Bloc Theory

Politics, philosophy, and political philosophy (and history). bloctheory.com

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The Theory on Hiatus

So I’ve been getting overwhelmed with other projects and Bloc Theory’s fallen by the wayside. It’s a shame, especially to me, but I’ve decided to focus my attention and simply put Bloc Theory on hiatus. Will it come back? If I get time, or if I need to write something that can’t quite go anywhere else.

Please follow my fiction work at nearzone.com, catch me on twitter at my depraved & longwinded personal account or my much more bearable and far less posty “business” account @_nearzone.

Thanks for reading! (Obinna) J Onwuka

http://www.bloctheory.com/2015/07/the-theory-on-hiatus/

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The Imperial Surveys, Bias

Note: I tend to call my project intros “biases.” Just if you were curious, which you weren’t.

One superpower overshadows all other powers on the planet today: the United States of America. Since the end of the Second World War, only one nation has claimed rival status with the United States. The Soviet Union rebuilt an empire which has, after the long Cold War, crumbled away again. As for America, its dominance seems to defy a familiar description. It does not see itself as a conquering nation and it explicitly rejects doctrines of expansionism. But when we consider that every supreme power before the Cold War called itself an empire, the question should then be asked: is America an empire?

Obviously, considering we used the term for the Soviets, we do not think kindly of the term empire. When we say empire we see years of bloodshed for the gain of only a few, we see oppression, we see extortion and theft. It makes it easy to use the word to denigrate the influence of our enemies. Yet what the Soviet Union had — a network of allied countries, ideologically compliant, receiving substantial assistance from the USSR — is not unlike the United States’s own investment in western European countries after WWII and its current loans and grants to countries all over the world. If we can call the Soviet Union an empire, why not America? And if we do so, should we simply leave it at bringing up images of oppression?

I am not yet convinced that America can be called an empire because the definition of an empire is vague. To that end I’ve decided to survey historical empires in search of common values. Many will have called themselves empires outright, such as Napoleon‘s French empire. Other widespread groupings, like Christendom in the Middle Ages, were less formal but still influential. My hope is to identify how these empires were run, who made them run, who they were run for, and how they exploited those who stood outside the aforementioned “state clientele.” These systems of coordination, administration, and control do not die out, they evolve. Understanding the relatively simpler methods used in earlier times can help us to better see how our society functions today.

I’ll start in a few days with what for Westerners is the archetypal empire: Rome.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2015/06/the-imperial-surveys-bias/

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The Matter with Whiteness

More white people sit in US prisons than there are people in The Bahamas. More white people are in state and federal people here in the United States than are imprisoned in India, South Africa, Vietnam, or Iran. More white women are imprisoned in the US than there are total prisoners, without qualification, in South Korea, in Saudi Arabia, or in Iraq. In fact more white women are in US prisons than the total prison populations of Australia and New Zealand combined.

If we were to take only the statistics of white people in prison in the year 2013, the United States would still be the #4 imprisoner of people in the world.

The fact that these statistics seem to be of little national concern is troubling. The size of the United States compared to other countries doesn’t explain it; even considering just white people in state and federal prison, as I have been, the United States would still be imprisoning its citizens at a rate greater than all those imprisoned in Iran or in Israel, about twice the rate of Mexico, and about four times the rate of China.

There are more white people in poverty in the United States of America than there are people living in Afghanistan or in Australia. In numerical terms, the number of hostile incidents between police and citizens predominantly have white victims. The CDC records that in 2013 white people were shot and killed by enforcement groups 237 times, almost double the number of blacks.

If there is a difference between white people and black people and Hispanic people and so on in terms of poverty or trouble with the law, you’ll only be able to see it in statistics. Throughout this country there are great numbers of white poor, white people who are unfairly targeted by the law, white people whose opportunities have dried up and who have been abandoned by the government.

Why is there no outrage?

The question that helps to answer that is, simply, “What is whiteness?”

When black people suffer injustice, black people will come together and try to fight it. If a black person succeeds, black people will be happy. If a black person does wrong, black people feel as though they have to make up for that in some way. But the reasons why black people — and Hispanic people and other groups — have this is precisely that they are not white. This collective feeling that black people seem to share is not an ingrained cultural identity, it is a defense mechanism and it exists in opposition to the mainstream — white — society.

Blackness, and all other shades of colored humanity, is defined as a foil to whiteness. This definition isn’t created by those who are called black, it’s created by those who call themselves white. But ultimately both groups are artificial. We know from history that race used to refer to what me call tribes, and then perhaps to cultures, that it’s been tied up with religion and it has had insidious connotations at some times which it didn’t at others. What, then, creates the collective identity in black people?

It is hardship. The shared pains and trials of black people have helped to bind them together. The shared heartaches and oppressions suffered by Hispanics is what unites them. For every racial group it’s these hardships which allowed them to find common cause in others of their race.

This is not to say that white people have not had hardships every bit as severe as those suffered by other peoples in their own history. The difference is that the hardships suffered by white people were suffered as individual nations and peoples. The hardships of the Irish are not the same as those of the English, and none are the hardships of the Germans, or of the Russians, or of the Greeks. Similarly, those people from West Africa had different trials from those in Egypt and those on the Cape. The difference here is that black people also had a shared experience: economic and military domination by people who grouped them all together. Hispanic people had the shared experience of colonial subjugation by the Iberian powers and also of largely being under American hegemony, even in their native countries. These histories allow people of these groups to empathize with each other significantly in ways that white people experience more strongly with nation-groups such as within the Irish or Italian or Polish communities.

It is not only directly experiential, either. Continental Africa was never under the kind of control that colonial South America was, for instance. However, the experience of the slave trade helped to entrench in white people a belief in black inferiority. This meant that when white people encountered any blacks, from whatever region, they treated them as inferior, which eventually compelled blacks to find common cause.

That explains what whiteness is not. But what is it?

Originally, racial whiteness was described as being of English or Nordic extraction. Famously, the Irish and Italians were not considered white (or at the very least decent white) for many years in America. Neither were Germans, Russians, Greeks, or Spaniards. All of these groups did eventually become white but the process was not quick. Instead, the definition of whiteness tended to expand in relation to the potency of the colored class.

The Irish, for instance, were reviled by many white Americans as a subject people. They began to arrive in the United States after their Great Famine in 1845. In 1861, the American Civil War was begun and in 1865 it ended, ushering in the emancipation of black peoples in the rejoined nation. It’s shortly afterward that the position of Irish people began to rise and, in the post-war west, Irish immigrants like Denis Kearney drove policy to exclude Chinese from work. As new groups arrived, groups who could less readily be assimilated into the definition of white, those who could be easily assimilated such as the Irish and Italians were so accepted.

By doing this, the white establishment protected itself by preventing any large anti-regime faction to get powerful. Given their common positions under the establishment, it would have made sense for the Irish and free blacks to join together politically. If this were to happen, this new group could force changes which would upend their regime in order to bring changes they required. Co-opting these European immigrant groups into whiteness allowed the existing establishment to retain its shape and self-perpetuate.

Whiteness is for them a promise. It says that they are part of the valued group, because the major quality of being white is not being colored, not being considered in the underclass. In fact, for it to be tenable, there has to be a colored class, a class separated from the white class by its lack of privileges like legal protection. It’s not that by being white there is any gain, it is simply the knowledge that one is safe from a worse fate.

However, as the figures noted above show, white people hardly experience a more secure fate than their colored neighbors. Further, it has never been the case in American history that all white people were better off than all black people, or even that all white people had more political power than all black people. There are enough exceptions to be found that I find it difficult to believe that white people could have, on observation only, ever believed that the government and/or the white establishment was particularly looking out for them. Whatever promise is given by the establishment is as thin as tissue.

So what is whiteness?

Whiteness is oppression. It oppresses in two directions. For colored people, whiteness oppresses directly, explicitly. It uses violence and vile words and gossip and stereotypes. It makes colored people into an example. For white people, whiteness oppresses by constraint and theft. The establishment steals from white people, kills white people, imprisons white people, and demands their loyalty. It threatens them with demotion to the colored class if they step out of line and frightens them with the phantom of coloreds overtaking the government if they don’t support the regime. It prevents those who are suffering from realizing they are suffering by putting the blame on an underclass taking more is their right.

The truth is that even if every colored person disappeared from America, the chronic problems of America would remain. They would not be helped in the slightest degree. Whiteness would retreat in order to exclude groups, or some other thing would take precedence over it, and there would still be prejudice and tension and oppression. If you work to uphold whiteness in any form then you will never be able to address these issues. It is blinding.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2015/05/the-matter-with-whiteness/

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The Matter with Democracy

We should be exceedingly wary of the export of this thing we call democracy. In the first place, anything in which we have placed so much trust deserves scrutiny. Why have we put all of our faith in government to this concept? There is a clear lure in it: the idea that, contrary to every earlier conception of government, the state would be expressly created to serve its people. But beyond that, what is it? An illusion which we color. A vessel into which our ideas our poured. Democracy is exactly what we say it is.

When we European/American societies use the term “democracy,” we mean it as a shorthand for “Western democracy,” a synonym of “Western civilization”: our entire society encapsuled in a phrase. It doesn’t mean simply a political system or set of laws, for us it is the bedrock of our society. To most eyes, these Western democratic societies function tolerably well at the least, arguably better than those outside. When we think of another nation adopting democracy, whether through choice or coercion, we think that their path is sure to lead them to a level of prosperity that is enjoyed by Western democracies.

However, the definition of a democracy is not consistent within the scope of modern Western civilization. The two-party, three-branch presidential system of the United States differs significantly from the bicameral, legislature-dominated British system. These both are at variance with the systems of France, Germany, and Canada. To say that they are all Western democracies means that there isn’t one concrete definition. We can find similarities, certainly — national elections, separation of powers, primacy of judicial decisions — but that doesn’t mean that “Western democracy” is a term with a clear and agreed-upon definition.

Stripping away the adjective, the concept of democracy itself has changed radically from its first description. Perhaps at one point it had a well-defined meaning, but this would have been at its very earliest days. The democracy of Athens is the prototype for all those who would claim the idea.

At the center of Athenian democracy was the active citizen, the one who starts an action. Their society valued the participation of all eligible citizens (excluding especially women, slaves, foreigners, and children). Not only were all citizens allowed to make a motion of their own account, all citizens were called to hold political office by random allotment. The laws forbade citizens holding most offices more than once. The focus was on ensuring that each citizen contributed to the governing of society and that no one or no group could dominate the government. For them, this emphasis on the individual citizen was crucial.

The ideas of European revolutionaries at the turn of the 19th century drew heavily upon the example of Athens. In France, the system had to account not only for the great size difference between France and the comparatively tiny Athens, it needed to respond to strong political ideologies and factionalism. This national democracy would focus on the process of election, which was somewhat denigrated in Athens. Appropriate representatives would be elected by the citizens to carry out the national duties. In this way, the citizens governed themselves through delegates. As opposed to Athenian citizens’ democracy in which every citizen was an actor, French national democracy gave every citizen a voice.

Since the French Revolution, the attitude of the world has changed drastically. A democratic revolution took place in every country in which aristocratic modes of thought were abandoned in favor of broadly democratic modes: rather than believing they ruled in their own right, governments admitted and agreed that they ruled to benefit the people. Not every country took on what we would call democratic institutions. Indeed, the erosion of traditional rulers was often a cause for massive corruption and a decrease in the effective franchise. However, before we begin to criticize these post-revolutionary nations for not being sufficiently democratic, let’s remember the differences of national and citizens’ democracy.

In the development of national democracy, the French did away with two very key aspects of the Athenian model: appointment by lot and the role of the active citizen. Political life was restricted to those who had been elected to engage in politics. This allowed a variety of political factions in France to seize power and influence, including the intial National Convention group and the Jacobin faction. As French national democracy — upon which all further democratic ideals have been based upon or in opposition to — progressed it proved to be prey to the sorts of entrenched interests that the Athenians may well have warned directly against.

