I’ve been seeing desperate Democrats working to “get the vote out” lately on Facebook and on a handful of liberal online magazines that I occasionally read. Here’s a “cute” example of a graphic used to promote the idea of voting for Democrats on November 2.

So we should “Vote Democratic” to save our asses?

Why?

Obama has continued and in some cases made worse the policies of Bush. The Democrats controlled Congress and never truly fought for anything worth a damn. They have been all sound and fury with generous capitulation to special interests on Wall Street and in the Health Insurance industry. Then, once they have sold out any progressive legislation, they either try to make it sound like it’s more than it really is or blame Republicans for obstructing it instead of taking responsibility for their own lack of meaningful action.

Voting is a form of control. When you vote for a Democrat or a Republican you are simply legitimizing the control of the ruling class. You are not changing anything. Your voice is not being heard.

A small elite group of the population actually has a voice in government – those wealthy and powerful people who fund campaigns, sit on boards of powerful corporations and prestigious universities, and run giant corporations. These people and their sycophants get to rub elbows with politicians and sometimes even get to write the legislation.

Voting allows these elites to control the state while appeasing the rest of us through offering the illusion of power. But it is just an illusion. You are just a number. A voting statistic.

Put your X here next to Coke or Pepsi. Having a say in the recipe of the beverage that you are forced to consume be damned!

Don’t play their silly game. Don’t vote this November. Organize! That’s the only way your voice will ever be heard.

I’ve decided to start blogging through the Bible on a semi-daily basis. I see this as a useful exercise in many ways:

1. It will force me to write regularly which is a long languished goal of mine.
2. At the end, I will have completely read the Bible for a second time.
3. I will be able to record and focus my thoughts and understanding of the Bible.
4. Hopefully, I can provide some commentary of interest or value to my right-wing Christian brothers and sisters and to my atheist comrades.

For my translation, I’ve decided to use the World English Bible (WEB) as I like the principles that it is based upon – especially the fact that it is copyright free. You can read more about the WEB here: http://www.ebible.org/web/webfaq.htm.

The Christian Bible consists of two book collections: the Old Testament (or Old Covenant) and the New Testament (or New Covenant). The Old Testament is essentially the books of the Hebrew Bible while the New Testament collects the early Christian writings that recorded the lives and teachings of Jesus and His early followers. As I begin a given section or book, I will provide some introductory comments for it.

It seems appropriate for me to briefly discuss here the logical dependencies of my religious beliefs as this will provide some insight into how I approach the Bible.

Belief Dependency Flowchart

The starting point for my religious beliefs is theism. I’m not trying to justify my beliefs here and so will not go into how I arrived at my theist position, but it is mostly independent of my other more specialized religious beliefs other than some interplay with my second foundational religious belief: the belief in the truth of the Gospels which provide accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. While theism is definitely the logically prior belief and the core belief that provides a foundation for the rest, my belief in the truth of the Gospels does provide supporting evidence for my theism even as it depends upon the possibility of the theistic hypothesis.

From my theism and from my acceptance of the Gospels follows my belief that Jesus is God’s definitive revelation to mankind, and it is this belief that forms the backbone of my belief in the truth of Bible and also represents the key to my interpretation of the Bible. The Bible is a large collection of writings that span across centuries and cultures. There are definitely passages that taken together present ambiguities or difficulties – though by no means are they necessarily the contradictions that a naive skeptic would paint them as. In fact, with a proper understanding of the relevant cultures and historical context as well as a proper attitude towards the text (seeking a solution rather decreeing an insurmountable problem), I find no contradictions in the Bible.

That’s probably enough material for today. Tomorrow, I’ll kick things off properly…

What better place to start than “In the Beginning…“?

Here’s an insightful quote by Abraham Lincoln that I recently read about the meaning of liberty and how different people with different interests define it in different ways:

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty… Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of the word liberty.

When political activists engage in discussions with sympathetic non-activists, we often encounter the idea that all the work of protesting injustice, educating the public, and agitating for change is futile in the face of the monolithic weight of social inertia and elite power structures. Indeed, despite being armed with a knowledge of the history of how political activism has shaped the world and brought about progressive changes, we can still find that, when we beats our fists against the imposing wall of power time and time again and our fingers stand bleeding at that effort while not a single damn brick has been dislodged, it can be discouraging to say the least.

