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wait---this is about state surveillance that runs beyond any meaningful legal limit, but which is not itself illegal because the authorization for it comes out of the patriot act (god how i hate that name...)
i read through the thread so i understand empirically how we got to a debate about revolutionary action/insurrection---but logically, th the more i think about the connection the less sense it makes.
no-one seriously thinks that the only form of political action is revolutionary. if the question is how one might go about organizing protests, or pressure groups, or a campaign to bring pressure on congress to repeal the patriot act, or not renew it, and so undercut the legal basis for the wiretapping, the answer's not that complicated. it's easy enough to start a webcampaign that would result in, say, tons of emails or phone calls. it's not that difficult to organize a demo---the logisitics of a large-scale "legit" demo are pretty arduous (permits and all that) but not insurmountable, and it's not like no-one's ever done this work before so you're not exactly inventing the wheel. the point is that this is an issue that one may not like, but which functions entirely within the logic of the dominant order. to address it, what's required is sustained pressure.
running around with a gun pretending you're some kind of minuteman looking to overthrow the state is not only tactically absurd in this case, but it's strategically meaningless.
will's been making versions of this argument all along...
to skip over the legion intermediate forms and cut straight to fantasizing about armed revolt seems a circle jerk.
to go from this circle jerk to a second-order one, which is somehow about one's abstract "committment" to the possibility of an armed insurrection that makes no sense in this context to begin with...
what exactly is the point?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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