The cult

Regarding the black bloc and throwing bricks through plate glass windows: I’ve read the anarchist tracts. I’ve listened to the black bloc types try to explain why their tactics are useful. None of it makes any sense at all in the real world, where the majority have no problem with the violence inherent in the system as long as it's directed against people who do things like, well, throw bricks through plate glass windows. It’s like a cobbled up philosophy thrown together to attract alienated kids who want to feel powerful, sort of a cult now that I think about it, a cult that’s amazingly similar to Ayn Rand’s cult of perfect freedom without responsibility. And as with the Rand cult, it has absolutely nothing to do with leftists or left-wing causes, and black bloc in the midst of a protest should be treated the same as teabaggers in the midst of a protest — i.e., as a hostile force with a philosophy and goals completely incompatible with our own.

-- Badtux the Left-wing Penguin

"Expose the violence inherent in the system"

That's one of the purported motives of the Black Bloc. The problem is, most people already are aware of the violence inherent in the system. As long as that violence is expressed towards people they don't like, such as criminals and minorities, they have not a single problem with it.

This is one reason why I insist that the purported motives of the Black Bloc are total bullshit, and that the actual motive is to discredit left-wing causes. And who benefits if that happens? Hint: the Koch Brothers dance a jig every time the Black Bloc shows up at a left-wing protest. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the "Just the Facts" Penguin

The lucky duckies

The above sign carried by one of those crazy OccupyWallStreet hippies with only vague complaints explains why we're seeing friction in our society. The 1% has done ridiculously well over the past thirty years. The top 20% has done quite well. The rest of America... not so much.

Oh those crazy kids and their notion that the gains of economic progress should go to everybody, not just to the 1%'ers... I mean, look at that kid above. Clearly has no demands. That button she's wearing saying "Tax the 1%"? Not a demand, nosirree. The fact that the 1% has an effective tax rate of around 17% while my effective tax rate is around 39% when you account for SSA, sales taxes, property taxes, etc.... gosh, why should I think the 1% aren't paying their fair share? Only silly people would think that, right? Right?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Disclaimer: I am one of the 20% who have done fairly well over the past 30 years, so I guess that disqualifies me from being a crazy hippy. Unless you're a right-wing moron. Oh wait, that was redundant redundancy in terms, wasn't it? :)

Nice hat

From the Brooklyn Bridge OWS arrests.

Folks, you attend these things, you, too, can meet cool girls wearing Gir hats who smile for the camera while being arrested :).

-- Badtux the Wistful Penguin

Why are today's protests so lame?

Earlier I pointed out that the civil rights protests were done by dignified looking people waving signs expressing an agenda advocating specific actions (ending segregated schools, voting rights, equal job opportunities, etc.), backed up by model legislation introduced in Congress and by some of the best legal minds in the country playing the courts like a piano. Then I pointed out that most modern protests look like a friggin' zoo, a buncha slovenly young people dressed like schoolchildren on a daytrip out to the city with no connection to any agenda or strategy whether legislative or legal. Where’s the signs demanding their agenda? Where's their sample legislation? Why are they dressed like slovenly children on a day trip to the city, rather than like dignified grownups? As a dignified grownup, how can I take them seriously?

The question is: Why are modern protests so lame? Personally, I blame the anti-war protesters of the 1960′s who think they ended the Vietnam War with their circus and continue to influence tactics. They didn’t end the Vietnam War. That was Walter Cronkite and large numbers of “serious people” who figured out that the only way to “win” the war was to invade North Vietnam, which had a big chance of inviting both Chinese and Soviet intervention that likely would have escalated to nuclear war (indeed we now know that threats to use nuclear weapons were made by *both* sides, and that the Soviets threatened to invade West Germany if we invaded North Vietnam). All the hippies did was give the right wing a convenient scapegoat so that they wouldn’t have to admit that the U.S. got beat like a drum by a buncha pajama-wearin’ slopes — i.e., it allowed them to maintain their racism against Southeast Asians. Instead, Hanoi Jane and the hippies ended the war.