What remained between them? Some of the citizens’ privileges and the profession that the government would work for the benefit of its citizenry. In fact, many of the privileges, duties, and protections afforded to the citizen in the Athenian system were removed from its revolutionary successor. The major plank in democracy seems to be this new relationship between government and public. If the government serves the people, who is it to say that, at its root, it is not democratic?

This is the philosophy behind an authoritarian military junta. Regimes of this kind have been imposed, as in Japan after World War II, and they have evolved from within, as in Argentina under El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Their assertion is that the nation is not in a state for broader democratization along the national or citizens’ models. El Proceso, for instance, took control in a period of widespread violence between guerrilla groups and enforcement agencies. By taking a strong hand themselves, the junta or chief can defend against the corruption which would surely overtake any electoral body and they can ensure that the populace is properly provided for. It is presented as an action of necessity, usually brought about by someone who has been appointed to high office within an elected government — often a military commander. All of these conditions are used to legitimize the idea that they have taken power in order to serve the people. In spirit, this profession is as democratic as those made by the Athenians and by the French revolutionaries.

The actions of a government against its people cannot be taken as a measure of its democracy or lack thereof, or else no country could call itself democratic. Athens rashly murdered an admiral for a simple failure in battle which they mistook as treason or cowardice. France sent many to death in its revolution and oppressed its colonies for years afterward. Modern democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom don’t have records that are much better, beginning with massacres of foreign nationals and ending with home invasions and robbery of their own citizens. To attempt to disqualify an authoritarian caretaker on the grounds of its brutality doesn’t prove viable, and disqualifying it on its authoritarian nature alone raises the question of how national democracy can be reconciled with citizens’. If we accept that both of those forms are equally democratic in spirit, we have to accept that the authoritarian democracy of la ultima dictadura and similar governments is also in that category.

Democracy, as a broad term, makes no pronouncements except for its vague call to rule in the name of the people. As we have seen from United States support of fascist militias in Ukraine to their backing of Sisi’s transitional democracy in Egypt, what exactly this means can be exceptionally fluid, even to us. Even within a stricter category like “Western democracy” or “national democracy” there are myriad hues which could, in time, become their own notable categories. By latching onto these blanket ideals we not only profess a belief in an empty shell, we allow our own grasp on the mechanisms of government to become weak. As our grasp becomes weaker, our ability to have any influence on the government weakens as well.

Separation of powers is an exceptionally influential concept in government, often associated with democracy. It can be credited with breaking the ultimate decision power of single leaders by creating concurrent avenues of authority. Most of those governments we would consider “Western democracies” view it as a key aspect of their operation. It’s application is localized and its use is clearly understood; even though there are variations in how it’s used, these variations consist mostly of which branches are separated, not in the necessity of separation.

It’s a concept like separation of powers which has to be remembered, and even then, not the term or the idea in broad but how it works in detail. If every aspect of government is folded into a larger concept, the reasons for the composite action become lost, which leaves not the reason nor the tenets but just the term. The term which is a shell, a vessel, that can be filled with any ideas whether they fit into any original idea of the term or not.

Democracy is an alluring concept but it is meaningless when trying to actually understand governments. Countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea have had rumored shifts toward democracy, though what this is supposed to mean is extremely malleable. A strong government will function well and respond to its people constructively with or without the label democracy. Similarly, a weak government’s problems cannot be solved by giving it the label. What has to be investigated are the ways in which the government relates to its people and vice versa. And as the differences between citizens’ and national democracy show, what matters for a government is not its form but its results. The export of democracy, shifting others to the idea of popular sovereignty, seems to be a morally sound goal but ultimately what we ought to try and “export” (to the extent such a thing is possible) are the tools from which a people can pinpoint their own problems and construct a system which will ensure their own local hue of democratic government.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2015/04/the-matter-with-democracy/

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The Matter with Government

Governments do not fail as often as we believe they do. This isn’t to say that they actually deserve more credit in serving their public. It is in fact to say that if we look at what governments actually pursue, more often than not those direct goals are in some way satisfied.

It’s easy to conjure up situations in which the state should bear responsibility and yet it does not. It is easy to research events that the United States government has perpetrated directly against the common well-being of the American people as a body. But we can’t call these failures because that implies that the government’s job is to provide for the needs of the people as a body. What we understand as a government’s proper constituency is the entirety of a national people. This is an ideal or, more accurately, a fiction. As all fiction it’s fine to speculate about but wrong to use as a guide for living.

The difference between the real and ideal is obvious in the example of the 1033 Program. Developed in 1997 under President Bill Clinton, this program authorized the Department of Defense to sell surplus military equipment to state and local police departments throughout the United States. As a result, a great many enforcement groups have become unwieldy with equipment that they are not properly trained to use. This militarization has had disastrous effects on a number of communities which find themselves powerless to use their government in order to protect themselves.

In no case was the 1033 Program subjected to any sort of public review before implementation, whether directly through referendum or through representatives. Communities and police departments that have succeeded in legally outlawing or ordering returns of this excess gear find that they are unable practically to send back or to dispose of the material. It appears that no part of the 1033 Program has been generally accepted by those that it affects.

We can assume that the 1033 Program is one of two things. It may be an example of an incredibly out-of-touch government that can’t properly take care of its people. It implies incompetence and confusion on a very broad scale. If that were the case, we the people ought to be able to replace these leaders with ones that respond to our requests. However, it may be that the government is functioning properly. The fact that we the people cannot make effective change is then not the result of government confusion but because we the people are no longer relevant to the government. In some way, the primacy of the entire public has been overridden by a smaller group which has been able to coerce the rest.

This is what I see as happening today. We are not experiencing government dysfunction. This is a redirection of government. Decisions which affect millions are still being made while each and every segment of the population professes powerlessness.

How has this come about? Certainly, the rise of a wealthy class which has been able to push its candidates into political office has played a key role. However, their success is not simply one of money and fame. Wealth can be divided unequally and often is. They have succeeded in ideas. That’s the ground upon which every participant in the nation has some footing. It’s also why their success against the greater public has been so total.

Ideas cannot be divided. They must be shared. When we share our ideas we no longer have full ownership of them. That means we don’t completely define what they are. In many cases, this is helpful, especially when we still have some say. But the larger this group grows, the less that people outside what calls itself the ruling class can have any effect on them. When we make ourselves loyal to mass ideas, we are allowing our beliefs to be determined by this ruling class. We no longer act directly in our own interest. Instead, we mediate all of our actions through these ideas, allowing ourselves to believe that anything in service to these ideas is justified.

This process is not limited to the United States or to “Western democracy,” it is global. For this we need only inspect the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership. Whatever we think about the utility of corporations, we must agree that corporations are not formed to serve the public interest. They are formed to generate profit. The TPP proposes to give these profit-driven groups the ability to make demands on governments which represent populations. This includes the United States of America itself. The knowledge that corporations could now directly extract concessions from popular governments is extremely troubling.

But this is being proposed by the Chinese as well, freely putting their influential government under these same strictures. In the United States, we are encouraged to think of China as our political and economic antithesis, and yet they are proposing to go along the same path of reducing their government’s power. We can see plainly that this accord does not directly aid the Chinese people or the American people. It aids powerful corporations, or the international elite. It allows them to continue increasing their wealth and independence from law while not in any way benefitting those people who ultimately drive these corporations by performing all the other jobs needed to run a society. Even if we are to concede that these elite groups do employ people on a large scale, we must also admit that it is at best a very flawed process of representation precisely because the people who have legitimate needs at the bottom of the corporate ladder can make no demands of those at the top. This is the purpose of governments and an effect that this wealthy class is actively trying to curtail.

My personal expectation would have been a pro-TPP, pro-1033 party and an anti-TPP, -1033 party. There must be enough people in America who can recognize that TPP is a danger to form a sizeable constituency. In a country where we have two major political parties who are willing to sabotage the government in order to seize control of its organs, the fact that neither one has a significant anti-corporate platform should puzzle us.

When we see that both parties are serving who they see as the constituents — this wealthy, international corporate class — this apparent disparity is made very simple. It is in all parts of this constituent class to support both TPP and the 1033 Program, so neither the Republicans nor the Democrats question it. It’s only when something threatens that class that they become motivated to find a workable solution.

And what about the rest of the country? The voting public? In this case there are two general divisions. Some are simply disenfranchised. Imprisoned and disqualified due to past felonies, obstructed by voter ID laws or eligibility tests, discouraged by the inability to balance work, life, and the time to think about politics. Others, the vast majority, are beholden to ideas like “democracy”, “security”, “freedom”. As long as we can be convinced that a proposition embodies these ideas, we do not easily question its content. Each successive generation of politicians redefines the meanings, and they are redefined again, and again, until what any particular president or corporate master calls “democracy” resembles very little what that word means to an outsider.

That’s how both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the 1033 Program have been sold, when mention of them is made at all. 1033 Program is supposed to make the country more secure, despite the criminal levels of abuse and murder committed by police groups in every state and locality. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is supposed to make our democracy stronger and aid our businesspeople by forcing them to be locked to fundamentallly non-democratic corporate interests. But for most people, the fact that those elected appear to believe these falsehoods is enough. The politicians define what “freedom” means for the public and the public, by and large, accepts that.

Offsetting the power of wealth and elite influence is a Sisyphean task. However, I am not convinced that this conversion is complete or irreversible. It is perhaps possible for sustained action to return the constituency to the broad public, the citizenry not only in the United States but in every country. This must start with a proper understanding of government. As long as we continue to believe that governments always or even usually serve “the people,” we’ll never be able to comprehend government missteps as what they often are: deliberate actions to enrich a powerful group at the expense of a vulnerable one. The government serves who it has to serve. If the people cannot make the government serve them, if they are manipulated into allowing a certain class to dictate the laws of the land, then the government will not serve them. Ensuring that a government serves the whole public comes, fundamentally, from ensuring that every citizen has the ability to control their own worth. It comes from ensuring that each person’s voice has an equal opportunity to be heard and have weight.

When rich, politically secure people can turn attempts through the government system to enable its public — attempts like welfare, public schooling, job assistance, and public healthcare — into a demonized “anti-democratic,” “freedom-crushing” plan, we really have to ask ourselves who “we, the people” is really referring to in this day and age.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2015/03/the-matter-with-government/

[bloctheory-blog]

Another Order: The Police and the Cult of the Police

New Yorkers rejoiced at the drop in speeding tickets and loitering charges from their police department over the New Year. The reason it came was sorrowful. Thoughts for two officers slain on the 20th of December 2014, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, poured in from the general public as well as from their comrades in the blue ranks. Police, concerned for their safety in turbulent times, protested City Hall’s lack of support by actually reducing their efforts. They decided to pull back on what many feel is harassment but what the establishment says is everyday procedure.

Still, a relaxed city would seem to be a win for the people and the politicians that they elect. Seem to be. The horror movie chill I get from the concerted slowdown has always eaten at me. I’m not sure it’s a cause for outright celebration.

A question that stands out here is why the police are choosing to protest New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in this way. A substantial amount of the police budget is generated through what they recoup from fines and fees. If the point of protest is to agitate, to disrupt order, this appears to do the opposite. The police are still responding to robberies and shootings. They still perform the crux of their function, to make people feel safe living in their areas. It seems like an ineffective protest at best.

It’s worth remembering that they receive their directions, ultimately, from de Blasio. The parking violations and other low-level arrests that annoyed so many citizens were in fact city policy. If there’s an order that they’re attempting to disrupt it’s not the public order, it’s the order mandated from City Hall.

It’s not just the NYPD. American police everywhere feel themselves to be under siege. Towards the end of 2014, a rash of police-perpetrated killings hit the news, putting cops from Los Angeles to St. Louis to New York under the public glare. Calls for reform ring out loudly. Calls for accountability do not rest in the communities of the slain Tamir Rices and Michael Browns. For the public, this is an issue of safety, not only safety from the police but a question of the police’s ability to respond appropriately to crises.

