Lenny Bailes-
Your entire argument proceeds from a vision of controlled, intended, cause-and-effect. The weather we are enjoying and will continue to enjoy is a direct result of that hubristic myopia applied to immediate gain/loss rationale.
I'm not advocating the controlled application of chaos as an antidote to immediate pain, and I'm not factoring pain in numerical quantities and qualitative sub-groupings.
I'm saying the Kalahari indigenous, the Amazonian indigenous, the Australian indigenous, the First Nations of North America, the circumpolar indigenous, in their pre-contact states, embodied a submission to what you would call chaos - what I call the wilderness. What they called "home".
Inasmuch as I have to use the common vocabulary I use the word but I don't mean Cartesian chaos, I don't mean Cartesian anything.
It's precisely that "greater good" horseshit that I'm arguing against. We don't know, we are not capable of directing our own evolution. The weather is only the most unavoidably obvious proof of that.
And, again, every quality and attribute that you find admirable in the human genetic display was a direct result of the submission I advocate, and none of it was the intended result of human artifice and/or social direction. Control doesn't work. Genetic modification is for the already monstrous. The result of human decision-making on our place in this world is obese human sheep strapped into SUV's, going 90 miles an hour in rivers of molten steel and poison gas.
To support that obscene way of life we have sacrificed the integrity of every eco-system on the planet and we've been forced to blind ourselves to the daily massacre and maiming of our own children. And we have invaded Iraq. Which is where Abu Ghraib is. Which was the source of the outrage Inhofe was outraged about. Which is how this thread got started.
What I'm trying to get said is that these outrages connect, they make a larger picture.
The momentum for change is here, but the danger is in the temptation to stop where it's comfortable.
Car ads with lakes and mountains and healthy young people in brand-new hiking boots.
This is the smiling face of a cunning predator, and it's looking at your sons and daughters.
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Not only that, but the cultural reservoirs that are vanishing with indigenous people hold what are probably the only adequate human tools for coping with catastrophic environmental disruption. They're lighter on their feet than we are.
We're wiping out the only real help we have with the same flick of the wrist we tear down the sky.
My point is essentially that the proof-estimates you demand will never be forthcoming, because what you want is to maintain control of process and outcome, even as it becomes obvious you can't. "You" meaning the larger social context from which you write.
Theresa-
Given a choice between the very clear direction we are now heading, and a chance at some other direction through chaotic social disruption, I say again - gimme chaos
Or freedom, or liberty, or the risk and gamble of the unknown.
The instinctual jerking of a limb, the flinch, even hysterical panic, these are not thought-out controlled re-actions, they're genetically programmed chaotic responses, to an immediate threat of harm that's greater than the risks of chance reaction. Chaos over status quo, when the status quo becomes too threatening.
Gimme chaos.
Where we disagree is the nature and extent of the threat.
Where that disagreement becomes antagonistic is in the disparity between our commitment to the way things presently are.
The election, the US presidential election, which was the original touchstone for this, is certainly not chaos, and it's certainly not an opportunity for change, not now. It's precisely on track to continue the direction we're headed in.
That's doom. Certain doom.
It's still too early for most of your audience maybe, but the circumpolar people are facing it. The Akha in Thailand are facing it, the Bushmen in the Kalahari are facing it. The Yanomami, the Awa, the Arhuaco, a too-long list of real living people and cultures who are dying, and what's almost worse, having their ways-of-being destroyed, not in some abstract could-be world, but in the world George Bush's masters, and John Kerry's, protect you from having to confront, except tangentially, at your own discretion.
You can shut it off, make it peripheral, regrettable but not central, important but not crucial.
I can't do that.
I used the word chaos because it's how the audience here, in my estimation, would view the natural world, outside the artificial boundaries of human-dominant landscape. In between is the world of dystopic fiction - hub-cap frying pans and cannibalistic urban ferals. A transition away from the coward's order of this disciplined and obedient landscape, toward the old wild and its true freedom. We could get stuck there, on the other side of the risk of chaotic disruption, potentially yeah; but the only thing on the other side of this controlled burn is the possibility of a desperate lunge off-planet; and the passenger list for that leap is disgustingly craven.
So again - gimme chaos. "Nature red in tooth and claw" and all that nonsense that makes modern man so timid.
That kind of chaos is the order that created us.
We owe our brains and our abilities to that molding hand and we have done our level best to amputate it. That's the chaos I choose, over the order that provides 380 million gallons of gasoline a day to people who are going nowhere but straight into a living hell of unintended consequences.
