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Lack of credibility of the libcom.org website?

Kevin Keating | 17.12.2008 21:45 | Other Press | World

If you're in the market to sell a bridge you own in Brooklyn, then skip Ebay; you might find an enthusiastic willing buyer on the UK's libcom.org...

This doc:

 http://libcom.org/library/fare-strike-s ... cisco-2005

Is the only version of a series of events in San Francisco in 2005 that gets linked to on the UK ultra-left/anarchist website libcom.org

That doc, and this doc:

 http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_strikeout.html

Present two very different and extremely contradictory interpretations of the same series of events.

I explain my version of why this is here:

 http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_farestrike.html


Obviously based on the sort of antics that take place on libcom 'forums' there's no love lost between me on the one hand, and the sort of people who spend a significant portion of their lives posting lots and lots of stuff on libcom. And I don't expect people who were geographically distant from the actions being written about here to automatically accept my version of what happened.

But basic honesty and integrity on the part of the people who do libcom.org would mean:

1. either having links to both of the docs -- and then trusting that their readers can judge for themselves,

2. or having links to neither of them.

It's obvious that if the mighty revolutionists of libcom.org don't want to get a reputation for being easily played by any leftist hustler who will tickle them under their chins and tell them whatever they want to hear, then libcom.org should either post links to both versions of this story, or not have links to either one.

Kevin Keating
San Francisco

Kevin Keating
- e-mail: proletaire2003@yahoo.com
- Homepage: http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html

Comments

Hide the following 15 comments

Seriously...

17.12.2008 22:32

Anyone can upload content to the site on registration. If you are so upset then upload the articles yourself.

Clint


Oh, Kevin's at it again...

18.12.2008 00:04

Plus there are several threads up in the libcom forums which he started in which he explains his position. This is typical of Kevin's interminable feuding, if he can't get his own way he throws a wobbly and tries to paint his opponents as compromised, dishonest etc.

RR


he's right though

18.12.2008 03:05

he's right about libcom though isn't he?

Don't think any uk anarchist worth his salt has anything to do with them.

Middle Class And Proud


Right?

18.12.2008 10:25

No he's not right, libcom is one of the best sources of information about anarchism on the internet, regardless of what you think of their forums (a tiny section of the site).

I get sick and tired of the shit-talking which goes on about them on indymedia, it's pathetic given that they don't post back and the main complaint about them is that people get slagged off when they venture on the forums with non-libcomish political views. How is slagging them off here any better?

RR


Libcom's not the bogeyman

18.12.2008 11:39

Whatever you think of Libcom, at least the politics there are generally coherent and well argued. If people there call themselves anarchists they have a good understanding of what that means, and are often members of an organised anarchist group - AF, SolFed, WSM etc. Sometimes people do get a pasting on the forums, but generally it's because at heart their ideas are muddled or just plain wrong. Things did get out of hand sometimes, but that's all been reigned in recently.

The poster above calls him/her self 'middle class and proud'. As class struggle anarchists most people who post on Libcom find the idea of the middle class virtually irrelevant - it's a sociological description, the 'middle class' are still wage earners, and not always privileged ones at that. The idea of being middle class and proud is nonsensical, as is the idea of being working class and proud. We should be trying to abolish classes, not celebrate them.

tigersiskillers


piss off

18.12.2008 12:55

A petty squabble over some internet drama. this certainly seems like a productive use of a radical media resource...

Libcom has set politics and the content on the site reflects those politics. You're not likely to see much from, say, the SWP or the WOMBLES on the site, for the same reason. This isn't some grand conspiracy, nor misdirection. I don't recall anything on libcom saying the versions of events presented there are the *only* version - merely that the content there, for a variety of reasons, is considered useful or interesting by the people involved.

