rigorousintuition.ca

In my experience, the misunderstanding of anarchist thought and action is common even amongst those who support #OWS.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:I think lupercal made some excellent and salient points, actually. As much as "horizontal organization theory" stuff fascinates me, it's naive to think there's not a lot of operators in the ranks right now. The fruits of Occupy Oakland right now are exceptionally weird. I would definitely be interested in seeing someone parse what they consider to be misinformation in lupercal's concise summary.

thanks Wombat not to be contrary but I'd argue that Oakland is exceptionally not weird, i.e., is representative of what's actually going on, which is pretty familiar both by California standards -- same damn deal with Grey Davis, another Jerry protégé who got run out by "activists" and replaced by Reagan clone Arnold for enough years to screw up Cali but good -- or by Ajax standards, because it's not difficult to see that Occupy is Ajax illegally jacked on domestic soil. But who's going to prosecute, right? Thus the violence, which, as with Ajax and more recent color revolutions, is what actually gets the job done, i.e., gets Mosadegh / ben Ali / Mubarak to resign. And if they don't, like Ghaddafi didn't, then the fake populism showboat gets shuttered, the cameras disappear, and the bombs fall without apology.

#OCCUPY IS A LARGE GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS, and that means it's subject to all the foibles and failures of any other large group of human beings. Common Ground had both Lisa Fithian and Brandon Darby in their small & legendary ranks. This is a nationwide movement, so it scales accordingly.

Where I differ from lupercal is that he seems to think the entire movement is on puppet strings and that's a tough sell if you've got any familiarity and experience with it. Been picking brains from Chicago to Asheville to Boston and the front lines are full of good earnest people. (Plenty of idiots, too, but again: LARGE GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS.)

Yes, the whole thing is on puppet strings, nakedly obvious ones in the case of Oakland, but I never said there aren't lost of "good earnest people" caught up in it. Cornell West comes to mind, though for all I know he's a spook, but lots of ordinary earnest people are safely "occupied" with meaningless activity. In fact they have to be in order for the thing to have any credibility. Nevertheless, they're purely for window dressing, and whenever there's a shortage of volunteers, as in Libya for example, ringers are easy to find. But it works best with a credulous professor or two out in front.

Also I think I have the right to say that even though the feds and especially aggressive cops have been doing all they can to get at a number of Occupy groups,
that some Occupy segments have been hijacked by anarchist elements that hurt the overall movement. I still am scratching my head wondering what exactly Occupy Oakland accomplished, having observed the whole thing from the intertubes and being around the bay area. They finally got a lot of union, teachers, middle aged and older workers into the college rank and file; and wide swaths of it got derailed into actions that seem counter productive. Though it's also a testament to how a couple hundred anarchists can ruin something.

Now I know 2012 Countdown takes issue with some of the things I say, but he also is highlighting what has to be the most lighting rod of all the financial-based protest vanguards: the Greece situation. if parts of Europe are the the way the wind is blowing for the states in the future, the question becomes; are people in the movement going to allow segments of it to become a vehicle for riots, or positive direct action? We've seen Europe take center stage with this sort of stuff, and I can't help but think it plays into "tptb" if you have people rioting and acting crazy.

And to 2012, whom from his posts it sounds like were mostly on the same page with the 'war on terror' issue, I was simply saying I wonder if the Zuccoti Occupy people just a few blocks from ground zero fully digest the how what happened a couple blocks from them is largely responsible for a lot of the things they're protesting and that have plagued much of the world. I wasnt advocating the Alex Jones bullhorn briade hijack the movement, but they (Occupy as a whole) should allow for all sorts of views.

lupercal wrote:

Wombaticus Rex wrote:I think lupercal made some excellent and salient points, actually. As much as "horizontal organization theory" stuff fascinates me, it's naive to think there's not a lot of operators in the ranks right now. The fruits of Occupy Oakland right now are exceptionally weird. I would definitely be interested in seeing someone parse what they consider to be misinformation in lupercal's concise summary.

thanks Wombat not to be contrary but I'd argue that Oakland is exceptionally not weird, i.e., is representative of what's actually going on, which is pretty familiar both by California standards (same damn deal with Grey Davis, another Jerry protege who got run out on a rail by "activists" and replaced by Reagan clone Ahnuld for enough years to screw up Cali but good -- or by Ajax standards, because it's not at all difficult to see that this is basically Ajax illegally jacked on domestic soil. But who's going to prosecute, right? Thus the violence, which, as with Ajax and the more recent color revolutions, is what gets the job done, i.e., gets Mosadegh / ben Ali / Mubarak to resign, and if they don't, like Ghaddafi didn't, then the fake populism gets shuttered, the cameras disappear, and the bombs fall without apology.

#OCCUPY IS A LARGE GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS, and that means it's subject to all the foibles and failures of any other large group of human beings. Common Ground had both Lisa Fithian and Brandon Darby in their small & legendary ranks. This is a nationwide movement, so it scales accordingly.

