Cynical Sindee: Another white academic (Vicky Osterweil) co-opting and trying to represent and direct what Blacks and other minorities think/want to serve their own political agendas, childhood grievances, and pathological personality recreations.{*}
Q: Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
Osterweil: "It does a number of important things. [...] It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss ... It points to the way in which that's unjust. ... So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free."
Compare how divorced from reality and natural processes Osterweil is to a Creationist's beliefs. The former is promoting a form of craziness that is immediately dangerous, whereas any effects of the latter is indirect/prolonged or consequential primarily if it invades the educational system.
The point is that secular para-religious fanaticism (political ideological cults and their conspiracy theory frameworks used to interpret everything and prescribe action) can potentially be a greater threat than supernatural fanaticism. There is a constitutional obstruction for straight-up religion oozing into administrative departments. Arguably it has been dodged at times in the past, but at least there is a formal separation of Church and state to be reckoned with. Whereas potentially pathological secular belief-systems that hijack social issues and masquerade behind junk "philosophy and science" can receive a free pass through the government/culture barrier.
- - - footnote - - -
{*} Jessica Krug: George Washington University professor says she lied about being black
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54008495
- - - - the article - - -
There is no defense for looting
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ng/615925/
INTRO: Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”
If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.
Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”
The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.”
Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.” (MORE - details)
Q: Can you talk about rioting as a tactic? What are the reasons people deploy it as a strategy?
Osterweil: "It does a number of important things. [...] It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss ... It points to the way in which that's unjust. ... So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free."
Compare how divorced from reality and natural processes Osterweil is to a Creationist's beliefs. The former is promoting a form of craziness that is immediately dangerous, whereas any effects of the latter is indirect/prolonged or consequential primarily if it invades the educational system.
The point is that secular para-religious fanaticism (political ideological cults and their conspiracy theory frameworks used to interpret everything and prescribe action) can potentially be a greater threat than supernatural fanaticism. There is a constitutional obstruction for straight-up religion oozing into administrative departments. Arguably it has been dodged at times in the past, but at least there is a formal separation of Church and state to be reckoned with. Whereas potentially pathological secular belief-systems that hijack social issues and masquerade behind junk "philosophy and science" can receive a free pass through the government/culture barrier.
- - - footnote - - -
{*} Jessica Krug: George Washington University professor says she lied about being black
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54008495
- - - - the article - - -
There is no defense for looting
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ng/615925/
INTRO: Last week, NPR’s Code Switch published an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. NPR summarizes the book as an argument that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”
If the real, lasting change you wish to effect is burning society to cinders and crippling for a generation its ability to serve its poorest citizens, then I suppose I am forced to agree. Osterweil sees an upside. Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” She came to this conclusion six years ago, and in her book, which is written “in love and solidarity with looters the world over,” she defends this view as ably as anyone could.
Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”
The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.”
Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.” (MORE - details)