As soon as we take for granted that there are better and worse ways of doing things, we create a hierarchy that implies perfection at the top. I’ve written that “modern society has a predilection for centralization;” modernity obsesses over perfection by collecting what are perceived as the best ways to do things into what is […]

Here’s a problem: reformists end up playing by oppressor’s rules, forming factions, and marginalizing minorities; revolutionaries become zealots who need to convert an army before they get anything done.
Here’s the underlying problem: change is slow, because people change slowly. Reformists want change that requires the consent of the very people responsible for why things are […]

McCain’s VP pick has been under fire recently for using her private Yahoo email account to conduct state business.
And while the rest of us were sitting around hoping for political backlash, Anonymous went out and did something about it. Remember them? That loose confederation of amateur hackers responsible for the attacks on Scientology earlier this year? […]

I want to continue to expound Abandonist political theory as introduced in this post. In particular I want to develop my statement that the abandonist renegotiates power through circumvention, not through competition.
Reformists cooperate. Revolutionaries compete. Abandonists circumvent.
But cooperate with what? Compete with what? Circumvent what?
The answer is institution–and this is tricky to define, but I […]

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’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 […]

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’s a pattern we can observe, it goes like this: naive enthusiasm, naive counter-enthusiasm, and wise release. Patriotism is foolish. Anti-Americanism is equally foolish. Nations seem to preclude some sort of world harmony, and yet to quest for their destruction is misguided.
Why celebrate the Fourth of July? The founders were intellectual elitists who forced their […]

So, I just saw the new movie adaptation of Ironman. If one can look past the racism and sexism that Hollywood seems incapable of transcending, it offered a fairly intriguing story. The narrative is well-rounded, with enticing action sequences that are by no means the central focus of the movie. By the end, some important […]