well fucking worth scrolling all the way down:

#45 Comment below posted by: superpatriot at August 17, 2005 09:13 AM

Bringing it On Again.

(A bit more bull spit as one of your reader calls it).

Post 9/11 the Bush people correctly identified Afghanistan as the target and followed the blueprint war plan left behind by Bill Clinton (or so they say). We invaded, the murderous scum that is the Taliban were routed. The world approved. All in all, a pretty good start for the war on terror. 

It was at this point however that an administration run by amateurs and, I hate to say this but yes, chicken hawks, began to show full feather. Juiced up just a tad on wartime endorphins following the successful (minus capturing Bin Laden) prosecution of the Afghan campaign the Bushies found themselves face to face with the real enemy: themselves. Bush forgot the most basic of rules (other than that someone other than he should do the fighting) that war , in fact , could be hell (I respectfully acknowledge thanks to Roggio’s bio that he does not share the same hole in his resume with our fearless leader). And so how does one forget or not realize war is hell? First and foremost by never having been in one. All the blogging in the world will not change the fact that Bush and Wolfowitz and Pearle and Rove and pretty much his entire brain trust (such as it is) never thought enough of fighting for their country to actually go out and do it. Never having taken a single pro-active step in their collective lifetimes towards putting their own lives on the line in defense of country, of the precious freedom they extol with such gravitas to grieving widows, nonetheless these gentlemen produced a common vision with an uncommonly high degree of thirst for blood by proxy. That they perhaps believed in what they were doing is as immaterial as it is probable. These guys believed all right but belief is the easiest of states to achieve when it comes to the table cloaked in arrogance and self righteousness. This is the same cocktail that produces terrorists and fanatics. (Do you think for a minute the 9/11 bastards felt any less righteous or believed any less in their mission?) What we needed at this point in time was a clear-headed non-emotional well thought out program to deal with terror. A marshalling of resources and a building of alliances with a post 911 world sympathetic to our pain and our cause. What we got was basically a grudge match and a poorly planned and executed one at that. A war and post-war fought in the wrong place and time and on the backs of a bunch of kids who never knew what hit them. 

Having spent a good deal of his life in and around Texas, George Bush could perhaps be forgiven for having forgotten the "talk softly" part of one very famous presidential edict. He cannot however be forgiven for having "the big stick" shoved back in our faces. With not enough boots on the ground to secure the territory they had worked so hard to occupy, the Bush plan sunk in a sea of blood and chaos. Not his blood (never is) but that of thousands of wonderfully brave but misled American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men women and children caught in the crossfire. In place of professional leadership and statesmanship Bush's childish "Bring it On" and “mission accomplished” photo ops served us most poorly and provided a rallying point for the opposition. 

In the end Bush empowered the opposition as no one else could. The great irony is that the thrust into Iraq, peddled with lies to the American people to win it's approval, had less to do with fighting terror than with establishing a pro-American, stable, democratized government in the place of a murderous and self-interested state run by a family of thugs. Not a bad thing on the face of it but not on task. The war on terror was the task and the American people understood this and had the Bush lot sold the war for what it was, it would have been no-sale. And they knew it. So they used the executive privilige of lying about the true purpose and circumstances of the invasion. I will not comment on this tactic other than to say there is plenty of historical precedent for this going back to, beyond and including FDR's "managing" of the news in order to help Britain in the roll up to WWII. Pehaps the biggest problem with Bush’s war is that his people prepared so poorly for it. It truly was war on the cheap. One can still see Wolfowitz sitting in front of Congress telling them why the generals were wrong and how we didn’t need a larger force to achieve our goals. My guess is he understood that to seal the deal he had to make it look as painless and inexpensive as possible. Lie or misjudgment, the result was the same. The sale was made and the fate of thousands of lives were sealed.

All the necessary information to avoid the worst of the mistakes existed had hubris and politics been left out of the equation and professionals allowed in. Neither happened. Dissent was not invited into the room (see Colin Powell) In the end the Bush plan set in place a chain of events that has resulted in the creation of a chaotic breeding ground in Iraq for a home grown insurgency and a recruitment bonanza or al Queda. Next door in Iran the invasion of Iraq squashed the momentum for the moderate cause breathing new life into the purveyors of radical Middle East theocracy, a murderous and unsavory lot for the most part. 

So now we are truly stuck. It's quagmire time. We have a two-front war, a re-invigorated opposition, daily death and destruction, a sad-sack coalition, a worldwide approval rating deep in the toilet and money flowing into a black hole draining our economy at the very time we need it most to invest for the competition in the global economy. And oh yes, oil prices through the roof. All in all, the Bush Doctrine has been a quite the ticket.

It is hard to know what Kerry would have or could have done, stuck as we are, had he won in '04. His performance at the Democratic convention with salute and reporting for duty schtick was all panderama. In fact the entire election was. You've got your saluting GI Joe Kerry and you’ve got your fear-mongering sabre-rattling Bush playing the John Wayne come to the rescue. Some choice. But it may have in fact been too late to make much of a difference.

Anyway, fear sells. The nation re-upped with the Duke and the rest is history. We brought it on.

his sister has a mousy voice but she's funny enough to end up here chicksandgiggles.blogspot.com (I bet)

Among the many questions that become apparent while watching ‘The Rising’ movie, for example how (given the strength of the British armies suppressing ‘the rising’)-did Europeans gain such a foothold in S.Asia ? The answer is, the sale of firearms and cannons. Where in Europe it increased vulnerability of signioral castles to the field artillery maintained by ‘kings’. The increasing use of firearms from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards is a crucial factor in the rise of centralized monarchical states all over the world.

One of the aims and outcomes of Jihad is to occupy attention. In this way it is a war against being interested in anything else.

al-Qaeda have defeated Hollywood. 9/11, on a budget of about $500,000, utterly absorbed and REALLY shocked, outdoing the stream of let-down, preposterous disaster films of the 90s (Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon) which spent fortunes on special effects.

Jihad is more real than Reality TV, employing hand-helds to record beheadings and suicide bombings; being caught on CCTV is a measure of success.

Media space and time is repeatedly conquered, good minds rack their brains, paranoia and pyschosis are palpable in the air.

Every moment of precious sentience focused on Jihad is a victory for Jihad. WWIII slipped by oddly unnoticed - some people betray confusion with a frown when it is mentioned. WWIV is a battle for space on the brain's hard drive.

Someone once asked James Joyce what he did during WWI. His answer: 'I wrote Ulysses.'

"Carriers know only what they need to know and no more. They are augmented by subtraction, their thinking liberated from the entropy of wisdom. They learn or remember only what they can use to go further, pursuing their relentless singular trajectories."

hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004648.html

Jihad is a master narrative seeking to squeeze out other narratives. One way of waging war against it is by stubbornly pursuing a trajectory that seems entirely incognizant of Jihad.

sd - while there is a lot to what you say (the terrorism-media nexus is a long established and persuasive model), you might be underestimating the Western (Anglospherean or even Global Market) gains from the intelligent escalation of this conflict - remember that the first wave of practical space technology and the Internet came from taking WWIII seriously on a technical level, while the equivalent civilizational bounty from WWII was simply stunning: the computer, radar, sonar, jet propulsion, rocketry ... (sure I've still missed key ones). Promises from WWIV include a huge leap in robotics (from unmanned predator vehicles), biometrics, cybersecurity (and aggressive cyberwarfare), satellite surveillance, biotechnology (response to bio-WMD threats), and even memetics (since everyone is aware the cultural war is the key).
Jihad is already incrementally raising the level of friction in the world business environment ('boiling the frog') and seems capable of continuing to do so, so there is also a case from switching from the current defensive mode of reaction to 'razzia' (the islamic mode of long-term, low-intensity, attritional, honour-based grudge-matches), to a style of conflict more in keeping with Western strengths (as outlined by V. D. Hanson in his Carnage and Culture - high-intensity, short-duration, decisive, shattering confrontation). In any case, since a seriously provocative WMD incident is inevitable on current trends, the question of escalatation may soon be taken out of the hands of Western strategists by populist politicians.

