let's all remind ourselves that democracy and ochlocracy are two different things.

ochlocawhatchamawho?

this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy

actually, that article is horrible.

even by wiki standards.

don't read that. let me find something better....

it's important. what we're seeing across the world is this idea that if people just go sit in a square or a park then that's enough to affect serious change.

tommy d.
I don't think we have the technology to make this kind of thing practical, or universally beneficial.

jessica amber murray 
i'm not sure what you mean, exactly. i'm going to finish my thought first, though.

of course, that's preposterous. the ideal is supposed to be people getting together and creating parallel systems. instead, people are getting frustrated that the sit-ins aren't getting the government to sort of just "get it" and are reacting in violence and anger instead. it's a dangerous spiral.

there was a narrative that began a few years ago that seemed promising, but it's quickly proven itself hopeless. we've learned that social media is just an elaborate spying tool, and that movement after movement is unable to provide anything other than masses of people that expect that merely showing up is enough to fix problems.

there needs to be a really conscious shift in focus away from demonstrations with this idea that the state will fix it if we yell loud enough and towards the idea that we need to find ways to fix it ourselves.

i'm not going to post another article, but that's democracy v ochlocracy.

now, thomas, i think you're talking about the problems of large populations with direct democracy? i could see how you thought that's where i was going, but i think it's clear now that it wasn't where i was going.

that being said, i do agree it's difficult to have a large direct voting democracy (although i do think the technology is better now than it's ever been) but i don't really think it's necessary that everybody decide on everything. i think what's more important is that people are able to decide on things that affect them. that doesn't actually require a parliament. it just comes out of living. it would be really impossible to avoid in just about any other system than the one we have, where we ship food around all over the globe.

i mean, what we've got to show over the last few years is a handful of military coups, the return of fascism, broken promises and shattered and co-opted movements.

we're not doing this right.

tommy d.
Personally, I think people should focus less on the shortcomings of movements like Occupy because the demographics involved there were hardly universal. While a wide variety of people and ideas participated, I found it was generally more "sheltered" types.

jessica amber murray 
well, what i think the world is coming to grips with is the reality that the new right's vision is not sustainable. it's convenient to call young people "sheltered" for rejecting the world that their parents created for them, but at some point it's going to have to click that that vision isn't working. unfortunately, what's becoming clear is that the failure of these movements is a part of the failure of neo-liberalism. that is to say that the system has created a generation of young people that have been educated so badly that they're incapable of building an alternate vision. i think connecting that together is important: the system is failing, and we're not able to come up with anything other than a list of hollow complaints, because the system failed to turn us into anything worthwhile, which is the reason it's failing.

that's absolute brokenness.

i'm going to otherwise avoid the discussion of critical race theory. it's another symptom of a generation that lacks critical thinking skills because it wasn't taught to them. i don't see it as a cause.

i'm not suggesting that giraffes would be smart enough to do this, if they had the physical ability to. i think this would be very hard for a giraffe to do, with the funky neck and awkward legs and stuff. maybe not - just a guess.

but it got me thinking about it.

i mean, if a few okapi-like giraffe ancestors could figure something like that out then it may have been intelligence that would have been selected for rather than something physical.

it just goes back to the idea that there's so much randomness inherent in evolution that very specific tests are required to figure out what's actually being selected for.

elephants are fucking brilliant by the way, if you don't know that.

well, i found a reasonable workaround.

$1/month.
$0.01/minute.
free voicemail-to-text.
no expiry.

almost free.

but now i have to wait ten or fifteen days for paypal to fail to convince me to give them a credit card number. sometimes it feels like the whole world failed economics 101. incentives? what is it, 1853?

in the long run, i'll hook a broken laptop into a router, install the scary software there and find some kind of budget ip phone on kijiji to hook up to it. for now, i'm happy with the email option.

