Sunday, August 14, 2011
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Why did I link this blog?
I just decided to associate a blog with my YouTube account to give me a bit more flexibility. Maybe I might want upload some stuff that's not cool with YouTube. I can do that here. Maybe I might want to write something, instead of having to film it. So that's why.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
What's political?
I recently watched a doco called Love and Fearlessness. I found the link from Submedia.tv. Who by the way have been very cool in uploading a video I edited of an infamous incident at the 08 RNC. Check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP8BUaEAv9c.
Anywas, the point, is this doco was about the loitering laws that are used to criminalise homlessness in a particular province of Canada. Basically the rule is you can't just be in public and you certainly can't sleep in public. The police can fine you, arrest you and take all the belongings you happen to be holding. The way they get away with this shit is by selectively enforcing these laws. If your some student it's perfectly ok for you to be sitting infront of the library, but if your homeless you get arrested.
So this got me thinking about my local situation and what the laws are like here. To be honest I don't know. I know a few homeless people, but I've never enquired as to how they manage to avoid state persecution. Sheltered me.
Then I started thinking about how in the activist circles I know, we rarely think about our local situation. We are media fiends. We decide what movement is most pressing based on what's currently being portrayed in the media. So we don't really pay much attention to the kids starving on our streets that are being hunted by the police. We're more likely to campaign about the impoverished kids in another nation. There was a fairly big movement in Australia a while ago around the Australian Gautanamo Bay inmate, David Hicks. It was great that this happened, but how many people stopped to think about the abhorant situation faced by inmates in Australian prisons everyday?
Personally I think that this preference toward the "exotic," is a huge weakness.
There are many reasons I think this, but the one I want to address here is that allowing the media to set our agenda means that we are always responding to them. We never have the element of surprise. Hell, even if they weren't surprised by us, at least if we're not letting them tell us when and where all the maijor conflicts are going to take place, we might be able to strike at a time that is particularly inconvenient...
My brain just fried, I need to eat. More later.
Anywas, the point, is this doco was about the loitering laws that are used to criminalise homlessness in a particular province of Canada. Basically the rule is you can't just be in public and you certainly can't sleep in public. The police can fine you, arrest you and take all the belongings you happen to be holding. The way they get away with this shit is by selectively enforcing these laws. If your some student it's perfectly ok for you to be sitting infront of the library, but if your homeless you get arrested.
So this got me thinking about my local situation and what the laws are like here. To be honest I don't know. I know a few homeless people, but I've never enquired as to how they manage to avoid state persecution. Sheltered me.
Then I started thinking about how in the activist circles I know, we rarely think about our local situation. We are media fiends. We decide what movement is most pressing based on what's currently being portrayed in the media. So we don't really pay much attention to the kids starving on our streets that are being hunted by the police. We're more likely to campaign about the impoverished kids in another nation. There was a fairly big movement in Australia a while ago around the Australian Gautanamo Bay inmate, David Hicks. It was great that this happened, but how many people stopped to think about the abhorant situation faced by inmates in Australian prisons everyday?
Personally I think that this preference toward the "exotic," is a huge weakness.
There are many reasons I think this, but the one I want to address here is that allowing the media to set our agenda means that we are always responding to them. We never have the element of surprise. Hell, even if they weren't surprised by us, at least if we're not letting them tell us when and where all the maijor conflicts are going to take place, we might be able to strike at a time that is particularly inconvenient...
My brain just fried, I need to eat. More later.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
It's coming back around again.
So I might give this a go. Vlogging was ok, but it's so fucking tedious. Script for however long at least 10 minutes, record for 10 minutes, edit for 10 minutes, upload for 10 minutes, do all the other shit. Easily takes an hour just to say anything of significance. So fuck that. Text is the new medium.
Anyway, here's my brief post just so you finally get something out of me.
