Radical media, politics and culture.
May 13, 2004 - 12:24pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Un-Liberating the Airwaves:

WFMU's Ken Freedman on the Post-Janet Jackson FCC"

Dave Mandl, Brooklyn Rail

Dave Mandl (Rail): How have things changed for radio broadcasters in
the wake of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance?


Ken Freedman: Things have changed drastically in recent months. As
recently as last fall, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued
a series of decisions that loosened their language rules
considerably — ruling, for example, that the word "fuck" was permissible if
used non-literally, as an adjective. Things have now not only reverted to
the way they were before, they've become much more rigid than ever.

May 13, 2004 - 8:55am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Trots in Space"

Matt Salusbury


We think of UFO cults, typically, as being naïve, fancy-dress Californian affairs, scary religious Doomsday sects, or even neo-Nazi groups convinced that flying saucers operate from a secret Antarctic base. But there was one UFO cult at the opposite end of the political spectrum: a Trotskyite UFO cult.

They called themselves the Posadists after their founder Juan R Posadas and, like many UFO cults, they bore a fierce loyalty to their “dear master”.1 They believed that close encounters were evidence of superior socialist civilisations from Earth’s future. Their bizarre belief in flying saucers was not channelled to them by some tackily-named space entity but “theoretically informed” by Marx and Trotsky, and was for them a logical extension of Marxist dialectical materialism. Posadas wrote: “We will travel to planets millions of light years away under a Socialist society.”


Full story is here.

May 12, 2004 - 4:56pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

"Changing Copyright"

Negativland

In an attempt to suggest a culturally sane solution to the continuing legal confrontations between owners of copyrighted cultural material and others who collage such material into new creations, we advocate a broadening of the copyright concept of Fair Use. We want the Fair Use statutes within copyright law to allow for a much broader variety of free, creative reuses of existing work whenever they are used in the creation of new work.

May 12, 2004 - 2:42pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

"Tourists and Torturers"

Luc Sante, New York Times

So now we think we know who took some of the photographs at Abu Ghraib. The works attributed to Specialist Jeremy Sivits are fated to remain among the indelible images of our time. They will have changed the course of history; just how much we do not yet know. It is arguable that without them, news of what happened within the walls of that prison would never have emerged from the fog of classified internal memos. We owe their circulation and perhaps their existence to the popular technology of our day, to digital cameras and JPEG files and e-mail. Photographs can now be disseminated as quickly and widely as rumors.

May 11, 2004 - 7:10am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

hydrarchist writes... well here is a report from an organizer with the Dublin Grassroots Network, protagonist of the demonstrations and actions "Against the Europe of Capital/No to Fortress Europe" which took place simultaneous with the official celebrations of EU enlargement that took placfe in Ireland on the Mayday Weekend. For the record, I was present myself but am not the author ;-)

The long march on Farmleigh

In terms of the development of a libertarian movement in Ireland
the march on the EU
summit at Farmleigh will probably be seen as a turning point. For
the first time the movement mobilized large number of people from
outside its own ranks, in a demonstration that was in direct defiance
of the Irish governments attempt to ban such demonstrations.

May 7, 2004 - 2:45pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

JZB writes:

"Art of Darkness:

The Abu Ghraib Effect"

J. Bratich


The average duration of an afterimage on the human eye is generally no more than a few minutes. What is less measurable is an afterimage on an entire culture, much less on global public opinion. So what can we say about the lingering effects of the traumatic images of Abu Ghraib?

May 7, 2004 - 12:45pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Prisons & Prisoners

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Thing With No Brain"

John Chuckman

I had an unpleasant moment on the day Bush decided to address "the Arab world." He is a man I cannot stand hearing, so when his voice comes on the radio, I always switch it off. Well, this time I was too far away and necessarily heard a couple of sentences, the ones starting with "People in Iraq must understand…And they must understand…."

May 7, 2004 - 12:34pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Filipino Lessons for America's Strategy in Iraq"

William Niskanen, Financial Times

[The writer, an economist and former defence analyst, is chairman of the
Cato Institute, a prominent right-libertarian think-tank.]

America's first experience of a relatively "easy" war followed by an
extended period of guerrilla combat was not in Iraq; it was a century ago
in the Philippines. Max Boot, the neoconservative commentator, described
the defeat of the Filipino insurrection as "one of the most successful
counterinsurgencies waged by a western army in modern times;" a model of
how US forces could prevail in Iraq." The parallels to date however, are
ominous.

May 5, 2004 - 11:12am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Two-Fold Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg"
Peter Hudis, News & Letters

[The following is a talk delivered at a panel on Rosa Luxemburg sponsored by Monthly Review Press at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City in March 2004, on the occasion of the recently published The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson.]

Far from being any distant memory, the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg continues to impact the major ideological and social struggles of our time. One reflection of this was the debate which broke out a year ago, in April 2003, over the Cuban government’s decision to impose jail sentences (ranging from six to 28 years) on 75 dissidents and to summarily execute three Black Cubans who tried to commandeer a boat to Florida.

In response to these actions, Eduardo Galeano, the longtime anti-imperialist activist and theorist who has long supported the Cuban Revolution, wrote:

"The Cuban government is now committing acts that, as Uruguayan writer Carlos Quijano would say, 'sin against hope.' Rosa Luxemburg, who gave her life for the socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin over the project of a new society. Her words of warning proved prophetic, and 85 years after she was assassinated in Germany she is still right: 'Freedom for only the supporters of the government, however many there may be, is not real freedom. Real freedom is freedom for those who think differently.'"

Galeano also quoted Luxemburg’s statement from the same work, The Russian Revolution, that "Without general elections, without freedom of the press and unlimited freedom of assembly, without a contest of free opinions, life stagnates and withers in all public institutions, and the bureaucracy becomes the only active element."(1)

Galeano’s comments helped ignite a firestorm of controversy inside and outside of Cuba.

May 3, 2004 - 7:38pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Gender

Yoshie writes:

"Winning the Culture War, Losing the Class Struggle"

Yoshie Furuhashi


The Culture War is over, and conservatives have lost. No less an authority on the conservative camp in the Culture War than Paul M. Weyrich declared in 1999: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important." If we have won the Culture War, though, why are we in such bad shape?

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