In an old joke from the German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter from me is written in blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink..."

Is this not how ideology functions? We "feel free", now as then, when we lack the language - "the red ink" - to articulate our unfreedom. It is the basic task of critical art and culture to provide the red ink.

"I believe pornography is at the center of the biggest cultural revolution of our century."



looks fairly pleased doesnt he


Braun was tackling this enterprise during a period in history when even brief, fleeting glimpses of partial nudity were considered a major taboo. The Cold Was was in full effect Nations hated each other, and pornography seemed the perfect vehicle to incorporate a multinational police apparatus. In the non-unified European countries like Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Italy, France and Spain -- printing boxes for porn or getting film developed was extremely dangerous. Everything Braun did during the early sixties and 1970's was a felony, and penalties in every nation (including the United States) were as swift and brutal as one might expect.

But Braun refused to shoot conventional, soft-core flicks. He considered half-assed flashy titty shows "a brain-damaging institution created by a bunch of criminals to blind people, to milk gullible masses to the limit"



They are demonized, they are hated, they are sometimes violently attacked.

They are freedom.

pornographer bios

What is your opinion/wisdom/information about the Thatcher/Mann/Archer?/Equatorial Guinea/Zimbabwe plot? It is a fascinating story which touches on all sorts of dark and dangerous ground. The news started in March, the Guardian has a good introduction herea guide to what is going on here, and a who's who as well, it's all fascinating, sinister and weird.

Monbiot is obviously fuming...

"Mann and Thatcher (Harrow, too thick for anywhere else) belong to a class which still believes it has a God-given right to oversee the lives of the Africans. Among Lady Thatcher's friends with homes on the slopes of Table Mountain was John Aspinall (Rugby, Oxford, Royal Marines), the gambling millionaire, zoo-keeper and remnant of that species of upper-class British fascist that used to keep the Duke of Windsor company. Aspinall believed that most of the human population should be culled by means of "benign genocide". He argued that "medical research should be funded into abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and birth control" and described his third wife as "a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable". Aspinall worked with Mangosuthu Buthelezi to undermine the African National Congress. He argued that South Africa should be split into 30 bantustans.

"Aspers" was the hub of a circle of rightwing extremists who sought to meddle in the affairs of Europe's former colonies. Robin Birley, the son of one of his closest friends, was mauled by one of Aspinall's tigers when he was 12, but this did their relationship no harm. Birley's mother left her husband for Aspinall's chum Sir James Goldsmith, and both Aspers and Birley (who inherited Annabel's, London's poshest nightclub, from his father) stood as candidates for Goldsmith's Referendum party. Some years ago, I had a furious row with Birley after he told me that he believed he had not just a right but a duty to give help to Renamo, the South African-backed force which terrorised the people of Mozambique."

Mann is a fascinating, evil character... and has just been convicted and scentenced to ten years in Zimbabwe, the arbiter of international justice!

"Mann founded his company, Executive Outcomes, with the British businessman Tony Buckingham. Buckingham counted among his friends the privy counsellor and former leader of the Social Democrats, Lord Steel.Until 1997 when he resigned, Steel was a director of one of Buckingham's other African interests, a company called Heritage Oil and Gas. He said at the time that his resignation was due to the company's restructuring, but later reports said that he resigned because of its connections with Executive Outcomes." (executive Outcomes has a history of dodgy actions... investigations and stories are linked from this page. These incluse protecting oil instalations in Angola. I met a PR man from Chevron Texaco (who I have heard described as 'running Angola') he told me that Mann worked for Chevron Texaco in Angola a few years ago, they were also involved in Sierra Leone when the British Army was there 'peacekeeping')

Meanwhile, the Equatorial Guinean 'opposition' hide out in (ex imperial rulers) Spain in waiting

Among the cast list of mercenaries and rightwing businessmen dragged into the alleged coup affair, Severo Moto, the self-styled "president" of the Equatorial Guinea government in exile, has emerged as a pivotal figure. Well-placed South African sources said that he was flown to neighbouring Mali on the eve of the coup, in preparation for his unveiling as the country's new leader.

