A lawyer who paints, frappes and surfs (just *where* does one surf in Maine?) … hmmm… I had a friend come up with something similar, I think. She was advocating that any significant relationship, with or without a sexual component, should be called a ‘domestic partnership’ and all of the privileges of marriage permitted therein – inheritance, POA, parenting, property, the whole schlemiel.
This all sounds very Dutch, no? Maybe the humans (or what’s left of us) on Turtle Island just take a nice boatride…
Anyway, do take a look at this essay, if you have a moment. I think it may have some practical applications here and there.
great quote, mysti — will have to check out the article.
reminds me of last year, taking with a local business owner (CA-style fresh smoothies & juice), who’s also a lawyer (and surfer and painter). he was saying that instead of people marrying, they should form LLCs. the contractual partnership is clearer, and they are more easily dissolved when necessary than are marriages.
i forget all of his points, but i thought it sounded like a great idea.
I just read the most *brilliant* article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
If you want to understand how the conservative mind works, and how to stake out a position that doesn’t inflame the worst tendencies of both Right and Left, I urge you to spend an hour reading and considering this article. Too many *great* quotes to choose from, but here’s a taste:
“Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them. That march and démarche of democracy is one of the main stories of modern politics. And it is the second half of that story, the démarche, that drives the development of ideas we call conservative. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
“Despite the very real differences among them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen—workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands—but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and continuing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history, in fact, the contract has served as a conduit to unforeseen coercion and constraint. Employment and marriage contracts have been interpreted by judges to contain all sorts of unwritten and unwanted provisions of servitude to which wives and workers tacitly consent, even when they have no knowledge of such provisions or wish to stipulate otherwise.
Until 1980, for example, it was legal in every state for a husband to rape his wife.”
Eric, you just beat me to it: it’s Olbermann’s syntax, style, and monologue structure all the way.
Mystes, an intriguing story shared. Going through the existence mill myself right now, which is grinding up relationships rough at the moment; but later, exceedingly smooth. Kudos.
Amanda, you just need a cushiony little $5 headset and it will sound interesting, without all the weird overtones. It was pretty dramatic on a sound system and I kept trying to figure out who it was. It almost is slightly mocking of Keith Olbermann, behind all the warp.
When I was about 27 I had a long vision about the lifetime after this one. It was back here, on Terra, and I was again a young woman. The planet had been turned into a very ‘aesthetic,’ yet highly dystopian prison – the population was divided between those who lived in a kind of luxurious paranoia, and on the other side was the Resistance. Members of the Resistance *often* came from the elite, and brought resources to interrupt the powerflows of the governors, who had developed highly refined methods of behavioural as well as territorial control.
The upshot of the whole system (which was about 100 years up the road) was that the governors could not have had the control they did without the Resistance. The Resistance kept a kind of cognitive innovation going in order to develop effective evasion and disruptive maneuvers. The governors were like a virus that *fed* off of that datastream, calibrating their systems to emulate and tweak the innovations, just so, in order to disable them – and more insidiously, to vector into their ideology. I had a pretty good idea of how to disentangle these, but convincing my peers to step away from the dialectic was very, very difficult.
In one particularly crucial moment, my partner in that lifetime used a technique I was disseminating, but inexpertly, and got himself killed. I was inconsolable and withdrew from the struggle. The lesson of the vision was to jack me out of the grief zone and show that it wasn’t the technique that created the outcome, but the naivete of the operator, and that in a very short time after the consort’s death, it would catch and counterinfect the governors.
This was in the early 80s, so I couldn’t understand how every single square nanometer of the planet could have been placed under surveillance (of course, now it is). In the 90s, when I was researching the similar cognitive strategies of artists and yogins, my thesis director said: Look out, girlie. There’s always a Department of Defense person seeking this kind of research. I thought he was kidding, of course.
Turns out, not so much.
The insights we are all developing now can certainly be co-opted and used in ways we won’t be happy about. But such is mill of existence. It grinds rough, and then it grinds exceedingly smooth.
The trick is to fall in love with *all* of it.
***
**
*
…and the minutemen hid behind rocks & trees…
i totally understand *why* it’s distorted, it’s just done to a level that makes it damn near impossible to make out the words being said — for me, anyway.
Thank you, Eric. Good point. Let us hope it does not come down to shooting at anybody. The weapons now are far beyond muskets and the world is much more crowded. No good can come of violence.
they are playing with this as a meme. part of the lack of identity is about the message being more important than the messenger.
I don’t think that activists of any kind should hide behind their anonymity – the black face cloths always seemed stupid to me. anonymous, however, is fighting specifically with felonies – but then I guess being a minuteman and shooting at the reds was a felony.
John Hancock felt no need to obscure his identity.
Yes it’s obviously distorted — for the sake of sounding anonymous —
sorry — the audio on this one is just too fuzzy and annoying for me to listen all the way through.
A lawyer who paints, frappes and surfs (just *where* does one surf in Maine?) … hmmm… I had a friend come up with something similar, I think. She was advocating that any significant relationship, with or without a sexual component, should be called a ‘domestic partnership’ and all of the privileges of marriage permitted therein – inheritance, POA, parenting, property, the whole schlemiel.
This all sounds very Dutch, no? Maybe the humans (or what’s left of us) on Turtle Island just take a nice boatride…
Anyway, do take a look at this essay, if you have a moment. I think it may have some practical applications here and there.
great quote, mysti — will have to check out the article.
reminds me of last year, taking with a local business owner (CA-style fresh smoothies & juice), who’s also a lawyer (and surfer and painter). he was saying that instead of people marrying, they should form LLCs. the contractual partnership is clearer, and they are more easily dissolved when necessary than are marriages.
i forget all of his points, but i thought it sounded like a great idea.
I just read the most *brilliant* article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
If you want to understand how the conservative mind works, and how to stake out a position that doesn’t inflame the worst tendencies of both Right and Left, I urge you to spend an hour reading and considering this article. Too many *great* quotes to choose from, but here’s a taste:
“Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors. They have gathered under different banners—the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism—and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them. That march and démarche of democracy is one of the main stories of modern politics. And it is the second half of that story, the démarche, that drives the development of ideas we call conservative. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.
“Despite the very real differences among them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen—workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands—but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and continuing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history, in fact, the contract has served as a conduit to unforeseen coercion and constraint. Employment and marriage contracts have been interpreted by judges to contain all sorts of unwritten and unwanted provisions of servitude to which wives and workers tacitly consent, even when they have no knowledge of such provisions or wish to stipulate otherwise.
Until 1980, for example, it was legal in every state for a husband to rape his wife.”
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Conservative-Mind/130199/
(Emphasis mine)
M
***
**
*
Eric, you just beat me to it: it’s Olbermann’s syntax, style, and monologue structure all the way.
Mystes, an intriguing story shared. Going through the existence mill myself right now, which is grinding up relationships rough at the moment; but later, exceedingly smooth. Kudos.
Amanda, you just need a cushiony little $5 headset and it will sound interesting, without all the weird overtones. It was pretty dramatic on a sound system and I kept trying to figure out who it was. It almost is slightly mocking of Keith Olbermann, behind all the warp.
When I was about 27 I had a long vision about the lifetime after this one. It was back here, on Terra, and I was again a young woman. The planet had been turned into a very ‘aesthetic,’ yet highly dystopian prison – the population was divided between those who lived in a kind of luxurious paranoia, and on the other side was the Resistance. Members of the Resistance *often* came from the elite, and brought resources to interrupt the powerflows of the governors, who had developed highly refined methods of behavioural as well as territorial control.
The upshot of the whole system (which was about 100 years up the road) was that the governors could not have had the control they did without the Resistance. The Resistance kept a kind of cognitive innovation going in order to develop effective evasion and disruptive maneuvers. The governors were like a virus that *fed* off of that datastream, calibrating their systems to emulate and tweak the innovations, just so, in order to disable them – and more insidiously, to vector into their ideology. I had a pretty good idea of how to disentangle these, but convincing my peers to step away from the dialectic was very, very difficult.
In one particularly crucial moment, my partner in that lifetime used a technique I was disseminating, but inexpertly, and got himself killed. I was inconsolable and withdrew from the struggle. The lesson of the vision was to jack me out of the grief zone and show that it wasn’t the technique that created the outcome, but the naivete of the operator, and that in a very short time after the consort’s death, it would catch and counterinfect the governors.
This was in the early 80s, so I couldn’t understand how every single square nanometer of the planet could have been placed under surveillance (of course, now it is). In the 90s, when I was researching the similar cognitive strategies of artists and yogins, my thesis director said: Look out, girlie. There’s always a Department of Defense person seeking this kind of research. I thought he was kidding, of course.
Turns out, not so much.
The insights we are all developing now can certainly be co-opted and used in ways we won’t be happy about. But such is mill of existence. It grinds rough, and then it grinds exceedingly smooth.
The trick is to fall in love with *all* of it.
***
**
*
…and the minutemen hid behind rocks & trees…
i totally understand *why* it’s distorted, it’s just done to a level that makes it damn near impossible to make out the words being said — for me, anyway.
Thank you, Eric. Good point. Let us hope it does not come down to shooting at anybody. The weapons now are far beyond muskets and the world is much more crowded. No good can come of violence.
they are playing with this as a meme. part of the lack of identity is about the message being more important than the messenger.
I don’t think that activists of any kind should hide behind their anonymity – the black face cloths always seemed stupid to me. anonymous, however, is fighting specifically with felonies – but then I guess being a minuteman and shooting at the reds was a felony.
John Hancock felt no need to obscure his identity.
Yes it’s obviously distorted — for the sake of sounding anonymous —
sorry — the audio on this one is just too fuzzy and annoying for me to listen all the way through.