Well, what a relief! The Republican Party of Virginia headquarters wouldn't let us in to help sort the 2.5 foot high stack of petititons the campaign submitted this morning. We were worried that might be the technicality that would prevent Paul's petitions from being certified, and that would prevent his appearance on the Virginia ballot. Luckily, the Republicans aren't trying any funny business yet. But don't trust them - keep the pressure on!
Here's the email I got from the campaign:
Congratulations! As of 2:00 PM ET today, Ron Paul was certified to be on the ballot for the Republican presidential primary in Virginia.
The Republican Party HQ of Virginia determined that he had enough signatures to be on the ballot. Actually, their staff had to stop counting after the first box of petitions because there were just too many petitions to count.
Thank you to all our volunteers for your hard work in getting Congressman Ron Paul on the ballot. You made this happen!
Cheers,
Mike McHugh
National Ballot Access Coordinator
Ron Paul 2008 Presidential Campaign Committee
For the sake of the campaign, I hope this is the last campaign effort McHugh "coordinates".
Sunday my friend Brady and I waved signs for Ron Paul on a busy corner with other Ron Paul fanatics. Check out Brady's awesome sign:
Pimp. Tight. Thanks to Jamie for taking the pic.
This past week has been the first time I've gotten involved officially with the campaign to elect Ron Paul. So I went to a local Meetup on Thursday, and the organizer's story was sobering. There were at least 15 people there (and this in an area that has four or five Ron Paul meetups within a 50 mile radius) and we were all eager to hear what we could do to move the campaign forward.
The bottom line is that the organizer claims to have been fighting the national campaign just to get it to do its job. According to him, the campaign has dropped the ball so many times that only two possiblities exist: they're incompetent or they're actively sabotaging the campaign. I don't know any of this information first hand, but I can tell you what I know.
The push to collect enough signatures to get Paul on the ballot in Virginia was a success, but only because the grassroots local guys worked their asses off. The national office told them everything was taken care of, and it wasn't until very late in the drive that people realized nothing was being done whatsoever. Ballot access is not some trivial detail - it is the number one priority of an electoral campaign to get the candidate on the ballot! These tireless activists had to scramble to meet the deadline and turn in the signatures to the campaign. Now, we just found out that the campaign was supposed (and specifically asked by local activists) to sort the petitions by congressional district, and they did not do that. So now a bunch of us have to go to the Republican Party of Virginia headquarters early tomorrow and sort them (who knows if we have the resources to do that on the fly, or if we'll even be allowed to). Apparently there are many, many more examples of no brainer campaign tasks being dropped or bungled.
Read more...
I'm tweaking my spam software a bit to try and make my life easier. If you're having problems commenting, email me at: my_first_name at 6thdensity period net.
This is part of a bit of an overhaul that's in the works. I still love the custom theme I created for this blog. However, there's some functional and organizational loose ends that I haven't tied up. For example:
- the poor search results display page
- the blogroll and link list are just totally missing (looks like the API got updated on me)
- the comment form never looks right
- the underlying code could be a little more consistent and look a little less hacked
- layout conventions should be in the stylesheet for consistency's sake (instead of me putting CSS and HTML directly into my posts everytime I want to float an image)
Generally speaking, there's just some clean up that I haven't gotten around to before. So expect some tweaks in the coming month.
This is one of the most powerful ideas Derrick Jensen transmits (source):
One of the smartest things the Nazis did was to co-opt rationality and to co-opt hope. The way they did that was by making it so that at every step of the way it was in the Jews' rational, best interest not to resist.
Would you rather get an ID card or would you rather resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to go to a ghetto or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to get on a cattle car or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to take a shower or do you want to resist and possibly get killed?
Every step of the way, it was in their rational best interest to not resist. But I'll tell you something really interesting: The Jews who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising had a much higher rate of survival than those who went along. We need to keep that in mind over the next ten years.
If you're alive, there always comes moments when the immediate experience of reason and logic becomes irrelevant to the task of being human. We can remain aware of that humanity so that when action outside of the system's premises becomes necessary, when short term welfare becomes worthless, the groundwork for trusting ourselves has already been laid. And if we trust ourselves, maybe we'll decide that our survival is desirable - that our lives are worth fighting for.
It's always possible that we could resolve to live.
From a Hakim Bey interview:
HB: People with wonderful attitudes and desires that are good desires; but since there is no comprehensive movement, there's nothing other than these "positive attitudes" and there's no way to focus them.
I went to a Peace March yesterday... it was the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. I swear it was like being back in the 60's again: same clothes, same slogans:
"What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!"
Read more...
Berkeley Breathed vomits all over my OH!-so-carefully-thought-out political agenda again. Why do the papers publish him if he's just gonna embarass us all?
Jeez, is it to late to go back to being a Ron Paul skeptic? Or did I just board the middle aged borgeouis dumb-dumb train at a pathetically early age?
Ah, the self-doubt and worry of being a lone subversive...
I've long been meaning to write a post about intelligence; moreover, our institutional, reductionist approach to it. When our ability to experience a phenomenon becomes trapped by the need to measure it. The institutional imperative for shoehorning the phenomenon into some system that, after all, we simply made up is so artificial.
