a General Theory of Rubbish

Was ganna just nick cloody's title but opted for this one instead

2008-08-26T23:13:59Z

Nice post by Cloody here. His point made through understatement and hinting, rather than yelling at fucking twats in green ink. He led me indirectly, and not directly, to read all of this article on Vasily Grossman. You should also do so as well as look at Neil's post and follow and read his link of course. Little blighters you.

Be free always

2008-08-25T00:31:10Z

It was Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 100th birthday a couple of days ago.

DESSAU, Germany -- A transit camp, located between the American and Soviet zones, was organized for refugees, political prisoners, POWs, forced labourers, and displaced persons returning from the Eastern front of Germany after having been liberated by the Soviet army. A Belgian woman and former Gestapo informer, being identified as she tried to hide in the crowd, April 1945.

Am Y'Israel Chai!

'lympics shite

2008-08-24T02:39:54Z

Kicking stuff — this time by Cuban gadgie

“there is no harder place on the body than the knee”

Errr fuck off dipshit. The hardest place is the heed on the human frame and the knee isn’t on the ‘body’ anyway. I would just have all sports commentators thrown into landfill sites after their throats have been cut for their own good and that. The Cuban ... canny radgie like … should be arrested and flung in a grotty jail like. No wonder he lost, he didn’t even knock the ref over never mind owt else like. And that and that.

Situationist thingy stuff*

2008-08-23T01:10:11Z

The "Bureau of Public Secrets" website is 10 years old. Inaugurated 22 August 1998, apparently. For the 10th anniversary, Ken Knabb has posted a brief account of the development of the site, along with a few remarks on the radical potentials and limits of the Internet. And that. Makes a good point about copyright fascism by publishers...

Thousands of classic works are now online and this in no way causes people to stop buying printed copies. No one says, “I was just about to buy a copy of Shakespeare’s works, but I guess I won’t since they’re now all online.” The Web is useful primarily as a reference resource, where you can check some particular point or search for some particular passage. It’s not very conducive to lengthy reading. Scarcely anybody ever actually reads a whole book online (unless it’s out of print and there’s no alternative). But the more of an author’s writings are online, the more likely it is that new readers will discover him or her.

And the limits of the Internetsweb ...

[It] is very useful for brief texts and communications, especially when timeliness is important (news, notices, networking, ongoing projects), or for creating reference archives of important documents. It’s not a good place for serious study. It’s ridiculous to imagine that you will get anything out of Homer or Lao Tzu or Gibbon or Montaigne or Murasaki, or anything else with any depth and subtlety, by clicking to a webpage and glancing at a few “graphically enhanced” excerpts. If you want to find out about Marxism or anarchism or the situationists, you should get books by Marx, Kropotkin, Debord, etc., read them carefully, discuss them, criticize them, try putting their valid aspects into practice, then go back and reread them in the light of those experiments. Only when you have become somewhat familiar with them does it make sense to check the Web for additional texts by or about them, or to seek others who share your interest. The Internet obviously shares some of the alienating features of other media, insofar as it habituates people to passive spectatorship of texts, images, news, ads, propaganda, sensationalistic soundbites, emotionally manipulative melodramas, etc. But it differs enormously from one-way media like radio, television and film in that it also facilitates interaction and participation. The mediocrity of millions of blogs and websites should not blind us to the fact that their very existence is an expression of horizontal popular communication that would have been inconceivable in the top-down, television-dominated world of two or three decades ago.

... *Warning note -- contains some idealism.

Update and that again

2008-08-22T01:30:12Z

Re: this Have had a packet of crisps before I go to bed -- cheese and onion -- feel a bit heavier than usual -- having problems locating budgies at such short notice tho but. And that.

Another experiment

2008-08-22T01:23:39Z

Have also decided to put on loads of weight -- and breed budgies. Hoping to emulate Geoff Capes in the Tossing Heavy Budgies competition at the 'Lympics 2012 in cockneeland and that. Will keep you informed if successful -- obviously (goes without fucking saying really don't it like and that).

Update and that

2008-08-22T01:20:18Z

Re: this Nowt has happened as of yet like.

Experiment

2008-08-22T01:04:58Z

I have decided to grow my hair like wot Einstein had his hair styled like. Forra laff like. Hoping to meet fillum stars and shit like that. Will let you know if successful like.

Superfluous fluff

2008-08-20T11:13:19Z

“At times, being a newspaper journalist can feel like being a coal-miner in 1985.”