But Mr Moto, who has been in exile in Spain since 1999, yesterday denied any involvement with Sir Mark Thatcher or the alleged coup attempt in the former Spanish colony. "The claims are absolutely false," he told the Guardian. "I didn't even know [Lady] Thatcher had a son." However, other sources in Madrid said it was common knowledge that Mr Moto had been planning to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema .... more

Obviously this all has something to do with OIL. Loads has been discovered in recent years in West Africa, which is causing renewed instability and conflict in the region (as predicted in this page on the 16th of March.

It looks like the US and UK governments are getting dragged into the row now.

any other news? sources? opinions?

Q: Though you cherish your Kantian project, are you not, on its behalf, acting like an advocate for a “military humanism?”

good lord - i might have to rethink my entire ideological outlook. where's satan's cock?

On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy

Have you all seen the 'this land' animation? If not check out some of the jibjab animations, they are hilarious

FREEDOM AT LAST

Claire Cozens and agencies, in the Guardian, Thursday August 26, 2004

Media organisations are preparing a formal protest to the Iraqi authorities after dozens of journalists in Najaf, including the entire BBC team, were forced from their hotel at gunpoint and detained by local police.

more

The police officer who burst into the Guardian's room, wearing a balaclava and pointing a Kalashnikov, said in Arabic: 'We're going to fuck the lot of you."

"Die Technik des Schriftstellers in dreizehn Thesen:

I. Wer an die Niederschrift eines grösseren Werks zu gehen beabsichtigt, lasse sich's wohl sein und gewähre sich nach erledigtem Pensum alles, was die Fortführung nicht beeinträchtigt.

II. Sprich vom Geleisteten, wenn du willst, jedoch lies während des Verlaufes der Arbeit nicht daraus vor. Jede Genugtuung, die du dir hierdurch verschaffst, hemmt dein Tempo. Bei Befolgung dieses Regimes wird der zunehmende Wunsch nach Mitteilung zuletzt ein Motor der Vollendung.

III. In den Arbeitsumständen suche dem Mittelmass des Alltags zu entgehen. Halbe Ruhe, von schalen Geräuschen begleitet, entwürdigt. Dagegen vermag die Begleitung einer Etüde oder von Stimmengewirr der Arbeit ebenso bedeutsam zu werden wie die vernehmliche Stille der Nacht. Schärft diese das innere Ohr, so wird jene zum Prüfstein einer Diktion, deren Fülle selbst die exzentrischen Geräusche in sich begräbt.

IV. Meide beliebiges Handwerkszeug. Pedantisches Beharren bei gewissen Papieren, Federn, Tinten ist von Nutzen. Nicht Luxus, aber Fülle dieser Utensilien ist unerlässlich.

V. Lass dir keinen Gedanken inkognito passieren und führe dein Notizheft so streng wie die Behörde das Fremdenregister.

VI. Mache deine Feder spröde gegen die Eingebung, und sie wird mit der Kraft des Magneten sie an sich ziehen. Je besonnener du mit der Niederschrift eines Einfalls verziehst, desto reifer entfaltet wird es sich dir ausliefern. Die Rede erobert den Gedanken, aber die Schrift beherrscht ihn.

VII. Höre niemals mit Schreiben auf, weil dir nichts mehr einfällt. Es ist ein Gebot der literarischen Ehre, nur dann abzubrechen, wenn ein Termin (eine Mahlzeit, eine Verabredung) einzuhalten oder das Werk beendet ist.

VIII. Das Aussetzen der Eingebung fülle aus mit der sauberen Abschrift des Geleisteten. Die Intuition wird darüber erwachen.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea - wohl aber Wochen.

X. Betrachte niemals ein Werk als vollkommen, über dem du nicht einmal vom Abend bis zum hellen Tage gesessen hast.

XI. Den Abschluss des Werkes schreibe nicht im gewohnten Arbeitsraume nieder. Du würdest den Mut dazu in ihm nicht finden.