Reagan's roll-back strategy obviously delivered more than ignoring Soviet communism was doing / would have done. Like jihadism (and jihadi terrorized islamopuppet states) today, the Soviets were squatting on and wasting a vast chunk of planetary resources, waging attritional warfare against the Free World, obstructing globalization, degrading the quality of capitalist social systems through 'triangulation' and threatening truly eschatological crisis up the road ...
Reagan's formula for the Cold War - 'We win. They lose.' -still works in the current conflict.

If, as military historians suggest, WWI was the chemist's war and WWII the physicist's war ... WWIV looks set to be the informaticist/roboticist war ('high intensity' only means blunt megadeath if things are allowed to get out of hand)

that's just great, 'strenght' of the west posted by the man who priviliges himself above all others here to spell so*cia*l properly (must have something to do with lowely sweeping duties or something); I reserve the right to disrespectfully suggest you wage a little big(ger) jihad on yaself .. .

piet - some Islamarxist self-rectification type thing?

Yes Nick but Nick,

If the cultural war is the key, how far are those cultures defined by war? [genuine question]

Insofar as WWIV actually defends certain cultures and their values (one of which is libertarian technoscience) then surely the war is waged so that some trajectories can remain focused on what they do best.

Some carriers relentlessly pursuing their trajectories does not imply that WWIV is ignored. Some narratives, e.g stem cell research, will benefit from not paying too much attention to Jihad.

Some narratives have to simply do their thang, otherwise there will be nothing left in 2020 but weaponry and surveillance.

Some people are paid to pay attention to Jihad - government consultants who spend their lives monitoring Jihad virulence. This must be taking a considerable psychological toll.

how's the charge compression (love =as gravity making) on a word like inflation these days?
is it debt or credit? = are we winning this (or any) war????????????????????????????????????

>Jihad is more real than Reality TV

wow, _that_ real, huh?!

sd - your basic argument here highly plausible on common sense grounds, and also resonant with the 'don't be terrorized by terrorism' imperative which I have great sympathy with. My worry is that the jihadis are actually manifesting a superior understanding of cultural warfare and the predisposition of human nature to embrace highly defined dramatic conflict narratives (with an apocalyptic spin) than is yet evident in the West.
PS. The Oankali are still a 'war culture' (or 'war machine') but one that has so sophisticated itself that the idiocies of zero-sum collision are no longer discernible. There might also be a tendency for humans, for morally admirable reasons no doubt, to over-emphasize the zero-sum features of major military conflicts, which - when analysed with historical detachment - appear often more like productive phase-transitions than mutually ruinous wastage. It is quite shocking, for instance, to note how insignificant warfare typically looks when charted against demographic and frequently even economic trends. 'War is hell' but the deep scars are often close to invisible.

'War is hell' but the deep scars are often close to invisible. --- which is close to why they keep happening and the earth is going bald in a hell of a hurry flurry

gentle down you sucky heads!!!!!!!

easy for me to say with mars in pisces right?

"the earth is going bald in a hell of a hurry flurry" - how empirically well-founded is this claim?

ever heard of hypoxia? no, pox on you, caught 'completely unaware' too soon then

the goddamn 'pilgrims' expansionism carriers died in hollow trees for god sake. Just try being fair and say you don't care. Once. At least.

My knee-jerk distrust of common sense leads me to ask: is it really possible to ignore this particular meta-narrative and pursue the same 'relentless singular trajectories?' How is this different from "Just keep _____ (usually something involving the pleasant narcotic of hedonistic consumption) or else the terrorists will have won!" -- often leading to a result parallel to the post-tragedy bar hop/bender style of repression. Can't this jihad narrative be used as a stimulus for more thoughtful, responsible action?

Or do we banish jihad to a mental 'undercurrent' that adjusts rather than dominates whatever we were doing before? -- is this even more dangerous...

related note: didn't Ulysses have quite a bit to do with WWI?

oh yeah -
recognize the division of labor/attention thing, but was talking more about mental space, total behavior patterns of any given individual, not just say, their jobs, some of which must of course not change.

traxus4420 - "is it really possible to ignore this particular meta-narrative [?]" - Al Qaeda is in large part 'theatrical' and highly proficient at seizing attention. It's operations have been designed more for spectacle than for direct military consequence of any kind, and there's no reason to think anything has changed essentially in this respect. Stockhausen notoriously describes 9/11 as "The greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos" - although the implication that it marked the final statement in sublime violence is probably an over-optimistic one. So your question is inescapable, and directly connects with an overall strategic evaluation of the conflict.

"Can't this jihad narrative be used as a stimulus for more thoughtful, responsible action?" - Even if this is answered in the affirmative, a number of very different agendas will be triggered by it.

piet, what's the wwiv significance in The Rising movie?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_%28Indian_movie%29
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rebellion_of_1857

I dunno, it's just one of encyclopedestrian globaloid war critic Eric's little rants (coming thick lately) and until I've actually read it (delay after initial qualifying of sniff outs and finds entering print out process can be months .. and months sometimes) I hardly know for sure he sees solutions the way I do (but doubt it cause those who specialize in analysis to detail resolution as deep as him leave themselves little time for that, still, I wonder sometimes, I must have sent is site a few clicks back in the busy days).

Anyway, his is a sharp eye for war industriousness and domino effects of dominance or foolish pride flare ups leading to one after the other. I don't know a single science fiction author that was inspired by say Winter, Arguelles, me and other bioneering bravura (always in need of 'discovering' more to prevent depression) of like stripe.

ps: I last wrote: .. ...expansionism carriers died in hollow trees for god sake. ---- that should be 'dined', not 'died' and there's a famous painting that shows it: www.the-tree.org.uk/TreeTalk/PicturePages/RGriffing/griffing.htm

hey traxusman welcome and thanks for your circle of acqaintances; I think I'll well enjoy these pieces for instance:

differenzmaschine.blogsome.com/2005/07/04/bio-politics-2/#comments

differenzmaschine.blogsome.com/36
Accounting Terror (talks about credit populism, a long piece I wouldn't be suprised to learn shows the ancient adage war is inflation is war is guerre inflatoire etcetera in al it's chessastions (transliteral dutch) well enough to make me proud and hopeful).

differenzmaschine.blogsome.com/2005/08/05/the-magical-control-of-primitives/

amazing. contrasting the bloody Indian rebellion of 1857 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rebellion_of_1857) with the brutality of the Iraqi insurgents, Abu Ghraib & NYC, Madric & London bombings.

