Rich Puchalsky's blog: politics

Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Saturday, August 22, 2026

Mastodon threads

Why have I written on my blog less? It's because I write on social media more. I sometimes write threads that I bookmark because I think that I may turn them into blog posts but I rarely do. Mostly I want to link to them instead of writing the same thing again on a future occasion. But Mastodon, while it has some good things about it, has a very bad search capability. So here is a list of whatever I've thought I might want to look for again, categorized by subject.

There are about 120 of these from February 2024 - August 2026. I probably should stop writing about specifically US politics so much, but it's what other people tend to be conversing about.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

_Oil Beach_ by Christina Dunbar-Hester

The very first thing in this book is a quote from Mike Davis' _City of Quartz_, and whatever interdisciplinary area of shelving that is in is where this should also be -- a book that looks at Los Angeles as both a particular place and as a way to see what is happening elsewhere. It is probably more similar to Davis' _Ecology of Fear_ because it necessarily has a wider geographic scale than Los Angeles. It examines a part of the county not advertised by the Hollywood sign -- L.A. as a center of trade, its existence as an oil field, its managed conflicts with wildlife, all with the city as a center of heavy industry and a military base looming in the background.

It is nearly evenly divided into chapters about commodities (oil, bananas) and wildlife (otters, whales) and thus avoids being one of the "history of a manufactured item" books that were once popular. I think that it succeeds in being a useful look at infrastructure and ecological aspects of its politics through the lens of one of the largest ports in the US.

The above is as much of a book review as I usually write: the rest of this is going to be about some ideas that I examined through the book -- not an exhaustive look at what the book is about, but where it contributed to my particular interests in ecology and infrastructure.

The Infrastructure of Delay

The book contains a description of one of the archetypal industry/wildlife interactions in American media: seabirds covered in oil and cleaned by professionals or volunteers, with uncertain results. Chapter I: "Precariously Perched in a Port", is largely about this interaction, with bird rescuers funded by Chevron or Proctor & Gamble, descriptions of "slow violence" done to the local ecology, declining populations of birds and action taken as reaction to incidents, and (throughout the book) the general idea that ecological protection exists only insofar as it will not impede trade or military use of the port. What should people make of a building labelled the Los Angeles Oiled Bird Care and Education Center, designed to treat up to a thousand birds in a spill and run by a nonprofit with ties to both government and industry?

My first impulse would have been to describe all of this as a public relations exercise, but it is not quite that. There is an actual building with actual full-time employees doing ongoing care of actual birds. This building is part of the infrastructure of the port -- a kind of infrastructure that manages public permission for the activities of the port to go on as usual. Thinking about this was probably the most useful part of the book for my particular concerns.

What does it actually do? The answer isn't nothing, and the answer is also not "it protects birds". Actually protecting them would require taking more expensive measures to reduce oil spills and other stressors before they happen. I think that it's best thought of as an infrastructure of ecological delay. The various interventions for birds, otters, and whales are not exactly adequate, but they do make it so that populations slowly are reduced rather than vanishing all at once. It's possible that they even may work and have populations recover, which would be all to the good as far as the port is concerned -- as long as trade and industry are not interfered with. This infrastructure of delay handles an important constraint on the port: charismatic megafauna and its accompanying public involvement in politics.

"Infrastructural Vitalism": Alive or Dead?

One of the concepts that the book coins as a phrase is "infrastructural vitalism": how managers treat ports, pipelines, and freeways as alive and as living systems that must be protected. Illustrative phrases mentioned are like "the health of the nation depends on the flow of commercial goods" or "the freeway is the spine of the region." It consists of:

"[...] heavily managed, industrial infrastructure which, I argue, is stuctured by industrial logics and possesses a 'life force' of its own. I do not mean that this infrastructure literally is alive, but an animistic belief in infrastructure's life force motivates its creators and maintainers. This belief does real work in the world -- and, ironically, is often deadly for biological life." [pg. 5]

Infrastructural vitalism is an interesting concept, but I do not agree with it as described. Is it really a belief, or is it a metaphor (economic activity is full of metaphors), or an excuse? How could we prove that creators and maintainers of core industrial capacity have an animistic belief, as opposed to someone figuring out that this is a good turn of phrase to put in a newspaper article? How would the managers, if interviewed, even know whether this is an actual belief that they hold or a rationalization, not much thought about, that they heard once and adopted because they like to feel good about what they do when questioned?

But that is a negative objection and I will lay out an alternative positive model: that of a basic difference between what the public thinks of as the purpose of a profession and what that profession or role institutionally does. The classic example is policing. People think that police forces are there to catch criminals and protect the public, but in terms of both policy and actual behavior they are not: they are there to enforce public order (including "racial order") and protect wealthy people's property. Critically, you could not find this view of the police by interviewing cops, who would either actually believe in protecting the public / catching criminals or would at least say that they do.

In a similar way, the purpose of local politicians is to sell their area to capital. People think that politicians do something else, but the important parts of cities like roads and sewers and electricity are run by technocratic managers: politicians and rare appointed high-level managers handle the interface between the area and business. If selling the area to business is helped along by propounding infrastructural vitalism, that may be done, but if the public's favored metaphors change the justifications will also change, because the activity itself can not change. The port presents itself as a part of America's bloodstream, the place where software design happens presents itself as a cyberpunk landscape ("Silicon Valley"), and the Southern states dependent on cheap labor reject metaphor altogether and put up signs on the roadways telling businesses that unions are discouraged in their state, but it is all to the same end. Politicians may have to try to attract new business but an area with an already paid for infrastructural sunk cost offers a steadier line of work which generally is only given up due to some catastrophic market change.

A minor observation -- perhaps the book included this somewhere, I'm sorry if I'm only repeating it -- I think it's instructive that in this case the infrastructural vitalism is coming from the Port of Long Beach, which is administered by the City of Long Beach. The nearby port of Los Angeles is larger, but the book does not focus on it because its records are not as easy to obtain. So the Port of Long Beach is a centrally managed important piece of infrastructure which is not one of the grandfathered in Federal ones, but instead is run by a local public entity. It is therefore in the strictest sense un-American. They may have need of organic metaphors about how the place grew and demands life on its own in order to disguise this.

Infrastructuralism

The book raises the question of whether ports could become managed in a different way, under a different system, in order to actually protect ecosystems and as a kind of measurement and enforcement point for communal decisions about how we will treat products coming from elsewhere (how labor is treated where the products are from, for instance). My political commitments don't lead me to examine this idea strongly as a possible element of our system, and if our system is ever replaced I have no idea what might happen.

