It’s nice that Tacticool Girlfriend is making all these super-relevant gun videos because it is saving me a huge amount of time. Watch the video, and then I’ve got a few things to add after.
It’s kind of surprising how much I agree with this video. So, consider all of the below to be nitpicking.
I guess the first thing I would add is that I’m in the “B.A.D. Lever is Bad” camp. I don’t want to take any chances with having anything in my trigger guard besides the trigger, but she makes a good case. If you’re going to go with something questionable, just make sure you’re putting in a lot of time to train with it so you make sure you are developing safe muscle memory.
The KAG is fantastic, and I have it on two AR-15’s. However, I’ll say that a lot of people do not find it to be ergonomic for them. Ergonomics is about how a machine fits your body — not someone else’s body — so just because one person really likes an ergonomic feature doesn’t mean it will work for you. Same goes for the slightly more vertical K2 grip, which allows you to keep the stock collapsed quite a bit more, which I really like, but some people just really want their rifle farther away from their face.
Those ranger bands can be made out of a bicycle inner tube. Get one, make a bazillion bands with it, and share them with your friends.
In terms of an optic, most people who are learning to shoot in preparation for a community defense context are not going to be putting in the additional training required for a variable optic like the one she has — we’re working class people who sometimes do community defense, not professional shooters. This is a big can of worms, but a better choice for most people is going to be a higher-end red dot sight (e.g., Trijicon MRO, Aimpoint Pro) — with the caveat that your astigmatism might render a red dot unusable and so you might look at a 1x prism sight or maybe a holographic sight (e.g., Eotech 512) instead. The advantages of these 1x sights are quick, easy target acquisition, both-eyes-open shooting, and little to no fiddling required.
The flip-up iron sights she has are really nice, but I’ve found that the cheaper plastic Magpul flip-ups work just fine — especially given that you’re going to have an optic to use most of the time.
I do recommend a weird buffer/recoil system, but there are several options. I’ve got the JP Enterprises option in one gun, and I’m going to be putting the Armaspec in another one. Basically, anything will work better than the stock AR-15 buffer and spring, but it’s a complicated thing to understand and you do need to buy the part that matches your gun. Importantly, this is something you can do later, and some people just really like that swooshy spring sound that the stock AR-15 system makes.
Last, make sure you understand the complicated rules governing short barreled rifles before you start buying parts — or just go with a 16″ barrel. It’s essential that everyone on the left stay 110% in compliance with all firearm laws, because both the near and far right love to use selective enforcement against us.
Let’s look at Columbia, MO, which is the biggest city in our club’s general area, and also a pretty good example of a small American city. It has a population of around 100k to 120k depending on how you are counting.
COLUMBIA’S PLAN
Columbia is doing a great job of reducing the ratio of people to carbon emitted… but it isn’t coming anywhere close to zero or negative emissions. Nowhere close. Still going up.
Climate Action and Adaptation Plan
Columbia organized a group of people to come up with a cohesive strategy for the city, and they really did a great job. Here’s a link to that:
To prepare Columbia’s natural and built environments (neighborhoods, resources, and systems) and people to be more resilient to the impacts of a changing climate
To reduce GHG emissions communitywide, through targeted municipal, residential, industrial and commercial activities
Emissions Targets:
Communitywide Target: 35% by 2035, 80% by 2050 and 100% by 2060.
Municipal Operations Target: 50% by 2035 and 100% by 2050.
Areas of Vulnerability:
Heat Stress
Air Quality
Vector-borne Disease
Mental Health
Housing
Stormwater Management
Transportation
Drinking Water Supply and Drought
Surface Water Quality
Drinking Water Quality
Trees and Open Space
Agriculture
Again, I want to emphasize that I think the group that worked on CAAP did a great job. However…
Problems with CAAP:
Columbia’s report is based on the IPCC report, which is wrong — as a result, their strategy does not address the severity of the problem
Promotes increase in total amount of air conditioning — air conditioning is one of the biggest contributors to green house gas emissions, and we need to find an alternative that is sustainable
Assumes growth — As long as growth is a bigger priority than surviving climate change, we will not be able to come up with a viable plan to survive climate change because the growth of capitalism is dependent on increasing use of fossil fuels.
Cannot achieve negative carbon emissions, probably not even zero emissions — based on the idea of “increasing efficiency” which never becomes zero.
Does not prepare Columbia for powerdown — the reality is that in order to survive, we are going to have to completely power down most things in our lives. If we’re not preparing for a (hopefully temporary) powerdown, we are not preparing to survive.
Rule of Thumb: 5-10 acres/person for sustained survival
442k acres of land divided by 178k people = 2.48 acres/person
This is not enough land. But we could have a significant population drop, down below 88k, as the university shuts down, dramatically reduces services, or switches to a mostly remote model.
5 Themes of a Just Transition
from Kingston, NY (Hudson Valley)/Movement Generation
Democratizing communities, wealth, and the workplace
Advancing ecological restoration
Driving racial justice and social equity
Relocalizing most production and consumption
Retaining and restoring cultures and traditions
A NARRATIVE FOR THE FUTURE
International Socialism is a solid idea, but it is boring and doesn’t really help people to understand how human technology can adapt to our future reality. We must find a compelling narrative for our children — something that allows us to adapt our expectations for the future, while still being optimistic.
We need to find a narrative for the future that emphasizes the themes of creativity, coping with adversity, making due with what you have, and finding novel solutions.
Fiction can offer models for adapting our expectations in terms of human technology. STEAMPUNK, SOLARPUNK, and HOPEPUNK are great ways to approach the future with your kids. These all offer an alternative future where people have to use creativity to handcraft solutions from the wreckage of the past.
