Sunday, November 22, 2009
"Glenn Beck promises 100-year plan to undo progress"
From RawStory.Gave a speech, YouTube video link in the article, at a retirement community called "The Villages" in Florida, saying that there's this big socialist plan that's been going on for a hundred years to create the sort of socialist utopia that we're seeing now....and that the Jews have been manipulating us all from the start. Wait, no, that last part wasn't what Glenn Beck said. That was Hitler. Sorry, I get the two confused sometimes.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
And a good one with some quotes by David Sirota: "Anti-Obama Billboard Stirs Controversy"
This one about a racist billboard portraying Obama as a cartoon smiling black man who might be a jihadi, with most of the sign taken up by the words "Birth Certificate?"
Excerpt follows, but Sirota is quite an interesting person in that he once bragged in an article, or should I say heavily implied in an article, that he was down with the working class and average Americans because he owns a golden retriever. Yeah. That sentiment alone is so far outside of reality that it negates the whole concept.
Says the man who put up the sign:
""Since Fort Hood, I've had it," owner Phil West told FOX 31 News Friday. "You can't suggest things. You can't profile. You gotta call a spade a spade."
[Even when the person you're talking about is black, I suppose]
"Everything I have read about Mr. Obama points right to the fact that he is a Muslim. And that is the agenda of what Muslim is all about. It's about anti-American, it's about anti-Christianity," West said."
Then the on target remarks from Sirota:
""It's out of control," Sirota said. "This conservative hatred of Barack Obama is out of contol, and this brings together all those strands of it: the racism, the anti-Muslim fervor. It's one thing to criticise the president on health care, or Wall Street reform, or immigration. But this is outrageous. And I think it's a fair question to ask why these questions about religion and ancestry are being directed so viciously at the first African-American President of the United States."
While the ADL issued a statement calling the billboard an exploitation of the Ft. Hood shootings that is "divisive and offensive, and perpetuates hateful and harmful stereotypes about Muslims", prominent conservatives have been silent thus far."
Excerpt follows, but Sirota is quite an interesting person in that he once bragged in an article, or should I say heavily implied in an article, that he was down with the working class and average Americans because he owns a golden retriever. Yeah. That sentiment alone is so far outside of reality that it negates the whole concept.
Says the man who put up the sign:
""Since Fort Hood, I've had it," owner Phil West told FOX 31 News Friday. "You can't suggest things. You can't profile. You gotta call a spade a spade."
[Even when the person you're talking about is black, I suppose]
"Everything I have read about Mr. Obama points right to the fact that he is a Muslim. And that is the agenda of what Muslim is all about. It's about anti-American, it's about anti-Christianity," West said."
Then the on target remarks from Sirota:
""It's out of control," Sirota said. "This conservative hatred of Barack Obama is out of contol, and this brings together all those strands of it: the racism, the anti-Muslim fervor. It's one thing to criticise the president on health care, or Wall Street reform, or immigration. But this is outrageous. And I think it's a fair question to ask why these questions about religion and ancestry are being directed so viciously at the first African-American President of the United States."
While the ADL issued a statement calling the billboard an exploitation of the Ft. Hood shootings that is "divisive and offensive, and perpetuates hateful and harmful stereotypes about Muslims", prominent conservatives have been silent thus far."
Nice Glenn Greenwald article: "Rule-of-Law Extremism Engulfs Primitive Eastern Europe
About Lithuania investigating torture. The commentary is priceless:
"What sort of a newly elected President would get into office and then start demanding that actions From the Past -- rather than the Future -- be investigated, just because they might be "criminal"? This deeply irresponsible Lithuanian leader apparently doesn't care about inflaming partisan divisions, and worse, appears blind to the dangers of criminalizing policy disputes. Even more outrageously, Lithuania faces one of the steepest recessions in all of Europe; obviously, this is a time, more than ever, that Lithuanians should be Looking to the Future, Not the Past. .."
"What sort of a newly elected President would get into office and then start demanding that actions From the Past -- rather than the Future -- be investigated, just because they might be "criminal"? This deeply irresponsible Lithuanian leader apparently doesn't care about inflaming partisan divisions, and worse, appears blind to the dangers of criminalizing policy disputes. Even more outrageously, Lithuania faces one of the steepest recessions in all of Europe; obviously, this is a time, more than ever, that Lithuanians should be Looking to the Future, Not the Past. .."
