At least this blatant Obama shilling is filed under Viewpoint. I fail to see how normally clear-thinking individuals still blame Nader for the 2000 Bush "victory" and the resulting policies. I remember my 87-year-old granduncle scoff at Gore as a man "who couldn't even win his own state." And - ahem - that state isn't Florida. Nor did he take Clinton's Arkansas. With either he would have taken the presidency. Washington's piece isn't so much "mean and unfair" but ahistorical.
All 42 comments by...
TheoPapathanasis
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Regarding the line in The Ninth most crucial to Zizek's thought here, let's recall that Schiller's original text read: "Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder" and not "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" (Trans: "Beggars become brothers of princes" NOT "All men will become brothers") In short, Schiller struck a note of economic justice absent from The Ninth. So I wonder: were this particular sentiment included in the chorale would the piece still be hailed as a celebration of humankind's inherent sense of solidarity or would it be dismissed as maudlin sentiment?
Posted to The Disturbing Sounds of the Turkish March
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José Padilla's case isn't exactly about race Redhorse. Sure, when we talk about Gitmo, well, sure, it doesn't seem anybody there is white. So I am not saying race isn't a factor, just personally doubt it's the crucial one. The issues here should be discussed. Should Americans (yes, I am a citizen) tolerate these newfangled presidential powers to whisk American citizens off to be drugged and humiliated and tortured? I mean, really... what the hell is that? Pretty much psycho dictator stuff. The threat of being reduced to a mental malum insanum scares people into submission. I can badmouth America with …
Posted to Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire
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Okay gang, I thought to chime in. WTH: As for drugging in Gitmo, a few released detainees have asserted as much. A 2006 UN Comission on Human Rights report, 'Situation of detainees at Guantánamo Bay', reads: 'The Special Rapporteur on the right to health has received serious and credible reports of violations of the right to health – both health care and the underlying determinants of health – at Guantánamo Bay. The reports allege, inter alia, that (i) the conditions of confinement have had devastating effects on the mental health of the detainees; (ii) provision of health care has been conditioned …
Posted to Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire
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Hi again recursive: Sorry about abandoning the Zizek discussion. I probably got distracted. As for Gitmo being "one of the beacons of our hypocrisy," I'll agree with you up to a point. The way I see things, because X-Ray symbolizes so much, it can be shut down with great fanfare, showing the world "we" finally did something about it, put our house in order, etc. However, I, a bit of cynic, can imagine this being done in the interest of PR. The same disgusting policies can be continued elsewhere (and that was gist of my comment on the recent ITT article …
Posted to Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire
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the edit thingee's not working... '88 in Gibraltar, not '98.
Posted to Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire
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Sure Guantanamo will eventually be closed. But what about CIA extraordinary rendition? the detention facilities to be built in case of an 'immigration emergency' (whatever that means) whose contract was awarded to Halliburton? What about that? Closing X-Ray is nowhere near enough. In fact, focusing on shutting down Gitmo without bringing up these issues might even enable the same sort of practices to continue unabated, elsewhere. Another problem I have is with the article is the author's wording. Just talking about ticking bombs (#5) should remind one of Dershowitz's justification for torture, which might be another word for abuse (#3). …
Posted to 8 Reasons to Close Guantnamo Now
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Lots of stuff here. I love this idea of throwing street parties and Mr Duncombe nailed it: protests are boring. People feel passive, lectured; and marching around stopping traffic doesn't engender a feeling of involvement. Video games are popular because, unlike television, some interaction is going on. Organizing a good party is challenging. And I'd think it would be tough to get people to rock out while getting political. So maybe the trick is to keep it light and just use the fun to build up a sense of cool. Luckily, lots of party people tend to be progressive from the …
Posted to Dreaming Up New Politics
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WTH: Fair enough. But when it's about tactics and messaging, the American situation is truly bizarre. Naturally one should not play the same game as all these slicksters out huckstering their latest, greatest, get-em-while-they're-hot political nostrums. Most Americas are thoroughly ensconced in a culture of advertising and often respond favorably to what's been pitched as a product, e.g., the war. Advertising's a crucial part of contemporary capitalism and America is utterly capitalist, so . . . it might make some sense to use some of those tactics so a message get heard in the first place: use the enemy. To be …
Posted to Dreaming Up New Politics
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The writer might have tossed out Russell's one-liner about Aristotle: "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." Anyway . . . Yes. Many of America's right-wing propagandists do seem to be disguising their less endearing opinions. I read one Tim Wilkinon recently describe Alan Dershowitz as 'camouflaging' his messages. A few months ago I pointed out Sam Harris's book The End of Faith is less about atheism than a nasty argument to justify torture. So I am unsurprised to learn D'Souza is doing something similar. …