XII. Stufen der Abfassung: Gedanke - Stil - Schrift. Es ist der Sinn der Reinschrift, dass in ihrer Fixierung die Aufmerksamkeit nur mehr der Kalligraphie gilt. Der Gedanke tötet die Eingebung, der Stil fesselt den Gedanken, die Schrift entlohnt den Stil.

XIII. Das Werk ist die Totenmaske der Konzeption."

Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse (1928), S. 46-49

"This project explores airplane sickness bags as a potential site for political activism. We have developed a slogan "You’re making me sick" and designed rubber stamps with George W. Bush’s address at The White House printed on them. Users are encouraged to modify the airplane sickness bags on flights they may take to send a message to the President. Whether left behind for future passengers to ponder or actually mailed to The White House, this project co-opts the airline industry as a global distribution system for messages of disgust addressed to our world leaders."

more from morgan schwartz

Remember all the climate change reports and peak oil stuff from January and February? Well, that all got cleared out of the press to make way for the war in Iraq and our FEAR of terrorism, which is kept simmering by a constant stream of red alerts and round-ups of muslims.

It has taken Britain a good kick in the Bocastle to look beyond their newspapers which scream about fanatics, war, terror etc. etc. to look up at the skies and around at the wacky weather and realise...



... that something is going on, when bizzare things like Britain being battered by waves hurling giant rocks start to happen and other reports start saying that the problem is not confined to Britain...

... Extreme weather threatens to trigger aid crisis

Sophie Arie in Rome and Jason Burke, Sunday August 15, 2004, The Observer

The world's biggest international aid agency has warned that tens of millions of the world's poorest people are threatened by an unprecedented wave of freak and extreme weather, and that aid workers may be unable to cope with the global humanitarian crisis that might result.
Clouds of locusts, cyclones, massive floods and devastating droughts are wreaking havoc in many of the world's poorest countries, and agencies don't have the resources to cope, said John Powell, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme.

priorities strait: I say ban weapons (and all motor racing), put armies to work feeding the world's poor and cleaning up the mess they've made, and invest the money in renewable energy and we might just be ok. meanwhile we should all be enjoying ourselves a lot just in case ... simple really...

"A starved, decaying thing, [analytic philosophy] paces obsessively around even the smallest scrap of anima:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Tractatus 7)

Reasonable Wittgenstein scholars tear their hair out at the prolific misapplication of this quote. Fergus Kerr once remarked to me that he wished Wittgenstein had never written it, and that he's sure a living Wittgenstein would think the same. But can we blame our hated post-positivist brothers and sisters? With so little license to speak of ethics, such shrinking ground on which to stake a politics, can we blame their retreat into mysticism and/or scientism?"

Beware rise of Big Brother state, warns data watchdog, By Richard Ford, Home Correspondent, The Times

Britain's information watchdog gives warning today that the country risks “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” because of government plans for identity cards and a population register.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, says that there is a growing danger of East German Stasi-style snooping if the State gathers too much information about individual citizens.

He singles out three projects that he believes are of particular concern. They are David Blunkett’s identity card scheme; a separate population register planned by the Office for National Statistics; and proposals for a database of every child from birth to the age of 18.

Times article

Another article and links from The Register



Needless to say, all this was said in SchNEWS months and years ago...

SchNEWS on ID cards: from May... The implementation and running of the (ID card) system is likely to be taken up by Schlumberger Sema, a company which is already conducting trials with the Passport Agency to produce biometric ID cards. Schlumberger, who have been bought by Atos Origin, say that their “best of breed solutions can help your company achieve a smart and robust level of security.” Sounds great.

