet plays in this.

I was commenting to

cowgrrl the other day about how it seems like there aren't any major corporations that are in business to just simply make a product and sell it to people; they all have a business model that requires sticking it to customers in every inventive way possible. I couldn't actually think of an example (well, there's Ben & Jerry's, I suppose). But for just about every company I could think of, I can recall reading of ways in which those companies have done what they could to to stick it to their customers, competitors, and employees.

Is this 'just human nature'? "Caveat emptor" is clearly not a modern innovation; if anything, the paltry constraints of law and regulation to reign companies in and made them do at least roughly what they say they're going to do is the modern innovation. But are people born this way? Is this a side to human nature we just have to cope with? I've read that apes are born with an innate sense of fair play and know when they've been cheated, and people get a dopamine boost from doing good deeds. It seems more like cooperation and generosity are natural instincts, where deception and two-timing are learned behavior. So much for "that's just the way people are;" I don't believe that, and I think it's time for people to expect better from one another.

But then, Socrates argued in The Republic that the one who profits most is the unjust man who succeeds at convincing everyone else that he is ethical and upstanding. If this is true, than we can expect people with this ethic to be the most financially successful, and therefore to gravitate to the center of the business world, where they force everyone else to emulate their model just to compete. As justifications go, "we have to stay competitive" has the benefit of having some truth to it, if at the downside of being circular.

What companies are all afraid of is that if they were to unilaterally de-asshole-ify their business model, their costs would go up, causing their profits to drop, in turn causing stockholders to rebel and hire a new board of directors who will just turn around and re-asshole-ify the business model. What we more typically see is that businesses will partially de-asshole-ify their business model, sometimes under penalty of law, trumpeting this in ads as proof of their honesty and trustworthiness. A company like Wal-Mart, which we're used to thinking of as an evil behemoth, has the power to do great good simply by virtue of its influence by making a single decision, such as for example lowering the price on generic drugs they sell or declaring they will hold toy suppliers to a new standard.

Research on what would happen if every major company all around the world simultaneously de-asshole-ified their business models is scant. For one thing, academic economists refuse to admit the business world has an ethics problem. If they can claim they are within the law and playing by all regulations, what's the problem? (This leaves unasked the question of just who wrote those laws and regulations and what they allow.) Even those sorts of asshole business that are outside of the law are usually covered by plausible deniability ("Hey, we had no idea our suppliers had 7-year-old kids doing 13-hour shifts! We're innocent!"). And as the last resort, when the deception and exploitation can no longer be denied, we're told it's the only thing that makes the benefits of modern life affordable (if by "benefits" you mean cheaper products that wear out in 3 years instead of 20). But, really, how do we know that?

What we do know is that few of us would choose to live in a world with so much deception and exploitation if we had any real say in things. The human race will probably never live in a utopia of honesty where the asshole business model does not exist. But I do think it is possible to chip away at it, with coalitions (cooperatives and mutual aid societies) and with more & better ethics training starting in childhood (interfering with our society's tendency to sympathize with takers: bullies and winners-at-any-cost). If people are taught to be this way, they can taught to be another way.

ETA. I've speculated in the past on how neat it would be if we redefined the idea of "profit" to mean not just a positive difference between revenue and cost, but to reflect a socially holistic idea of utility. Maximizing profit in that scheme would mean maximizing not just one's own revenue while minimizing one's own costs, but also maximizing the social benefit while minimizing the social cost. A change in perspective along these lines would move us away from the asshole business model.

I'm tired of politics.

Well... let me be more precise. I'm bone weary, exhausted to the core, by the antagonism and infighting and sniping and hatchet-jobs. I have no idea how we, as a society, are supposed to comprehend what is going on in the world, and what needs to happen and how we're going to accomplish it, when social discourse has become so bitterly acrimonious it becomes a political issue in itself.

Slowly, but steadily, I've been taking blogs off my reading list. First it was queer and feminist blogs. General lefty blogs have followed, starting with FireDogLake, which I got so fed up with I even removed from my bookmarks. There aren't any blogs anymore that I regularly read. I still read them from time to time, but I feel like I have to steel myself in preparation.

It's not that the topics depress me. They do, they always have. It's not that I don't agree with their views on what's right and wrong -- I do, most of the time. It's the overwhelming acrimony. There's no sense of community, no sense of coalition, just an overwhelmingly consistent approach of, "I'm right and this is why someone else is wrong." Anyone at any time can go from being an ally to being a target, and it's unnerving. The acrimony gets into my blood and then the anger sits in my brain like battery acid, eating away at my insides since it has nowhere to go. John Stewart's plea to Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on their show "Crossfire" comes to mind.

Do I still care about social issues & economic policy? Of course I do. But the fact that I even have to assert that shows that we've gotten to where this is the game you have to play if you have political opinions. Well, I have political opinions, but I am convinced there must be other ways to disagree, other ways to call someone out.

I'm beginning to see this as part of the work of the revolution. I've written before about affinity politics vs. identity politics, and when I say there's no easy-mode radicalism I mean that we're called to examine our own attitudes and behaviors on a very deep level, so deep that to subscribe to an "-ism" is to duck the issue. The ways out and through are likely to be shown in art, music, fiction, poetry; to be expressed in community gatherings and perhaps religious expression as well (though I feel the need to add a few caveats to that since so much of the current acrimony is expressed in religious terminology). I was toying with the idea of this as a kind of "para-politics:" an accompaniment to the political process that forces everyone involved to be mindful of their opponent's humanity and common cause. I don't expect that the adversarial mode of politics will ever go away -- nor do I think this would necessarily be a good thing -- but I believe in the necessity of tempering it with mindfulness.

One of the reasons I haven't been posting as much over the last couple of years is a dawning awareness of the general futility of words.

I've also, as I was saying to R* last night, developed a strong aversion to being lectured by people 15-20 years younger than me. I want to just say, though it is bad form, "Do you think you are the first person to recite these ideas at me?" It's 'bad form' because ideas are supposed to be replied to with ideas. That's the 'free marketplace of ideas,' right?

But there's so little point to playing the idea game because words are so often nothing more than a verbal soundtrack people play while committing acts which may or may not bear any resemblance to the ideas they are promoting.

And, it is highly discouraging how few people seem capable of really grokking this point. Especially when it comes to politicians. There are a lot of words about how politicians are lying scumbags but people will always refuse to accept this about their favorite politician. I hate to break it to you, but yes, even your favorite politician is a lying selfish scumbag.

So, what does matter to me? Experiences and actions. Tell me what you've seen and experienced. Show me what you've done and what you are doing. Those are the things I can trust, and which have real impact on the world.

