Radical media, politics and culture.
August 15, 2004 - 10:53am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Health

NOT BORED writes ....Article by Guy Debord (1985) on food in capitalist society. First time in English translation.


Hunger Reducer

Abat-faim


One knows that this term [1] designated a "meal's principal dish, which one served first to quiet down, to reduce the hunger of the dinner guests" (Larousse). In their dictionary, Hatzfield and Darmesteter refer to the term as "antiquated." But history is the infallible master of dictionaires. With the recent progress of technology, the totality of nourishment consumed by modern society is uniquely becoming hunger reduction.

The extreme degradation of nourishment is a banality that, in the manner of other banalities, is generally tolerated with resignation: as a fatality, a ransom paid for progress that one knows can't be stopped because one is overwhelemed by it everyday. Everyone keeps quiet about it. Some because they don't want to speak of it, others because they can't. The immense majority of the population that tolerates this degradation, as well as their strong suspicions about it, simply can't face such an unpleasant reality. It is never agreeable to admit that one has been played for a fool, and those who have created "beefsteak" [2] -- and its claims -- in the form of a "reconstituted" shadow of itself are also little disposed to admit what they have lost by allowing convenient ersatz semblances into their habitats. Those who can refuse nothing for fear of going back upon all that they have let happen in their lives are habitually the same.

August 13, 2004 - 2:56pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

hydrarchist writes.... This is an article written for the e-zine http://suburbia.sindominio.net
by Nomada and Montserrat Boix about hacklabs.


translated by cain, and then edited and revised by hydrarchist


AcD
~ MeSk

Hacklabs, from Digital to Analogue

Wednesday 10 September 2003

Translated 06 June 2004
revised August 13, 2004

The history of the hacklabs began in 1999, year of the second italian hackmeeting in Milan, where the need to take a great leap forward in digital
communication and create physical links between people interested in the use of new technologies and having a social background was discussed. But let´s proceed step by step... What is a hackmeeting?... The hackmeeting emerged in Italy in 1998. The manifesto of the italian hackmeeting in 2003 underlines that it´s a "meeting of the alternative digital community", setting out a "vision of hacking as an attitude not exclusively related to computers". Our "hacker" being -- states the manifesto -- is manifested in everyday life, even when we don´t use computers. It´s shown when we fight to change everything that we don´t like, such as false and prefabricated news, the commodification and restrictions imposed on the division of knowledge and know-how, and generally the use
of technology to defend dignity and freedom. The hackmeeting meets annually, usually for a duration of 3 days, during which are organized talks and conferences related to the world of liberated data networks, free software, cyber-rights, cryptography, hacking in general and, most of all, it proposes strong links with social collectives that use the net as a space of communication, sharing and struggle for their different causes.

August 9, 2004 - 12:44am -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
War

"The Pentagon as Global Slumlord"
Mike Davis

[This piece is from April 2004 during the general uprising in Iraq and the American siege of Falluja.The current escalation in many Iraqi cities seems to call for some analysis of the general US military strategy.]

The young American Marine is exultant. "It's a sniper's dream," he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah. "You can go anywhere and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are."

"Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him scream a bit to destroy the
morale of his buddies. Then I'll use a second shot."

"To take a bad guy out," he explains, "is an incomparable 'adrenaline rush.'" He brags of having "24 confirmed kills" in the initial phase of the brutal U.S. onslaught against the rebel city of 300,000 people.

Faced with intransigent popular resistance that recalls the heroic Vietcong defense of Hue in 1968, the Marines have again unleashed indiscriminate terror. According to independent journalists and local medical workers, they have slaughtered at least two hundred women and children in the first two weeks of fighting.

August 5, 2004 - 4:44pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

"Patriot Act Bullying Stirs Stronger Opposition:

Courts, Activists, and Civil Libertarians Weigh In Against Police-State Measures"

Allen Thompson

In early June of this year, Joe Previtera was arrested outside an Armed Forces Recruitment Center in Boston. He had been standing there silently for about an hour, dressed like one of the Iraqi prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib. His costume was realistic; he was hooded and caped and from his hands wires led into the crate he stood on. The police department used these wires as reason for charging him with making a false bomb threat. If convicted, Previtara could face several years in prison, far more punishment than the soldiers who tortured the Iraqi prisoners have received.


This incident is emblematic of how the fear of terrorism is being used to justify repressing dissent and taking away civil liberties in post-9/11 USA. The Bush administration is seeking to expand the Patriot Act and make all of its provisions permanent. Immigrants and social-change activists continue to be prime targets for police-state actions. Fortunately, resistance is very widespread.

