Showing posts with label Cowardice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cowardice. Show all posts
4.22.2015
***** SPDF Day 51: The question of punishing illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory was considered separately in Europe and Israel last week, with only superficial differences in the conclusions reached. Israel’s near half-century occupation is in no immediate danger, either at home or abroad.
4.19.2015
SPDF Day 48: Reply to today's MUST WATCH video log - "James, I urge those who are your friends where you live to talk to you about this. It eliminates your ability to be part of the long road to the change you dream of......
FB Comment on my earlier today, MUST WATCH video log: "I urge those who are your friends where you live to talk to you about
this. It eliminates your ability to be part of the long road to the
change you dream of......."
My reply: "I must be honest. I have history, scholarship, psychology... on my side. I am grossly unimpressed by comments like yours, I find them insulting, that totally dismiss what I've written, and just blather opinion. Palestine will die until we get serious, and give our personal opinions the near total disreagard they deserve, and hold ourselves to the standards of fact, history, psychology, social change.... "
My reply: "I must be honest. I have history, scholarship, psychology... on my side. I am grossly unimpressed by comments like yours, I find them insulting, that totally dismiss what I've written, and just blather opinion. Palestine will die until we get serious, and give our personal opinions the near total disreagard they deserve, and hold ourselves to the standards of fact, history, psychology, social change.... "
4.18.2015
4.15.2015
SPDF Day 44: funding is barely half that required to avoid irreversible, global, catastrophic, complete ecocide
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-14/fossil-fuels-just-lost-the-race-against-renewables?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_term=Energy%20Revolution&utm_campaign=Climate&__surl__=IgD76&__ots__=1429120223039&__step__=1
4.13.2015
SPDF Day 42: Our Coming Theocratic Hell: The Right’s “Religious Freedom” Push Is Just the BeginningReligion is far too dangerous to our liberties to be laughed off or mischaracterized as harmless.
http://www.alternet.org/belief/our-coming-theocratic-hell-rights-religious-freedom-push-just-beginning
4.10.2015
4.09.2015
***** SPDF Day 38: My email to JewishVoiceForPeace.org
I'm on Day 38 of the Stop Palestines Death Fast here in
Washington DC.
Given that, maybe you can take the moment
or two it will take to read the following. I don't ask for a reply.
I ask that you think. Deeply deeply think.
"Never Again" suggests, implies, states, pretty explicitly, that
humanity should stop, and pay any personal price necessary,
to stop another Holocaust, and although the scale is different,
Palestine is another Holocaust.
You all do some good stuff. Do you care enough about the
Palestinians to ask the question - given what we and others
will do, what is the likely hood that we will EVER bring them
the mass Human Rights they deserve? Do you care enough
about them to ask that question? If you do, the answer you will
see is - NO. Given all current efforts not in 10, 20, or 50 years
is it LIKELY that full human rights will come to the Palestinians.
Is that acceptable to you?
If not, will you escalate? How? What price will you individually
be willing to pay?
I suggest that this is the Law of Social Change that must be satisfied to make
it LIKELY that Palestines will be saved:
I suggest that this is the only (nonviolent) weapon (I can think of after decades
of practice and study) that they can be saved, or something
equivalent:
SPDF Day 38: When conservatives want something badly they pay the price or make others pay the price for it. When liberals want something...
When conservatives want something badly they pay the price or make others pay the price for it. When liberals want something they find excuses for themselves, don't pay, and don't make anyone else really pay either.
***** SPDF Day 38: A liberal on FB complaining about, Schumer, the Israeli, fighting to bomb Iran: "When will they ever learn?" My reply: ""THEY" HAVE learned.....
A liberal on FB complaining about, Schumer, the Israeli, fighting to bomb Iran: "When will they ever learn?" My reply: ""THEY" HAVE learned. Each day of the last 50 years they've learned that the liberals are all talk, whiners, blamers, complainers, FaceBookers... and will NEVER pay the price for what they want, even if it means the end of creation. Learning is not the problem of the hawks. It is the problem of the lip-service liberals... cept they want NOT to learn, cuz then they'd have to pay. Yes, creation will not end from denial on the right of the science, but from denial of the left of what price they have to pay now, to save Creation. This is so obvious to all but the pathologically in denial."
