No-Jokes Feynman posted:
Serious question: If I went to my local protest and tried to explain to everyone that the quickest way out of this mess is for Obama to spend a radical and gnarly amount of Keynesian stimulus, like another $1 trillion of printed money, would I get laughed out of there or arrested by the new police or is this still up for debate.
You wouldn’t get laughed out of there at all. You might get people agreeing with you.
I do think, though, that you will find that the only political power you actually have is at the assembly, and the assembly does not have the power to change this or that policy in the operation of the existing Government. So I have been to Assembly and I’ve heard people make proposals like that, and they don’t sound silly, they just sound completely impotent and misguided, like a church resolving to ask God to stop making hurricanes.
We don’t want a new fiscal policy. We want the reorganization of the structure of human life. We want society to function at the will of the people, and for the interests of the people, and we mean all of them. We want every person to have a voice in the process, and for their participation in society to not be determined by their appearance or identity or bank account.
We won’t get that by passing a stimulus bill to punt the problem to our kids or theirs. We want this system to go away, because we know how to run a better system.
Above all, all we want is to practice Assembly, freely and peacefully without interruption, as is our right, in public, every day. It is only by practicing Assembly that we will figure out the needs and interests of the people, and how to accommodate those interests into the actions of the collective. If there is some need or demand, it will be discussed and resolved at Assembly. There can be no resolution about Obama’s financial policy at Assembly, so although you won’t get laughed at, discussing your proposal will basically be a waste of time, and it will become immediately apparently how dramatically ineffective any such requests are when you see the power of the Assembly.
The Assembly is the source of our power. It is the most important thing we are doing, and it is the entire reason why we are doing this. It is both the means to achieve our ends and the end itself. It is the shape of the order to come.
Eripsa fucked around with this message at Oct 11, 2011 around 09:30
(Source: forums.somethingawful.com)
