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316 [lbo-talk] Enough With the China Shtick Already! -- rank: 1000

> Tibet ain't a nation by you? Well maybe it is a nation, but for some time now ethnic Han Chinese have outnumbered Tibetans in Tibet. The fact that the CIA trained and funded Tibetan guerillas in the 1960s shows that sponsoring lesser nationalist claims against a rival might not be a wholly innocent process. (See Mikel Dunham, Buddha's Warriors: The story of the CIA backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, 2004)

Document Size:	5070
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Jan 30 07:00:03 PST 2010

317 [lbo-talk] Enough With the China Shtick Already! -- rank: 1000

Dwayne makes the point that his friend tended to shift the blame for carbin emissions onto the Chinese (and even claimed "our consciousness about the critical issues is higher than in many other parts of the world -- including China."). The discussion over capping carbon emissions does rather lend itself to Great Power rivalries, and therefore economic nationalism, since it raises the possibility of enforcing an effective limit on the industrial ouput of rival economies, as I argue her ...

Document Size:	5434
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 29 13:04:21 PST 2010

318 [lbo-talk] NLR, was McLemee: short sweet intellectual history of Western Marxism in France -- rank: 1000

The best account I've read of the New Left in Britain is Duncan Thompson's book Pessimism of the Intellect, which I give a long precis of in a review, here http://forth.ie/index.php/content/article/review_pessimism_of_the_intellect/#axzz0e0di0WkU (and I see part of my introduction goes like this 'The NLR sustained a reputation for exotic and challenging work, introducing British audiences to such European intellectuals, living and dead, as Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mikh ...

Document Size:	5730
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 29 05:59:02 PST 2010

319 [lbo-talk] corporate personhood -- rank: 1000

SA writes '*Imposing* a preconceived plan is to deny the popular will. *Proposing* a plan is contributing to democratic debate. A few years ago, you published a book saying Britain should build 5 million houses. Were you substituting your preconceived plan for the popular will?' I take your point, but the difference is that my proposal was one that was framed in relation to an immediate and pressing problem that was allowed to persist in spite of the land, labour and materials being available ...

Document Size:	6465
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 29 05:50:59 PST 2010

320 [lbo-talk] morality police on alert! Pete Townshend is -- rank: 1000

'I don't know about the UK, but people get on those lists here for consensual sex between teenagers, prostitution, and public urination,' Yes, the British sex offenders list is absurdly broad, and in this case ( Pete Townshend) he was investigated for possession of images from the internet

Document Size:	4938
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 28 13:14:54 PST 2010

321 [lbo-talk] corporate personhood -- rank: 1000

SA takes issue with " this line (about how it's totalitarian to talk about how socialism might work)" But there is a considered and logical argument behind the parody of 'socialist cook books' and so on. The reason it is wrong - or not so much wrong as empty, formalistic - to draft plans for the future socialist economy is that the socialist economy is conceived of as the realisation of the popular will in the formerly closed sphere of production; and to substitute a preconceived plan ...

Document Size:	5285
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 28 06:12:14 PST 2010

322 [lbo-talk] Heidegger: 'self-appointed 'spiritual guide' for Nazism' -- rank: 1000

Heidegger The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy by Emmanuel Faye, Yale, 30 Nov 2009 'Faye disputes the view of Heidegger as a naive, temporarily disoriented academician and instead shows him to have been a self-appointed 'spiritual guide' for Nazism whose intentionality was clear. Contrary to what some have written, Heidegger's Nazism became even more radical after 1935, as Faye demonstrates. He revisits Heidegger's masterwork, "Being and Time", and concludes that in it Heidegger ...

Document Size:	5740
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jan 27 10:39:57 PST 2010

323 [lbo-talk] termitude -- rank: 1000

'Remember that France was the worst villain in the Rwanda genocide' - well, I think that is the mainstream interpretation, but it is open to question. The extant government in Rwanda was overthrown by a force led by Paul Kagame, made up of Tutsi exiles in Uganda. He is also now widely believed to be the man who ordered President Habyarimana's plane shot down, killing Habyarimana and Burundi president Cyprien Ntaryamira. That killing and the invasion destabilised the country, and led to massive k ...

Document Size:	5643
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 26 14:58:29 PST 2010

324 [lbo-talk] termitude -- rank: 1000

Doug: 'he's going to be a shitty one-term president, the way things are going' I am intrigued. It doesn't look so bad from over here. Do you mean bad relative to the expectations in him, or bad relative to the previous incumbent? He does look pretty cautious from outside, and we all have a good laugh over here about the tea-baggers (they fulfil all our prejudices about crazy Americans). But apart from a loss of inertia, we do not see terrible wickedness emanating from the Obama Whitehouse. There ...

Document Size:	5054
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 26 11:55:55 PST 2010

325 [lbo-talk] Americans think StimPak was a waste -- rank: 1000

I think your first instinct on Joe Klein is the right one, Doug. When he writes "It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don't make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you're a nation of dodos." It calls to mind Brecht's poem about the 1953 East German uprising: 'The Solution After the uprising of the 17th of June The Secret ...

Document Size:	5395
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 25 12:33:17 PST 2010

326 [lbo-talk] Americans think StimPak was a waste -- rank: 1000

If the government spending in the US is anything like spending in the UK, then the subject heads under which the spending is listed will offer little insight into how the money was actually spent. The UK government's priorities since 1997 have been education and health, and they massively increased the budgets to those sectors. But on closer inspection, it was clear that a lot of the money ended up being siphoned off by consultants and other businesses services and lawyers. Billions were wasted ...

Document Size:	5493
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 25 12:06:44 PST 2010

327 [lbo-talk] Suburban revolt against Obama -- rank: 1000

Dennis Claxton says that Mike Davis is not making up the Avian Flu pandemic, just reporting it. But Davis wrote a whole book The Monster at Our Door with the blurb: 'Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity' condemning the Bush administration for its failure to 'safeguard Americans from the greatest biological threat since HIV/AIDS.' I don't think I am the only one who said that Davis' methodology was a bit hysterical, in fact I think he got a kicking in both the L ...

Document Size:	6157
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 25 11:05:10 PST 2010

328 [lbo-talk] Suburban revolt against Obama -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss writes: 'He doesn't say that the disease would be created there. He says it would be unleashed there.' Sorry, Chris, I did not mean to discriminate against viruses. You should be allowed to date any virus who's willing to have you.

Document Size:	4841
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 25 08:25:25 PST 2010

329 [lbo-talk] Suburban revolt against Obama? -- rank: 1000

The plague of bird flu will erupt out of Java, not Suffolk Mike Davis 'The prospect of a new plague unleashed in the shantytowns of Lagos, Kinshasa or Nairobi, in other words, is virtually apocalyptic' http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/feb/07/comment.politics1 Isn't this the old nineteenth century hysteria about disease emanating in the miasma of the poor ('residuum') - only here the fear of the urban disease is relocated onto the 'World of Slums'

Document Size:	5087
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 25 01:16:13 PST 2010

330 [lbo-talk] Suburban revolt against Obama? -- rank: 1000

'Kotkin's one of the crew that did a series of hatchet jobs on Mike Davis when Ecology of Fear came out.' That would be the Mike Davis who said that we were all going to die of avian flu? Entertaining writer, but plainly not a reliable source.

Document Size:	4758
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 25 00:20:38 PST 2010