I am reading a bit here. It has dirges such as, 

While many Americans are focused on their ability to feel comfortable, or lack of, NATO continues the American war against brown women and children. And as always the death of brown children is “unfortunate” though acceptable and necessary to the continuance of the rape of the Middle East…

Narrating carnage, or raising awareness, in the parlance of our times, is what passes for moral behavior on the left.*

The blog has a lot of this. I am very sympathetic, I have written thousands of words just like it, probably will write more. Reading it is to read the thoughts of sociopathy. It is the narration of an unspeakable horror one is on some level complicit in. An analogy would be to pull up to a burning building and narrate the spectacle of its inhabitants being consumed by the flames rather than calling the fire department or trying to help them. The analogy dies here, because in the case of a burning building, the individual can probably help to some degree. In the case of the searing wrath of the military industrial mammon, there is not a whole lot one can do but despondently narrate the horrific events.

Well, there are things we can do, but they are not easy and they carry with them certain consequences and no certainty of extrinsic reward. Withdrawal of ones labor through tax resistance is one. There are, of course, other actions of resistance with equally dire consequences of incarceration or worse. Choices that require no trade-offs are not really choices though, they are inertia. I honestly can’t fault anyone for despondent inertia, and I have been as inert and likely will be as inert as anyone in the future. The system has spent hundreds of years evolving a devilishly malicious set of coercive mechanisms to get your working support and confine dissident action that goes beyond spending a couple hours holding a placard in a public place or writing on a blog.

Noam Chomsky has made a career as the despondent commentator and sometimes solidarity activist. He wrote his books, spoke his lectures, and then continued to work in the bowels of the military system he was against at MIT. I do not fault Chomsky for this, he had his choices and made them as best he could; I think he is an empathetic and intelligent person, as well as thin skinned, stubborn and obsessive. I respect that he made what he considered the best of his situation from his point of view. I can’t judge his accommodation because its basically the same as mine in our own ways. I consider him an immensely useful help in providing me with alternative frameworks for understanding Emperors, pirates and slaves. But it is worth being honest about that aspect of his contributions to society, at the end of the day, even Noam Chomsky’s labors primarily fueled the system. I think there is a lesson in that about how much good we actually do by standing by and commenting.

I could be wrong. Bearing witness might be all we can realistically be expected to do. The left has an oft heard rhetorical question, how do I say no? I can’t answer that for anyone but myself, because I have no idea what anyone else believes they are saying yes to. I do wonder, if I were getting my limbs hacked off by some psychopath in an alley while a despondent bystander stood by and gave a running commentary of the carnage, I am not sure whether I would consider their attention helpful or not. 

* Response here
FWIW, liking or disliking is immaterial. If I have given offense, that wasn’t my intent. My intent is to raise an implicit question, what exactly does being informed, bearing witness to, and speaking against or aghast at this stuff matter? There is something of a myth in our culture about raising awareness and changing our minds about something being the gateway to changing our reality. Given my own writing, this post was not a swipe at Payne nor Chomsky so much as a note of empathy. As I wrote, the beam sized mote in my eye renders all of my criticism blind.