7 ms·

"We only have hours"? What are we supposed to do in those hours? Make phone calls that won't get through? Tweet? Forget it. Senators and congressmen don't fear

"We only have hours"? What are we supposed to do in those hours? Make phone calls that won't get through? Tweet? Forget it. Senators and congressmen don't fear their constituents so they're not going to listen to their constituents.

logfromblammo 9y ago
We may only have hours left to watch elected representation completely ignore the welfare of the electorate again, but we probably still have months left to choose who exactly it is that we will be shoving up against the wall when the revolution comes. At this point, when they obviously don't fear losing their office, they need to fear something else. If you can't bring yourself to do physical violence, you can maybe plan out some property crimes. Keying cars and slashing tires is a traditional method of expressing anger against specific individuals, and those types of crimes are infrequently investigated, and even more rarely solved--at least when the insignificant people are the victims. When the catalytic converter was stolen off the bottom of my car, I never even saw a cop; I had to fill out the report myself, and the police apparently never actually did anything about it. Why should they, after all? They aren't working for us. Why not give them something to do for their real bosses? Watching C-SPAN last night, the shouting and chanting did nothing. There was no effect at all. The sergeant-at-arms will restore order in the gallery, and we will continue to pretend that those people don't matter. The sit-ins have done nothing. The communications campaigns had no effect. More of the same will yield more of the same. Try something different.
- macawfish 9y ago
  I get that you're angry. That's totally valid. I'm also angry and also have violent fantasies. I'm certain that everyone does, its a psychology fact. But why not channel your destructive urges into dismantling internalized oppression? The ways that you and I go about maintaining these very structures we are each so angry about? I'm a musician. I once played at a fancy downtown club that took my band's working/middle class crowd for granted. They had two shows every night: an early set with very expensive tickets and international artists, and a late night set with local artists and cheap tickets. They once made our audience... Hundreds of people... wait for an two hours, standing in the lobby, on valentines evening, because a bunch of drunk rich people had paid $150/ea for an earlier show, and they didn't have the guts to tell them to leave after it was over. We didn't get to sound check. I didn't get a monitor. Our friends and family waited for two hours to hear us play. We had to cut our set in half. After that I refused to play there anymore. This was a regular place at the time, but I told my friends that I was done, and explained myself. I loved the staff there. The sound was amazing. They had great food and lighting and all that. But I was tired of the management's priorities. They willingly engaged in segregating our communities to squeeze out the money. They weren't curating, they were leaching. I was over it. Know what happened? Not much at first. People kept asking me to play there. I said "nope, I'm done". Two years later, hardly anyone I know plays there ever. My little stand made a real difference. There are other venues in town that have been similarly 86'd by a few trusted leaders in the community. It makes space for new ways of doing things to let go of an old, tired staple. Why not find something like that in your life that you can do to take a stand?
  - hbt 9y ago
    Violence is a proven effective tool and it is used as a last resort (to be considered justified). There is no denying people are feeling powerless and not represented. Your method of protesting doesn't work if you care about the national debt, quantitative easing, inflation, interest rates, crony capitalism, the rent economy, the value of your money growing worthless day by day while the cost of living is artificially getting higher despite technological advances. What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote? They keep pushing people into a corner and expecting us to submit. Technological innovation (e.g cryptocurrencies, encrypted wallets, globalisation etc.) and violence are the only tools we have to fight back. Any other system (e.g voting) has been gamed to serve their interest or rendered useless (e.g protesting but don't be inconvenient) Don't get me wrong, your vote still counts (in non gerrymandered districts) and I'm sure you can voice your opinion on gay marriage; but the stuff that actually matters, you are voiceless and expected to obey or die.
