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Arabica Robusta

West 86th - The Administration of Things: A Genealogy - 0 views

  • “If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived,” Isaiah Berlin told his audience at Oxford when he assumed that position in 1958. Philosophy was at its best when it was being contentious, especially when it was being contentious about the meaning and purpose of our common existence. Too much agreement was an abdication of its ethical responsibility
  • The task of philosophy was not to settle disputes, but to unsettle them, to encourage them, to keep them going. For it was only through disputation that we could resist the rule of experts and machines, the bureaucratic-technocratic society foretold by Saint-Simon and championed by Marx and Engels, a society in which we replace the “government of persons by the administration of things.”
  • Louis de Bonald pointed to the hard choices that the state would have to make. “In the modern state, we have perfected the administration of things at the expense of the administration of men, and we are far more preoccupied with the material than the moral,” he wrote. “Few governments nurture religion or morality with the same attention that they promote commerce, open communications, keep track of accounts, provide the people with pleasures, etc.” 12
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  • All history, Comte argued, is a history of class struggle. Not the struggle between master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletarian—that was still a couple decades away—but the struggle between two classes of phenomena: “critical” phenomena that contributed to moral and political decay and “organic” phenomena that promoted individual and social regeneration.
  • The objective was to protect against arbitrariness in all of its manifestation. Earlier political thinkers had tended to associate arbitrariness mainly with absolutist governments, but for Comte any form of government was susceptible so long as it rested on “metaphysical” rather than “positive” principles.
  • Engels believed that the obsession with detail that had characterized utopian socialism—its compulsion to work out every last aspect of future social organization—is precisely what made it so utopian.
  • When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary.
  • “I think it was Trotsky who used a very plain but very telling metaphor,” the historian Isaac Deutscher told graduate students in a seminar on bureaucracy at the London School of Economics in 1960. “The policeman can use his baton either for regulating traffic or for dispersing a demonstration of strikers or unemployed. In this one sentence is summed up the classical distinction between administration of things and administration of men.”
  • Our hasty genealogy of the “administration of things” must conclude with its latest, and quite possibly last, iteration: Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things,” or Dingpolitik. Initially proposed in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991), then extended in a massive exhibition and accompanying catalog, Making Things Public (2005), Latour’s program has attracted a growing number of partisans in the world of political theory
Muslim Academy

Anti U.S. protests in Pakistan - 0 views

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    Series of protests took place all over the world and didn't spare Pakistan - Muslim country. Muslims around the country came up with huge anger and disappointment against the making of anti-Islam film. In many other parts of the world, protests captured huge attention of the international media as U.S. embassies were burnt and stormed. For instance, Egypt, Syria, Yemen etc. Muslims gathered in a great number and raised their voice against the making of the film. In some parts of the world, U.S. flag had been burnt and replaced with a black flag having words written on it as "There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his messenger" A small budget movie named "innocence of the Muslims" was made by an individual of California and put over the internet. This movie didn't get any attention until the subtitles were poste din Arabic and sent to the Egyptian journalists. Movie made humiliates the sentiments of the Muslims as it tried to shun the image of beloved Prophet (peace and blessings upon him). Movie made touches the themes of paedophilia and homosexuality. In Pakistan, security measured were tightened by the local police and made sure no violence hit and destroy U.S. embassy. Recently, violence hit the security of the U.S. embassies in many Muslim countries. Many U.S. embassies such as in Egypt, Libya, Yemen were stormed by the protestors greatly. The brazen attack on the U.S embassy also killed an American; the angry souls were tickled by "video linked to Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose public burning of the Koran in 2010 led to deadly protests in Afghanistan. The film reportedly mocks the prophet Muhammad." as per the sources.
thinkahol *

Germany has the economic strengths America once boasted - latimes.com - 0 views

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    Germany with its manufacturing base and export prowess is the U.S. of yesteryear, an economic power unlike any of its European neighbors. It has thrived on principles America seems to have lost.
thinkahol *

Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies - Salon.com - 0 views

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    The candidate supported by progressives - President Obama - himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians - Muslim children by the dozens - not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents - in secret and with no checks - to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
thinkahol *

The Moment When the Police Lost the Occupy Portland Narrative | Blogtown, PDX - 0 views

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    Well, it turned. The police bureau is starting to crack after six weeks of Occupy Portland. And one picture, right here, crystallizes the precise moment when it happened. During a choreographed effort to pull a few dozen protesters out of the Chase bank branch outside Pioneer Square, part of today's hundreds-strong N17 day of action, Portland police officers resorted to a decidedly more muscular show of force in a clash watched by TV cameras and rush-hour commuters earlier this evening. Suddenly all the fun-the dance parties, the union songs, the peaceful arrests earlier on the Steel Bridge and at Wells Fargo-was for naught. Tromping in with mounted officers, they pushed marchers who had gathered on the sidewalks along SW Yamhill into the street-forcing them to block MAX trains, something no one was doing until the heavily armored riot squad showed up-and then poked and, for the first time, pepper-sprayed the marchers. Significantly, some of the spraying came after protesters had clearly retreated to the opposite sidewalk. (In another odd shift, there also was no federal-court-required verbal PA warning that chemical munitions would be deployed-a hallmark of every other mass police action to date.) Meanwhile, at almost the very same moment, Police Chief Mike Reese was on TV blaming Occupy Portland for his officers' inability to respond to a rape victim for three hours today. Consider that tantamount to a declaration of war. Reese's point? Officers are tired and have been too distracted to do their main jobs: responding to actual crimes. It was an attempt to spin sentiment against the movement, which seems to be attracting adherents. Even the O today said the movement is "building momentum" and said the average age of some 34 arrestees earlier today was 50-not a bunch of young, anarchists/punks/hoodlums/hippies/road warriors etc. But that might come back to haunt him, judging by a wave of outrage on Twitter and elsewhere among those who noted that it
Joe La Fleur

Does Obama have any idea what defense cuts are in his budget? « Hot Air - 0 views

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    OBAMA DOESN'T KNOW HIS DEFENCE CUTS KILL 750 JOBS IN MANSFIELD OHIO. ROMNEY PEOPLE HAD TO BRING IT TO HIS ATTENTION
Marcus Davis

Give your vote: Would you support efforts to make cigarette smoking illegal in any indoor location, even if it is not a public place? (Your car, your home, etc.) - 0 views

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    How to share differences opinions? When your opinion differs from others, you might be unsure how to proceed in a discussion then join our community at YobMob.com. Here you will share your suggestion and opinion. Share Your Opinion here http://www.yobmob.com/ifyoucould/public/question/viewdetail/169
barrybcollinss

From Israel to Iran: a look at critics raising their voice over push toward nuclear deal - 0 views

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    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates –  Iran needs U.S.-led sanctions rolled back again, and Western nations and some others request to limit Iran's capacity to enrich uranium to ranges that could guide it closer to producing nuclear weapons. But negotiators experience resistance from Western allies these kinds of as Israel and Gulf states towards any pact that retains Iran's nuclear program normally intact and dissent inside Iran from hard-liners opposing any nuclear concessions or diplomatic outreach to Washington.
thinkahol *

The Democratic Party and Blanche Lincoln - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

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    The run-off between Democratic Senate incumbent Blanche Lincoln and challenger Bill Halter, which culminated on Tuesday night in Lincoln's narrow victory, brightly illuminates what the Democratic Party establishment is. Lincoln is supposedly one of those "centrist"/conservative/corporatist Senators who thwarts the good-hearted progressive agenda of the President and the Party. She repeatedly joined with Republicans to support the extremist Bush/Cheney Terrorism agenda (from the the Protect America Act to the Iraq War and virtually everything in between), serves the corporate interests that run Washington as loyally as any member of Congress, and even threatened to join the GOP in filibustering health care reform if it contained the public option which Obama claimed he wanted. Obama loyalists constantly point to the Blanche Lincolns of the world to justify why the Party scorns the values of their voters: Obama can't do anything about these bad Democratic Senators; it's not his fault if he doesn't have the votes, they insist.
thinkahol *

