This is some art i did recently as i thought about some of the more provacative content in the curious phenomenon of a free comix/paraphernalia (heh) mag making the rounds x-country. i’ve seen it in several midwestern towns as well as out on the west coast (u.s.a.), such as in Portland, OR where it appears to be headquartered. (Am i the only one who could not see the art on this posting? only in the dashboard do i see it! Hacked??)
thinking through Sean Aaberg and co, re: Pork Mag
Check this out, TWO entire issues in full. i’ve sold them well on the street, so now it’s about time to pass it around as widely as possible. Note, it’s Anti-copyright! (Do you know what anti-copyright means?)
Note: When you click on this pdf you SHOULD be able to scroll down to each page and view at least 30 pages worth of art and writing!
Issue 2 is FULL COLOR!!
If you really like this art and these ideas, i would appreciate some sort of TRADE from you to show your happiness. Originally i sold these zines for $5 (tho they were all in black and white). If you want to print them out, feel free. Pass as many copies as you want around!
2015.06-DaringVisionaryZine-Issue1
2015.06-DaDaringVisionaryZine2
There is a 3rd issue, but i don’t want to pass it around online yet.
Some comments about what Derrick Jensen said in the 2014 ‘Earth At Risk’ conference. There were two other speakers, Stephanie McMillan and Charles Derber (i loved Derber when he said this: “Social norms are created by ruling elites” and how they are systematically “reducing and attacking the commons”), but i want to focus only on Jensen this time around.
Jensen is known for his provocative statements, and for that i pay attention to him from time to time. Tho I admit, i’ve never closely read any of his books. Just heard him on youtube type stuff up to now, basically.
anti-porn statement
Jensen is anti-porn because apparently he sees it as all about ‘masculinity’. I wonder if he means “macho” instead? (How can “masculinity” be wholly bad? Perhaps when it is the ONLY alleged attribute to “being a man”??) So i think Jensen is against promoting “macho men” or warmind, or maleness without feminism. So i think he really means he’s anti-macho and how that relates to the perpetuation of alienation, such as alienated pornography. He seeks to tie this together with capitalism, war, and Earth attack, and I think it’s true in part. But only in part.
I want to point out to him one thing, and something else to the reader. To him i’d like to point out that “porn” is made by a wide variety of people, not only Big Business Values (i.e. reducing people into objects and that sort of stupid shit). He totally misses that many people make their own porn on their cell phones and so on. Brenda Loew of the magazine “Everyone Is Doing Outrageous Sex” (or EIDOS http://www.eidos.org ) can provide, in her media, loads of examples of that. And so can the website “youporn”. Then there is also art porn, art made up from artists’ imaginations which gets boxed and labeled as porn.
So why can’t Jensen (and the Left) allow for this grey area? Because, i think it all comes back to their need to reduce things down into “neat”, “easy to grasp” concepts “fit for” their ideology about “the masses” (very similar to those they attack in corporate cult-ure). They apparently continue to uncritically buy into the old colonial (and neocolonial) idea that these techniques HAVE TO BE used. Why? Because they’ve been “educated in political strategies that are Realistic”. Oh? Realistic? And the Left continues to perpetually struggle, unable to ever overwhelm the Right, as if that was the Only Possible approach. Sheesh!
So maybe Leftists someday get rid of capitalism/corporate tyranny, but a very similar rigid mindset still prevails inside their heads! Hierarchy still prevails! You Had Better Follow Our Pragmatism Or Else.
To conclude, while i agree that the big business of pornography is rife with corporate value-type coercions and alienations, not all depictions of sexuality called or labeled porn are oppressive and in need of blocking and silencing.
So what is up with Jensen’s provocations? Well, he’s certainly becoming widely read. But the “endgame”, what’s the endgame? He says it’s in line with Indigenous seeing and being, and yet, what i’ve read of some of his stuff comes across as merely the Leftwing version of Rightwing-type fundamentalism. How can that be truly liberating?