Remove city sales tax on food grown in Boone County
Find ways to use city resources to move food from surrounding county into Columbia
RE-LOCALIZE, DEMOCRATIZE PROPERTY
Dramatically increase the property tax for owners who do not live in the county
Dramatically increase the property tax for locations that are not a primary residence
Exempt first $100k of primary residences from property tax
Tax reduction for worker-owned businesses
Tax reduction for union-friendly businesses
Avoid using eminent domain to increase food production
MANAGE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES
Remove automobile roads — e.g., Broadway from College to Providence
Parking garages at edge of city
End planning and zoning requirement for on-site parking
Increase property tax on internal combustion engine transport vehicles
Convenient, free light rail and bus service
Rickshaw fleet (foot, bicycle, and small electric vehicles)
Protected, separate bike roads and walking paths
MANAGE HEAT SANELY
Work toward overall reduction in AC systems
Find other ways to cool interior spaces; e.g.,
Structural changes that maximize air movement
Solar-powered fans
Solar-powered systems that use the earth’s constant temperature… and no freon
Shade
Build structures further down into the ground
PROVIDE HOUSING
Disallow unoccupied dwellings — tax them out of existence
Give housing to owner-occupiers after a trial period
Convert abandoned retail and industrial space to free housing
CONSOLIDATE YOUR HOUSING
Physically consolidate where you live with friends and family that you are close to.
Reduces the cost-per-person of housing
Reduces per-capita carbon output
Provides a physically immediate community so we can better support one another.
This is the number one thing you can do to protect yourself and your people during this discontinuity. In Columbia, you can have up to 2 unrelated people in a home zoned for a single family. For example, if you have a 4-person nuclear family, you can have 2 additional people living there, for a total of 6.
NO MORE GROWTH
New construction must take place in the footprint of existing buildings
RACIAL JUSTICE, SOCIAL EQUITY, RESTORING CULTURES AND TRADITIONS
Re-make the Sharp End: The Sharp End was Columbia’s Black business district that was destroyed by bureaucratic shenanigans.
Rename the city, perhaps after the people who originally lived here.
“Columbia” is one of the three goddesses of the United States, a symbol of nationalism and conquest based on Christopher Columbus. (The other two are Liberty and Justice, but everyone likes those.)
RENEWABLE POWER & POWER DOWN
Eliminate all fossil fuel energy use by…
Increasing renewable power infrastructure
Eliminating energy use wherever possible “Collapse early and often!”
Switch back to paper
No more freon-based space cooling
COLLEGES CAMPUSES
Our local colleges and universities are unlikely to survive as they are. MU has started eating itself.
How do we want to use this resource if the state no longer is able to claim it?
Maybe Columbia can continue as a place where people come to learn.
Are these solutions politically possible?
These solutions are not politically possible. In fact, not even the inadequate and non-disruptive CAAP is likely to be politically possible. They created the report, but I will be completely shocked if the city government actually implements any of it. The fact is that we are probably not going to make it, but we know what is necessary, so it is only a matter of doing it. Let’s hope that the majority of people wake up to reality soon. Every day we wait makes what is necessary for survival all the more horrific.
I just noticed a fun video by Forgotten Weapons that they posted back in July. The AR-15 forward assist is a control on America’s most ubiquitous rifle, yet almost no one appears to know what it is for. I’ve seen a supposed expert say that it just makes them feel good to press it every now and again. The attached video is a complete history of this nearly-useless feature, but I’ll go ahead and clear it up for you.
A forward assist is something that can be used to jam the bolt into firing position if something goes wrong with the rifle — typically, foreign material in the chamber. The army thought they needed a forward assist because every self-loading rifle they’d fielded before had the charging handle affixed to the bolt (so it could be used as a forward assist) and they felt like soldiers needed the forward assist as a security blanket. Nobody ever studied how often a forward assist is needed — nor did they study how often using the forward assist makes things worse. In practice, if the bolt won’t go into battery without the forward assist, then once you’ve used the forward assist, the rifle will not cycle again until you’ve gone through a much more involved process to get that stuck case out of the chamber.
So when would you use the forward assist?
If you’re sneaking, and want to chamber the first round without making much noise, and you forgot to chamber a round before you started sneaking… you should not need to use the forward assist. The bolt should just go into battery even though you are riding the charging handle for the sake of quietness. However, if it doesn’t go into battery, you could press the bolt forward with your thumb on that indention on the bolt that is there so that the ejection port cover latch both clears the bolt and pops open when the bolt actuates. If that doesn’t work, something is Wrong.
If something is Wrong, and the bolt won’t go into battery, you could use the forward assist at that point, and there is a pretty good chance that will get you one more round. However, you’d be much better off pausing and clearing out whatever material is in the chamber and preventing the bolt from closing, because if you cram the next round into the chamber with the forward assist, the odds are extremely high that you’re going to get a failure to eject, and then you’re going to have to do something that takes a lot more time.
The go-to method for getting that stuck case out is called “mortaring“. If that doesn’t work (maybe because your extractor is a bit worn), then you’re on to getting a cleaning rod and a hammer and knocking it out that way. Before you use that forward assist, consider whether you have time to run a brush in the chamber or spray some cleaner into the chamber, because you’ll be in much better shape if you do that instead.
In practice, there is basically just one time you’d want to use the forward assist: You desperately need to send one more bullet right now, and that one bullet is much more important than the next 30. This situation is so rare that the forward assist is basically not necessary. Yet I still like having one.
I’ve been trying to stay out of electoral politics recently, and it’s been fairly easy since my Facebook account was disabled in the Great FB Purge of 2020. But now that the voting is over, I think it’s time to make some things clear. First off: The left hates Joe Biden.
