corvee labor II

corevee labor is an indirect form of taxation by which labor is extracted from citizens through statutory obligations...is there a statute in this town that demands i clear snow from the street? well...they mayor's name is on every garbage can in town and he has eleven federal indictments to deal with so it wouldn't come as much of a shock...however, the municipality has simply delivered me the accomplished fact the, for the fifth time in two days, my driveway and front parking area have been plowed in as they cut a passable lane down the street...so, for the fifth time in two days, i shoveled it out thus completing the municipal task of snow clearance...there is little justice in the world and i expect none here...but where is the damned tea party on this issue? oh..yeah...off doing what they are really about...protecting elite interests..i surely do not qualify for that sort of attention....and in my bitter angst i neglected to add that the bottom two photos are my street and house debilitated by "lake effect" snow

fallacious objectivity II

"...patrizi, at the turn of the century, declares that all history ultimately rests on eye-witness evidence: and argues that those present are likely to involved in the issues and are therefore likely to be partisan..." isaiah berlin. "the divorce between the sciences and humanities"...one more nail in the coffin of objective history...since history is made up of multiple and obviously partisan viewpoints, written to support and propagate those views there are no "true" questions in history because there is no one answer that is immutable as there is in mathematics, physics, biology, or other sciences...well...since history is an accounting of human affairs how could one expect objectivity...one cannot...but does that invalidate its recounting? i heard an interview with an air force drone pilot on the bbc this past week...he said he was part of missions in afghanistan and the "tribal regions" of pakistan...he discussed how being a video gamer throughout his adolescence prepared him for drone piloting and some of the more routine aspects of the "job"...he also went on to recount why he left the air force when his first enlistment was up...he was part of a mission that was supposed to kill suspected terrorists in afghanistan in a compound where he was assured women and children were sleeping in one building and the "bad guys" in another...as he fired the hellfire missiles he saw a figure he though was a child run from one building to the next just as the projectiles exploded...when he reported what he had seen he was told it was "a dog" and not to worry about it...dissatisfied he bumped it up a notch on the chain of command ( "when your chain of command fails they tell you to skip a link" )...there he was told not to worry about it and to shut up about it, "it was a dog"...he said that at that point he began to question the validity of every order he was given and that he left the military as soon as possible thereafter...that child went down the official "memory hole" and he couldn't stomach that...leave it to the military to awaken and enhance an ethical sense in the grunts who do the killing and dying and make them want to talk about it...a subjective viewpoint no doubt...and history too...the lack of what his former superiors and the freaks in the cia and nsa would call "objectivity" and a sense of "the broader picture" certainly leap out in it...it does not invalidate the content or the questions it raises..."objective" or not, it is still valid.

fallacious objectivity

in "as i please 10" ( 4 february 1944 orwell laments the lack of objectivity in contemporary history. he maintains that in the past objective, factual history was possible but with the advent of the mass of wartime propaganda, presaged by fascist and soviet distortions of events during the spanish civil war, any history of the world war or following events could not possibly be objective: "in no one case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true. in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. history is written by the winners."...well...all history has an agenda...it's true that in any struggle the winners get to write the first history...but the losers never disappear ( have a look at wolfgang shivelbush's "the culture of defeat" )...was there ever a bourbon history of the french revolution? or a bonapartist view of the battle of waterloo? would one view that victory by wellington as the result of superior generalship of a better army or as a loss to treachery and overwhelming numbers? the south in the u s civil war had the "lost cause" and post world war I germany had the "stab in the back" to assuage the loss...those myths did great disservice to many but were part and parcel of an alternative view of the winner's history...w g sebald's "on the natural history of destruction" is one of the first attempts to recount the deaths of german civilians at the hands of allied bomber command as the were pursuing "military targets"...civilians are always "military targets", professionalism non-withstanding...and surely japanese accounts of hiroshima and nagaski run counter to the consensus view of the "greatest generation", not to mention gar alperowitz "the decision to use the atomic bomb" which puts the lie to that consensus...history is never objective...even thucydides had an axe to grind...he just said he didn't...honest historian admit their biases...dishonest ones distort fact to fit theory...either way objectivity is elusive at best.

scabs

back in october i posted about my union publishing the names of workers at trane who had opted out of paying union dues under the aegis of the current "right to work" legislation here in hoosierland...they're at it again with the names prominently printed in boldface with the same exhortation to their peers at trane to "persuade" them to become "good" dues-paying unionists again...they've taken adding the nifty little "no scabs" graphic as well...leave it to a craft union...jurisdictional squabbles aren't enough...nothing quite like dividing workers against themselves to promote a sense of solidarity with the union in the face of a concerted political effort to do any sort of effective workers' representation in...this simply screams out "business unionism" and shows the union's primary interest is in its cash flow and not in any sort of advocacy for workers and their needs and interests...as the roll call of members who have opted out drains the local of black ink to print their names in they will become more shrill in their recriminations...they are working hard to alienate membership and are succeeding beyond their fondest hopes in that endeavor..i am still a third generation union member...my disgust still knows no bounds.