For more info:
Wendy McElroy: XXX: A Woman’s Right To Pornography
Brenda Loew: “Everyone Is Doing Outrageous Sex” magazine (www.eidos.org Quite long-running and worth exploring!)
A bit old, but not having very good access to the internet these days, normally, I get to rely on happening to watch LinkTV on television wherever i happen to see it (i don’t have a TV). The Chris Hedges is quoting, according to the narrator, from his book Wages of Rebellion.
First, Chris Hedges said some really interesting things that i would like first to quote here, and then maybe comment on quickly. Note, I don’t know a lot about the background of Hedges, but from what i’ve read smatteringly (heh), he has a pretty good grasp, if still ideologically-challenged by Leftism, which i realize most cannot help but be.
To start off, did you ever notice how Chris comes off, in the sound of his voice? He really sounds like a preacher…or a priest. Same difference “in my book”. It’s kind of funny…except for the seriousness of his topics.
“Tens of thousands of people driven towards psychological breakdown and yet they stand up anyway.”
my comment: Beautiful!!!
And “neofeudalism”. Nice one! Eye-opening!
Other general statements:
Corporate tyranny is all about destroying community.
We’ve all become a sacrifice zone
No more collaboration because they don’t listen.
Nebulous (foggy, vague) legal terms
rendering citizens impotent
What these forces have done to others, they’ll do to you.
Fines (in Ferguson, MO and etc.) for not mowing the lawn, for standing in a crowd for 5 seconds…
Overthrow of all forms and shapes of corporate tyranny.
Hedges:
“We live in an age where we are going to stand with all of the oppressed or none of the oppressed [citing the palestinian peoples in israel]. In the face of corporate tyranny we cannot pick which oppressed group is convenient to support and which is not. Because it is the language of oppression; it is the experience of the oppressed that will teach us how to resist. And will give us the courage and honesty to fight back.”
my comment:
Of course, that all boils down to WHO GETS TO BE VIEWED AS BEING OPPRESSED. Do “registered citizens” (“rc’s”) get to have that privilege? (“rc’s” are those whom have served their ‘time’ in prison for crimes and yet get to be publicly hounded and persecuted –by hyped-up bureaucrats and vigilantes– for their lifetimes –see groups like http://www.sosen.org ) No, they aren’t allowed that privilege. Why is that? Increasing numbers of kids fall under that attack as well (see: http://solresearch.org/report/Criminalizing_Childs_Play ), but for some reason the Left cannot and will not “go there”.
So what about all the groups whom haven’t gone through the meta prerequisites of Leftist “defense”? Care to “take a shot at” that one?
So it seems to me that Leftists (and Rightists) use their words in manipulative ways, notably assisting (but how thoroughly???) some while perpetuating rigid dichotomies in the bigger picture. (Where’s the SOLIDARITY?)
Thus, after corporate tyranny is done away with, doesn’t the old mindset survive? Don’t get me wrong, i’m for doing away with all forms of tyranny, it’s just that…well, I suspect you know what i’m getting at.
“[Elites] manufacturing reality in order to disempower us.”
“We have got to build movements that are unrelentingly antagonistic to every aspect of corporate power.”
my comment: Gee, does that get to include the social sciences, in which many Leftists have careers in? Say, psychiatry (across the board, not just one school of belief or another)? Historically (as in the last 40 years especially), if you were caught challenging the social sciences you were automatically labeled a right-winger and discredited. Then Amy Goodman (on Democracy Now!) touched on the subject, finally ( http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/24/dr_gabor_mat_on_the_stress ) opening up the floodgates…well, er, at least allowing for a trickle of critique. Such as the shows around the APA and torture. Pretty interesting. But did it go as far as, say, what Dr.Tom Szasz ( http://www.szasz.com ) demystified? I didn’t see that. Perhaps you think i’m missing something?
comment on another statement Hedges made, but i don’t have the quote:
Hedges comes out against ‘child labor’ during his speech, and gets applause.
