Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

For a nation centered socialism

2013-05-17T15:02:00.002-07:00

I think that the future of socialism in the United States, at least, lies in the fusion of working class lead revolutionary socialism with a national as opposed to international focus. "Socialism in one country", annunciated unfortunately by Stalin, makes sense in our condition as a soon-to-be-post empire. Once the American empire has truly gone by the wayside, due to our own ineptitude, it will be time to go inward once more and set our own house in order. On top of demoting the rich, and promoting the working class, the United States needs a national program of economic development that will build and restructure the economy so that it can viably compete in the world arena.

"Proletarian Internationalism" has always been more of a dream, a myth, rather than a reality, and the Soviet Union even rejected the pure notion of a one culture, one state, socialism as opposed to one that honored regional differences and the individual ways of life of particular countries.

What that means for the United States is complex. I'm in favor of honoring the actual cultural fabric of the United States, which is multi-cultural and includes people of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups as opposed to praising some sort of idealized, and non-representative, notion of what the United States is.

If a nation-centric socialism comes into being in the United States, it should reflect this diversity as well, as opposed to playing the politics of internal domination by one group over the other.

*and to add, on edit: Despite becoming one of the worst mass murderers in history, Stalin wasn't all bad. A lot of his ideas that he had before he started killing mass amounts of people weren't completely off the mark. "Foundations of Leninism", written before he seized power, remains a positive book.

My experience working in homeless advocacy in relation to radicalism and liberalism.

2013-05-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

I don't want to overstate my involvement. I was an intern for a men's shelter in Olympia, handled some case work there, and then volunteered at the connected drop in center for a summer, working the front desk a couple of days a week, then I remained a friend of the organization. I won't name it, but you can find it pretty easily on the web. I still have a great many friends who were connected to it.

Anyways, what I learned was that the radical, liberal, and conservative takes on homelessness are all both simultaneously right and wrong.

First the radical. My experience was that there were few people who were homeless who had simply been exploited by capitalism. Class formed a general background to homelessness, but few in number were the people who had simply been dealt a bad hand and nothing else. This was several years before the economic collapse. The folks who were homeless because of something like that tended to not stay homeless for an extended period of time, but instead get their stuff together and get back on track.

Next the liberal. Surprisingly, for my radical sensibilities, the liberal notion of what caused homelessness was much more correct than I thought--although not completely. That is to say, in the liberal as opposed to radical model, society is basically fine and just except for incidental things like family background and other non-economic factors that cause people to do self destructive and outright destructive things.

Most, if not all, of the people who were chronically homeless came from backgrounds where their family situations and community situations were seriously fucked up. I say that as a fact. This background directly contributed to the problems that they picked up that lead to them becoming homeless and staying homeless. Those problems were frequently addiction, or simply chronic bad choices due to psychological factors.

However, people across the board, across all backgrounds, have experiences like this. What made the difference between folks who had bad family backgrounds and became homeless and those that didn't was usually money, class. Folks who became homeless didn't have the financial or social support necessary to help them negotiate their problems without having everything collapse. That was how the radical informed the liberal.

Now for the conservative. It wasn't simply family background and class position that predisposed people to becoming homeless, it was often folks own choices that they made that were not good as well. Personal choice had a great deal to do with it--but personal choice often made on the background of severely fucked up family situations and community situations. Nevertheless, there was a continuum of amount of personal responsibility that contributed to people becoming homeless, with some folks basically being fucked from the start and others fucking up their lives more than others.

So all three positions had elements of truth to them, although none was the whole story. People weren't simply directly victimized by capitalism, they weren't only victims of their family backgrounds, and they weren't all in the situation because of personal choices.

Google recognizes Palestine

2013-05-08T21:32:00.001-07:00

Well they would. We all know what Google's record in World War II was like, hypocrites.

