30.9.03

EVOTE.COM : Keeping Score in the Great Game of Politics Check the byline on the piece about Wilson/Rove, currently the front page article. It's nothing too mind-blowing - any of us could have done it - but I hope it's done a nice job getting some thoughts across.
relevant chomsky is Old Wine, New Bottles:

"Typically, unions are presented as anti-worker organizations. The typical movie about unions is something like On the Waterfront, where Marlon Brando is the heroic worker who stands up against the corrupt union and defends the workers against the union; that's the hero. The unions are an alien element which tried to break up our harmony and harm the workers, and you gotta protect yourself from them. That's the theme that goes all the way through.

Consciously designed, incidentally. Very interesting business propaganda about this in the late 1930s. Business was terrified when American workers finally got the rights that they'd had in Europe sixty years earlier, namely the right to organize, and they won their first legislative victory, the Wagner Act which gave them the right to organize -- first and last legislative victory. Business was terrified, there was all kinds of frenzied discussion in the business journals. [...] And the main technique was to use public relations methods -- I mean they also continued to use force, workers still got killed -- but the main idea was to use public relations techniques, propaganda, to try to create an image of us vs. them. In fact, it was called the Johnstown Valley formula; it worked so well in breaking steel strikes in the late thirties. The Mohawk Valley formula [started] in Johnstown Valley, Pennsylvania. The idea was to present an image of us vs. them, where us is the sober worker with his lunch-pail, the housewife you know preparing dinner, the hard-working executive toiling sixteen hours a day for the benefit of everybody, the honest editor turning out the truth. That's us; we're all in harmony. And then there's them, you know these aliens, these outsiders who are disrupting our harmony and are anti-American, and this and that and the other thing, and you present these images in the press and in those days the radio, nowadays television, and the pulpit and so on and so forth, and you can kind of mobilize the public, they hoped, and it succeeded very often, into defending us and our harmony, the harmony of the worker and the executive, against them, the outsiders who are trying to disrupt. That's the formula that's produced, and it runs through a whole long period of public propaganda. By that I mean things, everything from comic strips to movies to, these days, television, and so on. Well, that's one of the techniques for controlling the public mind."

also avail on mp3

29.9.03

Elia Kazan dies at the ripe old age of 94. Director of some great films, including the interesting sounding Viva Zapata!, although;

"To some, however, Kazan diminished his stature when he went before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era and named people he said had been members of the Communist party with him in the mid-1930s.

But he insisted years later that he bore no guilt as a result of what some saw as a betrayal. "There's a normal sadness about hurting people, but I'd rather hurt them a little than hurt myself a lot," he said."

[…]

"His friendship with Miller was never the same after his congressional testimony. Kazan talked with Miller before he testified, and Miller later wrote in his journal about a side of his friend that he had not seen before: "He would have sacrificed me as well."

[…]

"Some critics saw in as a subtext of On the Waterfront a justification for Kazan's decision to cooperate with congressional red hunters. The movie's hero, portrayed by Marlon Brando, breaks the code of silence on the docks and courageously fingers a corrupt, murderous union boss."

I think Chomsky mentions (somewhere. Ed?) this depiction as a classic example of Hollywood’s anti-organised labour propaganda. Note also Kazan’s HCUAA testimony, on his objections to "being told what to think and say and do" by the commies.

"Greater fear hath no man that he shaft his friend to save his own skin."

via ai/office
SCHNEWS
8 Years old (420 issues....and still counting)


SchNEWS was born in a squatted Courthouse in Brighton in 1994 as part of Brighton's campaign against the Criminal Justice Act when a few bright sparks decided to start reading out the news. Some of those bright sparks then decided to put some of it on paper - nearly nine years later and still printing! From the anti road protests at the M11 in London to the Newbury Bypass to the big Reclaim The Streets events of the nineties SchNEWS was there. From worker struggles such as the Liverpool Dockers, fights against the privatisation of public services, racism, genetic engineering, to reporting on positive solutions - week in week out SchNEWS reported the news from the direct action frontline.

