Random Sunday Ramblings

I owe longtime readers a series of concluding posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I will try to write another post in the series within the next week or so.  But today I'm feeling a bit lazy and I have the challenge of trying to rein in a schedule that has recently become less manageable than it ought to be.  So I'm chillin' in my backyard right now.  (My cat Koshka is chillin' also next to my right foot.)

I normally shop for groceries twice a week, although I hope to cut that down to once a week as soon as the veggies in my garden start producing.  However, last Thursday I forgot to catch up on some items that had run out, so this morning I made a run to a supermarket.  Along the way I passed three churches and noted the cars in the parking lots.  Those parking lots have had Sunday cars for the last few months, and whenever I've thought of people going to church during a pandemic like that caused by COVID-19, I have wondered at the craziness of some humans.  I haven't been to church (or coffee shops, libraries,  restaurants, etc.) for over a year.

The percentage of people who have received at least one vaccine shot in my state is high enough that a few days ago, the governor's office removed the requirement for people to wear masks in most public places.  That means that one of my biggest excuses for not attending church may go away.  Yet I still feel a curious reluctance to resume my churchgoing.  Part of the reason is that I have become used to taking what I consider to be lifesaving precautions.  In this I am not alone.  Today, for instance, I noticed that perhaps a majority of people in the supermarket I visited were still wearing masks, including store staff.  I feel a bit like the Willie Keith character in The Caine Mutiny after WWII has ended and he's steaming back to the United States - still observing personal blackout practices at night aboard his ship and unable to get used to steaming with the sonar turned off or having his ship's lights brightly blazing.

But another part of my reluctance stems from the fact that the pastors and members of many churches in the United States have shown themselves to be thoroughly, nauseatingly disgusting during the Trump era and especially during the last year and a half.  That stinking disgust burst into my consciousness again just a few minutes ago, as I was reading the Gospel of Luke, particularly Luke 3:15-17:

Now while the people were in a state of expectation 

and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ,

John answered and said to them all, "As for me, I baptize you with water; 

but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; 

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  

And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, 

and to gather the wheat into His barn; 

but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

This passage struck me precisely because John describes Christ as a coming Judge.  It must be noted that Christ, when He came, did not refute or alter anything that John had said about him.  Nor did Christ alter any of John's exhortations to people to prepare for the coming of Christ by repenting - and by bringing forth fruit in keeping with repentance.  This is seen clearly in Luke 19:1-10, when after meeting Zaccheus the tax collector, Zaccheus announces to the Lord that he is giving back to people everything he stole or cheated out of them.  The Lord responds by saying, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he [Zaccheus] too, is a son of Abraham."  In other words, if a person has really repented, it will show in the way they treat others - especially in the way they treat the powerless, the poor and the oppressed.

Now the white American evangelical/Protestant church (and those Stockholm Syndrome-affected pastors of certain nonwhite churches) will enthusiastically preach Christ as a coming Judge - especially as a Judge who is coming to destroy all dark-skinned infidels.  Thus the white American evangelical/Protestant church continues to insist that "Blue lives matter!" and that we need to pray for our men in uniform who continue to use State-sanctioned violence in order to maintain both white privilege and white supremacy.  And their pastors continue to try to validate both themselves and the politicians who are backed by them by appealing to a "culture war" which is being waged to "purify" our society from deviant elements.  Never mind that these "culture warriors" continually prove themselves to be as deviant as the sins they condemn, or that the appeal to "culture warfare" is itself simply a ploy to garner more political and economic power for a privileged minority.

A funny thing happens, however, when anyone dares hold up a truth-telling mirror to the eyes of these people.  When they are forced to look at their own sins, they are suddenly all, "Well Jesus is full of grace!  The wonderful thing about Christ is that He died for our sins!  You're being judgmental for pointing my sins out to me!"  It gets even better if you dare to point out to them the Biblical mandate for social justice and the practical love of one's neighbor.  In Luke 16, for instance, the story of the rich man and Lazarus is routinely misinterpreted by these evangelicals to mean that the rich man went to hell simply because he refused to accept a 90-second catechism from a "Gospel tract."  (Somebody forgot to give that rich dude a leaflet explaining the Four Spiritual Laws!  After all, we're justified by faith apart from works of the Law, aren't we?!)  Many of these evangelical/Protestant types now going so far as to say that anyone who says that Christians are mandated by the Gospel to practice social justice is guilty of "legalism."  (See this, this, this, and this for instance.  And when you say "legalism", say it with the same sinister hiss that you would use when you say the word ssssocialissssmmmm...)

But the best of all whoppers I have ever heard were the assertions by evangelicals during the Trump years that Trump was somehow a Christian.  In order to say such a thing, these evangelicals had to deny almost all of the Biblical teaching on Christian character.  And when it was pointed out that Trump was not even a good example of sexual purity (almost the only purity that evangelicals seem to care about), we heard drivel like "Well, Trump is just a baby Christian" and "If God could use a wicked king like Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus to accomplish His will, we can be sure that God is using Trump!  So we must support him!"

But what if Christ, when He returns, turns out to be what many evangelicals would call "legalistic"?  What if, moreover, many evangelicals wind up getting incinerated by unquenchable fire?  What if, when the Judge comes, He's coming for you?  Lemme tell ya, it makes me a bit uncomfortable to write this, knowing that for every finger I point outward, there are three pointing back at me!

