Christopher Hitchens

Corey Robin

The American Conservative

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch

Glenn Greenwald, at Salon.com

Gawker's John Cook

OWS

Orion's The Reign of the One Percenters

Occupy Everything Eats the Rich

The Christian Science Monitor asks if OWS needs leaders.

The Guardian sees OWS as a reprise of our radical imagination.

Soldiers' Revolts

These, from Vietnam.

The Zapatistas

Don't let a good movement go to waste, or, organizing ain't Glam.


S&P


Chomsky: The Assault on Education

Lawyers, Gun$ & Money reports that PETA will soon put its paws into porn.

Today's...

"It’s just that conservative ideas are born out of social cataclysms—the French Revolution, abolition, the Russian Revolution, the New Deal, the 1960s—in which people with power lose power. Real concrete power: over peasants, slaves, workers, blacks, wives. Conservatism, strange as it may sound, is the voice of the dispossessed: the aristocrats, masters, employers, whites, and husbands who’ve had their power taken away from them and want it back."

Wednesday Roundup

Religion doesn't have to be full of nutjobs


Mother Jones explains the London Riots

Mainstream media and Magical Thinking or, Why Conservative Media Understands Deficits Better (it's all about the money, stupid).

Democratic, small communities using local food and energy VS. Extinction

What we need are tough decisions that require virtue to address.

But until that, there's this , which is precisely what Zizek argues against here.

Reading this week

Corey Robin posted a very thorough discussion about Obama (BHO) and the debt ceiling.

Game Theory, Debt Ceilings, Lost in the Strategery

NPR's non-apology

We Are Respectable Negroes posts on Tea Party Racism.

[I will continue to update this post over the next week.]

Bradley Manning

The example of Bradley Manning underscores a current security reality, in which numerous actors generally have open access to secrets and could potentially leak them. As the number of witnesses to any classified information increase – and as these witnesses perceive a more generous transparently shared culture, OR as these witnesses perceive greater injustices in each cover-up – the risk of leaks increases. Repudiations for why leaking is unethical vary: it represents a breach of a code of conduct, that while transparency is admirable, leaking isn't itself transparent but “underhanded”; that it's immoral– seditious or unconscionable; that the appropriate channels (chain of command) are available to those seeking to address and redress wrongs and expose any crimes that may have been committed.

Is war possible in an age of yawning security and a greater proliferation of transparency and security-less networks? Do the advantages of wartime secrecy – that we know something the enemy doesn't and where these secrets constitution our sole advantage – exist in an age of total transparency? Could a transparent world eradicate the advantages of war and thus bring on the futility of war for all parties involved? Could a superabundant pervasiveness of transparency lead to the end of warfare?

Lenin and the Present Tense.

In the Translator's Notes to the 1991 version of Lenin's The State and Revolution, Robert Service posits that Lenin refers to Marx using present tense (his example is that Lenin frequently wrote "Marx writes") because "[Lenin] wanted to emphasize that Marx was no dead prophet in the eyes of Bolsheviks." I wanted to explore -- as I read the book -- different ways to interpret Lenin's use of present tense, particularly as it pertains to how many writers use Literary Present to establish immediacy rather than to deify historical actors and events. My theory is that Lenin, in mixing into his political tract both examples of formal and informal writing style (Service's Introduction, xxiii), wanted to have his reverence of Marx both ways too. In other words, Lenin uses Literary Present because he wants Marx to be both political and literary, an author in character; and he wants Marx to have the immediacy that Lenin's contemporaries perhaps seek to deny him (Marx).

Bank Errors

It's quite simple, really: If I made an error which shortchanged anyone, I'd be at fault.

Libertarianism

Wouldn't a true libertarian not be concerned with how far the US is "falling behind," dismissing the entire National Identity/competitive edge debate as a product of statist thinking?

Researching the United Nations, by Linda Tashbook

This should keep you busy for some time.


Linda Tashbook is the Foreign International Comparative Law Librarian at the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law's Barco Law Library, a Fulbright Senior Specialist, and an attorney in private practice. Prior to becoming the foreign and international librarian, she was the Barco Law Library's Electronic Services Librarian. Before law school, she worked as a public librarian. Her Juris Doctor and Master of Library Science degrees are from the University of Pittsburgh. Her Bachelor of Science degree is from Texas Woman's University.

Why Aren't You Speaking English

I've been meaning to post about this, and I will, I swear.

While I'm writing down my thoughts, mull it.


Update: Apparently, having No God threatens a church in Ohio. A not-so-undisputed list (see Comments) of failed states, courtesy of Foreign Policy.

More to come in my Evening Update of this post...

Franco Moretti

Franco Moretti says if you stand back you can Understand Literature, a stance summed up in this NY TIMES Article.

My comments are the following:

I have two objections to Moretti: 1) Perhaps if you seek to understand literature that's what you might do: pull out a chart and stand back from it all, seeking to get an aerial view. But seriously, who reads thinking that by finishing a few books we'll understand all of literature. (And don't readers read to understand reading, not literature?) And 2) what's all this bullshit about "sample size"? Literature isn't a fucking survey! If we believe that literature is comprised of words and deeds, then each book is filled with thousands of each, making reading even two books a pretty fruitful undertaking.

I don't purport to know why everyone reads, but it seems silly and naive to supplant the premise that by reading a few books one would ever "understand" anything with "Don't read books and you'll understand all of literature."

Agreed. His mapping techniques are interesting, and would be amazing to use in class (assuming everyone had read/was reading the text in question), but without reading over the language each author uses, claims to understanding seem -- like Plot on his charts -- thin.

The Military as Pluralistic Socialism

Bill O'Reilly knights himself as MC Rightnut. The Nation reimagines capitalist reality The military leads the fight against racism.