Why I Am Not a Revolutionary

Many writers and thinkers I respect a great deal argue that the extant social order — which is in bell hooks’s terms white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy — is hopelessly morally corrupt and must be ended.  I agree with this, in fact.  The inhumanity of our system is evident; thus clearly it must be changed.  However, it’s common for these people with whom I agree (Twisty Faster is a good example) to hold that because this hopelessly morally corrupt social order is extant, and being hegemonic will not only fight to preserve itself, but has access to virtually limitless resources in order to do so¹, it is functionally impossible to reform, and must instead be overthrown by revolution.  And there, I do disagree.

First, I want to emphasize that it’s the conclusion I disagree with: the idea that the solution is revolution.  It is certainly true that the extant social order is very, very difficult to change.  But I reject revolution, as I’ll explain, on the grounds that it’s a cure worse than the disease.

Quick Hit: Cambridge Phelps-a-Thon

Apparently Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church  (sic) will be protesting in Cambridge, MA in a couple of weeks, over the continuing existence of a Gay-Straight Alliance at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.  This is close to home: I live only a few miles from there, and a good friend of mine went to Rindge.  The gall of these terrible people bringing their hatred here is astonishing, and it makes me very angry.

If you’re angry too, and you can spare some  money, please consider the Phelps-a-thon, which I think is one of the more effective counters to the WBC.  Phelps wants attention; he wants shouting matches with counterprotesters and even altercations, because that raises his profile.  Better to calmly display to him a sign showing how much money he’s raised so far for the causes he hates.

Why Does Glenn Beck Hate America?

On his Fox show last week, it seems Glenn Beck, noted professional terrible person, had a panel including ex-CIA and ex-Army officers discussing a supposed coming civil war in the US.  Greenwald:

[H]e convened a panel that includes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong.  They discuss a coming “civil war” led by American “Bubba” militias — Beck says he “believes we’re on this road” — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with “the people” in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with “the people”) [Emphasis mine.]

Even for a vile, eliminationist blowhard like Beck, this is shockingly blatant (and I’m a bit surprised Dave Neiwert hasn’t written about it yet; he probably has a piece in the pipeline, though).  I probably don’t even need to bring up the kind of enormous storm of fauxtrage we’d be seeing from the right wing, if a Rachel Maddow or a Keith Olbermann or a Michael Moore had said something even a fraction as inflammatory as this.

This bears empasis, so pardon my repetition: Glenn Beck, a professional political commentator employed (presumably to the tune of a rather large number of dollars) formerly by CNN and now by Fox News (sic), just ran a program promoting the idea that there will soon be a civil war in this country, in which in violation of their oaths the military will side with survivalist-type civilian militias against the (Democratic-Party-controlled) government.

This is insane.  And it’s unconscionably, dangerously irresponsible, especially in light of recent, tragic proof that this kind of violence-promoting rhetoric is not just a gimmick to boost ratings (and the question of whether Beck himself thinks that it’s just a gimmick is essentially irrelevant to the horrific results) has real, and terrible consequences.

The only remotely conscientious, responsible course of action for Fox is to cancel Beck’s show immediately and require him to deliver an on-air apology.  They won’t do that, of course, because they aren’t conscientious or responsible.

Update: See also Cosmic Variance.

AG Holder and the Race Speech

Yesterday, Eric Holder — the country’s first Black Attorney General — gave a speech to DoJ employees in honor of Black History Month.  (AP Story; Text of remarks.)  The thing that’s been getting particular attention (though, actually, less than I might have expected; perhaps people are just really too busy paying attention to, you know, the ongoing catastrophic meltdown of the world economy) is mainly this line:

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

Before I continue to talk about this, I’m going to go off on a tangent for a little bit, because it’s my blog, and I can do that.

It seems to me that “the race speech” is an expected rite of passage for PoC politicians and other public figures in America.  The person of color, having unsettled white America by ascending to a position of power, must give a thoughtful, nuanced, and above all eloquent speech on the subject of race, confirming in the minds of those unsettled that he or she is, after all, exceptional (and thus not a genuine threat to the extant social order), and reassuring them that everyone bears a share of the responsibility for ongoing racial problems in America (and thus they, on behalf of white people, aren’t being accused of racism) — which anyway are of course much less bad than they were, and really can be solved by everyone making little, painless adjustments in their everyday behavior.

If it’s not abundantly clear how much is wrong with that, on how many different levels, then I’m not sure how to make it more clear.  Let me point out, by the way, that this is not a criticism of the PoC public figures placed in this position, or any kind of claim to know what’s in their minds with respect to these speeches and their effects; nor indeed to suggest that the above is necessarily a reasonable reception for such speeches — only that I think this is how they are generally received by white America.

It is not the responsibility of those who have suffered centuries of oppression at the hands of others, and who continue to be disadvantaged by the social and economic structures and norms that developed during those centuries, to help those who have benefited from oppressing them, and who continue to benefit from those same inequitable social and economic structures and norms to feel better about themselves and their history.  So suggest that it is, as the expectation of the race speech implicitly does, is nothing less than insane.  (I suppose it also supports Holder’s point: that we are indeed cowardly on this topic.)

