Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Policy Through Rose-Colored Pilot's Glasses"

John Chuckman

Everyone, not attached by threadbare ideology or plain old war profiteering to President Bush's War on Terror, knows that even on its own terms, it can only fail miserably in a great waste of lives and substance. You cannot fight a war against religious faith and opposition to injustice unless you are prepared to be as utterly ruthless as Stalin, and even then, when you lie pickled in your tomb, the roots you missed destroying will grow hardy new plants, as they have in contemporary Russia. But I would never have expected stark evidence for failure to come so quickly.

Marko writes:

"Anarchism and Human Survival:
Bertrand Russell's Problem"



Bertrand Russell throughout his long career as a public intellectual and political activist had reason to reflect on the follies of humanity and the real threats to human survival, threats which are self induced. Much speculation and movie making is devoted toward such survival threatening events as asteroid strikes and mantle head plumes. What is totally ignored is the threat to human survival posed by our own institutions. We can notch another one for the propaganda model; it is to be expected that our pathological institutions would not dwell on their inherent pathology. We can expect nothing less of the corporate media.

jim submits:

"Music From the Left"

R. G. Davis

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali argues that musical innovations prefigure social developments. For those of us interested in effecting changes in society he offers this thought: "Any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form" (1985, xi).

The form of most folk and almost all jazz/pop music does not (cannot) even reflect industrial social relations as we know them, much less make a comment on them. Classical music, or music organized by a trained composer, art music, is more likely to produce an instructional metaphor (and form) with which to examine the foundations of corporate society. I think that the structure/form of a musical composition, no matter what the lyrics, influences the listener's thoughts about the world. The structure contains a view of the world which the listener reiterates in his/her personal musical repetition. The structure then becomes a metaphor for a view of the world.

Full story continues at Davis