Right wing ideologies seep into our thought processes in surpising ways. In my old, deleted YouTube account I made a video called Pro-Traumatic Revolutionary Disorder about the prominence of the idea that what is required to "turn people revolutionary" is for them to be abused by an alpha male character (e.g. Tyler Durden from Fight Club or V from V for Vendetta). The title of the video was a pun on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which would more likely be the result of the interactions portrayed in V for Vendetta (for example) then the kind of anti-authoritarian epiphany portrayed in the movie.
While most people can recognize the macho posturing in these boy fantasies, I noticed a more subtle and more prominent manifestation of this which kind of excited me a bit cause it's the perfect counter to the "no body wants to do anything" whining that's prevalent almost everywhere.
I was talking with one of my friends and she was saying that the reason the people we know don't protest more is because they are comfortable with their white middle class privilege. Because they don't have to fight to survive they don't care about the world. This is something which I had agreed with until I suddenly had this thought.
The 60's/70's is seen as the time of uber-revolution. It's the ideal that every radical wants to return to so they could be in the streets with 100 000's instead of 10's. But this wasn't a time of hardship. People had it way, WAY, cushier in the 60's/70's then we do now. In Australia, we had free university education, we had a better health care system, we had a less punitive, more widely available welfare system.
Today everything has withered away. It didn't "toughen us up". It didn't make us more revolutionary. We just got trounced.
I think their are two big reasons for this
1. The capitalists have forever won the battle with the unions. Now that capital can be pulled out of a country and moved to another country on a whim, the unions have no bargaining power. Only industries that must be localized (building, teaching, nursing) have power and even many of these can be undermined via other methods. Casualisation for instace.
2. The increasing destruction of face to face communities, mean that we don't know each other as well as we used to. That bond is essential for social movements. You've got to trust each other to take risks together and you've got to know each other in order to do that. Consumerism has replaced community. We need to fix that before we can fix anything.
Strong community bonds are the fertile soil that rebellion grows in. We can keep trying to make better and better seeds (political programs) in an attempt to Monsanto our way out of the problem or we can try rehabilitating the soil.
Anyway, here's my brief post just so you finally get something out of me.
Right wing ideologies seep into our thought processes in surpising ways. In my old, deleted YouTube account I made a video called Pro-Traumatic Revolutionary Disorder about the prominence of the idea that what is required to "turn people revolutionary" is for them to be abused by an alpha male character (e.g. Tyler Durden from Fight Club or V from V for Vendetta). The title of the video was a pun on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which would more likely be the result of the interactions portrayed in V for Vendetta (for example) then the kind of anti-authoritarian epiphany portrayed in the movie.
While most people can recognize the macho posturing in these boy fantasies, I noticed a more subtle and more prominent manifestation of this which kind of excited me a bit cause it's the perfect counter to the "no body wants to do anything" whining that's prevalent almost everywhere.
I was talking with one of my friends and she was saying that the reason the people we know don't protest more is because they are comfortable with their white middle class privilege. Because they don't have to fight to survive they don't care about the world. This is something which I had agreed with until I suddenly had this thought.
The 60's/70's is seen as the time of uber-revolution. It's the ideal that every radical wants to return to so they could be in the streets with 100 000's instead of 10's. But this wasn't a time of hardship. People had it way, WAY, cushier in the 60's/70's then we do now. In Australia, we had free university education, we had a better health care system, we had a less punitive, more widely available welfare system.
Today everything has withered away. It didn't "toughen us up". It didn't make us more revolutionary. We just got trounced.
I think their are two big reasons for this
1. The capitalists have forever won the battle with the unions. Now that capital can be pulled out of a country and moved to another country on a whim, the unions have no bargaining power. Only industries that must be localized (building, teaching, nursing) have power and even many of these can be undermined via other methods. Casualisation for instace.
2. The increasing destruction of face to face communities, mean that we don't know each other as well as we used to. That bond is essential for social movements. You've got to trust each other to take risks together and you've got to know each other in order to do that. Consumerism has replaced community. We need to fix that before we can fix anything.
Strong community bonds are the fertile soil that rebellion grows in. We can keep trying to make better and better seeds (political programs) in an attempt to Monsanto our way out of the problem or we can try rehabilitating the soil.
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