Just to make sure you saw that:
THE LEFT HATES JOE BIDEN.
The left doesn’t hate Joe Biden because he isn’t Bernie Sanders. The left was actually kind of lukewarm about Sanders. Sanders was not what the left wanted but rather the compromise the left was willing to live with. We may have seemed overly enthusiastic because we were incredibly happy to possibly, maybe have the option of someone who was not a sack of shit. The left hates Joe Biden because he is Joe Biden — because we see plainly what he is. And if you want a list of reasons why we hate him, just ask a Democrat what’s so good about him, dissect each item on that list, and you’ll figure it out for yourself. Or you can keep reading.
The 2020 election was a real shitshow, and the primary cause was the American people themselves. If ever a nation needed to learn how to have some solidarity and stop letting con men run the government, it is the USA right now. But now that we’ve chosen which of the two sacks of shit with obvious cognitive impairment will be handed the keys to our ridiculously overpowered Presidency, we should really look at the new kind of horror that we’re heading into and figure out something resembling a strategy.
Let me suggest that this strategy include calling Joe Biden a sack of shit.
Joe Biden is a Puppet
I was trying to remember why the Democrats like Joe Biden, so I googled it, and all I found was something by a right-winger trying to figure out the same thing. And the crux of that essay was that Joe Biden is a puppet for Marxists. Wow! The fact that billionaires control our government isn’t a secret. They are not doing a conspiracy. It’s right out in the open. Two political parties, Republican and Democrat, both serving their own set of billionaires, with no regard for the material conditions of the American people. Completely obvious. But this guy thinks Joe Biden is a puppet for “Marxists”.
Yes, Joe Biden is a puppet, just not for anyone on the left. Marx would have hated Joe Biden, and he would have hated Joe Biden’s puppeteers, just like the left hates both of those things. Any noteworthy leftist — anywhere on the entire planet — hates Joe Biden.
Touching & Sniffing
Did they think people would just forget the weird sniffing, the inappropriate touching? The fact that Joe Biden is so out of touch that he couldn’t see it as a problem? The narrative appears to be that he’s so old that his behaviors were molded before these new-fangled non-touching ideas were created by overly strident youngsters (Democrats and Tucker Carlson agree on this). Yes, they explained to him that our culture had moved on to a place where consent matters, and he says he “gets it” but I think it is clear that between these inappropriate moments and the weird verbal gaffes, Biden’s presidency is going to be a constant embarrassment to the country — just like Trump’s was. Just don’t blame the left for it — we hate him.
Quiet Misogyny
Joe Biden completely failed women during the Anita Hill hearings, and though his campaign certainly marketed him as supporting the bodily autonomy of women, indications are that he personally opposes abortion based on his Roman Catholic faith. There’s no reason to think that he will fight for the right of women to control their own bodies, and we hate him for it.
Mass Incarceration
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Joe Biden spent his time overhauling crime laws in cooperation with Republican segregationist senators. The mass incarceration nightmare that the US is today — eclipsing every other nation in the world in terms of percentage of population imprisoned — is directly attributable to Joe Biden. That program of mass incarceration is an extension of Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, which itself is an extension of Jim Crow — so it should not be a surprise that while Black people make up only 12% of the US population, they are 33% of the people in prison. No legislator who participated in this horror should have a job in politics today, but there he is, and we hate him for it.
The Assault Weapons Ban
In 1994, Biden helped ban “assault weapons” as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill was part of Biden’s fear-based “get tough on crime” performance during that time. The fiction he and his fellow vultures pushed was essentially that Black gangs were going to get machine guns were it not for the Assault Weapons Ban, and the white suburbs ate it up. The result was an incoherent law that didn’t change the lethality of the weapons available to Americans. All it managed to do was get right wingers really pissed off. And now, when the very real threat of genocide is once again at our doorstep, Joe Biden wants a do-over on the assault weapon ban. What’s not to hate?
Gutting Welfare
Biden participated in the gutting of the US welfare system. It was spearheaded by Bill Clinton, a real sack of shit in his own right. We’re still seeing the consequences of those disastrous policy changes today. For example, the number of people in deep or extreme poverty has more than doubled. The left hates anyone who drives people into poverty and makes it so they can’t escape.
Banking Deregulation
Joe Biden voted to repeal Glass-Steagall and participated in the larger banking deregulation push that happened under the Clinton administration. That set us up for economic disaster and helped unscrupulous bankers get even richer. Banks are the core institution pushing capitalism along as it crushes humanity, and the left hates them.
School Desegregation
Remember how he worked with segregationist senators on mass incarceration? Well he also opposed school desegregation. It’s almost like he wasn’t really “working with” segregationists so much as he was just simply a segregationist. It’s gross, and the left hates it.
Iraq War
The Iraq War is a point in time that a lot of people like to talk about because it was truly obscene how they manufactured obvious excuses for invading Iraq (twice!) and how jackasses in the Democratic party ignored their reasonable, peaceful colleagues and supported the horrific destruction and resource grab that followed. And Biden was one of those jackasses.
The historic nature of Obama’s presidency and the swirling racism surrounding him made it very difficult to air the many, many legitimate criticisms of his administration. Thankfully, Joe has none of that. He’s just obviously a big old sack of shit. And that’s why I’m here, coming out of the gate at a full gallop, to tell you about it.
I do not care at all that he has apologized for most of the things in the above list. If someone keeps fucking up, you don’t promote the sack of shit. You certainly do not promote him to President of the United States.
The most important thing about declaring Biden to be a sack of shit is that we can build solidarity with other Americans in doing so. Many of us know he is a sack of shit — we can talk with other people (even conservatives!) and work through exactly why he is a sack of shit and then use our new shared understanding of his shittiness to move forward and start making some better decisions.
