Red Sky, Black Snake: Eight Strategic Theses from Standing Rock

06/28/22 • 123 min

In celebration of the anniversary of the killing of Custer, to prepare for revolutionary efforts against the theocratic authoritarian regime which has taken over the US, and in hopes of a holy war against the forces that are destroying life on earth, Arnold describes lessons learned at, or illustrated by, the pipeline struggle of 2016-7 at Standing Rock. When moments of uprising occur, how do we gain the organization necessary for our strategies and tactics to evolve faster than those of the police? For as much as the police will inevitably surveil us, do they really have any idea what they're looking at? What is pipeline construction like? When is it time to concentrate, when is it time to disperse, and how do we coordinate diffuse conflicts? Is there an optimum of risk and difficulty for protest to progress into revolution? Are trainings, so often eschewed by more radical movement elements, the best way to organize people? These are some of the questions we ask in this episode.

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#52: Varieties of Scientific Revolution pt. 2

In order for scientists to start a revolution, the case for revolution must emerge from the scientific process. But that process is heavily influenced by the underlying psychologies which produce the different worldviews found in different disciplines and sub-tendencies within disciplines. We introduce a coarse classification of distinct segments of academia and distinct segments of the power structure, which, by sheer coincidence, are both tripartite schemes. In the former: technics, literary experimentation, and science. In the latter: narcissists, strongmen, and technocrats. We examine how these tribes within academia can be defined by statistical ideological bias, epistemology, relationship to manipulation of the physical world, and degree of representation in settings of institutional power, relying heavily on Gambetta and Hertog's Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education. We describe how institutional power is inhabited by technocrats and narcissists from the technics echelon of the academy, and how this implies that the civil resistance model, a default paradigm for ecological activism, is flawed.

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Myth, Science, Power

(11/17/2022) Why is it that apocalyptic cults have been such a common aspect of the human experience, but are largely absent from our apocalyptic present? Does global collapse inherently invoke a mythical frame of awareness, and if so, what is the role of science in helping us navigate collapse? Here, we continue our examination of the relationship between science and political power, describing the inherent tension between specialization and egalitarianism, local and global survival strategies, rigorous and empirically-grounded inquiries which nonetheless have a mystical quality, the modes of awareness science often attempts to exclude (which continually reassert themselves nonetheless), and the revolutionary potential of structures for meeting human needs outside of the extant economy.