    - macawfish 9y ago
      Proven effective? To what end? And what kind of violence? Also, b.t.w., I'm not trying to judge you if you think violence is effective. I'm just convinced that it's actually self-sabotaging in the long run. The actions I'm describing are violent, but not in the war-mongerer's way. They're violent in the same sense that Slavoj Žižek (regardless of your opinion about him) says love is violent. My point is not so much that our huge problems have easy, one-stop fixes, it's moreso that we often reinforce the bigger problems with a multitude of little, normal habits that we can exercise control over if we choose to. Go ahead and stomp out those big bad enemies with your violence. Their seeds sprout daily in most of our hearts. After the fire, what's gonna grow back if we haven't learned to cultivate justice in a positive sense? The same old shit. Paulo Friere writes about this in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Everyone in capitalist societies is educated to desire to become like the oppressor. Kids wanna grow up and be rich, have servants. What are we doing to break that cycle in ourselves? My example was just one wake up call showing me that I do have some power. It's rare that you get to see that your actions have consequences. This one was dramatic for me. For the record, a lot of my musician peers are cultivating their own events these days instead of using the booze/drug clubs. It's a movement, and I was a small, real part of it. Platitudes/things I believe are powerful: Fix shit instead of tossing it. Go on regular hikes instead of flying to another country every time you need a break. Cut out the petty shit talk about people. Stuff propagates fast and it only takes the right straw to break the camels back. Take care of yourself so you can shed your bitternesses. Practice forgiveness. Don't take debt, only to pass its burden onto others. Don't encourage others to take debt. Don't tell young kids to take debt because it's "what adults do". When you do this, you're propagating the very thing you wish deep down to violently destroy. Quit it with the "adultism". You're awesome. Keep learning why, so we can be free of the burden of proving yourself by putting others down. As for the housing thing... I understand that the solutions to this problem are radical and associated with stereotypes like "hippy" and "college student". We need to shed that. Here's an organization devoted to assisting people in building equitable housing relationships: https://coophousing.org/ https://coophousing.org/ Keep striving to look past peoples' educational degrees/class/race/culture/intelligence. Cut your superficial judgements out with the same violence you're imagining against "the system". Learn to recognize non-traditional intelligence. Learn to have deep conversations with conventionally unintelligent people. If you think people with down's syndrome are dumb, you are enacting the oppression you hate. In positive terms, keep striving to love and understand people, to be teachable, to be open hearted. Walk/bus/bike more. Slow down. > What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote? As much as it's possible for you. But also: divest from inequitable businesses as much as possible. I mean this in a big way. For example: stop using amazon prime when ebay would be just as good. Use the slow shipping. That itself is a small, radical act. Buy an old, used computer/phone, upgrade the ram, fix the little broken stuff. Plant a garden. Last but not least, call your representative and tell them we want score voting in the primaries.
- adventured 9y ago
  > we probably still have months left to choose who exactly it is that we will be shoving up against the wall when the revolution comes Advocating violence - and implying worse - is a step beyond inappropriate on HN.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Many of the people here are employed to fix problems. Mostly, those problems get fixed with the versatile multitool of general purpose computing using high-level programming languages. At a larger scale, we have no problem standing behind an entrepreneur to jump in, create a startup, and disrupt the status quo. Generally, those startups use the preferred solution to the smaller problem--computers--to be as efficient as possible. That works out great for problems solvable by a new competitive option in the free market--probably the best way to handle it, actually. The people implementing the best solutions to the problem get paid the most money, and everyone is happy. But that only works up to a certain scale. If your problem's solution requires a capitalization of more than $100M, you're not going to fix it with a hip, cool, dynamic startup tech company, with the founder-CEO right there directing traffic. At larger scales, you need a lot of people: investors, employees, and managers. You have to deal with the principal-agent problem, where the selfish concerns of an individual may be in conflict with the overarching goals of the whole group, and they have the individual authority to act on their own behalf as they act in the name of the group. That is the realm of multinational corporate governance and governments. The essence of a government is a controlled monopoly on the uses of force considered to be legitimate. The government is a cartel enforcer. It is there to ensure that if any one person acts too much in his own interest at the expense of the public interest, the cartel enforcer may impose a penalty to encourage a better outcome for the whole cartel in the future. There is no enforcer for the enforcer. If the government becomes corrupted, it can cease to function for its intended purposes. In particular, if a portion of a government that is designed for self-repair ceases to function, there is no possible in-band activity that can reliably restore it. Even if that self-correcting element only partially ceases to function, it may still be cheaper