I said it was the price I had to pay to be my own persona and that I was prepared to pay it. The Resistance, I claimed, would carry on its struggle in jail and also out. Our bodies might be locked up, but we would continue to organize. I claimed that when I was... Continue Reading →
You stay put, circumstances change around you… #schismogenesis #FieldDynamics
What seemed "radical" a couple of years previously gets overtaken by 'events' and - frankly, by other people needing to stake out more extreme/holier-than-thou edgelord positions in order to distinguish themselves from 'the pack.' This dynamic is well understood - see Irving Janis on "groupthink", or "Chaos of Disciplines" by Andrew Abbott. Bateson probably wrote... Continue Reading →
Ayn Rand, climate change and food vulnerability
It's funny what stays with you. When I was 20 I went through a very brief Ayn Rand "phase." For those not familiar - she's a loony tunes author and "philosopher" for whom anything that wasn't competition and "free markets" was the slippery slope to the gulag. Google her if you want a laugh. In... Continue Reading →
Judges refusing to let defendants explain their motives is nowt new. #JustStopOil #VietnamWar
"This isn't a court of justice, son, this is a court of law"... and all that. This below from David Harris's memoir "Dreams Die Hard" is worth remembering as Just Stop Oil people get done for contempt of court for simply explaining to juries what they did, or rather, why they did it. As a... Continue Reading →
Awesomely effective manipulation technique
This, from "Dreams Die Hard" by the late David Harris, is a chilling look at love-bombing followed by setting someone up to fail... If they taught this stuff in school - "how elites and charlatans manipulate you", alongside courses in understanding corporate and state propaganda and lies, we might not be in quite the same... Continue Reading →
Consistency against hypocrisy, or on a martyrdom trip?
Another age-old debate. In this clip below, from "Dreams Die Hard" David Harris recounts a debate about strategy/what next with his friend Dennis Sweeney “I don’t believe you’re saying this, Dennis. If I felt that way I’d still have a deferment. I've given all kinds of speeches telling people they ought to join The Resistance,... Continue Reading →
“strategies given six months to succeed, then abandoned…”
This below from David Harris' "Dreams Die Hard" seems crucial. Although I was not privy to them at the time, other conversations of Dennis’s after his return from Washington made it apparent that his enthusiasm for The Resistance strategy was waning. The idea, he said, had been to break the peace movement out of its... Continue Reading →
What IS it about libraries and archives that affects me so much?
The emotions of archives, their "affect" - presumably someone's done an autoethnography of that? (Yes - see further reading!) Of the joy of handling papers that haven't been looked at for decades/centuries? Of the rituals of the getting of the entrance card, furtling around in archives, of visiting, of becoming adept at the various rituals... Continue Reading →
FT Magazine letter: orbs, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton
Published in the FT Magazine, 19 August 2023
“Prolier than thou” bullshit, 1967…
Two quotes from the excellent book "Dreams Die Hard" by David Harris... He'd co-founded a draft resistance outfit (called "The Resistance" and within a year it was being outflanked by groups wanting/needing to edge-lord it. Steve, holding the fort in Berkeley, favoured the latter. Before leaving for the Northwest, we had agreed with him to... Continue Reading →
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