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May 20 - Reclaim the Streets against the G8!
Resist the G8! - Destroy Boredom! - Reclaim the Streets!
Streetparty/Protest Against the G8, Global Capitalism, and Boredom!
Meet 8pm, Friday, May 20th
Lytton Plaza in Palo Alto
University Ave. at Emerson
>Commute, work, commute, sleep...
Our everyday lives are fucking boring. From where we work to when we sleep, when we go to school and where we play, every aspect of our lives is beyond our control. We are given false choices about everything - Coke or Pepsi, Republican or Democrat, waiter or janitor - either way we're choking down chemicals, living by someone else’s laws, and selling ourselves into slavery to make someone else rich. The real decisions which affect our lives have been made for us - only collective resistance can take back control of our lives and bring us back to life!
>Work
Work sucks. We don’t work because we want to. Our time at work is time that we are forced to sell to our bosses so that we can survive; we allow them to control our activities and profit off of our energy in exchange for our wages. Our jobs are horrible; confined in small areas, we repeat the same boring and useless task over and over again. We are constantly told to work faster, harder, and more efficiently. Our bosses act and make decisions according to their interests, which answer only to the global economy. At work everything we do is controlled on every level by the
market; the only exceptions are the few remaining victories won by the militant labor movement of the early 20th century.
>School
School sucks. No one goes to school to learn. We go to school to earn credits and a GPA, meaningless numbers which future admissions officers and employers will use to sum up the entirety of our existence. The time we spend in school is preparation for our entrance into the job market, so
that we can graduate with the skills that we need to work. Compulsory education was Adam Smith's compliment to the alienation of a lifetime of boring, repetitive, and exploitative work; he argued that workers would be less likely to revolt against a system which exploits them if they were
forced to study and accept an ideological framework which justifies their exploitation. Schools, colleges, and universities - along with police stations, courts, and prisons - are established by this government to perform this function alone, to keep workers working - to keep the market
functioning.
>Shop
Shopping is our consolation for a lifetime of boring and repetitive labor. We go to school so that we can work, we work so that we can shop. Just as the global economy creates more and more useless work to keep us busy, it
also relies on us to consume more and more useless garbage we don't need. Most of what we purchase was not created because we need it to survive, or because it actually makes our lives more exciting, more pleasurable, more
enjoyable. Most of what is produced in the world today is produced because its production creates profits for the corporation which produces it; people around the world who are struggling just to survive suffer through dystopian working conditions, slaving away in sweatshops for fifty nine cents an hour to produce products which make our lives more boring, make us more isolated and alienated. They are forced to work because free trade agreements allowed the same corporations to drive them off of the land off of which they've lived for centuries and steal everything else they possessed from which a profit could be extracted. We shop because
advertising - one of the largest industries in the world - was
successfully developed to bring us up desiring things we know we don't really want and to convince us to buy their shit we don't need.
>Content
But advertising and compulsory education aren't the only social institutions developed to keep us pacified, working and consuming. Every aspect of this society has been specifically designed to give the illusion of freedom, stability, and content that keeps it alive. Everything that you see in the course of your day which is not a product of or someone's
rebellious creativity (graffiti, free food programs, street protests, etc.) serves a function in maintaining the current social order. From television to austere public parks, government elections to police patrols, boring nightclubs to that cute little "fair trade" sticker which keeps you consuming even though you have a conscience, to your history textbook and every billboard you pass each day, everything serves to
stifle creativity, enforce content, and prevent us from truly living.
>Urbanism
Modern cities as a whole are designed to serve the market and the government which keeps it functioning, at the expense of everyone who lives in them. Composed of sites of wage-labor exploitation, empty consumption and escapism, compulsory education, government oppression, and a graveyard of billboards and ideological spectacle, cities are planned for and dominated by the personal automobile, the fundamental commodity of industrial society. We spend hours each day sitting in traffic, alienated and isolated from everyone around us, choking on smog, and dying of boredom. Our neighborhoods and districts are divided by a network of identically austere roads; everything else is built around them, lacking any united ambiance, always focused elsewhere, isolated and atomized. Foot, bicycle, and recreational traffic is marginalized, contact with strangers is discouraged, and public space is devoted to institutions
whose interests run contrary to ours. The whole experience of modern urbanism is nothingness; we feel nothing, we see the same thing everywhere, everyday, and we experience nothing exciting, nothing new. Against the dominance of functionalism, our hearts scream for something real, something exciting, something new.
>Capitalism
This system is called capitalism. From your shitty job to sweatshops in the third world, from the police who beat the shit out of you for skateboarding in your city to the soldiers fighting a fucked up war in Iraq, from the administrator who writes you up for arguing with your right-wing teacher to the judge who sends you to jail for doing what you need to survive, and from electoral campaigns to advertising campaigns, this system serves one purpose: to make the rich richer, to make the powerful more powerful, and to fuck all of the rest of us over to do it.
>...
Contemporary capitalism, as it exists today, is an extremely complex system consisting of millions of interrelated institutions and functions working in unison to insure the dominance and stability of the market, a global economic construct and engine behind this system. By mismanaging resources and production, and through artificial industries such as advertising, it creates scarcity - a false shortage of goods and services which we need to survive. This requires us to work for the things we need to survive and our work generates profits - the benefits of our labor which are taken from us. An elite ruling class of CEO's, politicians,
bureaucrats, and stockholders invest the profits they steal from us, creating more profits for them and more boring, useless work and unnessecary environmental destruction for us. Scarcity also creates competition, which means that we compete with each other to work shittier and shittier jobs and pay more and more for worse products, while the ruling class competes with itself to fuck us over more efficiently. No matter what happens, they win and we lose.
>The G8
In 1975, amidst a global oil crisis and a general upsurge in struggle, the G8 was born. Its intended role was as a crisis manager for capitalism, a forum in which consensus could be constructed on issues of importance to capital such as world trade, migration, oil supplies and security. It was designed as a tool for the creation and maintenance of stability: a stability of exploitation. All around us we see the impacts and effects of a system to which the G8 attempts to bring longevity: mindless work, war, famine and destroyed ecologies. A system whose very survival means that none of us can live our lives to their true potential. A system that is resisted daily, everywhere.
>Resistance
This resistance often takes place away from the spotlight of the world’s media. It manifests itself in individual acts of refusal, in sporadic collective withdrawals of consent and, occasionally, in spectacular moments of mass rebellion. The 2005 G8 Summit provides the opportunity for exactly such a moment. The neo-liberal project – ‘capitalism with its gloves off’ – has been fiercely contested across the world, with struggles taking on almost as many different forms as they are numerous. The social and material conditions from which they have arisen, the demands made, and alternatives demonstrated, have been similarly varied. Yet they have been
united in reclaiming a sense of humanity to our existences from the many-sided social and ecological crisis within which we find ourselves today. These struggles, and the hopes they express, will certainly continue – and likely multiply – in their diversity, as we fight ‘for a world in which many worlds are possible’.
>Reclaim the Streets!
Reclaim the Streets! is a global movement which grew out of this struggle against capital. It began in the 1990's as a tactic used to combat the construction of capitalist infrastructure roads through working class neighborhoods and undeveloped green-spaces in England. In the late 1990's
it became a part of the more general global anti-capitalist movement, as it evolved into a world-wide phenomenon which blurs the line between streetparty and militant protest. On June 18th, 1999 in response to a call-out by Peoples' Global Action, protests were held in 40 countries around the world against the G8 summit taking place in Germany - the
London RTS turned from streetparty to anti-capitalist riot, as protesters fought police and destroyed over a million pounds worth of capitalist property in the financial district.
>Resist!
From July 6th-8th, 2005, the G8, the rulers of eight of the world’s most powerful economies and countries, return to Europe for their major annual summit, taking place at Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, Scotland. Groups and
movements across Europe, from the Assembly of Social Movements at the European Social Forum, to those involved in the global grassroots network Peoples’ Global Action, have called for the summit to be ‘massively disrupted’. There are calls for people to converge in Scotland, and on the 6th of July, for action to be taken simultaneously in villages, towns and cities worldwide. In the UK dozens of grassroots autonomous groups have created the Dissent! anti-capitalist network which is organizing radical resistance to the G8 Summit and building alternatives to the current social order. A major Bay Area mobilization against the G8 is being
organized as well, running through the end of this years G8 Summit. The first action is planned for Friday May 20th and will take place in downtown Palo Alto.
>Revolt!
Our everyday lives are fucking boring. From where we work to when we sleep, when we go to school and where we play, every aspect of our lives is beyond our control. We have to work, to shop, and to go to school to survive, but these repetitive activities deprive us of what make us really alive: freedom, creativity, spontaneity, adventure, excitement, and love. Our cities are planned to keep us content, isolated, and passified - we want excitement, community, and revolt! When was the last time you danced like no one was watching - when was the last time you ran like it really mattered?
Resist the G8! - Destroy Boredom! - Reclaim the Streets!
Streetparty/Protest Against the G8, Global Capitalism, and Boredom!
Meet 8pm, Friday, May 20th
Lytton Plaza in Palo Alto
University Ave. at Emerson
Critical Mass/Bike Bloc leaves White Plaza at Stanford at 7pm.
Reclaim the Streets! Palo Alto rts-pa(at)riseup(dot)net
Anarchist Action anarchistaction(at)riseup(dot)net
Bay Area Anti-G8 Mobilization anti-g8sf(at)riseup(dot)net
www.anarchistaction.org/rts (coming soon)
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You guys have to be the dumbest people I've ever met. You guys think you are like going to make a difference, but you won't. I love how you have all of these faults with society and yet you have no solutions. That is why you will go out whenever you want and exercise your first right, but just rember you won't change anything by "rebeling". So long live capatilism and long live democracy you stupid terriosts.
I'm sure you won't engage as your posting reveals low intellect---but what do you mean when you say, "long live capatilism and long live democracy you stupid terriosts." More specifically what does capitalism mean for you when you use it in that context?---Do you think we have a free market?? Is the U.S. a democracy? What is the working definition of a terrorist for the sake of this conversation? (If you have the courage to engage, which I highly doubt)---I'll check back for your response at about 12:30, and then again in the morning--around 8am--You might need to do a little research.
Go ahead and end your life now and take a few of your sheep with you. I have a high school education and a masters in manipulation. I realized early on that you can make a mint off of misguided, over schooled, lazy liberal idiots. I own a roofing company. I love it when a tree hugger calls me for a new roof. They want an eco-friendly roof, that will last forever and cost almost nothing. the alternatives are:
Wood shingles? No, it could have come from a forest where the spotted ass owl lived and most likely had my friends chained to its base.
Asphalt? No, It is comprised of oil, and that is what the war in Iraq is all about. Also, you have to ravage trees that house my friends are chained to and the home of the spotted ass owl.
Metal? Totally recyclable, last forever. Now that is funny. It is to expensive and comes from the ground. Its plants produce too much pollution.
Concrete tiles? See metal.
How about Eco-slate? I like it. I'll take it and when can you start? As I pick up my check in my huge truck, I am amused that some advertising guy came up with this name for a roofing product that is the least Eco- Friendly product. It is rubber that is petroleum based, produced in massive factories that pollute. Dear God, please let these liberal university professors and institutions keep cranking out these lazy intellectual suckers! My wife need a new Mercedes and my degree-less ass needs an upgrade from my million dollar house by the lake. I think i'll take next week off because I can.
Wood shingles? No, it could have come from a forest where the spotted ass owl lived and most likely had my friends chained to its base.
Asphalt? No, It is comprised of oil, and that is what the war in Iraq is all about. Also, you have to ravage trees that house my friends are chained to and the home of the spotted ass owl.
Metal? Totally recyclable, last forever. Now that is funny. It is to expensive and comes from the ground. Its plants produce too much pollution.
Concrete tiles? See metal.
How about Eco-slate? I like it. I'll take it and when can you start? As I pick up my check in my huge truck, I am amused that some advertising guy came up with this name for a roofing product that is the least Eco- Friendly product. It is rubber that is petroleum based, produced in massive factories that pollute. Dear God, please let these liberal university professors and institutions keep cranking out these lazy intellectual suckers! My wife need a new Mercedes and my degree-less ass needs an upgrade from my million dollar house by the lake. I think i'll take next week off because I can.
I really don't believe that you have a brain the size of a pea, but your weak attempt at inflammatory comment could make some think so.
What are your beliefs?--Obviously you love money. But as you come in vaguely bashing environmentalism and "liberals" with admittedly only a high school education, are you prepared to engage in a meaningful discussion of any issues? Or are you actually just a coward who is repeating what you heard on AM-nut radio?
What are your beliefs?--Obviously you love money. But as you come in vaguely bashing environmentalism and "liberals" with admittedly only a high school education, are you prepared to engage in a meaningful discussion of any issues? Or are you actually just a coward who is repeating what you heard on AM-nut radio?
The only solution is world revolution. People, rise up. Cast down our rulers and dance on their graves. Build of their tombstones a home for the new world that lives today in our hearts.
Who is smarter? You are obviously, since I have pea brain. I just want to continue my cubicle-less life that has no boss, other than my family. I abhor laziness and slackers who think that just because they
have a little 8x11 piece of paper hanging on the wall that they are superior. I can fillibuster your superior ass into the ground so deep that you will wish you had picked out your tombstone first. The funny thing you said regarding money, is that I could care less about money.Yes I / we do need money but the less you care, it seems to just flow in. You must care so much about what you don't have, that you try to show your worthiness by calling your adversaries pea brains. Get a job, get a family, but first you need to get a Life and try to overcome your insecurities. Good luck
have a little 8x11 piece of paper hanging on the wall that they are superior. I can fillibuster your superior ass into the ground so deep that you will wish you had picked out your tombstone first. The funny thing you said regarding money, is that I could care less about money.Yes I / we do need money but the less you care, it seems to just flow in. You must care so much about what you don't have, that you try to show your worthiness by calling your adversaries pea brains. Get a job, get a family, but first you need to get a Life and try to overcome your insecurities. Good luck
dallas roofer quote-"Get a job, get a family, but first you need to get a Life"
What's funny, is that you are so far off base---I work 40+ hours a week, plus go to school at nights and on weekends---I'm 36 years old and married. I realized that life experience is cetainly valuable---but it's not everything, and education has made me a double edged sword in terms of how I relate to others and take action to better my community. It's apparent that you have some self-esteem issues, or at least somewhat of an inferiority complex about your less-than-stellar education (as evidenced by your comment "and slackers who think that just because they
have a little 8x11 piece of paper hanging on the wall that they are superior").
And you failed to elaborate on your original post and the questions I posed--are you here to engage in a discussion or simply attempt inflammatory rants? If it's the former, what are you trtying to discuss? Capitalism? Envrionmentalism? The Bush administration's disasterous foreign and domestic policy?---I'm game if you can handle a real discussion beyond childish name calling and blanket accusations/name-calling.
What's funny, is that you are so far off base---I work 40+ hours a week, plus go to school at nights and on weekends---I'm 36 years old and married. I realized that life experience is cetainly valuable---but it's not everything, and education has made me a double edged sword in terms of how I relate to others and take action to better my community. It's apparent that you have some self-esteem issues, or at least somewhat of an inferiority complex about your less-than-stellar education (as evidenced by your comment "and slackers who think that just because they
have a little 8x11 piece of paper hanging on the wall that they are superior").
And you failed to elaborate on your original post and the questions I posed--are you here to engage in a discussion or simply attempt inflammatory rants? If it's the former, what are you trtying to discuss? Capitalism? Envrionmentalism? The Bush administration's disasterous foreign and domestic policy?---I'm game if you can handle a real discussion beyond childish name calling and blanket accusations/name-calling.
I was having dinner at Bay Leaf on Friday night and stumbled on your completely confusing rally. I asked several other passerbys, and nobody had any idea what you were yelling about. It looked to me like a bunch of kids with incoherent signs and an excuse to smash some shit up.