Where I differ from lupercal is that he seems to think the entire movement is on puppet strings and that's a tough sell if you've got any familiarity and experience with it. Been picking brains from Chicago to Asheville to Boston and the front lines are full of good earnest people. (Plenty of idiots, too, but again: LARGE GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS.)

Yes, the whole thing is on puppet strings, nakedly obvious ones in the case of Oakland, but I never said there aren't lost of "good earnest people" caught up in it. Cornell West comes to mind, though for all I know he's a spook, but lots of ordinary earnest people are safely "occupied" with meaningless activity. In fact they have to be in order for the thing to have any credibility. Nevertheless, they're purely for window dressing, and whenever there's a shortage of volunteers, as in Libya for example, ringers are easy to find. But it works best with a credulous professor or two out in front.

Well Lupercal it goes to my original thoughts from last year regarding Occupy/Arab Revolutions/etc...

Is there a fine balance between fighting the system, and then actually doing precisely what the system wants? Im sure some of the people involved in 1953 thought they were 'fighting the good fight'. I often talk of how some of those 19 hijackers thought they were "sticking it to the great western capitalist devil", when in fact it's exactly what the system wanted. (not comparing activists to terrorists) but if you have a bad autocratic regime in a country that the West wants to take out, but you genuinely have a gripe as well against said autocratic regime...it seems a fine line between activism and simply being a stooge

But the DHS and fed involvement in trying to infiltrate and maneuver segments of Occupy is interesting. I think people in these groups need to be aware as well of being used as a springboard for mindless violence. That's why this whole Trayvon Martin thing worries me, as I dont think America is too far away from all out mass violent riots as seen in London and Paris.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:.. I would definitely be interested in seeing someone parse what they consider to be misinformation in lupercal's concise summary.

Sure, if you really can't see it ... tho you can ...

Wombaticus Rex wrote:.. he seems to think the entire movement is on puppet strings and that's a tough sell if you've got any familiarity and experience with it. Been picking brains from Chicago to Asheville to Boston and the front lines are full of good earnest people. (Plenty of idiots, too, but again: LARGE GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS.)

Don't forget Occupy in UK, Spain, Australia etc - are they all "controlled opposition" too?

If not, who might benefit from misrepresenting them as such? What a coincidence that lupy is pushing the same line as the establishment - nothing to see here, public dissent and networking is pointless, sneer and smear.

lupercal wrote:Yep "controlled left" is exactly the word. What has Occupy Oakland accomplished, besides f*cking over a nice lefty mayor?

There are no lefty anythings in the USA that i can see.

lupercal wrote:Let's see, they had a teacher's strike that wasn't really a strike, meaning a lot of teachers used up their personal days on a lot of nothing, meaning they won't be able to use them to work on elections or an actual anti-war demo, bingo.

You have many many times claimed elections and street marches are meaningless, suddenly they're important enough to keep teachers out of the only serious protest movement i've seen in US in my lifetime?

lupercal wrote:And they shut down the port a couple of times meaning lots of teamsters didn't work. Way to hand it to Wall Street banksters, shut down the Port of Oakland.

You ever hear of a thing called trade? Import & export type of thing .. try imagining where your computer came from, and consider if you're west of the Rockies in US it quite possibly was imported via that port. When was last time that massive port was closed by protest? Lupercal worries about the poor teamsters missing a days work, but happily at least some of the teamsters understand solidarity and the need to sometimes "cast yourself between the wheels". That most yanks don't is no surprise, thats why the 4th Reich has its headquarters there.

lupercal wrote:Totally illogical and pointless, and that's Occupy in a nutshell.

Totally conspiritard-predictable and dispiriting, thats lupercal in a nutshell.

Thank you, wintler2. At the moment I can't think of any way to reply to Lupercals ridiculous statements that won't get me banned from the site.

willard you really should stick to what you don't know best, which is Freak Oil, because when you're not cut and pasting from those glossy e-zines you keep under your pillow you're lost. D- and that's for showing up.

MayDay wrote:Thank you, wintler2. At the moment I can't think of any way to reply to Lupercals ridiculous statements that won't get me banned from the site.

Welcome Mayday, may we assume you know whereof you speak?

willard wrote:You have many many times claimed elections and street marches are meaningless. . .

Where?

lupercal wrote:

MayDay wrote:Thank you, wintler2. At the moment I can't think of any way to reply to Lupercals ridiculous statements that won't get me banned from the site.

Welcome Mayday, may we assume you know whereof you speak?

Indeed. And I believe I recall that you're local. YAY! We should totally meet up. City Hall?
edit: it's another Lup that's local. Sorry for the confusion.

lupy wrote:

willard wrote:You have many many times claimed elections and street marches are meaningless. . .

Where?

Okay, you got me there, i got that wrong, you are not one of those conspiritards who asserts that all elections are meaningless. Mea culpa etc.

The context:

lupercal wrote:Let's see, they had a teacher's strike that wasn't really a strike, meaning a lot of teachers used up their personal days on a lot of nothing, meaning they won't be able to use them to work on elections or an actual anti-war demo, bingo.

