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Striking out
Mar. 24th, 2008 09:33 pmCurrently at Toronto Pearson: -3. High today: -1. Eight degrees below normal; we were re-blanketed with snow last night, more coming tomorrow, more supposed to come Friday. I got April 23 in UW's 20-degrees pool.
First I heard of the eljay strike, I thought it was wrong-headed: eljay's a business, and it's inappropriate to protest a business not behaving the way you want it to, as long as it's not breaking the law or its contracts. (It was a strike, insofar as it was a withdrawal of labour. (The fact that you do something voluntarily and even pay to do it doesn't mean it's not labour. It's labour if it produces value for someone else; contributing content to eljay produces value for it.) What, to me, makes it a deviant sort of strike is that it had nothing to do with any kind of contract. My thinking on this may be coloured by the fact that my union is currently on a work-to-rule campaign over something that has nothing to do with the collective agreement, which strikes me as inappropriate.) But then I thought, well, hang on: businesses can do what they want, but their producer-consumers can do what they want, too. The business doesn't have any obligation to be the way you want it to be, but if you want it to be somehow, you don't have any obligation not to exert force on it, within the law, to try to make it that way.
So, first interesting point the eljay strike brings to light: there's this tension between the idea of a strike as a moral gesture and the idea of a strike as a forceful action. (Using the distinction Habermas draws between the moral and the ethical, where the moral has to do with what's right and wrong (so duties and obligations) whereas the ethical has to do with what's better and worse, the forceful action may still be ethically motivated.) Unions always portray their strikes as moral gestures, to any interested parties, including themselves. (This is all very complicated now, but there's a basic Marxist principle at work: the employer has a perpetual obligation to pay the employee more, because everything the employer has is exploited from the employee.) They portray their strikes as forceful actions much more judiciously: to strikebreakers, management, themselves to some degree.
Some of the backlash against the eljay strike could have been motivated by perception of it as a moral gesture, but I actually suspect that more of it was motivated by the perceived ethical motivation of the forceful action: if you don't care whether your world fills up with ads, you are likely to feel personally offended when people assert that a world full of ads is a bad world to live in. They're asserting that a world you're OK with is a bad world; there's something wrong with the way you live in the world. This is, I take it, why there generally are backlashes against "do-gooders" of all sorts. At root, it's the same principle that leads to genocide: another ethnos projecting a world different from yours is an insult to your way of life.
The second interesting point the eljay strike brings to light: there is no public square on the net. All communication on the net takes place in some forum that is owned by some private interest. Even usenet: for usenet, you need a feed which is supplied by some private interest (not to mention all the connecting hardware), even if you've set up your own server and that private interest is you. The eljay strike may have kind of felt inappropriate because it seemed not so much like a strike as a demonstration against a government. It was a matter of petitioning our rulers for more gracious treatment: the subjects will be heard. That feeling of inappropriateness will probably fade, is probably fading, as the public square disappears in the real world as well and is replaced by the Wal-Marts. Of course, in the suburbs, there never was a public square, but rather a mall.
(Has anyone ever demonstrated to assert their right to free speech in a mall? There is, in my understanding, a perpetual confusion in Canadian law, and definitely in the Canadian public consciousness, as to whether the Charter of Rights binds private entities. This is, I'd say, an amazing development: the idea that the Constitution would protect your rights in the private sphere. I don't imagine the US is anywhere near this point yet, because it has always been obvious there that the point of the Bill of Rights was to protect you against the government. We have only recently in Canada come to perceive the government as our natural enemy--although we've never worshipped our leaders like Americans do, either.)
I was going to say, back about January, that I wondered how long it would be until Obama's church popped up to bite him. It took so long that I figured it wasn't going to. But then it did, and now it's gone. Ho hum. I caught the end of the McLaughlin Group yesterday, Wild Prediction time, and somebody's Wild Prediction was that McCain would move into a tie with Obama or HRC or both in the polls soon. This is really incredibly bizarre, how people are ignorning the plain fact that McCain has been leading polls, sometimes substantially, ever since he became the Republican frontrunner.
Meanwhile, Canada's Conservative government is now looking like it might die of old age. Who woulda thunk. And they'll win the next election, because the same sort of thing seems to be going on in Canada now as has been going on in the US for a long time: we will vote right of what we believe in, because people as left as what we believe in are gay.
