On the Dawn of Yet More New Democratic Failure

Of course, he's gone and re-posted this himself, but I also must pass on Jack Crow's recommendations for some policies that would have been worth more than the Wisconsin recalls (which is to say worth something):

At the point of work:

1. Wage hikes.

2. Vacation time extensions.

3. Increased health care coverage.

4. Shorter working days.

5. Shorter working weeks.

6. Anything which forces a company to reduce contributions to its profit statement.

Outside of the work place:

1. Larger strike pay funds.

2. Comprehensive child care facilities.

3. Independent and semi-independent food supplies, so that striking workers and their families can eat without fear of starvation.

4. The construction of low rent or no-rent union residences, so that striking workers do not have to calculate the hit to their paychecks as a first step to eviction.

5. A better outreach to women and minorities, by ending "outreach" efforts and agitating for exactly what they want: equal pay.

6. A coherent message which can be simplified to this: It Should Be Easy For Everyone. This conservatarian/bootstrapper ethic which dominates our culture and society has got to be fucking attacked, and mercilessly. Hard work and poverty don't improve character. They break lives.

So basically, people who say they want to help the working class need to stop sending money from the working class to other people who say they want to help the working class. If you want to help people, you fucking help them.

Balance and Equivalence

I disdain the media's take on objectivity. Routinely I see, whether in serious or "humorous" news programs, the hurried attempt to find an equivalent episode following the criticism of one party or another. "Corporations and unions," "private and public," "both supporters and critics of the war," "employees and management..." Is there fault to be found in all of these places? Certainly there is.

Is it always the same? Is it always identical? Sometimes it may be or certainly appears to me. I find most of the party machinery of the United States to be analogous and have found their partisans to speak similarly. They play the same game, that's pretty evident. But I also see times when fault stands on its own, when criticism can be voiced without immediately faulting the other, which I feel maintains the duopoly as effectively as clearly one-sided propaganda.

See, I'm frustrated by what I've encountered among a lot of third-partiers and self-described independents when I criticize one side. Hungry to point out hypocrisy--and to be fair, there's plenty of it around--you can barely get in a heavy critique before someone steps in to remind that other people suck too.

In my personal experience, you can roll with that and play with it, reminding the partisan of the bastardy of those on his side, too. And an honest person must be prepared to look at the big picture and try to identify what is generalizable about an argument that takes on only one faction in the vast system. That said, I don't need to adopt some cable news outlet's idea of "fairness." "They're all a bunch of bastards" is objectively true, and ought to be understood at least on some level. My critique doesn't satisfy me, however, if it only stops there.

Not to go all leftwing on you, but I like some of what Debord said when comparing and contrasting the spectacles present in both pro-capitalist and Soviet blocs. He didn't need to equate them in order to tar them both, and that's where I hope to stand. Nuance and distinction can be found anywhere in order to obscure crimes and pardon the unforgivable, but the doctrine of equivalence brings about its errors as well.

Innocent Ideas

Let's be honest. Nobody likes thought police, or at least nobody I want to have anything to deal with. The business of searching other people's minds for sickness, danger, and evil is the business of coercion. We all have violent impulses. We all have treacherous feelings. We all have some inherent instincts and urges that can be hard to understand even in our own contexts, much less if we are expected or forced to justify them to some other asshole.

That said, I resent the impulse to say that ideas don't kill people, that "real communism" doesn't explain Stalin or "true fascism" doesn't lead to the extermination of other ethnic groups (I actually heard that once, if you'd believe it) or, as a family member told me (naturally, after support became unpopular), "I thought Bush was a conservative," or now the endless line of liberals who say that Obama isn't a "true liberal," that he's "betrayed" not the people or basic decency, but liberalism itself.

As I have said numerous times, victory has many fathers while failure is an orphan. Nobody wants to claim the violence and terror that follows from many a thought, and I will say this and I mean it that I will deny everyone and anyone the defense of "but I didn't mean that!

This is not political maneuver. This is not smearing of my opponents with the brush of horror and death. I do this to my own "side," whatever it happens to be at a given moment. I am aware of the crimes of putative anarchists even as I am sympathetic to the cause of their Victorian iteration. I have taken this up when discussing "revolutionary violence" with the respectable Jack Crow. I do the downside, and I'm comfortable with that.

So if you're a liberal who says that you have some black politician on hand to defend your prosecution of the drug war to "keep communities safe" and jail millions of economically and ethnically downtrodden, then you're not simply an asshole. Your ideas are wrong. Ideas alone are not enough to try you and punish you, but they are not pure, Platonic ideals that exist on some ethereal fucking plane. They are real.