Posted to A Wingnut in Sheeps Clothing
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Well ITT crew, here's the real kicker to this story . . . I thought my screen name here was Theo, whereas it is, in fact, TheoPapathanasis. And, against all odds, both Theo and I share the same unimaginative password: inthesetimes (which I will immediately change). So we have a genuine case of someone, yours truly, actually, if accidentally, passing themselves off as another person. I swear. How's that for legimitizing these Zizekian identity concerns? Hi Arpie: Yes, I am a 100% real human being. Even more so when I am not signed in as somebody else. My name is not …
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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What's mad here is that I am totally levelling with you all (not like The Law of Freedom in Platform levelling, of which I approve, but in the normal sense of just being honest). Unwittingly, I actually did sign in as another person, someone named Maurice, who perhaps might wish to be known as an entirely different real life person, namely me, Theo from Greece. Trivia: the word 'persona' comes from the Latin for 'mask'. A minor point Zizek might have considered making when writing: 'Our social identity, the person we assume to be in our social intercourse, is already a …
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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Hi gang: Um. . . this is all rather interesting. I think it was recursive who, in another thread, chastised me for vanishing from this one. Fact is, I didn't realize the conversation was still alive and well. recursive: I love this idea of my being a construct that passes Turing tests. Hilarious! I mean that. No, really, I am who I say I am: a mostly unsuccessful Greek-American writer of decidedly progressive views. I first popped up here on the ITT site about a year or so ago, and only to comment on another Zizek article. In fact, it's largely …
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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Agh, ye dogsbodies an yer infernal Portugese parliament! No, carry on with this seadog talk. I can't after actually writing a childrens' story about pirates who steal candy from babies, flying the Lolly Roger atop their dark conveyance, The Tooth Fairy, under Captain Saltwater Taffy. No, gentleman, I am, in fact, not The Magus. Eric Blair: Of course it's possible that I am, in fact, a bearded Slovenian man on a mission to revive dialectical materialism. But no, I am just a bearded Greek man who can't stop typing. Oh, and yes, that link to DV in recursive's post is to …
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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Great post recursive and a cool link. Thanks. I like the idea of self-recursion myself (thinking about, for example, Ray Sullyan's 'What is the Name of This Book?'). IMO, Stallman's the man. I've heard it that, after his stint in the MIT AI Lab, he was known to sometimes dictate code. Informational freedom is obviously what the net's supposed to be about, heralding a new age and a new enlightenment. Bloggers taking out bigwigs is just part of it. There's also the whole idea taken from Burroughs about storming the reality studio (recommend the anthology with that title). The reality studio …
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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It's OK RP, I couldn't understand a brilliant comment in my current state and yesterday's assessment also holds for today: 'My head feels like a fishbowl lounge for an idiotic, unblinking carp.' That is to say my hangover is probably permanent; my brain in the vat. But still, I'm back. Honestly, I love this thread. What should we talk about?
Posted to In You More Than Yourself
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Besides ignoring the research about medical cannabis, I think Americans also neglect another issue about cannabis: the outrageous prices. I'm talking about the mediweed concept , a term coined long ago by the legendary Wernard (founder of the Mellow Yellow coffeeshop [the first ever] as well as the old Positronics grow shop in Amsterdam, the guy who discovered that plastic greenhouses tend to work better than glass). Mediweed is about supplying cannabis to patients at a reasonable price, based on the principle that the stuff is simply expensive.California's Compassion Clubs were a great idea: get a prescription. Some of them even …
Posted to Science: The Drug Wars Latest Victim
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I have not picked up Parallax yet. It's funny Kotsko describes the end of Z's book as anticlimactic when it's precisely Z's comment on the Matrix trilogy's anticlimax that he quotes... [quote]What leads to this deadlock is that, in a typical ideological short-circuit, the Matrix functions as a double allegory: for the Capital (machines sucking energy out of us) and for the Other, the symbolic order as such. Perhaps, however - and this would be the only way to (partially, at least) redeem Revolutions - there is a sobering message in this very failure of the conclusion of the Matrix series. …
Posted to Zizek's Refusal
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This guy rules! (And, technically, that's impossible for an anarchist!) I don't tend to pay too much attention to MMA. But it's cool, lots of ground fighting and tell me those dudes are not conditioned. And this guy is sharp: "If there is any contradiction, it’s that we’re part of the capitalist machine, and I’m really just a wage slave." And that shows he really understands class consciousness.
