Happiness is a warm hamster
Lambert at Corrente is holding a fundraiser to keep him and his blog going through the Maine winter.
Corrente is well-nigh unique among group prog blogs for never drinking the Obama-as-progressive Kool-Aid and for not trading truth for access.
Its open policy for front-page posting provides a rare platform for little-heard voices to get a little more heard.
If you enjoy the discourse at the Mighty Corrente Building, please consider making a donation.
Corrente is well-nigh unique among group prog blogs for never drinking the Obama-as-progressive Kool-Aid and for not trading truth for access.
Its open policy for front-page posting provides a rare platform for little-heard voices to get a little more heard.
If you enjoy the discourse at the Mighty Corrente Building, please consider making a donation.
posted by Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy at 9:06 AM
11 Comments:
Thanks for the link!
What to do in the slow news cycles? Couldn't you at least be dredging up old WMD cartoons and replacing "Iraq" with "Syria"? You even have some more recent "Iran" ones that should do.
The Death of the Faux Resistance.
~still holding the candle~
Could write something about the fiscal cliff and what is happening there, oh right nobody knows what is happening there, because all the meetings to discuss it are closed door.
Ah well I have a feeling this election was just incredibly demoralizing for a lot of people (because evil, whether or not it was the lesser evil, managed to win, and that's in plain truth demoralizing).
As for Akra, get lost, you have no even kinda workable answers to anything (vote for Obama, that is your answer, really). Or organizing, I am plenty familiar with where most middle class do gooder organizing leads, it leads with noone having time for it, because at the end of the day noone who works for a living does. And yes, I know it means well. And a revived labor movement, while workable in theory doesn't have that power yet, nor does Occupy (oh since you hate everything except the great holy Obama and your own precious reflection in the mirror, you probably hate the Occupy movement too - go Obama!).
And unlike Floyd, Sibler, and Vast, you don't even have a decent critique, really you just want to troll your betters mostly, people whose contributions will be missed if they stop.
Thinking about it some more, it's not just that evil won, although yes that. But how easily does that lead to some "purity" charge (oh your so pure, bet you even oppose presidential murder!).
But it's also everything it means for the direction of this country for however long this direction lasts. I can't say how long that will be. Forces in motion are in motion in that way for awhile until something turns. The U.S. as police state until then. The U.S. as being in it's own private Idaho information bubble until then due to all crackdowns on whistleblowers, the truth will NOT out. The U.S. as an offense to the world militarily but also as sabotager of climate treaties until then. The U.S. as petro state until then, poisoning everyone's local community. The U.S. as having the least welfare state in the developed (and really not just the developed) world until then and getting worse, and nothing else to replace it.
Yea, the election change nothing, it changed really almost nothing (except for a few state propositions which did legitmately make some changes), but other than that everyone was reelected, nothing changed, and yet it confirmed every bleak truth we already knew somehow, by changing nothing, when everything was already so wrong.
What you just saw up there, Vast, was an example of the stagnation of the "internet resistance." If you were all really interested in freedom, justice, humanity, etc., then you wouldn't declare it a slow news day, and stop trying after Obama's reelection wrap-up had finished. You're allowing the same imperial news cycles to control your own critiques as guide the support and/or resignation of stock conservatives and liberals.
Scions have been raised up--Chris Floyd and Arthur Silber, and to a lesser (but funnier!) extent, Vast--and the tribe responds to perceived disagreement with personal insults, misdirected anger, and bad grammar.
While polarizing yourselves as "anti-Empire," and stifling open debate, many people have become what you were supposed to be fighting against, at the beginning of all this.
Suddenly, to criticize Arthur Silber is to "support Obama." Just like criticizing Obama is "supporting Romney," or voting for Nader is "supporting Bush."
Many of these other movements started out like you: they were resisting something genuinely bad, and they actually had ideals. Even American neoconservatives, at some point. But when you start enshrining certain subjects as untouchable--even if you're right about those subjects at that point in time--you lay the groundwork for shifting your own movement into one of censorship, conformity, and sorrow.
The empire is safe. This process--the one you're seeing happen before your eyes, as High Arka is attacked for being "pro Obama" and is censored on Floyd's site and insulted by Arthur because of a failure to toe the line fast enough--is exactly how rebellion becomes assimilated into an even stronger imperial bastion.
This is how it happens. This is what it looks like. If you care about a justice that transcends current incidental politics, don't let the end of your journey be a miasma of recited critiques of what you see as the powers-that-be.
