Contrary to popular belief we do have some peacful strategies and tactics that take the enormous, unfocused emotional energy of grassroots groups and transform it into effective anti-government and anti-corporate activism. Use these principles to create an emotional commitment to victory - no matter what.
Grassroots pressure on large organizations is reality, and there is every indication that it will grow. Because the conflicts manifest in high-profile public debate and often-panicked decision-making, the 12 rules will help organizations develop counteractive strategies that can level the playing field.
Governments and corporations have inherent weaknesses. And, time and again, they repeat mistakes that other large organizations have made, even repeating their OWN mistakes.
Large organizations have learned to stonewall and not empower activists. In other words, they try to ignore radical activists and are never as committed to victory as their opposition is committed to defeating them. Result? They are unprepared for the hailstorm of brutal tactics that severely damage their reputation and send them running with their tails between their legs.
RULE 1: "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." Power is derived from 2 main sources - money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)
RULE 2: "Never go outside the expertise of your people." It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don't address the "real" issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)
RULE 3: "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy." Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)
RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity's very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
RULE 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
RULE 6: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They're doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid "un-fun" activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)
RULE 7: "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag." Don't become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers should be constantly coming up with new tactics.)
RULE 8: "Keep the pressure on. Never let up." Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)
RULE 9: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists' minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)
RULE 10: "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management's wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)
RULE 11: "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. ( If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Activist organizations should have an set agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
I sometimes feel like an alien creature for which there is no earthly explanation Sure I have human form walking erect and opposing digits, but my mind is upside down. I feel like a run-on sentence in a punctuation crazy world. and I see the world around me like a mad collective dream.
An endless stream of people move like ants from the freeway cell phones, pc's, and digital displays "In Money We Trust," we'll find happiness the prevailing attitude; like a genetically modified irradiated Big Mac is somehow symbolic of food.
Morality is legislated prisons over-populated religion is incorporated the profit-motive has permeated all activity we pay our government to let us park on the street And war is the biggest money-maker of all we all know missile envy only comes from being small.
Politicians and prostitutes are comfortable together I wonder if they talk about the strange change in the weather. This government was founded by, of, and for the people but everybody feels it like a giant open sore they don't represent us anymore And blaming the President for the country's woes is like yelling at a puppet for the way it sings Who's the man behind the curtain pulling the strings?
A billion people sitting watching their TV in the room that they call living but as for me I see living as loving and since there is no loving room I sit on the grass under a tree dreaming of the way things used to be Pre-Industrial Revolution which of course is before the rivers and oceans, and skies were polluted
before Parkinson's, and mad cows and all the convoluted cacophony of bad ideas like skyscrapers, and tree paper, and earth rapers like Monsanto and Dupont had their way as they continue to today.
This was Pre-us back when the buffalo roamed and the Indian's home was the forest, and God was nature and heaven was here and now Can you imagine clean water, food, and air living in community with animals and people who care?
Do you dare to feel responsible for every dollar you lay down are you going to make the rich man richer or are you going to stand your ground You say you want a revolution a communal evolution to be a part of the solution maybe I'll be seeing you around
the cowboy code, and why bush is a wannabe
Category: Life
Waylon Jennings, a Real Cowboy
George W. Bush Ain't No Cowboy
George W. Bush is a fake cowboy. From media accounts, you'd reckon that the president was a buckaroo to the bones. He plays up the image, big-time, with $300 designer cowboy boots, a $1,000 cowboy hat, and his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas. He guns his rhetoric with frontier lingo, saying that he'll "ride herd" over ornery Middle Eastern governments and "smoke out" enemies in wild mountain passes. He branded Saddam Hussein's Iraq "an outlaw regime" and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a trophy. As for Osama bin Laden, Bush declared, "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' " Britain's liberal newspaper The Guardian noted that "such language feeds the image overseas of Mr. Bush as a hopelessly inarticulate, trigger-happy cowboy." But liberals from both coasts and Europeans who derisively call Bush a "cowboy" foolishly insult not Bush, but one of America's prime ennobling myths. Instead of ridiculing the myth exploited by George W. Bush, they may want to measure him against it.
