-Facebook -YouTube -X -Threads -Instagram -"Fox News" -Reddit -Quora -Rednote

Over the last few years I have noticed a disturbing trend regarding breaking news or emergent events.  If I when I want to find out about such events I try to use standard commercially-available search engines such as Google or Bing (or DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, which like Bing, are owned by Microsoft) the top search results are usually links to posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or similar platforms.  Links to articles written by actual professional journalists who follow long-standing codes of journalistic ethics (including fact-checking) are becoming increasingly hard to find.  

Let me just say straight up: posts on social media platforms are not journalism.  Therefore I do not trust these when they offer "breaking news" flashes.  From the Russian aggression against Ukraine to the current mess in the Mideast, I therefore do NOT consult anything found on YouTube, Quora, Rednote, Facebook, or the like.  The fact that posts on these platforms have been displacing genuine journalism can be attributed to multiple causes, such as the corporatization and monopolization of historically independent news outlets, the diversion of advertising revenue from historically independent news outlets to the owners of massively deployed social media platforms, and the massive gaming of the system of page and website rankings on the largest search platforms.  However, one particular cause is the fact that the providers of responsible journalism have increasingly hidden their content behind paywalls.  This in turn is probably an effect of the diversion of advertising revenue from actual news outlets to the owners of social media platforms.

So I'd like to set forth my strategy for coping with this proliferation of hot air and word salad on social media served up by search engines instead of actual journalism.  Whenever I try to find out more details about an emerging story of interest, I use one of the features of advanced search that was originally deployed on Google.  If, for instance, I hear a report or rumor that a dozen giant heads of lettuce grew legs and walked through a town in the Midwest, killing dozens of people, I type in the search box of my search engine of choice something like '"giant heads of lettuce" walking' and see what search results come up.  If the first two or three pages of search results are dominated by links with titles like "Facebook: You've Got to See This! - Giant Heads of Lettuce On the Rampage!" or, "YouTube: Midwest Town Threatened By Lettuce!" then I modify my search query as follows.  I type into the search box '"giant heads of lettuce" walking -Youtube -Facebook -Reddit -Instagram -Threads -X -Quora -"Fox News" -Tiktok' and run a new search query.  The way this works is that whatever I type in quotes such as "giant heads of lettuce" returns search results that contain that quoted phrase verbatim.  On the other hand, whatever keywords have a short dash (-) in front of them are excluded from the search.  This means that any search results offered by a platform that has a dash in front of it are excluded from my search results.

This method works tolerably well for general searches, although it breaks down seriously when I try to search for pictures.  For instance, if I click on the "Images" tab of my search page and type -"baboon brushing teeth" "wikimedia commons"' in the search box, I will definitely get all kinds of images that are NOT hosted by Wikimedia Commons!  If, moreover, I try to use the dash prefix to exclude those images that are not hosted by Wikimedia Commons, they will show up anyway.  So maybe my prefix dash method is not so foolproof after all.  If search providers ruin general search in the same way that they have ruined image search, then my prefix dash method of filtering search results will break down.  But never fear - I still have other methods up my sleeve.

Two Knuckleheads Versus A Near-Peer

So once again I'm so out of touch with the rest of the world that a couple of acquaintances had to tell me today that the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran before I became aware of this fact.  Why have I chosen to isolate myself to such a degree that I'm not aware of breaking news? Simply because I already know that the world is a messed-up place, and that this is due in no small part to the United States of America.  We are now reaping the chaos that results from over 45 years of behind-the-scenes machinations by white supremacists and American exceptionalists.  The combination of white supremacy and American exceptionalism has worked synergistically to produce an extremely potent social toxin.  That toxin produced Trumpism, but it certainly did not begin with Trump.  Rather, there is an entire cabal of damnably malignant men to blame, an entire coterie of rich and powerful people, an entire demographic of people whose souls are a pile of garbage.

I'll say at the outset that from my limited reading of the situation, the attack against Iran was unprovoked.  It was not an act of retaliation against any Iranian attack on Israel or the U.S.   In other words, Iran did not throw the first punch.  This shows that the regimes of both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are guilty of a criminal act.  (Regarding Israel, my last shreds of sympathy for Israel are evaporating right now.  Netanyahu seems like a singularly rigid, unimaginative, and brittle head of state in such times as these.)  The problem for both nations is that Iran is much closer to a near-peer to the U.S. than Venezuela was, and is much more populous than Israel.  Attacking Iran has probably erased any fault lines that previously existed in Iranian society, and the attack will harden anti-Israel sentiment across the entire Mideast. Israel, having managed to alienate many people by its actions in Gaza, seems bent on escalating the alienation still further.  As for Iran, it has defensive and offensive missile capabilities which pose a serious threat to U.S. military assets in the region.  It has begun to use those capabilities.  And those capabilities are about to be augmented.

It's time for the rest of the world to recognize that the United States is now itself a rogue state.  The rest of the world does indeed have the collective power to bring this rogue state to heel, but only if it presents a united or nearly united front.  As for whether bringing the U.S. to heel involves military responses, I will reserve any comment or opinion.  However, the rest of the world can definitely impose the kinds of steps of economic noncooperation (including even sanctions) that can render the U.S. powerless.  Please decouple from the U.S. - completely.

I'll also say that those members of the U.S. military who choose to obey Trump's orders are men without conscience.  They may be merely people who have chosen to indulge in what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, or they may have chosen more enthusiastically to support the Trump/America First agenda, but either way they are people who have thereby forever lost my respect.  Right now I don't support our troops.

