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346 [lbo-talk] Lincoln Gordon, he dead -- rank: 1000

> Do any of us really believe that it's possible to be non-racist > within a certain social relationship, or racist outside of it? This seems like a counsel of despair to me. Social relationships are just the sum of human actions in the end, and endorsement or challenge to racism are some of the choices available. I am not saying that it is a question of personal behaviour. Lots of people who had no interest in Jewish culture, or even had any Jewish friends fought against the British Union ...

Document Size:	5734
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 15 13:49:55 PST 2010

347 [lbo-talk] Lincoln Gordon, he dead -- rank: 1000

I am just re-reading Heart of Darkness now, and find it difficult to think of Conrad as a racist. The book is plainly one facet of that upsurge of humanitarian feeling in England that exposed the atrocities in the Belgian Congo. He was a friend of Roger Casement, I think. Conrad comes to it though as an artist, not a political pamphleteer, and so he occupies the minds of people who characters who are racists. But representation of white cruelty is no more white cruelty than the representation of ...

Document Size:	5381
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 14 12:42:17 PST 2010

348 [lbo-talk] Social determination of Gender? -- rank: 1000

thanks to all those who posted on and off list on this, thanks to whom I have some excellent source to follow up.

Document Size:	4700
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 14 02:35:33 PST 2010

349 [lbo-talk] Social determination of Gender? -- rank: 1000

List: help me out? A friend of mine is trying to make a television programme about gender. She wants to show that the ways that boys and girls are raised shapes their gender. The brick wall she is up against is that all the commissioning editors are convinced that the evidence is in on this question and we 'now know' that gender is biologically determined (then they mumble something about socio-biology etc etc). She has to find some experts that say that gender is substantially determined by soc ...

Document Size:	5343
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jan 13 01:51:39 PST 2010

350 [lbo-talk] cell phone hell -- rank: 1000

Doug 'Who wants to do this?' (i.e. demonise family life) Oliver James (author 'They **** you up) Liz Kelly, (author 'Continuum of Sexual Violence', 1987) Sue Palmer (author 'Toxic Childhood') Susan Forward (author 'Toxic Families') Dr David Southall (diagnostician of Munchausen syndrome by proxy) Beatrix Campbell: 'Despite the historic commitments of the Children Act, the state does not take the side of children. Childcare policy and professionals have been unable to withstand the toxic alchemy ...

Document Size:	5211
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 12 14:37:10 PST 2010

351 [lbo-talk] Cell phone hell -- rank: 1000

'the fact that most sex offenses against children are committed by someone known to the family is ignored.' That's good for the relative proportion of sex offences between strangers and family members, but it ought also to be put in perspective, that serious sex offences against young children are very rare. There is a miserable view of the family as nothing more than torture and incest, which likes the formula 'most abuse is committed in the home' not so-much because they want to diminish exces ...

Document Size:	5015
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 12 13:30:12 PST 2010

352 [lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment -- rank: 1000

' like seeing a donkey trying to count.' Fuck you, too.

Document Size:	4599
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 12 11:59:00 PST 2010

353 [lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment -- rank: 1000

Doss: 'Religious believers in impending armageddon are optimists, not pessimists.' Up to a point, Lord Copper. There is something liberating, I guess, about the anticipation of armageddon. It says that all this is just illusion, or temporary (so that trials and obligations in the present are less onerous). But that is not really optimism of any normal kind, since it sees its reward in the Day of Judgement, not this world. It is also kind of barking. There is a similar kind of solace that people ...

Document Size:	5678
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 12 10:41:47 PST 2010

354 [lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment -- rank: 1000

leftwingwacko writes: 'But hey! You are ignoring the "feel good movies of the year"! What were they last year? (I hate that genre). ' Well there was Up, but that was a children's film. Here are the top grossing in 2009. http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2009,2009&sort=boxoffice_gross_us,desc I don't know which of these you would call 'feel good' - The Proposal, I guess (I missed it)

Document Size:	5151
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 12 07:29:46 PST 2010

355 [lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment -- rank: 1000

Or maybe you have a case of street-wise, world-foolish, Doug. A country whose citizens believe in armageddon and is among the most heavily armed in the world is not what I would call optimistic. Look at what you are watching at the cinema: Avatar, The Road, The Book of Eli, Lovely Bones. Hollywood's output for the last fifteen years has been one disaster film or vile torture epic after another. You make the point that everyone is reading Ayn Rand - I wouldn't call the Fountainhead optimistic, ex ...

Document Size:	5938
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 11 12:52:13 PST 2010

356 [lbo-talk] Individualism and psychiatric treatment -- rank: 1000

Doug 'The OECD does offer some support for the notion that Americans experience more mental troubles than most other nationalities. There are good reasons for this - the extreme competitiveness, the inequality, the terrible consequences of failure, an ideology of self-reliance and a culture of individualism' Though the finding that France is also high on the list would militate against that conclusion, since France is often cited as the European country with the most developed hostility t ...

Document Size:	5521
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 11 10:39:13 PST 2010

357 [lbo-talk] Yemen: taking another beating from the west -- rank: 1000

My background article on Yemen Yemen: taking another beating from the West The post-Pantsman labelling of Yemen as a hotbed of terrorism is not the first time that nation has been unfairly demonised. Here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7925/

Document Size:	4976
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 11 06:15:07 PST 2010

358 [lbo-talk] individualism and psychological treatment -- rank: 1000

Carrol writes: 'I had students who wanted treatment but whose parents' response was "No child of mine is crazy!" That factor would suggest the incidence of mental illness is STILL under- rather than over-diagnoesed.' I had the opposite experience, students claiming to have attention deficit disorder and therefore needing extra time on exams - in that they were supported by their parents. I would be sceptical about a statistic like the OECD's increasing mental illness, since this would ...

Document Size:	6339
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Jan 10 09:59:56 PST 2010

359 [lbo-talk] Avatar: The Exquisite Horror of The Strange stranger -- rank: 1000

Dennis Claxton writes: 'I think he's saying Hollywood anti-capitalism is not anti-capitalism at all.' Or as Lenin explained in 1899 Romantic Anti-Capitalism is not really Anti-Capitalism at all, but a conservatism that helps to preserve the status quo (and Marx said much the same of 'Feudal Socialism'). The aesthetic is very familiar. There was a science fiction illustrator, Bill Woodruff of something like that, who did all those floating mountains in the late seventies, for album covers and ch ...

Document Size:	5231
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 8 17:29:20 PST 2010

360 [lbo-talk] MI6: 'Global Intellingence'? -- rank: 1000

I cut and pasted the wording of this ad on Facebook: 'Time for a Career Change? MI6 can use your Skills. Join us as an Operational Officer collecting and analysing Global Intellingence' ... like learning how to spell 'intelligence', for example?

Document Size:	4754
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 8 12:00:35 PST 2010