of sending in a mole to incite the foolish.

The more I think of it, however, this bill is probably some lame attempt by the Dems to position themselves for the elections.

this bill itself may well incite the foolish, in many ways.

while the homegrown threat our country faces is not from dissenters, none of whom miss the 1984 parallels, those in favor of such a bill would very likely view it as necessary as an adjunct to such policies as torture.

Possibly "informants', but it would seem quite silly... Most internet addicts are innocuous BECAUSE they are internet addicts...

awww, im a type.

of what exactly??

net addict? hardly, im on the agonist and a few other sites for a couple hours and occasionally check the agoinst for news at different times.

I don't.

I advocate not becoming one of the forces of hate even in dissenting such. That reply to me was about that very notion.

An advocacy for reason and nonviolence, whether on the nonviolent grounds of Gandhi or King, or simply not to fool oneself, needs be known at the very least as just that.

We need to convene and address our troubles I say. Troubles such as peaceable assembly itself being threatened by such bills. Troubles such as a need for alternate venues of communication that cannot be so 'shut down'. Even now, old school straight dial-in BBSs may well be making a comeback. Myself, I advocate something similar to the Paine-like Kinko's-powered mail art culture, something nondigital.

If you think we are rabblerousing here in speaking for nonviolent discourse and assembly, and call it 'advocating armed resistance', i take it you favor the bill and are 'thinking "informant"' with yourself as the informant to 'save' the site. I'd like your statement clarified.

Whom is bringing more undue and erroneous attention to the site here?

"The first principle is you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." -Richard Feynman

You did not bring such concern for the site to that thread itself, and ask Bob to clarify his position. I suggest you might do so and address your concerns and perhaps have them allayed.

Nonviolence needs be advocated and promoted. It is apparently becoming hard to do so on the internet. Up is not down and black is not white.

There is much blowback to the government's actions, as usual, and that needs be addressed constructively as does the government's actions itself, not fueled. Constructive attitudes, in proposals, tend to clarify and isolate belligerence.

I almost did post on that thread, but LJ's post provided a better context of why one might want to think twice about what they say on the net. I know you don't advocate armed resistance. But what Bob?/Warvigilent was suggesting was flirting mighty close to the line.
And it has the potential to be dangerous, as you know, that's all. (but JPD could be just the military expert he's looking for)
I must have said something to piss you off somewhere, but don't fret, we're on the same side. (I did make the mistake of assuming Bob was an older guy and would probably have cut him more slack in his thought processing had I known otherwise. let me apologize for not cutting him slack, regardless of age)
but these days I am very leery of agents provocatuers, especially as some of the anti-war efforts seem ill thought out.

in my defense, i only talk about armed resistance because i cannot conceive of any other possible solution, that indeed becoming the victims of this such bill and far worse measures would be preferable to simply doing nothing.

i ask again show me how non-violence will work, cause ive seen nothing but theory and "if onlys".Just what has to happen, just how many people have to physically demonstrait in the streets, how many workers have to join a general strike, how can we possibly stop the infiltration of protest inciters who give the police the excuse to crack skulls and pepper spray children and old ladies.

I know its extreme and dangerous, but every single protest, even world spanning rebukes have DONE NOTHING WHATSOEVER. the agonist examines what is happening and what will happen and none of it is acceptable on any level, economically, enviromentally, politically, socially, and morally.
i want non-violence to work, i want people to march and scream and demand change through peaceful measures, but i cant see it working and the chances that it will are steadily disappearing. nothing significant in terms of domestic violence has occurred yet they are already preparing measures to stop any form of it and they will come not with just new losses of rights and freedoms but with support for physical civil oppression, new jackboots, new private riot police armies, new fancy microwave crowd control weapons. they have the huge prison camps, and they have the private armies already. they expect it, that means something.

id really like to see a non-violent solution but we are not dealing with good people, or people who give a fuck about the rest of the world. i want to emphasis that i see it happening as an inevitability, those on this site have plainly shown how things are going to get a lot worse, things will either break or we can consign ourselves to a bleak dehumanized future of poverty, environmental collapse and fascistic corporate rule.

please show me where i'm wrong and that this isn't what will happen. i want to belive in a peaceful solution, but we are not in the position of MLK or Ghandi but we are facing something are more powerful and terrible than the british empire or the last vestiges of open institutional racism.
i'm pessimistic, and maybe its a failure of my imagination but what else is going to happen, cause it sure as hell ain't gonna turn out all sunshine and rainbows.