Here’s a comment that I ran across today on a post from the excellent Kasama Project:

It is interesting and appropriate, G, that you bring up the Milgram experiments (“The Perils of Obedience” I think, is the title of the paper he wrote about them). Overall, Milgram’s studies found that a huge percentage of the population (at that time)–as he summed it up, it didn’t matter what social strata or country the people came from–would go along, playing their obedient role in helping to electro-shock a stranger beyond the point of rendering them unconscious, even when that victim complained aloud that they had a heart problem, so long as the subject was told clearly by a team of lab coat technicians that 1) the Experiment required that the test-shocking go on, and 2) that the subject (who was asked to press a button, giving the victim a shock each time he or she gives a wrong answer… or no answer at all) will NOT be held responsible for the effects of the experiment; the scientists take “full responsibility.” Something like 90% go all the way to not only torturing, but potentially killing the shocked-subject. Shocking indeed.

Nonetheless, one remarkable finding of Milgram’s studies–he ran the experiment many many times, playing with different variables along the way–has always represented a certain basis for hope. Namely: the fact that when the study was staged so that one of the three lab coat technicians (all played by actors of course) rebelled, verbally protesting and then refusing to continue with the lab experiment, ALL OF THE TEST SUBJECTS (the shock-button pushers) ALSO REFUSED AND STOPPED. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I have always thought of this as a kind of allegory for how the rebellious actions of a minority or even a single person–particularly someone that occupies some position of authority within a particular community–can utterly transform a situation, opening up the possibility of others’ real freedom. That is, we might say that it is the psychic space created by the rebellion amongst the so-called “experts” that enables the “subjects” to act upon their own impulses, which were already present, but were suppressed in service to a up-till-now unified and seemingly monolithic authority.

I take comfort from this in the knowledge that even if it sometimes seems like activists are talking to the air, speaking out about injustice and speaking up for the voiceless and oppressed is never futile. Every voice is like a little light that opens up just a little more space in the darkness allowing some other soul to find his match and light his own candle to join the growing chorus of lights. Eventually, there comes a point where there is sufficient brightness for everyone to locate their own light source if they have one, and then, this flood of lights will banish the darkness to the tiny cracks and crevices.

I often read the website ZNet. It is a great daily source of articles coming from a perspective that is critical of the media and the establishment. A lot of the content of the site reflects an anarchist viewpoint and promotes the idea of participatory economics. It’s a good site and I recommend it as a daily news stop along with Antiwar.com (which comes from a Libertarian party perspective but is nevertheless a great source of information).

Today, I was browsing ZNet when an article on abortion from the neo-liberal magazine The New Republic caught my eye. The article by Princeton feminist scholar Christine Stansell was entitled “A Lost History of Abortion”, and despite my better instincts, I clicked on the article and started to read it. That is until Ms. Stansell decided to play her hand and use language manipulation from almost the get-go. In the second paragraph, she refers to those who oppose abortions as “the anti-choice movement”.

And that just irritates me to the extreme.

Like the Bush administration and the Republican Presidential hopefuls calling radical Islamic terrorists “Islamo-fascists”, calling those who oppose the killing of the unborn “anti-choice” is to engage in dirty semantics propaganda.

Would Ms. Stansell or others who love to use the term “anti-choice” call themselves anti-choice because they are (presumably) against giving men the freedom to choose to rape woman?

Suppose that we lived in a society where many people considered woman little more than property owned by men (hard to imagine I know). In such a context, there might be plenty of men who consider it their right to do what they please with their female property in the privacy of their own homes. In this society, you would also find people of moral fiber who respect human life, and they would rightly oppose these men and this supposed right to abuse women. Likewise, there are people today who see the unborn child as a human life worth protecting and who at the same time can value human liberty and women as equals to men.

The pro-abortion movement is dishonest to hide the nastiness of abortion behind the positive connotations of freedom associated with the term “pro-choice”.

Before jumping off my podium, I’ll add that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

While the term “pro-life” is less manipulative than “pro-choice”, I still find the term dishonest in many cases because a large majority of the folks calling themselves “pro-life” are anything but in that they support state-sanctioned murder in the forms of capital punishment and war.

