February 2012
11 posts
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n 1: Concerning the Violent Peace-Police →
Gandhian strategies have not historically worked in the US; in fact, they haven’t really worked on a mass scale since the civil rights movement. This is because the US media is simply constitutionally incapable of reporting acts of police repression as “violence.”
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Trying to assemble some kind of coherent thoughts about flat affect in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Houellebecq’s Whatever, and Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. Well, Tao Lin does flat affect to an almost parodic extent (but not actually parodic, as that would imply some kind of external standpoint from which to draw a contrast between his affectlessness and something...
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Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges'... →
Hedges quoting Derrick Jensen:
If you live on Ogoni land and you see that Ken Saro-Wiwa is murdered for acts of nonviolent resistance, if you see that the land is still being trashed, then you might think about escalating. I don’t have a problem with that. But we have to go through the process of trying to work with the system and getting screwed. It is only then that we get to move beyond it....
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nursewithwoundlist replied to your link: Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges’ Columns - Truthdig
Moreover, insurrectionists like most black bloc types have no interest in boring old John Zerzan. Terrible article.
Yes, I should have pointed out when I linked to it that the entire article is a load of crap. Hedges knows absolutely nothing about Black Bloc history or tactics and...
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Thirty More Years of Hell →
While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.” Just as in the submerged state of 2012, they did their best to make the government’s hand all but invisible, all the while using the machinery of the Cold War to purge...
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Chris Hedges: The Cancer in Occupy - Chris Hedges'... →
Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it.
You know who owns “locally owned businesses”? Capitalists. But the criticism of vandalism against small businesses actually prevents thinking about what “small businesses” are. I think the coffee shop Hedges is talking about here is a...
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You know how according to the previews every episode of House is the most SHOCKING episode EVER? It occurs to me that Gossip Girl has actually been following a policy of making each episode less shocking than the last. Not in the sense of the diminishing returns of repeatedly attempting to be shocking, but by actually continually dialing down the scandal and reducing the stakes. Aside from being...
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WatchM.I.A.’s new video.
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The other interesting thing about Vorticist Britney Spears was the experience of spending an afternoon making the macros. When the connection between Britney and vorticism occurred to me, I looked through BLAST for quotes and through Britney fan sites for pictures and then started trying to fit the text on the pictures. This meant trying to find an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of text in an...
January 2012
43 posts
No Useless Leniency: Refusal of Work →
Leopoldo Lugones’s short story ‘Yzur’ (from his 1906 collection Strange Forces) is a tale premised on the idea that monkey’s have refused language so they will not be forced to work. The narrator of the story evolves a theory that this initial refusal has led to a degeneration in monkeys, and he aims to demonstrate this by returning one to speech. He buys the animal Yzur...
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“I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the whole economic crap in 5...”
– Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1851
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The rise of the data self < PopMatters →
But my suspicion is that this runs deeper — that data collection is slowly becoming the ideological basis of the self — what we regard as the real self. Data is the authorized way to pursue self-knowledge in the networked society; the other means are suspicious, deluded or outmoded.
I wonder how new this is, or maybe better, how different relationships to data are leading to different forms of...
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From Ned's Review of Lana Del Rey →
nedhepburn:
It sounds like the soundtrack to a James Bond movie directed by and starring twelve year olds.
In more “descriptions of Lana Del Rey that I think are supposed to be critical but which make me want to listen to her album” news.
(The rest of this review is sort of positive-ish although in the rather patronising “it’s for tween girls so let’s lower our...
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What is Google taking when it takes our data? ›... →
A lot of concerns about “privacy” seem to be objections simply to the fact of Google tracking data, to the idea that our behavior can be quantified and mathematized. The concern, that is to say, is about privacy in the sense of our true, innermost, self, our bourgeois subjectivity. Or, to put it another way, people are worried about technology stealing their souls.
In which I try and figure...
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It's Official: Google Is Evil Now →
nelannderthal:
Guess I have a reason to switch to Bing now.
Microsoft’s privacy policy is down right now, but according to the version in Bing’s cache, Microsoft has exactly the same policy people are freaking out about: they record information from different products and services (including what you search for), and combine that information together.
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The songs come off like 15 different variations on a drunk chick at the bar trying to convince someone to come home with her.
I misread this as claiming that each song sounds like 15 different variations on a drunk chick at the bar, which actually isn’t entirely inaccurate and is an aesthetic I could kind of get behind.
Average Is Over - NYTimes.com →
But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average.