Last night a full, 750 mL glass bottle of oil-and-balsamic-vinegar salad dressing spontaneously exploded in our kitchen. This may have been the stupidest thing that has ever happened. I feel like something stupider must have happened, but I can't think of anything in particular.
First I heard of the eljay strike, I thought it was wrong-headed: eljay's a business, and it's inappropriate to protest a business not behaving the way you want it to, as long as it's not breaking the law or its contracts. (It was a strike, insofar as it was a withdrawal of labour. (The fact that you do something voluntarily and even pay to do it doesn't mean it's not labour. It's labour if it produces value for someone else; contributing content to eljay produces value for it.) What, to me, makes it a deviant sort of strike is that it had nothing to do with any kind of contract. My thinking on this may be coloured by the fact that my union is currently on a work-to-rule campaign over something that has nothing to do with the collective agreement, which strikes me as inappropriate.) But then I thought, well, hang on: businesses can do what they want, but their producer-consumers can do what they want, too. The business doesn't have any obligation to be the way you want it to be, but if you want it to be somehow, you don't have any obligation not to exert force on it, within the law, to try to make it that way.
So, first interesting point the eljay strike brings to light: there's this tension between the idea of a strike as a moral gesture and the idea of a strike as a forceful action. (Using the distinction Habermas draws between the moral and the ethical, where the moral has to do with what's right and wrong (so duties and obligations) whereas the ethical has to do with what's better and worse, the forceful action may still be ethically motivated.) Unions always portray their strikes as moral gestures, to any interested parties, including themselves. (This is all very complicated now, but there's a basic Marxist principle at work: the employer has a perpetual obligation to pay the employee more, because everything the employer has is exploited from the employee.) They portray their strikes as forceful actions much more judiciously: to strikebreakers, management, themselves to some degree.
Some of the backlash against the eljay strike could have been motivated by perception of it as a moral gesture, but I actually suspect that more of it was motivated by the perceived ethical motivation of the forceful action: if you don't care whether your world fills up with ads, you are likely to feel personally offended when people assert that a world full of ads is a bad world to live in. They're asserting that a world you're OK with is a bad world; there's something wrong with the way you live in the world. This is, I take it, why there generally are backlashes against "do-gooders" of all sorts. At root, it's the same principle that leads to genocide: another ethnos projecting a world different from yours is an insult to your way of life.
The second interesting point the eljay strike brings to light: there is no public square on the net. All communication on the net takes place in some forum that is owned by some private interest. Even usenet: for usenet, you need a feed which is supplied by some private interest (not to mention all the connecting hardware), even if you've set up your own server and that private interest is you. The eljay strike may have kind of felt inappropriate because it seemed not so much like a strike as a demonstration against a government. It was a matter of petitioning our rulers for more gracious treatment: the subjects will be heard. That feeling of inappropriateness will probably fade, is probably fading, as the public square disappears in the real world as well and is replaced by the Wal-Marts. Of course, in the suburbs, there never was a public square, but rather a mall.
(Has anyone ever demonstrated to assert their right to free speech in a mall? There is, in my understanding, a perpetual confusion in Canadian law, and definitely in the Canadian public consciousness, as to whether the Charter of Rights binds private entities. This is, I'd say, an amazing development: the idea that the Constitution would protect your rights in the private sphere. I don't imagine the US is anywhere near this point yet, because it has always been obvious there that the point of the Bill of Rights was to protect you against the government. We have only recently in Canada come to perceive the government as our natural enemy--although we've never worshipped our leaders like Americans do, either.)
I was going to say, back about January, that I wondered how long it would be until Obama's church popped up to bite him. It took so long that I figured it wasn't going to. But then it did, and now it's gone. Ho hum. I caught the end of the McLaughlin Group yesterday, Wild Prediction time, and somebody's Wild Prediction was that McCain would move into a tie with Obama or HRC or both in the polls soon. This is really incredibly bizarre, how people are ignorning the plain fact that McCain has been leading polls, sometimes substantially, ever since he became the Republican frontrunner.
Meanwhile, Canada's Conservative government is now looking like it might die of old age. Who woulda thunk. And they'll win the next election, because the same sort of thing seems to be going on in Canada now as has been going on in the US for a long time: we will vote right of what we believe in, because people as left as what we believe in are gay.
Last night a full, 750 mL glass bottle of oil-and-balsamic-vinegar salad dressing spontaneously exploded in our kitchen. This may have been the stupidest thing that has ever happened. I feel like something stupider must have happened, but I can't think of anything in particular.