Whatever problems there may or may not be with the forums, Libcom is an amazing resource and one which comes in for a lot of undeserved flak.

anonymous


RR's vapid non-response

18.12.2008 19:18

RR's comments here are typical of the piss-poor excuse for critical thinking that takes place on libcom, and especially on their wretched and embarrasing 'forums.' What I've outlined here is transparently clear. If individuals like RR don't grasp what I'm saying, and can't address the point head on, and in an honest manner, then it may be due to them not having much experience trying to test drive their pleasant sentiments in the the non-virtual reality world. Frankly it appears that both RR and libcom's key point of practical reference isn't anarchism, Marxism, the class struggle, or the historical revolutionary movement, but the worst aspects of internet culture, and all the junior high school boys locker room level of polemics that flourish on internet discusssion boards.

I sent an e-mail, saying essentially the same things that I've posted here, to the libcom administrators several months ago, and never got a response. So now I've posted it here. And it looks like I'm not the only one who has some doubts about the credibility and judgement-making skills of the people at libcom.org. As a matter of fact, my longer article/critique of the transit system fare strike flop was posted briefly on libcom, then it got taken down without explanation. The libcom people probably have a link to the leftist recuperators version of the event because it tells them what they want to believe, because they are easily manipulated, and they are easy to manipulate because they probably don't have much practical experience with anything like what's being described here.

If you don't have first-hand knowledge of some event on the other side of the world from you, and if there are several contending version of what happened, then how can you tell which one is the most accurate and honest one? There's no hidden agenda in a question like that. Even guys like RR should be able to figure that out.

They should post links to all the docs in question here and trust that readers can make up their own minds -- got that? -- trust that the readers can decide for themselves. But that might be beyond the level of critical thinking and practical decision-making that take place at libcom.org at this point.

Kevin Keating in San Francisco

Kevin Keating
mail e-mail: proletaire2003@yahoo.com
- Homepage: http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html


Thrashing around much Kevin?

19.12.2008 00:52

No answer to the point that you could have put your own stuff up and had already had your say in the forums I note, just more talk about it being everyone else's fault but your own.

Really I couldn't have illustrated your snotty attitude any better if I'd been parodying you. Cheers for that Kevin.

RR


Kevin, you can't expect people to take your stuff seriously

19.12.2008 02:29

The thing is, Kevin's articles about the Fare Strike are all still available at libcom. Just search "Fare Strike" and you'll hit a goldmine of articles that Kevin has written against this event. But the best thing about the threads is that the people who respond to his "critiques" effectively expose his writing as short on facts and long on ad hominem and fabrication to bolster his weird and unsubstantiated assertions.

Moderators at libcom have every right to remove writing that they find to be dishonest and inaccurate.

Kevin's writing is the reason


what is this doing here?

19.12.2008 07:39

what i don't understand is why keating is taking his smear campaign to THIS indymedia site. why doesn't he simply post his ad hominems and attacks to the libcom forums, where the conflict belongs?

if everyone in frisco is a nutter like keating, that is definitely someplace i will never go near. hopefully he will act in kind and never come here.

the strange thing is that he keeps rewriting, and posting everywhere, exactly the same long winded story of the failure of something that happened more than 3 years ago, which is 180 degrees opposite of what everyone else says. even on libcom i've seen at least a dozen accounts in the latter category, including Tom Wetzel from WSA whose various accounts i find the most credible. either keating is totally obsessed with defining and encouraging others to fail, or more likely he is simply mental. Regardless, his campaign doesn't belong here and should be taken up on the libcom forums.

pete


Libcom forum thread : What do you prefer on demos police horses or tear gas?

19.12.2008 16:33

I can't imagine any of these middle class student tossers ever having experienced either but thats the kind if drivel they toss off about!

Aunty Christ


As always, the weenies here cannot offer a persuasive response...

19.12.2008 17:59

The whining here from RR and company is what you'd get with five year olds if you told them that it was time to leave the sandbox and threatened to take away their toy dumptrucks and plastic buckets and shovels.