4.06.2015
4.05.2015
SPDF Day 34: vlog. My unrecognized assumptions at the beginning of this death fast are not working out terribly well
1. That the, immediacy, the horror, the barbarity of the west's terrororization of Palestine yielded a situation that was concrete enough that we walking dead Americans would show a heightened response, any increased propensity to tap into our humanity and respond.
2. The other unrecognized assumption is that the Palestinians, both the Palestinians in Palestine that maybe somehow become aware of this death fast campaign, and the Palestinians in the United States Diaspora, would have a readiness greater than any other population I've seen thus far, to be drawn to an understanding of the necessity and unique power of the death fast.
All evidence that I have so far suggest that these were entirely false assumptions.
Today for example several different small groups of Palestinians stopped by an identified themselves during my 12 hour campaign at the White House. I found no more sense of urgency, no more sense of immediate family kinship between themselves and the Palestinians being tormented in Palestine, then I've experienced in other populations concerned with global warming, for example. This is very disturbing and somewhat shocking to me. It certainly was unanticipated by me, and as I reflect more broadly on observations I can make I do not find these reactions today to be abnormal or an exception. I've had significant contact with people concerned with Palestine through my face book interchange up until about a week ago, and it became ever more apparent that they were involved, as is the chicken, but not committed as is the pig.
This will factor into my thinking as to how far to take this death fast. If a tree felled in the wilderness does not make a sound does it make sense to finely chopped it down?
4.01.2015
SPDF Day 30 vlog: On Sanity, and Insanity
I consider the desire to control the lives of others is insane, pathological, and that sanity is the willingness to pay joyfully with one's life if necessary that others can be free of the control of any one beside themselves.
I consider it insane to choose a life of pleasure over a life of service, and that sanity is exactly choosing the life of service over a life of pleasure.
I deem that our American culture is profoundly insane.
It seems to me that the only sane cultures that I see today are the indigenous Palestinians, although I can't yet reconcile how they keep having children in such a hellish environment, seems cruel and selfish; some of the indigenous of America and Canada that are putting their lives in the way of the destruction of their/ our world.
Among so called activists I see only the International Solidarity Movement as probably very sane; along with, possibly, Sea Shepherds. The rest I see as wallowing in a self-gratifying lifestyle choice of doing what is safe and convenient, or even more so, but by not being willing and eager to pay the ultimate price for our fellow humans, as I said at the top, insane.
3.31.2015
SPDF Day 29: I expect to reduce or eliminate all together posting on Facebook. As I have always found....
SPDF Day 29: I expect to reduce or eliminate all together posting on Facebook. As I have always found, and have found again, all on Facebook are passionately committed to unending lip service, and profoundly terrified of, and hostile, truly committed life service. I haven't the time to waste, and it is my duty to not enable such grotesque hypocrisy and cowardice. There is a horrible, wonderful, old saying - the chicken is involved, the pig is committed. There is no activist, never has been, ever will be, of any consequence what so ever, that is not committed exactly in this way. And all on Facebook are committed with every fiber of their being to not be committed to life service in this way.
3.30.2015
***** SPDF Day 28: The Liberal's Denial of duty, personal responsibility, the cowardice, that is destroying the world can best be seen.... ...
***** SPDF Day 28: The Liberal's Denial of duty, personal responsibility, the cowardice, that is destroying the world can best be seen....in these two works of fiction:
The wife in A Dry White Season, the wife of the lone white man of privilege that paid everything for Justice in South Africa.
The towns-folk in the Garry Cooper version of High Noon.
The wife in A Dry White Season, the wife of the lone white man of privilege that paid everything for Justice in South Africa.
The towns-folk in the Garry Cooper version of High Noon.
3.29.2015
***** vlog. SPDF Day 27: A PERSON IS NEITHER ALIVE, NOR AN ACTIVIST, WHO WOULD NOT EAGERLY GIVE THEIR LIFE FOR THE JUSTICE OF THEIR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS...
Notice: Transcript is always slightly enhanced over the live video.
(If the shoe does not fit, don't wear it.) There is very very very good news. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You are not activists.