Schlumberger have a history of ever-so-slightly-less-than-popular schemes, extracting tax payers money to make a quick buck and at someone elses expense. Under the government’s ‘Benefit Integrity Project’ people receiving benefits because of illness or disability were asked to prove they couldn’t work. Usually it takes around an hour for a doctor to check someone’s illness or disability. But Sema, who were often paid by the visit, managed to rattle off check ups within a matter of minutes. As a result thousands of people lost their benefits. The government eventually scrapped the programme due to “a serious error of judgement”.

The company does have some experience in the spying game though. Sema’s got the benefit of John Deutch, disgraced former Director of the CIA, on its board. Deutch has a bit of a murky track record in the Pentagon too, helping to oversee the US invasions of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Grenada, which led to thousands of deaths during the 1980s. His experience with data secruity’s not too hot either. He was dismissed from the CIA for keeping 17,000 pages of, according to the CIA, “enormously sensitive material at the highest levels of classification,” on his home computer which was also used by his children for school work and surfing the net.

A track record like that on the protection of sensitive data might be problematic as Blunkett has justified the scheme on the basis that “our liberties will be strengthened if our identity is protected from theft”. Privacy International’s Director, Simon Davies, however, warned “The technology gap between governments and organised crime has now narrowed to such an extent that even the most highly secure cards are available as blanks weeks after their introduction. Criminals and terrorists can in reality move more freely and more safely with several fake “official” identities than they ever could in a country using multiple forms of “low-value” ID such as a birth certificate.”

But it might not just be criminals who are after our data. The scheme will rely on computers being used with all our private information by thousands of people, especially the Boys in Blue. The Police Complaints Commission has admitted that “there will always be a few officers willing to risk their careers by obtaining data improperly.” And that’s the police! We don’t think there’s any danger of private companies misusing our information to make a bit more money though.

SchNEWS on the children's database: Also from May... A couple of months ago the government published the Children’s Bill, which is supposed to protect children from abuse. But rather than putting more money into social services so that social workers are not overstretched and understaffed it will create an Orwellian database of every child in the country (11 million people) which will do little to protect children at risk from harm. Now call us paranoid, but isn’t a vast database another step towards a total surveillance society where your every move is traced and if you don’t conform to a defined set of behaviours then you are labeled subversive or anti-social?

SchNEWS predicts the rise of interlinked databases, poulation registers and ID cards back in 1995

"Even given the constraints under which it is currently produced, pornography is valuable. It sends out messages of comfort and rebellion. It says: Lust is not evil. The body is not hateful. Physical pleasure is a joyful thing and should not be hidden or denied."

Indypendent Aug 12-25, by IMC Staff 13 Aug 2004

The third in our series of issues on the Republican National Conference.

Featuring articles on: the evolution of protest pens, why protest works, the connection between country music and conservatives, Bush's contingency plans to cancel the elections and how the GOP has screwed over New York.

Download a full PDF version of the magazine

We're printing 200,000 copies of this issue, believed to be the largest print run in decades by any radical grassroots newspaper in the U.S. Help us pull it off. We'll be distributing throughout the city over the next few weeks. If you would like to get involved, please contact us at indy_distro@yahoo.com or call 212-684-8112.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Tell you what I will give $10,000 to the P.L.O. in your name if you can find historical fact in my book that you can prove to be false. I issue that challenge, I issue it to you, I issue it to the Palestinian Authority, I issue it to Noam Chomsky to Edward Said,

[...]

FINKELSTEIN: Turnspeak is not Orwell, Mr. Dershowitz, you're the Felix Frankfurt chair at Harvard, you must know that Orwell would never use such a clunky phrase as turnspeak.

finkelstein vs dershvoitz ("the case for israel") great fun

Last March in Bonn, Goldhagen was given the "Democracy Prize" by the Journal for German and International Politics. Before a large audience philanthropist Jan Philipp Reentsma delivered a eulogy and philosopher Juergen Habermas gave an appreciation.

The analysis directs us ineluctably to the conclusion that schizophrenia is a myth

who's in here?



Otto Gross was the first analyst to emphasise the dialectical interdependence between individual inner change on the one hand and collective political change on the other.

