Sam Harris is wrong about everything

Harris’ success has been built on his parents’ wealth, his connections, and a media and audience lusting after the kind of warmongering-but-liberal calls to action that he spouts, touched up with a veneer of intellectual credibility.

Television is the air you breathe and with it come the ads.

Marxism is centered on the idea that classes can be abolished through the liberation of the proletariat.

Spiritual warfare is being fought every day under the veneer of a sane human everyday existence.

is Assisted Living by Nikanor Teratologen. feel free to look it up for yourself. a section on the back reads, “leaving no horror unattended to, be it murder, incest, nazi fetishism, substance abuse, or even continental philosophy.” i’m about ten pages in and it’s funny, dark, insightful, creepy, astonishingly well-written, exciting, and a million other praiseful adjectives. i recommend you read it. every other line is worth quoting and showing to a friend.

while following this book, or the conversation so far, a question may be beginning to appear in your darling heads - "well, blinkandwheeze, this is all very well and good. but how, if at all, does this pertain to the immortal science and shining path of marxism-leninism-mao tse tung thought?"

In March 2012, the McRib returned. It's back. The pinch of juicy onions, the two slices of pickle, and the main attraction: the finest pork available slathered with premium BBQ sauce. All of it's back for a limited time only at your local McDonald's restaurant. Just remember: we are not responsible if you get a speeding ticket on your way over there.

For advocates of social justice the problem of postmodernity is generally seen in terms of political impotence, specifically a subjective, individual impotence. The conditions of postmodernity are allegedly such that the pre-emptive co-option of social action into the reproduction of capital is assured. Capital, despite creating first and foremost its own gravediggers, has somehow 1. achieved hegemonic dominance, 2. circumvented the creation of alternative productive modes, and 3. completely subjugated the site of resistance, the working class, into its reproductive program.

In this way, one could see great potential in Cybersyn, at least on the surface, in that the aim of regulating value is essentially an exercise of trying to bias the system, i.e. society, towards some goal by the system controller, and that could theoretically be done by a true democratic vote. We could have our cake and eat it too... In contrast, the market is an autonomous entity, a beast prone to roam wild until it is attacked and consumed by some other beast, more vicious and powerful. However, it is also precisely because of that potential for control that Cybersyn suffers a fatal flaw: it will never be able to maintain itself in balance while maintaining an accurate representation of the underlying economy it seeks to model.

For the most part, the directors (“interventors”) of the new state industries were competent, however, some were not, and it was difficult to determine the difference with the few existing channels of communication between industry and state. In August of that month, Fernando Flores, the young intellectual who had been named General Manager of the CORFO, the state institution that regulated the recently nationalized factories, flew to England to meet with a very peculiar man. Bearded and eccentric, lacking any formal degree in cybernetics or computer sciences, Stafford Beer was a visionary in the mold of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, with one key difference – he was a socialist, even a techno-communist. He spoke no Spanish. However, he communicated to Flores – in broken Latin – that he very much desired to offer his expertise to the Chilean project.

Dark Days is gritty as heck and has an amazing sound track (dj shadow), shot masterfully in black and white (the film they dug out of dumpsters) with shopping cart dollies rigged to rotting train tracks. it's an hour and a half long documentary about a village of homeless people who find community underground in abandoned amtrack tunnels. they hack into the utilities and take pride in building their hovels. they chat about lost family members and their struggles with substance abuse. most of the film is just long shots of conversation between friends discussing the challenges of everyday life, how to make money, how to love and defend themselves in such vulnerable situations.

I'm a straight cisgendered white male so I speak from a position of privilege on basically all issues of gender and sexuality but I find it extremely problematic that the liberal gay rights movement bases its position on a sort of sexual-essentialism, that gays are "born this way" and "cant help it". It is about as scientific and coherent as race science. Sexuality is behavior, and obviously can be controlled and channeled in many, many different ways. This is clear from history and comparative anthropology. There is no such thing as a "gay" person, nor a "straight" person. These are boundaries peculiar to a given culture, and the antagonisms between them are disciplined by the prime socioeconomic forces of the day: i.e. capitalism.

within the unity of the so called 99% there exist that minority (or majority!?) which has learned by the very nature of their environment to stay silent. it's not their place to speak. they just want to eat and live out their peaceful lonely lives out in some shitty suburb, as long as it's away from the incessant violence and retardation of the rest of the human race. (un)fortunately, sometimes those very people, by the activities that they find themselves repeating day after day, find out more about the world around them than the people that walk around yelling what they think is the key to the door of civil stagnation.