or easier to fix the problem using out-of-band signaling activity. That out-of-band signaling behavior for a government is all the behaviors explicitly banned by the government: lawbreaking. That can run from relatively innocuous law-scoffing, such as blocking downtown traffic for an hour without a valid municipal demonstration permit, to a full-on bloody rebellion, which is probably the most illegal thing you can do. The important questions: - Is the self-regulation function of government compromised? If so, how badly has it been damaged? - What is the minimum level of unlawful behavior necessary to restore government to its proper functioning (the proper functions being a subjective judgment) as cartel enforcer? If you maintain that government is functioning as intended, there is no problem to fix. For you. Carry on. Those who do think there are problems may attempt to work around you. They might also go through you. So it helps to be aware of your neighbors and surroundings. If you maintain that zero amount of unlawful behavior is necessary or sufficient to fix the outstanding problems, then you can continue working within the system. If your efforts aren't yielding results, you have no choice but to double down and do all the same things even harder next time. Violence is just one tool in the toolbox. Its the one that may still work after all others have failed, the "last argument of kings". You can't take it out of the toolbox. It's always there, even if you don't talk about it. Let us not forget that the US is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The US has the same order of magnitude for population size and for number of firearms. I recently got some polling results from Cards Against Humanity [0] reporting that 33% of the US population believes another civil war may start within the next decade. You don't have to believe in violence, because violence still believes in you. It believes that you will continue handing over your lunch money every day, and never fight back. It may well be that a punch on the nose, delivered too early, may prevent a chain of events ending with a stab in the back, delivered too late. Yes, you are correct, discussions on the unauthorized use of force--whether ethical or not--are likely out of scope for HN. But I'm scared out of my mind right now, and talking about it helps me to find more reasons not do it. [0] https://thepulseofthenation.com/ https://thepulseofthenation.com/
okonomiyaki3000 9y ago
Let me clarify. By "fear", I mean fear of losing their seats, not their heads. Clearly, they don't fear either but I'm only implying that government would work better if elected positions were easier to lose.

logfromblammo 9y ago

We may only have hours left to watch elected representation completely ignore the welfare of the electorate again, but we probably still have months left to choose who exactly it is that we will be shoving up against the wall when the revolution comes. At this point, when they obviously don't fear losing their office, they need to fear something else. If you can't bring yourself to do physical violence, you can maybe plan out some property crimes. Keying cars and slashing tires is a traditional method of expressing anger against specific individuals, and those types of crimes are infrequently investigated, and even more rarely solved--at least when the insignificant people are the victims. When the catalytic converter was stolen off the bottom of my car, I never even saw a cop; I had to fill out the report myself, and the police apparently never actually did anything about it. Why should they, after all? They aren't working for us. Why not give them something to do for their real bosses? Watching C-SPAN last night, the shouting and chanting did nothing. There was no effect at all. The sergeant-at-arms will restore order in the gallery, and we will continue to pretend that those people don't matter. The sit-ins have done nothing. The communications campaigns had no effect. More of the same will yield more of the same. Try something different.

macawfish 9y ago
I get that you're angry. That's totally valid. I'm also angry and also have violent fantasies. I'm certain that everyone does, its a psychology fact. But why not channel your destructive urges into dismantling internalized oppression? The ways that you and I go about maintaining these very structures we are each so angry about? I'm a musician. I once played at a fancy downtown club that took my band's working/middle class crowd for granted. They had two shows every night: an early set with very expensive tickets and international artists, and a late night set with local artists and cheap tickets. They once made our audience... Hundreds of people... wait for an two hours, standing in the lobby, on valentines evening, because a bunch of drunk rich people had paid $150/ea for an earlier show, and they didn't have the guts to tell them to leave after it was over. We didn't get to sound check. I didn't get a monitor. Our friends and family waited for two hours to hear us play. We had to cut our set in half. After that I refused to play there anymore. This was a regular place at the time, but I told my friends that I was done, and explained myself. I loved the staff there. The sound was amazing. They had great food and lighting and all that. But I was tired of the management's priorities. They willingly engaged in segregating our communities to squeeze out the money. They weren't curating, they were leaching. I was over it. Know what happened? Not much at first. People kept asking me to play there. I said "nope, I'm done". Two years later, hardly anyone I know plays there ever. My little stand made a real difference. There are other venues in town that have been similarly 86'd by a few trusted leaders in the community. It makes space for new ways of doing things to let go of an old, tired staple. Why not find something like that in your life that you can do to take a stand?