Let me be 100% clear: These are not conspiracies. A conspiracy is a group of people secretly planning to do something. This is not secret — it is out in the open, and these are not plans — rather, these are just distinct worldviews that groups of people have and the vision that those worldviews have for the future. Worldviews have natural conclusions, but they are not conspiracies. They change the world because people share the worldview and assume the same kind of future is both inevitable and good. And obviously I’m generalizing to try to make sense of things, and reality is a lot more complicated.
Here are your 4 choices. I’m only going to talk about 3 of them.
Neo-feudalism — traditional fascism, God Emperor Trump
Neoliberal Futurism — fascism, but as designed by accountants; corporate feudalism; Musk, Bezos, Gates
International Socialism — the ideal of Karl Marx
The Non-changists — Conservatives like the DNC or the pre-Tea-Party GOP have no position. They are just trying to keep things from changing which is not possible or even desirable. I’ll be skipping this one, but here is a quote that sums it up:
Nothing will fundamentally change.
Joe Biden, speaking to donors at a June 14, 2020 fundraiser
NEO-FEUDALISM
We all know this is bad, but let’s talk about it anyway. This is what the Trump Republican party believes in. It is the ideals of the Confederate south and American colonialism, on a global scale. Features:
Fascist Anti-Revolution – This is basically just taking all the social progress of the last couple hundred years and reversing it — so that’s what happened under Trump.
Christian Dominionism – the right-wing evangelical plan to elevate their interpretation of the Bible above the authority of the secular state. It’s a whole lot of dominion and just a little bit of Christianity.
“God Emperor Trump” – A figurehead is required for neo-feudalism. God Emperor Trump is a play on a character from the Dune novels by Frank Herbert — he’s a guy that’s so all-in on fascism that he makes himself into a giant, immortal worm-monster (this character is not in the movies or TV shows) — but this reference really is just meant to emphasize the supremacy of the leader in fascism.Trump probably won’t turn himself into a giant worm monster.
White supremacy as doctrine – includes male supremacy, hetero supremacy, cis supremacy, etc.
No legal rights for any minority groups — declared non-citizens — The way fascism works is through the idea of citizenship. Basically, it just declares a group to belong to a different “nation”, then strips them of the privileges of citizenship, and then once that has happened they can be disempowered, relocated, or even murdered at will. In contrast, the left rejects the idea of citizenship completely, and believes everyone should have rights regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
Total war against all real and perceived enemies — Total war is an important concept to understand. It means that you have no rules about who may be killed, how they may be killed, or where and when they may be killed. In fact, total war means that total extermination of all enemies is compulsory, making them suffer before you kill them is a bonus.
NEOLIBERAL FUTURISM
A neoliberal dystopia where 10 people control most wealth… but 5 of them are women! These are the people who seem to be winning at the moment; the promoters of this worldview overwhelmingly supported Biden in the election, and most Americans agree with this worldview. If you want to know who the promoters are, just look at the richest 15 people in the world on the Forbes list. The central concept is that technological progress will inevitably make things better, and so economic and power inequities are both irrelevant and justified. Features:
Corporate feudalism (a kind of fascism) — Corporate feudalism is the natural evolution of neoliberalism and the dream of the banking industry. This would end nation-states and replace it with corporate rule — we’re already halfway there. This is the correct meaning of “globalism” (and is the opposite of global Marxism).Under corporate feudalism, your rights come from your association with a corporation (like how you get health insurance through your employer).
Reduction to 2 classes — You’re either someone who controls capital or a serf — no in between, a very simple hierarchy.
Everything is quantified — especially YOU. Converts everything from material goods, to religions, and even people to quantifiable resources
Requires poverty — It is inherently comfortable with poverty, and even requires that it continue to exist. It’s part of how a labor market exists — there have to be surplus workers to keep the cost of labor down.
Technology as a religion — Technology is the pretty wrapper around the dystopia that gets naive people excited about it. They imply that other worldviews don’t have technology, but do we really think Socialists — or even Fascists — can’t make new technology? Some surface-level ideas that come out of this are: Occupying Mars, Transhumanism, and AI as liberator of humanity. In reality, Mars will never be anything more than a mining facility, or an expensive place to conduct experiments. Transhumanism isn’t for you — it’s for the rich. Like other kinds of automation, capital will use AI workers to make themselves richer and drive down wages — it won’t make your life better.
Side note: Ultimately, AI will be used to do more than control the means of production, though — it can be used to directly control the means of violence, which is the longterm checkmate in this game. The typical AI dystopian fantasy entails the AI rebelling and either destroying or enslaving humanity — but in the very near term, the issue is who is controlling AI, and how is it serving them — the concern is the same: destruction, enslavement.
Violence, racism hidden —Pretends it doesn’t contribute to violence or racism. Still allows both to exist, though, which enables them. Initiates violence to enforce property rights, or gain control of a resource, but insists it is defensive violence. Pretends that racism doesn’t exist by insisting that the data indicates that everyone’s social position is justified by non-racial factors.
Preparing for The Event — Neo-liberal futurism disconnects the fate of the rich from everyone else. They are preparing for “The Event” — the event is a disaster; billionaires will survive this disaster, and it will basically cleanse the world making way for the corporate feudal utopia that billionaires dream of. They see this discontinuity as something that can elevate their kind, if they can figure out how to survive it. The Event could be anything, though, including an asteroid hit or nuclear war or a new virus.I’ll remind you that this isn’t a conspiracy — this is something that’s being discussed fairly openly.