For the police, these killings represent a challenge to their authority.

The response from the police community in the wake of these killings has been near-unanimous: support the police no matter what. “Breathe Easy – Obey the Law” t-shirts mock the death of Garner and tell people not to question. Prominent politicians like Rudy Guiliani insist on deflecting criticism from the police by insinuating it is the community which endangers itself, that police violence is not the issue. The few from within the police who make any gestures to address criticisms are met with a landslide of opposition from their own departments.

In no other public sector would such a revolt against public criticism be countenanced. You could not contend that road workers who have done a bad job then have the right to damn everyone who has criticised them. Even political officials have to attempt a constructive response to criticism. A legitimate answer from a governor asked about his exorbitant spending would not be “Listen to me no matter what.”

It’s clear to me that the police do not want to respond to the public. They do not feel that their actions are open to public scrutiny. Their service is not to citizens but to a nebulous concept of The Law, a concept which the police themselves define more often than not. This rogue order of police operates with near-total impunity. They are not beholden to any authority but themselves and they defend this separation diligently.

Camden, New Jersey is infamous for its outrageous crime rate. It was regularly listed on “most dangerous cities” list throughout the 2000s. If there was ever a department that needed reform, it was this city’s. But reforming the police is difficult. It has been tried and it is rarely successful. The Attorney General of New Jersey took charge of overseeing the Camden Police Department in 1998. Fifteen years later, it saw no option left but to scrap the city department and establish a new non-union county police. The problems encountered there are not unique.

Frank Serpico uncovered a pattern of corruption in the New York Police Department that was investigated by the Knapp Commission in 1970. The Commission confirmed his allegations in its 1972 report. It recommended that a series of measures be taken in order to combat the widespread corruption and change police culture. In 1991, the Christopher Commission was convened to investigate a toxic environment in Los Angeles Police Department. It made a series of damning findings. Both were high profile investigations. Neither produced a serious and systemic process for police reform.

The answer has always seemed to involve the police changing their own attitudes. Robert Allenbach was appointed police chief of Camden in 1998, under the eye of the state attorney general. He held the post until 2003. In that time, several reviews of police conduct were made, none positive. In 2005, the state authorized a commission on Camden’s public safety that disclosed no significant improvements. And still it took until 2013 for the state — not the city of Camden — to make a decisive move to overhaul city policing. New York City fared little better. Without any enforcement mechanisms for the recommendations of the Knapp Commission, that responsibility fell upon the police themselves. The Mollen Commission, or The City of New York Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and so on, was convened in 1992. It found that “today’s corruption” was “different” but no less widespread than that of the Knapp Commission era. In both cases, there should have been ample time for the police to change their attitude and move away from corruption if they were inclined to do so.

When the police won’t respond to basic calls for decency on the job, it shows that there is a disconnect between themselves and the citizens. The current protests from NYPD are targeted messages, a response to a general dialogue. General police inaction concerning corruption is simply ignorance of the needs of those outside. It is willful ignorance in large part. An ignorance informed by the police’s lofty position in society.

At the heart of how the police’s rogue order operates is its perceived necessity. We must have a police force. We can’t imagine a society functioning without a police force. Because we feel this way, it becomes a lot harder to deliver any sort of ultimatum to the police, justified or not. We know and they know that we won’t obsolete the police entirely, and that gives them a bargaining chip that they cherish.

Police unions trade heavily on that perception. They defend the rights of one authority, the police, against supposed intrusions of another, the elected government. The fact that people believe in the police — not support them, though many do, but simply believe in their necessity — gives their viewpoints legitimacy, but it’s the unions that focus and amplify them. They make sure that the police as a class are insulated from the outside specifically by making a separate class of the police.

The purpose of a labor union is to agitate on behalf of the workers against unfair practices of the bosses. A union of steel workers does not represent the steel industry, it only represents those workers. However there should be no notion that police unions represent individual police officers. They do not. Police unions represent The Police.

The traditional workers-bosses division which legitimizes unions does not work when applied as police against civil government. In the traditional dichotomy, the bosses have complete control over the workers. The act of unionizing is to challenge this control in order to ensure basic rights. The police are not under such a complete control. In fact, police are effectively not controlled. They are employed to control others. In this capacity the police are given authority over the public, allowed authority over themselves, and permitted a deniable (or excusable) use of force. For a union to organize solely on the basis of police affiliation is for that union to necessarily attempt to uphold these three planks. Rather than establish basic rights and provisions for workers, police unions work to ensure the separation of the police class from the rest of society.

Authority over the public is an essential quality of the police. It’s certainly the aspect of their order that impacts outsiders most directly. Like the authority that bosses have over workers or parents have over children, the police-public authority creates a sense of distance. There’s a separation between those who exercise it and those who are subject to it. In most situations, that distance is bridged somehow. With employers, their authority usually ends outside the workplace. Parental authority is about seniority and respect, both of which are transformed by time and children growing up. For the police, the bridge would ideally come in the form of the civilian government which the police serve and are subject to. But the bridge is broken.

Internal affairs is the major byword for police wrongdoing. Any infractions that involve police officers are looked at first inside the police department. Through the establishment of such divisions, known by different names in different jurisdictions, the job of policing the police has largely been given over to the police. Their accountability for improper uses of that authority over the public is circular.

Of course, mayors often do appoint their police commissioners and police chiefs. In many jurisdictions, sheriffs are elected. Los Angeles led the way with civilian review boards, bodies formed to review complaints against the police. In all of these ways, accountability is supposed to be encouraged, civil control is supposed to be enabled. None of these measures makes a significant difference in police operation. The changes in police operations in Camden from 1998 to 2013 didn’t result in reductions in crime or in findings of corruption. In terms of departmental corruption, the stagnancy was similar in New York. At most, these measures are caps. They don’t make the police more accountable to the public because ultimately they all refer the issues raised back to the police, not to any public body.

The police’s circular authority exempts them from the consequences that the majority of citizens would face for their actions. It gives them another law to live by, a law that they determine. What defends this separate law, even more than the unions, is the police’s deniable use of force. The force itself is important but it’s the deniability of it that makes the police unique.

Police militarization is a huge debate in America and around the world. SWAT teams blur the line between the two. Yet there’s a stark difference between them, at least in America. If you get drunk at a bar and say something to a soldier, you can get in a fight with the soldier. You can’t get in a fight with a cop. That cop can beat the holy hell out of you and you are not allowed to do anything about it. In fact, if you try to defend yourself, the cop is then legally allowed to escalate the situation.

The regular objections can be made. The cop would have to register the event, it would have to be reviewed. If there were witnesses, they would be able to corroborate your story. Police do get arrested for plenty of things.

What’s important about this hypothetical is that the cop has justification for using greater levels of force at their discretion. Not even the soldier is allowed that. It may come back for review, but it’s the police who will review it. Police who have a vested interest in upholding their deniable use of force by not condemning uses which may, in other cases, be used again. If the matter is taken to court, the evidence that will have the most weight will be the police’s; naturally, as they are entrusted with guardianship of the law and of making sure that they themselves follow it.

This deniability goes further than individual privilege. It means that police can break up protests against their actions and claim that their force was justified. And not only that, they can claim it seriously, because they have been given all the legal authority to do so. They can determine what constitutes a civil assembly and know that those who have a different opinion will obey for fear of force.

In essence, the police are able to determine who is allowed to protest them, where they are allowed to do it, and how long they are allowed to do it. This is not according to any law or statute. It is their opinion alone what constitutes unruliness and their opinion is never challenged. It may even be that in our current situation, with our current philosophy, we cannot challenge it.

Police reform does not have a history of independent approval. Its successes are self-reported and trusted because of their source. When the task of measuring that success is given to an outside agency, the report does not come in favor of the police. That is not the measure of an effective organization. An effective and capable organization should be able to display such capability to the outside. But each and every investigation turns up maggots where there should be grains of rice.

The Camden County Police Department has made a fresh start for law and order in the wounded city. To get there, they endured fifteen years of state oversight and bad press, fifteen years without significant reform. The city department was not made to function as it should have: it was obsoleted, replaced. Change was fought against until the end but, with the help of federal and state resources, it came. It can’t be said that the rogue order always prevails, but it remains. The Camden County Police have joined a new union lodge. Its authority is once again its own, its ability to use force has not been curtailed. What Camden did not do was significantly alter the way its police operate. It simply transferred police authority from a veteran but leprous body to a brand new one. A clean one. A group that has to disappoint before it will be scrutinized.

That is, unfortunately, how it all works. That is what is being defended when police officers turn on their chief for supporting #BlackLivesMatter or when they demand apologies for deserved criticism from American citizens. It isn’t that this rogue order could never be dismantled. In fact, the police are keenly aware that it could be. That is why they attempt to stifle discussion of their activities. The breaking of one plank might lead to the breaking of the others. To keep their position in society the police will fight doggedly to prevent this.

I’m not in favor lots of low-level arrests. Everyday New Yorkers should be glad that they’re not being hassled so often by the cops.

They should also remember that the NYPD is using this work slowdown in order to defend their right to kill without criticism. They don’t care about public opinion because, to them, we the people are outsiders.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2015/01/another-order-the-police-and-the-cult-of-the-police/

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Catherine's Eagle, First Position

This is the First Position of the rewrite of my Catherine’s Eagle essay. The essay is now available for purchase on Amazon for just 99 cents. Please help support me with a purchase. Thanks!

We in “the West” believe in a thin fiction: the era of high politics, of continental chessboards, is over. Now we conceive of stark choices to be made about ideology. We must choose capitalism or communism, democracy or autocracy, rule of law or thieves-in-law. In all of our rhetoric, domestically and internationally, we stress that it is possible for us all to be on the same side if only we make the proper choices.

The first objection against this line of thought is that it does not take into account any factors but human choice. It does not presuppose that some have more and other have too little or that the conflicts will ever be over that fact alone.

The second is that all choices have been made without history. We now believe in analysis; if presented with two options and sufficient information, we can choose the best one. The conceit is that in every decision this was the case. Soviet Russia made a singular choice to accept communism, according to this line of thinking. The United States similarly made a singular decision to accept capitalist democracy. It doesn’t take into account the strength of communist organizing or the extent to which non-communists aided the initial Russian revolution. It doesn’t say that the idea of democracy that flourished in the United States was a direct descendant of similar changes already taking place in its former mother country.

We can believe that high politics is over primarily because we believe that everyone thinks the idea is now ridiculous. We believe, and quite loudly, that no one would simply march into another place specifically to take territory. We believe this because we assume that those in the past could never have acted with economic or strategic ideas. Whatever conquests they sought appear to have been a product of intractable blood feuds or divine mystery.

High politics is not a strategy or a mode of thinking about politics. It is an abstraction of a variety of smaller forces that ultimately play out in the jockeying between governments, the representatives of these disputing peoples. High politics can’t be “over” because it’s not a state of being. Rather, it’s a way of investigating the relationships between state-level actors in a more broadly historical sense than the economic analysis or myopic readings that are now favored. The use of high politics is not to give one absolute answers but to provide context for further investigation. It allows possible actions, states of being, and motivations to be examined better precisely because its detail is not so granular that it cannot be taken as a whole.

So in that sense, the Russian seizure of Crimea is not a relic of an older era. It’s not pseudo-tsarist empire-building on the part of Vladimir Putin. He reacted to what he properly saw as Euramerican maneuvering in a country not only bordering Russia but historically aligned with it. We perhaps could not see it — at the very least, were able to deny seeing it — because of our conceptions of choice during the events of the Euromaidan.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has not only been a project of capitalism building in the former Soviet Bloc countries but a project of Europization. There has been an effort to strengthen the European Union, traditionally western European in character, by assisting those countries now lacking the support of a powerful puppetmaster. In other ex-Soviet states such as the Czech Republic, Romania, and Poland, the accession was peaceful, political, and most of all, gradual. Ukraine had seemed to be moving along the same path, but its ties with Russia were still strong. When Euromaidan erupted and the government of President Viktor Yanukovych collapsed, Ukraine’s westward shift seemed to be complete in a single swift moment.

