Knowing that the United States and the world are on a course toward instability and chaos ensured by irreversible climate change and economic deterioration, the Obama administration and those who expect to inherit its role and powers “want the mechanisms by which they can criminalize any form of dissent,” Hedges continued. The attack on the press, which the AP phone records scandal exposes, is “an excuse to ferret out and destroy legitimate movements that challenge centers of power” by scaring potential whistle-blowers and dissidents into silence.
Chris Hedges: The ‘Terrifying’ State Assault on Press Freedom - Truthdig
Frightening words from the guy who handed Kevin O’Leary his ass a year and a half ago.
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Source: truthdig.com
Our transit system was never designed for the needs of anyone with a wheelchair or a stroller. But for a vast number of people, mostly women, it is not a choice. It is the only option available, and it has just become a little more unwelcoming.
Why the stroller debate on Toronto public transit is a gendered fight | canada.com
From my awesome, smart and funny friend @neville_park.
Source: o.canada.com
OLG isn’t looking to make municipalities rich. Instead, they’re looking to stick a local government with the costs of servicing a massive new entertainment complex while the province gets rich off direct gaming revenues and the Ontario share of the HST. By comparison, city revenues look to be virtually microscopic. Unless council is able to get the province to offer far better terms on a casino deal than other municipalities have been granted, this whole debate remains a waste of time and a distraction from more important civic issues.
Canadian political scandals and the dangers of false equivalencies | #cdnpoli #robocalls
There’s a big difference between objectivity and / or impartiality on the one hand, and mindless, cringing devotion to “balance” on the other.
The news out of Ottawa sees two competing storylines fighting for prominence: the Vikileaks tweets and the dirty-trick phone calls.
If you’ll permit me one observation: tweeting embarrassing personal details from court records that are publicly available to anyone with elementary research skills is one thing. A sustained and systematic campaign to disenfranchise voters because you think they’ll support your opponents is something else entirely. Straight out of the GOP playbook, in fact.
More prosaically: social media memes are legal. Electoral fraud: probably not.
#Vikileaks shouldn’t be this week’s #ShinyObject in #cdnpoli Focus must stay on#ElectoralFraud
— Sol Chrom (@sol_chrom) February 28, 2012
Just in case it isn’t obvious.
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- … there is a particular political movement that has refined misdirection in the form of smear campaigns to an art form
- “Austerity” is a theological construct. It is about punishing the alleged sins of sloth and gluttony. It is about purging through pain
- UPDATED - PMO InfoAlerteBot After Dark: “Foreign radicals threaten further delays” - Inside Politics | via @kady
… there is a particular political movement that has refined misdirection in the form of smear campaigns to an art form. There is a particular group that consistently tries to push bigotry and eliminationism into the mainstream. The accusations of treason or support for child pornography come primarily from one side of the aisle. If the only response is to say that we need to be on guard and prepared to engage with this nonsense then all we’re doing is feeding the trolls. If that’s all we’ve got, then the trolls win because while we allow them to suck up our time in endless debates about civil discourse, they’ll finish dismantling democracy and looting the economy.
Please feed the trolls - Peace, order and good government, eh?
A worthwhile observation about the pitfalls of misguided devotion to “balance.”
Source: pogge.ca
Ignore the trolls, or engage? Mudwrestling with pigs and other dilemmas for 2012 | #cdnpoli
Every now and then you want to pause and re-evaluate. Is this working? What am I trying to do here? Is this the best way to go about it? Is it producing the results I want?
Now seems as good a time as any. Last night on FB, I offered this:
Aspiration for 2012: win back the words, reclaim the public sphere, raise the tone of civic discourse, make citizenship something to which we can all rededicate ourselves with pride. In other words, carry on being an insufferably sanctimonious wanker.
While I’m not worried about the sanctimonious wanker thing, I’m curious about the larger picture. It’s sometimes helpful to cast off the intellectual equivalent of yellow-wax buildup and go back to first principles. Going through the reasoning will, I hope, help clarify some things.
In brief, I’ve tried, in this little corner at least, to avoid engaging directly with people whose sole purpose seems to be filling cyberspace with specious bullshit. It’s an arbitrary, personal judgment on my part, naturally, but there’s a clear difference between honest disagreement and empty sophistry. Until now, my attitude toward the latter has been “don’t bother. You’re wasting your time and energy,” or “paying attention to them just gives them the validation they’re looking for,” or “don’t get into a pissing match with a skunk,” or perhaps most vividly, “never get into a mud-wrestling fight with a pig. You’ll ruin your clothes, and the pig will just enjoy it.”