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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johnnyincentx answers wolf: "Yeah capitalism is the best economic system the world has ever known." This od course does not imply it is the best economic system the world will know. For example, living in antiquity, one could confidently declare: "Slavery is the best economic system the world has ever known." And so on. Now, I agree with johnnyincentx that the Bush administration openly works for the plutocrats. Hell, at this point, the Republicans might be termed the party of capital, but the Democrats are just as dependent and, I remind you, the 3rd way of Clinton was the way of …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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johnnyincentx: I believe that second comment of yours was directed to one knocko and not me. Are you always this much of charmer or have I caught you on one of your winning days? If you were familiar with third way economics and neoliberalism (which you are not), then you might have had something to say to me (which you don't). Of course, I am aware of the domestic economic devastation caused by the Bush administration. I am also aware of the tremendous foreign economic damage that's been done in the name of neoliberalism. Perhaps you noticed the leftward shift in …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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btw: For clarification's sake, I am no fan of Bobbit's thesis. I just picked that chapter as an interesting source for comparing the two presidents' rhetoric.
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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luminous beauty: Thank you for your kind mediation. Actually, I am a Greek-American, dual national and overall internationalist who has lived many years in both Europe and America.
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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johnnycentrix: Look, you are simply being rude. As for those books I hit you on the head with, when you say: "Of course I’m assuming that your NOT recommending any books that disagree with you as evidence that you consider them not worthwhile reading and thus don’t read them." In fact, I do not wholly agree with Frank (although I love the guy as a political writer) and disagree 100% with Bobbit, who I think flirts with some very dangerous stuff. I used them as examples of mainstream books that expressed ideas you claimed were "extreme lunatic fringe," thank you. Somehow …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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Bang my palms with spikes and call me the king of the Jews! You really are being a jerk. “Correcting” your grammar was meant in jest, hence the parenthetical comment. Do you look for offence and personal slight everywhere? How trollish. I see being civil or playful gets nowhere with you. You are a keyboard belligerent. Now, the little blurb to the right of this window says "Please be respectful in your comments..." and I am trying with you. Really trying. After trying to be nice. You, on the other hand, have shown no respect whatsoever throughout this entire "exchange." As …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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Hi FreeDem and thanks for writing. I am all for open source tech, but have been too lazy to make the switch yet. Personally, I do not adhere to any particular ideology these days and just make an effort to pull what's useful from different traditions to better understand what sort of alternatives we have. I think it's difficult (probably impossible) to definitively say what the future ought to be like. It's indulging in some kind of mantic sociology or something. I imagine the real alternative, if it ever comes about (that is, if we don't just destroy ourselves or the …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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Hello again luminous beauty and thanks for reading The Obliterator. Ah yes. I agree. We should all use that word all the time! It's a bit of a sly reference to Book One of Aristotle's Politics, where I think we first find a distinction between "use value" and "exchange value" and his criticism of "chrematistics," a term (pardon the pun) I think he coined. Writing SF and, more generally, fictionalizing the future is my preferred way of addressing the kinds of thorny issues FreeDem, for example, is interested in. Rather than going around promulgating some kind of social program or whatever, …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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Somehow, against all odds, after ending on some sort of vague libertarian note, this thread was resuscitated... johnnycentrix: I really think you owe me an apology. (Not that I actually expect one, because, these days, I find internet discourse is more and more an series of snarky exercises... and I have been involved in internet politics since the days when internet was just a bunch of bulletin boards.) However, the offer stands, so feel free to email me to clear this up: tpapathanasis@gmail.com Anyway, let's all get over the childishness and get to the heart of the matter here: John_Christian went …
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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Well, it's clear there's really no point in trying to communicate with you, guy.
