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July 9, 2003 - 4:05pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Michael writes:

"Nothing So Mean Could Be Right"

Once again we enter that silly season in the lives of Americans when
numbers, oratory and brightly colored balloons substitute for thought,
probity and rational discourse. The political convention epitomizes this
circus approach to choosing those we laughingly and unthinkingly refer to as
"leaders."

July 8, 2003 - 5:14pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Worst Kind of Lie"

John Chuckman, July 8, 2003

A few years sometimes make a big difference in human affairs. A few years ago an American President was put through the 18th century ordeal of impeachment, a vast, expensively-staged comic opera of white manes waving and grave baritones intoning, over a dribble on a dress and the lie he told to save himself embarrassment. Today we have a President who has hurled the world into two dirty, pointless wars after what undoubtedly qualifies as the longest sequence of public lies ever uttered in a free society, and yet in his homeland he remains popular and is collecting enough campaign cash to rival the Swiss bank balances of the Russian Mafia.

July 5, 2003 - 4:40pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

[This article continues from Barbarians, Part One]

GO TO WORK!

    The two emissaries describe the subjects as “multitude”, a neutral term of the quantitative sort taken from some scholars of the past that is useful for avoiding the encumbrance of using a qualitative description of sides. Their aim is to convince the subjects that although it may be true that the Empire shows many defects, it is also true that its existence is the result of a right and inevitable necessity. That if the Empire is the One that represents the Many, it is only because it expresses them in a precise arithmetical sum, not because it annihilates them inside itself. That its functioning is not something that the multitudes now suffer, but that they themselves have determined, intentionally or not. In a word, that the will of the Empire is not, in fact, opposed to the desires of the multitude, but that, on the contrary, it is their expression and realization, even if lacking -– which is why there is no reason whatsoever for wanting its destruction. Quite so!

July 5, 2003 - 3:16pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Barbarians: The Disordered Insurgence"

A Critique of Hardt & Negri’s Empire

By Crisso and Odoteo

[Translator’s Preface]

"Barbarians" by Crisso and Odoteo is a text of some importance for anarchists and anyone else who sincerely desires the destruction of this social world of exploitation and domination. It presents a devastating critique of a book that has become one of the most significant theoretical influences on a major part of the so-called anti-globalization movement, Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. When one reads these two texts together, two opposing ways of using language are exposed. Hardt and Negri use a language that is obviously meant to conceal at least as much as it reveals, and that should immediately tip one off to the recuperative nature of their text. Crisso and Odoteo, on the contrary, use direct language as sharp as a barbarian’s sword to cut through the murky web of Hardt’s and Negri’s postmodern doublespeak to reveal the essentially anti-revolutionary core of their perspective.

   

June 27, 2003 - 9:16pm -- nolympics
News
Rants

gnat submits "I was reading this morning that Donald Rumsfeld has put Paul Wolfowitz in charge on Military Tribunals. After ranting about it for a bit, I realized it reminded me of something.



(Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/ 20030627/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_tribunals_9 )


It reminded me that Wolfowitz (as well as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush Sr., Powell, and circumstantially W.) are imperialists in the real sense of the word, so much so that their ideologies of global domination make their conception of justice as just as that of crusaders and absolute monarchs. Any trial whereby US interests can be furthered in any way, as is obviously the case when speaking about POWs held in US custody hostile to American interests, should not be the domain of those who seek gains from the outcome. The plaintiff in any case cannot be the judge, the jury or the executioner. Unless of course we are willing to drastically redefine what justice is, and open for discussion of allowing foreign armies to try US military officials for war crimes in Afghanistan (http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=200305 23 for information of US complicity in war crimes during the “liberation” on Afghanistan). In all honesty, aside from the American ere of moral superiority and the fact that the winners of the war must be “right”, the situation looks the same from both sides. This is not an endorsement of terrorism, my argument, while clearly overly simplified, is stating that leaders of both sides are driven by a particular moral beacon, which is something that should be remembered. The morality that Wolfowitz, and the Bush Administration follow are summed in this statement whose source is discussed later (PNAC):



“a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.”

June 25, 2003 - 5:08pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Real Clash of Civilizations"

John Chuckman, June 24, 2003

There is a real clash of civilizations in the world, but one that has little to do with East and West. It is found in the advanced world and consists in the values of traditional liberalism being attacked by the right wing. Nowhere is this battle noisier and of more consequence to the world's peoples than in America where victory for the right appears all but certain.

June 13, 2003 - 6:34pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"The Failure of Christianity"

Emma Goldman

First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth
journal.

Conceptions and words that have long ago lost their
original meaning continue through centuries to
dominate mankind. Especially is this true if these
conceptions have become a common-place, if they have
been instilled in our beings from our infancy as great
and irrefutable verities. The average mind is easily
content with inherited and acquired things, or with
the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much
easier to imitate than to create.

May 29, 2003 - 7:00am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Bill Not Bored writes:

A Monumental Bad Joke

or, Lou Reed laughs all the way to the bank

What does it take to make famously stone-faced rocker Lou Reed crack a smile? Playing the blues for the first time, says Wim Wenders, director of "The Soul of a Man," the first installment in Martin Scorsese's seven-film series on the blues which premiered Friday at the Cannes Film Festival. Reed joined Beck, Bonnie Raitt and Nick Cave in interpreting the songs of Mississippi blues legend Skip James. "For Lou, it was so much fun, I am proud to announce he actually laughed," Wenders quipped. "And we have it on tape -- no photographer has ever captured him smiling on film." -- New York Daily News, 25 May 2003.

In other words, Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is. On top of that he's a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer . . . . Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock 'n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch. -- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged it out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake," 1975.

May 10, 2003 - 6:40pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"Angered by Snubbing, Libya, China and Syria Form 'Axis of Just as Evil':

Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form 'Axis of Somewhat Evil';
Other Nations Start Own Clubs"

Andrew Marlatt, SatireWire

Beijing (SatireWire.com) -- Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of his State of the Union address.

Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils... best at being evil... we're the best."

May 10, 2003 - 6:04pm -- jim
Rants

From "America, America"

Saadi Youssef (translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa)


I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island

and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.

I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.

I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.

But I am not American.



Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the stone age?

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