Next time you want to change the world, volunteer at a homeless shelter, teach a kid to read, plant a tree, anything but dancing about like a bunch of buffoons in front of Restoration Hardware and leaving some tags on the street.
Next time you want to change the world, volunteer at a homeless shelter, teach a kid to read, plant a tree, anything but dancing about like a bunch of buffoons in front of Restoration Hardware and leaving some tags on the street.
I think it's good that they went out, let off some steam and shook things up a little. It's only one tool for self-empowerment and affecting a community--and maybe not all of us would choose it---but if it just makes those kids feel better while maybe causing one person to reconsider their blind faith in the status quo, then good.
Bring it all on. I appreciate the fact that you are working and going to school and you are to be commended. I went to 2 universities for 5 years while working. i never got that little piece of paper on the wall, but may some day when I am retired and have nothing else to do. 20 hrs. short but I earned the opportunity to go for broke. I did the math and believed in myself. It was the right decision and I have no regrets.
I am 42. When I was your age, I had already secured financial peace. If you are working 40+ hrs. and going to classes you are to be commended. You are not a slacker. I worked 70-80hrs./wk building 2 businesses. The first 10 years were tough. I doubt that I could of been a good father or husband with these hours. Choose a subject... we'll see if it all makes sense.
I am 42. When I was your age, I had already secured financial peace. If you are working 40+ hrs. and going to classes you are to be commended. You are not a slacker. I worked 70-80hrs./wk building 2 businesses. The first 10 years were tough. I doubt that I could of been a good father or husband with these hours. Choose a subject... we'll see if it all makes sense.
For starters, and to stay--at least loosely--w/in the context of the original posting, I will say the bush administration is a disastor on every front--foreign and domestic--whether we are talking about the economy, the environment, socially, and of course, foreign policy. First I need to see where you stand on this, but after we establish that, I further propose that BushCo. is simply a symptom of a disease state in this country that is much larger than this administration. There's some lofty opening criticisms---Let me know what you think about these statements.
68% of Americans are homeowners. Unemployment is near lows. Afghanastan is liberated. Iraq, Lebanon are close too. Israel and Palestine have agreed to a cease fire and make a unilateral effort to divide the strip and condemn Hamas. 69% of all Americans believe the economy is and will improve according to a recent Zogby poll. Interest rates are at near all time lows and inflation is in check. Discounting the fact that we are dependent on forein oil, the higher oil/gas prices are a mini hump in the road, that will inevitably propell an accelerated advance towards ANWAR, GULF,and Iran. Believe it or not, I am a compassionate conservative. God, Family,work.... I have many liberal friends. We have good times debating. 2 are Lesbians (my sisters), one is a doctor, and one is an owner of a Honda dealership. My definition of Capitalism; treat your customer like you would treat your mom. Provide a viable and needed service. Work as hard and smart as you can. Value your life and all other forms of. Help your customers and they will help U
68% of Americans are homeowners. Unemployment is near lows. Afghanastan is liberated. Iraq, Lebanon are close too. Israel and Palestine have agreed to a cease fire and make a unilateral effort to divide the strip and condemn Hamas. 69% of all Americans believe the economy is and will improve according to a recent Zogby poll. Interest rates are at near all time lows and inflation is in check. Discounting the fact that we are dependent on forein oil, the higher oil/gas prices are a mini hump in the road, that will inevitably propell an accelerated advance towards ANWAR, GULF,and Iran. Believe it or not, I am a compassionate conservative. God, Family,work.... I have many liberal friends. We have good times debating. 2 are Lesbians (my sisters), one is a doctor, and one is an owner of a Honda dealership. My definition of Capitalism; treat your customer like you would treat your mom. Provide a viable and needed service. Work as hard and smart as you can. Value your life and all other forms of. Help your customers and they will help U
******68% of Americans are homeowners. Unemployment is near lows. Afghanastan is liberated. Iraq, Lebanon are close too. Israel and Palestine have agreed to a cease fire and make a unilateral effort to divide the strip and condemn Hamas. 69% of all Americans believe the economy is and will improve according to a recent Zogby poll. Interest rates are at near all time lows and inflation is in check. Discounting the fact that we are dependent on forein oil, the higher oil/gas prices are a mini hump in the road, that will inevitably propell an accelerated advance towards ANWAR, GULF,and Iran. Believe it or not, I am a compassionate conservative. God, Family,work.... I have many liberal friends. We have good times debating. 2 are Lesbians (my sisters), one is a doctor, and one is an owner of a Honda dealership. My definition of Capitalism; treat your customer like you would treat your mom. Provide a viable and needed service. Work as hard and smart as you can. Value your life and all other forms of. Help your customers and they will help U*****
OK--you said alot--we have alot of work to do
1. About Afghanistan, you're far off-base-liberated??-here's just a little to rebut your allegation:
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=559872005
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gangster21may21,0,5954895.story?coll=la-home-headlines
2. Iraq--Now, let's first recognize that the ends do not justify the means--it's not o.k.--even if Iraq does, one day, eventually end up better off than it was before the U.S. invasion and occupation--it's still not o.k. that this administration lied/distorted/manipulated information to sell this war to the american people--here's some of the lies (not exhaustive) in chronological order
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/20/1055828490557.html?oneclick=true
http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/lieswmd.html
http://www.rotten.com/library/history/war/wmd/saddam/
AND, I htink it's truly naive to believe that this was about 'liberating the Iraqi people---this was part of an ideological agenda that was in place by neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield, Perle, ect. long before Bush even took office, and they exploited fear after 9-11 to advance this agenda (along with alot of other policy) see this link for a comprehensive look into the project for the new american century--notice dates and names
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqmiddleeast2000-1997.htm
incidentally--this guy, who was writing papers during the Clinton era for proj. for new am. century, while working for Unocal and wining and dining the Taliban with the prospects of putting a new natural gas pipeline through afghanistan, is now the ambassador
http://usembassy.state.gov/afghanistan/wwwhbiozal.html
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/khalilzad/khalilzad.php
It is truly naive to think that this was about anything other than geopolitical control of a region that is strategically important as well as rich in natural resources---Now, many, many thousands dead later, Iraq is in chaos--this is a country that hadn't heard of suicide bombers that is seeing them daily, it's infastructure is devastated--it's a fucking mess---remember, the U.S. picked one of the weakest nations in the region, too--devastated by 12 years of sanctions---and it's still a disastor--remember Wolfowitz/Rumsfield talking aobut how we'd be greeted as liberators and the whole thing was going to be done w/ real quick and neat in just weeks???(I can get quotes to that affect, too) These were the scholars--who'd never been to war--the architects who were so salivating over power that they also had no real post war planning in place--
Now. with that said---I believe in people's fundamental power to repair/heal their worlds---and there probably will be a day that a reasonably stable democratic situation realizes itself in Iraq---but it will be in spite of the Bush administrations' actions, not because of---and it won't look like BushCO wants it to--it'll be an Islamic democracy.
3. Now, you referred to a poll re: the economy---well, most U.S. citizens know that as bad as it's gotten (highest deficti ever in history)--it has to get better, so of course they'll say that, and it eventually probably will, but Bush's terrible tax policies, enormous deficit spending are actually a traditional republican's nightmare---here's a little on that:
http://www.thetruthaboutgeorge.com/economy/
O.K.--I'm real tired--2 pages into a 10 page final paper I have to finish tomorrow---those links should start you out---I like your commentary re: how you do business and treat people/human life and agree with you----except that your politics are inconsistent with those admirable values---that's not what American style captialism is at all, and that is not even remotely the way this administration has done business or treated people at all---how do you reconcile this?
Let me know what you think of those links--I don't neccessarily endorse everything on those websites, but the information is consistent w/ multiple sources----In a democratic society, we must have an informed citizenry, and in a country this large, it's the media's job to inform the citizenry, hold power accountable, and engage in true analysis--in the spirit of criticism---and the mainstream media--esp. t.v.--has completely dropped the ball and become info-tainment sound bites, and especially in the lead up to Iraq, virtual cheeleaders for the whitehouse and pentagon, actin as marionettes rather than engaging in anything remotely resembling investigative journalism.
I'm out
OK--you said alot--we have alot of work to do
1. About Afghanistan, you're far off-base-liberated??-here's just a little to rebut your allegation:
http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=559872005
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gangster21may21,0,5954895.story?coll=la-home-headlines
2. Iraq--Now, let's first recognize that the ends do not justify the means--it's not o.k.--even if Iraq does, one day, eventually end up better off than it was before the U.S. invasion and occupation--it's still not o.k. that this administration lied/distorted/manipulated information to sell this war to the american people--here's some of the lies (not exhaustive) in chronological order
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/20/1055828490557.html?oneclick=true
http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/lieswmd.html
http://www.rotten.com/library/history/war/wmd/saddam/
AND, I htink it's truly naive to believe that this was about 'liberating the Iraqi people---this was part of an ideological agenda that was in place by neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield, Perle, ect. long before Bush even took office, and they exploited fear after 9-11 to advance this agenda (along with alot of other policy) see this link for a comprehensive look into the project for the new american century--notice dates and names
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqmiddleeast2000-1997.htm
incidentally--this guy, who was writing papers during the Clinton era for proj. for new am. century, while working for Unocal and wining and dining the Taliban with the prospects of putting a new natural gas pipeline through afghanistan, is now the ambassador
http://usembassy.state.gov/afghanistan/wwwhbiozal.html
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/khalilzad/khalilzad.php
It is truly naive to think that this was about anything other than geopolitical control of a region that is strategically important as well as rich in natural resources---Now, many, many thousands dead later, Iraq is in chaos--this is a country that hadn't heard of suicide bombers that is seeing them daily, it's infastructure is devastated--it's a fucking mess---remember, the U.S. picked one of the weakest nations in the region, too--devastated by 12 years of sanctions---and it's still a disastor--remember Wolfowitz/Rumsfield talking aobut how we'd be greeted as liberators and the whole thing was going to be done w/ real quick and neat in just weeks???(I can get quotes to that affect, too) These were the scholars--who'd never been to war--the architects who were so salivating over power that they also had no real post war planning in place--
Now. with that said---I believe in people's fundamental power to repair/heal their worlds---and there probably will be a day that a reasonably stable democratic situation realizes itself in Iraq---but it will be in spite of the Bush administrations' actions, not because of---and it won't look like BushCO wants it to--it'll be an Islamic democracy.
3. Now, you referred to a poll re: the economy---well, most U.S. citizens know that as bad as it's gotten (highest deficti ever in history)--it has to get better, so of course they'll say that, and it eventually probably will, but Bush's terrible tax policies, enormous deficit spending are actually a traditional republican's nightmare---here's a little on that:
http://www.thetruthaboutgeorge.com/economy/
O.K.--I'm real tired--2 pages into a 10 page final paper I have to finish tomorrow---those links should start you out---I like your commentary re: how you do business and treat people/human life and agree with you----except that your politics are inconsistent with those admirable values---that's not what American style captialism is at all, and that is not even remotely the way this administration has done business or treated people at all---how do you reconcile this?
Let me know what you think of those links--I don't neccessarily endorse everything on those websites, but the information is consistent w/ multiple sources----In a democratic society, we must have an informed citizenry, and in a country this large, it's the media's job to inform the citizenry, hold power accountable, and engage in true analysis--in the spirit of criticism---and the mainstream media--esp. t.v.--has completely dropped the ball and become info-tainment sound bites, and especially in the lead up to Iraq, virtual cheeleaders for the whitehouse and pentagon, actin as marionettes rather than engaging in anything remotely resembling investigative journalism.
I'm out
Hillary will not run for pres.. Her past is catching up. I doubt that she will win her senate seat back if Rudy G. runs. Reid is a hypocritacle idiot. There will be no compromise on the fillibuster. The constitutional option will be used if needed. W is dead wrong on the stem cell issue. Also wrong on immigration. The democratic party is no longer the party for minorities or the working man. W made a huge mistake on the bankruptcy bill. Condi will run in 2012. WMD's were in Iraq. Read the NYT article from 5/20. Dean will be fired soon. PACS should be banned, on both sides. Are democrats happy with their leaders? Dean,Reid,Pelosi, Boxter,Kennedy and M.Moore? Pathetic morons. JFK was the last great champion of labor and minorities and is probably turning in his grave now. I admire both Clintons for their resiliency. I would rather have a beer with Bill over W. It is no tat all stimulating posting these ramblings on sites that are hardline right. Thanks for your time.
Dallas
Dallas
*****Hillary will not run for pres.. Her past is catching up. I doubt that she will win her senate seat back if Rudy G. runs. Reid is a hypocritacle idiot. There will be no compromise on the fillibuster. The constitutional option will be used if needed. W is dead wrong on the stem cell issue. Also wrong on immigration. The democratic party is no longer the party for minorities or the working man. W made a huge mistake on the bankruptcy bill. Condi will run in 2012. WMD's were in Iraq. Read the NYT article from 5/20. Dean will be fired soon. PACS should be banned, on both sides. Are democrats happy with their leaders? Dean,Reid,Pelosi, Boxter,Kennedy and M.Moore? Pathetic morons. JFK was the last great champion of labor and minorities and is probably turning in his grave now. I admire both Clintons for their resiliency. I would rather have a beer with Bill over W. It is no tat all stimulating posting these ramblings on sites that are hardline right. Thanks for your time.
Dallas*****
1. I'm not a democrat, both parties have become 'by and for' the corporations, not the people---the repubs certainly aren't the party for the average guy--as evidenced by current tax policy that mostly favors the rich
2. You mad many allegation, without saying why i.e.WMD's were in Iraq---Now, I've read a couple of things and actually talked to some folks at the World Affairs Council that give a persuasive argument that there may have been some WMDs---but what are you basing this on?----Also, that still doesn't excuse the blatant lies that this administration told--did you look at the link and see how they changed their stories as time went on? This was disastorous policy from beginning to now
So if you state something, back it up with some links--Ilinks w/ facts/data (not Rush Limbaugh ranting opinions)---
But once again Afghanistan and Iraq are not even close to "liberated" as evidenced by some of the links I sent---maybe Fox news tries to deny the truth and say this, but it's not true
Dallas*****
1. I'm not a democrat, both parties have become 'by and for' the corporations, not the people---the repubs certainly aren't the party for the average guy--as evidenced by current tax policy that mostly favors the rich
2. You mad many allegation, without saying why i.e.WMD's were in Iraq---Now, I've read a couple of things and actually talked to some folks at the World Affairs Council that give a persuasive argument that there may have been some WMDs---but what are you basing this on?----Also, that still doesn't excuse the blatant lies that this administration told--did you look at the link and see how they changed their stories as time went on? This was disastorous policy from beginning to now
So if you state something, back it up with some links--Ilinks w/ facts/data (not Rush Limbaugh ranting opinions)---
But once again Afghanistan and Iraq are not even close to "liberated" as evidenced by some of the links I sent---maybe Fox news tries to deny the truth and say this, but it's not true
See above posting
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Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
Keith Thompson
Sunday, May 22, 2005
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Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.
I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.
I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.
Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.
Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.
I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").
The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.
I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.
Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.
A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.
When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.
My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.
I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.
Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.
Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.
All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.
These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.
I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.
In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).
Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."
When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."
I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?
He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."
My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.
In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.
America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.
At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."
One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.
This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.
True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.
Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.
All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.
Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens" and "To Be a Man." His work is at http://www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at insight [at] sfchronicle.com.
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San Francisco Chronicle
Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
Keith Thompson
Sunday, May 22, 2005
* Printable Version
* Email This Article
Opinion
.Main Opinion Page
.Chronicle Sunday Insight
.Chronicle Campaigns
SF Chronicle Submissions
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.Sunday Insight
Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.
I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.
I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.
My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.
Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.
Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did many years before.
I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").
The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.
I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.
Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.
A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.
When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.
My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.
I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.
Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.
Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.
All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.
These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.
I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.
In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).
Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that."
When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."
I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?
He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."
My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.
In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders' talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.
America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition.
At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society (whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to "foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."
One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.
This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.