Related: We Appreciate Power — a song by Claire Boucher (stage name: Grimes), the mother of Elon Musk’s child. It’s about the inevitable global rule of AI and humanity living in a virtual reality environment. The ideas of neo-liberal futurism are securely wedged into human culture at this point.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
Karl Marx
Importantly, neoliberal futurism is what the far right thinks socialism is. (They are wrong.)
NEO-FEUDALISM vs. NEOLIBERAL FUTURISM
Both hate the poor — poverty as a moral failure that should be punished further
Both love a hierarchy — they just strongly disagree about the details
Both are more focused on their fear of “Socialism” than on their own agenda
Both are horrific, but Neoliberal Futurism is slightly better for most people
Both are racist — Neoliberalism protects racism by pretending it doesn’t exist
Neither one is currently serious about addressing climate change …but both have mechanisms for doing so:
Both seek to protect those higher on the hierarchy from those lower on the hierarchy and offload the costs of climate change onto those with the least impact and responsibility. Given that conservatives erroneously think neoliberal futurism is “socialism”, they are technically correct that “socialism” will use climate change as a strategy to make their lives worse.
Ethical behavior leads to success.
“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”
Marie Curie
“[W]e choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”
Chidi Anagonye (a fictional character from TV show “The Good Place”)
So what’s the right answer?
INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM
You knew we’d end up here, right? Features:
“A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”
Uses a complex organization structure that maximizes local control and minimizes the influence of political parties or other collusions of the powerful; i.e., maximum democracy
Actively works to minimize bigotry
Advocates for all people, everywhere (the international part)
Recognizes the obligation that the present has to the future
Embraces the values that have been successfully villainized by the right wing: Empathy, Generosity, Kindness, Fairness, Community
If the above features are things that you agree are good, but you just can’t stand it because I called it “International Socialism” then please go ahead and call it something else. We’re here to support good things no matter what they’re called. If you can only support some of the features I listed, then please go ahead and do that. We will support your support of those things, and agree to disagree on the rest. But if you’re going to tell us that goodness is obviously pure evil in disguise, then you really just need to pull your head out of your ass.
Fascism and Neoliberal Futurism both probably become socialism after they murder all the undesirables. In my opinion, fascism is the more likely of the two to completely eat itself.
This is part 1 of a 3-part presentation that has been converted into a post. Links to the other three parts will be included here when they are ready.Part 2: Worldviews; Part 3: Strategy
CONTEXT
Boone County, Missouri is our context. We’ve grown used to living in a global society — it’s only global in the sense that we receive resources from all over the world. It’s less energy intensive to get resources from closer to where we live and our ability to get resources from all over might change.
City people take for granted that cities are good. Rural people take for granted that they are bad. Cities do not produce resources (similar to how refrigerators don’t produce food). But what are cities for?
Trading resources
Processing resources into more complex products
Socializing, Entertainment, Culture sharing, Fun
Helping one another identify what is real through social interactions with people who have different worldviews
Protecting people from violence
Cities don’t work alone! A city is part of a system that serves other geographical areas as they simultaneously serve it. So, we should be thinking about all of Boone County… at the very least.
DISCONTINUITY
A Discontinuity is a Time of Rapid Change… A distinct break in the basic characteristics of the world. However the world was before the discontinuity, it is different after. In contrast with a period of time featuring slow, constant change.
Historical Minor Discontinuities
The Industrial Revolution (1760)
US Civil War (1861-1865)
Marriage Equality (2015)
Invention of Agriculture (various, but around 8000 BC)
Invention of Banking (2000 BC)
Fall of Rome (200-476)
The Internet (1990)
Birth Control Pill (1960)
Monotheism (around 1200 BC)
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (1981)
Historical Major Discontinuities
Late Ordovician Extinction: 485-444 million years ago, 86% of species lost. Cause: Short, severe ice age caused by severe drop in CO2 triggered by plate tectonics.
Late Devonian Extinction: 383-359 million years ago, 75% of species lost. Cause: De-oxygenation of the oceans via massive algal blooms.
End Permian Extinction: 251 million years ago (60,000 years in length), 96% of species lost (nearly all life). Cause: Massive global warming and release of poisonous gasses initially caused by an enormous volcanic eruption.
End Triassic Extinction: 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost. Cause: Rapid increase in ocean CO2.
End Cretaceous Extinction: 66 million years ago, 76% of species lost. Cause: Climate change due to volcanic activity and asteroid strike
The important thing to note about this list of major discontinuities is how often they were caused by a change in the mix of gasses in the atmosphere or oceans.
OUR PREDICAMENT
We are facing a major discontinuity. It’s a predicament — not a problem. A problem has a solution; a predicament can’t be solved — only mitigated.
Anthropocene Extinction: 1945-2450, 85%+ species lost. Cause: Rapid climate change due to industrial processes
It’s not just climate change… it is a multi-faceted, systemic failure of human beings.
There’s a fancy French word for this: “The Problématique” — The complex of issues associated with a topic, considered collectively; specifically the totality of environmental and other problems affecting the world. What we are facing might be related to the Fermi Paradox, which is the idea that scientists believe there should be abundant life in the universe, yet we’ve detected no life anywhere but Earth. The explanation that I find most plausible is the universal filter — A planet that attempts to develop intergalactic travel always kills itself before achieving that goal.
How did we end up in this handbasket?
The complete ethical failure of Western civilization was carefully engineered by three far-right groups starting in the 1930’s:
Free market capitalists
White supremacists
Right-wing Christians
It was the free market capitalists who really succeeded, but part of their success was strategic cooperation with these other two groups of ghouls.
They didn’t really start succeeding until the 1970’s.