An additional problem for the U.S. is that this nation's malignant narcissism - expressed through the potent poison of white supremacy and American exceptionalism - may damage and erode the capability of the leaders of the U.S. to discern reality to such an extent that they will choose to launch unprovoked military attacks on nations that are even closer to near-peer status than Iran.  This could result in disastrous consequences for the world in general and for the U.S. in particular.  These consequences may last a very long time.

The Hard Drug of Hard Power

Several months ago, while looking up something on Wikipedia, I came across a striking picture.  It is a digital reproduction of a painting made in 1887 by Viktor Vasnetsov titled, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now I know the saying that goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words", and I've just given the link to the picture so that readers can see it for themselves, but I'd still like to indulge myself in using a few words to describe the painting from my point of view.

The painting is rich in detail, yet what stands out immediately are four men riding four horses. The first is a king with a fierce face who, wielding a bow, is about to shoot someone with an arrow.  He is followed by a large, broad, thick burly guy who is wearing nothing except a loincloth (which I first mistook for an old-fashioned diaper). He is swinging a sword.  He is followed by a gaunt man with a fierce face who is carrying a pair of scales, holding them in his hand in such a way that one gets the impression that he's about to bash someone (or something) with the scales.  He is followed by a skeleton wrapped in a shroud and wielding a sickle.  All four characters are fearsome, yet although Vasnetsov made the large burly guy the central feature of his painting, I personally find the skeleton to be the most unnerving - especially since he is painted with eye sockets in the shape of a scowl and a jaw and teeth in the shape of a snarl.  (Imagine dreaming about that guy at night!)

Let's consider the large burly guy for a minute or two. This broad, thick guy is swinging a sword that looks like it must weigh as much as three or four sledgehammers. One can't help but think that if he went to chop off the head of an opponent, that opponent's head would go flying as if it were a baseball hit by a slugger.  Yet in the lower part of the painting, we see that the effect of this big guy's sword-swinging is not to directly kill men, but to induce men to kill each other.  For he and his horse (a horse that looks as if it had been scared nearly to death) are the artistic embodiment of a passage in the New Testament that reads, "And when He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying 'Come.' And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that men should slay one another; and a great sword was given to him." (Revelation 6:3-4)

Today's post is not about making some predictive prophecy (after all, I'm not a certified prophet ;)), but I must say that the Scriptures which I have quoted, as well as the painting which was inspired by these Scriptures, seem to be an apt embodiment of the thinking of certain rich and powerful people in the present day.  For we have a few nations which have recently become fixated on building up their "hard power."  And while economic non-cooperation is a key element of both national hard power and of strategic nonviolent resistance, I'd like to focus on the element of hard power that most attracts the attention of nations that want to be bullies: military might.  

The point of amassing large amounts of hard power is to be able to say to other nations, "Give us what we want from you or we will ruin you."  In the case of the Axis powers prior to World War 2, this statement was usually phrased as, "Give us what we want or we will bash you." The actions of the Axis powers led to a lot of bashing and of counter-bashing as well, and the end result was that the Axis powers that started the bashing got decisively bashed themselves in the end.  Yet we can learn much from analyzing the motives which started the Axis powers on their destructive path.  For I would argue that the same motives are at work in those nations that are at present fixated on acquiring and building up hard power.

I suggest that some of those who are now seeking to build an overwhelming amount of hard power are doing so so because they feel an overwhelming sense of injury at the emergence of a world in which they can't instantly get their way, a world in which they are not worshiped as superior to all other humans and their demands are not instantly and abundantly satisfied. In the case of nations, this sense of injury is often felt by a dominant culture which loses or begins to lose its power over peoples or nations over which it had historically exercised domination. Thus, this feeling of injury is expressed in statements like, "We used to be great! We ruled over X and Y and Z! Now behold our humiliation, in that we must politely ask X and Y and Z for the things we want!  They're forcing us to say please and thank you and to wait our turn!!!!  Such humiliation is utterly unbecoming to a nation as great as ours!"

This sense of injury (an unjust sense, if I may say so) is what motivates the heads of nations which feel thus injured to begin to pursue the building up of hard power.  And the hard power they seek is almost always military hard power.  This is what motivated the arming of Japan in the early 20th century and the rearmament of Germany after World War 1. This is what motivated the Soviet Union to devote such a large percentage of its GDP to military expenditures after World War 2.  And it has been a key motivator of U.S. military expenditures from 1980 onward - especially under Republican presidential administrations. So what does the pursuit of this kind of hard power ultimately gain the pursuers? And what are the risks and costs of the pursuit of this kind of hard power?

First, while it is obvious that hard power deployed in overwhelming force can achieve short-term gains, it is also obvious from the record of history that the continued deployment of such power over a long time loses its effectiveness.  In fact, eventually the continued costs of the use of such power begin to exceed any benefits reaped by those who use this power.  It can be argued that even if there had been no intervention by the U.S. in the Far East or in Europe, in the long run neither Germany nor Japan could have held onto their territorial gains which they achieved from 1930 to 1941.  This is because both nations were so fixated on bullying the people they conquered that they provoked the kind of resistance that would ultimately have destroyed their hard power.  This is the lesson of the French (and later U.S.) failure in Vietnam, the Soviet (and later U.S.) failure in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Russian failure in Ukraine. Treating people like trash while threatening them at gunpoint is hardly the way to "win hearts and minds."

Second, the very process of both building up and deploying hard power is itself expensive in terms of human resources.  Fielding an army requires warm bodies to wear uniforms and carry guns.  Yet I would argue that equipping people with uniforms and guns and sending them out to try to bash their fellow humans in other countries is going to be increasingly expensive as the 21st Century continues.  The reason is that birth rates throughout the world are continuing to decline.  Those nations that are most eager to throw their weight around are among the nations whose birth rates are most steeply declining.  Thus it makes very little sense to train one's young men and women to invade other countries if it is likely that a significant number of those young men and women will get shot up during the invasion and subsequent military operations. This is especially likely in a fight between nations that are near peers.  Once those young men and women have gotten killed, who will be left to do the ongoing work of maintaining their societies at home?

