The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
In an appearance Tuesday on MSNBC's Countdown, Daily Kos* founder Markos Moulitsas criticized Rep. Dennis Kucinich's** threat to vote against health care reform legislation as "a very Ralph Nader-esque approach to politics" and indicated that he would consider such a vote to be legitimate grounds for a primary challenge.
"It's not perfect," Moulitsas said of the current health care legislation, "but it's a first step, and God knows it's taken us a long time to even get our toe in the door. ... If somebody like Kucinich wants to block that, I find that completely reprehensible."
"Is it reprehensible enough to mount a primary challenge against him?" O'Donnell asked. "Is it possible to be too liberal?"
"Absolutely," Moulitsas responded. "I don't think he gets a pass. I don't care what his excuse is. ... He"s not elected to grandstand and to give us his ideal utopian society. ... He's not representing the uninsured constituents in his district by pretending to take the high ground here. ... I think that's the perfect excuse and rationale for a primary challenge.***" [link]
Of course, Political Genius Mamz has no idea that the filing deadline has already passed: "The Ohio primary takes place on May 4, and the filing deadline for candidates was February 18," Dayen notes. "Kucinich has no Democratic challenger." -- maybe mamzie would like to return to his roots and start supporting Republicans again.
* DailyKos is a website dedicated to electing Democrats.
** Rep. Dennis Kucinch is a Democrat.
*** Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga aka Kos should be banned from DailyKos. As many others have been banned in the past.
Last year a friend of mine in Germany sent me his Meisterarbeit about Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, and as you might expect (if you have any expectations about such a thing), it was a forest of Begriffe.
So many concepts, and such a difficult subject, now further complicated by 200 years of criticism and analysis! But it wasn't exactly inconceivable that I might provide some aid and comfort for my friend, because I studied the first Critique once upon a time with a famous Kantian, although he never had a balkier student!
But as I began to read through my friend's thesis, with a German text of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and two translations (Max Muller and Kemp Smith) near at hand, an uncanny sort of unfamiliarity with what was formerly most familiar about "the Chinese of Königsberg " suddenly descended upon me.
Did I really have a concept of a "concept?"
Leaving aside the difficult examples which have provided grist for the mills of nominalism and realism for more than 2000 years, and proceeding directly to Kant's favorite objects of intuition and analysis in geometry, where every quality of a circle can be deduced from the definition, I still doubted that all those qualities were already somehow present in my intuition as soon as I conceived of a curve everywhere equidistant from a given point.
Did I already (or ever) also conceive of the beautiful connection between Pascal's triangle and the four (or any number of) travelers problem, where all of them traveling at constant speeds on skew lines will inevitably meet all of each other if any two of them meet all the rest? It was hard enough to conceive a statement of the problem!
Worse yet, was it even conceivable for anyone to conceive of the higher-dimensional analogues of our familiar two-dimensional circles, the most familiar of all geometrical objects, but eventually generalized into a realm where anything like a geometric interpretation of those hyper-complicated generalizations may (or may not) be impossible? (This is a worm's-eye view of the Hodge Conjecture, and for an eagle's-eye view readers are referred to Pierre Deligne.)
Apart from this zone of ne plus ultra abstraction, everything concrete also conceals an equal inconceivability in its limitless particularity, every apple indescribably individuated away from a concept of apples which is serviceable enough for grocery stores and picture dictionaries, but only because almost none of the differences matter.
If you know it's a Fuji apple, and it isn't a rotten apple, or an apple with a worm in it, you know almost everything that you need or want to know about that apple.
So our concepts of concrete things are so dependable in our everyday existence that it's only natural to invest them with a confidence beyond their everyday context, in a parallel world of Platonic Forms, for example, and not only beyond any possible experience, where Kantian antinomies return us abruptly to the here and now, but even more naturally into domains where we might have any amount of experience, but happen to have none at all.
And then, descending from the aerial perspective of Pierre Deligne and Plato and Kant, down, down, and down to the less-than-a-worm's eye view of George W. Bush...
I wondered what that dim and demented little man had conceived we were invading when our armies invaded Afghanistan.
Was it only a shape on a map, where Bush or his tools at the CIA wrote "Here There Be Terrorists!" like a scrawl on some medieval Imaginarium: "Here There Be Dragons?"
And terrorists likewise exist! ...although they only distantly intersect with our everyday experience, and by the time we recognized the name "Mohammed Atta," it was the name of nothing.