And likewise for the millions of people in this world who, whether they follow first and swallow the belief system later or whether they, in classical, probably mythically rationalist pattern, think first and act in accordance. Your ideas fucking matter. They lead you to maintain or adopt stances, tell narratives about others, tell stories about yourself and your behavior. They flow through your words and your acts and your relationships. They lend context to the whole of this bloody world affair. And even as I defend the right of any and all to any manner of stupid, cruel, and murderous thought, to any belief in superiority, any will to dominate, any desire to punish and break and humiliate and ruin and own, any articulation of reason and justice behind this imposition of power or that artifice of rule and command... Don't say they're innocent. Maybe all intellectuals have done since the time of scribes is drink the piss of the mighty and call it wine, but I wouldn't call philosophy impotent. Even today's ideology of hostility toward ideology is itself an idea of great power.

Power Checking Power

BBC News - Turkey issues arrest warrants for seven top officers

A Turkish court has ordered the arrests of seven generals and admirals accused of trying to undermine the government....

Dozens of other senior officers are in detention over a separate investigation into an alleged plot to provoke a coup.

Four top military commanders, including the Chief of the General Staff Gen Isik Kosaner, resigned 10 days ago in protest at the jailing of officers as part of the investigation into "Operation Sledgehammer".

The conspiracy is alleged to have been drawn up in 2003 at the Istanbul base of the First Army, shortly after the governing Justice and Development (AK) Party - which has Islamist roots - came to power....

In the past, the army has regarded itself as the guardian of the secular Turkish state. It has overthrown or forced the resignation of four governments since 1960 - the last time in 1997.

I started writing about Turkish history, about the deep state and the CIA training of rightwing death squads, stay-behind paramilitaries, and domestic spy networks. I started writing about what I saw in Turkey a little while ago, as investigations of military and police corruption were under way. In my original post, I rehashed a lot of things I wrote when I was getting my often-delayed undergraduate degree, going to school by night and watching my son by day. It was then that I said that honest-to-goodness, not-merely-rhetorical-or-bombastic fascism was present in Turkey, present in uniformed and irregular bands of assassins and thugs supporting an industrial, nationalist, statist ideology and program. It is why Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was jailed, harassed, and murdered. And it is what appears to be on trial, bit by bit.

But that's not a post. That's a fucking book, and it will be written by Turkish citizens, though with great difficulty and, I fear, at a terrible cost.

Instead I will go to the generalities, not for avoidance, but to glean from obscure Turkish politics some truth for myself and maybe some meaning for you, my few but increasing readers.

First, it is important to think about what a military coup means. It is violent, it is coercive, it is unpopular in the sense that it is not motivated by the people but by an organization with its own goals and interests (as opposed to whether or not people support it or obey it), all of this is true, but it is also, almost always, extrajudicial. Coups are illegal. They counter the state, move from within it to above it and then replace it. The latter we usually emphasize but the interesting thing that this illustrates, for me, is the illusory nature of power. I define "State" very loosely. Whether it is the Soviet or the Russian or the American or the French, whether it is the British East India Company or the Raj or the British Empire, it is the State. If some other force were to become greater, then it would become the State as well.

Some argue against this, saying that the State is a matter of essence rather than position, that a State that is truly democratic or truly communistic would be no State, that businesses could never be states because they are not coercive or something, blah blah blah...

And some tacitly accept the contention of powers to further enrich and justify their side. In the United States we see corporations and political groups each claiming to serve liberation from each other or from other putative forces. In England and Great Britain (and most of Europe in general), the nobles contended with the crown, and these nobles inspired most of the oligarchs who succeeded in American secession from Britain.

In the Turkish context from the 1300s the conflict has taken place between military forces and the central ruler, whether he was Sultan or President or, now, Prime Minister. Mehmed created the Janissary corps to counter the Turkish aristocracy, Janissaries deposed sultans to increase their power, and in the 1800s the so-called "Fortunate Incident" saw the Ottoman Sultan side with those long-denied aristocratic military forces to hunt down, disband, and in some cases exterminate the venerable and ruthless Janissary bands. A modern, national, and Western-style military was formed. Students of Japanese history may read this as an anticipation of what would befall the samurai.

In any case, this has continued, with that new, Western-style military claiming itself, in the person of Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), as the savior of the nation in opposition to the Ottoman state. They continued to claim the right until very recently, and now it appears that this is coming to an end.