Dylanology: in defense of "Self Portrait"

2013-05-07T09:34:00.002-07:00

A little bit of a departure from most of the posts on here. I'm a big Bob Dylan fan, and I've recently started listening to the famously unlistenable double album...and not only do I like it, but I think that the folks who have condemned it have seriously been barking up the wrong tree. The songs on "Self Portrait" look to be part of the same collaboration with The Band that saw the Basement Tapes, the live performances represented on "Before the Flood", and more broadly part of the same live performance tradition that produced the "Rolling Thunder Review" shows. All of these are non-standard Dylan releases in that they're not organized around any sort of a particular concept, except very broadly, and the songs themselves are less introspective, more representative of American music as a whole. What I think Dylan is doing in Self Portrait is exploring the same vein of Americana that the Basement Tapes documents, and in the process putting forward his personal favorites of the time. Unlike some reviewers, I don't believe that the cover of "The Boxer" by Paul Simon is intended ironically, for example. It sounds like a song Dylan just wanted to cover.

That folks at the time wouldn't like the Self Portrait of an artist, would be mystified by it, speaks volumes. This is Dylan as Dylan presents his interests and likes to the world unvarnished and unadorned, raw, without any consideration for making any other over-arching statement.

*on edit: to see some of the similarities, listen to the "Self Portrait" versions of "Like a Rolling Stone" and "She Belongs to Me", both of which are live, and compare them to the songs on "Before the Flood" and the Official Bootleg Series "Rolling Thunder Review".

Isn't it great that Israel can bomb other countries and it's just okay?

2013-05-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

I mean, an act of war against Syria, no big deal, because it allegedly targeted weapons that were allegedly from Iran that were allegedly going to Hezbollah in Lebanon.....that might someday have possibly been used by the Lebanese Hezbollah against targets inside Israel.

*addendum: from the New York Times: "Syria Blames Israel for Fiery Attack in Damascus"....because it was Israel who attacked them. Should people blame Iran, which supposedly sent weapons that Israel was supposedly targeting?

Gun Control: Why isn't it ever discussed this way?

2013-04-30T17:16:00.001-07:00

Folks always talk about the threat of the government maybe doing something terrible and the need to protect yourself...but that's only one side of the coin. The other side is crazy Earl down the street who believes in black helicopters accumulating an arsenal. Personally, I think that the latter is the greater danger to folks in the U.S. at this moment. In fact, the people who most loudly talk about their need to own AK-47s, who have extreme paranoid delusions about the government, are precisely the people that I'm most afraid of owning high powered weapons.

The Boston bombing---it punctures the jargon of authenticity

2013-04-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

That has been built up over the notion of "Terror". Bin Laden and company carefully cultivated their image as complete outsiders to western culture, as people who represented some sort of pure alternative to the corrupted west....even though many of the people involved in 9/11 were partially westernized in general, had lived in Europe, and had studied in western universities. The people who committed the Boston bombing, on the other hand, left a large paper trail within the United States itself, that will no doubt be pored over, that will make it very hard to demonize them as the complete Other, as folks who had absolutely nothing in common with other people in the United States. The notion of the terrorist as a guy with a long beard in a flowing garment living in the desert actually benefits radical Islam, in my opinion, because it not only suggests to us that we have nothing in common with them--it says the same thing to them. If you have an oppositional construct like that, reality takes a hike and gets replaced by almost metaphysical constructs and ideas. John Kerry's lamentable declaration that the bombings were the face of Evil, with a capitol "E", is an example of what I'm talking about from the Western side, and is as unhelpful as declaring that westerners are the godless Infidels.

Thoughts on the Boston bombing, and especially of the pictures that were released

2013-04-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

Mostly the latter. The bombing was a tragedy. I think that something very interesting about the surveillance pictures is that you have someone probably carrying one of the bombs who is very inconspicuous, with bland clothing and a hat that's pulled down over his eyes, and who has lighter skin, standing next to someone who's very noticeable--a guy of probable Middle Eastern descent who's not trying to hide his identity whatsoever, and who is in fact wearing a bright blue shirt that brings attention to himself. To me, this suggests that the guy with the darker skin may have been someone who the (or one of the) bombers came up and talked to, trying to draw attention away from himself. Which doesn't mean that the bomber himself therefore couldn't have been Middle Eastern, but that he could be throwing people off through knowing that he was probably being photographed and surveilled.

