Brain Failure in L.A.

Those of you who read this post will be able to tell at a glance that I don't follow the news closely.  It took a next door neighbor's relatives for me to find out today that there have been ongoing protests in Los Angeles over the immigration policies of Donald Trump.  I knew about the No Kings rally.  However, I did not know that the protests in Los Angeles had continued after that rally.  It turns out that even though I did not know about the continuation of the protests, I could easily guess the turn which these protests have taken, as noted below:

• Some of the protests have turned violent.  This violence has included vandalism and property destruction.  (NOTE TO ANY BONEHEADS WHO SAY THAT VANDALISM AND PROPERTY DESTRUCTION ARE NOT THE SAME AS VIOLENCE: VANDALISM IS VIOLENCE!) 
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and various law enforcement agencies ample justification for an overwhelmingly heavy police/military presence in Los Angeles.
• The violence of some of the protests has given the Trump administration and the major right-wing media outlets in this country a gold-plated opportunity to portray those who oppose Trump as lovers of chaos who want to bring chaos into America.
• I strongly suspect that at least some of the violent actors in the protests were and are agents provocateurs either paid by the Trump administration or inserted by various police and Homeland Security units in order to strengthen support for the Trump regime by discrediting the critics of Trump.
• The protests were ongoing throughout the entire month of June and into July of this year - EVEN THOUGH THE PROTESTORS COULD SEE THAT THE PROTESTS HAD BECOME VIOLENT AND EVEN THOUGH THE VIOLENCE INJECTED INTO THE PROTESTS WAS BEING USED BY RIGHT-WING MEDIA TO DISCREDIT THE PROTESTORS AND THEIR CAUSE.

I just want to say that normally I don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS as it comes off sounding like I'm shouting.  But in this case, I am!  I hate Trump as much as any decent person ought to.  I hate the demographic from which he has emerged, as well as the members of his pillars of support.  But what makes me extremely angry is when I see people who claim to hate Trump and who claim to be part of the resistance against Trump choose tactics and strategy (or a slap-dash, boneheaded failure of strategy) which can so easily be hijacked by the very regime they claim to oppose.  A truly effective resistance uses a multitude of tactics, and is not fixated solely on the tactic of mass protest marches.  A truly effective resistance is able to switch to tactics of dispersion if its leaders see that tactics of concentration have begun to lose their effectiveness or to be derailed by violent agents provocateurs.  Hint to the boneheads: mass protest marches are a tactic of concentration!  A truly effective resistance is guided by a wise strategy and is implemented by actors who display tactical ingenuity and creativity.  And among the most important of all, a truly effective resistance is composed of people who maintain strict nonviolent discipline, as they know that allowing any violence - including property destruction - hurts their cause because it hardens the oppressor's pillars of support!

To those who want to be identified with righteous resistance, I say, Please, please, PLEASE study the theory and practice of successful strategic nonviolent resistance!  Please understand that if you call for a mass protest march or rally, an autocratic thug like Trump will find a way to inject violence into the protest march so that he can justify deploying a violent military or police response in order to crush it.  As I have said before, relying on mass protest as your sole go-to tactic of resistance is as stupid as relying on daily frontal assaults was in World War 1.  Please, please, PLEASE read some books!  Learn how to organize and deploy such highly disruptive tactics as the stay-at-home, the strike, and the boycott.  It is almost impossible for an oppressor to justify arresting citizens simply for refusing to shop or refusing to go out to an amusement park or restaurant.  Find out what Trump's economic pillars of support are and go after them with tactics that are street-legal, nonviolent, and guided by wise strategy.  Use such strategy and tactics to go after the wealth of the entire Trump family.  Read my previous posts on strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read the book No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey.  Above all, read the writings of the Albert Einstein Institution - especially Gene Sharp's list of 198 methods of nonviolent action.  (That's right folks - 198, count 'em, 198 methods! Not just one!) I leave you once again with a quote from Theodore Sturgeon: "...and when you see them do that twice in a row you know you got a one-trick fighter, which makes it easy for anyone who knows two, and I know half a hundred."

On Not Needing You, Part 2

This blog contains several posts which describe the psychological dynamics of national and ethnic narcissism.  Those posts have focused particularly on the United States and Russia as examples of deranged, narcissistic nations.  Many experts who have studied personality disorders have stated that the best way for normal people to deal with narcissists is to go No Contact.  In other words, to reduce one's dealings with the narcissist as much as possible and to sever, as much as possible, any relations of dependence on the narcissist.