a scrap of rural life

"there is no town, no townlet without its villages, its scrap of rural life attached: no town that does not impose upon its hinterland the amenities of its market, the use of its shops, its wights and measures, its moneylenders, its lawyers...it has to dominate an empire however tiny, to exist." fernand braudel. "the structures of everyday life: civilization and capitalism 15th-18th century, volume 1._________________________well...fernand is an historian and like all historians he is biased...the honest ones share their biases upfront and i have to admit fernand puts his in the title...credit where it's due...and he highlights the exploitative nature of capitalism in that quote in masterful fashion...unwittingly perhaps...he is a booster of capitalism form page one and that howler was probably written in all admiration...his contention that "towns are like electrical transformers" holds water too...because they do not produce their own energy...they get it from outside...no town is self-supporting...that's why it has to "dominate" that "scrap of rural life"...and it does so by setting up an extractive system to take as much as possible with as little return as it can give...summed up nicely in the list of things the town must "impose" on the "hinterland" to survive...like "the amenities of its market, the use of its shops, its weights and measures, its moneylenders, its lawyers..." ( "take back everything you can" william s burroughs. deposition: testimony concerning a sickness. )his honesty in exposing the exploitative nature of capital is, i suspect, accidental...he is too innocent for the history business...an ardent lover exposed as a fool...

happy christmas

"frustration aggression theories use psychological theories of individual behavior to explain civil strife, including revolutions, insurgencies, strikes, riots, and coups. these theories suggest that people become aggressive when they feel frustrated by something or someone who is blocking them from fulfilling a strong desire. and important subset of these theories suggests that this frustration and aggression can be caused by relative deprivation, which arises when people perceive a widening gap between the level of satisfaction they have achieved ( often defined in economic terms )and the level they believe they deserve. deprivation therefore is relative to some subjective standard of equity or fairness, and the size of that perceived gap obviously depends on the beliefs about economic justice held by individuals." thomas homer-dixon "environment, scarcity, and violence"_____________(bear with me...there are only forty or so page left in the book to read...it will be over soon )...perceived is one of the more operant words here i'm thinking...those "beliefs about economic justice" are mostly informed by advertizing from a consumerist culture that expects ( because it is the foundation of the system ) people to purchase more material goods than they can afford, thus being "good citizens" who create new money by going into debt...which further depletes their ability to " consume more " ( because there are limits even to sub-prime debt and the cost are astronomical..."easy monthly payments" my ass...one of the blessings of aging is that advertisers [except for cemetery plots] don't target me because they are fairly well aware that i will say "no thanks" [ or, possibly, "fuck you" ] to any sort of new cycle of debt ) and adds to their frustrations...there is a lot of perceived and very real economic inequality going on around this country these days as cohorts of small, well funded coalitions move into the government to engineer more upward redistributions of wealth to themselves and their constituents...it is obvious...so overt you have to wonder why there isn't more violence and social unrest...the tea party thinks we're stupid...not so...stunned perhaps...but the political theft is so blatant no one could miss it...the flames are fed oxygen by the "news as entertainment and manipulation" bunch at fox and cnbc who insist on lurid new programming because it sells advertizing and everyone's out for a buck...people may be "branded" by what news they watch ( or other programming for that matter ) but that doesn't make them less manipulated...only insensitive to voices other than those in complete agreement with them..i, for one, call that stupid as well as manipulated...causality is non-linear...no one knows what's going to happen exactly..all we have are "informed" extrapolations of what "Might" happen..the airwaves are alive with allegations...the only certainty is that if we don't stop listening to the nightly news or the political blather from the government and start listening to each other all this is just going to get worse...merry christmas...happy holidays..."false and commercial festival"...whatever suits your fancy.

get a grip

"economic and technological optimists have an unrealistic faith in human-kind's ability to unravel and manage the myriad processes of nature. there is no a priori reason to expect scientific and technical ingenuity can overcome all types of scarcity...(one reason is)human cognitive limits. humans do not have infinite ability to understand and manage the nonlinear, multivariate, and often chaotic processes of ecological-social systems." thomas homer-dixon. "environment, scarcity, and violence.__________________so...we live on a finite planet with finite resources and a growing number of people to feed, clothe, and shelter...what "resource substitution" basically boils down to is replacing dwindling resources with processes dependent on increasing amounts of complexity and high quality energy...humans can handle only so much complexity before the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to handle and the returns on that increasing complexity bear a cost too high to pay in both intellectual and economic terms..in the end resources will continue to dwindle and as they do they will become rival and exclusive...there will be keen competition among groups for remaining stocks as they try to maintain a bankrupt system...since the world has been converted to a market which values everything by its monetary cost ( which discount present and future social costs because economists are apologists for greed ) wealth will be the vehicle that allows a small minority to trap vital resources for their own use leaving the rest to suffer ever more sever shortages...there is a lot of contentious violence going on in the world and if you look deeply enough the cause is rivalry for resources...israelis and palestiniand bicker and kill one another over the "west bank"...west bank of what? the jordan river...water...the arab spring started as a rising protest over surging food prices...it has widened into a factional war of haves against have nots...isis is about resources, not religion...that's just the vehicle...wealth has always had a stranglehold on the political process here...it is in the process of finishing the job of overtly converting it to a wealth-protection system base on the broad mass carrying as much of the economic burden as it possibly can...there is every possibility of collapse as the periphery looks somewhere else for a better deal...this is papered over by a distorted media in denial or owned outright as well as mouthpiece politicians...the times ahead will be interesting..especially when the current "recovery" is exposed for the smoke and mirrors paper game it is...who benefits from this "recovery" look at stock prices...look at legislation...then you tell me.