John Kerry represents a hearty cheer for the status quo. That was the original point and it still is. The question I'm pushing forward is - what do we do when it hasn't worked to change presidents?
I'm not answering it directly because the context and the moment aren't appropriate, except to say that for all of us there will be a moment when we will say, "Anything but this; please, anything but this."
Like the way you jump when you're startled - it's a leap into the unknown, far below the will or the rational mind, a gamble that the next position will be no worse and could be better than the immediate harmful present.
What I see here and in other flagship venues is a stalwart defense of a dream that, as bad as it is now, by keeping within the boundaries of decency and compromise and altering the system by degrees, we can make the world better, and still have consciences that aren't howling with grief. That's how we got here.
That dream is over for me.
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As for your well-written series of miniature essays - great, cogent and lucid effort, but I'm older than you I'm sure, chronologically and, especially, experientially; I've seen more evil, and closer at hand, than you ever have or will.
Which is not to slight your own experience, don't misunderstand me. I realize that second assertion is a little stark, but I'm sure it's accurate. I have semi-articulable memories and vivid narratives that go abruptly blank. Stuff I don't want to remember, and stuff I can't.
It doesn't give me any more stature in a logical debate about human affairs, and I'm not pretending it does, unless the subject of the debate is the nature of evil. Then it does.
Your audience benefits from the length and depth of your exposition, that's a good thing, but for me it's like being lectured at by a teen-ager, sort of the very thing you saw as happening, only in reverse.
Those dowdy institutions are like all dowdy things, like the aged humans we shunt off to warehouses as if they're poultry - some of them were great, most of them were not, all of them are old.
There isn't one single institution on this planet capable of dealing with what we're facing now.
The world is truly a terribly complicated place. Absolutely.
One of the more egregious temptations, when you're surrounded by half-awake dunces, is to believe that the distance between your comprehension of that complexity and theirs actually measures something like attainment.
—
Patrick-
It's not about disabled people dying where no one else is.
The list of indigenous people who are being slaughtered for the automobile, which is in its essence an heroically powerful wheelchair, is shrinking.
It's shrinking because there are only a limited amount of indigenous people, and they're being slaughtered. Already. Now.
Choose.
Agenda.
Sorry.
________
tost - Thanks
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P.N.H.-
"...generally don't work out the way you want them to..."
The guillotine etc.
Or the American Revolution etc.
Yes. And? Compromise with evil is what got us here. The insistence on controlled predictable outcomes has put a scalpel to the neck of life itself. Anarchy that's still fossil-fuel driven is a marketing niche, but invoking chaos when control is dooming us, or worse, dooming us and leaving a remnant of cunning manipulative bastards who rode the changes to triumph, well, gimme chaos.
Short-vision pay-offs, abject fear of death, and servile reverence for controlled outcome is what happened to make it like this. Positivist morality. "We are the champions".
Submission to the unknown and true balance are what's missing. The wilderness and its red-toothed chaos seem more and more like a warm embrace compared to this rigid discipline and omniscient technocracy.
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Jeremy Leader-
"...you might want to think about how you can make your position more clear..."
Always good advice.
"Yes, bad. Yes, make them go away. But don't stop there."
That's pretty clear, I think.
For the rest of the equation, I'm not going to advocate armed insurrection in a thread on what is essentially a mild-mannered journalism analog. I'm urging the group mind toward the inevitable decision. Fight or flight. Submission or defiance.
Kerry is submission, Nader means Bush, Kucinich wouldn't survive the nomination without a bullet. That's the election I see.
So rather than wait until Kerry shows his true colors unmistakably -which would be what? next April? - I'm suggesting people stop pretending it's going to work. The knee-jerk trope of what-are-you-suggesting-we-do is not working like it used to. Telling people the building's on fire is not contingent on having an escape route to hand them right after.
I understand the theater's crowded, I'm not yelling at everyone.
tost - Thanks
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P.N.H.-
"...generally don't work out the way you want them to..."
The guillotine etc.
Or the American Revolution etc.
Yes. And? Compromise with evil is what got us here. The insistence on controlled predictable outcomes has put a scalpel to the neck of life itself. Anarchy that's still fossil-fuel driven is a marketing niche, but invoking chaos when control is dooming us, or worse, dooming us
"...Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America..."
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To the United States as it was. Unless something changes real quick people like Inhofe are gonna own this place.
It seems urgent as hell that people not get seduced by cheap catharsis.
