And we don’t know it’s rule…

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Tuesday November 02, 2021 · 4:47 PM PDT

2021/11/02 · 16:47

All across the San Francisco Bay Area, residents woke up to dark, orange skies. Here's a look at some of the most dramatic images.

This was a Facebook post by me on this date two years ago. Seems pertinent when our fate is being glad-handed by governments beholden to billionaires and fossil fuel magnates at COP26…

We've been watching the new BBC series of 'The Name of the Rose' with John Turturro & it has really reinforced what a phenomenal novel that was. On tonight's episode, there was a scene where they were mapping the library. I haven't been able to track down the exact quote from the novel, but the television scene had Turturro responding to Adso's question as to how he could figure out the design of the library from the outside, but not the inside as follows:

"God knows the world because he conceived it in his mind, as if from the outside, before it was created. And we do not know its rule because we live inside it, having found it already made."

I was trying to express the other day how we, living within a socio-economic system, have difficulty imagining our way out of it. This is not a new thought by any means. It is the age old question of totality versus infinity - of the limited nature of knowledge, precisely because knowledge is the delimiting of the possible. This is why Kant brackets God, immortality and the 'thing-in itself', as possible objects of knowledge in Preface B of the first critique. This is why in the dialectical thinking of Hegel, followed by Marx, the 'truth' of a given historical era results in its collapse, because that truth can't be realized within the organization of that era - and that truth becomes the basis of the organization of the next era of history.

Even in philosophy of science, this is the very structure of Thomas Kuhn's idea of scientific revolution and the well documented paradigm shifts in scientific history - 'and we do not know it's rule because we live inside it, having found it already made'. Only viewing a paradigm from the outside can we map it, understand it, make it an object of knowledge.

While I don't subscribe so much to the purely episodic nature of such thought, as I think there exist currents within every era, every form of organization, that when followed, ultimately lead to those revolutions, I do think that this idea very well describes the structural resistance to those currents - precisely because those currents point to something unknowable, unthinkable within the existing order.

We are now at such a place in our history as a species. A place where any number of long entrenched models of knowledge, society, economics, politics, identity are collapsing as new understandings and visions emerge. Some of these, such as misogyny, racism and hierarchical aristocracy, have a common thread throughout our history. Others like 'nation-states' and 'capitalism' are more recent fixtures. And it is hard to see our way out of it. It is hard to envision the other side of the divide, because 'we live inside it, having found it already made.'

But it is imperative that we try, because given the precarious situation we've created vis a vis climate change, there won't be much more history if we don't.

Koalemos Rising

lucid

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Wednesday September 08, 2021 · 5:13 PM PDT

2021/09/08 · 17:13

To think
The nonsense
Of our well-heeled democracies
Would be the crisis.

Not the policies,
The ideologies,
The low spark of high heeled boys
Flirting their way to petty tyranny
On bespoke beach resorts.

Not the deprivation,
The indignation of poverty
Or the Malthusian alter
On which human equality
Sighs it’s last breath.

But the nonsense.

All Things in Common Nation Should Produce without Sweat or Endeavour

lucid

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Sunday February 19, 2017 · 9:11 PM PST

2017/02/19 · 21:11

Having attended the St. Anne’s Warehouse production of The Tempest this afternoon [the first theater afforded my wife and I after 11 months with our Welsh, Communist daughter — inside joke] I was reminded of Gonzalo’s utopia. I found it a wonderful tonic to this thread from a diary yesterday.

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 860
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;—
...
All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, 870
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

It is an interesting speech for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is cribbed almost directly from Montaigne’s Of Cannibals :

[Brazilian Indians have] no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate or politic superiority, no use of service, of riches or of poverty, no contracts, no successions... no occupation but idle, no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. (from John Florio's 1603 English translation)

This essay was one of the earliest known references to the idea of the ‘noble savage’ which was eventually developed against Hobbes’ notion of nature as ‘a war of all against all’ during the 17th century [and the authoritarian state proposed to corral that ‘state of nature’]. This idea even filtered into fairly frequent reflection by Benjamin Franklin:

The Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distressed for Want, the Insolence of Office . . . and restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust [the Indians] with what we call civil Society.

— Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in a pamphlet entitled [Matthew Wheelock], Reflections, Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies, 1770^[26]

I expound upon this here because there exists a technocratic delusion among the ‘ruling’ left that tinkering at the margins of capitalism will somehow effect a social, political and economic order that can engender equality and justice [and yes, I mean effect with an ‘e’, as the dkos grammar algorithm has flagged that word — quite in keeping with my point]. It might affect the existing order, but it certainly won’t result in a world of justice and equality.

Going back to the thread linked earlier, the problems are systemic, multiple and almost untranslatable to technocrats. For one, anarchists aren’t disgusted with civil society because it is civil society. Anarchists are disgusted by how we currently construe civil society — namely it is hierarchical, dependent on property regimes, non-representative in its governance, promotes sanctioned violence and reiterates socio-economic inequality. Alternatively, rightists and fascists are disgusted by civil society because it is. Rightists and fascists believe in authoritarianism, hierarchy, inequality, property, violence and ‘a war of all against all’. There can be no peace. There can be no commons. Violence by rightists is reality, while violence employed by [some] anarchists is a tactic. And what is that ‘anarchist’ violence? It is always ‘property’ violence. What the technocrats cannot stomach, much like the rightists they unwittingly support, is an attack on property.

And use of service, none; contract, succession, 860
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none

For an anarchist, the regime of ‘property’ is the violence. Police forces are raised to protect it; wars are fought to acquire it; people are impoverished to maintain it. But for those entrenched in a property system, the idea that what they do every day is violence cannot stand. They cannot comprehend the violence of their existence. They cannot fathom a commons.

Mojique sees his village from a nearby hill
Mojique thinks of days before Americans came
He sees the foreigners in growing numbers
He sees the foreigners in fancy houses
He thinks of days that he can still remember...now.
Mojique holds a package in his quivering hands
Mojique sends the package to the American man
Softly he glides along the streets and alleys
Up comes the wind that makes them run for cover
He feels the time is surely now or never...more.

Read more: Talking Heads - Listening Wind Lyrics | MetroLyrics

If you have to wonder how some Americans might bristle at the property regime, why not make it easier and see how most of the world experiences it. The Battle for Seattle [which people seem to have forgot] was more about property than it was trade — specifically intellectual property regimes and their effects on access to science and technology by developing nations and the selling of the commons [natural resources] to multinational corporations — along with all of the environmental casualties of such idiocy.

If you really want to understand an anarchist, try to understand the idea of equality. Try to envision it in every aspect of your life. Try to envision it in your personal relationships. Try to envision it where you ‘make a living’. Try to envision it in your government. Try to envision it in the world — in the way in which your individual life affects the lives of unknown people thousands of miles away. Try to envision a world where we are all equal, because if anyone is Caliban, none of us are free.

Where is the space in which we can rationally discuss race?

lucid

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Thursday August 25, 2016 · 9:26 PM PDT

2016/08/25 · 21:26

My wife is a member of a private group on facebook for new mothers. It consists of tens of thousands of women across the country of all socio-economic and racial backgrounds. It’s been fascinating for her to participate in as a UK national looking at the horror that American women experience — particularly the poor and lower middle class. The UK, in it’s infinite wisdom has 52 weeks leave. While not all paid at full salary, it is all paid and women are guaranteed their jobs for at least that amount of time. In our case, her job afforded her 4 months leave which is far more generous than most experience here.

Today, in honor of Black Breastfeeding Week one of the members posted a link to promote events around the country. It dismays me to say that what happened in response was completely predictable. The responses were littered with outrage about this excluding white mothers, privileging African American’s struggles to breastfeed above others, etc. — so much so that the moderator, herself a minority, had to issue a statement about the stupidity of many responses and remove the original post.

