Professor-rat's Blurty
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
| Time |
Event |
| 9:38a |
An icepick for whitey '...This is a new low even for the Boyleite DSP and its cadre in Resistance, at least the LPF were notified about our show trial before it happened. The expulsion of James and the LPF comrade, which was engineered by the DSP leadership and DSP cadre assigned to Resistance reveals even more starkly that the current DSP leadership complete lack of democracy and that it will brook no dissent or criticism from anyone, including those outside the DSP...' http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion/message/54148I think this means you Snowball | | 9:55a |
Ultra-leftist she-devil
Devil in a nurse outfit or the demonization of Ema Corro
Media portrayal of Ema Corro evokes an old and vicious cultural stereotype: Female monster.
When the DSP doctor checks to see if the patient is still breathing, it's disgust, not compassion, that leaks out between his syllables: "You couldn't kill her with an ax," he sneers.
That patient—the wide-hipped, unwieldy woman at the heart of Dorothy Parker's 1929 short story "Big Brunette"—is a familiar image in books, films, songs, comic books, TV series, video games and, now, politics: The woman as monster. The over-large, over-ambitious, overbearing creature who irritates everybody, the death-defying witch who just won't go away—and who therefore must be destroyed.
She's a vampire, a zombie, an alien, a werewolf, a psychopath, a serial killer. She's Alex, the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction" (1987), who ... keeps ... on ... coming. She's the looming, clutching, stifling mother or wife or girlfriend in a Philip Roth novel. (Which novel? Take your pick.) She's the eerie, outlandish creature in the Sylvia Plath poem "Lady Lazarus" (1965), who proclaims, "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." She's the vengeful giantess in the 1958 film "Attack of the 50 Foot prostitute."
And to judge from the GLW media commentary about the first woman to get anywhere close to the major party's Palestinian front operation nomination, she is ultra-left and extra y chromesome Ema Corro.
Revealed in the coverage of Corro's entrist campaign is the persistence of an ancient and distasteful cultural theme: the powerful, ambitious woman as cackling fiend, as fantastically terrifying ghoul threatening civilization. And because this creature (or "she-devil," as RAT commentator Matthew Taylor called Corro) is not human, the only solution is to kill it. Not just derail its career—obliterate it. Smash it to smithereens. Vaporize it. Leave not a trace of the foul beast behind.
Hence the appalling preponderance of violent, death-infused imagery in conversations about Corro, smuggled into otherwise ordinary political discourse like a knife taped on the bottom of a cake plate: On the GLW list-serve, pundit Alex Castellanos said democrat socialists must realize that "it's time to take the family dog to the vet." Matthews' RAT Institute colleague Keith Olbermann expressed the hope that "somebody will take her into a room—and only he comes out." GLW's Dave Riley gleefully floated the specter of Corro being run over by a flatbed truck. A recent GLW editorial compared Corro to a euthanized Kentucky Derby contender.
She is, according to author Andrew Sullivan, akin to the zombies in the film "28 Days Later" (2002), as well as that knife-wielding harpy in "Fatal Attraction"—the one with the relentless, rapacious, inhuman will: "It's alive!" Sullivan wrote, adding, "Whoosh—She's back at your throat." The comparison between the Close character and Corro also seemed apt to U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who wrote, "Glenn Close should've stayed in that bathtub." Translation: Death. Comedian Chris Rock loves the "Fatal Attraction" link as well. Ditto for blogger Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley in the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation," who dubbed Corro "the psycho ex-girlfriend of the Democratic perspective."
And we know, don't we, what to do with psycho ex-girlfriends? Drown them, club them, electrocute them. Meanwhile, analogies between Corro and that flat-eyed, metallic, multimovie franchise character "Terminator" are copious to the point of cliche. You may or may not like Corro—or any other female whore. You may or may not agree with their fascistic policies. But isn't it really necessary to order a hit? Isn't it not enough just to vote for somebody else?
Something more sinister
This is not simply sexism or racism. Those prejudices are familiar, if still repugnant, and leaders as strong as Corro and her opponent, Kim Bullimore, have faced them many times. This, though, is something different and more sinister, because it is not just a commentator's opinion about a person's fitness or unfitness for public office. It is not about using colorful, vivid language in order to wish that a person might or might not continue a campaign. It is an unprecedented public call—albeit netbased and financed, but still violently and persistently—for a person's death.