Contrary Brin: Can Libertarian Conservatism Find Its Way? - 0 views

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    "This relates to something I have been saying for a long time - that the conservative movement badly needs a counter reformation, an insurrection by reasonable grownups who are brave enough to push back against the forces of bilious unreason and Culture War that have taken over an entire wing of the "left-right spectrum." Is there any hope that this might happen?"
Maria Lewytzkyj

From the dr. who signed the Declaration of Independence to what's at the core of health policies - 1 views

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    The high cost of healthcare has been a subject that has confounded life in America and in various countries throughout the world throughout history. Why so high? Do higher costs in various countries determine the quality of care? Is health care supposed to be seen just like any other commodity? If a doctor notices that people cannot afford quality healthcare, what is their responsibility to the patient?
Bakari Chavanu

Amazon.com: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free eBook: Charles P. Pierce: The Kindle Store - 0 views

  • Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise.
  • Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect? Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.”
  • Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
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  • To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
  • Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
  • "Idiot America" is great, informative book about concepts we see everyday. Also, many of the 1-star reviews are likely biased because of some of the political and religious topics noted. I think this book is definitely a full, 5-star book.
  • The author notes "The 3 Great Premises: and applies them to many instances in this book: 1. any theory is valid if it moves units (rating, and making money). 2. anything can be true if it is said loudly enough. 3. Fact is what enough people believe (the Truth is what you believe).
  • POLITICAL TALK RADIO: One set of rules noted by a professor studying radio discourse: *Never Be Dull *Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity *The American public is stupid; treat them that way *Always ignore the fact and the public record when it's convenient
  • TELEVISION: "Television is an emotional medium. It's entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse."
  • But to someone willing to take the time to read it, this book tells people what practically everyone should know about American politics -- that the American people are being sold a sob story about how experts are an elite that is keeping them from being The Best Damn Nation In The World. (In that regard, one should definitely read "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter -- it's over four decades old, but saw from the very beginning what has come into full bloom now with the barking lunacy of the American Right.)
  • The main problem with this book is this: the people who are likely to read it already know most of the story, and are mostly getting background information, and the people who won't read it are like the six reviewers I mentioned in my intro -- determined to ignore its stories and insights as "bias" because their politics and faith won't let them look outside the cloister.
  • He lays the blame at the feet of various ideology-driven entities, with special attention given to the same corporate-media war cheerleaders who happily passed on Bush's lies about Iraqi weaponry to a somnolent public, and who, in the name of putting "balance" over reality, treat specious creationist nonsense and hard scientific fact as if both had equal validity. Highly recommended!
thinkahol *

"You Need to Know What's Really Going On": WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on the Fight for the Truth | | AlterNet - 0 views

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    "Assange: "In order to make any just decision you need to know and understand what abuses or plans for abuses are occurring." "
thepalinexpress blog

The Palin Express - 0 views

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    Welcome to my new blog, The Palin Express. This blog seeks the goal of support of Sarah Palin, Governor Sarah Palin in any of her endeavors. Also op-eds on relevant news.
thinkahol *

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Bruce Fein, American Empire Before the Fall | Book Salon - 0 views

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    There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.
thinkahol *

YouTube - Targeted Killing - 0 views

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    This video from the American Civil Liberties Union condemns the U.S. government practice of issuing death sentences without due process as part of its targeted killing policy. "Targeted Killing" is being released to coincide with the filing today of an unprecedented lawsuit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) challenging the government's asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without judicial process, and without disclosing the standards it uses to target individuals for death.
thinkahol *