Tying Two to Two

I have been thinking today about a Greek word I encountered a few weeks ago during my daily Bible reading.  It is found in Matthew 13 and Mark 4, shortly after the Parable of the Sower, and it is the word συνίημι ("syniemi"), which means literally "to send, bring, or set together."  In a metaphorical sense it also means to "put two and two together," that is, to understand the meaning and implications of a thing.  The passage in which this word appears reads thus:

For the heart of this people has become dull,

and with their ears they scarcely hear, 

and they have closed their eyes, 

lest they should see with their eyes, 

and hear with their ears,

and understand (σῠνῑ́ημῐ) with their heart and return,

and I should heal them.

Here we have a picture of a people who were diseased - and who indeed were suffering from their diseased condition - yet who were doomed to remain in their suffering because of their refusal to put two and two together.  Consider the many forms of suffering that arise from this willful refusal to put two and two together - a refusal that is one of the hallmarks of addiction or of cultic thinking.

And consider those nations which have historically identified themselves as the Global North.  Note how the cultures and political discourse of so many of these nations has been hijacked by the ideology of predatory laissez-faire free-market capitalism, the worship of wealth, white supremacy, and the selfishness of "libertarianism" and "conservatism."  Those who promoted this hijacking have loudly and insistently preached the message that there should be no limits or restrictions placed on the "liberty" of individuals for any reason whatsoever.  They failed to mention that they are most concerned about preserving the liberty of those individuals in a society who have the greatest economic and political power, who are thus free to indulge their selfishness by stepping on the toes (and any other convenient body parts) of all the rest of us.  Yet what is both noteworthy and tragic is that so many of the rest of us have bought the same message and drunk the same Kool-Aid which is sold to us by the wealthiest and most powerful members of our society.

But in recent decades, a number of crises have emerged as a result of this thinking.  I will consider only two of these today.  Let me mention that both crises could have been mitigated or avoided entirely had our society held a more collectivist mindset - that is, had we been the sort of people who value the common good above the unrestrained exercise of individual "liberty".  The first crisis is that of manmade climate change.  Yes, I said "manmade."  Other accurate phrases or terms would include "anthropogenic" or "human-caused."  We have known for decades that industrial activity was altering the earth's atmosphere in ways that would alter the climate - yet the defenders of "liberty" have loudly and insistently denied such knowledge.  Why?  Because to admit the impact of human industrial activity would have forced these people to confront a moral choice.  They would have been faced with the choice of "understanding with their hearts."  And that choice would have cost either a numbed conscience or possibly lots of money.  The Global North does like its money, doesn't it?  (The white American Evangelical/Protestant church really loves its money!  Must be why so many of its members and leaders can't seem to put two and two together...)  And in addition to the numbing of conscience, these nations chose to continue the destructive chasing of economic gain because many of their citizens told themselves that the consequences of their choices would never fall on them.  They said, "What do we care about polar bears?  Or about poor island people drowning in rising seas?  That's so far from us!"

Except that now it isn't far away at all.  Last year was the first year of my life in which I lived in the midst of a widespread, potentially lethal climate event.  It was an event for which to escape, many of us would have had to travel up to a thousand miles to the east.  It was an event during which the amount of free oxygen in the local atmosphere dropped to such levels that dangerous levels of carbon monoxide were produced.  And it was caused by wildfires that raged from Southern California to southern Canada.  We are about to experience another potentially lethal climate event, as daytime temperatures over much of the American West will exceed 100 degrees for several days, and nighttime temperatures will not drop below 70 degrees.  (See this also.)  Moreover, there will be few places to which to escape, because much of the rest of the United States is also experiencing climate crises including severe weather.  And both the heat and the severe weather are likely to recur several times this summer.  Would you like a little fire with that order?  Or maybe you have enough money to escape to Europe for a while.  Except that Europe is enduring its own heatwave (especially Eastern Europe), and parts of Russia have turned into a bit of Hell.  (See this also.)

There is also the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus pandemic.  What is noteworthy about the United States is the large number of people who have not yet been vaccinated - especially in southern "red" states - as well as the number of people who continue to refuse to wear masks in public.  I ran into one such gentleman this morning when I made a quick dash to buy some groceries.  I pointed him out to one of the store clerks, who told the man to put on a mask.  He protested, saying that he had been vaccinated.  Then the man looked at me and announced that he had been to Afghanistan.  I don't exactly know what reaction he hoped to get out of me - he was fat and had gray hair, and if he was really a vet, it was obvious that it had been a long time since he had graduated from the college of violent knowledge.  I just looked at him.  Had he caused trouble, he would have been able afterward to boast that not only had he been to Afghanistan, but he had also been to jail.  He did put on a mask.  People like him are the reason why the United States is so slow in returning to any semblance of a pre-pandemic "normal."  

The United States ignored for a while the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result, the American economy was badly damaged even as our leaders prioritized profits above dealing with the crisis.  The United States is now no longer the strongest nation on earth.  The Global North has ignored the implications of climate change until now, and as a result, the differential in power and wealth which the Global North has built with respect to the rest of the world is eroding.  Could it be perhaps way past time for some of us to start putting two and two together?

In Search of Good Work, Or, A Right Autarky

I'm glad to report that the work I've had over the last few months is winding down to a more manageable level.  (Not that I want it to disappear entirely - I still like eating and having some spending money!)  So today I thought I'd write a post that continues to develop some of the thoughts I've tried to expound in my series of comments on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  One thing that Gene Sharp says in his book is that "a liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  This notion of self-reliance and internal strengthening reminds me of a Bible verse which has struck me repeatedly ever since I noticed its occupational context over ten years ago.  The verse reads as follows: "And let our people also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, that they may not be unfruitful."  (Titus 3:14)  In the margin of my Bible, the word rendered "deeds" has an alternate rendering of "occupations."  It is the rendering of that word as "occupations" which first arrested my interest.

