Disqus - Latest Comments for moe_cipher

Re: http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2007/09/zimbabwe-and-imperial-thrust-of-white.html

moe_cipher — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:21:27 -0000

i agree with Mugabe that the West has developed a conspiracy against him. I also agree with his detractors that dude is also responsible for the situation in Zimbabwe along with neo-colonialists. I think the whole paternal liberation model has yet to show any success anywhere.

Re: What you're not hearing about Haiti (but should be)

moe_cipher — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:15:19 -0000

context...how i love thee.

Re: Obama preserves renditions as torture tool.

moe_cipher — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:45:52 -0000

"The CIA has long maintained that it does not turn prisoners over to other countries without first obtaining assurances that the detainees will not be mistreated." They forgot to add, "with a wink and a nod."

Yo, there's official policy and there's unofficial policy. Where there's a loophole, power will exploit it. Nobody ignores loopholes. Programs and policies designed for narrow purposes are always applied to the extent of and beyond their legal limit. Like when the PATRIOT ACT was used to get information from anyone at all traveling to Las Vegas or against homeless people in New Jersey. When they originally authorized its use nobody said, "we'll probably use this against homeless people".

The more preemptive light cast on this loophole, the better.

On the issue of unofficial policy, whenever has any government allowed something as insignificant as it's laws to get in the way of it's broader economic and military goals? The law is designed for us to follow. There's nothing sacrosanct about law. It's a political tool. That's why all the stuff we want to do to survive is illegal (any hustle we engage in) and the morally repugnant stuff corporations do is considered legal.

Re: Tell the truth to the soldier...

moe_cipher — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:33:05 -0000

yeah.. my beef is with the "do your prayers in private" tip as well as the lack of respect he's giving to his elders. no matter how jacked their situation is it's ill to watch a young man emasculate an older head like that. there's something very sad about seeing a man past his prime basically beg a man in his teens for some cash. the voyeuristic element of it all is what makes me ill. i wouldn't beef with the whole concept if this is just how he happens to roll, "sometimes solider boy gives cash out on the block."

watching his self made video of it in all its detail is something else entirely for me.

Re: Tell the truth to the soldier...

moe_cipher — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:35:35 -0000

just watching this post makes me feel dirty.... does he expect folks to be impressed with his philanthropy? i totally missed the punchline too. what so funny about a wealthy young black celebrity waving money at struggling brothers on the block and filming it for a vlog?

Re: Medicine for melancholy. [nyc]

moe_cipher — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:30:20 -0000

oh snap.. daily show cat.. i love that dude..

Re: On the Masses of Black Folks & Obama

moe_cipher — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:07:50 -0000

i agree that i don't personally know sister that wrote the article.. so, she could very well be ensconced in the community and doing work in the community and talking to working class black people on the daily.

i think i could have expressed it better in the original post. but I basically have a suspicion against people who make conclusions about black people that i don't encounter in real life. i wonder if these folks are talking to real people or if its just coming from the top of the dome.

i've spoken to folks who spit that, "black people are sheep" tip. and i don't know if that's accurate. i worked on an electoral campaign in a black neighborhood and the people i encountered did what they did from a place of personal self interest.

this also goes fort bill cosby and his ilk like dr. alvin poissaint...... like, do they really commingle with working call black people. what are these guys even talking about? i don't know. maybe they do. i don't KNOW bill cosby. but i do know some of black people. and they don't see themselves as "victims." and a bunch of news programs had bill cosby on so he can share his experience of voting for Obama.. like his experience is somehow representative of anything?!?!

but yeah.. i think the essence of this post is how folks translate that Obama energy into how they look at their own people.

oh but B.. on another tip.. i agree that it is accurate that there's some things that our people don't know. i think i'll frame it like this. our people know everything they need to know to get free. they may just lack the space to put it all together and work together around it.

what we're doing here is helpful because i think these informal blog posts will translate into something that someone working two jobs and can't get on the internet all the time actually reads. maybe that sister's mind will be sparked and have her thinking about her situation and what she can do to change it.

so, pretending that we all know the same stuff is not a reality based perspective. but i would say our people's collective consciousness, which we are a part, carries alot of information. enough information to carry our our liberation. look at the indigenous people in chiapas. they didn't benefit from a standard education, but they got free. subcomandante marcos and them did come from college.. but it was only until subcomandante marcos and them humbled themselves, and learned from the people, did the EZLN form..

