To understand the riots and our current inabilities to organise better
community we need to understand more of the secret pleasures of bureaucracy
and our inability to communicate without distortion. We operate without
much data or knowledge about what such stuff as data really is. A huge
problem is that once we get intense about this the work is both frightening
and the language disappointing. One ends up an "expert" in language no one
speaks in a hostile audience being told it doesn't really know anything -
most run to the protection of a cabal that uses the esoteric language,
These cabals are at least partially funded to go on talking, whether doing
science or various bits of social epistemology that probably drive Francis
and I to frustrations that involve secret pleasures - maybe delusions that
answers lie in the hard work of 'truth seeking' practised in lives we have
made as non-vulnerable as we can to the wolf at the door. In this
condition we may not be able to resolve anything to data on which to base
argument that is understandable by most people, yet alone the basis for
praxis, a great word to confuse people with on rational action.
The riots are set in human action (generally barely rational as we have
tended to define it - we now talk of bridled irrationality) - moulded by
what has come before, 'forces' acting in invisibility. In England, the
last riots were sparked by Mark Duggan's death, a fellow human being I'd
honestly not put high on any priority list. Some years on, having followed
the case, I have no idea what really happened and the legal resolution of
his killing relies on him having thrown a 'gun' no one saw may be 20 feet
through the air. A dozen cops should have seen it fly. Years before,
another black guy, Azelle Rodney, was shot in a similar incident - this
shooter now faces trial after previous cover-ups so dire that no one
collated the shooter's evidence with the audio from a video camera that ran
through the incident until years afterwards. The shooter, Anthony Long,
remains innocent in my view, as does the unnamed officer in the Duggan
case, though I lack evidence I would have tried to gather as an
investigator, and very obvious ways to ensure best evidence was available,
mostly but not exclusively police carried CCTV, was excluded by default
incompetence. Neither Rodney nor Duggan was a real threat with 20:20
hindsight, yet were seen as such by the shooting officers - both men ramped
up by adrenaline and probably false briefings overseen by senior officers.
As a public, we have almost no scrutiny of how we form the views that lead
to the conclusions we draw. I'm just off to a local school to vote (cock
up on my postal vote by Council) knowing only that the whole process is
almost meaningless to me as I want a very different system. If I was a
juror in the Long case I doubt anything that could be produced in court
could make me find him guilty, or even my view that he is now a scapegoat
victim. This is partly because I've been in his position, partly 'Tony' in
the sense I want cops to call not mobs (though I might think of times when
I lived where the cops were part of more obvious terror than we live under
in the west). The data of my decisions might take several books to write
to expose my theoretical spin they lie in.
We fear the exposure of intimate detail. I know what was once expected of
me, the cool head of the trained marksman making split second decisions, is
a myth. We are lying before we open our mouths, to say only what might
convince, what fits with manuals of guidance, evidence system demands and
much more such as not saying what will land us in the shit if interpreted
in usual idiocy.
It seems irrational to trash one's own neighbourhood in a riot. Yet this
is the easy bit. It is irrational to shoot someone with no gun who is not
a real threat. Yet decent cops do this. Our treatment of people in
custody is often dire. Priests and politicians lie to us all the time.
The financial system is not a service but a parasite. "Respectability" is
based on a farrago of lies and deceit. Singles dating sites are full of
married people, especially women, presumably living some kind if lie at
apparently intimate levels.
I think we are too scared to address the riots and the way we live. We
secretly lust simple answers.Yet actually we have been educated to this
simplicity. With empty paper in front of us, how many of us can write
facts about anything for very long? Did you know the stuff on world food?
Where might your understanding of why a cop shoots someone come from -
television? How would your version of why a rioter loots compare with what
the rioter might write? Where would your version have come from? Why,
given our ability with databases, do facts play such little part in our
arguments?