Now if you Google "Titus 3:14", you will encounter a huge number of emotive commentaries by people who tell us that the "good works" mentioned in Titus are primarily deeds of church-style charity to those who are in need, such as picking up elderly Sister Gladys from her house in the country so she can come with you to church on Sunday, or helping Deacon Weatherly pull weeds in his front yard on Saturday so he can have more time to be a servant to the church.  Carried still further, those who interpret the verse in this way begin to talk eloquently about the huge amount of work that is needed to run a church with multiple services - from running the sound system to making the coffee to mowing the church grounds to cleaning the bathrooms, etc., etc.  (Not to pick on anybody, but here and here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.)

But to interpret that verse in an occupational sense opens up an entirely different window - a window through which many people have never attentively looked.  For this interpretation begins to illuminate the spiritual dimension of the work, and of the kinds of work, which we choose to do for a living.  So let us consider this dimension as we read the words "good deeds," or in the King James version and other versions, "good works." Those words in the original Greek are "καλός ἔργον," which can be translated literally as "beautifully good work".  And the purpose of the work is to provide for "necessary, urgent, indispensable needs, necessities or uses" (ἀναγκαῖος χρεία).  If we take Titus 3:14 as part of a body of New Testament teaching on the spirituality of work, we are drawn to other Scriptures such as 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, which says "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing."  

The quiet working with our own hands is a key pillar of the Biblical definition of righteous autarky.  The other element of righteous autarky is contentment with what one has, as described in 1 Timothy 6:6.  But there are many in the world who seek autarky in a perverted way because they insist on living in a world that places no limits on them, and because they are addicted to consumer culture, national narcissism, and the love of money.  For them autarky means going to war against those who are both content and self-sufficient in order to knock them over the head and take their stuff.  The wealthy of most nations fit into this category - including много вороватых русских человечков в бункерах as well as many rich American thieves in their own bunkers.  This evil kind of autarky is a hallmark of earthly empires.

Righteous autarky is a hallmark of those who are escaping from the global system of predatory capitalist domination and exploitation which in Revelation 18 is called "Babylon", for those who practice this kind of autarky depend on their own beautifully good work and their own ability to live simply as a means of breaking their reliance on their oppressor, that is, Babylon (and providing themselves with a clear conscience as part of the bargain - Revelation 18:4).  I submit to you that engaging occupationally in "beautifully good work to meet indispensable needs" is a key part of righteous autarky.  Ain't bad work if you can get it, but ya gotta know where to look!

So let us consider the search for occupations that are beautifully good and that meet necessary needs.  And here we must consider the things which make this search difficult.  First of all, there is the distraction of the worthless - that is, the distractions served up by a society that exalts the worthless.  By this I mean particularly celebrity culture, the culture which exalts the best and brightest performers in those fields which are crowded precisely because they are fun, they don't require much effort, and they are entirely optional.  Here we have those who want to follow in the steps of rich as YouTubers and lottery winners, those who want to become famous podcasters like Joe Rogan, those who are wanna-be actors and other celebrities, and those who would like to become members of the British royal family - in short, people who seek to be like those individuals who have managed to get a lot of something for nothing.  We are told to imitate celebrity because celebrities are held up as a model which the rest of us can and should imitate.

An acute example of the distraction of the worthless is the celebration of worthless business.  By this I mean the rise and excessive valuation of many "tech" companies whose chief executives (like Mark Zuckerberg) are celebrated as inventors of engines of "wealth creation."  But to credit these people with "wealth creation" is actually false, for what they have actually achieved by means of tech platforms such as Facebook is parasitic wealth transfer - a transfer of the last remaining distributed wealth of the non-wealthy into the pockets of the wealthy.  In other words, men such as Zuckerberg (and, I would suggest, Elon Musk) are merely really good examples of efficient parasites.  The same could be said for the CEO's of many major retail chains such as Walmart and Home Cheapo which have driven smaller retail operations out of business.

The activities of these parasites has given rise to a third difficulty, namely the impacts of a changing society on our ability to find meaningful, beautifully good work.  This change has two causes:

• The change in the occupational landscape wrought by the deployment of artificial intelligence and task automation.  AI is an interesting subject in that there are two camps of human opinion regarding its use.  One camp consists of those who look critically at AI in order to determine and define its limits and adverse effects (such as the sometimes disastrous effects of automation-induced complacency).  The other camp is enthusiastic about the ability of AI to transform the workplace by automating repetitive tasks or tasks that require a lot of brute force calculation, thus freeing humans to focus on tasks which require "creativity."  A barely noticed corollary to this assertion is the fact that software and hardware development teams are trying hard to push AI into realms of human "creativity" as well.  (Case in point: if you use AutoCAD for engineering design, you will have known for a long time that Autodesk has automated many design tasks which used to take a fair amount of skill on the part of a designer!)  This push is being driven by owners of capital who would much rather use AI to continue their concentration of capital by paying an upfront capital cost for a piece of machinery in order to do more with fewer people.  As the push for task automation progresses, people will need to engage in a constant re-skilling in order to keep from being run over by the robot juggernaut of "progress".

• The impact of resource depletion on the kinds of economic activity which a society can sustain.  I will not say much tonight about this subject, since much has already been written on this subject.  (Some of what has been written actually makes sense.  On the other hand, I removed from my bookshelf all books by Dmitri Orlov or James Howard Kunstler and threw them into the compost bin.  Those books have better uses as fertilizer than as guidance.)  But I will say that there are forward-looking societies run by leaders who know how to play a long game, which have begun to respond to resource depletion by investing in progressive responses such as circular economy principles.  On the other hand, there are nations like the United States.  If you live in the USA, you may find yourself needing to navigate situations and invent solutions which Asian nations (and I don't mean Russia!) have long since collectively figured out.  