Instead I'm going to write a bit about my own most successful idea about the constraints of infrastructure, the clumsily named Infrastructuralism, which claims that people use whatever infrastructure is available and that infrastructural use can only be changed only by actually building-and-debuilding. This blog post predicted (at least to me) events such as the Yellow Vest protests taking down the French carbon tax, and the syndrome in the US where mothballed coal-burning power plants are bought and restarted by cryptocurrency miners. How would it apply to a port?

In many ways it's a statement about how we handle sunk costs. When an item of infrastructure is brought down by negative externalities, the business that ran it may go bankrupt, but the infrastructure often remains. Part of the system of capitalism is that these negative exernalities if they are taken into account at all are often applied to the business and are mysteriously set to zero again for a new purchaser. In addition, infrastructure that is brought down by economic forces only awaits a market upturn or a new use (see e.g. the Jevons paradox) to be turned back on again.

In this sense the sunk cost of investments made into the infrastructure of the port ensure that the port is going to continue to be used somehow, for as long as economic activity continues to increase. It will always be cheaper for someone doing some marginal use to turn things on again (the book, for example, explains how bananas were diverted back to less developed ports that had fewer investments in containerized cargo, because bananas don't use that and the less developed ports are cheaper / less crowded).

In this sense the current metaphors for infrastructure are Lovecraftian -- for instance, market as shoggoth. The port is not a living thing that must be cared for and that serves as a part of our communal body: it is the corpse-city of R'lyeh, and what has never lived can never truly die.

Saturday, May 4, 2024

Naomi's Klein's _Doppelganger_

This is a very good book about the politics of our contemporary moment, but I'm mostly going to write about where I disagree with it, since agreement amounts to a 200 character post on social media and it takes some element of disagreement to make a work worth writing about at length. I'll generally assume that people reading this have read the book or are at least familiar with its premise: Naomi Klein writes about the ongoing popular confusion between her and Naomi Wolf as if Wolf is her doppelganger, using that as a springboard to write about the whole current right-wing movement and the way that it mirrors elements of leftism.

I. Doppelgangers by Genre

Naomi Klein tries dutifully throughout the book to see the similarities between herself and Wolf in order to examine what lessons her shadow self or doppelganger might reveal. She has to overcome her natural feelings of difference to do so -- Klein prides herself on careful analysis and fact checking, while Wolf is notoriously not careful and a fabulist -- but I don't think that she really seems able to do this well.

_Doppelganger_ is cultural criticism that makes extensive use of the most blighted staple of contemporary writing, the personal anecdote. Reporters and writers never seem to grasp the difference between a scientist writing something as science and what they write, but this is a book that tries to give people a story through which they can think about current events, not some kind of social science description of them. As a poet I appreciate the use of sense words to make anecdotes memorable: there is a scene in which someone gasps that they can smell the sandalwood after meeting a far-out person who one presumably expects to be a sort of hippie but who wants unfit people to die. Is this person representative of a wider trend? People who share vaguely left values certainly feel that this person is representative. Due to the mirrored nature of our society, I could come up with a similar anecdote about how some member of any group wants all members of some other group to die. (I think that this involves Freudian death drive and its rise in our society, but that is going far from the point.)

The point is that Wolf writes books that want to convince readers about societal narratives based on flimsy evidence: so does Klein. It's possible to do this well or badly: Klein's description of why anti-vaxxing as a gateway to rightism became prevalent among "body people" (people who work on individual body improvement such as trainers, supplement providers etc.) is a brilliant set of observations that combine cultural and material analysis in a way that a pro forma "petit bourgeois are right wing" would not. But doing it well is not in some ways a large difference from doing it badly.

Am I mischaracterizing Klein's body of work? I should mention that this is the only book of hers that I've read. I heard about _No Logo_ a while after it was written and my response was an annoyed "read some Baudrillard or something, you can't escape branding by being conspicuously against branding" (something that Klein agrees with in _Doppelganger_) and when I heard about _This Changes Everything_ my response was that people who think that capitalism depends on a single commodity have had a bad run and that a green capitalism in which fossil fuels were eliminated and yet every renewable power plant and large battery array was mysteriously owned by investors so that energy was not free was perfectly possible. But I haven't read these books and I may be doing her general work a disservice.

II. What is a Usable Past?

Now I come to the more serious critique of this work. _Doppelganger_ references among much else a "usable past", an idea which I wish that leftism had never picked up on. What makes a usable past? Retelling past events in a different way to make a narrative that gives someone a foundational feeling that they can build on is something that can be done by any politics. The current right-wing narrative is full of obvious scientific and historical falsehoods such as vaccines having extreme bad effects, Great Replacement theory, and so on. Do these falsehoods make it not usable? No. A settler colonialist story has proven to be extremely usable throughout American history: people are not looking for scientific truth but instead something that justifies an elevated positional status in society.

What is Naomi Klein's politics? She doesn't forthrightly describe it at the beginning of the book, but it becomes clear that it's a fairly standard democratic socialism. That is not a usable past. Democratic socialism has died out everywhere: its advocates will of course say that it is far different from the authoritarian socialism of the USSR but others of course disagree. The USSR took over about a third of the world and then died the most ignominious death possible: not through war or civil war or even really revolution but mostly through a tired sense that no one actually supported it. State socialism survives as the authoritarian socialism of China (with its leader for life) and in various European social-democratic-influenced states whose policies are now neoliberal like any other Western state.

Klein references the core of why her politics is supposed to be preferable through the old "socialism of fools" idea. Playing on the similarity of the words conspiracy and capitalism, she writes that teaching people about capitalism gives people a real sense of how the world works, and without that they make up conspiracy theories to explain what is happening to them. I'm an anti-capitalist, so of course I'm inclined to agree, but really this doesn't reckon with the disaster that the left's attachment to Marxism and Marxist categories has been. The story of how Marxist change is supposed to happen has proven to be just as fake as the right wing conspiracist one.

Why is this? Again, I have my own ideas: surplus value has been defined by Marxists in a tautological way but in a general sense I think it's apparent that surplus value is ecological, always was, and that proles have no world historical role as such, so the whole "scientific" basis of scientific socialism is flatly wrong. Again, this is beside the point: the point is that people have been treating the "capitalism is a real, scientific description so our story is better" as an argument for leftism for a long time but the story has not worked.