Then I saw this.
So while there’s much to be said for the “don’t engage” approach, @wicary’s elegant scalpel work is a pretty eloquent argument for taking the opposite tack. And in truth, it feeds into the larger project of reclaiming public conversation. There’s a persuasive argument for not letting this kind of nonsense go unchallenged; lies, astroturf, propaganda and manufactured controversies have to be addressed, because if not, they’ll just keep being propagated and amplified and eventually they’ll come to dominate the conversation.
Again, it goes back to fundamental critical-thinking skills. Who’s advancing this storyline? Whose interests are being served? Does it make sense? Do the underlying assumptions hold up in the face of the evidence? Why is this narrative being advanced? What else is going on? Is it meant to draw attention away from anything else?
As always, the first question has to be: what are we trying to accomplish? It can’t be to make the other side shut up; a., that’s never going to happen, and b., we don’t want to give them an excuse to whine about censorship and act like victims.
No. Ultimately it has to be about reclaiming the discursive turf, about re-framing the way we approach issues of public policy and what kind of society we want, and about not letting the noise machine and echo chamber hijack the conversation and / or drown everything else out.
It’s a long and exhausting undertaking. No illusions here; it takes a lot of time and energy going through things over and over again, especially when they’re things that ought to be obvious, and when the other side’s devoted so many resources to its own insidious and calculated framing. We’re facing a disciplined, focused campaign that’s willing to advance untruths, to smear, to misdirect, to take things out of context, and to drag the conversation into the gutter every day if that’s what it takes. The buffoonish antics of some of its mouthpieces haven’t made it any less effective.
Strong arguments both ways, and thus far I haven’t found either way definitive. What say you, internets?
Related posts:
- The #EthicalOil meme is pathetic PR bullshit | #cdnpoli #tarsands
- @wicary rules. That is all. | #tarsands
- Far-right wackjobs: they’re not just tedious - they’re a genuine threat | via AlterNet | #uspoli
- @Cityslikr, @NickKouvalis, and the need for civility in public discourse | #TOpoli #TeamFord
- @GraphicMatt dismantles @TOMayorFord on transit | #TOpoli #TTC #TeamFord
- @GeorgeMonbiot on the subversion of ‘freedom’ | #winningbackthewords
- Why conservatism needs to be rescued | #cdnpoli
- From @alexhimelfarb on Harper’s omnibus crime bill / #C10 #cdnpoli
- Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think
Chris Hedges: No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted | #classwarfare #OWS
We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored by a media that caters to the needs and profits of corporations, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.
From a Hedges column just over a year ago.
No one can say for certain what 2012 will bring, but for starters, let’s go back to first principles.
We’re citizens of a democratic society, deriving our rights and our obligations from a public sphere that is both the sum of its parts and something more. I’ll say it once more for emphasis: we are citizens.
Not taxpayers. Not customers. Not shareholders. Not consumers. We are not defined in terms of how much profit we create or how much we spend on goods and services or pay in taxes. We have an intrinsic value that goes beyond generating returns for investors.
For 2012, let us at least rededicate ourselves to the idea of engaged citizenship.
Related posts:
- Income inequality, the 99 percent, and the dysfunction of American society | via Esquire | #uspoli #OWS
- The cruel reality of the American class system: We Are Not All Created Equal | #classwarfare #uspoli
- Far-right wackjobs: they’re not just tedious - they’re a genuine threat | via AlterNet | #uspoli
- From @mtaibbi, a Christmas message from Wall Street | #classwarfare #uspoli
- @GeorgeMonbiot on the subversion of ‘freedom’ | #winningbackthewords
Income inequality, the 99 percent, and the dysfunction of American society | via Esquire | #uspoli #OWS
Income inequality is a symptom, not the disease. People realize that now. They see the symptom erupting in all directions, but, at a visceral level, they can sense the deeper pathology at work in their lives. The disease is a lack of accountability, a failure of the responsible institutions, political and otherwise, to do their jobs as a check on the inebriate gluttony of the financial sector of the economy, abetted by its pet economists and its legions of fans in the business media, and the disease is also a political system so awash with the proceeds that it can’t clear a space to do anything about making whole the victims of this reckless pilferage.