Data in science includes such as sum over history - yet we keep treating
our Baltimores with little exposition of our history - and always with
rhetorics of economics that have already failed and enquiry systems that
don't work other than to evade the real problems. Baltimore is discussed
by our presstitutes without even the knowledge put forward in The Wire
years ago. We need something else and that is a new form of public
scrutiny. Even this immediately runs foul of staying ahead by beggaring
neighbours because we are so scared of not being in control of their
policing.
On Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 12:29:36 AM UTC+1, archytas wrote:
>
> I'd start the economists off with much more general education. This would
> be an example -
> http://wphna.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/WN-2015-06-03-170-183-George-Kent-How-to-end-hunger.pdf.
>
>
>
> Hunger is at root a social problem, its extent and degree heavily
> influenced by human relationships of compassion, indifference, or
> exploitation.
> Only 30% of the world’s food supply is produced on industrial farms, while
> half of the world’s cultivated food is produced by peasants. More than 12%
> comes from hunting and gathering while more than 7% is produced in city
> gardens.
> The notion that there is a tremendous exchange happening between countries
> for food crops is incorrect, as 85% of the people in this world live on a
> domestic diet.
> The Industrial Food Chain uses 70% of the world’s agricultural resources
> to produce just 30% of our global food supply. Conversely, the Peasant Food
> Web provides 70% of the global food supply while using only 30% of
> agricultural resources.The pre-modern is not just ancient history. It is
> alive and doing well in much of the world, but it gets little attention.
> (from the short article)
>
> Various riots across the world including the ones that seem to spring from
> our black communities have an element of mob rule that is about some kind
> of threat to the Establishment - an attempt at some kind of control of now
> largely perverted leadership. Tony's point is only part of what mob rule
> might be about, not unlike Francis' on the end of the revolutionary road.
> We need to be aware that crying freedom is complicated. I get to vote
> tomorrow and have no one to vote for (Greens will get my X) and have heard
> no sense in the campaign. Not being able to vote would be even worse.
>
> I point to hunger because I'm struck we have similar language problems in
> the area of the riots - very few facts to work with in Francis' world of a
> thousand compromises and the rock and the hard place. One might add to
> this thousands of organisational reorganisations that don't work either and
> end up in today's weird financialisation..
>
> The riots don't seem very fact based - yet if we could talk directly to
> people involved (the agony of main media of course intervenes) we might
> understand more. Even this is grasped in our own frame of ignorance and
> false education. And to get the facts we need detectives of some kind.
> There are usually facts to find. I think we shy away from the hard work,
> frustrations and the very results we fear as likely to be ill-mannered.
>
>
>
>
>
> n Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 4:17:23 PM UTC+1, frantheman wrote:
>
>> No question, Neil, Graeber is compelling. If basic university economics
>> courses made his *Debt *and Piketty’s *Capital *required reading, then
>> perhaps it could be the beginning of change in that area (I’m not holding
>> my breath).
>>
>> Still, as you point out, anarchist anthropology is seriously – maybe even
>> hopelessly – idealistic. The great weakness of anarchism as a theory is its
>> difficulty in accepting that power structures are a hardwired part of any
>> societal organisation, going beyond the human into the social structures of
>> every social animal (primates, wolves, cats, meerkats). If you really want
>> to change anything you’re going to need organisation and continuity and
>> such considerations lead one to the realisation that power is a ubiquitous
>> reality and that all you can do is try to develop structures which, at
>> their best, serve to limit and control its abuse. That’s why (I believe)
>> Chomsky – another anarchist – keeps harping on about accountability as the
>> only mechanism with any hope of bringing about change.
>>
>> I certainly don’t regard hunter-gatherers as noble savages; power abuse
>> can and does take place in small groups too. Maybe it just has to do with
>> size and personal relationships; in the small group the dominating bully
>> can still be brought to heel by his granny, of whom he is still afraid.
