Greta Christina has a fascinating article over on AlterNet:
“Why Being Liberal Really Is Better Than Being Conservative
(Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about specific issues — we disagree about core ethical values. Can a case be made that liberal values really are better?)”

“When asked a series of questions about different ethical situations, self-described liberals strongly tend to prioritize fairness and harm as the most important of these core values — while self-described conservatives are more likely to prioritize authority, loyalty and purity.”…

In the past (mostly on Facebook) I’ve proclaimed that the conservative value-system is inherently a selfish, xenophobic, authoritarian one that has tried to stop all historic efforts to better humanity with social justice and equality. Greta is a lot nicer than I am and makes a case for the necessity for standard conservative values.

However, I think her arguments that liberal (I prefer “progressive”) values (that’s values, not people) are inherently better to be the best argument I’ve heard made.

If there’s anything Enron, the West Virginia mine tragedies, AIG and Goldman Sachs have taught us is that corporations care about safety, employees, doing the right thing, because capitalism and the mystical magical “invisible hand of the market” encourages corps and their owners to not put profit above all else!

Oh, wait….

http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2010/05/smoking-gun-bps-deep-horizon-mess
“Seems that a crew from Schlumberger, on contract to BP, hightailed it off the platform at their own expense 6 hours before the blowout becuase BP refused their recommendation to shut down the well.”

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/costly_time-consuming_test_of.html

And the well-written and summary of the foundational causes of corporate disasters (whether it’s natural disaster or economic disaster)

http://www.socialistwebzine.org/2010/05/bp-oil-spill-crime-not-disaster.html

“BP has fought the federal government on safety procedures that might have minimized the impact of the most recent spill for more than a decade. CEOs do not get bonuses based upon ensuring future generation’s access to resources, clean air, or a hospitable climate. The purpose of corporations is not to oversee the welfare of the people of the world, but to make money. Environmental damage is not factored into the corporate calculations of costs and profits. Instead, environmental damage is viewed as the collateral damage of the free market in operation.”

Last year, a Canadian writer, after visiting the U.S., returned home and was stopped by the U.S. border guards. They demanded that he step out of his car, which he did. When he chose to ask “why?” he was being ordered around, he was pepper sprayed, hit, cuffed, and arrested. The officers claimed in their statements that the writer, Peter Watts, resisted and tried to choke an officer. They eventually released Mr. Watts on the Canadian side in freezing weather without his coat.

Well, his U.S. trial recently concluded. And during the trial it was shown the officers written testimony contradicted their oral testimony, they contradict each other, and witness testimony confirmed that Mr. Watts did not resist and never laid a hand on an officer.

So all is good and justice prevailed and the charges dropped, right?

This is Amerika; think again.

Mr. Watts was convicted of a felony and faces two years in federal prison in the U.S. … because he questioned the officer.

• Boing Boing: Peter Watts may serve two years for failing to promptly obey a customs officer

Even a juror after the trial has stated that the officers mishandled the situation and “committed offences” against Watts. But they determined that based on the letter of the law, questioning an officer constituted felony obstruction.

This isn’t about safety, it isn’t about security, it isn’t about the rule of law.

It’s about obedience.

Authoritarianism is a disease of the mind. It criminalizes the act of asking “why?” It is the obedience-sickness that turns good people into perpetrators and victims of atrocities great and small.

Sure, we think, in order to keep us safe and secure, some cops may go overboard now and then. It’s just bad apples. But these bad apples are sprouting up in many, many places performing various acts of brutality and abuse of power, and getting away with it. (See link on that page of “Classically Liberals” collection of documented police abuse.) What’s worse, though, is it doesn’t stop at the apples–here is a case in which a jury of peers, who have the ability to enact jury nullification in contrary to the letter of the law applied to the defendant, (and according to at least one juror, this would have been a good situation to use that right of the jury), but instead decided to uphold and support state abuse against someone who simply questioned authority.

When “peers” support the state in its abuses even when they recognize its illegitimacy, the whole barrel has become rotten.

An article I recently read: “Pastors will test Matthew Shepard Act by ‘inciting hate crimes’”

Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about “hate crime” legislation. It feels too much like “thought crime”.

Case1: Al is beaten to death by a couple of thugs.
Case 2: Ben is beaten to death by a couple of thugs.

Both are horrific crimes. Both should be punished. Should one be punished more or less severely than another?