"Siege of Cawnpore ... The surviving women and children were led to Bibi-Ghar (the House of the Ladies) in Cawnpore. On the 15th of July, worried by the approach of the British forces and believing that they would not advance if there were no hostages to save, the Nana Sahib ordered their murders. Three men entered it and killed everyone with knives and hatchets and hacked them to pieces. Their bodies were thrown down a well ... When the British retook Cawnpore later, the soldiers took their sepoy prisoners to the Bibi-Ghar and forced them to lick the bloodstains from the walls and floor. Then they hanged all of the sepoy prisoners."

"The British adopted the old Mughal punishment for mutiny and sentenced rebels were lashed to the mouth of cannons and blown to pieces. It was a crude and brutal war, with both sides resorting to what would now be described as war crimes."

"Soldiers took very few prisoners and often executed them later. Whole villages were wiped out for apparent pro-rebel sympathies. The retaliation was termed by the Indians: Devil's Wind."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"(Bill Roggio) ... wakening the American military psyche. The West would basically have two options: (1) blitzkrieg 21st Century style - the full mobilization of its military and an accompanying sweep of the Islamic crescent, without regards for Politically Correct warfare; (2) nuclear war. Both campaigns would be designed to fully eliminate the Islamist threat, and the Muslim infrastructure, which allowed for the rise of al Qaeda's ideology."

piet - thanks for the welcome, hope you enjoy the few links i've assembled. The database of end-of-the-world scenarios (exit mundi) is one that seems like it might be relevant to this site.

It's still unclear to me if Nick/sd are talking about strictly occupational trajectories as avenues that can and sometimes should progress 'seemingly incognizant of' jihad/9-11, or if they are going for a more 'holistic' view.

traxus4420 - I didn't advocate ignoring Jihad: that is plainly impossible, with the media and audience penchant for disaster-replay porn. I advocated stubbornly pursuing a trajectories that seem entirely incognizant of Jihad. 'Seem' being the operative word.

Re: Ulysses - the book is 'about' a day in Dublin in 1904, so the content is relatively free of explicit or implicit reference events of 1914-18 (even the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916). T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is, however, much more explicit in its links to WWI. In terms of form, it is possible to view the multiple styles and POVs which constitute the textual fabric of Ulysses as being shaped by the shattering of official reality which came bundled with WWI and modernism, and by Joyce's deeply weird perceptions of language. WWI was taken into account, but Ulysses behaves as if it were incognizant. At bottom, Ulysses is an affirmation of banal existence in urban Ireland and its core strategy is to mutate and process the English language and English literary canon by tracking and feeding them through the streets of Dublin, a town on the periphery of the British Empire. Engagement with the enemy through an affirmation of values which are under threat.

sd - "Engagement with the enemy through an affirmation of values which are under threat" - as a defensive strategy this has considerable merit, but Faiths are very robust viz memetic warfare because they are precisely structured to deal with such situations (since they lack non-parasitic functional content they are free - like viruses - to devote all their resources to parasitic replication).
Classic examples (as you've already alluded elsewhere) include 'critical thought is a sin' 'dogma is holiness' 'lying satanic foreigners should never be listened to' 'leaving the faith is apostacy deserving of death' 'our intellectual incoherence attests to the sublimity of the divine' 'God loves little children who don't ask questions' 'the beards know best even when we don't understand them' 'rote learning by heart is best' ... since critical inquiry, intellectual debate and detached evaluation of empirical social, historical and economic evidence have failed the left (leading implacably to a global 'neoliberal' revolution rather than to the soc*alist holy land), they have discovered that rabid monotheistic meme structures are surprisingly comforting ...

...which is why I lean towards a ruthless dissection of faith, no matter how 'politically incorrect' and insensitive it might be. There are many forms of attack. Being deep in a planetary meme war, engagement with the enemy through an affirmation of values which are under threat is just one strategy at our disposal.

Given the fact we are not being paid to think about WWIV, I thing the exercise of extreme caution in allocating attention and time to it is essential. WWI was fairly meme-lite (which is why the Bolshevik seizure of power was so easy). WWII was characterised by extreme meme-toxicity, but there was a high degree of clarity, with humans wearing their ideologies on their sleeves (yet the Allies failed to appreciate just how virulently opposed to freedom Stalin was, with disastrous consequences for Central and Eastern Europe). WWIII was memetically simple but economically complex. WWIV is so complex that you can hear people say 'I don't know what to think' - partly because postmodernism disabled the ability to think. Anti-virus programs for the mind with regular security updates and warnings?

The Bill Rogio piece does not mention Chechnya vs. Russia - what's your angle on this?

The Chechen conflict is a legacy firstly of Tsarist, and then of Lenin and Stalin's depradations in the region (e.g. Stalin's deportation of the entire nation in 1944). Putin's
placing the conflict under the aegis of WoT is a bit dodgy (to say the least). The high civilian death tolls, strategic use of rape and the assasination of people prepared to negotiate has resulted in brutalisation - one of the most worrying phenomena that accompanies 'War is hell, but it's necessary' approach: heavy-handed slaughter breeds heavy-handed slaughter. The separatists, largely defeated, have nowhere to go but westwards. If the US is flailing, Russia definitely does not have the sophistication necessary for dealing with Jihad.

One last thing: any sites about robotics and surveillance you could recommend?

sd - excellent contribution to taxonomy of these conflicts. Need to reflect before commenting on your evaluations here.

pomo ref. of course crucial - pomo basically sugar-free faith-memetics for cynical western dognmatists, pre-packaged for red meat theofascism

On Chechnya - think there's a danger of trying to fix a stable essence for highly dynamic conflicts, what the Chechnya war is now, and is becoming, probably quite different from what it started out as. Like any strong ideology, Jihad polarizes and co-opts, so even situations that begin as relatively 'secular' (national-ethnic) become globalized and fanaticized - once you cross the Beslan threshold there's a whole new thing happening

Don't have anything off pat on robots and surveillance - sure we've got more adept net monkeys here who can scrape something together quickly ...

since there's not a lot of monkeys hanging around the ol' hyperstitional homestead ... you must mean this monkey.

webebizy.

THE SHOCKING MENACE OF SATELLITE SURVEILLANCE
english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/14/10131.html

ack!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improved_Crystal

I wrote chessastions but meant chessations, an even better translation (for schakeringen) would be chesserations (tesselation and ration chases are obviously hopping hinterher closely).

The word is that Rackspace simple responded to a request to hand over certain logfiles, not an order, so that makes the Indymedians regard this, their server hosts as whimps giving in to the populist meme 'totally legit, nothing to hide, be our guest' (which unfortunately not stimulated by way of exemplary practice on the part of doubly standardosed, strictly one way perps, pentagonians and ofFBeIers or something; see latest thing by Chuck Grimes an LBO-talk lister; via via link; also a confession to being here there)

piet. thanks for pointing out traxus4420 link to "magical control of primitives". reminds me of abelard reuchlin booklet on new testament authorship by piso family.

below the beginning of one of the last serious attempts to get the global newswire on some sort of stable base; since then it went missing for long stretches of time, then even the whole archive went missing (and my 40 file series pointing to article ID rendered a lot less useful, a brief restart was made (apparantly by someone very familiar with the german indy software), then a much reduced (no more quick guaging of popularity to be gleened from glancing at the comment numbers items attract) and changed version (instead of items per page there were now 30something) appeared only to be gone again after little over a year, and the list from which the sample thread below has been taken? It is still there alright, but has been visited only by spam for the last few years now.

I am still not done mourning the global indy(main)wire (despite all the spam and duplicate problems it had) .. .but .. .. perhaps this is all for the better really; if it foreshadows and prefigures the secessions on all sorts of 'tighten up to tidy up' fronts

. .. . ..