Over the last many weeks, I’d been discussing with my wife the prospect of approaching both the moderator of the group and various posters about putting together a book detailing the harsh reality of early motherhood in America based on the statements made by a diverse community in a space deemed ‘safe’ because of its privacy - a space in which all of those struggling with the huge challenge of new motherhood could vent their struggles with jobs, partners, health care, sleep, poop, depression — and the joys as well, and the questions and the beautiful uncertainty of it all. While the privacy allows for the honesty of the posts, it is also a story that needs to be told if anything is going to change the horrendous way in which this country treats new parents, and mothers in particular. I don’t think the visceral reality of raising babies in this country is something that has been discussed in a genuine way in public, ever — despite our ‘child positive’ simulacra, and yes, despite the platitudes of many in the Democratic Party.

That said, in that type of space, I expected more solidarity. African Americans breastfeed children at a rate of 58% to 75% for white women — and the duration of feeding rate sinks significantly lower. This is for a plethora of reasons — cultural, economic, educational, historical. There is a very good reason during Breastfeeding Month to have a week dedicated to events specifically targeting the African American community. But even within that space, within a private place of solidarity for new mothers, one finds both the virulence of white privilege and the sheltered conceits of latent [or overt] racism.

If we can’t find common ground on economic issues, or issues of police brutality and the drug war, or, for fuck’s sake, on the issues of how shitty it is to try to raise a baby in this country, how the hell are we ever going to have a rational discussion of race?

Einstein once said when addressing the the students at Lincoln University that ‘racism is a disease of white people’. That was 70 years ago, and racism is still a disease of white people. It is a disease that most cannot see even if they think themselves immune.

To deny both the implicit structural racism and the explicit manifestations must be willful ignorance, as no rational observer could be so blinded. And to get offended when people bring such things to light is, in a word, racist.

So You're Concerned About Climate Change...

lucid

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Saturday May 07, 2016 · 12:21 AM PDT

2016/05/07 · 00:21

If, like me, you are a human being possessed of self-consciousness and reason, living on this pale blue dot, you should not just be frightened by climate change, because you will be petrified by it. At just a 6 degree rise in temperature [predicted by 2100 at current models — which get revised downward everyday], the disruption to oceanic phytoplankton could render our atmosphere unbreathable. We’re not just talking, storms, disease, sea level rise, massive food and water disruptions — we’re talking breathing.

The ‘serious people’ have plenty of solutions — from reducing emissions, taxing fossil fuels, increasing efficiency and transitioning to a ‘green economy’ on a macro level to reducing carbon footprints on a micro level. It is said that we need a ‘World War II mobilization’ to combat climate change — and that is by the most ardent of the ‘serious people’. What this approach fails to comprehend is that climate change cannot be fundamentally altered when the structure of the world economy itself is the cause. We can’t tinker at the margins and expect any appreciable positive change while we still base our entire economic order on manufactured scarcity.

One can argue whether or not the notion of scarcity is at the heart of all historical economic orders, but it is inarguable that it is the central concept of capitalism. From Smith to Ricardo to Marx to Keynes, the fundamental promise of capitalism is, if not the elimination, at least the efficient management of scarcity. Organizing a society based on exchanging labor for the ability to obtain perceived scarce goods not only created a labor pool that had the illusion of being invested in the selling of their own labor, but also immediately created a consumer base for the result of that labor. And the scarce goods were food, shelter, clothes — maybe some medicine and education thrown in.

As this system has developed over several centuries, the actual scarcity of the most important goods has ceased to exist. There is no scarcity of food. There is no scarcity of shelter. There is no scarcity of even education or medicine. And there is also no scarcity of energy. But our economy cannot exist unless those basic resources are not just believed to be scarce, but kept, in reality, scarce. Capitalism cannot abide the material abundance that it, itself has created. It requires that its labor force works to receive them. And even if it can’t continue to employ all of them, it still requires them as a customer base to continue to exist. But wait, if no one can afford to buy your product, it ceases to exist.

This circular process of labor and consumption — and the usurious resource extraction by those who maintain that cycle to pretend we have not yet conquered scarcity — is the cause of climate change. And the full repudiation of the idea that ‘work’ is required for subsistence is the only way out.

We can no longer afford to buy your product.