Especially if the difference between them is that the thugs in Case 1 had on their minds a hatred for Al because he was gay while the ones in Case 2 hated Ben because he owned them money? Should we base crime and punishment on what people think as opposed to only what they do?

Homophobia is stupid, no question. But at risk of making a slippery-slope fallacy, if we punish an identical crime more severely because of homophobia in one’s mind, will the next logical progression be to punish people because they believe unAmerican things? Should shoplifter 1 be punished more severely than shoplifter 2 because 1 also purused anarchist Web sites?

I don’t know. Gay-bashers are scum, ignoramuses. But I’m deeply uncomfortable with thought-crime.

That said, people who INCITE crime are themselves scummy criminals because of what they do. A preacher has a right (*shudder*) to say homophobic things. Free speech protects all, mainly the marginalized and non-majority speech. No matter how stupid the speech may be. But if a preacher knowingly says hateful things that involve suggesting or implying violence, knowing that as influential religious leaders there will be influenceable followers that hear that hate-mongering–that’s like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater (no, much worse) and is not protected speech. It’s a criminal act.

And if these scummy, hate-filled, arrogant, disgusting preachers go ahead and do what they’re planning, they should absolutely be arrested and tried for inciting violence and criminal acts.

In honor of Guy Fawkes Day this Nov. 5th (Wiki link)* are a couple of links for light reading:

A recent musing of mine on anarchy and democracy: link

An excellent (and scary-sad) collection from Classically Liberal of examples of police state abuse and misconduct.

* Like most things in postmodern culture, this topic is well filled with contradictions. Guy Fawkes, for example, was not truly an anarchist (as far as I can tell). He, along with his cohorts, were simply p.o.ed that Catholics were being descriminated by the Protestant British government and decided to get rid of it, hoping to establish a Catholic-friendly one. (*sigh* what, religious violence again!?)

Guy Fawkes ironically became a symbol of later anrchistic movements despite his basically being just a religious terrorist.

Guy Fawkes was also appropriated by the British cultural hegemony as a symbol of celebrating the God-protected and ordained rule of proper British royalty. (Much like how Hitler propagandized his surviving the Valkyrie assassination attempt as a sign that God protected his divinely ordained Third Reich. [I may have just Godwined myself, but it just goes to show that anyone and everyone can and does invoke God's favor when things go well for them.])

And now there’s this Anonymous group appropriating Guy Fawkes to protest Scientology. Interestingly, as this is a quasi-religious fight, this may actually be a more “appropriate” use of Guy’s image… if not for the fact that what they’re really doing is using the image created by the film “V for Vendetta”. They’ve taken an image crafted for entertainment consumption, based on a hyperreality of an appropriated image, of a man whose purpose has been fictionalized by one group and celebrated for it’s failure by another group for ideological justification…

Ow. Jean Baudrillard is probably laughing in his grave over this a-historical postmodern pastiche! (I think I see a scholarly paper in this!)

The Tyranny of the Majority:
If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us – and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

[...]

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: “We should put it to a vote!” The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.
“Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner,” they threaten. “Otherwise, vote or no vote, we’ll eat you.”
The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: “Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!”

–From THE PARTY’S OVER: BEYOND POLITICS, BEYOND DEMOCRACY
http://thecloud.crimethinc.com/pdfs/democracy_reading.pdf

So, I’ve discovered this Web site: CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective (http://www.crimethinc.com). They have some blog posts on the G-20 protests…and most interestingly, a non-protest that was treated as a violent protest by the police and resulted in more than a hundred arrests (including a great many who weren’t doing any protesting) and many injured. (State Repression at the G20 Protests) From this I started looking over the site. It’s an anarchists’ site, filled with info and publications geared toward helping people find the anarchist within and fight the system.

This is what’s struck me as interesting: Their reason for existing, their criticism of the system, their complaints of capitalism and democracy, I completely agree with–and I’ll explain why in a moment. But their explanation of their remedy, their idea of anarchy, I’m having trouble with. (Note, that anarchy does not mean violence or chaos in the sense of abuse of others, harming people. It simply means no government, no rule of imposed law, no masters.)