(fabulously difficult to do; how throw parasites off (overblown desert fundamentalism out of gentle and green regions) if certain forms of them are already deeply rooted?

You just can't attack the quran and ignore what the bible wrought without practicing intorerable and partisan partiality.

Islam's best defense is on grounds of (french) levelage, eq. treatment, non-discrimiation and ending affirmative this, favored that and subsidized other. Same rights for all or none.

They could argue: You whities let the bible in so be fair and give us a chance too.

Deport all quran toters and throw the bible after them including 'real' dutchmen who insist on holding on to that one of the 3 great evil wrighting books in this world? That would cause a lot of treeroot concrete cracking, perhaps not the least cheerful prospect.

//archives.lists.indymedia.org/www-newswire/2002-February/003458.html Chuck Munson posts: [Www-newswire] Is IMC-Global beyond hope of saving?
Chuck Munson chuck at tao.ca
Tue, 12 Feb 2002 12:17:38 -0500

Previous message: [Www-newswire] Heads up: IMC Switzerland being sued under Swiss anti-racism law

------

It seems like every week I go through this debate in my head: should I
continue to participate in the IMC global project or should I organize a
boycott?

So today I opted for participation. I posted an item to the newswire
announcing a project (Class War Posters of San Francisco) that I spent
many months putting together. I've just gone back to the newswire and
find that in two hours it's already been kicked down the page. What
kicked it down the page? Another flood of right wing posts from that
pathological liar, Bill White.

Great. While the IMC is controlled by free speech zealots who have
sabotaged the mission of the IMC, people who try to participate are
going to be driven away by the juvenile antics of the Bill Whites of the
world.

Bill White wins every time, because IMC can't get its fucking act
together.

I warned everybody several months ago that we were headed for trouble by
allowing people to repost copyrighted corporate articles. Now it looks
like Free Republic is going down because people reposted corporate
articles there.

Is Indymedia going to go down next? I'll bet money on it.

Thank you for not listening.

>

Infoshop.org -> //www.infoshop.org/
Alternative Press Review -> //www.altpr.org/
Practical Anarchy Online -> www.practicalanarchy.org/
Anarchy: AJODA -> www.anarchymag.org/
MutualAid.org -> www.mutualaid.org/
Factsheet 5 -> www.factsheet5.org/
AIM: AgentHelloKitty

Web publishing and services for your nonprofit:
Bread and Roses Web Publishing
www.breadandrosesweb.org/

introductory texts:

www.jeffvail.net/2005/03/theory-of-power-online.html
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
"A Theory of Power" Online

www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm

hey, funny, after posting the above I amend as follows: They could argue: You whities let the bible in so be fair and give us a chance too.

Not that they haven't been given a chance to recreate the great hanging gardens of babylon at least in miniature (the dutch for instance, are famously stingy with land desired and indeed requested for such purposes)

next I go pick up the maxspeak.org (you listen!) item I mentioned yesterday and find a google ad (in dutch) trying to sell me an acre of israeli for 200.000 euri!!!!!! -- you can also view google ads by category

maybe not that funny.

neither is this: //harpers.org/CartoonSheehan.html

pietje sputter - a new term has been coined: blogblight. Any idea to what kind of blogbehavior it might apply?

BOTH SIDES NOW; author of the long comment I quoted at the beginning has meanwhile received the advice to seek help from female red in tooth and claw; and her account is certainly from the other side of 'the fence'; let me climb it and see what either side stems from.
Pedigree profile: finery filter known as the flow of time: the times it takes for A: lava to cool, effluvia to precipitate and dust to be pressed hard and dry dwarfs B: the time it takes to grow millenia old organisms yet both happen at the same time and even the latter in turn miniaturize those it takes be consumed by flame or the time it takes to produce a little dust. If these are not a the most recursive, important and interesting one way cascades that make and/yet miss each other to ever get to know, besides the even longer term/scope like 'genesis continuous', I'd like to know which are..

PS: BILLYBOY seems to have turned comments off

no, you?

. ..or I would request that lady visit: nativeways.tripod.com/index.htm
via www.wildroots.org

ranprieur.com loops me back to a site I discovered only yesterday (via an item on jinn), the part-time cyclist/homesteader seems to agree with Nick: "I think the various human factions are like bugs put in a jar by a cruel child-god who is shaking it to make us fight. How do we get out? Something that comes up over and over in "paranormal" research is that the entities have very little physical power. Most of their power is in the ability to influence the human mind. So the way to get free of them is to be aware of their existence, but not take them seriously."

doin xixtx

hey sd, as soon as google swings by 'blog( )blight' will no longer be a 'whack' (unless making them one word don't count ((think it doesn't)), as 2 it scores 9 results)

another turn of phrase: blog kudzu

Maybe I missed something. What happened to WWIII? Why the leap to WWIV?

Tachi - WWIII lasted from 1945 to 1991. Capitalism vs Communism; US vs USSR; the Cold War. Although some terrestrial territory was fought over (Korea, Vietnam), WWIII was mainly an economic and cultural war, the outcome of which was the utter destruction of the USSR and its grip on Easterna dn Central Europe. WWIII is not described as such because of myopia and meme blindness.

The roots of WWII can be traced to the Bolshevik seizure of power (1917) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919).

The roots of WWIII can be traced to the Yalta Peace Conference (1945).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference

The roots of WWIV can be traced to the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan (1989).

War seems to be born in the ends of conflicts and peace treaties.

Hell, war is just a game; ask half the internet:

www.costik.com/weblog/2005_08_01_blogchive.html#112454587656432430
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Violence ('game' 'released') to Creative Commons
you people are sicker than I can say and sicker than you know by a further and wider margin still; I can at least close that gap though I warn you from my position to that of an empow(d)ered speader of peace requires a few additional notches both on the comprehension and what to do with it front. That caveat out of the way, allow presentation of some creds: For those born in old fashioned butchershops (47 yago) blood holds little mystery to me (though the mutual desire to kill is familiar only in as far as I imagine ways to make fighting fair which I trust and fancy is part of gaming culture struggling with it’s dark, selfish and highly nonsocial self); I struggled free from familial (soft though traumatic enough) coercion (and its compulsively commercial drive to live for the dynastblast, the private regional and national sizes of messianism, no stranger to any fancier of offspring) and since then attempt showing others what mindsets and practices immunize and afford a choice when it comes to partaking in the categories of experiences one can call violent or not.

Going out killing some bad guys and having to always be on guard for them was for the longest time a great antidote against and pre-emption for the rise of the suffocating mass-society we find ourselves in but no more. It is gonna take a better distribution/understanding of discipline in order to improve the ratios between demographic prickroot (eco-footprint) and provision prowess if we opt for the gentlest possible way out/back.

If that sounds good to you so far, consider your self lucky; you (too may soon) find yourself spending hours at my sites, reading the works gathered by one out (of) a billion (a unique combo of talents, inclinations, troubles and times resulting in privileges gained from catering to urgent needs of the masses reapplied to serve them with a slight delay to study needs and requirements we are only dimly, cryptozoically or even totally UNaware of). Of course we all are one in a billion and I am much like most of them in that I don’t get a billion visitors either (let alone paying ones) but it simply takes at least that many to outwit the randomization and erasure always going on.

