I saw:
“confusing, deliberately so”

for capitalism, like the open-source warfare of terrorism, the best defense is its very diffuseness.

it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes when in the sweaty throes of blogging (or commenting) but, as we are in some small way the indy media it might be best for us to try to restrain ourselves when the difference is especially unclear to ‘the reader,’ a poor sap already half-brainwashed by real, non-parodic MSM propaganda.

slipping into certain subject-verb combinations like ‘we should’ is a handy warning sign.

making grand sweeping rhetorical gestures is another.

“Fixated on the perpetual “new”, americans were more excited by the prospect of “freedom’s march”, by the deployment of all our toys, than they were by any sort of revolution or change.”

this sentence is not an observation of fact. it’s what i was referring to when i politely accused you of over-generalizing. it’s not the only one in that paragraph.

again, maybe it’s true, but why are you saying it?

i understand better why you made the cheap shots at academia and having money. better than i understand the weirdly self-undermining digression about liveblogging sit-ins or whatever it was. that seemed to be missing the amount of shame needed to make sense given the context. i kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As for how to get paid to do what you do, this is not complicated. JWalter Thompson even publishes their copywriter’s test and solicits mass applications.

Chabert, a quick look at your site shows that yer quite quick to scream SHILL! But don’t think for a moment that you yourself are not a shill for your own particular BRAND of ideology, paid or not. If I’m a shill, it’s for an ideology that is in the midst of being formulated, not for a published, trademarked one. If you think I’m being a shill, imagine I’m speaking in old grand-style french, which I’m sure would legitimize the content of my speech for you.

If anyone knows how to actually GET paid to do this, please let me know. I would LOVE to be able to afford opera tickets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_Televised_(documentary)

However, my point was one I’m sure you agree with: the US media’s coverage of domestic protests are egregiously telescopic. This does not seem to be the case elsewhere. Either that, or protests in France and Latin America are much more vigorous exercises of democracy, so much so that they can’t be spun as easily as ours.

Oh, but wait! Regarding the efficacy of protests in general, and the possibility of their backfiring, let’s look at a bit of ephemera from France’s protests from a few years back:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20060405/ai_n16196776

["It is giving them too much credit to ascribe an ideology to them. These are just hoodlums, who come to break and pillage. I'm not sure there is an ideology behind all this," said Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.]

…and then they elect this guy to the highest office in the land.

In any case Chabert, it was Venezuelan citizens’ RELIANCE on indy media that “saved the day”. Here in the states the indy media most often takes the position of an elitist supplement, not a primary site for information. This is MSM spin the truth of which should not be ignored. I’m not parroting it, but rather bemoaning it.

On that note, Traxus, it seems we’re in perfect agreement. I make no generalizations about “all US protesters”, only about the way they are viewed by the rest of the US through the MSM lens. You say that “maybe the strategy needs to be revised”, and of course I agree. But perhaps with a much more radical gesture! I submit that we should hold all “public protests” in utter secrecy. Instead of standing in the streets, we should rent out banquet halls and other private venues, hiding the preceedings of our meetings from the prying eyes of MSM distortion. They should not be able to easily find out what we’re up to, and it would expend a lot of their energy in ferreting out the truth of our pursuits of truths. What say you to that? Would that not replicate what we’re doing here, but in a real space?

sixfoot subwoofer as usual what you write is completely and utterly preposterous and false. The protests which overturned the coup were completely blacked out of media, and indy media workers were among the sixty victims of the two day killing spree. Here’s al giordano:

During the two-day regime of dictator Pedro Carmona last April, at the same time that his troops were beating and torturing Nicolás Rivera of Radio Perola and his family, Carmona’s police forces also kicked down doors and raided Radio Catia Libre and Catia TV in another popular barrio of Caracas. At TV Caricuao the troops shut down the station and placed its staff, illegally, under arrest. At the Catholic Church’s popular broadcaster, Radio Fe y Alegria (“Radio Faith and Happiness”), the troops ordered the staff to play only music and to not report any news of the events that were shaking the country, or they would be shut down, too.

During those days of crisis last April, the journalists of the Community Media in Venezuela got to work reporting the true facts – that masses of people from the popular barrios were coming down from the hills and taking back the Capital and other cities, street by street, building by building, and media by media. And it was only because of the Community Broadcasters at independent media like Catia TV and Radio Catia Libre that the public had any idea that the counter-coup underway in their own neighborhoods was happening, simultaneously, like a lightning bolt of democracy, throughout the city and the nation. The minority of Venezuelan homes that had cable TV got some, albeit distorted, news from CNN and international news agencies that there was resistance to the coup, but those reports were slow and left in the dust by the rapid-fire factual reporting of the Community Media in Venezuela and the international independent Online Press.

http://www.narconews.com/communitymedia1.html

i meant continue, build momentum, empower organization, etc. though technically they did continue, they just haven’t accomplished a whole lot except stopping traffic and that sort of thing.