We need NO JOBS. How much energy is wasted pushing papers for companies that only exist because people need to make money to eat? How much energy is spent giving services and support to all of those people with other jobs that don’t need to exist in the first place? How much energy is wasted in transporting people to those jobs. How much energy is wasted in companies that make needless goods purchased by people who work all of the above jobs for companies that only exist because people need money to eat… Capitalism is the ultimate ponzi scheme.

If we simply provided everyone with subsistence level goods, which is quite easy given our technological development, none of the ridiculous carbon consumption would need to exist.

We need to recognize that the modest and below market income most of us hope for in America in exchange for labor, if we’re lucky, is itself part of the reason for our eventual extinction at the end of this century. Our income itself is part of the support system for the economic order that is destroying the only planet we have.

What we need is a full scale recalibration of scarcity. It doesn’t exist in our capacity. It only exists in our distribution. Today, every human on the planet can be fed, housed, educated, given medical care and have access to unlimited energy. Today, we need to reshape our economy so that it doesn’t inefficiently waste all of our resources by requiring work for subsistence — or worse, poverty. We should provide for everyone universally. We have the technology. We have the food. We have the housing stock. We have the intellectual capital. We lack the will.

But Wait! “It will cost too much money”! What money? We invented money. Money is the historical vehicle of aristocracy. It exists as a more efficient medium of exchange for their power. Money has no inherent value. But technology does — it actually allows for things to exist. It allows us to conquer scarcity. Without scarcity, there is no need for money. We no longer have scarcity, so money needn’t have meaning.

If we’re serious about surviving as a species, repudiating the system that requires the waste of both human and energy resources for its own survival would seem the prudent course of action. I’m honestly mystified by the resistance.

Should it Cost $81,000 to Have a Baby?

lucid

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Wednesday April 20, 2016 · 9:19 PM PDT

2016/04/20 · 21:19

Our beautiful daughter was born on March 16, 2016. Labor was induced because she was 9 days late and her mother and I are older, so the doctor wanted to play it safe. It was a fairly uneventful labor that ultimately ended in a C-section because after 22 hours it hadn’t progressed far enough and, though our daughter wasn’t in any distress, we decided that continuing a process that had stalled without any guarantees that it would change would be the wrong choice. Everything was by the book, the APGAR score was a 9, she latched for breast feeding within 3 hours of birth and there were no complications. We were released from the hospital a day early… And then, the shitty American medical system kicked in.

Because of the shitty implementation of a new Enterprise Resource Management system at my wife’s employer, we were unable until today to add our daughter as dependent. In the meantime, because our daughter was deemed to have no insurance, the hospital billed her, not us for $11,000 worth of medical expenses that were not itemized in any way on the bill. So my darling daughter, for 35 days, you were in debt for $11,000 just for being born. Welcome to America.

Prior to that, however, we started to receive our itemized accounting from our insurance company. The final bills are not in yet [including the cost for my wife’s doctor]. But so far, in addition to the $11,000 of non-itemized costs billed to our 1 month old daughter, the insurance billing from the hospital for us is about $70,000. So, even prior to the bill from my wife’s doctor, it has somehow cost $81,000 to deliver a baby, for a delivery that was pretty straight forward, even with a C-section.

What is the makeup of that $70,000 that we have seen itemized? $17,000 for the ‘nursery’. My daughter didn’t spend a second in the nursery. She was with us the entire time. $11,500 for the C-section. $3,500 for 2 hours in the recovery room. $10,000 for the semi-private hospital room [which we had to abandon because our ‘roommates’ had decided to litigate who ruined who’s life within hours of the birth of their own child, so we ponied up $1,050 out of pocket for a private room]. $1,900 for ‘medication’ which consisted of a handful of motrin and oxycontin that one could buy at a pharmacy without insurance for $10. $900 for a medical device that consisted of a straw with a balloon on the end that was probably made in China for $20. Thousands for IV’s. Etc.