I remember having seen you come out elsewhere as pro-Obama, that the main point was vote for Obama for diversity or something, I forget what exactly as 75% of your writing is completely and utterly incomprehensible.
And you've gone personal many times yourself. If you have to direct wrath somewhere, at REAL power, at Obama fine, F that ahole bastard, and who cares if it's directed at Romney either, but personal attacks on political bloggers with small readerships, meh.
You can pretend that now that Floyd and others are silent, horray, NOW THE REVOLUTION! But where? Things are probably going to have to get a whole lot worse before they get better, and that hurts. Those bloggers were not what blocked the revolution (aka real social change), if anything knowing how bad things are quitely goes underground and may someday errupt (let's hope). Those bloggers just kept some of us somewhat sane is all, in an insane world, and will be sorely missed.
Dear Anonymous, if you'd like to focus on High Arka, then let's do so: where did Arka express pro Obama viewpoints?
If not, or in addition to that, let's discuss the issue at hand: after the election hand-wringing had petered out, the big "radical" blogs went mostly silent. All of a sudden, they have nothing more to talk about. Their commentary was based on corporate news cycles. They were a downstream version of the New York Times, and that's sad.
Before the internet is further closed, perhaps there is something more that we can use this medium to learn, instead of simply recycling easy critiques of the various megacorp propaganda outlets.
* * *
Vast, by all means, don't stop your critiques, which are often delightful. Note again, though, the responsibility given by your sizable following: by guiding them only to mock the two-party system, you have allowed clannish attitudes and anger to metastasize. This has gotten bad enough that they're even hoping things "get worse before they get better." This isn't an attitude confined to this particular anonymous commenter; it's quite prevalent among the radical blogging audience, across social networks, blogs, and even IRL.
You don't have to help them. No one will force you to, and this one will still read your comics and commentary if you want to put them up. But you have a wonderful opportunity here to help a lot of people--people who respect you because of your cartoons, and because of the security they feel when you give voice to their frustrations at American politics.
High Arka,
For starters, I can't speak for Arthur Silber et al. (but I will note that I find your critiques of them unconvincing, incoherent, and unpleasantly personal).
Time and inspiration for blogging tend to come and go.
Things come up in one's personal life, sometimes the fodder that sparks writing isn't present (yes, blogging is quite frequently connected to news and trends), and sometimes people are working on longer-term or alternate projects. I can't imagine shaming anyone, especially low-paid or unpaid bloggers, for not writing because of these or other causes of a fallow period.
P.S., I plead innocent of having a "sizable following." On most days, when posting is active, I get maybe 300-600 visitors, with the rare spike when someone links me.
"Things are going to get worse before they get better" isn't a hope, it's an observation. Preferably things would get better instead of getting worse, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards, particularly when so many folks who should know better encourage those (like the Democratic leadership) who are actively making things worse.
For example, we might hope all we want that global temperatures won't rise. That won't do a thing to affect the climate. And it isn't hard to see that, absent awful consequences, and despite all our hopes, the majority of people won't be willing to act to change the reasons that temperatures are rising.
What a sad, political response. Trying to talk to a "radical" blogger has become like trying to call your Congressman. If you're in a small town, like VastLeft, you get a derisive, "sorry I can't help you." And possibly, an anonymous adherent tries to beat you up for "supporting Obama."
In a midsize district, like Floyd or Silber, you can't get through to the person, and hordes of unpaid interns jump at the chance to sneer at you for not understanding what a responsible public servant Mr. Bigg is.
(Unless you send donations, of course. In that case, Arthur's nice enough to employ his autopen to give all that month's donors a special thank-you post.)
And then, of course, we have Digby and Atrios, who have a staff of fawning Communications M.A. who can sweetly direct you to the Complaint Department's paper shredder.
Shall we use this medium only to ape our numerical superiors--to do nothing except critically regurgitate the contents of bigger news outlets? To be too important and busy to discuss ideas that may be initially upsetting to us?
Discuss, perhaps, the way all you big radical white blogmasters suddenly weren't able to keep going after the election. Maybe, no matter how much it hurts, it is an important issue to discuss why your "resistance" is so wedded to what you purport to fight against.
...maybe it underlies the entirety of what you're doing here, as you mock the political process using the same news feeds that everyone else uses.
How reliable are those news feeds, considering that they come from the same people who have spent decades, at the least, starting wars, starving children, and maintaining a worldwide network of psy-ops?
Is the information that you think of as "most damning" really the most damning? Or is it just a version of the news targeted at your audience, who is wearing blinders of a type more suited to their preferences?
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