There’s been a little talk lately about “socialist bullshit”. With Bernie Sanders’ recent visit to town, the little spasm of organized resistance to the current shape of things at the federal geopolitical level has shouldered its way to the forefront of local political discussion. As attentive readers have no doubt noticed, I value the reflexive rejection of prescribed paradigms. What does that mean in less pretentious language? I think that broad ideologies are a fucking trap and with the sophistication of modern mass media propaganda and brainwashing, terms like “socialist”, “conservative”, and “democracy” are functionally meaningless.
There’s a temptation to try to use a broad-stroke narrative to make sense of an exponentially more and more bewildering world. It makes a certain sense from the citizen civic engagement standpoint. Real people rarely have the time to research every goddamn candidate in every goddamn election, so assuming you still engage with the placebo of voting, having a D or an R next to a candidate’s name and hoping that will give you some useful understanding of the direction they want to take your town or your state or your world… well… its tempting.
(By the way, the placebo effect is a measurable improvement over zero treatment, so maybe chew on that “voting is a placebo” metaphor for a minute. Shit’s got layers man.)
What the fuck does all this have to do with Daniel Carlino? I’m glad you asked. I was risking getting off on a rant there.
So when unabashed contrarianism controls your life and you’ve abandoned the guidance of political parties, left-right political spectrum, and respect for law and order, the natural reaction is to look to what practical chances you have to fuck with the power structure whenever it effects your life directly.
In my case, I had a little legal trouble brewing with the city… They kept threatening to start issuing fines and citations if me and my people kept conducting public demonstrations of ecstatic music and dance on Missoula’s streets. And I kept threatening to sue the motherfuckers if they tried it, because a few years ago I went and established a nonprofit religious corporation so our little weekly demonstration of performative freakdom would be legally recognized as a church.
There was one particular police sergeant who really got a bug up his ass about us showing up downtown with amps and drums and flamethrowers and shit every week. My paper shield of us being a church kept him at bay for a couple years, but once he got promoted to lieutenant, officer asshole thought he finally had the sway to shut us down for good.
Well fuck him. I went over his head. 100 or so emails back and forth with the chief of police later, I decided the best way to put lieutenant limpdick in his place was to change the law he thought he could use to stop us (a seldom used law that’s meant to be used to keep people from driving around with trucks blaring advertisement from loudspeakers, but which the cops were trying to use to shut our static performance down).
So I called my city council person. Both of them. They ignored me. Typical government experience. But I kept calling city councilors. And I found one that was actually interested in constituent service. One who (like me) felt like the mayor and the city council had been presenting a too united a front and ignoring their citizens for too long. That City Councilor is named Daniel Carlino.
Councilman Carlino listened to my proposal and said it was a good idea. He said he read the law they were threatening to cite us under and didn’t think it reasonably applied to us, so he said he’d push a bill through the city council to amend the ordinance in question.
And he fucking did it. I called an elected official. Told them the law was wrong and he fucking changed it.
See that text in the middle that’s in red and crossed out? Those are the six words Daniel Carlino changed in the Missoula Municipal Code so that my church was free to practice in peace.
That was over a year ago and we haven’t had a cop step foot on our little island since.
That’s the way government’s supposed to work. Elected officials are supposed to listen to their constituents, see where laws are being applied in a useless or harmful manner and fucking fix it. And he did it.
I don’t give a fuck if the kid’s a socialist, a nationalist, a national socialist, a Whig, a Torrey, or a fucking pescatarian. All I give a shit about is that I think the Mayor and the City Council are a tight knit little club of backroom dealing cocksuckers, and if there’s one or two people on the council that regularly vote differently then the rest of them, then I’ll take what I can get.
There’s a big motherfucking problem in fringe political action to shit on the slightly-less-shitty politicians because said politicians are painfully wrong and stupid about one thing or another. There’s not a human on this Earth I agree with about every single thing, and if there was I’d have to change a couple of my opinions to argue with that disagreeable motherfucker. There’s not a single politician in this hell-on-Earth that’s much better than “kinda shitty”, but a “kinda shitty” socialist cuck type who helps me fuck the law while its trying to fuck me? Well that motherfucker’s a hell of a lot more worthwhile in my book than the rest of his cohort.
A lot of otherwise intelligent people have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot by vocally decrying the usefulness of a politician just because they’re full of shit about one thing or another. We’re all full of shit about one thing or another, and that applies double to politicians. When one’s worth working with, criticize them for the individual issues that piss you off, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, and don’t shoot yourself in the head because big scary buzzwords like “socialism” put asses in seats.
Better red than dead!