Re: On Critiquing of Barack Obama

moe_cipher — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:35:43 -0000

i agree b. that we need a formula to absorb Obama critiques... ima try to blog on that..

as for the black intellectual class.. i can totally identify with you on this point. i too was dumbfounded and upset in poli sci 101 at university. going to howard, arguably the premiere breeding ground for the black intellectual and academic class, i feel like i have some expertise on this matter.

it's bugged because at the same time that alot of these folks, my classmates, are the bane of my existence, i also could identify with them.

i think those folks simply do not share the same worldview as me/us. their strategy for success is the american dream and they are on some other, career tip.

maybe i'm (i know i definitely am) romanticizing or simplifying the goals of the black intellectual, but historically it seems like one the central roles of the black intellectual was the same as the black laborer, and the black preacher, and the black political leader: to get the mans foot outta our collective asses.

at a point the black intellectual class simply betrayed that mission and decided there was another mission, their own personal financial stability and social freedom.

these cats, my classmates and others have basically betrayed that mission and got on this other tip.

now its like you're on some other radical tip if you are living for the liberation of your people, when that was the original goal of most black people.

they called it in the late 60's and early 70's. they warned of the betrayal of the black academic and intellectual.

so, it's like barack obama is a symbol for them. he's pathing a new lane to the american dream. his success is written with the same ink that draws the outlines of their identifies. it's an emptional attachment that is at the very root of who they are and aspire to be.

they can't think rationally around this stuff until they do a serious gut check about who they are and what they aspire to be.

Re: On Critiquing of Barack Obama

moe_cipher — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:53:49 -0000

The idea that I can be neatly placed in any crowd when it comes to Obama is baffling to me. Esp. the "give him a chance crowd." Any "give him a chance" stuff is a non starter as a political strategy and basically goes against everything I understand around power. So I don't know where one could imagine I would ever believe or say or imply "give him a chance" when it comes to Obama or any politician. The idea that I’m somehow a “give him a chance” guy also goes against the work I’m actually doing around challenging dude.

Around who I’m referring, I wasn’t implicating anybody specifically, although, the picture that posted on the Liberator Blog of Obama-as-Nazi did start me thinking on a number of things that ultimately led to this post.

As far as your posts on Obama B, I can’t comment on them as a body, because I haven’t read all of them. However, I generally am down with most of the underpinnings of what you spit on the Obama stuff. So, this post certainly wasn’t a direct critique of anything you’ve written, but rather a critique of what I’ve been hearing from cats and reading from folks in general. This includes conversations at work, recently in DC, while organizing, with family, or within our community. And it really wasn’t a negative critique of any content but rather the methodology being applied.

The only serious content or philosophical issues I have is around folks who, in my opinion, take blanket hits on black folks for voting for Obama or showing up at the mall. I only personally did one of those things but witnessed both of them. From my perspective, I didn’t see something that warranted what I think is pretty counterproductive.

You’ll never see me lift a finger to “defend Obama” just on the merits of it. However, I’m never gun shy when I comes to defending regular folk when cats get on that, “our people don’t know this… our people don’t’ know that” tip.

Secondly, I'm positive my methodology has flaws, which is why I wanted to post it to get the community's critique of it. which I’m appreciating. However, in #2 I never suggested that it we should critique Obama, on one aspect at a time, but rather that we be clear about the feature(s) were critiquing. That’s why i said "role or set of roles."

In the interest of clarity, I don't really believe in neutrality, so no I'm not neutral about most things I care about. I think neutrality is either a symptom of a lack of information or an unshakable cowardice.

About Rinku. I don’t really know what to say about her as a “peacemaker” but I’ll say that her statement, as well as my cosigning of it is admittedly a caricature of what cats are saying.

As far as who I’m taking about. I’ve been having these conversations almost on the daily with folks. And a lot of them have been on the “see, Obama is gunna change everything” tip on the “see, Obama wack” tip. This brought me to wonder if there were other ways of looking at the Obama thing, esp. from the vantage point of doing work on the ground.

Lastly, just for clarity sake, I never worked on the Obama campaign, So, perhaps there’s cats who put in a lot of work on the campaign and feel an emotional connection to him and are no having trouble critiquing him. I’m just not one of them.

I cringe when I see people who I thought were black revolutionaries or folks who were interested in a more radical set of politics, refuse to examine Obama’s policies because of emotions. I was shaken to my core when a sister told me, “ever since the election, I don’t see race.”

My desire to think about how we talk about this stuff is borne out of engaging with those folks as well as folks who are on the “Obama is wack” tip. It is probably more out engaging with everybody else, who I can wager anything, are not even thinking on those terms.

I agree that most folks are on the "I don't know what the hell is really going on i'm just glad to see a black president" tip. And its of those folks I’m ultimately focused on.

