Outside Agitation

Outside Agitators
"Outside Agitators" were blamed for stirring up the blacks in the South in terms of them getting dichty and beginning to "sit in" and "show up at fronts of things like buses and doors--"Yep, it's them thar outside agi-tators who's stirrin' up our cullard. Ya kan't rush that thar sort'a thang on good White folks--it takes time"--and that was said by all the white (read: Snopes) intellectuals (yep, including Little Bill Faulkner) down South. Damn Nu Yawk Jew boys like Abbie Hoffman and damn Northun N-worders like Julius Lester and H. Rapp Brown and Huey Newton and the most logical speaker I've ever heard, Stokely Carmichael--yep, "outside agitators."

White people don't like agitators. They love being hecklers, but they don't consider heckling as agitating. Agitators are intruders in the dust who sneak in in the night and wake up the oppressed and convince them they have the power of the true people of the US of A behind them and that they have a right to vote so they should come out en mass to vote....

Outside agitators are also antiwar freaks. Hippies were outside agitators. Peaceniks are outside agitators. We flew around the blogger dial or the airwaves of the Internet looking for sense--let's see what we came up with.

thestaff
for The Daily "Outside Agitator" Growler

Ludwig Wittgenstein as an Outside Agitator

Wittgenstein held that the meanings of words reside in their ordinary uses, and that that is why philosophers trip over words taken in abstraction. From England came the idea that philosophy has got into trouble by trying to understand words outside of the context of their use in ordinary language (cf. contextualism).

For example: What is reality? Philosophers have treated it as a noun denoting something that has certain properties. For thousands of years, they have debated those properties. Ordinary Language philosophy would instead look at how we use the word "reality". In some instances, people will say, "It seems to me that so-and-so; but in reality, such-and-such is the case". But this expression isn't used to mean that there is some special dimension of being that such-and-such has that so-and-so doesn't have. What we really mean is, "So-and-so only sounded right, but was misleading in some way. Now I'm about to tell you the truth: such-and-such". That is, "in reality" is a bit like "however". And the phrase, "The reality of the matter is …" serves a similar function — to set the listener's expectations. Further, when we talk about a "real gun", we aren't making a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality; we are merely opposing this gun to a toy gun, pretend gun, imaginary gun, etc.

From Wikipedia

Hot damn! See what we mean? Where are our outside agitators today when we really need them? Is Ralph Nader an outside agitator? Not like the kind we're lookin' for. Really. (You see, in reality Ralph Nader is really a such and such.)

And Here's Fred Reed Back in 2004

Help me puzzle out Iraq. I’m just a country boy, and don’t understand Advanced Thought, or high strategy, or anything else. I admit it. Tell me about Iraq – quick, 'cause it seems to be blowing itself all to flinders, and it’s hard to study something the which there ain’t no more.

Now, as I understand it from the White House itself, it’s all because of three diehard Saddamites, two terrorists, and an outside agitator. Yes. The White House says ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of Iraqis love us, and want us to bomb them and invade them, and starve them with embargos, and only a few soreheads don’t like it. And I believe the White House. You can only lie so long before you slip up and tell the truth. I figure they’re about due.

You can read the rest of this--here ya go:

www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed31.html

Interesting--from a Libertarian. We are rather Anti Authoritarians.

We Close Today With a Poem From Anjela Duval (and You Can Read It in Breton, Too

RED ANGER

There is no worm so small that

it won't curl up, if one walks on top of it

No, I no longer dare,

Dearly beloved parents,

I no longer dare to direct my gaze

At your pictures.

On your faces I read too many rebukes

Rebukes for my laziness, for my carelessness:

I fail in my strictest duties,

Fail to defend my country's integrity,

That sacred heritage passed through the centuries,

From generation to generation in your lineage.

I let that sacred heritage weaken,

For fear of losing the good graces

Of the bigshots of the parish...

...But you know well, my mother and my father,

The little people? It's better for them to keep quiet.

Keep quiet and suffer.

To be immobilized throughout their lives

By the aristocracy

It's the little people who don't have the right

To defend their right!

They don't have the right to shed a tear for their unhappiness

Except in secret from everyone...

However, I can no longer keep quiet,

I've already been quiet too long,

Months and months I have been patient,

Between epochs of rage

And epochs of despair.

I have felt too much bitterness in my heart,

One day soon the package

Will explode,

Like a spring too restrained

And all the worse for someone

For

There is nothing worse on earth

Than sheep enraged...

24 August 1971.

Read this poem in breton Translated by Lenora Timm