But y’know, I never seen a dead body come back from Vietnam that had been killed by Jane Fonda. They all got killed by NVA or VC guns or grenades or bombs or booby traps. Funny, that Hanoi Jane gets all the credit for winning the war for North Vietnam, despite the fact that, like, she didn’t kill a single soldier, while the people who did win the war don’t get credit at all from racist America, which *still* refuses to admit that a buncha pajama-wearin’ slopes beat’em like a drum. But the VC and NVA won. They did. But racist lefties and racist righties both refuse to admit that fact and insist that the lefties ended the Vietnam War, not the NVA and VC, because apparently brown people could *never* have, like, actually beat the good ole’ white folk of the U S of A. Funny, huh?

So anyhow, we aren't going to get anywhere with this protest stuff until we tell the boomers and their hippy bullshit to go take a hike and start behaving like Serious People with a clear political agenda and with the legal resources to back up that agenda. That's just the facts. That's how the world works, and no amount of slovenly young people getting beat up by fat middle-aged cops is gonna change that.

-- Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin

How to make sure there's "liberal bias"

A law blog points out why the police might want to re-think how they treat journalists: If you arrest student journalists and other journalists for doing their job, that will make them cover the police more critically in the future. If you arrest a photographer for "rioting" when he is in fact taking a photograph of the riot rather than participating in it, if you arrest a reporter for "rioting" when he is in fact standing in front of a camera reporting on the riot rather than participating in it, this will make that photographer or reporter less inclined in the future to believe the police when the police make accusations. After all, he now has personal experience with the police making a false accusation against him. So now he personally knows that police officers can and do lie. That has to color his future reporting. There is an old saying, "never argue with someone who buys paper by the truckload and ink by the barrel". Even in today's Internet-connected world that is still a wise saying.

- Badtux the Journalism Penguin

It's Freedom(tm)!

Dude! It's Freedom(tm)! Less filling! Tastes nasty! Why do you hate Freedom(tm)?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

* Freedom(tm) is a trademark of Corporate America. Any resemblance to freedom (small f) is accidental. Offer enforced at gunpoint whenever necessary in order to insure compliance with Corporate America's dictates. You are Corporate America's slaves and if you disagree, you will either be rounded up or forced to live as a homeless bum on the streets until you die of exposure or starvation. Enjoy your Freedom(tm)!

Why there is no draft (and won't be one)

As we all know, the U.S. Army is seriously hurting for manpower, to the point where they are accepting gang-bangers into the military. So it would seem reasonable to expect there to be a draft in our short term future, right?

Uhm, no. There's two reasons for this. First of all, our rulers learned from Vietnam that a draftee army simply won't fight a war that is deeply unpopular at home. During the last two years of our involvement in Vietnam, Nixon had to rely on the strategy of "Vietnamization", because the majority of the U.S. Army simply refused to conduct combat operations and "fragged" officers and NCO's who tried to force them to do so.

But secondly, and most importantly, our rulers learned from the fall of the Soviet Union. When the military junta declared that Gorbachev was "relaxing", the KGB wasn't on board, and thus the Soviet media immediately reported Yeltsin's assertions that this was a coup against the lawful government of the land and his call for massive protests. When the draftee Army of the Soviet Union was sent to crush these protests... they simply refused to shoot. Because the draftee soldiers were a cross-section of Soviet youth, not a self-selected minority self-selected for loyalty to their leaders, and a cross-section of Soviet youth were not interested in killing their fellow Soviet citizens. The Soviet junta had learned the wrong lesson from Tiananmen Square. The correct lesson to be learned from Tianamen Square was that any attempts to crush a popular uprising via force had to be accompanied by a large-scale media operation to demonize the protesters and by quietly shifting away any units that might sympathize with the protesters and instead bring in units comprised of soldiers who had an ethnic hatred for the protesters. But the lesson that the Soviet junta had learned, not being particularly bright apparently, was that the way to deal with protesters was to bring in the Red Army and order them to shoot the protesters.