The world was obliged to follow this prescription against Russia after Russia's thuggish violent attempts to conquer Ukraine.  (Note that Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine was merely one component of a narcissistic Russian attempt to establish a world empire.)  Now the world is discovering that it is possible to take care of itself and to do beautifully good work without the United States.  The world is not caving to the threat of American tariffs against foreign goods.  And the rest of the world is coming together in surprising ways to create spaces of equity, fairness, and sustainable social arrangements without the involvement of the United States.  The process is actually easier now that the thuggish, misanthropic, racist, murderous regime of Donald Trump has withdrawn from a number of important international arrangements.  In short, the world is beginning to discover that it can live without the United States.  The U.S. may thus soon see how much harder it is to live in a world in which its soft power has been destroyed by self-inflicted wounds.  Check out these headlines:

• "Trump delays tariffs as the rest of the world plays hardball," BBC
• "Can the world be governed without the US?", Inside Story
• "This Fourth of July, the world declares its independence from America", The Guardian
• "To save the global economy, kick the US out of the WTO," Politico.eu

P.S. How do people build soft power in their societies and in the world at large?  Why, by becoming the sort of benevolent, wise, knowledgeable people that everyone else can respect, of course!  But soft power is not built by trying to take other people's stuff, by trying to conquer other people's countries, by trying to disenfranchise or enslave other people, or by trying to play smashmouth with the rest of the world.

A Comment Policy Reminder

I noticed that this blog has picked up a few comments over the last few months.  Unfortunately, I had to delete them.  I greatly appreciate comments from readers even though we may sometimes disagree.  However, as noted on the sidebar of this blog, I have adopted a non-negotiable policy that all commenters must have an ID (Google ID or OpenID) or something similar in order to post comments to this blog. Anonymous comments will not be published.  Unfortunately I must adopt this policy in order to prevent one bad actor from spoiling an entire barrel of apples, to use a metaphor.  So if you are one of the recent commenters, please get a recognizable Internet ID and post your comment under that ID.  Thanks for your understanding.

Peter Ackerman's Accuracy

Here's another short post that is a follow-on to the post I wrote yesterday.  My encounter with the protest march in Portland yesterday got me so agitated that I actually went back to watch a YouTube video that was made by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2013.  As long-time readers of my blog know, I believe the ICNC went seriously off the rails from 2017 to 2020, and that as a result they gave some advice that was seriously flawed, both morally, tactically, and strategically.  So in my posts from 2020 onward, I have scrupulously avoided referring to any materials or videos published by the ICNC.  However, I must admit that the materials they published and released up to 2016 are actually quite good.  Their Fletcher Summer Institute video series is a particular example of this.  Also, I've grown to strongly dislike YouTube for reasons which I have mentioned on this blog, yet to this day YouTube remains the best place to find videos of talks and lectures by people such as Srdja Popovic, Jamila Raqib, Marshall Ganz, Zeynep Tufekci, and other scholars of people power, community organizing, and strategic nonviolent resistance.  So to use an analogy, even though I hate the taste of cheese, because I'm hungry and there's nothing else to eat, I guess I'll have to eat this cheese sandwich...

Anyway, the video I am referring to is "FSI 2013: Why Skills Can Make Civil Resistance 'A Force More Powerful'" and it is a recording of a talk which was given by Peter Ackerman, who was one of the founders of the ICNC.  (By the way, Peter Ackerman passed away around three years ago.  I'm sorry to hear of his passing.)  In his talk he makes the point that the development of skills and wise strategy among the participants in a nonviolent liberation struggle is the key to winning the struggle.  He has some interesting things to say about the lack of effectiveness of mass protest marches when those protest marches are nothing more than an expression of collective outrage:

"Well..you know, again, we're always talking about probabilities. But a strategy to go to the street because you're angry - to let off steam - recognizing you probably have a finite amount of steam - that's probably a not good use of your steam.  [Sic] And I don't believe you should...even consider a tactic without understanding its strategic context.  Why would you just go out and do something without thinking it through?...Tactics are not a strategy. [Emphasis added.]  "What makes a tactic have a strategic context is the forethought that comes to it. [Emphasis added.] 

"And the military gets this...as some of you know, I have a son who was in the military and...as a combat officer before he went out on any activity he had to write a 40-page paper about what was the purpose, what were the risks, and on and on and on! We should submit ourselves to that same kind of discipline.  If you don't do it, you're gonna lose!"

To those who want to craft an effective resistance to the autocrats who have taken over their countries (as Trump and the Republican Party have done in the United States), I say the same thing.  Educate yourselves in the theory and practice of effective strategic nonviolent resistance.  Read some books - especially the books published by the Albert Einstein Institution.  Learn to craft an effective strategy of resistance, an effective theory of change.  If you don't do it, you're going to lose! 

Cassandra's Sore Throat

I was planning to meet some friends for coffee (or in my case, green tea) today in downtown Portland, Oregon.  Because I don't have a TV and don't watch the news on my computer, I was completely surprised by the presence of a huge anti-Trump protest rally (one of over two hundred taking place across the nation) which blocked several downtown streets, including the street I needed to take to reach the coffee shop where my friends and I were supposed to meet.  

