O'Connell / Shaving with Occam’s Razor for Activists (Firedoglake) / Friday, February 8th, 2013

A portrait of William of Ockham

Occam’s Razor was named centuries after William of Ockham’s death.

A new and particularly infuriating conspiracy theory, the Sandy Hook Truthers, inspired a recent post on Firedoglake. I wasn’t going to open that can of worms on a major political blog because that’s like making eye contact with a rabid dog — once you attract their attention you’ll never get away. Debating directly with a conspiracy theorist is like staring into an abyss of circular arguments and despair.

So instead I took a look at a basic tool for critical thinking, Occam’s Razor, and showed how you can apply it to news stories and alternative theories:

Conspiracy theories proliferate in the blogosphere, via YouTube videos, and on social media. As the Internet penetrates further into our lives, it can seem like these beliefs become more common. This may be a side effect of communal reinforcement engendered by modern communication — irrespective of what evidence could confirm or deny these ideas, they seem to become more weighty and relevant the more our friends share them, the higher their view counts become on YouTube, or the more they show up in Google searches.

Using Occam’s Razor can help radical thinkers focus on important facts over flights of fancy.

It concerns me when these theories appear among my activist friends, because I think it makes the entire movement look bad when we stray from fact into fantasy. Rather than address any specific conspiracy theory, I want to focus on a tool which I believe can help us focus on reality and its many tangible ills. That tool is Occam’s Razor, also known as the Principle of Simplicity (or the Principle of Parsimony if you want a nice five-dollar word).

Occam’s Razor: Simpler is Better (Read More)

I was flattered when Bob Carroll, author of The Skeptic’s Dictionary (which I quote in the piece) told me he enjoyed this essay!

Image via Wikimedia Commons, released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

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O'Connell / 3 Lessons of Modern Activist Movements (On Firedoglake) / Friday, January 11th, 2013

Banner Drop: Terrorists Wear Badges. Free the NATO 3!

Modern activist movements use social media to amplify the impact of small actions like banner drops. (Photo: John Jack Anderson, used with permission).

Social media tools are transforming activism, and ushering us into a new age of protest. Over the last year, I’ve watched, written about and participated in street level direct action. In a new post to Firedoglake I wrote about a three ways modern movements are spreading the civil disobedience meme:

When I glanced at the #IdleNoMore hashtag recently, I was disheartened to see someone suggesting that the movement should cease civil disobedience and instead organize around cleaning up trash on the roadways and beaches of Canada and the United States. Obviously, some statements like this come from a position of racism (or at least privilege) — there’s a long tradition of telling the oppressed to just settle down rather than engage in troublesome free speech. Even taken charitably, such statements are ridiculous — the Adopt-A-Highway campaign is hardly a hotbed of revolutionary change.

Yet some of these statements come from genuine ignorance about the effectiveness of direct action as part of a movement. The same mainstream media that happily spreads anti-activist propaganda is loathe to share stories of the effectiveness of mass movements; when they do show up at a protest they are notorious for highlighting “weirdest” looking, least articulate protester they can find in their sound bytes. Before last year’s #NoNATO protests, police deliberately kindled fear of widespread disruption among the city’s people and business owners. Chicago peace activist Sue Basko told me that, because she was a public organizer of the protests with her name on march permits, she fielded many calls and emails complaining about public transportation delays and disruption, even though most or all of this disruption was caused by the NATO conference and its security apparatus.

Some people will always be “inconvenienced” by civil disobedience, mass protest, and other forms of nonviolent direct action. It’s the job of the activist to educate the public about the necessity of free speech in all its forms, even when it makes some people late for work. What follows should not be taken as another white guy telling Idle No More or other new activist movements what to do, but rather highlighting some of what I think they are doing right.

Read more on Firedoglake.

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O'Connell / #Occupy Gulf Port Action One Year Later (Firedoglake) / Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

The Port Shutdown was a national call to action from Occupy Oakland.

The Port Shutdown was a national call to action from Occupy Oakland.

