Pew Research Political Typology

                                         From 2017 but still relevant in many respects.

Social Experimentation

                         Check out your friendly neighborhood anarchist collective,

The late, great, Howard Zinn

 

Canceling Comedians while the World Burns

                                             Read about it here.

Nonviolent Noncooperation is the Key

 

Mystical Anarchist

                                                 Nikolai Berdyaev

Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr

Daniel Immerwahr: How to Hide an Empire

Hearts that grow not cold...

 

"The stupendous task of human regeneration will be accomplished by the purified vision of hearts that grow not cold." ~ Alexander Berkman, Western Penitentiary, 1901. 
 

Kurds vs. Israeli Settlers

 Note the Anarchism symbol in the background. Read about these young Kurdish citizen journalists here.

Tolstoy on Authoritarian Liberals

 "Those who try to improve others' lives through force cannot tell the difference between good and evil." 

                                                                        ~ Leo Tolstoy.

And now a word from Mr. Burroughs

 

Reparations for Palestine

                                                    It's only fair.
         

Read in Tandem

 

Political Compass

 Where shall hope be found?

The Law of Love and the Law of Violence

"War will disappear only when men [and women] shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war." --Anatole France (cited by LN Tolstoy in "The Law of Love and the Law of Violence").

Don't Count On It.

 Besides, the thugs who are replacing him are not exactly what I'd call a step forward...

Capitalism is eating us alive

 

Required Reading

What's left of the Left?

 

Back in 2003--which seems, today, like several millennia ago--Hakim Bey wrote: "What's left of the Left now seems to inhabit a ghost-world where a few thousand 'hits' pass for political action and 'virtual community' takes the place of human presence. The Web has become a perfect mirror of Global Capital: borderless, triumphalist, evanescent, aesthetically bankrupt, monocultural, violent--a force for atomization and isolation, for the disappearance of knowledge, of sexuality, and of all the subtle senses...Utopian dreams have value as critical tools and heuristic devices, but there's no substitute for lived life, real presence, adventure, risk, love. If you make the media the center of life then you will live a mediated life..." (from the new preface to T.A.Z., published by Autonomedia).

In the intervening eighteen years, it seems to me that our trip down this Rabbit Hole has become routine--the "mediated life" is the only life that most of us really know. Not that our lives have ever been completely unmediated, but we appear to have resigned ourselves to this extra layer of cyber-mediation with very little resistance.

In a hopeful mood, Bey added: "The present oneness of the totality feels spurious as hell; more than spectacular, more than simulated; downright spurious. Surely some day soon some real opposition will begin to cohere. A new movement will appear based on both solidarity and difference, as opposed to the sameness and separation of commodity culture and the Global Image."

Has this happened? Bey declined to predict the shape this movement would take, but he ventured that it would be "passionately Green and somewhat anti-Civilization, with a touch of Luddite technophobia. It will be 'poor' and deeply spiritual (not religious but perhaps shamanistic). It will be 'social' and resolutely anti-Capitalist." As a convinced Tolstoyan I say "Amen to all of that."

But a new movement? I think this is where I get stuck. Bey predicted that T.A.Z.'s (Temporary Autonomous Zones) would be part of this "movement," but I question whether such spaces can ever be part of any movement--for unless they are spontaneous and ephemeral, they aren't T.A.Z.'s, and unless they are T.A.Z.'s, they are not moments of liberatory resistance. A movement may emerge from a T.A.Z. like a chick from its shell--but the shell is then dead matter, detritus, and discarded.

Bey ended his remarks with this question: "Can we evade or even oppose the Final Enclosure--and learn to create our own Outside?"

To that question, I pose the following: If we could, who would know and what difference would it make? 

An American Education

 

Never Seen Together in the Same Room

 

Le Rouge et Le Noir

 

The Banality of Evil

                                     California Judge Roger T. Benitez.

On Anarchy - by Leo Tolstoy

The Government of No One

                                             A superb introduction.

The Pittsburgh Manifesto

                                                     Johann Most.

Thanks be to Banksy

 

And now a word or two from Veterans for Peace:

                                                             FUCK WAR.