Rumsfeld, even Bush, those guys are fusible links; villains of complicity, and fundamental liars, but the evil isn't coming from them. They're midwives. Facilitators. Tools.
Yes, bad. Yes, make them go away. But don't stop there.
We need deep change. Now.
Report and Recommendations on Iraqi Detainees
Christian Peacemaker Teams, Iraq January 2004
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The S&M War
Justin Raimundo
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Voices from Iraq
Letters and articles from people currently in Iraq
Spotlight Iraq
Voices in The Wilderness
Let me say, if it wasn't clear before, that I'm with anyone who's in position and finding out that what they thought was a moral and necessary fight was not that at all. Anyone who's doing a hard job in a thankless hour. I know how that feels.
It's exactly how a lot of us feel.
Are we fighting for America?
Or against it?
I got trimmed back a little when someone with experience said that all the carnage and body counts were nothing compared to forced sodomy and degradation.
That many Muslim men would prefer death rather than that degree of humiliation, even the deaths of their children.
Because to me, the hundreds of civilian casualties in Fallujah were it. It shouldn't have taken that long but it did.
Enough watching from the sidelines.
Hundreds of women and children. Hundreds of women and children, in broad daylight. To me it's worse; but it's all unspeakably bad.
The difference is Lynddie England at Abu Ghraib is porn, and actionable, but Fallujah is success, and commendable.
Dave Klecha-
Well let's see.
Somebody needs to cop to the facts on the ground. Is scepticism out of line?
It's good you're disgusted, though I'd be real wary about what it is that's caused that disgust. There's a strong desire, in everyone, to make this containable, an aberration, fixable.
How deep does it go, how far up the chain of command? Is it that irresponsible to withold trust? Now? After being cluster-bombed with b.s. for months?
How many lies got told on the way to where we are now?
That won't be as easy to calculate as the number of prisoners you can see.
10,000 was the lowest estimate I found.
There's no way for me to know, from California, how many prisoners are in Abu Ghraib now, or even if it exists at all. The very limited credibility of the news sources I still bother with leads me to believe Abu Ghraib does exist, that the atrocities Seymour Hersh reports did happen, and in numbers far greater than the photographs we all see.
My own experience with American military justice, with American justice generally, and with the consistent eye-witness accounts of credentialed impartial journalists and living victims of atrocities that were sanctioned by, and ordered by, and done with the compicity of, American military, and American politicians, from El Mozote to East Timor, from Chile to Puerto Rico, says that worse was done, and is still being done.
I'd like to think it's not happening on your watch, because of the presence of you and people like you.
But that trust is long gone.
And all the confident tones in the world won't bring it back.
Dave Klecha is talking about a prison complex that holds over 10,000 prisoners. And yet he's confident he can assert that "what happened" there "isn't happening any more".
Dave Klecha must be in a very important position in Abu Gharib to make that assertion so confidently. To know that all 10,000 of those prisoners are now being treated according to the Geneva Accords. Because you'd have to have unlimited access and authority, to know that, wouldn't you?
The problem then of course is that everyone in a position of authority connected with the invasion and ooccupation of Iraq has been thoroughly discredited. Everyone.
Thoroughly discredited.
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As far as the pictures themselves go:
There's an almost boasting quality to the images flying around the world. A "take that" aspect.
Choosing a woman/girl to carry the perpetrator's role, the perfect touch.
To Muslim men these images of sexual degradation performed by a woman are unspeakably vile.
And they're being shown around the world.
The only difference between those images being shown publicly as evidence and condemnation, and their being shown in boasting, crowing triumph, is the perceived intent behind the display.
But then the perceived intent of the US presence in Iraq has been bogus from the get, hasn't it?
WMD's, liberation...
And the media has walked obediently alongside those bogus actors from the get, as well. Haven't they?
Does anyone really think they've turned suddenly into human beings?
Isn't it maybe time to start asking about deeper, more complex motives? Even when they seem unspeakably deranged?
And John Kerry.
He's repeatedly condemned these inhuman crimes hasn't he?
Because he's not in the pocket is he?
He's fighting mad, and preaching truth, right?
Loudly, forcefully, like the true leader he is.
Isn't he?
If these questions are too unsettling you can always go back to believing that it's only in Abu Gharib, and that it's all Bush's fault.
That will give you at least the rest of the year to live out your fantasies, before it becomes impossible to hide from the truth anymore.
Nice if some of the individuals responsible for the variously broken subjects of these more or less damaging techniques could get to work on some healing processes.
