[Richard]
I just found a blog that is knocking my socks off: Political Graffiti. Here are a couple of choice quotes, just from the latest page:
[From January 31:]
We are all human capital. The society we have been born into has afforded us rights and benefits only as investments in our capacity as producers and consumers of human energy and creativity that is bought low and sold high by capitalists. Why? It can do nothing else. Try stepping out of this role and see how deep you roll in the land of the free (tm).
My people we grew up and were told to go to school so we could get a good job. What's important is a good salary so we can get cars, settle down in a house with a mate, furnish it and ourselves with various bells and whistles, have children, hand them over to the compulsory education system and the television execs to expose them to the same cycle of leisurely consumption and life-long labor. Sit in our mass-produced, corporately clean cookie cuttered cages in the burbs, our luxury one hundred story filing cabinents in the city, our cubicle farms... get fat, get milked. This is freedom(tm).
Most of the cats I know are coming out of the first 20 something years that have been planned for them by someone else, and are like what the fuck? All my talents and "education" and I have to work retail or wait tables?
[And, this is from February 16:]
Clinton and Gore killed how many with sanctions? Papa and Baby Bush have killed how many with depleted uranium, five hundred ton bombs, cluster bombs, and whatever other weapons in the arsenal of the military built up by (... hmm? ...) both democrats and republicans?
Death by disease and starvation or death by bombs and radiation. You vote, the choice is yours. You don't? The choice is theirs.
This guy's pretty good at pointing out the duplicitous and authoritarian nature of the system that rules over us and, especially, at showing when the choice that we're given is really no choice at all. I guess it's pretty fitting that he calls himself Eric Blair and has a picture of the original Eric Blair (aka Orwell) lurking behind every post.
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March 3, 2004
   Modem Troubles (still) / Voting for Dennis / Sidney RIP
[Richard]
No coherent article this morning; I'll just use the journal to relate some stuff...
In case some of you are wondering why asfodel hasn't responded to comments to her posts, it's because she's still not online. She's been sending me posts by snail mail and I've been retyping them. (I suppose that it theoretically would be easier to send them on a disk, but we've also had computer-to-computer conversion problems. Aren't computers wonderful?) Anyway, I do type about 80 words a minute (which would have gotten me a job 20 years ago), so it's not that big a deal to me. But it would be nice if we could both be back online again. I brought back the modem that Mike had lent me, but to no avail this time. Asfodel thinks there's something wrong with the "Hardware Conversion" software. I think she should just pay somebody to fix the damn thing already, but she feels that would be an unnecessary expense. So, she'll be "restoring" and trying a few other things soon. Hopefully, we can both be online and working on these projects in computer time soon enough.
Today, I cast my first vote in a primary in ages. I guess I should reveal the secret that I am still a registered Democrat from something like 20 years ago. I almost changed to Green once, to Independent once, etc., but I got lazy about it. Besides, I still think it's good to have that Democratic registration for strategic reasons once in a while, though I hate supporting the Democratic Party and don't intend to vote for them in the General Election. I guess this all makes me something of a heretic in anarchist circles, but I think sometimes anarchists tend to make too much of a big deal about not voting. But once again, this is not something I care to debate about and philosophize about right now.
So, anyway, I went and cast my vote for Dennis Kucinich. Everybody I've spoken to here in New York City who voted (i.e., several people), voted for either Kucinich or Sharpton...and there were even some other people I know who would have voted for Kucinich had they been able to register or had they registered in time. (This was the first time I'd ever seen anarchists express a desire to vote for someone in the Democratic Primary, and those anarchists wanted to vote for Kucinich.) Now, I have no idea where all those Kerry votes came from, but this wouldn't be the first time that I've been mystified about this sort of stuff.
Over in the anarchist scene, I learned of the death of an old organizer who'd made a significant contribution for a number of years. Sidney Solomon, who died on Monday, was very instrumental in putting together the Atlantic Anarchist Circle in the mid to late 1990s. The AAC was the group that brought me into the anarchist scene on a full-time basis, in the spring of 1997 (for better or for worse). The AAC was also the group through which I met Mike back in about '98. Mike has been helping Sidney out now and then and saw him just a short while before he died. Asfodel informed me of Sidney's death over the phone last night, and I sent out some information to several people, including ChucKO, who posted it to Infoshop right away. I hadn't intended to broadcast this to a wide public, but I think Chuck did a good thing. Sidney deserves a tribute in a large forum in the anarchist scene.
As some people around here know, Sidney and I had some arguments a few years back. (Unfortunately, I've had arguments with a few people in this scene, as had Sidney, so I guess it makes sense that we argued with each other at some point.) In the general scheme of things, the arguments didn't amount to much as far as I'm concerned. In general, I am pretty sad to see him go. It's not that much of a surprise, actually, since he was 92 years old when he died, but I think a few of us expected him to last into his hundreds.
I've got to give Sidney credit for doing as much as he did well into old age. I really do respect him for that and have for a while. He probably didn't know that and he never will now, but I guess things happen that way.
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[Continue to February Archive]