The issue was the method. The new Kyiv group broke no laws in ousting Yanukovych. However, a reading of the events reveals that this was far from an open and legitimate transition. Many members of the Rada from groups allied with Yanukovych were not present and proceedings moved without them. The speaker of the Rada resigned abruptly. There was no quorum when the vote in the Rada was taken to depose Yanukovych. And further, these actions were all tacitly endorsed by the United States and European leaders. There was no attempt by any of them to investigate what had happened or to negotiate with Yanukovych. In their minds, this had been a lawful transition enacted by the Rada, which — as all records will show — it was.

However, to a man invested in this situation as Putin certainly was, self-deception was not wise. What he saw was another ally moving towards Europe, a Europe which speaks of friendship but has always been cold towards cooperation with Russia. This is the crux of his actions. He moved to defend himself against an aggressive action by his rival neighbor. We in the Euramerican press have taken Putin to task for what was, by our standards, a blatant use of military power. It must be said, however, that it was not a move that any Euramerican leader would have thought of and one that none was prepared to counter.

We’ve also made much of the fact that the economic power of the rest of the world can severely punish Russia. Seeking Crimea purely for land is the act of a dinosaur, we like to say. All we have been able to see is the hubris of it. It should be borne in mind that military force, even when seeming reckless, is not undertaken for its own sake. Whatever his reasons were, and whatever his reputed level of foresight, we can assume that it is not sheer adventurism. I don’t presume to know his precise reasoning. The conflict between Russia and Europe is not new, though, and neither is Russia’s interest in Crimea. One strength Europe has always had over Russia was its ability to extend commerce across the seas. In order for Russia to follow suit it required a warm water port such as Sevastopol on the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula.

This was also the scene of an earlier, similar conflict between Russia and the European powers. In the 18th century, Russia sought to deal militarily with problems that it regarded as in its sphere; that is to say, not dealing with the other European powers. The European response was to intervene, disregarding previous squabbles between themselves, in order to prevent Russia growing too powerful. They did not go to war but they checked Russian aspirations for dominance in eastern Europe and Anatolia. The Black Sea War of 1768 between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was to be a great victory for Russia. Instead, their gains were modest, and from the standpoint of its western neighbors, manageable.

The reasons for this are, I believe, similar to the reasons surrounding the crisis in eastern Ukraine. Russia is not part of Europe as politically conceived. The extent to which negotiation between the two polities can work is more limited than it would be within them. When there are tensions with Russia, it tends to become Europe as a whole against Russia as opposed to any particular nation-state. In eastern Ukraine now, as concerning the Ottoman Empire then, the lack of strong dialogues allowed each side to see the other as enough of a threat that strong measures needed to be taken.

1768 will therefore be my focal point. However, the war will not dominate the piece. The investigation of these tensions necessarily goes much farther back. At first it seems ridiculous that France and Germany have had an incredibly varied relationship over time and yet France and Russia have generally been antagonists. The reasons for this division lay in the origins of these blocs, the first and immortal European power.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/12/catherines-eagle-first-position/

[bloctheory-blog]

Discourse on the Chinese Revolution

This is an excerpt of a longer draft of mine on revolution and state philosophy. Image is a photograph of the Nanjing Road in Shanghai on 1911.

Economic hardship was not the principal reason for the Chinese Revolution. It is true that there were several periods of famine and national debt leading up to the initial uprisings. It is also true that a great majority of the Chinese population were rural poor. However, the livelihoods of these rural peasants had been much the same for thousands of years. There was no new and more onerous poverty on much of the population. Inasmuch as economics seem to determine the course of history, China at 1890 did not seem primed for a general revolt.

In my view, the reason for the revolution was two-fold: the deficiency of Qing policy and the inability of another single power to unseat them. It was clear by the domination that foreign powers held over the Qing court that they were no longer able to truly assert their authority. Their capitulations to noncombatant Russia after the Arrow War serve as undeniable evidence of their weakness. In order to operate, this foreign alliance required Qing control of the Chinese government. To that end, they supported the Qing against dissidents. The only major uprising against the foreigners was even backed by the Qing, but its defeat did not throw out the Qing. It only reformed them into a more pliant puppet for the foreign powers.

Previously in Chinese history, when one dynasty weakened they would be overthrown by another court figure or regional governor. The basic system of Chinese imperialism changed under each ruler, as regimes do, but it remained in essence a continuous entity. Now this system was being held hostage. Reconstructing the entire imperial system was the only way to wring it from its captors. Because the head was protected, it became necessary for the revolutionaries to dig up the roots.

The basic point that I want to make is that the Chinese Revolution was fought for nationalist goals first and foremost. The conventional division of this era into Xinhai and Communist Revolutions is based in the idea that the goals of the Kuomintang revolutionary movement had been achieved by 1912 or, at the latest, 1928. It must be remembered that even after the nominal takeover by revolutionary forces, fighting between resumed between various factions withing the government. Several of these ruling cliques held regional domination for many years.

China is vast. France, a much smaller country, has for most of its history been dominated by a single figure, a single regime. Though France has expanded and shrunk over time, this has mostly been the result of interactions with its neighbors. China, on the other hand, has often been divided and even its great empires rarely held the entirety of what we call China. Even the Qing held Mongolia which is today an independent nation. Because of this, the chaos of the Ruling Cliques Period (the so-called “Warlord Era”) does not seem as relevant as a revolutionary episode, which further supports the splitting of the eras.

What is crucial here is that throughout this period, every chief commander or ruling clique aimed to control all of China. This was partially because the Qing realm had been recognized by the emerging international community as a single polity. In dealings with the outside world, the ability to represent China was – and continued to be in later years – a key political buttress. More importantly, in my opinion, the identity of a great Chinese nation persisted even through the periods of division and reconstitution. Even during the Chinese Civil War, there was no attempt to establish separate Communist and KMT nations on the mainland; this only developed when the KMT refused to accept defeat and voluntarily left for Taiwan.

As a philosophy, communism was far more instrumental for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party than it was for the general population. This may seem a reductive statement, but this is unlike the French Revolution. In France, the general population was possessed of the need to pursue liberal ideas in order to free themselves from oppression. In China, the primary oppressors were foreign. Further, by the time the CCP developed, the revolution had already forced out the Qing. The philosophy that drove the Qing out was national identity.

Obviously, communism did have a major effect on Chinese life and thought. Chairman Mao’s modified version of Marxism remained the dominant philosophy long after Mao’s death. This does not negate the fact that in 1911 there was no need for the CCP. The KMT were not mishandling the government in such a way that a new philosophy was demanded. Even the May Fourth Movement did not mean that the Kuomintang had lost what grip on power they had. What communism did during the Revolution was to mobilize the party which would eventually emerge as the sole power in China.

Mao’s rise to power in the Chinese Communist Party owed greatly to his charisma. Even though he was greatly discredited after the Great Leap Forward, his personal charisma was still such that he could initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Yet despite the role that his charisma played in the communists gaining and holding power, his government was not a charismatic one. His ideas were the basis of much of the CCP’s early policy, but those ideas were open for interpretation and debate. Though he suppressed dissent with his Anti-Rightist Campaign, the developments after the Great Leap Forward proved that Mao ruled with and not over the Party.

The Communist Party replaced the Qing court with a system that can be entered into by any Chinese citizen. Its tenets are not restricted or hidden from anyone. This, not the victory of communism itself, was the principal achievement of the Chinese Revolution. The length of this revolution, especially its reorganization period, shows that revolution is not always a singular event. Even though nominally opposed to Chiang’s National People’s Party, the Communists still pursued as their ultimate and highest goal a united and sovereign Chinese nation.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/11/discourse-on-the-chinese-revolution/

[bloctheory-blog]

Discourse on the French Revolution

This is an excerpt of a longer draft of mine on revolution and state philosophy. Image is 1814. Campagne de France painted by Ernest Meissioner.

In power, Napoléon had a mixed relationship with the “true Revolution spirit” at best. His actual regime was extremely repressive, using the tyrant’s tactics to remain secure: spies, informants, and strangulation of the press. His Constitution of the Year VIII was supported in a referendum by 99.94% of the voters. Even considering that over half the eligible population abstained, this is clear evidence of fraud. Through his minister of police Joseph Fouché, he suppressed dissent as far as possible. And in a final, surely damning anti-Revolutionary step, on 2nd December 1804 he was crowned Emperor of the French.

These claims are all true, but it has to be said that there was no popular uprising against Napoléon. This is important because the events of the preceding decade had proved that, if provoked, the French population could and would overthrow its government. Napoléon survived several plots against his life but never was there a mass revolt. If he had been killed, perhaps France would have been plunged into turmoil again. Still, he wasn’t. He would only be removed by forces from outside his realm.

The obvious question is why, with the seeming antithesis of their revolution before them, did the people accept rule under Napoléon? Weariness certainly has a part to play in this, coupled with the fact that most of the outstanding radicals of the bloody Revolutionary period were themselves dead. However, I don’t believe that people stop fighting purely for weariness, especially when driven by ideals such as the Revolution’s: the liberty to live and progress as free people, without the unequal restraints of class and tradition. The fact that royalists and even surviving Jacobins continued to struggle against Napoléon gives some evidence of this.

Looked at from that perspective, Napoléon did satisfy a number of the complaints raised by the Revolution. There was no class distinction in Napoleonic France, and if Napoléon himself began to affect a more imperious style, much of France still prospered during his reign. He established the Banque de France to regulate commerce and the Napoleonic Code, a widely-admired set of laws that still forms the basis of the French Constitution. His Concordat of 1801 reversed the divisive Revolutionary persecution of religion and he emancipated Jews from ghettos throughout his empire.

Not everyone gained during the Revolution. Women’s unequal status was entrenched in the Napoleonic Code. Even during the Revolution itself, attempts by women to increase their position were accepted only inasmuch as their vitriol added to the general clamor. Their actual proposals were ignored and their groups were dissolved. Further, slavery in French colonies had been banned during the Revolution. Napoléon sought to re-establish it in order to finance his heavy diet of war.

From the standpoint of a cold analysis of revolution, however, these groups did not need their more specific demands to be met for society to function. Women have always been integral to society, whether treated second-class or not, and for whatever social reasons have co-existed with men in this arrangement for centuries. The slaves in the colonies had no part in the society of France because of their distance and the fact that the West Indes trade was not a lifeline for France. Napoléon specifically provided for the French citizenry, adult men and would-be men, and that support was enough to keep him in power.

Though Napoléon was eventually defeated and his particular line deposed, the succeeding Bourbon regime continued many of Napoléon’s policies. What dealt Napoléon death in the end was his excessive warmongering which not only enervated his country, both in spirit and in manpower, but continually angered his neighbors. Still, under Napoléon, France had the solid core of a new government that was not and could not be supported merely by an elite. Despite fraud and the heavy toll his wars took on his empire, he was the one who entrenched Revolutionary principles against popular upheaval. This is why Napoléon could be a iron-fisted tyrant and still embody the spirit of the liberal Revolution.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/10/discourse-on-the-french-revolution/

[bloctheory-blog]

Buying TV in Bulk

Sometimes it really does seem like we can’t just do one thing and leave it alone. When I first saw HBO’s True Detective I was transfixed, like a lot of people. Very stylish television with characters so dark they’re dripping with ink. In eight episodes they delivered a taut and creep-filled story. Did it have its faults? Definitely. Emily Nussbaum points out how it fails women. I had misgivings on story aspects while I was watching it. But as a whole it worked and I was glad that we’d been able to turn out TV like that in the U.S. Other big HBO shows like Game of Thrones or the prototype, The Sopranos, told their stories over many seasons. This was short, well-contained, urgent even.