- hbt 9y ago
  Violence is a proven effective tool and it is used as a last resort (to be considered justified). There is no denying people are feeling powerless and not represented. Your method of protesting doesn't work if you care about the national debt, quantitative easing, inflation, interest rates, crony capitalism, the rent economy, the value of your money growing worthless day by day while the cost of living is artificially getting higher despite technological advances. What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote? They keep pushing people into a corner and expecting us to submit. Technological innovation (e.g cryptocurrencies, encrypted wallets, globalisation etc.) and violence are the only tools we have to fight back. Any other system (e.g voting) has been gamed to serve their interest or rendered useless (e.g protesting but don't be inconvenient) Don't get me wrong, your vote still counts (in non gerrymandered districts) and I'm sure you can voice your opinion on gay marriage; but the stuff that actually matters, you are voiceless and expected to obey or die.
  - macawfish 9y ago
    Proven effective? To what end? And what kind of violence? Also, b.t.w., I'm not trying to judge you if you think violence is effective. I'm just convinced that it's actually self-sabotaging in the long run. The actions I'm describing are violent, but not in the war-mongerer's way. They're violent in the same sense that Slavoj Žižek (regardless of your opinion about him) says love is violent. My point is not so much that our huge problems have easy, one-stop fixes, it's moreso that we often reinforce the bigger problems with a multitude of little, normal habits that we can exercise control over if we choose to. Go ahead and stomp out those big bad enemies with your violence. Their seeds sprout daily in most of our hearts. After the fire, what's gonna grow back if we haven't learned to cultivate justice in a positive sense? The same old shit. Paulo Friere writes about this in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Everyone in capitalist societies is educated to desire to become like the oppressor. Kids wanna grow up and be rich, have servants. What are we doing to break that cycle in ourselves? My example was just one wake up call showing me that I do have some power. It's rare that you get to see that your actions have consequences. This one was dramatic for me. For the record, a lot of my musician peers are cultivating their own events these days instead of using the booze/drug clubs. It's a movement, and I was a small, real part of it. Platitudes/things I believe are powerful: Fix shit instead of tossing it. Go on regular hikes instead of flying to another country every time you need a break. Cut out the petty shit talk about people. Stuff propagates fast and it only takes the right straw to break the camels back. Take care of yourself so you can shed your bitternesses. Practice forgiveness. Don't take debt, only to pass its burden onto others. Don't encourage others to take debt. Don't tell young kids to take debt because it's "what adults do". When you do this, you're propagating the very thing you wish deep down to violently destroy. Quit it with the "adultism". You're awesome. Keep learning why, so we can be free of the burden of proving yourself by putting others down. As for the housing thing... I understand that the solutions to this problem are radical and associated with stereotypes like "hippy" and "college student". We need to shed that. Here's an organization devoted to assisting people in building equitable housing relationships: https://coophousing.org/ https://coophousing.org/ Keep striving to look past peoples' educational degrees/class/race/culture/intelligence. Cut your superficial judgements out with the same violence you're imagining against "the system". Learn to recognize non-traditional intelligence. Learn to have deep conversations with conventionally unintelligent people. If you think people with down's syndrome are dumb, you are enacting the oppression you hate. In positive terms, keep striving to love and understand people, to be teachable, to be open hearted. Walk/bus/bike more. Slow down. > What do you do to address those issues? Not participate in the economy? Create your own currency, your own bank and somehow escape regulation? Vote? As much as it's possible for you. But also: divest from inequitable businesses as much as possible. I mean this in a big way. For example: stop using amazon prime when ebay would be just as good. Use the slow shipping. That itself is a small, radical act. Buy an old, used computer/phone, upgrade the ram, fix the little broken stuff. Plant a garden. Last but not least, call your representative and tell them we want score voting in the primaries.