In our world of worshipped and warshipped innovation we all hope to come up with a rare combo of stuff and thus contribute to the flow of our or others’ blood, cash or whatever.

this website presents obscure but pregnant texts, graded by urgency only in so far as I keep mentioning them; I have so far failed to set it up so I can progressively reward as well as pamper people enough to go near, snif at, protect, spend intimate time with and combine them into practice with any reasonable and satisfying measure of success. So I am definitely not one in a billion when it comes to being frustrated but far fewer will feel like it is due to unrealized rather than blocked potential. So if you resent me painting you sorry ass figures take comfort I am harder on myself than anybody.

Everybody needs others to be hard on them though and that’s me, at your service; barehanded.

Yall are gonna go/sputter/object: jesperjuul.dk/ludologist/?p=200 Economist stat: violent crime down game sales up
and: gamegirladvance...study_senators_wont_want_to_see.html

but these facts don't fool me

skotos.net/articles/bth.html made her laugh (if I understand correctly); her employer/partner(s)? run (black and white) lovecraft comics

www.generation-online.org/p/fpcaillois.htm Bug off! (mimicry in the insect world --
people.freenet.de/autres-espaces/collin1.html On Caillois and Camus in french ::::: L'épreuve de l'aridité : Camus et Caillois ou les arcanes du contentement -- Frédéric Collin
mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/reviews/jan2004/edge_graubard.html review of a Caillois Reader
Matuschek: Using Caillois' Modes of Play In Literary Analysis (last april) post from Roll_The_Bones Research, Reflections, and Speculation concerned with Risk, Play, and Chance. :::::: a more recent one is on Matuschek too: cultureraven.typepad.com/roll_the_bones/2005/08/milestones_in_t.html I think I can safely recommend exploring this site (weird colour on that april item though; amsterdam canal colour); he does another blog too: Culture_Raven --- "Satire ... stems from the curse of wrath, not from reason." J.L. Borges. Bad tempered, cynical, and pessimistic musings on cultural carrion.
generation-online.org/p/fpcaillois2.htm Power - Roger Caillois
(presented by Georges Bataille Saturday, February 19, 1938)

ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/reso/2003/00000032/00000001/art00005
The bureaucratic beyond: Roger Caillois and the negation of the sacred in Hollywood cinema ----- Author: Genosko G.1
Source: Economy and Society, Volume 32, Number 1, February 2003, pp. 74-89(16) ---- 28$ (!?!?!?) will get you the rest of this:
Abstract:In a short paper written in the early 1950s, 'The representation of death in the American cinema', Roger Caillois theorized the representation of the afterlife in America through the Hollywood cinema of the late 1930s and 1940s. Caillois maintained that the American afterlife is fundamentally bureaucratic and represents a prolongation of the world of the living. This prolongation is understood as a negation of the separation of the sacred and the profane domains in favour of a desacralized, profane pan-bureaucracy. Caillois's essay is read in the context of a sociology of the sacred in the tradition of the Collège de sociologie, with special attention given to his descriptions of how the sacred tends to wane in ordinary life and to his hybrid methodological strategies. The films Caillois used as evidence are critically reviewed and the Hollywood invasion of French film markets in the 1940s and 1950s is developed as a critical historical context for grounding Caillois's claims about American 'originality': the negation of the sacred dimension of the afterlife, the power of cinema to replace oral tradition in collective life, and the consequences of a powerful, 'exported' mythology that negates the sacred.

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3806/is_199805/ai_n8806098/print long article -- Romanic Review > May 1998 > Article > Print friendly
Revenge of the novel: Roger Caillois's literary criticism in the wake of the 1930s ::::::::::: Peter F. DeDomenico ::::::: University of California-Berkeley :::::::: Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

sd. thanks for the history lesson.

Here's a wallop of history for ya; just the way you like it; get lost in an excellent program (congame?): cultureraven.typepad.com/final_and_history.xls

don't let nobody brand my site(s) the most impractical . ..

:o

sd - thanks for response. In your view, what would mark an end to WWIV? And would an end of WWIV necessarily give rise to WWV? It seems that war is the norm, and that peace is just a phase of war undergoing mutation, from this point of view.

tachi - I'll have something in response later this evening.

wars are fought over scarcity
allowing ourselves the luxury to stop wars is easy once we start abundance

turn war around into raw .. .

turn putting life to death around into feeding life with death; feeding death into life is ever so easy; sprinkle the right sort of dust (most any fresh rockdust will do into a summer puddle big enough to last a few days and presto: reduced oxides, hydrocarbons at the humble end of a laaaaarge loooong bewildering strange trip of a chain and fresh oxygen bubbles peeping out of the freshly slipperizing stuff of life.

I don't know how much more clearly I need to say this; perhaps Cindy Sheehan's son, as his death was approaching, would have grasped the concept if he and the other six of his pals who died could have been afforded a time out somehow and by some miracle read one of the umpteen times I strewed this message around (including soldier's blogs); the company killed hundreds that day by the way according to a colleague of his who is quoted on proteinwisdom.com

tachi - a few thoughts, crude and clunky, nothing conclusive (of course)

"In both his December 2004 statements, for example, Bin Laden clearly stated his view that democracies, constitutional governments, and insufficiently Islamic monarchies are equally unacceptable forms of governance for Islamic societies because they empower human rulers and man-made legal systems rather than "the law of God." Al Zarqawi expanded on these sentiments in a January 2005 statement that characterized democracy as a rival "religion" to Islam and criticized adherence to democratic principles such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion as un-Islamic and tantamount to punishment by death."

www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL32759.pdf

Insofar as WWIV is a meme war, Jihad/Islamism has pitched itself against the modern democratic meme.

The former sees itself being most at home in the body of a feudal system where Islamic law is enforced by the state - tending towards control, repression and even mutilation of the body in the enforcement of its law, and towards censorship of media forms, not just its content (the Taliban banned TV). The meme is fiercely iconoclastic and part of the program it unpacks carries out the destruction of symbols pertaining to other memes (The Buddhas of Bamyian; WTC). One arm of the police is defined as the religious police. The state is utterly and uncompromisingly hostile to any other meme than the one it imposes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_under_Taliban_rule
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_under_Saudi_rule
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1242856.stm
archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/03/02/Bamiyan/

The modern democratic meme has policies of freedom (of conscience, economic, political, sexual) written into its core code and seems to be most at home in the body of a secular society where the economic system of capitalism is allowed to run on a long leash and the main function of government is that of Leviathan (the secular police).

The modern democratic meme mutated from isolationism at the periphery of European Imperialism and has defined itself through war (against fascism and communism) and in the process of decolonialisation following WWI and WWII. Capitalism, the meme's host, is intrinsically inclusive and proceeds by co-opting its outside through trade: to approach full potential its market forces require the Earth and all its resources. One of the problems of WWIV is that the democratic meme serves up the system it unleashes with apple pie and seems reluctant to acknowledge the system's machinic intolerance of any societal structures that get in the way of its pursuit of resources.

The modern democratic meme has a tolerance for alternative memes, and can even cope with parasitic un-democratic memes inside its body. WWIV will demonstrate whether or not this tolerance is a strength or a weakness, whether the meme can take having its own democratic technologies turned against itself.

Jihad has attacked the core code of democracy and challenged it to a fight to the death. It wants the undivided attention of democracies sensory apparatus (the media) and often succeeds in getting it. Images bombard the mind, triggering fear in some and setting inspirational precedents for others.