While I agree that most of what was ‘child labor’ in the 19th and early 20th (u.s.a.) century was extremely problematic from a liberation standpoint, i also understand that SOME kids SEEK to be “financially independent” and would very much like to work, at least part-time. And they would LIKE to have the capability to be freer than they are. Remembering here an article published in the investigative magazine, MOTHER JONES, about a CHILDRENS LABOR UNION in the ‘third world’ that was 14,000 members strong ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/11/underage-unions ). A short article but very important, and worth investigating further! (there were several websites from the point of view of the kids, several years back, but i was unable to find them in a short search, today; i do recall that one youth liberation worker from the ‘third world’ was murdered. His name was Iqbal, something.)
Maybe that’s the clincher, drawing out the desire to be free of groanup control by gathering the one (?) frame of reference readily available around them: Be viewed as SERIOUS and CAPABLE and become ‘mature’ in the eyes of their adults …similar to some teen moms, i suspect, and why they may have babies. The need for serious affirmation, and not being scapegoated with patronizing ways, and that sort of thing. (note: the term “groanup” comes from a youth liberation group of the 1970s that lasted for 10 years. If you’d like more info, look for FPS/CHIPS and “Ann Arbor Youth Liberation”)
Of course, i would promote such decisions as a PROCESS. Let kids experience their desires and as well allow them to move on when or if they choose!
And I think it makes sense to make a distinction between “very young” kids and teenagers; curiously, in today’s post-Rollback climate, ALL kids under 18 are reduced into being “children”…
Another distinction would certainly be the distinction between “first world” and “third world” kids. In the “third world”, kids are reacting to the reality of colonialism that has pushed them to work in the first place (where before colonialism, they were free, i think, to explore and participate in all aspects of life, and did not have to generally worry about starving homelessly in the street). So that is certainly an important context. On the other hand, “first world” kids are coming from a very different trajectory.
For example, when i was 13 i had my own paper route. And at 15 i worked a shitty job, paid only $1.25 an hour. (i was not part of any program) At 16 i was hired as a camp counselor and even had my own cabin at one point. Under the ideological rigidity of today’s system, all that participation, good and not so good, is wholly denied persons under 18, apparently, and employers get saddled with hysterical labels, thus they don’t do it, and most kids aren’t allowed to work –for money. (I admit i have not researched this lately; my knowledge was up to par around the early 2000s.)
Leftists (and other ideologically-challenged folk) cannot seem to allow for ANY grey area, and thus do a disservice more than a service, i think to human beings called kids. These groanups’ stuckness in propaganda-type tactics feels to me like foolishness, when you’d think they’d “get it” that SOLIDARITY is the better approach. Or at least variations of becoming solidarity, say by instituting programs that allow kids to explore while being paid fairly.
Leftists want to make statements that might incite their masses, instead of promoting that “the people” actually think things through in a more village-like way, where openings for MUTUAL liberation remain an integral part of the process of change. Not simply crushing coercions and attack (which characterize so much of politics and political action), which feel to me to be all too like the machiavellians and other would-be vanguardists of the Lippmann/Bernays/Niebuhr/Lasswell variety. Projecting ageist assumptions and directives against a whole ‘class’ of humans as usual! So WHERE IS THE NOTION OF STANDING WITH ALL OF THE OPPRESSED???? Is this not an example of the corporate elite “manufacturing reality in order to disempower”, as Hedges said in his speech???
Hedges:
“By scaring the powerful, revolutions do their work nonviolently.” (an approximate quote, i think that one was)
my comment: Who gets to be called The Powerful? All white men? (oh, I’m sorry, that’s “straight” white men!)