...and i'm still thinking that i should be able to rout that to an android phone if i ever get one, too. that might make more sense than the broken laptop thing.

you know, all i really want is a local phone number (it has to be local because the primary reason i need the phone in the first place is for the border fascists....this is apparently an impossible process without a phone number....) that routs to a voice mail box and routs those messages to email. that way, i could walk down to a pay phone and call somebody back, if necessary. or respond via email. that's what i always did in the past; somebody would leave me a message, and i'd send them an email.

the system could be fully automated. there's no real justification to pay for it.

google voice can do that, but not in canada. which sort of makes me want to launch a string of terrorist attacks against the communications oligopoly. i know that won't solve anything. but, fuck them. there's ways around it, but not with a local area code. i can't give the border fascists a wyoming area number, they'll think i'm running coke back and forth. so i'm stuck with the whole voip rigmarole, which i'm dreading going through with.

in the end, i'll probably just buy the voip mailbox and never actually go through the process of getting an ip phone or installing the software. then i'll forget to buy minutes and lose my number...

how does it make sense to ask for verification by phone when somebody is signing up for a phone number?

ugh.

AAAAAGHGHGAAGGHGHAGHHG.

ok. this is the last time i'll do this. it's not technically wrong, it's just fucking skewed for political purposes. this is all it says for roughly four thousand years of vaguely understood history:

" In its early history, it was colonized and occupied repeatedly - by the Greeks, Romans, Huns, the Byzantine Empire, among others."

early? greeks? that's not early.

the thracian and iranian occupations are early. scythians. sarmatians. cimmerians.

now, when we speaking of colonization and occupation that implicitly suggests that there is an indigenous group being colonized and occupied. and would you like to guess who that group was?

the iranian influence was slowly pushed out over thousands of years. the article skipped the goths, who were extremely important in the destruction horizon on two levels - both the one they created and the one that set off their own migration. probably cause they thought of eye makeup.

herodotus is explicit - there were the "royal scythians" and sarmatians who commanded the armies and were of iranian backgrounds, and then there were the "agricultural scythians" who farmed the land and were their slaves.

now, on the one hand it's easy to connect these agricultural scythians to the broad slavic speaking areas through archaeological continuity. on other other hand, it's easy to point out that all other possible contenders were both living far away at the time and not at all agricultural. so, the agricultural scythians are quite obviously slavic groups, extending over a wide area.

throughout all of these invasions, the slavs remained tied to the land.

so, yeah, there's been various turkic groups in the area for the last several centuries. but they kind of just showed up, and were merely at the end of a long process of colonizing and occupying an area that is indigenously slavic.

i don't want to come off as the supremacists i'm criticizing, so this discussion is now officially dropped.

http://www.voanews.com/content/the-history-of-crimea---in-brief-/1860431.html

ok, miguel, but you sound like an establishment politician attacking free trade protesters. even so, i think everybody sees a certain amount of reason in presenting something coherent.

i'm still not convinced that the opposition controls the protesters. there's basically no example anywhere in history in the world where the marching masses are represented by parliament. even gandhi spent half his time arguing against the people he was trying to emancipate. i'm not exaggerating: zero examples.

as mentioned before, i'm also aware of a substantial amount of anti-government opposition on the left, which isn't being discussed by anybody at all.

so, forget about the opposition's demands, i don't care. what are the crowd's demands?

well, if they're like most crowds with a broadly anarchist bent, they'll tell you that that's not the way democracy works. people standing in a square yelling isn't democracy. it's ochlocracy. it leads to meaningless shifts in power and state repression. see egypt, ukraine. democracy is people getting together and discussing things through an assembly process. it's consequently not up to the crowds to make demands, but only up to them to incite a process of self-determination. if you want to be semantic, that means that the demand reduces to a desire for more local governance. what that means is a shift in power from representative bodies to more direct, organic ones. it's not a demand that the state do stuff, but that the state dissolve to allow the protesters the freedom to decide what stuff they want to do.

