Search LBO-Talk Archives

1216 [lbo-talk] Let's Build -- rank: 1000

Doug: "Wow, James, have you spent much time touring the U.S. landscape, what Kunstler calls the geography of nowhere? It's soul-destroyingly hideous." If you mean that Americans are hideous, I cannot agree with you. I read the news of 300 000 000 Americans as a good thing. And where else should they live but in houses?

Document Size:	4800
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Oct 14 01:09:44 PDT 2006

1217 [lbo-talk] Canada: imperialist or vassal? -- rank: 1000

I remember Canada being cited in marxist debates as an illustration of the difference between economic imperialism, as Lenin meant it, i.e moribund capitalism, exporting capital to offset the overaccumulation of capital at home on the one hand, and political colonialism, i.e. the related drive to dominate the world through military might. The point was that over-mature capitalism was not necessarily syonyomus with colonial oppressor, though the one was the basis of the other. The point of the il ...

Document Size:	5889
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Oct 3 17:53:36 PDT 2006

1218 [lbo-talk] Let's build! -- rank: 1000

Me in today's Sunday Times:"Experts from Kingston University's Centre for Suburban Studies were dreaming of dotting the countryside with houses, creating sprawling megacities and ushering in an era of cheap homes for all. "We will have a city 100 miles in diameter taking in Cambridge and Windsor and Brighton," declared James Heartfield, author of Let's Build!, a book launched at the conference that advocates ending the division between town and country and the building of 5m homes ...

Document Size:	5126
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Oct 1 12:53:23 PDT 2006

1219 [lbo-talk] Support -- rank: 1000

Everyone's picking on Yoshie, so I hope she'll forgive me if I too take issue with some points. Yoshie wrote: "Today, wherever leftists in the West look at in the Middle East, there is no viable political force they can support, for viable political forces are either Islamists..." And "In the age of Islamism, I predict that there will be a wider and wider gulf between those who live in the OECD nations and those who live in the Middle East." I appreciate that this is how thin ...

Document Size:	8112
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 21 03:31:29 PST 2006

1220 [lbo-talk] My interview with Litvinenko -- rank: 1000

The doubts raised by Chris Doss and Peter Lavelle are pertinent, and in the article we did try to convey the point that a lot of what Alexander Litvinenko said was questionable. That said, I did not want to dance on his grave. Peter especially says he knows that he was not killed by the Russian security services. I think he might well be right, but I don't know. Chris asks what my interest was, and honestly, it was tangential. I was researching a dull and worthy paper on Chechen ethnic groups in ...

Document Size:	5638
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 25 11:50:11 PST 2006

1221 [lbo-talk] My interview with Litvinenko in the papers -- rank: 1000

The Telegraph bigged up mine and Julia Svetlichnaja's interview with Litvinenko: "Death may have silenced Mr Litvinenko late on Thursday night but his testimony lives on, most dramatically in a series of interviews he gave two academics from the University of Westminster earlier this year. For a total of six hours, most recently in the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, Mr Litvinenko opened his heart to Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield and shared with them the story of his life, from his bir ...

Document Size:	5893
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 25 01:20:06 PST 2006

1222 [lbo-talk] Suburban alienation? -- rank: 1000

"Burbs not so bad after all "Shannon Proudfoot, CanWest News Service Published: Saturday, November 11, 2006 "A new study says that people who live in sprawling suburban areas have more friends, better community involvement and more frequent contact with their neighbours than urbanites who are wedged in side-by-side. ... "The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking ...

Document Size:	5743
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 22 02:35:15 PST 2006

1223 [lbo-talk] Support -- rank: 1000

Everyone's picking on Yoshie, so I hope she'll forgive me if I too take issue with some points. Yoshie wrote: "Today, wherever leftists in the West look at in the Middle East, there is no viable political force they can support, for viable political forces are either Islamists..." And "In the age of Islamism, I predict that there will be a wider and wider gulf between those who live in the OECD nations and those who live in the Middle East." I appreciate that this is how thin ...

Document Size:	8316
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 21 15:40:18 PST 2006

1224 [lbo-talk] Al Qaida - agents of imperialism -- rank: 1000

Al-Qaida "planted information to encourage US invasion" http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,,1950055,00.html This interesting story comes from the informant Omar Nasiri, that the seizure of senior Al-Qaida officer Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who was tortured in Egypt at the behest of the US in November 2001. According to Nasiri it was Libi who manufactured the story that Saddam Hussein had offered to train Al-Qaida in the use of chemical or biological weapons, which he repeated to his US ...

Document Size:	6799
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 21 13:57:15 PST 2006

1225 [lbo-talk] the Iraqi resistance at work -- rank: 1000

Yoshie says "What's clear is that those who have taken up arms against the occupation are divided multiply: some are Shi'i militiamen, like the Mahdi Army; others are Sunni guerrillas of diverse political tendencies; and yet others are foreign jihadists. Among them, the only faction whose political program we know even a little about is the Mahdi Army. The conditions in Iraq are so dangerous that it is impossible for us to get reliable accounts about who's who of combatants in Iraq." ...

Document Size:	6631
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 20 14:45:13 PST 2006

1226 [lbo-talk] the Iraqi resistance at work -- rank: 1000

> What does "the French resistance killed far more French citizens > than it killed Germans" mean exactly? That would not be so exceptional. The Algerian FLN killed more Algerians than it did Frenchmen (see Alastair Horne, Savage War of Peace). I think it is true also that the IRA killed more Irishmen than it did Britons. The North Vietnamese Army killed 243,748 South Vietnamese, as against 57,690 Americans (and lost 666 000).

Document Size:	5072
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 20 13:32:25 PST 2006

1227 [lbo-talk] Anti-war campaigners backed economic sanctions -- rank: 1000

On Nov 19, 2006, at 1:37 PM, Steven L. Robinson wrote: > Go back 15 years to 1991, to the eve of the Gulf War and recall > many - perhaps most - of the liberal wing of the anti-war movement > took the view that "we should let sanctions work." And Doug replied "I thought that was the liberal wing of the imperialist movement." But Steven is right, in their desperation, anti-war campaigners argued that economic sanctions were the better way to pressure Saddam's regime t ...

Document Size:	5983
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 19 13:16:21 PST 2006

1228 [lbo-talk] "you and I, are indirectly responsible" -- rank: 1000

Yoshie, this one is a bridge too far for me. "I do know that we, including you and I, are indirectly responsible for the deaths of the poor Shi'ite workers in the story, the responsibility that you refuse to acknowledge." I tend to think that the people who did it, did it. Yours and my respective governments did something else - overthrowing Saddam's regime. That did cause instability. Me, and I know not for want of trying, you, failed to convince people to throw our warmongering gover ...

Document Size:	6231
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 19 10:58:35 PST 2006

1229 [lbo-talk] Ellen Willis dies postscript -- rank: 1000

Read Ellen Willis' obituary in the Guardian today, she sounds much better than the write up she got on LBO (Jesse's still wrong for being such a Jessie about it, though). http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,,1946390,00.html

Document Size:	4868
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 13 15:33:15 PST 2006

1230 [lbo-talk] My review of Bettina Aptheker's memoirs -- rank: 1000

"Overthrowing the father Bettina Aptheker accuses her Communist dad of sexual abuse, in a depressing memoir of the descent from free speech campaigner to victim-feminist." http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2096/

Document Size:	4908
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 15 05:15:34 PST 2006