"The idea of the American cowboy is the direct lineal descendant of the chivalric knight," observes Bonnie Wheeler, a medievalist in cowboy country. "The only serious difference is that your status doesn't depend on your social class." Editor of Arthuriana, the journal of Arthurian studies, Wheeler teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
"Our president," she says, "is neither a knight nor a cowboy. He doesn't believe in taking care of the little guy, nor does he have the restraint or dignity of the cowboy."
Children of Bush's generation grew up knowing of the Cowboy Code, which echoed the chivalric one. It was written by screen cowboy Gene Autry. In real life too, this lifelong Democrat was the kind of white-hat cowboy our president presents himself to be. Autry was the son of an itinerant cattle driver and horse trader in rural Texas and Oklahoma. He was a recreational small-aircraft pilot, but during World War II he paid for his own flight lessons on larger planes so he could serve in the Air Transport Command on the war front, instead of being stuck at a domestic base. Ultimately he flew explosive supplies (ammunition and fuel) over the Himalayas. A grateful U.S. Army bestowed a singular honor on Autry: He alone was allowed to wear his cowboy boots in uniform.
This is about more than having a big ranch. Like the knight, the cowboy is an ideal to which people aspire, Wheeler says, regardless of its mundane historical origins. And Autry's code still carries resonance in red states. Voters there, including the Wild West swing states of Colorado and Nevada, might want to think twice about returning a soft-handed wannabe to the White House. Here's how Bush stacks up against the Cowboy Code:
1 The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage. The doctrine of preemptive war, the centerpiece of Bush policy in Iraq and for the "war on terror," is one for the black hats. In 1902, five years before Gene Autry was born, Owen Wister's bestselling novel The Virginian elevated the cowboy to a national symbol. "It's not a brave man that's dangerous. It's the cowards that scare me," a card dealer observes early in the book. "I never like to be around where there's a coward. You can't tell. He'll always go to shooting before it's necessary, and there's no security who he'll hit." When the Virginian is forced into a climactic duel, the villain shoots first. Only then does the Virginian return fire and make a clean kill.
Though the Virginian continually countered dastardly deeds done by the villain Trampas, he always acted magnanimously when he had the upper hand. American Cowboy magazine asked its readers to explain why we still need cowboys, noting that, thanks to western movies, "for decades, folks of all descriptions have admired and tried to emulate him." U.S. Army Corporal Randy Melton of the 1st Cavalry Division replied from Baghdad, "If those guys who did all that crazy stuff to the 'terrorist POWs' grew up sitting on a horse instead of in front of a TV playing video games, maybe they would have conducted themselves with a little more dignity." Melton added, "Every time my platoon corralled a couple of 'bad guys,' it's easy to get angry with them. But we always treat them with dignity, whether they deserve it or not."
Unfortunately, the sadistic abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the violations at Guantánamo Bay and Afghanistan didn't start with a few young soldiers raised on Mortal Kombat. According to probes by the Army itself, it stems from specific policies crafted in the White House and carried out by Pentagon generals and consultants.
2 He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him. Soldiers commit their lives to the commander in chief's judgment and care. Bush sent them into a war of choice, not necessity, and one based on misleading rhetoric, and they landed in Iraq without so much as enough sets of body armor to shield them. At the same time, he pushed to cut soldiers' pay and cut veterans' benefits. The Bush administration has also extended terms of service, effectively drafting soldiers who've already done their duty.
On the home front, the Bush administration has used the Patriot Act to prune back the very liberties he swore to uphold and protect.
3 He must always tell the truth. Ersatz cowboy George W. Bush hasn't. The two key issues facing America today are the war and the economy. He misled the nation into the Iraq war with false claims of imminent danger. He promised that his tax cuts wouldn't result in deficits and then said deficits would be "small and short term." The federal deficit is now enormous, estimated at over $400 billion, and looks likely to last years.
4 He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals. Children are being ground under the heels of those fancy boots. Bush is relaxing safeguards against the neurotoxin mercury, which is particularly dangerous to the growing brains and nervous systems of fetuses and children, and the Clean Air Act has been stripped of key provisions to control coal-fired power-plant emissions known to cause respiratory illnesses like asthma.