Gross perceived the individual within the dynamics of the nuclear family and was the first to empathize deeply with the child in this conflict. And he recognized the way in which family structures that violate the individual reflect those of patriarchal society. For him the concept of the orgy described the space in which individual and collective liberation could become possible within the framework of a matriarchal ritual. Thus the idea of the orgy became his term for a sacralization of radical politics.

Gross did influence the course of analytic theory and clinical practice to the present day. He was a 'pioneer of life experiment' (Green, 1998, Introduction) and tried to live his radical ideas in both his private and his professional life - which he refused to separate. Thus he became unacceptable to those trying to establish the credibility of analysis as a science in the eyes of society and academe in the early years of this century. Already in 1921, less than a year after his death, the writer Anton Kuh wrote of Gross as 'a man known only to very few by name - apart from a handful of psychiatrists and secret policemen - and among those few only to those who plucked his feathers to adorn their own posteriors' (Kuh, 1921, pp. 161f.).



oder auch:

»Das Ziel wird die Befreiung der Liebe von der Sabotage durch die latenten Autoritätsmotive sein, das passive wie das aktive, die Unterwerfungsbereitschaft wie den Willen zur Macht.«

desweiteren-

Otto Gross - Leben, Werk und Wirkung

lots more at The propaganda remix

Islam is not alone in producing fanatical sects - Roman Catholicism has its own,
Opus Dei has sided with the powerful against the weak, both theologically and politically, Johann Hari, 13 August 2004.

This summer, the beaches of the world are awash with The Da Vinci Code. It's a daft, mediocre thriller - but it contains two words that matter: Opus Dei. The novel depicts this strange sub-strata of the Catholic Church as the Pope's secret police. According to the author, Ron Brown, they are a mad, murderous mob who pick off the enemies of their own brand of ultra-conservative Catholicism.

From the Independent

Pope John Paul II has been a strong supporter of Opus Dei. John Paul II's press spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, is perhaps the most famous member of the organization.

In 1960s Spain, Francisco Franco appointed several members of Opus Dei as ministers. These ministers are generally acknowledged to have introduced to Franco's rule a capitalist, technocratic ideology which contrasted with previous Falangist, Carlist and military influences. Simultaneously, some other members of Opus Dei were exiled on account of their political ideas, like the founder of Diario Madrid who lived in Paris and would later have a leading role in the Spanish transition to democracy.

In present-day Spain, members of Opus Dei have been appointed as ministers by Partido Popular leader José María Aznar. Now that Aznar and the PP / Opus Dei party has been voted out, Opus Dei are less powerful, but still very powerful. They have a reputation as rich, powerful, arch-conservative, vengeful and dangerous.

In Ireland, members of Opus Dei (along with other religious or political organisations) have for decades been required to declare their membership if asked to serve in the government. In recent times, no known Opus Dei members have held cabinet posts.

In the United States, the Boston Globe reported connections between the Opus Dei priest Father C. John McCloskey and some conservative Catholic politicians.

Opus Dei states that its members are completely free in their personal, professional and political lives, and that the organization plays no role in the professional decisions made by members, including those who work in politics, and therefore cannot be held responsible for them.

(some of the above from Wikipedia)

The Opus Dei Awareness Network is a catholic organisation trying to set the record strait and raise awareness about this Kinky Katholic Kult. Below are some 'corporal mortification' tools used by the groups members to remind themselves of Christ's suffering. One is worn arount the top of the thigh and is spiky, the other is a more traditional type of whip used in the usual S and M way on the buttocks of the believer...



Good Article on Right Web "group watch"

Here The group's website refutes all the acusations against them.

other sources about Opus Dei

FOIA Hubbard

protestant culture

In the first place, Google's claim that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web" must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, "Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'" In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all. This is not "uniquely democratic," but rather it's uniquely tyrannical. It's corporate America's dream machine, a search engine where big business can crush the little guy.