But at one time Mohamed Atta was a brilliant engineer and architect with an advanced degree in urban planning from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. Immediately before he disappeared into the Islamist underground he was spectacularly under-employed as unskilled labor in a warehouse.
Mohamed Atta's otherwise austere apartment in Hamburg, Germany, had a curious decoration. On his wall hung a poster of the black-and-white photograph taken by Lewis Hine in 1930 of construction workers perched on a beam of the Empire State Building high above New York. The city far below looks dwarfed and inconsequential. According to his teachers and former classmates, Atta believed that high-rise buildings had desecrated his homeland. In the ancient cities of the Middle East, the time-honored mode of construction was to build one- and two-story houses with private courtyards. The construction of towering, impersonal and usually ugly apartment blocks in the 1960s and '70s, Atta believed, had ruined the old neighborhoods, robbing their inhabitants of privacy and dignity.
The ordinary business of terrorism is so crude that even American media can almost adequately describe it. Dig a hole. Put a bomb in it. Boom!
Mohamed Atta elevated this miserable occupation into an art-form of almost super-human power. Superman "leaps tall buildings in a single bound." Mohamed Atta knocks them down, with nothing but a set of warehouse box-cutters and a few clumsy accomplices, like Zacarias Moussaoui.
To match this masterpiece of the art of destruction, you would have to cast someone like Richard Feynman in the dual role of inventing nuclear weapons and also piloting the plane which obliterated Hiroshima, and from 9/11 to Hiroshima the course of history runs backward and forward like Feynman's hypothetical electron/positrons, flowing backward and forward in time in an infinite dance of creation and annihilation, from Big Bang to Big Bang...
And if you can imagine that, maybe you can also conceive of an adequate concept of terrorism.
(Side Note: There would probably be a huge public outcry against this proposed bill if it were, let's say, happening in Germany. But there are very few white people in Uganda; turns out Uganda is mostly full of Ugandans, so only wacky left-wing communists and George Clooney will give a fuck.)
Of course, Pope B-Dog didn't mention the bill while addressing Ugandan Catholics. This is because the Catholic church in Uganda is competing with Christian fundamentalists and Muslims. The fundies and Muslims are, hilariously, not content with just imprisoning or killing gays; presumably, they would rather build a time machine and go back in time to kill the first homo, thus annihilating the 'gay threat' at the beginning. The Catholics, fundies, and Muslims are fighting over believers, sort of like corporations battling for customers, although fuck the "sort of like" big business, because that's exactly what's happening here. And Pope B-Dog and the Ugandan bishops, instead of standing up for the principles laid out by Jesus, would rather play it safe and, at least, retain a neutral stance on the Homo Killer bill to placate the fiery hatred of gays held by Ugandan religious retards so said religious retards don't go Islamic or pentecostal fundie.
This is akin to having two Nazi parties, one which is somewhat 'progressive' (in the absolute loosest sense of the term) and would rather just kill Jews as opposed to the super Hitler supporters who want to strap Polish Heebies to a rocket and send them crashing into the sun. (Another Side Note: Yes, we totally just took a cheap shot at Pope B-Dog with the Nazi reference. And no, we don't care about how cheap it was.)
There it is, dear readers. This is what happens when so-called benevolent institutions must choose between sticking to their principles or, like any big business, fretting over their bottom line.
Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.
It's hard to believe that more than 90 percent of the workforce in Zimbabwe are part of the informal sector. These workers do everything from selling bananas and playing music to selling stone carvings and other crafts. Unfortunately because they are not considered part of the formal economy, they are often the most exploited-or ignored-by the government. As a result, in 2002, they formed the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA), an associate of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), to help gain a voice for their members in government.
These workers, who traditionally competed against each other and with the formal sector -are now coordinated and working together to tackle pressing issues such as social security, disability benefits, improved infrastructure, working conditions, and many others.
The Informal Economy is being helped by ZCTU together with their elected leadership to lobby legislators to change the laws to that they become user friendly.
. . . The protest is being sponsored by a broad coalition of about 25 left-wing groups, including American Jews for a Just Peace, Codepink, Gaza Freedom March and Jewish Voice for Peace. Organized by Jews Say No!, the protest was endorsed by the Israeli groups Coalition of Women for Peace and BOYCOTT! Supporting the Palestinian BDS From Within.