Income inequality is the medical shorthand. The butcher’s bill will run to volumes.
A little further reading on how the United States got to where it is today.
Note the backhanded compliment paid to the New York Times, and how people missed the signs leading to this in the 90s because “a pack of ignoramuses decided to chase the president’s penis all over Washington.”
Not much to add to this, really, other than to note, once again, that there are people currently governing our country who look at what’s going on in the United States - ignorance, distractions, polarization in economic and cultural terms, belligerent stupidity - and think it’s a good thing worthy of emulation.
I know I keep going on about the cultivation of stupidity, but demented greed isn’t a civic virtue either.
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Chris Hedges: Zero Point of Systemic Collapse | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as “negative.” This belief, which allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters.
Chris Hedges, almost two years ago, on “junk politics.”
There’s really only one acceptable narrative, and it’s part of the function of the message machine to ensure that we stay within its parameters. The rest of it is just kabuki theatre designed to produce the illusion of choice, of debate, of a genuine multiplicity of viewpoints.
Something to keep in mind whenever you see Sun News meat puppets ranting about the Maoist collective at the State Broadcaster.
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If Team Ford’s Port Lands plans are truly dead, would someone mind driving a stake through them?
The plans, that is.
That’s how a tweet from Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan is describing things, linking to a quote from Councillor Paula Fletcher.
“This is a triumph for the public… This is a Toronto moment, a Jane Jacobs moment.”
Can’t argue with the sentiments, but I’m inclined to agree with a comment left on the Torontoist site by one dsmithhfx:
Don’t celebrate quite yet… I don’t trust this cabal of scumbag opportunists as far as I could throw them.
It’s a setback, to be sure. And much as we’d like to think of it as a turning point, the point where the wave of ignorance, resentment, stupidity, and short-term greed that the Ford approach taps into finally broke, let’s not start the happy dance just yet.
The Port Lands / Waterfront fiasco has captivated our attention for several weeks, to be sure, and we can’t underestimate its symbolic importance. But it’s also possible to think of it as this week’s Shiny ObjectTM — something thing that attracts our attention and keeps us all occupied while other things are going on.
A thoughtful essay by Dylan Reid in Spacing last week discussed the slow decline of a community through a process of dozens of little cuts. Cancel a minor program here, put less resources into something else there, cut back on the scope of something else over there. The examples Reid cites include things like litter pickup, tree planting, neighbourhood improvement programs, snow clearing, and making bylaw enforcement reactive rather than proactive.
As Reid writes:
Individually, the impact of each of these is small. And it’s quite possible some of them could be reasonable proposals for a city with a screwed-up budgetary process if they were thought through properly (e.g. all parks could have citizen committees that take care of flower planting and care, if the city provides the flowers and eases up on regulation). But done all in a rush, and all together, the overall impact will be a gradual degradation in the walking environment. It will get dirtier and trickier, and many programs that make it more attractive will be abandoned. People will still be able to walk, of course. They just won’t want to walk as much, unless they have to. And since walking is how people experience their city most directly, Toronto will feel a little bit more like a city in decline — which, given the amount of building going on and people moving in, it really shouldn’t.
By themselves, these measures may not amount to much. They don’t have the impact or the visibility of the Port Lands clusterfuck, because they don’t carry the same scale or price tag. That’s why they’re mostly off the radar. Cumulatively, however, their effect on our quality of life could be just as serious. The places we love and live in, whether they’re downtown or in the suburbs, would become dirtier, more threadbare, and less welcoming.
But this is what happens when the function of government is entrusted to people with no commitment to the public sphere. I’ve already written that the current administration seems colonized by people with no interest in using the power of government to advance the common good, and the events of the past few weeks have done nothing to suggest otherwise. When you start pulling at the threads that hold a community together, you never know when the whole thing’s going to unravel.
This is not to take anything away from the the people whose efforts forced a retreat on the waterfront, of course. And the folks involved in CodeBlueTO deserve a special shout-out. Let’s just remember, though, that this is a long war that has to be fought on many fronts. These guys aren’t done yet. There’s still a long slog ahead.
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Citizen, cyclist, father, diver, cheap-laugh aficionado, sanctimonious wanker, #BadJew. Thoughts are my own.