– Freeman Tao
I think this mode of “doing politics” is actually much more accurate as a whole and mirrors what the podcasters The Good Ol’ Boyz and other greater thinkers have been saying for a while: All politics is patronage. “You give me a treat and I will pledge my support to you.” Regardless of the effect granting the treat has on the broader community as long as loyalty has been fostered and there is a hope of growing the constituency of said loyalty, the treat is justified. The loyalty can be in the form of spreading (posting) the gospel of the treat giver, but ultimately it should ideally manifest in filling in the bubble in May or November. Missoula runs on patronage. Carlino understands this very well. As do most of the leftoids who shape and direct this city. I am hopeful that, as with the national leftoids as of late, their patronage networks begin to crumble. Ah, and, congrats to your church.
I had a lot of fun talking emphatically with Daniel on Saturday. I liked his smile and how long he had to maintain that smile as I showed him my TALE OF TWO DUIs sign with Ellie’s mascara-smeared face under the slumbering turtle.
You are right about ritual—Drums, call response, all gelded from empty Boomer platitudes you have to be retarded to believe.
Luckily I remembered I was a cuck and thus could only watch others achieve climax by fondling their signs, not participate myself.
A legit assessment, and a succinctly expressed example of one of the pitfalls of the hyper-individualist, man-without-a-tribe ideology I appear to be advocating for in the article above.
One more thing I feel I should add to more thoroughly communicate my point and my purpose in making that point – I feel you are uniquely qualified to understand this aspect Roy. There’s a very specific reason I felt compelled to pipe up with a highly personal pro-carlino post as soon as I read “Daniel Carlino And Kristen Jordan Are Killing People With Their Socialist Bullshit”…
I find Travis’ critique of Carlino and Sanders to be fundamentally leftist in character. I think there is an unfortunate and deeply imbued tendency in leftist thought to subject their own emerging leadership to impossible-to-pass purity tests. I’ve seen it my whole life among leftist fringe thinkers, where the greater their level of civic engagement the more harshly they attack what emerges from the morass of neo-liberal bullshit to form the figurehead of “as progressive as its gonna get” leadership.
My previous rhetoric and posturing about transcending the left right binary notwithstanding, I am capable of recognizing the practical usefulness of recognizing the dynamic, and I find Travis’ criticism of Sanders and Carlino to be right in line with this unfortunate tendency. I don’t disagree with any of his particular claims when he identifies issues where these “leaders” come up depressingly short. When I’m “in character” as the subversive executive editor/agent provocateur, I’m inclined to write slogans like “legalize fentanyl and then just let all the junkies die. We’ll clean up the mess afterward and be rid of a lot of dead weight”. But when I’m forced to actually discuss the issues seriously I have to acknowledge that I know that idealistic dream of a better, cleaner world where all the bums were fed to the furnaces and America became a high trust society (again?) is unrealistic. Oregon tried it. They hated it. ’nuff said.
Again, my intention in writing this article was because I found the apparent motivations of the preceding article to be somewhat myopic and I think Zoomchron’s readership is smart enough and probably broad enough that a voice of counterpoint would be beneficial to all involved. Damn near my favorite part of a fringe news website like this is the arguments that take place in the comments, so if I can bring that same energy to the front page articles themselves, everybody benefits (hopefully).
You and I will likely argue more at the next opportunity about what arguments are and aren’t “leftist”. For the record, unless I specify otherwise I’ll be working approximately under the qualities you defined in our previous discussion “hostility toward hierarchy, disdain for capital, suspicion of order”, etc. But I’d also like to point out that there’s a RADICALLY different and very frequently used definition of what makes a leftist, so before we clearly defined terms we were setting ourselves up for failure by using such terms. (I’m referring in this instance to the Ted Kaczynski definition of “leftist” from his article “Industrial Society and Its Future”.
7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically
identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly
be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists,
collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights
activists and the like.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image
of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise
inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to
themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as
inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians,
etc. are inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
The manifesto goes on about this psychology and its emasculating effect on resistance movements at some great length, and I think you likely recognize in my intense rhetoric a certain synergy with Kaczynski’s conclusions and warnings, as well as (I should hope), an incredible amount of hostility for what HIS terms define as leftist (what I usually refer to in short hand as “race baiting cucks” or “The Tranny Agenda”). For the record I identify Travis’ Carlino article as leftist in character under your definition and less under the Unabomber’s (though paragraph 9 of Industrial Society and Its Future, where he discusses “feelings of inferiority” in leftist thought feels unsettlingly familiar in light of recent Travis posts…
Enough of this. I just had the thoughts and felt they’d be better spun out here than in another Ouroboros of an article.
Cheers.