Jihad is winning on the image front, and probably in cyberspace. The war is also enabling Jihad to make serious inroads into democratic civil liberties. Leviathan requires and demands better eyes and ears, speeding up the process of total surveillance. Intelligence agencies can read and decode electronic communication over our shoulders: the state has its hands on intellectual property - the capitalist system is forced to become more feudal. Jihad polarizes the conflict, as Nick pointed out, and so pushes democracy away from pluralism towards a monolithic, unified front. The modern democratic meme, aware that it is fighting for its survival, has laid down an un-democratic ultimatum to moderate Islam: join us (and democratize?) or die. In this way the meme facilitates Capital's planetary drift.

a very clear article: The War on Terror: Year Five
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/19/opinion/main788708.shtml

WWIV could develop into a total war (like WWI and WWII) if a vaccine for the virulent meme of Jihad is not found. Ultimately, if the meme war is not fought in minds by means of dialogical confrontation, then it will be fought on the body of the Earth.

If WWIV becomes total, the war so far will be on a similar scale to the Spanish Civil War (a training and testing ground) in relation to WWII.

One possible end of WWIV could be when democratic puppet governments have been successfully installed in all the countries which are deemed to constitute a threat to the Free World as managed by the puppet master US. The US and its memes being themselves puppets in their turn, of course.

War feeds on the aggressive genetic makeup of homo sapiens. War, whether military, economic or memetic, seems to feed the system of Capitalism. So yes, the seeds for further conflict will no doubt be sown in the resolution of WWIV, if it ever comes, IMHO.

>>a very clear article: The War on Terror: Year Five
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/19/opinion/main788708.shtml

"Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon are principals of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm."

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Frank_Cannon
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jeffrey_Bell
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution
www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27345

Part of President Bush's political DNA
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Natan_Sharansky
Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli journalist, wrote of Sharansky's influence on Bush that "The idea that the teachings of this particular political philosopher are the guiding star of the mightiest leader in the world, the commander of the biggest military machine in history, is rather frightening". [Avnery, op. cit.]

>>a very clear article: The War on Terror: Year Five
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/19/opinion/main788708.shtml

sd. several things caught my attention in this article: {a} inflection points, {b} Iran and the larger Shiite world, {c} effective psywar.

can you expand on these a little concerning your meme thread (quite interesting, btw)?

and a discussion on Natan_Sharansky re: programming WWIV would be helpful also.

sd. how are the different types of propaganda used to program WWIV — black (misdirection), grey (unattributed) & white (declared)?

sd - appreciate your insights. Though not sure how the memetic dimension of WW should be articulated or conceived in relation to the material basis of war. Energy, resources, key IMHO, though there is obviously a clash of ideas and values penetrating the trajectory of this and previous WWs.

Can there be said to be a singular trajectory to all WWs, marking them as different from other, relatively isolated and paraochial wars? Is there something at work, however mutational, non-linear, that can be said to be a singular process that makes WWs connect?

If so, wouldn't it be too simplistic to say that these wars have been about freedom and democracy, overcoming successive obstructions (facism, communism, jihadism)? Surely the memetic aspect needs careful elaboration within the material context of un-anthropomorphic processes?

some useful questions... some answers later.

from yesterday's news:

An Islamic Republic of Iraq? news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4177266.stm

excuse me, but don't most wars get fought over

A: command over testosterone-driven hierarchy heigtening search for honour and prestige?

Aa: Does the winning team have to prove it's the most violent team; can the most violent team call itself a winner

B: retaliations perceived as offensive enough to escalate these diabolic staple feeds for fundamentalities?

Bb: aforementioned 'reasoning' taken as excuse to appropriate that which the targeted party doesn't deserve/know how to use, etcetera?

C: another vicious circle: scarcity brings on the misconduct of war which causes even more of them.

Logic dictates that allowing ourselves the luxury to stop wars might leave us with enough time on our hands to start abundance; to open rock isn't just to create or shape space, but time too.

the above posted (as prelude to my last one here) at proteinwisdom.com (hawk territory or at least tolerated) in order to teach them a lesson about taking chickens to market (it's a highly offensive thing to do also known as hawking); if people turn down your hawkishness and you don't set them free you'll find yourself taking them back home to roost.

amsam.org has a link about US pentagon slogans (Operation Iraqi Freedom; Operation Enduring Freedom) appearing on gravestones.

www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5228467,00.html

Northanger - re: Sharansky

The following article by Martin Kramer identifies a 'blockage' which will hinder the spread of democracy in the Arab world: Democracy's base code is 'freedom from', on top of which the modern democratic meme has written 'freedom of'. According to Kramer, the Arab-Muslim world cannot install 'freedom of' because "submission to God" and Islamic law get in the way .

Mr Sharansky ease my doubts, by Martin Kramer
www.geocities(dot)com/martinkramerorg/Sharansky.htm
(again, dot problems)

Particularly relevant sections (sorry for the length):

Who wants freedom?

And this brings me to my second doubt: the idea that the peoples of the Middle East all want freedom. Now of course there are liberals who want freedom as we would understand it—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of religion, all belonging to the autonomous individual. These are the "freedom of" people, many of them with direct experience of Western democracy, having visited at length or lived in exile in the West. They have created various associations and NGOs, which Western governments and foundations fund. They are good people. Unfortunately, they are relatively few.

A much larger group is what I would call the "freedom from" people. Their idea of freedom is somewhat different. It is freedom from oppressive government, not so much for the individual, as for the collective—the kinship group, the tribe, the religious sect. The quest for this kind of freedom has existed in the Middle East from time immemorial. The late Elie Kedourie put it best. "The Middle Easterner," he said, "is very far from thinking that he has a right to have a say in politics. All he wants is to be left alone and not to be oppressed." Elsewhere he wrote of the Syrians, as archetypes of the Arabs, that "they have never been much accustomed to being asked their opinion about their rulers. For them the happy man has always been he who has a beautiful wife, a comfortable house, a lucrative occupation, who does not know government, and whom government does not know; in short, the private man."

No doubt this is a desire for freedom, but it is freedom from, not freedom of. What is the difference? You may desire freedom from oppressive government, and still deny your beautiful wife the freedom to drive, or get an education, or go about in public. You may fervently wish not to know government, but still expect blasphemers and adulteresses to be punished by law. You may fight for freedom from oppression for yourself, and not much care if your neighbor is oppressed, especially if he is from a different family, or tribe, or sect.

It can well be argued that democracy's concepts of freedom began with this more basic concept. The concept of "freedom of" begins with the desire for "freedom from." But this is where there is a blockage in the Arab-Muslim world, an obstacle, and it brings me to my third doubt.

An Arab exception?

It has to do with a certain understanding of Islam, sometimes called Islamism. Muslims who are under its sway uphold divinely-revealed Islamic law as the blueprint for the just society. I will spare you the details, but this law is not compatible with democracy, or even with a plural society. It is predicated on a set of dichotomies, primarily between believer and unbeliever, secondarily between men and women. Some of its provisions are open to interpretation, but it is not infinitely elastic. Most importantly, Islamic law does not recognize the autonomous sovereignty of man, only that of God. And Islamists are largely indifferent to the means by which they would establish Islamic law and the regime to implement it.