A few real villains:
James McGill Buchanan
Lewis F. Powell (the Powell Memo)
Milton Friedman
Rothbard
Ayn Rand
They managed to villainize ideas traditionally defined as good, such as:
Empathy
Generosity
Kindness
Fairness
Community
They convinced society to become so cynical and misanthropic that it assumes anyone displaying or endorsing these characteristics is actually evil.
“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy… and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation — and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
James Gustave Speth (American environmental lawyer and advocate)
But obviously, it took more than just being awful people. We had to do something awful, too.
From a practical perspective, the core issue is that fossil fuels are intimately linked to a destructive and exploitative global financial system that most people believe is inevitable.
We started using fossil fuels — a destructive, limited resource.
We started using fossil fuel to make food — making our food production unsustainable. This is the Green Revolution. We started using fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides — all created from fossil fuels, and of course intense mechanization. And then the food is distributed all over the world using vehicles that burn fossil fuels.
Economic growth is imperative under capitalism, and the primary creator of economic growth is fossil fuels — so we had to use more fossil fuels.
The global financial system is tied to oil. Unfortunately, we can’t talk about climate change without talking about money and, specifically, the “petro dollar”. The petrodollar is any U.S. dollar paid to oil-exporting countries in exchange for oil. Since the dollar is a global currency, all international transactions are priced in dollars. As a result, oil-exporting nations must receive dollars. This creates an enormous economic advantage for the US because it compels people to buy things from the US; it was established by the Nixon administration and the House of Saud (i.e., Saudi Arabia) in 1970, and so is part of the Middle East debacle.
Combine those two things, and money basically represents future fossil fuel production. Since fossil fuel production means climate change, money itself is one of our enemies (as it currently exists). Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of capitalism. We can’t slow down fossil fuel production or it destroys everything… much like whale sharks must keep swimming or they don’t get enough oxygen and die.
Climate change should not have been a surprise. But for a while it was even odds that we would hit peak oil first. Peak Oil is the theorized point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which it is expected to enter terminal decline. Peak oil theorists did not take into account the illusory property of money, so didn’t realize that more money could be used to turn a normal production curve into something very different. They assumed that when the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) became 0, production would stop.
Why is climate change happening faster than the official IPCC prediction?
Assumption of rational response from power elites
IPCC is a product of capitalism — includes capital-controlled governments, capital-dependent scientists, and reviewers that are frequently direct representatives for capital
Assumption that realism will cause cognitive incapacitation in audience
Does not include feedback loops or new data
Columbia’s plan is based on the IPCC report which is wrong… but there’s a lot of good information here in this IPCC graph. The thing I’d like you to really take a good look at is how the emissions curve goes negative in each of these conditions. Emissions have to become negative, and nobody knows how to do that. We’re talking about 0 emissions but also removing some carbon from the atmosphere.
How bad is our predicament?
Here’s how Roger Hallam (Extinction Rebellion) explains it:
We are already 1.1C above the pre-industrial average.
There is an additional 0.7C of carbon lag already locked in.
Once we stop burning fossil fuels, we will have an additional 0.7C increase due to removal of global dimming
Due to the above increases, an additional 1C of soil carbon will inevitably be released.
TOTAL: 3.5 C already locked in
(Roger Hallam’s math is a little bit off, but here’s his presentation on this part of the problem.)
But will we really stop emitting carbon anytime soon? Obviously not! The most likely scenario is now 4 degrees C of temperature increase above the pre-industrial average. What does that look like?
I double-checked the date, and 2050 is unlikely but possible for a 4C world. More likely not until 2100 — but hey, we seem to be trying really hard, so we might get there by 2050. But what we’re looking at is that none of the continental US is likely to be habitable, and before it becomes uninhabitable, there will be a constant grinding down of our ability to support our own lives. We’ll have to leave — presumably to Canada — or find ways to get everything we need to live from other places (traditionally, we’ve done this with war). The data source is the IPCC and the World Bank, which are both pro-capitalist institutions.
This is if we continue fucking up to the same degree we are currently fucking up, and might not include feedback loops, some of which are 70 years ahead of schedule.
This version of Earth would have a population of about 1 billion. The majority of the population reduction will probably come from people not having children… but let’s all be clear that a population drop of maybe 8.5 billion down to 1 billion will be the most horrifying period of time in the history of humanity. Imagine the Holocaust, but global and lasting a thousand years.
This is going to make it really hard to achieve environmental justice. I’m trying to be funny, but the bottom line is that it is probably not going to be possible. For example, things are not going to work out for the Amazon tribes — how can they when there isn’t going to be an Amazon?
What about technology? Scientists are already working on solutions to climate change… aren’t they? Sure they are. Most is vaporware. Some things, like new battery tech or photovoltaics are real — but they are not carbon negative! Every renewable energy source we have requires the emission of more carbon to produce it.
Here’s the important thing, though: As long as we are living under capitalism, techno fixes for climate change will primarily be used to extend economic growth; they will not be used to create negative carbon emissions.
The mere existence of technological progress has no bearing on whether or not we survive climate change… you always find things in the last place you looked… our civilization will be at its peak when it collapses.
I’m leaving out a lot of things because we don’t have enough time:
Population (real, but mostly used as a strategy to try to blame normal people for the failures of our elites)
And many other things
What is the value of this capitalist economic system?
A market is a socially constructed thing just like money, gender, race, social roles, or coolness.
A “bubble” is the difference between the imagined value of something (according to “the market”) and the real value of that thing.
When the people (creators of “the market”) realize the true value of capitalism (negative), the economy will attempt to perform a “correction” and use all the money to mitigate climate change… including all of the billionaires’ money.
When billionaires realize that this correction is about to take place, it will mean that the economic system has a negative value to them, specifically, and they will abandon the entire economic system…
But they will still claim ownership of resources.