The number of children living in poverty has risen, yet he proposes in his 2005 budget to freeze funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Head Start's budget would also be frozen, and the $247 million Even Start literacy program would be eliminated. More children will be left behind. Budgets for a host of other education programs would be frozen, cut, or eliminated by Bush's proposals.
"This administration wants to require low-income mothers to work more hours to receive benefits," says Bethany Little of the Children's Defense Fund. "What exactly is going to happen to those children is a mystery to us." She adds, "I don't think there's anything gentle about denying children child-care access, early-childhood education in high school, good public schools, living wages for families, and standing health care."
As for the elderly, Bush is catering to his religious-right constituents by blocking stem cell research to fight Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. His efforts to privatize Social Security put most seniors' pensions at risk. And he has also hampered efforts to legalize cheaper generic drugs and pharmaceutical imports from Canada.
"The Medicare Drug Bill was a lucrative deal for pharmaceutical companies," says Susan Murany, executive director of the Gray Panthers. "We didn't consider it a win for consumers at all, we considered it a win for drug companies."
When it came to animals, the Virginian rued the pain the cattle industry inflicted on the beasts, even before the age of industrial farming. He delivered a beat-down to a man who was ruthless with "hawses." He "gentled" his own horses for riding and took care of a mentally disturbed chicken. Really. Bush, on the other hand, enjoyed putting firecrackers inside living frogs and tossing them into the air when he was a boy.
Now that Bush is an adult, he and his appointees haven't proposed adding a single species to the "endangered" list. And his approach to natural habitats has been "disastrous," says Brad DeVries of the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund. "The needs of wildlife go by the wayside when they get in the way of energy development, logging, or mining."
Perhaps most galling, DeVries says, is the Bush administration proposal "to allow the importation of endangered animals and their body parts as hunting trophies and zoo animals and other uses."
Ron Reagan Jr. summed it up nicely in a TV discussion last year. Describing Bush Jr.'s faux-cowboy lifestyle, the son of the late cowboy actor-turned-president remarked, "You know, George Bush sallies forth in his pickup truck to go torment small animals."
5 He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas. At this moment, Bush operatives are working to keep blacks off the voter rolls in Florida. And since 9-11, Bush has used language that evokes the Crusades.
"There's a seismic gap between some of the president's very needed symbolic acts and initiatives on the street," says C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and a Baptist pastor in Monroe, Louisiana. Gaddy cites the broad sweeps that jailed Muslim immigrants and statements by Attorney General John Ashcroft asserting the superiority of Christianity.
"One of the surprising things to emerge," Gaddy notes, "was that the president met with conservative Christians about the preemptive strike on Iraq but refused to meet with bishops of the Methodist church because they didn't support it. Same with the National Council of Churches."
Bush and Dick Cheney also tried to draft conservative Christian denominations into their re-election bid by suggesting that congregation membership rosters be used for political mailings.
6 He must help people in distress. AIDS is ravaging nations across the globe; more die each year than Osama bin Laden could dream of killing. Yet the Bush administration blocks from its aid programs vital, World Health Organization–approved generic drugs made in the developing world that cost one-fifth as much as the drugs produced by the big pharmaceutical manufacturers. Critics say Bush's budget slashes U.S. funding for the Global Fund (to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases) by 64 percent.
7 He must be a good worker. Even the Virginian hit the books, albeit to impress a pretty schoolteacher. But Bush, though he married a librarian, is famously incurious. By the time he'd served three years in office, he'd taken more vacation days than Bill Clinton took in eight. Those days in Texas (mostly in Crawford, a comfortable Waco suburb and not a hardscrabble frontier) took up more than 40 percent of his term—until 9-11. Bush was on his suburban ranch, the 9-11 Commission noted, when he received notice that Osama bin Laden was coiling to spring an attack upon the U.S.
Part of a cowboy hero's work ethic is that he "always gets his man." But Bush interrupted the hunt for bin Laden to invade Iraq, where he hauled in Saddam Hussein.