To those who want freedom from oppressive government, the Islamists offer as an alternative not the collective will of the people, but the divinely-revealed message of God. And that is the blockage that prevents the transition to democracy. There is a widespread desire for "freedom from" in the Arab-Muslim world, for an end to tyrannical government. But the Islamists warn that "freedom of" is even more dangerous than tyranny, because it will unravel the entire social order. They offer a different alternative, which might be called "submission to"—submission to God. (Islam means submission.) This alternative has great appeal. Every single polity that has opened itself to free and unencumbered elections in this part of the world has seen Islamists make tremendous gains, or even take power.

Is it possible that one part of the world, one unique nexus of history and culture, is an exception to the rule that leads peoples to democracy? If you answered "yes" in Middle Eastern studies over the past thirty years, you were denounced as a heretic, or even worse, as an orientalist. The worst orientalist thought crime was the belief in Islamic or Muslim exceptionalism. Now that same belief has become a thought crime in the neoconservative doctrine.

But to hold the view that there are no exceptions, you have to believe that the passage of power to Islamists is not point final, but an interim phase. To go from "freedom from" to "freedom of," Arabs have to pass through "submission to." To get from tyranny to democracy, they need an interim phase of God's sovereignty—God as a transitional figure, God as Gorbachev.

Alas, to date, there is not a single example of any polity that has followed this path to democracy. Above all, Iran is clearly stuck in the "submission to God" stage. The reason is that the people who exercise power in the name of God do not see themselves as managing a transition to a "freedom of" society. Quite the opposite: they use their power precisely to block the emergence of those freedoms, because they cannot relinquish power exercised in God's name.

also an interview with Sharansky here: www.meforum.org/article/666

piet - can you provide some hard evidence for this claim: "wars are fought over scarcity"? How can this explain the arms race which led up to WWII and the arms race of WWIII (which crippled the Soviet economy).

sd. hmm, "666".

tachi - some quick responses (time is short)

"Can there be said to be a singular trajectory to all WWs, marking them as different from other, relatively isolated and paraochial wars? Is there something at work, however mutational, non-linear, that can be said to be a singular process that makes WWs connect?"

I'm tempted to say WWs are impossible to fully understand as they happen. The clarity comes in retrospect.

For example, when WWI took place, it seemed to be nothing more than senseless slaughter. When looked at from the perspective of outcomes however, the war really seems to have been 'about' the collapse of mafia-like dynasties which had held Europe in their grips for centuries: the Romanov, the Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties/Empires all imploded during or immediately after WWI. Lenin was right (but blinded by moralism) when he said that Britain and France -the 'victors' of WWI were huge firms. Nations as companies defeated nations as dynasties.

WWII went through radical shifts as it happened: it started as an alliance of Facism and Communism against European democracies and transformed into an alliance of Democracy and Communism against Facism. The meme war took place in the open and may have actually obscured what WWII was really 'about' - e.g. technological development, as Nick has suggested.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_September_Campaign#Phase_2:_Soviet_aggression

"Energy, resources, key IMHO"

"Surely the memetic aspect needs careful elaboration within the material context of un-anthropomorphic processes?"

Yes. The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was 'about' the oil of the Caucasus and the grain of the Ukraine as much as it was 'about' the enslavement of the Slavs. The deciding battle of WWII took place at Stalingrad - not at Moscow, precisely because Hitler, against his generals' advice, deemed seizing resources more important than the political gains of occupying Moscow.

With regard to WWIV, maybe one unexpected outcome will be the serious development of plausible bio-fuels which will make the US less dependent on overseas oil.

www.msnbc.msn(dot)com/id/8769619/site/newsweek/

Convergemce: Islamic Terrorism as a virus

fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com

[The Cancer Ward Wednesday, August 24]

and here:

www.windsofchange.net/archives/007399.php

and here sd!!! hurry, such warm buddys there for you: //israpundit.com

www.loudwire.net/community/culture_jammers/19095.html
p(remove)okerwithoutcards.com

Modern media has become increasingly manipulative and assaulting on each and every person who finds him or her Self awash in the endless sea of endorsements, messages, suggestions, enticements, and so on, that it produces repetitively, day in & day out. Seemingly more than ever before, media agencies have discovered methods based on sound principles which tap into the deeper realms of our mind, and are designed to distract the conscious mind while carrying out their intention. This intention appears to carry with it a disease or sickness the effects of which we see indirectly manifest in some of the occurrences & events in our cultures & in our world(s). It is, then, imperative that we begin to understand the effects that modern media have upon us, and an excellent presentation of this in found in Ben Mack’s P(remove)oker Without Cards. Within this brief exploration we will uncover some of the means & mechanisms by which mental distress is manifest within our Western culture as they are related through Mack’s work.

Within the dialogue of the book the character Howard Campbell says,

“Business is a physical manifestation of meme warfare. Media company choices do have tangible effects on shaping the structure of society. By creating targets, and crafting delivery mechanisms for these predetermined audiences, we segregate the information they receive. Isolation breeds mutation.”

What is being suggested here, and indeed one of the many threads central to the book, is that the increasing alienation amongst not only individuals, but groups of individuals standing under a certain core identity, is a byproduct of the way media currently functions in order to create more revenue for its corporate clients.

It might also be worth mentioning that an analogy is pursued in the pages of this book that seeks to identify or characterize the general personality or motivating principles of most (or all?) corporate enterprises as having the values, direction, and imperative of a sociopath. While discussion of this might add a great deal more sense of urgency to our present examination, it is too much ground to try and cover here; however, there are some compelling arguments presented in formulating the analogy. Interested individuals are encouraged to read the book for more on this aspect of Mack’s work.

WWICCICVDIDVCIVCIIIIDVCIIVVD:
occurrencies.topglobs.com
or cerebrality.topglobs.com and I forget the one I thought of in the dead of night

sd's warm buddys - well that certainly was a deep and productive contribution, wasn't it?

Since when did posting links to sites constitute an unambivalent endorsement of their content? Implying allegiance to israpundit is an unbelievably cheap shot.

More importantly, how can we appreciate the extent of the present bipolarity and gulf in comprehension if we don't go to the edges?

Or maybe it would be safer and more reassuring to ping pong backwards and forwards between the moral sanctuaries of Lenin's Tomb >K-Punk >The Guardian.

If you've got any substantial points to make then please fire away. I'd love to see what a penetrating and extensive analysis of Palestine/Israel you have up your sleeve.

Intelligence Whispers: Terrorism's Funding Friends in High Places
www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3159&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
"WMR - Wayne Madsen - WMR has obtained further paper trails linking George H. W. Bush's longtime mysterious Swiss German money mover (see July 24-25 article below) to a now defunct bank operated on behalf of Osama Bin Laden, his family, and some of his closest business associates. The network of Swiss-based terrorist financiers are also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and prominent European fascist leaders."

Bank of Terror (Al Taqwa) - old news, but i just heard about this. thoughts.

sd, no, not 'up my sleeve' but certainly plenny relevant stuff sprinkled throughout my site (gliberally I admit); I don't feel called upon to fingertiptapspoonfeed you with it here, so let's see how far your 'love to see it' goes and comes; you might dig (for) it . .. you need not; dig?