involving yourself in grassroots democracy movements will make that clear. it's commonly understood. but it's totally taboo to discuss it any kind of media at all. focusing on demands implicitly denies the possibility of any kind of actual revolution (a shift in power is not a revolution!), so that's all the media ever does. it's also exactly why you won't get an answer - to provide demands would be to reject the revolution in favour of reform.

again: i'm sure there's some nasty, reactionary forces. street protest attracts these assholes. predictably. but i really wish i could just go down and talk to some of the people on the street myself. i suspect the media spin is largely inaccurate.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11528

again, his history only goes back 250 years (and is consequently basically useless in explaining the ethnic divisions), but he's at least confused by this.

of course, there's a big russian naval base there. forget about the cold war, this is a discussion of the factors underlying the crimean war.

i'll come back to this in a few hours. it looks like it has to develop properly.

http://rt.com/op-edge/ukraine-crimea-west-policy-942/

http://www.nrcu.gov.ua/en/148/557364/

THIS PRESS RELEASE MAKES SENSE.

well, sort of. i mean, they're there now. there's no justice in shipping them back to asia. i guess it's more of a peeve. most random people don't have my grasp of history. in a way, 1945 is sort of a global year zero, too.

anyways, to have this turkish/muslim group stand up and be like "hey, we're worried about rising nationalism in the region" - that makes sense. it still doesn't really explain what happened, though....

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/crimean-tatars-wellbeing-rests-upon-neighborly-relations-with-russians-ukrainians-337741.html

something is fishy about this.

http://zik.ua/en/news/2014/02/27/column_of_apcs_moving_to_simferopol_stops_then_backtracks_465403

the short version is that, regardless of what the people on the street actually want (which is not this), there are now officially fascists in the ukrainian cabinet and they're not likely to be easy to get rid of.

i'm thinking in my head that the mainstream conservative party is going to collapse as a result of it's support for the far right. that's often the case, just about everywhere except israel.

but it depends on the assumption that svoboda is just going to sit around and play by the rules, rather than get aggressive about the opportunity the mess provided for them.

ukraine needs to send the right message in may, if it still can.

that might even be the setup, actually. split that german pawn boxer guy off, then bury the fascists by aligning them with the status quo. that gives the eu stooge a clear path as the only party that can be voted for. see how they do this? but it might just split the right and end up with yanukovich' party winning.

i have to say that would be hilarious.

http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/katya-gorchinskaya-the-not-so-revolutionary-new-ukraine-government-337768.html

this is official, now, and it's bad news - it means electing these guys is going to putting fascists in cabinet. that's not been the case up to now.

the flip side is it could very well make them unelectable. how many fatherland supporters want to vote for a coalition that will put fascists in power? and the....now opposition...will campaign on that.

oops?

http://un.ua/eng/article/494863.html

http://un.ua/eng/article/494867.html

well, the bloomberg headline gives the lie away a little more clearly:

"Crimean Tatars Deported by Stalin Rally Against Putin in Crimea"

i'm very curious as to what was actually happening, though.

"Protest leaders said Wednesday that they would propose Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the country's new prime minister."

translated: western backed parliamentary forces that falsely claim to represent the protestors have put forward an old, corrupt bureaucrat to establish a quasi puppet state.

what's going to be interesting is to see whether:

1) the right coalition can even win the upcoming election
2) if it's fair to begin with
3) if they do win and it's fair if it sets off a counter-protest
4) what kind of influence the smaller fascist parties play in the larger coalition.

'cause, if i was a crimean tatar, it would be the fourth of these things i'd be concerned about - and really the only reason i could see going out to protest, as an ethnic group.

whatever the oil princess' faults were, she was generally considered a kleptocratic neocon on the soft right. this new coalition is a different animal and produces some legitimate cause for concern.

do i think the western media would go that far? yes. i also think it could be that badly misinformed, by pure accident.

again: intuition, let's see what reports come in.

clearest precedent: georgian invasion. i think the western media still thinks the russians launched an attack, rather than responded to a provocation.

which of course is why the russian military is prowling. i think it's very unlikely they'd strike first. i think it's certain they'd take advantage of a provocation.

well, i should take a step back. the nationalist groups are not currently in power. an "elected parliament" is, of which the nationalist groups represent a fringe element - both in terms of the people on the ground and the sitting mps. it might be repeated american policy to fund the most extreme factions, but they use it as a means to an end. if they can skip that and just go with the oil princess, they will.

further, it *does* make sense to think that *if* tatar groups support the central government (and the entire idea that "tatars support x" as though it's a genetic implication is pretty hollow to me) then it *could* produce a racist reaction from a fringe of white supremacist russians that share the same kind of white nationalism as the fringe ukrainian extremists. further, putin has a history of pragmatically folding to extremism, as well.

but to suggest that there's been a "tatar uprising" against a "russian-speaking" seizure of parliament isn't getting through my bullshit detectors, even if it's being reported by both sides; one may have something to gain by repeating the other's propaganda.

i don't want to further speculate, let's see what news comes in.

historically, this is waaaaaay more accurate than the guardian and cbc reports i just read, although it glosses over the slavic pre-history of the region.

the slavs have been living in the region for millenia, but (until the middle ages) lived in decentralized farming communities rather than organized states. they often paid tribute to invaders, be they scythians or goths or huns or turks. they were also often either enslaved as soldiers or used as mercenaries, which brought them deep into eastern europe with the raids of other groups like alans, huns, goths and sarmatians. for all the talk of gothic raids at the fall of the empire, it was slavic speaking people that inherited central and south-eastern europe. macedonian, for example, is a slavic language - but it's a recent invader to the region, brought south mostly by bulgarians.

suggesting that the region is historically and ethnically tatar or turk or mongolian and that the russians were invaders is entirely equivalent to suggesting that the native americans are not real americans. these eastern groups set up brutal, colonial states based on the economic foundation of land expropriation and white slavery. it's not to justify the stalinist reaction, but it's to put it into it's proper historical context. if the descendants of the sioux one day rise to slaughter the descendants of the colonists, it would be hard to be particularly moralizing about it.

http://rt.com/news/crimea-facts-protests-politics-945/

so, when you see these white nationalist groups in the ukraine - and in russia as well - you have to understand it in that context of the centuries of slavery that the indigenous slavic speaking peoples endured at the hands of the colonial turkic speaking peoples, how it completely destroyed their national identity and how their existing identity is constructed in large part as a reaction to their emancipatory struggle. it's a huge, huge thing (culturally) in the entire region. the crimean tatars are the precise targets of these groups, both in the ukraine and in russia.

to be a slav means to fight against the turkish oppressor, who gave them the name of "slave" to begin with.

so, this makes precisely no sense, except in terms of western propaganda designed to make it seem as though ukraine is united in opposition to russia.

"in soviet russia, white people oppressed".

not quite soviet russia. but the russia and ukraine of the middle ages, yes.

lol. there's been some kind of a seizure in the crimea. i'm not sure what's going on yet.

the western media is sadly trying to suggest that:

1) it's ethnic violence between russians and "tatars". probably not true.
2) the tatars are indigenous to the crimean area. absolutely false. in fact, russians are indigenous to the area. waves of mongols and turks invaded the region in the middle ages causing all kinds of carnage. that itself was a repeat of the hunnish invasions that destroyed the goth regions.
3) that the tatar groups would somehow prefer the white nationalist government in the ukraine, who would like to send them back to kazakhstan (where they came from).

these things are all obvious lies. i'll have to see how the story unfolds.

more likely to me seems to be that there's probably been some ethnic demonstrations against the racist government that was just installed. how that relates to the seizure, i can't say. how that relates to russia, i can't say.

but of course the fear is that something big is developing.

i find the term "popery" to be rather hilarious, as it conjures up images of puritans in preposterous hats (that goofy pope hat has nothing on those triangular enlightenment era catastrophes) carrying out finger pointing witch hunts, in a vaguely cleesian manner.

POPERY! POPERY!