Of course, I’m not shocked by any of this. But my wife is British and grew up with the NHS, so when she sees these types of bills, knowing what it costs for a birth in the UK, she is apoplectic. And WE should be apoplectic too. $81,000, not including the doctor, to deliver a baby. $11,000 of those costs billed to the infant — and what are they? Weighing her 3 times? Administering vitamin K drops and a hep B vaccine? Checking her vitals 4 times a day for 2 and half days? Giving her a hearing test? Because that is all they did specifically related to her after she was born. Christ. I went to an elite east coast college in the early 1990’s and we paid about $80,000 for that. Under what circumstances should it ever cost over $81,000 to deliver a baby?

This is precisely why the American health care system is a disaster — why for profit health care is an abomination. Every piece of the system itself is scratching for profit, using a shareholder model of capitalism to administer a human good. Hospitals are just as much in the real estate market as they are in the health care market — spending on lavish physical plant improvements to improve their marketing and expand their client base so that the CEO’s, upper management, et al. can benefit from their expansion. And don’t get me started on pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers and even many medical practitioners. It’s a racket. It’s completely unregulated. It has no basis in reality. And the people who suffer are those who pay — the patients. And they suffer not just in their pocket books, but in their treatment outcomes.

We as Americans spend over 14% of our GDP on medical care — more than double everyone else in western Europe. The results of our medical industry rank us on par with some of the poorest former Soviet satellites in eastern Europe. It’s a disgrace. And while the ACA was certainly a step in the right direction as far as getting people basic access to medical care, it simply never addressed the actual problem in this country.

For profit medicine is the problem in this country. No price controls. No bargaining for prescription drugs. No telling hospitals ‘fuck you, we aren’t paying you $17.000 for a nursery a baby never set foot in’. The only answer is nationalized health care — be it single payer, medicare for all, NHS. This is not sustainable. Everyone knows it’s not sustainable. Despite the protestations of Krugman, et al, even the Democratic establishment knows it’s not sustainable. So it’s about damn time we did something.

I don’t care if you are a Hillary supporter or a Bernie supporter. If you don’t realize that we need some form of nationalized healthcare in order to keep our healthcare system from coming apart at the seems [and to be honest, it already has], you’re a blind fool. No country can consider itself remotely ‘civilized’ and allow the idiocy, inefficiency and injustice of our health care system to continue.

My clients are 'still of an age'...

lucid

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Tuesday January 05, 2016 · 9:37 PM PST

2016/01/05 · 21:37

I’m about to have a daughter. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t expected. In fact, a year a go to the day I was a middle aged single man with no intentions of having children; but intention doesn’t always make reality.

The reality that always led me to dismiss the notion of having a child is the multifaceted miasma of capitalism and the slow motion suicide of our species it assures. And as I’m crossing the threshold to parenthood — the threshold that supposedly makes one more ‘conservative’, aspirational and embracing of the status quo — I find I am as radical, and practical, as ever.

Below follows the world I want for my soon to be daughter:

1. The biological fact of having a vagina should in no way impact the recognition of her basic human rights — her right to self-determination, autonomy over her own body and equal protection under the law. That we are still discussing this in the 21st century is one of the greatest travesties of our species.

2. The right to a habitable planet. Generally speaking, human beings can’t exist outside of the confines of the planet upon which we live, so we better put every intellectual and natural resource into assuring that we can continue to live here.

3. Both self-determination and ecological preservation require that we have a socio-economic system which both recognizes equality and prioritizes our continued existence. Neither of these necessities are possible within capitalism. We not only need a ‘political revolution’, we need a full scale recalibration of how we can continue to live on this planet, and live in a way which recognizes the humanity of every human being.

4. A world in which dreams and ideals aren’t dismissed as youthful naivete, but embraced as both imminent and immanence.

Despite my imminent parenthood, I am ‘still of an age’ in which I can see a better world for my daughter. I can still have ideals. I can still bristle at the suggestion that ‘security’ and ‘stability’ are more important than what is right. I can still sneer at the complacent capitalist apologists in the Democratic party and tell them to join their corporate patrons in the 7th circle of hell.

Electing Bernie Sanders might help put us on the footing we need to create this new world I want for my daughter. But it is not enough. We need a global movement. All countries. Everywhere. Equality and Existence. We are species. Species-being. Human. Equal.

We are.

