Revolution?

People are too invested in things as they are now. They post things on Facebook and sometimes go to protests because it somehow assuages their guilt for benefiting from the system.

A naive belief in the salvific power of violence never did anyone any good; it’s especially dangerous when coupled with a folksy appeal to unity and pretty pictures of trees and an abstract centrist decoupling from real interests. I can agree with the first premise– by all means do something, stop complaining! –but not with anything that follows. It’s a limited imagination that conceives of violence as the alternative to political impotence.

This is evil stuff. I fear we will see a lot more of it.

I agree with Stuart. This is a disturbing call.

There are things you can do other than violent things. In this regard I agree with the permaculture community: don’t waste time pulling down the old system, rather start building the new.

We don’t need violence to end this system, it is unsustainable on a number of counts, and it is only a matter of time before it collapses without anyone having to do anything. A violent end, even if it shortens the natural term of the system, is likely to be just as destructive, if not more. Also, the leaders of violent revolutions are violent people, and perhaps a worse regime would come in. The current system, certainly borne out of violence has at least evolved to one that no longer depends on it in a raw form for its own perpetuation, any new system born out of violence would depend on raw violence to maintain itself, at least initially. Whereas a system that emerges through co-operative endevours that seeks to create an alternative would be far more pleasant (if successful).

Look to the words of Bill Mollison in this regard (father of permaculture) “the most revolutionary thing you can do is to grow food” (or something to that effect). Growing food locally frees you from the corporate system, by providing your most basic essential needs.

That is my suggestion for any aspiring revolutionaries. Grow food where-ever you can, or just gain the skills on a small scale (home or community garden) or run a seed bank, or teach preserving techniques – do anything you can to contribute to this ‘new’economy. But do not waste time, and perhaps your life, fighting the old system. It is already a ‘walking dead’ entity. Your energies can be better directed.

A Walt with a great radio voice is still a Walt.

The call to revolution deserves it’s own response, maybe. Actually it’s hard to know just what part of this you actually do agree with Ian. The aesthetic is simply bizarre paired with the message whatever you think of the text. “Neo-modern” architecture and cool nature calling up the passions to revolution in a blase tone of voice? I think not. “The revolution will not be televised” is a tone I can take much more seriously than this artsy-fartsy nonsense.

DavidW – the system is already walking dead? No way, except for if it does indeed bring about cataclysmic climate change on a scale large enough to seriously damage the human species, enough to cause chaos heavy enough to collapse state control.

As for “the revolution”, the state serves the .01 percent *very* well, thank you, and the masses seem to be farther from clueful than ever. Does anybody believe any part of Marx’s theories of revolution now? If not Marxism, then what is your (anybody, please) theory of how we could possibly get from here to revolution? The real endpoint of Yippieism was proven in Chicago in 1968 if not again in the USA starting in Seattle, on up to Occupy almost everywhere. The cops have heavy weapons now, the DAs own the courts and the judges aren’t opposed to total lockdown style discipline if it comes to that, and the corrections industry is quite up to the task of housing another few percent of the population on demand.

Nobody is going to crush the modern state from within. It can and will get much much repressive if it needs to (think “1984”), but it doesn’t even have to in the least. It’s already got the 99% by the hearts and minds and balls. IMHO and I sure don’t like it, but there is zero ideological base on the left for any serious ‘state-denting’ level action anywhere I look in US/UK/Oz/Asia and almost nothing in Europe.

At the age of 60 I’m old enough to see Iraq or Afghanistan when I think of what a revolution significant enough to succeed in smashes the modern state would like. I sure hate the wholly owned modern state of the .01% but revolution does not seem to be the answer. Actually I can’t conceive of any process whereby we get from here to there anyway so IMO it’s totally moot.

As for the message of ‘get off your ass and DO something’, the narrator himself says, ‘I’m sick of your pissing and moaning so I’m just going to chill out. Call me when you get the revolution together.’ That more of less does in the supposed call to action, doesn’t it?

I’m as opposed to the corporate state of by and for the .01% as anybody but as far as I can tell the possible forces to oppose this are historically weaker than ever since the start of the industrial revolution. “Labor”? It’s gone. Where else is the anti-capitalism supposed to come from?

You had me waste 3 minutes to watch THAT? April 1 is 6 weeks off

It does amuse me to watch the top quintile muse about revolution, safe in the blasé assumption that they would of course be part of the over-turners, not the over-turned…

That said, fear not, this is not actually a call to revolution. This is simply a packaged piece of media fluff with good production qualities aimed at capturing eyeball share. If it is a call to anything, it is a call to more ass sitting – the message being that change is worth coming out from in front of the keyboard and screen for only if it is revolutionary and only if the other folks are sufficiently blood thirsty to be “worth the producer’s while”. Said producer is a voice actor who vaguely claims a background with SADF special forces – my view, this is just another example of the “some guy on the Internet big talking about what a hard, hard man he is” genre.

