Fellow Traveler

Heard an interview this morning with Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. ( Click here for rant. )

I promised mojave_wolf a post about the destruction of the World Trade Center and the explanations of it, to spare ataxi from hosting a discussion of it on an unrelated post of his.

( And this cut spares you, the reader, from having it on your friends page! )

As the candidates jockey for ideological position, we'd do well to remember:

( No matter who takes office in 2009, good policy and moral policy will only come about through mass public pressure. )

Yes, I know that I still owe you all a follow-up to my post about the Greens. It's coming.

You know those hypothetical moral dilemmas that people use to illustrate ethical principles? For instance, would you kill one child to save a thousand of them, or let the thousand die through inaction? Is it acceptable to steal bread to feed your children? Objectivists love these things, since they let you pour energy into debates without having to look at reality. And I think they're the proper lens through which to view the past few days of political maneuvering.

Once again, the Congress has decided that being insulted by crypto-fascists and possibly losing elections someday is a worse outcome than killing a million innocent people.

All of which is merely my excuse for posting this:



Click it to tell your Congresspeople that their constituents want them to stop committing the supreme international crime.

During his recent Colbert Report appearance, it was subtly revealed that Tom DeLay made a common error in his new book: ( 'I believe it was Adolf Hitler who first acknowledged...' )

David Noble says that the corporation was deliberately constructed to be the "economic man" that mere humans could never be, interested only in its own monetary gain. Undistracted by familial ties, religion, solidarity with others, or a search for meaning in its existence, the corporation's legally-mandated psychopathy was seen by some as critically enabling it to bring to life Adam Smith's invisible hand.

If this is the case, then corporations are definitionally incapable of acting except in their own self-interest in the economistic sense. One can then invert this notion and define self-interest as "What would a corporation do in your shoes?" This is enlightening; indeed, in my shoes, Exxon-Mobil would work 20 hours a day, sleep in my office, pay food-delivery fees (to my office!) rather than going to the store, and so forth.

Todd McGowan says that we get enjoyment from things which go against our self-interest. If this is true, then since corporations are incapable of acting against their own self-interest, they would also be incapable of experiencing enjoyment.

Slavoj Zizek says that whereas early Victorian industrial capitalism was ruled by repression, modern late capitalism is permeated by an "injunction to enjoy". If so, this means that the social order which is demanded is one of total dichotomy between the purely self-interested corporations on the one hand and the pure-enjoyment public on the other.

The slogan "Enjoy Coca-Cola!" takes on a new meaning in this light; it might be continued, "... because the Coca-Cola Company cannot enjoy itself!"

Notably, this also effectively reserves the realm of productive work as the exclusive domain of the corporation.

If every individual received the full value of his or her labor power, rather than being exploited by an owning class, then how would we realize public goods like infrastructural investment and research? Perhaps this is why every instance of "really existing socialism" has had a strong central state.

It's not really a rhetorical question, of course. All sorts of "voluntary associations" may be put forth to fill this void. But if you sell the revolution on the labor theory of value, what worker would then be interested in giving up the surplus he just won back?

I took fifteen months off out of guilt and embarrassment at my previous post. Rereading it just now, it wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered it. You guys made some good points which I want to respond to at some point. Sorry for not reading your LJ in the meantime. I'll try to catch up somewhat, but I was barely able to tread water on my friends page back in the day anyway, so don't hold your breath.

I have transitioned from webcasts to podcasts, using my new MacBook Pro and iPod. Yes, I am now one of those people, at least if you define one's fundamental character in terms of products consumed.

The main podcast I now collect is Against the Grain, a really good radio show on KPFA.

Against the Grain introduced me to Slavoj Zizek, a Slovene Lacanian Marxist philosopher-psychoanalyst. Watch him talk about toilets and shit.

I was pleased to discover that Camus also thought the leap of faith was a crock.

I have addicted myself to World of Warcraft. There is nothing redemptive in this.

I have internalized the algorithms involved in Sudoku-solving such that it's now finally as mindless as playing Minesweeper. And yet it's still the most stimulating part of USA Today.

Having bought a house about a year ago, I have been practicing human-powered lawn-mowing and snow-shoveling on a fairly large lot. Today was my fifth consecutive work-day of bus-ridership, so I feel like I'm starting to build up some eco-cred.

My new userpic is from this spring's vacation with my significant other.

LJ's spellchecker remains worse than useless.

More later.

Disclaimer: The following commentary is my take as an outsider, having just read these letters to Z Magazine (subscription required, I think). I cannot point to specific documents or strategic discussions to support it.

( The Green Party was founded on the assumption that significant numbers of Americans were good socialists who were only voting for Democrats and Republicans because they had no better options. )

http://rwor.org/a/027/yoo-crushing-innocent-child-nazi.htm
http://rwor.org/a/026/torture-victims-confront-advocate.htm

I'm pretty sure that "revcom" stands for Revolutionary Communist Party. So, I am thus far taking this with a grain of salt. I don't know what this organization's precise history is, but if these guys had an affilitation with the Soviet Union (which seems plausible given their name), I wouldn't put doctoring a clip past them.