Then in February 1998 some of the crew went to Geneva to the first ever Peoples' Global Action conference. Here we met people involved in grassroots protests from across the world, swapped stories, made friendships and began to see the bigger picture, and with many others who had been involved in localised direct action campaigns, our attention now turned to also attacking the corporate carve-up of the entire planet. The first signs of this new shift was in May 1998 when mass demonstrations were held world-wide simultaneously against the G7 Summit in Birmingham, then again on June 18th 1999 (J18). But it was the mass protests against the WTO in Seattle in November 1999 that really brought this 'movement' to the world's attention. Needless to say, ongoing rampant economic globalisation, the near-universal clampdown on civil liberties since September 11th 2001, continuing refusal by the fattest felines to acknowledge the rapid decline of the environment and right-wing fundamentalist US imperialism are still keeping us busy...

It's impossible to know how many people read SchNEWS, particularly now with the internet. Out of the 3,000 that get printed, 350 are paper subscribers, and around 50 prisoners in Britain and abroad get it each week for free. Add to that around 8,000 email subscribers, many of which get it as a PDF* file (so it looks exactly like the real thing). While many photocopy and distribute their paper copy locally, PDF files allow people all over the world to print out SchNEWS, and distribute it, before it's even hit the streets in Brighton! We often hear from people who print out PDFs and distribute each week - at infoshops or wholefood shops, on campuses and out on the streets, all over the world. Added to that popular sites like Urban 75 mirror SchNEWS each week, while A-Infos news service email it out internationally to subscribers, and the odd issue gets translated into other languages. So as well as the many thousands who visit the SchNEWS site each week, it is hard to work out how many we reach altogether.

Our Party and Protest section is the most popular feature on our website, updated every week with a mishmash of festival dates, meetings and demos as well as a section on where to go if you want to find out radical contact points around the country. Our DIY section has useful tips on everything from setting up your own newsletter to making your own bio-diesel. We also try to continually update our contacts list - currently listing over 800 useful grassroots organisations.


schnews online here

28.9.03

highly recommended- this 1970 chomsky lecture on libertarian thought - mp3

26.9.03

Palestinian intellectual Edward Said has died in New York aged 67 after a battle with leukaemia, a colleague at Columbia University said.

ai/office

25.9.03

Paul Krugman - BuzzFlash Interview: "'Well, a couple of things. The first is that a good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You're basically just part of a propaganda machine. And that's a pretty large segment of the media.

As for the rest, certainly being critical at the level I've been critical –- basically saying that these guys are lying, even if it's staring you in the face –- is a very unpleasant experience. You get a lot of heat from people who should be on your side, because they accuse you of being shrill, which is everybody's favorite word for me. And you become a personal target."
Supply Side Jesus. The proof of the divine trickle down effect.

via ai/office

24.9.03

"It is time to recognize that the prohibition of drugs is a huge threat to U.S. national security, and that regardless of the social consequences, we must legalize drugs in order to pull the proverbial financial rug out from under all the transnational criminal, narcoterrorist, and terrorist organizations that benefit from drug prohibition. These are the organizations that pose the greatest threat to U.S. national security. They cannot be deterred by our nuclear or conventional forces. They have no territory for us to occupy, but often operate within the sovereign territory of states to weak to crack down on them. We cannot threaten the Russian Mafia militarily, but we can take away one of their most profitable businesses."

Found on the website Conservatives Against Bush, which is just what it sounds like.

22.9.03

alan's daily reports


Welfare for the Rich or Tough Love (“that’s ‘tough’ for the poor and vulnerable, and ‘love’ for the rich and powerful”) – a parable about how economics actually functions.



I was reminded of this point when reading this story about farm subsidies in the UK and who gets what;



“The latest study reveals that farming support in eastern England amounts to £121 a head, compared with £41 in Britain as a whole. It shows that the CAP dwarfs other EU regional aid and social programmes designed for needy regions away from East Anglia, such as for the north-east.

Lamenting the level of subsidy directed to the barley barons, Iain McLean, who led the study team, said it was extraordinary that while less-favoured parts of Britain were crying out for aid to boost flagging economies "the real beneficiaries of European expenditure in Britain seem to keep quiet about it"



***


How is this illusion possible? Take a look at “Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopaedia 1500 to the Present, by Professor Nicholas Cull, Professor David Culbert, Professor of history at Louisiana State University, and Professor David Welch, Professor of modern history at the University of Kent, Canterbury, published by ABC-CLIO”



the encyclopedia awards the US the dubious accolade of being the "largest disseminator of propaganda and persuasion in history".

It says: "The US would not have come into being without propaganda, nor would its society exist as currently constituted.