Third, consider the material costs of building up and deploying hard power.  In 1983, Seymour Melman wrote a book titled Profits Without Production which accurately diagnosed many of the elements of the disease which is now destroying American industry.  He described the pernicious effect of the American military-industrial complex and how ever-increasing expenditures for "defense" were impoverishing other elements of the American economy and of American scientific and technical research.  His points were amplified and re-broadcast in a recent paper by Julia Gledhill of the Stimson Center titled, "The Ugly Truth about the Permanent War Economy."  The fact is that building war material costs some serious folding money - whether planes (~$100 million each for an F-35 fighter), ships, artillery, drones, tanks, or other instruments of mayhem.  Once natural resources and money are turned into war material, these resources can't easily be repurposed for more productive aims.  What's more, the body of knowledge needed to design and build these items frequently does not transfer well to other sectors of industrial production or of the overall economy.  (I should know - I used to work for a defense contractor who went out of business after the Cold War ended.  The reason why that contractor went out of business was because it was unable to make the switch to inexpensively producing things needed by the civilian market.  Later I worked for an engineering firm whose client base used to include many military agencies, yet which shrank over the years until it was designing MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) systems for fast food joints and amusement parks.)  And the money that is sunk into defense is withdrawn from other necessary elements of national infrastructure such as roads, dams, bridges, and similar civil infrastructure as well as schools and libraries.  Of course, here in the USA, the Rethuglican/conservative/libertarian organs of culture have managed to convince most of us over the last 45 years that only "sssssocialistssss!!!" and "lib-ruls!!!" want to use tax money to maintain roads, dams, bridges, wastewater treatment plants, schools, libraries, and other instruments of the public good.

So our carefully cultivated aversion to collectively contributing to the public good means that our infrastructure of the public good is falling apart. Moreover, we can't even seem to find the political will to pay down our national debt by requiring the rich people who call themselves Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. (By the way, the interest on the U.S. Federal debt now exceeds $1 trillion per year. And this does not even take into account the debt of U.S states, counties, and municipalities.)  Yet Donald Trump wants a $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon in FY 2027. (See also "The reality of Trump’s cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal," Responsible Statecraft, January 2026.) And Trump is not the only fool who wants to use a nation's declining stock of resources in order to build up one last expression of hard power.  There are other nations with declining birthrates, a depleting resource base and increasing government debt who also want to project hard power on the global stage of the 21st century. As Isaac Asimov once wrote, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."  It's looking more and more like the burly thick guy I mentioned at the beginning of this post has successfully addled the wits of an increasing number of national leaders by bashing them upside the head with his huge sword.  

The Coercive Power of Withdrawal

As many readers know, in those posts on my blog which deal with strategic nonviolent resistance, I have cautioned against relying solely on protest rallies and marches as a tactic of resistance.  I have also emphasized that tactics of noncooperation - especially economic noncooperation - are far more powerful, as these tactics can impose far more painful costs on an oppressor than mere mass protest.

So we come to the tactics which have been deployed against American businesses which have supported the fascist, racist, supremacist regime of Trump and the Rethuglican party.  I don't have time to go into an exhaustive analysis today, but I can definitely tell you that boycotts have definitely hurt the Target chain of big box stores.  Target was targeted (no pun intended) by boycotts because in 2025 it rolled back its employee diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in order to please Donald Trump. As a result, by September 2025, Target stock had lost 33 percent of the value it held at the beginning of 2025.  This drop in stock value erased over $20 billion in shareholder value.  By October 2025, Target had eliminated 1,800 corporate jobs.  And Spotify is starting to lose stock value.  Boycotts do indeed bite.

Boycotts should be part of a larger strategy of decoupling from existing oppressive systems in order to create smaller, local alternative institutions and arrangements that are more equitable.  So instead of hoping merely to "apply pressure" in order to try to "change" Spotify, why not go for broke and create arrangements which don't require the use of any streaming music service?  Does anyone remember CD's and CD players?  If you haven't thrown your old CD player away, you can always fish it out of the attic or garage, dust it off and fix it up, and enjoy great high fidelity music without ever again subscribing to Spotify.  In doing so, you will help small indie artists in the process.

And as far as boycotts and creating alternative institutions and arrangements, here's something the international community can do to help those of us in the U.S. who still remain decent people and not fascist monsters.  You in the international community can help us by ending your buying of U.S. debt.  You can also help us by getting rid of the U.S. Treasury bills that you already have.  Think about this: the U.S. is already over $38 trillion in debt.  The interest on the U.S. debt has begun to exceed $1 trillion per year.  Whatever debt you buy, I think it's safe to say that a point will come when the interest on the U.S. national debt exceeds the annual tax receipts of the U.S., or at least that portion of annual taxes which the U.S. government is able to dedicate to paying the interest without collapsing due to the starving of other sectors of government spending.  Then you may never see your money again.  And by continuing to buy U.S. debt, you will be financing a huge buildup of the U.S. military (for Trump wants to boost war spending to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027).  That money will be used to build the capability to bully and threaten the entire world with violence so that the fascist, supremacist element in the U.S. can get its way. Please, for the sake of all of us, decouple from the U.S.  The sovereignty you save may be your own.

A Minor Symptom of American Breakdown

Car crash in 2018. By Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States - Car Crash 7-1-18 2246, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71153146

一个汉语文功课的问："Comment [in Chinese] on how you drive, and how you drive on the highway...Comment on how people drive in your city..."

