Great stuff below, and a continuation of Mark Ames’s rant about that Jon Stewart rally: http://l.ravi.be/gitzkJ.
—ravi
On Nov 13, 2011, at 7:42 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> Anyway, she explains why jazz hands are used: so clapping or cheering
> or booing won't interrupt the speaker. The speaker still gets
> feedback, she just doesn't get the hostility of an interruption. This,
> according to Polletta, is one of the techniques consensus democracy
> advocates in Direct Action have come up with over the years. They
> stress the importance of building trust among participants and this is
> but one way to do that.
>
> http://www.plutocracyfiles.com/2011/11/too-cool-for-jazz-hands.html
>
> A friend of mine recently pointed out that, apparently, some people
> are put off by the jazz hands used in the consensus process. I was a
> little taken aback - I mean with everything wrong with this country
> and the world, there are people who are dismissive of the first real
> attempt to do anything about it in years by jazz hands?
>
> I'm loathe to address the substance of the issue - since there really
> is no substance to the issue - but here it goes: Jazz hands, like
> clapping, is a way for a large group of people to communicate
> approval; however, jazz hands, unlike clapping, is silent and
> therefore, allows the speaker to continue speaking while getting
> feedback from the group. That's all. It's actually critical to the
> consensus process.
>
> In one sense, such issues are really so trivial that they're not worth
> addressing. But, of course, we live in the era of hipsterdom, where
> mockery avoidance has taken on the status of a religious quest:
>
> It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this
> absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my
> generation to pillory the hippies and progressives–that’s why we were
> South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because
> back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made
> you look lame. Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into
> mythology and all they stand for is “not as crazy or stupid as
> Republicans” is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put
> nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this
> generation’s highest value....
>
> I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my
> generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond
> mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking
> stupid.
>
> Also, I was struck by something Matt Taibbi said in a recent blog post
> about the ridiculously trivial grounds that were used - successfully!
> - to discredit 1960s protests:
>
> The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the [OWS]
> movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as
> a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike
> Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just
> like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War
> somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of
> innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on
> bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved
> flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of
> fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole
> debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy"
> of the rich, their "hypocrisy."
>
> And, apparently, their jazz hands.
>
> After some reflection on the fact that there are people who are
> dismissive of an intensely substantive protest movement on the basis
> of trivialities like jazz hands, what came to mind is people who
> dismiss Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the basis of its name. And believe
> me, there are such people. Here's the bottom line: If you dismiss OWS
> on the basis of jazz hands or BtVS on the basis of its name, it says
> nothing about OWS or BtVS, but it says all anyone needs to know about
> you.
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>