Since late last week there's been some controversy in the blogosphere regarding the New Orleans Women's Health Clinic, which was opened in NOLA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. After Katrina there was (and I understand there still is) a shocking gap between health care options available and the health care needs of the population. The hardest hit were, as always, women of color and women of economic disadvantage.

The controversy began when activists and bloggers in the trans community noted that while NOWHC's policy statement promises nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity, they also explicitly state "We are currently not able to provide care to trans people who were male assigned at birth or who have had genital sex reassignment surgery."

Most of the discussion I've seen since has been confrontational, with accusations of hate and cissexism. I personally think that this is entirely the wrong approach to take. Certainly if the root of this is prejudice, that prejudice should be called out. But there is a qualitative difference between an institution of the kyriarchy, against whom the confrontational approach is entirely appropriate, and a radical organization, with (not against!) whom I believe we should adopt a different approach.

I've said before that there is no easy-mode radicalism. I've said before I think that adversarial confrontation is the wrong approach to take with other radicals. And, as I said the last time there was a dispute about transwomen's access to women's health space, when the dispute is with sister radicals, there is no victory in confrontation, or in making someone see things your way, but in learning how to coexist and converge paths.

The comments I made previously all apply to how I feel about this situation, too. I believe the better approach would be to approach Incite! and ask, what can we offer to build a stronger coalition? Is it a matter of resources? Is it a matter of volunteer time? Money? Or is simply a matter of dialogue in good faith and consciousness raising together? What can we do that will make it easier for us to walk together on this path?

The sad thing is, I don't feel safe saying this publicly in any trans community. I barely feel safe saying it here in my own blog.

This morning i finished reading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. Now it's time for my review of the His Dark Materials trilogy to which this is the conclusion.

I've been writing this review in my head through half the trilogy, but i wanted to actually finish the trilogy before setting any of it down.

The quality of Pullman's writing craft i'll give a B. It was particularly uneven with regard to vividness. In many parts, there was no attention given to the senses at all - no description of sights, sounds, smells. Now, typically, i don't like prose which is bogged down in elaborate descriptions of things. But a few hints here and there, just to tickle the senses, would have been effective - especially given the (literal) otherwordliness of many of the book's settings. In other places the setting descriptions were so elaborate the scene felt bogged down.

Dialogue was good though, and the characterization was (with one exception) superb. I love that the protagonist is an untidy, poorly-behaved, stomping-in-the-mud, neighborhood-warfare-waging, prank-pulling, truth-challenged 12 year old girl.

The exception is Marisa Coulter, a femme fatale who wields charm, seduction, and manipulation to achieve supernatural results. Coulter is the hardest character to read, because one never knows when she is being upfront and when she is lying until she actually acts. I know this is by design, and that element of not knowing would be laudable if it were done via any different means; but it's still unfortunate to see a character play an essential role mainly because everyone who meets her is stunned by how she looks.

Still, i have to give Pullman some points for writing a work of fantasy in which female characters are just as strong and prominent -- if not, on balance, a little more so -- as male characters.

The plotting and storytelling i'll give an A. As a whole the work is superbly conceived and structured. It's set in an elaborate multiverse and the reader finds herself wishing she could take tangents, just to learn more about this or that. Lyra's world, where the story starts, is fascinatingly different from our own. Even the experience of day to day life as a human being is vastly different there, because every person has a companion, a dæmon, who is an extension of their individual being and nature.

In many ways, this is the ultimate "underdog" story. The heroes are figures usually cast as villains: witches, fallen angels (esp. gay ones), dæmons, harpies, users of divination, gypsies ("gyptians" in Lyra's world), African kings, rebels, dissidents... while the villains of the book are figures of authority: various members of the European upper class, bishops and other church functionaries, and upper ranks of angels, including God himself.

Wait, so God is a villain in His Dark Materials? Well, it's more complicated than that. ( spoilerish stuff starts here )

Hmm, not sure how to characterize the last few paragraphs, but since they gel with my own views, i'm going to give it an A. Which means that my overall grade for the trilogy is about an A-.

A while ago i offered "a meta-neo-marxian semiotic principle" but left sorta fuzzily undefined what i meant really by "meta-neo-Marxian." What i wrote then, was:

"Neo" because we have progressed quite a bit in the last 150 years, in understanding the sociology of oppression and the intricacies of economics, and "meta" because i am not a subscriber to a philosophy, but merely a critic whose views are inspired by the trajectory which Marx played a role in laying out.

It dawned on me yesterday that i have to take this to its logical conclusion. I have to. And so, i offer for your consideration, meta-neo-. I will define this more fully in a moment, but for now i will leave it sorta fuzzily undefined and let you ponder what i mean by it.

I make no claims to originality or uniqueness. In fact i hope there are a million other people out there with similar but not exactly identical ideas.

Meta-neo- is not a philosophy. One does not become a subscriber or an adherent to meta-neo-, but merely perhaps, i dunno, a listener. Meta-neo- is an affinity, not an identity. I'm sick and tired of identity politics ruining my friendships and threatening my relationships and demolishing my political coalitions and causing me to lose sleep.

Let's throw all this crap out the window: "You're not 'X' enough." "You're not a true 'X'." "I want to do W, but if i do, i'm not an 'X' anymore and my X friends will reject me." "I'm not X, but i'm Y, let's call this the 'XY' coalition." "Hey, i'm a 'Z,' you left me out."

Meta-neo- is analogue, not digital. There's no "Meta-neo- vs. non-meta-neo-." You can be a little meta-neo-, you can be a lot meta-neo-, your affinity with meta-neo- can vary from subject to subject or even from mood to mood or day to day.

The prime directive of meta-neo- is simple: When it becomes widely recognized that there is a need for a meta-neo-meta-neo-, those who pay any attention to it at all are urged to declare it dead and come up with something else.

Still need me to define meta-neo- or should we just leave it there and run with it?

For about a week now, i've had an instance of Notepad up on my computer at home with the words, "boredom; pleasure taken; pleasure shared" written in them. These terms each represent key elements of a complex constellation of thoughts i woke up with on Saturday morning and which have sought articulation ever since.

What do i mean by it? For a while now i've been pondering the notion that pleasure points us towards what is good and right. But obviously i have to say so with caveats because not all pleasure is good. When i say something like that, i am thinking of the way i feel when i am with a lover; and i strive, as much as i can, to see to it that my interactions with lovers are an even give and take, a meeting of equals who bring things into one anothers lives. This is pleasure shared. If my lover has an orgasm, i did not "give" it to him or her, i did not "make" him or her come; it is pleasure he or she felt but which we experientially shared. I am so well-attuned to my closest lovers that i would swear i can feel some of it sympathetically when they experience pleasure.

