Don’t blog, organise

politics, socialism
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Hamas knows how to organise

Avedon:

One reason why a lot of Democratic Party insiders have a lot of contempt for bloggers is that we are sitting in front of our computers getting fat rather than getting out where it becomes a public affair. It’s all very well to phone and mail legislatures (and you should), but you need to be out there where people can see you.

Yes, I know people are still shy about being associated with the circus, but visibility matters. It’s a lot harder for the talking heads to pretend that Bush is still popular and people don’t mind the destruction of the Constitution if they’re being deafened by protests.

And 2007 is not 1968. The public isn’t freaked out by hippies anymore, it’s freaked out by losing a major American city, and being known as a nation of torturers, and having our money sucked away by an illegal war and assorted con-men in expensive suits.

Thom Hartmann often points out that neither of the Roosevelts ran as progressives, and Lyndon Johnson certainly didn’t run on civil rights. When progressives came to FDR with their program he let them know that he was convinced, but he needed one more thing: “Make me.”

They did it because we made them. It wasn’t done just by people sitting at home and writing.

Avedon is right. Blogging is a great way to write away your frustrations about politics, but in itself it has a limited capability to change things for the better. Blogs are good at getting you informed about things not covered much in the mainstream media or helping likeminded people discover each other, not to mention help people realise that they’re not alone. But becoming aware and informed is only the first stage of becoming political active. After that, you need to act. Unfortunately, blogging is seductive and you do get the feeling of having achieved something from just having written about something, so it’s easy to keep blogging instead of taking that next step.

For the rightwing this doesn’t matter, as to them blogs are just another part of the noise machine, but us lefties have to be aware that blogs are just one tool we need to use if we want to change things.

David Price: superhack

War on Iraq, wingnuts
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This is the most hackish thing Dean Esmay David Price ever wrote, until the next thing EsmayPrice writes, (to paraphrase a certain sarky blogger:

Little noticed this month was the news that Iraq’s electricity production has set a new all-time high in September of around 6,860 MW, including 2,000 MW or more of non-public generation (p40), illegal under Saddam (because like any good national socialist despot, he outlawed private generators). Oil revenue also set a new record of $3.79 billion (p39).

When he’s talking about “non-public generation” he means people with diesel generators people! He thinks his readers are stupid enough to read that and go “Whoo! Power to the free market!”. Well, perhaps he’s right; every writer gets the audience he deserves. But does he really believe anybody else will not realise that, you know, having to rely on your own generator to get electricity is not a good thing? Especially when you’re not living in some shack in Alaska five hours from the nearest village, but in a multimillion city? Or would David be happy to trade in his state controlled electricity for some free market solution?

The Dragon Reborn – Robert Jordan

books and books review, fantasy
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Cover of The Dragon Reborn


The Dragon Reborn
Robert Jordan
699 pages
published in 1991

The Dragon Reborn is the third book in the Wheel of Time series and as such it does not quite have the worst artwork in the series. That honour is reserved for either the previous book The Great Hunt, with its depiction of Trollocs as humans with curved helmets or the sixth book, The Lord of Chaos, with its incompetent romance novel cover. No book in the series however has what you can call good art, or even art that bears much resemblence to the books its used on. That’s not unusual for any book of course and normally I don’t care too much about what’s on a cover, but the Darrell Sweet artwork on these is just too embarassing, especially when read in public. But never mind eh? It’s still much, much better than reading Dan Brown where people can see you.

Moving on to what’s between the covers, The Dragon Reborn is the last book in the series to duplicate the quest structure of The Lord of the Rings and also the last book in which the various storylines neatly come together in the end. It’s not the end of the series, as the series has no end, but it’s a end. From the next book, The Shadow Rising onward, things would be much more complicated. It’s also a sort of beginning, as this is the first book which is not dominated by Rand as the main character; in fact he’s hardly in it, with much of the action focussing on Perrin, Mat and Egwene/Nynaeve/Elayne in three different storylines, which come together at the climax of the book, just as with the previous two books.

Read more…

Hillary or Rudy

2008 US election
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That might be the horrific choice on offer next year in the American presidential elections, the worst of the Democratic candidates versus the nutties of the Republicans. Not a very inspiring choice, not that there’s any Democratic candidate much better, or any Republican less worse. I well understand why so many Americans don’t vote anymore, as it changes nothing.

Nothing, I hear you say, but what about the War on Iraq, or the Supreme Court, or Healtcare, or… And sure, you’re right, having a Democratic president, even one as awful as Hillary would be slightly etter than yet another Republican nutjob. With Hillary in the White House, the ongoing war against the poor would be covered up somewhat, more people would get slightly less poor, the structural racism and sexism in American society would be lifted somewhat and there would be slightly less and slightly less insane foreign military adventures on offer.

But that’s all. Hillary won’t give up the god-given right of the United States to meddle in other countries affairs, nor will she do anything that will offend big business too much. At best she will provide a breathing space, four or eight years in which the battered US middle classes can recover somewhat, the military can get itself back into shape after Iraq and Afghanistan and things can go back to normal. Which is better than what Rudy would offer, more craziness, but not much better.

To me, the upcoming elections feel somewhat like a rerun of 2004, with a rightwing Democrat against a loony rightwing Republican; the big change is that this time, the Democrat will probably win. But it’s hard to get excited about this, as it seems that four more years of war and disaster hasn’t lead to a more radical alternative. Ghu knowns I’m not hoping for a socialist, but at the very least an actual liberal, somebody who has not bought into the War on Terror, would’ve been nice.

Linky, linky

2008 US election, Life under Capitalism
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The post over at Crooked Timber about how Americans now have worse teeth than a decade ago is interesting. Interesting, in that the discussion in the comments tries hard to avoid the simple truth as to why that is: lack of dental insurance. Too scary perhaps.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports on vulture capitalism, the practise of buying up third world debts then suing the country in question in an European or American court for the debt plus interest. Many of such funds are based in London and it probably won’t surprise you either that some of these funds have ties to highlevel US politicians…

Lawyers, Guns and money is worried about Giuliani, who has stuffed his campaign chockful with the nuttiest of neocons. Personally I don’t doubt he would be a disaster as president for America, but for the rest of the world he might be the better choice than a more competent candidate like Clinton. Because whoever becomes president will always be someone willing to use US military force abroad, and somebody a little bit nutty might be opposed more and earlier.

Does that make sense? Perhaps not.