About caucus99percent and issues
Good morning folks.
This is a response to a comment by TomP that was made in another essay last night. I tried to post it as a reply several times but would not post in the proper nesting so I gave up, but I think it is important so I'll post it now.
Here's Tom's comment (he's speaking about c99p):
I hope it will grow also.
There is a diversity of left opinions here, from Dems to Greenish (or create a third party) and some support Trump (which I think is error because he is a fascist).
A hundred flowers blooming.
It will be interesting to see if it stays fixated on electoral politics or moves to issues also.
Of special import to me is the last sentence that I bolded. I'd like to expound on that statement.
Caucus99percent was set up as an issues oriented site and it mostly was just that for the first year and a quarter of it's existence, up until the time of what I call The Great Migration. We did not or will not ever have an official party affiliation. Surely electoral politics was discussed but the vast majority of time and pixels was spent on issue related subjects. Most of the original 200 or so members that were here before March of this year were/are Bernie Sanders supporters, but even with that he was very rarely the topic of discussion. We tried to stick to the pressing issues that are facing all of us, especially as it pertains to the 99percent, and very rarely was Daily Kos even mentioned.
Surely I understand that electing the right politician will help with the issues before us, but my point is that this site was never fixated on electoral politics up until very recently, and hopefully someday and someday soon we can get back to the issues.
Comments
Good info.
I remember also seeing a list of demands, about 15 I think, going around the camps. Which was my point about it being the hard part. Even saying, "ending corporate influence on democracy", is difficult to grab on too for me. Like, what democracy? We don't have a democracy not because of corporate influence imo, it's because the system itself is not a democracy, it's setup to be an oligarchy. So I and others might want a new system but some might just want reform of the current system like campaign finance reform, getting money out of politics.
The hard part is deciding exactly it is we want collectively.
That's a good point. Probably many different answers
to it amongst Occupiers, who occupied (heh) a wide variety of ideological positions (one of the strengths of the movement, I think). But you could get them all together, I bet, to agree that they did not want the wealthy to control what the law is, how it shall be enforced, and what kind of government we have. If you left out the libertarians (most of them) you could unite all the rest in saying the rich shouldn't dictate what kind of economy we have either.
Whether they were anarchists, Democrats (there were a few), libertarians, or unaffiliated folks who lost their jobs or houses, or socialists, or whatever, they *really didn't like* oligarchy. Proposed solutions to that, I'm guessing, would be many and varied and probably conflicting. But we never got to really have those arguments because it became a war over the encampments between a bunch of unarmed people and cops--and others--with military-grade weaponry.
So it became a war over whether anybody has a right to say anything critical of power in public space.
Bastards.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I've tried out a simple,
"End Rule by the Rich". Globally that's what's happening everywhere, we're all connected. In fact that's my big idea, start global petition to end rule by the rich, get a couple billion signatures then elect a group to take it to the U.N. and demand it become "Human Law" forever and ever Amen. That could include a definition of what ending rule by the rich means. I've long thought our extreme problem requires extreme measures to solve.
I'm kind of being facetious but kind of not.
Big Al, the first question is this: Is runaway climate change
occurring? Yes, it is.
Therefore, there are NO international, federal, or state IDEAS that matter. NONE.
The only IDEAS that matter are those within my personal control or the control of my local community. The only ideas that interest me are those that would make my family members more resilient during the CLIMATE CHAOS now arriving in all our lives.
The rest of my life is dedicated to making my family more resilient. Any ideas about making monetary policy/foreign affairs/national affairs/state affairs more this that or the other is irrelevant to my personal mission in life. How to build a house that could survive the initial "storms of my grandchildren" is extremely relevant to me. I'm all over all ideas about building for massive heat and wind and water and fire.
Does that make any sense, my friend? As always, it begins with one's first principles.
If we are now experiencing runaway climate change, one logically proceeds to deal only with ideas relevant to personal and local resilience. If we are not, then anything and everything could be relevant.
We need a free and frank discussion about First Principles and it begins with the most important topic on the planet: runaway climate change. Should someone accept runaway climate change, yet not work actively to become more resilient, that is their choice. They are welcome to discuss any ideas they choose. I'm here to talk and learn about ideas about practical resilience-building that are within my control.
Forgive the caps and underlining. please :=) They're just me putting the emphaaaasis on the right syllaaaaables :=) What do you think, Al?
Resilience: practical action to improve things we can control.
3D+: developing language for postmodern spirituality.
Good approach Gerrit,
Sure it makes sense to start with your own and in the local communities. And obviously climate change and what to do about it has got to be at the top of the list. But maybe not alone. That's where the discussion gets complicated. There are obstacles to truly addressing climate change that we have to address first. And we can prep and building local communities all we want but it could all go up in smoke anyway if the entire planet doesn't join in. What happens in China, the Middle East, Fukishima, the Amazon, the plan to address it has to be global and the recent attempt by our world "leaders" was pathetic. They're not going to do it anymore than they're going to end war or capitalism.
So ya, this discussion is very important, I hope we can really get down to it.
