Category Archives: Uncategorized

(White/Cis/Het/Male) Class-first Politics

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

So I’m reading this one tweetstorm from an Irish venture capitalist on how to take back power from conservative and white nationalist politics.

Sounds like an interesting thread, but then I see this:

“Let me tell you what you can’t defend: illegal immigrants, Muslim immigration, most identity politics, pronoun-style feminism, world peace.”….

“Things you cannot attack: foreign wars, the police, mass surveillance, 1984-style use of the internet, and expect key escrow and worse.”…..

“All that territory is ceded. There’s simply no way a right wing government will tolerate mass outcry about those issues, or serious dissent.”

Earlier in the thread, he suggests exploiting fault lines between Confederate and Christian demographics and appealing to the latter because they’re the largest demographic in this country. Later in the thread, he suggests the defense of abortion access should be the best cause around which the center and left should rally.

So, if I’m reading this right, intersectional social justice should be put on hold or outright discarded from the program until left-wing politics return to electoral vogue.

Outcry over deaths of unarmed PoC at the hands of police will have to be muted because far-right government. Defense of LGBT employment and public accommodations access will be extremely lowkey because far-right government. Illegal immigration, DREAMers and war refugees will take several way-in-the-back seats because far-right government. Diversity, visibility and empowerment of historically-marginalized demographics in corporate/government/nonprofit boardrooms and employment will be de-prioritized because far-right government. Racial anything – gerrymandering, voter suppression, overpolicing – will be placed on the backburner because far-right government.

But that’s all “identity politics” of the minority. It’s all expendable and trifling to the majority’s fight.

 

What is journalism, anyway?

Uncategorized

What is journalism, anyway?

There’s really not much difference between journalism and blogging right now. In both, you observe, write, record, publish, and let your viewers share the results.

But after that, what is to be done with the story? Does it just sit there?

Journalism is a weird profession. It’s not a personally-oriented profession which revolves around provider and client. It’s not a personal service. It’s directed toward some type of nameless “public”, be it the general public or a smaller section of society.

Narrower journalism genres tend to require a greater deal of sensitivity and rigor to the topic at hand. Depending on the genre, its time sensitivity and how much it may affect our lives and resources, one has to have professional and/or academic experience on the topic. Weather and environmental journalism is perhaps the best example of a journalism genre which has an immediate impact on human life; business journalism is another quasi-genre of journalism which immediately affects human resources and, hence, lives. There is little partisanship in either genre.

Political journalism, on the other hand, is a terrible and ill-formed genre. It vacillates between slow-going sports game coverage during campaign season and celebrity gossip during electoral off-years. Crime journalism is little better.

There is no rigor to political and crime journalism beyond the AP Stylebook. They rely on “investigative” bullshit which doesn’t help any reader or viewer in the short term.

Concrete action in politics is too slow to report on, so let’s report on some stupid shit that a politician said, and rinse and repeat everyday except for Election Day.

That’s how bad it has always been. Political journalism is sports crossed with celebrity gossip.

Is it Mere “Blackness” or a Violent “Southernness”

Politics, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

So I was reading an article on Vox critiquing this book by Barry Latzer, “The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America”, which blames African-Americans’ import of “violent black culture” for the rise in urban crime following the end of the Great Migration in the 1960s.

Then the article mentions that Latzer ties “Black culture” to violent White Southern culture, also known as the “Southern culture of honor” studied by Richard Nesbitt and Dov Cohen. The article mentions that this hypothesis has been touted by Thomas Sowell.

Really? Thomas Sowell? The Black supply-side conservative academic who has compared President Obama to Hitler more than once?

Oy.

So apparently, Sowell wrote in the title essay of his 2005 book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” that “black ghetto culture” is a relic of the highly dysfunctional white southern redneck culture which emanated from the “Cracker culture” of Northern England (among the livestock herders of the border between England and Scotland) and the Scots-Irish of Northern Ireland. Sowell attributes the following to this entire cultural lineage from England to Southern Black America:

“an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,… and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.”

Sowell contrasts this cultural lineage against the cultural lineage which emanated from farmers and more urbane types in lower England to what became New England, which emphasized a “Protestant work ethic”, literacy, civic participation, entrepreneurship in a wider number of economic activity, and quieter religious observance. He extends this latter culture – positively – to African-American antebellum New Englanders and Afro-Caribbean migrants.

Sowell, Nesbitt and Cohen all attribute to both White Southern and Black Southern cultures a greater degree of possession-driven violence and aggressive mentalities, both of which negatively impacted Black Southern culture through violent racist, anti-Black regimes and led Southern African-Americans to import this violent culture to urban areas in the North in the 20th century.

But I didn’t know that Sowell is of this opinion that “Black American culture” or “ghetto culture” as we know it now is a relic of White Southern culture. I know that he tends to spar against liberal strawpeople to make his point and preach to the choir, but I would say that his indictment of Black American culture can just as well be an indictment of White Southern culture and its political manifestations against generations of African-Americans in the South.

Idea for Georgia Dems: Have our county Central Committees elected by voters in the General Primary, like California’s Dems.

Because having central committee members nominate and select other members is not working out.

