29 September 2006
Civilised (adjective): cultured, educated, refined, enlightened, polite, elegant, sophisticated, urbane
Civilise (verb): to enlighten, educate, cultivate, improve, advance, develop, refine
Poor old Dante Alighieri, were he around today, I am sure he would find it difficult to find the words to describe the evils visited by so-called civilised nations on the defenceless of the planet, assuming that is, he was fully informed of what is going on.
25 September 2006
My buddy S. Artesian who writes such inciteful deconstructions of capitalism[1] especially its depradations of South America, is, it has to be admitted, pretty much a lone voice these days, at least in the so-called developed world.
An avowedly unreconstructed Marxist, that is, he continues to utilise Marx’s razor sharp analysis of capitalism in all its gory details which as events unfold in this post-Soviet world of capital in (yet) another crisis, becomes all the more relevant to our current predicament.
23 September 2006
Strange Liberators – Militarism, Mayhem and the Pursuit of Profit by Gregory Elich. Llumina Press, 2006.
Around 1990, when I was living in New York, I, along with two or three other people were invited to an evening at the North Korean Mission to the United Nations where we were plied with a meal of amazing and delicious Korean cuisine followed by an interminable and utterly boring (to my jaded, Western eyes) video that attempted to put the North Korean case.
20 September 2006
Do you believe in synchronicity? Yeah, I know it sounds like some mystical new age crapola, but it is a fact that the creative process is driven by—well who knows what—quantum physics? All those impossible entities whizzing around (metaphorically speaking) in our brains that make connections, driven by an impossible number of combinations that we call the imagination that are the sum (and then some) of what we are born with and all the experiences we go through from birth that end up making us what we are.
14 September 2006 — Media Lens
The Australian social scientist Alex Carey summed up the evolution of political power in the last century as follows:
“The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” (’Taking the risk out of democracy,’ University of Illinois Press, 1995, p.ix)
12 September 2006
Anybody who has read Joe Bageant’s excellent cries of rage[1] here will surely sympathise with the guy, stuck as he is firmly in the craw of a totally insane beast. The question is, who will choke first? As of writing, all bets are off.
Yet before I go off half-cocked it’s worth remembering that here in the UK we have our own version of insanity and I am no less stuck even if in the craw of a lesser beast than Joe is, nor are my fellow citizens any the less caught up in the madness than Joe’s neighbours on the Beltway. (For our sins we are all condemned to our own special hell. Conditions may vary from state to state, please check your purchase agreement.)
11 September 2006 — Media Lens
Kidnapping Aristide
In a series of alerts in 2004 we examined media coverage of events surrounding the military coup that forced Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile on February 29, 2004. Continue reading
9 September 2006 — Joe Bageant
Nobody talks about it out loud, but a few million Americans are seriously doubting their sanity these days. Or having their sanity doubted. Or both. They seldom speak their minds because what is going on in there is a vision of society that conjures grave doubt, if not outright horror. It is the kind of stuff that will get your ass kicked off the island in a heartbeat. Nobody wants to hear it.
8 September 2006
Review: ‘Democracy and Revolution – Latin America and Socialism Today’, D.L. Raby
‘[O]nly a fool could think that the solution to the world’s problems lies in capitalism.’ – Hugo Chavez Ruz
I really like this book; firstly its straightforward language makes it accessible unlike the verbal diarrhoea that usually afflicts academic writing, especially on the ‘left’ with all its talk of paradigmatic this and the dialectics of that.
5 September 2006 — Media Lens
On May 25, one of us spent several minutes laughing on the phone with a friend of ours, an environmental journalist. We were looking at the homepage of the Independent website – a newspaper that has made huge efforts to present itself as a radical campaigning force for action on climate change. A February 17 news report, for example, was titled: ‘Greenhouse gases are already past threshold that spells disaster.’ A May 4 article read: ’Global warming fastest for 20,000 years – and it is mankind’s fault.’ Continue reading
The New Dark Age 