8 He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits. In Bush's 2000 campaign, he said to running mate Cheney, "There's Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from The New York Times." More recently, it was rumored that after Cheney's infamous "Go fuck yourself" to Senator Pat Leahy, the born-again Christian Bush joked at a cabinet meeting, "Fuck 'em all!"
9 He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws. The apple fell far from the tree; Bush's mom is pro-choice. But, as documented by the National Organization of Women, regressive Bush policies threaten abortion rights, Title IX sports, and affirmative action. His economic policies have hurt the livelihoods and security of working women and their families. Radical-right Supreme Court appointments in his second term could make things worse for decades.
Not that his attitude toward women is a surprise. In his twenties he was known as a "cuntsman," and one recollection of his days at Yale is that, according to The Guardian (U.K.), "He walked up to a matronly woman at a smart cocktail party and asked, 'So, what's sex like after 50, anyway?' "
Bush's only real black mark, as far as obeying laws, is a fine for drunken driving in Maine, but his administration is run through with corruption and insider privileges.
10 The Cowboy is a patriot. George W. Bush didn't fight in the jungles of Vietnam, nor did he fight in the streets to end that waste of lives. Instead, he used his father's connections to land a safe position in the National Guard and even then shirked his duty.
Dian Malouf, a native of "brush country" and author of Cattle Kings of Texas, is chronicling the last of the cowboys for a photo book due this winter called Seldom Heard. Like other Texans, she knows that state residency doesn't confer cowboy status.
"I'm in Midland lots, and I haven't seen a Midland cowboy yet," she says, speaking of the wealthy oil town where Bush was raised. "Bush and Cheney are not cowboys by any stretch of the imagination. Cowboys are silent types, remote but genuine, with serious integrity and caring. They are a bit rough and work hard, and they don't want to call attention to themselves the way George W. Bush kind of does. I know and admire and respect cowboys." She adds, "Wearing boots does not make someone a cowboy."
10 things you can do to fight fascism
Current mood: crappy
Category: Life
This is the best guide I can offer for proactive, prolonged, independent and effective resistance against the overwhelming direction towards greater warfare, poverty, and fascist control we see around the world in 2007.
I was asked by a weirdo I have a lot of respect for to write on this specific subject. I want this article to be as useful as possible, so I'm just going to lay things on the table as quickly and as clearly as I can.
Let's begin by shaking off bad language—we tend to discuss politics using old metaphors, which are useless today and actually make understanding the problem more difficult. There is no Left and Right, there is no "inside the system" because none of us are "outside" of it, there is no change "from the bottom up" because there is no "top" to bring the change to.
We find ourselves up against an entrenched power structure composed of a relatively very small group of wealthy elites. They seldom rule directly or even visibly, and maintain their power through building huge armed bureacracies who enforce power for them. The global power structure is a decentralized, constantly shifting network of organized crime and national control systems, representing many different races, nationalities, religious dogmas and cultures.
However, there are common threads in all systems of social control: They do not have a sense of humor, they are bitterly opposed to Art, and they are unable to handle bizarre and confusing situations. These systems are built upon enforcing conformity, turning nature into consumer goods, and controlling information. These systems require enemies and they create criminals.
Because of these common threads, these systems all have common weakness that we have the power to exploit to incredible effect. If you take nothing else away from this, please remember: you are exponentially more powerful than you think you are.
The simplest summation of the overall strategy I propose is this:
1. Destabilize Existing Structure
2. Minimize Destructive Backlash
3. Establish Robust Communication
To this end, I propose 10 steps which form a conceptual toolkit. Perhaps that's a euphemism for "disorganized pile of shit," but I feel strongly that these are all relevant and useful:
1. Practice is repetition is preparation is power.
Can you win a fight? Can you control a situation enough to escape? Can you outrun police? I'm not saying you need to be able to knock someone out like Brad Pitt, but am saying self-defense is a core life skill. Without it, you're not effective. I recommend Aikido and Tai Chi to all living humans, unconditionally.
Establish meaningful and beneficial routines. Our culture is a constant pulse of imposed rhythms and rituals that we need to actively fight against to maintain clarity and effectiveness. Learning any skill set is amazingly simple: learn about it, then try it out until you get it. That iron-clad formula will guide you through anything, from juggling to fellatio to meditation.
