Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey
Professor David Harvey of the City University of New York is currently serializing 13, two-hour lectures of a close reading of Karl Marx’s Capital. If you don’t want to watch them in your browser window, you can check out the video feed and download them as .MOV for later viewing. (Via Rough Theory.)
Obama vs. the Internet vs. FISA
Mike Soron has several perspicuous links and quotes regarding Obama’s regrettable support for the house’s update of the FISA bill, which grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms that aided the Bush administration in carrying out its unlawful domestic spying program. Although Obama has stated that he is against the measure to grant retroactive immunity, there’s still this gem:
Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.
Such a position is more than unfortunate, it is what one might call a travesty. Regardless of whether Obama is simply playing a game of appearances by trying to “act tough” to win over the petty bourgeois and lumpenproletariat that would likely not be willing to vote for him to begin with, his decision to support the updated FISA bill should alert his supporters that it’s not enough to put their faith and trust into such a candidate, even if he is far more progressive than a number of others. If anything, they should be ruthlessly critical, lest one wishes to justify one’s spinelessness as pragmatism.
The American Right and Freedom
The Nation:
In “Conservative Thought,” an unjustly neglected essay from 1927, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, they have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchical, particulars.
Worth reading the entire article. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Judy Miller Is Back
Hilarious analysis of this bullshit NY Times article on the mysterious origins of US-UK-French no-bid contracts for Iraqi oil.
Is A Commodity Bubble Behind the New Housing Bubble?
There should be a market for speculating on what the next bubble will be. Who’s taking bets on what comes after the commodity bubble? Maybe a solar bubble? Either way, an informative article. (Via The Consumerist.)
Lacan and Sexuation
Want to know what this is?
I stumbled across a terrific and comprehensible (albeit two year old) post on Lacan’s sexuation formulas over at Larval Subjects, so if you do, I suggest giving the article a read.
Flashes of Terror / Dredges of Horror
Another great post over at Naught Thought on the relationship between Terror and Horror, as well as some more interesting stuff on correlationism.
Put most directly: terror is not knowing, horror is knowing too much. However, there is a level of cross over. The horror, in the realm of terror, is the discovery of the body, it is the knowing too much which leads back to not knowing (in relation to the self) hence ‘am I next?’ The terror of horror, is the sight of the thing which cannot be definately described.
Maybe one could say that Terror is Kantian, while Horror is Hegelian.
This is a clip from one of my favorite Herzog documentaries, The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner. It’s about Walter Steiner, the world-class Olympic ski-flying champion from Switzerland, who is also a talented carpenter.
Sometimes Herzog’s documentaries feel somewhat forced and inauthentic, as if Herzog is trying to make more out of them than what they really are, and his subjects seem to be aware of it (The White Diamond and How Much Wood Would A Woodchuck Chuck come to mind). In other cases, what he hopes to capture doesn’t live up to his expectations, such as La Soufrière. But usually Herzog succeeds in creating brilliant documentaries that feature captivating and inspiring subjects. Steiner is no exception, and the soundtrack by Popol Vuh has a kind of other-worldly sentiment that the best of Herzog’s films evoke.
Don’t Annoy Karl
Ricky Gervais:
OK, so I may have, possibly, maybe, in a slight way, have persuaded Karl to do another (and final) series of the podcast. Don’t quote me on that and please don’t annoy him between now and September.
I usually wouldn’t say anything, but seeing as how I’ve been lured into his trap, I’ll bite. I don’t think people would’ve been as active in annoying Karl if a certain Mr. Gervais didn’t initiate a worldwide publicity campaign to annoy Karl. Good news about the podcasts though.
Pentagon Lied About Torture Memos
The Washington Post reports that a Senate investigation has uncovered evidence that research on torture methods came from the top chain of command (Donald Rumsfeld) as early as July 2002. Not that any of this should come as a surprise, or that anyone will actually read the investigation, but I guess having the proof is a good thing. (Via I cite.)
US Special Forces Counterinsurgency Manual Leaked
Julian Assange writing for Wikileaks:
Wikileaks has obtained a sensitive US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies and guerilla movements world wide, history making.
Looks to be the real thing. (Via A Tiny Revolution.)
Was It Jokes That Defeated Communism?
‘What is the difference between communism and capitalism?’ ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; communism is the exact opposite.’
While the title is mostly tongue-in-cheek, it’s no doubt that jokes played an important role in Soviet society. I’d heard a lot of these from professors during courses taught on Soviet history, but I still think it would be worth reading Ben Lewis’s book, Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes, if not for the unique historical perspective, then at least for the jokes.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
From the Wall Street Journal, click here to view. To sum up: if you make less than $111,645 per year, you’ll be better off (in terms of after-tax income) under Obama. (Via Open Up.)
Metering the Internet
If you’re someone who uses the Internet to do more than just check e-mail and browse through blogs (i.e., you download movies or music through BitTorrent), then this new proposal by a number of telecom giants, including Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, will likely put an end to that (although Comcast has already begun to heavily “shape” BitTorrent traffic without admitting it to their customers). I think this casts doubt upon the viability of deregulated and privatized telecoms, but even more so I think it threatens potential development in terms of video streaming and online media distribution, which is why most Internet-related businesses that aren’t telecoms, like Google, are opposed to this.
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