To close, then, let us look at the characteristics of the kind of work we should be looking to do.  It should be beautiful - that is, it should have an element of craftsmanship, of mastery, and of increasing rewards for the acquisition of increasingly rare and valuable skills.  It should be good - that is, genuinely beneficial to humankind.  And it should be necessary - that is, indispensable.  As Asef Bayat says, "An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world-class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry.  Excellence is power; it is identity."  This is how the church of the New Testament - composed largely of poor people and slaves - began to liberate itself from Rome.  This is how we of the African-American diaspora will liberate ourselves.  To  borrow some language from the study of artificial intelligence, let these characteristics define the "objective function" you seek to optimize in your search for paying work.

On Fleeing The Glowing Glass

I have every intention of continuing my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  However, as I have said in a recent post, I've been working like a dog.  This has deprived me of bandwidth needed to write research-heavy posts.  In a few weeks, hopefully, I won't be so busy.  

This week, I thought it would be good to re-visit a post I wrote a few months ago titled, "Farewell to YouTube."  I wrote that post to announce my decision to quit watching YouTube videos.  I made the decision to quit because YouTube had chosen to make itself the haunt of racist, far-Right thugs (and of extremists in general).  (See this also.)  The reason for YouTube's decision was that the executives who run this service were told by marketers and cognitive psychologists that the way to drive up viewership was to recommend and promote videos that provoke outrage and extremism.  The reason why these doofuses thought that this was a good idea was that increased viewership meant increased advertising revenue for YouTube (and hence for Google).  I just got nauseatingly tired of recommendations to videos by Sky News, Fox News, or any other media outlet owned by the family of Rupert Murdoch.  I got "projectile emesis" tired of seeing recommendations for any videos with Donald Chump as the main character - especially after the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol by Trump-head white supremacists in January and after YouTube's foot-dragging in removing former President Chump's access to YouTube.  

So I quit YouTube this past January.  But a funny thing happened.  I discovered that I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms of a sort.  Not that I missed being constantly insulted and threatened.  But it was because of my original reasons for starting to watch YouTube in the first place - reasons which roughly paralleled my original fascination with the Internet in the first place.  For the Internet (and YouTube in particular) started out as a source of inspiration and information to guide me in my pursuit of the mastery of hard things.  Later, they became an unfortunate escape to an unfortunate extent, as I found myself stuck in the drudgery of everyday life while compensating for the drudgery by sneaking looks at people whose lives truly seemed to be a happy adventure. This was especially true of the fascination I developed for the Philippines, for Indonesia, for South Korea, and for Gambia last year.  For in watching YouTube videos of life (and music) in these places, I was struck by the difference between the happy, sane cultures and the polite, pleasant people I was seeing versus the derangement of life in the United States under Donald Thump.

In quitting YouTube, I found that I was missing the dopamine rush of vicarious living - that is, of living through the experience of watching other people's happiness.  So I fell off the wagon a bit in February.  I thought I could tame the YouTube beast by switching browsers and search engines.  And I discovered YouTube channels hosted by people who made videos of themselves studying.  This was during our rainy winter season, and I had not yet been vaccinated, so I was stuck working from home.  The study videos did indeed provide inspiration, but I noticed that some of them also seemed to be designed to sell furniture, music players, computer monitors, and other gear so that the viewer could replicate the perfect study setup he or she was watching on his or her glowing screen.  As I watched these videos while doing some difficult reading of my own, I was struck by the silly banality of thinking I needed to watch a video of someone else studying in order to help me do my own work.  

And I was again confronted by the fact that for too many people (myself included), YouTube had become a means of vicarious enjoyment of other people' successes rather that a help for us in doing our own difficult yet worthwhile tasks.  It is much easier to watch mentally healthy, non-radicalized, non-European people socializing in developing countries than it is to try to repair the poisoned culture of one's own country.  It is much easier to watch an accomplished fingerstyle guitarist play music than it is to pull one's own ax out of the closet and engage in an hour of deliberate practice.  It is much easier to watch someone study to the sound of background music in the perfectly decked out living room of a fifth or sixth floor condominium whose window looks out over a city skyline than it is to read technical journals in silence at a desk in a spare bedroom during a rainstorm.  (Although now the weather is quite warm and dry.  My backyard has become the perfect place for me to do some deep work, accompanied by the ASMR sound of the freeway several blocks away and the more intermittent sound of the wind in the trees. My backyard beats the condo dude's living room - even though he has thousands of YouTube "followers"!  Maybe I should make videos of myself reading in my backyard.  Or maybe not...)  

So I am back on the wagon.  And one thing that has helped me stay on this time is a podcast I heard in March or April, titled, "Close Enough: The Lure of Living Through Others."  Fascinating stuff.  What are we missing by living vicariously through social media rather than doing the hard work needed to accomplish worthwhile things ourselves?  What kind of miserable life do you have if you spend all your time on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube?  And even if YouTube should clean up its act and cease to be a tool of white radicalism, would it be worth it for me to go back?  Didn't I waste enough time as a kid watching hours of TV?  What if by boycotting a thing, you discover that you really don't need it anymore?