III. Do the particular beliefs of leftism matter?

A strength of the book is that Klein agrees that people, even petit b, suffer in our society and seek reasons that explain their suffering and give them a potential way out. There was a very annoying recent moment on left social media where people would cite someone on the right saying or doing something racist and scornfully say that this disproved any suggestion that economic problems under liberalism led to fascism, which of course they do. The problem is that she calls on science -- a science that left usable pasts do not notably participate in -- as the measure of what makes some stories good and some not.

As an anarchist, I think that our stories are better because of moral or ethical reasons and have to be forthrightly presented that way. I see that some people find their deepest meaning in life, their greatest sense of joy and fulfillment, in being genocidaires. You can't really say that this is bad because genocide involves false beliefs, because all of our pasts involve false beliefs: it has to be because genocide is wrong.

Anarchism opposes hierarchy and therefore is more than leftist anti-capitalism: it also includes opposition to all of the failures of state socialism. In this opposition it includes racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other forms that are only uneasily theorized as related to capitalism but that leftists reject in any case, as well as some things such as democratic elections of representatives or executives, which are used to justify capitalism in contemporary states but which leftists still generally like.

Klein includes a generic appeal to the left not to be sectarian and not to tear each other down towards the end of her book. All right. But this doesn't mean that we should adopt a belief in scientism that has failed us for a century. Moral consistency and clarity does not appeal to everyone but it is a better base for a path forwards than repeating the mistakes of the past.

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Animal and plant labor, part III

Part III: Why does it matter?

Before I go on to plant labor – complete with quotes from Luke 12:27 and Buenaventura Durruti – there's the question of why any this matters. So you can describe animals as doing labor if you define your terms in a certain way: why should this matter to anyone?

It matters because the classic European leftist imaginary is all about work. It doesn't matter that newer (or older) imaginaries exist that aren't so focused on producerism: the left was dominated by Marxist ideas until the fall of the USSR, and the neoliberal era after that has suppressed any widespread adoption of anything else. For better or for worse, when many people on the left think of what defines the left, the answer has to do with the working class. Since Marxism is basically a 19^th century ideology, it has no ecological understanding, and has a false model of value in which all value comes from human work. No socialist state informed by the Marxist tradition has ever done better than capitalist states have in ecological terms.

It's not necessary to argue against Marxist ideas directly: these have more or less died out as living technical ideas for most of the population. What's left is a kind of folk Marxism. Psychologists now say that Freud was wrong about many important things: this doesn't stop generally literate people from thinking about the conscious and unconscious, the superego, ego, and id, the Freudian slip, the father complex and so on, or the more pop culture versions of these ideas like “daddy issues”. In the same way, people who adhere to class forms of the left rather than identity forms will immediately come up with ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest.

I'm one of these class-form people myself: as an anarchist, I've seen what happens when people claim leftism on the basis of identity but otherwise have a liberal politics. Neoliberalism runs on that kind of thing. So it seems to me to be imperative to re-use or recycle folk ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest into a form that can address the most important problems that we have as a civilization: our ecological limits. To do that, it becomes necessary to see animals and maybe even plants as workers, to feel solidarity, to understand that there is a common interest between them and ourselves.

This is a long-standing part of the anarchist lineage. In the Eurocentric tradition it goes back to works like Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published in 1902. As such it is nothing new, but rather represents a kind of 20^th century that should have occurred but did not, either in the capitalist west or the Marxist east. For real 21^st century ideas we'd probably do better to turn towards Indigenous anarchists. But I myself am a product of the Euro tradition, and this is all I can write about.

Monday, January 30, 2023

Animal and Plant Labor, part II

Part II. Do animals work?

When people discuss this, they generally attribute work that an animal does that's supervised by a human as something that only counts as work because a human being is directing it. So, horses pull plows, provide transport, were used in war and so on but in this view they are generally understood as tools or adjuncts to human beings who are working – as capital, in other words. Dogs do what we might call emotional labor (and assist in the hunt) in the same way. Because I don't want to argue about this, I'm not going to address labor by domesticated animals.

For wild animals, our ideas of what labor is tend to match what we do in our civilization. So, for instance, models of animal labor from the last couple of centuries involve building things: beavers and dams, spiders and webs, birds and nests, bees and honeycombs. They don't involve packs of wolves doing the work of going out on the hunt and bringing down prey, because in our civilization we no longer often go out in hunting groups as a form of work occupation. So for now I'll only write about animals who build. The immediate objection is that animals are doing this instinctively, while we think about it, so our activity counts as work and theirs doesn't.

I suggest that this is not as large or as binary a difference as some people believe. To start with, Taylorized forms of human work have been developed that involve human beings doing simple, repetitive motions over and over on an assembly line: no one doubts that they are working, even though any opportunity for thought has been purposefully excluded. But this would be answered that human adaptability can be used to have people do repetitive motions that are not instinctual, but instead changeable and appropriate to the situation – of earning pay via wage labor, in this case. That leads me to my main argument, which is that both humans and other animals find their opportunities for routine work limited by their environment.

You can't define work as something that only geniuses or extraordinary individuals do. For most of us, it's limited by what is available: beavers build dams based on the wood that grows nearby, birds use leaves or human litter, bees build into the confines whatever hollow exists. Humans have extraordinary capability for language, culture, and the development of technology, and this creates a social environment that acts much like their physical environment. When beavers go into a new region, you'll see beaver dams appear: when humans do, you'll see characteristic human structures as defined by the physical resources available, their culture, and their technology.

I don't expect everyone to be convinced by this, although at least we are past the days in Europe when animals were considered to be a kind of machine. People these days at least consider that animals have emotions, feelings, and (in some cases) tool and language use, or a form of creativity. At any rate, I will consider labor to be strenuous, purposeful activity that a living thing does in order to live. By this measure, animals do work.

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Animal and Plant Labor, part 1

"Air, virgin soil, and natural meadows are not static piles of things lying in bins. They are the result of ecological processes, which means that they are the result of unremitting labor. It's just animal and plant labor rather than human labor."

In what sense do animals and plants do labor? People have talked about the first but generally only as an adjunct to human labor, and very rarely conceive of the second. I'm interested in this as part of a questioning or re-centering of the fundamental ideas of leftist thought, which are still based on Marx's writing as folk ideas.

I wrote a number of Twitter threads about this during the years in which I was on Twitter: I'm going to see whether I can rewrite them as a somewhat more coherent set of blog / Mastodon posts. They never would have been written at all without the sense that someone was reading and replying to them.

