Friday, May 13, 2011
Terrorist Ben Kenobi Killed in Outer Rim
Notorious terrorist Obi-Wan Kenobi finally killed after eluding capture for two decades.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Quotable Quotes, I
Nuggets dug up from the bowels of the internet
"Last week, John Boehner found himself in the position of having to defend tax subsidies to oil companies; he agreed that subsidizing the massive, and massively profitable, oil companies was perverse but, he pleaded, what about all the small, struggling oil companies? This is a particularly amusing instance of the appeal to an imaginary petit bourgeoisie, which you also see in claims that people getting paid half a million dollars are “small business owners.” This is, perhaps, a central feature of bourgeois ideology, which imagines that capitalism is based on individual “property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence” (Marx), rather than being a whole system of social production. This particular aspect of bourgeois ideology does seem to be undergoing a resurgence of popularity at the moment, perhaps as a kind of protective reaction to the increasing visibility of the structures of capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis."
--Voyou Desoeuvre
"It boils down to this: Berlusconi wants to reduce democracy not to a plebiscite but to an opinion poll, where every citizen is isolated and deprived of any cultural and social instrument for his or her effective independence, defenceless before a structure of power based on the mass media and patronage. For Berlusconi, public life is nothing but a grand arena for ad-men and touts, a gigantic souk. Or if you prefer, Berlusconi conceives of the country as a firm (belonging to him, naturally), where instead of citizens there are employees and/or consumers, a principal shareholder and a few minority shareholders, and where the decisions of the Managing Director cannot be countermanded or delayed. This is why for his tycoon mentality—and he became a tycoon, lest it be forgotten, thanks to the political support of Bettino Craxi—such things as the separation of powers, limited government and constitutional constraints are truly incomprehensible and unreasonable. The Berlusconi regime is not fascist; what it is actually creating is a postmodern version of the ancien régime patrimonial state."
-- PAOLO FLORES D’ARCAIS
"Last week, John Boehner found himself in the position of having to defend tax subsidies to oil companies; he agreed that subsidizing the massive, and massively profitable, oil companies was perverse but, he pleaded, what about all the small, struggling oil companies? This is a particularly amusing instance of the appeal to an imaginary petit bourgeoisie, which you also see in claims that people getting paid half a million dollars are “small business owners.” This is, perhaps, a central feature of bourgeois ideology, which imagines that capitalism is based on individual “property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence” (Marx), rather than being a whole system of social production. This particular aspect of bourgeois ideology does seem to be undergoing a resurgence of popularity at the moment, perhaps as a kind of protective reaction to the increasing visibility of the structures of capitalism in the wake of the financial crisis."
--Voyou Desoeuvre
"It boils down to this: Berlusconi wants to reduce democracy not to a plebiscite but to an opinion poll, where every citizen is isolated and deprived of any cultural and social instrument for his or her effective independence, defenceless before a structure of power based on the mass media and patronage. For Berlusconi, public life is nothing but a grand arena for ad-men and touts, a gigantic souk. Or if you prefer, Berlusconi conceives of the country as a firm (belonging to him, naturally), where instead of citizens there are employees and/or consumers, a principal shareholder and a few minority shareholders, and where the decisions of the Managing Director cannot be countermanded or delayed. This is why for his tycoon mentality—and he became a tycoon, lest it be forgotten, thanks to the political support of Bettino Craxi—such things as the separation of powers, limited government and constitutional constraints are truly incomprehensible and unreasonable. The Berlusconi regime is not fascist; what it is actually creating is a postmodern version of the ancien régime patrimonial state."
-- PAOLO FLORES D’ARCAIS
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Arab Springtime in the New Left Review
An intelligent analysis by the great historian and essayist, Perry Anderson, that ends on a note wondering whether the political revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia will also become social revolutions. Followed by an illuminating interview with the Egyptian sociologist, Hazem Kandil, on the social roots of the revolution and its potential future.
No Blood for Oil!
Surprise, surprise. Material interests do have a role in decisions of war and peace. Who'd have thunk it?
Monday, May 2, 2011
Equality as Unconstitutional
Citizens United was already a travesty of judicial reasoning -- a decision that only a plutocrat could love. Apparently, now, the principle of equality is unconstitutional. Ronald Dworkin lays out the bizarre questions and reasoning during oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Arizona Free Enterprise Club PAC v. Bennett. According to this reasoning, it is only a matter of time until political offices are bought and sold, literally, on Wall Street. Why go through the middle man -- after all, it's economically inefficient.
Obligatory Post on the Death of OBL
Well, the bloodlust has been satisfied and thousands of fratboys and sorority girls are in the streets celebrating a victory in what has become our great national pastime.
I don't begrudge the families of those slaughtered on 9/11 if they should feel vindicated and that justice has been done. My guess is that most will not be carousing on the streets, but rather quietly reflecting about their loss.