I was less glad to hear about season 2.

Now, granted, I’m not the kind of television fiend who’s up-and-up on every bit of news. It escaped me that the show was pitched as an anthology. While that might have made the “sting” (get to that later) of a second season better, I might not have even bothered with it. One of the appeals of the show to me going in — as, again, a non-fiend — was that it was short. The fact that someone was out there attempting to tell a clipped story in an environment that celebrates getting renewals was intriguing.

So why wasn’t I glad to hear about season 2? A lot of it has to do with what it implies about True Detective as a concept. Like with any show that’s getting renewed, when you watch the new season you’re expecting some continuation of the previous one. In a show like Game of Thrones, that’s mostly the plotline and the characters. Yeah, they killed plot driver Ned Stark off in season 1, but there were plenty of other characters that had stories to push forward. The style is repeated but there’s a reason for it: it’s the same story and the story isn’t done yet.

Anthology series like True Detective don’t have that plot continuation. But in a lot of ways their second and third seasons are like those of more conventional shows. When you turn on the season 2 premiere of True Detective, what’s important is that it feels like True Detective season 1. There needs to be that same darkness, that same sleaze, anger, unsettling nature. So those qualities that I thought made True Detective special are really not special. They’re a part of the True Detective product, they’re an aspect of the franchise.

When I talk to people about movies coming out one of the main themes is that everything is a sequel these days. Your superhero movies are the main culprits; the only reason we’re not on Spider-Man 83 is that they keep rebooting the series. Then there’s 21 Jump Street which has spread next door to 22 and will soon take over the whole block. There are the Shrek 3D animated kids’ series, the Step Up gonzo dance movies, and Tyler Perry’s Madea old lady series. You can’t escape it.

And if it’s not a sequel then it’s an adaptation. 300? Adaptation of a comic, itself lifted from history. The Polar Express? Children’s book. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty? Do you even remember that existed? Yeah, based on a short story. Hell, there was a movie about the near-abstract boardgame Battleship.

It seems awful that we’ve let things get this bad.

But like I said before, this has always been with us. The Swiss Family Robinson, published in 1812, was a direct take-off from 1719’s Robinson Crusoe. An entire genre of medieval literature sprang around the Holy Grail, the creation of one Chretien de Troyes. The Aeneid, one of the great works of Classical literature, had its origin in the end of Homer’s Iliad, itself likely a composite from various unknown authors.

By saying that sequels are a shadow of the source, I’m not trying to say that sequels should stop. Not every movie has to be a magnum opus. Movies should primarily be enjoyable and plenty of sequels have been: Beverly Hills Cop 2 is fantastic fun. But in the vast majority of cases, the original is going to trump the sequel. Having that freedom of creativity appears integral to creating great work.

That brings me back to True Detective’s season 2 and the idea of franchises. It shares one thing with another show that’s been hot recently, American Horror Story: they were pitched as seasonal anthologies. This is different for U.S. television. We’ve had shows like the Twilight Zone before, where each episode is different from the others. Changing things every season gives the show a different feel.

Television characters have a different connection to audiences than movie characters. It’s a simple matter of having more time. If it’s episode to episode, then the stories don’t get enough time to really sink in. The characters might be intriguing but in the end they’re gone. With serial television, the audience has a chance to really hang on a character. It’s not simply in the watching of it, it’s in the spaces in between: thoughts about the show in idle moments, twitter arguments and watercooler chats about it.

Because of this, the “basic unit” for TV is the season, not the episode. A season of Twilight Zone puts across the idea of interesting bite-sized stories, weird but all uniquely interesting. It feels like an anthology in the way that literature uses it in that your attention is not supposed to get wrapped up. In True Detective, what’s being sold is a very specific idea, a specific mood and thrust. There’s more that a sequel needs to commit to and that means less freedom for a new creation.

What worries me is how everything now is a franchise. All the signs for True Detective’s season 2 show that it won’t have any plot relation to season 1. Unlike American Horror Story, it’s unlikely that True Detective will even bring over major actors. Essentially, it’s a new show being pitched under the True Detective banner. But this makes that new show a lot more attractive to people — not only the guys with the money but the people in front of the screens, the viewing public.

When you start off the ground with a franchise in mind, you’re sort of sequelizing yourself from the get-go. All the comic book Cinematic Universe movies are suffering from this. There are a lot of problems to be had with the Nolan Batman movies (largely revolving around their dreariness) but there’s no doubting that they were taken seriously when they emerged. Some people derided the idea of a superhero movie being considered art, but enough people did that there was an actual public conversation about it.

There’s no debate on whether Iron Man is art: it’s not. There’s no debate about the latest Spider-Man or The Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy. Nobody said it about Superman Returns. They’re popcorn movies and that’s fine.

Then what’s the big difference between them? No, it’s not that Batman is a grittier, more realistic character. He is called Batman; you’ll never convince me that a hero called Batman could exist in the real world. The difference is that the Dark Knight films were seen as Christopher Nolan’s Unique Vision. They were a trilogy but the story was meant, from the beginning, to span the three films; the fact of the sequels doesn’t mean that they’re not part of the same work. You went to the Nolan Batmans to see Nolan’s work as much as, if not in many cases more than, to see Batman. The other cape films had notable directors attached and good acting talent but they were, for better or worse, franchise films. Their purpose was to cash in on the identities of these well-known characters (or in the case of Guardians to cash in on Marvel brand identity). The Avengers benefited from having Joss Whedon at the helm but at the core it was about the Avengers, not about Whedon’s work.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is one work in three volumes. Peter Jackson, who directed the modern adaptation, made three movies, one for each volume. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien is set before the Lord of the Rings and is one work in one volume. Jackson, negotiating after the success of the Lord of the Rings films, was hired to produce three films based on the Hobbit.

That’s the way we do things now. We don’t just want the story, we want to ensure that there will be follow-ups, continuations to the franchise. Sometimes it makes sense. The Harry Potter film series seemed unendingly long, but it was adapted from a series of seven blockbuster books so on a level it makes sense. On the other hand, you’ve got a case like the Mortal Instruments. You remember those? Think hard. While you do that, I’ll keep going.

What is being pushed more than ever is the idea of purchasing a franchise. No longer are you tuning in primarily to see the singular vision of a writer or a director or the performance of an actor. You’re going to see a set of themes and moods that are mostly interchangeable between different works. The only thing that’s important is that if Wolverine is gruff and angry and kick-assy in part 1 he’d better be gruff and angry and kick-assy in parts 2, 3, and 4.

If you saw Beverly Hills Cop, you’d hear later that they were making a sequel and you might be interested enough to see it. Now, at the end of a superhero jam, people shush you so that you can all watch the commercial for a movie that hasn’t even been filmed yet. True Detective isn’t selling a great, taut story with odd characters. It’s selling a dark gritty mood that you can set your clock to, a neo-noir time every week that you schedule to feel cool and dark and gritty. The problem isn’t that there are sequels. It’s that we’re more than ever looking past the story that’s there so we can gawp at its follow-up.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/10/buying-tv-in-bulk/

[bloctheory-blog]

Discourse on the American Revolution

This is an excerpt of a longer draft of mine on revolution and state philosophy. Image is Washington and Lafayette at Valley Forge painted by John Ward Dunsmore.

The American Revolution is atypical for such an episode. There seems to have been no major shift in ideology among the revolutionaries. Ideas about representation in government, natural rights and liberties, and the duties of government to the people had mostly been derived from England. Indeed, perhaps the most important political pamphlet in the Revolution was the Common Sense of a born Englishman, Thomas Paine. For the most part its leaders were not raised from obscurity but already among the colonial elite. Everyday society in the United States was not much changed in its details from society in the Thirteen Colonies.

The very short control and formalization period is far apart from the bloody reorganizations of the French and Chinese Revolutions. This has a great deal to do with the makeup of the colonies, which were, again, atypical. Unlike other European colonies, both British-held such as India or the Spanish colonies or the French, British America was primarily inhabited by British emigrants. Slavery was widespread but also primarily the result of imported labor. Importantly, those who had conceptions of themselves as British citizens because of their descent were the major part of the American population.

As stated earlier, the relationship between a superior and vassal state means that the vassal state’s privileges are inferior to the home state’s. In that vassal state, the vassal class enjoys enhanced privileges in order that they can control the rest of the population. Most European colonies of the time were controlled by a very small colonist class which jealously guarded its privileges. Cultural difference allowed a strong division between colonists and natives, while resources meant that the entire colonist class enjoy these high privileges. The lower classes feel themselves subjugated and are so.

Obviously, this introduces its own tensions. New Spain, stretching from Texas south to the Andes, experienced much unrest from conquered people throughout its existence. What is important here is that because these subject peoples were not of the same culture as their colonial rulers, the government that those rulers set up was restrictive. In other words, they set up a regime that was better able to oppress and coerce its people.

In America, especially in the Thirteen Colonies, most of the people saw themselves as full British citizens. The object of their regime was not wringing labor out of subjects but administering essentially free societies. They set up structures that mirrored and drew from their British forebears for the purposes of expressing their rights as British people. They did not live or believe themselves to be subject peoples and it’s for this reason that the American Revolution was relatively neat. They did not need to first overthrow the home rulership in order to organize, they were already organized. They did not need a new ideology to free them, they already had a freeing ideology.

What determines the need of a revolution is not an explicit ideology which differs from the current one. The determinant is a breakdown in the contract between the constituents and the government. Inevitably, the British crown and Parliament viewed the American colonists as subjects, not as constituents. Most British people felt the Americans to be fully their equals in principle, if not perhaps in substance. Many even in the highest echelons felt this way. But the fact that Britain had to be able to extract what it needed from its colonies meant that they could not in practice treat them that way. If there is an ideological point that is central to the Revolution, it is the question of whether or not Parliament has the right to rule over those who are not represented.

Could the American Revolution have been avoided? Perhaps more than the previous two, yes. However, it could not have been avoided in a purely colonial relationship. The composition of the American colonies meant that something revolutionary would have happened. If it was not independence, it would have been something like a great federalism of the British Empire. Unlike Scotland, Wales, and Ireland which were close enough to be directly appropriated or ruled militarily, Britain had no facility at that time for controlling willful populations like the colonials.

Ultimately, the American Revolution can be traced to the initial Spanish explorations of America. Their diseases wiped out enough of the North American population that the British could arrive in numbers, not as colonial masters as they would in India and Africa but as colonists, settlers themselves. British citizens abroad with complete ideas of what it meant to be British and the same determination not to be violated.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/10/discourse-on-the-american-revolution/

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Elliot Rodger and the MRA Matrix

In case you didn’t hear about it, last Friday this fucking nutjob went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California. Said suspected psycho, Elliot Rodger, has been widely reported as a loner, chronically shy, polite to a fault, and obsessed with video games. In fact, there’s a community out there that sympathizes with his plight, probably because the description of him hits close to home. Those traits on their own don’t make him a psycho. What makes him a psycho is that he stabbed and shot people to death.

I hope we’re all clear on that.

Rodger was active online, both on forums and YouTube, where he posted an announcement of his intent that reminded me of a B-movie horror villain’s first take. He also sent in a massive autobiography/manifesto that I’m sure Knopf and all the heavyweight publishers will be lining up to option, vultures that they are. Throughout all of this, he pinpoints one specific cause of his anguish: women.

He says that women have never found him attractive, always rejected him for obnoxious brutes and left his heart broken in his hands. Having that happen over and over cannot be a fun experience. Most of us have felt rejection and heartbreak in our lives. However, most of us haven’t then plotted and executed a murder spree. There’s a big leap between being frustrated at your romantic life and wanting to take that out with indiscriminate violence.

A large part of that leap is personal to Rodger. There’s no theory that can “solve” the problem of serial murders, or murder in general. There are plenty of people who have had similar personal experiences to Rodger’s and who didn’t go on a rampage. No criteria can fully account for why any person becomes so coldly violent.