However, I haven't seen anyone allege that yet, much less prove it. Does anyone know for sure who runs rwor.org? Are they generally trustworthy? More importantly, can you find any corroboration for the specific story here? I would think there would be official transcripts available for a debate between public intellectuals like this.

So far, all I can establish for sure is that the debate took place:
http://www.gapersblock.com/slowdown/archives/2005/12/01/

... and it looks like Andrew Sullivan, at least, is willing to take rwor.org's word for it.

This looked like a worthwhile enough exercise when xamses did it, so here goes:

( 2005 Year in Review )

UPDATE: I mentioned the wrong Radiohead song previously. Fixed now.

"[Fallujah] grew from an unimportant town in 1947 to a pre-war population of about 350,000 inhabitants in 2003. The current population is unknown but estimated at less than 200,000."

We've cut the population of a city the size of St. Louis in half. One hundred and fifty thousand people whom George W. Bush says we are democratizing are now either dead or driven from their homes (many never to return--"The war has reportedly damaged 60% of the cities buildings, with 20% totally destroyed").

What does that mean? What does it look like? Imagine walking through a city the size of St. Louis. As you walk down the street, every other building has a smoking hole punched through it, and every fifth building is a smouldering ruin. Every other citizen either lies dead in the street or has fled with whatever they can carry on their backs to some other town. How many of the survivors do you think haven't lost loved ones? How many of those who remain do you think haven't been separated from a family member who has fled into the desert? What do you suppose the local economy is like now, considering that the most able-bodied would have the easiest time fleeing?

This is what our government has been doing. Do we believe what we say about sympathizing with innocent people? Or conversely, do we believe that fully half of the citizens of Fallujah were hardened terrorists who deserved to be killed or chased out? How can anyone contemplate this situation without concluding that the people who ordered that this should happen are the most brutal of criminals?

( I attended my sibling's college graduation today. )

"Somehow after a long day's work riding the sleigh, nothing relaxes Santa like a cocktail and watching a pole dance."

I propose that volunteerism and in-kind donations are inherently superior to cash donations with regard to assisting charitable groups.

Suppose I took a day off from work to go volunteer for a soup kitchen. They get eight hours of my labor. Or if I spent the day growing (rather than buying the resources) and preparing food, they'd get roughly eight hours' work-product of food. (Yes, I realize you can't grow food in one day, so consider this a shorthand for amortizing it over one harvest cycle.)

If I instead spent a day at my regular job and then donated the money I earned, part of my labor value goes to my employer's profits. Let's say they take 25%, so the charity gets six hours' work-product of money.

Now what do they do with the money? They buy food. From whom? Why, Monsanto of course, which charges more for the food than it costs to produce. So, the soup kitchen's money not only pays for the production of the food, but also subsidizes Monsanto as an institution. This both costs them value and sponsors an exploitative institution which contributes to the problems they're trying to solve--poverty and hunger. So, with six hours' worth of money, they get, say, four hours' work-product of food.

From my standpoint, the situations are roughly equivalent--I work eight hours either way. But for the soup kitchen, the differences are dramatic: they get half the food (although the actual numbers here are of course absolutely invented). And the line of desperate people they're feeding is slightly longer.

Now that I've typed it out, I see lots of obvious holes in this, but some of it may still hold. For instance, I make more money than a typical farm worker, so in the current system it is probably still more economically efficient for me to do my job and donate part of my salary rather than working in the fields myself.

I spent most of last night "playing" the SNES Shadowrun game.

I presume that's why I dreamt I was having a friendly squirtgun fight with Hulk Hogan, during most of which he was chasing me because he is immune to water.

Attention fellow KGB operatives!

Eric Raymond is on to us!

Have no fear, however. Comrade Stalin has just announced that the orbital mind control lasers are being upgraded as we speak. By the end of this week, no one will be able to resist the understated charm of noted linguist and anti-war activist Noam Chomsky!

At last, Raymond will finally become one of us!

Many progressive commentators of color have recently condemned the use of the term "refugee" to describe New Orleanians who have been forced to flee their homes. Most of the objections I've heard have been in Pacifica webcasts*, so I can't really link to them at the moment. However, I'm not shitting you; people really have complained, and it's been fairly frequent, and I don't recall any of the complaints coming from people who don't identify as what we usually call "black."

( Why does this bother them? For that matter, what exactly is a refugee? )

I realized on my way home today that in order to be able to make eye contact with black people and not feel weird, I need to talk to some of them (though preferably not gangsta rappers (non-gangsta rappers, on the other hand, would probably work fine)) about what it's like to be black, to establish a visceral empathy and thereby force my lizard-brain to believe the things that my logic-brain has concluded.

In fact, I speculate that most white people ought to do this.

However, this is a ridiculous obligation to foist upon anyone. You, the wronged party, need to spill your guts to me, just so I can work through my own issues? Plus, I think white people are around 75% of the population, and black people are around 15%; who could seriously ask the members any group to each play personal shrink for five of us?

I sort of feel like attending one of those "conversations on race" events, now. But I'd probably just bore or offend everyone.