The points I've made here are plain as day and clear as glass. And here, as it consistently is in the infantile and sometimes quite repulsive 'forums' on libcom, individuals like RR cannot offer an even minimally persuasive and substantial response. They have nothing to say and no words to say it with, and, tough guys that they are, they even have to hide behind fake names while doing it as well. If my opinions were as weak as theirs and my command of language as poor I'd probably be ashamed enough to use a fake name, too. Cut out the Walter-Mitty-fantasies; the state and its security services have no reason to be concerned with you. Anyone can see you are no threat.

Libcom could be a useful and interesting resource for subversive politics, or "anti-politics," in the 21st century; with some significant improvements perhaps it still can be. Unfortunately at this point it exibits the weaknesses of a project whose main practical reference point is internet culture. This means that when a political conflict arises the functionally a-political, grossly naive, or politically inept boys who are drawn to a mostly or exclusively internet-based endeavor will be incapable of engaging with the conflict on political terms.

Yes, functionally a-political dweebs, there is plenty of good reason to critically examine a fiasco like the 2005 San Francisco fare strike. People who have it in them to contribute to a working-class based opposition in contemporary society -- clearly that's not several of the people posting on this thread -- can learn from the mistakes made and incorporate the insights that can be gained in similar efforts in the future.

Put briefly:

1. This effort in SF in 2005 began as something very different from what it decomposed in to;

2. The effort got taken over by conventional leftists,

3. The effort then, predictably, sank like a stone,

4. The conventional leftists in question, one jumb-sized source of bad news in particular, GH, peddaled an outlandish account of what happened with their failure,

5. And in what I refer to here, an ultra-left/anti-authoritarian web site, apparently staffed by gullible and easily played individuals, helped the leftist recuperators peddal their airbrushed photo version of this. This isn't some great defeat in the story of the revolutionary movement; it's not like libcom has any kind of audience among potential combative working people right now. Nobody pays any attention to this stuff right now. But it is a symptom of how ultra-leftists and anarchists repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot.

Right now stuff like this doesn't matter; tomorrow under vastly different circumstances things like this might matter very much. Anyone who wants to make a positive contribution to a liberatory mass social movement in the future is going to have to be a lot smarter and more honest that what's been displayed here.

From the outside, and not knowing any of the libcom crowd -- at least I hope I don't know them, and I don't want to know them now -- a willingness to be played for chumps by stone leftist hustlers is probably a function of the ones getting played having no or next to no actual experience attempting to assert their pleasant sentiments in the larger world around us. The ultra-left milieu isn't exactly a breeding ground for dynamic men of action, or women, either; in the English-speaking world it's an all-male phenomenon and that's only the first of its major failings.

Anyone who has tried to fight for what for lack of a better term I'll call an anti-state communist perspective in contemporary society -- that doesn't appear to include anyone at libcom -- has plenty of experience:

1. facing the challenging task of making an obscure message intelligible and relevant to contemporary working people, who have no reference point that will automatically make anarchist and Marxist ideas relevant to their everyday life experience, and,

2. has some practical experience in having their efforts outmanuevered, lied about and ripped off by hustlers on the left-wing of capital's political apparatus.

That's what happened in that failed effort in 2005, that's what I examined in the two docs refered to above. That's what's at issue here.

RR and company cannot response to what I've written. They do not object to the substance of what I've said; they object to the fact that it is said at all. No wonder the Trotskyists always get over on these punks.

Kevin Keating
mail e-mail: proletaire2003@yahoo.com


Delusions

22.12.2008 20:05

Danny, you claim that you and your alter egos are in fact separate people, but but it seems strange that you always post within a few minutes of each other. And you are both making the exact same deluded claims, none of which has ever made by anyone else before.

And all your statements are complete and utter lies.

Trying to be fair to you, maybe you do know of some events like these which happened somewhere - but whatever none of them have anything to do with us.

As we are very open about one our site, 10 people are members of the Libcom group. These are myself, catch, Joseph, zobag, rkn, Ed, pingtiao, jimmer, Gav and Jack.

All of us live in London or Brighton, none of us know anyone involved at any level with indymedia Scotland or have anything to do with anyone involved in indymedia Scotland, or any other indymedia.