It is hard not to cheer. The military committed many, many crimes, against Turkish leftists, against Islamists, ethnic minorities, journalists, to name but a few, and it is not mere rhetoric to discuss a profound conspiracy the likes of which one would expect in a novel. And yet justice is not merely about who deserves what but about how it is imposed and by whom. Justice and Development, or the AKP, has done a lot for the conservative, religious bourgeoisie of Turkey, and with it has come the usual costs of "competitiveness" and "efficiency." Monopolies, themselves a statist relic, have been challenged and threatened with closure, their employees no longer useful enough to deserve security in the new, confident, and increasingly capitalist Turkey. And religious conservatism seems the same all over; Erdogan has brought with him a creeping religiosity, not that of the mullahs but more familiar to Americans living post-Christian-Coalition. On the Kurds, Erdogan has been mixed. There have been legal reforms, but challenging of Kurdish parties, shooting and jailing of protesters. On the subject of protests in general, Erdogan has displayed a hypocrisy common to rulers the world over, speaking positively of protests that challenge other states while beating into submission those who challenge his own. That his government has shifted in regards to the Palestinian question is probably more pragmatic than idealistic. In any case, I think I've made my point.

Those of us who find ourselves in the puzzle of challenging power against power often take refuge in the myth of big protectors. The world over, I believe it is clear that big powers have their own interests, and we should be cautious. It is good to see thugs, murderers, and tyrants put on trial, but when they are judged and executed in turn by thugs, murderers, and tyrants, what victory have we really been delivered?

No victory can be delivered. It is only experienced by those who have won it themselves.

Benefits

He (or she) who claims the title of "anarchist" has a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that all the revolutionaries of history offer their experience to her (or him). The curse is that all those who have overthrown are, in their turn, to be rejected for their failure to avoid the blight of new oppression.

We have any number of tutors, but no prophets. This is no great lack. All men are wrong in some way, and yet it is the greatest fool who refuses to learn from his fellow foolish.

The First Rebellion

The mother struggles with her child. She's stressed out. He's fussy, maybe tired. She mutters, grumbles, or shouts that she doesn't understand what he needs. He makes no sense, she says. She's frustrated because she can't fix it. He's frustrated, which frustrates her more. She holds him tighter and he thrashes, throwing his sweaty little head back against her arms. Maybe he hits her. Maybe his little fast-growing nails, so difficult to clip, rake her. Maybe it's just the thrashing that hurts as she strains to keep him held against her. She may be little more than a child herself, or she may just be a child on the inside. She feels useless. Feels futile. Feels offense at herself, offense at her child, not yet a toddler, really, so recently a baby, a baby who could be held so easily, a baby whose strength might have been surprising, but within her ability to check. And her strength was not merely physical; he was easier to understand then, easier to anticipate, his needs predictable. She's learned him before. Why isn't this working?

Maybe she puts him down, not a little sharply, her voice rising in tone, her gestures perhaps too rough. She feels rejected and so she rejects him. She takes his fit as an insult, the feeling of impotence just salt to the minor wound. And when he seeks comfort from her seconds later, she feels vindicated and scornful and a bit angrier again. Why does he cry now? Didn't he get what he wanted? Some mothers would punish, withhold affection, walk away, ignore the frustrating little creature. But she doesn't. She picks him up and holds him, maybe softly, maybe more tightly because in time, he thrashes again, exhausting him, exhausting her.

In my life, I've seen this several times. I don't say there are answers; in parenting, there are some situations that don't get solved. From experience--a lot of empathy is required to really satisfy a child, rather than shut them up--I assume, and theory and education seem to validate, that what one sees in the child is what it is: conflicting impulses for connection and independence. It is a conflict that continues, for many of us, through our entire lives.

Most of us follow the process of raising children by observing the effects on the children, and this does matter. Childhood isn't all-important, but it is pretty damn influential. Less discussed is what this means for the caregiver.

Do we allow others to connect with us? What does this mean? Can they walk away? Can they be independent? If they show such desires, do we push them away roughly, reject them as we have felt rejected? Do we turn cold, or stay cold, when others crawl to us, when others express their needs? Do we scorn them, turn independence into a punishment? What relationship does any of this have to the way we live our lives?

Are we allowed independence, or do we find ourselves held tight by others? Do we seek out those who will restrain, reject, or ignore us? Are we allowed to connect with others? It is a fine thing to feel no need to connect and grow intertwined with others--and very different from feeling forbidden to ask for what we want.

Like I said, there may not be answers for any of those questions. But like the desperate parent, we find ourselves involved with others fighting for control, fighting for independence. We may not have The Answers, but in the ways we live and the actions we take, we respond all the same.

Brevity

Start your morning with IOZ!

Man, it's too bad that Mark Duggan wasn't Iranian; all the same assholes who are like, "Oh, the rioting, Oh, the looting, Oh, the humanity!" would be making room for another green ribbon between their LiveStrong bracelet and Kabala string.

He truly is a national treasure.

Backstory at the Beeb.