Ironically, these anarchists have, from what I can see, I great disdain for socialism, communism, any -ism apparently derived from Marxism. I say “ironic” because their entire criticism of the current state of capitalism and authoritarian democracy comes straight from Marxist criticism, 101. Take for example this page from the book Days of War, Night of Love:

(page image link: “How Does Capitalism Work“)

This is capitalist criticism straight from Marx’s Kapital (not verbatim, of course). Everything this anarchist site decries about the current state of capitalist economy, culture, and the police state used to protect the hegemony and the owners of capital, is Marxism stripped of the Marxist lingo (like “hegemony”). There’s nothing about their critique of capitalism I don’t agree with (my being a Marxist). However, and this is where things get uncomfortable, their ideas of overcoming the system I don’t know if I can support. Well, let me clarify…

At the core, I consider myself an anarcho-socialist. I too believe that the best path for humanity, for human advancement, equality, justice, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the complete lack of government and forced adherence to someone else’s majority rule. However, I also believe that married to that must be a social contract of mutual cooperation, shared resources, publicly owned and operated resources, manufacture, distribution…capital. This is different from anarcho-libertarianism, or Objectivism (vis-à-vis Ayn Rand) which believes that in addition to lack of any forced rules or regulations, private ownership is valued above all. That humans are selfish and greedy by nature, and that we should live to acquire as much for ourselves as we can and help others only so much as we can gain from it ourselves. Pretty much ethically and morally bankrupt, in my opinion.

As I read through the CrimethInc site, most of what they believe (and what they purport anarchists believe) matches up with my anarcho-socialism. They support cooperation, mutually beneficial action, gift economy. Hey, great! But they also support a sort of worship of anti-social behavior, crime, vandalism, activities that make me cringe (e.g.: shoplifting). Although, all the anti-social behavior they support, is all geared toward the state, corporate America, the power structure, and not against other individuals and their personal rights. OK…that sounds good… I guess.

So, I’m left to question: Is my cringing because I’ve lived my entire life controlled by the hegemony, brainwashed into subservience to conformity with passivity, being a good little worker bee who keeps his head down and continues to make profit for his capitalist lords without making any trouble for them? Well, yes I have. We all have. That’s the entire goal of hegemony, be it capitalist or feudal or slave economy. Those in control use whatever sociological means available to control the other 99% of the people for their own benefit. This requires blind obedience to their laws. It requires complete acquiescence to state-supporting meek mildness.

When I remember these things, which I’ve been studying and contemplating for some years now, it reinforces my belief in the anarcho-half of my anarcho-socialism. So, why does the action of subversiveness bug me?

Since President Dubbya started taking away civil liberties after 9/11, I started studying libertarianism and even anarchy–but always from a level of personal rights and liberties. It wasn’t until I started grad school and my first professor, Dr. Burling, introduced me to Marxism that I learned that Bush, civil liberty removal, the corporate ownership of the government, wars, all of it, are a result of the economic foundation: capitalism. It is essentially the base on which everything is a superstructure built extending from it. Everything is about the material question: Who uses it and what is it for? With that in mind it’s easy (easier) to understand power, wealth, who benefits from it most, and how they exploit those without it. Dr. Burling helped change my entire outlook on culture, laws, economy, politics, etc.

But when asked why doesn’t he live outside the corruption and control of capitalism, his response was, in essence: you can’t escape it, it affects everyone, might as well not make your own life unnecessarily difficult fighting it. And this is a guy who, in addition to being an unashamed Marxist, was also a musician with a focus on rock (meaning nothing exactly, except an implication that he has a rebellious spirit).

And it also makes me think of vaunted Marxist cultural critic and major figure of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, who it is said that during the Paris riots of 1968 when asked by his students why he didn’t participate or support the student protests, he replied “How can you actively fight for something before you fully understand it?”

There is “theory,” and there is “praxis.” Praxis is putting theory into action. Is it that these Marxist critics and theorists I look up to, who happen to be intellectuals and educators, don’t know how to put their words into action? Do they not have the courage of their convictions? Or are all they are about is understanding and criticizing the current system, but not about doing anything about it? When asked what good is knowing how culture develops, knowing how the hegemony controls and influences our decisions and our wants? They have replied that it helps you understand why you make the decisions that you do, why you choose what products or how you sell your labor. But is that enough?