Monday, May 31, 2021

global warming activism II (a poem)

black-swooping over a land of no ice

I will reincarnate as a corvid

(don't know what kind nature will provide)

I will fly and see your body lying bloated

I will alight and eat your eyes

in compassion I will feed and they will be gone

no one will ever again see as you did

did you hide in a bunkered place?

that lasted you for years the door too thick for pounding

then you died and got thrown out,

a body will smell up a dead place fast

and there it lies outside

nothing particular about eyes

just easiest to pull out, skin is tougher

did you die innocent outside?

poor soul none of us are innocent

you scrabbled then your kids killed you

after all you cursed their lives first

and they left you uncovered

nothing particular really about how we see

all of us saw the world the same way

only one life is pledged though

being a corvid doesn't seem bad

but only one life to remove this way of seeing

then go on and let it go, let it rot in the heat

and fly and see something else at last

Friday, October 20, 2017

A bit more on left theses

Back in July, Bruce Wilder wrote a comment in reply to the post below. I wrote an answer which promptly and discouragingly got lost, but I'll write a bit more now, as well as some replies to other comments.

First, on fatuousness. Ideology is supposed to be more or less fatuous. What we need now is a system of belief that is actually widely believed: I wrote it as an outline because I think that those are the major elements that are required. Going into too much justification doesn't help. The "predictably produces" bit wasn't meant to be a claim of historical inevitability, only an observation that whatever supposedly differing choices are being made in different places now are leading to the same outcome everywhere.

The main point I'd make in reply is that ecological value can't really be our gold, because it's not tradable or exchangeable. Human work can not replace or make up for ecological work. If the reports of 75% of insect biomass going away are accurate and represent a widespread rather than local effect, there's no way we can work to make up for that, no way we can say that we'll exchange lower insect biomass for greater something else. We can try to stop doing whatever we're doing that's causing that effect, but that isn't an exchange: it's us trying to get out of the way of a disaster. Even in less fraught circumstances, you can't do things like say that we'll make up for taking more from an ecosystem over here by taking less over there: ecosystems don't generally work that way.

Money does loosely coordinate over scale, but that mechanism is exactly one of the things we should give up. The coordination is not very loose, as evidenced by the observation that we're in a world-system that is producing the same results everywhere despite local differences.

What would coordinate? Culture, essentially. The post below has a heading for "Societal values" where I was going to write something about how you can't very well have an anarchistic system (which this would be) unless people widely believe in it. The chicken-and-egg problem of how this would come about is best handled elsewhere, but cultural values are coordination over large distances.

Lastly there was another comment about how the left is based on universalist grounds... I don't see what can be more universal than the fact that we all live on and depend on a single planet whose systems are increasingly stressed by all of us. That is why US style "libertarianism" -- not liberators socialism, but the right-wing version -- is so attracted to science fictional dreams. Elon Musk describes his position as "I'm somewhere in the middle, socially liberal and fiscally conservative" and so can be taken as a representative of a type, and he would like Mars colonies. Why? Because that really is the only way to separate oneself from the universal community at this point.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Theses towards a left ideology

It's common, on the left, to talk about historical materialism without acknowledging that the primary theories that the left uses have no connection to our contemporary era or its material conditions. Here are my best ideas to correct that.

1. Ecological value

a) The primary constraint on human economics is the production of ecological value: powered primarily through solar energy and processed through biomass.

b) Ecological processes are what create and maintain our air, water, and food. They can not be replaced by human labor. They are not "natural resources" but products of cycles with limited replacement times and limited surpluses.

c) All human value depends, in the end, on ecological value. We can't live without it, and no human labor can take place without it.

d) The primary surplus that capitalism, as well as state capitalism, feeds on and appropriates and changes into human value is ecological surplus.

e) No future left ideology can succeed unless it internalizes the maintenance of ecological value as an ideal and constraint

2. Democracy and scale

a) Representative democracy is the primary reproductive and maintenance mode of late capitalism. It predictably produces the exact results that we see around us now.

b) Large state structures run non-democratically also predictably produce those same results, but with extra misery. Even idealized, democratic left states would make popular decisions that, when averaged over millions of people, are predictably bad. See "ecological value" above, but also racism, xenophobia etc.

c) The best way of making decisions is to limit the decisions to the people closely or strongly affected by them. Large-scale decisions have to be minimized.

d) What scale counts as small? From the beginning of the Western political tradition, we know that even city-states are too large. Probably best is groups of less than 100 people.

e) The anarchist idea of confederalism is an attempt at small-scale democracy with some degree of large-scale coordination. The main element of what needs to be coordinated is built infrastructure, which is the main limit on what people can do.

3. Work and money

a) Human labor is no longer a limiting factor of production. We have more than we need, and there is no particular power in withholding it.

b) All attempts to call on person power as worker power are going to fail, and fail counterproductively, in part because being a prole is now a social identity that puts someone a step up from the class of lumpenproles, and more and more of us are lumpenproles. These two classes have different interests and can no more naturally cooperate than elites and proles do.

c) For this reason a social revolution requires devaluing work. We don't need everyone to do it: most of it is useless or ecologically harmful. Wage labor should be phased out through shortened workweeks until it disappears: people who believe in the value of work can do it, with most necessities provided through automation.

d) In a world where necessities can be provided to everyone, there is no reason to use money. Money only results in ridiculous situations like less than 20 people having half of the world's amount of it. Let's abolish it and educate people not to replace it with a new money system.

e) Without money, there is no real reason to forbid people from doing whatever kind of economic activity they want to do. If they pile up a big pile of some kind of valuable material, someone will eventually take it, and non-violently taking something that someone can't possibly use should not be a crime.

4. Societal values (in progress)

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Eyeroller: a short comedy in three acts

I haven't been blogging much lately: I've been Tweeting. But given the recent back-and-forth over the NY Magazine climate change article and the instant suggestions about individual volunteerism e.g. that people should have fewer kids if they want to do something, I think it's time to repost this short play. (Originally from Crooked Timber comments.)

EYEROLLER: A short comedy in three acts

Act I:

FIRST PERSON: “I put solar panels on my roof. That cost a lot! Why are people always scolding people for not doing more? They should encourage them instead.”

EYEROLLER: “Micro-decisions about personal consumption or production will have no real effect, even en masse. The only purpose in talking about them is to give people something useless to do so that they can feel like they’re doing something.”

SECOND PERSON: “Of course you should tell people to put solar panels on roofs. That pressures the “market signals” to expand production and to further innovation, encourages politicians to get on board, etc., among other complex responses.”

EYEROLLER: “OK.. If we’re going to talk about complex responses and signals, let’s talk about what other signals the act of putting solar panels on your roof sends. It says that you’re interested in volunteerism, not collective action: it tells the market that you want middle-class equipment, not large-scale equipment.”