Like many things, writing this blog began in earnest because of a crisis.
The crisis came out of the first anti-globalization protest that I went to. It wasn't big. In fact, I don't think that many people know about it. It took place in Chicago in 2002. I went up there with a few friends who were from Chicago and who were friends with the people organizing it. The expectations that I had for it went far and wide because previously I had been very isolated geographically, living in the extreme south of Florida, and had been unable to get to many of the events that went on in the years following the WTO protest. What I found instead of a hopeful experience was a discouraging one that made me question my whole commitment to the scene itself.
The folks who were organizing it were more anarchist and punk oriented than I was, the friends that I went up with sharing the same culture. Because I didn't share a lot of the same outward values there was immense distrust of me, even eventually by my friends themselves, so much so that I got into a large argument with my companions leading to the dissolution of our friendships permanently. I had been cut out from helping altogether, instead just dumped in the plaza where the protest was happening and left for hours until my friends showed up for the main march. In general it sucked beyond belief.
I had trusted in the good will of these folks and had been let down severely, and what I experienced in the wake of it was a profound sense of disease relating to the whole anti-globalization movement. Was this really it? Was this what it was actually about? Or was this some sort of an aberration? If it was an aberration in the anti-globalization movement, then was this still representative of anarchist subculture as a whole? In the end I found my answer in a greater skepticism of self appointed leaders, and didn't give up the values that I'd been working on for years before. But I was still alienated from a culture that I had put lots of work into.
It was the reckoning with that alienation that persisted that gave rise to an acceleration of the rate of writing done for this website, as I went on my own trip to find my own answers instead of depending on an outward movement of some kind to provide them....if I could only locate them, right? I had located some of them and they had profoundly disappointed me, leaving me with a sort of vacuum that had to be filled somehow if I was to go forward with being a radical.
That's when the really weird ideas, ideas that I'm proud of, started coming into play and why they started appearing in the first place: unconventional answers to fill that very vacuum and put me on what I considered to be a surer radical footing than I obviously had before.
My other experiences with anti-globalization protests and personalities were much better, by the way.
The folks who were organizing it were more anarchist and punk oriented than I was, the friends that I went up with sharing the same culture. Because I didn't share a lot of the same outward values there was immense distrust of me, even eventually by my friends themselves, so much so that I got into a large argument with my companions leading to the dissolution of our friendships permanently. I had been cut out from helping altogether, instead just dumped in the plaza where the protest was happening and left for hours until my friends showed up for the main march. In general it sucked beyond belief.
I had trusted in the good will of these folks and had been let down severely, and what I experienced in the wake of it was a profound sense of disease relating to the whole anti-globalization movement. Was this really it? Was this what it was actually about? Or was this some sort of an aberration? If it was an aberration in the anti-globalization movement, then was this still representative of anarchist subculture as a whole? In the end I found my answer in a greater skepticism of self appointed leaders, and didn't give up the values that I'd been working on for years before. But I was still alienated from a culture that I had put lots of work into.
It was the reckoning with that alienation that persisted that gave rise to an acceleration of the rate of writing done for this website, as I went on my own trip to find my own answers instead of depending on an outward movement of some kind to provide them....if I could only locate them, right? I had located some of them and they had profoundly disappointed me, leaving me with a sort of vacuum that had to be filled somehow if I was to go forward with being a radical.
That's when the really weird ideas, ideas that I'm proud of, started coming into play and why they started appearing in the first place: unconventional answers to fill that very vacuum and put me on what I considered to be a surer radical footing than I obviously had before.
My other experiences with anti-globalization protests and personalities were much better, by the way.
"Emotion as life term sought for US student in Italy"
Title fromRawStory article. I'm just waiting for Seattlers to go over the edge and basically, in a polite and passive aggressive way, insinuate that the Italian court system is made up of guinea wops who don't know what they're doing. I mean, Amanda Knox went to Seattle Prep, private school supreme. That makes her unimpeachable, no? I mean, we all know that those Italians aren't as smart as us anglo and nordic people living in one of the whitest cities in America. Shoot, we even have a "Nordic Heritage Museum" in Ballard to commemorate the Norwegian population here....sure beats Perugia, right?