**just in case anyone isn't aware of it, this post was based on the picture of the two guys that the New York Post ran, that turned out to be just random people in the crowd, one of which was Middle Eastern, who had nothing to do with the bombing.

No such thing as "the rootless", in my opinion

2013-04-18T09:22:00.003-07:00

Or the "Deracines", to use the original term. I think that the dichotomy between country and city that sees the country as the repository of all values is false, and in fact ignores some of the hard facts about country living. I partially grew up in rural Michigan, and I can tell you that I was happy to get out of there, because of the stultifying idiocy of the people. I don't consider rural America to be more 'real' than urban America, and things like the Iowa Caucuses, nicknamed sometimes by me the Iowa Caucasian-us, are relics of a past world.

Maurice Barrés, who came up with the concept of the Deracines, also explicitly used it to promote anti-Semitism, by arguing that people who are Jewish are constant rootless individuals, who won't be at home in any community that they're part of, something false. Barrés also expanded his critique to middle class bourgeois folks, who he also conflated with people who are Jewish.

That folks who live in bourgeois situations get a kind of threadbare perspective on the world, that's missing something, is sometimes true, but the antidote to that isn't to go back to rural life but to make the present life deeper, and, if desirable, to recover some of that depth within modernity itself instead of rejecting it in total.

...and John Richards at KEXP goes nuts over potential penalties for drunk driving

2013-04-18T08:31:00.001-07:00

Taking a complete "law and order" position, as strict as possible. It's very ironic, in that folks are sometimes scared and intimidated by the admixture of conservatism I add to my socialism and liberalism, but I've never, in fact, advocated for extreme penalties like this....while folks who are straight liberal/progressive, without that admixture, at times go straight to the jugular with advocacy for immensely strict punishments when it suits their cause.

Young, wealthy, diplomat's life tragically cut short.

2013-04-07T19:45:00.004-07:00

25 year old Anne Smedinghoff, enthusiastic about her job and from a rich suburb of Chicago, met her untimely fate in Afghanistan on Saturday. A graduate of an expensive private high school, and then John Hopkins University---one of the finest private universities in the country. Her father, "Mr Smedinghoff told the Associated Press: "It was a great adventure for her ... She loved it. She was tailor-made for this job."

In other news, Afghanistan's own army began to take over duties from the U.S. military.

Liberalism, Marxism, Conservatism---a natural progression

2013-04-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

I look at it this way: Marxism corrects some of the flaws of liberalism, namely the ignorance of most of liberal theory to the class issue and to capitalism, and then conservatism in a moderate form corrects the defects that continue to exist after Marxism makes its corrections to liberalism. The potential for these latter defects was there from the start, but in my opinion was much less important and immediately relevant than the ignorance of social justice that many classical liberals displayed. After capitalism is taken on, and the basic ideas of personal freedom, freedom of speech, are established, it's proper to look at some of the flaws within the conceptions of liberalism---and to a certain extent in Marxism taken in a vulgar as opposed to a sophisticated sense. The latter would be represented by things labeled as Stalinism today.

Ethnic stereotypes and discrimination within 'white' ethnic groups in the U.S.

2013-04-02T12:09:00.001-07:00

I posted a version of this a few weeks ago, then took it down, and am now reposting another one because I think it's worth saying.

Basically, I've had the experience on many occasions, when people somewhat get to know me, and like me, of assuming that because of my last name I'm Jewish. It's meant to be complimentary, in the sense that they think I'm possibly talented, and intellectually oriented, but it denies my own ethnic heritage, and demonstrates that the people who say this don't take into consideration the possibility that a person with a heavily Polish last name who is intellectual and talented could actually be Polish.

In point of fact, I've had people argue back to me, suggesting that I was possibly descended from Sephardic Jews who migrated to Hungary, which is absurd, despite also having Hungarian ancestry.

Stereotypes abound in American society, but while, in my opinion, whatever heavily negative stereotypes about people who are Jewish that once existed have largely been replaced by the character of the nebbish intellectual, when it comes to people who are Polish and Italian, the same negative stereotypes still apply.