2. Create situations that cannot be controlled.
I don't propose that because it's punk rock, but because I believe it's a solid strategy. Ideally, in any confrontation, you want control of the situation. However, we're talking about us, you and me as individuals, taking on the global power structure of Earth in 2007 for control of our planet. We are not in control of the situation, it is dumb to assume we could be. So go for the next best thing—be totally unpredictable, escalate chaos and noise, and create a situation that nobody could possibly control.
This is basically an unspoken bet with your opponent: "I am giving up control of this situation because I am faster, smarter and stronger than you." Get comfortable with the weird and unpredictable. Embrace chaos and leverage chaos, because what cannot be predicted cannot be controlled. Only a lawyer would pretend otherwise.
3. Do not allow yourself to be controlled by situations.
What do you do if someone puts a loaded gun in your face? Sure, that's a heavy situation, but do you panic? I propose you remain calm and ask the human with the gun what they want. There is never any reason to panic. Self-assembling nanotech hunter-destroyer clusters swarming thousands of feet high, raining down human blood and internal organs, is still not a valid reason to panic. Panic is helpless idiot fear. In high stakes situations, you need to be calm and focused.
Horrible and amazing things will happen in the next five years, but you're going to survive and maintain, just like humans always do. You yourself should make peace with death. I mean that honestly, not being sarcastic or macabre—it's important for psychological health to keep your death in perspective. Avoiding it always leads to complications, and as I will discuss later, denial of death has been shown to make people more suggestible, afraid, and prone to violence.
4. Seek information, avoid arguments.
The only person responsible for getting you trustworthy information is you. This involves a great deal of work. Am I seriously advocating that you spend hours a day just sitting around learning stuff? Absolutely yes, I am. The wonderful Jennifer Bowen introduced me to the phrase "good company is kept discussing good ideas—not people."
The internet is insanely effective for rapidly accessing high volumes of high quality information. It's also a great way to spend four hours checking your email, watching porn, or getting into pointless arguments with total strangers. We all have egos, we all get pissed off occasionally, but don't do that online: get up immediately and use that anger to lift some free weights.
I propose that it's more important to have a general sense of what's coming up next, than to have a precise picture of what's going on now. The global power structure is not a monolithic, static object: it is constantly shifting, and while we focus on one tentacle, seven more will be taking advantage of our ignorance. An accurate history of this power structure is far less valuable than knowing how they operate, and what their assumptions are.
Remember, we're living on the same planet. No amount of secret insider knowledge will spare you the consequences of catastrophic storms, toxic pollution, solar and lunar cycles, space weather radiation, etc. The global power structure has to respond and adapt to the world it claims to control, use the cycles of nature against them.
This is a massive source of power that few activists seem to be aware of: for the past three centuries, governments, militaries and corporations have been waging a very literal War Against Nature, attempting to control what they cannot understand. Recent documents like the UK Ministry of Defense report "Global Trends 2007-2036" make it clear that those in power cannot predict the short-term consequences of worldwide toxic pollution. They are scrambling to prepare for a future crisis they cannot plan for. You can, though.
6. Become an autonomous cell.
Do you realize that most of what "intelligence analysts" do is just read through publicly available media and look for patterns? Are you familiar with the concept, technique and theory behind "asymmetric warfare"? What do you think military analysts mean when they predict a future of "constant low-intensity urban conflict?" Is it signifigant that the US government has a long track record of inflitrating, subverting and murdering counter-culture icons and revolutionary leaders?
As Peter J. Carroll observed in Psybermagick: "In practice the power of any conspiracy rises and falls in inverse proportion to the power of its internal conspiracies. Mutual guilt and bribery mainly hold together conspiracies whose ideologies command insufficient loyalty, but this makes them vulnerable." Take advantage of your opponents paranoia, use their need for control against them.
