Tuesday, October 29, 2002

'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11?

Guardian Unlimited Observer | International | Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11

America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.

Even if the Bush junta was not complicit they have capitalised on it in all the ways that they would have if they were... and that is just as bad, and also reveals the bankruptcy of terrorism as a tactic.

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Monday, October 28, 2002

Richard Stallman - forging language

Clarity, dedication, inspiration from RMS, as usual. His concern about language is often criticised by even those who support him, but I think he is right. "Piracy" for example is a propaganda word and we should never use it apart from its legal definition - raiding ships at sea, a serious crime.

In "Can You Trust Your Computer?" he tackles the propaganda use of the word "trusted" and distinguishes it from "treacherous". It is a notion which we need to take on board. "We" of course are not "them" i.e. they who rule. They cant trust our computers, it is an issue that defines which side you are on. I hope this article becomes a classic and that people will adopt his usage.

Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing," large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal.

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Saturday, October 26, 2002

Social Networking

Nice Bogg Interesting author: alex wright : projects
Thanks Josh.

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Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Doonesbury

Doonesbury Town Hall and Web Presence- Daily Dose

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Friday, October 18, 2002

John Perry Barlow is unhappy about the American Empire

BarlowFriendz 8.8: Pox Americana

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Monday, October 14, 2002

Seeds of Protest Growing on College Campuses

NYT

The speed of the antiwar mobilization has struck some longtime college presidents. "Students are engaging very, very quickly with Iraq," said Nancy Dye, the president of Oberlin College. "This morning I was struck by a very large sign on top of an academic building, saying, `Say No to War in Iraq.' A new student organization has gotten itself together, and I don't even know if they have a name yet. There wasn't anything like this during the first gulf war, when I was president at Vassar."

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Only the American people can stop Bush now

Guardian
I hope we see some serious opposition there - strikes - demonstrations.

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Saturday, October 12, 2002

Caroline Casey's Center for Visionary Activism: Home Page

Here it is with links to radio shows from the past. I am downloading them now. Real audio + Total Record. Will be interesting to see how useful this stuff is. A sort of Starhawk?

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Un? American.

Scoop Images: Un-American Graffiti

It is a nasty observation, but not un American. There must be plenty of Americans who oppose the imperialist expansion, who see it akin to german expansion last century. What is American? We could say jazz and Elvis and pop-corn, and the world does somehow value the exported American culture. The image clarifies exactly which bit of the USA we are against. Important to be against the Empire not America as such.

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Plans to Occupy Iraq

U.S. Has a Plan to Occupy Iraq, Officials Report

Today marked the first time the administration has discussed what could be a lengthy occupation by coalition forces, led by the United States. Officials say they want to avoid the chaos and in-fighting that have plagued Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban

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Friday, October 11, 2002

Empire

Bush's real goal in Iraq

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

There is plenty of opposition to this war, but not all that much which reveals the imperialist motivation. The official line, the safety of the world, if true, might be a good reason for the war but it is not what it is about, the world will be safer without an American empire. The real task IS to make the world safe and opposing the US empire is part of that. To oppose it will have a price, it will not be an easy battle. It is a war that requires the unity, organisation and courage of the forces opposed to it. All of these posts about the EMPIRE are related to the psychological explorations on my website that the empire is also at work exploiting the psyche. Psyche herself has been captured and occupied. To speak of opposing the US as an imperialist force has been psychologically damned, it no longer sounds a sane thing to say.

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Robert Fisk: What the US President wants us to forget

Independent Argument

In all of Bush's 30 minutes of anti-Iraq war talk yesterday – pleasantly leavened with just two minutes of how "I hope this will not require military action" – there wasn't a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war. We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget.

High on Daypop today... and most of the bloggers citing it are on the side of Robert Fisk. http://www.finnern.com/ http://indc.weblogger.com/ http://www.liberalartsmafia.com/ http://www.electricedge.com/greymatter/ http://www.theplasticcat.com/ These sites are anti war, and some have links exposing the imperialism driving the war.

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A voice for our side - Steve Earle

A voice for our side

At times, Earle rightly makes no attempt at subtlety at all--as with his opposition to the coming war on Iraq. "We intended to go into Iraq before September 11, and we’re gonna go into Iraq, and that’s part of this big lie," Earle argued in a recent interview. "Iraq had fuck all to do with September 11! John Walker Lindh had fuck all to do with September 11! It’s just scapegoating, and scapegoating is always about making somebody feel more than, by making somebody else feel less than--and that’s a really dark, dangerous, malignant thing to do.

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What Price the American Empire?

What Price the American Empire?

Is the empire worth it? French, Brits, even Soviets said no. They went home. And nothing over there – not oil, not bases in Saudi Arabia, not global hegemony – is worth risking nuclear terror over here. I may be the only right-winger in America who loves D.C., but then I grew up here. Washington is my hometown. It comes first, and empire isn't even a close second.

Strange to be quoting the RIGHT here, but he can see clearly that all this about imperialism. We are in for an new Empire that will take a lot to defeat.

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Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Arundhati Roy

Guardian
Indian writer Arundhati Roy argues that it is the demands of global capitalism that are driving the West to war with Iraq

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Monday, October 07, 2002

Andrew Samuels interviewed by Ruth Williams

Interview

On the publication of his new book, Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life, Andrew Samuels is interviewed by psychotherapist Ruth Williams.

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Sunday, October 06, 2002

More

Hollywood and Baudrillard The Matrix and Baudrillard's Concept of Simulation Evil Demons, Saviors, and Simulacra in The Matrix

by Doug Mann & Heidi Hochenedel. This essay is well done. Looks at the themes as three distinct entities: Christian, Descartian, and Baudrillardian. Convincing, apart from its conclusion, which may be because of the bankruptsy of The Matrix themes themselves, after all the movie is itself part of the hyperreal Hollywood machine. Or it may be that they have some strange pomo ideology?

I went to the hyper website and used copy, paste-into-editor, print, to get an accademic looking paper from the unreadable mess (including irritating sound!) on the screen. This process was like returning to a welcome desert of the real - I like it better in black and white.

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Saturday, October 05, 2002

History of the tilde

~
dive into mark/October 4, 2002
I love this sort of stuff. This Mark does thorough items and is ALWAYS in the Daypop Top 40 Links.

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J. G. Ballard - www.contemporarywriters.com

J. G. Ballard - www.contemporarywriters.com Critical Perspective 'We live inside an enormous novel', observes Ballard in the introduction to his most controversial novel Crash (1973), 'The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality'.

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The Matrix - Essential to the exploration of psyche and cyberspace

The Matrix - Simulacra and Dystopia - Planet Papers

Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996)

You’ve been living in a dream world Neo. This, is the world, as it exists today: Welcome to the desert – of the real. (Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix)

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Open Knowledge - great idea.

MIT OpenCourseWare | Home

MIT and the OpenCourseWare team are excited to share with you a first sampling of course materials from MIT's Faculty. We invite educators around the world to draw upon the materials for their own curricula, and we encourage all learners to use the materials for self-study.

This has to be phenomenal. Whatever their motives, whatever the actual use of it by the masses, somewhere somehow this can tip the balance... though of course for sheer access to knowledge the Internet has already made this transformation in the world. I wonder what restrictions apply? What if I offer a course based on the material? What if other Unis do that? See also the Wired item: All the World's an MIT Campus

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Tuesday, October 01, 2002

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Life's not so complicated web

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Life's not so complicated web

As in social groups, cliques tend to form in which every member knows all or most of the other members. The researchers used a measure called the clustering coefficient that describes how clique-like a network is.

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