Frederic Jameson (Marxist cultural critic) has developed a concept of applying “cognitive mapping” to cultural criticism, which is a theory of mapping the contradictions in capitalism, where it affects our lives, and finding and exploiting the holes in it. And it’s a step toward praxis, which gives people like me hope of doing something to make a difference. To help turn the tables on capitalist exploitation and help the “seeds of rebellion” grow. But…what is that rebellion? What are we Marxist intellectuals waiting for? We who study culture, and politics, and socio-economics? Dr. Burling had cryptically referred to the biopic about Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, in which a young, pre-revolutionary Guevara is asked about how to spark the South American peoples into revolution against their oppressors, he responds that you can’t have a revolution without guns.

But then, Dr. Burling often referred to other ways to create such drastic upheaval as to eliminate capitalism, without revolution and war, and used as examples Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and 40, 50, 60 trilogy. Stories in which the only way to evolve from capitalism to egalitarian socialism is either to colonize another planet, or deal with Earth-shaking environmental disaster. So, do we just wait for change?

Back to my point: Are these anarchists doing what we intellectuals fear to do, but are a natural and proper result of the same Marxist-rooted criticism of capitalism we both share? Am I a hypocrite for complaining about and railing about capitalism and its ills and evils, but I continue to lust after home ownership and getting a better job and obeying all the laws of the land so I don’t draw the attention of the state’s police apparatus?

Is it because I have a family to care for? I don’t risk rocking the boat, and so I participate, if grudgingly, in my own commodification and the orgy of consumerism? Of course, this is exactly what the hegemony counts on, this conservativism that we’re all supposed to grow into. We’re allowed to rebel a little as a youth, test the bounds of social acceptance, and then “settle down.” Grow a family, buy a home, get a job you can’t leave because you can’t live without the insurance benefits. You become a productive worker bee who has too much to lose by questioning authority, bucking the system, making waves. Be a quiet little worker bee, and you get to go (somewhat) unnoticed by the system that exploits you and uses you and extorts you, giving little in return except an addiction to mass consumption.

Are anarchists heroes I fear to admire? Or are they the hemp clothing wearing, organic food growing, dumpster diving neo-hippies that I can easily dismiss and marginalize, exactly as I’ve just done, because they threaten the social stability and conditioning I’ve internalized because I grew up brainwashed to become a quiet and non-trouble-making worker bee? Is that why when asked, I say I’m an anarcho-socialist “in theory” but “in practice” I’m a democratic-socialist? Isn’t that just a way for me to marginalize myself?

I don’t know. But this Fighting For Our Lives: An Anarchist Primer is at the very least thought-provoking reading.

My apologies in advance: I think I’m going to be posting a few (hopefully not too long) blogs in succession to try to make up for the fact that I can’t blog from work any more, and school work (and the desire to not be on a computer after a day of work) after coming home have been preventing me from blogging like I used to.

BoingBoing has been following the issue of a new surge of British “fear everything” posters:

David Byrne’s snapshots of UK police posters.

London Police poster mashup (in which people have ‘shopped their own versions)

And my favorite so far:

Make your own paranoid British terrorism poster!

The fine print in that one’s dead-on.

(Whew! Finally, I can close those tabs off my browser!)

(For the Facebook users: This is a post from my blog getting auto-noted to Facebook, which cuts off any images or videos in the transfer.)

Saw this news report tonight:

• Pastor beaten while decorating church

In brief, a pastor was visciously, brutally beaten (oh, and robbed) by two men with no provocation, in a cowardly, disgusting act of human cruelty.

That alone is tragic. The tragedy is compounded by this comment:

“By yesterday afternoon, the bleeding had stopped. And there’s no brain damage,” said Mendy. “And so we’re rejoicing today in a God that loves us and cares about the details.”

The weird, twisted, sado-masochistic rationalization of this religious delusion astounds me. A man is senslessly beaten, in horrible pain, and people praise God’s love and mercy?? “Praise God for allowing wretched me to live!” I’m serious, faithful believers act just like long-term spouse abuse victims–defending their abuser, making excuses for him, blaming themselves for the abuse they receive.

But, what can you do with such blatant cognitive dissonance? You’re believing in a “God of love and mercy” that’s supposed to be all powerful, all knowing, and all loving–and yet the world is filled with senseless violence and death and misery and cruelty. The deluded human mind has to create conveluted excuses and strange rationalizations if it’s going to try to hold onto two conflicting and mutually-exclusive concepts at the same time.

People living lives of delusion and self-deception makes me almost as sad as their being victims of human creulty.