Does a pretty good job of elaborating on Burke’s quote: “Bad things happen when good people do nothing.”

Whether a revolution happens really isn’t up to the hoi polloi. Whenever talk of it comes up, I am reminded of the words of somebody (Glen Tomkins) who articulated the point better than myself, in some other blog’s comment section.

This came out of a discussion about the debt ceiling madness back in 2011.

I’m not going to say it’s time for a revolution. Revolution is the opiate of the high-brow intellectuals. (Centrism is the opiate of the middle-brow intellectuals.) In any even half-way successful society, revolution isn’t an option that anyone but the ruling elite has available. In a successful society, everyone else imagines that their relative prosperity and well-being is the result of the leadership of the current elite, and they won’t upset the apple cart no matter how strong a merely theoretical case high brow intellectuals might make that they could get themselves a much better deal by being demanding and assertive. The US is a lot more than half-way successful, so only its ruling elite can decide for a revolution.

Damned if they don’t seem to be intent on doing just that. It looks like we’re going to have a completely optional national bankruptcy crisis, created by the party that most closely serves the ruling elite, because that elite just isn’t getting all the RoI, and all the impunity, that it imagines it deserves. It has to suffer the indignity of the continued drain on their incomes posed by Medicare and Social Security, God help us.

This could only happen in an unusually successful society, and one in which the elite had grown completely unused to the very idea of any need to respect limits. But it does happen to such societies. England at the time its great earls and dukes forced a budget crisis, and then their Civil War, and France at the time the grandees on the Parlement de Paris forced an equally unnecessary budget crisis, and thus their Revolution, are both examples of incredibly entitled and privileged elites in the most successful nations of their day, just throwing it all away because they weren’t getting everything without limit, and could not comprehend that that is a basic condition of life.

If that’s how it goes here in the US, if they actually do this thing and force the US into bankruptcy, the result will so go against them, will so completely destroy them, that future generations will have the same difficulty understanding that it wasn’t the ordinary and downtrodden who made the resulting revolution, but the very elite that the revolution ended up obliterating, that we have in understanding the French Revolution and English Civil War.

The machers in our ancien regime have a death wish. They’re welcome to it, and good riddance once they’re gone. The problem is that revolution isn’t one of their little private excesses they can indulge in and not hurt anyone else.

I’m uncomfortable with author Timster’s propagation of holocaust revisionism.
http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.com/2015/01/its-about-time.html

I don’t like addiction being used as a universal theory of human behaviour. It’s verging on a grand synthesis with the “war on terror”.

1. You have rights.
2. (Except, naturally, on a battlefield)
3. Every square inch of the Earth’s surface is a battlefield.

1. Everyone has rights.
2. (Except for addicts, naturally, who need to be protected from themselves)
3. Every single person on Earth is an addict.

In case the above isn’t clear, “slaves and knaves, fuck ’em” is not just wicked, it is empirically wrong.

Theory must empower praxis, and the job is to find an analysis that makes revolution plausible, and an activism that simultaneously intellectualizes actual social being.

It is not optional just cause it’s really fucking hard.

@ different clue February 12, 2015

Yes you heard it aright. If you check the link given by Kurt above:

http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.com/2015/01/its-about-time.html

You’ll find this:

Mission Statement –
It is the mission of this site to expose and reject
the actions of the jewish. Judaism is a racist, supremacist
cult. Therefore, so also is the nest of zionism…the terrorist
state of israel.

Jews are taught their immoral behaviour from
their separatist culture. They
either accept or reject this indoctrination. It is my
experience that most of them accept it…however I
do not hate all jews. I do not hate anyone for what
they cannot control. I hate judaism for the evil that
it has brought to this world.

I do not believe, nor can I be convinced that genetics
plays any part in their actions. To believe this would be genetic
prejudice, and exactly what their cult wishes us to believe. Their behaviour is a learned one, as is all behaviour.

Judaism is a fundamentally flawed religion/cult. It is not
a race. It has become, through cultural networking, theft,
terrorism, ethnic cleansing and double-dealing…the dominate power in this world. It must be exposed and
shown for what is. It is my intention to help in the effort
to do so.

Oh…and I use a LOT of ellipses

– Timster

Go here: http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.com/2014/12/why-are-you-telling-me.html

And you’ll find the text of the video in-toto including the “jew tube” comments.

Or there’s this: http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.dk/2014/07/horribly-wrong.html

(Have a vomit receptacle handy).

mfi

Hilarious!

Go ahead and try your little revolution. Pussies.

Leftards using any means to disarm the true liberal democrats (IE the Tea Party) all the while calling for bloodshed.

Absolutely hilarious.