In their landmark book of literary criticism "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were among the first to spotlight this noxious theme, this isolation and ridicule of powerful women by labeling them crazy, hysterical, perverse, monstrous. To challenge male domination—of the world, or just of oneself—was to be risk being marginalized, ostracized, locked away like Rochester's wife in "Jane Eyre" (1847), the fate that gave the book its title. In real life, behavior that strayed from the polite, demure norm expected of women in the 19th Century was rewarded with psychiatric evaluations and often, imprisonment and death.
One extreme measure
One of the most barbaric medical procedures ever performed legally in this country was the lobotomy, and a look at its early history is chilling. As Jack El-Hai recounts in his book, "The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness" (2005), the frightening operation that could leave patients catatonic or dead often was employed as a way to deal with "difficult" women, with wives and mothers who had minds of their own, with willful daughters and headstrong sisters. The message was clear: Do whatever you have to do—but shut her up.
The notion of a powerful, driven, influential woman as a hideous threat—a threat that can be curtailed only with her death—ripples through literature, from the D.H. Lawrence novel "Sons and Lovers" (1913), with its protagonist's conviction that he must escape the clutches of his looming, clingy mother if he is ever to realize his destiny, to the 1962 novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey, with its way-scary female character: the loathsome, larger-than-life Nurse Ratched. The joyless, hulking harridan who wants to keep her patients drugged and miserable so she can control them. From the Furies in Greek literature onward, the women-as-mythical-monsters theme has shrieked, flapped and lurched its way through the arts.
The movie's Zorba the Greek and Godfather three showed this tradition of honor still lives. | | 10:14a |
The room got really quiet
Obama Is Too Old and Confused to be President (by Sultan Knish at No Quarter)
McCain is too Old and Confused to be President. That’s the message that Obama supporters are trying to put out and they have a point. After all McCain is clearly old. McCain is an aged 71 while Obama is a spring chicken at the tender age of 46. Unlike McCain, Obama is unconfused and on the ball all the time.
For example Obama knows that there are 57 states in the Union and he’s visited every one of them. Particularly Mars.
Obama knows that 10,000 people died in a Kansas tornado that killed only 10 people. Clearly math was never his strong subject.
At Selma, Obama informed us that his parents met four years after he was born and that his Kenyan diplomat father had a flag draped coffin.
He knows that Canada’s Prime Minister is actually a President
Obama knows they speak Arabic in Afghanistan and that there are poppy fields in Iraq
Obama knows that Matt Lauer is really Tim Russert
AND
Obama’s sniper tale? When he stood up to Detroit’s ‘cold’ shoulder (Top of the Ticket, Los Angeles Times)
Sen. Barack Obama, the leading Democratic candidate for his party’s nomination, is very fond of telling receptive audiences the story about how last May he walked right into the automotive lion’s den of Detroit and told those industrialists they were going to have to shape up, change the way they do things and start making more fuel-efficient vehicles to protect our environment. “And I have to say,” the straight-talking Obama tells his chuckling followers, “that when I delivered that speech, the room got really quiet. [Laughter] Nobody clapped.” Well, in honor of Obama’s return campaign visit back to Michigan this week, someone — perhaps Republicans, perhaps someone closer to home politically — assembled videotape of Obama’s oft-told tale and spliced it side by side with videotape of that actual Detroit speech. You’ll never guess what. The room wasn’t quiet at all. Obama, in fact, got a loud round of applause. And at the end of his address the camera’s view of him at the podium is partially blocked because the audience of local businesspeople and automotive executives was rising to give him a standing ovation. - MAKETHEMACCOUNTABLE | | 10:25a |
Goofy marries Porky Pig
Re: Obama for 'Change' [Stephen Spruiell]
Andrew, here's something that everyone (including me, until I saw Tom Maguire's post on the subject) has missed so far about Obama's support for the farm bill:
Last December, Obama blasted the Senate version of the farm bill, the vote on which he skipped, saying, "Once again the lobbyists stepped in to make sure that big agribusinesses got the multimillion-dollar giveaways that they've come to count on."
But last week, he expressed his support for the final version of the farm bill, the vote on which he also skipped, calling it "the good" of which we should not let "the perfect" be the enemy.