The Strongest Nonviolent Weapons

When an oppressed people faces an oppressing power, there are certain limits on what the oppressed can reasonably expect.  One thing the oppressed usually cannot expect (at least, not by itself) is to end their oppression simply by appealing to the better angels of their oppressors.  For the whole point of oppression is to create an economic and political system which grants all the benefits of a society to a small group of privileged people while externalizing all of the costs of that society onto the oppressed.  This was the goal and chief characteristic of the antebellum American South and of South Africa under apartheid.  Anyone who would want to create such a system therefore has no better angels to appeal to.  The soul of such a person is a piece of garbage.

The Republican Party in the United States has sought to revive such a system.  From the Tea Party to Trump, we all can see the poisonous fruits of their labors.  The Republicans know that they can never win elections in a nation that is composed of many peoples who have been designated by the Republican party as meat to be chewed in a cannibal feast.  Therefore one of their strategies has been to try as hard as possible to restrict the right to vote in the United States by disenfranchising as many of their intended victims as possible.

So we come to Georgia in 2021, where the Republican-controlled state government has recently passed the most restrictive voting law in the United States.  But here we have a beautiful response by some of the people most affected by that law.  For over 1,000 pastors of African-American churches have joined together to urge a boycott of corporations such as Home Depot (also known as Home Cheapo) that refuse to oppose the Georgia law.  The boycott as a tactic is straight out of Gene Sharp's 198 methods.  Note also that these pastors have not called for street protests, thus showing a level of tactical and strategic maturity far beyond that shown by the Black Lives Matter organizers last year.

To be sure, there are some who say that calls for boycotts are "controversial."  Among these is Stacey Abrams, who asserts that a boycott is the wrong move because it would hurt poor Georgians.  She conveniently forgets that the same criticism was made against Black South African liberation leaders in the 1980's when they called for boycotts and international economic sanctions against South African businesses.  She also forgets that most Black South Africans living under apartheid supported the boycotts and calls for economic sanctions.  For they knew that when dealing with corrupt, proud, evil pieces of garbage, the only language that would carry weight was the language of power - the power to impose real costs.  Finally, Ms. Abrams seems to forget that it was the sanctions and boycotts - not merely trying to work through institutional means - that forced the de Klerk regime to renounce apartheid.  In her opposition to an economic boycott of Georgia, Stacey Abrams sounds suspiciously like the leaders of many modern-day "business unions" who dissuade their members from striking.  (Perhaps Stacey Abrams might better be named "Aunt Tammy"?)

To those "bleeding-heart conservatives" who oppose the organizing of economic non-cooperation against oppressors, I have some words.  Over fifty years ago, Thomas Schelling wrote the following:

“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions. They can deny him most of what he wants — they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration….They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves….It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins.”

In denying the oppressor what he wants, the oppressed must of necessity bear some costs themselves. However, the oppressed can win only by bearing those costs in a disciplined manner, from a position of mutually helping one another so as not to provide any support to the economic structures of the oppressor.  Each member of an oppressed population must ask whether he or she is willing for the "disciplined organization to refuse collaboration" with the oppressor.  Those who are not willing become Uncle Toms (UT's) and Aunt Tammys (AT's).  Given enough of these UT's and AT's, a nonviolent liberation struggle collapses.  Bleeding-heart conservatives such as former President Reagan and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher cry great crocodile tears at the sufferings which oppressed people take on themselves in their struggle to liberate themselves.  Yet those tears will turn to laughter if the oppressed are persuaded to sabotage themselves.  We who are of the oppressed must remember that some things are non-negotiable.  It was for the purpose of learning to organize exactly the kind of strong, coercive nonviolent action described by Schelling that I spent over two thousand dollars of my own money a couple of years ago to take a series of community organizing classes.  I mean business.

As for me, I have a four-pronged hoe that I've been using for several years.  A few weeks ago, the wooden handle broke.  The next hoe I buy will not be from Home Cheapo.  Let's boycott!

On The Relative Poverty of Money vs Time

Last year was truly horrible in many respects, as the world in general and the United States in particular were subjected to the criminally incompetent leadership of malignant leaders aligned with the Global Far Right.  The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the fruits of this leadership.  COVID-19 sidelined many economies, including the economy of the United States.  The sidelining we endured was protracted by the refusal of our former Prez Donald Trump and the Rethuglican Party to take effective measures to deal with the pandemic.

As a result, for several months I found myself with very little to do, and hence no real income.  This was not a terrible hardship, as I had some money saved up.  So I spent way too much time traveling the world via YouTube (and falling in love with countries like the Philippines!).  I also spent time sharpening my occupational skills, developing marketing plans, and writing proposals.  During the summer (at least up until last year's terrible wildfires) I spent evenings taking walks through the neighborhood and playing guitar in my backyard as the sun went down.  

This year I find myself suddenly working like a dog.  This is exciting on a certain level, as my line of business is beginning to revive.  On the other hand, there is a certain stress.  I sometimes envy the lives led by my "associates":

Koshka and Vashka, doing what cats do best!

Someday I'll get to do that again ...

When The Wicked Perish, There Is Joyful Shouting

I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd.  I had my doubts as to whether the American so-called "justice" system which has been used so devastatingly against unarmed people of color would actually be willing and able to dispense justice to some of the perpetrators of that devastation.  Derek Chauvin is to me a throwaway person - a worthless pile of used toilet paper like so many cops in America's police forces, a piece of garbage thug, a worthless junkyard of a human being.