It did not work, and it did not work because the Red Army was a draftee Army. In short, a draftee army threatens our ruler's rule over us because it is loyal to the nation, not to our rulers. WWII proves that a draftee army can be tremendously effective when engaged in a cause that is just. But the last time anybody attacked America with military force was on December 7, 1941. The chances of our military engaging in a "just war", one against a nation which has attacked us, is slim to none -- the closest we've come to that in the past 60 years is Afghanistan and the initial campaign to go after Osama bin Laden, a campaign which has mysteriously morphed into a campaign against the Taliban, which had nothing to do with bin Laden's attack against America. A draftee army is not effective when being used to fight unpopular wars or to repress internal popular dissent because it represents a cross-section of the nation and thus its primary loyalty is to the nation rather than to the government.

More on self-selecting: Let's face it, even if I were young enough to join the Army, I would not. I would not because I do not believe in the legitimacy of the current war that our military is fighting in Iraq and I have no loyalty to the current government of the United States, which I believe is acting in an illegal manner against the best interests of the nation and its people. I would not join the Army today because my loyalty is to the nation, not to the government. The people who join the Army today are those who are self-selecting for loyalty to the government. If they were not loyal to the government, they wouldn't join the Army -- like me, they'd stay home. They may be loyal for any number of reasons. They may believe in the rightness of the government, are at least neutral on that regard and are joining the Army for other reasons such as, well, the possibility of starving to death if they stay home, or because they're violent gang-bangers who just like the idea of cappin' some homies without any legal repercussions and what bigger gang can you join than one that has the atomic bomb? But the end result is that people whose first loyalty is to the Constitution and the nation which it defines are increasingly either leaving or being purged from the military (e.g. General Shinseki, Admiral Fallon, etc.), and instead our military being increasingly populated by those whose only loyalty is to themselves or to their leaders (Petraeus, the gang-bangers who are loyal to the notion of "cappin' some homies", the die-hard 21 percenters who believe Bush is God, etc.). And our rulers like it that way, because while a military comprised of thugs, gang-bangers, zealots, and toadies is a military that isn't particularly effective against other militaries, it is one that is loyal. As our military is increasingly purged of all those who are loyal to the Constitution and the nation which it defines rather than to the government, expect larger roles for the military in domestic "law enforcement" -- up to, and including, orders which require our military to fire upon unarmed demonstrators. Orders which will be followed, because one thing that history has shown -- no government ever has ever had a problem finding sufficient zealots, thugs and gang-bangers to follow such orders. All they have to do is lower their enlistment standards sufficiently to get the thugs into the ranks, and voila.

So: There will be no draft. There will simply be a continued lowering of standards to get more zealots, thugs and gang-bangers into the ranks. And that is a feature, not a flaw, as far as our rulers are concerned. Clear?

-- Badtux the History Penguin

The guerilla in defeat

Over on Lucky White Girl, the blog proprietor waxes nostalgic about the modern anti-globalization movement, which has proven capable of mustering 10,000 guerillas to take on the Borg-like forces of globalized mercantilism (I call it mercantilism rather than capitalism because government-enforced "capitalism" which takes the wealth of nations and gives it to a privileged few via government-enforced oligopolies is nothing of the sort). She exults over its decentralized nature, its lack of central leaders that can be taken out to destroy the movement, their resilience in the face of overwhelming opposition from the forces of globalized mercantilism. The thing is, by comparing her movement to a guerilla movement, she is admitting that it has been defeated.

Look, nobody fights a guerilla war if they don't have to. The only people who fight guerilla wars are the losers. If you can take on an opposing army in a straight-up battle, that's what you do. In Vietnam, the NVA resorted to guerilla tactics not because said tactics were effective. They resorted to guerilla tactics because every time they fought a straight-up battle against the U.S. Army, they got their butt kicked.