The way I’ve come to think of the situation (via much deep reflecting) is that those who are doing the most persecuting are in fact the most persecuted; that is, psychologically. Like when John Trudell spoke of white people having been put through “psychological genocide” while Indigenous people have been put through physical genocide, i think there is something profound to think through there. So heavily trounced, psychologically, EVEN IN THEIR ELITE SCHOOLS, i think, that they TRULY DO NOT KNOW AN ‘SERIOUS’ ALTERNATIVE TO THE COERCION THAT THEY ARE TAUGHT!
Think about THAT one for a minute. They have all of the material riches, but their psyches are attacked. Only one student may be “MADE AN EXAMPLE OF” and yet EVERYONE gets to indirectly experience that attack. Think about that one! Most just learn to “keep our heads down and our mouths shut”!
Oppressed people are of course much worse off physically AND psychologically. And yet those who actually CARRY OUT the mandate …they become sadists, they become severely alienated from the rest of humanity. And even the elites that don’t have to carry out the mandate directly. Look at the psychology of their lives. They cannot trust even their own kids (much less their kids’ intuitions)!
(So imagine constructing a dissent movement that encompasses this reality! Talk about solidarity! No one allows these treacherously alienated people to TRAMPLE anyone, but they DO allow their symptoms to be AIRED! They DO promote that their alienation be evolved! Imagine the NUMBERS that would be interested in THAT!)
Those who feel called, do your scaring; those of us called to try to somehow poeticly bridge, we can do our wradical humanity-ing in plethoras of creative ways. Does any one method work? i don’t think so. i think we may well need both and all. Tho we’ll most certainly need to organize separately from the martially-oriented (a.k.a. the physicality-trusting).
An alternative to SCARING people might be found in this older article: “Good Peasant, Bad Peasant” ( http://visionaryhumanity.blogspot.com/2007/11/good-peasant-bad-peasant-some-ideas-for.html ). Basically i recall that it promoted a methodology that takes from the “Good Cop, Bad Cop” routine and does a little “mass-jiu-jitsu”, Saul Alinsky style. This seems like a good way to approach, perhaps in tandem with scaring. Let the Hedges types get a few good swings in, and then the more feminine side of people gets to try to more poeticly bridge?!!
Hedges quotes Howard Zinn: “Every opening in the u.s….came from radical movements.”
Good quote. I’d only say that the problem with “radical” is that it means ONLY going to the roots of things, not their HEARTS. So it feels like a status-quo game, the old one (continuing!) about attacking and suppressing SYMPTOMS while never truly dealing with the REASONS FOR THE SYMPTOMS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
This all comes together into what i value in puzzling through things and people. The way i see it, EVERYONE is DOING THE BEST THAT THEY CAN in a context of being strategically and ideologically-challenged! Most simply DO NOT have this:
Serious frames of references’ for other paradigms.
In other words, for instance, college educations give people other frames of reference, generally speaking, but are they allowed to be seen as truly serious and valid? I have to wonder.
Most folks, i think, are heavily encumbered by the pressure to conform to the groups (family, gang, peers, formal society) arrayed around them. Groups which have become rigidized in the context of everyday war. War so often in so many places (and in so many types, covert or overt, intense and subtle) that groups and groupthink becomes rigidized.
So i seek to promote life beyond that rigidity by thinking it through and puzzling it out as best as we can. While Left/Rightists don’t promote that. They promote hype in various forms, seeking to mobilize.
Dissent welcome!
The Contours of Ressentiment, by Lupus Dragonowl.
Phew, pretty hard getting in my wordpress account of late, but i guess that’s what one gets when they challenge with some success.
i want to HIGHLY RECOMMEND the title essay! Try listening to it at: archive.org/details/FRRagainstIP or reading (link has a link to a site that i cannot get into, due to a “security warning” (normal ? vernacular for status-quo institutions angry at anarchist sites?) and commenting: http://anarchistnews.org/content/frr-audiobooks-against-identity-politics-spectres-joylessness-contours-ressentiment-lupus
My own comments as follows, reading from “Anarchy” (AJODA) mag:
i was most drawn to the section after the subheading on Maoists, etc. i’ll try to update my comments as i don’t have all of the text and my notes with me.