I'm Italian as well, so forgive me for being sensitive on that aspect of the issue.

There are loveable Woody Allen type intellectuals....and then there are dumb Polacks and Jersey Shore and Mafioso goombah Italians. If the idea of a Polish intellectual rarely comes up in American society, the idea that an Italian could be an intellectual is something that's almost unthinkable. Yet on a personal level, I know that I know more Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Schelling than 99.9% percent of Americans, if that.

I remember one of my roommates at Evergreen once affectionately posting a picture of a guy in a skullcap diligently studying at a desk at a Yeshivah on my door as a tribute to my studiousness. I would have appreciated it much more if he had payed attention to who I actually was, not who he thought that I must be with my last name and with my facial characteristics and darker skin coloring.

The U.S. government actually does something right for a change: "U.S. trolling fans of Al Qaeda with online campaign"

2013-03-27T21:51:00.000-07:00

Here at Rawstory. "Trolling" isn't the right word for it. They're going onto online forums where " “Al-Qaeda and its supporters lurk” " and "... robustly engage with them in chat forums in Arabic, Somali, Punjabi and Urdu,” she explained.

“By targeting the hardliners, we are really trying to reach the middle grounders, the fence sitters, the sympathizers and passive supporters.”

Last year, staff at the new Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which reports directly to Sonenshine, wrote some 7,000 posts on different online forums.

“When we counter unfounded rumors, propaganda and conspiracy theories with facts, truth and reasonable argument, we can better define what we stand for. And we have a greater chance of changing more minds,” Sonenshine "

It's good because 1) they're actually trying to reason with people, and 2) we don't have a maniac like Bush in the White House anymore.

The controversy over affirmative action in college admissions comes down to...

2013-03-25T12:53:00.002-07:00

Our old problem of race vs. class in the United States. Specifically, after the '70s we became very aware of addressing racial disparities through programs like Affirmative Action, but this was based on the false idea that class disparities had been corrected in America through our (temporary) economic prosperity. The '60s to the early '70s were the "Golden Age" of the U.S. economy, a time when people thought that there were only "pockets of poverty" left that had to do with things such as racial discrimination that weren't the immediate result of capitalism. But, such was not the case, and when the class divides started to show up from the mid '70s on, it started to strike a lot of folks as hypocritical that Affirmative Action programs for college admissions were in place to help racial minorities while aid to the poor either stagnated or decreased.

One theory of Affirmative Action in college admissions is that if the person denied admission is white they can surely get into another college somewhere else, whereas the same isn't the case if the person is one of color, but this is not always the case. In fact, it trades on the notion that people who aren't people of color have a uniform amount of privilege, which is false.

The solution is to help people both in a class based way and in a race based way, to eliminate the potential for competition or conflict by just generally helping those who because of their condition face extra obstacles in getting into and staying in college, as opposed to destroying all of the programs because as they're implemented they're imperfect.

The defense budget...

2013-03-21T10:00:00.001-07:00

What they don't tell you: is that a great deal of it is "Military Keynesianism", meaning that the defense spending is a constant stimulus to the economy that's not acknowledged as such. If military spending went down, which I think it should, we'd have to fund the stimulus in an outright way. It's ironic that there's so much opposition to Obama's above board stimulus whereas the defense manufacturing spending is deliberately spread across every state, providing jobs and cash to people in those states. The massive infusion of pork that a huge number of congress people take home provides the basis for this below board stimulus of the economy. We should be honest about it, and spend our money elsewhere than in buying military equipment...like in public improvements to our infrastructure.

Why the stagnation....a la Bill Maher

2013-03-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

Who had a great recent comment that shit kicking rednecks are being left behind in our country, and in any case have exerted influence on our country far beyond their numbers. Well, the United States under the Constitutional system was designed to protect itself against the "Tyranny of the Majority". It started by having only Representatives be directly elected. Everyone else was selected by a combination of Representatives and State office holders. The majority, in this case, was the unwashed, poorer, masses, and the minority in question was the wealthy land holders. Times have changed.