Yet the news of Chauvin's conviction has also unleashed a great shaking anger in me.  For there are many just like him who have gone unpunished.  These include Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderers of Philando Castille and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor, and the murderers of Stephon Clark.  The anger I feel right now is never very far from the surface of my consciousness.  Yet that anger is what drives me to the study of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For that resistance is not about trying to be "spiritual" or trying to build "beloved communities" with unrepentant racist white supremacist piles of garbage.  I'm not trying to melt their hearts.  Their souls are their problem.  My conception of strategic nonviolent resistance is about using indirect means to put myself and my people into a position in which we can no longer be assailed by such thugs.  In other words, it is the most radical example of the strategy of indirect approach.  

One salve for my anger is the thought that these unrepentant murderers haven't really gotten away with anything.  For a day will come in which they leave this earthly life - even though it be from old age - and then they will stand before a Judge who cannot be corrupted.  The smoke of their torment - literally, the smoke of their torture - will rise forever and ever.

From D to D, Chapters 6 and 7: A Rut By Any Other Name

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

This topic is timely even today, even though Donald Trump is no longer the President of the United States.  For the structures of inequality which he amplified are not yet dismantled.  Thus the need of the hour for communities of the oppressed is to organize ourselves for our collective liberation.  For organizers, this involves learning to persuade significant numbers of people to do things that are hard, that involve cost, that involve risk.  My interest in studying the art of community organizing has therefore been to learn to do just that: to learn to persuade my brothers and sisters to engage in effective liberating collective action.  To me it seems that the study of community organizing is a natural outgrowth and next step in the study of strategic nonviolent resistance, since this resistance is most effective when it is practiced by organized collectives of people instead of isolated individuals.

But the act of liberating oneself and one's people from long-term oppression is unavoidably disruptive to those who benefit from the present oppressive status quo.  This is especially true when the oppressed follow a strategy which their oppressors are not ready to meet, and which these oppressors therefore cannot counter.  Therefore, the masters of the present oppressive systems will do all they can to prevent the rise of this kind of effective, disruptive resistance.  In this pursuit, these masters have developed their own strategy.  That strategy has been to condition society in such a way that any expressions of collective discontent emerge within certain channels for which the masters have already prepared effective countermeasures, and which these masters are therefore quite ready to meet.

One example of the strategy of the oppressors has been the ways in which collective labor action has been tamed over the decades to the extent that officially recognized unions in their dealings with organized business are forced to follow rules of engagement which effectively de-fang and de-claw these unions so that they are no longer a threat to big business.  Therefore these unions have become worthless, because their most powerful weapon - the strike - has been declared unlawful (or "unprotected") in the vast majority of cases.  Also, most officially recognized unions have by now become "business unions," whose leadership actively discourages their members from the kind of disruptive collective action that could actually threaten economic inequality.  Collective bargaining and organized labor have therefore become the kind of challenge that holders of concentrated wealth and power are quite ready to meet.

I'd like to suggest that another strategy of the oppressors has been to define nonviolent resistance solely as mass protest.  Leaders of oppressive regimes (and of oppressive systems in supposedly democratic countries) have known for a fairly long time that the most disruptive change-making movements are nonviolent.  Therefore they have known for a long time that the best way to neutralize such movements is to inject violence into them.  While there are well-documented cases of this injection of violence into Russian anti-tsar protests and American labor strikes in the 19th century and early 20th century, it is important to note the history of the injection of violence into protests from the 1990s to the present day.  This was especially apparent during the clashes between the "Antifa" and various right-wing white supremacist groups before the 2018 U.S. elections and the infiltration of Black Lives Matter protests by various white supremacist groups in 2020.  (For documented proof of white supremacist infiltration in the protests of 2020, see "Riots, White Supremacy, and Accelerationism" by the Brookings Institution, "Far-right extremists keep showing up at BLM protests. Are they behind the violence?" by the Kansas City Star, "Small But Vocal Array of Right Wing Extremists Appearing at Protests" by the Anti-Defamation League, and "Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests:Indicators of White Supremacists," by Mia Bloom of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.)  As these events have shown, it is childishly easy for an oppressor to inject violence into a supposedly nonviolent protest.  After this injection occurs, it then becomes childishly easy for the oppressor to justify the use of lethal force to crush the protest.  To base a "movement" solely on the tactic of mass protest is therefore to mount a challenge that the holders of concentrated privilege are again quite ready to meet.

(One note about that last paragraph.  The advice given by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict during the "Antifa" clashes of 2018 and the BLM protests of 2020 is yet another reason why I have largely stopped listening to the ICNC - as I think at least some of their members have gotten into the business of deliberately giving bad advice to victims of American oppression who are trying to free themselves from that oppression.  Otherwise, how can one explain Tom Hastings' criminally stupid suggestion that there are cases where destroying other people's property can help a nonviolent movement?  And to think that the ICNC let him say that under their masthead!  Or Steve Chase's suggestion that we who seek to prevail by means of strategic nonviolent resistance must sometimes be willing to work with the kind of "protestors" who embrace "diversity of tactics" and follow the "St. Paul's principles" as he suggested during a 2018 online civil resistance course hosted by the ICNC?  He failed to mention that nonviolent organizations which attempt to partner with or dialogue with groups who embrace violence can themselves also become legitimate targets of police action!  Or take Daniel Dixon's suggestion during that same online course that movements that combine both violent and nonviolent tactics can achieve greater synergies than movements that remain strictly nonviolent.  What an idiotic thing to say - especially since history shows that movements that combine violent and nonviolent tactics are more easily crushed by their opponents!)