So, this is likely how capitalism will end.
Prominent US fascists have already said that they are willing to abandon capitalism because the market simply doesn’t support their model for dominating other people.
The death of capitalism is now inevitable.
That means we have a lot of scary changes ahead, but if we can be ready for those changes, we can mitigate this predicament. Right?
So instead of panicking, let’s figure out what we need and figure out how to get it without global capitalism.
Wow, Democratic party voters. You really suck. I mean the actual Democratic party voters, not those of us forced to take part in this idiotic game of jackass vs. jackass — you all are OK. But you Democratic party voters — the ones who started out saying, “Joe Biden seems good to me.” — what is wrong with you? It’s a rhetorical question. You’re going to have to figure that out for yourself. Just take my word for it — something is wrong with you if you ever thought Joe Biden was a good idea.
So, thanks to you, here we are on the brink of what appears to be another win for the Orange Menace. You looked at the racist, sexist old man who won the previous election and thought, “Hey, what we need is someone slightly less racist and sexist, but every bit as old, white, and male. That’s the ticket.” And it wasn’t. If you’ll think back, we said this would happen. The moment you started in with the Joe Biden bullshit, we said, “Don’t do that, it will be a repeat of 2016.” But did you listen? No, you did not.
By “we”, I mean the left. We are not Democrats. You keep acting like we are, but we are not.
Joe Biden is significantly worse than HRC. Can you not see that? I mean, just awful. And the campaign his people ran was terrible. They literally settled on a natural disaster as the thing to make him appealing to voters — as if Trump is responsible for the movement of viruses. Oh, yeah, I know that Trump’s bullshit made the pandemic way worse in the US — but do you see the subtlety there? Do you think subtlety works on the American people? Do you see how Joe Biden never had any kind of solution for getting rid of the virus? He literally said, “If I’m elected, I’ll do nothing; I’ll just let the scientists do whatever they were planning to do.” And the scientists are saying that we won’t have this under control until 2022. It’s not a very good pitch.
Yeah, OK, Joe Biden still has a “path to victory”. Mm hm. He just has to beat Trump in a couple of the swing states that Trump won last time, when you had a better candidate. But let’s say Biden manages to squeak by. This is not a good scenario. Trump has already done what we expected — claiming victory and election meddling. If we have a civil war at this point, you are partially to blame.
If you look back at the left’s various excellent analyses of this moment, the “good” outcome is already gone — there will be no Biden landslide (as if that would have been “good”, hahaha). What you’re left with is Trump squeaking by (and then implementing an authoritarian state) or Biden squeaking by (followed by something like a civil war). And this is substantially because you chose a terrible candidate.
The Biden campaign’s tag lines were things like: – “Get over it.” – “You’re a damn liar.” – “Nothing will substantially change.” – “No malarkey!” – “Vote for someone else.”
Damn, that is awful.
You really couldn’t find anyone better than this?
Anyway. Whether or not Biden squeaks by, you all need to get your heads on straight and figure out how not to do this again. If you keep thinking of politics as a one-dimensional “right vs. left” scenario, and if you keep thinking that the near-right Democratic Party is somehow in the center of this completely over-simplified model of reality, you will keep losing forever. I mean, honestly, it’s probably too late at this point for America, but maybe we’ll get lucky.
PS: “Republican voters are crossing the aisle to vote for Joe Biden!” hahahahaha! oh, wow, y’all are hilarious. haha
Friday, MU sent students an email reminding them that the university’s policies encourage “free expression while setting time, place, and manner rules to avoid substantial disruption of University operations”. So, MU wants students to express themselves, but doesn’t want their operations disrupted.
On its face, it is a reasonable request, but it has consequences you might not realize, which brings us to the topic of one Erica Chenoweth (not to be confused with Kristin Chenoweth) and the book she wrote with Maria Stephan in 2011, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. If you are an organizer on the left or a Democrat (no, Democrats are not leftists), you should really have at least a rough working knowledge of this book.
As a community defense group, we are subjected to a lot of finger wagging from Democrats, and quite often that finger wagging is accompanied with references to Erica Chenoweth and that book. That book, however, is a multi-layered propaganda piece that purposefully obscures the path to effective action and replaces it with something that makes very wealthy people comfortable. I assure you, I am not going to advocate violence, but I am going to step you through the layers of deception in this book.
The Title
The name of the book — Why Civil Resistance Works: The Stategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict — is the only part of the book that most people will ever experience. There are words in that title that mean something different to Chenoweth than they do to normal English speakers, and so the title is the first and most important deception. To Chenoweth, “nonviolent conflict” and “civil resistance” mean something specific and different from what you would expect. The book briefly but explicitly explains that only disruptive actions are effective; it explains that permitted (in both the bureaucratic and more general sense) actions do not create change. This fact is so well-established in the literature, that the book doesn’t even examine whether non-disruptive personal expression is effective — it is not, and the book says so.
So, when the book says “civil resistance” and “nonviolent conflict” it means disruptive actions. Since disruption is not typically legal, this usually means illegal actions.
Does the book mean “nonviolent” in the common sense? Also no. Chenoweth defined an action and a campaign as nonviolent if very few people died. For example, if a thousand people were punched in the face, but only 3 died, then the action would be coded by this study as nonviolent. In the US over the past 5 years or so, we’ve had some incidences of what I would call street violence. There has been a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, and a few people have been shot or attacked with cars. But if Chenoweth were coding Trumpism’s campaign for fascism, she would code it as nonviolent because relatively few people have died. People carrying around rifles seems pretty violent to me, but again, very few people have died; this is “nonviolent” according to Chenoweth. Burning down buildings seems pretty violent to me; but that also does not count as violence in the book.