>>
>> As I’ve commented before, I grow ever more pessimistic about the
>> possibilities of real change. It’s not that there aren’t enough good ideas
>> out there about better ways of doing things. The problem is how to get from
>> a to b. You either go the long, hard way of organised politics, making a
>> thousand compromises in order to achieve something until you’ve finally
>> diluted your initial goals so much that you finish up a signed-up member of
>> the mainstream. Or you take the revolutionary road, one that generally
>> finishes up with terror, committees of public safety, and the total
>> cannibalisation of its children.
>> Watching the desperate attempts of the Greek *Syriza* government to try
>> to achieve some degree of sanity in its negotiations with the European and
>> global financial establishment just shows how difficult any attempt to
>> minimally move outside bwanker orthodoxy is.Molly's suggestions about local
>> concentrated action are certainly good, but without well thought-out and
>> supported structures it's difficult to sustain momentum and consolidate
>> progress.
>>
>> Am Mittwoch, 6. Mai 2015 14:24:06 UTC+2 schrieb archytas:
>>>
>>> I've gone off Jared Diamond (prose style was never easy) in favour of
>>> more anarchist anthropology (David Graeber) - though I can't more than
>>> quibble what Jared says overall and complain he takes too long doing it.
>>> There's some relevant dispute over the idea of 'fierce people' rather than
>>> noble savages. Anarchy (as leaderlessness) is a myth with our biology -
>>> but I digress. Graeber makes the point somewhere that he always finds that
>>> language cannot be understood without an understanding of loads of
>>> day-to-day action. This is also true of our words like consensus, which
>>> may be achieved by various forms of violence in practice.
>>>
>>> I fear it's worse (even) than Francis describes. Our ability to tell
>>> each other what we need to know seems to have gone backwards with 'social
>>> media' and we seem to have broken into the 'knowledge gossiped at the back
>>> of the class' with no real public argument. Don has said a couple of times
>>> recently that it's a good idea to be humble with cops if you do something
>>> wrong. I found black and Asian people in trouble much more hostile on
>>> average than whites and there is some evidence to suggest all cops react
>>> rather quicker and tougher because of this. US policing is out of control,
>>> military and very rough compared with most in the UK. UK cops have been
>>> very, very poor for a long time when dealing with so-called minor crime,
>>> particularly amongst poor neighbourhoods. And I have to say cops lie
>>> nearly all the time, even if this is aimed in noble cause. This won't
>>> help. Plus the court systems are upper-crust and stuff like forensics in a
>>> dire state of bias. There are no bankers inside and the rich generally
>>> don't go to jail. I'm not sure what will pop, but surely we can all hear
>>> the pot boiling up!
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 12:18:49 PM UTC+1, frantheman wrote:
>>>>
>>>> If a society is broken, you won’t be able to fix it with policing. Neil
>>>> pointed out that the “police” and “polite” have a common
>>>> linguistic/cultural root: the Greek word *polis*. “Politics”, of
>>>> course, has the same root. All of these concepts go back to the basic
>>>> meaning of *polis*, “town” or “city”, that location where people come
>>>> together in societies larger than the original hunter-gatherer groups
>>>> where
>>>> questions of power and conflicts of interest could be regulated in easy,
>>>> informal ways, usually resulting in decisions which were accepted and
>>>> supported by some kind of consensus. It’s worth remembering that this was
>>>> the universal form of societal organisation for humans for around 98% of
>>>> our existence.
>>>>
>>>> It was only around 10,000 years ago, with the discovery of agriculture,
>>>> that humans started living in larger organisations. The spread of
>>>> agriculture, cities, and the differentiation of functions and competencies
>>>> in larger societies was accompanied from the very beginning by a power
>>>> grab
>>>> by the strongest – no longer inhibited by the consensus mechanisms of the
>>>> small family/clan group (maximum size around 150 members). If anyone wants
>>>> to read up on this kind of stuff, the writings of people like Jared
>>>> Diamond <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond> are one way into
>>>> it.