But there is yet another strategy of the oppressors which should be pointed out.  And that is to define the goal of community organizing as the building of power by a constituency in order to prevail in a political contest and a political system whose rules of engagement have actually been set up by people who dominate and exploit that constituency.  In other words, we are told that the main reason why we organize should be in order to help us prevail in electoral politics according to the rules of the present political system.  To say such a thing, however, is to ignore the fact that the rules of that system were set up by rich, powerful oppressors in order to maintain and preserve the power and positions of those oppressors.  To play the game by these rules is therefore to lose unless you are one of the privileged people for whose benefit the game was originally created and rigged.  To me therefore, the goal of learning to organize is not to try to build power to win at a game that was actually rigged to make me a loser.  The goal of learning to organize is to teach myself and my people to start playing a different game altogether in order to make the first game irrelevant.  Here it must be remembered that nonviolent civil resistance is a means of seeking change by means that lie outside of existing institutions.  That is the goal of my organizing and of my study of the art of organizing.

Let me close by re-quoting Basil Henry Liddel-Hart:

The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move so that, as in jiu-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.

And from Gene Sharp, 

Even in military conflicts, argued Liddell Hart, generally effective results have followed when the plan of action has had "such indirectness as to ensure the opponents' non-readiness to meet it."  It is important "to nullify opposition by paralyzing the power to oppose"...

In other words, don't get stuck in ruts that someone else has dug for you. 

 

From D to D, Chapters 6 & 7: What You Do With What You Have

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. The poor of the earth experience this exploitation as enslavement, discrimination, harassment, dispossession, and the threat of genocide. Many live as refugees. Theirs is an experience of apparent utter powerlessness in the face of an all-consuming, murderously abusive power. Yet the poor of the earth do have at their disposal a "weapons system" and a strategic method which holds the promise to liberate them from their oppression if they dare to use it. That means of liberation is strategic nonviolent resistance.

The previous post in this series explored the role of grand strategy in the exercise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  We noted that the concept of grand strategy is part of the strategic framework which nations use in order to achieve their highest and most important goals.  Specifically, grand strategy is the art of arranging all the resources of a state or polity to achieve its goals.  We also noted that national governments have the ability to compel their citizens or subjects to give their resources for the support of the nation's grand strategy.  This compulsion can come in the form of taxes or compulsory national service such as being drafted into the military.  However, this ability to compel is not available to those who live under oppression and who seek to liberate their people from that oppression through strategic nonviolent resistance.  You may be part of an oppressed group of people and you may be moved to try to organize a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Yet you cannot force your brothers and sisters to join your movement or to give their resources to support your grand strategy.  What you can do, however, is to craft a compelling "vision of tomorrow" to set in front of your people - a vision that concretely describes where we should all want to go and how we will try to get there.

And there is a second thing you can do.  Let's repeat Gene Sharp's definition of grand strategy here:

Grand strategy is the conception that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of a group seeking to attain its objectives in a conflict. Grand strategy, by focusing primary attention on the group’s objectives and resources in the conflict, determines the most appropriate technique of action (such as conventional military warfare or nonviolent struggle) to be employed in the conflict. In planning a grand strategy resistance leaders must evaluate and plan which pressures and influences are to be brought to bear upon the opponents. Further, grand strategy will include decisions on the appropriate conditions and timing under which initial and subsequent resistance campaigns will be launched. (Emphasis added.)

Here's the thing.  As Gene Sharp pointed out in Part 3 of his work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, "Rarely, if ever, does either the nonviolent or the opponent group include the whole 'population,' or group of people, whom they purport to represent or serve.  In a given nonviolent campaign the active participants are usually a relatively small percentage of the whole population in whose interests the nonviolent group claims to be acting." (Emphasis added.)  This "relatively small percentage" needs to develop its own grand strategy, its own plan that serves to coordinate and direct the use of all the resources at its own disposal in order to attain its objectives in its struggle.  In other words, the struggle group itself needs to develop a plan for how it will coordinate and use its own resources in building a successful long-range liberation struggle.

There are two things to note in considering the grand strategy of a struggle group.  First, it is a well-known historical fact that many successful movements have been created by small groups of people with few resources.  The fact that these movements were successful in bringing about large changes in societies shows the skill of these small groups in developing a wise grand strategy for the use of their own resources in bringing about these large changes.  One example of this is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose members went into Mississippi to desegregate centers of white power and to win the right of African-Americans to vote and participate in electoral politics without fear of violence.  The story of SNCC is told in books such as I've Got The Light Of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne, PhD.  The story of SNCC also partly refutes Doug McAdam's assertion that political movements emerge only where the dominant power structures allow "political opportunities."  For the white supremacists who controlled Mississippi at that time fought very hard (and violently!) to thwart the efforts of the SNCC organizers.  Yet SNCC won.

From this observation comes the corollary observation that the long-range outcomes produced by a social movement organization are a reflection and embodiment of its grand strategy.  Some groups have access to many resources, yet they produce meager or worthless results.  Other groups are small and have few resources, and they work under extremely threatening circumstances - yet they change their societies.  And sometimes they change the world.  I argue that the difference in outcomes comes down to a difference in grand strategy.

What then is this difference?  I would argue that it may just be possible that the difference comes down to a basic difference in motivation, a difference in desire.  And I'd like to suggest that in so-called social movement organizations that have existed for a long time, we can see in many cases a certain corruption of desire.  The reasons for this are found in the third chapter of Doug McAdam's book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930 - 1970, in which he lists three dangers which are faced by a social movement organization: oligarchization, co-optation, and dissolution of indigenous support.  

