Rad Geek People's Daily

Speaking for myself (not for Irfan, who wrote these two commentary pieces) — I have no desire to offer a brief for voting for Tulsi Gabbard (or anybody else), or to vote for Tulsi Gabbard (or anybody else), or for her (or anybody else) to become President of the United States of America. But this has been a particularly atrocious stretch of Liberal Electioneering Silly Season, especially when it comes to the rhetorical pitch of much of anything that touches on American foreign policy.

(I owe the phrase guilt by free associaiton to Crispin Sartwell.)

• Michael Kazin, The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left, Dissent (Spring 2012)
• Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements, Dissent (Spring 2012) (in praise of horizontalidad and in criticism of Kazin)
• David Marcus, The Horizontalists, Dissent (Fall 2012) (one cheer for horizontalidad and Sitrin, one jeer for an aging and vertically inclined Left, and a lot of boringly predictable Leftist guff about large-scale institutions, larger structural vision and a silly moral panic^[1] at the bogeyman of aspirations — oh dear! — dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right)
• Andrew Flood, An anarchist critique of horizontalism, Anarchist Writers (2 May 2014), the somewhat predictable anarcho-syndicalist perspective on Occupy, Kazin, Sitrin, Marcus, class analysis, life, the universe and everything. Along the way some brief and interesting notes on relations between mass movements, revolutionary movements, information technology and the effect of a press that has been infinitely digitally dispersed, etc.
• Andrew Flood, Turnips, hammers & the square – why workplace occupations have faded (7 May 2014), more of much the same, with some look at precursors to 2011, and a landscape of globalized economic complexity.

1. ^[1][18-Jun-2020: Formerly moral painc; typographical error corrected. –RG]↩