Modern society has a predilection for centralization–the consolidation of resources. This has clear roots in Enlightenment thinking: use natural science to discover and build on the best ways to do things, and ultimately strive toward perfection. This crippling singularity does not reflect the complexity of the human experience.
There is no best form of government. There […]

I hate Obama. I hate Democrats as much as Republicans. I hate electoral politics. My rage sits with me, fetid, like a growing abscess. I want so much to use this post as razor blade to lance it, and spray the pus all over you, leaving you so disgusted that you will share my hate.
I […]

I’ll just say this flat out: non-violence is a luxury of privlege.
You’ll say, “What about Ghandi? What about Martin Luther King?” Ghandi was operating in the context of imperial decline that was already well on its way due to violent resistances in other countries; King in the context of black militance.
I’d love to be a […]

Slow and steady–that’s how tyranny grabs at our throats, so we’re already blacking out by the time we realize we are being strangled. People always gawk at how well-intentioned and sane Germans allowed the Nazi Party to rise to such prominence. It was a slippery slope; consecutive decisions were fairly rational, but from beginning to […]

It’s happening a lot more these days, this blurring of the lines between dystopian fantasies and the world I see around me. I used to absorb those works of fiction which let me bathe in the tragic absurdity of what the world could become. It might even have seemed remotely realistic, but it was still […]

I shall make some attempt to offer a concise theory of oppression that has predictive power. To entertain this discussion, I take for granted that oppression in the United States is pervasive–manifesting in the various ‘isms–and shall offer no evidence to support this claim. My goal is not to validate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy […]

We became aware of suffering. We knew we had to work to change things. The first step was learning. We read as much as we could, we started talking about how things could be different. We didn’t know what to do.
We became aware of power structures. We saw an opportunity to work towards change. We […]

There was a time when I was ignorant of oppression; a blissful childhood spent aloof to the suffering in the world. My eyes began to open in my adolescence, and my identity shifted. Naively, I thought we could use the system’s own channels to reform and ameliorate oppressive conditions. I slowly became disillusioned with this […]

Last Friday I took part in Chicago’s Critical Mass. Rain was expected and it was the first Mass of the summer, so we numbered in the hundreds rather than thousands. Those who road found gorgeous weather, only light rain, and high spirits all around.
Hundreds of cyclists riding in unison tend to block traffic out of […]

This is a very long post. If you get all the way through it, there is a treat at the bottom just for you.

Somewhere lying on a desk in the back of our cultured minds is a definition of property. We read it once, and can’t recite it verbatim, but we have a good idea […]