Like Gatto, I believe it boils down to the need for humans to live in and with abstractions to ensure our minds can be harnessed for a greater, systemic agenda (whatever that may be). In light of this topic, I've thoroughly enjoyed this article in the New Yorker:
"If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents," Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century's great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn's phrase, we have now had to put on "scientific spectacles," which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
...
Read more...
Radley Balko has just posted what I think is the most moving essay yet on the Cory Maye case and the drug war in general (if you think it's worth sharing, digg it). Getting beyond the legalities, moral appeals, and outrage, Balko simply recounts how the drug war cost a good cop his life and a great father his family and freedom. When you feel like the cards are stacked against any chance of decency in this world, read this post and dig deep down for the strength, not simply to vote for the right politicians and see the right policies enacted, but to make your neighborhood a better, safer, more humane place.
Not supporting a libertarian candidate who is, in many ways, unlibertarian, does not indicate that you're "politically unserious". If anything, it means you do take your politics seriously, because you realize that they're your politics - they don't belong to whomever swoops in and promises libertopia, nor the first blogger who calls you "unserious" or "unlibertarian". It's admirable, not condemnable, to hold out for a better deal on your political capital than 10 cents on the dollar.
I think Paul's giving libertarians a great deal, but not because LewRockwell.com bloggers say so. The attacks have got to stop, fellas. To hear you tell it, the presidency is the prize, the ultimate aspiration of libertarian theory. Even I'm not that convinced of Paul's messiah status - let alone the overwhelming utility of putting him in a position of authority that makes it worth trashing any coalition libertarians have built over the past few years.
God forbid you have to - GASP - persuade people of your point of view, rather than barking at them until they fall into line. Let's have enough respect for each other and the seriousness of our common ideas not to throw a temper tantrum when people disagree with us. Whatever miscalculations you feel that certain left libertarian individuals are making in their political priorities, they are the individual's miscalculations to make. This is a matter of value judgments and moral balancing: it's not a science.
Read more...
I've been going through some pretty significant changes: personally, professionally, and philosophically. In the latter category, I'm trying to take stock of these changes to clarify my reasoning and mark what I consider a new phase of my intellectual life. Here's something I wrote on the LeftLibertarian2 list that went off in the direction I'm headed (and strayed completely off the thread's topic), adapted for the blog:
We're not going to reach some bright, shining, voluntary future. Life is a permanent struggle, and the reward can only be in the journey, in the work itself, in the experience of being ourselves. That's the only starting point to figuring out what it means to be human, and therefore what it means to voluntarily associate with them. I'm not saying we can't rest sometimes, both intellectually and physically; it's just that we should realize that state of rest is not the destination, nor where we're likely to grow and learn.
We're going to have to accept that we will make mistakes. We'll have to accept that we'll disagree with each other and likely part ways, if not come to blows. We'll have to have faith in ourselves to bounce back from setbacks. We'll have to have compassion for ourselves and others, as easy as it is to strike them from our hearts and minds as "wrong" or "evil".
The anarchist project must be synonymous with the project of being human. It's too easy to decide on the mechanistic, dogmatic principles that we believe and then, based on that personal conclusion, set out to judge the world and everybody else by those principles. I'm starting to think it's too much to believe that we should hold ourselves to that standard. We simply don't understand ourselves or the world sufficiently to act in a fundamentalist manner, whether that be based on libertarian, communitarian, nationalist, or religious principles.
Read more...
For the first time ever, this blog has contributed to the advancement of my career, rather than serving as a liability to it. That's encouraging.
I just finished watching What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire and I have to say - what a way to start the day (and I mean that both positively and negatively). The documentary is an extremely sobering look at just a few of the unresolvable problems our culture has created. Just as the Jensen Endgame talks floored me last week, this movie brings the wider themes together in a way that I am able to ignore even less.
It should go without saying that for every opinion in the world, I could find pieces I disagree with. So let me say that I don't recommend this movie because I agree with every detail of their thesis. However, what I find so moving about this video is that, like the Jensen one, it is evidence that other people are thinking along the same lines as I am. Even better, they're approaching this common analysis of our situation from a wide variety of starting points and mindsets. As much as I'd like to have original, groundbreaking ideas for which to take credit, I have to admit: it's more comforting to know the insights are profound enough that all sorts of people are coming to them. Not only are we finding something somewhat universal with all the different approaches and starting points and personal journies, but each perspective is bringing something unique and necessary to the table.
There's a very tiny bit of Earth worship and mysticism in the movie. I don't say that to slap a disclaimer on the movie, to distance myself from it, or even to indicate that I necessarily disagree with the message. There is a metaphorical sense in which I'm entirely comfortable talking about our need to listen to the wind, trees, and rivers: the idea of feedback. By engaging in our communities and building relationships with our neighbors, we acquire the data necessary to spontaneously coordinate ourselves in society without the need for a central governing authority. Similarly, if we begin to pay attention to our natural surroundings and simply acknowledging their condition, rather than isolating ourselves in our homes, cubicles, and television programs, we gain information that is crucially needed to coordinate ourselves within the ecosystem, instead of counting on the government to socialize and regulate our collective impact from the top down. It's all about acknowledging reality so we can adjust to it, rather than believing we can order reality to our desires.
Read more...