THIRD PERSON: “What? That’s unworthy. How could you say that putting up solar panels makes things worse?”

EYEROLLER: “Well, it might, and anyways if people invest in personal middle class solutions, they’re not going to want to also invest in community solutions.”

FORUTH PERSON: “Wait. Did you just say that I should have spent my money on the poor rather than putting solar panels up?”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)

Act II

EYEROLLER: “We’re stuck inside a neoliberal system within which all messages get turned into messages about personal consumption and personal virtue based on consumption, even if they weren’t intended that way. It becomes impossible to say anything about incentive structures without this being interpreted as whether personal decisions are good or bad, or anything about whether putting solar panels up or not is really a good idea overall without this being interpreted as a personal attack on people who put up solar panels.”

FIFTH PERSON: “You described reducing overall energy use as a kind of Puritanism, but we need to reduce overall energy use so what’s wrong with using Puritanism to do that? It mobilizes certain limbic system anchors for collective social behaviors you need, like the appeal of common sacrifice as a form of civic action and the kind of righteousness you need for altruistic punishment of deviants.”

(EYEROLLER looks disconcerted.)

EYEROLLER: “Puritanism and its focus on individual virtue is part of this, yes. Are you sure that’s a good idea? Once you start mobilizing limbic system anchors for righteousness to punish deviants, it’s pretty difficult to control –“

THIRD PERSON: “Are you saying I’m a goody-goody? I want you to apologize.”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)

Act III

EYEROLLER: “One more time. You can reach a kind of limiting case in which certain messages become literally unintelligible. Even if someone starts out thinking that they are doing public health work, how is the public going to interpret that? The public is going to see it as another opportunity for personal status competition–“

THIRD PERSON: “Are you trying to trash my reputation?”

EYEROLLER: “– everything comes back to a discussion of personal virtue and who has it, personal decisions and whether those are moral decisions –“

SECOND PERSON: “So you’re saying that people who put up solar panels are just motivated by feelings of moral superiority?”

EYEROLLER: “– and any kind of system critique can only be heard as personal critique — “

THIRD PERSON: “I have an orientation to public health in my work, and certainly that would never turn into just sanctioning people who didn’t agree with the program! Now talk about this how I want you to or I’ll tell the moderators on you.”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes, but has a muscle spasm part way through, eyes pointing in different directions.)

EYEROLLER (in Captain Kirk tones): “FACE… FROZEN! Can’t stop … rolling eyes! CAN’T! STOP! ROLLING! EYES!”

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Geographical base of US protest

The fixation on social media obscures this, but protest in the US is strongly geographically linked. Other than the rare international meetings or major political conventions that activist networks make an effort to bring people to from a wide area, the kind of horizontalist movements that are the main mode of contemporary protest rely on people who don't have to travel a long distance. Even something like the NoDAPL Sacred Stone Camp, which attracts people from far away, is organized around a base of indigenous people who live there.

The airport protests around the Muslim Ban are a case in point. They sprung up quickly, without much leadership. This type of protest is made to order for the left, because large international airports tend to be located near large cities. Just as Occupy started with Occupy Wall St., the airport protests seem to have started at JFK. And the largest ones are near instantly recognizable left strongholds.

I looked at a list of large international airports in the US, and there are about 30 of them. I tried to match them to a reported list of airport protests. There are three large cities -- NYC, DC, and Chicago -- that seem to have an under-protested airport because they have two large airports each and protests focussed on one of them. But otherwise, my impression is that the area with a number of large airports that isn't reliably blue enough to have large protests is Florida.

The geographic base of protests has good elements and bad. It makes it easy for horizontally organized protest to start in NYC. It makes it difficult for protest to spread to the areas of the country that most need it. It means that left-leaning areas can get a lot of media, but makes them less aware of the attitudes of people elsewhere.

But the major problem is that it represents a vulnerability. As with OWS, when a protest in NYC gets repressed, the penumbra goes away -- people outside don't have the ability to sustain a national or international movement. That's something that people have to think about.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

About #theresistance

There's a Twitter hashtag / meme / whatever: "#theresistance". At first glance it appears, mostly, to be a vehicle for ex-GOP current Dem people like Frum and Brock to continue to try to keep influential positions by making the alternative to Trump be a neocon one, using the techniques of manufactured outrage that doesn't go anywhere that they learned in the GOP.

But there are some people with similar ideas who are well-meaning and sincere. For instance, here is an article by B Sales-Lee: Keep Calm and Protect Democracy. It has the characteristic combination of two assumptions (or, in this case, what are presented as the professional judgements of a historian): 1) we're close to fascism, or at least close to authoritarian martial law; 2) we best prevent this in the short term by being calm and not breaking the rules. Further characteristics not present in the Sales-Lee article are that the goal of this resistance to fascism is implicitly or explicitly to put things back to how they were, back to "functioning democracy" and "functioning government" and generally back to the neoliberal order as it was under Obama, either because this is good in itself or because it is a lesser evil way station on the way to better things.

I have my doubts about whether Trump is really going to lead us to authoritarian martial law or fascism or however you'd like to describe it. He's a very unpopular and in many ways standard GOP politician, promising to do many of the things that Reagan promised and could not do. As Corey Robin has been writing, it's quite conceivable that plain political opposition will stop him. #theopposition doesn't have the glamour of #theresistance, of course.

But let's say he is. People are then taking the position that fascism is fast approaching and that we'd better be polite about it. This I just don't understand. It only works if you can get everyone to be polite, but of course you can't, so it predictably ends up with liberals as the "peace police": enforcing their standard of behavior on others and finally turning them in to the police or not supporting them when arrested in order to save us from fascism. (B. Sales-Lee, I should note, isn't a liberal, but rather a pacifist socialist.)

I really don't have a problem with the center-left saying that Trump is a very bad GOP pol and that we have to oppose him through normal political methods. There are always some people playing the "inside game" in politics, and that's their role. But if that's really what they are going to do, they should stop presenting themselves as resisting imminent fascism, because they aren't. Or if they do really think there's imminent fascism, then they have to recognize that this will in most people's minds demand actions that they aren't comfortable with. I think that a lot of the lower-level #theresistance talk is from people who are realizing that the Democratic party will not do even ordinary political opposition, so they are trying to ramp up expectations rhetorically.