Autonomy also implies economic freedom, good health, and secure access to food. Shelter can of course be communal and improvised—in many climates, shelter is barely nescessary most of the year. Although I'm essentially advocating that we take the Army recruiting slogan, "an army of one," further than they themselves ever will, I'm not avocating turning your back on anyone. I'm advocating that you work for your community, independently and perhaps invisibly.
7. Don't be a dickhead, and love thy neighbor.
It's the only rational approach to life: do your best to be nice. By doing so, you make life easier for those around you, you reduce physical stress that wears on your own body, and you will often find yourself reaping rewards at random. Some people call this "karma," other folks call this "emergent properties of complex networks."
Be nice to your neighbors. Help them out for no reason, refuse to accept money for doing so. Partly because real charity is subversive these days. Also, in 2007, you do not want the cops called on you, period. You truly do the world a favor when you purge yourself of terms like "sheeple" and "the herd"—I've also learned, through hilarious personal experience, that referring to taxpaying citizens as "slaves" will never work out for you.
There is nothing wrong with being selfish, only being dumb. Dumb selfish people look for simple self-benefit, smart selfish people look for open-ended, mutually beneficial situations. My personal rule of thumb is avoiding theory as much as I can and focusing on That Which Is Useful, but perhaps that's not useful for you. If you can improve your community, you have also improved your personal power base and your chances for long-term success. That's not "public service," just science, math and common sense.
8. Invest in tools and share them subversively.
The old Industrial Revolution plan for social control was simple. Wealthy families owned all the "capitol goods"—the machines and factories that make consumer goods. So they used that power to hire poor people to work for them, in exchange for being able to purchase some of the "consumer goods" they themselves made. Things have changed a lot in 2007, because the line between captiol and consumer goods has blurred almost completely. You can launch a record label with about $5000 and be pressing your own CDs, for instance.
Technology is magick. I think that's become clear enough to just leave that as a statement. We now have the tools for invisibility, weather control, human cloning and burning entire cities to the ground with a single missile. We will soon have the tools for universal translation, undoing one of Jehovah's major curses as chronicled in Genesis 11. It's vitally important that us fringe weirdos get ahold of all these amazing future toys before they get turned into future weapons against us.
Sharing is subversive. Communal access to important tools is subversive. Growth is a sign of a healthy economy, profit is a sign of a sick one. Break the profit cycle everywhere you can. Nobody will go pay for a service or tool when they can use an equally good one locally, for free. You would be amazed how low overhead can be when maintenance is your only expense. You would be amazed how well you can maintain tools and facilities if you're willing to put in work.
9. Become a Beacon of Insane Hope
Yeah, perhaps I'm reaching with this one, but I mean it emphatically. There is no shortage of people telling me how fucked I am, but I've spent the better part of a year tracking down people who are talking about solutions, comparing technique, and putting in work towards something better. I want to talk to people about seed bombs, quantum microdots, urban farming, water purification, anything that can improve reality, here and now.
There's strong evidence that fear and anger are actively used as tools of manipulation and social control: the White House spent $1.6 billion dollars in 2006 on "public relations." This is a signal that needs to be counteracted, becacause based on psychology experiments, evoking the concept of death alters human perception. People become more dogmatic, nationalist and likely to support violence. This is based on the research of Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, and you can find more information searching for the phrase "Terror Management Theory."
I am not advocating violence to any extent. Perhaps this is the strangest concept in my toolbag, but for what it's worth: violence is actually not your weapon. Sure, you can throw rocks at cops, shoot cops, and blow up police stations, but you're actually not accomplishing anything. In fact, you're doing Their job for them, which is why undercover police officers around the world try to start riots at peaceful protests. Violence is not a weapon we can control, so it's not a weapon we should use, either.
10. Please, be fearless.
The stakes are beautifully high, the enemy is unbelievably strong, the fight looks completely hopeless. It's too perfect, it's ridiculous. How can we be bored on a planet as deliciously dangerous and insane as Earth? I can only conclude that my entire generation is living inside an open-ended video game that we've been training for since birth without even realizing it.
So keep pushing, stay calm, eat healthy, seek novelty, breathe deeply, take risks, think slowly, move quickly, speak clearly, fight dirty, dream crazy and please, be fearless.
high
calm
crappy
artistic
pissed off