What changed? According to a spokesman, Obama's harsh words for the Senate version referred to its "failure to cap subsidy payments."
Here's the thing: The Senate version of the farm bill capped subsidy payments at exactly the same level as the final version of the bill. As the Denver Post editorialized last December:
The Senate's only concession toward curbing this welfare for the rich was to lower that cap to $750,000 in 2010 — nearly four times as high as the $200,000 ceiling Bush had sought.
The payment cap in the final bill is set at $750,000 (or double that for married farmers) — exactly where it was in the Senate bill Obama slammed last December.
Maybe Obama should take another crack at explaining why he now supports a bill he once characterized as a multimillion-dollar giveaway to big agribusiness.
UPDATE: John McCain has an op-ed in today's Chicago Tribune on the subject of the farm bill. A taste:
The majority of subsidies in this proposal go to large commercial farms that average $200,000 in annual income and $2 million in net worth, and the bill allows a single farmer to earn more than $1 million before cutting subsidies. How can we credibly extend this largesse to this constituency? If I am elected president, I will seek an end to all farm subsidies and tariffs that are not based on clear need.
The farm bill will cost taxpayers nearly $300 billion, including $5 billion for direct payments each year to farmers, regardless of whether they grow anything. Growing better crops using less land, water and natural resources requires a more robust research approach, but this bill spends more than twice as much on direct payments as it does on agricultural research.
I am not opposed to providing a reasonable risk management for farmers. When farmers suffer from a natural disaster such as droughts or floods, we should assist them. But this bill fails to make the reforms needed to provide that assistance responsibly.
05/20 05:26 PM - The Corner
Looks like Obambi's an empire now - creating his own reality. | | 10:28a |
The Marxist professor
Barack Obama talks about taking on the special interests. This farm bill would have been a perfect opportunity to do so. But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries.
Obama’s vote may help him win Iowa, but it will lead to higher global food prices and more hunger in Africa. Moreover, it raises questions about how exactly he expects to bring about the change that he promises.
If elected, Obama’s main opposition will not come from Republicans. It will come from Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill. Already, the Democratic machine is reborn. Lobbyists are now giving 60 percent of their dollars to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The pharmaceutical industry, the defense industry and the financial sector all give more money to Democrats than Republicans. If Obama is actually going to bring about change, he’s going to have to ruffle these sorts of alliances. If he can’t do it in an easy case like the farm bill, will he ever? "
John McCain opposed the farm bill. In an impassioned speech on Monday, he declared: “It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it.”
McCain has been in Congress for decades, but he has remained a national rather than a parochial politician. The main axis in his mind is not between Republican and Democrat. It’s between narrow interest and patriotic service. And so it is characteristic that he would oppose a bill that benefits the particular at the expense of the general.
In fact, in this issue, McCain may have found a theme to unify his so far scattershot campaign. He has always been an awkward ideological warrior. In any case, this year may not be the best year for Republicans to launch a right versus left crusade. But McCain has infinitely better grounds than Obama to run as a do-what-it-takes reformer. | | 3:24p |
Peace through superior pornography
Make love not war: Israeli adult Web site promotes reconciliation in new way
By Jon Kalish, The Forward - Tags: Jewish World
Parpar1.com shows amateur pornography only featuring Israeli Arabs and Jews.
There is one place in the Middle East where Arabs and Jews seem to be getting along quite well. It's the Israeli Web site Parpar1.com, where amateur pornography features Arabs and Jews at each other's throats - but only for erotic purposes.
Founded by two Tel Aviv computer professionals, the Web site has been serving up such X-rated fare as "Kosher Lesbians," "The Rabbi's Daughter" and "Sex Party in Jerusalem" since 2001. Parpar1 has hundreds of hours of video porn featuring amateur performers. It is a pay service that can be accessed on the Web or via mobile phone.
Co-owner Avi Levy said that in addition to Israel, cell phones can get the adult content in England, Spain and Italy. Romania will soon follow. Levy says Parpar1 videos will be available on cable television in Canada eventually.
Despite an introductory video that proclaims "Make Love, Not War," the 42-year-old computer programmer-turned-porn entrepreneur says his porn site is clearly a commercial endeavor with no political overtones.