Because it allows for very fast creation of hyperlinked ideas, many people install Wikis on their own machines to act as notebooks. You can throw things into them very quickly, and create vast swaths of interlinked research and material without really thinking about it. Writing WikiWords - missing out the spaces - becomes second nature.

Leon Khun from Rob the Rub's website, which is worth a visit.

right thats the last image I'll post today, I got a bit overexcited... finally working this really simple thing out...

Sniffing has been taken to a new level by Todd, a police sniffer dog with five years experience. After searching an abandoned car in a field for drugs he became ill and later died of a suspected amphetamine overdose. Perhaps because of the dog’s insatiable habit, police were unable to find any drugs on the scene, but the dogs handler, Roger Moore (truth really is stranger than fiction), is understandably upset. Without a hint of irony, Lancashire Police told reporters that Spaniel sniffer dogs tend to be “quite daft, but very very very keen”.

The BBC reported it, it must be true!

Voices in the Wilderness ...



Corporate 'executives' with their snouts in the trough - a protest at the Iraq Procurement 2004 conference (sponsored by Shell, Exxonmobil etc etc) calling for genuine and democratic reconstruction in Iraq and justice for Iraqi workers, 26-29 April 04.

Shell misleads investors again as it lines up for Iraq spoils

In a move certain to feed the belief that the Iraq war was oil-motivated, oil giant Shell has now appointed a Country Chairman for Iraq. The Country Chairman role is the most senior coordinating job in a country where Shell operates, and indicates a significant amount of activity by the company there. But the beleaguered company, already under fire for misleading investors about the extent of its reserves, will face further criticism for telling its shareholders it had no activity or plans in Iraq.

At the annual general meeting of shareholders in June, Managing Director Malcolm Brinded unequivocally said, "We have no activities in Iraq yet; we don't have people in Iraq at the moment". The latest move was uncovered by researchers from PLATFORM [1] and Voices UK [2], who found it in a recruitment advertisement for a public relations (PR) officer for Shell Iraq [3]. That advertisement seeks "A person of Iraqi extraction with strong family connections and an insight into the network of families of significance within Iraq". The role of the PR officer will be firstly to build relationships with key decision-makers in awarding Iraqi oil contracts, and secondly to prepare a "reputation management plan", to prevent Shell being criticised internationally for its thirst for Iraq's oil.

Greg Muttitt, of PLATFORM, commented, "Shell is an extremely secretive company, to the extent that it wouldn't even tell its shareholders its plans in Iraq. Shell wants to avoid public accountability for its actions - and it's hiring a PR officer to help it do this. This is the clearest sign yet of how developed oil companies’ plans are in Iraq. It is telling that Shell made no announcement about this; that we had to find it in a recruitment advert".

Gabriel Carlyle, of Voices UK, added, "A Baghdad poll conducted last September found that only 5% of those polled believed the US invaded Iraq to assist the Iraqi people; whilst 43% of respondents believed that the US/UK had invaded primarily to rob Iraq's oil. Shell's ongoing efforts to"establish a material and enduring presence in Iraq" - efforts founded on massive (and ongoing) military violence on the part of the US and Britain - clearly illustrates that Baghdad's residents have a clearer picture of reality that most British newspaper pundits."

1: PLATFORM is a research group specialising in the environmental and social impacts of the oil industry.

2: Voices in the Wilderness UK has been campaigning on British policy towards Iraq since 1998.

3: the advertisement can be seen here

Guardian article

Guerrilla artist Banksy has covertly cemented a 20-foot (6-metre) satirical statue protesting at the British legal system into a central London square. Banksy, best-known for sneaking his work into the Tate, has depicted the figure of justice as a prostitute with leather boots and a thong.



"It is a monument dedicated to thugs, to thieves, to bullies, to liars, to the corrupt, the arrogant and the stupid."

BBC report

blightey hell!