True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.
Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.
All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.
Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens" and "To Be a Man." His work is at http://www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at insight [at] sfchronicle.com.
Page C - 1
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Cala Foods/Bell Markets Sale This Week
On Sale This Week - Schwarz Sausage
Sunday, May 22 thru May 26, 2005
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Sunday, May 22 thru May 26, 2005
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odds are, you and your SFGate hero were never really left wing to start with (and that would make at least him a big fat liar)
nevertheless, you are obviously too busy waving flags around and proclaiming the importance of "freedom" to notice the farce in the following line from the piece you reposted
"Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country"
you see, you buy the hype (or the BS more accurately) that with us OCCUPYING IRAQ that it is a free country. hello! we're building permanent, yes, permanent, military bases there to assure that they will never truely be free. look at what happenned with Karzai and Afghanistan just today -- Bush said "self-determination, my ass". Bush's daddy built up and kept the Saddam dictatorship going and now Jr. is assuring a more compliant outpost of American empire (Saddam got uppity after all and thought he didn't have to listen to us after we brought him to power).
when you cheer FOR war, you are cheering AGAINST self-determination for Iraqis and FOR American occupation, but you are so blinded you'll never even see that.
lastly, Mr. Patriot, why haven't you gone over there to fight? you know the army's having a hard time recruiting, don't you? you'll cheer on war, and then sacrifice absolutely zippo and leave the bleeding and dieing to other folk. now, that's a true American hero!
nevertheless, you are obviously too busy waving flags around and proclaiming the importance of "freedom" to notice the farce in the following line from the piece you reposted
"Leading voices in America's "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country"
you see, you buy the hype (or the BS more accurately) that with us OCCUPYING IRAQ that it is a free country. hello! we're building permanent, yes, permanent, military bases there to assure that they will never truely be free. look at what happenned with Karzai and Afghanistan just today -- Bush said "self-determination, my ass". Bush's daddy built up and kept the Saddam dictatorship going and now Jr. is assuring a more compliant outpost of American empire (Saddam got uppity after all and thought he didn't have to listen to us after we brought him to power).
when you cheer FOR war, you are cheering AGAINST self-determination for Iraqis and FOR American occupation, but you are so blinded you'll never even see that.
lastly, Mr. Patriot, why haven't you gone over there to fight? you know the army's having a hard time recruiting, don't you? you'll cheer on war, and then sacrifice absolutely zippo and leave the bleeding and dieing to other folk. now, that's a true American hero!
Iraq--Now, let's first recognize that the ends do not justify the means--it's not o.k.--even if Iraq does, one day, eventually end up better off than it was before the U.S. invasion and occupation--it's still not o.k. that this administration lied/distorted/manipulated information to sell this war to the american people--here's some of the lies (not exhaustive) in chronological order
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/20/1055828490557.html?oneclick=true
http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/lieswmd.html
http://www.rotten.com/library/history/war/wmd/saddam/
AND, I htink it's truly naive to believe that this was about 'liberating the Iraqi people---this was part of an ideological agenda that was in place by neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield, Perle, ect. long before Bush even took office, and they exploited fear after 9-11 to advance this agenda (along with alot of other policy) see this link for a comprehensive look into the project for the new american century--notice dates and names
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqmiddleeast2000-1997.htm
incidentally--this guy, who was writing papers during the Clinton era for proj. for new am. century, while working for Unocal and wining and dining the Taliban with the prospects of putting a new natural gas pipeline through afghanistan, is now the ambassador
http://usembassy.state.gov/afghanistan/wwwhbiozal.html
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/khalilzad/khalilzad.php
It is truly naive to think that this was about anything other than geopolitical control of a region that is strategically important as well as rich in natural resources---Now, many, many thousands dead later, Iraq is in chaos--this is a country that hadn't heard of suicide bombers that is seeing them daily, it's infastructure is devastated--it's a fucking mess---remember, the U.S. picked one of the weakest nations in the region, too--devastated by 12 years of sanctions---and it's still a disastor--remember Wolfowitz/Rumsfield talking aobut how we'd be greeted as liberators and the whole thing was going to be done w/ real quick and neat in just weeks???(I can get quotes to that affect, too) These were the scholars--who'd never been to war--the architects who were so salivating over power that they also had no real post war planning in place--
Now. with that said---I believe in people's fundamental power to repair/heal their worlds---and there probably will be a day that a reasonably stable democratic situation realizes itself in Iraq---but it will be in spite of the Bush administrations' actions, not because of---and it won't look like BushCO wants it to--it'll be an Islamic democracy.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/20/1055828490557.html?oneclick=true
http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/lieswmd.html
http://www.rotten.com/library/history/war/wmd/saddam/
AND, I htink it's truly naive to believe that this was about 'liberating the Iraqi people---this was part of an ideological agenda that was in place by neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield, Perle, ect. long before Bush even took office, and they exploited fear after 9-11 to advance this agenda (along with alot of other policy) see this link for a comprehensive look into the project for the new american century--notice dates and names
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqmiddleeast2000-1997.htm
incidentally--this guy, who was writing papers during the Clinton era for proj. for new am. century, while working for Unocal and wining and dining the Taliban with the prospects of putting a new natural gas pipeline through afghanistan, is now the ambassador
http://usembassy.state.gov/afghanistan/wwwhbiozal.html
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/khalilzad/khalilzad.php
It is truly naive to think that this was about anything other than geopolitical control of a region that is strategically important as well as rich in natural resources---Now, many, many thousands dead later, Iraq is in chaos--this is a country that hadn't heard of suicide bombers that is seeing them daily, it's infastructure is devastated--it's a fucking mess---remember, the U.S. picked one of the weakest nations in the region, too--devastated by 12 years of sanctions---and it's still a disastor--remember Wolfowitz/Rumsfield talking aobut how we'd be greeted as liberators and the whole thing was going to be done w/ real quick and neat in just weeks???(I can get quotes to that affect, too) These were the scholars--who'd never been to war--the architects who were so salivating over power that they also had no real post war planning in place--
Now. with that said---I believe in people's fundamental power to repair/heal their worlds---and there probably will be a day that a reasonably stable democratic situation realizes itself in Iraq---but it will be in spite of the Bush administrations' actions, not because of---and it won't look like BushCO wants it to--it'll be an Islamic democracy.
This is not my joke, but funny.t a small terminal in the Texas Panhandle, three strangers are awaiting their shuttle flight.
One is a Native American passing through from Oklahoma.
The second one is a local ranch hand on his way to Ft. Worth for a stock show.
The third passenger is an Arab student, newly arrived at the Texas oil patch from the Middle East.
To pass the time they strike up a conversation on recent events, and the discussion drifts to their diverse cultures.
Soon the Westerners learn that the Arab is a devout Muslim.
The conversation falls into an uneasy lull.
The cowpoke leans back in his chair, crosses his boots on a magazine table, tips his big sweat stained hat forward over his face.
The wind outside blows tumbleweeds and the old windsock flaps, but no plane comes.
Finally, the Native American clears his throat and softly, he speaks: "Once my people were many, now we are few."
The Muslim raises an eyebrow and leans forward, "Once my people were few," he sneers, "and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?"
The Texan shifts the toothpick to one side of his mouth and from the darkness beneath his Stetson says, "That's 'cause we ain't played Cowboys and Muslims yet.
One is a Native American passing through from Oklahoma.
The second one is a local ranch hand on his way to Ft. Worth for a stock show.
The third passenger is an Arab student, newly arrived at the Texas oil patch from the Middle East.
To pass the time they strike up a conversation on recent events, and the discussion drifts to their diverse cultures.
Soon the Westerners learn that the Arab is a devout Muslim.
The conversation falls into an uneasy lull.
The cowpoke leans back in his chair, crosses his boots on a magazine table, tips his big sweat stained hat forward over his face.
The wind outside blows tumbleweeds and the old windsock flaps, but no plane comes.
Finally, the Native American clears his throat and softly, he speaks: "Once my people were many, now we are few."
The Muslim raises an eyebrow and leans forward, "Once my people were few," he sneers, "and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?"
The Texan shifts the toothpick to one side of his mouth and from the darkness beneath his Stetson says, "That's 'cause we ain't played Cowboys and Muslims yet.
You're pro-Bush, pro-America, and pro-genocide.
You deserve credit for being consistent.
You deserve credit for being consistent.
Thanks, that is a compliment with the exception of the genocide label. Funny thing is that I am 25% american indian but 100% American. Just today I saved a few babies lives. You could ask the mother. I have a faimily of sparrows nesting between the top of my outdoor speakers and the bottom of my back porch roof. Early spring, I stuffed A bundled up newspaper to fit tight against the roof. The tenacious rascals had the paper shredded and a new nest built in two days. This morning, I noticed the babie sparrows nest ready to fall as mom was feeding. My wife said do not touch! I then got out the ladder, and risked my life by climbing on the NOT A STEP step to re-inforce the babies nest. They should be flying in 2weeks. I have locked up my brakes as to not run over a box turtle, only to dodge traffic oncomming @45+. That little turtle was released in Turtle Creek in the town of Highland Park, Texas. He is probably mad now though, as the taxes have made him move downstream. Blue Jay story. We had BJ'S nesting in our red oak tree 5 years ago. Beautiful birds. We saw them build a nest in early spring. You know what happend next? Babie BJ'S. We took pictures from our second story window. Our then 2 year old was stoked, and checked the nest daily. She put out bird feed and water. One morning, a premature was dead on our law. My daughter cried and demanded that I do something.... So we put a cheap round plastic swimming pool under the nest. We added pillows to cushion the fall if needed.....2 weeks later, mother was schreeching relentlessly. Two baby birds had tried to fly but could not. They were still alive though, flapping their little wings. I called Wildlife rescue to try to save the young ones. They said do not touch and stay away. We'll stupid me, at my daughter's request, I went into Hero mode. 30 seconds later, I had 6 Flaming Beautiful birds attacking my head, back and arms. The next spring, we had 3x nests.Moral of this true story? Hell, I don't know. All life is special whether youre a bird, human, turtle or an unborn baby.
Thanks for that completely uninteresting and irrelevant story.
No matter what evidence provided to "Dallas roofer" about Bush's piss poor foreign and domestic policy---he remains in denial---and still considers being 'pro-bush' a compliment
I would save you too. Misguided souls need help too. "Though I post in the valley of liberals, I have no fear... for I have the majority with me. Rush, Shaun, Anne and the gang will watch my back". W rules!
Step into my office. I will help u too. Lets look into your childhood deeds.
Dr. Roof
Dr. Roof
Step into my office. I will help u too. Lets look into your childhood deeds.
Dr. Roof
Dr. Roof
<<...for I have the majority with me....>>
I'm not usually one to bring up poll numbers, but since you're talking majorities, let's take a look.
As of mid-April, 45% approve of Bush's performance and 49% disapprove. That's unprecendentedly low for this early in a second term.
By comparison, Nixon had an approval rating of 57%
and a disapproval rating of 34% at this point in his second term.
Bush's two major initiatives--Iraq and Social Security "Reform"--are opposed by solid majorities.
I'm not usually one to bring up poll numbers, but since you're talking majorities, let's take a look.
As of mid-April, 45% approve of Bush's performance and 49% disapprove. That's unprecendentedly low for this early in a second term.
By comparison, Nixon had an approval rating of 57%
and a disapproval rating of 34% at this point in his second term.
Bush's two major initiatives--Iraq and Social Security "Reform"--are opposed by solid majorities.
What I have said earlier seems to be growing -- DPreview has found it's audience -- and it is NOT advanced amateurs nor pros. I am disappointed.
When was the last review of a pro camera here? 1DmkII? Nope. D2x? Nope. Oh, yes, the S3 got the worst rating of any camera I have ever seen on this site. But some company makes a cosmetic change to some consumer wunder-camera, and poof --- full review.
Well, I will have to accept DPreview's shift in focus, but I don't have to like it. I still think this is a great site for folks to congregate and have discussions, but the reviews -- they are a changin'...
--
Thom--
When was the last review of a pro camera here? 1DmkII? Nope. D2x? Nope. Oh, yes, the S3 got the worst rating of any camera I have ever seen on this site. But some company makes a cosmetic change to some consumer wunder-camera, and poof --- full review.
Well, I will have to accept DPreview's shift in focus, but I don't have to like it. I still think this is a great site for folks to congregate and have discussions, but the reviews -- they are a changin'...
--
Thom--
Thanks for the offer, but since I worl in psychiatry, I've made it a point to take care of myself mentally/physically/spiritually pretty well--otherwise I can't help others--but once again I notice that you ignore the real issues in favor of making infantile posts---still unwilling to debate the facts?--Your God, "W" is a complete fuck up on every level and if you want to attempt an adult discussion of this, I might try to work with your denial by presenting you some facts---it's up to you
The Gallic Wars
By Julius Caesar
Translated by W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn
Chapter 1
When Caesar was setting out for Italy, he sent Servius Galba with the twelfth legion and part of the cavalry, against the Nantuates, the Veragri, and Seduni, who extend from the territories of the Allobroges, and the lake of Geneva, and the River Rhone to the top of the Alps. The reason for sending him was, that he desired that the pass along the Alps, through which [the Roman] merchants had been accustomed to travel with great danger, and under great imposts, should be opened. He permitted him, if he thought it necessary, to station the legion in these places, for the purpose of wintering. Galba having fought some successful battles and stormed several of their forts, upon embassadors being sent to him from all parts and hostages given and a peace concluded, determined to station two cohorts among the Nantuates, and to winter in person with the other cohorts of that legion in a village of the Veragri, which is called Octodurus; and this village being situated in a valley, with a small plain annexed to it, is bounded on all sides by very high mountains. As this village was divided into two parts by a river, he granted one part of it to the Gauls, and assigned the other, which had been left by them unoccupied, to the cohorts to winter in. He fortified this [latter] part with a rampart and a ditch.
Chapter 2
When several days had elapsed in winter quarters, and he had ordered corn to be brought in he was suddenly informed by his scouts that all the people had gone off in the night from that part of the town which he had given up to the Gauls, and that the mountains which hung over it were occupied by a very large force of the Seduni and Veragri. It had happened for several reasons that the Gauls suddenly formed the design of renewing the war and cutting off that legion. First, because they despised a single legion, on account of its small number, and that not quite full (two cohorts having been detached, and several individuals being absent, who had been dispatched for the purpose of seeking provision); then, likewise, because they thought that on account of the disadvantageous character of the situation, even their first attack could not be sustained [by us] when they would rush from the mountains into the valley, and discharge their weapons upon us. To this was added, that they were indignant that their children were torn from them under the title of hostages, and they were persuaded that the Romans designed to seize upon the summits of the Alps, and unite those parts to the neighboring province [of Gaul], not only to secure the passes, but also a constant possession.
Chapter 3
Having received these tidings, Galba, since the works of the winter-quarters and the fortifications were not fully completed, nor was sufficient preparation made with regard to corn and other provisions (since, as a surrender had been made, and hostages received, he had thought he need entertain no apprehension of war), speedily summoning a council, began to anxiously inquire their opinions. In which council, since so much sudden danger had happened contrary to the general expectation, and almost all the higher places were seen already covered with a multitude of armed men, nor could [either] troops come to their relief, or provisions be brought in, as the passes were blocked up [by the enemy]; safety being now nearly despaired of, some opinions of this sort were delivered: that, "leaving their baggage, and making a sally, they should hasten away for safety by the same routes by which they had come thither." To the greater part, however, it seemed best, reserving that measure to the last, to await the issue of the matter, and to defend the camp.
Chapter 4
A short time only having elapsed, so that time was scarcely given for arranging and executing those things which they had determined on, the enemy, upon the signal being given, rushed down [upon our men] from all parts, and discharged stones and darts, upon our rampart. Our men at first, while their strength was fresh, resisted bravely, nor did they cast any weapon ineffectually from their higher station. As soon as any part of the camp, being destitute of defenders, seemed to be hard pressed, thither they ran, and brought assistance. But they were over-matched in this, that the enemy when wearied by the long continuance of the battle, went out of the action, and others with fresh strength came in their place; none of which things could be done by our men, owing to the smallness of their number; and not only was permission not given to the wearied [Roman] to retire from the fight, but not even to the wounded [was liberty granted] to quit the post where he had been stationed, and recover.
