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676 [lbo-talk] Prodi as great a creep as Berlusconi -- rank: 1000

Michael Pollack explaining the extreme hostility in some quarters to Berlusconi cites "The belief that after being frozen out the entire cold war by an armory of unfair means, the left, which was the majority, was finally due to take power after the cold war ended. The feeling of inevitable historical triumph was increased 10 fold by tangentopoli, which removed almost the entire right and center political elite (whereas the left was notably clean by comparison). And then suddenly thi ...

Document Size:	6843
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jun 24 13:43:58 PDT 2009

677 [lbo-talk] STATE CAPITALISM IN BRITAIN -- rank: 1000

STATE CAPITALISM IN BRITAIN Two very contradictory stories about British capitalism are told today. The first is that the State is eating up more and more of the private sector. The other story is that the British government has inherited its predecessor's mania for privatisation. How is it possible to reconcile these two accounts? My article in Mute: http://www.metamute.org/en/content/state_capitalism_in_britain

Document Size:	5036
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jun 24 06:02:31 PDT 2009

678 [lbo-talk] paranoia -- rank: 1000

What ever happened to the Orange Revolution? by Tara McCormack "Last year we were told that a popular uprising in Ukraine had ousted a fraudulent leader. So why has that fraudulent leader now been voted into power?" http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/303/

Document Size:	4780
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jun 18 16:34:51 PDT 2009

679 [lbo-talk] planned economy [was: Hamid Dabashi on Iran] -- rank: 1000

'Didn't they [the Germans] practically invent the modern welfare state?' I thought it was New Zealand that invented the modern welfare state. There was an excellent TV play on about fifteen years ago, by Alan Bennett, dramatising the early life of Franz Kafka, as a clerk administering the German compulsory health insurance, that makes the point gently, that the nightmare of pleading before the oddly informal authorities in The Trial, might be drawn from Kafka's own experience with the workers me ...

Document Size:	5175
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jun 18 16:28:11 PDT 2009

680 [lbo-talk] paranoia -- rank: 1000

Julio wrote: "that does not exclude that the CIA and the Mossad may be trying to exploit the situation to advance their agendas" No indeed. Simon Tisdall writes in the Guardian: "Iranian officials say US protestations of non-interference would be more credible if the White House publicly cancelled a $400m Bush era covert programme, authorised in 2007, that they say was intended to destabilise Iran, with the ultimate aim of regime change." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfr ...

Document Size:	4982
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jun 18 12:40:47 PDT 2009

681 [lbo-talk] real aphorism? -- rank: 1000

Didn't Khruschev make up most of those old Russian sayings? 'A pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Pushkin'

Document Size:	4519
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jun 18 11:26:58 PDT 2009

682 [lbo-talk] Hamid Dabashi on Iran -- rank: 1000

"Sokal bullshit was already lame in the 90's." I hope that rather cryptically abbreviated comment is not an attack on the wise and saintly Alan Sokal.

Document Size:	4645
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jun 18 11:17:15 PDT 2009

683 [lbo-talk] Galloway it will soon fizzle out -- rank: 1000

Eric Beck wrote: > [At first I thought this was just another data point proving what > an asshole Galloway is. Now I realize it's more than that: He's An Julio replied "What are the other data points that you're presuming we, readers, know or should know about? Maybe I'm misinformed or underinformed (or both), but George Galloway has shown to be a social fighter of worth in the international left. " Maybe Eric is an anarchist at heart, and hates all leaders. But though you are r ...

Document Size:	6513
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jun 18 11:10:30 PDT 2009

684 [lbo-talk] Hamid Dabashi on Iran -- rank: 1000

Shane Mage writes, caricaturing Chris Doss: '""the intelligentsia and educated professionals"=the most super- exploited group of workers (paid the least proportion of their product) under Stalinism. Their "ire" was "more directed at the system" that denied them the most elementary personal and political freedoms. And constantly insulted their intelligence.' Exploited? Oh please. The soviet intelligentsia were full of complaints, but the essence of them was that ...

Document Size:	5426
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jun 17 16:40:25 PDT 2009

685 [lbo-talk] When Skateboards will be free -- rank: 1000

(If there was already talk on this, my apologies for missing it.) I just finised Said Sayrafiazadeh's memoir of a childhood in the SWP (US) which made me laugh like a drain (and wince a lot, too). I see it made Louis Proyect very angry, but I did not think it really was an attack on the left as such, just on dogmatism, but most of all one of those Oedipal memoirs raging against the parents, like Augusten Burroughs'. I recommend it to anyone who is tempted to raise their children according to rev ...

Document Size:	5066
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jun 17 08:24:12 PDT 2009

686 [lbo-talk] Juan Cole: preliminary reactions to the Iranian vote totals -- rank: 1000

Bhaskar Sunkara wrote > Also I think this ?win? is an excellent thing for Israel, Egypt and the > other US-backed forces in the region. An election of a moderate would?ve > allowed Obama to engage with Iran more, maybe deferred their nuclear > ambitions and thus comparatively weaken the power of US-backed client > regimes in the Middle-East. Certainly, that is what this Haaretz columnist thought: ANALYSIS / Ahmadinejad win actually preferable for Israel http://www.haaretz.com/hase ...

Document Size:	5838
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Jun 14 04:49:18 PDT 2009

687 [lbo-talk] Talking CCTV Camera: 'stop having sex!' -- rank: 1000

Talking CCTV camera tells couple to stop having sex By Aidan McGurran 13/06/2009 A couple were caught having sex in a town centre by a talking CCTV camera - and ordered to stop by operators. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-world/2009/06/13/talking-cctv-camera-tells-couple-to-stop-having-sex-115875-21436534/

Document Size:	5202
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Jun 13 08:15:43 PDT 2009

688 [lbo-talk] Seymour to save Brown -- rank: 1000

Richard Seymour writes "Pardon me? The argument (not drafted by me, even)" <no, but reproduced on your website> "is that we have to form an alternative to New Labour and Gordon Brown, in time for the next elections." Well, it is a bit ambiguous, actually, as in this phrase: "The mass of Labour voters simply did not vote. We cannot afford a repeat of that." Which reads like a call to get the Labour vote out, not turn them into a left-of-Labour vote.

Document Size:	5004
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jun 12 16:34:25 PDT 2009

689 [lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background -- rank: 1000

"Isn't the fundamental assumption here that kids learn to speak in grammatically correct sentences?" Yes, you might fault that, but children make grammatical mistakes by misapplying grammatical rules. My daughter explained to me the other day that she pulled her ice cream away from a pigeon because he "mightened of eatened it". She was misapplying a rule of tense, adding too many endings.

Document Size:	4989
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jun 12 12:15:28 PDT 2009

690 [lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background -- rank: 1000

Miles writes 'So questions about the "independent" effect of biological factors are based on a faulty premise. The sooner we stop asking them, the sooner we can focus on the important questions about how the complex interactions between biological factors and the environment shape various human characteristics.' Well, you say those are the important questions. But it is surely right to insist on the specificity of the study of human biology as biology. The human organism offers up bio ...

Document Size:	5394
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jun 12 11:07:00 PDT 2009