Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Bunkers Without Their Guns

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange with Jim in the Moot:

He begins by quoting from the recent post, then goes down memory lane a bit:
Democracy's definitive insistence on accountable authority. . . is. . . misunderstood. . . by [those]. . who mis*identify* state forms with a violence that precedes and exceeds them. . .
Dale,

You wrote, more than 7 years ago,
Look, people, we know all this already. The Moral Majority was never a majority. Multiculturalists won the culture wars. . . America is becoming day by day by day an ever more diverse, secular, urban, pragmatic, convivial multiculture. Please make a note of it, get used to it, and act accordingly.

(via http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/03/america-is-diverse-secular-urban.html )
That may be true (particularly trend-wise), but unfortunately it seems that **most** of the folks in this country who are officially charged with pointing and discharging the state-sanctioned puff-bangs[*] against targets both domestic and foreign, puff-bangs ranging in size from hand-guns all the way up to nukes -- i.e., the cops and the military, are anything but "convivial multiculturalists".

As always, Jim's a good no-nonsense critic with a finely honed bullshit-detector, and with a dauntingly good memory! I replied:

"My point about those who mis-identify the state with violence was directed at anarchists. I am far from denying the vulnerability of law and policing to violence, abuse, and organized exploitation. I just think there is nothing anarchists add to such critiques that liberalism hasn't understood for centuries at this point, and that by focusing their ire at the state itself as the indispensable site of the most organized violence they fail to grasp that the state is also the indispensable site of the most organized non-violence.

"Nor am I unaware nor would I diminish the fact that there are bigots and dangerous characters in the military and in our police forces. How could anyone fail to grasp the reality of that problem at this point?

"But the visibility of abuses and the wide circulation of long-understood reform proposals to ameliorate these abuses are going to turn the tide. De-militarization of the police, community policing models, representative policing, continued de-patriarchization of the military (women and queers rising in the armed forces, recognition of and crackdowns on rape culture, etc.), ending the drug war, getting commonsense gun safety regulations, banning military style weapons and private arsenals, eliminating for-profit prisons, shifting budgetary priorities from jails to education and housing... all of this is in the wind now.

"Far from seeing a worsening here, I am hopeful. In part, demographic diversification and secularizing is the driver here (and of backlash-formations needless to say, as well) but the phenomenon I addressed years back in my posts about winning the culture wars is also connected to this. I still think I was right and think with every passing year the evidence and the resulting force of the American left's victories in the Culture Wars are more palpable.

"Of course, assholes will always be among us and assholes will asshole in their variously catastrophic ways. I just see this as a more hopeful than dreadful story. At any rate, it is something where there is work to be done where the work can make a difference for the better, and that is all anyone can really ask for. New problems will raise their ugly heads soon enough. Environmental racism and climate disruption is a big and growing worry for our remaining years, but the Archie Bunkers with guns are dying off into a more or less manageable marginality in the diversifying, secularizing, planetizing REAL Real America."

1 comment:

jimf said...

> My point about those who mis-identify the state with violence
> was directed at anarchists. I am far from denying the vulnerability
> of law and policing to violence, abuse, and organized exploitation.
> I just think there is nothing anarchists add to such critiques that
> liberalism hasn't understood for centuries at this point, and that
> by focusing their ire at the state itself as the indispensable site
> of the most organized violence they fail to grasp that the state
> is also the indispensable site of the most organized non-violence.

Yes, there was a salient illustration of real-world anarchy in
the Times just the other day.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/world/venezuela-malaria-mines.html
---------------
Hard Times in Venezuela Breed Malaria as Desperate Flock to Mines
by NICHOLAS CASEY

. . .

As a computer technician from a big city, Mr. Balocha was
ill-suited for the mines, his soft hands used to working keyboards,
not the earth. But Venezuela’s economy collapsed on so
many levels that inflation had obliterated his salary,
along with his hopes of preserving a middle-class life.

So, like tens of thousands of other people from across the
country, Mr. Balocha came to these open, swampy mines scattered
across the jungle, looking for a future. Here, waiters,
office workers, taxi drivers, college graduates and even
civil servants on vacation from their government jobs are
out panning for black-market gold, all under the watchful
eyes of an armed group that taxes them and threatens to tie
them to posts if they disobey. . .

Order Outside the Law. . .

It is enforced by an armed group known as the Union.

One of the Union’s bosses came to the mines years ago to work as
a dentist. He still does. But the squads of patrolmen on motorbikes
who dominate this place are the real source of his wealth and power.
He sports gold chains, two gold teeth — and brass knuckles made
of gold. . .

Sitting on his patio, the boss, who declined to be named because
he could be arrested by the government, took pride in what he said
was the Union’s ability to fill in for the vacuum left by the state.
Yes, he acknowledged, the punishments the group meted out could
be gruesome, like shooting off a man’s hand when he stole, or
tying others to posts at the entrance of town with a sign
detailing the offense committed.

But he argued that the discipline kept crime in the camps low and
allowed miners to go about their business in peace — another
aspect of life that has steadily eroded in Venezuela’s dangerous cities.

“To get justice from the police is a joke,” he said. “You have to get
your own justice.” . . .
====


With "brass" knuckles made of gold, no less.