August 4, 2004 - 7:32pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"We No Longer Own Our Country"

Nuruddin Farah

On the day I needed to fly out of Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, to get back home to Cape Town, my only choice was a Kenyan Fokker, normally used as a cargo plane, that was flying back to Nairobi with passengers. As we were being shown to our seats, the Kenyan captain told the passengers to hand over our passports. He said that he would hold them in the cabin until we landed in Kenya.

August 3, 2004 - 5:09am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

NOT BORED! writes:

"On Basque Armed Struggle"

Guy Debord

An open letter from Guy Debord, dated 1 September 1980, concerning the secret detention of Basque separatists in Spanish jails, translated into English for the first time since 1981. (Addressed "To libertarians")

Esteemed comrades,

We regret to have to draw to your attention a serious and urgent question about which you would ordinarily know more than we, who are far away and foreigners.[1] But we are obligated to clarify the diverse circumstances that until now have made it impossible for you to know certain facts or their meaning. We believe it necessary, therefore, to clearly expose you to those facts, as well as to the circumstances that have prevented them from reaching you.


At this moment, more than fifty libertarians are [secretly] being held in the prisons of Spain, and many among them have been held many years without being tried. The whole world, which every day speaks of the intriguing struggles of the Basques,[2] completely ignores this aspect of the reality of today's Spain. Even in Spain, the existence and names of these comrades are sometimes cited by a narrow sector of opinion, but generally there is silence about what they [the imprisoned libertarians] have done and what their motives were; and nothing concrete has been done to rescue them.

August 3, 2004 - 1:22am -- Uncle Fluffy
Analysis & Polemic
Reviews

Anonymous Comrade writes: Reviewed By: John McMahon | An Anti-Author Whose Identity is Known to the Department of Homeland Security

To celebrate the fact that John Ashcroft's Department of Justice still has access to every American citizen's bookstore and library records, we decided to go to our public library and check out the Critical Art Ensemble's revolutionary manifesto titled Electronic Civil Disobedience, and other unpopular ideas . . .

http://www.altpressonline.com/modules.php?name=New s&file=article&sid=227"

July 31, 2004 - 3:51pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Electoral Politics



Hope is on the Way

The Disturbing Words of John Edwards


John Chuckman


I heard several lines from John Edwards' convention speech on the radio before I clicked it off. Anymore and I would have vomited.


As it was, I experienced a horrible flashback to being a twelve-year old at the Midwest Baptists' Camp Sycamore, sitting in the sweltering cinderblock meeting hall, shirt stuck to the back of a card-table chair, while a strutting little preacher sprayed beads of sweat and globs of spit into the twilight yelling about hell.

July 29, 2004 - 8:36pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley
in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Jennifer Bleyer
From the excellent

Brooklyn Rail



It’s been nearly ten years since Peter Lamborn Wilson—née Hakim Bey—looked at the pitiably state-bound, rule-bound world around him and asked: "Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom?" In a slim, rattling volume called Temporary Autonomous Zone, Wilson intoned that, in fact, freedom is already here. Autonomy exists in time, he said, rather than space. It’s in times of wildness, revelry, abandon and revolution that for even just one brief jail-breaking moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is freed of all political and social control.

Wilson rightly became celebrated as a kind of urban prophet. It was an identity to add the others he bears seamlessly and without contradiction: anarchist, poet, public intellectual, psychedelic explorer, artist, social critic, Sufi mystic. Six years ago he moved upstate from the East Village to New Paltz, New York. The setting is different, but the ideas have only deepened—notably his critique of global capital and "technological determination." In his green wood-frame house, trees rustling overhead and birds chirping outside, we drank tea and talked.

July 28, 2004 - 12:29pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Orion Anderson writes:
"Richard Koenigsberg’s paper on the logic of war and genocide is available for the first time as an on-line publication."


"Dying For One's Country:
The Logic of War and Genocide"

Richard Konigsberg

As the Final Solution began, Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the extermination of men, women, and children. He explained: “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood, then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin.” If he was permitted as national leader to send his own soldiers to die in war, why should he have compunction about sending the mortal enemies of the German people — Jews — to their deaths?


If we understand war as a sacrificial ritual that requires shedding the blood of one’s own people, then the Holocaust is no longer “incomprehensible.” Genocide represents an extension of the logic of war, enlarging the pool of sacrificial victims. If German soldiers were required to “die for the country,” why should Jews be exempt?"

The whole article is

here"

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