Category: Uncategorized

www.counter-inaugural.org

Kep quotes Daniel Ellsberg on the stop-the-inauguration list:

From Daniel Ellsberg’s “Secrets: A memoir of the Vietnam War and
the Pentagon Papers”

pg. 336

“… The big event on that campus, just before our talks, had been the burning of the ROTC building. In the question period a student referred to this, with much applause and cheering from the audience, and asked me challengingly what I thought of it. The implication was that my questioner had taken part in the burning, though he didn’t say that, and it was clear that it had been a popular act among the students. ” I said that I had been trained in the Marine Corps to do violence and that I had seen a lot of it in Vietnam. Its effectiveness, which was ultimately its justification, wasn’t just a hypothetical question for me. I had had a good deal of experience on which to judge that, and I was no longer so impressed with it, and I knew much more about how it could go wrong than when I had been a marine. I very well understood, and shared, the frustration of the students at their inability to stop the war. But it seemed to have a lot in common with the frustration of the troops in Vietnam, who were the same age as the students in this audience, at their inability to win the war. And the response I had seen in Vietnam was very similar. As I spoke, the memory seemed very fresh to me, as if I had just come back, though three years of war had passed since I’d returned from Vietnam. I told them of the soldiers in Rach Kien, burning down every hut they came to, for no real reason than to leave some mark that they had passed that way, that they were not just plowing the sea. It was understandable, but it didn’t really help anything, it didn’t change the situation. “It was very American, I said, to think that to be willing to use violence was to show seriousness and to be effective, but that was not what I’d learned in Vietnam. I said I could see that many people in the audience felt proud of what had just happened on their campus but that I couldn’t tell them I believe that burning down ROTC buildings would be any more productive for ending the war than burning down villages in Vietnam. It would take commitment, and courage, and tenacity to end this war, not the imitation of the government’s own destructive tactics. “

I think that this is a very good perspective, and articulates the reasonable concerns for violence as political dissent. I think if there are concerns, they should lie in these arguments and not from peoples prejudices about black-clad anarchists.

Geraldine Sealy quotes Paul Krugman in a Salon article:

Paul Krugman, who actually is an economist, has an even scarier warning: We’re turning into Argentina. In an interview, Krugman told Reuters he’s most concerned Bush will ignore the advice of economists and push through more tax cuts while also trying to privatized Social Security. ‘If you go back and you look at the sources of the blow-up of Argentine debt during the 1990s, one little-appreciated thing is that social security privatization was a important source of that expansion of debt,’ said Krugman. ‘So if you ask the question do we look like Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is quite willing to admit at this point. We’ve become a banana republic.'”

Try the paudio module.

Also check this thread out: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/10/msg01221.html.

I got info about this from some listserv or another:

Hi All,
I wanted to let you know about a research/support
service offered by library workers to activists and
independent journalists.

Radical Reference http://www.radicalreference.info/
was established for the protests against the RNC, but
we’re keeping on and will also work on the Counter
Inaugural. In addition to answering questions online
and helping journalists with fact-checking, I hope
we’ll have a group of street librarians onsite with
“Ready Reference” kits to help people at the protests.

Pose questions (on any activist topic) via the form on
the website. For more information or to discuss the
project further write to info@radicalreference.info

All my best, Jenna

From http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?action=history&id=MuttFaq/Misc:

One simple way is:
# start a new eMail,
# fill in the template data & body,
# postpone the eMail,
# Copy the template eMail to your templates-folder (repeat for any other templates).
Then, to use a template, apply the resend-message
function on the desired template and continue to fill out the
missing data & body.

You can also read a template from a file with partial headers and
body text when you launch mutt with -H .

Writing this here is really interesting and also somewhat inappropriate, because this really good radio piece critiques media, the Internet, and blogs, which is exactly where I’m mentioning it. These pieces are collected from the Your Radio Nightlight radio show and come from a series of pieces that the shows producer made to reflect his feelings being confronted with all of the socio-political events that we’ve all been bombarded with of late. The piece that I find most interesting is the last one in this radio show. Initially, I thought his metaphore was crude and contrived, but the point he makes is a very good one. That is, that the problem is that people aren’t misiniformed. He argues, that with the Internet, people have access to a number of alternative news sources. He describes the process of trying to tap into this information in an attempt to do something, anything. However, even when bombarded with this fair and more accurate information, it still leaves him and the people around him feeling powerless.

