Been seeing lots of talk about “is demisexual a even valid identity” and such. I just don’t get it though. Lots of people obviously identify as demisexual and are willing to withstand bullying and ridicule to continue asserting it. They are obviously very serious about it.  So yeah- it passes the identity test with flying colors. The Académie Française might disagree, but that is not how identities work. If people flock together under a common descriptor of their being and experience, that is an identity. And nothing else can add or subtract an ounce of validity from it. 

Its not that economic sanctions never work- its just that they are not working against the Iranian state, and it is unlikely that they ever will. The problem with sanctions is that they don’t effectively encourage people to rebel against their governments. Instead, a good portion of people in the targeted country tend rally around their governments in opposition to the callous foreign powers that have decided to starve them out. Off the top of my head, I can really think of only a single exception. If I remember correctly, sanctions actually helped destabilize Apartheid in South Africa. This was however largely due to the special nature of Apartheid. Black South Africans could not be induced to rally around a system that was dedicated to their dehumanization and enslavement.  The Iranian system simply lacks such a vulnerability.

Ah, the Economist- so full of fail and yet also so full of fail.

In response to: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-3

To begin with, attributing these organizational ideas to one man (even though he is certainly someone who has worked very hard to champion them) is an absurdity typical of the limited perspective on leadership, governance and collective ideation that this global movement is even now in the process of discrediting. Would the Economist have us believe that Mr. Graeber was hiding in the crowds gathered in Tahrir Square? That he was whispering in the ears of the youth of Spain? That he has pitched a tent in Tel Aviv and has had a foot in the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico for the past two decades? How absurd!

Second of all, the author’s presumption of ideological homogeneity in Liberty Park flies in the face of every report (both laudatory and critical) on this movement- as well as my own lived experience of it. If you can call a demos that ranges from Trotskyists and Anarchists to Ron Paul enthusiasts ideologically and tactically homogeneous, then what in the blazes is your definition of heterogeneity?

And what is the author’s counterpoint to this collectivity? Our own dear ‘liberal democracy.’ The one that deals with the sticky problems of diversity by strictly limiting the range of acceptable discourse through organs such as the Economist. The petty bickering of governmental elites with barely distinguishable positions presented to us as a sensible democratic compromise.

In the General Assemblies of Liberty Park, we are confronted with the striking tableau of a thousand people gathered from many different parts of the world- people who represent this country’s racial and ethnic diversity far better then our political elites ever have, people living what the author might imagine to be mutually irreconcilable lives. And they make decisions together. Not because they all come into the process already in agreement, but precisely despite the fact that they often do not.

Spend a few hours in the park with your eyes and ears open and the author’s implicit suggestion that the process in question is not conducive to a pluralist discourse falls flat on its face.

In response to this nonsense:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/dot_matrix__Capitalism_means_never_having_to_say_you_re_sorry.html

Unless the exchange in question occurs within a defined collectivity with established mutual aid/ gift economy practices, a product cannot be expected to given away without monetary compensation in the context of a capitalist economy. And if all of our exchanges occur within such collectives, we can expect nothing but the stagnation and death of our ideas. We haven’t abolished capitalism yet, so things (including eating and sleeping indoors) cost money.

It is revolutionary to work for the abolition of the capitalist system. It is not revolutionary to pretend that we’ve already done it.

The deal you get in an anarchist society isn’t “everything for nothing” it is “everything for everything.”

So there is really no contradiction here. But for some unfathomable reason some less-than-reflective anarchists do not quite get this. To them, anything that isn’t LETZ GIV STUF AWAY 4 FREES GUIS just sounds like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2hULhXf04

‎3,000 Americans were murdered, so the US government went out and murdered over 100,000 Iraqis and over 40,000 Afghans who had nothing even remotely to do with it. And then we’re told to ‘Never Forget’ the first act of murder and to never remember all the others. If they’re going to read out the names of the dead every year, the list needs to be much longer. And only a small minority of those dead had anything to do with bearded fanatics wielding box cutters. The rest were murdered by our government. Never forget.

I generally stay away from TV because TV is boring and despair-inducing even on days that aren’t tacky national sorrow/death/hate festivals.

I understand the need for private ceremonies for the friends and family of victims, but why make a big garish Broadway production out of it? It is unhealthy and the state has already used this shit to justify many more murders than were committed on that terrible day. The Iraq War (what was that all about?) took over 100,000 lives.

Frankly, when I think of September 11th tragedies this one comes in second. As bad as 9/11/01 was, The 1973 CIA-backed fascist coup in Chile resulted in more death and suffering and it killed the freedom, hope and autonomy of an entire nation.

So as terrible as the 9/11/01 murders were, lets have a little perspective here. It isn’t the worst thing that ever happened and the annual song-and-death number is nothing but crowd manipulation to get us all riled up to support more murder. 

It is always very sad to see people lose their livelihoods, but I entirely understand why many young people who have no livelihood and little chance for obtaining one don’t give a shit and I find it impossible to condemn them for it.

Like many of you, I had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school. At one point I even managed to make out what the words were beyond ‘mumble mumble mumble under guard mumble mumble mumble invisible’, and realized that it was a gentile prayer- one that was too close to the ancient Roman standard-worship ritual for comfort. The significance of the Eagle that I’d seen on top of many US flags became quite clear and ominous at this point. This made me uncomfortable, as I had been made to understand earlier that Church and State were strictly separated in the US.

I can’t say that I was offended at the time, but it was most certainly disconcerting. The flag had been transmuted into a bizarre pagan idol which my teacher, whom I was supposed to obey, was ordering me to pay daily homage to. It brought to mind my first Easter in school, when I refused to paint an egg, explaining to the teacher that this is a Christian ritual and that I am Jewish. This seemed to confuse her for some reason, and I just ended up sitting there while the other kids painted their eggs and was given a plain unpainted egg to take home. As you can imagine this was quite awkward.

So with that earlier brush with a fissure in the church-state divide in my mind, I thought of a compromise. A direct challenge in this case would not only involve sharply ostracizing myself from my classmates on a daily basis, but it would also put my already tenuous status as an American in jeopardy. So I opted to continue to stand with my hand on my heart, but I made no further attempts to actually say the flag prayer. Of course in retrospect I wish that I had made a more solid and visible stand.

“Things got out of hand & we’d had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”
-David Cameron, 1986 

“The looting and arson last night were criminality, pure and simple. Justice will be done and the people will see the consequences for their crimes.”
-David Cameron, 2011