sgtpigeon
Peace Mob Blog
Welcome to the official brain dumpster of Sgt. PigeonFaithful spouse, learner, laugher, liberal, humanist, founding member of the band Peace Mob, author of this blog, and technically a dove.Veteran of many bird wars, Sgt. Pigeon is today a confirmed pacifist. When not occupying various administration buildings, he journals from an anti-partisan, anti-war, anti-capital perspective on the subjects of the day. His writing is critical of power, empathetic to victims, and avoids politics in the usual sense.Musically, Pigeon’s style is an Upper-Midwestern hot dish of vintage and modern sounds propelled by approachable melodies and beats you can dance to. Lyrically, his songs reflect a fascination with people and how they reckon the world around them.
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Note
Hi this is so dumb what are tankies, specifically
let me preface this by saying that this is not dumb. not asking questions when you don't understand something is dumb and i'm proud of you for being inquisitive, anon.
so in a nutshell... 'tankies'—it's slang in leftist circles for folks who get all hot and bothered for authoritarian regimes that claim to be communist, like stalin's soviet union or mao's china. these were governments that, yeah, talked a big game about socialism and the working class but ended up crushing a lot of the freedoms and rights that are pretty essential to true socialism, and definitely to anarchy.
keep in mind: the word "tankie" has absolutely nothing to do with the left-right axis, but with the authoritarian-antiauthoritarian axis.
when i, as someone who identifies as a leftist anarchist, refer to someone as a tankie, it's because they are *as left as me*, but too authoritarian to be safe for me, after a whole century of authoritarian communist regimes persecuting anarchists.
from an anarchist pov, which is all about getting rid of unjust hierarchies and giving power back to the individual, the whole tankie mindset and way of thinking is counterproductive. anarchism is about flat structures, deconstructing unjust and unfair systems, and definitely no secret police or labor camps, which were a huge part of the stalinist-era soviet and chinese maoist playbook.
supporting governments that use force and repression to control their people kinda goes against the whole ethos of fighting for a fairer, freer society. it's kind of like cheering for the underdog and then also celebrating when the underdog becomes the bully once they've got power. it trades one form of oppression for another, which is exactly what anarchists and most reasonably informed socialists wanna avoid.
it's important to understand the past to build a better future, and the history of these authoritarian regimes show that concentrated power is risky business. what starts with the promise of equality often ends up with just a new set of gods and masters. freedom and respect for individual rights are obviously vital to the anarchist viewpoint and tankies generally espouse views directly in contrast to these beliefs.
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People Are People
It's Thursday. As a M-F, banker's-hours wage slave, I like to think of Thursday as Friday Eve, to start generating weekend anticipation energy. It's better than Monday, anyway.
I have one of those meetings today where I'll be discussing "important" things with "important" people. They are important because they occupy positions of authority on the company org chart, not because they are exceptional in some way.
They are printed from the same genetic code I am. Their time is not essentially more valuable than mine just because a company pays them more money. We all have a finite and scarce amount of time in this world.
The important people I'll be talking to report to even more important people, who eventually report to the most important person. It works the same everywhere.
What becomes impossible to ignore once you see it is that these people, overwhelmingly, will not think for themselves. By they, of course I mean us--I can't except myself from the basic curses of human cognition. What I mean is that very naturally, we will think first of how the more-important people above us will feel about any recommendations we make. We will assume that so-and-so "won't like that", and we will self-censor to the point of not bringing up observable truths in order to not make political waves.
This is tremendously unproductive. So, today, I am setting the intention for myself that I will trust the other people in the conversation, and allow myself to be vulnerable, and not avoid conflict because it feels icky--but embrace it because it leads to answers to tough questions that are much more easily just ignored.
Off I go then! Wait 'till Thursday gets a load of me.
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Painting
The story of a man and his hallucination learning to live peacefully together [advisory--contains a couple of naughty words]
This song is the result of a really fun collaboration with Balthazar B. One day in 2017, I threw a song bed at him. I recorded it in 2005, or thereabouts, if memory serves. I told B I'd diddled with a lyric and given the song a working title of "Painting". He replied by telling me he had a completed lyric called... you can't make it up, "Painting".
He put the vocal down on it, we got an excellent drum part from FIGSOUNDS on Kompoz.com, did a quick mix, thought it was kind of cool, and then promptly fixated on something else, letting this rough gem languish in the WIP bin.
Fast forward six years or so. My production skills much improved, I pulled those tracks off an old hard drive--recordings making up nearly two decades of elapsed time--got them onto my computer, imagined some new instrumentation, mixed it, and voila--a song was finally born!
I hope you enjoy Painting. To us, it felt a little like catching lightning in a bottle. Really slowly. 🤣
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“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
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when i have a crush i dont kick my feet or twirl my hair instead i am in my kitchen at 3am pacing in circles with my hands clasped behind my back like a middle-aged divorced detective haunted by a cold case he just cant crack
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Hope is a Drug
This is a breakup song you can dance to. The metaphorical trope of drug addiction as a toxic relationship, but Hope isn't a person--it's the notion of hope itself, and being over the letdown of high expectations. Hey--don't bum out--turn it up! 😊
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Pretend It's a Blog
Well, well, well. Here I sit almost one year removed from the temporary and limited rush of inspiration that propelled the effort, such as it was, to start getting some of these thoughts of mine out of my head and onto a something, somewhere, to achieve some sense of permanence for those ideas, somehow. At least the better thoughts. Nobody got any use for most of my thoughts, least of all me. But I digress...