Violence defines itself. There is nothing to fight in fighting fighting itself, it's patemtly a self-defeating proposition. I don't believe in beating up bullies, that only legitimizes them. I posted on nonlegitimization of terrorism in livejournal before I'd ever heard the CIA term 'blowback' that Ron Paul has brought to the public discourse. By 'nonlegitimization of terrorism', I mean the repression of dissension, even violent dissension, doesn't work. This is what Sun Tzu addressed in that quote of his on "supreme excellence in combat".

Martin Luther King had cojones and died violently for his nonviolence and yet triumphed over that very violence. It's the only way. Look at it this way; our country was born by violence and here we are. Have we ever yet really been born as a nation of Liberty? No. We need a birth. Born nonviolently. We need it desperately.

Your phrase failure of imagination was apropos. We need novelty of thought. Any novelty of action needs that precede it. Mindless kneejerk reactionaryism accomplishes naught, no matter it's emotional earnestness.

Please keep wanting imaginative nonviolent solutions, lest you join the forces of hate. Read 1984. In it, the protagonist, Winston Smith, succumbed to just such spirited rebellion in principle, thought, and action, and failed for it. -By becoming, inadvertently, one of them of force, and hatred. forcesofhate.mp3

What you *can* [positively] do is act. Call your representatives relentlessly. Join the campaigns to do so. It's work, boring, and requiring effort, concerted and consistent and tenacious effort, and commitment. Write letters, emails, posts. Speak up locally, soberly, calmly, reasonably. Look to others who do so for inspiration. And call them to task when they become powerful and such power flips them over to the dark side that political success and power brings. Garry Kasparov in Russia may succeed some day and himself need such truth spoken to power. In South America too they wrestle with this. It's the central conundrum of modern civilization. Look at Evo Morales brought to such power by others, himself aware of the danger of power intoxication. Ego dissolution is the issue and South America is at the heart of that with it's ancient bounty and culture in such schism. Look to the cultures of history and the substances influencing them. Look at what alcohol, gasoline, and gunpowder have wrought. Look at what body drugs have wrought. Then look at what head drugs have wrought. Look at the 'drug war' and then look at the history of literature. Look at South American literature. Read endlessly... It's good for you and prevents dumb jock syndrome (caloric diversion). Look at what you eat and everyone else. Imagine. Do what aids you do so. Stop doing what stops it.

When they come knocking at your door, who will you be? We are what we do. We are first what we think. What we take in.

Mind the current culture and rise above it.

Fluffy clouds rule the sky, not us.

thanks, that does help, i should look to the power of discipline and resist the heady temptations that seduce man so easily, seek strength in others who see the same wrongs.

i still hate to say it, but even as much as Sun Tsu sought non-violent resolutions( and made a great logical case for it) he did not deny that sometimes you dont have that option.

alright im done for a while, i gotta work some things outta my system possibly find that herb that relaxes my body and pacifies my mind.

Yah, OK, so I'm a geezer, BFD. ;) I do remember another group who could only see the same solution. The right wing only fed off their energy and well, we have what we have today.

Don't give this "thing" your energy, if you can help it.

it is the yippies who had the effect, and the answer, and the imagination. hence, this blowback to them.
the chicago 7 trial seeded, by blowback, this very neocon thing we are suffering through now.
google up leo strauss, the university of chicago 1969, paul wolfowitz and the rest of the straussian cabal. then google up the yippies and the youth international party.
did ya ever see 'do it' by jerry rubin? that sort of theatre were what the neocons loathed. helluva book. very novel. 'steal this book' by abbie hoffman was almost as novel.
the yippies sort of creative activism is what we need now.

energy. right. right. damned right. thanks. i'm 53 myself. i know whatcha mean.

http://zuma.theprawn.com/itz/2007/10/22/leaving-room-for-the-alien-primer/

they were effective, creatively, positively. too much so perhaps even.

Violent revolts seem to emerge in times of government weakness, when the government not only has lost legitimacy but has lost its ability to control basic infrastructure. A war or economic dislocation, for example, can cause this. The instruments of repression might work, like police and soldiers, but the other institutions (e.g., food, transportation, communication) will have failed to the point where the citizenry sees the rulers as either responsble or as obstacles to things getting better. I think there has to be a mood of collective dispair supported by genuine misery, like hunger, to motivate people to take arms against their government. And there has to be an organization with leaders in place to direct the violence, or else the rebellion is no more than a riot.

There are exceptions to this of course, like civil wars organized by elites (e.g. our civil and revolutionary wars). But the only elites I see willing to rebel are right-wing elites, which is why I fear Blackwater's private army. But a Jacquerie-style revolt requires hopelessness and a momentary loss of power by the government to get going. And leaders and organization to keep it going.

We're not there. Yet. But I have no confidence that our government would take action to avoid the looming problems that promise to leave a lot of people desperate.