How Corporations Buy Congress | BuzzFlash.org - 0 views

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    With the November elections quickly approaching, the majority of  Americans will be thinking one thing: "Who cares?" This apathy isn't due  to ignorance, as some accuse. Rather, working people's disinterest in  the two party system implies intelligence: millions of people understand  that both the Democrats and Republicans will not represent their  interests in Congress.  This begs the question: Whom does the two party system work for? The  answer was recently given by the mainstream The New York Times, who  gave the nation an insiders peek on how corporations "lobby" (buy)  congressmen. The article explains how giant corporations - from  Wall-mart to weapons manufacturers - are planning on shifting their  hiring practices for lobbyists, from Democratic to Republican  ex-congressmen in preparation for the Republicans gaining seats in the  upcoming November elections: "Lobbyists, political consultants and recruiters all say that the  going rate for Republicans - particularly current and former House staff  members - has risen significantly in just the last few weeks, with  salaries beginning at $300,000 and going as high as $1million for  private sector [corporate lobbyist] positions." (September 9, 2010) Congressmen who have recently retired make the perfect lobbyists:  they still have good friends in Congress, with many of these friends  owing them political favors; they have connections to foreign Presidents  and Kings; and they also have celebrity status that gives good PR to  the corporations. Often, these congressmen have done favors for the corporation that  is now hiring them, meaning, that the corporations are rewarding the  congressmen for services rendered while in office, offering them million  dollar lobbyist jobs (or seats on the corporate board of directors)  that requires little to no work.  The same New York Times article revealed that the pay for 13,000  lobbyists currently bribing Congress is a combined $3.5 bil
thinkahol *

t r u t h o u t | Do Not Pity the Democrats - 0 views

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    There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the press, the educational system, the financial sector, labor unions, the arts, religious institutions and our dysfunctional political parties, which can be considered democratic. The intent, design and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and anti-democratic power of the corporate state. These institutions, often mouthing liberal values, abet and perpetuate mounting inequality. They operate increasingly in secrecy. They ignore suffering or sacrifice human lives for profit. They control and manipulate all levers of power and mass communication. They have muzzled the voices and concerns of citizens. They use entertainment, celebrity gossip and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy.
thinkahol *

YouTube - Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck - 0 views

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    This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using 50 classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.   Will Donald's feelings of disenfranchisement lead him to be persuaded by his radio's increasingly paranoid and divisive rhetoric? Or will our favorite Disney duck decide that this voice is not actually on his side after all? Watch and find out!   * Listen to Glenn Beck's response on his radio show to this remix video: YouTube via stopbeck.org - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHByFFSh54  * Better yet check out ikat381's remix of Beck's response using Mickey Mouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjjTLVrkKA  This transformative remix work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. "Right Wing Radio Duck" by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License - permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.  * Please link back to my website: http://www.rebelliouspixels.com * English captions are now working in case you're not fluent in duck-speak  * Learn about fair-use at the Center for Social Media: http://centerforsocialmedia.org * Learn about transformative works at the OTW: http://transformativeworks.org * Useful Media Matters archive of Glenn Beck clips: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Jonathan McIntosh http://www.rebelliouspixels.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  List of Cartoons used:  * Window Cleaner - 1940 * Lucky Number - 1951 * Symphony Hour - 1942 (Mickey Mouse Cartoon)  * Put-Put Troubles - 1940 * Donald's Dilemma -19
thinkahol *

t r u t h o u t | Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability - 0 views

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    Any rigorous conception of youth must take into account the inescapable intersection of the personal, social, political and pedagogical embodied by young people. Beneath the abstract codifying of youth around the discourses of law, medicine, psychology, employment, education and marketing statistics, there is the lived experience of being young. For me, youth invokes a repository of memories fueled by my own journey through an adult world, which largely seemed to be in the way, a world held together by a web of disciplinary practices and restrictions that appeared at the time more oppressive than liberating. Lacking the security of a middle-class childhood, my friends and I seemed suspended in a society that neither accorded us a voice nor guaranteed economic independence. Identity didn't come easy in my neighborhood. It was painfully clear to all of us that our identities were constructed out of daily battles waged around masculinity, the ability to mediate a terrain fraught with violence and the need to find an anchor through which to negotiate a culture in which life was fast and short-lived. I grew up amid the motion and force of mostly working-class male bodies - bodies asserting their physical strength as one of the few resources over which we had control.
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