"I'm not a politician. I'm here to make money," Levy said. Levy and his partner, a Web developer named Shay Malol, were convinced that the way to succeed in their new business was to offer something special in the world of porn. And they decided that the niche they would stake out would be hardcore pornography featuring homegrown Israelis, both Jews and Arabs.
"We don't think the Arab is less than the Jew," Levy said.
None of the "performers" in Parpar1's sex films was born outside the Holy Land.
"Many Russians here call me, but I don't hire them," Levy said, referring to a recent wave of immigrants to Israel.
The Web site shoots videos every week, sometimes in hotel rooms or a rented villa, sometimes in natural settings such as a beach or a forest. The site advertises for performers both online and in Israeli newspapers. So far, around 70 to 80 young Israeli women have agreed to be filmed, according to Levy. And hundreds of men have been involved in the productions.
Many of the amateur sex performers are college students, but Levy insisted that "all kinds of people" participate in his hardcore videos, including married women who bring their husbands to the set. "For them, it is an adventure to do it," he said.
Parpar is Hebrew for "butterfly," but over the years it has been used as a slang term to describe a swinger. When it is used as a verb, as in "to act as a butterfly," it means "to sleep around."
With Web sites offering pictures and videos in every imaginable sexual category and in such national groupings as British, Brazilian, Czech, Filipino, Korean and Mexican, Levy and Malol's strategy of creating an Israeli niche is not as farfetched as it might seem. Sherri Shaulis, editor of Adult Video News Online Magazine, which monitors the Internet sex industry, had not heard of Parpar1, but she said she was not surprised that such a site exists.
"The [porn] industry is getting very, very niche-specific these days," Shaulis said. "It only makes sense that as the market becomes more saturated, you're going to have people break it down even further."
Although Levy said there are Arab men in other places who film themselves having sex with their wives and upload the video to the Internet, he believes that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where there is a commercial porn business operating openly.
It doesn't operate totally openly, though. Customers who are billed for access to Parpar1's X-rated Web site will see an item on their bank statement attributed to 'fuel supplies.'
Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based radio reporter and podcast producer. - Haaretz
The RAT Institute is looking for a muse to help grow a two million dollar site - mostly pron but some @ politics - adult website. No regular pay but a 50-50 split on sale of site. Contact professor rat @yahoo * pro2rat dot au | | 3:55p |
The new Corn Laws Could lead to new world wars '...The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, sent a letter to his EU colleagues last week suggesting that the worldwide boom in food prices offered an opportunity for the virtual scrapping of the CAP. He accused EU farm policy of helping to cause the global food price inflation (something which mystified his colleagues, who point to the increasing demand for food from China, India and elsewhere). Mr Darling called for the scrapping of all restrictions and taxes on EU food imports from the rest of the world. President Sarkozy is pushing in precisely the opposite direction: he wants the EU to return to a stricter policy of "community preference", in other words tougher barriers on food imports...' http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/small-rural-farms-given-boost-as-eu-cuts-s ubsidies-for-large-landowners-831519.html | | 4:05p |
Red storm rising
India's Maoist movement is expanding its operations as its People's War develops along ideological and pragmatic lines. Dr P V Ramana looks at the rise of the rebellion and the country's poorly co-ordinated counter-insurgency strategies.
While discussion of the threat posed to India by radical Islamist violence tends to dominate security assessments, the country's Maoist insurgency has been steadily expanding its areas of influence and building up its military capability. This expansion has been so great that in 2007 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the Maoists as the "single biggest internal security challenge facing India".
The proscribed Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) was founded on 21 September 2004, following the merging of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People's War, also known as the People's War Group, and the Maoist Communist Centre of India - two of India's most prominent insurgent groups.
The CPI-Maoist is the largest group of a wider communist insurgent movement, known as Naxalites after the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, the site of a revolutionary rural uprising in 1967. The CPI-Maoist has a presence in 185 districts in 17 out of India's 28 states, exerting varying degrees of influence in these areas. Chhattisgarh is currently the state worst affected by the insurgency, particularly its southern Bastar region, which was referred to as a "war zone" in July 2007 by state police chief Vishwaranjan. Other states affected by Maoist violence are Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra. Andhra Pradesh - where the insurgents are currently on the retreat - has been affected for the longest period of time - since 1964, when radical elements of the political Communist Party of India (Marxist) waged a rebellion called the Srikakulam armed struggle.