You could start in Argentina. Or El Salvador. Or Indonesia. Or Bosnia. Or Azerbaijan. Or China. Or the Philipines. Or Chile. Or Angola. Or Zimbabwe. Or Sudan. Or Palestine.
Or Iraq.
It would take insight and intimate knowledge of the particulars, a familiarity with the nuanced disintegration of the human personality.
And it would take a conscience.
And shame.
Wouldn't be near as glamorous and powerful though. Kinda weak really, helping people. Makes you vulnerable.
Breaking people is strong. Even tricking them is strong.
Sexy-tough.
Power and control are a turn-on.
Yum.
Clean-up's a drag, though. Yuck.
OK so you've got it all lined out - there's no possibility the current administration was unaware of the potential use of airliners as bombs.
So then what?
They had to have known that, they're spouting nonsense hoping to be believed? Like some Mack Sennet bank robber caught with a sack of money?
Or they're really a very powerful group of absolute lunatics with no connection to the real world?
Or maybe something else is going on.
And maybe Rice and Bush and even Cheney and Rumsfeld are sacrificial.
Used to accomplish something, held up as responsible for it, and discarded along with all suspicion.
Tell me the vast majority of news-aware liberals and leftists won't feel they've accomplished great things if Bush fails to gain a second term.
Yet the same media that elected him, against the majority will, is at best Bush-neutral now, and seems coyly friendly toward Kerry.
That's why the numbers still show Bush's approaval ratings in the double digits, the media.
If it was politics alone, in a neutral media context, you'd need a decimal point for his ratings numbers.
The simplest explanations often work.
Bush is too dim to orchestrate his own way on to a City Council, let alone into the White House.
After four years of Constitutional evisceration and fascist police-state building, the idea that merely removing him and his visible cohort will do much to change things seems pretty naive.
Scorpio-
Conspiracy theory now means a bogus idea about organized behind-the-scenes manipulation of events.
Grammatically, it's supposed to mean a theory about that.
People have conspired since before the pyramids were built. Brutus and Caesar. Gilgamesh, for crying out loud.
The attachment of bogosity to something as real as hydrology and as old as architecture should strike people as odd and highly significant.
It's one more line of defense, behind which real actual certified 100% conspiracies can play out unaccused.
Scum like that that rises toward Washington can immediately snap back, "Conspiracy theory!" the way they did for a while about "...things you read on the internet..."
But it has another, more desirable effect.
Besides relegating anything that even smells like accusations of conspired action to the back of the room, it enables weaker minds to ignore that insistent warning buzz they keep hearing.
It's a slamming down of the lid to Pandora's box.
-
Whew.
Now.
Now we can get back to concentrating on what's really going on, right kids?
Which of the candidates could whup Bush's butt in a fair fight?
Is it a fair fight now? When did that happen?
The change I mean.
Last time I looked he got to the White House on the back of a snake. Did the snake die?
Is it realistic to think whatever machine Dick Cheney sits in the cockpit of is just going to step back and 'let the best man win'?
Is it simply about winning the 2004 election?
Or are we discussing a corrupt plutocratic oligarchy, ready and willing to do whatever it takes to maintain its power base, including subvert the most successful experiment in democracy the world's ever seen? Not to mention callously increasing the death, suffering, and chronic misery of multitudes of the undeserving.
I don't want to sound overly pessimistic, but there seems to be a Pollyanna-ish expectation that that whole Florida thing was an aberration, and that Cheney and W and all them will just head on back to their respective haciendas and ranchos, once the good guys re-win the presidency fair and square.
Maybe so.
It'd sure be nice, I'll say that.
Castalia with the humming sound of this. Moderated discussions that debate the etiquette of participating in moderated discussions on the validity of journalized commentary on the evolution of information. Jots and tittles in huge catalogues randomly filed on reference shelving that may as well be infinite. The grain of sand in Gibson's pearls is always a machine. He contains it. For some of us it's more conjunction, we drag it around, or are dragged by it, Eng as android, Chang as borg. For others it's carapace, chitin, metal skin around soft amorphous 'self'. To say that Gibson has a kind of pathology driving his world-view is empty and dis-aesthetic, unless it's said to someone who hasn't gotten that far yet. The trope that information technology covering the earth will deny the sinner hiding place is ferro-deistic. There's a Babelian assumption at the heart of that, as though the combining of languages, the steady climbing spiral of knowing more and more will actually get somewhere. Like the all-knowing all-seeing and possibly all-powerful God of western metaphysic, it must be more than neutrally honest.
Without love information is viral, prionic.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 13 |
| 2003 | 2 |
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