All right, back to the subject at hand: AG Holder’s actual speech.  I think it’s a good speech, and I think he’s right about a lot of things; though I also think he gives too little attention to ongoing structural problems, I understand the political reasons for treading lightly around those.  Perhaps, if enough Americans take this speech seriously and act on it, we will finally begin to be able to approach these issues with more maturity, and honestly own up to the things that are wrong.  (After all, if we don’t claim them, they aren’t ours to fix.)  But Holder raises a lot of very important, and I think correct, points.

Both Rachel S.’s take at Alas! and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (which has the MSNBC video of the speech embedded) are worthwhile reading.  Coates’s criticisms are intriguing to me (I don’t think I agree with them, though) — in some ways, I’d say the speech’s boringness, its workaday matter-of-factness, is actually a strength.  The Attorney  General’s delivery serves this purpose well, too.  He’s not a fiery, electrifying or inspiring orator like the President is; he’s not exhorting or demanding, he’s just saying how things are and what needs to be done.

I’m going to end here.  Ultimately, I don’t know how comfortable I am taking on the role of yet another white guy declaiming about race: white people shouldn’t get to set the terms of this debate.  So these are just my first-draft, rough-cut opinions, with some links to thinks I think worth reading, and I’m happy to be disagreed with.

Nothing is "Just a Game"

A lot has been written, and I expect a lot more will be written, about Resident Evil 5.  IGN published a column insisting that it’s not really racist; Eurogamer wrote that of course it’s racist and gamers and the gaming press need to confront it if we want to have any credibility for our claims that games deserve to be taken seriously as an artistic medium.

Penny Arcade addresses the issue today.  As often happens, the comic went up before the news post, and I was very concerned, without the context provided by the latter, that the former was an attempt to, like IGN, deride the criticisms of the game’s imagery.  I’m very glad to see, in reading the post, that that isn’t the direction Tycho was going.  I could have hoped he’d spend more time seriously engaging the racism and what’s wrong with it, but since I was concerned that he’d join much of the gaming press in simply insisting it was no big deal, I’m happy he is in fact taking it seriously.  He links to an interview at MTV’s Multiplayer blog with N’Gai Croal, who writes for Newsweek, which I think is worth your time to read.  And I think Tycho’s closing paragraph does a good job articulating the change of perspective I hope the discussion of this game provokes in at least some young gamers:

It’s sort of like those Magic Eye pictures. You can’t see it, you can’t see it, and then bam. All you can see is the genocide.

One final note (as it were) that particularly pleased me about the news post: be sure to mouse over the small, italicized epigraph at the bottom of Tycho’s post.

I thought I was going to have more to say about RE5, when I started writing this post: I didn’t mean it to just be about Penny Arcade’s response.  But, it turns out, I find the whole situation — both the fact¹ of the game’s racism and the impassioned defense of the game being mounted from many corners of the gaming world: a defense which, given the aforementioned fact, genuinely cannot be perceived as anything but pro-racist — tiring and depressing.  RE5 is unabashedly, violently racist, and uncritically, unironically² portrays the wholesale slaughter of black Africans by a white American as heroic.  How there can be any debate over whether it’s a “good game” or whether it’s “worth playing” in the face of that, let alone any debate over whether that’s an accurate characterization, is beyond me.

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1 Yes, fact. There really is no room for interpretation here.
2 No, “but, see, it’s ironic!” wouldn’t be any kind of defense; I’m not advocating hipster racism. I just want to highlight the apparent complete lack of awareness on the part of the developers that anyone might find blatantly racist, pro-genocide imagery offensive.

Quick Hit: The Obameter

From the fine folks who brought you the Truth-O-Meter, the St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact has now launched the Obameter, a project to track President Obama’s performance on his campaign promises.  They list 510 promises, and

We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

The report card […] provides an up-to-the-minute tally of all the promises.

Found via Feminist Law Profs, with whose opinion I concur¹ in noting

One great feature of the Internet is the ability to track the performance of politicians in real time like this.

This is a fantastic project, and I’d love to see this kind of tracking become an expected, normal part of our political discourse.

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1 see what I did there?

…Did He Really Just Say That?

Yes.  Yes, he did.

Pete Sessions (R-TX32), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, did in fact say that the Republicans need to mount an “insurgency” against the Democratic majority in Congress, and that the Taliban can serve as a model for how to go about it.

The Taliban.

As the gnome pointed out over IM, even if Sessions hadn’t picked such a fraught analogy as the (of all things) Taliban, he’s still saying that the Republican minority in Congress should work like an “insurgency,” i.e. operate outside Congressional rules and procedures, in order to disrupt and obstruct the Democratic agenda.

Look, I know no major Democratic strategists read my tiny little blog.  But come on.  There is, very clearly, no good faith negotiating partner available for the Obama administration.  The Republicans don’t care what the actual outcomes of policies are, they only care about their “team” “winning” and the Democratic “team” “losing”.