Chapter 5
When they had now been fighting for more than six hours, without cessation, and not only strength, but even weapons were failing our men, and the enemy were pressing on more rigorously, and had begun to demolish the rampart and to fill up the trench, while our men were becoming exhausted, and the matter was now brought to the last extremity, P. Sextius Baculus, a centurion of the first rank, whom we have related to have been disabled by severe wounds in the engagement with the Nervii, and also C. Volusenus, a tribune of the soldiers, a man of great skill and valor, hasten to Galba, and assure him that the only hope of safety lay in making a sally, and trying the last resource. Whereupon assembling the centurions, he quickly gives orders to the soldiers to discontinue the fight a short time, and only collect the weapons flung [at them], and recruit themselves after their fatigue, and afterward, upon the signal being given, sally forth from the camp, and place in their valor all their hope of safety.
Chapter 6
They do what they were ordered; and, making a sudden sally from all the gates [of the camp], leave the enemy the means neither of knowing what was taking place, nor of collecting themselves. Fortune thus taking a turn, [our men] surround on every side, and slay those who had entertained the hope of gaining the camp and having killed more than the third part of an army of more than 30,000 men (which number of the barbarians it appeared certain had come up to our camp), put to flight the rest when panic-stricken, and do not suffer them to halt even upon the higher grounds. All the forces of the enemy being thus routed, and stripped of their arms, [our men] betake themselves to their camp and fortifications. Which battle being finished, inasmuch as Galba was unwilling to tempt fortune again, and remembered that he had come into winter quarters with one design, and saw that he had met with a different state of affairs; chiefly however urged by the want of corn and provision, having the next day burned all the buildings of that village, he hastens to return into the province; and as no enemy opposed or hindered his march, he brought the legion safe into the [country of the] Nantuates, thence into [that of] the Allobroges, and there wintered.
Chapter 7
These things being achieved, while Caesar had every reason to suppose that Gaul was reduced to a state of tranquillity, the Belgae being overcome, the Germans expelled, the Seduni among the Alps defeated, and when he had, therefore, in the beginning of winter, set out for Illyricum, as he wished to visit those nations, and acquire a knowledge of their countries, a sudden war sprang up in Gaul. The occasion of that war was this: P. Crassus, a young man, had taken up his winter quarters with the seventh legion among the Andes, who border upon the [Atlantic] ocean. He, as there was a scarcity of corn in those parts, sent out some officers of cavalry, and several military tribunes among the neighbouring states, for the purpose of procuring corn and provision; in which number T. Terrasidius was sent among the Esubii; M. Trebius Gallus among the Curiosolitae; Q. Velanius, T. Silius, amongst the Veneti.
Chapter 8
The influence of this state is by far the most considerable of any of the countries on the whole sea coast, because the Veneti both have a very great number of ships, with which they have been accustomed to sail to Britain, and [thus] excel the rest in their knowledge and experience of nautical affairs; and as only a few ports lie scattered along that stormy and open sea, of which they are in possession, they hold as tributaries almost all those who are accustomed to traffic in that sea. With them arose the beginning [of the revolt] by their detaining Silius and Velanius; for they thought that they should recover by their means the hostages which they had given to Crassus. The neighboring people led on by their influence (as the measures of the Gauls are sudden and hasty), detain Trebius and Terrasidius for the same motive; and quickly sending embassadors, by means of their leading men, they enter into a mutual compact to do nothing except by general consent, and abide the same issue of fortune; and they solicit the other states to choose rather to continue in that liberty which they had received from their ancestors, than endure slavery under the Romans. All the sea coast being quickly brought over to their sentiments, they send a common embassy to P. Crassus [to say], "If he wished to receive back his officers, let him send back to them their hostages."
Chapter 9
Caesar, being informed of these things by Crassus, since he was so far distant himself, orders ships of war to be built in the mean time on the river Loire, which flows into the ocean; rowers to be raised from the province; sailors and pilots to be provided. These matters being quickly executed, he himself, as soon as the season of the year permits, hastens to the army. The Veneti, and the other states also, being informed of Caesar's arrival, when they reflected how great a crime they had committed, in that, the embassadors (a character which had among all nations ever been sacred and inviolable) had by them been detained and thrown into prison, resolve to prepare for a war in proportion to the greatness of their danger, and especially to provide those things which appertain to the service of a navy, with the greater confidence, inasmuch as they greatly relied on the nature of their situation. They knew that the passes by land were cut off by estuaries, that the approach by sea was most difficult, by reason of our ignorance of the localities, [and] the small number of the harbors, and they trusted that our army would not be able to stay very long among them, on account of the insufficiency of corn; and again, even if all these things should turn out contrary to their expectation, yet they were very powerful in their navy. They well understood that the Romans neither had any number of ships, nor were acquainted with the shallows, the harbors, or the islands of those parts where they would have to carry on the war; and the navigation was very different in a narrow sea from what it was in the vast and open ocean. Having come to this resolution, they fortify their towns, convey corn into them from the country parts, bring together as many ships as possible to Venetia, where it appeared Caesar would at first carry on the war. They unite to themselves as allies for that war, the Osismii, the Lexovii, the Nannetes, the Ambiliati, the Morini, the Diablintes, and the Menapii; and send for auxiliaries from Britain, which is situated over against those regions.
Chapter 10
There were these difficulties which we have mentioned above, in carrying on the war, but many things, nevertheless, urged Caesar to that war; - the open insult offered to the state in the detention of the Roman knights, the rebellion raised after surrendering, the revolt after hostages were given, the confederacy of so many states, but principally, lest if, [the conduct of] this part was overlooked, the other nations should think that the same thing was permitted them. Wherefore, since he reflected that almost all the Gauls were fond of revolution, and easily and quickly excited to war; that all men likewise, by nature, love liberty and hate the condition of slavery, he thought he ought to divide and more widely distribute his army, before more states should join the confederation.
Chapter 11
He therefore sends T. Labienus, his lieutenant, with the cavalry to the Treviri, who are nearest to the river Rhine. He charges him to visit the Remi and the other Belgians, and to keep them in their allegiance and repel the Germans (who were said to have been summoned by the Belgae to their aid,) if they attempted to cross the river by force in their ships. He orders P. Crassus to proceed into Aquitania with twelve legionary cohorts and a great number of the cavalry, lest auxiliaries should be sent into Gaul by these states, and such great nations be united. He sends Q. Titurius Sabinus his lieutenant, with three legions, among the Unelli, the Curiosolitae, and the Lexovii, to take care that their forces should be kept separate from the rest. He appoints D. Brutus, a young man, over the fleet and those Gallic vessels which he had ordered to be furnished by the Pictones and the Santoni, and the other provinces which remained at peace; and commands him to proceed toward the Veneti, as soon as he could. He himself hastens thither with the land forces.
Chapter 12
The sites of their towns were generally such that, being placed on extreme points [of land] and on promontories, they neither had an approach by land when the tide had rushed in from the main ocean, which always happens twice in the space of twelve hours; nor by ships, because, upon the tide ebbing again, the ships were likely to be dashed upon the shoals. Thus, by either circumstance, was the storming of their towns rendered difficult; and if at any time perchance the Veneti overpowered by the greatness of our works, (the sea having been excluded by a mound and large dams, and the latter being made almost equal in height to the walls of the town) had begun to despair of their fortunes; bringing up a large number of ships, of which they had a very great quantity, they carried off all their property and betook themselves to the nearest towns; there they again defended themselves by the same advantages of situation. They did this the more easily during a great part of the summer, because our ships were kept back by storms, and the difficulty of sailing was very great in that vast and open sea, with its strong tides and its harbors far apart and exceedingly few in number.
Chapter 13
For their ships were built and equipped after this manner. The keels were somewhat flatter than those of our ships, whereby they could more easily encounter the shallows and the ebbing of the tide: the prows were raised very high, and, in like manner the sterns were adapted to the force of the waves and storms [which they were formed to sustain]. The ships were built wholly of oak, and designed to endure any force and violence whatever; the benches which were made of planks a foot in breadth, were fastened by iron spikes of the thickness of a man's thumb; the anchors were secured fast by iron chains instead of cables, and for sails they used skins and thin dressed leather. These [were used] either through their want of canvas and their ignorance of its application, or for this reason, which is more probable, that they thought that such storms of the ocean, and such violent gales of wind could not be resisted by sails, nor ships of such great burden be conveniently enough managed by them. The encounter of our fleet with these ships' was of such a nature that our fleet excelled in speed alone, and the plying of the oars; other things, considering the nature of the place [and] the violence of the storms, were more suitable and better adapted on their side; for neither could our ships injure theirs with their beaks (so great was their strength), nor on account of their height was a weapon easily cast up to them; and for the same reason they were less readily locked in by rocks. To this was added, that whenever a storm began to rage and they ran before the wind, they both could weather the storm more easily and heave to securely in the shallows, and when left by the tide feared nothing from rocks and shelves: the risk of all which things was much to be dreaded by our ships.
Chapter 14
Caesar, after taking many of their towns, perceiving that so much labor was spent in vain and that the flight of the enemy could not be prevented on the capture of their towns, and that injury could not be done them, he determined to wait for his fleet. As soon as it came up and was first seen by the enemy, about 220 of their ships, fully equipped and appointed with every kind of [naval] implement, sailed forth from the harbor, and drew up opposite to ours; nor did it appear clear to Brutus, who commanded the fleet, or to the tribunes of the soldiers and the centurions, to whom the several ships were assigned, what to do, or what system of tactics to adopt; for they knew that damage could not be done by their beaks; and that, although turrets were built [on their decks], yet the height of the stems of the barbarian ships exceeded these; so that weapons could not be cast up from [our] lower position with sufficient effect, and those cast by the Gauls fell the more forcibly upon us. One thing provided by our men was of great service, [viz.] sharp hooks inserted into and fastened upon poles, of a form not unlike the hooks used in attacking town walls. When the ropes which fastened the sail-yards to the masts were caught by them and pulled, and our vessel vigorously impelled with the oars, they [the ropes] were severed; and when they were cut away, the yards necessarily fell down; so that as all the hope of the Gallic vessels depended on their sails and rigging, upon these being cut away, the entire management of the ships was taken from them at the same time. The rest of the contest depended on courage; in which our men decidedly had the advantage; and the more so, because the whole action was carried on in the sight of Caesar and the entire army; so that no act, a little more valiant than ordinary, could pass unobserved, for all the hills and higher grounds, from which there was a near prospect of the sea were occupied by our army.
Chapter 15
The sail yards [of the enemy], as we have said, being brought down, although two and [in some cases] three ships [of theirs] surrounded each one [of ours], the soldiers strove with the greatest energy to board the ships of the enemy; and, after the barbarians observed this taking place, as a great many of their ships were beaten, and as no relief for that evil could be discovered, they hastened to seek safety in flight. And, having now turned their vessels to that quarter in which the wind blew, so great a calm and lull suddenly arose, that they could not move out of their place, which circumstance, truly, was exceedingly opportune for finishing the business; for our men gave chase and took them one by one, so that very few out of all the number, [and those] by the intervention of night, arrived at the land, after the battle had lasted almost from the fourth hour till sun-set.
Chapter 16
By this battle the war with the Veneti and the whole of the sea coast was finished; for both all the youth, and all, too, of more advanced age, in whom there was any discretion or rank, had assembled in that battle; and they had collected in that one place whatever naval forces they had anywhere; and when these were lost, the survivors had no place to retreat to, nor means of defending their towns. They accordingly surrendered themselves and all their possessions to Caesar, on whom Caesar thought that punishment should be inflicted the more severely, in order that for the future the rights of embassadors might be more carefully respected by barbarians; having, therefore, put to death all their senate, he sold the rest for slaves.
Chapter 17
While these things are going on among the Veneti, Q. Titurius Sabinus with those troops which he had received from Caesar, arrives in the territories of the Unelli. Over these people Viridovix ruled, and held the chief command of all those states which had revolted; from which he had collected a large and powerful army. And in those few days, the Aulerci and the Sexovii, having slain their senate because they would not consent to be promoters of the war, shut their gates [against us] and united themselves to Viridovix; a great multitude besides of desperate men and robbers assembled out of Gaul from all quarters, whom the hope of plundering and the love of fighting had called away from husbandry and their daily labor. Sabinus kept himself within his camp, which was in a position convenient for everything; while Viridovix encamped over against him at a distance of two miles, and daily bringing out his forces, gave him an opportunity of fighting; so that Sabinus had now not only come into contempt with the enemy, but also was somewhat taunted by the speeches of our soldiers; and furnished so great a suspicion of his cowardice that the enemy presumed to approach even to the very rampart of our camp. He adopted this conduct for the following reason: because he did not think that a lieutenant ought to engage in battle with so great a force, especially while he who held the chief command was absent, except on advantageous ground or some favorable circumstance presented itself.
Chapter 18
After having established this suspicion of his cowardice, he selected a certain suitable and crafty Gaul, who was one of those whom he had with him as auxiliaries. He induces him by great gifts and promises to go over to the enemy; and informs [him] of what he wished to be done. Who, when he arrives among them as a deserter, lays before them the fears of the Romans; and informs them by what difficulties Caesar himself was harassed, and that the matter was not far removed from this - that Sabinus would the next night privately draw off his army out of the camp and set forth to Caesar for the purpose of carrying [him] assistance, which, when they heard, they a11 cry out together that an opportunity of successfully conducting their enterprise, ought not to be thrown away: that they ought to go to the [Roman] camp. Many things persuaded the Gauls to this measure; the delay of Sabinus during the previous days; the positive assertion of the [pretended] deserter; want of provisions, for a supply of which they had not taken the requisite precautions; the hope springing from the Venetic war; and [also] because in most cases men willingly believe what they wish. Influenced by these things they do not discharge Viridovix and the other leaders from the council, before they gained permission from them to take up arms and hasten to [our] camp; which being granted, rejoicing as if victory were fully certain, they collected faggots and brushwood, with which to fill up the Roman trenches, and hasten to the camp.
Chapter 19
The situation of the camp was a rising ground, gently sloping from the bottom for about a mile. Thither they proceeded with great speed (in order that as little time as possible might be given to the Romans to collect and arm themselves), and arrived quite out of breath. Sabinus having encouraged his men, gives them the signal, which they earnestly desired. While the enemy were encumbered by reason of the burdens which they were carrying, he orders a sally to be made suddenly from two gates [of the camp]. It happened, by the advantage of situation, by the unskilfulness and the fatigue of the enemy, by the valor of our soldiers, and their experience in former battles, that they could not stand one attack of our men, and immediately turned their backs; and our men with full vigor followed them while disordered, and slew a great number of them; the horse pursuing the rest, left but few, who escaped by flight. Thus at the same time, Sabinus was informed of the naval battle and Caesar of victory gained by Sabinus; and all the states immediately surrendered themselves to Titurius: for as the temper of the Gauls is impetuous and ready to undertake wars, so their mind is weak, and by no means resolute in enduring calamities.
Chapter 20
About the same time, P. Crassus, when he had arrived in Aquitania (which, as has been before said, both from its extent of territory and the great number of its people, is to be reckoned a third part of Gaul,) understanding that he was to wage war in these parts, where a few years before, L. Valerius Praeconinus, the lieutenant had been killed, and his army routed, and from which L. Manilius, the proconsul, had fled with the loss of his baggage, he perceived that no ordinary care must be used by him. Wherefore, having provided corn, procured auxiliaries and cavalry, [and] having summoned by name many valiant men from Tolosa, Carcaso, and Narbo, which are the states of the province of Gaul, that border on these regions [Aquitania], he led his army into the territories of the Sotiates. On his arrival being known, the Sotiates having brought together great forces and [much] cavalry, in which their strength principally lay, and assailing our army on the march, engaged first in a cavalry action, then when their cavalry was routed, and our men pursuing, they suddenly display their infantry forces, which they had placed in ambuscade in a valley. These attacked our men [while] disordered, and renewed the fight.