Too bad we cannot be honest and simply refer to these different groups as “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion”.

Way back in February, my good friend Jason ran across the following quote from Shakespeare:

Thou wilt be as valiant as the wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse.

-Spoken by Falstaff in Henry IV, part 2

He thought the phrase the wrathful dove fit perfectly for my blog, and I quite agreed!

After many weeks of procrastination, I’ve finally taken the time to update the site with a new logo and its new name. Thanks go out to the authors of the excellent Christian anarchist website Jesus Radicals whose logo featuring the raised fist with a nail through the wrist inspired me when I was designing the blog’s new logo.

I suppose here is as good a place as any for explaining the imagery for those who may not be familiar with all the symbols used in the blog’s logo.

I designed the symbol on the left as a Christian anarcho-communist flag. The color black symbolizes a world without national borders or boundaries that artificially divide the people from one another. The color red symbolizes the blood of comrades and martyrs who have died for humanity and for God. The black flag basis for the design is one of the historical symbols of anarchism. The cross is one of the most recognizable symbols of Christianity and obviously symbolizes Christ’s sacrificial suffering and submission on the cross for all people. The hammer and sickle is a sign of communism. It represents the unity of the workers and common people of the world via overlapping symbols for agricultural workers (sickle) and industrial workers (hammer). Taken altogether, I find it a beautiful symbol of a world of solidarity and unity under the loving Kingdom of Christ.

The symbol on the right combines the raised fist which has been used by various leftist movements over the years as a salute and a symbol of solidarity. The addition of the nail through the wrist brings a Christian dimension to the symbol and for me represents Christ’s unity and suffering with his people as they struggle to live lives that reflect the values and reality of his Kingdom. I added an olive branch clutched in the fist to emphasize the pacifism and non-violence that I embrace and believe an integral part of my faith and politics.

As an anarchist, I have extremely mixed feelings about participation in bourgeoisie elections. Reading the excellent A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, one gets a deep sense that real political change almost always occurs through direct action taken by the people rather than through participating in elections and appealing to politicians in hopes that they will listen to the people instead of their backers in big business.

That is why historically many if not most anarchists have been opposed to voting. The argument is that participating in the election rat race with sacrifices of time, energy, and money in the hopes of getting a candidate elected who will then bring about change once in office is usually a doomed effort that ultimately results in little more than draining people of energy and enthusiasm that they could have instead devoted to organizing and direct action. I can understand this position, and I have felt some of the effects that it predicts first hand.

Despite these experiences and despite the risks of losing sight of the true battlefield within our hearts and out in the streets and halls of society, we cannot completely shun elections, for they can sometimes (though not often) prove beneficial to the cause of human freedom and progress. Participating in local elections and seeking to get others to participate brings us closer to a society that consists of decentralized communities governing themselves. As we move further up the ladder towards the federal government and ultimately the Presidency, the utility of voting diminishes and the potential for merely wasting one’s time in an ultimately discouraging and draining exercise in futility becomes all the more likely. The reality is that the Presidential race is a contest between corporate sponsored elites whose differences are mostly skin deep. The voting ritual then only serves to reinforce the top-down authoritarian system by offering the illusion that the people have a say in their government.

So, given all these reservations about voting, why then am I supporting Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his 2008 Presidential campaign?

I do so because once in a while the system breaks. Once in a while a true statesman gets involved in government out of a sense of idealism and a commitment to principles and makes it through to a position of power without bowing to elite interests. Once in a while such a person even makes it through the process without being corrupted. And sometimes such a person can truly fight for the people and be an asset in the struggle for a just and truly democratic society.

I believe that Dennis Kucinich is such an individual. Studying his life and his record in politics, you will find a good and honest man who consistently fights for progressive principles as a champion of the people. Where other politicians reveal a widespread pattern of compromise for the sake of political gain, Dennis demonstrates an unbending character and a tenacious courage to stand alone where his party cowers.

