Archive for the ‘Current Affairs’ Category

The “Conservative” Mind

Monday, August 9th, 2010

The “conservative” need never provide evidence to substantiate the rationalizations of his/her irresponsibility for any and all social ills. He does not have to prove that the homeless choose destitution, let alone provide us with the reasons that might provoke such a choice. Because this would entail, first, the real work of investigation and learning, and “conservatives” do not work, but only delegate work; and it would further entail a response to the problem. The “conservative” is not interested in responding to problems, only in dismissing them (unless, of course, he can “respond” to the problem with his “volunteer” army, which is to say, shrug the responsibility onto someone else’s shoulders).

The “conservative” conserves only his own energy, for his own private, selfish, narcissistic purposes. He claims to have “ideas,” but all his thought boils down to one pathetic proposition: “I am not responsible.”

Thought for the Day

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Eh, Jacques! Let’s cut off the King’s head!

Freedom of Speech II

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

11. God blesses the sexed, not the nice.
12. History exists in the silence.
13. The People are invisible.
14. Predator drones have nothing to do with war or warfare.
15. Only cowards use them.
16. The Truth is on the outside.
17. George Will pimps McDonalds for cold coffee and spare change.
18. Security institutionalizes fear.
19. To understand today, study yesterday. (after Pearl S. Buck)
20. The United States has choices, too.

Why We Are Losing and Will Continue To

Monday, July 5th, 2010

We have learned above all that, in campaigns such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, the human terrain is the decisive terrain. We have to understand the people, their culture, their social structures and how systems to support them are supposed to work — and how they do work. And our most important tasks have to be to secure and to serve the people, as well as to respect them and to facilitate the provision of basic services, the establishment of local governance and the revival of local economics.

— General David Petraeus

Freedom of Speech

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Some things you’re not supposed to say . . .

  • Israelis are Nazis.
  • The Germans loved Hitler.
  • Americans are little baby children.
  • The ruling class is sociopathic.
  • A job is a cheat and a swindle.
  • Education teaches nothing.
  • Experts have more education than anybody.
  • Freedom is a commodity.
  • Barack Obama is an Oreo.
  • God is dead.
  • This post is for Anne Ostrenko, A. C. Lambeth, Dan Denoon, and Erick Dittus.

    “The Sixties Are Over”

    Sunday, February 21st, 2010

    Are they?  Really? Why does my (Republican) high school English teacher keep saying this?

    Nobody ever says, “The Forties are over,” because they are. I think the persistent whine that “the Sixties are over” is nervous wishful thinking, a whistling in the graveyard of the liberal order (now known as “neoconservatism”), a desire that all that trouble that frightened all the middleclass white people from 1963 through 1968 just, please, “settle down” politely into the dustbin of history and leave us alone to get back to the business of making piles and piles of worthless dollars on this year’s version of The New Frontier, whether it be the “information superhighway” or the Green Zone.

    Thoughts taking off and circling above the following, in Hatred of Capitalism (ISBN 1584350121), “May ’68 Did Not Take Place” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:

    Following ’68 in France . . . the authorities never stopped living with the idea that “things will settle down.”  And indeed, things settled down, but under catastrophic conditions.  May ’68 was neither the result of, nor a reaction to a crisis.  It is rather the opposite. It is the current crisis of France, the impasse that stems directly from the inability of French society to assimilate May ’68.  French society has shown a radical incapacity to create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, which is what ’68 demands.