Chapter 21
The battle was long and vigorously contested, since the Sotiates, relying on their former victories, imagined that the safety of the whole of Aquitania rested on their valor; [and] our men, on the other hand, desired it might be seen what they could accomplish without their general and without the other legions, under a very young commander; at length the enemy, worn out with wounds, began to turn their backs, and a great number of them being slain, Crassus began to besiege the [principal] town of the Sotiates on his march. Upon their valiantly resisting, he raised vineae and turrets. They at one time attempting a sally, at another forming mines, to our rampart and vineae (at which the Aquitani are eminently skilled, because in many places among them there are copper mines); when they perceived that nothing could be gained by these operations through the perseverance of our men, they send embassadors to Crassus, and entreat him to admit them to a surrender. Having obtained it, they, being ordered to deliver up their arms, comply.
Chapter 22
And while the attention of our men is engaged in that matter, in another part Adcantuannus, who held the chief command, with 600 devoted followers whom they call soldurii (the conditions of whose association are these, - that they enjoy all the conveniences of life with those to whose friendship they have devoted themselves: if any thing calamitous happen to them, either they endure the same destiny together with them, or commit suicide: nor hitherto, in the, memory of men, has there been found any one who, upon his being slain to whose friendship he had devoted himself, refused to die); Adcantuannus, [Isay] endeavoring to make a sally with these, when our soldiers had rushed together to arms, upon a shout being raised at that part of the, fortification, and a fierce battle had been fought there, was driven back into the town, yet he obtained from Crassus [the indulgence] that he should enjoy the same terms of surrender [as the other inhabitants].
Chapter 23
Crassus, having received their arms and hostages, marched into the territories of the Vocates and the Tarusates. But then, the barbarians being alarmed, because they had heard that a town fortified by the nature of the place and by art, had been taken by us in a few days after our arrival there, began to send embassadors into all quarters, to combine, to give hostages one to another, to raise troops. Embassadors also are sent to those states of Hither Spain which are nearest to Aquitania, and auxiliaries and leaders are summoned from them; on whose arrival they proceed to carry on the war with great confidence, and with a great host of men. They who had been with Q. Sertorius the whole period [of his war in Spain] and were supposed to have very great skill in military matters, are chosen leaders. These, adopting the practice of the Roman people, begin to select [advantageous] places, to fortify their camp, to cut off our men from provisions, which, when Crassus observes, [and likewise] that his forces, on account of their small number could not safely be separated; that the enemy both made excursions and beset the passes, and [yet] left sufficient guard for their camp; that on that account, corn and provision could not very conveniently be brought up to him, and that the number of the enemy was daily increased, he thought that he ought not to delay in giving battle. This matter being brought to a council, when he discovered that all thought the same thing, he appointed the next day for the fight.
Chapter 24
Having drawn out all his forces at the break of day, and marshaled them in a double line, he posted the auxiliaries in the center, and waited to see what measures the enemy would take. They, although on account of their great number and their ancient renown in war, and the small number of our men, they supposed they might safely fight, nevertheless considered it safer to gain the victory without any wound, by besetting the passes [and] cutting off the provisions: and if the Romans, on account of the want of corn, should begin to retreat, they intended to attack them while encumbered in their march and depressed in spirit [as being assailed while] under baggage. This measure being approved of by the leaders and the forces of the Romans drawn out, the enemy [still] kept themselves in their camp. Crassus having remarked this circumstance, since the enemy, intimidated by their own delay, and by the reputation [i.e. for cowardice arising thence] had rendered our soldiers more eager for fighting, and the remarks of all were heard [declaring] that no longer ought delay to be made in going to the camp, after encouraging his men, he marches to the camp of the enemy, to the great gratification of his own troops.)
Chapter 25
There, while some were filling up the ditch, and others, by throwing a large number of darts, were driving the defenders from the rampart and fortifications, and the auxiliaries, on whom Crassus did not much rely in the battle, by supplying stones and weapons [to the soldiers], and by conveying turf to the mound, presented the appearance and character of men engaged in fighting; while also the enemy were fighting resolutely and boldly, and their weapons, discharged from their higher position, fell with great effect; the horse, having gone round the camp of the enemy, reported to Crassus that the camp was not fortified with equal care on the side of the Decuman gate, and had an easy approach.
Chapter 26
Crassus, having exhorted the commanders of the horse to animate their men by great rewards and promises, points out to them what he wished to have done. They, as they had been commanded, having brought out the four cohorts, which, as they had been left as a guard for the camp, were not fatigued by exertion, and having led them round by a some what longer way, lest they could be seen from the camp of the enemy, when the eyes and minds of all were intent upon the battle, quickly arrived at those fortifications which we have spoken of, and, having demolished these, stood in the camp of the enemy before they were seen by them, or it was known what was going on. And then, a shout being heard in that quarter, our men, their strength having been recruited, (which usually occurs on the hope of victory), began to fight more vigorously. The enemy surrounded on all sides, [and] all their affairs being despaired of, made great attempts to cast themselves down over the ramparts and to seek safety in flight. These the cavalry pursued over the very open plains, and after leaving scarcely a fourth part out of the number of 50,000, which it was certain had assembled out of Aquitania and from the Cantabri, returned late at night to the camp.
Chapter 27
Having heard of this battle, the greatest part of Aquitania surrendered itself to Crassus, and of its own accord sent hostages, in which number were the Tarbelli, the Bigerriones, the Preciani, the Vocasates, the Tarusates, the Elurates, the Garites, the Ausci, the Garumni, the Sibuzates, the Cocosates. A few [and those] most remote nations, relying on the time of the year, because winter was at hand, neglected to do this.
Chapter 28
About the same time Caesar, although the summer was nearly past, yet, since, all Gaul being reduced, the Morini and the Menapii alone remained in arms, and had never sent embassadors to him [to make a treaty] of peace, speedily led his army thither, thinking that that war might soon be terminated. They resolved to conduct the war on a very different method from the rest of the Gauls; for as they perceived that the greatest nations [of Gaul] who had engaged in war, had been routed and overcome, and as they possessed continuous ranges of forests and morasses, they removed themselves and all their property thither. When Caesar had arrived at the opening of these forests, and had began to fortify his camp, and no enemy was in the mean time seen, while our men were dispersed on their respective duties, they suddenly rushed out from all parts of the forest, and made an attack on our men. The latter quickly took up arms and drove them back again to their forests; and having killed a great many, lost a few of their own men while pursuing them too far through those intricate places.
Chapter 29
During the remaining days after this, Caesar began to cut down the forests; and that no attack might be made on the flank of the soldiers, while unarmed and not foreseeing it, he placed together (opposite to the enemy) all that timber which was cut down, and piled it up as a rampart on either flank. When a great space had been, with incredible speed, cleared in a few days, when the cattle [of the enemy] and the rear of their baggage train were already seized by our men, and they themselves were seeking for the thickest parts of the forests, storms of such a kind came on that the work was necessarily suspended, and, through the continuance of the rains, the soldiers could not any longer remain in their tents. Therefore, having laid waste all their country, [and] having burned their villages and houses, Caesar led back his army and stationed them in winter quarters among the Aulerci and Lexovii, and the other states which had made war upon him last.
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© 1994-2000
By Julius Caesar
Translated by W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn
Chapter 1
When Caesar was setting out for Italy, he sent Servius Galba with the twelfth legion and part of the cavalry, against the Nantuates, the Veragri, and Seduni, who extend from the territories of the Allobroges, and the lake of Geneva, and the River Rhone to the top of the Alps. The reason for sending him was, that he desired that the pass along the Alps, through which [the Roman] merchants had been accustomed to travel with great danger, and under great imposts, should be opened. He permitted him, if he thought it necessary, to station the legion in these places, for the purpose of wintering. Galba having fought some successful battles and stormed several of their forts, upon embassadors being sent to him from all parts and hostages given and a peace concluded, determined to station two cohorts among the Nantuates, and to winter in person with the other cohorts of that legion in a village of the Veragri, which is called Octodurus; and this village being situated in a valley, with a small plain annexed to it, is bounded on all sides by very high mountains. As this village was divided into two parts by a river, he granted one part of it to the Gauls, and assigned the other, which had been left by them unoccupied, to the cohorts to winter in. He fortified this [latter] part with a rampart and a ditch.
Chapter 2
When several days had elapsed in winter quarters, and he had ordered corn to be brought in he was suddenly informed by his scouts that all the people had gone off in the night from that part of the town which he had given up to the Gauls, and that the mountains which hung over it were occupied by a very large force of the Seduni and Veragri. It had happened for several reasons that the Gauls suddenly formed the design of renewing the war and cutting off that legion. First, because they despised a single legion, on account of its small number, and that not quite full (two cohorts having been detached, and several individuals being absent, who had been dispatched for the purpose of seeking provision); then, likewise, because they thought that on account of the disadvantageous character of the situation, even their first attack could not be sustained [by us] when they would rush from the mountains into the valley, and discharge their weapons upon us. To this was added, that they were indignant that their children were torn from them under the title of hostages, and they were persuaded that the Romans designed to seize upon the summits of the Alps, and unite those parts to the neighboring province [of Gaul], not only to secure the passes, but also a constant possession.
Chapter 3
Having received these tidings, Galba, since the works of the winter-quarters and the fortifications were not fully completed, nor was sufficient preparation made with regard to corn and other provisions (since, as a surrender had been made, and hostages received, he had thought he need entertain no apprehension of war), speedily summoning a council, began to anxiously inquire their opinions. In which council, since so much sudden danger had happened contrary to the general expectation, and almost all the higher places were seen already covered with a multitude of armed men, nor could [either] troops come to their relief, or provisions be brought in, as the passes were blocked up [by the enemy]; safety being now nearly despaired of, some opinions of this sort were delivered: that, "leaving their baggage, and making a sally, they should hasten away for safety by the same routes by which they had come thither." To the greater part, however, it seemed best, reserving that measure to the last, to await the issue of the matter, and to defend the camp.
Chapter 4
A short time only having elapsed, so that time was scarcely given for arranging and executing those things which they had determined on, the enemy, upon the signal being given, rushed down [upon our men] from all parts, and discharged stones and darts, upon our rampart. Our men at first, while their strength was fresh, resisted bravely, nor did they cast any weapon ineffectually from their higher station. As soon as any part of the camp, being destitute of defenders, seemed to be hard pressed, thither they ran, and brought assistance. But they were over-matched in this, that the enemy when wearied by the long continuance of the battle, went out of the action, and others with fresh strength came in their place; none of which things could be done by our men, owing to the smallness of their number; and not only was permission not given to the wearied [Roman] to retire from the fight, but not even to the wounded [was liberty granted] to quit the post where he had been stationed, and recover.
Chapter 5
When they had now been fighting for more than six hours, without cessation, and not only strength, but even weapons were failing our men, and the enemy were pressing on more rigorously, and had begun to demolish the rampart and to fill up the trench, while our men were becoming exhausted, and the matter was now brought to the last extremity, P. Sextius Baculus, a centurion of the first rank, whom we have related to have been disabled by severe wounds in the engagement with the Nervii, and also C. Volusenus, a tribune of the soldiers, a man of great skill and valor, hasten to Galba, and assure him that the only hope of safety lay in making a sally, and trying the last resource. Whereupon assembling the centurions, he quickly gives orders to the soldiers to discontinue the fight a short time, and only collect the weapons flung [at them], and recruit themselves after their fatigue, and afterward, upon the signal being given, sally forth from the camp, and place in their valor all their hope of safety.
Chapter 6
They do what they were ordered; and, making a sudden sally from all the gates [of the camp], leave the enemy the means neither of knowing what was taking place, nor of collecting themselves. Fortune thus taking a turn, [our men] surround on every side, and slay those who had entertained the hope of gaining the camp and having killed more than the third part of an army of more than 30,000 men (which number of the barbarians it appeared certain had come up to our camp), put to flight the rest when panic-stricken, and do not suffer them to halt even upon the higher grounds. All the forces of the enemy being thus routed, and stripped of their arms, [our men] betake themselves to their camp and fortifications. Which battle being finished, inasmuch as Galba was unwilling to tempt fortune again, and remembered that he had come into winter quarters with one design, and saw that he had met with a different state of affairs; chiefly however urged by the want of corn and provision, having the next day burned all the buildings of that village, he hastens to return into the province; and as no enemy opposed or hindered his march, he brought the legion safe into the [country of the] Nantuates, thence into [that of] the Allobroges, and there wintered.
Chapter 7
These things being achieved, while Caesar had every reason to suppose that Gaul was reduced to a state of tranquillity, the Belgae being overcome, the Germans expelled, the Seduni among the Alps defeated, and when he had, therefore, in the beginning of winter, set out for Illyricum, as he wished to visit those nations, and acquire a knowledge of their countries, a sudden war sprang up in Gaul. The occasion of that war was this: P. Crassus, a young man, had taken up his winter quarters with the seventh legion among the Andes, who border upon the [Atlantic] ocean. He, as there was a scarcity of corn in those parts, sent out some officers of cavalry, and several military tribunes among the neighbouring states, for the purpose of procuring corn and provision; in which number T. Terrasidius was sent among the Esubii; M. Trebius Gallus among the Curiosolitae; Q. Velanius, T. Silius, amongst the Veneti.
Chapter 8
The influence of this state is by far the most considerable of any of the countries on the whole sea coast, because the Veneti both have a very great number of ships, with which they have been accustomed to sail to Britain, and [thus] excel the rest in their knowledge and experience of nautical affairs; and as only a few ports lie scattered along that stormy and open sea, of which they are in possession, they hold as tributaries almost all those who are accustomed to traffic in that sea. With them arose the beginning [of the revolt] by their detaining Silius and Velanius; for they thought that they should recover by their means the hostages which they had given to Crassus. The neighboring people led on by their influence (as the measures of the Gauls are sudden and hasty), detain Trebius and Terrasidius for the same motive; and quickly sending embassadors, by means of their leading men, they enter into a mutual compact to do nothing except by general consent, and abide the same issue of fortune; and they solicit the other states to choose rather to continue in that liberty which they had received from their ancestors, than endure slavery under the Romans. All the sea coast being quickly brought over to their sentiments, they send a common embassy to P. Crassus [to say], "If he wished to receive back his officers, let him send back to them their hostages."
Chapter 9
Caesar, being informed of these things by Crassus, since he was so far distant himself, orders ships of war to be built in the mean time on the river Loire, which flows into the ocean; rowers to be raised from the province; sailors and pilots to be provided. These matters being quickly executed, he himself, as soon as the season of the year permits, hastens to the army. The Veneti, and the other states also, being informed of Caesar's arrival, when they reflected how great a crime they had committed, in that, the embassadors (a character which had among all nations ever been sacred and inviolable) had by them been detained and thrown into prison, resolve to prepare for a war in proportion to the greatness of their danger, and especially to provide those things which appertain to the service of a navy, with the greater confidence, inasmuch as they greatly relied on the nature of their situation. They knew that the passes by land were cut off by estuaries, that the approach by sea was most difficult, by reason of our ignorance of the localities, [and] the small number of the harbors, and they trusted that our army would not be able to stay very long among them, on account of the insufficiency of corn; and again, even if all these things should turn out contrary to their expectation, yet they were very powerful in their navy. They well understood that the Romans neither had any number of ships, nor were acquainted with the shallows, the harbors, or the islands of those parts where they would have to carry on the war; and the navigation was very different in a narrow sea from what it was in the vast and open ocean. Having come to this resolution, they fortify their towns, convey corn into them from the country parts, bring together as many ships as possible to Venetia, where it appeared Caesar would at first carry on the war. They unite to themselves as allies for that war, the Osismii, the Lexovii, the Nannetes, the Ambiliati, the Morini, the Diablintes, and the Menapii; and send for auxiliaries from Britain, which is situated over against those regions.