I know I’ll be engaged in plenty of these conversations in the future and for my own personal utility I wanted to develop a consistent process through which to pass things. Hopefully, refined by the responses I get from cats. This is a good start.

Lastly, if I somehow offended “folks whose critique is already being done out of love” that wasn’t my intent. If you’re doing what you’re doing out of love, beautiful.

Someone else’s intent is something I try hard not to comment on. Ultimately you are the only one who knows why you do what you do. Others can only judge its impacts.

My intent is also based in love and really coming from a place of creating personal standards so I don’t find myself neatly aligned in a “camp” when it comes to the Obamatron.

Re: On the Masses of Black Folks & Obama

moe_cipher — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:23:56 -0000

I fully agree that adding Obama to the Pantheon of black revolutionaries is anathema. And i fully agree that Obama simply is not and never has been a civil rights leader. Furthermore, MLK never said anything about "the day a black man becomes President is the day we as a people have reached the mountain top." So MLK's dream has not been fulfilled as one would assume if they believed some of the stupid t-shirts that people were hocking on the national mall

My critiques here are more meta-critiques. Not so much about content, but about process.

I don't think I'm really imagining a cadre of obama haters. I know obama haters. I don't think they're organized in some cadre, I just think they exist. I talk to "goo-goo" Obama lovers, so I know those folks exist too. Similarly, I don't think one-dimensional Bush hate is actually helpful either. That's easy and doesn't necessarily translate to something useful for our people.

I'm writing this as someone who is explicitly not a Obama fanatic and is basically incapable of political fanaticism as a moral principle.

Furthermore, this post is definitely not an apologist post for Obama nor a defense of him. I frankly could care less about him or any individual politician. I was spurned to write this after reading the post written by sister from Black Agenda Report which i felt was flatly condescending to black people. I cringe at the politics of castigation. And i don't think it's effective. But other than her, I speak to people that are on that tip in my day to day. I just don't really feel it.

As for the romanticizing of people thing, I'm glad you brought that up. I don't want this post to be considered blind romanticism of the masses. That's not my intent. I just think that based on the actual people talk to on the ground, that is simply not what's going on. This, of course, is based on my experience, but that's all I got.

And when I talk to most people across race and class, folks aren't on some crazy Obama obsessed tip. These are everyday working class folks. They may be excited, but not nuts. I mean, if you stood on top a taxi cab on Nov 4th but had to pay a CON ED bill. Your bill still needs to be paid on Nov. 5th and Obama ain't gunna help you pay it.

Re: Black America surrenders to Obamamania.

moe_cipher — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:55:24 -0000

there goes my knee jerk sexist assumptions.. i thought there was a dude that usually posts alot of their stuff.

Re: Black America surrenders to Obamamania.

moe_cipher — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:49:20 -0000

i agree with many of his underlying assertions but dude's tone is wack and insulting to the intelligence of average black people. I tend to give average black people alot more credit than this dude does.

Re: Obama can't enforce the law, he already violated it.

moe_cipher — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:47:38 -0000

...Obama may actually fully shut these prisons down.. and outlaw official torture... and i won't be surprised if he really does... however, there's a difference between torture and official torture.... every government tortures, and every government violates human rights.. every government will.. it is part and parcel with the role of the modern nation state. what was profound about bush's policies is that they were above ground.

Obama's government will continue to do whatever it feels it has to do to defend or expand whatever it understands as US interests. I imagine though, that they'll do alot of the more "distasteful" stuff underground. That's how the US government traditionally handles its dirtier business.

You can even say Bush was more transparent with his.

Re: Obama can't enforce the law, he already violated it.

moe_cipher — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:23:05 -0000

one thing.... what's up with the nazi imagery though?

Re: Obama can't enforce the law, he already violated it.

moe_cipher — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:00:36 -0000

i haven't read this post in its entirety. however, i just want to echo the fact that "giving Obama time" or "giving Obama space" is a strategy that is doomed to fail.

our strategy, our intensity, and focus on universal standards of human rights, human dignity, and justice shouldn't be shaken simply based on who's in office.

if my momma becomes President, I'll campaign for her. One day 1, I'm on the streets protesting the second she violates a core value of human rights. Now, because she's my momma, my tactics may change, but I'll be as intense with her as I would be with George Bush. Maybe even more intense b/c I'll be thinking, "Momma, WTF?!?" If momma don't get a pass, Obama can't get a pass.

Likewise, I think we need to develop Obama specific tactics. George Bush tactics are stale in an Obama presidency.