Off the cuff, i think of the problem of *internalized values* and what Noam Chomsky means when he discusses this. And i think of how many critical thinkers cannot help but to have largely internalized Rollback values, thanks to over 40 years of its propaganda. Including the largely seemingly undiscussed topic of how the social sciences have taken the place of orthodox religion, today. Social Science interests have been embedded into most “well educated” folks’ psyches in my view, and work to add to and build on how religion entered (and still enters) people’s unsuspecting internal psyches.
The essay on page 39 of the AJODA article is where i want to start a more “point by point” response.
i wonder at the meta provocations of Indigenous voices such as that of Waziyatawin (a Dakota patriot, and leading voice in the unsettling america project) in this context. My intuition tells me that some of these kinds of authoritarianistic provocations have depths or levels that are mysterious and that “there is more going on than meets the eye.” So, in seeking to walk in Waziyatawin’s “moccasins” so to speak, i think of her pushing the MUGGLE MIND, prodding it, unsettling us. Her DESIRE to fuck with self-claimed anti-authoritarians and that kind of thing.
So, rather than cast off Indigenous voices such as hers with a counter-judgement (“Why listen to them? They are ALL ‘nationalists’!”), i think it’s crucial to try to radically listen, gulp down the imperfect (?) method, and respond with our own kinds of HEART. Putting our lives on the line, or at least our immediate comfort, to show who we truly are to these kinds of champions.
As for the discussion of “sickness” amongst those stuck in authoritarian cult-ure, check out the unsettlingamerica discussion of the Wetiko (i particularly found value in Part 2, but couldn’t find it just now). See a list of articles here:
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/?s=wetiko
So there’s some food for thought, for now.
time is high for REMEMBERING our GREAT spirit’d
sanity
& SOLIDARITY’s
care!
The character assasins and psychological genocidists will fire off their so-called “best”
BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO
while a few (?) o’ yOu –will realize the VALUE
of
THINKING THANGZ THRU
for THIS LIFE and others,
practicing our “better bests”
for whichever QUEST or/and tests
may come on
cue.
(editor’s note: Oops, didn’t INTEND to post this on this blog rite here…. Hmmm. Well, i THOUGHT i was posting this on my newest blog! Ahhhhh, wellllllll! No desire to “hide” here, fellow human beings! (did PLAN to link to this site, but not rite now…..))
This is a big topic and i will be accepting writing as well as composing/writing my own posts and possibly illustrating them, either with art i’ve already done or something special just for here. It has been awhile since i have been writing any blogstuff so excuse me if i come off as being a little “off-kilter” (a curious word within itself!).
Off the top of my head, when i think of “care” and “decolonizing” together, i think of the following, almost immediately (what do you immediately come up with?) :
HOkay, so there’s some thinking to possibly inspire someone out there. Where-ever you may be.
A little bit more articulation may be needed, so such will likely come in time….
To all the directions i send this, my best.
a-hOh!
(please note: the author only recently discovered, at age 50, that he apparently is more fully related to Indigenous folks from this general side of moM EartH than he previously thought; thus, the strength of spirit of that one-sixteenth seems to have inspired my other percentage of spirits of the last, what, 30-plus years?!!!! Tho it may well be that the two relatives that claim their grandfather told them this were in actuality “pulling my leg”; so let that be out in the open as well!)
(please also note that i am a solopathic ORrioR, and that means that most of the people i mention on this site are only known to me as, at best, acquaintances, but mostly they are strangers whose writings i have been DEEPLY inspired by and wish to SHARE, in order to INSPIRE ALL O da WREST o’ y’aLL!!!!!!!!! And of COURSE experience the REFLECTIONS of all o this!