"Yet the average American continues to take comfort in the notion that propaganda is something one associates with Nazi Germany, neatly distinguishing between propaganda and advertising and defining the latter as dealing with information or persuasion and the former as a form of deception.

"Collective amnesia is too strong a way to characterise this curious state of affairs, but its seems to take some doing to live in a society that is the world's greatest consumer of propaganda while at the same time convincing oneself this is not so."

See the relevant LSU page, a review here or buy it (for an extortionate £62). Hopefully LRB will review it…

from alaninternational

19.9.03

'there is only one truth'

An artical by Tim Predmore, a US soldier on active duty with the 101st Airborne Division, based near Mosul in northern Iraq, from today's guardian.

'So what is our purpose here? Was this invasion because of weapons of mass destruction, as we have so often heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime because they were closely associated with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof?'

does it need to be anymore clearer...?

The London Anarchist Bookfair is on the 25th of October this year at ULU on Malet Street. It’s apparently the premier anarchist meeting occasion of the year. Any lounge folk fancy coming over for it, let me know and I’ll se you there.



***



Links to all the press everywhere.



***



Just listening to a radio item this morning about this bombing.



Totalitarian institutions don’t like being trifled with…



***



Another example of this is the Lockerbie farce. This report from a UN approved observer is mind blowing, a court process openly subverted in order to hide the truth.



***



Relief to hear executive pay is weathering the storm okay.



***



Robert Kagan et al. take note: Fallacies


from alan/office

17.9.03

Synergies with some of the Finkelstein content - found this rather interesting blasting of Chomsky's political contributions:

"Chomsky's sort of been the poster boy for the Problem With The Left for angry non-leftist liberals for a while now (Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens have both done some heavy hitting), and I do think that many of the things he says are outrageous and seriously irritating. But I must admit that I'm rather of two minds about the man. On the one hand, he is one of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century. First he invents linguistics. Then he revolutionizes it--over and over again. His thinking has deep implications for philosophy of language, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology--all things I care very much about."

Chomsky, 'the scientist'. Great. But then:

"And this brilliance, I feel, ought to carry over into his political writing, too [...] We're talking about one of the towering geniuses of the twentieth century. This guy is, if not quite like Newton or Kant or Einstein, at least like Hume or James or Russell. He's invented entire new scientific disciplines that now flourish in the world's greatest universities. Among philosophers and linguists he is universally admired--if not always agreed with--for his thinking. His name's going to be in the intellectual history books for a long, long time."

What's this sick heroism? Brown-smelling "völkischer Realismus"? How about, not quite like Nietzsche but at least like Schopenhauer, or not quite like Gramsci but at least like Althusser. Interesting comparisons, some weird notion of value involved (not quite a hummer but as good as any SUV etc.). Anyway. It continues:

"So I guess you could say I'm conflicted. I have a hard time believing that someone so smart and so committed to finding the truth could be wrong about the world. But I do."

Point: with a history of ideas as above under the belt, seeing NC's truth might be rather tough, yes.

Will leave you with following amusing critique of Paul Berman's Chomksy-blasting (looks strangely familiar, think we've been through this before):

"After 9/11, Berman continues, Chomsky was similarly doctrinaire and deluded. He found the "entirely predictable" attacks by Al Qaeda "the reply of oppressed people from the Third World to centuries of American depredations." Chomsky, Berman scoffs, "had no basis at all," in his ridiculous bestseller 9/11, "to attribute these centuries of Third World motivation to bin Laden."

No; but then, he didn't. The "terrorist atrocities," Chomsky noted in 9/11, were "a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all sides." The likely perpetrators were "extreme Islamic fundamentalists," "murderous...religious elements" who "for 20 years have caused great harm to the poor and oppressed people of [the Middle East]"; not surprisingly, since the latter are "not [their] concern." Al Qaeda has "little concern for globalization and cultural hegemony," and bin Laden himself "knows virtually nothing of the world and doesn't care to." There is not a word in 9/11 ascribing Third Worldist political motivations to bin Laden or Al Qaeda. Berman had no basis at all to attribute this absurd misreading of their motives to Chomsky.

In ten pages, Berman manages to make more, and more serious, errors of fact and logic than Chomsky has made in 10,000. An impressive performance."