It should make us happy, but environmentalists are deeply alarmed: Prozac, the anti-depression drug, is being taken in such large quantities that it can now be found in Britain's drinking water.
Environmentalists are calling for an urgent investigation into the revelations, describing the build-up of the antidepressant as 'hidden mass medication'. The Environment Agency has revealed that Prozac is building up both in river systems and groundwater used for drinking supplies.

"It is a sad fact that from early childhood we are tyrannised by the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible. Parents begin the brainwashing process and then school works yet harder to indoctrinate its charges with the necessity of early rising. My own personal guilt about feeling physically incapable of rising early in the morning continued well into my 20s.

...

The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, more than 2,000 years, to the Bible. Here is Proverbs, chapter 6, on the subject:

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

(I would question the sanity of a religion that holds up the ant as an example of how to live. The ant system is an exploitative aristocracy based on the unthinking toil of millions of workers and the complete inactivity of a single queen and a handful of drones.)

Christianity has promoted bed-guilt ever since. This passage from the Bible is used as a bludgeon by moralists, capitalists and bureaucrats in order to impose upon the people the notion that God hates it when you get up late. It suits the lust for order that characterises the non-idler.

...

Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition. In his youth, the great poet of loafing, Walt Whitman, would arrive at the offices of the newspaper where he worked at around 11.30am, and leave at 12.30 for a two-hour lunch break. Another hour's work after lunch and then it was time to hit the town.

The English historian EP Thompson, in his classic book The Making Of The English Working Class (1963), argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before the advent of steam-powered machines and factories in the mid-18th century, work was a much more haphazard affair. People worked, yes, they did "jobs", but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown.

...

"Convalescing" is a word one doesn't hear much these days. It's as if we have banished the notion that time is a healer. What happened, I wonder, to the doctors of the turn of the century, who used to recommend long periods of inactivity on the South Coast for minor ailments? When the sickly velvet-coated dandy Robert Louis Stevenson fell ill in 1873, aged 23, the diagnosis was "nervous exhaustion with a threatening of phthisis" and the prescription was a winter on the Riviera, "in complete freedom from anxiety or worry". Once upon a time, we knew how to be ill. Now we have lost the art. Everyone, everywhere, disapproves of being ill.

To demonstrate how our attitudes to illness have grown dramatically less idler-friendly in recent years, we need only look at the recent history of Lemsip's marketing. When I was a child, a mug of Lemsip mixed with honey was one of the pleasures of lying in bed with a heavy cold. It went with being wrapped in a dressing gown and watching Crown Court. It was all part of the fun. Your mother might bring you a steaming cup of the soothing nectar in bed. You would sip it, cough weakly and luxuriate in its fumes. It had some positive effect on the physical symptoms of the illness, to be sure, but it was also a pleasure in itself. Lemsip was part of the delicious and much-needed slow-down that illness can bring into our life.

Not any more. Lemsip has reinvented itself as a "hard-working medicine". It has changed from a friend of the idler to his worst enemy. The implication now is that rather than enjoying your illness and waiting a few days till it has gone away, you should manfully repress the symptoms and carry on as normal, competing, working, consuming. Most appalling of all was their recent ad line, "Stop Snivelling and Get Back to Work"."

Romantic love in the west received energies from neoplatonism, just as the islamic world; and romance provided an acceptable (still orthodox)means of compromise between Christian morality and the rediscovered erotocosm of Antiquity. Even so the balncing-act was precarious: -- Pico della Mirandola and the pagan Botticelli ended up in the arms of Savonarola. A secretive minority of Renaissance nobles, churchmen and artists opted out altogether in favor of clandestin paganism; the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo, or the garden Monsters at Bomarzo, bear witness to the existence of this "tantrik" sect. But for most platonizers, the idea of alove based on longing alone served orthodox and allegorical ends, in which the material beloved can only be a distant shadow of the real (as exemplified by such as St. Theresa and St.John of the Cross) and can only be loved according to a "chivalrous", chaste and penetential code. The whole ppoint of Malory´s Morte dArthur is that Lancelot fails to achieve the chevalric ideal by loving Guenivere in the flesh rather than omly in the spirit.