Jared Diamond and two other authors are challenged in this indepth rebuttal posted on survivalinternational’s blog! See: exploding the myth of Indigenous folks as “brutal”, etc.
Excerpts:
Survival exposes the ‘Brutal Savage’ myth by examining the recent work of some ‘popular science’ writers, who claim that tribal peoples live in a state of ‘chronic’ violence.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker promotes a fictitious, colonialist image of a backward ‘Brutal Savage’, which pushes the debate on tribal peoples’ rights back over a century and is still used to justify their destruction. Read more about why Pinker’s ‘science’ is wrong.
Steven Pinker would arguably not have been able to reach the conclusions he does about tribal violence without the highly controversial work of a single anthropologist: Napoleon Chagnon studied the Yanomami tribe from the 1960s, calling them ‘The Fierce People’. But are the Yanomami really fierce?
Napoleon Chagnon’s view that the Yanomami are ‘sly, aggressive and intimidating’ and that they ‘live in a state of chronic warfare’ has been widely discredited. Nonetheless, both Diamond and Pinker’s conclusions about tribal violence rely heavily on his work.
Jared Diamond’s 2012 book, The World Until Yesterday is ostensibly about what industrialized people (whom he calls ‘modern’) can learn from tribal peoples (he calls them ‘traditional’). His book, however, carries a false and dangerous message – that most tribes engage in constant warfare, both needing and welcoming state intervention to stop their violent behavior. Read more.
I’m really looking forward to what the new anti-authoritarian/anarchist journal “Modern Slavery” (modernslavery.calpress.org) will come up with, and have been trying to support Jason McQuinn’s project for awhile now. i have tons of respect for McQuinn thanks to all of his excellent editorial responses for many years in his old project, editing “Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed”!
Tho not wishing to identify “merely” as an anarchist, instead preferring a much broader “identity” (if i HAVE to have one!), one that is a little more creative and not so maligned so automatically in many peoples’ heads…(one old friend actually hung up on me and never spoke to me again when i mentioned the mag i thought he might enjoy reading back in the ’80s).
Anyway, my preferred “identity”/methodology? Span-archy, a.k.a. bridge-archy. The method (not ideology?) of seeking to promote and keep “poetic bridges” with the plethora of methods and “ways of doing things” out there.
Sometime i may get into this idea in more depth, but for now i’ll just leave you with that to think about! (anyway, my time is severely limited these days….)
Check this out, first:
http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8980
VERY IMPORTANT read, and GOOD for passing around through your networks!
*(note: um, a little roughly written, sorry about that! Needs editing when i have the time!)*
Comments on the article:
Same Old Again, Inc. doing its work…i figure.
Question is, who funds these widely-circulated anti-Indigenous books, and how is it that they can get right up there in the mainstream circulation crowd fairly quickly, while other books remain languishing in the margins??? Do you have any idea?
i think i do, recalling Philip Agee and Ward Churchill (two authors who get pretty deep into the “shadow” government thing) discussing “the patsy picked to…” publish on behalf of shadow government, making his writing appear to be independent. Who? One John Crewdson, a writer, whom for those who have woken up to the meta games of u.s./Western journalism games, was awarded the s0-called “prestigious” Pulitzer award, no doubt for his careful obedience to Western ideology.
The quote above is Agee speaking about this reality in his seminal book about some of the consequences of his whistle-blowing on the c.i.a., On The Run. While Ward Churchill wrote in his book Indians Are Us? (yes, i need to get specific pages, and have them in my notes somewhere)
Do compare and contrast, and let me know what you come up with, if you want.
The linked article goes over a wide variety of truths not being mentioned in Western media outlets, which should come as no surprise. Though, this time, the patsy picked (?) to push the same old bigotry and out-of-context truths is Jared Diamond.
As one who finds myself often engaging the strategically-challenged on Indigenous issues (and etcetera), i for one would like to know more about this Jared Diamond. Anyone know a good source to read?