Again -- just saying like

2008-08-20T01:17:10Z

SWP, the bastard offspring of the International Socialists, to give aid and comfort to the "resistance" in Iraq, and to defame the Iraqi labour movement, tells you a lot about the trashing of that tradition. Consider this, for a start: what exactly is socialist about calling for the victory of a dictatorship over a coalition of democracies, and then supporting Ba'athists, Islamists, and other murderers and terrorists who do not even claim to be a national liberation movement, thus insulting not only the European resistance movements against Nazism but also genuine movements of national liberation? Whatever happened to 'the liberation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself', comrade?": You seem to be confusing liberation in the sense of transition from capitalism to socialism with liberation in the bourgeois sense outlined above. Marx himself accepted that the victories of the North in the US Civil War, and of Prussia over France in 1870-71, were historically progressive. Self-styled revolutionaries would ally themselves, not with moderate, democratic Muslims (which they would have had no problem with), but with Islamists as hostile to progress as the fundamentalist Christians they knew in their day. In contrast, the broad view is - or should be - the one taken by those who supported the liberation of Iraq (and no, we're not going to go over all the details and nuances of last year's arguments yet again). "Support for Iraqi democrats" should mean exactly that: support for the efforts of all groups of Iraqis seeking to work together to establish democracy in their country, regardless of whether they call themselves socialists, liberals, Islamists, nationalists or anything else, and regardless of what theoretical position they adopt towards the Coalition in general or the United States in particular. In practice, the transition process, which necessarily involves negotiation, compromise and, yes, collaboration between Iraqi democrats and the Coalition authorities, requires the support of all who genuinely care about the establishment of a stable democratic polity in Iraq - as opposed to those who seek mainly to exploit Iraq for the purposes of political point-scoring in their own countries. Of course, the Coalition authorities have made some stupendous mistakes, and must be constantly monitored and criticised. Of course, there are elements within the Coalition governments (all of them, not just the US administration) that have no interest in building democracy in Iraq, and they must be exposed. Of course, the motives of these governments are not pure or altruistic, any more than anyone else's motives are. Yet it's a simple matter of fact - however regrettable - that no other route to democracy in Iraq is available, and that the alternatives to holding our noses and supporting the transition process, faute de mieux, are all far, far worse. In this situation the analogies with Vietnam or Algeria that the "anti-war" crowd are so stupidly eager to propagate are entirely misleading. Support for Iraqi democrats now is much more like support for German, Austrian and Japanese democrats after the Second World War. True, the end-result - partly, of course, because the right were better-organised and better-financed than the left - was the election of right-wing governments in West Germany, Austria and Japan alike. But that's what support for democracy necessarily entails: respecting the wishes and judgements of the majority of the people, even if you disagree with their wishes, and even if you suspect that their judgements have been corrupted. In the absence of majority support for socialist revolution - and in the presence of clowns who are doing their best to ensure that socialist revolution never does receive majority support - liberal democracy is the least appalling option available. For all its grave faults and dangers, now is not the time to be fantasising about going beyond it. On the contrary, given the obstacles, building it in Iraq would be an achievement in itself.

SIAW -- worth remembering and that like. All human beings have one and the same nature it is power and culture that mislead us Baruch Spinoza (1632-77)

Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses Slavoj Zizek - Tilton Gallery, November 28 2007

2008-08-19T22:41:34Z

Have so far watched the first three -- placed here to remind me to watch all. If you also want to watch may I suggest that you wind forward on the first one to listen to the Zizek himself and not the boring as fuck wifey doing the intro (nee offence like). Might I also suggest that when introducing interesting people like Zizek that the introducer keeps it short and fucking sweet? Yes -- thought so.

Trailer

2008-08-19T19:10:35Z

Brad Meltzer's 'Book of Lies' trailer... Starring Joss Whedon and Christopher Hitchens!

'Simplicity' does not equal wrong

2008-08-19T01:22:08Z

Excellento post here by the Jimbo (as usual). One thing tho' but. He should have drawn a 'simplistic analogy' because its simplicity would be all the more correct through its simplicity. Fuck it ... . Here is the the Utube as well.

I am Bruce Forsyth

2008-08-18T00:06:32Z

Just saying like

Try as you might

2008-08-17T00:54:28Z

Whenever you have the day off from work, do you also get the feeling that it is merely an eight hour period that begins with plenty of optimism, during the passage of which it is incrementally taken for granted by yourself that events are occurring elsewhere -- thus, it all ends in bitterness and self recriminations? Just wondering like.