The emergence of Capitalism exercizes a strange effect on romance. I acn only express it with an absurd fantasy: -- it´s as if the Beloved becomes the perfect commodity, always desired, always paid for, but never really enjoyed. The self-denial of Romance harmonizes neatly with the self-denial of Capitalism. Capital demands scarcity, both of production and of erotic pleasure, rather than limit its requirements simply to morality or chastity. Religion forbids sexuality, thus investing denial with glamor; capital withdraws sexuality, infusing it with despair. "Romance" now leads to the Wertherian suicide, Byron´s disgust, the chastity of the dandies. In this sense, romance will become the perfect two-dimensional obsession of the popular song and the advertizement, serving the utopian trace within the infinite reproduction of the commodity.

In response to this situation, modern times have offered two judgements of romance, apperently opposed, which relateto our present hermeneutic. One, the surrealist amour fou, clearly belongs to the romantic tradition, but proposes a radical solution to the paradox of desire by combining the idea of sublimation with the tantrik perspective.In opposing the scarcity (or "emotional plague"as Reich called it) of Capitalism, Surrealism proposes a transgressive excess of the most obssessive desire and the most sensual realization. What the romance of Nezami or Malory had separated ("longing" and "union"), the Surrealists proposed to recombine. The effect was meant to be explosive, literally revolutionary.

The second point of view relevant here was also revolutionary, but "classical" rather than "romantic". The anarchist-individualist John Henry Mackay despaired of romantic love, which he could only see as tainted with the social forms of ownership and alienation. The romantic lover longs to "possess" or to be possessed by the beloved. If marriage is simply legal prostitution (the usual anarchist analysis), Mackay found that "love" itself had become a commodity-form. Romantic love is a sickness of the ego and its relation to "property"; in opposition Mackay proposed erotic friendship, free of property relations, based on generosity rather than longing and withdrawal (i.e.,scarcity): - a love between equal self-rulers.

good job this guy. mackay is officially stirner-reader by the way.

'From a marketing point of view,' said Andrew H. Card, Jr., the White House chief of staff on the rollout this week of the campaign for a war with Iraq, 'you don't introduce new products in August.'" New York Times, September 7, 2002

hakim bey - The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory

"If conspiracy theory is essentially right wing, it can only be so because it posits a view of History as the work of individuals rather than groups. According to this argument, a Mae Brussel-type theory (she believed that Nazis had penetrated American Intelligence and Government at policy level) may appear Leftist but in fact provides no sustenance for genuine dialectical analysis, since it ignores economics and class struggle as causal forces, and instead traces all events to the machinations of "hidden" individuals. Even the anti-authoritarian Left may sometimes adopt this low opinion of conspiracy theory, despite the fact that it is not bound by any dogmatic belief in economic determinism. Such anarchists would agree that to believe in conspiracy theory is to believe that elites can influence History. Anarchism posits that elites are simply carried by the flow of History and that their belief in their own power or agency is pure illusion. If one were to believe otherwise, such anarchists argue, then Marx and Lenin would be correct, and conspiratorial vanguardism would be the best strategy for the "movement of the social". (The existence of vanguardism proves that the Left-or at least the authoritarian Left -- has not merely been tainted accidentally with conspiracy theory: vanguardism IS conspiracy!) The Leninists say the state is a conspiracy, either of Right or Left-take your choice. The anarchists argue that the state does not "have" power in any absolute or essential sense, but that it merely usurps the power which, in essence, "belongs" to each individual, or to society en masse. The state's apparently conspiratorial aspect is therefore illusory-mere ideological wanking on the part of politicians, spies, bankers and other scum, blindly serving the interests of their class. Conspiracy Theory is therefore of interest only as a kind of sociology of culture, a tracking of the delusory fantasies of certain in-groups and out-groups-but conspiracy theory itself has no ontological status."

Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchy: The Writings of Hakim Bey

via wood s lot

revolutionary expression - facettes de la petite mort