Chapter 10
There were these difficulties which we have mentioned above, in carrying on the war, but many things, nevertheless, urged Caesar to that war; - the open insult offered to the state in the detention of the Roman knights, the rebellion raised after surrendering, the revolt after hostages were given, the confederacy of so many states, but principally, lest if, [the conduct of] this part was overlooked, the other nations should think that the same thing was permitted them. Wherefore, since he reflected that almost all the Gauls were fond of revolution, and easily and quickly excited to war; that all men likewise, by nature, love liberty and hate the condition of slavery, he thought he ought to divide and more widely distribute his army, before more states should join the confederation.
Chapter 11
He therefore sends T. Labienus, his lieutenant, with the cavalry to the Treviri, who are nearest to the river Rhine. He charges him to visit the Remi and the other Belgians, and to keep them in their allegiance and repel the Germans (who were said to have been summoned by the Belgae to their aid,) if they attempted to cross the river by force in their ships. He orders P. Crassus to proceed into Aquitania with twelve legionary cohorts and a great number of the cavalry, lest auxiliaries should be sent into Gaul by these states, and such great nations be united. He sends Q. Titurius Sabinus his lieutenant, with three legions, among the Unelli, the Curiosolitae, and the Lexovii, to take care that their forces should be kept separate from the rest. He appoints D. Brutus, a young man, over the fleet and those Gallic vessels which he had ordered to be furnished by the Pictones and the Santoni, and the other provinces which remained at peace; and commands him to proceed toward the Veneti, as soon as he could. He himself hastens thither with the land forces.
Chapter 12
The sites of their towns were generally such that, being placed on extreme points [of land] and on promontories, they neither had an approach by land when the tide had rushed in from the main ocean, which always happens twice in the space of twelve hours; nor by ships, because, upon the tide ebbing again, the ships were likely to be dashed upon the shoals. Thus, by either circumstance, was the storming of their towns rendered difficult; and if at any time perchance the Veneti overpowered by the greatness of our works, (the sea having been excluded by a mound and large dams, and the latter being made almost equal in height to the walls of the town) had begun to despair of their fortunes; bringing up a large number of ships, of which they had a very great quantity, they carried off all their property and betook themselves to the nearest towns; there they again defended themselves by the same advantages of situation. They did this the more easily during a great part of the summer, because our ships were kept back by storms, and the difficulty of sailing was very great in that vast and open sea, with its strong tides and its harbors far apart and exceedingly few in number.
Chapter 13
For their ships were built and equipped after this manner. The keels were somewhat flatter than those of our ships, whereby they could more easily encounter the shallows and the ebbing of the tide: the prows were raised very high, and, in like manner the sterns were adapted to the force of the waves and storms [which they were formed to sustain]. The ships were built wholly of oak, and designed to endure any force and violence whatever; the benches which were made of planks a foot in breadth, were fastened by iron spikes of the thickness of a man's thumb; the anchors were secured fast by iron chains instead of cables, and for sails they used skins and thin dressed leather. These [were used] either through their want of canvas and their ignorance of its application, or for this reason, which is more probable, that they thought that such storms of the ocean, and such violent gales of wind could not be resisted by sails, nor ships of such great burden be conveniently enough managed by them. The encounter of our fleet with these ships' was of such a nature that our fleet excelled in speed alone, and the plying of the oars; other things, considering the nature of the place [and] the violence of the storms, were more suitable and better adapted on their side; for neither could our ships injure theirs with their beaks (so great was their strength), nor on account of their height was a weapon easily cast up to them; and for the same reason they were less readily locked in by rocks. To this was added, that whenever a storm began to rage and they ran before the wind, they both could weather the storm more easily and heave to securely in the shallows, and when left by the tide feared nothing from rocks and shelves: the risk of all which things was much to be dreaded by our ships.
Chapter 14
Caesar, after taking many of their towns, perceiving that so much labor was spent in vain and that the flight of the enemy could not be prevented on the capture of their towns, and that injury could not be done them, he determined to wait for his fleet. As soon as it came up and was first seen by the enemy, about 220 of their ships, fully equipped and appointed with every kind of [naval] implement, sailed forth from the harbor, and drew up opposite to ours; nor did it appear clear to Brutus, who commanded the fleet, or to the tribunes of the soldiers and the centurions, to whom the several ships were assigned, what to do, or what system of tactics to adopt; for they knew that damage could not be done by their beaks; and that, although turrets were built [on their decks], yet the height of the stems of the barbarian ships exceeded these; so that weapons could not be cast up from [our] lower position with sufficient effect, and those cast by the Gauls fell the more forcibly upon us. One thing provided by our men was of great service, [viz.] sharp hooks inserted into and fastened upon poles, of a form not unlike the hooks used in attacking town walls. When the ropes which fastened the sail-yards to the masts were caught by them and pulled, and our vessel vigorously impelled with the oars, they [the ropes] were severed; and when they were cut away, the yards necessarily fell down; so that as all the hope of the Gallic vessels depended on their sails and rigging, upon these being cut away, the entire management of the ships was taken from them at the same time. The rest of the contest depended on courage; in which our men decidedly had the advantage; and the more so, because the whole action was carried on in the sight of Caesar and the entire army; so that no act, a little more valiant than ordinary, could pass unobserved, for all the hills and higher grounds, from which there was a near prospect of the sea were occupied by our army.
Chapter 15
The sail yards [of the enemy], as we have said, being brought down, although two and [in some cases] three ships [of theirs] surrounded each one [of ours], the soldiers strove with the greatest energy to board the ships of the enemy; and, after the barbarians observed this taking place, as a great many of their ships were beaten, and as no relief for that evil could be discovered, they hastened to seek safety in flight. And, having now turned their vessels to that quarter in which the wind blew, so great a calm and lull suddenly arose, that they could not move out of their place, which circumstance, truly, was exceedingly opportune for finishing the business; for our men gave chase and took them one by one, so that very few out of all the number, [and those] by the intervention of night, arrived at the land, after the battle had lasted almost from the fourth hour till sun-set.
Chapter 16
By this battle the war with the Veneti and the whole of the sea coast was finished; for both all the youth, and all, too, of more advanced age, in whom there was any discretion or rank, had assembled in that battle; and they had collected in that one place whatever naval forces they had anywhere; and when these were lost, the survivors had no place to retreat to, nor means of defending their towns. They accordingly surrendered themselves and all their possessions to Caesar, on whom Caesar thought that punishment should be inflicted the more severely, in order that for the future the rights of embassadors might be more carefully respected by barbarians; having, therefore, put to death all their senate, he sold the rest for slaves.
Chapter 17
While these things are going on among the Veneti, Q. Titurius Sabinus with those troops which he had received from Caesar, arrives in the territories of the Unelli. Over these people Viridovix ruled, and held the chief command of all those states which had revolted; from which he had collected a large and powerful army. And in those few days, the Aulerci and the Sexovii, having slain their senate because they would not consent to be promoters of the war, shut their gates [against us] and united themselves to Viridovix; a great multitude besides of desperate men and robbers assembled out of Gaul from all quarters, whom the hope of plundering and the love of fighting had called away from husbandry and their daily labor. Sabinus kept himself within his camp, which was in a position convenient for everything; while Viridovix encamped over against him at a distance of two miles, and daily bringing out his forces, gave him an opportunity of fighting; so that Sabinus had now not only come into contempt with the enemy, but also was somewhat taunted by the speeches of our soldiers; and furnished so great a suspicion of his cowardice that the enemy presumed to approach even to the very rampart of our camp. He adopted this conduct for the following reason: because he did not think that a lieutenant ought to engage in battle with so great a force, especially while he who held the chief command was absent, except on advantageous ground or some favorable circumstance presented itself.
Chapter 18
After having established this suspicion of his cowardice, he selected a certain suitable and crafty Gaul, who was one of those whom he had with him as auxiliaries. He induces him by great gifts and promises to go over to the enemy; and informs [him] of what he wished to be done. Who, when he arrives among them as a deserter, lays before them the fears of the Romans; and informs them by what difficulties Caesar himself was harassed, and that the matter was not far removed from this - that Sabinus would the next night privately draw off his army out of the camp and set forth to Caesar for the purpose of carrying [him] assistance, which, when they heard, they a11 cry out together that an opportunity of successfully conducting their enterprise, ought not to be thrown away: that they ought to go to the [Roman] camp. Many things persuaded the Gauls to this measure; the delay of Sabinus during the previous days; the positive assertion of the [pretended] deserter; want of provisions, for a supply of which they had not taken the requisite precautions; the hope springing from the Venetic war; and [also] because in most cases men willingly believe what they wish. Influenced by these things they do not discharge Viridovix and the other leaders from the council, before they gained permission from them to take up arms and hasten to [our] camp; which being granted, rejoicing as if victory were fully certain, they collected faggots and brushwood, with which to fill up the Roman trenches, and hasten to the camp.
Chapter 19
The situation of the camp was a rising ground, gently sloping from the bottom for about a mile. Thither they proceeded with great speed (in order that as little time as possible might be given to the Romans to collect and arm themselves), and arrived quite out of breath. Sabinus having encouraged his men, gives them the signal, which they earnestly desired. While the enemy were encumbered by reason of the burdens which they were carrying, he orders a sally to be made suddenly from two gates [of the camp]. It happened, by the advantage of situation, by the unskilfulness and the fatigue of the enemy, by the valor of our soldiers, and their experience in former battles, that they could not stand one attack of our men, and immediately turned their backs; and our men with full vigor followed them while disordered, and slew a great number of them; the horse pursuing the rest, left but few, who escaped by flight. Thus at the same time, Sabinus was informed of the naval battle and Caesar of victory gained by Sabinus; and all the states immediately surrendered themselves to Titurius: for as the temper of the Gauls is impetuous and ready to undertake wars, so their mind is weak, and by no means resolute in enduring calamities.
Chapter 20
About the same time, P. Crassus, when he had arrived in Aquitania (which, as has been before said, both from its extent of territory and the great number of its people, is to be reckoned a third part of Gaul,) understanding that he was to wage war in these parts, where a few years before, L. Valerius Praeconinus, the lieutenant had been killed, and his army routed, and from which L. Manilius, the proconsul, had fled with the loss of his baggage, he perceived that no ordinary care must be used by him. Wherefore, having provided corn, procured auxiliaries and cavalry, [and] having summoned by name many valiant men from Tolosa, Carcaso, and Narbo, which are the states of the province of Gaul, that border on these regions [Aquitania], he led his army into the territories of the Sotiates. On his arrival being known, the Sotiates having brought together great forces and [much] cavalry, in which their strength principally lay, and assailing our army on the march, engaged first in a cavalry action, then when their cavalry was routed, and our men pursuing, they suddenly display their infantry forces, which they had placed in ambuscade in a valley. These attacked our men [while] disordered, and renewed the fight.
Chapter 21
The battle was long and vigorously contested, since the Sotiates, relying on their former victories, imagined that the safety of the whole of Aquitania rested on their valor; [and] our men, on the other hand, desired it might be seen what they could accomplish without their general and without the other legions, under a very young commander; at length the enemy, worn out with wounds, began to turn their backs, and a great number of them being slain, Crassus began to besiege the [principal] town of the Sotiates on his march. Upon their valiantly resisting, he raised vineae and turrets. They at one time attempting a sally, at another forming mines, to our rampart and vineae (at which the Aquitani are eminently skilled, because in many places among them there are copper mines); when they perceived that nothing could be gained by these operations through the perseverance of our men, they send embassadors to Crassus, and entreat him to admit them to a surrender. Having obtained it, they, being ordered to deliver up their arms, comply.
Chapter 22
And while the attention of our men is engaged in that matter, in another part Adcantuannus, who held the chief command, with 600 devoted followers whom they call soldurii (the conditions of whose association are these, - that they enjoy all the conveniences of life with those to whose friendship they have devoted themselves: if any thing calamitous happen to them, either they endure the same destiny together with them, or commit suicide: nor hitherto, in the, memory of men, has there been found any one who, upon his being slain to whose friendship he had devoted himself, refused to die); Adcantuannus, [Isay] endeavoring to make a sally with these, when our soldiers had rushed together to arms, upon a shout being raised at that part of the, fortification, and a fierce battle had been fought there, was driven back into the town, yet he obtained from Crassus [the indulgence] that he should enjoy the same terms of surrender [as the other inhabitants].
Chapter 23
Crassus, having received their arms and hostages, marched into the territories of the Vocates and the Tarusates. But then, the barbarians being alarmed, because they had heard that a town fortified by the nature of the place and by art, had been taken by us in a few days after our arrival there, began to send embassadors into all quarters, to combine, to give hostages one to another, to raise troops. Embassadors also are sent to those states of Hither Spain which are nearest to Aquitania, and auxiliaries and leaders are summoned from them; on whose arrival they proceed to carry on the war with great confidence, and with a great host of men. They who had been with Q. Sertorius the whole period [of his war in Spain] and were supposed to have very great skill in military matters, are chosen leaders. These, adopting the practice of the Roman people, begin to select [advantageous] places, to fortify their camp, to cut off our men from provisions, which, when Crassus observes, [and likewise] that his forces, on account of their small number could not safely be separated; that the enemy both made excursions and beset the passes, and [yet] left sufficient guard for their camp; that on that account, corn and provision could not very conveniently be brought up to him, and that the number of the enemy was daily increased, he thought that he ought not to delay in giving battle. This matter being brought to a council, when he discovered that all thought the same thing, he appointed the next day for the fight.
Chapter 24
Having drawn out all his forces at the break of day, and marshaled them in a double line, he posted the auxiliaries in the center, and waited to see what measures the enemy would take. They, although on account of their great number and their ancient renown in war, and the small number of our men, they supposed they might safely fight, nevertheless considered it safer to gain the victory without any wound, by besetting the passes [and] cutting off the provisions: and if the Romans, on account of the want of corn, should begin to retreat, they intended to attack them while encumbered in their march and depressed in spirit [as being assailed while] under baggage. This measure being approved of by the leaders and the forces of the Romans drawn out, the enemy [still] kept themselves in their camp. Crassus having remarked this circumstance, since the enemy, intimidated by their own delay, and by the reputation [i.e. for cowardice arising thence] had rendered our soldiers more eager for fighting, and the remarks of all were heard [declaring] that no longer ought delay to be made in going to the camp, after encouraging his men, he marches to the camp of the enemy, to the great gratification of his own troops.)
Chapter 25
There, while some were filling up the ditch, and others, by throwing a large number of darts, were driving the defenders from the rampart and fortifications, and the auxiliaries, on whom Crassus did not much rely in the battle, by supplying stones and weapons [to the soldiers], and by conveying turf to the mound, presented the appearance and character of men engaged in fighting; while also the enemy were fighting resolutely and boldly, and their weapons, discharged from their higher position, fell with great effect; the horse, having gone round the camp of the enemy, reported to Crassus that the camp was not fortified with equal care on the side of the Decuman gate, and had an easy approach.
Chapter 26
Crassus, having exhorted the commanders of the horse to animate their men by great rewards and promises, points out to them what he wished to have done. They, as they had been commanded, having brought out the four cohorts, which, as they had been left as a guard for the camp, were not fatigued by exertion, and having led them round by a some what longer way, lest they could be seen from the camp of the enemy, when the eyes and minds of all were intent upon the battle, quickly arrived at those fortifications which we have spoken of, and, having demolished these, stood in the camp of the enemy before they were seen by them, or it was known what was going on. And then, a shout being heard in that quarter, our men, their strength having been recruited, (which usually occurs on the hope of victory), began to fight more vigorously. The enemy surrounded on all sides, [and] all their affairs being despaired of, made great attempts to cast themselves down over the ramparts and to seek safety in flight. These the cavalry pursued over the very open plains, and after leaving scarcely a fourth part out of the number of 50,000, which it was certain had assembled out of Aquitania and from the Cantabri, returned late at night to the camp.
