Tag Archives: failure

In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy – NYTimes.com

Posted on December 11, 2010 by Steve Lambert

Attempts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases are highly unpopular here because of opposition to large-scale government intervention. Some are skeptical that humans might fundamentally alter a world that was created by God.

If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues must be separated. So the project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.

via In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Green Energy – NYTimes.com.

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Bill Ayers on Fresh Air

Posted on November 26, 2008 by Steve Lambert

Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross

This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win.

Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that only a young person would do?

Ayers: Absolutely.

Gross: What fits into that category?

Ayers: Well I think that you’re caught up in a street demonstration and you are young and full of fire and you just spontaneously find yourself spilling onto the streets. Leaving the line of march. And deciding to throw a rock at the window of a military recruiter. That’s spontaneous opposition. It’s not well thought out, um, but it makes a certain amount of sense but it’s not part of a larger strategy that’s thought through.

Gross: Is there a level of doubt that you feel when you were young you didn’t allow yourself to entertain because you had to feel so committed to the cause and what your plan was that you couldn’t allow certain doubts to enter your mind?

Ayers: Yeah I think that I live with doubt today, every day, all the time. And it is different than being young and certain and jacking yourself up to do certain things. I argue to my students, I argue to young people all the time that you cannot live a political life – you can’t live a moral life – if you’re not willing top open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world.

And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.

And when you act, you have a responsibility to doubt.

And when you doubt, you can’t get paralyzed. You have to use that doubt to act again. And that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt, you act, you doubt.

Without doubt you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid.

But without action, you become cynical and passive and a victim of history. And that should never happen.

P.S. If you haven’t seen the Academy Award nominated Weather Underground documentary, I highly recommend it. You can watch it in its entirety below:

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LIVERMORE / Anti-nuke activists lose out on bid to run weapons lab

Posted on October 26, 2008 by Steve Lambert

A bid by Bay Area anti-nuclear weapons activists and the New College of California to take over Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been rejected by the U.S. nuclear weapons agency.

Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) out of Livermore, New College in San Francisco and two allied groups filed the bid for the Livermore contract on Oct. 27. At the time, they acknowledged they had little chance of winning it, but said they hoped the bid would encourage public support for phasing out the lab’s nuclear weapons work and diverting its thousands of scientists into research on global warming, alternative energy sources and other peaceful enterprises.

On Friday, Tri-Valley officials said the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons complex for the U.S. Energy Department, had rejected the bid. Officials said the call for phasing out nuclear weapons work was “inconsistent” with Energy Department and Nuclear Security Administration strategic planning.

read more – LIVERMORE / Anti-nuke activists lose out on bid to run weapons lab

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Laugh at a Campaign Pitch? Sure. Visit the Grandparents? Not So Much. – NYTimes.com

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Steve Lambert

MIAMI — When Sarah Silverman told young Jews to get their lazy rotund rear ends to Florida to persuade their grandparents to vote for Senator Barack Obama, one question loomed: Would they go?

This weekend was the first big test, a kickoff for the so-called Great Schlep, and so far, momentum has been building with the pace of a nice brisket. Though about seven million people have watched Ms. Silverman’s four-minute Web video explaining why “visiting your grandparents could change the world,” the schlep remains mostly virtual.

Mik Moore, 34, co-director of Jewish Council for Education and Research, the nonprofit group behind the project, said 100 people visited Florida this weekend to convince older Jewish voters that Mr. Obama should be president, while about 100 more visited relatives in other swing states.

Declaring it “a really good start,” Mr. Moore said he hoped that dozens more would officially schlep before Election Day.

read more:

Laugh at a Campaign Pitch? Sure. Visit the Grandparents? Not So Much. – NYTimes.com

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Get Your War On: Terrorist Watch List

Posted on August 3, 2008 by James

This is a new video from 23/6.com a political-ish comedy site. The video is about a serious issue, but treats it in a comical-ish way. Which is a fine strategy if done well, but I there’s just not quite enough substance here. All you really get from the video is that there’s a terrorist watch list with a million names, and that means regular people are on it for no good reason. The video has a nice wind-up, but no delivery, no real punch line. I think at the end the viewer should have gotten some insight into the implications of having a million people on the watch list. Comedy can help people understand tragedy (see L.M. Bogad interview for more) and motivate them to act, but there has to be some meaningful information inside the joke. There has to be some “ah-ha” behind the gag.

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John Pilger – Freedom Next Time

Posted on June 19, 2008 by James

This is great speech by journalist John Pilger on the powers and dangers of corporate media. I think what’s most interesting about it is that he breaks from the Left/Right dialectic that plagues social change movements and takes liberalism to task for some of its crimes. The liberal Clinton administration increased the size of the prison-industrial complex and justified the Iraq sanctions and bombing campaign as a humane method of dealing with a dictator. The parents of the 500,000 children who died as a result of those sanctions (according to the UN) would disagree, I think.

Pilger’s point here is not simply to criticise the dominant ideology of the intelligentsia, but to stress that no action is inherently just or good by nature of the beliefs that support it. Again and again the liberal media has supported wars of empire, and liberal Democrats like Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton have instigated and supported violent oppression around the world. The responsibility to prevent tyranny then falls to the public, and if I have any criticism for Pilger’s speech it’s that his conclusion suggests few solutions beyond vigilance and a citizen fifth estate to watch the watchers. Valid, sure, but the real issue is how do we inspire people to want to be the fifth estate?. Still, it’s an educational, sobering, thought provoking speech that’s definitely worth watching.

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PRWatch: Corporate Sponsored Slacktivism

Posted on June 15, 2008 by Steve Lambert

After reading this, I wonder if artists or activists have been unwittingly influenced/inspired by some of these token, ineffective campaigns? If the culture is openly celebrating these supposed victories, one might believe they are actually effective.

By Anne Landeman

title=Recently while browsing the Web I came across UrbanDictionary.com, which is sort of a wiki of contemporary slang. I found some of the newer words listed there amusing, like “hobosexual” (the opposite of metrosexual; someone who cares little about their looks), “consumerican,” (“a particularly American brand of consumerism”), and “wikidemia” (“an academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia”).

Then I came across a word that put me into a more thoughtful zone: “slacktivism.”

“Slacktivism” (alternative spelling “slactivism”) is a fusion of the words “slacker” and “activism,” and UrbanDicationary.com defines it as “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.” It refers to ersatz acts that people perform that they have somehow come to believe are full of meaning, like slapping a magnetic ribbon on your car to “support the troops,” wearing a colored rubber wristband to “fight cancer,” or refusing to buy gasoline on a certain day to protest high gas prices, instead of, say, actually changing your lifestyle to use less gas.

According to UrbanDictionary.com’s definition, slacktivism pertains only to individual behavior, but shortly after I grasped the meaning of the word, I started to see that slacktivism is really much bigger than that. I started to see that corporations perpetrate large-scale, organized slacktivism as a public relations strategy to subtly derail social movements aimed at creating beneficial change.

So what form does corporate-sponsored slacktivism take, and how can people recognize it? The best way to describe it is to give some examples. Continue reading →

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