>>>>
>>>> Since then, humanity has largely been controlled by elites of one sort
>>>> or another. In the better iterations, those with power have realised that
>>>> life is actually better for them if they can win the support of a broad
>>>> group within the *polis*, rather than retaining power through
>>>> oppression. The best way to do this is with ideas/shared
>>>> mythologies/common
>>>> narratives, which gain legitimation as they become part of the
>>>> self-identification consensus in the society. Examples would be the Roman
>>>> concept of the *res publica *[“the common thing”], or the idea of the
>>>> king as the divinely ordained guarantor of the security and the protector
>>>> from oppression of the little man, or the Enlightenment/bourgeois idea of
>>>> universal human rights.
>>>>
>>>> The real motivation for the power elites in these cases is the
>>>> realisation that they actually do better when the mass of society is
>>>> basically contented, and has the feeling that they are secure and have the
>>>> possibility of some kind of prosperity. Built-in mechanisms for upward
>>>> mobility and participation also help. If you want to see it completely
>>>> cynically, it’s just a development of the “bread and circuses” concept.
>>>>
>>>> Ideas, however, also bring problems, because their constituent memes
>>>> have a tendency to take on a life of their own. In other words, they work
>>>> because people accept them and believe in them, but then they can also
>>>> become a threat to the elites, because the working-out of their
>>>> consequences often threaten their hegemony. This dialectic is one way of
>>>> looking at modern history from the 18th to the end of the 20th
>>>> Century. The Enlightenment memes of rationality, human rights, democracy,
>>>> etc. had immense power to motivate and activate people, who actually
>>>> believed in them. “Power to the People”, if really applied, means “power
>>>> away from the elites”.
>>>>
>>>> There was a moment in the West, in the immediate aftermath of the
>>>> horrors of WWII, where the Enlightenment/modern/liberal programme seemed
>>>> to
>>>> have won the day. It didn’t last. Even in the late 50s, Eisenhower (a
>>>> Republican!), in a prophetic insight into deeper practical reality, warned
>>>> against the “military-industrial complex” and its ability to practically
>>>> negate the whole civil-liberal programme. The struggle for the “soul” of
>>>> society continued through the 60s and 70s before – as Alan points out –
>>>> the
>>>> rise of neo-liberalism as propagated by Reagan and Thatcher finally
>>>> sounded
>>>> the death-knell of the inclusivist participational Enlightenment modernist
>>>> project. The really insidious part of this was that the liberal “form” was
>>>> left in place while the content was completely subverted.
>>>>
>>>> There was a realisation among the elites that Lincoln was wrong, you
>>>> don’t have to fool all the people all the time, you just have to fool
>>>> enough of them enough of the time. It doesn’t matter if the hopeless
>>>> underclass is growing, if more and more children are left behind, as long
>>>> as you can continually manipulate the balance of power in your favour.
>>>> Keep
>>>> the bread and circuses going, keep enough of the people “believing the
>>>> dream” (while at the same time controlling practical access to its actual
>>>> realisation) so that discontent is kept below a potentially dangerous
>>>> threat level. Even modern, sophisticated, information societies need an
>>>> underclass to flip burgers, clean offices, mow lawns, and deliver packages
>>>> of stuff ordered online – hewers of wood and drawers of water. In the US
>>>> they’re mostly black and Hispanic, in Europe they’re immigrants from
>>>> Eastern Europe, former colonies, and all those in Africa and the Middle
>>>> East who are prepared to take the chance of drowning in the Mediterranean
>>>> just to get away from the nightmare of their failed countries of origin
>>>> (in
>>>> which failure the West itself is deeply complicit). Then you tweak the
>>>> situation even more to your advantage by persuading that proportion of
>>>> your
>>>> indigenous society which is rapidly falling down the social ladder (people
>>>> who might have had a proud working-class identity fifty years ago but are
>>>> now increasingly becoming just “poor white trash”) that the immigrants are
>>>> the ones to blame for their misery. The result is Tea Party, Front
>>>> National, UKIP, Jobbik <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobbik>, etc. The
>>>> long con, the big lie, getting turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.