A worker at a munitions factory, wondering about the morality of creating weapons, inquires about the proportion of civilian and military deaths caused by any particular bomb he has created. His superior reveals that in Iraq, casualties are roughly 44% women and 39% children; at least 85% of those killed are thus highly likely to be civilians. This realization would require at the very least the worker's conscientious objection and immediate refusal to continue work on the bombs. But the bomb-maker is in a unique position to go farther...

of course all this came crashing down sometime in the last 6 or 8 years, when all of the sudden we were suddenly supposed to be putting ourselves online. the anarchy of identity had to be corralled somehow and exposed to the market. imagine, you go up to a stranger on the street and start to discuss the most personal parts of your sexuality and experiences with them... of course, this is quaint and a little perverted - yet totally acceptable! - within an anonymous framework, when we can never really be sure if the other is telling us the truth (and they always are in a way) and so we chalk it up to the strangeness of the medium. but is the medium changing us now?

The pipsqueak, by now, is an old, well-explored character in literature. Normally I’d avoid quoting Tao Lin, but he’s one of the few writers today who’s realized that the pipsqueak’s mind-disease has leaked out of literature and now roots in the populace at large—that is, we’re all of us, men and women, rich and poor, smart and dumb, we’re all of us becoming pipsqueaks. Never has this been more clear than at a party I attended last Friday night.

“For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California . . . Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments.” -- Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism

Ever since reading that D.H. Lawrence was a reactionary monarchist, and having an Irish Lit. friend tell me that Yeats was an Irish Fascist, it's come to me that a significant number of Great Writers are reactionaries, far more than their percentage in the population at large probably justifies.

“Every country has the government it deserves.” Or, at least, they will eventually, for only the form of government suited to that nations specific circumstances will endure more than a few years. Anything else is an aberration. This all seems like common sense, of course, but becomes problematic when applied specifically, which is to say critically. For example, let us consider the “long counter-revolution” to borrow a phrase, of American social-politics: that is, the last 40 years.

This has been brought up before and undoubtedly a lot of you are familiar with the now infamous Wikipedia article about the Cultural Revolution that delves into a hilariously sickening level of anti-communist blood libel. However, what I find deeply interesting are the sources quoted in the article and academic articles written that treat such absolutely ludicrous accusations as fact without batting an eye.

First and foremost, I have come to the understanding that first-world feminism has almost nothing in common to the overwhelming majority of women of the world. The issues that I saw as important in my youth have never crossed the radar of these women and they are wary to concern themselves with issues such as abortion (hammered into every young USA feminist's head as the golden issue), sexuality, gender, dress, and public economic position.

In 2003, in the wake of massive protests against austerity, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said, "The street must express itself, but the street does not govern." This encapsulates the bourgeois view of democracy, with a passive public that is governed by an elite. Its negation is quite simple: Rule of the street. That is, communist-oriented democracy is the public governing itself through direct action. The emerging democracy must be best thought of as insurgent, as interrupting the normal flows. Importantly, insurgent democracy seeks to end the state's monopoly on regulating flows, pulling these tasks down to affected communities and to a restored commons.

What's better than a mutual assured destruction? 'Better' can only ever be that which is more convenient for the Dragon of Capital, and what does she seem to prefer these days? If the Dragon is not pleased with the WWWIII (Cold War) stalemate scenario, where does she go from there?

As the plague preceded the renaissance so too the scourge of the satellite precedes the the birthing pains of an unknowable new era of global economy and endless war. There are many kinds of technology but the technology that reigns supreme is INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, the wooden horse that brings along open markets, apache helicopters, and the apocalypse of culture as we can relate and know it. The richest men in the world are those that deal in communication, be it in the transmission or architecture of words, feelings, desires, or standards. Whoever owns the satellites, the media monopolies, or the IT hubs also directs the ebb and flow of events.

I've basically been working through some books on poststructuralist marxism and friends. Mostly stuff about Laclau and Mouffe, but some stuff about Zizek as well. Mostly I've been thinking about the three-part set "liberalism -Chantal Mouffe-, marxism -Slavoj Zizek- and anarchism -Richard Day-", and trade-offs that each one makes. So basically a convergence between Lacanian psychoanalysis (which all three lean on to different degrees) and certain situated traditions within (pots)modern society.