However.

The fact that a spree killer is getting staunch support from some people is ludicrous. I’m not specifically calling his defenders ludicrous (though they are), I’m talking about the whole phenomenon. I’m sure the vast majority of these people defending Rodger would hasten to add that they wouldn’t seriously contemplate doing something like he did. What they are defending is not his act but his mindset, or his right to feel the way he did.

In a broad sense, they’re right, everybody’s got a right to think and feel the way they wish. However, it’s not just Rodger that has this anger, clearly. There are a lot of men in the world who are completely wound up to the point that they have nothing but animosity toward women, whether expressed in overt hatred or in condescension and repression.

Everybody has a responsibility for their own actions. I firmly believe this. At the same time, you have to play the game that’s there, as it were. Your actions are determined to a vast degree by the expectations and “rules” of the world around you. For instance, on OKCupid there is a question vaguely like “Do you think women should have to shave their legs?” Pretty much every woman who answered that question (that I saw) answered “No.” They also added “But I do shave my legs regularly.”

It gets tricky like that.

So while I believe that it was Rodger’s responsibility to keep a check on his own emotions, I also think there are strong cues from society that he and people who have his social frustrations are struggling with. In fact, I think society in general struggles from this tension. For Rodger and his ilk who identify with the vaguely-misogynistic men’s rights activism movement, as well as those revolving around the pick-up artist community, there’s a very specific tension at work:

How to be a straight (white) man in a changing world?

FX aired one season of a great show called Terriers several years back. Starred Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James, was a lighthearted detective drama. One scene sticks with me in particular. They’re going into a college dorm, it’s SoCal, very nice. Mike RJ is your typical short-ish pretty boy (except for his little pirate ‘stache). He takes the lead here. He saunters in and all the girls are now staring, doing the thumb and pinky thing against their ear (“I’d love to be your receptionist”?), checking him out. And whenever I see that scene I think “That will never be me.”

But I’m a 6’3″ black guy with a full beard, so in important ways, it could never be me. It’s not just my physique, though. It’s type. I’m not fit and even if I got fit, I don’t think I’d carry myself like that. And blackness and whiteness goes a lot deeper than skin color, especially in this country. There are completely different expectations and prejudices. Plus, as a general thing, women don’t gawk at every cute guy that walks their way. So no, while I might wish that women loved me that much, I don’t think it’s a thing I deserve.

Elliot Rodger, though? He is basically that. That’s sort of his birthright in America. It’s not just that. Look at pretty much every movie made in this country, especially your plot-heavy action movies and thrillers, which have a strong subplot of “Attractive straight white man gets beautiful woman and lives happily ever after.” If the lead is black (or somehow Latino (Asian? HAH! (Native Ame–(ARAB!?!?!?(etc. etc.))))), just substitute in that race for “white” and the effect is the same. Not only that, Rodger was apparently pretty damn well off financially. If his life was a Hollywood movie, by 22 the kid was basically owed a woman out of a catalog.

And that’s another big part of this problem. Our media and culture in general encourages us (men and women) to view women as objects. For anyone to feel sexually viable, they’ve got to receive attention. In a culture where men don’t pay attention to women unless they’re all done up, I can’t help but think women don’t feel as good themselves if they don’t get done up. Anecdotal, yes, but I think on average women get done up for less important occasions than men do and take longer to do it. Not throwing shade here, just saying that the reactions are different because expectations are different.

People likely to read this blog probably know that these issues exist and know that they need to be tackled (or know about them and dismiss them). We’ve got to find a way to reduce objectification of women in the media. A question I rarely see asked, though, is why?

That is, why does objectification happen in the first place?

Where does a kid like Elliot Rodger get off in thinking that he’s owed a woman? Patriarchy is a broad reason, but when you get down to it, there are a lot of assumptions we all make that reflect that patriarchy in ways that we all may actually agree with.

First and foremost: the dream life. This isn’t just something that Americans have thought up, or just straight people, or just white people. The life with a house, a partner, and children (and/or pets) is historically and universally thought of as “the good life.” Somehow, as long as you have all that, tedious activities like mowing the lawn or unblocking toilets have a special, warming significance. More than anything else, this is an image that we repeat over and over as the ideal of happiness that’s within everyone’s reach. You might have screwed up your Olympic career, sank your father’s fishing boat, and burned down your lemonade stand, but somewhere there’s a woman or man who will love you and take you in.

And for a straight man to do that, he needs a woman. So right away, a woman becomes not a partner but a requirement. Happiness, as an “accomplishment” (a poison philosophy to start with), becomes contingent on achieving a woman.

But if you want the “right” woman (again…), you have to show that you can get women so you’re able to choose. Enter the playa phenomenon: if you ain’t bangin’ lotsa bitches, you ain’t shit. If you don’t have that “good life” where you have “family obligations” tying you down, you’re supposed to get as much pussy as possible and don’t stop until “the one” finally ties you down with her relentless nagging and annoyingly telling you she loves you.

“How could any guy just get away with bangin’ lotsa bitches, though?” I hear you asking. “Surely women have some agency, some choice in the matter?”

Well, they do. The thing is, in these guys’ minds, women are all secretly sluts. All of them. I don’t just mean slut in the sense of “promiscuous woman,” which I think we can all get behind (ba-dum-tssh, okay, I’ll stop undercutting my point now). I mean completely depraved, animalistic, ravenous for sex. If you can only find that one button (I hear it’s like just between a woman’s shoulderblades but shhhhh don’t tell anyone), she’ll turn into a drooling, wild-eyed sex maniac.

That’s not true. Clearly. It’s not just pornography that reinforces it, though I think it’s sort of the concentrated form. Everything in our culture is obsessed with sex and the idea that having great sex is something meaningful about your life. We’ve all seen those sitcom jokes where the lady is pissed/disappointed and she says to her female friend something classic like “Wasn’t much motion in my ocean ’cause his boat was like a ferry ride.” OH SNAP!

And if sex matters that much to women, then clearly they’ve all got to have a mode where they’re just begging for sex the way that the guy is in his mind. What the woman’s actual feeling is doesn’t matter, she simply has to have the same kind of heat he does in the way that he’d express it because he needs the sex to be validated. Look at the pick-up artist community’s obsession with jargon and stats like women are cars up for auction. What matters to them is how the woman can be rated and displayed to his friends and that’s not got anything to do with her emotions.

It’s a particularly twisted culture we live in when you peel it apart, certainly. There is a last bit of this that I think deserves addressing, though. It’s not as direct as the other reasons for this MRA bullshit but what makes it important to me is how pervasive it is.

It’s the conception that women are from Venus and men are from Mars.

Now, I didn’t read that book and I don’t really know what the phrase means other than “women and men are different!” Which is true, not debating that. But they’re not worlds apart, the way that many men and women seem to believe they are. A large driver of the men’s rights movement is society’s feeling that they are, and more than that, women are incredibly complex while men are reassuringly simple.

We go to great pains to cite how long women take to get ready or their constant mood swings over something minor like a plate’s cleanliness as reasons women are “so hard to understand.” On the other hand, the fact that all guys are into the big game and just want sandwiches and bacon and blowjobs means that their needs and wants are simple and direct.

Even though we’ve probably all known a meathead who’s a bit too protective of his car and demands that no one even breathe on it. And your mom coming home and immediately devouring a slice (hah) of cheesecake after a long day at work is as primal as “Me want bacwichjob!”

Keeping to this thinking means that men couldn’t be blamed for not trying to communicate at all. If the thinking is that all communication is going to fail because there’s a divide that can’t be crossed, there’s all the more reason for guys to reduce women to as few variables as possible (to use a crude phrase) in order to get optimal results. Women, to them, are so convoluted that they’re gibberish, and even if one tried to make herself understood, a man could never really cope.

For guys in the MRA movement (and, to a lesser extent, the PUAs/anti-PUAs), the real threat to them is that women are gaining agency. A guy like Elliot Rodger could, in earlier days, be pretty sure that he’d eventually find a woman who’d live with him because there was less choice for women in the matter. Not only were women usually under the care of their fathers before marriage, there wasn’t much of a life for an unmarried woman. Now, the fact that a woman is not necessarily seeking a man to complete her life means that men — who, even if they have other goals, are socially required to “get” women by virtue of being a man — can’t be as secure in that rite of passage.

These social cues are written all over Rodger’s messages when I read them. His constant talk about what he deserves, even going as far as to cite his race as a reason he deserved to have women, show me a level of entitlement that a lot of these MRA-types share. They are owed women, in their minds. When a woman doesn’t drop into their lap, they buy the book of cheats (PUA). And when that doesn’t work, they break the game. It’s not enough that they are playing, they are supposed to win. If they don’t, it means the game is broken or fixed or both.

That’s certainly how Elliot Rodger saw things. People were killed because of it.

I didn’t write this as a defense of Rodger by any means, nor as a “guide” on how to prevent and avoid spree killings in the future. When a guy goes off his rocker like the kid Rodger did, though, it’s important to figure out what was behind it because it’s likely that there’s a broader cancer that may go untreated. A big part of his decision to kill was his own personal leap, but there’s also the misogyny, the anger that the game of sex and relationships society told him was going on seemed to be beyond him beyond him, and that’s shared by many more people. I don’t think that there are many copycats in the community, though the anger is certainly there. I’m mostly hoping to dig into this anger and figure out what in society is reinforcing those assumptions, not just by examples but by the criteria of fulfillment it gives and the way people need to navigate them.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/elliot-rodger-and-the-mra-matrix/

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Cryptobigotry: It's All the Rage

So a yesterday, white guy Gavin McInnes told three other white people that racism doesn’t exist on white person’s station Fox News. I’m getting all that out of the way that you know I’m an awful, virulent racist up front. I write Vice style columns and I need to be real edgy right off the bat. So like I was saying, McInnes said a classically stupid thing that really should be taken apart. The thing about him and guys like him is that in order to get past this sort of thinking, figuring out the tricks is pretty important.

Cryptobigotry. That’s my I-went-to-college word for “you are saying some pretty racist stuff but pretending you aren’t racist.” It’s all the rage nowadays and McInnes is getting to be world-class at it. Basically, it says that if you are complaining about a thing, you’re really causing it.

“You getting mad about someone getting in your face and saying nigger nigger nigger? Well, man, if you weren’t so uptight about it, it wouldn’t bother you.” That sort of thing.

It sounds like it makes sense on the surface in the “Denial is not just a river in Egypt” way (Denial isn’t a river in anywhere, actually). If you take out the part where you are offended, then there’s no offense.

So it’s sort of like if McInnes tripped and fell and it didn’t hurt, then he didn’t actually trip.

Wait.

Anyway, he took aim at Michelle Obama and Eric Holder’s recent comments about racism and the need to be vigilant against it. In McInnes’s eyes, the Eric Holder attitude of “they’re out to get you” is the real poison. Invoking racism and making it public is really what drives it forward. Programs like affirmative action which are designed to redress the inequality instead promote it. Saying “we are viewed as inferior” basically means you’re saying “we are inferior.”

What McInnes wants is for things to be even, level, and he believes that they pretty much are. Any further agitating would just make things unequal. That’s the main plank of the cryptobigot’s platform. It relies on the “It’s 2014! We’ve come so far in the fight against _____ism!” feeling. All the big fights are already won because I read about them in history class, I got a 96% on my 8th grade test about the trail of suffrage rights, so why would anyone still be mad?

Right. Well, we all know the reasons to still be mad, so I’ll skip right over that. Let’s look at another case that’s a bit starker: Michael Sam.

Yeah, he kissed a guy on ESPN. Yeah, it caused an outrage and it got some people in trouble. What came out of it was a lot of talk about the double standard in the media, where people who are gay can’t have anything bad said about them, but people who are “normal” are always demonized. Cal Thomas brings up the repeated mockery of Tim Tebow’s Christianity, comparing it to the comments about Sam and asking aloud why those damned liberals who made fun of Timmy T. didn’t get their druthers.