Two of us have been engaged, and they are both now married. There have never been any allegations of any kind - other than the ones you are making on this page now. None of us have heard anything about this before today.

You've never spoken to any of us ("mouthpiece") about any of this, and none of us have ever been involved in any legal action - apart from against the police following the Fairford coaches incident. None of us have ever had anything to do with an assault on a teenage girl, and that certainly hasn't ever been "admitted to" on indymedia. Most of us never even look indymedia because of the type of preposterous bullshit and smears - like these - which unfortunately infest it.

"UK anarchist", yes these are "very serious" charges. But they are completely fabricated by a deluded mind that has never even mentioned any of this before today. These are particularly serious - and preposterous - because many of us, myself included, working in child protection.

We have also worked at exposing those within the anarchist movement who propagate support for child abuse - such as Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson, and some editors of anarchopedia (links included below).

I would request that you to be a decent human being and retract these allegations - either because they are completely fabricated, or because you have confused us with other people.

I would also request of indymedia to preserve any respectability as an information source that they delete all posts related to these disgusting and ridiculous allegations.

If you are still claiming the any of these allegations are true - name which of the 10 of us you are accusing.

Links:
 http://libcom.org/library/leaving-out-ugly-part-hakim-bey
 http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/anarchopedia-expanding-needs-expand-more-06122007

Steven.
- Homepage: http://Http://libcom.org


This is all suspect

22.12.2008 20:13

Seems like the UK is importing one of the worst practices of the US in the 60s and 70s: state sponsored snitchjacketing by provocateurs.

Don't trust anyone coming onto public websites making unsubstantiated accusations, especially of pedophilia, child abuse or other extremely inflammatory "crimes."

COINTELPRO, KevINTELPRO, or DannyINTELPRO are ALL the same; don't trust anyone posting these divisive provocations.

Beware of snitches


Delusions

23.12.2008 02:13

Danny, you claim that you and your alter egos are in fact separate people, but but it seems strange that you always post within a few minutes of each other. And you are both making the exact same deluded claims, none of which has ever made by anyone else before.

And all your statements are complete and utter lies.

Trying to be fair to you, maybe you do know of some events like these which happened somewhere - but whatever none of them have anything to do with us.

As we are very open about one our site, 10 people are members of the Libcom group. These are myself, catch, Joseph, zobag, rkn, Ed, pingtiao, jimmer, Gav and Jack.

All of us live in London or Brighton, none of us know anyone involved at any level with indymedia Scotland or have anything to do with anyone involved in indymedia Scotland, or any other indymedia.

Two of us have been engaged, and they are both now married. There have never been any allegations of any kind - other than the ones you are making on this page now. None of us have heard anything about this before today.

You've never spoken to any of us ("mouthpiece") about any of this, and none of us have ever been involved in any legal action - apart from against the police following the Fairford coaches incident. None of us have ever had anything to do with an assault on a teenage girl, and that certainly hasn't ever been "admitted to" on indymedia. Most of us never even look indymedia because of the type of preposterous bullshit and smears - like these - which unfortunately infest it.

"UK anarchist", yes these are "very serious" charges. But they are completely fabricated by a deluded mind that has never even mentioned any of this before today. These are particularly serious - and preposterous - because many of us, myself included, working in child protection.

We have also worked at exposing those within the anarchist movement who propagate support for child abuse - such as Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson, and some editors of anarchopedia (links included below).

I would request that you to be a decent human being and retract these allegations - either because they are completely fabricated, or because you have confused us with other people.

I would also request of indymedia to preserve any respectability as an information source that they delete all posts related to these disgusting and ridiculous allegations.

If you are still claiming the any of these allegations are true - name which of the 10 of us you are accusing.

Links:
 http://libcom.org/library/leaving-out-ugly-part-hakim-bey
 http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/anarchopedia-expanding-needs-expand-more-06122007

Steven.
- Homepage: http://Http://libcom.org


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