In fact, if you are on a central committee or have been recently elected to a central committee through Party District Caucus, 2017 is your chance to change your committee election method to the 2018 General Primary. This is provided for in Article 7, Section 4 of the DPG Bylaws.

Russia’s RT and Venezuela’s Telesur

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Some thoughts about comparing/contrasting Russia’s RT to Venezuela’s Telesur.

There are three countries which have both international TV channels and U.S.-oppositional foreign policies: Russia’s RT, Venezuela’s Telesur and Iran’s Press TV.

But what I’ve noticed is that Venezuela’s government is not trying to play both sides of U.S. politics like Russia’s is doing. I’ve never seen any reports of right-wing reactionary activists collaborating with and holding conferences in Venezuela under the auspices of Venezuela’s government. I’ve never seen right-wing conspiracy theorists brought onto Telesur English as guests and correspondents like RT has done frequently.

While RT boasts an ideological grab-bag of American talent like Thom Hartmann, Ed Schultz, Larry King, Max Keiser, Peter Lavelle and Lee Camp, Telesur English boasts consistently American hard-left talent like Abby Martin (who left RT in disagreement with Russia’s annexation of Crimea), Bill Fletcher and Laura Flanders, the types who you’d encounter more often on Free Speech TV.

RT channels their content through live video, on-demand episodes and interviews, and “no-comment” raw footage, while Telesur (which had live video in English for a brief period of less than a year, but may have cut back due to loss of funding) primarily relies on on-demand episodes and “share this” video.

RT has a more economically-stable backing state than Telesur. RT’s politics are somewhat reflective of Putin’s hard-right United Russia Party, while Telesur’s politics are wedded deeply to Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

RT combines the visual on-screen graphic sense of Fox News with journalism qualities which are below that of Al Jazeera English, while Telesur may as well be ran out of a basement in Miraflores Palace.

Telesur, like RT, was very critical of Hillary Clinton during the election and boosted Bernie Sanders as the better candidate, but diverged from RT on Trump. Telesur’s English-language posts are vehemently critical of Trump, and may as well have been written by writers from Truth-out or Alternet. RT, by comparison, has boosted Trump.

Telesur, finally, is unique among the power players in international broadcasting – both state-controlled and state-influenced – in that it is situated in the Americas in critical opposition to U.S. foreign and even domestic policy, and is perhaps the most representative international outlet of hard-left politics from the Americas. Telesur is state-controlled, partisan and ideological, which emanates unabashedly in their support for the Cuban regime, their critique of the politics of Israel and Turkey and their overt pro-government bent on Libya and Syria (which brought an end to Telesur’s collaboration agreement with Al-Jazeera). RT, meanwhile, speaks more for Russian interests against U.S. interests with more regard to United Russia’s nationalism and expansionism.

But Telesur also focuses greatly on events in Central and South America in ways that I’m more likely to find from, say, the BBC than from U.S. or other international outlets. I’m more likely to see coverage of Ecuadorian or Peruvian politics from Telesur than I am from U.S. outlets. I think Central and South American politics, especially as they affect Aboriginal and Afro-American interests, should be covered more extensively, and not just the bad, trainwreck stories like impeachments and plane crashes.

If one who is a U.S. citizen is hard-left and U.S.-critical in one’s politics but wants to reach for a more international audience than Free Speech TV or Link TV would allow, I would suggest the more consistent Telesur over the more opportunistic RT.

“The ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness that would be the result of prolonged calm, so the corruption of nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual peace’.” -#Hegel

You can strip the VRA of its protections against racial animus in voting rules.

You can gut welfare, affirmative action, voting protections and municipal rights.

You can excuse it all by saying that “slavery and racism are over, so pull yourself up by your own bootstrap!”

But don’t you ever take away that sweet, sweet Electoral College from “Middle America”.

worker cooperatives and unions

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I’m interested in the work between worker cooperatives and unions.

Cooperatives are, arguably, the more democratic for-profit structure than your “regular” corporation. Labor unions are the foremost advocate for workers’ rights.

And the Basque-Spanish #Mondragon Co-op has been heavily investing with the USW to build unionized worker co-ops in the U.S. for the last few years.

But I also wonder about the role of the unionized worker co-op in the age of automation.

If automation is touted as this inexorable force for extraction of more resources, the production of more products and the provision of more services at the expense of existing human labor roles, while co-ops are for-profit entities entailed to the equal provision of shares of the profit to those who are members, how can automation be made to work equally for a co-op’s shareholders without the co-op losing member-shareholders?

Should the worker-shareholders own the robots, even if that means that the worker-shareholders do less of the work? And if the worker-shareholders are doing less or even little of the procedural work while they share the revenue from those robots, does the co-op degenerate from worker-type to consumer-type co-op, or does the co-op retain the worker as the primary shareholder by way of cooperatively owning the devices used in the operation of the business?

Models like Amazon Go’s cutting-out of human cashiers in brick-and-mortar grocery stores work to the benefit of the few shareholders and executives at the top of Amazon because their corporate structure is built to favor those at the top. But that same model can also be applied to benefit cooperative member-owners without undermining the worth of human labor.

If greater automation/digitization, co-op membership and worker-shareholder democracy can all be made to work in tandem, I think it would make life easier for a lot of people while avoiding reactionary tendencies against civil rights, labor rights and robots.

#1u #coop