the tribbles take on the space lizards

[click image]

.

Team work. You know, that all-American value, team work?

Unlike the short-lived uprising in neighbouring Algeria or recent socio-economic protests in other Arab countries, the popular Tunisian uprising was immediately supported by all the opposition groups, from the Islamists to the Communists, as well as by the labour unions, which helped it spread to all major parts of the country, including the influential north.

We are many; they are few.

Which is why the old divide-and-conquor bit is applied so relentlessly. Surely there are very few who are not conversant with this strategy, and yet Americans in our millions still fall for it, many gleefully engaging in it. I don't know whether to be semi-proud of myself for recovering from it, climbing back out—slimed—after falling into this glue pit when Dubya stole his second term, or continue to flog myself for it, let my shame keep burning. So I decide to do neither and to just do better.

I have very little patience even with people who constantly invoke our numbers advantage and yet insist on nonviolence because that violence is what "they" want from us, so they can crack down all the way. In the abstract, this sounds darn laudable to most people, those of us whose desire to remain physically unscathed by anything as colorful as an up close and personal confrontation, but, ahem, be realistic for a moment, would you? Yes, the violence is almost unerringly started by agents provocateurs, but there are no Gandhis or MLKs around to help insure nonviolence from uprising masses. When it happens, it isn't going to be nonviolent, but it will happen.

For US and European leaders, Tunisia's deposed president [er, dictator] had been considered a staunch ally in the war on terrorism and against Islamist extremism.

Are we going to leave it for as many decades as the Tunisians did?

I think we will. If they can drag out the fall slowly enough to keep the mainstream from overcoming its denial, it will be later rather than sooner. If we can keep ignoring the numbers of our fellows being culled by calling our participation in hotly partisan venues "engaged activism" or the proprietors of such venues "engaged activists", the day of reckoning can be indefinitely postponed. Sorry culls. We're cranking out cleverisms and books and blog ratings and facts—OMG, shitloads of facts—just as fast as ever we can.... Hold on. We will turn the tide. Don't die for a quarter of a century or so, okay?

Is it too much to endure if I point out that ANYONE engaged in partisan shit-slinging is not engaged in social justice? They are fervently working to coöperate with the power elite—most of them fervently trying to join them—whether we're talking on the right or on the left. If you can step out of your righteous indignation for but a few moments, this actually is readily apparent and indisputably lethal.

Then you have to train yourself to stop going there, now don't you? And that could mean eventually having to get out into the analog world and risking something fleshy, now wouldn't it? So, let me reïterate, they are NOT going to take away the means for you to keep engaging in your suicidally-ineffectual clicktivism. It is working beautifully for them, insuring they prevail, and giving more people a chance to make a living off this new theater of saving the world, this cyber liberation that corresponds with actuality not at all.

Plus, beside insuring you stay locked safely in la-la land, it gives them a means to identify you as possibly dangerous, too, and if you are a particularly audacious virtual revolutionary, you can make a name for yourself, make some bucks, get in with the power elite, help cull people who think you're a saint.

Whether you prefer to think of this as fascism or communism—whether you're a little bit Country or a little bit Rock and Roll—dragons are not slain by solitary knights. It takes masses of humans to rid the world of monsters.

.
love, 99
.