I share this sentiment completely and I had that eerie feeling when listening to the radio piece that one only gets when they hear someone else describing their own life. I think alternative media is very important. Without it, we would all be more ignorant. Things are so bad, also, that I think it’s important to have some sort of documentation, maybe as a cautionary tale for future generations, maybe as a marker for future historians to pinpoint where things started going horribly wrong, or maybe for us, here, now to force us to aknowledge that yes, things really are this bad.

Still, for all the information, for all the reality that we consume, filtered through televisions, headphones, and computer displays, we are just as frustrated, just as afraid. Knowledge is power, but in this case, it’s not enough. The difficult question is, with all our knowledge, our awareness, even our empathy or concern or fear, what happens next?

Boxcar Website: I made updates to the survey software based on Erin’s e-mail. The authentication now gives more chances and the summary of completed surveys is sorted alphabetically.

Boxcar Website: I finished up the survey application and sent the URL and login credentials to Matt/Erin for approval.

6DC Slideshow: I made a slideshow with quality and size that I’m pretty happy with it. I exported lower res. versions of it to the web for Justin and Jad to take a look at. You can watch it here.

A lot of my friends have written things in response to their feelings about the election and they all reflect the same feeling of loss, of frustration, of trepidation, but additionally, I can’t think of a time when people have come, independently, to the same conclusions. Maybe there’s something positive in that, I don’t know. The interesting thing, is that people have the same feelings and thoughts about the elections, the issues in it, the reasons people voted a certain way, or didn’t and there’s been so little communication between people. I feel like my voice has been stolen and that any time I try to talk through my feelings about American politics, it comes out muddled and confused. Hopefully the words of my friends might articulate some of the things that I can’t.

My friend Jason writes in e-mail:

So it is over. I just watched Kerry concede and Bush declare victory.
There is a dull ache somewhere in my head and my stomach is cranky. I
feel the need to articulate something to somebody, and hope that makes
me feel better. Though, this could be read as my sour grapes. : )

A snippet from a CNN exit poll illustrates my concerns:
22% called “moral values” the election’s most important issue (79% of
those were backing Bush), 20% believed it was the economy (80% of those
were backing Kerry), 19% pointed to terrorism (~79% of those were for
Bush), and 15% pointed to Iraq (75% of those for Kerry).

Granted, exit polls are not the most reliable, but I suspect that this
is a good snap shot of reality. Here’s my take…

America is dangerously conservative and unabashedly uncritical–this is
the momentum of our electorate. They care more about the behavior of
same sex partners than they do about issues of import.
Republicans are good at conjuring red herrings that rely on fear and
moral issues–this is the momentum of our politics, and the media is
only fostering it. And the paucity of integrity and lack of
appreciation that people should come before profits afflicts politicians
on both sides.

Now Bush has a legitimate mandate, and this is scary. Before he ruled
by fiat of the Supreme Court and even then carried on with an air of
entitlement. What the Republicans do with this new vote of confidence
and the additional gains in Congress will be frightening. Expect bold
new appointments, sneaky politics, shady bills, and some Supreme Court
action.

Every other liberal jokes of moving out of the country (me included of
course), some seem serious. But we need a liberal (hell, even a
moderate) America more than ever, so I hope this attitude doesn’t give
way to political lethargy. The U.S. needs people like us to advocate
for the marginalized and the environment, and keep a watchful eye on our
military and economic misadventures. We’ll bring the debate to them and
get a productive discourse going. Our history has seen shittier times,
but through action, often at the behest of true leaders, people beat it.
So as the country becomes increasingly divided and as domestic and
global politics heat up, I believe that Republicans will be held to
account. I think we’ll be instrumental in this.

Think of this way. Without representatives to stand in for us, we’ve
got to own our politics more personally. So while we are out of power
formally, we will pick up the slack in our regular lives. In some
respect this is cool and empowering. We are on the offensive, we will
find solidarity, and we’ll meet success sooner or later.

My friend Becca writes on her livejournal:

resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.
resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.resist.

please. it’s going to take all of us

My friend Mike, who I haven’t really talked to since we both lived in Edinburgh wrote in e-mail:

i’m completely devastated by this election, and it is not going away. i wonder if you feel the same. the only explanations are ones which shatter beliefs about this country that i need to be true: that it is not filled with stupid, silly people and that it is not easily cowed by political reduction of macroscopic problems.