adventured 9y ago
> we probably still have months left to choose who exactly it is that we will be shoving up against the wall when the revolution comes Advocating violence - and implying worse - is a step beyond inappropriate on HN.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Many of the people here are employed to fix problems. Mostly, those problems get fixed with the versatile multitool of general purpose computing using high-level programming languages. At a larger scale, we have no problem standing behind an entrepreneur to jump in, create a startup, and disrupt the status quo. Generally, those startups use the preferred solution to the smaller problem--computers--to be as efficient as possible. That works out great for problems solvable by a new competitive option in the free market--probably the best way to handle it, actually. The people implementing the best solutions to the problem get paid the most money, and everyone is happy. But that only works up to a certain scale. If your problem's solution requires a capitalization of more than $100M, you're not going to fix it with a hip, cool, dynamic startup tech company, with the founder-CEO right there directing traffic. At larger scales, you need a lot of people: investors, employees, and managers. You have to deal with the principal-agent problem, where the selfish concerns of an individual may be in conflict with the overarching goals of the whole group, and they have the individual authority to act on their own behalf as they act in the name of the group. That is the realm of multinational corporate governance and governments. The essence of a government is a controlled monopoly on the uses of force considered to be legitimate. The government is a cartel enforcer. It is there to ensure that if any one person acts too much in his own interest at the expense of the public interest, the cartel enforcer may impose a penalty to encourage a better outcome for the whole cartel in the future. There is no enforcer for the enforcer. If the government becomes corrupted, it can cease to function for its intended purposes. In particular, if a portion of a government that is designed for self-repair ceases to function, there is no possible in-band activity that can reliably restore it. Even if that self-correcting element only partially ceases to function, it may still be cheaper or easier to fix the problem using out-of-band signaling activity. That out-of-band signaling behavior for a government is all the behaviors explicitly banned by the government: lawbreaking. That can run from relatively innocuous law-scoffing, such as blocking downtown traffic for an hour without a valid municipal demonstration permit, to a full-on bloody rebellion, which is probably the most illegal thing you can do. The important questions: - Is the self-regulation function of government compromised? If so, how badly has it been damaged? - What is the minimum level of unlawful behavior necessary to restore government to its proper functioning (the proper functions being a subjective judgment) as cartel enforcer? If you maintain that government is functioning as intended, there is no problem to fix. For you. Carry on. Those who do think there are problems may attempt to work around you. They might also go through you. So it helps to be aware of your neighbors and surroundings. If you maintain that zero amount of unlawful behavior is necessary or sufficient to fix the outstanding problems, then you can continue working within the system. If your efforts aren't yielding results, you have no choice but to double down and do all the same things even harder next time. Violence is just one tool in the toolbox. Its the one that may still work after all others have failed, the "last argument of kings". You can't take it out of the toolbox. It's always there, even if you don't talk about it. Let us not forget that the US is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The US has the same order of magnitude for population size and for number of firearms. I recently got some polling results from Cards Against Humanity [0] reporting that 33% of the US population believes another civil war may start within the next decade. You don't have to believe in violence, because violence still believes in you. It believes that you will continue handing over your lunch money every day, and never fight back. It may well be that a punch on the nose, delivered too early, may prevent a chain of events ending with a stab in the back, delivered too late. Yes, you are correct, discussions on the unauthorized use of force--whether ethical or not--are likely out of scope for HN. But I'm scared out of my mind right now, and talking about it helps me to find more reasons not do it. [0] https://thepulseofthenation.com/ https://thepulseofthenation.com/

okonomiyaki3000 9y ago

Let me clarify. By "fear", I mean fear of losing their seats, not their heads. Clearly, they don't fear either but I'm only implying that government would work better if elected positions were easier to lose.