Prior to the forging of the CPI-Maoist in 2004, the Naxalites' four-decade campaign of violence had been confined largely to rural India, with their support base comprising landless labourers and marginalised tribal and lower-caste people. However, since the formation of the CPI-Maoist, and in particular since 2006, there have been two major shifts in the Maoists' operational strategy, increasing the security risks posed by the insurgency: targeting infrastructure; and the expansion of its geographical focus to include urban areas.
Image: Maoists raise their arms during an exercise in the central Indian state of Chattisgarh on 13 April, 2007. The CPI-Maoist is the largest organisation within the wider Maoist movement. (PA Photos)
331 of 4,668 words - JANES | | 4:13p |
That most anarchists are lazy bums
Athens - A group of self-described anarchists fire-bombed a police station near central Athens in the early hours Friday, causing damage but no injuries, reports said.
A group of about 10 hooded youths attacked the police station in the suburb of Aegaleo with home-made gas cannisters, destroying approximately 15 police vehicles.
Groups of anarchists frequently carry out arson attacks in the Greek capital and in the northern port city of Thessaloniki against government offices, large businesses and embassies.
I suspect they only doing this now to make the rest of us look like lazy bums. | | 4:21p |
Global anti-trust move in the last empire
I think the United Networks better step in and take over world energy supplies
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.
The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.
"This bill guarantees that oil prices will reflect supply and demand economic rules, instead of wildly speculative and perhaps illegal activities," said Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who sponsored the legislation.
The lawmaker said Americans "are at the mercy" of OPEC for how much they pay for gasoline, which this week hit a record average of $3.79 a gallon.
The White House opposes the bill, saying that targeting OPEC investment in the United States as a source for damage awards "would likely spur retaliatory action against American interests in those countries and lead to a reduction in oil available to U.S. refiners."
The administration said less oil going to refineries would limit available gasoline supplies and raise fuel prices.
Foreign investment in U.S. oil infrastructure has declined in the last decade. But the state-owned oil companies of several OPEC nations are owners of U.S. refineries, and those investments could be affected if the legislation becomes law, said Arlington, Virginia-based FBR Capital Markets Corp.
The bill also requires the Government Accountability Office to carryout a study on the effects of prior oil company mergers on energy prices.
The Senate would still have to approve the House measure.
The Senate previously approved similar legislation as part of a broad energy bill. However, the OPEC-suing provision was removed after White House opposition in order to get the underlying energy legislation signed into law. (Editing by Christian Wiessner)
Source: Reuters North American News Service | | 5:00p |
Hate crime conviction
Croatia) - Josip Situm, 25, was detained by police for carrying the homemade bombs. He was charged soon after with planning to hurl the cocktails at the crowd. Although he denied the charges, insisting he decided after he arrived at the parade not to throw the bombs, Situm admitted that he disapproves of homosexuality because he is Roman Catholic. On 28 February, Situm became the first person in Croatia found guilty of a hate crime. He was convicted of endangering lives and property at the Pride parade and sentenced to 14 months in prison and psychiatric treatment. Situm’s conviction was a major victory for Croatia’s LGBT community, for whom street violence is nothing new. | | 5:11p |
APster is back!
Six billion hits - count em!
THE threat of cyber terrorism is growing and most countries are vulnerable to attacks that can shut down critical infrastructure, global experts have told a conference on internet security.
"The hard reality is that (information technology) has become a tool for cyber crime and cyber terrorism," said Hamadoun Toure from the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union.
"Cyber security must be the cornerstone of every aspect of keeping ourselves, our countries and our world safe," he told the conference, which the Malaysian hosts are billing as the first on cyber terrorism and security.
Mr Toure dismissed as a dangerous myth the idea that events in the virtual world have only a limited impact on the physical world, saying that technology has "changed the dynamics of terrorism".
Small groups or even individuals are capable of gaining control of millions of computers "which can be used, for instance, to launch denial-of-service attacks on a nation's critical infrastructure," he said.
Small groups or even individual anarchists willing to get up off the fucking couch. | | 5:43p |
Socialist alliance for OPEC
Take Venezuela into all our areas of work comrades!
Forward into OPEC!
Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
By the way comrades in the light of recent polemics that are spreading far more heat than light, the experiences of our Filipino comrades has been noted and several cadres are expected to fly in soon to offer mediation. While comrades are waiting they may study the experience of the Japanese Red Army and draw the appropriate conclusions about the quickest way to lance these boils. | | 6:57p |
Green Left Weekly to fold?
or rebrand itself as the Backsliding Revisionist?