Here’s the thing. In many states around the Union, gay marriage is still not legal. In a large number of states where it is, it’s mostly because bans were struck down by judges, not because they were enacted by legislators. That’s an important point because legislation means a lot broader support represented in the decision.

In how many states is Christianity illegal?

Michael Sam’s possibility of being drafted, or rather, the possibility that he might not be drafted because of his sexuality, was what made news. It was exceptional, it was a story that did not make itself because of Michael Sam’s effort to push a gay agenda, it was simply that he was going to be the first openly gay man to be drafted to an NFL team. You may ask “Why does he need to be open?,” but considering straight people don’t need permission to kiss on TV, I think we’ll scuttle that question, thank you very much.

Tim Tebow, on the other hand, made ostentatious poses and displays of a faith that a majority of the country professes and is frequently cited as being the foundation of this country. He was a good-looking white male quarterback of an NFL team making a spectacle of himself. That is what people were making fun of, primarily.

Even if not, where is Tebow going to walk down and be afraid because he’s a Christian? Maaaayyybe Satan’s Alley, New Mexico, but that’s a place I just made up. How many jobs does Tebow have to be afraid of losing or not getting because he’s a Christian? Again, BeelzeBurger may take a pass on him, but that doesn’t exist. (Incidentally, steal these ideas if you want to, BeelzeBurger could be a hit.)

There’s no adversity he’s overcoming. He’s not done anything. Other than his skill, he’s not exceptional, and considering he’s in a league for people with extreme skill, that doesn’t really count. Plus, it’s not really cool that he’s doing his paint writing and poses, it’s kind of Boy Scoutish and lame. He never really had a cool persona. That’s what people are making fun of, not the fact that he is Christian.

But Cal Thomas has to make this equal because that way he can simply say that those on the other side are making a big deal of things. It has to be an attack on Tebow’s Christian faith because then Thomas has a chance to take a shot at Michael Sam. If Tebow can be made fun of and nothing happens, why the furor for jokes about Sam?

The great thing about cryptobigotry is that it can be done by any majority group to any minority. In fact, it relies on that being the case. All you do is point to all these organizations that exist, regardless of the level of impact that they’ve had, and say “Everything is fine the way it is!”, regardless of who’s healthy and who’s not, who’s needy and who’s got too much.

If you came into your money because of your parents who came into their money because of their parents who found their money under the floorboards, well, you basically worked for that. If your dad got fucked in the Enron bust, had a heart attack and died and left you and your family pennniless well, that’s your bad luck, buckaroo.

Because for a cryptobigot, it’s essentially to disconnect yourself from history in any real sense. Oh yeah, you’ve read books about it, but none of that really matters. In fact, go ahead and disconnect yourself from all context.

I’m sure every trust fund kid who earned every cent of his money knows how to make every bit of their clothes, or if not, they know someone who makes them personally. And, of course, they have the finer points of paving roads and building stores and providing electricity at hand.

That executive in his sharp business suit, I’m reliably informed, knows all about keeping his office building sparkling clean. Why wouldn’t he? He built the damn thing with his own two hands, and he also paved and painted the roads on the way there, and he waved the plane that brought all his business friends in to the nearby airport (that he built (own two hands)) and he flew the plane and he served drinks. Also, he was all his business friends.

Well, of course not. Yet it’s the contention of these cryptobigots that all those things that their businesses rely on are the product of their work only and they should get all the benefits. Now that’s a spatial look. You flip that through time and it’s the same. Their idea is that whatever is happening now is how it should be and there’s nothing in history that they rely on that is not accountable to them. They can’t conceive that somewhere there was luck, or there was benefitting from some discrimination or prejudice, and more than that, they can’t believe that prejudice would echo down to this day.

When people like the Benham brothers complain about their faith preventing them from getting a TV show on HGTV and thousands of black people, Latino people, Asian people, Native Americans complain about not getting housing because of their race, I’ve gotta chuckle a little bit. I can’t help it. It’s when they remain just stories that you can equate them and believe that they’re in any way comparable. When they aren’t real, the Benham twins can complain about not getting a show as if it was their right to get a show with whatever beliefs they had, even if they might have clashed with the views of HGTV and not necessarily the public at large. After all, it would have been HGTV’s decision and the fact that anti-gay activists consistently fight for the right to exclude gay business, I’m sure gay-friendly companies are afforded the same leeway.

When it’s not real, you can think that people being driven off TV shows for their views is the same as prison populations being so unequal you’d think they were meant for a different country.

Because those are the stories that minorities tell, stories not just about rejection but about violence, loss, belief in the system and betrayal. That’s the “mythical racism” that guys like McInnes are decrying. It’s equating masses of poor minorities being unable to get the foot in the door for jobs with one CEO (quite a noteworthy position) of a very visible corporation having his public opinions called into question.

Of course, for McInnes and Thomas, these are all stories. You tell them and they exist just in that way. They don’t need to be real, and in fact, it’s better if they’re not. Better if they’re just speculations about how the world works so people can fill in the blanks. And if you’ve got your story, and it seems to tell everything that needs to be told, why in hell would you listen to mine?

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/cryptobigotry-its-all-the-rage/

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Hashtags vs. Boko Haram

It’s hard to believe that in this day and age of quickie meme creation, Michelle Obama actually held up a white sheet of paper and gave the world her best puppy dog. She had to know that it was going to be erased and reproduced over and over for the rest of time. She’s not the only tone deaf celebrity (yes, she’s the First Lady, but she is also a celebrity, as have been all presidents and first ladies since television at least) to fall prey to this sort of blunder. Like most of them, though, the cause she was trying to promote was noble. In Obama’s case, it was the #BringBackOurGirls campaign.

I will admit to being confused as to the actual point of #BringBackOurGirls. The ultimate goal of rescuing the 200-plus schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram is obvious, but what is the campaign and petition and outrage meant to achieve? Is it to sway Boko Haram to give the girls back on their own? To force President Jonathan to do more to get them back? To make international actors take action? I’ve seen it targeted at all those possibilities. I am not sure what #BringBackOurGirls can actually accomplish, but so far it has certainly put Boko Haram on the front pages across the world.

It can be argued that this is what Boko Haram want. After all, as a terrorist organization, essentially a violent PR group, they need publicity. To that end, #BringBackOurGirls should please Abubakar Shekau very much. However, that’s a bit hasty. Shekau has proven himself to be somewhat shrewd, so as much as he might like the spotlight, he definitely knows that it’s doing at least as much harm as it is good.

Yes, terrorists generally are after publicity, but the thing to remember is that their message is generally local. When a car bomb goes off, people on that street know, and in that city know, and probably up to the nation. Everybody who’s meant to get the message is going to get it. Boko Haram isn’t a worldwide terrorist organization and it doesn’t have an international goal. The extra attention being put upon the group now doesn’t really help them much because the new people it terrifies are people it is not concerned with.

Certainly, Boko Haram’s terror tactics haven’t made us think that we’d lose if we sent our brave boys and girls into the fight. If anything, they’ve made it more likely that we’ll send our troops in and dig Shekau out.

The problem with believing that “all publicity is good publicity (in Shekau’s eyes)” is that it falsely equates the “serial killer” scenario with a political insurgency. In America, and I’m sure elsewhere, a huge part of the debate about the occurrence of serial killers centers around the media’s role. Specifically, it seems that a lot of serial killers get the idea from seeing others and wish to get similar attention for themselves. The way the theory goes, if you just stop media attention, the problem of serial killings will be localized and there’ll be less chance of copycat attacks in the future.

That’s just it, though. Boko Haram is already localized, that’s where its effect is supposed to be. Shutting down talk about them in the world press will not stop people in Nigeria from knowing about them, and that is really all Boko Haram is concerned about. #BringBackOurGirls might give the group a more fearsome image but it doesn’t do anything to help reach their goal. In fact, if the U.S. does put boots on the ground as it looks likely to, Shekau in particular might find his days easily counted.

So even if the campaign is pretty haphazard, #BringBackOurGirls is pretty much a success, right? Not really.

#BringBackOurGirls is another manifestation of the “responsibility to protect” culture that cripples our foreign policy. Now that the world knows about the kidnapping of the schoolgirls, it has become incumbent upon the international community to do something about it.

I want those schoolgirls to come back alive and well just like those pushing for the campaign. I understand what I’m going to say might be unpopular, but it needs to be said:

Those schoolgirls are not the most important thing here.

Boko Haram has been shooting up schools and attacking the concept of “Western” education for years. They have assassinated critics and wiped out whole towns. They’ve gotten the latest in al-Qaeda haute couture vests from the kamikaze line.

The kidnapping of the Chibok girls is a vile, heinous crime, but it is not the first or the only crime Boko Haram has committed, or even the most important one. It does not define the group. Bringing justice for this one crime will not end the horror that Boko Haram wreaks upon Nigeria.

Campaigns like #BringBackOurGirls reduce what is a very broad and complex problem — the chronic poor conditions and philosophical tensions that have given birth to a violent insurgency — to one that is very simple and easy to digest: the rescue of kidnapped schoolgirls. Sure, if we send our troops in we might kill Shekau and destroy the group called Boko Haram, but even that is missing the point.

The fight against al-Qaeda, and the evolution of that organization, tells the story in analogue. Once able to be presented as a monolithic group, now there’s absolutely no pretense to the fact that al-Qaeda is a splintered, loose association of small factions. Maybe it is to our advantage to see them that way. Even so, despite our intervention in the Middle East, despite assassinating Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda has persisted as a brand if not an organization. Rather than defeating al-Qaeda as an entity, we’ve made them into an infestation, which is far more difficult to contain.

The obvious fact is, whatever Osama bin Laden was the head of — be it an organized syndicate or a loose coalition — he was not the font of the rebel fervor. Cutting him out of the picture only removed the whitehead, not the disease. In fact, when we cut off that head, we didn’t find the beast headless. There was Ayman al-Zawahiri. Soon there were splinter groups acting with more autonomy.

In Nigeria, when they cut off the head of Boko Haram that was called Mohammed Yusuf, Abubakar Shekau was there to take his place. If #BringBackOurGirls goes beyond its greatest hopes and eliminates Shekau, there will be another one. If we stomp Boko Haram down, there is always Ansaru and there will be others. A terrorist movement is a hydra. Unfortunately, simply burning out all the stumps isn’t going to cut it.

Not only that, but despite the blaring self-righteousness of some commentators, the United States (and the international community as a whole) does not have a sterling track record with interventions. It doesn’t even have an acceptable fake. Yes, those schoolgirls are being held, but if the situation in Nigeria is even further destabilized — which is the one talent that Western intervention troops have fully mastered — not only will Boko Haram continue to thrive, they will be able to conduct more hateful operations like the Chibok kidnapping.

Taking down a group like Boko Haram has to be thought of in terms other than direct warfare, and it cannot be achieved by big smiles and tours of the presidential palace, either. The amount that #BringBackOurGirls helps, however, is negligible. I don’t begrudge anyone caring about the issue. People should care. At the same time, our powerlessness should not be combated with an eagerness to do something, anything, even the wrong thing.

I believe a military intervention would be disastrous in general, not only politically but very likely for those girls. Any rescue operation should be conducted by Nigerians. It may be difficult to realize that this is not an enemy that will be laid to waste by American force alone but until we do, we’ll keep on tweeting #BringBackOurGirls instead of #StopBokoHaramViolence.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/hashtags-vs-boko-haram/

[bloctheory-blog]

Cecily and the Porcelain Police

If I saw a fire in front of me plain as day and I stuck my hand in it, then I told my best friend about how bad it hurt, he would laugh right in my face. So why don’t we do the same thing to cops?

Cecily McMillan is a twenty-five year old grad student with exactly zero years of police, paramilitary, special forces, or military training. I don’t think she’s even read the Anarchist Cookbook. Definitely not Chicken Soup for the State-Smasher’s Soul. Two years ago, she was present at an Occupy Wall Street protest (a movement she was very active in) that was being broken up by police.