我的回答：“我开车开得不错。我开车开得有一点慢。因为我不喜欢超速罚单，所以我开车开得有一点慢。我遵守限速规定和交通法规。很多司机不遵守交通规则，他们开车开得特别快，所以我的城市（和美国）有很多交通事故和死亡事件。我觉得很多美国的司机都想死或者他们觉得他们是超人 （"Superman"）。我从前坐公共汽车和轻轨，可是我现在只开我的电动汽车。”

Aaand, the rest of the world is starting to notice! See this: "美国：法律视各州而定，一般为：东海岸普遍为非城区65mph（105km/h）城区50-55mph（80-89km/h）；中西部普遍乡村70mph（113km/h）城镇65mph（105km/h）市区50-55mph（80km/h-89km/h）部分市区（芝加哥为例）45mph（72km/h）；西部（怀俄明州等）非城镇80mph（129km/h)城镇山区65-75mph（105-120km/h）；西南部（德州亚利桑那等）非城区75-80mph（120-129km/h）；西海岸：非城区70mph（113km/h）；近郊：55-65mph（89-105km/h）；夏威夷州：60mph（97km/h）。现实是，美国普遍存在超速现象。。。" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E9%AB%98%E9%80%9F%E5%85%AC%E8%B7%AF, retrieved 13 January 2026)  还有看 "The Uniquely American Epidemic of Traffic Deaths," Deutsch, 2023.

Repost - Touching The Oppressor's Wound

I'd like to point my readers to a post which I wrote back in 2017.  The title of that post is "Touching the Oppressor's Wound."  That post lays out the theoretical basis for weakening the power of the oppressor by showing his agents how their oppression is hurting not just the oppressed, but the oppressor's agents as well.  That may sound like a crazy and impractical approach to dealing with an oppressor, but allow me to give a simplified summary of the points I wanted to make in my original post.  That summary is as follows:

• First, we know that when a tyrant or dictator recruits men to serve as his armed henchmen, he tends to select such recruits from the most violent, deviant, and psychopathic members of society.  This must be so, because the tyrant will want to use these men as agents of terror both against his own citizens and against the peoples of foreign nations whom the tyrant wants to conquer.  
• Second, in order to make these recruits even more effective as instruments of terror and violence, the tyrant will subject these recruits to the kind of training that greatly amplifies their viciousness and violent tendencies.  In other words, their training will amplify their tendency to act like monsters.
• Third, this violent viciousness will become such a pervasive part of the character and personality of these people that it will essentially be "on" at all times, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  This means that they will be very hard people to live with!  Indeed, there are multiple studies which show highly elevated levels of domestic violence among U.S. military and law enforcement personnel.
• Fourth, this tendency to violence and cruelty will actually turn out to be a weakness of their families and intimate partner relationships, as it can become a motivator for their spouses and children to seek some way of escape from relationships with these people.  
• Fifth, and most important: Therefore, a viable tool of resistance against a tyrant and his agents of oppression can be for trained volunteers and mental health professionals to offer counseling, help, and especially outreach to the spouses and children of these men.  For in offering such counseling and help, the volunteers and mental health professionals will be communicating to the spouses and children that their situation is not normal or acceptable, and that the men perpetrating this domestic violence are not normal or acceptable.  This will weaken the ability of the tyrant to continue to use these men as a pillar of support of his oppressive regime.
• The weakening starts with the volunteer, friend, or mental health professional getting the victim of domestic violence to admit that she is in a destructive relationship and that she (and any children she has) are in danger of serious harm.
• The volunteer, friend, or mental health professional must then bring the victim to see that her spouse's monstrous behavior is a direct consequence of his choice to do the violent dirty work of the oppressor.  The victim must be brought to see that her spouse has been turned into a monster precisely because being a monster is part of the requirements of his job.
• The victim must then be shown that there are righteous, legitimate ways of escaping from her monstrous situation, and she must be gently led to choose between staying in a harmful (and potentially fatal) situation versus walking away into a more healthy life.

I suggest that in the United States at this time, there's no shortage of potential victims who could be helped by this kind of intervention.  For we have a military that has come unhinged from any moral restraints, a military which allowed itself to be deployed against its own citizens in 2025, and which is now busily killing people in other countries in order to take over those countries for Trump.  (First, Venezuela, then Cuba, then Denmark and Greenland, then...?) And we have domestic bullies like the ICE agents who have been shooting unarmed U.S. citizens lately.  (I'm a man and not a woman - yet I cringe at the thought of what it must be like to be the spouse of Jonathan Ross! Or one of his kids.  It truly must be a living hell...)  The kind of domestic violence interventions I am suggesting might be a pivotal tool in showing the men of ICE and of the U.S. military what monsters they have become by showing their spouses and children how impossible it is to live with these men any longer.

P.S. Those who read the original post will encounter comments from a few rather wacky and unhinged commenters.  These commenters spouted a bunch of right-wing talking points in their comments.  I believe two of the comments are from the same person even though one of them was posted anonymously.  Feel free to take the comments with a grain (or more) of salt.

Of Monkeys, Gourds, and Peanuts

I've been pleased to learn over the last few weeks that Donald Trump is losing the support of his base, as reported in such articles as "Three Polls That Show Donald Trump Is Losing His Base" (Newsweek, December 2025), "Trump's Support is Collapsing. But why?" (Vox, December 2025), and "How divides emerged at the heart of Trump’s Maga world" (BBC, December 2025). It is interesting to see that among the reasons for the collapse of Trump's support among white American males is the fact that MAGA Trump-ism has begun to seriously hurt the economic prospects of the people who comprise his base.  This is due to such factors as the costs of Trump tariffs to ordinary Americans, the harms to American industries and businesses from the international backlash against Trump-ism, and the negative economic impacts of Trump's mass deportations on America's farming sector.  But it must also be acknowledged that some of the negative economic impacts are due to the boycotts of businesses whose owners support Trump-ism.  Consider, for instance, how badly Elon Musk's businesses were hurt by boycotts in early 2025.  Consider also the decrease in revenue suffered by Amazon, Target, and Home Depot over their abandonment of workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in their bid to curry the favor of Donald Trump.