16.9.03

A threat to the rich

Forcing the poor countries to walk out of the Cancun trade talks may rebound on the west

George Monbiot
Tuesday September 16, 2003
The Guardian

Were there a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, it would be awarded this year to Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade negotiator. A week ago, in the Guardian's trade supplement, he argued that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) "helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness into a more Kantian world - perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law".
On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas Hobbes's words, they were "a war of every man against every man", Lamy scuppered the negotiations, and very possibly destroyed the organisation as a result. If so, one result could be a trade regime, in which, as Hobbes observed, "force and fraud are ... the two cardinal virtues". Relations between countries would then revert to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty and brutish behaviour of the powerful ensures that the lives of the poor remain short. More.

12.9.03

11.9.03

The slaves of money - and our rebellion

Marcos, in today's Guardian

'This is the transcript of a message - Marcos's first international communiqué for four years - delivered on Wednesday to the anti-globalisation conference taking place alongside the WTO global trade negotiations in Cancun'

via joseph

10.9.03

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

'Depending on where along the political spectrum power is situated, apostates almost always make their corrective leap in that direction, discovering the virtues of the status quo. "The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat," Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. "You always wore it the 'right' way around." If apostasy weren't conditioned by power considerations, one would anticipate roughly equal movements in both directions. But that's never been the case. The would-be apostate almost always pulls towards power's magnetic field, rarely away However elaborate the testimonials on how one came to "see the light," the impetus behind political apostasy is--pardon my cynicism--a fairly straightforward, uncomplicated affair: to cash in, or keep cashing in, on earthly pleasures.

Indeed, an apostate can even capitalize on the past to increase his or her current exchange value. Professional ex-radical Todd Gitlin never fails to mention, when denouncing those to his left, that he was a former head of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Never mind that this was four decades ago; although president of my sixth-grade class 40 years ago, I don't keep bringing it up. Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations on the exploitation of one's political past? In any event, it's hard to figure why an acknowledgment of former errors should enhance one's current credibility. If, by a person's own admission, he or she had got it all wrong, why should anyone pay heed to his or her new opinions? Doesn't it make more sense attending to those who got there sooner rather than later? A member of the Flat-Earth Society who suddenly discovers the world is round doesn't get to keynote an astronomers' convention. Indeed, the prudent inference would seem to be, once an idiot, always an idiot'

[...]

'Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse. A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky. It's the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has "grown up"--i.e., grown out of one's "childish" past. It's hard to pick up an article or book by ex-radicals--Gitlin's Letters to a Young Activist, Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism--that doesn't include a hysterical attack on him. Behind this venom there's also a transparent psychological factor at play. Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out but he didn't. Hating to be reminded, they keep trying to shatter the glass. He's the demon from the past that, after recantation, no amount of incantation can exorcise'

[...]

On the King of Apostates:

'Although a tacit assumption equates unpredictability with independence of mind, it might just as well signal lack of principle. As if to bear out this point, Hitchens has now repackaged himself a full-fledged apostate. For maximum pyrotechnical effect, he knew that the "awakening" had to be as abrupt as it was extreme: if yesterday he counted himself a Trotskyist and Chomsky a comrade, better now to announce that he supports Bush and counts Paul Wolfowitz a comrade. Their fates crossed when Wolfowitz and Hitchens both immediately glimpsed in September 11 the long-awaited opportunity: for Wolfowitz, to get into Iraq, for Hitchens, to get out of the left.

[...]

'the élan with which Hitchens has shed his past and, spewing venom, the brio with which he savages former comrades is a genuine wonder to behold. No doubt he imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at all'

[...]

Hitchens collects his essays during the months preceding the U.S. attack on Iraq in The Long Short War. He sneers that former comrades organizing the global anti-war demonstrations "do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all" (emphasis in original), and the many millions marching in them consist of the "blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist." Similarly, he ridicules activists pooling their meager resources for refreshments at a fundraiser--they are not among the chosen at a Vanity Fair soiree--as "potluck peaceniks" and "potluckistas."

All sounds a bit familiar...

A series of declassified US documents have revealed the extent of America's role in the Chilean coup:

'on the 30th anniversary of the coup, professors, journalists and citizen activists around the world are continuing to expose the full role of the US government in financing and promoting this bloody coup, which ushered in the 17-year military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.

Thousands of top secret documents which were declassified over the past five years have now been synthesized in a new book, The Pinochet File, by investigative reporter Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives, a Washington-based investigative centre. "The US created a climate of a coup in Chile, a situation of chaos and agitation," said Kornbluh. "The CIA and state department were worried that the [Chilean] military ... were not ready for a coup."