"But the U.S. lost in Vietnam!" I hear you say. No. The U.S. left Vietnam. The U.S. left Vietnam because there was no compelling national interest for the U.S. to be in Vietnam. North Vietnam never posed a security threat to the United States, and lacking such a security threat, there simply was insufficient rationale to forever station half a million troops on the other side of the world at enormous expense. Reality is that no guerilla army has ever defeated a professional army using guerilla tactics, and never will. All that guerillas can do is provide pinpricks in the side of a professional army, pinpricks which are painful but not life-threatening by any means. Over time, such pin-pricks can motivate the professional army to go elsewhere, much as the pin-pricks of a thousand flying mosquitos can send a troop of Boy Scouts to the shelter of a screened-in cabin, but the notion of a guerilla defeating a standing army is ridiculous. The Viet Mihn which defeated the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu were not a guerilla army. They did not use guerilla tactics against the French. They were a regular army, equipped with artillery and anti-aircraft cannon, using regular military tactics against an opposing army.

The very fact that you use guerilla tactics is an admission of weakness, because if you had the strength, you would mount a full-scale assault using conventional tactics. But in this particular war, the mercantilists have all the weapons. They control a vast right-wing propaganda machine that has propagandized millions of brownshirts to enforce political conformity amongst wide swathes of the population. The anti-globalism activists reach hundreds of thousands with their tactics. The VRWC reaches millions every single night, every day of the week. And furthermore, the mercantilists can't be pinpricked into leaving the way that the Americans were pinpricked into leaving Vietnam. They were born here. They live here. They have much self-interest in perpetuating their rule over the United States, a rule which is very profitable. They're not going anywhere.

Does this mean the situation is hopeless? Probably not. It is starting to dawn upon the more brilliant of the mercantilists that pure mercantilistic oppression of the masses is probably not in their best interests. A kinder, gentler rule works better in the long run because it keeps the sheep contented and on the farm where they can be more easily fleeced than if they jumped the fences due to harsh conditions. The pinpricks of the anti-mercantilism activists, while not particularly hurting these people, have the potential to grow into something larger if the masses are oppressed harder, and heading off a potential adversary at the pass before he has mobilized his full forces is always a wise thing to do. So while this movement will never win, the very fact that it exists brings some unpleasant facts to the fore that our ruling class had unwisely forgotten. But, as with Vietnam, in the end the decision will be made by our ruling class, not by "we the people", who do not rule this nation and have not ruled this nation since the day it was born (unless by "we the people" you mean a wealthy elite, or, as George W. Bush puts it, "my constituency, the haves and the have-mores"). Our noise is important in leading them towards making a wise choice, but in the end, we will no more defeat the mercantilists using guerilla tactics than the North Vietnamese Army defeated the U.S. Army using guerilla tactics. At best, we're a nuisance. Which, in the end, may be good enough.

-- Badtux the Movement Penguin

Vladmir Putin needs to take lessons from Mayor Blumberg

When the Republicans came to New York City in 2004, Mayor Blumberg arrested thousands of people and imprisoned them in toxic waste warehouses for the duration, resulting in lawsuits and mass dismissal of charges.

When protests broke out in Moscow, President Putin arrested "dozens" of people and kept them in jail overnight.

That's all? That's all you got, Pooty-poot? What kinda freakin' banana republic President are you anyhow? I mean, c'mon, the mayor of freakin' New York City is more repressive than you are! Sheesh! Keep up this level of repression, and, why, why, Dear Leader might rebuke you again! Sheesh!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

NYPD spying on America

Hmm. Apparently the NYPD is under the impression that their job now includes spying on people who don't like Republicans. Funny, I thought the job of the police was to protect me from criminals, not to protect me from folks saying things I don't want to hear. But oops, I forgot! Remember, the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. If we don't destroy our freedoms before the terrorists can do so, the terrorists win! If we don't spy on our fellow Americans or shut them up when they say things we don't like, why, those nasty islamofascists will swim across the Atlantic with box cutters in their teeth and KILL US ALL!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Clashing styles

Unintentionally hilarious Pravda.ru headline: "Brazil police clash with protesters demonstrating against Bush visit".

Uhm, yeah. Hasn't anybody ever told the Brazil police that blue-grey really, really does NOT go with green and yellow? The Brazil police need to get those Queer Eye guys to come in and give them a fashion makeover, sheesh! Although I must admit that the jaunty beret certainly gives this fine example of Brazil police-dom a rather dashing look, wot? But what's with the motorcycle helmet worn by the cop in the background? Quite unfashionable, that!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin