Why I left the Radical Left

This is not about the many serious issues we face, but about my experiences and the general mindset of the many groups reacting to these issues from the Far Left side of the spectrum

For what reason did I leave the Far Extremes? Why did I leave the Radical Left? Who cares? Well, I care, and so do the people close to me. When you’re deep in the haze of revolutionary fervor blinded by righteous struggle, Far Extremist groups don’t seem far out at all but quite normal. Go too damn far to the Right or too far to the Left, however, and it’s a buncha damn crazy people. They’re obsessed with ideology. They worship symbols as icons. Their ego is inflated with self-righteousness and a distorted sense of history. Their self-confidence is poisoned by a wild, cerebral mix of low self-esteem buttressed by delusions. They focus on what should be, what could have been, what would come to pass, and what ought to be, not on what is actually true and factual.

So many people I encountered among the Far Extremes are paranoid, revel in feeling oppressed, and live in constant, never-ending “struggle.” And the struggle never ever ends. There’s always the next revolution, another group to demonize, another cause to get enraged and bitter over, and even deaths of “those against us” to celebrate. Acceptance is alien. Forgiveness is mocked. Compassion and empathy are absent. Love is conditional, prosperity scorned unless either shared or aggregated, and we’re all expected to march, fight, and struggle. Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle! The big, evil “System” is to be overthrown or infiltrated and demolished. Reform is just a mask. The complexity and range of human nature is reduced to a simple “us versus them” mentality. Science becomes religion. Religion becomes science. Economics becomes politics. Imagine what happens when the race up the Tower becomes a race to the bottom…and one breaks on thru the bottom to the other side?

Economics is held up as some kind of holy religion, but few within these cults bother to check the math. Or even apply the math. Instead most just parrot, and they parrot nonsense. If one keeps hearing 2+2=5 long enough, and hearing it spoken as true by so-called credible authorities, and echoed often by one’s peers, then guess what one assumes is true? Why bother to check the charismatic demagogue’s math? Why have the demaguru and all your new cult friends mad at you and angry enough to revile and ostracize you? Hello? History, the interpretations as well as records of people and events, is instead gazed upon as a mess of tea leaves and goat intestines in search of arrows pointing to utopian futures. Go be the future now! Yeah, right.

Radical used to be a cool word. It means to return to one’s roots. We radicals would return to our roots and rebuild the foundations of civilization. We would destroy and wipe clean the earth to rebuild a better world for all. The problem with this thinking is believing the masses, the common folk, the working classes, whatever, regardless of how difficult their lives may be, would prefer instead to live amidst carnage, destruction, and annihilation. Few of those who have endured revolutions and civil wars have any desire to keep reliving such violence, bloodshed, and hatred in the pursuit of justice. 

A major reason I left radical activism is I grew tired of ideological rigidity and cultish groupthink. History and actual economics were ignored if they did not fit group ideology. Pragmatism and practicality were scoffed at. Any serious attempt to question and challenge ideological authorities led to demonization, ridicule, and ostracism. Group ideology became group idiocy, altho those within the group failed to recognize it as such. So many so-called radical intelligentsia confused critical thinking with harsh criticism of the Other and the Other’s minions. Critical thinking skills had atrophied inside the groups I experienced. Critical thinking was instead replaced by circular thinking and the babble of confirmation biases.  Continue reading

Goofin’ with my Fam on Cam: An intersection of family & technology captured in time

Fun Family Moments with technology & the Memories they generate recaptured from May 2000 & June 2001

The Bass-Hughes/Hughes-Bass Family goofin’ around on their new LogiCam attached to their Compaq computer where they lived at Orca Landing, a small intentional community as urban cooperative household  in Seattle. L2R: William, Baby Kate, Morgan (now Dylan), Gwen, & housemate Baby Dylan (under Gwen’s chin). Tuesday 9 May 2000. Foto by Computer!

These pictures are not by any means “good” as far as quality of photography goes. They are fuzzy, blurry, and fusty. Nor is this a traditional article the general public may seize upon with joy. This is more of a family legacy post, a digital heirloom for now, nearly two decades later, and the future beyond every tomorrow. Yet these capture a certain nostalgia, a few moments back in yonder spacetime of joy and befuddlement, of tears and misery, of surprise, confusion, and laughter. Even moments of glee!

All but the last three fotos were taken by what was then an amazing new tool, a Logitech Webcam mounted atop and connected to our Compaq Presario desktop PC running OS Windows 98. At the time the Internet had shifted from bulletin boards & Gopher protocols to MS-DOS-based programing for Microsoft programs, IBM Peanut desktop computers, and Apple’s Macintosh to the growing, glowing World Wide Web with way cool browsers such as Netscape. Oh yeah, remember MS-DOS? And those fancy, old Peanuts and sublime early Macs? Gosh, remember Netscape? What an astounding expression of technology the Netscape browser was! All of these artifacts are today considered “vintage technologies.”