As the others suggest, don't give up on nonviolence yet--even as the government tries to curtail nonviolent avenues of change. Once folks unsheathe the sword, they do not seem to know when to sheathe it again. Violence is a Pandora's Box, and there is no guarantee that grievances would get resolved even with victory. It is too often "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

i think thats exactly how i should have expressed my thoughts, keep it to the theory and philosophy realm. just so it can be talked of as a sociological/political theoretical/historical examination or a moral/ethical philosophy debate, i thrive on that stuff its what makes me love collage. from plato and crew to now a coming class on Machiavelli.

i have gained confidence back in non-violence, i know that the greatest courage is with those who resist violence even as it is upon them.
and those exact reasons are why i am afraid of violence however seemingly just. maybe the gay bomb wasent such a bad idea.

see my reply above contrasting the weather people of the 60s with the yippies of the 60s.

violence does nothing. not even called for.
again i say read 1984; violence makes you one of them.

my friend, we are fighting the very spirit of violence itself. we are fighting the spirit of belligerence itself.

if, perhaps, you are a drinker, i humbly submit it may be influencing you towards belligerence and violence and a need for an enemy. these spirits rob our minds.

fear is the mindkiller. it makes us dyslimbic, restricted to less of our intellectual faculties. our dinosaur brain, our limbic system, cranks up the fight or flight syndrome. adrenalin rushes.

we are not of the military culture crowd. let us not drink their brews.

i think i will have to go back and re-read 1984, its been a long time.

i rarely drink, but it has plauged my family and ended my parents marriage. i have not really tried to hide my use of cannabis, ive made my position clear in a few posts a while back. i find it helps me in many ways, one of which is that it helps me dispel that fear, if only because i see it as a movement with potential that could spark off more social and politcal revolutions and of course it is fueled by non-violent protest all the way.

i admit i still have my reservations but that can wait for some later theory or philosophy.

http://www.archive.org/details/George-Orwell-1984-Audio-book

This is a wonderful reading of the book.
One can download chapters or the whole enchilada zipped up -huge tho: 270 megs or so

We don't want you to leave! It is true SP prefers that we don't call for violence or pray for the apocalypse, nuclear destruction, death...... We have had people on who wish to unite or call others to violence and well its not something the site owners want to see. It not because of fear of being closed down but more to do with it is incompatible with SP's vision of the site. I do understand with all that is going on that some might consider an option.

I just think "informant"

In fact, if the state of things in this corporate-owned-and-operated country doesn't inspire you to resist, I think you're missing something. Or, you're getting some benefit from the rest of us losing our civil liberties and the middle class losing it's way of life.

I don't know a thing about civil disobedience or resistance or political action, but I'm damn well gonna learn. I've got a kid and I want her to grow up in a country that bears some resemblance to the nation that those bright men of the Enlightenment envisioned when they wrote our Constitution.

http://thewaxwingslain.com/resistance/

against the six al Qaeda wannabes from Florida? if that's the kinda shit they'll bring to trial, we're in trouble

- eom

EOM.

don't we already have laws on the books to deal w/ these issues?
why more?
as a political ploy? that's just pathetic

The GOP has labeled all sorts of liberals and liberal causes as "terrorists" because they don't agree with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, et al, ad nauseum. But the accusations are incorrect.

What this bill would do, if it defined terrorism properly, would give the GOP an extremely painful choice by flaying some of the most rabid supporters off their own hide, or conversely, not support a bill against domestic terrorism. I don't see anything wrong with it, per se, because it identifies certain GOP supporters as terrorists, plain and simple. And frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of legislation that smothers a nascent brownshirt movement in the form of private paramilitary organizations. There are no abortion clinics in certain states, as I recall. They've been the victims of bombings and arson, and the people who worked there were repeatedly threatened with violence. In some instances, they followed through and killed and injured people. Whether or not you agree with abortion, those are violent actions that kill and maim, they're designed to make a political message that terrorizes abortion providers across the country--and that, my friends, is the very definition of "domestic homegrown terrorism."

"I don't see anything wrong with it, per se, because it identifies certain GOP supporters as terrorists"

Do you actually believe that, because the law could be used to go after a certain group, that it should be passed? Maybe if the bill was only about groups that attack abortion clinics, and it specifically laid the rules for what constituted terrorism, like a site that encouraged bombings, than maybe we could debate it. But, this is a law that vaguely says people on the Internet "could be" terrorists. Did you actually read it?

Now I understand how easily the US is slipping into 1984. Just like in the book, there are a lot of seriously stupid people who let it happen, plain and simple.

And saying "terrorism is wrong" as if to imply those who oppose this thought crime law are supporting terrorism? You make me sick.

Bunter to The Agonist. Please note that we do not insult other members. Feel free to disagree but please be more careful in how you respond.