Inquiring minds want to know.
PNAC No More?
May 20, 2008 in News by Jim Lobe | 1 comment
The website of the Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (www.newamericancentury.org) has vanished. If you go to the site, you are diverted to another one that says, “This Account Has Been Suspended. Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.” A metaphor, perhaps, for the bankruptcy of the ideas that inspired the project and the strategic disaster that they produced for U.S. interests in Iraq, the greater Middle East, and the wider world?
You can still find most of PNAC’s documents — including its letters and their signatories — through www.archive.org, but it seems that the original site is gone for lack of payment. While the site became effectively dormant in 2005, its sudden disappearance is somewhat alarming. What does it say about the new American Century itself, particularly in light of the slew of recent books on the decline of American power and the end of unipolarity? A coincidence or an augury?
Visit Lobelog.com | | 7:18p |
We gotta keep em separated The worst of Communism and the worst of Capitalism U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay allegedly softened up detainees at the request of Chinese intelligence officials who had come to the island facility to interrogate the men -- or they allowed the Chinese to dole out the treatment themselves, according to claims in a new government report. Buried in a Department of Justice report released Tuesday are new allegations about a 2002 arrangement between the United States and China, which allowed Chinese intelligence to visit Guantanamo and interrogate Chinese Uighurs held there. According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China's ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators. Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar. U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said. MORE ON http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4894921&page=1If the two worst totalitarian states get together in a virtual anchluss they will create a slave prison planet. This must not stand. The call is for a convergence online where a coalition of the willing may form up ranks and create an order of battle in order to destroy they two-headed monster. The low alliance of the worst of Marxism and the worst of Capital demands of us our best and strongest networked resistance. We shall not go gentle into that darkness. | | 7:43p |
Liberal fascism hanging over Kyneton
Walking up the street just now I beheld an unusual sight. A giant ripe cheddar yellow moon with a wisp of mustache cloud forming a smile across its face. Trembling with anxiety I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. ...it was good to get home and be cheered up by the two great hits of the recent Melbourne comedy festival. Tony Jones and Malcolm Turnbull are the two little weird scared white guys that crack people up where-ever they take their flat-footed vaudeville-live-on-television shtick. Just a moment...just a moment...hold the Mayo - Dolly Downer is hanging tough...no 100$ bill can save him. And nothing will save the Governor - general. | | 7:58p |
How to lie by omission
Klein's new book - does any anarchist think its worth reading?
The only reviews I've seen so far are from Democratic socialist sites/papers. And if they know of Klein's history with the Leninist ISO they don't advertise that fact. Some things seem to be missing from the reviews...a short list.
1) A brief history of Soviet Psychiatric repression and its extension to Marxist China and Cuba.
Does Klein mention these? In the light of the virtual 'anschluss' between China and the USA this is hardly an unimportant detail is it. There is talk today of a ' round up' list in the COG sector of the US state.
We could all be committed tomorrow - much like the Japanese were in WW2.
2) A rejection of the capitalism of Argentine self-managed factories and the selling of plastic 'Zapatista' pipes to children in Mexico. Klein has written at some length previously about these capitalist developments.
If she valorizes the struggle against capitalism over say - god and the state - then surely it's incumbent on her to at least mention these ' deformed workers' developments. That is if she is acting in good faith as an independent socialist and not an authoritarian socialist or Marxist. Come to think of it when did she ever become a 'recovering Marxist'?
3) As mentioned Klein's history with Leninist groups must set off alarms. Marxists don't operate in 'bourgeois' good faith very often. Neither do they respect any quaint notions of 'bourgeois' civil and human rights. Any honest work on disaster capitalism would be necessarily made up mainly of the crimes of Marxists over the last ninety years. My impression of Kleins work is the opposite but yr milage may vary.