Chapter 27
Having heard of this battle, the greatest part of Aquitania surrendered itself to Crassus, and of its own accord sent hostages, in which number were the Tarbelli, the Bigerriones, the Preciani, the Vocasates, the Tarusates, the Elurates, the Garites, the Ausci, the Garumni, the Sibuzates, the Cocosates. A few [and those] most remote nations, relying on the time of the year, because winter was at hand, neglected to do this.
Chapter 28
About the same time Caesar, although the summer was nearly past, yet, since, all Gaul being reduced, the Morini and the Menapii alone remained in arms, and had never sent embassadors to him [to make a treaty] of peace, speedily led his army thither, thinking that that war might soon be terminated. They resolved to conduct the war on a very different method from the rest of the Gauls; for as they perceived that the greatest nations [of Gaul] who had engaged in war, had been routed and overcome, and as they possessed continuous ranges of forests and morasses, they removed themselves and all their property thither. When Caesar had arrived at the opening of these forests, and had began to fortify his camp, and no enemy was in the mean time seen, while our men were dispersed on their respective duties, they suddenly rushed out from all parts of the forest, and made an attack on our men. The latter quickly took up arms and drove them back again to their forests; and having killed a great many, lost a few of their own men while pursuing them too far through those intricate places.
Chapter 29
During the remaining days after this, Caesar began to cut down the forests; and that no attack might be made on the flank of the soldiers, while unarmed and not foreseeing it, he placed together (opposite to the enemy) all that timber which was cut down, and piled it up as a rampart on either flank. When a great space had been, with incredible speed, cleared in a few days, when the cattle [of the enemy] and the rear of their baggage train were already seized by our men, and they themselves were seeking for the thickest parts of the forests, storms of such a kind came on that the work was necessarily suspended, and, through the continuance of the rains, the soldiers could not any longer remain in their tents. Therefore, having laid waste all their country, [and] having burned their villages and houses, Caesar led back his army and stationed them in winter quarters among the Aulerci and Lexovii, and the other states which had made war upon him last.
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Go home. YAAAAnnnnnnn.
you wrote: "Go home. YAAAAnnnnnnn."---typical response from someone who is unable/unwilling to challenge themselves and engage in a coherent discussion---this response is indicitive of someone who (in general) is of the mentality, "I'm clinging to my beliefs no matter what"---Usually based on fear---what are you afraid of?
still unwilling to debate the facts?--Your God, "W" is a complete fuck up on every level and if you want to attempt an adult discussion of this, I might try to work with your denial by presenting you some facts---it's up to you
still unwilling to debate the facts?--Your God, "W" is a complete fuck up on every level and if you want to attempt an adult discussion of this, I might try to work with your denial by presenting you some facts---it's up to you
One of the most popular complaints or indictments against liberals – individual minions, not just the public figures – is that they are out of touch with reality.
They are.
So what?
What does this have to do with our country, really?
When it comes to national issues, Liberals find it most difficult to sort them out and identify topics as friend or foe. To them, personally, I mean. For them, societal issues are injustices, not facts of life or opportunities for object lessons to youth.
For all the lip service the Left pays to reality, liberals are betraying their own intimate difficulty on precisely that subject.
Liberals are impaired. They are not mentally ill, they are impaired. Like many of us, conservatives included, liberals erect a reality distortion device to cope with old wounds, only they cannot get past them. We all do it, but as some of us get past our anxieties and become self-confident, others cannot, and become the ever-wounded.
I have written and spoken on the subject of that impairment, on my thesis that unhappy children of three generations of broken homes make very hurt, very angry followers. Millions of them.
Many have put it differently, such as the breakdown of the family and so forth, but here is the political connection to that – not only the social consequences – and here is its significance. It’s so much more than a breakdown of the family: it’s that the nation is under attack by way of its households, and where the family breaks down, it gets a little shove from the angry.
What I identify as the causation and the relationship to a rotten values system and irresistible urge to alter the U.S. way of life is this and the constant ad hominem attacks: Childhood disaffection, parental indifference to a child or old wounds make a child angry. Other landmark events or even seemingly insignificant events can become enormous perceived crimes against the individual who finds it hard to manage. It becomes buried, it becomes longstanding and armor-plating part of the character such that symbols or icons in our society become provocative triggers to them – offensive is a popular word used – and everyone else has to suffer for one’s singular anger or constellation of angers. Multiply this by the number of broken homes over three generations or so and you have it.
The result is angry political change, talented, eloquent rhetoric and underhanded tactics, all justified in the mind of the angry to eliminate that anxiety that hurts so much.
Liberals are not evil - they are hurting, wounded people.
And now, the thrust of this piece: What if we cooperated with these personal, inner experience solutions as they are proposed to us? What if we changed a village for one person? And then changed all villages based on such an erroneous cooperation?
What if there were millions of these people who were offended by everyday institutions and who brought their political clout to bear on them?
Would it change their inner experience?
When the problem of one’s excess baggage cannot be contained any longer, and makes its way into politics, will changing that village or the entire nation cure the inner pain of the individual? Or of those millions?
No, it will not. Of course not.
But cooperation with such an unreality will tear the nation apart.
We’ve been able to determine that one out of two marriages will end in divorce. In the 1950's, it was one out of three.
Irrespective of what held a marriage together, it worked better for society, for it recognized, as we recognize today, that the Household is the Stronghold against adversity in our nation. Marriage was important then.
Somehow, they would make the effort to survive nearly anything, and many did, and an intact home made for intact kids you might say. We call this integrity. Fewer do today.
When no-fault divorce came along, it made the wimping out and begging off easier, which had the effect of abandoning the effort that was the very redeeming benefit of that contract: stick with it and you develop a personal strength you can use, and you create an environment that develops that strength in others. You make for yourself a private retreat and refuge unique in the world. Your Household is one of a kind. They all are. In so doing, you also confer to your children that strength that becomes for them the stronghold of the nation. More courage, less wimping out. In this, parents are all the Champions a child needs.
Liberalism is to wimp out, to interfere to try and change that pain by being the uninvited champions of others, and of course to attack a reliably safe target; the polite and etiquette-overly-concerned Right.
Meanwhile, dissolve the household and you can take down the whole nation. But that pain never goes away.
There are many glues that keep our society together, and if we permit any dissolving those glues, the nation will fragment and separate until it becomes a bargain basement investment, to put it nicely, and someone will always be around to pick up the pieces. There always is. Some are expediting this ruin in order to drop the value enough. It works by causing us to doubt ourselves, to cooperate in silly notions where we really ought to know better, and to discourage resistance when we do know better and protest.
The key is, naturally, to see through the rhetoric and understand the true motivation of the impaired: to try to resolve their own inner conflict by changing the external environment for the rest of us, a solution that cannot work because the inner conflict can be changed only from within.
Thus, liberal policies have failed so miserably over the decades. They are based on the defective idea that changing the political environment will somehow vanquish their inner conflict, that tragically misled sense of injustice, an injustice that often - often enough - isn’t even really there. When it doesn’t work (of course), they try harder and harder (slippery slope), and become enraged when it’s challenged, a small clue to the dynamic actually at work.
When we want to be good to people, and when we sometimes express that good will as cooperation or compassion, we can be used for our goodness. When anxiety is so great as to move an individual to action, as it does with activists, the idea can seem curative at first, irresistible to some, sensible. When that idea resonates with other angry, hurting persons as much as it does the kindly and the willing, it’s easy to swell the numbers.
In short, we are being lied to because the anxious liberal is lying to himself, and dragging the nation into it all.
When it’s proven that such approaches simply don’t work, and now we know why they don’t work – generations of broken homes leads to more broken homes with more angry kids who become hurting, angry adults – we stand to give away the entire nation on the distorted reality perceptions that create those policies demanding our cooperation. When we disapprove, they punish us or force it on us.
The clue to the angry liberal / failed policy connection is in the insistence of enacting laws against the will of the people. This urgency to stop the anxiety politically by destroying the icons that irk them is much, much more powerful (and in many ways more personally satisfying to them) than the political endeavor to find justice. Changing America isn’t where you’re going to get rid of that personal pain. And insisting on change against the will of the people is to deal in bad faith.
Irrespective of its origin, the lies and self-delusion of the Left means that what they ask, demand or coerce will not solve their inner problems, nor our joint societal problems. It’s all based on the misinformation input of their reality distortion device.
It means that whatever we agree to will have us giving away the nation for no justice at all, but merely to add to the long record of just making it all worse.
It means that we’ll be merely giving it all away, and for positively nothing.
They are.
So what?
What does this have to do with our country, really?
When it comes to national issues, Liberals find it most difficult to sort them out and identify topics as friend or foe. To them, personally, I mean. For them, societal issues are injustices, not facts of life or opportunities for object lessons to youth.
For all the lip service the Left pays to reality, liberals are betraying their own intimate difficulty on precisely that subject.
Liberals are impaired. They are not mentally ill, they are impaired. Like many of us, conservatives included, liberals erect a reality distortion device to cope with old wounds, only they cannot get past them. We all do it, but as some of us get past our anxieties and become self-confident, others cannot, and become the ever-wounded.
I have written and spoken on the subject of that impairment, on my thesis that unhappy children of three generations of broken homes make very hurt, very angry followers. Millions of them.
Many have put it differently, such as the breakdown of the family and so forth, but here is the political connection to that – not only the social consequences – and here is its significance. It’s so much more than a breakdown of the family: it’s that the nation is under attack by way of its households, and where the family breaks down, it gets a little shove from the angry.
What I identify as the causation and the relationship to a rotten values system and irresistible urge to alter the U.S. way of life is this and the constant ad hominem attacks: Childhood disaffection, parental indifference to a child or old wounds make a child angry. Other landmark events or even seemingly insignificant events can become enormous perceived crimes against the individual who finds it hard to manage. It becomes buried, it becomes longstanding and armor-plating part of the character such that symbols or icons in our society become provocative triggers to them – offensive is a popular word used – and everyone else has to suffer for one’s singular anger or constellation of angers. Multiply this by the number of broken homes over three generations or so and you have it.
The result is angry political change, talented, eloquent rhetoric and underhanded tactics, all justified in the mind of the angry to eliminate that anxiety that hurts so much.
Liberals are not evil - they are hurting, wounded people.
And now, the thrust of this piece: What if we cooperated with these personal, inner experience solutions as they are proposed to us? What if we changed a village for one person? And then changed all villages based on such an erroneous cooperation?
What if there were millions of these people who were offended by everyday institutions and who brought their political clout to bear on them?
Would it change their inner experience?
When the problem of one’s excess baggage cannot be contained any longer, and makes its way into politics, will changing that village or the entire nation cure the inner pain of the individual? Or of those millions?
No, it will not. Of course not.
But cooperation with such an unreality will tear the nation apart.
We’ve been able to determine that one out of two marriages will end in divorce. In the 1950's, it was one out of three.
Irrespective of what held a marriage together, it worked better for society, for it recognized, as we recognize today, that the Household is the Stronghold against adversity in our nation. Marriage was important then.
Somehow, they would make the effort to survive nearly anything, and many did, and an intact home made for intact kids you might say. We call this integrity. Fewer do today.
When no-fault divorce came along, it made the wimping out and begging off easier, which had the effect of abandoning the effort that was the very redeeming benefit of that contract: stick with it and you develop a personal strength you can use, and you create an environment that develops that strength in others. You make for yourself a private retreat and refuge unique in the world. Your Household is one of a kind. They all are. In so doing, you also confer to your children that strength that becomes for them the stronghold of the nation. More courage, less wimping out. In this, parents are all the Champions a child needs.
Liberalism is to wimp out, to interfere to try and change that pain by being the uninvited champions of others, and of course to attack a reliably safe target; the polite and etiquette-overly-concerned Right.
Meanwhile, dissolve the household and you can take down the whole nation. But that pain never goes away.
There are many glues that keep our society together, and if we permit any dissolving those glues, the nation will fragment and separate until it becomes a bargain basement investment, to put it nicely, and someone will always be around to pick up the pieces. There always is. Some are expediting this ruin in order to drop the value enough. It works by causing us to doubt ourselves, to cooperate in silly notions where we really ought to know better, and to discourage resistance when we do know better and protest.
The key is, naturally, to see through the rhetoric and understand the true motivation of the impaired: to try to resolve their own inner conflict by changing the external environment for the rest of us, a solution that cannot work because the inner conflict can be changed only from within.
Thus, liberal policies have failed so miserably over the decades. They are based on the defective idea that changing the political environment will somehow vanquish their inner conflict, that tragically misled sense of injustice, an injustice that often - often enough - isn’t even really there. When it doesn’t work (of course), they try harder and harder (slippery slope), and become enraged when it’s challenged, a small clue to the dynamic actually at work.
When we want to be good to people, and when we sometimes express that good will as cooperation or compassion, we can be used for our goodness. When anxiety is so great as to move an individual to action, as it does with activists, the idea can seem curative at first, irresistible to some, sensible. When that idea resonates with other angry, hurting persons as much as it does the kindly and the willing, it’s easy to swell the numbers.
In short, we are being lied to because the anxious liberal is lying to himself, and dragging the nation into it all.
When it’s proven that such approaches simply don’t work, and now we know why they don’t work – generations of broken homes leads to more broken homes with more angry kids who become hurting, angry adults – we stand to give away the entire nation on the distorted reality perceptions that create those policies demanding our cooperation. When we disapprove, they punish us or force it on us.
The clue to the angry liberal / failed policy connection is in the insistence of enacting laws against the will of the people. This urgency to stop the anxiety politically by destroying the icons that irk them is much, much more powerful (and in many ways more personally satisfying to them) than the political endeavor to find justice. Changing America isn’t where you’re going to get rid of that personal pain. And insisting on change against the will of the people is to deal in bad faith.
Irrespective of its origin, the lies and self-delusion of the Left means that what they ask, demand or coerce will not solve their inner problems, nor our joint societal problems. It’s all based on the misinformation input of their reality distortion device.
It means that whatever we agree to will have us giving away the nation for no justice at all, but merely to add to the long record of just making it all worse.
It means that we’ll be merely giving it all away, and for positively nothing.
The Mis-Education of the Right Wing
Filed under:
* General
* Writing
* Culture
* Libertarian Problem Solving
— KTK
While Joe Carter is running a project to compile the best lists of books for expanding your mind in any direction, his fellow conservatives are compiling a list of books close-minded people should avoid becoming knowledgeable about. As with every demonstration of the right’s addiction to ignorance, it tells us more about them than about their intended subjects.
Human Events online asked a group of conservative activists and think-tankers to nominate candidates for “Most Harmful Book of the 19th and 20th Centuries", then vote among the resulting list. (Why is it that people who don’t support a nuclear non-proliferation treaty regard books as dangerous?) The outcome was 30 books nominated by a panel of 15 respondents, of which 10 were rank-ordered by each panelist as the most-"harmful” of the bunch. (The aggregate rankings don’t reveal how many panelists voted any given book into the top 10, as they account both for number of votes and relative ranking of the book by each voter.)
The results were predictable: conservatives are still obsessing over Communism (5 books out of the total of 30, including 3 by Marx, with The Communist Manifesto - surprise! - as #1 Most Harmful Book of the last 200 years). Mein Kamp gets in there at #2 (oddly, perhaps, since the book itself was probably not responsible for convincing many people to follow Hitler). But beyond Communism and Hitlerian Fascism, what are the most harmful sources of knowledge in recent human history?
Sex, science, and rational philosophy. (C’mon - don’t even bother to claim you were surprised by this, either.)
Sex!
#4 - The Kinsey Report, responsible for “normalization of promiscuity and deviancy”
#7 - , which “disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood” (double-shocker!: “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects” - yes, feminism is Communism!)
#21 - Coming of Age in Samoa
#23 - The Second Sex
Science!