And i would contrast this with "pleasure taken," and in so saying i suppose that the experienced hedonists among my readers can instantly grok where i'm going with this. I've had encounters with people who took pleasure from me; not just the rapes and the sexual assault, but people who had no interest in sharing an experience with *me* as an individual. Who *i* am made no difference at all; the idea was to reduce sex to a scripted, detached thing, wherein partners are completely interchangeable.

Naturally, this is not a recipe for happy-making sex; it's what people do when they are looking for a way to separate this activity from the rest of their lives, rather than when they want to integrate it.

And, in most of those encounters i took pleasure as well, not as in taking my own, but taking theirs, in a way where i too did not have to share an experience with them as a person, but simply having one.

I've learned how to tell at a glance when someone is the sort of person who is more likely to be looking to take pleasure from me, and i have to avoid them. It is almost certain that they will bring nothing good into my life at all.

When i've been asked, "What did you get out of that?" i can't really answer. Something indefinable. I usually felt incredibly sexually charged hours afterwards, so some part of me was getting something out of it. Most people say they can't imagine having sex that way, but i have to say, i've encountered enough who do from every walk of life and of every gender that the potential for it is pretty much universal (at least among Americans).

Which is where "boredom" comes in, because i think it has a lot to do with what drives it. Not boredom in the sense of, you're sitting around one evening and saying to yourself, "Ho hum, what am i going to do tonight?" No, i mean boredom in the really deep sense of the word. The same kind of boredom that drives zoo animals to mutilate themselves after they've been pacing around a small cell, staring at the same four fucking concrete walls day after day. You can change your room around or get a new apartment, you can get a new job, but your life can still be, in a deeper sense, like staring at four fucking concrete walls all the time.

This is the downside to civilization. And i think all of us struggle with this, some of us more successfully than others.

Eventually it deafferents your soul. Why do i choose that word? Because an animal, after having a part of their body deafferented, will often chew it off. This is what many of the Silver Spring monkeys did. At that point, you know what it is you need, but you actively avoid it in favor of the dehumanizing experience which you know is only going to cut you off from your life a little further. And that thing could be dehumanizing sex, or it could be alcohol or drug abuse, or whatever.

Why do we push deeper into that which we know damn well is going to ruin us? Honestly, i don't know. Maybe the brain gets used to it, and sees it as the closest thing to "interesting" that is going on at that point. I think we can accurately call it a break with reality.

One antidote for that boredom seems to be pleasure shared. And by that i mean in the broader sense, not just sexual pleasure, and not just happiness with a partner; it could be just an evening of "hanging out" and "not doing anything special" (put in quotes to demonstrate that such things are more crucial than people generally think). Think that's not important? Go without it for six months.

I don't want to say it absolutely *has* to be pleasure shared with another person because sometimes it can be very affirming to share pleasure with oneself. But i suspect that most of us would usually need to share with others.

It's not a cure-all, certainly, but i find that a lot of my psychic disorientation seems to clear up when i have enough of this in my life. When i say something "grounds" me, that's usually what i mean; experiences which make me mindful, present in the now, pleasure shared.

The Gap has gone into full PR-damage control mode after it was revealed that one of their vendors was selling them clothing made by literal child slaves.

They have plausible deniability of course, because they buy from vendors who hired subcontractors to make their clothing. And they probably are actually appalled by the problem itself, not just by the criticism they're facing. They never told anyone to purchase children as slaves... they just gave their business to whoever could come up with clothing at the lowest price.

The Marxian term for the process at work here is commodity fetishism, which is a distortion in social priorities brought about by putting price tags on things. It's a distortion which blinkers us to the causal effects of our decision-making, the long-range or distant ethical ramifications of continuous cost-cutting and profit-maximization.

One aspect of this distortion is the devaluation, and subsequent discarding, of children.

In the agricultural and pastoral economy, children are a boon and blessing; in the urbanized economic model, they are (economically speaking) a burden. It is not a simple matter of children working on farms and ranches but not working in markets or factories - throughout most of history (including the present), children have occupied a place in the urban division of labor. No, the real issue is that in an urban economy people are separated from the wealth they create. They make things or perform services, for which they receive a wage which is not - which is never - equal to the average revenue product of their labor. What that means, in plain language, is that a person is never paid a wage equal to the value their labor creates.

That extra value is sucked up by the upper class. This is how it is that the gap between rich and poor tends to grow, and this is part of what i have, for two years now, referred to as slow-motion cannibalism.

Simply by virtue of existing in an urbanized society, an individual wage earner can statistically expect their net value to decrease over time. Some people manage to improve their lot; for every one who does, there are two or three who sink further into the whole. This is reflected in our financial life by perpetual debt; unless one owns property and capital, one is in debt forever to landlords and to banks. And to a poor family which has little of worth to give a child upon their birth, a child is an economic drain from the instant she or he is born.

It is a drain that people are willing to bear because of love. But being in debt makes you vulnerable. And a family that starts out with a margin of zero is on very thin ice indeed. Any kind of mishap - an illness, a drought, an inopportune death, and suddenly the unthinkable becomes the inevitable.

There are certain realities that are not altered by economic or political philosophy, and one of these realities is that the survival and caretaking of an individual human child represents a tremendous investment, of time, energy... even of love.

However, because of the way commodity fetishism works, this investment is not recognized as such. It is not recognized as an undertaking which creates value, even though it does. Viewed through dollar-sign-colored-glasses, the investment of raising a child is invisible, contrasted with the investment of buying a new piece of factory equipment.

When bankers run into problems, other capitalists and the government rush to prop them up. But when parents run into problems, they are on their own, a problem exacerbated by the urban breakdown of the extended family. On their own, with no prospects of aid or rescue, a desperate family will turn to horrific measures to survive - selling a child into slavery, or prostituting them, or killing them.

As an alternate vision, imagine a society that does recognize and give value to the investment of child-raising. Imagine a society where parents who run into difficulty are able to draw upon assistance based on the capital of their investment in the future. This would have to be a society where people ask, "How does this benefit us?" instead of, "How does this benefit me?"

We are only a state of mind away from it.

To me, feminism is much more than a set of concepts and ideas about society. Actually, i'd even say that concepts and ideas are not even the biggest part of what it is about. The biggest part, in my opinion, is praxis - outward and inward action.

The inward part is probably the hardest. I mean, things like working at a DV shelter or a rape crisis hotline or doing outreach activism isn't easy, but it connects you with other people and you can sometimes tangibly see your results. That outward stuff is not as hard as the parts that you have to do alone. The parts that have no reward. The parts that involve facing things inside you that you don't want to face. Things done to you, things you've done, things you want to do or don't want to do, and how they fit into the overall pattern of oppression. Putting your thoughts out there and having them be challenged. Listening to someone's anger without storming off, and finding the voice of your own anger.