It’s hard to believe it’s been one year since the Gulf Port Action, when occupiers from around Texas came together to blockade the Port of Houston in solidarity with Occupy Oakland’s national call to action. A week after I returned from the Port, I wrote about it here on the blog:

I’d never been to the port before, and there was a palpable sense of almost Cyberpunk-level desolation. The air smelled as bad as you imagine it does in a William Gibson book. At first there were few of us, but more and more began to get dropped off in waves until we had a couple hundred protesters at the peak, finally outnumbering the police. We chanted and spoke with a few members of the mainstream media that had managed to get inside. Then, suddenly, everyone — police and occupiers alike — were running.

Without warning to the rest, a group of protesters was laying in the street, blocking traffic. Police barked orders, horses raced. Those with lockboxes quickly linked up and formed a second blockade behind the first.

This was no longer organized protest but chaos. Police on horses came at us hard; They stepped on us with their hooves; a mounted officer kicked one girl in the stomach with a steel-toed boot. I, who had pledged to my lovers that I would not get arrested, found myself during one moment holding arms in a line of human bodies, resisting the mounted police who seemed dangerously out of control. “Hold the line!” someone shouted.

Read more.

 

Over on Firedoglake, I reflected on the anniversary in the first of two posts I’ll make on the topic this week. The national action was a nonviolent but direct attack on the heart of corrupt capitalism:

This violence was no coincidence; it was one of Occupy’s boldest moments on the national stage. Locally this was one of Occupy’s most intense direct (though nonviolent) attacks on the heart of crony capitalism itself, featuring more civil disobedience than most Occupy Houston actions — Houston’s mayor accused Occupy Austin of being ‘outside agitators.’ With unprecedented coordination through social media, this national action had to put images of peasants with pitchforks and torches in the minds of the one percent. The government tipped its hand that day when a Department of Homeland Security vehicle appeared at Tranquility Park that afternoon. Coordinated efforts to suppress the movement, already underway by December of 2011, only became more intense in succeeding months.

Read more on Firedoglake.

 

Later this week, I’ll be writing an update on the Gulf Port 7 case and collecting more recollections of the day.

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O'Connell / Burning Man and the Death of Paul Addis Part 2 (Firedoglake) / Thursday, December 6th, 2012

Vermin Supreme (with a boot on his head & toothbrush) with a friend in a suit

Vermin Supreme at Occupy Wall Street.

I continued to transcribe my interview with KDVS about Burning Man and the death of Paul Addis on Firedoglake. In Part 2, Richard Estes and I discuss the effect both police and pranksters can have on countercultures or activist movements:

Kit O’Connell: At the very beginning, there are stories of people taking it into their own hands and telling people to leave or things like that. But police have been called out for specific incidents. It’s something where the Organization does make that call from time to time.

But I also think the police to some extent arrived on their own, just suddenly becoming aware that there was this huge gathering happening in their midst every year and it was an opportunity — obviously there were safety issues but of course also an opportunity for revenue generation as far as giving out things like speeding tickets to people driving around in the desert. So I think there was a need for order at some point but also there was this sort of encroachment of the police into this separate space much like in Occupy where they weren’t always invited but they appeared anyway and had to be negotiated with one way or another.

Speaking In Tongues:  One of the impressions I’m getting from hearing you describe what transpired with Addis in Burning Man, it draws my attention to what has been sort of a — I don’t know if conflict is the right word, but competing social perspectives within anti-authoritarian movements whether you want to call them anarchist or whatever — between those who see such movements as an opportunity for individualization and celebrating the individual with the least amount of social constrants possible, and those who see autonomous communities within the tradition of someone like Colin Ward, who celebrated communal forms of social organization within the United Kingdom that often took extremely mundane forms like house squatting or  organizing a sports league where people were acting nonhierarchically, and were working autonomously outside of a capitalist relationship. That’s the type of tension that I perceive when I hear about this situation with Addis within Burning Man.

Read more on Firedoglake.

Photo by Paul Stein released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

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