Morgan & Kate. Morgan now goes by Dylan. Here they are focusing on this hypnotic vintage technology! In the age between TVs and smartfones, too! Here at Orca Landing, Seattle, woo HOO! Wednesday 3 May 2000.

While we were having so much fun posing & goofing around with our new Logicam, these hi-tech companies were booming themselves right up into a massive financial bubble. The Dot-com Bubble began around 1994, the year my first daughter Morgan Hannah (now my eldest child Dylan Blair) was born, and ended in 2000. This hyperspeculative bubble finally burst, many companies died, the economy crashed, and a recession kicked in. The bursting of the bubble was a process lasting into 2002. Around the same time Compaq, once one of the top leading brands of personal computers, fell apart and was gobbled up by Hewlett-Packard.

This particular recession, which in some ways began a decade earlier in Asia, continued in parts of North America into 2003 and across Europe till around 2004-2005. This crazy tech boom of the 1990s laid the foundation, however, for stunning digital transformation of civilization over the next two decades. This remained true even into the midst of the Great Global Recession, an economic and financial catastrophe that began in late 2007. These events greatly affected our family and friends even as we carried on our daily lives. Our vintage technologies allowed us to preserve some of the good times amidst all of the gloomy news. Such memories remind us our glasses were more than half-full rather than half-empty or knocked over. So let’s raise a toast to those happy moments of yesteryear and be present to the little joys all around us even now, woo HOO! Yes!

Here we are, however, back in the day at the turn of the Common Era’s 21st Century in awe of those blurry, silly, and spontaneous “vintage tech” pictures. Digital spontaneity is one of the keys to understanding this brief time in history. The astonishing speed of computerized camera technology reached the point people felt free to be spontaneous in the moment. These were the beginnings of the digital selfie boom! People were goofy! Solemn. Smiling! Frowning. Weeping! And grinning, too.

Momma Gwen gets in on the action, too!

Small, precision-image camera technology making the Logitech cams and then the tiny iPhone and Android fone cams were initially developed back in the 1960s by the NRO, the secret National Reconnaissance Office. This unique technology was finally released into the public marketplace, seized upon by private companies, and made its way into mobile devices such as cellphones. The NRO was a clandestine Federal intelligence agency formed in 1961 but wasn’t officially declassified until 1992 after the Cold War was over. It’s early cameras are considered superior to those in the later Hubble Space Telescope.

Social media entered the global picture, and, boom! Our planet would never be the same again. At the same time, sadly enough, this the lull before the storm, before the growing, intermittent Global Long War on Terror exploded into a worldwide conflict with the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States Home Front in September of 2001.

In the meantime, while this long war still burns and smolders around the world, let us nevertheless enjoy these precious moments in time. Perhaps they will fortify us to more closely re-examine our history of violence as a species. Perhaps doing so will illuminate and motivate us to find ways to generate peace and love instead of war and hate. Meanwhile, we move forward. Life is messy! Enjoy the pictures!

“Shirley Temple Kate.” Kathryn Elizabeth stylin’ at Orca Landing in Seattle, Tuesday 26 June 2001.

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Fighting Back against Trump and the Right beyond Inauguration Day Weekend

No flash in the pan protests! Sustained demonstrations are required.

Building Massive Resistance against Trump and the Alt-Right helps build a Democratic Socialist world.

Major demonstrations are being planned across the United States of America over these two days to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump as President and Mike Pence as Vice-President. Other marches and rallies in solidarity with this insurrection are planned in other cities around the world. These protests, even in the midst of winter, are expected to be huge. Already over 25,000 people took to the streets of New York City on the Thursday before Inauguration Day to demonstrate against Trump-Pence and their ugly and dangerously stupid agenda.

It would be naïve to think all these vigorous acts of defiance, resistance, unity, and courage will have much immediate effect. And with today’s technologies at our fingertips with social media, anything is possible. Even more naïve, however, is to believe we can simply pack up and go home and plop down as if OK, look how LOUD we showed Trump-Pence and the Alt-Right we roared! No. This is a long fight shaping up. We must be prepared for a long, long struggle!

Know, too, when we on the Left fight, we win in the end. To fight and win, however, we must come together to educate and organize ourselves to fight effectively.

Consider examples in American history of what efforts activists took to win. Let’s look at our own history. Struggle takes time, and the more we fight we win. Perseverance is key. The Civil Rights Movement lasted from the early 1950s all the way thru the 60s into the mid-1970s. Significant high points were the Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 followed 10 years later by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Then the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and National Services Act passed in 1965, and the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

The anti-Vietnam War movement began protesting in 1964 and grew so vigorous President Lyndon Johnson of the Democrats was compelled to withdraw from seeking reelection in March 1968. These anti-war demonstrations also compelled the next President, Republican Richard Nixon, to withdraw U.S. forces from the Vietnam War in March 1973. These civil rights and anti-war protests merged with other movements as resistance to Nixon exploded yet again during the Watergate crisis. Nixon resigned the American presidency in August of 1974. The labor and environmental movements are other classic examples of struggles taking years to manifest a string of powerful successes.

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