If it were remotely plausible that the Republicans wanted what’s best for all of America but disagreed on how to achieve that, I would be all for trying to work with them, compromising on some things, and embracing bipartisanship as a useful method for moving forward.  But they are, in fact, utterly, brazenly, blatantly, opposed to bipartisanship.  They say the word “bipartisan” a lot, but everything they actually do makes it clear that that word simply doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it does to everyone else.  When a Republican talks about “bipartisanship,” he or she just means “doing what Republicans want, and not what Democrats want.”

Ugh.  It’s tiring, belaboring this point; I don’t really know what the point is of my trying to emphasize it further.  What could I, or anyone, conceivably say to persuade anyone not already convinced by the past month and a half that the Republicans have no interest in bipartisanship, compromise, progress, or indeed trying to fix the collapsing economy?  It’s simply not on their radar screen — the only thing that matters is making the Democrats “lose”.

I don’t know if there’s any audio or video of Sessions’s remarks.  I sincerely hope there is, and that the Democrats get hold of it.  After eight years of hearing the right wing scream at the top of their lungs that the Democrats were traitors and on the side of the terrorists, the chairman of the NRCC holding up the Taliban as a model for the Republicans to emulate is something that ought to be hung around the neck of the whole party.

After all, if in 2005 Rahm Emanuel had made a similar statement, we’d still be hearing about it twenty years from now.

Democrats: nail them to the wall on this.  They richly deserve it.

Holy Crap. It's For Real.

Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President.  George W. Bush is no longer in office.

Wow.

Nouning Considered Harmful*

Note: I’ve taken the opportunity of Melissa McEwan’s generous offer of a guest post at Shakesville to revise this post to clarify some phrasing and expand on some areas I didn’t feel I’d covered sufficiently.

Here’s the thing: using adjectives as nouns obscures meaning, harms discourse, impairs communication, and ultimately reduces our ability to think in a careful and nuanced way about controversial issues, let alone effect social progress.  Anyone who wants to see our society become less divided rather than more, and in particular anyone who wants to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of prejudice and modes of oppression, should try hard to avoid the practice. Don’t call anyone a sexist, or a racist, or a homophobe. Here’s why.

Shakesville: Gone Shirky?

All right, first off, if you don’t know Clay Shirky’s seminal “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”, go read it.

Now, what I’m going to talk about isn’t precisely the same as what Shirky’s talking about, but to use vague and general terms, the notion that the larger a group or community gets, the more likely it is to fracture or disintegrate or tear itself apart, is useful here.

Shakesville, one of the treasures of the progressive blagoweb, has been showing an increasingly worrisome number of stress fractures over the course of the campaign season.  If I were to try to characterize the problem broadly, I’d say that there are different groups of commenters, and they have slightly varying ideas about what the blog, as a community space, is about; and those ideas are not always totally compatible either with each other, or with what Melissa McEwan — the founder and central figure — thinks the blog is about.

This came to a head just recently, after McEwan, whose attitudes toward now-President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden have been gradually and publicly shifting from mistrust to cautious optimism (and I hope, on the off chance she or anyone else from Shakesville read this they’ll forgive my oversimplification there), and whose growing stress and frustration with the unrelenting negativity of some of the comment threads, wrote a moving post on the need to be optimistic and push hard, even when that means pushing our ostensible friends, for the change we want to see.  As has often happened, a lot of the comments were, or came across as, purely negative, offering anger, frustration and disillusionment — and not generally unfounded! — but little else.  It’s a commonplace, it seems, with many Shakesville commenters, that there’s no particular reason to be excited or hopeful about last Tuesday’s election results, that nothing in particular (or nothing important) is likely to get much better.  I think that’s absurd to the point of being an insult to the intelligence of anyone who reads it, but it’s not what I’m trying to address right now.  McEwan, understandably upset by the utter failure of a community which professes to value her greatly to pay attention to her wishes, hasn’t posted on Shakesville since.

There’s much soul-searching going on at Shakesville today; McEwan’s co-bloggers have penned impassioned pleas for the commenters to pay attention, and the commenters are by and large experiencing a collective “my god, what have we done?” moment.  I readily declare that I’m as guilty as anyone, when it comes to taking McEwan for granted.

I don’t know what the solution is.  But that this is happening breaks my heart.  What the hell is wrong with us?  When did we forget that we’re in this together, that we’re on the same side?

Shirky points out that the same group-dynamics phenomena have been happening over and over again in the realm of social software for about thirty years.  And yet, somehow, each time, the developers of the social software fail to anticipate those phenomena, and look at them and say (if they’re sufficiently detached), “Wow!  What an interesting development!  We should document this unexpected turn of events!” or (if they’re not), “Shit!  Our carefully planned online community is collapsing!  Whatdowedo??!?”

And, he also emphasizes, this is not just a software or just a social problem.  “A Group…” was written five yeras ago, and the software end has shaken out somewhat and gotten more standardized; but the social problems will, I expect, always be with us.  It’s troubling, however, that we don’t seem ever to get much smarter about dealing with them.  And more troubling yet that we — the Shakesville community — in the process of being our own worst enemy may have pushed Melissa McEwan away from her own blog, and deprived political discourse on the Internet of a much needed, careful, thoughtful voice.