I understand the passion, but the Zucchinni of Chastisement or the Duck Pit is about as far as we go, here, as I'm sure you'll be the first to understand.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

...that the next, or ANY subsequent, Executives will voluntarily abjure the exercise of the Powers which the Busheviks have (need it be said: illegitimately, illegally, and unconstitutionally) arrogated to the Executive in the last 7 years?

Cuz if you do, i got some real estate in Manhattan i'd like ya to look at.

The "Rule of Law" has been a dead letter since IX/XI. Unless something is done to resuscitate it--without immediate, emergency intervention--it may remain as an atrophied, useless emblem of the better, former days, mummified like an ancient egyptian king.

If the Busheviks seizure of power, abrogation of the separation of powers, and other criminal enterprises--including the ICORP of Iraq--go unpunished, unrestrained, uninterrupted, how does anyone think to prevent it the NEXT time--and there WILL BE a next time...

This is the link to the Barbara Jordan speech. The one above appears to be bloggered.

If we do not insist on defending our Constitution against our Cretin-In-Chief then we deserve to lose it.

As I have discussed with Woody before, Cheneyburton is wired for violence. You will notice that much of the Patriot-associated legistlation and signing statements Bu$hCo has produced deal with powers they can use to deal with violent protest right here at home.

Do the terms "concentration detainment camps" and "secret trials" and "'nonlethal' weapons for crowd control" mean anything to you?

Darth Cheneyburton has been chomping at the bit for an an excuse for martial law for sometime now. Particularly as November 2008 grows closer, these Killer Klown Kommandos will be searching for any excuse to propagate their not so invisible Empire. Violence, or the advocacy of violence, will get you noticed, and possibly thrown in the slammer.

Along with anyone agreeing with you they can catch.

Lambert is no slouch on defending the Constitution. It's just every problem has its optimal remedial methods. Nonviolence works best right now.

Caveat: it's a fluid situation. Big Brother is definitely watching. He's too stupid to see everything, but if you get his attention he can find out everything about you and your little dog, too, Dorothy.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

Thanks for the video, Shystee, which is awe-inspiring, and I fixed the links to the text.

What I believe:

1. Morally, Ahimsa is the right thing. I've just been going through The Descent of the West, all about the world's most lethal century. See Edwin Brock's famous poem:

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

There's enough evil been done, and we don't need to add to it.

2. Vanguards have a long and depressing history of becoming what they oppose when they gain power. See, for example, the Trots who morphed into neo-cons.

3. Not-Ahimsa is a strategy for jerk-offs who have pretty pictures of themselves as heroes, but no concept either of history or of the armed lethality in the hands of the State.

4. Not-Ahimsa is exactly the excuse the enemy wants.

5. Not-Ahimsa ignores the long history of the state infiltrating leftist groups and acting as agent provocateurs.

6. With the media tools available today, the possibility of ahimsa are multiplied a thousand-fold. Think of the effect of Bull O-Connor's in the 60s, but with the news propagated instantly over cell-phones.

7. No doubt the state is too stupid to understand that nobody serious talks in an open forum.

Bottom line is, why be stupid when you can be smart? Mars is a big dumb fuckup. Don't imitate him.

Not-Ahimsa in a maximally transparent environment is the only way forward.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

Nor am I a minister (may The God(ess)(e)(s) of My Choice, If Any, be thanked).

But morally, tactically, strategically, the civil rights movement had great success using the tactic Ghandi labelled as ahimsa, as, for that matter, did Ghandi. (Others with more experience in the civil rights movement feel free to chime in.)

Incidentally, if you're not a dick--"Woody"--you could be working a lot harder to show it than you are.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

Practicing non-violence, in both our personal and public lives, is as a general precept a good thing. As a means of effecting political change, however, it turns out to be one of those situational sorts of ethical values, much more complicated than it seems. Back in the day, some of us explored different paths to reach the ends we desired. My introduction to political action came in the summer of 1964, as I was stepping away from the rigid unyielding condemnation of Missouri Synod Lutheranism in which I was raised towards something else, anything else that might make more sense and actually jibe with physical reality. Civil rights, specifically at that time for blacks, seemed like a good place to start with the added benefit of annoying my bigoted family not to mention the presence of some really pretty girls who didn’t wear bras and who had access to good dope. Sometimes in life good things come bundled.

Lots of long nights sitting around talking about violence versus nonviolence, himsa vs. ahimsa, morally, strategically, practically, from every angle imaginable. UC Berkeley in the fall of ’64 was an exhilarating place to be for a person in search of themselves, an unparalleled feast for the intellect and the senses. Classes in the daytime, picket lines at the racist Oakland Tribune in the afternoon, pot-fuelled strategy/pickup sessions in the evening, the midnight shift factory job, a little chemical help for breakfast and do it all over again. Ah, the limitless energy of youth.

Then one day standing around the SNCC table on Sproul Plaza, one of many advocacy card tables set up around the periphery of this central social square on campus, along come the University police and they arrest (with apology) Jack Weinberg, a part-time student and one of the folks sitting at the adjacent CORE table, for violating campus regulations limiting political advocacy. Seems he’d been singled out as an object lesson, the publisher of the Tribune had called the governor who called the university president who called the cops to teach us rabble rousers what the state can do if we don’t get back in line and stop causing trouble for the establishment.

As he’s being put in the cop car (Ref #1 below) a gentle student name of Mario Savio hops on the car roof after taking off his shoes so as to not scratch the finish (Ref#2) and shouts for everyone to sit down. So we did. (Ref#3. Hi, that’s me, #23 from the left.) It was all very civilized on both sides, with lots of talking and strategizing and really good singing (Ref#4) and a big sit in and arrests and everything. Eventually the faculty voted to reinstate political advocacy rights for students, and we had won.

The reason we won at Berkeley in 1964 is the same reason that nonviolence was successful for the US civil rights movement and for Mohandas Gandhi in India against the British. All of these movements were successful because, as Gandhi taught, a Campaign of Satyagraha succeeds when it engages the moral nature of the opponent.

In another time and place, however, Mao Tse-tung encountered the amorality of the Kuomintang and concluded that “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” And so the efficacy of one approach or another, of ahimsa or himsa, may depend upon and be determined by the nature of the opponent – are they moral, or amoral?

Sun Tzu teaches that the most important principle in conflict is to study and know your opponent better than they know themselves and align your strategy accordingly. What is the Buddha nature of the Corporatist cabal? Is there a sufficient morality to which a non-violent appeal can be made? Is there a realistic alternative to armed revolution? Our Founding Fathers in their time decided not. I hope we have a broader range of options than did they.

Ref #1. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7r...
#2. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf5j...
#3. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf7p...
#4. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf6w...
The change in the nature of US student protests over time, and the causes, are summarized decently here: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/hi...

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart that you cannot take part. You cannot even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels and levers, upon all of the apparatus and you have to make it stop and you have got to indicate to the people who run and own it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Mario Savio, 1942-1996 and deeply missed.