#10 - General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes - yes, the theory that underlies all modern economics and ended the Great Depression is surely the 10th-most dangerous idea in history (hilariously, they claim that “FDR adopted [Keynes’s] idea[s] as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt” - without mentioning that our last Keynesian President, Bill Clinton, left a multi-trillion dollar surplus and that the entire debt is the result of George Bush’s tax-cutting irresponsibility!, or that the only previous supply-side President, Ronald Reagan, bankrupted the government in exactly the same way!)
#15 - Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by B.F. Skinner (granted, nobody takes Skinner very seriously anymore, but that’s why the inclusion of his book is so odd - it never had any serious influence on psychology or public policy - as usual, conservatives regard as “dangerous” any idea they just don’t like)
#18 - Origin of Species - enough said . . . if this isn’t self-evident self-parody, nothing is.
And oh - by the way - toss in #30 - The Descent of Man, by the same author, just to put the icing on it. If there’s anything funnier than a conservative expounding on “dangerous ideas", it’s a creationist conservative expounding on dangerous Darwinian ideas.
#27 - Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud (you had to know this would be in there - human psychology and sex! - it’s a wonder that this book doesn’t just burst into flames all by itself!)
Philosophy!
#5 - Democracy and Education, by John Dewey - who “encouraged the teaching of thinking ’skills’ . . . [which] . . . had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation” - no, I’m not making this up (and why is “skills” in scare quotes? - apparently conservative thinking doesn’t involve any skill . . . hey, they said it, not me!)
#8 - Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte - damn atheist
#9 - Beyond Good and Evil, by Nietzsche - damn atheist individualist
#13 - Authoritarian Personality, by Theodore Adorno (note that Adorna thought it was a bad thing; conservatives think that is “dangerous")
#14 - On Liberty, by J.S. Mill (note that Mill thought it was a good thing; conservatives think that is “dangerous") (odd, too, that conservatives - who today often claim to be inheritors of “classical liberalism", now disown the author of that credo)
#19 - Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault - his critique of the use of social authority to control and program individuals (conservatives think that’s a “dangerous idea")
Who else makes the list? Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson . . . the Club of Rome . . . the usual lot of bomb-throwers and anarchists (as well as, well . . . some bomb-throwers and anarchists, including Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci). It’s basically yet another conservative enemies list (they love those, don’t they?), but funnier than most.
I say read ‘em all - what you don’t know can hurt you (if you don’t know enough about enough subjects, it’ll turn you into a conservative).
Filed under:
* General
* Writing
* Culture
* Libertarian Problem Solving
— KTK
While Joe Carter is running a project to compile the best lists of books for expanding your mind in any direction, his fellow conservatives are compiling a list of books close-minded people should avoid becoming knowledgeable about. As with every demonstration of the right’s addiction to ignorance, it tells us more about them than about their intended subjects.
Human Events online asked a group of conservative activists and think-tankers to nominate candidates for “Most Harmful Book of the 19th and 20th Centuries", then vote among the resulting list. (Why is it that people who don’t support a nuclear non-proliferation treaty regard books as dangerous?) The outcome was 30 books nominated by a panel of 15 respondents, of which 10 were rank-ordered by each panelist as the most-"harmful” of the bunch. (The aggregate rankings don’t reveal how many panelists voted any given book into the top 10, as they account both for number of votes and relative ranking of the book by each voter.)
The results were predictable: conservatives are still obsessing over Communism (5 books out of the total of 30, including 3 by Marx, with The Communist Manifesto - surprise! - as #1 Most Harmful Book of the last 200 years). Mein Kamp gets in there at #2 (oddly, perhaps, since the book itself was probably not responsible for convincing many people to follow Hitler). But beyond Communism and Hitlerian Fascism, what are the most harmful sources of knowledge in recent human history?
Sex, science, and rational philosophy. (C’mon - don’t even bother to claim you were surprised by this, either.)
Sex!
#4 - The Kinsey Report, responsible for “normalization of promiscuity and deviancy”
#7 - , which “disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood” (double-shocker!: “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects” - yes, feminism is Communism!)
#21 - Coming of Age in Samoa
#23 - The Second Sex
Science!
#10 - General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes - yes, the theory that underlies all modern economics and ended the Great Depression is surely the 10th-most dangerous idea in history (hilariously, they claim that “FDR adopted [Keynes’s] idea[s] as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt” - without mentioning that our last Keynesian President, Bill Clinton, left a multi-trillion dollar surplus and that the entire debt is the result of George Bush’s tax-cutting irresponsibility!, or that the only previous supply-side President, Ronald Reagan, bankrupted the government in exactly the same way!)
#15 - Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by B.F. Skinner (granted, nobody takes Skinner very seriously anymore, but that’s why the inclusion of his book is so odd - it never had any serious influence on psychology or public policy - as usual, conservatives regard as “dangerous” any idea they just don’t like)
#18 - Origin of Species - enough said . . . if this isn’t self-evident self-parody, nothing is.
And oh - by the way - toss in #30 - The Descent of Man, by the same author, just to put the icing on it. If there’s anything funnier than a conservative expounding on “dangerous ideas", it’s a creationist conservative expounding on dangerous Darwinian ideas.
#27 - Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud (you had to know this would be in there - human psychology and sex! - it’s a wonder that this book doesn’t just burst into flames all by itself!)
Philosophy!
#5 - Democracy and Education, by John Dewey - who “encouraged the teaching of thinking ’skills’ . . . [which] . . . had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation” - no, I’m not making this up (and why is “skills” in scare quotes? - apparently conservative thinking doesn’t involve any skill . . . hey, they said it, not me!)
#8 - Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte - damn atheist
#9 - Beyond Good and Evil, by Nietzsche - damn atheist individualist
#13 - Authoritarian Personality, by Theodore Adorno (note that Adorna thought it was a bad thing; conservatives think that is “dangerous")
#14 - On Liberty, by J.S. Mill (note that Mill thought it was a good thing; conservatives think that is “dangerous") (odd, too, that conservatives - who today often claim to be inheritors of “classical liberalism", now disown the author of that credo)
#19 - Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault - his critique of the use of social authority to control and program individuals (conservatives think that’s a “dangerous idea")
Who else makes the list? Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson . . . the Club of Rome . . . the usual lot of bomb-throwers and anarchists (as well as, well . . . some bomb-throwers and anarchists, including Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci). It’s basically yet another conservative enemies list (they love those, don’t they?), but funnier than most.
I say read ‘em all - what you don’t know can hurt you (if you don’t know enough about enough subjects, it’ll turn you into a conservative).
Copy this.......
I will pray for you and your misguided souls.
Love,
Roof
Ps. If you are gay I understand. I have many gay friends. There is a lesbian couple that adopted a young black boy. He is in my daughters private school class. They are incredible parents. Every function, every game, every everything, they are there. We consider them "family". I fired my straight barber today. One he was in Jamaica, and two, his flaming assistant did a better cut than he ever thought about doing. No homophobia here, unless you count the woody I got while I was getting head.
I will pray for you and your misguided souls.
Love,
Roof
Ps. If you are gay I understand. I have many gay friends. There is a lesbian couple that adopted a young black boy. He is in my daughters private school class. They are incredible parents. Every function, every game, every everything, they are there. We consider them "family". I fired my straight barber today. One he was in Jamaica, and two, his flaming assistant did a better cut than he ever thought about doing. No homophobia here, unless you count the woody I got while I was getting head.
I will pray that you may one day undo your brainwashing and learn some critical thinking skills
I agree with 90% of your point of view. How you see the system and all of it's manifestations, is absolutely correct. But I would like to offer up some ideas about how to turn our dissatisfaction into a conscious effort to transform the existing abomination into the eutopia that universe has in mind for it's intelligent life.
I believe that 99.999% of most current human thought is encapsulated and controlled by the prison of civilization and it's false intellectual boundaries that are consentually agreed to by all the humans in all the societies on earth. The essence of civilization is abstracted virtualization (math, language, imagemaking, programming, etc.) which provides humans the ability to shortcut the natural, ecological, earth life processes, and reward those who can implement those shortcuts (they become the wealthy) by fooling other humans into the labor that physically implements these shortcuts, and ruthlessly (cheaply) extracting earth and animal resources (non-susainability). This is the entirety of "civilization" and it wraps around and becomes the intellectual environment of every society on earth.
What it seems to me that we have failed to realize is that this "civilization" is the universe's gift to us to surmount the limitations of the natural systems so that we could see the actual physical nature of universe (science/objective perception of physical reality) and then take that knowledge of the universe and use it as a tool to facilitate further evolution in exploring itself - the universe.
If universe, through us, is seeking consciousness, wouldn't it of nature make possible the ideal state of eutopia as a perfect cacoon for exploring universe in perpetuity? And wasn't the hunter-gatherer life a free life provided by the bounty of earth? Just look at the life of the Ohlone before the Europeans came to the Bay Area. I think a good argument can be made that they existed in an earth provided eutopia, and managed it in such a sustainable way, that it would still probably be functioning that way had "we" not allowed it too. The point I am trying to make is that humans had eutopia, gave it up for the shortcut tools of civilization and have never seen clear to get out of the trap we made for ourselves, which is heading us in the absolute direction of species obliteration.
So the stages human development are: earthian birth and development within earth's life systems, abstracted virtualizing tool use to surmount nature, and integration of the two previous "civilizations" into a new, infinitely sustainable, eutopian life on earth, by maintaining earth's life systems and the intelligent, discretionary use of virtualizing tools.
It seems to me that we need to get to this integration of the two evolutionary stages above, not by physically destructive conflict and rebellion, which just provokes the knee jerk reaction, of the family-protecting urged consumer programmed worker-human that our current "civilization" has produced, but by intelligently guiding human perception of problems and providing clear physical real world examples of a changed paradigm, of a non-toxic, satisfying life.
An example of a society that does the above exists, in rough state, in the book Ecotopia. It's a good start and waaaay better than anything we have now. Instead of being bored why not work, design, judo, coerse humans into eutopia/Ecoptopia? Destroying their "precious" property just makes 'em go berserk. You need to SHOW them that they don't need that crap instead.
I would like to see the creation of a new parallel counterculture that can assume roles within their system (part time employment, etc.) that is visibly successful and does not use any of their toxic stuff (the list is so long as to be near-infinite) and uses only their non-toxic stuff. Whatever non-toxic tools that don't exist we design a way to provide them. We should be the manifestors of this new paradigm, through intelligent design and action. It seems clear that they are not going to do it. A lot of this is starting to be done.
Nonviolent protesting like peace, critical mass and street parties is a positive, fun inducing action. The others, the "sleepers", need our careful action to wake 'em up. And this carefulness should be where our boredom turns to REAL "intelligent design". Trying to find ways to get these folks out of their socially enforced consumer gluttony behavior is the most challenging and difficult process we will ever attempt. If that doesn't keep us from being bored I don't know what will!
The anarchist, free-life movement needs to manifest actions and tools that free us from their toxic prison, not just rant and rail against a corrupt system. We need to stand strong and quietly disrupt their modalities while simultaneously presenting new, fun and visibly life enhancing activities and tools that show them a new way is better, cheaper and satisfying!
As the consumer gits say "Let's do it!"
Peace, Love and Cheers!
-Sandy
P.S.
Ideology rethinks?:
Boredom is a byproduct of civilization's consumer culture and is the engine of "selling us a cure to a disease they create". "Bored, of course.. you are...and here is something... new!" Without boredom, without the eternal desire for some new product, there would be no consumerism.
Violence to property is like breaking the toys of litte kids that have all the weapons. Makes 'em go berserk and close their ears while they try to break you. Or they just ignore you and let their system wear you down to a bloody pulp, like they have been.
Conflict and "absolutes" are traps of civilization. Intent and persistent movement towards the ideal will snap it's control over us and the sleepers.
This rebellion requires intelligence!
I believe that 99.999% of most current human thought is encapsulated and controlled by the prison of civilization and it's false intellectual boundaries that are consentually agreed to by all the humans in all the societies on earth. The essence of civilization is abstracted virtualization (math, language, imagemaking, programming, etc.) which provides humans the ability to shortcut the natural, ecological, earth life processes, and reward those who can implement those shortcuts (they become the wealthy) by fooling other humans into the labor that physically implements these shortcuts, and ruthlessly (cheaply) extracting earth and animal resources (non-susainability). This is the entirety of "civilization" and it wraps around and becomes the intellectual environment of every society on earth.
What it seems to me that we have failed to realize is that this "civilization" is the universe's gift to us to surmount the limitations of the natural systems so that we could see the actual physical nature of universe (science/objective perception of physical reality) and then take that knowledge of the universe and use it as a tool to facilitate further evolution in exploring itself - the universe.
If universe, through us, is seeking consciousness, wouldn't it of nature make possible the ideal state of eutopia as a perfect cacoon for exploring universe in perpetuity? And wasn't the hunter-gatherer life a free life provided by the bounty of earth? Just look at the life of the Ohlone before the Europeans came to the Bay Area. I think a good argument can be made that they existed in an earth provided eutopia, and managed it in such a sustainable way, that it would still probably be functioning that way had "we" not allowed it too. The point I am trying to make is that humans had eutopia, gave it up for the shortcut tools of civilization and have never seen clear to get out of the trap we made for ourselves, which is heading us in the absolute direction of species obliteration.
So the stages human development are: earthian birth and development within earth's life systems, abstracted virtualizing tool use to surmount nature, and integration of the two previous "civilizations" into a new, infinitely sustainable, eutopian life on earth, by maintaining earth's life systems and the intelligent, discretionary use of virtualizing tools.
It seems to me that we need to get to this integration of the two evolutionary stages above, not by physically destructive conflict and rebellion, which just provokes the knee jerk reaction, of the family-protecting urged consumer programmed worker-human that our current "civilization" has produced, but by intelligently guiding human perception of problems and providing clear physical real world examples of a changed paradigm, of a non-toxic, satisfying life.
An example of a society that does the above exists, in rough state, in the book Ecotopia. It's a good start and waaaay better than anything we have now. Instead of being bored why not work, design, judo, coerse humans into eutopia/Ecoptopia? Destroying their "precious" property just makes 'em go berserk. You need to SHOW them that they don't need that crap instead.
I would like to see the creation of a new parallel counterculture that can assume roles within their system (part time employment, etc.) that is visibly successful and does not use any of their toxic stuff (the list is so long as to be near-infinite) and uses only their non-toxic stuff. Whatever non-toxic tools that don't exist we design a way to provide them. We should be the manifestors of this new paradigm, through intelligent design and action. It seems clear that they are not going to do it. A lot of this is starting to be done.
Nonviolent protesting like peace, critical mass and street parties is a positive, fun inducing action. The others, the "sleepers", need our careful action to wake 'em up. And this carefulness should be where our boredom turns to REAL "intelligent design". Trying to find ways to get these folks out of their socially enforced consumer gluttony behavior is the most challenging and difficult process we will ever attempt. If that doesn't keep us from being bored I don't know what will!
The anarchist, free-life movement needs to manifest actions and tools that free us from their toxic prison, not just rant and rail against a corrupt system. We need to stand strong and quietly disrupt their modalities while simultaneously presenting new, fun and visibly life enhancing activities and tools that show them a new way is better, cheaper and satisfying!
As the consumer gits say "Let's do it!"
Peace, Love and Cheers!
-Sandy
P.S.
Ideology rethinks?:
Boredom is a byproduct of civilization's consumer culture and is the engine of "selling us a cure to a disease they create". "Bored, of course.. you are...and here is something... new!" Without boredom, without the eternal desire for some new product, there would be no consumerism.
Violence to property is like breaking the toys of litte kids that have all the weapons. Makes 'em go berserk and close their ears while they try to break you. Or they just ignore you and let their system wear you down to a bloody pulp, like they have been.
Conflict and "absolutes" are traps of civilization. Intent and persistent movement towards the ideal will snap it's control over us and the sleepers.
This rebellion requires intelligence!
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