Anonymous Comrade writes "Middle East News Online has posted an examination by Ray Hanania of the curious, destructive and symbiotic relationship between the Palestinian HAMAS organization and the Israeli Likud Party: How Sharon and the Likud Party Nurtured the Rise of Hamas.

An Excerpt: In 1978, [former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud founder Menachem] Begin sought to undermine Arafat's influence by funding a program of pacification to win over the hearts and minds of the Palestinian masses. Years later, Begin would unleash his war-mongering defense minister on Lebanon to finish Arafat.



Over the objections of many Palestinian Islamic leaders including the Commissioner of the Muslim Waqf in the Gaza Strip, Rafat Abu Shaban, Israel registered the newly formed 'Islamic Association' which [religious leader Sheik Ahmad] Yassin founded.

Anonymous Comrade writes: Foreign Policy has posted Immanuel Wallerstein's 'The Eagle Has Crash Landed'.

The United States in decline? Few people today would
believe this assertion. The only ones who do are the
U.S. hawks, who argue vociferously for policies to
reverse the decline. This belief that the end of U.S.
hegemony has already begun does not follow from the
vulnerability that became apparent to all on September
11, 2001. In fact, the United States has been fading as
a global power since the 1970s, and the U.S. response
to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this
decline. To understand why the so-called Pax Americana
is on the wane requires examining the geopolitics of
the 20th century, particularly of the century's final
three decades. This exercise uncovers a simple and
inescapable conclusion: The economic, political, and
military factors that contributed to U.S. hegemony are
the same factors that will inexorably produce the
coming U.S. decline.

hydrarchist writes:

The Gamer-Refugee: searching 'Autonomy' in Gamespace(Revised)

[J.J.King / jamie@jamie.com]

In the 1944 text Homo Ludens, the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga argued that Homo Sapiens was no longer an appropriate name for our species: now the playing, rather than thinking, man had become key to a proper understanding of civilisation. 'All play means something,' claimed Huizinga. He attempted to invigorate a philosophical interest not only in the games of children, but also in ‘adult’ games: chess, sport, theatrical plays, plays on words and so on. Games were an acknowledgement of the existence of ‘mind’ in the world, a force that intervened in (what would otherwise be) ‘the absolute determinism of the cosmos’ (1).

Huizinga would presumably be pleased that this interest in games is finally stirring in the world of the academy – and yet, since his text was produced, the idea he advances in his final chapter about the increasing ‘systematization and regimentation’ of play seems increasingly potent (2). How would Huizinga have seen the computer game, for example, one of the most popular forms of play today, and one produced by corporations for the enjoyment of consumers – one, in other words, in which play takes place as a commodity form? And is the philsopher right to suggest, as he does at the end of Homo Ludens, that this form – insofar as it is a ‘profane’ and ‘unholy’ form of play far removed from the original ludic impulse - ‘has no organic connection whatever with the structure of society’ whatsoerver? (3)