To me, feminism is at its core an intensely personal thing. And each of us only has a finite capacity for it. There's more work to do than we have the resources or energy for.

So feminists need each other. We rely on each other to hold us when we're quaking from the trauma. We rely on each other to back us up when everyone's against us. We rely on each other to call us on our shit and nudge us forward towards greater understanding. We rely on each other to listen and to be respectful, because at least then we know that someone will.

Feminist space is coalition space, not a safe space. So you will sometimes get angry there, sometimes sad, sometimes triggered. But there's no way around it, there's no other way to face the demons of internalized misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia.

At the Network La Red we've been nurturing a variation on this theme called "accountable space," so named to call attention to the need for being accountable to yourself and others while working to root out the tendrils of oppression in your own mind. It's a space where you are allowed to make mistakes, but to know that your mistakes will be pointed out. This is why coalition space can be such a scary, threatening place sometimes; because you don't always know when you're going to offend someone or be offended.

Nowadays you don't hear so much about consciousness-raising groups, and this is a big omission from modern feminism. Therein you talk about the 'mundanities' of your life, and others can help you to see the way your life choices, even down to the smallest things, are shaped or distorted by oppression. There's no other way to really grok how it works. You can't read in a book, you can't be told what to think, the light bulbs have to go on in your own head.

It *should* go without saying that in a feminist accountable space there has to be some sense of trust. You don't have to like the people you do this work with, but you have to know that they wouldn't sell you out at the end of the day. But unfortunately it *has* to be said because the closest most of us have to CR groups today are online feminist forums. And online, people do things they wouldn't do even in person.

None of us are perfect, so there should be latitude given for mistakes. But there are some actions that just cross the line. In a feminist accountable space, misogynistic behaviors like shaming should not be tolerated. This is one of the ways women are broken -- by being shamed, slut-shamed, shunned, ostrasized, etc. -- or by doing this yourself while knowing that as a participant you are safe from being the target.

Oppression is the business of traumatizing other people for your own gain. The goal and purpose of shaming is to traumatize. Therefore if you participate in the shaming of a woman, any woman, for any reason, you are being misogynist and anti-feminist.

Period.

I'm not saying it's okay to do this to a man, but especially it should not ever be done to a woman in the name of feminism. I don't care if she comes in wearing the emblem of the KKK and chanting poems about white supremacy - if you respond by shaming her you are no better than she is.

Now, i went on about "accountable space" because i want to be clear that i'm not saying that errors should go unchallenged. But one has to find ways to call someone on their privilege while still maintaining the goals of healing the wounds of oppression.

It's hard. It takes courage to respond with compassion to something that makes you boiling mad. It's easier to lash out and cause harm. But that's what got us into this mess in the first place, and every instance of it counts. There is no easy-mode radicalism.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

So i’ve been making plans for weeks to go to the Boston Dyke March tonight. And in my inbox this morning i see that there is a last-minute letter-writing campaign to ask the Dyke March committee to disinvite the artist Bitch, who is scheduled to perform for us tonight, on account of her performances at Michfest and her stated approval (or non-disapproval) of their policy of excluding gallae. Others are planning to turn their backs to her during her performance.

I’m feeling a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, it is really touching to see that so many in my community are willing and eager even to fight for my inclusion. But i also find it heartbreaking.

Despite what Bitch has done or said regarding MWMF, she has to be aware that the Boston Dyke March is explicitly galla-positive. It’s right there on the front of their webpage. I have heard mixed things from local gallae about how welcome they actually feel there, but the stated policy counts for a lot. Knowing about the policy (i presume), she has chosen to be here with us anyway.

So it seems to me that if she really hated gallae, she could have chosen to perform somewhere else tonight. Or, maybe she’s just an equal-opportunity opportunist, but i think that is an unfairly cynical thing to assume.

She’s been asked about the policy of exclusion at MWMF; i wonder if anyone has even asked her what she thought about the policy of inclusion at the Dyke March. Heck, if i get the chance, maybe i’ll ask her myself. Assuming, that is, the sight of dykes turning their backs on a dyke doesn’t break my heart so much i have to leave.

Suppose the committee disinvites her. Suppose she hears about the protest and stays away. Suppose she feels pressured into making a statement of support. Are any of these things victory? I don’t think our community wins by making one of our own feel they have to back down or silence themselves under pressure.

Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to see her leave here talking about having had a great experience in a community that welcomes and includes gallae? Having seen how a dyke community which includes gallae can be just as woman-affirming and healing and vital as the community she’s experienced at Michfest? Otherwise i’m concerned that she could leave here with a sour taste and see the whole thing as evidence that those who say gallae are here to undermine and sow seeds of discord are right.

I’m not saying we should back down. I’m saying that there’s a bravery in solidarity that goes beyond the bravery it takes to protest. Are things really so adversarial over this issue that this is now and forever an “us versus them” situation? I mean, protest is what you do when there is no hope that the other party will listen to you. If i’m just a hippy fruit-loop with delusions of compassion where it will never be, break it to me gently, will you?

ETA. Bitch is no longer scheduled to perform. I don’t know any more than that; more as i learn it.

Now that i've been introduced to the idea of "affinity politics," i am strongly tempted to say goodbye to identity politics forever.

The problem i've always had with identity politics is that it is based on an idea that can be twisted into something divisive. It works like this: people A, B, and C all identify as "X," and qua "X," they all have the same concerns. So they should band together!

It sounds great, but it is all too easily turned around. "You're not 'X' enough." "You're not a true 'X'." "I want to do W, but if i do, i'm not an 'X' anymore and my X friends will reject me." "I'm not X, but i'm Y, let's call this the 'XY' coalition." "Hey, i'm a 'Z,' you left me out."

Affinity politics does not parse the world in terms of how people identify themselves. It is still a form of Critical neo-Marxism, but the coalition is not based on how one identifies, but rather on where people find themselves in the web of oppression. The basis of affinity politics is the conscious formation of a coalition, rather than the realization of an identity within oneself. You are free to coalition with people who are like or unlike you; therefore it does not matter if everyone in the coalition shares a single characteristic, or performs that characteristic dutifully enough. No more being expelled if you aren't X enough or you want to do W.

It is the next step in consciousness raising beyond identity politics. Each of us begins in a state of unawareness of the web of oppression around us. Then you start to notice that everyone who is female, or who is gay, or who is black, is mistreated in certain systematic ways. You get together with other people who are female, or black, or gay, to talk about these things. So you start to think that everyone who is female, or black, or gay, has a unifying experience that makes you natural allies.