I doubt the teachers union is attending antiwar demo's in US, and participation in electoral politics is of neccesity far more moderate/controlled than anything Occupy does. Its pretty confident of you to tell the teamsters and teachers they were all wasting their time supporting Occupy, when doubtless they have experience of the activities you say they should be doing instead.

wintler2 wrote:

lupy wrote:

willard wrote:You have many many times claimed elections and street marches are meaningless. . .

Where?

Okay, you got me there, i got that wrong, you are not one of those conspiritards who asserts that all elections are meaningless. Mea culpa etc.

The context:

lupercal wrote:Let's see, they had a teacher's strike that wasn't really a strike, meaning a lot of teachers used up their personal days on a lot of nothing, meaning they won't be able to use them to work on elections or an actual anti-war demo, bingo.

I doubt the teachers union is attending antiwar demo's in US, and participation in electoral politics is of neccesity far more moderate/controlled than anything Occupy does. Its pretty confident of you to tell the teamsters and teachers they were all wasting their time supporting Occupy, when doubtless they have experience of the activities you say they should be doing instead.

While I don't share Lupercal's belief that on the whole Occupy is controlled opposition(certainly not near as much as all the Bush era "leftist" activist groups) I do agree that some of the stuff that went down in Oakland was very counter productive. But Im not going to taint the movement as a whole. I would like to see more black activist groups link up and overall see a broader coalition. People still see Occupy as a mostly white college kid meme situation. I think it's begun to nicely evolve into a whole other beast, especially depending on what region you're in.

I think when certain chapters become a cult of personality and personal politics/conflicting personalities take over then it can be bad. As well as the violence prone anarchist sects.
But I am all for anything relating to alternative communities and people doing little things to better the national dialogue.

Hey RI - what are you thinking?

This week's podcast from OccupyRadio - http://occupyamerica.ning.com/profiles/ ... ackdown-on

The podcast last week was on defeating Delphi (Discussion here centered on Horizontal Decision Making, ignoring that the Delphi Technique, created by RAND, is specifically designed to keep uncontrolled decision making from taking place.) Relinking: http://occupyamerica.ning.com/profiles/ ... ion-of-ows

If anybody can take time to listen to these two half hour interviews, I am really interested in hearing some discussion. I am the person doing the interview. We need your input.

Well, you're starting from a fairly poisoned conception of what the Delphi Technique even is. Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method

Not exactly a nefarious system for infiltration, huh? Almost the opposite of how the Conspiratainment Complex frames it, right?

As for infiltration and group dynamic problems, bluntly, you simply can't have an open movement without 'em. Either get serious about #OpSec or accept that GA is as good as it gets.

Edit: for the sake of nerd history and cultural anthropology, the Conspiratainment version of Delphi is a mish-mash of SRI's work under Willis Harman, especially during the Changing Images of Man era -- another work that conspiracy theorists love to discuss in detail without ever having actually read -- and the subsequent Marilyn Ferguson book about that milleu, The Acquarian Conspiracy. "Change Agent" is pilfered from the fascinating group dynamics work of Kurt Lewin, MIT technocrat extraordinaire.

As many views of anarchism as anarchists. To me, Mutual regard/Mutual aid.

Everyone Remeber You Shou;ld Bring Lots Of Jasmine For Self and Others

Thanks, Keep up the good works.

Thanks Rex - I went to the wiki you sent me to, and found, "The governments of Latin America and the Caribbean have successfully used the Delphi method as an open-ended public-private sector approach to identify the most urgent challenges for their regional ICT-for-development eLAC Action Plans.[11] Course, that does raise the question of which governments of Latin America and the Caribbean - and how's that working out for them.

That "regional ICT-for-development link", for example, takes me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT-for-development which tells me that the kind and caring individuals at the "...World Bank's GICT section has a dedicated team of approximately 200 staff members working on ICT issues." Those of us in the 99% are usually less than totally reassured when we here that Our Friends at the World Bank are here to help. However, who am I to dispute a noted authority on any subject like Wiki. Their research puts all my fears at ease.

Seriously, I will try to read up on the EDIT note references. Thanks for that - and hopefully this will be the beginning of some fact based discussion. I was counting on you RI guys for that.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:…Side note: Allegro, thank you for that article.

You’re Very Welcome.

_________________
There are some very smart and savvy men and women attracted to the #occupy movement, a profound movement I believe, and those people know what to say and how to say it when they phone, text or email someone on another continent or in the next state—#occupy participants are talking with and learning from each other. The planet wide #occupy considerations are myriad; thus, many of us at RI can barely appreciate yet imagine what all is happening with any one person or within any assembly in the movement, anywhere, at any moment, until we do.

Project Willow wrote:…Occupy has already been effectual. It succeeded in affecting the frame of the national discussion about the response to the recession from budget crisis to systemic inequality and fraud, re-introducing these issues into common discourse. Management of perception and the boundaries of debate are major weapons in the control system and Occupy leveled against it a heavy blow. That, to me anyway, is resistance.

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