A Christmas Card to America from a Hooker in Minneapolis

lucid

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Wednesday December 23, 2015 · 10:28 PM PST

2015/12/23 · 22:28

YouTube Video

Hey Charley I think I'm happy
For the first time since my accident
I wish I had all the money
That we used to spend on dope
I'd buy me a used car lot
And I wouldn't sell any of 'em
I'd just drive a different car every day
Dependin' on how I feel

If we had the honesty of Tom Wait’s ‘Hooker from Minneapolis’, we’d be several steps further down the road, alas, we only have the delusional optimism — the optimism summed up in the assessment that had we not spent all our money on dope, we would have spent it driving a different car every day.

Though I’m sure Tom Waits never meant this song as a profound political statement, it really does embody the sordid reality of American civil society. Not only are we a broken people, with broken institutions, where “everyone I used to know was dead or in prison”, but we still cling to the fantasy that:

He says that he loves me
Even though its not his baby
He says that he'll raise him up
Like he would his own son
He gave me a ring
That was worn by his mother
And he takes me out dancin'
Every Saturday night

Who are we kidding?

Our childhood poverty rate ranks among the lowest of first world nations and our overall poverty rate isn’t much better. We’re 34th in life expectancy, just above Qatar. We’re 57th in infant mortality, between Croatia and Serbia. Of the 15 cities in the world with the most homelessness, 6 are in the US. Our educational system is floundering. We have no social safety net. The actual ‘democracy’ part of our Republic is in serious question. And as my British wife likes to remind me as we navigate our insane medical system while trying to have a child — we have the worst medical system in the western world.

And all that money goes to dope. It goes to murdering people across the globe so a bunch of greedy junkies can continue to get their money fix. It goes to propping up anti-democratic economic policies which impoverish all of us to prime the gigantic felatio engine of wealth for the few.

And the so-called economic ladder of ‘capitalism’ is a blow job. Kneel down and do it. Do it enough times and maybe [we’re led to believe], if you’re lucky, you can turn around and receive it — but in reality, that happens about as often as winning the lottery.

If we were as honest as the hooker from Minneapolis, we’d admit:

Hey Charley, for chrissakes
Do you want to know the truth of it?
I don't have a husband
He don't play the trombone
I need to borrow money
To pay this lawyer
And Charley, hey
I'll be eligible for parole
Come Valentine's Day

I’m sorry. It’s just that the American exceptionalism that floats around, explicitly, implicitly, in the everyday, makes me laugh — just like a Tom Waits tale from skid row. I just wish we were that honest. The world would be better off.

The False Consciousness of Politics

lucid

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday December 20, 2015 · 12:33 AM PST

2015/12/20 · 00:33

I must confess, my intellectual history as a student of philosophy predisposes me to a structuralist understanding of our world — from our socio-economic order, to our scientific revolutions, on down to our everyday existence as ‘political animals’. Perhaps one could say that my bent toward human cosmology precludes an even basic understanding of everyday existence — specifically that existence as a ‘political animal’. But therein lies the rub: the very category of the political — the thought that our self-consciousness is defined by politics, that the personal is political — is itself a vestige of history that our species has been striving to cast off (consciously or unconsciously) for millenia. It is a vestige of an ancient aristocratic order that undermines the very notion of self-consciousness — and subverts human reason.

The idea of human beings as ‘political animals’ stems from the Greek notion of ousia, inheritance [translated in the history of philosophy as ‘substance’]. The self, rather than being an imminent, self-creating, self-conscious being, is rather imagined as a being defined by its predicates. We are of this family. We are of this state. We are of this mettle. Our identity as a being is subject to what we are determined to be by the world we exist within. Essentially, our identity is defined by our existence — our very being within the world. ‘Politics’ is one of those categories, one of those predicates — and according to some of the greatest right wing theorists in the history of the world, the defining category — our defining category as ‘humanity’. Our identity as an individual is defined by accepting our role in the body politic, internalizing external definitions of our existence is our only route to identity as a subject — we are ‘subject’ to our predicates.