Posted to The Ultimate Fighting Anarchist
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Of course Zizek is right about this. Big-shot money men who flash their philanthropy cred are doing more than poncing themselves up with good causes... The underlying idea is the answer to systemic problems will be solved by the mega-capitalists, and so, make the world dependent upon the whim of their benevolence. It not only serves their PR goals (and maybe even salves their conscience), it is "disempowering" in the extreme. People should consider the logic behind simply expropriating these plutocrats and using these resources to solve problems as they see fit. But that's Marxism there, and, as I have discovered, …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Hello Kuya: I do not think anybody actually needs capitalists to create wealth. Turning plastic, glass, transistors, and wire into a computer does not create wealth. It creates an object. The wealth is created by exploiting the labor nexus, which is, of course, many human beings. As for what's done with the wealth upon its reification through sale, that's a matter of distribution. In capitalism, the profit is the capitalist's, because that's the person that owns the capital. Think about Bush's "ownership society" for a minute. The owners he's really talking about are not America's middle class home owners, but . …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Phaedrus: Well said. That's exactly the point. We choose not to do anything about it. The in-your-face-ness of today's disparity of wealth is simply repulsive. Something "needs to be done." Ignacio Ramonet said, "To begin with, we have to disarm the power of international finance which over the past 20 years has eaten into the world of politics, reducing the space available for democracy." http://mondediplo.com/2000/01/01leader But how do you disarm interantional finance? It's very difficult when people are afraid to talk about the simplest things, so, yes, that old idea of expropriation needs to come back into conversational currency. It's all …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Hi again Kuya and thanks for writing. Actually I don't pay to much attention to any kind of capitalist/socialist dichotomy much these days. Personally, I think it kind of oversimplifies things and, ultimately, devolves into another ideological quarrel for the political hobbyists to tally up some talking points. So when I read your "one liners" here: Capitalists: clever gluttons who want to possess rather than share. Socialists: thieves with the gift of the gab who want to take rather than make. Well, no offense, but that's what I'm getting and I think you're admitting as much. Now, when I talk about …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Great comment radko, If I may, I'd like to comment on part of your comment. "My beef with Zizek was a little more specific. If he has such snide disdain for wealthy people who donate to socially progressive causes – because presumably they tapped their wealth from an evil well (a rather broadstroke presumption by the way) – then what is the alternative?" IMO, Zizek's overall "mission" seems to be to restore dialectical materialism to its proper place... as a part of the western philosophical tradition and to extricate it from (what I like to call) the the ideology carnival. When …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Hi again everybody: I am all for living as independently of capitalism as well as one can. However, I don't think it's an answer. It's something we can do on an indivudual level as consumers and that's its extent. When we start to look at things on systemic level however, it becomes increasingly clear (at least to me) that something more substantial needs to be done than moving out into the wilds to grow tomatoes (although I do love a good tomato). Of course going around advocating violence is silly. It giives you a bad rep. It remains entirely possible that …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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True frog... I was thinking about what kind of people actually become provacateurs, and I randomly stumbled on this by Serge: "But there are not only people who are agents out of cowardice; there are, much more dangerously, those dilettantes and adventurers who believe in nothing, indifferent to the ideal they have been serving, taken by the idea of danger, intrigue, conspiracy, a complicated game in which they can make fools of everyone. They may have talent, their role may be almost undetectable. ... The illegal revolutionary – above all the terrorist – acquires a terrible cast of mind, a formidable …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Oh yes, Frog, you are right to make the point. They do send in cops to the demos. At the big antiwar demo in DC two of them took up position right next to me! I know all about it. It's almost funny, well, in a bitter, sad, and wretchedly unfunny way. At the previous demo in San Fransisco, there was a lot of footage of some guy beating the living daylights out of some other guy and the quasi-fascist shockjock Michael Savage was using it as "evidence" to condemn the demos, actually asking for then director of Homeland Security Tom …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Frog: Hmm... personally, I'd suggest walking away from "gurudom" at your earliest convenience. Nobody should look to anyone else for too many answers or as a repository of knowledge. It creates a situation in which others can become dependent "brain bugs" (Starship Troopers) and that means that if something happens to those brains, the rest are left headless. I'm not saying your situation is like that (I don't know anything about you), just pointing out thatt's how hierarchies, factions and leaders originate and contributes to "followership." Debunking media propaganda is one of all time favorite activities. There is o winning and …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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That sounds pretty straightforward and you are right, it's about the kids that may or may not have much of a world left for them. I suppose all I mean meant was: make sure that anyone that looks to you are a "guru" is left with the idea to go out and become one too. This is the way. There's a great, if weird, moment in Trotsky, the closing words of Literature and Revolution, where the idealized vision of a future society and the Nietzschean notion of the uebermensch sort-of-kind-of meet. (Now, I am not exactly a Trotskyite per se (SWP, …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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(...continued from above.) This will to just take the plunge is well illustrated in scenes in 'The Matrix' as well as in Grant Morrison's 'Invisibles'. It's just something you have to go through at some point in your life. So, all a "guru" can hope to do is teach people how to make that leap in the first place (all this is kind of a weird image for a discussion of gurus, because "guru" implies weight, but I’m sure you see my point). When we look to the "liberal communists" Zizek describes, we are looking at a situation in which those …
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Oops... forgot to include scare quotes here: And that’s how we and why are going to "win."
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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Yeah, I am supposed to be asleep because I am said I do some scullery work in preparation for the European Social Forum here in Athens. Yes, I take your point. That was a poor paraphrase on my part. The way Z put it was not about "useful sometime allies," but "necessary tactical alliances." ("Necessary" being the key word.) Anyway, I am in agreement with his overall assessment here. The Spirit of Utopia was just translated into English. It's mostly about music, but a lot of Zizek's thoughts about the "messianic" nature of Marxism are already there in Bloch.
Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos
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