There is one thing, though -- actual resistance is dangerous. I don't see why anyone should do it if the goal is to, explicitly or implicitly, return to the neoliberal order. That same order created the conditions that made Trump possible as a political leader in the first place, and if we return to it, those conditions will return and we'll get a worse Trump. An actual resistance has to be based around shared values that would not lead to a return to that order. Until people in the center-left are ready to treat the left as serious interlocutors rather than as encumbrances on the way towards putting everything back as it was, those shared values are impossible to work out.

ETA --

Tally of the day

3/4 of National Mall empty, in part due to checkpoint blockades

1 limo burned

1 Nazi leader punched (didn't want to embed the GIF, you can find it easily enough)

0 declarations of martial law

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

The Buzzfeed leaked document

Buzzfeed has leaked the dossier on Trump supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence person for election opposition research purposes. This document is apparently the ur-source of all of the claims that Russians have compromising material on Trump, that he is a Russian agent, etc. -- the David Corn article, the Reid letter, the supposed FBI investigation, etc. There's just one basic problem with this dossier. Anyone who reads it, rather than summarizing its contents, has to realize that it's crazy. It's not just "unverified" or "unsubstantiated" or "contains errors" or whatever the latest weasel words are: it's kook-conspiratorial and I defy anyone to read through it without laughing, preserving their sense of its credibility to the end. If, as Buzzfeed claims, this is the document that everyone has been looking at, then the system is full of credulous fools.

Here are some of the assertions in the document:

* That the Kremlin has been feeding Trump intelligence on his opponents, including HRC, for years. (Who were his opponents for the years before he even decided to run?) And offering him deniable bribes as real estate deals. But he apparently never used any of this information or took any of these deals.

* People don't go into details of the "golden showers" thing, because they are so ridiculous. The core compromising material that the Kremlin is supposed to have on Trump is that he specifically stayed in a Presidential suite at a hotel because Obama had stayed there and because he disliked Obama, and then defiled it by hiring prostitutes to perform a golden shower show in it (which the Russians secretly videoed). In other words, it wasn't even that he just secretly liked this fetish, it was supposed to be also that he was insulting Obama.

* Trump was supposed to be actively participating in gathering intelligence for the Russians by reporting back on the activities of the families of Russian oligarchs living in the US. Just imagine this for a minute.

* Trump also participated by hiring his own hackers, in addition to the Russian hackers, and by having moles in the DNC. Trump's known associates (his lawyer, etc.) are supposed to have had multiple, personal meetings with Russian agents in Europe. One doc in the dossier is titled "Further Details of Secret Dialogue Between Trump Campaign Team, Kremlin, and Assorted Hackers in Prague".

* Trump's team is "happy to have Russia as media bogeyman to mask more extensive corrupt ties to China"

* There are various tells, within the document, that it comes from a kook right-wing source. It's anti-Semitic -- one assertion is that the FSB is approaching "US citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin" as agents, rather than just any citizen of Russian origin. It says that the Russians are also supporting Jill Stein and *Lyndon LaRouche*.

That last bit is a telling detail. Lyndon LaRouche is utterly irrelevant, and the only people who tend to mention him out of the blue are LaRouchites. LaRouchites have a core skill in making up long tracts about how various world leaders are conspiring and having lurid sex with each other, and they're fascinated with Russia. My best guess is that some LaRouchite wrote this and it's since been circulated by people who know it's BS but want it out there anyways.

The document is full of specific claims, such as that a named lawyer went to Prague for secret meetings in a specific month. The lawyer, of course, denies having ever been to Prague. It is completely not credible that our surveillance agencies, the greatest panopticon ever invented, can simply not corroborate this assertion rather than proving or disproving it.

Laughing at Trump is fine. Actually believing in this stuff isn't, not if you expect people to believe in actual scandals about Trump.

Friday, December 30, 2016

Protest (III)

I wrote a previous post with a few notes about a FEMA training manual for police that Unicorn Riot turned up. Here are a few notes about another, older one (from 2008):

From here:

"Last week, after filing a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request, Unicorn Riot received a heavily redacted copy of the Denver Police Crowd Control Manual. Most sections of the manual relevant to the policing of protests (our primary interest) were redacted. One redaction was 15 pages long!
Since then, an anonymous source provided Unicorn Riot with an unredacted copy of the manual. This version is dated May 2008, while the redacted version via CORA request is dated October 2011."

This one doesn't have as much useful information as the FEMA one, but there are a few points of interest. From the "Denver Police Department Crowd Management Matrix":

* If you use passive resistance (towards police), i.e. going limp or remaining in a prone position, it is official policy that police are justified in using pain compliance techniques against you. What these are is not spelled out -- a strange or perhaps not so strange omission in a document that spells out a lot of other things. But basically, if you go limp, police are authorized to torture you into compliance by causing pain to move you along.

* If you use "Defensive resistance" (towards police), i.e. actions that do not attempt to harm an officer but instead are actions like attempting to flee, police are authorized to shoot you with a pepper ball. Additional text helpfully explains that people can be shot with pepper balls if they have climbed up trees, walls, signs etc. to get them to come down "when their elevated position or actions pose a threat to the field force".

* If someone is passively resisting, police aren't supposed to hit them with batons. They can use batons in "escort techniques" i.e. come-alongs. That isn't even considered to be a use of force and doesn't even trigger the paperwork of having to fill out a use of force report.

* There are the usual mentions of Shadow Teams to pick people out of crowds and of Cut Teams, which are groups of police specifically trained in how to cut peaceful protestors out of devices where they chain themselves to things or to each other in order to block something. People usually think of specialized police training as being in detective work or in how to handle various kinds of violent criminals, but some of it is in how to make people move along more quickly because they are in some business's way (complete with the above mentioned pain compliance).

This is the reality of peaceful protest in America, long before Donald Trump.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Partisanship is no substitute for values

Today, Obama wrote in an official statement that "All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions." That is what Obama ran on, after all, hope and change and universal alarm.

It goes without saying that Russian interference -- if Russia was indeed behind the DNC hacks, which is far from proven -- amounted to releasing true but embarrassing Emails. Unauthorized journalism, in other words.

Since the election, the American center-left has shown itself as completely incapable of resistance to anything. Resistance requires integrity and solidarity and the guidance of strongly held values. There is no left value that says that embarrassing Emails from politicians should not be released. On the contrary, there are -- or should be -- strong left values against mindless war fever and unthinking trust in the security apparatus, and in favor of openness in the political process. Imagine that the Russians were responsible for the hacks. OK, then what? What kind of left idea says that the response should be escalation, tough-guy posturing, and ratcheting up tensions with a nuclear power that we have no essential grievance with? Defense of American institutions, even when those institutions are corrupt? Because the DNC certainly was corrupt: it used the Hillary Victory Fund among other means to slant the primary in favor of one candidate (thereby hurting the party in the general election). Should we retrospectively condemn Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers and harming America's defense forces?

