This guy is great. He saw an opportunity and jumped on it, disrupting a corrupt auction, costing major corporations money, and drawing attention to an issue that easily could have been buried under the mountain of year-end top 10 lists and countless other examples of Bush Administration corruption.
What started out as a spur of [...]
Not effective: Simply drawing attention to yourself. Yelling at him at a political rally. Flipping him off. Effective: throwing a shoe at him and the press asking questions. Conclusions: The more unusual things one does that stray from U.S. norms and culture that cause the press to ask questions, the more effective you will be. Who said [...]
Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…
via Ill Doctrine
Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ‘em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the [...]
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win.
Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that [...]
In recent weeks, I’ve ended up more than once amid marketing executives discussing, with apparent seriousness, what the purveyors of ordinary products can learn from the campaign that sold America on Barack Obama. To which my response is, well, they can learn lots. As long as they, too, sell something that makes people cry when [...]
My take is a little different. If anything, I think activists are already excessively focused on the media. People often judge the success of a demonstration primarily on how much media coverage it receives, rather than seeing demonstrations as a place to gain confidence, meet people and groups, and build the core of a long-term [...]
Sinfest is both incredibly dark and refreshingly soft-hearted. The author, you can tell, is earnest. He doesn’t hate the US, he loves its ideals, but he also has no illusions about its past crimes and current hypocrisies. Check out Sinfest daily.
via: Sinfest
A bid by Bay Area anti-nuclear weapons activists and the New College of California to take over Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been rejected by the U.S. nuclear weapons agency.
Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) out of Livermore, New College in San Francisco and two allied groups filed the bid for the Livermore contract [...]
Funny, engaged in pop culture, arguably hard-hitting message… this is good.