So today I'd like to write a bit more about the agenda of Donald Trump and his supporters, and the necessity of economic noncooperation from those who are the intended victims and targets of Trump and his supporters.  To be quite plain and blunt, Donald Trump is one of the de facto leaders of a revanchist movement among white supremacists.  He and his supporters want to bring back a world which is the undisputed empire and sole possession of a small group of fat, privileged, evil people who have Made Themselves Great Again at the expense of all the other peoples on earth.  This is the goal of his international policy, which is why he is engaged now in violently trying to conquer other people's countries.  It is also his domestic policy, a policy whose goal is to return the United States to being a paradise for one privileged group of people while turning the rest of us into the domestic servants of this privileged group.  

But he and his supporters depend on an economic machinery which in turn depends on the support and patronage of large numbers of the very people whom he wants to dispossess and subjugate.  In this he and his supporters are like the British were in relation to India and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  India was a supposed British "possession", yet the prosperity of the British economy depended on Indians buying British goods.  This fact was expertly used by Mohandas Gandhi to hurt the British economy during India's struggle for independence.  For Gandhi persuaded his fellow Indians to stop buying British goods and to begin to develop their own self-sufficiency.  This drastically raised the costs of empire for Britain and was one of the factors that led to India's independence from Britain.  As Marshall Ganz once said, systems of oppression always depend on the people whom they exploit.  One powerfully effective, yet nonviolent way for the oppressed to hurt the owners of these systems of oppression is to deny them the payoff they are hoping to gain from their oppression.  Don't feed the beast.

A more-than-likely fictional example may be helpful.  I'm going to repeat a story I heard long ago when I was a member of an abusive church, and which I've seen repeated since in the evangelical-o-sphere.  Supposedly there are countries in the developing world in which villagers go out day by day to hunt monkeys.  They are supposedly able to trap these monkeys by spreading hollowed-out gourds on the ground.  Each gourd has a small hole in its shell, and inside the gourd are a few peanuts.  When monkeys find the gourds, they reach inside and grab the peanuts as the hunters watch.  When the hunters come to seize the monkeys, the monkeys are so fixated on the peanuts that they won't let them go - even though by holding the peanuts they are unable to remove their hands from the gourds.  The gourds in turn are so big and heavy that the monkeys cannot run away from the hunters.  Thus the hunters are able to catch the monkeys and crack their skulls, and the monkeys are turned into monkey stew.  One note: I personally don't know whether most monkeys anywhere in the world would fall for such a trick, as I've never owned a monkey as a pet.  I specialize in cats.  I also suspect that the originators of this story have never seen a monkey in their lives, except in pictures or on TV. But let's assume for the moment that this story is true.

Now consider a person who is a member of a historically marginalized group, or a group which is targeted for oppression by a rich, powerful piece of garbage like Trump or like one of his supporters.  If the person who has been targeted for oppression continues to buy things made and sold by the Trump-oids, isn't he financing the very people who want to bash his brains out and turn him into cooked monkey meat?  How many of us allowed ourselves to be made into monkeys during this past holiday season?  How many of us splurged in our spending during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Years? How many people of color bought Teslas in 2025?  How many will want to buy a Tesla in 2026? How many of us will watch the Superbowl in 2026? How many of us will join the military in 2026 even though the U.S. military is likely to be deployed against our brothers and sisters in foreign lands?  How many of us are signed up for Amazon Prime and YouTube and Hulu and Fox and Netflix and ESPN and HBO? How many of us are still using Spotify (which has for a long time been involved in cheating musicians out of their earnings, and which in 2025 ran recruitment ads for ICE)? Boycotts and other forms of economic noncooperation mean letting go of the peanuts. Don't let the present system of oppression make a monkey out of you.

Image courtesy of Craiyon (craiyon.com). Created 17 October 2025.

(Yes, yes, I know - this is a picture of an ape and not a monkey.

But you can't expect too much from the free version of an AI service!)

Boycotts Have Begun to Bite

Truly this is an age in which those people who have been historically marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed and enslaved by dominant powers are being called on to rise up and resist their continued mistreatment.  That means that this is the time for us to resist the Trump administration and its attempts to revive exploitative supremacy.  Over the last eight years much of my writing for this blog has therefore focused on the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I have repeatedly stated, this kind of resistance consists of much more than merely staging mass protest marches and rallies.  As noted in Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy, there are at least 198 methods of strategic nonviolent action.  (His book lists only 198 methods, but he himself acknowledged that there are actually many more methods than these.)

One of the categories of tactics of strategic nonviolent resistance is the category of economic and political noncooperation.  This kind of noncooperation - especially of economic noncooperation - can impose extremely painful costs on a would-be oppressor or dictator (such as Trump) and on those rich and powerful people who comprise the dictator's pillars of support.  I'd like to suggest that the use of boycotts has begun to catch on in this year, 2025.  A number of large retailers who terminated their diversity, equity and inclusion programs this year are now feeling the bite of consumer boycotts.  Such retailers include Amazon, Target, and Home Depot (or, as I like to call them, Home Cheapo).  This year's holiday season may not be a very merry Xmas for such retailers as these.  You can read more about these holiday boycotts here: "Can Holiday Shopping Boycotts Make a Difference?", Yale Insights, December 2025.  Note that even though the cited article seeks to cast doubt on the effect of these boycotts, the fact remains that the boycotts are having enough of an effect to force the mainstream organs of power to take notice.  