I can’t believe I missed this. In researching information on my last post regarding the addition of peaceful opponents to capital punishment being added by police to terrorist watch lists, I found this news item from last year about the FBI and CIA’s programs to recruit and pay for citizen informants (thus spreading fear and mistrust as well as creating gi-hugic ineffectual mountains of hay to look for needles in–resulting in more false accusations and arrests and less actual safety and security)

• FBI Proposes Building Network of U.S. Informants

Excellent, emotional and enlightening movie, by the way, of a story set within the end of the East German informant society: The Lives of Others.

It’s easy to find countless articles on the appearant rise of police brutality and fascist, militarized mindset, and are gleefully proud of their testasterone overdosed abuses, and stories in which the police are used as political weapons.

Well, here’s one more story of overreaching abuse of power and damage to civil liberties:

• Top Maryland cops ordered nonviolent peace activists’ names added to anti-terror, drug trafficking databases

And a good editorial on the subject:

• Opposing death penalty gets people listed as terrorists.

In the midst of the ever-increasing shift from police watching over the public to the police watching the public, one will try to mitigate the fear and disappointment by rationalizing: “Well, these are just the bad ones in the news. Most cops are good ones!” So, where are those “good cops” when the bad ones are breaking the law, violating the Constitution, and generally harassing and beating the public? Why aren’t the so-called good cops standing up against the few bad ones and eliminating them from their ranks?

Because: (a) police forces generally draw the power-hungry bullies of society which tend to create a pervasive culture of abusiveness from the inside;

(b) police forces are being funded by the Department of Justice and given neato-cool paramilitary toys to play with based on their devotion to and performance in the War on Drugs (and increasingly the War on Terrah) which is inherently a civil liberty trampling campaign that routinely treats harmless citizens as wanton and deadly criminals, fostering a culture of abuse and power from the outside;

(c) police forces are fiercely fraternal and loyal to each other–a useful and vital trait for military units in war, a destructive and criminal trait in a group that is supposed to serve the interests of the public over and beyond any sense of brotherly camaraderie.

These influences from the inside, outside, and the pathological in-group loyalty police forces encourage, generally lead to an environment which will quickly reject or break the few people who go into police work with a true desire to serve the public and put citizen above fellow cop.

However, there are very rarely exceptions to the rule. A story out today tells of a Chicago sheriff who is (at least in this case…who knows what he’s like otherwise) thinking and feeling like a real person and not RoboCop (pre-self aware RoboCop, of course) :

• Illinois sheriff scolds banks for evictions of ‘innocent’ renters

Banks on foreclosed houses aren’t doing basic checking on who’s actually in the houses, and are literally forcing renters out onto the street even if they’re good, rent paying renters, despite what defaulting the actual owners of the home are doing on their mortgage.

“These mortgage companies … don’t care who’s in the building,” [Sheriff] Dart said Wednesday. “They simply want their money and don’t care who gets hurt along the way.

“On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.”

So, good for him!

Too tired and sleepy to comment on…but it doesn’t need any additional commenting by me anyway:

Despicable arrogance of self-satisfied culture of police brutality on cs’s “Classically Liberal” blog:

• Gang brags about beating crowd.

A year ago, MIT student Star Simpson was nearly killed by police when an airport worker panicked at seeing a benign electric light-up design integrated into Star’s sweatshirt. Long story short, she’s been forced by the state to do community service and issue an official apology–for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

They tried to get her convicted on threatening the public with a “hoax device,” (again, this was a harmless wearable electronic, no different than some of the commercial, store bought novelty clothes–except she made this herself…did I mention she was a student at the Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology?) and the state has threatened her that if she doesn’t do community service and apologize (for doing absolutely nothing wrong) they’d convict her of being a “disorderly person” which basically has no defense. The state can tag that onto anyone they like.

Here’s the transcript of one of her first public appearances discussing the event and ensuing court drama since it happened:

• Star Simpson, one year after Boston airport terror-scare: unedited BBtv interview transcript

Moral of this story? Be a completely unremarkable and passive citizen. Don’t do anything interesting or unique or else someone in authority will put a gun in your face.

XENI: Star, how old are you now?

STAR: 20.

XENI: Do you feel like what happened with this incident has caused you to grow up faster?

STAR: The main thing I can say is that I believed that police were nice, friendly folks before last September. And my opinion has changed drastically in that respect.