And then you're disillusioned to discover that this is not the case! So you're tempted to go back to step one and just give up on the whole thing. But a better next step is to form an affinity coalition. What binds the people in an affinity coalition is a similar point of view, and a similar desire for action, based loosely on having the same identity. An affinity coalition is inclusive in the same way that an identity group tends towards being exclusive.

My first encounter with such an idea was the use of the term "wo/man" by feminist theologian Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza:

( Read more... )

The downside is that when you're forming a coalition you can find at times that the people around you make you very uncomfortable. Bernice Johnson Reagon gave the quintessential description of this in 1981:

( Read more... )

Despite the difficulties, i think the future of radicalism is in affinity politics rather than identity politics. Let me give two examples of affinity orientations: "Women of color," and "Deep Lez."

Donna Haraway is often credited as calling attention to the idea of affinity politics in her Cyborg Manifesto. From that piece:

( Read more... )

"Deep Lez," a concept put forward by activist and performance artist Allyson Mitchell, is envisioned as a renewal of radical lesbianism. Mitchell's description of Deep Lez, from an interview, carries the same "oppositional consciousness" noted above by Haraway.

( Read more... )

The Epoch Times is a newspaper which was founded primarily to report on human rights abuses in China. I have on my desk here at work a copy of a similar paper which was handed to me a few months ago in Harvard Square, carrying a story about the Chinese government basically farming dissidents for their organs -- rounding them up, carving them up while they are still alive, and putting their organs on the transplant market.

Excuse me, i don't mean to speak out of line, but didn't we, as a species, decide that we wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing the last time a government rounded people up and farm-cannibalized them? Every now and then some government or other will make a statement about this, but so far not a damn thing has been done about it.

And i don't know what to say to the people who stand on the street trying to hand these newspapers out to people who, for the most part, don't want to be confronted with it. It's truly chilling to know that you can stand on a streetcorner all day and talk openly about terrifying crimes going on against thousands of people right now, here's the evidence, and few will even care to listen, and fewer still will do anything about it.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of girls have had their developing breasts ironed by their parents to keep them from growing. This is ostensibly to protect them. The city of Bangalore in India is considering a law that would forbid many employers from scheduling women to work at night. This is ostensibly to protect them.

Elsewhere in the world, the Virginia Citizens Defense League organized a gun giveaway to pointedly spit in the eye of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who complains that people are buying guns in Virginia, where laws are lax and enforcement of them even laxer, in order to commit crimes in New York City. Gun control may or may not be the answer, but the message is clear: for trying to stem violence at the source, you get ridiculed.

At the source -- that is the key to what i am getting at with all of these things, the thread that connects them all. No one ever wants to talk about what is wrong with bullies and abusers; instead the attention goes on the victims, the survivors, or the potential victims. For example, the most popular answer to widespread gun violence in the US is to propose that more people get guns, so they can have standoffs with would-be gun criminals. Perhaps that may even work.

But what troubles me about this approach is that it leaves completely unquestioned the observation that people buy weapons and commit crimes with them. Try to address the problem from that angle, and people get furious. Why is the most popular solution to take thuggery for granted and meet thugs at their level, rather than try to change them?

Many cities in the US have a shelter system for battered women. These operate on shoestring budgets because abuse survivors are not a social priority. But this system is frustrating and disheartening because everything falls on the survivor. The abuser almost always gets off scot-free. The survivor often loses everything, including whatever social standing they had. After seeing this happen to one survivor after another, after seeing one abuser after another getting away with it and facing no consequences whatsoever, it becomes really disheartening. Is this truly a world where someone can beat a person they claim to love and no one will do a goddamned thing about it?

"But, Sabrina, the prisons are overflowing. We do hold thugs accountable." Yes, prisons are overflowing, but to what extent does this actually address or fix the problem? This subject demands its own series of journal entries actually, particularly the extent to which the prison system is itself a form of institutional bullying, and the extent to which crime survivors feel bullied by the justice system. Suffice it to say for this entry that the justice system and the prison-industrial complex takes for granted the existence of thugs and bullies.

Our justice system examines individual events as if they occur in a vacuum, excluding social and economic factors from consideration as much as possible. The goal of the court proceeding is to establish guilt or innocence with regards to single isolated incidents, with everything else being deemed irrelevant. The bigger questions of social environment are thus kept out, are never scrutinized; a verdict is reached, someone is imprisoned or goes free, and justice is said to be served. Court proceedings are part of the enforcement of laws which have been crafted to call attention to some forms of bullying while legitimizing other forms or creating loopholes for abusers.

And this criticism is not meant to say that we shouldn't examine individual events and seek accountability in such cases, but to say that this is not all there is to justice. We are leaving out the biggest part. Instead of addressing the systemic problems in society that cause and perpetuate abuse, our edifices of justice play whack-a-mole and, as often as not, whack survivors instead of perps. It is a reaction, not a response.

Not only are we accustomed to treating thugs as "inhuman others," we are unaccustomed to thinking of injustice as something that permeates a society. Catch the bad guy and you're done, right?

Lasting justice will require sustained focus and interest on thugs themselves, why they do what they do, and how they play on our fears in order to avoid scrutiny and accountability. It will require every single person to look inside themselves and face what they do not want to face -- the piece of them that sympathizes with bullies and sees their point of view as normal or even normative. It will require sustained scrutiny of our institutions for encroachment by abusers and their sympathizers. It will require facing head-on the culture of fear that keeps each one of us scrambling for our own survival instead of seeing the interconnected threads of injustice. It will require keeping some of the focus on the big picture, to recognize when our pursuit of injustice on the small scale has made it possible for some to get away with injustices on a bigger scale because no one was looking.

But most of all, we have to start expecting better from thugs and bullies. If we resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be bullies, we enable them.

A conservative beat a socialist in the election in France, and many are using this as an opportunity to declare socialism dead in Europe.

The reality is much more complex than that. The last hurrah of state socialism notwithstanding, what is actually happening is a revolution within the revolution, which is precisely as it needs to be.

It's fair to say that a century of experiments have demonstrated that top-down, state-imposed socialism doesn't work. Economies and societies are too complex to be run from the top. Bureaucracies are too slow, too entrenched, to react to changing conditions. And we have seen, to our great disappointment, that there is no edifice we can establish as one generation's solution that cannot be undermined by unscrupulous cronyism and mutate into the next generation's problem.

