The Portal of Lost Wanting

Feb 09 2012 ∞
“ Recent research by the sociologists Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, and Sharon Erickson Nepstad shows that one factor more than any other determines whether nonviolent struggles succeed: protesters’ decision to adopt nonviolence itself. Indeed, Chenoweth and Stephan have shown that peaceful protests are more than twice as likely as violent confrontation to bring about complete or partial regime change.
— The Moscow Times

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Feb 02 2012 ∞

AMIRI BARAKA > DOPE

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Feb 01 2012 ∞

poem of the day 010212

i’ve decided to do poem a day for all of this month.  subjectivity liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity.  too weary to type exclamation marks.

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Jan 27 2012 ∞

don't fetishise the revolutionary other, just give them your money

for the next month, all U.S. dollahz proceeds from sales of Amy De’Ath’s poetry pamphlet CARIBOU will go to Occupy Oakland to support them in their new venture. GO HERE to get yourself some poetry with a side order of SMASH THE STATE.  or, uh, non-violent protest.  or however you wanna call it.

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Oct 26 2011 ∞

Fighting or Camping?

As much as reading the phrase ‘Žižek was right’ makes me hurt, this is interesting (Ben Ehrenreich in the LA Review of Books):

If the cops are being polite and the politicians are eager to make the protesters comfortable, it’s not because they’re nice. It’s because they’re not feeling sufficiently threatened. When several hundred protesters left the City Hall campsite last week, marched to a Bank of America branch on Figueroa, and refused to leave until tellers cashed a giant, Ed McMahon-style check for $653 billion made out to the people of California, the chumminess of our brothers in blue evaporated. Eleven people were arrested. The lesson was clear: The protests would be permitted, encouraged even, so long as the protesters didn’t try to actually do anything. It’s not a fight, in other words, unless you’re fighting. Otherwise, as one particularly intense young fellow put it to me on the City Hall steps last night, “We’re just fucking camping.”

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