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Analysis & Polemic

September 28, 2005 - 2:58pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The Mysteries of New Orleans:

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy"

Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot


We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city
remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern
deliberate design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death,
of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply
physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

September 27, 2005 - 5:56pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Adrian writes

Playing Down Rita

Things are a mess here in Texas and Lousiana. Yes, Houston was generaly spared, but the little towns all around Port Arthur and Lake Charles were hit very, very hard. Things are bad and almost a repeat of what went down in New Orleans.


Poor folks that did not evacuate are left to fend for themselves unless they mobilize for up to ten miles on their own to be taken out of the region without any information as to where they are going or for how long. Folks choosing not to evacuate are not being brought supplies by FEMA or state and local authorities.

September 27, 2005 - 10:23am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Health

"Anarchism, Nudism, Naturism"

Carlos Ortega


Anarchism and the different Naturist views have always been related. This relationship was quite important at the end of the 1920s. The linking role played by the ‘Sol y Vida’ group was very important. The goal of this group was to take trips and enjoy the open air.

The Naturist athenaeum, ‘Ecléctico’, in Barcelona, was the base from which the activities of the group were launched. First ‘Etica’ and then ‘Iniciales’, which began in 1929, were the publications of the group, which lasted until the Spanish Civil War.

We must be aware that the naturist ideas expressed in them matched the desires that the libertarian youth had of breaking up with the conventions of the bourgeoisie of the time.

September 27, 2005 - 9:30am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Science

clore writes: "[This seems like RAW at his very best to me."]

"The Semantics of 'Good' & 'Evil'"
Robert Anton Wilson, Critique

The late Laurance Labadie once told me a parable about a king who decided that everytime he met somebody he would kick them in the butt, just to emphasize his power. My memory may have elaborated this yarn a bit over the years, but basically it continues as follows: since this maniac wore a crown and had an army, people soon learned to tolerate being kicked fairly often, and even began to accept it philosophically or stoically, as they accept taxation and other impositions of kings and governors. They even learned to bend over as soon as they saw the king coming.

September 27, 2005 - 9:17am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Under the Shadows of Terrorism"
Mathew G.H. Toll


The 7th of July terrorist attacks which set off four bombs throughout the London public transport system have murdered 56 and injured 700 people. This is the worst bombing Britain has seen since Pan Am Flight 103 bombing on December 21, 1988.

With theses attacks on London and the British nation a leading member of the "coalition of the willing." This event forces those of us who aren’t taking in by Tony Blair’s much loved “stoicism” to ask a few questions.

September 27, 2005 - 8:36am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Brain Holmes writes:

"Continental Drift

Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization"

Brian Holmes

[Brian Holmes is offering the seminar “Continental Drift" in September and October, 2005 in New York City in conjunction with the 16 Beaver art group. Autonomedia will publish a collection of Holmes' essays, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms, this winter.]

This seminar is called “Continental Drift,” and it's about the different sorts of regional blocs that are forming in the world and in our heads. Now, the first questions to ask could be these:


Why even talk about regional blocs or continental integration? Isn't that just about the European Union, and its attempt to regain some lost power? Why not pursue the bottom-up theory of the multitude that was launched with the book Empire? Or conversely, why not admit that the real force of globalization is American imperialism? How can the abstractions of geopolitics have any meaning for the ordinary individual? And what does “continental drift” have to do with art, or with activism?

September 27, 2005 - 8:20am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Ecology

"Apocalypse Now:

How Mankind Is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth"

Maria Gilardin, Dissident Voice

This headline appeared in the London Independent in early February of 2005, following a conference at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, England, where 200 of the world’s leading scientists issued the most urgent warning to date: that dangerous climate change is taking place today, and not the day after tomorrow.


Floods, storms, and droughts. Melting polar ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. Scientists from the fields of glaciology, biology, meteorology, oceanography, and ecology reported seeing a dramatic rise over the last 50 years of all the indicators of climate change: increase in average world temperatures, extreme weather events, in the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and in the level of the oceans.

September 26, 2005 - 3:11pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Bush in a Bottle"

John Chuckman

There have been rumors of Bush taking to the bottle again. Since alcoholics are never cured, this is possible. The stress of having his ineptitude so publicly displayed as it was in New Orleans and of having his every major policy collapsing before his eyes would certainly tend to push him in this direction.


There are also rumors of very ugly behavior towards associates and especially anyone bringing unwelcome news.


These rumors have sparked stories of the dangers of a drunken President, but I think these stories are misguided. If true, Bush's drinking is a development we should welcome. There is, in fact, less danger from a drunken Bush, and his return to drinking would provide one of the most fitting possible outcomes for his destructive, miserable time in office, a political version, if you will, of time wounds all heels.


His handlers will not allow him to do anything truly dangerous. Neo-cons are moral ciphers, but they are not suicidal. Remember the precautions taken during Nixon's last days in office when he was gulping whiskey by the tumbler? Not only will a Bush back on the bottle effectively be side-lined, but all his ghastly entourage will be forced to spend their remaining time trying to hide the facts.


In the meantime, I think it would be helpful, as well as a fitting political statement, for all concerned Americans who can afford the cost to send a gift bottle of Bourbon to the White House. Who knows, it might just speed things along?

September 26, 2005 - 8:39am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Goodbye Joe"

Jamal Mecklai

me gotta go, me oh my oh

me gotta go pole the pirogue

down the bayou…

The heartbreaking scenes out of New Orleans these past two weeks brought to mind the lyrics of "Jambalaya," one of thousands of great songs that sprung out of the bayou mud of Southern Louisiana over the past few hundred years.


I know – I guess, "knew" would be a better word today – New Orleans, the Cajun country stretching across South Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast extremely well, having been taken to New Orleans on my first fall break in college – a wide-eyed 21-year old graduate student (relatively) fresh off the boat from India.

It was – to use a contemporary phrase – awesome. Not only did we drink all night and whatever part of the day we were up – I particularly remember sitting on the sidewalk swigging Boone’s Farm Apple wine (99 cents a bottle, I kid you not) – but we danced on the streets, heard the finest music and I almost ended up married to a girl who was dancing naked on my table at a bar just off Bourbon Street one night.

September 25, 2005 - 9:01pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Reviews

"Object a As Inherent Limit to Capitalism:

On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri"

Slavoj Zizek

What makes Empire and Multitude such a refreshing reading (clearly the definitive exercises in Deleuzian politics) is that we are dealing with books which refer to and function as the moment of theoretical reflection of — one is almost tempted to say: are embedded in — an actual global movement of anti-capitalist resistance: one can sense, behind the written lines, the smells and sounds of Seattle, Genoa and Zapatistas. So their theoretical limitation is simultaneously the limitation of the actual movement.


Hardt's and Negri's basic move, an act which is by no means ideologically neutral (and, incidentally, which is totally foreign to their philosophical paradigm, Deleuze!), is to identify (to name) "democracy" as the common denominator of all today's emancipatory movements: "The common currency that runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the world today — at local, regional, and global levels — is the desire for democracy."1 Far from standing for a utopian dream, democracy is "the only answer to the vexing questions of our day, /.../ the only way out of our state of perpetual conflict and war."2 Not only is democracy inscribed into the present antagonisms as an immanent telos of their resolution; even more, today, the rise of the multitude in the heart of capitalism "makes democracy possible for the first time"3 Till now, democracy was constrained by the form of the One, of the sovereign state power; "absolute democracy" ("the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts,"4 only becomes possible when "the multitude is finally able to rule itself."5

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