Right on, Al. I look forward to interesting discussions. Enjoy
your day, mate,
Resilience: practical action to improve things we can control.
3D+: developing language for postmodern spirituality.
I'm a pretty frustrating person in this regard
as I'm more or less equal amounts Idealist and Materialist. It drives both sides crazy, and sometimes drives me crazy as well, but I've always been this way since I became an adult (as a kid, I was entirely inside my own head, but there were reasons).
I'd probably talk both in the MMT philosophical ideas group and in the Resilience Local Money group.
The elephant (or maybe donkey) in the room is power.
I gotta get offline for a while, but let me know if you want to talk about this further--I'll check back for replies later tonight or tomorrow.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Elections increase engagement
I feel like the issues brought by Sanders's campaign and the electoral politics pushing back against it are inseparable. To put it concisely: if you run a campaign based on taking absolute power away from the moneyed interests, then the moneyed interests are going to campaign against you relentlessly. The discussion of each individual smear is just the "micro" level of how real change is dismissed, marginalized, drowned out, etc., but the macro level is - big money will exert its control over elections to get the result it wants.
Hey, JtC. How about a Litter Box?
After posting my long-winded response to mimi, and knowing we'll have wayward migrants finding their ways here, I thought a Litter Box might help.
Doesn't have to be only TOP related - can be a place to dump the turd of the asshole who cut you off while driving, or my racist boss who only allows people of his race to use cell phones while on the clock.
It could be at the very bottom of the rt side, or wherever. We could provide a link when we see a Kos or TOP comment, and admin could move all related essays there.
That weird Kos PTSD is real. I guess because we're like abuse victims. A safe place to vent is kinda needed. Most certainly doesn't ever have to make it onto FP or Community Content.
Just a thought.
What do you think?
yes, it would help, we could name it after ek hornbeck's
tip jar, which he calls "Vent Hole". We can dump all sorts of things that comes out of holes and have to go into holes as to not disturb and soil the good writing of this site.
I approve your message, deja.
:-) eom
"Storm sewer?"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Storm_Drain.JPG
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I'm always saying that some of us wean off gradually and
some of us go cold turkey. I don't think anything will change that. I think it's more of a personality trait. Like hoarding. Only blog connections.
As a weaner, I like the diaries about TOP, especially when it's some crap that needs to be mocked or some Berner who needs support. Until I'm banned, I'll respond to those.
OTOH, I was pleased to see that there are tons of diaries this evening (new since I checked last evening) that are not referring to TOP at all. A lot of interesting content. It looks to me like the weaning is working.
So those of you who like to make clean breaks, have patience. We'll get there.
Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.
we started out as a lifeboat
when the ship is sinking and you're in a lifeboat you don't really want to go back to the ship.
we can get back to the issues after July 27th.
WE will, after July 27th
Of course we may keep fixating on these issues until Citizens United is overturned, which might be a bit longer then that! It's the root cause of all these problems anyways.
"YOU must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~ Mahatma Gandhi
What's an "issue"?
And who says?
gjohnsit said something about "transgender bathrooms" being a "dogwhistle issue." The point, I gather, was that there was no issue before North Carolina passed a law about transgendered people's use of bathrooms, a law no doubt modeled on the Boston ordinance forbidding the eating of peanuts in church.
It's built into the US political system that we elect large numbers of legislators with careers to worry about and lots of free time on their hands. Can we make that into an issue some day?
Issues are manufactured things. And when we talk of manufactured things, the issue invariably becomes: "if they manufacture it, are we obliged to buy?" And then there's the issues about the issues. Gay marriage, for instance, was once publicly regarded as an issue. But what's the issue about the issue? The right to throw a party? (And it doesn't even have to be a party -- the novelist Aldous Huxley, for instance, married his second wife in a five-minute ceremony in a government building in Yuma, Arizona.)
And then there's climate change. Since climate change is regarded by some as a "life or death issue," we might very well ask about whether or not life is in the offing with climate change as an issue -- given that death, of course, is a certainty.
Once upon a time, the issue about climate change was "is climate change happening?" Never mind that the mathematics of climate change had been more-or-less worked out by Svante Arrhenius in 1894. At some point the issue became "how severe is climate change?" But this is also an issue in the same way in which mathematics is an issue. Now, I suppose, the issue is "what do we do about climate change?" But maybe that's not an issue, either; the problem is that "doing something about climate change" is not in fact likely to mitigate climate change. Perhaps we can get to a real issue if we ask this question: "what form should society take if it is to physically mitigate climate change"?
One way of looking at issues, then, is that issues are a dead end. The mind is buffeted by manufactured issues in a way that is ultimately, and deeply, conservative. In the process of resolving "issues," the fantasy of a happy status quo is left unchallenged by what might be more productive alternate fantasies. I am, therefore, against the idea that C99% should be about "issues." Instead, let's talk about the life of the mind here. I can think of nothing more intimately connected to the crap we deal with every day.
"the Democratic Party is not 'left'." -- Sabrina Salvati
Pages