As is my style, I overdid every aspect of that little idea except the blogging part. This is so me. Always laying down a twenty when a five will do. I ended up revisiting every early-internet-adopting geek impulse I ever had; registering a good domain name, finding a provider to host the most flexible and difficult-to-learn blogging platform there is, creating graphics, spending weeks tweaking every last little detail of my new blog site, and then writing two of them during the rest of the year.
"Hello, Me!"
"Oh, Hi. HEY! I know you!"
The good news is this; I managed to revisit this miscarriage of prudence before the hosting bill for the next year came due. Shit, I'm practically winning already.
First Rule of Holes: When you're in one, stop digging.
And then, there was Tumblr. It was here all along. I'm an idiot. Somehow, those things intersect harmoniously. I have a feeling it's a step in the right direction.
"Are you sure this is long enough?"
"Shut up! We talked about this. Short-ass blogs. You hear me? SHORT. ASS. BLOGS.
Cheers!
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Monday, Monday
Bah-da bah-da-da-da (copyright The Mamas & The Papas).
It's Monday! Keep your eyes open or you may end up getting your nards destroyed by a ram in the crosswalk.
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"The only dangerous minority is the rich"
Sticker seen in New Orleans, Louisiana
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"End Feudalism humanely, spray or neuter your landlord today"
Sticker seen in San Anselmo, California
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Five Ways Corporations are Literally the Devil
The incorrect use of the word literally in the title is intentional, for ironic effect, to indicate that this piece is not serious analysis. It is an analogy that tries to make a few decent points about what corporations are and what they do.
I think corporations are not good. Or at least, I think they don’t need to be as bad as they are. I make no bones about that. I understand why corporations "exist", and the value they supposedly add to our society, but I also know that they are the concoction of a privileged elite who have always shown that they value wealth over everything else, and whose primary concern is the protection of their property.
I’m both fascinated and infuriated by the idea of the corporation.
One more thing before I present the list. This is not a debate on the existence of a god. That is not the point. When I write about the devil, I'm using Christianity as my source, because that is where I came to know the subject.
Having lined ourselves up on all of that, let’s get on with it.
They are Both Fictions
In law, a fiction is a thing that doesn't exist, but for practical purposes need to be treated as if it does. A court of law cannot outright dispute the existence of either a corporation, or the devil, in the dispatching of its duty.
Just as business law wouldn’t make any sense without the fiction of a corporation, neither would the concept of sin in Christianity without the devil. In this way, they serve a similar purpose.
They are Both Evil
The whole idea of evil is deep and wide. For the sake of economy, in this comparison let’s agree that ‘evil’ is a thing, and that religion is the basis for most people’s understanding of it.
“For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”
--1 Timothy 6:10 (NIV)
Corporations have the single overarching purpose of producing profit. Any purpose a for-profit corporation may claim is subordinate to their primary mission to produce profit, and to grow that profit over time.
If the only aim of a corporation is to create wealth, and the desire to accumulate wealth is evil, then how can a for-profit corporation be anything but evil?
They Both Lie
The devil’s deceptive nature is well-expressed in religious text. I identified more than fifty verses that referenced directly or inferred that The devil is a charlatan. Not just a liar, but one who appears to be one thing while bearing intentions that are totally different.
“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”
--2 Corinthians 11:14
Corporations wouldn’t deliberately lie, would they?
“If [cigarettes] are behaviorally addictive or habit forming, they are much more like … Gummi Bears, and I eat Gummi Bears, and I don’t like it when I don’t eat my Gummi Bears, but I’m certainly not addicted to them.”
--James J. Morgan, President, Phillip Morris Tobacco Company, under oath, 1987
Does anyone buy the idea that in anyone who wasn’t living under a rock in 1987 didn’t know intuitively that cigarettes are addictive? So, what else can we call the statement above but a lie? Though I’m glossing over this item for brevity, it’s not a minor point. Lying is not only something corporations do, it can be said that manipulating the truth is one of the things corporations do best.
They are Both Scapegoats
Who hasn’t heard the old phrase “The devil made me do it”? In Christianity, The devil still gets the blame for making people sin.
There is a nearly religious reverence for corporations, which includes a tacit approval of their means and motives. People have no problem, it seems, accepting that they should not expect corporations to do good things, or for that matter, to even care much about the negative impacts of what they do to generate their profits, right up to putting at risk the health and safety of their workers, or even the public.
Put another way, corporations get away with things people couldn’t. Things a person might expect from another person; respect for their privacy, their safety, etc., they do not expect from a corporation.
We accept that corporations are apex predators like a sharks. We are saddened but not shocked by news of a shark attack, but never blame the shark. It’s only doing what sharks do.
They are Both Immortal
The Devil is immortal according to official sources. A supernatural being. That’s pretty cut and dried.
Corporations are immortal because the law says so. States may have their own rules regarding how often a corporation’s registration needs to be updated, but for the most part a corporation, once ‘born’, will live until its owners decide it is no longer useful.
Corporations are immune to disease. They cannot be killed in a natural disaster or an automobile accident, or even old age. You’ve probably done business, as a customer, with one or two of our country’s oldest corporations; Dupont was established in 1802, making it 220 years old.
So, Basically the Devil, then, Right?
I have confessed my morbid fascination for the phenomenon of the corporation, and the strange loyalty they create in the mind of ordinary people, particularly those who are motivated to defend their country’s continuing dedication to unconstrained capitalism.
Though the corporations are entirely the creation of people; their decisions made by people, their risks calculated by people, and their profits ultimately collected by people, the investor can rest comfortably, one degree separated from any harm resulting from the creation of the profits they enjoy, by their wonderful friend the corporation.
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