UC protesters---good for them
Students in the University of California system of colleges are protesting over tuition hikes that will likely make them unaffordable to many students who attend. Universities and colleges are the last official route in the United States to upward mobility. It's no longer possible to "work your way up" in a company or otherwise find a path from point A to point B like that when you start off pretty far down in the social ladder. Education remains the equalizer that everyone points to, although of course there are lots of problems with our educational system as well. State schools were specifically created so that regular people could go to college. Without this method for social advancement people at the bottom are basically fucked, and the last vestiges of the claim that the U.S. is a meritocracy go out the window.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Just a thought about Obama's declaration about Khalid Sheik Muhammad:
Usually, if a political figure makes a statement like that it's thought to prejudice the jury to the point where a mistrial is in order. But of course that won't happen, in part because liberals love Obama and are willing to overlook things like a President declaring the verdict to a trial that has yet to happen.
Another strange juxtaposition:
Just put a sheaf of Monthly Review's in a bookshelf that contains, among other things, Scientology pamphlets about faith healing that I got from the "L. Ron Hubbard Life Experience Museum" in L.A. It was hot, the thing was air conditioned, and I have somewhat of an interest in Scientology, although not really to the level of actually being part of it. The museum itself was schlocky in the extreme, an example of what unbridled hero worship produces.
Personally, I'm getting to the age where it's no longer possible to just eat what I want without suffering consequences, so I'm more concerned with "Dietetics: the modern science of physical health" than with Dianetics.
Personally, I'm getting to the age where it's no longer possible to just eat what I want without suffering consequences, so I'm more concerned with "Dietetics: the modern science of physical health" than with Dianetics.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
An interesting thing, ideology wise, would be...
A synthesis of Dostoevsky's positivity with Nietzsche's nihilistic perspective. Despite being concerned with profoundly messed up situations, Dostoevsky had an overwhelming hopefulness about the human condition and the possibility of love overcoming the fuckedupness of life. He located this love not in interpersonal love but in divine, religious, Christian love and saw the coming of this sort of redemption as being kind of the resurrection or at least the coming at the end times. I'm not either a Christian or an Orthodox Christian, but there's something about this sense of transcendent love in Dostoevsky's thought and the possibility of reconciling man with man through it that's very interesting. Maybe if this sense of the possibilities of love was combined with Nietzsche's general critique of things there'd be some sort of positive doctrine that could be built on and worked with and applied to things in outside, social, life.
The original Lost Highway Times Logo
From circa spring 2003.
Offered on Cafe Press with a variety of items to choose from, including cups.
Was more of a small time capitalist in those days, I guess, since I also had an Amazon Affiliate thing going that offered a combination of fucked up books and political ones. But then I dissolved that and went to linking exclusively through Powells or small presses or distros. The Cafe Press store may come back one of these days.
Yes, my Amazon Affiliate site connected with this blog was probably one of the few places that you could see a sex manual trans. by Sir Richard Francis Burton called "The Scented Garden", and a book by De Sade next to books by Chomsky and Marx.
10 most and 10 least corrupt countries
From the Seattle PI:
The world's ten most corrupt countries:
1. Somalia
2. Afghanistan
3. Myanmar
4. Sudan
5. Iraq
6. Chad
7. Uzbekistan
8. Turkmenistan
9. Iran
10. Haiti
[notice #s two and five there?]
The world's ten least corrupt countries:
1. New Zealand
2. Denmark
3. Singapore
4. Sweden
5. Switzerland
6. Finland
7. Netherlands
8. Australia
9. Canada
10. Iceland
The world's ten most corrupt countries:
1. Somalia
2. Afghanistan
3. Myanmar
4. Sudan
5. Iraq
6. Chad
7. Uzbekistan
8. Turkmenistan
9. Iran
10. Haiti
[notice #s two and five there?]
The world's ten least corrupt countries:
1. New Zealand
2. Denmark
3. Singapore
4. Sweden
5. Switzerland
6. Finland
7. Netherlands
8. Australia
9. Canada
10. Iceland
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
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