Tag: politics

Though it’s probably the basis of pragmatic socialism, really, and therefore nothing new…

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… it just struck me in a fundamental, pragmatic way that the idea of “surplus labour” kind of depends on the people who are “surplus” allowing such a fundamentally oppressive system to exist. And while the utopian vision of a society in which a concerted uprising puts a stop to such a system was (supposedly) trampled in 1989, there’s another version of the uprising–one that depends on an unconcerted attack on the system, a continuous, distributed, disorganized form of resistance that, instead of collapsing the oppressor system, transforms the system into something more universally oppressive. The name of this distributed, …

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Viridian Note #00456

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Right now on the front page of the The Viridian Design Movement site, you can read the current Viridian Note, number 00456, which sums up the “State of the World 2006”. Included are a summary of a dozen bizarre weather moments from 2005, and a mockery of Thomas Friedman’s latecomer handwringing about the “oil problem”. Also is included a link to a pretty interesting conversation with Bruce Sterling on The Well. Worth checking out, for more than just this one strange link.

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What To Do With Snake Oil Salesmen (and Other Spammers)

gordsellar6 Comments

Another day, another wave of spam in my inbox. It’s very easy to pick out, for me, but my webmail provider doesn’t seem to have a system sophisticated enough to catch only the bad stuff; as soon as it starts blocking spam, it also starts blocking everything else along with it. My first instinct, like that of many people, is to think up and appeal for highly punitive responses to spam. After all, spammers — at least, the ones who’re pushing viagra and seething malware through unsolicited email, and through comments and trackbacks on blogs — are committing a much …

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Racism shock therapy

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The author of the site American Pictures bills his work as “Racism shock therapy”. It’s a fascinating, and rather saddening, collection of photos by a Dane named Jacob Holdt who traveled as a vagabond among the poor classes in America back in the early 1970s. The thematic focus is systemic racial oppression. Worth a look.

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Hate torture? Consider boot camp – Los Angeles Times

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Yes, the premise of the article I just read is as bad as you think from the title of this post. It’s that bad. What the difficulties of boot camp do to justify torturing Iraqis and other “suspected terrorists” — and let’s remember that in America now, a feminist T-shirt is enough to place you under enough suspicion to block you from attending a Presidential speech — is beyond me. Yet this is, well, at least for a little while, the thrust of Max Boot’s “opinion” piece in the L.A. Times, titled “Hate torture? Consider boot camp”. Oh, wait, there’s …

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