The Advice of Benjamin

I must apologize to any readers who might wish that I had posted more frequently over the last several months.  Admittedly, my posting has been light.  In particular, I have stepped back from regular updates to my series of essays on the subject of economic precarity.  This is not because this subject has become less relevant.  Indeed, it has become increasingly relevant as the governments of many nations are being taken over by the Global Far Right.  However, my eyes are on a number of trends which have yet to come to full fruition.  Until those trends mature fully, I think it best to keep quiet.  To quote from one of the characters in A Canticle for Leibowitz, "Probing the womb of the future is bad for the child."

And like that fictional character, in a manner of speaking I too have chosen in these days to live a somewhat anchorite life at the top of my metaphorical desert mesa, wrapping myself evening by evening in my metaphorical prayer shawl.  However, I am not so detached that I haven't noticed recent news reports about the global wave of protests against corrupt and conservative governments around the world this year.  These protests have been led predominantly by the members of Generation Z, or Gen Z for short.  I am more than a little too old to be part of the Gen Z cohort, yet if Gen Z'ers don't mind, I'd like to offer some advice.  First, although mass protest is not without effect, I would strongly caution you all NOT to base your activism solely on mass protest marches.  In other words, don't have just one tactic in your suite of tactics. The scholar Gene Sharp identified at least 198 tactics of strategic nonviolent resistance.  These methods include both protest and much, much more than just protest.  Study his writings.  Read his book From Dictatorship to Democracy to learn how to think strategically.  Read the writings and watch the videos of Jamila Raqib.  Use the resources offered by Srdja Popovic and his organization CANVAS.  Learn how the widespread practice of radical frugality can disrupt the holders of concentrated wealth and power.  Learn the power and necessity of maintaining nonviolent discipline in your struggle.  And if you feel so inclined, please read the posts I have written for this blog from the end of 2016 until now, particularly the posts titled "From D to D" which I wrote as a study guide for Gene Sharp's book.  In solidarity I wish you all the best.

Escalating Noncooperation

This week the Trump administration has begun operations designed to destroy the government of Venezuela.  This is totally unnecessary, as Venezuela has presented no threat to the United States.  Rather, these operations are an expression of American white supremacist narcissism.

So what should decent, moral people do?  Many today are engaged in mass protest marches.  I have written extensively about the dangers and disadvantages of relying solely on mass protest as a tactic or strategy of strategic nonviolent resistance.  (See "Peter Ackerman's Accuracy" for instance.)  Acts of mass noncooperation and withdrawal from the dominant system remain a far stronger tactic than mass protest - especially when that noncooperation and withdrawal are economic in nature.  So let me suggest an avenue of noncooperation and withdrawal.

We know that many farmers - especially farmers who are in red states - solidly support Trump.  We also know that these farmers have begun to feel serious pain from the sanctions imposed on them by the nations to which they used to export their produce.  These sanctions were imposed by these nations in response to the tariffs on these nations' exports which were imposed by Trump.  We can increase the pressure on Trump's base by reducing our dependence on the things produced by his base.  This includes farm produce.  So if you want to do something constructive to help the resistance, start planting your winter vegetable garden.  Or start thinking about what and how you will plant next spring.  See how much you can reduce your dependence on supermarket farm produce.

A Deeper Dive Into Dilemma Actions

Here is a link to an interview which provides a clearer picture of a concept which I mentioned in my last post.  The interview was given by Srdja Popovic on the Democracy Paradox podcast and was posted on March 7, 2023. Srdja Popovic is the founder of CANVAS (The Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies). CANVAS provides training to organizers who need to wage campaigns of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to liberate themselves and their people from oppression and build durable democratic societies. 

In the interview Mr. Popovic emphasizes several points which have also been mentioned on my blog, The Well Run Dry.  In particular, he talks about how essential it is for the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance to start by developing a wise master strategy.  He also talks about why movements need leadership in order to be successful and why so many "leaderless movements" of spontaneous mass protest have accomplished so little over the last two decades.  He explains the concept of a dilemma action and shows how it can be a powerful tactic when wielded by skillful resisters who implement this tactic as part of a larger, well-formulated grand strategy.

The points he makes fit in well with my most recent post, which makes the case that struggle groups who wish to win need to evolve their tactics in order to fit with the ever-evolving nature of the space in which they struggle.  This particularly applies to the methods of protest and persuasion listed by Gene Sharp in books like From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I have mentioned previously that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  Yet they are not useless - they can still augment the power of a resistance movement as long as the tactics of protest have evolved to meet the changing nature of the struggle space, and especially as long as these methods are part of an entire suite of strategically chosen tactics which accomplish more than just protest.  Calling for mass protest marches is not a tactic that fits the present times, due to the extreme ease with which an oppressor can neutralize this form of protest by injecting violence (including vandalism) into any such protest marches.  Feel free to listen to Srdja as he describes more innovative and effective tactics of protest.

How Tactical Tools Adapt or Die

In a few previous posts on this blog, I have pointed out that relying on mass protest marches as the sole tactic of a struggle of strategic nonviolent resistance is as stupid as the British High Command's insistence on constant daily frontal assaults against German positions was in World War 1.  This observation may be disputed by some, yet the observation points out the fact that practitioners of strategic nonviolent resistance have often learned valuable lessons from the study of armed conflict.  In particular, it is possible to notice those commanders of forces who made the most out of limited resources in order to achieve surprising victories.  It is also possible to notice and study those commanders who were inept, hidebound, or who otherwise doomed themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - even when these commanders started out with overwhelming numerical and material advantages.