My sense, though, is that even if the media crowns this event as the world-historical equivalent of the falling of the Berlin Wall or the taking of Hitler's bunker, the capture and death of OBL means much less than it might have even six months ago. New historical events have outdistanced OBL. For one, Tunisia. Another, Egypt. The political Islam of al-Qaeda -- a misnomer in the sense that its ideology was always more a nihilistic reaction towards modernity and western imperial dominance than a politics (in fact, it is an anti-politics) -- has had its day in the sun. While it has been able to incur sympathy of many in the muslim world given the humiliations of the US imperial presence throughout the Middle East, Palestine, and lack of democracy throughout the Arab world, it never truly offered a plausible political, economic, and social alternative, much less program, for those suffering under autocratic dictatorship and economic de-development. For all the failures of Arab nationalism in the post-colonial era, it at least had an alternative economic vision to Western capitalism and imperialism. The very failure of this alternative laid the seedbed for the growth of political Islamism; the Arab spring has now overturned this soil and planted new seeds and new hopes.
No, the death of OBL will not have much impact upon the Arab world. There will still be off-shoots of supporters, but they will not have the allegiance of the masses, nor be able to capture the imagination of the great majority. Rather, this death will have a much greater impact upon the West, particularly, the United States. For all of Obama's talk about the importance of OBL's capture, he did not allude to a lessening of the threat. The war on terror will continue; early criticisms of the vagueness of a war declared upon a tactic still obtain. Following Rumsfeld, we must ask what metric we can use to measure "victory"? The WOT is just too convenient a spectacle for the power elites of this country, whether they are the military-industrial complex, the media, the increasing surveillance state, or economic elites looking for distractions from the increased inequality and economic precariousness that a majority of people in this country face. Even as we capture the "most dangerous terrorist in the world," the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue (and may actually be prolonged -- see Gareth Porters recent reportage on the supposed troop reductions in Iraq or the talk of extending the occupation of Afghanistan past 2014). Pakistan's resistance to drone attacks increases, whatever the nature of their cooperation with the US in OBL's death.
So, my fellow Americans, enjoy the celebrations. After all the partying, we will still wake up to three major military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, an economy still in the shitter for the majority, and a political system tone-deaf to the voice of the people. But, hey, at least we got our two-minutes of hate.
I don't begrudge the families of those slaughtered on 9/11 if they should feel vindicated and that justice has been done. My guess is that most will not be carousing on the streets, but rather quietly reflecting about their loss.
My sense, though, is that even if the media crowns this event as the world-historical equivalent of the falling of the Berlin Wall or the taking of Hitler's bunker, the capture and death of OBL means much less than it might have even six months ago. New historical events have outdistanced OBL. For one, Tunisia. Another, Egypt. The political Islam of al-Qaeda -- a misnomer in the sense that its ideology was always more a nihilistic reaction towards modernity and western imperial dominance than a politics (in fact, it is an anti-politics) -- has had its day in the sun. While it has been able to incur sympathy of many in the muslim world given the humiliations of the US imperial presence throughout the Middle East, Palestine, and lack of democracy throughout the Arab world, it never truly offered a plausible political, economic, and social alternative, much less program, for those suffering under autocratic dictatorship and economic de-development. For all the failures of Arab nationalism in the post-colonial era, it at least had an alternative economic vision to Western capitalism and imperialism. The very failure of this alternative laid the seedbed for the growth of political Islamism; the Arab spring has now overturned this soil and planted new seeds and new hopes.
No, the death of OBL will not have much impact upon the Arab world. There will still be off-shoots of supporters, but they will not have the allegiance of the masses, nor be able to capture the imagination of the great majority. Rather, this death will have a much greater impact upon the West, particularly, the United States. For all of Obama's talk about the importance of OBL's capture, he did not allude to a lessening of the threat. The war on terror will continue; early criticisms of the vagueness of a war declared upon a tactic still obtain. Following Rumsfeld, we must ask what metric we can use to measure "victory"? The WOT is just too convenient a spectacle for the power elites of this country, whether they are the military-industrial complex, the media, the increasing surveillance state, or economic elites looking for distractions from the increased inequality and economic precariousness that a majority of people in this country face. Even as we capture the "most dangerous terrorist in the world," the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue (and may actually be prolonged -- see Gareth Porters recent reportage on the supposed troop reductions in Iraq or the talk of extending the occupation of Afghanistan past 2014). Pakistan's resistance to drone attacks increases, whatever the nature of their cooperation with the US in OBL's death.
So, my fellow Americans, enjoy the celebrations. After all the partying, we will still wake up to three major military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, an economy still in the shitter for the majority, and a political system tone-deaf to the voice of the people. But, hey, at least we got our two-minutes of hate.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Economics as Ideology, Part I
Roger Gathman is a blogger I've been following for about 6 years. Limited, Inc. (and Gathman's other blog, News of the Zona) and the Whiskey Bar blog (RIP) were two of my early serendipitous finds on the internet for which I am grateful. They were moments of sanity during the run-up to the Iraq War and the popping of the bubble. The following post demonstrates why:
http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2011/05/neo-liberalism-and-insanity-of.html
http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2011/05/neo-liberalism-and-insanity-of.html
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