As readers of my blog know, I am utterly opposed to the Presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also utterly opposed to the Republican Party.  Even though I am a Christian, I find that regrettably, I must now stand in complete and utter opposition to the white American evangelical/Protestant church in all of its manifestations.  So I could certainly sympathize and agree with many of the grievances of the protestors - especially because I am a black African-American.  Yet I must say that the sight of the protestors filled me with a strange mix of feelings.  This mixture of feelings was even more agitated when I gave up on trying to reach my coffee shop friends and parked my car instead in order to talk to some of the protestors.  I learned that many people had come to the protests simply because they had heard about them during this past week, and that they had not received any prior training in the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Moreover, the protest march seemed at times to be very little more than a nearly inchoate venting of grievances.  

So I asked a few of the protestors if they had ever heard of the study of the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I stressed that this three-word phrase meant far more than simple "nonviolence."  I asked them if they had ever read any of the books of Gene Sharp or if they had ever heard of Jamila Raqib or Marshall Ganz.  I asked them if they had ever heard of the difference between tactics of concentration and tactics of dispersion.  I asked them if they were willing to start reading the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance, and particularly on the methods of organizing a strike, a boycott, or a stay-at-home.  (One note about that last link: it leads to a webpage written partly by Erica Chenoweth.  While I greatly enjoyed Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, written by Chenoweth and by Maria Stephan, I must say that I did NOT enjoy a subsequent book by Chenoweth titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  If you want my reasons for disliking that book, please click here.)  I told them that the use of mass protest rallies is actually one of the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, and that if they wanted to mount an effective resistance to Trump and the demographic he represents, they needed to learn the far more powerful methods of organizing economic noncooperation.  I told them that people who relied solely on mass protests as a tactic did not know what they were doing.  I warned them that people who only know how to organize mass protests can be undermined by the government if the government chooses to infiltrate the protests with violent agents provocateurs.  I ended by urging them to read some books.

They politely listened to my near-diatribe and graciously answered my words, yet I must wonder how it must have felt for them to be button-holed by a total stranger and lectured for several minutes.  If any of them are reading these words now, my deepest apologies for any heartburn I caused in you.  Nonetheless, I have over the last several years felt like the Cassandra of Greek mythology who was condemned to scream out warnings which were not heeded by her hearers.  Then again, maybe things are not as bad as I sometimes fear.  After all, tactics of economic noncooperation effectively drove Elon Musk out of his role as one of Trump's henchmen.  These tactics have almost bankrupted the Tesla corporation and are starting to hurt Starlink, which is another of Musk's businesses.  And things like these boycotts should be proof enough to my fevered brain that I'm not the only one who can come up with a good idea.  Still, like Cassandra, it's hard sometimes to resist the urge to scream my head off...

Repost: A Clarifying of Stance

Although I don't have time to post extensively right now, I do check my stats from time to time.  I have noticed how some readers have focused on posts which I wrote several years ago from an overtly pro-Russian point of view.  However, in 2016 Russia revealed itself to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, a toxic and narcissistic wanna-be empire run by a thieving little man in a bunker.  To understand how I view Russia now, please read the posts linked on the sidebar of this blog, particularly, "A Clarifying of Stance."  As for the pro-Russian posts, as they come to my attention, I am either editing them or making them entirely invisible.

Legible To Machines?

Here's another short post.  I have a Chinese friend who is a software engineer.  I think her husband may also be a software engineer.  Anyway, we have been having a friendly semi-disagreement about the capabilities and impact of AI on the future of industrial society.  (It's always a good thing to have friends who are willing to disagree with you!  This helps to keep your thoughts and conclusions healthy!  She also knows more about computers than I do...)  She sees AI as somewhat inevitable due to its rapidly increasing capabilities, although she recognizes some of the potential harms that may result from the increasingly widespread use of artificial intelligence (including large language models or LLM's) in society.

As one can tell from reading some of my most recent posts on precarity, I am a bit more skeptical about the ability of AI to take over a majority of human cognitive tasks.  And in re-reading (or in my case, re-hearing the audiobook version of) Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott, I've been wondering how much of the power of present-day AI is the result of our society having been remade in order to become more legible to AI.  Scott points out the many ways in which the ruling elites of past and present societies have remade their societies in order to make them legible to the command and control organs of the State, thus facilitating easier command and control of their subjects.  Yet these schemes of legibility have often had painfully unforeseen consequences.  How have major corporate interests made our society more legible?  How have their methods also facilitated making our society more legible to large AI deployments such as chatGPT and Gemini?  What are some of the consequences we are likely to see from this re-making and its resulting increased legibility?  I wish I could ask James C. Scott such questions, but unfortunately he passed away last year.  Looks like we'll have to figure things out ourselves...