But, at the heart of the problem is this: it is just not feasible in the long run to achieve the central goal of socialism within the state aparatus. There are some things, like accountability for wrongdoers, which will probably always require government. But the heart of socialism -- unraveling the web of control so we can be free -- is only hindered thereby.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in the middle and late nineteenth century, envisioned the global scheme of exploitation inevitably hitting a kind of rock bottom, causing ire among the working class to conflate to the point of violent revolution. They could not have foreseen the effects of technology between then and now; the effectiveness of advertising and television in numbing people to the inhumanly cannibalistic nature of the global economy -- nor could they have foreseen the widespread consciousness-raising potential of the internet.

They also imagined that the state could be transformed into an instrument for carrying out the will of the people. They were no doubt influenced by the grandiosity of American and French Revolutionary language -- the proclamation of "we the people" as the granter of governmental authority "by consent of the governed" (implying that consent can be withdrawn) instead of brute force and coersion and fear. That's a wonderful theory but it never seems to work out in reality.

At the other end of it, it is not enough to brew up a new critical rhetoric, bash a wine bottle on the bow and send it off into the world. Time has demonstrated that there is no rhetoric which cannot be misappropriated. Revolutions of this sort really only have to be waited out. A while back i proposed the (admittedly not very catchy) term "hypostatic reverie" to refer to the conceptual apathy by which people, over generational time scales, forget the 'revolutionary' character of new institutions and ideologies, and accept them as part of the landscape. And with this apathy comes the opportunity for misappropriation.

In terms of class struggles, it's been a very educational 140 years. We've learned, foremost, that we can't take the easy way out when unraveling the control paradigm. There is no single route to undoing the ideological and institutional hold of sexism, classism, and racism on society. It can't be imposed from the top; it can't be achieved in an adversarial-style uprising. If it were that easy, it could have been accomplished by now. The control paradigm operates on every level; it is embedded in our brains, implanted during childhood and, figuratively if not literally, beaten into us by parents, peers, and adults in authority.

Views become entrenched, even within the revolution; and "the revolution" has become such a fixture that it now is itself an edifice against which people of conscience must struggle. "The revolution" has been misappropriated so that it now is just another cog in the great machine of violence that chews people up. It is only with hindsight that we can comprehend that the monster often takes the guise of two factions, espousing different ideology, who grind away at each other, with children and women in the crossfire paying the highest price.

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle reflects this shift in awareness -- acknowledgment of the need for those with socialist consciousness to greatly re-think the unraveling of control and domination.

The revolution has been changing. It has taken the form of an emphasis on individual efficacy, a fondness for observing with Gandhi that we should "be the change," to recognize one's own place in the pyramid of control and understand that actions carry repercussions.

For example, once you become aware of "fair trade" products, you are directly confronted with the reality of exploitation overseas. You are also confronted with the understanding that if you continue to buy products you can no longer pretend you don't know were made in sweatshops or by slaves, that no matter what political positions you espouse you are a cog in the machine.

It may be, because of limited income or family size, that you have no choice but to continue to buy the cheaper product -- which in itself bears interesting insights about the way the game works, the way we are all swept along with the tide and, scrabbling for our own individual survival, rarely take the time and energy to see the greater pattern.

That fair trade products cost more reflects to a degree the economies of scale, but also the reality that what makes many products affordable is wage exploitation, low labor and safety standards, and even slavery. The difference represents the degree to which it is profitable to have a global empire which does not care about oppression.

But this is the level on which the revolution needs to happen -- not "us versus them" antagonism, but waves of lightbulbs lighting up in individuals on every level of the pyramid. If you're reading this, you're probably pretty close to the top of the pyramid, like me. The closer we are to the top, the more effect our individual choices can have as they propagate down the line. As each of us makes more and more humane choices, this change progresses until it becomes a building wave, a ripple which sweeps across the world.

So, i've been staring at this story in the New York Times all day. I don't know how to respond to it. It turns out that the melamine poisoning which officially killed 16 pets and unofficially killed thousands is an "open secret" in China, where food manufacturers have been putting the stuff in food for decades in order to fool testers into thinking it has more protein than it actually does.

I'm just wondering, how do we stop this from happening?

I mean really, how do we stop it from happening? Because if it is startable it is stoppable.

Well, we could "vote with our wallets" -- stop buying from food sellers who put melamine in their product. But after people or animals have died or gotten sick, it's too late. The point is making sure it doesn't happen in the first place.

I'm sure industries in China have to submit to some kind of inspection, regulation, and/or certification process like they do everywhere. But obviously it did no damn good. No matter what system you put in place -- a government system, or industry self-policing, or consumer watchdog agency -- it's susceptible to cronyism. People get bribed to look the other way; inspectors are overworked and don't test everything or notice every detail; whistleblowers get hounded into silence; there's always plausible denial and insufficient proof; juries can be tampered with, dazzled with brilliance or baffled with BS.

Besides, setting up a system of watchers, and then more watchers to watch the watchers, and more watchers to watch THOSE watchers, is a waste of human potential. So a control society is not the answer.

The real answer is to address directly why these things happen in the first place, what makes it seem like a good idea, and what kind of thing there is in a person's mind that makes them even think, "Gee, i'll put melamine in this pet food, i'll make more money and they're only animals so who really cares?" People might entertain these thoughts but not act on them; what tips them over into doing it?

How can we develop a society full of people who do not do such things? What has to change between this world and that world? Part of me is inclined to point at the profit motive but if we did not even have an economic system based on profit, this could still seem like a good idea. Need to dig even more deeply into ourselves to find this, i think.

Well, i feel i need to say a few things about this.

The Supreme Court of Canada on Friday declined to hear the case of a transsexual woman who was denied a job at a rape crisis center because she was not born biologically female.

For 12 years Kimberly Nixon has been battling the Vancouver Rape Relief which turned her down for a job at its facility in Vancouver which provides a safe-house for battered and raped women, and a crisis phone line.

from Supreme Court Of Canada Declines Transsexual Case

I don't agree with VRR's exclusion of Nixon, but i disagree MUCH MORE with the decision to take this to the courts at all.

Issues of disagreement between transactivists and radical feminists are not going to be resolved by calling in the state's apparatus of coersion. The state is singularly ill-equipped to handle disagreements between radicals. Adversity in this disagreement should not be escalated -- which is the only way that the legal system really knows how to handle disagreements.

Reconciliation between these two groups of activists is not about "winning victories," because a situation where any radical is forced against her will to submit to a state-enforced "remedy" against her conscience is not anything to celebrate about.

There is no real solution if one comes at this with the attitude of, "Well, i'll bring you around to seeing things my way." That attitude is reminiscent of the society of domination which we are trying to unravel. So the starting place is willingness to find an understanding.

In looking for a starting place for the solution here, i'm thinking of the essay on coalition politics by Bernice Johnson Reagon which i cited a month ago:

I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing. ... The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.