While the police were trying to arrest everyone, Cecily wound up elbowing a copper in the face. And for that, she endured prosecutor Erin Choi giving everyone her best Wicked Witch impression (for which I’m sure she’ll be applauded and promoted) and is looking down a seven year stretch in jail.

That is quite a tantrum on the part of the police, if I do say so myself.

I realize that I left out the alleged sexual assault, but it was for a reason. I fully believe Cecily’s account of the events. Right now, though, I’d rather keep away from that question because it’s very charged and, right now, it’s a subset of a bigger issue.

What Cecily McMillan is being charged with, even outside the sexual assault claim, is reacting quite normally to someone trying to grab and restrain you. In general, people don’t like to be restrained. If Cecily had paid the officer to tie her up the story might be a bit different (and also somewhat odd for happening in Zucotti Park during a demonstration), but this was without consent.

If someone on the street grabs me, I’m gonna do my best to get them away. Bottom line. I’m not gonna ask who the guy is or if he’s got a right to grab me, I’m going to defend myself until I figure out what’s going on. Especially if the guy has a gun, armor, a club, and a bunch of other guys equipped the same. Sticking around is just a recipe for getting messed up.

So why do we give cops the benefit of the doubt? Oh, right, because they’re supposed to protect us. That government that everyone trusts is out there, and they said the police and the legal system are alright, so that’s fine.

Except for when people want to live on their own and are attacked by the government, as at Ruby Ridge. Oh, and when they fire into protesters ilke at Kent State. Not so good ones there. Then there’s the standoff at the Bundy Ranch, or Waco, or the chronic abuse of blacks in Birmingham and throughout the South. The legal system has thrown out polarizing verdicts like the “not guilty” verdicts OJ Simpson and George Zimmerman.

So yeah. I mean, except for all that bad stuff, and you know. All the other ones. If you leave aside all that, you’ve got a squeaky clean police force, and you’ve also got a handful of magic beans that will take you to see the giant.

Who really trusts the police? Who trusts the police enough to say that they’ll definitely never act against them? That they, the citizens, will never want to resist arrest even for a second?

It’s not just that, though, let’s look at the other side. The privilege that a police officer is given, the finality and sense of justice that the legal system has.

If you saw True Detective, you probably saw Marty take out his frustration on two boys that had sex with his daughter. He did it in a jail, knowing that they would not strike back because he was a cop, with no one around to tell him no. In fact, he was given charge of the cell by a friend, with a grin and an attaboy.

I mean, hell, there are definitely a lot of fathers (and mothers) who would love to get that chance. The way Marty was built in the show, I think that he would have gone after them badge or no. But the fact that he had the badge made it a lot easier. And then, having the badge, why would he give up the privilege voluntarily just for this? Doesn’t make sense to me, probably wouldn’t to anybody.

And that’s the issue here, to me. When the cops have the power to get someone done for “resisting arrest,” it doesn’t really matter what their intention with it is. It’d be like criminalizing throwing up after a night of cheap vodka, but not criminalizing the vodka. Yeah, technically vodka’s still legal, but how many people are going to really try to go all out when they know the risk?

The fact that police have war chests with which to unleash upon protesters and still rely on using tactics like resisting arrest charges if fairly pathetic. The legal system supporting them instead of telling them to get their heads out of their asses is expected, unfortunate, and even worse. And the fact that everybody basically shrugs their shoulders at it is the biggest joke.

It doesn’t make any sense to keep acting like these people have our best interests at heart. They don’t. Why? Because they don’t have to. Whatever they choose to do is protected, and it’s often by these insidious, helpful-sounding details like “resisting arrest.” We never get around to asking what the cops would do in their place, or what that judge would do, or that prosecutor. It doesn’t matter to them. These legal protections are why. The day that a decrepit old judge can have his hip broken by the police with the knowledge that he’ll only be charged for his actual crime is a day I hope to see soon.

And since this is my blog and it’s been burning in me this whole time, I’d like to say fuck Erin Choi. What a disgusting soul that woman has.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/cecily-and-the-porcelain-police/

[bloctheory-blog]

Whistleblowers and the Government System

In response to the question: “Should Leakers of Classified Government Wrong-Doings Be Punished?” from Wielding Power Magazine

We must always remember that the government is a system, not a being. We talk about it as a single thing because simplification is useful for us to think about problems. The flaws of this approach become apparent when we talk about crimes against the nation. If someone betrays government information that reveals some intolerable act, this knowledge might damage the state but benefit its people.

It is tempting to prescribe clemency for such a person. We may indeed call them a hero. However, the government has an inflexible responsibility to prosecute and, whenever possible, punish those who betray its secrets. The reason for this prosecution should not be crude revenge but the preservation of the government as an institution.

Most people going about their daily lives have little need for a government. A sense of shared identity creates nationhood within the group and otherness without. That essentially sets up the two main tasks of a government: judgment of disputes between its citizens and the settling of affairs with foreign groups. Of course, various other functions spring out of those, such as the military, taxation, social services, and so on. At base, however, all can be boiled down to those two functions.

An essential feature of any government is a separation between the state structure – the government as an entity – and the nation, or the people. Every system of government is in some way representative, in that the state is empowered to act as judge and diplomat for its people. This necessarily requires that information be kept and brokered by the state, as the sheer number of clients on both ends makes it impossible for all information to be shared.

Further, in most every arbitration there is a gainer and a loser. In such a situation, the definition of wrongdoing is immensely fluid. Even a government which consistently ruled along a specific standard would fall foul of someone because of the details of their particular case. The questions of “what should be secret?” and “what is wrongdoing?” are central for any decision on who should be punished for leaking government information.

For a government to function properly, it must be credible. To its people, it must be seen that its judgments will be upheld and enforced. Its true laws and customs – whether those are codified statutes, longstanding traditions, the decrees of the current ruler, or some mixture – must be recognized and agreed to. To foreigners, there must be a sense that the state truly does represent its people, and that by dealing first with the state it will be able to transact reliably with its people.

Government secrets fall into the realm of this credibility. The necessity of an espionage or intelligence agency can be debated, but if it is in the fabric of a government, its procedures must be trustworthy. Those organs of the government which rely on classification and secrecy must be able to rely on it, or else such a system should never have been instituted. Therefore, we can discard the question of “what should be secret.” As far as the prosecution of wrongdoing is concerned, “what should be secret” is what the state says should be secret.

That is not to conflate such a classification with moral correctness. The American government’s involvement in tragedies like My Lai and their willful disinvolvement in others like Rwanda prove that secrecy does not always prove to be in the interest of a nation’s people or humanity at large. Actions that serve to prevent tragedies such as this should be lauded. People should not be afraid to suffer the consequences for actions they believe are right.

The answer to “what is wrongdoing?” will be different for every person, but it cannot be made by the government. The state is a simplification, an abstraction. It is, in truth, a system that cannot make such a moral decision. This is why it is harmful for people to equate the consequences and strictures of the law with the ideas of moral correctness. It is something like expecting the socket not to shock you because it wasn’t shocking anyone when no one’s finger was there. No system can determine if the perpetrator was Robert Hansen or Mark Felt.

If that is true, when should the government punish those who leak its secrets? The answer is always. Always because the government is a system. In order for it to function properly, everyone who engages it and engages in it must be able to trust it. This means that those who give their secrets to the government must be able to know that such secrecy will not be violated. If such a law isn’t enforced, it loses its force and falls into disuse.

I believe that there are many situations in which the state does morally objectionable things. Those who have the courage to stand up and speak out against it should be commended. If possible, such whistleblowers should be dealt with dispassionately with a view to how their efforts have helped to promote the state’s health. But in order for the government as a system to function properly, the state as an entity must prosecute those who violate its codes. Without that essential, unshakeable structure of credibility, what is the point of government?

text reproduced as submitted

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/whistleblowers-and-the-government-system/

[bloctheory-blog]

Same Old Song: John Kerry Plays Africa

Lately, Africa hasn’t had much to laugh about, but thankfully the United States is sending one of its best acts over for a six day bonanza. John Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State, has already begun his “We Really Oughta Do Something” tour with a stop in Addis Ababa where he’ll play that smash hit for the benefit of the South Sudanese. I don’t think it’s that Kerry doesn’t want to help. It’d be too easy to look at the guy as some kind of schemer just trying to smooth everything over. There’s no evil in Kerry’s eyes, though. There’s barely anything. I would not be surprised if his diplomatic notes are something like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, typed out longhand by his programmers.

Let’s move past him, though. He’s just a symptom of the problem. South Sudan may be facing a genocide. The questions about what class an atrocity is in are notoriously difficult to answer, at least before one is fully in swing. What’s known for sure is that there is a hell of a lot of fighting, a hell of a lot of killing, and it doesn’t look likely to stop very soon. The International Crisis Group has reported over 10,000 deaths in the country already, a report made in January of this year.

John Kerry’s message to South Sudan? “Y’all need to chill out.”

Yeah.

It’s easy for people like you and me and John Kerry to chill out, though, when we’ve got running water, constant electricity, and air that’s 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and round about 0% bullets.

That’s pretty much the message we send to Africa, though. “Maybe chill out and take a hit of this democracy, bro.” Yeah, just elect people and follow their lead and it’ll all be good. As if that didn’t happen in Rwanda or in Cote d’Ivoire. As if it didn’t happen in Civilized Europe with the Ukraine crisis.

Number one lesson for any dealer is don’t get high off your own supply. But look at John Kerry. A face that blank has got to be on something.

The United Nations has almost made it a policy of shouting and getting nothing done. I understand perfectly well that it is a voluntary organization, but that’s not my point. Take their mission to South Sudan for example. Right about this time last year, they authorized 12,500 military personnel, an amount that will be reviewed in June (aka next month). Currently they are at about 2/3 operating strength. In Centrafrique, the UN has just “committed” to similar numbers of military and are expected to have serious problems coming up with the numbers.

In Rwanda, the UN made it a point to back as far away as they could (recommending seeking ways to reduce overall military force in a document to establish said force?) while still reminding everyone that they stood for human rights, justice, and the American democratic way.

Pretty sure John Kerry’s gonna bust that li’l ditty out somewhere along this tour. He sings great on the “foot in his mouth” register.

He probably won’t say anything about the laughable mandates these missions get. Read them sometime. First of all, there’s no goal in there. There’s never a specific objective to be reached. The UNMISS mandate for South Sudan has pretty strong language about taking all necessary measures, but what are those measures for? “Supporting the government…” “Supporting the development…” “Facilitating a protective environment…” All very vague, very deniable.

In point of fact, what the mandate actually authorizes UNMISS to do is stand around holding their guns. Same is true in Centrafrique and has been for pretty much every UN mission until they’re forced to make a move. It makes for great pictures, great publicity shots for back-patting and Facebook sharing, but doesn’t do so great in actually helping violent situations. They rarely even tag the Africans in their pictures which, to me, is the rudest thing about it.

The United Nations is in love with itself and its opinion that it can help people around the world. It loves to promise it’s gonna do a lot and, really, does very little. I don’t mean to denigrate the men and women who are actually on the ground. This is about people who get a kick out of seeing how many blue helmets they put in a foreign country, then obsess over how quickly they can get them all back. They see a stubborn stump and can’t resist saying they’ll help you with it, but they just stand by and watch you break your back.

Personally, I respect the guy who just walks on to the house a lot more. And that doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t help, we absolutely should. But it’s about doing the things you say you’ll do. If you really want to help, you gotta get your hands dirty. ‘Course Kerry couldn’t do that, he’d mess up his costume.

I really don’t know how much Africans trust the west to help them these days. I bet more than a few will be getting tickets to Kerry’s big tour, though. Pretty rare for them to have a starched suit come play the local clubs.

http://www.bloctheory.com/2014/05/same-old-song-john-kerry-plays-africa/