The top secret documents accumulatively detail the crude workings of Washington during the Cold War. "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," reads a CIA document from October 1970. "It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US government] and American hand be well hidden."'

[...]

'While conservative Chileans argue that the coup was a home-grown affair, the current Chilean minister of education, Sergio Bitar, says: "That internal crisis was activated by the North American policies against it. We see how they energetically obstructed all types of credit from the World Bank and the InterAmerican Bank ... these were decisive actions. This were political and financial pressures that were very relevant [to the ensuing coup.]"

The US effort to destabilise Chile was led by a policy of massively funding and bribing non-leftwing Chilean politicians.

Throughout the 1960s, the US secretly spent millions funding political parties of their choosing - usually the moderate Christian Democrats led by Eduardo Frei Montalva. By the early 1970s, Chilean society had become so leftwing that Washington decided to change tactics. First, President Nixon authorised $10m to be spent "to make the economy scream".'

One can only imagine (all to easily) what will start to be released 30 years from now...

'you know we said all that stuff about Iraq, well.....'

9.9.03

...we looked at the receipt

sweet jesus...

'Europe's largest arms fair, Defence Systems and Equipment International is being held in London, and for the first time the media have been allowed full access...So that's what 'merchants of death' look like. They wear sober suits - dark blues and black dominate. They are mostly men, and on average they are not very young

[...]

'A poster shows a curvaceous blonde, the inscription reads "The perfect shape". But she is not draped over the bonnet of a car, but a Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol with a 15 bullet magazine'

Hiding the 'inappropriate' (!!) products

'The UK government, which helps to organise the event, has been so kind to provide exhibitors with a list of products which to display would be "improper". Cluster bombs are legal, and were used to great military success - and some say even greater civilian damage - in the Iraq war. But they are an "emotive issue in the UK", say the organisers, so arms makers have been advised that it might be "inappropriate" to display them (they still show up in brochures, though, for example the D632/642 bomblet artillery shell from Rheinmetall of Germany).

However, what is definitely not visible is war itself. There are no casualties anywhere, no real-life battle footage, no film of the displayed hardware doing its best in action'

Shopping around...

"Could you wrap up one for me to take home now?"

"We are not allowed to sell the Javelin, you can buy it only through the US army foreign sales office", Mr Terrell tells me.

Plus there is the little issue of the price tag. Killing a tank (and its crew) with a Javelin missile will set you back $85,000, plus $135,000 for the portable and reusable launch unit.

And anyway, this is not a sales show.

"We are just here to raise awareness, exchange business cards" and meet industrial partners, says Mr Terre... (!)'


...............................................................................


7.9.03

An Equity Concerning Political Justice - William Godwin (1756-1836)

I’ve searched all over the net to try and find some précis’s of his political writing, or decent criticism, but had no luck. This synopsis of life/work is from and old issue of Green Anarchist and is the best I can find. Nonetheless, it portrays a very interesting character. Despite the dense and grandeur style of language, and the odd discrepancy in his argument, (free will?) considering the social/historical context, his ideas are hugely radical:

‘The efficacy of political institutions will be rendered still more evident, if we enquire into the history of the most considerable vices at present existing in society; and if it can be shewn that they derive their inveteracy from political institution’

This is from a chapter entitled ‘Influence of Political Institutions Exemplified’ from his book ‘An Enquiry concerning Political Justice’ (1789), if you time you can find it here

‘To attain a happy and free life we must be honest and truthful. How do we know what is true? By following the dictates of reason which is common to all people. This means discussion; relying on proof not on power, on argument not on authority, on openness not on deception

supposedly for a brief period, Godwin was the most celebrated political theorist in England, but even within his own lifetime became almost completely unkown.

Interestingly also the father of Mary Shelly (Frankenstein), which would also make him the father-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who penned 'Ode to the West Wind' - no doubting Godwin's political influence there!
This story provides the basis of the growing story of Ambassador Wilson and his wife Valerie Wilson, a likely CIA agent who had her cover blown by "senior White House officials" as retaliation for Wilson's outspoken attacks against the Bush administration tactics in pressing for war in Iraq - specifically hitting the Niger uranium story hard. This link here leads to an article that is taking the investigation further, fingering Karl Rove as the insider, while also outting some of Rove's shadowy familial past (Rove, who has dual German citizenship, appears to be the grandson of Karl Roverer, a mid-century German who's company helped build Birchenbau). I don't take much stock in attacks on bloodlines, but the fact that the fight is gettin a bit bloody is worth noting. I think this is more likely than anything to pull down the administration, as it all seems very plain, there isn't much uncovering that needs to be done (after all the crime was leaking to the press, and the press is right out there) and there are laws that, once put into affect, make the process automatic. No leaning can change what happens, not unless more laws are broken, and that's just gonna bring em down all the faster...