Running with this... the solution begins with recognizing that you don't really have any choice but to figure out how to co-exist and work towards your mutual goals together. In the case of transactivists and radical feminists, the thing is that individuals from both camps already encounter one another in the community, and their lives are frequently intertwined -- so there is no avoiding one another.

But anyway, if someone will not or cannot recognize mutual need, then that one is not ready to be your ally and there are no grounds to begin reconciling yet.

IMO a good next step is agreeing to sit together, even if silence in one another's presence or conversation about other topics is the only alternative to argument. But i think underlying this there needs to be an understanding that one will not just easily give up and walk out. Togetherness and respect for sisterhood is meaningful, even when there is disagreement, and it can be the foundation for further understanding.

This weekend i spent a fair amount of time pondering what peace is and how it should be achieved.

Whenever we have a war, there's a bunch of shooting and bombing and fear and rape and famine and torture and maiming, and whole nations are deeply traumatized and face environmental and economic crises for years or decades. And after the primary spasms of horrific violence end, there are "peace talks." Or, often the "peace talks" happen when there's been some terrorism and skirmishing and threats.

This whole idea of "peace talks" though enshrines a number of unspoken presumptions and agendas that i want to unravel a bit.

First, look at who gets to be party to the peace talks: the generals and warlords and state leaders and other people who masterminded the war in the first place. Does anyone ever speak for, or listen to, the refugees, the broken families, the orphans and widows, the children who were prostituted or drugged and made into soldiers?

Also absent are the war profiteers. They would prefer to stay in the shadows, because they benefit most when no one pays any attention to their role in all this and everyone just assumes that they are passive merchants, not power brokers. They want people to think that it wouldn't matter if they stopped selling arms or hiring out mercenaries because the demand exists independent of their supply, so if they got out of the war business someone else would just offer the same products anyway.

The people who do get to participate in peace talks do so in order to advance their agenda -- and i assert this to be the case for all parties no matter what ideology or doctrine they epouse: they want to duck any kind of accountability they might otherwise face for war crimes, and they want a seat in the cartel that has a monopoly on violence in the region. Throughout the peace talks, it is in their interest to make it seem that they are willing to return to violence at the drop of a hat -- as if being violent is the easy option, and not being violent is a perpetual struggle. Running and outfitting an army is not cheap, the resources for training, weapons, and provisions have to come from somewhere, and yet we are to believe that being nonviolent is the harder option? At peace talks, the biggest asset one has is the appearance of having limitless capacity for violence, and how backward is that?

So the idea of "peace" promoted by the state is the absence of factional organized violence, enforced by a cartel who assert the unique authority to use sanctioned violence in that region. Anyone else uses violence, they are criminals; the state uses violence, it is just and heroic. This is "peace:" unrealized potential violence. The state wants you to believe that peace comes at the point of a gun.

Which is where, like so many of the matters i consider, this comes down to one's view of human nature. If people are fundamentally unruly animals, for whom it actually is more difficult to be nonviolent than brutal, then pacificism doesn't make sense, and neither does compassion. Under the pessmistic view of human nature, we should be thankful if we live in an area with a strong state and a healthy culture of fear-respect for God, police and military.

However, i'm not inclined to think that way, for several reasons, not the least of which is that what we are witnessing is not the action of humans in our natural habitat but the action of humans under the severe stresses of crowding and being caged. If our unruliness is fundamentally the reaction to this stress -- along with stress from various other stressors -- then adding the stress of perpetually-threatened state violence cannot be a lasting solution. The better solution, it seems to me, is a more direct response to the stresses which cause our unruliness.

Is peace more than the absence of war? I believe instead that it is the steps we take to foster greater understanding, less prejudice, and reduced stress. If this is the case, then we all have a stake in promoting and developing peace. And we, all of us, not just the ones with the guns and bombs, have a voice in saying what it looks like.

I'm sure a fair number of you know who Twisty is: radical feminist and proud resident of Austin, Texas. I've read her blog for some time, and, like several other transpeople i know, was horrified to witness an explosion of transphobic vitriol in the comments to a post she wrote on December 15 [warning: may be upsetting!] which originally had nothing to do with transgenderism. It hurt so much because (1) of the rawness of it and (2) because it was a surprise to see the topic come up there: Twisty, by self-admission, doesn't bring up trans issues because it is not something she knows a great deal about.

As happens in the blogosphere there have been numerous echoes and responses and retrenchments and un-blogrollings and such. Even though Twisty herself has made it clear she is not transphobic and has been deeply shaken and disappointed by the conduct she witnessed in her own comment page (something with which i can comisserate), i still don't feel comfortable reading her blog. The self-preservation instinct has kicked in and is still overriding my willingness to risk being stung a second time.

The silver lining is that some truly inspired bloggery has come out of this, such as Winter's response: "I did not come to feminism for this."

But on the whole i have a bad taste in my mouth over what i saw happen in the feminist and transfeminist blogosphere in the last couple of weeks. Division between feminists always pains my heart and makes me feel like i'm dying a little. Humanity needs feminism to succeed -- possibly for its very survival.

Feminism is not a revelatory religion with a high priesthood who makes proclamations and writes scripture. There is no "perfect feminist" who is without flaw and whose utterances can be taken as inerrant gospel. There is no easy answer, no laundry list of dos and don'ts that guarantee you're on the straight and narrow. It's an ongoing process of discourse and learning and introspection, and even someone who's been walking this path for decades has room to learn and grow.

Problem is, our society is not tolerant of this kind of process. We expect illumination to come in a flash, to be able to flick a switch and go from hellbound sinner to born again saint. Admitting you might be mistaken, and then forgiving yourself for having a lapse in your insight, are hard. It takes years, and honesty, and humility. It requires that we are capable of admitting, "Oh, okay, i misunderstood, i did the wrong thing, and now i know better and will act differently in the future" -- without excoriating ourselves afterwards.

This is what discourse is: growth and evolution, not standing in a trench of static, unchanging, presumably perfect doctrine exchanging pot-shots with someone in an opposing trench clasping an opposing presumption of perfect doctrine.

But in this society, true discourse is not allowed. It is subversive; it might start off as harmless-enough navel-gazing, but eventually it means questioning the current distribution of power -- and those who have power do not think it's in their interest to encourage that. And so the baby of personal and cultural growth is thrown out with the bathwater of discourse. Discourse becomes "rational dialogue" (so-called because any first-hand accounts of trauma or experience are generally considered off-limits) in which talking points are spat back and forth with no real exchange of meaning at all. Meaning is not abstract, it requires perspective, understanding, and personal experience. "Rational dialogue" is a hamster wheel: radicals are sentenced to an eternity of having the same draining conversations with status-quo defenders over and over and over, like Sisyphus in Tartarus pushing a rock up hill all day every day and watching it roll downhill in the evening.

