Anonymous Comrade submits:

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

An Interpretation of Bush's Character

John Chuckman

While I find those images on the Internet of a blunt little mustache digitally-scribbled onto President Bush's upper lip feeble and unhelpful, still, there are parts of Bush's character and behavior that strikingly resemble at least one major biographer's interpretation of Hitler. Ian Kershaw's two-volume life of Hitler puts great emphasis on his being a driving high-stakes gambler - with innate, animal-cunning about human psychology, few gifts of statesmanship or strategy, and little systematic learning - attributing most of his success and all of his failure to his compulsive quality.

anonymous kumquat submits:

Some of the Necon media are getting mighty nervous about the recent outing of their main man...

"What Hath Strauss Wrought?"

Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard

The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973.

On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians by all accounts, are stooges and dupes. It insinuates that neoconservative intellectuals--Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is at the top of everybody's list--have craftily ascended to positions of power in the federal government from which they aim to implement Strauss's teachings. And it invests Strauss, a student of political philosophy whose life's work consisted in writing learnedly about thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, and sharing his discoveries with students, with almost superhuman powers: Through the force of his ideas, we are told, this scholar and teacher is able, a generation and a half after his death, to command the respect and loyalty--and indeed, to compel the actions--of highly successful and well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the academy.

(Link above will get you full story, if you've got the stomach for it.)

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Queer Theory in a Nutshell"

Jackie Susann

Queer theory is the academic discourse that has largely
replaced what used to be called gay and lesbian studies. The
term was coined by Teresa de Lauretis for "a working
conference on theorisising gay and lesbian sexualities that was
held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990".
The word queer has since come to be pretty much synonymous
with gay and lesbian (or maybe just gay male) but at the time
one of its main advantages was seen as its inclusiveness:
queer covered gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people,
sadomasochists and a potentially endless list of others
somehow marginalised by their sexuality.

by Franck Düvell writes:

"The Globalisation of Migration Control"

Franck Düvell,[1] 19.May.03

The IOM recommended the Turkish government "to prevent irregular migration and to fight trafficking".[2] Later a daily paper reported, "in Turkey, nine people are shot and five other injured at an attempt to illegally cross the border. 139 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh had tried to cross the Iranian-Turkish border".[3]

"Business As Usual"

Tariq Ali, The Guardian, Saturday May 24, 2003

Unsurprisingly, the UN security council has capitulated completely,
recognised the occupation of Iraq and approved its re-colonisation by the US
and its bloodshot British adjutant. The timing of the mea culpa by the
"international community" was perfect. Yesterday, senior executives from
more than 1,000 companies gathered in London to bask in the sunshine of the
re-established consensus under the giant umbrella of Bechtel, the American
empire's most favoured construction company. A tiny proportion of the loot
will be shared.

"The Violence of the Global" [1]

Jean Baudrillard (Translated by Francois Debrix)

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of
anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary
partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is
necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly
of its relationship to the singular and the universal.

Full essay is at ctheory

"The Google AdWords Happening"

Christophe Bruno, April 2002

How to lose money with your art ?

At the beginning of April, a debate took place on rhizome.org mailing list, about how to earn money with net art. It suggested to me an answer to an easier problem : how to spend money with my art (if you understand everything on how to spend money, you should in principle understand also how to earn money, because of conservation laws...)

I decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords . I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little "poems", non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative.

I began with the keyword "symptom".

"Empire and the Capitalists"

Immanuel Wallerstein, May 15, 2003

No doubt, George W. Bush thinks he is in the forefront of those sustaining the world capitalist system. No doubt, a large part of the world left thinks that too. But do the great capitalists think so? That is far less clear. A major warning signal has been launched by Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading financial investor firms, in their Global Economic Forum. Stephen Roach writes there that a "US-centric world" is unsustainable for the world-economy and bad in particular for the United States. He specifically takes on Robert Kagan, a leading neo-con intellectual, who has been arguing that American hegemony can only increase, particularly vis-a-vis Europe. Roach could not agree less. He sees the present world situation as one of "profound asymmetries" in the world-system, one that cannot last.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Of Blair, Hussein and Genocide"

John Chuckman, May 19, 2003

Britain's Prime Minister Blair has now claimed that the war in Iraq was justified by the discovery of mass graves. The ugly truth is that mass graves have become pretty common things since the beginning of the twentieth century, although many of the world's most savage and horrific acts left no such evidence, as in the case of America's napalming, carpet-bombing and throat-cutting millions in Vietnam.

pirate greg writes:

"Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere: MAVN Conference, and the Battles Lost"

Gregory G. Sholette

"The emphasis on the passive element in experience certainly does not claim to be a theory of knowledge? But it is certainly the preliminary condition of any theory of knowledge which is not content with verbalistic and illusory solutions."

Sebastiano Timpanaro(1)



"There is perhaps no current problem of greater importance to astrophysics and cosmology than that of "dark matter". The Center for Particle Astrophysics.(2)

What does one make of a conference entitled Marxism and Visual Arts Now in which examples of contemporary, visual art were all but absent and the few speakers who did address recent artistic practices hardly strayed from citing works and practices not already ensconced within the institutional art world?(3)