And it is possible to trace how tactical tools evolve in their composition and methods of use as they are deployed by wise commanders who are observant, willing to listen to different perspectives, and who otherwise display the characteristics of reflective practitioners.  So let's consider in this post how the experiences of World War 1 influenced the development of infantry as a component of the armed forces of modern nations.  At the outset it must be said that the poor use of infantry by the Allies throughout much of World War 1 led to large losses on the Allied side.  From 1914 to 1916, it was also true that the German military suffered heavy losses as well.  However, the Germans seem to have been the quicker to realize how massed artillery and machine guns had altered the battlefield, and what tactical and strategic adjustments were needed to make their fighting forces more survivable as a result.  On the other hand, the British and French forces continued to use outdated and obsolete tactics in deploying their infantry, with the result that a casual observer might be forgiven for concluding from the British example that dismounted infantry had become obsolete.  But infantry as a tool had definitely not become obsolete.  This was shown by the German development of the concept of defense in depth.  Defense in depth greatly reduced the effectiveness of British and French artillery against German defenders, and enabled the Germans to inflict heavy casualties on British and French attackers while suffering relatively few casualties of their own.  The Germans also developed a more flexible skill in maneuver warfare which made German forces highly dangerous and much more survivable during the German offensive of 1918 than the British and French had been in previous Allied offensives. (To their credit, however, the British army became much more effective toward the very end of the war, when they also began to implement defense in depth.)

After World War 1, those nations which had observant and teachable commanders and generals carefully studied the battles of the war in order to apply lessons to their own armies.  As a result, the militaries of the United States and other powerful nations began to make changes to the tactics of infantry deployment, switching from trench warfare to the use of foxholes in the defense, learning also to deploy elastic defense-in-depth, and beginning to learn new techniques for offensive operations at the small unit level and beyond.  However, the Germans once again proved to be far ahead of their peers in applying these new lessons, as demonstrated by the World War Two deployment of the blitzkrieg method of combined arms offensive warfare.  Learning by observation of enemy tactics, tools, and technologies on the part of both the Allies and the Axis powers led to the continued evolution of infantry by the armies of these nations, including evolution of technologies such as the assault rifle, the armored personnel carrier, and the tools of combined-arms assault, as well as changes to small-unit offensive tactics which resulted in the development of the traveling, traveling overwatch, and bounding overwatch dismounted squad formations.  The result is that a modern army which has incorporated modern tools and techniques for the deployment of its infantry can easily defeat a military which digs long lines of trenches for defense, which is rigid and inflexible in its use of artillery, and which day after day at regular times sends its infantry troops on assault in neat lines of men who move at a slow walk.  (By the way, according to a number of historians, this inflexible style is what characterized the British army in World War 1 under Sir Douglas Haig.)

In other words, by observation, learning from history (and especially from mistakes), and responding to that learning by making the necessary tactical innovations, the infantry as a component of modern militaries has continued to make itself relevant even to the present day as a key component of an effective fighting force.  What lessons can we take from the infantry's continual self-reinvention to apply to the field of strategic nonviolent resistance?  

Well, let's take the methods of protest and persuasion as a key category of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I said at the beginning of this post, I have argued that the use of mass protest marches as the sole go-to tactic of resistance is stupid, because this has become the method of resistance which oppressors are most equipped to meet and to counter.  But does this mean that the entire category of methods of protest and persuasion is now obsolete? Not necessarily.  It is true that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of nonviolent action, just as it is true that the squad-level dismounted small infantry unit is the weakest troop unit in warfare.  But just as the squad-level dismounted unit is still relevant in war-fighting, the methods of protest and persuasion still have value in the battlefield of 21st century strategic nonviolent resistance.  What is needed, however, is an evolution of tactics, of tactical thinking, and of methods.  And these tactics and methods must be deployed by wise leaders whose tactical and strategic thinking has evolved with the times in order to remain relevant and effective.

A hypothetical, yet concrete example may be helpful.  Suppose you are a resister against the fascist Trump regime and you want to weaken his pillars of support.  We know that the white American evangelical/Protestant church remains one of the staunchest pillars of support of the Trump regime.  (By the way, that shows just how little white American evangelicals are actually interested in obeying the words of Jesus!)  Let's say that you want to plan a series of operations designed to weaken this church as a pillar of support of Trump.  You could adopt one of two possible approaches.  The first would be to gather as many people as you can by means of Facebook, Reddit, or other social media announcements in order to besiege as many churches as you can with armies of protesters carrying picket signs to show your outrage over the white evangelical support of Trump's fascist policies and imperial overreach.  To make things even more interesting (and stupid), let's say that you want to repeat this same tactic Sunday after Sunday for several weeks in a row.  Let's examine such a tactic through the lens which Peter Ackerman provided us in one of his Fletcher Summer Institute lectures.  In particular, let's ask what is the purpose and what are the risks of such an action, and how likely it is that such an action would achieve its stated goals.  Below is my summary of possible answers to these questions.

• Purpose: To attempt to shame the white American evangelical church by expressing outrage over its hypocrisy, its worship of secular power, and its use of religion to support the oppression of the poor and nonwhite in the U.S. and throughout the world.
• Likelihood of success: very small.  Why? In attempting to shame these people by means of a series of mass protest marches, you are attempting to appeal to their better angels.  But most of them don't have better angels.  They are perfectly willing to do or to say whatever it takes in order to maximize their secular economic and political power and supremacy, regardless of the morality of their actions.