"We think it's inappropriate for an American organization to be feting the Israeli army, when the Israeli army is implicated in violations of international law," said Rebecca Vilkomerson, director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She said Operation Cast Lead opened up people's eyes to the role that the Israeli army plays. The Goldstone Report also made people consider the notion that the IDF is fallible, she added.
"Definitely, it has opened up a big conversation in the Jewish community," she said, observing that in the past year more Jews have begun "questioning the idea that Israel is always right."
Okay, I admit, the actual Jerusalem Post headline was "Hundreds set to turn out for anti-Israel demo in NY." I.e., equating support for Israel with support for its the criminal actions of its military, like labeling an anti-Iraq war protest an anti-U.S. protest. But, okay, par for the Jerusualem Post course, and we move on. . . . to more important positive news out of Israel/Palestine from a basic humanitarian perspective. Note btw the efforts by Israel to avoid a fair verdict:
Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.
In Harare, on the way to our meeting with Wellington Chibebe, the secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), even our driver was excited for us.
"He is a good, good man. I've only seen him on TV, but he's fights very hard for the people and to promote democracy!"
Since the early 1990s, ZCTU grew increasingly opposed to the government of Robert Mugabe and was the main force behind the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In fact, MDC's leader and the current Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Richard Tsvangirai held the same position with the ZCTU before Chibebe.
Chibebe is one of the most vocal-and effective-voices in civil society promoting respect for human rights and democracy. Despite being brutally beaten, tortured, and having his life threatened over the last two decades, Chibebe remains more positive than ever about the direction of his country. It was largely due to Zimbabwe's labor movement that in the 2008 presidential election Tsvangirai defeated Mugagbe. Yet despite MDC's victory, Mugabe, refuses to step down and the nation has a "power sharing" agreement.
When we met with Chibebe, he was cautiously optimistic about the power-sharing agreement and the future of democracy in Zimbabwe. "Our role as the labor movement is to fight for democracy and good governance, respect for people's basic rights, and also social and economic rights." He says that while the MDC plays a critical role in promoting democracy, the mission of the union movement will be to hold all political parties accountable to these principles. "We just can't afford to repeat the same mistake by treating any government or political party as angels from heaven," he says. While he described the beginning of the power-sharing agreement as "terrible," Chibebe felt strongly that "things are now getting better, we are able to make some positive changes happen."
Chibebe was born 300 miles south of Harare. His upbringing herding goats and farming built both a sense of responsibility and social consciousness, he says. "Rural kids grow up different from urban ones, you start fighting for your rights at a very early age. If you aren't aggressive, you'll get abused." He also described how in rural life he had no access to books or libraries, so everyone listened to their elders, learning about the importance of struggle and hearing passionate tales of resistance against the ruling government. Not even a teen when his mother passed away, Chibebe became passionately involved in political struggle for social and economic justice that has lasted his whole life.
Being at the helm of the Zimbabwe labor movement at this moment is no easy task. The country faces unemployment rates of more than 90 percent. The media is controlled by the government. Union leaders are routinely harassed and imprisoned. And the Mugabe government instituted draconian laws to thwart unions, such as arresting any meeting of more than four people. Yet the affiliates of the ZCTU, representing more than 30 unions and every sector of the economy, have remained united. "While it is very difficult at times with unemployment so high to convince people to be in unions, we are still able to recruit and grow."
Chibebe works tirelessly to bring attention to Zimbabwe's economic and human rights realities and to pressure the government to reform its ways. As workers struggle to survive inflation and low paying informal employment, Chibebe has expanded the work of the ZCTU to represent all workers in both formal and informal employment. ZCTU fights for economic and social justice not just for his members, but for the fundamental rights of all of Zimbabwe's workers.
In 2002, Chibebe and the ZCTU had the vision of helping informal sector workers-everyone from street vendors to musicians and artisans-form unions. The desire for social and economic change spread like wild fire when the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Associations (ZCIEA) started in 2002. Presently with more than 1.5 million paying members (out of 3.5 million members), the informal workers now have access to all the resources of the ZCTU such as their lobbyists, their research arm, and the strength and power of their affiliate unions.
Chibebe, and everyone we met with at ZCTU, speaks with great pride about the support they've been given by the American labor movement through the Solidarity Center, which maintains an office in the country. "Because of the Solidarity Center and the American worker, we've had incredible moral and material support," Chibebe said. Some of the examples he cites are the role the Solidarity Center plays in supporting their research institute, expanding distribution of their newspaper "the Worker," their ability to fund a lobbyist, create a paralegal program, training activists and leaders, and getting support from international governments and politicians through organizational delegations such as the visit from the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU).