I think we can trust Dennis Kucinich. Instead of dancing around issues and trying to appeal to some imaginary creature known as the swing voter, Dennis addresses the great issues that face our society with bold plans of action instead of hollow rhetoric. We can trust that Dennis will give his everything as President to consistently fight for the progressive values that so many Americans care about but never find expressed by any of the candidates offered to us on a narrow slate every election season.

Dennis has a detailed plan for universal health care that will actually work and get to the root of the problem instead of ill-conceived attempts to plug up holes in a sinking ship. This issue is very important to me both as a passionate Christian and anarchist who is concerned for the poor and the sick and the oppressed, and as a strategist who recognizes that without universal health care, the workers of this country simply cannot afford to take the risks of strikes and direct action against oppressive employers because their lives and the lives of their families literally depend upon their continued employment.

Dennis has always opposed the illegal, immoral, destructive, and highly expensive Iraq War. Besides the honorable Republican Congressman Ron Paul, Dennis is the only consistent antiwar member of Congress and is the only antiwar progressive candidate for President. Dennis Kucinich opposes the Iraq War as well as the ominously likely war on Iran, but he is so much more than just a critic of the immoral wars of the day: he a true devotee to the causes of peace and social justice.

Dennis is a champion for the working class. He seeks to achieve a balance of power between labor and corporations – a balance that is severely lacking. And if that falls short of the revolutionary changes that most anarchists have in mind, then I say so what! It would be a big step in the right direction. Instead of focusing narrowly on ideological purity, we must work to improve lives now as well as fight for the future that we wish to see and build. We need short term goals within the system and long term goals that transcend the system.

I could go on and on about Dennis Kucinich and describe how he stands on each of the important issues that face America today. I could detail for you how in each case – incredibly enough – I have found in Kucinich a candidate who shares my concerns and is willing taking a stand for the good fight. I can share all of this with you, but in truth it wouldn’t fully communicate to you why I support Dennis Kucinich for President and why I strongly encourage everyone who reads these words to become better acquainted with the man via his campaign website.

At the root of it, I support Dennis for President because he has breathed new life into a very discouraging situation. I support Dennis Kucinich because quite frankly he inspires me. He cares about the same things that I do, and he speaks out and points to the hope that is always there but that is sometimes so hard to see. By taking action himself and running for President again, he reminds us that we can all take action together and that we are not alone. It’s an encouraging reminder that everyone needs once in a while.

If you care about progressive values for America or even if you’re simply fed up with the same old uninspiring politicians paraded before us by the media every election, then please visit Kucinich for President 2008 and find out more about the vision that Dennis has for our country and how you can help him.

Today I received an email from Pandora.com concerning a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. According to the email, “the new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all”(emphasis added). The email then points out how these sharp increases in fees will effectively strangle Internet radio companies because it artificially inflates the cost of doing business to levels far above what such businesses can expect to afford.

For those of you unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s a great service that I highly recommend to any fan of music. You go to the Pandora site, enter the name of a musician or song, and Pandora creates a custom radio station that plays music that Pandora thinks you will enjoy based upon a sophisticated analysis of structural properties of the input music or the typical music produced by the input musician. It’s a cool and innovative idea that has allowed people like me to found all sorts of interesting musicians that they would have never encountered otherwise.

So you can see why this news about the decision of the Copyright Royalty Board on behalf of the recording industry is highly upsetting to me. I encourage people to visit the SaveNetRadio website and contact their representatives in government to try to apply some popular pressure to counter this decision and save internet radio stations like Pandora.

But there’s more to this decision that gets under my skin than just the potential loss of a valued service provider. You see, I have a big problem with the notions of copyright, patent, trademark, etc and all the other things that are increasingly referred to as intellectual property.

Which is highly ironic and an endless source of cognitive dissonance for me since I write software for a living at a company that sells its software and fiercely guards its so-called intellectual property rights.

So what exactly is a copyright?

A copyright is a set of laws passed by governments to restrict the use of particular expressions of an idea or information. Likewise, if you research patent, trademark, etc. on Wikipedia or Google, you’ll find that they are similar sets of laws that also restrict the usage of ideas and information. Each of these ideas applies to a different domain and has different alleged goals, but they all share the common effects of restricting our freedoms while allowing certain individuals or groups to extort money for lengthy if not indefinite periods without engaging in productive labor.