>>>>
>>>> Getting back to the point, before this background policing is no longer
>>>> an expression of the self-regulation necessary in an empowered,
>>>> functioning
>>>> society; instead it’s more and more an instrument of oppression, a
>>>> necessary instrument of social control, the defence of the status quo. The
>>>> Rent-a-mob phenomenon (with strong criminal tendencies) Molly refers to is
>>>> just another consequence of deep dysfunction in our civil societies.
>>>>
>>>> It seems to be the consensus among the elites that this situation is –
>>>> from their point of view – controllable, stable. I don’t really believe
>>>> that this is a conscious conspiratorial consensus, most of it is *ad
>>>> hoc*, a confidence that they can go on riding the tiger indefinitely.
>>>> Most of the educated, working middle-class (and that includes everyone
>>>> here
>>>> on ME) is lulled into complacence, or moved to supporting the status quo
>>>> by
>>>> fear of the increasing alienation of the alien underclass in the ‘hoods,
>>>> *banlieues
>>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banlieue>*, or camps for refugees/asylum
>>>> seekers.
>>>>
>>>> I’m afraid we’re all playing with fire. I think of 1788 in Paris, or
>>>> 1916 in Russia. Policing as control rather than regulation is trying to
>>>> increase the weight on the lid of a boiling pot rather than turning down
>>>> the heat. The longer this goes on, the bigger the bang when the mechanisms
>>>> finally fail.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Am Montag, 4. Mai 2015 12:59:15 UTC+2 schrieb Molly:
>>>>>
>>>>> The big ongoing news here in the states is the rash of clash between
>>>>> demonstrators and police. The demonstrations are (supposedly) brought on
>>>>> by
>>>>> the ever growing voice against the use of excessive force by police. It
>>>>> is
>>>>> such a complex issue, and the demonstrations themselves are not a simple
>>>>> problem.
>>>>>
>>>>> Since living in Detroit I've heard many storied about how the riots of
>>>>> 1967 altered the course of history for the city, and changed individual
>>>>> lives forever. Most recently, I cried like a baby listening to the eulogy
>>>>> of a fine man given my his loving wife, my friend. He was a catholic
>>>>> priest
>>>>> at the time, and she a Detroit resident. He left the priesthood afterward
>>>>> and they married a couple of years later. There were over 40 priests at
>>>>> the
>>>>> services, three from Rome officiated the funeral mass. This guy was on
>>>>> the
>>>>> fast track to Cardinal when the riots shook his very core and changed his
>>>>> value system forever.
>>>>>
>>>>> It gets me thinking about the very nature of the waves of
>>>>> demonstrations. In the sixties, of course, they were spurred by civil
>>>>> rights issues, Then the war in Vietnam (four dead in Ohio). Now it seems,
>>>>> in the age of transparency, the relationship between law enforcement and
>>>>> the criminals they deter (treatment during the time of arrest.)
>>>>> Complicated
>>>>> and exacerbated by the new "protest for hire" gang, the same well funded
>>>>> group that travels the US heightening racial tension (Al Sharpton, Jessie
>>>>> Jackson.) Baltimore's riots had a big gang problem that hasn't been seen
>>>>> yet, the street gangs hoping on board in an organized way to conduct
>>>>> criminal activity in the chaos. Something's gotta give.
>>>>>
>>>>> Certainly, the police methods employed in some metropolitan cities
>>>>> should be eliminated and cleaned up. But the police have to be able to
>>>>> defend themselves and do their job (which should be protecting and
>>>>> serving
>>>>> the public.) Where any of that goes off the rail is where it gets murky.
>>>>>
>>>>> When we can't have civil unrest without it being corrupted by monied
>>>>> interests looking to make things worse, there is little hope for societal
>>>>> change. This may be the reason for the current chaos. Follow the money.
>>>>>
>>>>
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