“The way to succeed is to be above average. Therefore, we must make sure that everyone is above average.” Thomas Friedman’s extraordinarily marketable skill is his ability...
It's Official: Google Is Evil Now →
bellafaim:
In a radical privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users across all services—email, Search, YouTube and more—sharing information with no option to opt out. The change was announced in a blog post today, and will go into effect March 1.
In an entirely non radical privacy policy shift, Google announced that it would continue doing what it had been...
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We need to talk about Tilda :: rogerebert.com ::... →
When she was not yet five years old, Tilda Swinton told me, she saved the life of her brother. At least that’s what everyone told her, and praised her for, and only little Tilda knew that soon after he was brought home from the hospital she intended to murder the baby.
The evidence is certainly mounting that Tilda Swinton is the most amazing living human being.
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“The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on...”
– Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
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“This logic is missed by, e.g., Lakoff (1996), who struggles to understand why,...”
– Nicole Pepperell, Disassembling Capital, 11.
A note to Alternative Music Scribes having trouble... →
And there’s no need to feel bad that it hasn’t worked out. You’ve given it a good go. You’ve had your chance to impose your boring ideas of authenticity onto a pop creation, to express your disgust that she might be better in the studio than on the stage. That’s the way you like to judge things and that’s fine, it’s just that this isn’t how pop...
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imathers replied to your link: Non-film: Steve McQueen’s “Shame” « Film Quarterly
Aren’t sex addicts using sex as a kind of displacement activity to avoid talking/thinking about ____________?
I don’t really know much about sex addiction, but I think that’s the case, yes. Which makes it so odd that the film concentrates so much on the sex.
Non-film: Steve McQueen’s “Shame” « Film Quarterly →
Shame is dominated by such an overwhelming sense of affectlessness that it could be about depression as much as sex addiction.
Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the film itself uses the subject of sex addiction as a kind of displacement activity to avoid talking about depression.
Disrespectability Politics: On Jay-Z’s Bitch,... →
Black feminists have long pointed to the limitations of respectability politics, steeped as they are in elitist, heteronormative, and sexually repressive ideas about proper Black womanhood. When disrespect becomes where we enter, we confront a reality that is pretty dismal for Black womanhood. But when we enter at respectability, there we confront limitations, too.
This is great on the...
Indie rock's slow and painful death | Music |... →
The Radio 1 playlist, and hence the top 40, is more deadeningly conservative than anybody can remember, dominated by an oligarchy of collaboration-happy artists (Rihanna, Bruno Mars, David Guetta, Pitbull, Jessie J), most of whom converge on the same R&B-goes-to-Ibiza template.
I’m not going to disagree that the Radio 1 playlist is pretty conservative, but it’s not because it...
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Why the S&M Lifestyle is Self-Destructive and... →
S&M, another extension of the office space, for office workers who are addicted to orders and systems of control in their lives; so addicted in fact, that they turn their sexuality into a systematic corporate machine.
LBR this sounds pretty hot though. Agamben somewhere says something like we can prefigure the post-messianic playfulness of the law by dressing up like authoritarian rulers...
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WatchI suppose messing up an appearance on Saturday Night Live has a certain amount of potential hipster appeal. That is, the idea of Lana Del Rey as a delicate and faintly ethereal artist who, nervously, falls apart in the harsh gaze of a middle-American TV audience kind of fits with her narrative. That “Lana Del Rey” is fairly obviously a performance is what makes her a bit more...
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Scoreboard Jesus
thenewinquiry:
Though the scale of hype may make Tebow seem at best a flash in the pan and at worst a prop in a cynical NFL marketing scheme (Charles Barkley has called him “the national nightmare”), the Tebow phenomenon is nonetheless a uniquely American one, tapping into the long intertwining of sports and religion in the U.S. It dates back to the Puritans, who considered sports sinful...
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“There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot—well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W....”
– Lars Iyer, Spurious
“We’re essentially joyful, reflects W. in the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe, that’s...”
– Lars Iyer, Spurious
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“The subject was cats: when Boswell said he didn’t care for them, Rousseau...”
– Robert Zaretsky & John T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel (via The Virtual Stoa)
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“Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get...”
– Elfriede Jelinek, quoted in Žižek, Living in the End Times
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Nae Hauf-Way Hoose: Kimchi and Class Struggle →
This is great for a number of reasons, but I found it particularly interesting because the only aspect of the Korean Wave I’d previously really encountered was the recent popularity of K-Pop in Japan (I’m listening to SNSD’s new Japanese album as I write this), so I’m pleased to get a little bit of a sense of the wider social and political context.