I will henceforth refer to these ideas collectively as information monopolies and the laws associated with them as information monopoly laws. The reason I wish to refrain from using the phrases intellectual property and intellectual property rights is because words have connotations and the words property and rights are heavily charged in a way that makes these phrases deceitful and hurtful to the cause of freedom and to the social usefulness of the various industries that have been tainted by information monopolies. To call a copyright on a song intellectual property is to suggest either an absurdity or to make a very bad analogy. Obviously, intellectual property cannot be thought of as real tangible property. You cannot hold a song in your hand. When someone makes a copy of an MP3 or copies the score to a song, the holder of the song’s copyright doesn’t lose the song. To the extent that the holder of the song’s copyright could ever be described as possessing the song, the holder can still be said to possess the song even after the copier makes a copy. This is true from the very first copy up to the seven-hundredth copy, ad nauseum.

So why would someone wish to refer to a copyright on a song as an intellectual property right when the concept fits so poorly? The reason lies in the charged term property. The notion of property rights in most Western cultures runs very deep. Property rights have their foundation in the naturally occurring idea that people should be able to do what they wish with things that they possess. Once you bring the idea of property into the mix, you can start using even more sharply charged words. For example, you can describe my sharing a piece of useful software with a friend as piracy and thus equate it with imagery of barbaric men stealing wealth, cutting throats, and raping woman. It should be obvious that these two acts are very different.

Let us not contribute to the propaganda of software giants, the recording industry, and Hollywood by using their extremely warped terminology. To use the phrase intellectual property serves only to muddy the waters and pollute or kill the discourse on how better to achieve the noble goals to which copyright, trademark, and patent are outdated and failed solutions.

To engage in this conversation, we need to examine why governments invented information monopolies in the first place. The modern copyright was invented in the 1700’s as an attempt to encourage creators to create books, music, and works of art for the public good. The idea was that giving a creator a monopoly on his creation for a limited period of time would provide an incentive for creators to share their creations with the public. The patent was invented as a similar effort to encourage inventors to share new ideas with the public without fear of loss of credit or loss of any competitive advantage gained by the invention. Thus, we can see that information monopoly laws were created out of a desire to encourage the share of information for the public good.

To that end, modern information monopoly laws fail horribly in an era where information can be inexpensively copied and where powerful industries have developed that usually force creators to sign over their information monopolies in exchange for distribution of their creations to the public. People like to share things that they enjoy or find beneficial with their friends and family. To promote such sharing is good and healthy. Instead, information monopoly laws make this act of sharing a crime and slander it with terms like piracy and theft. Rather than enforcing the natural idea that a person should receive a compensation commensurate with the labor that he puts forth, information monopoly laws suggest the bizarre idea that a creator should somehow be entitled to live off society like a parasite because they created something that many people enjoy or use. Even if this pernicious idea were sound, the creator rarely sees the profits from their creations in modern society because corporations generally make them sell the rights to most or all of the profits in exchange for mass distribution.

So how can we encourage people to share their creations without placing huge restrictions on freedom and promoting antisocial behavior?

For starters, we should observe that people have been creating and inventing things since the dawn of history, while information monopoly laws are a modern idea conceived and refined over the law few centuries. No matter whether we are examining the artist, the software developer, the scientist, or the inventor, most creators are truly driven to create by something deep within their own personality. Artists want to express themselves. Scientists want to know how things work. Programmers like to write code. They would do so even if society did not pay them for their works. In fact when it comes to art, many people would agree that intrinsic motivations such as the satisfaction derived from expression or the pride of accomplishment are far superior to extrinsic motivations like money in motivating truly great works of art. It is almost a truism that an artist driven by profit instead of the need to express makes poor art.

Given this natural tendency for creators to create and share their creativity with others, I submit that we have really proposed the wrong question. We really have no need to encourage creators to share their creations with society for the public good. They will tend to do so naturally. The real questions for us to ask are how to better facilitate their sharing things with others and how best to ensure that creators have time to create.

There are many intriguing suggestions and answers to these questions. But we will never consider the alternatives and experience the benefits of a new approach until people stop thinking inside the narrow confines defined by those who seek to control and exploit how we share information with one another.