“What does one expect from street protests alone?”

this is a tough question, isn’t it? again i have to suggest that the propaganda machine’s effects need to be taken into account in planning protests. like the way unions plan strikes, maybe, recognizing that a protest’s effectiveness depends on a number of extraneous factors that need to be understood, and that protests can in some instances be counterproductive.

like sixfoot’s comment: ‘to what ENDS do they work?’

“We’d only know if protests “worked” if they were happening; that they are not happening is not proof they don’t work anymore, just that they’re not happening.”

they do happen though, here and there — it just seems like they don’t expand big enough or sustain long enough, or aren’t well enough organized. i mean both of the big tasing incidents sparked campus protests, hundreds of people showed up, they lasted a few months, there were specific demands made (regulate or restrict taser use on campus) and nothing was done. jena 6 had effects, but again it seems to have been very well organized and had time to build momentum — set in motion the ’self-sustaining process’ bean refers to — before it became a mass media event.

so maybe we can revise my comment that protests ‘aren’t as effective anymore’ to ‘have to be more careful/strategic.’

but sixfoot, i would be careful with the generalizations about ‘all u.s. protesters’ this or that — i think chabert is right that the depressing picture you paint is the msm’s spin even if true in some respects, we have to take the spin and its effects into account BOTH in planning AND the discussion that goes on about it.

I wouldn’t be so hasty in making that statement….there were small protests, and lawyers held out at the courthouse for days in protest. While it’s true that american citizens exhibited their present flaccidity in responding, it was mostly because of disbelief! We were so naive we thought our electoral system was beyond manipulation, which speaks to a level of “comfort” that american citizens enjoy that keeps them safely ensconced in their happy little lives, relying on lawyers annd legislators to do their jobs.

The Venezuelan protests were a completely different type of protest, one that I believe is nearly impossible here in the states. If you remember, their protests were violent, dramatic ones which contained multiple narratives of violence and revolt. And, this is KEY, they were broadcast in their ENTIRETY on television there. Cameras followed with excruciating detail, using the pulse-pounding plane of immanence of real time footage, particular gun battles and hold-outs. Here we get maybe an aerial shot, never focusing on faces or individuals, and inane diversionary voice-over. The media coverage of our anti-war protests might as well have been filmed by the Hubble Telescope, they were contextually placed so far away from the average american that most who caught them on CNN just shook their heads and chuckled (I witnessed this), even those against the war.

I don’t really think that there is an argument of whether or not mass street protests WORK; of course they can. The question is, to what ENDS would they work? Here, the asinine television coverage of protests actually served to consolidate the right against the anti-war protesters, not to rally more to take to the streets. Fixated on the perpetual “new”, americans were more excited by the prospect of “freedom’s march”, by the deployment of all our toys, than they were by any sort of revolution or change. The opposition was deemed childlike and reactionary instead of heroic or even rational. That was not the case in Venezuela and rarely is the case in France. There they are presented as the spectacles that they are, here they are presented as anti-spectacles that only serve to undermine the efficacy of protest itself. Americans smirk as they watch on television what they perceive to be half-hearted nostalgic throwbacks. Our current protests are almost the opposite of “happenings” or “be-ins”; they amount, in the perception of most americans, to a bunch of people standing around and shouting tired slogans and being generally self-congratulatory. I hate to say that they’re mostly right, but they are. There are hard-core protesters who will show up for any cause, their real reason for protest lying not in a desire for political change, but in some kind of libidinal expenditure that has very little to do with the state or its actions. These people mean well, but they are really damaging to the efficacy of protest, as their rather beautiful sentiments of faith and naivete are used against them.

Some here say that it would take something like the reinstatement of the compulsory draft, or the removal of abortion rights, or some other radical conservative takeover of liberties, for americans to “take to the streets” in a grand style. A Democratic senator actually attempted to reinstate the draft several times as both a rhetorical protest against the war and to rally americans, and of course he failed. Sadly, the war was too far away, too abstract, and, worst of all, too fascinating of a prospect to be sufficiently incendiary for mass protest.

It takes the much more particular transgression of racism’s spectre to get people going. Conspiracy theorists could easily say Jena was planned as a diversionary tactic. Who wants to bet there will be more protests against “racism” as the elections approach?