Now, the minority that wants to protect itself against the tyranny of the majority is the most uneducated, backwards, part of our country. They sometimes work on behalf of that other minority, but also have their own brand of idiocy that they put forward far in excess of what their corporate masters require.

What was designed to protect an elite that saw itself as both economically and culturally more sophisticated than the majority is now being used to protect the worst in American society, with the ultra-rich not really caring except if it somehow starts to not look good for their bottom line.

Why '80s retro?

2013-03-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

I'm curious. '60s retro was mostly a commercialized fad, the '50s and '70s retro that existed in the '90s was reactions against the cultural void of the '80s...then '70s retro came into its own because people thought that the decade was interesting unto itself. So why are people taking up '80s styles? My sense, although I haven't extensively polled all 20 somethings in Capitol Hill in Seattle, or elsewhere, is that folks are just following the years up...that, you know, because the '70s is done and people now think of the '80s as being so long ago, '80s retro is now in style. But, at this juncture, is there any particular reason why folks are doing the retro thing as opposed to thinking for themselves in their styles and creating something new? It's so retro to be retro when most of the culture you're being retro in opposition to is retro itself.

Meta on meta on meta.

Of course, who knows, there could be something to it that I'm not seeing....but I would argue that without an overarching sense that it's just nostalgia, as opposed to a social movement.

I think a Latin-Italian Argentine Pope is a good thing...

2013-03-13T15:17:00.003-07:00

Although I think that the Papacy is a bad institution.

One of the great achievements of Chavez...

2013-03-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

Was that he combined his socialism with a type of message, based on Simon Bolivar, which was deeply resonant in a populist way with the people of Venezuela. Bolivar was similar to George Washington in that regard, and through linking socialism to the populist past Chavez was able to tap into that consciousness possessed by the nation at large. The Communist Party in the United States tried to do a similar thing during the Popular Front period with the slogan of "Communism is 20th Century Americanism", which wasn't a throw away. What they meant by that was that if you took the basic values that Jefferson and Lincoln put forward, and tried to translate them into the reality of the 20th century, you'd need socialism to really make them work.

Welcome, our corporate orverlords..Seattle Times puts Jeff Bezos' wife's book on online front page

2013-03-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

Without specifying that she's the wife of the founder of Amazon. The review is Here.

I don't think Israel should get special treatment because...

2013-03-10T19:44:00.003-07:00

Been a lot of mentions about Israel on this blog recently, and the reason is simple: Israel does things on a daily basis that are outrages to common decency and international standards, and the people who support both them and U.S. aid to their committal are hypocrites who should be shunned from civilized discourse.

With that out of the way, I don't support special treatment for Israel in the Middle East because I'm not aware that covenants made with an imaginary sky god three thousand years ago have legal validity. I mean, show me the footnote where it says "Oh yeah, and a semi-fictional ancestor who heard a voice tell him he was entitled to a piece of land in the desert, yeah, that's legit too."

Obama to "reassure" leaders about Iran

2013-03-09T11:31:00.002-08:00

It's important to remember, just in case a threat of actual war breaks out, that the Israel lobby represents roughly 4% of the American public. Should the rest of the United States go to war on behalf of the 4% who are very attached to Israel?

Guess who else was at Chavez' funeral? The crown prince of Spain, Evo Morales, the President of Uruguay...

2013-03-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

The coverage of Chavez' funeral makes it appear that it was only the leaders of Cuba and Iran that were in attendance, but that was not the case. The Global Post reports that Spain's crowned prince was there, and Spanish language Voz Populi reports that leaders from Chile Ecuador were there as well. Irish Times has put Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil there.

Wow, let me qualify that, I'm now diappointed by the progresso-sphere's response to Rand Paul's filibuster

2013-03-08T01:32:00.001-08:00

Rawstory wasn't the one that said it was okay despite him being a crazy Republican....in fact they've been pissing on it since it's happened. I can't believe that there really are folks in the progresso-sphere who put partisanship to Obama above things like drone strikes on civilians and possibly people in the U.S., to say nothing about U.S. citizens abroad.