3.9.03

Interesting article about bloggers as monitorial citizens. Especially amusing was this part:

"The evident preference of the great mass of the public for soft news, infotainment, and a brand of journalism that many "political intellectuals" clearly see as crass and shallow, presents seemingly insuperable barriers to achieving any meaningful form of broad-based civic discourse leading to a truly informed citizenry. Yet the conviction that journalism (including self-publishing phenomena like blogging) should embody more lofty aspirations and tackle 'worthy' subjects is not confined to intellectuals of a broadly left-leaning orientation (like Tim Dunlop or Eva Cox). Right-leaning economist Gerard Jackson's Brookes News recently launched a remarkably vitriolic attack on Australia's leading (in terms of audience size) blogger Tim Blair. The author, Joe Cambria, seems to regard Blair as letting down the right-wing cause by exhibiting insufficient intellectualism:

"Blair's articles and blog are, to be charitable, rather long on smart aleck commentary and extremely short on analysis. Furthermore, they suggest, rightly or wrongly, that he is not what one might call bookish. Now how can anyone successfully tackle the left without a reasonable knowledge of economic theory, the history of economic thought, economic history and of leftist thought? Yet Blair gives no indication of being even slightly acquainted with these subjects. Nevertheless, despite his obvious shortcomings and shallow commentary, Melbourne's Adam Smith Club, the H. R. Nicholls Society, the Devines and now the publicly funded magazine Quadrant appear to be presenting Mr Blair as something he self-evidently is not - and that is a rightwing intellectual."

That attitude ignores, or at least treats as irrelevant, the fact that Blair reputedly often attracts a daily audience to his blog numbering in the tens of thousands, where more academically-inclined bloggers, such as University of Queensland economist John Quiggin or University of Sydney law academic Kim Weatherall, typically enjoy daily 'hit' counts in the hundreds."

Tim Blair's blog can be found here.

via philosophy.com

2.9.03

Monbiot on Brutal Diplomacy unfair trade and the World Trade Summit in Mexico next week, part of a three part series in the Guardian
"Handel und Adel. — Kaufen und verkaufen gilt jetzt als gemein, wie die Kunst des Lesens und Schreibens; Jeder ist jetzt darin eingeübt, selbst wenn er kein Handelsmann ist, und übt sich noch an jedem Tage in dieser Technik: ganz wie ehemals, im Zeitalter der wilderen Menschheit, Jedermann Jäger war und sich Tag für Tag in der Technik der Jagd übte. Damals war die Jagd gemein: aber wie diese endlich ein Privilegium der Mächtigen und Vornehmen wurde und damit den Charakter der Alltäglichkeit und Gemeinheit verlor—dadurch, dass sie aufhörte nothwendig zu sein und eine Sache der Laune und des Luxus wurde:—so könnte es irgendwann einmal mit dem Kaufen und Verkaufen werden. Es sind Zustände der Gesellschaft denkbar, wo nicht verkauft und gekauft wird und wo die Nothwendigkeit dieser Technik allmählich ganz verloren geht: vielleicht, dass dann Einzelne, welche dem Gesetze des allgemeinen Zustandes weniger unterworfen sind, sich dann das Kaufen und Verkaufen wie einen Luxus der Empfindung erlauben. Dann erst bekäme der Handel Vornehmheit, und die Adeligen würden sich dann vielleicht ebenso gern mit dem Handel abgeben, wie bisher mit dem Kriege und der Politik: während umgekehrt die Schätzung der Politik sich dann völlig geändert haben könnte. Schon jetzt hört sie auf, das Handwerk des Edelmannes zu sein: und es wäre möglich, dass man sie eines Tages so gemein fände, um sie, gleich aller Partei- und Tageslitteratur, unter die Rubrik "Prostitution des Geistes" zu bringen."

Nietzsche, "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" 1-31

1.9.03



"keep moving! nothing to be seen here"


"you look to see-
fuck the police"