Partisanship can not substitute for having some kind of basic idea -- both for oneself and for simple communication with others -- about what you do and don't support. The left can not be the party of trust-the-CIA and war posturing when that is convenient. The whole concept is sickening and should shame any putative center-left person who once mumbled something about what a shame it was, what the US did in Central America. Death squads then, trust now, all because of an election that the left legitimately lost according to the completely ridiculous but fixed rules of the US political process.

Since then the center-left has done almost everything that it accused the right of. Not accepting the election results and attempting to overturn the election with the "Hamilton Electors" foolishness. Believing in every fake news story that flatters their preconceptions. Accusing journalists of being Russian agents if they write non-approved stories. Allowing their party to be taken over by grifters (most of them ex-Republicans looking for easy pickings) who tell them whatever they want to hear. The main difference is that the center-left is ineffectual and when it does these things that doesn't even bring any results.

Both central American parties and tendencies are tottering, hollowed out and ready to collapse. What's going to come next? Something from the margins, from people who have the courage of their convictions, good or bad.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Anonymous sources are more credible than named ones

I'm doing some eldercare this week, so NPR has been on. A day or so back there was an earnest interview with someone who said that unnamed sources in the CIA assured them that Russia had interfered in the US election. Today there was a followup. They had gotten some kind of listener feedback about anonymous sources so they brought people back to say that all was well. We were given a kind of child's first reader of CIA reporting.

The text for this is probably up on the Internet somewhere, so someone who cares can impeach my memory. But what I remember being told is:

* Reporters assess anonymous sources carefully for why they are saying what they are saying (institutional interests, etc.)

* We should actually trust anonymous sources more than named sources (!). Whenever we hear a reporter citing an anonymous source from an intelligence service, that means that the reporter has done the utmost checking on whether the person is credible, has knowledge, and has a good reason to tell us

* Pretty much all reporting from intelligence services is from anonymous sources, because one of their rules is that they are not supposed to talk to reporters

* In fact, they take periodic polygraph tests where they are asked whether they have talked to reporters. The interviewer mused that anonymous sources must have to lie and hope that they pass the polygraph.

This is ridiculous, and no one who thinks about it for two minutes could not find it ridiculous. If everyone is given periodic polygraph tests where they are asked whether they have talked to reporters, then polygraph tests must not work. I find that pretty believable that they don't work well at all, but security services keep using them. Is it really credible that all of these "leaks" that favor the CIA's favored story really are from truth-tellers half-assedly hoping that they pass their next polygraph?

There's a much more credible story. All of these "leaks" -- the only things that reporters get -- are officially authorized leaks meant to tell a story that the CIA wants to be told. The people doing the leaking don't have to fear their next polygraph, because they were told to leak the information to the reporter. The reporters have every motive to play along, because if they don't, they don't get any news from this beat at all.

It's self-serving twaddle all around: from the CIA, from the reporters, from the listeners who want to believe the latest story that flatters their prejudices.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

First they came for Boeing

In between choosing supervillain names for members of his cabinet, Trump sends out tweets. One of these read "Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!"

All of the implicit claims in this tweet are pretty much true. Air Force One is more than one plane, and the project really is projected to cost something like $4 billion. It's also probably true that Trump tweeted this because the CEO of Boeing said something mean about him -- as far as I can tell, it was something in support of the TPP.

So cue all sorts of approach-of-fascism, this-is-the-end things from the center left. Trump was "tearing up a contract". (Well, actually, no. The President saying that a contract should be cancelled does not cancel the contract.) He tanked Boeing's stock and should be sued for that. (The stock was back to its previous value by the end of the day.) He was deluding his brainless followers, who wouldn't even check the blatant lies in his tweet. (Actually, of course, the people who were saying that the tweet was crazy hadn't checked for themselves at all.) He was calling the whole capitalist system into question by thuggishly pressuring a company using the leverage of government contracts.

Boeing is the second largest defense contractor in the world. It's the military-industrial complex. I was unaware that being on the left meant defending the sanctity of contract for big military business, or defending stock prices, or that we should leap to defend the TPP because Trump is against it. Pity poor Boeing's lobbyists who are being silenced as they try to speak truth to power! Of course Trump and Boeing patched this up in short order.

Trump's next target (there's probably going to be one every couple of days) was Chuck Jones, a Steelworkers union leader, and that was bad for Chuck Jones who got a lot of threatening phone calls from Trump supporters, but at least this Trump target was a) a person, not a giant corporation, b) telling the truth, not speaking out for the TPP, c) one of a group that is a traditional first target of the right and that people really should support.

That lasted a little while. Then Trump attacked the most important target ever, apparently: the CIA. And the reaction was "how dare he attack the CIA". Pity the poor deep state! They only want to speak the truth, which they have tortured out of a succession of innocent black site prisoners. They could not possibly be lying about nebulous evidence of Russian involvement in releasing DNC Emails. And how dare a foreign country interfere in some other country's election. The CIA's entire history shows that they are the guardians who stand strongly against that.

I know that I've written this a lot, but there is no anti-Trump alliance. The center left or whatever you want to call it does not share the left's values: they are motivated strictly by partisanship, and will instantly throw the left overboard as soon as they return to power or really whenever it's convenient, such as when they think they'll get a better deal out of Trump. They won't support us: they won't defend us: they don't even really want anything from us or have any use for us. They won't even defend their own voters or their own base. That's the first and most salient fact about the Trump era.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

The twilight of neoliberalism (II): the free trade bait and switch

The support of mainstream economists (think, say, Brad DeLong or Larry Summers) for free trade agreements goes something like this:

1. Economists say that free trade mathematically helps everyone -- makes everyone richer.

2. But if hurts certain sub-populations within countries who work in certain industries. Center-left economists will then say that the "losers" of globalization or free trade should be compensated, helped or supported in some way.

3. But this hardly ever actually happens. Even though it doesn't happen, economists continue to call for free trade.

4. The losers of free trade revolt at the ballot box.

Why does it work this way? "Free trade" agreements are not simply agreements that countries will hold down tariffs. They are bundled in with all sorts of items that favor global elites and the global financial system: intellectual property, restrictions on regulation, restrictions on support of national industries. They are a vehicle for the managerial/professional class, negotiated in secret and without public input. These elites never will spend money on compensating the losers of free trade. For them to do so, these agreements would have to arise from popular politics, the product of organizations that would demand that vulnerable segments of the public not lose out. That is not the class background or ideology that produces free trade agreements, and that is not the power that backs them.