Alice Paul and the suffragists alongside her that would pay any price, were activists. There was no personal price that they would not pay to achieve their goal. They did not do what was convenient, they calculated what was necessary, and they paid the price.
That is anathema to todays so called activists. Utterly, explicitly, forecefully forbidden. Literally incomprehensible, today, in the US outside of the few fighting global warming by placing and keeping their very lives in the way of Ecocide. These exceptions prove the rule.
There are no activists today.
There were activists in Tahrir Square several years ago. There was no personal price they would not pay to achieve their goal. They expected it would cost their very lives these young people. Exactly because they were willing to pay that price the onlookers of the world could not stand to see that price exacted and rose and demanded of the leaders of the world that their lives be saved by meeting their demands. And they were.
There was only one group for whom Gandhi had utter contempt and that was those who would not happily risk or give their own lives when justice demanded it. I've written weeks ago of the law of social change which is the law of paying the price, the law of suffering. This is an immutable law. And yet for the last 40 or 50 years those that call themselves activists, the most educated in our society, almost always from affluent or relatively affluent backgrounds, are in ferocious, catatonic, psychotic, clinical denial of this law.
It is said that patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels. No, activism in the United States since the late sixties is the refuge of scoundrels. It is where one goes for zero personal accountability, the approval of one's peers in excoriating anyone and everyone except those in the same group, holding oneself and ones group to 0 standards, certainly not the historical standards of true activism, and certainly not the standards of results.
The Washington DC not many years ago there was Ngo after Ngo, activist after activist, rapturously involved in historically doomed,, tepid, comfortable, self serving 'activism' to supposedly Save Darfur.
Fact, the leading such group, "Save Darfur," was headed by a pleasant fellow. At times that I deemed it constructive and appropriate I clearly, honestly, forthrightly and vehimintly confronted the total hopelessness, the total inadequacy, of the strategies and tactics that were being attempted by this group.And indeed, as was patently obvious to anyone that WANTED to see the truth... they saved not one Darfuri, but they had a nice time, got lots of press, had nice confortable jobs for years, added to their resumes, got credit on their college degrees....
Several years later I saw the head of this preeminent Save Darfur group outside a supermarket. Actually, he saw me and wanted to speak. To his credit he said to me, why were you so hard on us? I said, just as when a Dr. hangs out a shingle proclaiming that they are a Dr., thereby setting life and death expectations for those who choose to enter, you did the same by calling your group Save Darfur. You set an expectation that impacted millions of people and yet you planned and attempted nothing that would ever come close to saving those people. This is a moral problem that I had a duty to those brothers and sisters in Darfur to attempt to confront. This is a moral failing I had a duty to you to try and bring to your clear attention, and I felt that you were not seeing it, as a result of active denial or otherwise.
Again, to his credit, he replied with astonishing candor, James, he said, I had no idea how to save the people in Darfur. I give him credit for the candor, but he still had no idea the horror of what he was saying. And I find him completely representative of the activism in the United States, or what considers itself activism, be it for stopping global warming, preserving some shred of democracy, or freeing the Palestinians while there is still a living Palestinian left.
The left in the United States adores excoriating the right in this country for their denial, especially in the subject area of global warming. The denial on the right is nothing compared to the denial on the left of their own irresponsibility, non-solidarity with those they purport to be fighting for, lip service, self serving efforts that have the certainty of not achieving the stated goals but only of serving the egos and other gratifications of the so called activists.
The left's denial near incomprehensible. This is not slender from me. This is not condemnation. It is an opportunity to seriously consider it, thereby it is an offer of liberation.
King, Gandhi, any and all of the true activists, in their own way lived, believed, and articulated that someone that would not risk their very life, happily, in the service of justice for their fellow human being, was already Dead. None of the 2015 activists that I see are anything of the sort.
None or few are hypocrites on purpose. They've been taught and learned well a lie. They've been taught a means of behavior that is not activism, but they've been told in word and deed for 40 or 50 years that it is.
If King, Gandhi, Jesus, and the like are correct that cowardice is living death, and by my life and words I believe that they are, then I am not slandering, I'm attempting as they did, to offer Life, to the activist, and to those they think they are serving..
A person is not living who is not ready to give their life for the justice of their fellow human beings, to paraphrase Dr. King.
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