Beginning with the renaissance, this whole train of thought was turned on its head — Kant referred to it as the Copernican Turn. Human reason itself becomes the basis of identity — the ability to objectify and make sense of the world without reference to our specific political, social or economic predicates redefines the idea of identity from a passive, static being, into an imminent, self-creating and unlimited self-consciousness.

This new understanding of self and concomitant release from predetermined social, political and economic stations allowed us to recognize, for the first time, the structural relations that define our existence. In academic terms, with this new understanding, we saw the birth of ‘social sciences’. We began to analyze the world within which we lived because we could stand apart and objectify it. This is the fundamental basis of modernity, the scientific revolution and small ‘d’ democracy.

Yet, these ancient chains persist. Alas, we are still defined individually by the social, political and economic institutions that subject us to their order. In fact, we celebrate them — we kill for them, we live for them and we fear their demise. They persist because they are reified by the very order that has been at odds with the idea of human consciousness that developed 500 years ago — and we reify them every day in nationalism, capitalism, religion, even science. We continue to fight against our own freedom because we cling to externally defined identities — and it is the very system of those identities that must be overthrown — that should have been toppled hundreds of years ago.

But that structure will fall. Structurally, we know this — it is already happening. Systemic contradictions can only be maintained for so long and technological change continues to undermine the girders that support those institutions.

So my question is this: why do we, in a supposed ‘reality based community’ continue to support institutions that are themselves dying? Why are we not putting every effort into establishing a new world that finally embodies what we now know about human consciousness and identity? Why are we participating in partisan hackery that distracts from efforts to craft our imminent reality? Why are we trying to preserve the system that denies humanity its true identity and ultimate freedom?

Adam Purple RIP

lucid

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Tuesday September 15, 2015 · 10:41 PM PDT

2015/09/15 · 22:41

When I used to live on the Lower East Side in the early 2000's, a somewhat reclusive old hippie started being around the building all of the time. Wearing purple shirts and hats and riding around a bicycle decked out with bells, he would go through the recycling for returnable cans and bottles... I didn't really think anything of it until the construction project next to my building created a foundation to rooftop crack in the building. People's doors fell off, their sinks askew. We petitioned the landlord to intervene and get city inspectors out to verify the stability of the building, but, silence.

Shortly thereafter, I got to know Adam Purple. Unbeknownst to me, our super, who was an old time friend and community activist, had been housing him in the basement because after the city evicted him from his long time home on Forsythe St., a block away, he really didn't have anyplace to go.

lucid

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Wednesday August 19, 2015 · 10:40 PM PDT

2015/08/19 · 22:40

Back on July 18, 2014 I just happened to be home from work and the video came across my newsfeed. I was so outraged that I posted a short diary - something I rarely do. I wanted the community to share my outrage.

I've lived in NYC since 1994. It certainly wasn't the beginning of an age in which cops have tortured, maimed and murdered countless minorities in this city, but it was my introduction to that widespread horror as a 22 year old.

Before we had the internet, we had to cobble together press reports with eye witness accounts. But even then, the evidence pointed to calculated police killing of minorities - particularly African American men. And it is a policy that is hundreds of years old...

lucid

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Tuesday August 18, 2015 · 11:22 PM PDT

2015/08/18 · 23:22

I have to say it. I love Bernie. I know the streaming events get disrupted sometimes because the wifi at the venue, or the bandwidth of the local streams trying to host him become overwhelmed....

But seriously. I record fantastic audio and video of all of my bands live shows with a $100 tripod and and external mic on my iphone. Total cost, about $250. In fact, if you want to mix camera angles, get a board feed for Bernie's audio and blend it with various crowd feeds to get a sense of how it is in the crowd, it really doesn't take very much. Put up 4-5 camera's on tripods for $250 a pop and a couple of decent crowd mics that can be blended in with the house mic, and hire an audio engineer and video editor to blend it all very quickly, and it's golden... They seem to do that for edited segments, by why not do it for everything?

But even if you're just livestreaming an event, A. buy good tripod, B. don't put the smart phone vertical, put it horizontal, C. buy a good external mic for said smart phone.

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A $100 tripod and an external mic