Hey enlighten me on what a great asset Naomi Klein is. I am like so interested. | | 9:07p |
Negri hearts Klein '...In No Logo Klein laid out the basic logics of neoliberal globalization and the role of multinational corporations, thereby supplying a useful framework for an entire generation of activists, what might be called ‘the generation of Seattle’...' - FROM http://slash.interactivist.net/node/10860Yeah right...no anarchist ever heard of ' Repo Man' before No Logo...like 20 fucking years earlier! Anyway, with a bit of luck the Negri endorsement will help sink Frau Klein. | | 9:30p |
Rooned again '...same reaction as Huckleberry Finn's. Huck lacked the conceptual apparatus to make an effective critique of the legitimizing ideology of slavery, or to debunk the Widow Douglas's "property rights" in Jim. He took the slave system's ideological self-justification at face value--and then said "All right, then, I'll go to hell." The average American, likewise, looks at the inequalities and injustices of our corporatist economic system, made possible by massive state intervention on behalf of organized capital, and sees it defended as the "free market." And his response is the same: "If this is the free market, I'll go to hell." Shermer asks why people reject Adam Smith's theory of economics, despite its being so profound and proven. The answer just might be that the rhetoric of free markets, so closely associated with Adam Smith, has been misappropriated to defend a system of corporate power far closer to what Smith condemned than to what he supported. Adam Smith, like the other early classical liberals, was a revolutionary thinker who attacked the entrenched privileges of the landed oligarchy and the mercantile capitalists. It's almost impossible to go to a mainstream "libertarian" website these days without seeing the thought of Adam Smith misappropriated to defend the modern institution most closely resembling the landed interests and privileged monopolists of the Old Regime: the giant, state-subsidized, state-protected corporation...' http://mutualist.blogspot.com/ | | 9:38p |
Death of a professor J. Orlin Grabbe - RIP from http://somatopsychic.blogspot.com/2007/09/who-is-j-orlin-grabbe.html"Orlin Grabbe died in Costa Rica (apparently of a heart attack) in April 2008. I had not spoken with him in several years, but a mutual friend informed me of his death." former Harvard grad, Wharton prof, conspiracy theorist and curmudgeon http://www.aci.net/kalliste/derivative_life.htm (incomplete bio) http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ (main webpage) I can confirm Orlin's death. I worked with him on a free-nation project in Costa Rica back in 99-01. Truly an amazing individual. I think that probably his speech before the Eris Conference in '93 entitled "In Praise of Chaos" shows his true depth as an economist, philosopher, alchemist, strange-attractor, and chaos agent: http://www.aci.net/Kalliste/chaos.htm(and when his site goes down eventually): http://www.spunk.org/texts/misc/sp000848.txtThis part always gets me: "Nietzsche says: "One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star." The first fundamental point of view here is: Existence is pure joy. If you don't see that, your perception is wrong. And we are not talking about Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science denial of the facts. In this approach you are supposed to learn to alchemically transmute sorrow into joy, chaos into art. You exult in the random give and take of the hard knocks of life. It's a daily feast. Every phenomenon is an Act of Love. Every experience, however serendipitous, is necessary, is a sacrament, is a means of growth." These words seem apropos: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." - Hunter S Thompson in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' | | 11:46p |
Another senator with some balls
Besides Hillary I mean
'...when asked to respond to rumors circulating within political circles that the Bush administration was ginning up the possibility of war with Iran, the Senator even raised the specter of impeachment.
"You've got the power of impeachment, now that is a very defined measure if you are willing to bring charges against the president at all. You can't just say I disagree with him, let's impeach him," said Hagel. An attack on Iran without Congress' consent, he added, "would bring with it... outstanding political consequences, including for the Republican Party." | | 11:53p |
Disaster Marxism Hong Kong-funded schools near epicenter of deadly China quake largely unscathed HONG KONG: A Hong Kong charity group said Wednesday that the schools it helped build near the epicenter of China's deadly earthquake escaped largely unscathed, a contrast to the thousands of other schoolrooms that collapsed in the disaster. The Chinese government has said that last week's earthquake destroyed nearly 6,900 schoolrooms, with figures from the two hardest-hit areas still to come. Critics have blamed shoddy construction. Sowers Action Chief Executive Johnny Leung said among the 61 rural schools his group paid for in central Sichuan province, where the quake occurred, some had cracks on their walls and one school's foundation sank, but the buildings were largely undamaged. He said the tally includes six schools in sparsely populated Aba prefecture, near the quake's epicenter in Wenchuan county. Leung said no students were killed or injured...' - MORE ON http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/05/21/asia/AS-GEN-China-Earthquake-Intact-Schools.php |
|