Mainstream economists have a dual function (or perhaps a singular function) as the ideologues of the global managerial class. That is why they will never cease supporting free trade even as the compensation of losers that they say should happen never does.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

The twilight of neoliberalism

As one European country after another falls to right-wing populism, people in the U.S. should stop treating Trump as if he is a total outlier, or thinking that his supporters are a peculiarly American phenomenon. The election was very close, and I'm not writing that the result was preordained, but that something larger than U.S. politics is going on. If you accept that all of these elections are part of an international pattern, you have to explain them in large part as due to some international cause. And that brings us back to neoliberalism. I don't think it's credible that all of these countries turned more nativist at the same time as part of some cultural syndrome unrelated to a world system that features austerity and ever increasing capture of wealth by elites.

I agree with a lot of this article by Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, but I'm even more interested in what Ian Welsh has to say about it. Ian Welsh has, for a while, been making the very simple point that people will not put up with neoliberalism indefinitely and if the left can't stop it, people will turn to the right.

There is no mass base for neoliberalism, no group of people beyond perhaps a couple of percent of any population who really want free trade agreements, austerity, privatization, monetization, and all the rest. Neoliberalism depended on there being no alternative, and now that it appears that there is an alternative it's starting to come crashing down everywhere. The alternative isn't a left alternative, because the left was destroyed by the failure of left statisms. The right-wing alternative that is emerging is going to be worse than neoliberalism, but that always was a predicted problem with neoliberalism, because neoliberalism can't solve certain problems and always was unstable.

The first article linked above talks about coalitions and movements coming together. I hope so, but from my American vantage point the most salient fact about recent history is that when left movements spring up, they are destroyed by police. And the role of theory is not so easily replaced by evolutionary praxis. The strength of state repression requires horizontalism in organizing, but horizontalism in turn requires some kind of widespread basic understanding of common purpose. The last American election revolved on the center-left around a deliberate attempt to discredit leftists as racist or sexist (the whole Bernie Bro trope, cynically created by the HRC camp) and on a larger scale the left has never really fully incorporated ecological value into its basic economics, or (from my point of view) incorporated an anarchist critique.

No one really knows what will emerge from this era. But I think that it's time for people to stop trying to put everything back just as it was. Like it or not, I think that neoliberalism is not simply the natural center-left and waiting to return in the next electoral cycle.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

The horrible politics of Recount 2016 scolding

Jill Stein and the Green Party have embarked on an effort, Recount 2016, to recount the Presidential votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. As of yesterday, they'd raised more than $6 million in small donations, and are on track to raise about twice what they raised in the campaign itself. And predictably, this effort has been greeted by a wave of scolding. I'll take this article by bmaz as the reference case, although as another example Rich Yeselson tweeted about how the recount effort was a scam or "mass grifting". From the bmaz post: the effort is "folly", "cynical", "a crass vanity project at the last second by a bit player glomming on for self promotion". John Cole is shorter: grifter, idiot, or attention seeking diva.

Before I describe why this is probably the worst possible reaction, I'll clarify a few things: I don't expect the recount effort to find any evidence of hacking, and I don't expect it to change the results of the election in any way. The most likely direct effect is a shift of a few hundred votes, although there is a small chance of a major scandal of some kind which I'll address below. So why is this kind of scolding bad?

1. Democratic Party won't fight for you

It's clear that this recount is being funded by money from Democratic Party small donors, not Green Party ones -- given that the amount raised in the actual election was much smaller. So they want to continue to fight. What is everyone saying about the coming age of Trump and possible neo-fascism? Don't give in, don't preemptively surrender, don't normalize, resist. OK, so why isn't the Democratic Party doing this? They are doing what they always do, which is to preemptively give in. Why aren't they supporting what their base wants to do?

The answer to this is presumably that this is a bad fight because it's doomed to failure. But that's a horrible political lesson even if it's realistic. Resistance to a more powerful opponent (i.e. one with the Presidency, Senate, House and SC) means that you resist whenever and wherever you can. And it isn't doomed to failure: there's a small but significant chance of some kind of scandal that will get turned up, because when people look at American election machinery in depth, it's badly maintained.

The second answer is that we *shouldn't* want this scandal to be turned up -- that we have to defend the legitimacy of American elections. Why? I'm an anarchist so maybe I'm constitutionally incapable of understanding this, but we just had an election won by the popular vote loser, with extensive voter suppression efforts. Maybe people shouldn't be told that they have to believe in the system as it is?

2. Technocratic lectures are just what we need right now

Foolish donor base, wasting your money on efforts that will fail because of complicated election law issues that you can't begin to understand! Don't you know that the experts know better? Get back in your box.

3. Insulting your way into an alliance

Now it's time for all of us to come together against Trump, so you leftists are fools / scammers / grifters / vanity cases. That lecture may have had some success against susceptible people back when you were selling the Democratic Party as the lesser evil, but guess what you lost big. If you're going to lose, you have no value as the lesser evil.

There's a big difference between a scam and a foolish project. One that you haven't observed, so why should people listen to you when you say that Trump is scamming? By the way, it is perfectly fine for the Green Party to promote themselves as political actors through activities like this: they are not your adjunct.

4. Blaming people for their marginalization

It's common knowledge that the Democratic and Republican parties have cooperated to make it very difficult for third parties in the American system. Most of the barriers are unheard of in almost any other advanced democracy. So now that you've helped to ensure that the Green Party is marginal, you're blaming them for not having the best election law experts and not being entirely up to speed on the mechanics involved. OK, why is that? The Democratic Party could have done this if they'd wanted to, with all of the expertise that they have.

5. The left /liberal alliance, redux

What, exactly, do people want this supposed alliance to do? What role is the left supposed to have? However you define the left as opposed to the center-left, it's numerically very small in America. The natural role would seem to be protest leadership and radical resistance in general: as the post below mentions, the tiny number of anarchists in America are encountered by police as 1/3 of their 3-part categorization of protestors.

But protest for what, and resistance for what? If it's to return neoliberalism to power, then no thanks! Serious protest is dangerous under Obama and will remain so or become more so under Trump. Are liberals going to support and defend protestors? Of course not. People can already hear the first rumblings of "they're too impolite, they have to not challenge American institutions".

So the message now is back off, crazy scamming vanity-driven hippies, we've got this. Is that really what you want to go with?