Keith's reaction to the debt ceiling deal - Get mad.

Huh. Someone on television telling people what they need to hear. Small wonder MSNBC fired him.

The betrayal of what this nation was supposed to be about did not begin with this deal and it surely will not end with this deal. There is a tide pushing back the rights of each of us, and it has been artificially induced by union bashing, and the sowing of hatreds and fears, and now this evermore institutionalized economic battering of the average American. It will continue and it will crush us, because those that created it are organized, and unified, and hell-bent. And the only response is to be organized, and unified and hell-bent in return.

Is it bad that my eyes rolled instinctively when he said "We must rise, nonviolently"? I think people should start smashing shit in the streets, personally. How many more times are we going to let the upper 1% do this to us? Are we ever going to draw a line, or are we just going let them keep at that successful tactic of chipping away, little by little?

But Keith is also on television, so I guess he can't just go and incite riots if he doesn't want to get thrown in jail. I came across an essay the other day called Pacifism as Pathology, which I'm pretty sure was written by an anarchist. The guy strongly criticizes the pacifist peace movement as entirely useless, claims it's never accomplished a thing, and dismisses it as pseudospiritual nonsense, almost like a cult. Considering that this is the tactic liberals have been using since the 60s, and considering that what it's accomplished is where we're at now, I find myself agreeing with this assessment more than I'm disagreeing with it. If I wind up dead under mysterious circumstances, I didn't commit suicide.

Pacifism, the ideology of nonviolent political action, has become axiomatic and all but universal among the more progressive elements of contemporary mainstream North America. With a jargon ranging from a peculiar mishmash of borrowed or fabricated pseudospiritualism to “Gramscian” notions of prefigurative socialization, pacifism appears as the common denominator linking otherwise disparate “white dissident” groupings. Always, it promises that the harsh realities of state power can be transcended via good feelings and purity of purpose rather than by self-defense and resort to combat.

Pacifists, with seemingly endless repetition, pronounce that the negativity of the modern corporate-fascist state will atrophy through defection and neglect once there is a sufficiently positive social vision to take its place (“What if they gave a war and nobody came?”). Known in the Middle Ages as alchemy, such insistence on the repetition of insubstantial themes and failed experiments to obtain a desired result has long been consigned to the realm of fantasy, discarded by all but the most wishful or cynical (who use it to manipulate people).