Care International's work in Zambia has two main goals: increase the production of staple crops and improve farmers' access to agricultural inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers.
But instead of giving away bags of seed and fertilizers to farmers, Care is "creating input access through a business approach," not a subsidy approach, according to Steve Power, Assistant Country Director for Zambia.
One way they're doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbors as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. At the same time, "we are mindful" of the benefits of local varieties of seeds, says Harry Ngoma, Agriculture Advisor for the Consortium for Food Security, Agriculture and Nutrition, AIDS, Resiliency and Markets (C-FAARM). Care and C-FAARM are working with farmers to combine high- and low-technology practices.
Care thinks that this "business approach" will help farmers get the right inputs at the right time, unlike subsidy approaches that give farmers fertilizer for free, but often at the wrong time of year, making the nutrients unavailable to crops. And Care's focus on training agro-dealers and giving them start-up grants allows the organization to remain invisible to farmers. Power says that Care wants to be a "catalyst to the market" and help transfer resources, without distorting the basic pricing structure.
Another component of Care's work is improving the production of sorghum and cassava. "Zambia is as addicted to maize as we are to Starbucks coffee," says Power. But by encouraging the growth of other crops, including sorghum, which is indigenous to Africa, Care can help farms diversify local diets as well as build resilience to price fluctuations and drought.
Care is promoting conservation farming in Zambia as well. The organization has been working in six districts since 2007, reaching 24,000 households. In addition to promoting minimum tillage practices and the use of manure and compost, Care is helping to train government extension officers about conservation farming so that eventually they'll be responsible-instead of Care-for training farmers.
According to Power, the key to Care's work is promoting business-like approaches to agriculture alongside more traditional ones, so farmers don't become dependent on the organization for gifts of fertilizer or seed. These sorts of programs, according to Care, will be more effective at feeding people and increasing incomes than traditional food-aid projects that rely on long-term donor support. This is a big challenge in a country-and a region-facing the impacts of both climate change and the global economic crisis.
Stay tuned for more blogs about how farmers are linking to the private sector.
Government works quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.
It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.
The last thing that I clearly remember is walking into a bar on Silver Lake Boulevard, and in a man-bites-dog scenario the bartender was trying to get my attention.
"Hey paparazzo", he said, "I invented a new drink specially for you! You want to know what's in it?"
"Five shots of vodka! Hahahahaha!"
This was supposed to be my last stop on the way to the Kodak Theatre, where Sandra Bullock would inevitably win Best Actress as the first female headliner of a movie grossing over $200 million, in her more or less irrelevant role as a University of Mississippi football booster so insanely gung-ho that she coincidentally adopts a huge, inarticulate, and unfriendly black teenager who is coincidentally a future All-American left tackle at Ole Miss.
This payoff for the relentlessly likeable Ms. Bullock would be followed as night follows day by Best Picture for "The Hurt Locker," a passive-aggressive video game where Iraqi bombers mysteriously decline to blow up a bomb-squad honcho 800 times in a row, and nobody even wonders why!
It's just those wacky Iraqis!
So now I'm at an after-after-after party with my new best friend, the inventive Silver Lake bartender.
"Hey paparzzo," he says, "you want to know what I call your special drink?"
First things first. We at Lib Porn believe that Black History Month is an academic consolation prize for an entire group of people, tantamount to a bitch slap of smiley racism along the lines of, "Okay you guys have been fucked in America for years, so here's a month of black history to shut you niggers up." Except so many aspects of Black History Month reek of the foul aroma of the white power structure's system. Black History Month is all Rosa Parks and MLK, very little Nat Turner and Huey P. Newton, which limits the centuries-long civil rights movement among blacks to the sort of fight for social change that white people are comfortable with. Ya know, nonviolent protests and calls for unity. But sometimes, to get some shit done in the face of injustice, oppressed people had to curse or get angry, and when black people curse or get angry, white America gets all shook up. Basically, what we learn about black history in February is equivalent to a neutered black panther.
Yet even this racist academic token breeds resentment among white people too stupid to understand that yes, institutional racism is alive and well in our country. After preparing myself by popping several Quaaludes chased with a vodka and orange juice, I jumped headlong into Facebook groups who concern themselves with the issue of why there should totally be a White History Month.