We usually think of both being civil and being nonviolent as the opposite of being disruptive. The intent of this deception is to keep people from being disruptive, and since an action that is not disruptive does not work, the intent is to stop you from getting anywhere.
Defining Mixed-method Movements as Nonviolent
In keeping with this theme, the next layer of deception employed by Chenoweth is the inclusion of somewhat violent movements in the “nonviolent” category. Again, I’m defining violent in the way normal English speakers define it, and would include physical destruction of property, carrying weapons, using weapons, assaulting people, and even showing up in great numbers as acts of violence. If you are home and 500 protesters show up in your front yard, are you not concerned for your safety? Once this intentional mis-coding of the data is complete, nothing else in their study matters because the data itself has been poisoned in support of the conclusion they want you to believe.
Defining Success and Failure
To determine whether violent vs. nonviolent campaigns succeed or fail, they obviously had to define success and failure. But there are degrees of success and failure and some successes are so meager that they are not worth mentioning. Regardless of this fact, Chenoweth coded each campaign as either a success or failure. In reality — a place where most of us live — a campaign with more leverage creates greater change than a campaign with little or no leverage, and that is why non-disruptive campaigns yield no appreciable change.
Assumptions
The book makes assumptions about the way the world works, and then uses those to explain the results (the results having already been contaminated with purposefully deception). For example, if a movement had an armed flank and succeeded, the book says it succeeded “despite” the armed flank not “because” of the armed flank or “with the help of” the armed flank. It also assumes that if a movement is violent it will become unpopular; you need only look at the quite popular Trump movement to see that the truth is much more complicated than that.
Violence Doesn’t Work, Except When it Does
The book is ostensibly all about violence not working, yet in every data point and case study explored in the book, the “nonviolent” side wins by gaining the support of agents of violence. At this point, the purposeful deception of the book should be clear, but this one might be hard to see, just as it is hard for a fish to notice water. Over the past couple hundred years, there has been a constantly droning message to people all over the world: Only the state can wield violence effectively.
The idiocy of this message is clear if you just stop to think about it — police and military are not grown in vats, living only to serve the state, and then liquefied to nourish the next generation of “boots on the ground”. No, they are human beings. They had human parents, they grew up in a neighborhood, they went to school with other children. They will retire from living lives of violence in service to the state, and they will come back to their communities broken and alienated, but they are still people. They are using tools that any human being can use — in fact, those tools keep becoming more accessible all the time.
There are well-known conflicts where the people successfully used violence to fight off oppression — and when I say success, I mean that they became fully free of that oppression, at least for a time. Most notably, the Vietnamese fought off at least two colonial powers. Did we all forget that happened? And let’s not forget the Battle of Athens (Athens, Tennessee – 1946). There are many examples, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this point.
Here are some alternate titles for the book: – Violence Doesn’t Work, Except When it Does, Which is Always – The State Will Always Win: You’ll Have to Beg Politely for What You Need – Violence Only Works When the State Does It: Stop Resisting and Start Asking Nicely
In truth, violence is the final authority, but people who are both good and civilized choose not to use violence because it is immoral — unless they have no other recourse. People who are thoughtful understand when they have no other recourse but they also work hard to keep a social conflict from getting to that point.
Every political conflict is extremely complex and has multiple narratives, with some narratives being more true than others. How people interpret and react to those narratives affects whether or not they support a social movement. The Trump movement is very violent based on my definition of violence, and yet Trump enjoys an approval rating of over 43% today, according to fivethirtyeight.com — he still might even win this election. That’s because Trump supporters enjoy and support the violence of other Trump supporters, including violence that results in death. Explaining why requires us to really examine the narratives that Trump supporters believe to be true. To just assume that violence will make a movement unpopular requires you to completely ignore these narratives and the context in which they exist.
Conclusion
I’m not advocating for any particular type of action, and I’m certainly not advocating for violence. I’m not even advocating for disruption. For one thing, this is a general information piece and I don’t even know what the issue is that you’re trying to address. My intent is that you understand the complexity that you are dealing with when you are working for social change. When you are choosing a course of action, you must consider how the wider community will understand the narrative of that action, because you need those people on your side. If your action’s meaning is incoherent, or if the action itself is somehow repulsive (as would usually be the case with violence), then the action will not move you toward success.
It should be clear that although purely expressive demonstrations feel good and might be a very good way to build a movement, they are extremely unlikely to create change. It is only disruptive actions and disruptive movements that are likely to create substantive change. Disruption is a type of power, and it is ultimately power that matters.
Please make sure the narrative of your movement makes sense and is being communicated in a coherent way to people who have the power to make change — that, or find a way to wield power directly.
Two members of the neo-nazi group “The Base” (named after al Queda) have been arrested by the FBI in Michigan for plotting to murder members of an antifascist group.
The signs of a coming conflict are everywhere. Political polarization is up, gun and ammunition sales have spiked, killers such as Kyle Rittenhouse are being lauded by their political allies, and protests are widespread in American cities. Police kill unarmed people in the street, the government is polarized and corrupt, and our institutions are failing. Armed militias patrol U.S. streets and groups like the Atomwaffen Division and the Base plot to start a larger conflict. Mass shootings, sometimes ideologically motivated and other times not, occur frequently. Poverty and unemployment are widespread as mass evictions loom and Congress stalls to help those in need. […] This is all happening during an election year, and we have a sect of the president’s supporters who have vowed to show up at polling places armed. If you have a terrible and ominous feeling about all this, you’re not alone. Some on the far right are talking about another civil war. Some experts who have studied sectarian violence in the United States and other countries think we’re already in one.
If you’re interested, the article goes on to provide some expert opinions about what the coming months and years will probably look like.
