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766 [lbo-talk] Trotsky's ashes made into cookies -- rank: 1000

'SA' writes Maybe this can clarify http://s11131978.150m.com/trotsky.pdf I see, so when Trotsky writes of Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-quaker prattle, you identify with that. OK, think I know who the jerk is, now.

Document Size:	4868
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 25 01:15:54 PDT 2009

767 [lbo-talk] Americans sorta like torture if it works -- rank: 1000

Shane Mage writes, confusing the workers' movement with a philosophy seminar: 'Secondary? If the arguments grounding their claim that "their overall cause was just" are compatible with the assertion that torture could be a legitimate "means to use in the prosecution of their cause," then, recalling the Marxist conception of the interdependence between ends and means, we have to conclude that their argument fails and that their end, "their cause," is in reality as wo ...

Document Size:	5894
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 24 16:09:22 PDT 2009

768 [lbo-talk] Americans kinda like torture -- rank: 1000

Gar thinks that torture is wrong. Would that apply to all violence? 'National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.' Frantz Fanon 'They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is ...

Document Size:	5370
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 24 15:15:14 PDT 2009

769 [lbo-talk] tasting the ashes of defeat -- rank: 1000

Matthias Wasser: "Trotsky was a jerk" Yes, what a jerk he was, when he led the Red Army to defeat the White Reaction. Only a jerk would ever have committed himself to the armed overthrow of capitalist reaction. And what a jerk, to object to protest at the Stalinisation of the Communist Party, to risk all to expose its barbarities. How lucky we are to have a giant like Matthias Wasser and not a jerk like Leon Trotsky with us today.

Document Size:	5123
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 24 15:02:02 PDT 2009

770 [lbo-talk] Americans sorta like torture if it works -- rank: 1000

In the 1980s (and before then) the IRA used punishment beatings, interrogation and what I guess would be called torture. So did many other national liberation movements. I wouldn't say that they were right to, or wrong to, only that it was their right to decide what means to use in the prosecution of their cause, and that that was a secondary question to whether their overall cause was just. A revolution is not a tea party, as Engels explained. The reason to oppose torture by the state is that y ...

Document Size:	5325
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 24 11:29:00 PDT 2009

771 [lbo-talk] Ballard -- rank: 1000

Ballard: explorer of catastrophe The author of Empire of the Sun and Crash was no dystopian prophet; he used disaster to reimagine the world. My obituary of J.G. Ballard: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6561/

Document Size:	4733
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 20 05:11:00 PDT 2009

772 [lbo-talk] Platypus1917 -- rank: 1000

> Who are these Platypus people, do you > know? Chris Cutrone, Spencer Leonard and some others based mostly in colleges in Chicago. Their central thesis is not just that the left has lost its way, but that that has an impact on a wider political malaise. Their critique of the left turns mostly on the projection of revolutionary potential onto what are essentially reactionary movements (like in Iraq or Afghanistan) but those are taken as symptomatic of a broader retreat from socialism. Cutr ...

Document Size:	5158
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 18 10:43:47 PDT 2009

773 [lbo-talk] good morning my fellow ecosystems -- rank: 1000

Dennis writes "I rarely, if ever, eat pig anymore" reminding me (the phrase I hasten to say, not the author) of the story about the rude guest at dinner, holding up his forkful and asking "is it pig?" to hear his hostess reply "to which end of the fork do you refer?"

Document Size:	4918
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 17 07:03:45 PDT 2009

774 [lbo-talk] Thumbs, ecosystems, neanderthals -- rank: 1000

"That they [Neanderthals] were killed off by our ancestors is unlikely" I thought current thinking was that the Neanderthals failed to respond to climate change, keeping to the shore-lines, while our ancestors followed the retreating glaciers in-land, thus prospering. No doubt this is all bunkum that will be overthrown soon, if it has not already. When I was a boy, my encyclopedia was so old that it still had Piltdown Man in it as the missing link.

Document Size:	5034
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 17 02:43:20 PDT 2009

775 [lbo-talk] good morning my fellow eco-systems -- rank: 1000

Michael wrote: "Any non-analytic proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly wrong." Which is very funny

Document Size:	4716
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 17 01:01:52 PDT 2009

776 [lbo-talk] good morning my fellow ecosystems -- rank: 1000

Michael Smith wrote "the grappling with the concrete that architects really do. They make models, they draw diagrams, they find out late in the game that they've routed two pipes through the same space (and they let the contractor sort it out). " most of the houses that Marx lived in in London had no architects. They were built on the system - common in Victorian England - from pattern books. So-called 'speculative builders' would put together a team, take time building the first house ...

Document Size:	5922
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 17 00:59:06 PDT 2009

777 [lbo-talk] Still banging the drum over Yugoslavia -- rank: 1000

"Living Marxism accused ITN of distorting the truth about Bosnia. Now, it faces ruin after losing the ensuing libel battle. Ed Vulliamy , who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje camp, explains why an unholy alliance of Serb apologists and misguided intellectuals had to be defeated in court" 'Poison in the well of history', Guardian, 15 March 2000 But strangely, despite having proved their point, even in a court of law, and silenced their opponents, the architects of ...

Document Size:	5781
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 16 08:35:33 PDT 2009

778 [lbo-talk] while we are on Lenin quotes... -- rank: 1000

I am looking for a quote I dimly remember from Lenin (or possibly Trotsky) to the effect that it is very convenient for Britons to counsel peace when they are at the top of the imperialist pile, having most to lose, obviously fear conflict that might see them lose their top-dog position

Document Size:	4866
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 16 06:47:29 PDT 2009

779 [lbo-talk] Lenin quote -- rank: 1000

Yes, thanks for finding that Joseph. We had a small domestic in the Heartfield household because I stayed up late looking for it.

Document Size:	4628
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 16 02:03:34 PDT 2009

780 [lbo-talk] Lenin quote -- rank: 1000

"To believe that there is no way out of the present crisis for capitalism is an error." seems to be Amyrta Sen's attribution to Lenin (http://www.mail-archive.com/ekonomi-nasional@yahoogroups.com/msg09623.html). Whether Lenin ever really said it I don't know, but it was common coin on the Marxist left for the last thirty years at least. David Yaffe puts there is 'no final crisis' in quotes as if Marx said it but gives no reference (because he was doing it from memory?) in his articles ...

Document Size:	5935
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 15 15:42:52 PDT 2009