Oligarchization refers to the way in which the leaders of social movement organizations can tend to forget over time that the reason why their organization exists in the first place is to make a needed change.  They then start to think that the only reason why their organization exists is to exist, and that the leaders' job is simply to make sure that the organization keeps existing.  Co-optation is what happens when a social movement organization forgets that a key to the liberation of an oppressed people is the building of self-reliance among the oppressed.  Once the organization's leaders forget this, they start begging for funding (or applying for nonprofit status) from resource-rich members of the members of the dominant culture.  But they forget (or willfully blind themselves to the fact) that he who pays the piper gets to call the tune.  Therefore in receiving or asking for funding, the leaders of an indigenous social movement organization tend quickly to abandon the disruptive original goals of the social movement.  By being bought off, they cease to be a threat to an unjust status quo.  Dissolution of indigenous support is what then happens when a social movement organization has allowed itself to be oligarchized and co-opted.  For the people most affected by injustice - the people on whose behalf the social movement organization originally came into existence - will now look at that organization and correctly conclude that it has become a bunch of worthless Uncle Toms (and Auntie Tammys).

This is why I'm not terribly impressed with the NAACP anymore or with many other historic Black social movement organizations which have survived to this day.  For when Aiyana Stanley Jones was shot in her own bedroom - and when Trayvon Martin's murderer was acquitted - and when the long spate of publicly witnessed and recorded police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans ensued - and when the Trump presidency was busy committing its own atrocities - I would have expected that these organizations should have been able to mount a nonviolent, yet extremely coercive response that could have stopped this garbage in its tracks.  Instead, I was reading news articles that described the NAACP as "moribund".  (This is not a new criticism, by the way!)  At the same time, it was revealed that a White woman had risen to the leadership of a chapter of an organization that existed supposedly to solve problems faced by the Black community, namely, the NAACP!

I would suggest therefore that many historically Black social movement organizations have become moribund, and thus worthless.  In this, they mirror a broader phenomenon which has taken place in the American labor movement, in which certain unions which had come into existence decades ago as extremely scrappy and coercively powerful organizations were transformed over time into toothless "business unions."  But I would also like to suggest that social movement organizations that become worthless in this way face a danger.  This danger comes because their "grand strategy" has degenerated into a strategy of merely trying to continue existing and to keep obtaining funding in order to pretend to fight for the people they claim to represent.  This is then their way of "making the best of a bad situation" by profiting from that situation.  But what if the bad situation suddenly disappears?

I am thinking now of the Cold War and of the thriving and wealthy American defense industry which resulted from it.  If you talked with many employees of defense plants of that era, they would have told you that "war is good for the economy."  Clearly their career plans had been built on a strategy of "making the best" of a long-term bad situation.  Yet there were people in the Soviet Empire who were tired of this bad situation.  Among these were the Solidarnosc organizers in Poland, and the organizers of pro-democracy and liberation movements in other satellite countries.  They did not want to "make the best" of a bad situation.  Instead, they wanted to end that situation.  

And they succeeded.  This caused a massive disruption of the American defense industry.  I suggest that it was a contributing cause of the recession of the early 1990's which took place in the United States.  One of the casualties of the collapse of the Cold War was the Hughes Aircraft Company plant in Fullerton, California.  That plant (called the "Huge Aircrash Company" by some employees) occupied several acres of land in the Sunny Hills part of Fullerton, and employed thousands of people.  In 1990, it lost its raison d'etre.  It is now a bunch of supermarkets and big box stores.

Working Like A Dog

Those who follow this blog will have noticed that I was unable to write a post for last weekend.  The title of today's post explains why.  I suddenly find my occupational skills to be in very high demand - which is a good thing as it helps me to buy groceries!  However, I will try to have a post for this coming weekend.  In the meantime, here is a link to a fascinating article exposing the actual basis of the 2020 profits of the Tesla corporation.  The linked source, along with others, points out that Elon Musk's company has been unable to this day to be profitable on its own by selling its own cars.  The only thing that has helped the company post profits recently is the selling of carbon credits.  This is interesting, because Musk has built a PR campaign over the last year to portray himself as a smart, cutting-edge businessman and intellectual.  (See this also.)  Beware of celebrity culture; you know the old warning about all that glitters...

Link - Arab Tyrant Manual podcast with Jamila Raqib

Here is a link to a podcast interview of Jamila Raqib of the Albert Einstein Institution.  Jamila is the executive director of the Institution, which was originally founded by Dr. Gene Sharp to study the development and application of strategic nonviolent resistance.  The interview was conducted by Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash of the Kawaakibi Foundation, an organization which describes itself thus:

Kawaakibi Foundation is an accelerator for thinkers and doers, with a focus on the future of liberty in Muslim communities and in the Arab world. Our work causes headaches and sleepless nights for tyrants and terrorists.

We envision a world free from tyranny, terrorism, and foreign intervention; one in which society trumps the state, extremism and illiberalism have no appeal, and individual rights are sacrosanct.

The Kawaakibi Foundation is also very active in training movement organizers in effective nonviolent change.  To quote them again,

We don't do traditional activism - our projects are innovative and radical. We develop cutting-edge research and apply new methodologies and a rigorous theory of change to the root causes of problems. That's why our small team have caused headaches to the world's worst tyrants.

Their Arab Tyrant Manual is an initiative designed to fight the spread of illiberal and authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab world.   

The interview with Jamila covers ground that will be familiar to long-time students of strategic nonviolent resistance.  But it breaks some new ground as well in discussing how a successful nonviolent movement depends less on changing the heart of the oppressor and more on changing the hearts of the oppressed so that they begin to discover their own power.  The podcast also discusses questions of how to carry on the legacy of Dr. Gene Sharp.  Enjoy!