Pacifism as Pathology: Notes on an American Pseudopraxis Ward Churchill
" . .. .they offered virtually no physical opposition to the consolidation of the Nazi State. To the contrary, there is strong evidence that orthodox Jewish leaders counseled "social responsibility" as the best antidote to nazism while crucial political formulations such as the zionist Hagana and Mossad el Aliyah Bet actually seem to have attempted to co-opt the nazi agenda for their own purposes, entering into co-operative relations with the SS Jewish Affairs Bureau, and trying to use forced immigration of Jews as (page 33) a pretext for establishing a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine.

www.oxygensmith.com/~arc/readings/ pacifismaspathology/pacifism-3.pdf

ps: perhaps the zionist initiative was parralel to and maybe even the antecedent/innoculant that started the whole sick Nazi epidemic (shem and shaun; cheggen Q); Ward C certainly makes a mistake when he suggest the ghettos came about bycause of the Nazis unless you wanna give them very old roots indeed.

My regular reading schedule just happens to have crossed cited passage yesterday and I must say, the whole book makes more sense than I suspected it would judging from reviews (workingforchange)and polemics (Carol Moore) against it when it came out.

. ... I just happen to have looked up some relevant things this morning which I can warmly recommend:

Leon Blum just published a 136 page book on the Dreyfuss affair (in german), the sample mentions Lazare (much admired by H Arendt according to Mehlman) frequently: www.perlentaucher.de/artikel/2488.html

Jeffrey Mehlman: www.columbia.edu/cu/french/ maison/conferences/jaccuse/Mehlman.pdf 35K on Lazare's role in the Dreyfuss affair

www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-project/history/antisemitic/ Bernard Lazare's whole 'history of the jews' framed and hypered working from the gutenberg version--- National Institute of Technology,Calicut-673601,India

muse.jhu.edu/journals/jewish_social_studies/v010/10.1cohen.html Auto-Emancipation and Antisemitism (Homage to Bernard-Lazare) -- Mitchell Cohen

www.doingzionism.org.il nothing there, just his name

www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1539 Jewish Nationalism and Emancipation (1897-1899) ----- Jews in the Modern World ----- If the cause of anti-Semitism is the existence of the Jews as a nationality, its effect is to make this nationality more tangible for the Jews, to make them more aware of the fact that they are a people.

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/1899/antisemitism.htm Source: Antisémitisme et Révolution. Stock Editeur. Paris, 1899.
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor

not much about Palestine yet; still curious why Karl Kraus used philistine as adverb etcetera so often and why his conception of it changed over time; have to go get to use one of them expensive CD-Roms of the 'fackel'; asking politely ain't getting results for me either.

So European Jews were complicit with their own annihilation? They started it? It was all part of a cunning plan which would obviously end with the creation of the state of Israel?

Well I'm so glad that's all cleared up. Thanks Piet.

PS Half your links don't seem to work, which is a shame - I'm sure they're very insightful.

{testing} hey nick.

as far as links not working sd, for one I didn't bother to take the google spaces out here (but did for my blog at //liecause.tripod.com)

for two, I wouldn't stick them up here if I hadn't been able to get there and find them noteworthy somehow.

You wrote:
So European Jews were complicit with their own annihilation?

me: Allow me to quote from the Ward Churchill book I posted some more:

" .. . . when states perceive their international power positions eroding, or simply undergoing substantial external threat.125 Invariably, such circumstances entail the identification (i.e., manufacture), targeting, and elimination of some internal entity as the "subversive" element undercutting the "national will" and purpose. At such times the state needs no, indeed can tolerate no hint of, domestic opposition; those who are "tainted" by a history of even the milder forms of "antisocial" behavior can be assured of being selected as the scapegoats required for this fascist sort of consensus building. 126

While the precise form which might be assumed by the scapegoating involved in a consolidation of North American fascism remains unknown, it is clear that the posture of the mass nonviolent movement closely approximates that of the Jews in Germany during the 1930s. The notion that "it can't happen here" is merely a parallel to the Jewish perception that it wouldn't happen there; insistence on inhabiting a comfort zone even while thousands upon thousands of Third World peasants are cremated beneath canisters of American napalm is only a manifestation of "the attitude of going on with business as usual, even in a holocaust."127

Ultimately, as Bettelheim observed, it is the dynamic of attempting to restrict opposition to state terror to symbolic and nonviolent responses which gives the state "the idea that [its victims can] be gotten to the point where they [will] walk into the gas chambers on their own."128

And, as the Jewish experience has shown for anyone who cares to look the matter in the face, the very inertia of pacifist principles* prevents any effective conversion to armed self-defense once adherents are targeted for systematic elimination by the state. " --- page 76 from Pacifism as Pathology

You again:
They started it? It was all part of a cunning plan which would obviously end with the creation of the state of Israel?

Well I'm so glad that's all cleared up. Thanks Piet.

All catalytically triggered processes are/have effects which diverge greatly from the state, substance and intent of the proverbially unmoved movers who are usually a minuscule portion of and minutely diverging version from some huge mass (zionism and messianism vs jewishness is as terrorism vs islam??); to generalize about this like you do is incorrect (no matter how much it may be considered wise by affirmative activists or otherwise politically motivated equality idealists).

Some of these effects may be calculated to rebound catalytically, thus a sort of reciprocal feed and further for substance, quantity and intent/intensity of initiating catalyst starts aforementioned effects to enter vicious circle with latter results at such speed and to such an extent that the whole ball of cheggen wax loses (in)sight of beginning and end until the fuel is spent.
Ward writes: " .. .inertia of pacifist principles .. ."
I am going to argue that his stubborn refusal to as wax eloquent about the potential of those principles, not to mention their application, no matter how ever farther apart and fewer between they seem to be getting all the while, as he is (only too) willing to go on (and on) about the drawbacks (without mentioning that his line of reasoning implies total and utterly unreasonable hegemony that will only wither from being fought to exhaustion (the terrorist meme) proves him to (probably willy nilly) be an agent of the right and that's the main reason they have trumpeted his alledged subversion so clear, loud, far and widely.

His is in fact, alas, the more realist reprentation of reality on the ground. It is however never ever time for a last stand or desperate last resort measures unless you rule out the realm of possibilities (the true motor of all the ongoing fresh beginnings from the humblest speck of dust on up and beginning with squatting more than anything, ideally followed up speedily by 'ingratiatory embeddiment' in the neighbourhood, success in the local legislature; legalization and graduating to the sort of support and nurture than works little miracles like the one I started my examples out with, my favorite; the oldest and only way for heaven to take root on planets).
Modeling is all the rage in this day and age; nothing happens any more without model making, rehearsing and simulation. In as far as Ward interprets and represents the left accurately (forgetting what he leaves out for a minute) he shows and relentlessly, mercilessly emphasizes and mirrors their weakness, gives voice to the obsession with sordid sides and facets of reality besides the disinclination and near complete inaptitude of presenting a jocularly infectious form of 'voorpret' (anticipatory pleasure). BUT that does make it all the more urgent to emphasize there isn't enough 'don't just count, take a chance with your blessings' type of creativity about in the only way that counts, offer a sample to which nothing comes close. Utopian forces, unite.
Ward is a nice change from the usual 'open spaces for potential to sprout up and blossom blahblah blah' type rhetoric but to fall short of 'm is as bad as overshooting your goals. I am still convinced that unless you dramatize the 'right idea', nobody will follow up and actually begin alternatives, let alone work on a chance to change and outgrow all the bad stuff. I fancied animating a few little epic and organic videos in the eighties, nobody has taken me up on that yet. The folks that got a giant grant that could go some way toward it aren't up to it (yet): www.seercentre.org.uk

e-Qaeda - A special report on how jihadists use the internet and technology to spread their message

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501138.html

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/custom/2005/08/05/CU2005080501141.html?whichDay=1