The first group I found, which for some reason bore the visage of Sean Connery as a profile pic, was a lesson in racism, ignorance, and the absolute gayness of many white people. In the description field, the administrator of this group humbly states, "This is not a group supporting racism or anything along those lines. We just believe that if one race gets a month why don't we have the same rights. We are not a racist group! Join but do not pick fights or try to insult." Clearly, the admin doesn't fancy him or herself as racist. The admin certainly hasn't visited any Klan rallies, nor does he or she seem likely to lynch anyone. Yet this simple group description, which sounds somewhat naïve and innocent initially, reflects the attitude of the severe lack of self awareness among otherwise decent white people.
American blacks are, whether everyday white people like it or not, at a peculiar disadvantage. Yes, we realize that other groups have their own disadvantages, but black Americans have been demonized as persons to be feared. For example, for about a month Glenn Beck had everyone in middle America fearing that Van Jones and his marxist Black Panther buddies were about to explode Bettsy Ross. The Obama presidency has sent more hillbillies running to underground militia groups than any president in history. And let's not forget the simple everyday fear of black men and the welfare queen stereotype aimed almost exclusively at black women. Also, it isn't like black families from back in the day (back in the day being a pleasant euphemism for America's slave-owning days) always had a chance to inform their children of their home countries in Africa; black Americans can't trace their national heritage to individual countries as often as white people can. That's why white people are German, Irish, or Norwegian, while blacks are just Africans. (To be fair, we understand that many young white Facebook users aren't aware that Africa is a continent.) This lack of heritage beyond the breakup of an ancestor's family at the hands of some toothless Confederate slave peddler separates the cultural identity of blacks from, say, Puerto Ricans or those darn no good Irishmen.
All this, however, matters very little to those who are very stupid. Users who've joined the White History Month (who apparently enjoy Sean Connery's handsome features a little too much) plaster the group's page with innumerable comments referencing the disgustingly obvious racism forced upon the white community, which we assume really pisses them off. One user, whose comment received the Facebook equivalent to a standing ovation, said in response to a poster who said white history dominates text books, that "Text books teach about history as a WHOLE, not white history specifically." This is like getting punched in the face then saying, "Well he punched my FACE, not my nose specifically." The historical texts of the white power structure (and there is a white power structure, and no, poor and working class whites -- some of whom are doubtlessly champions of a white history month -- aren't really part of it) center on the doings of powerful caucasians and caucasian nations. African involvement in these histories is relegated to that of a whipping boy of the Euro-powers. There is little to no mentioning of African civilization, that occurred way before any such societies in Europe, we might add, nor the devastation brought upon the dark continent, not to mention South America, by white colonialism. Sure, you'll hear that the Spaniards did this or the British did that, but how many history teachers flat out tell us, "White Europeans, followed by white Americans, totally fucked up the lives of countless brown and black nations"? This, dear friends, is called revisionist history. Or flat-out-lying history, if you want to be blunt.
To be fair, there was another user who created a group called White History Month? (the question mark is not a typo), which was actually a formed by smart people who believed that the retards calling for a month glorifying white history were, for lack of a better term, totally retarded. This group (who lacks a photo or any mention whatsoever of Sean Connery) was, however, soon overtaken by young white idiocy. The admin's calls for civility in poster discussion, and the original intentions of the group, were drowned out by countless racist one-liners and dubious evidence of the rampant prejudice against the oppressed white peoples of America.
All of this is very asshole-ish and, I'm sorry to say, unsettling. The internet is like a nude beach where people wear bags over their head; you can let it all hang out in the open, but you're still relatively anonymous. That anonymity allows the wacky people of the internets to spew their disgusting bigoted beliefs. But Facebook isn't anonymous. The person saying that disgusting shit is right there, in their profile picture, and might even provide a phone number or AIM screen name. So it isn't like these idiots are just barking up the racist tree for kicks. They're either too stupid to understand the not-so-subtle aspects of revisionist Eurocentric history...or they really are just bigoted assholes.
Lately, every time I post something here that is spozed to kind of generate conversation, without too much of my madness inserted, I get these people popping up admonishing me about my lack of original content.
My fix on this is that I am in much better a position to direct y'all to good original content, than I am to invent it myself, but I shall defer to your wisdom, O Kossacks.
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
-First Amendment to the United States Constitution
In Harare, on the way to our meeting with Wellington Chibebe, the secretary general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), even our driver was excited for us.