The internet causes discourse to lose whole dimensions of understanding and communication which are present when you're talking face to face. It encourages a "gotcha!" mindset, and Google makes it possible to dredge up any kind of dirt you need to find on someone to nail someone just that much more thoroughly. Never mind if you have matured and evolved beyond a certain point of view, if you wrote it down it can and will be dredged up to discredit you today. The internet encourages immediate gratification, and so in the blogosphere people often write things without reflection. (I've taken to avoiding posts on current issues, in part because of my concern about this.)

Interacting in the comments page of a blog can feel deceptively conversational, but all too often it is not really conversation.
Let me be plain: for fostering understanding, there just is no substitute for speaking face-to-face.

In any other mode of communication, meaning is lost. For many kinds of mundane interaction this may make no difference, but when the topic at hand is difficult and requires very deep introspection and sometimes even gazing into the soul of the person with whom you are conversing, the internet is not necessarily a boon.

As an aside, to establish the bigger picture i'm pondering: this is a big part of why walls are evil. They block off whole populations from having any contact with one another. Walls do not bring peace, they bring misunderstanding and discord. Peace does not come at the point of a law enforcement officer's gun (this is the myth the government wants you to believe), it comes from face-to-face interaction; it comes from standing beside the infidel at the market watching them haggle over the price of a toy for their kid.

I've lost sleep over flame wars, i've had migraines because of them, gotten sick because of them, and did not feel that my growth was really fostered in any meaningful way. I challenge any of the people who posted transphobic comments in Twisty's blog to spend an hour or two with me, seeing my pain and sharing her pain with me, to see if they can still afterwards make the same comments they made then. (I'd challenge myself to see if i retained the same harsh opinion i have of them, too.)

I don't mean to imply that we should stop having blogs, because on the whole it is still better to have internet communication than not, but i don't know how, really, to address this concern.

The Echo 9 launching facility for the intercontinental nuclear missile Minuteman III is about 100 miles northwest of Bismarck, North Dakota. Endless fields of sunflowers and mown hay dazzle those who travel there.

... On the morning of June 20, 2006, three people dressed as clowns arrived at Echo 9. The clowns broke the lock off the fence and put up peace banners and posters. One said: “Swords into plowshares - Spears into pruning hooks.” Then they poured some of their own blood and hammered on the nuclear launching facility.

[Fr. Carl Kabat, 72,] is a Catholic priest. [Greg Boertje-Obed, 52,] is an ex-military officer, married and the father of an 11 year old daughter. [Michael Walli, 57,] is a Vietnam vet who has worked with the homeless for decades. Greg and Carl are members of the Loaves and Fishes Community in Duluth. The three are called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares.

They placed a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, international legal condemnations of nuclear weapons, bibles, rosaries, bread, wine, and a picture of Greg's daughter on the top of the missile silo.

Then they waited until the air force security forces came and arrested them.

From Bill Quigley's article CONVICTIONS: The Trial of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares Clowns

The Plowshares Clowns were convicted and each face up to 10 years in prison. What caught my eye in this article was this:

The defense asked for two instructions about justice – one from the preamble to the US Constitution another from Judge Learned Hand – both were denied by the judge. Defendants asked that the jury be read the First Amendment – denied. International law? Denied. Nuremberg Principles? Denied. The US statute defining war crimes? Denied. The US statute defining genocide? Denied.

The judge then went forward and instructed the jury to disregard anything about nuclear weapons, international law, and the good motives of the defendants. The effect of these instructions was to treat the actions of the defendants the same as if they had poured blood and hammered on a Volkswagen – pure property damage.

... One of the jurors told people afterwards that many on the jury learned a lot in the trial and were sympathetic to the defense, but “the judge's instructions left us no option but to find them guilty.”

Of course they had no option but to find them guilty. The whole process had been rigged from the beginning to reduce the various perspectives and nuances of the situation to a single black-and-white renduring of "innocent or guilty." It is not a process by which the truth of the matter is discerned; it is a process by which all of the meaning and significance of life, the big picture, is filtered out as much as possible.

This is what i've referred to in various entries as "the tyranny of the written word." By that i don't mean that written language is somehow evil or tyrannous (although that idea has been explored); i refer to a way of looking at the world which deliberately examines details in a distinctly literal and direct way... pouring over the words of contracts and laws, with the net result that the greater meaning of things -- which many of us might be inclined to think of as the really important part -- is filtered out in favor of a stultifyingly limited cross-section of events.

How else is it conceivable that three people, avowed pacifists, protesting in a less than placid and well-behaved way their lack of voice with regards to the distribution of resources and labor in their society, can be essentially reduced to vandals? The ability of people to speak their wishes aloud, and act in accordance with their words and beliefs -- in short, to act in accordance with their will -- is perhaps the most fundamental right there is. And it is NOT in the best interest of the ruling oligarchy to allow people that right, or to even let them think that right exists.

Hence, we have this "rationalistic" method of smashing reality with a hammer and looking only at the little bits that best suit our goals.

The justice system meets the needs of the state rather than the needs of people. The needs of people would be best served by mapping out a route from here to the maximum empowerment of every person involved. Even though the ideal "government of, by, and for the people" would (according to the US's founding documents) have a similar concern (and would therefore have no interest in restricting people's non-harmful actions or expression), the government we have is not in the least interested in the empowerment of people. It is interested in the self-preservation of ongoing institutional concerns.

The "big picture" is threatening to the state -- not just because, as Stephen Colbert put it, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" -- but because thoughtful, engaged citizens are not so easily swayed by shepherding tactics. People can only become aware of the inequality and injustice which permeates our society, of the truly small amount of control the state allows them to have in the direction of their lives, if they are able to deeply contemplate the big picture. Being conscious and aware is one of the most radical things you can do.

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sophiaserpentia

December 2021

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with compassion as solution

on freedom and dissent

interesting times

the grabbing hands grab all they can

when all you have is a hammer, everyone looks like a nail

some words on the general futility of words

an opportunity to build a coalition

his dark materials - a gnostic/humanist fairy tale

meta-neo-

a peek into the swirling mass that is my brain, from which occasionally emerges coherent thoughts

it's all about the way we define our society's priorities

no easy-mode radicalism

are things really so adversarial?

affinity politics: women of color and deep lez

abuser planet: where the right of bullies to have their way is never questioned

the revolution within the revolution

(no subject)

(no subject)

peace versus the absence of violence

blogging as a pale imitation of discourse

the devil's in the details