• Risks: Very, very high! Why? Because of the following factors:
• Your protest marches will provoke a violent response from the organs of right-wing power in this country.  In particular, you can count on Trump taking over the local police forces, sending in troops from the regular military (and not just the National Guard), and initiating a massive crackdown on civil liberties.
• To facilitate and legitimize that violent crackdown, the fascist element will inject violence into your protest by means of agents provocateurs.  They will then blame the outbreak of violence on you and your fellow protestors, using such organs of right-wing media as Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp media empire (including Fox News) to make their case.  On the TV screens in every household there will be scenes of rooms full of stone-faced middle-aged men sporting buzz cuts and wearing blue uniforms who announce that in town X or city Y the police had to "declare a riot" because of the actions of "subversive hooligan elements bent on sowing CHAOS because they HATE AMERICA!!!"
• By your protest marches you will make your opponents look like innocent little lamb martyrs who are being "persecuted solely for the name of Christ" (that is, being persecuted merely for being "innocent and nice people"), thus boosting their standing in society and actually strengthening them as one of Trump's pillars of support.  And you will get yourselves painted as "attackers of the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom".

So we see that such a direct deployment of mass protest marches would actually not work in weakening the white evangelical church as a pillar of support because it would not persuade the members of that church to abandon Trump, and because Trump and his fellow fascists would easily be able to turn the effects of such protests against the protestors, thus actually boosting the power and prestige of white evangelicalism.

Now let's consider the second approach.  Suppose you have studied the changing battlefield of strategic nonviolent action and you decide to deploy a smarter tactic of protest.  Your goal remains the same: to weaken the white American evangelical/Protestant church as a pillar of support of a fascist regime.  But instead of calling for massive protest marches to picket as many churches as possible, you talk to your physical, flesh-and-blood neighbors and say, "From now on, let's each put out a sign on our lawns every Sunday which says 'THIS SUNDAY, I AM WASHING MY CAR.'" And let's say that you all agree that at the hour in which most churches have their Sunday services, you and your friends start washing your cars.  Moreover, let's say that you video yourselves all washing your cars at 11 am every Sunday and post those videos online.  Let's say that you make it abundantly clear that your choice of 11 am every Sunday for car-washing is an act of protest, your sending of a signal that you will not be attending church on Sunday because the churches have become the corrupt handmaidens of a fascist regime.  What can Trump or his goons or the liars who work for Rupert Murdoch possibly do to counter such an act of protest?  

What I have described in this second approach is what is known as a dilemma action.  (See this also.) And it is a tactic of dispersion, which is much harder to repress than tactics of concentration. It is also an action which has the capacity to produce massive amounts of backfire if the oppressor tries to stop it.  For instance, if ICE or Marine Corps troops violently seize someone and beat him up simply for washing his car on a Sunday morning, how will such an act look in the eyes of witnesses?  Won't such a response produce serious questioning of the Trump regime, as well as serious revulsion toward that regime?  Moreover, as the idea of washing your car on Sunday (or pulling weeds, or cleaning your gutters, or my favorite - sleeping in!) catches on, the revenue and attendance numbers at most evangelical churches will start to show a definite decline.  And there will be very little they can do to stop it! (You can also boost the effectiveness of your tactic by making bumper stickers that say "I AM NOT GOING TO CHURCH THIS SUNDAY" or "I'M SLEEPING IN THIS SUNDAY.")

Thus we see that just as in the use of weapons and tactics in war-fighting, a method or category of methods of nonviolent resistance can remain relevant and effective as long as the practitioners of that method or of those methods continue to evolve their capacity for tactical and strategic thinking.  A key to the evolution of tactics of nonviolent resistance can be found in the methodology which the German army used to re-invent itself on the fly during World War 1:

• Perception of the need for change
• Solicitation of ideas, especially from the front-line units
• Definition of the change
• Dissemination of the change
• Enforcement throughout the army 
• But in this case, since we are dealing with a civilian movement rather than a military operation, the word "enforcement" may be too strong. For the members of civilian movement organizations, a better way to phrase this is the building of a culture of discipline throughout the organization.  This discipline must facilitate adherence to wise strategy.  An essential part of this discipline is the maintaining of strict nonviolent discipline.
• Modification of organization and equipment to accommodate the change
• Thorough training
• Evaluation of effectiveness
• Subsequent refinement

Note: the above outline is quoted from The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War, by Timothy T. Lupfer, published in July 1981.  (I told y'all that y'all need to read some books!)

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...

Repost: Gantry Collapse

I must apologize for not writing a new post in a while.  Unfortunately, we in the U.S. are reaping the consequences of the curse that reads, "May you live in interesting times." This curse is commonly cited as originating in ancient China, but it was actually uttered for the first time by a British politician in the early 20th century.  (However, the Chinese do have the following deliciously appropriate phrase: 宁为太平犬，勿为乱人, which can be rendered, "Better to be a dog in peace than a man in chaos!")  

Anyway, the effort of dealing with national chaos (and its trickling down to the local level) has me quite busy, so I won't be writing a lengthy post in the near future.  However, I have been thinking about the current chaos as well as the architects of that chaos, namely Mr. Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  I am also thinking of one of the chief enablers of Trump, of the Far Right, and of Republicanism - namely, the white American evangelical/Protestant church and its subculture.  This is a church which claims to know Jesus, yet whose members hate their fellow human beings if those human beings are not American or white or rich or English-speaking, and whose leaders practice and tolerate the most egregious predatory sexual behavior - including felony-level sexual assault, pedophilia, and rape.  Reading the latest news about evangelical sex scandals and the culture which enables perpetrators to continue in the ministry made me think of a blog post I wrote over two years ago.  Therefore I am presenting to you the link to Gantry Collapse, for those who want a blast from the recent past.  Please note how that post documents the process by which religion used as a tool of domination eventually loses its power to dominate.