Imagined Communities was really good

In Imagined Communities, I tried to illuminate the nature of this change by comparing it to the difficulties we face when we are shown photographs of ourselves taken as babies. These are difficulties which only industrial memory, in the shape of photographs, produces. Our parents assure us that these babies are us, but we ourselves have no memory of being photographed, cannot imagine what it was like to be ourselves at one year old, and would not recognize ourselves without our parents’ assistance. What has happened in effect is that though there are countless traces of the past around us—monuments, temples, written records, tombs, artefacts, and so on—this past is increasingly inaccessible, external to us. At the same time, for all kinds of reasons, we feel we need it, if only as some sort of anchor. But this means that our relationship to the past is today far more political, ideological, contested, fragmentary, and even opportunistic than in ages gone by.

Do right by Benedict Anderson and read the whole article here

Don't be coy

From Fred Halliday:

I very much like the famous mistranslations of the 20th century. I particularly like the first Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto, which was done by Chinese students in Japan from Japanese in about 1910. And instead of saying “Workers of the world, unite—you’ve nothing to lose but your chains,” it said, “Scholars of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your shame”!

The shame is not doing the work. The shame is not listening to other people. The shame is not saying what you think. The shame is running after fashions of Left or Right. The shame is wasting your time in a kind of public, theatrical pugilism of the kind which too many of my British friends in the United States seem to have fallen into.

QDN Communique: QDN is not alligned in the Halliday-Ali Cold War.

If you enjoyed this quote please do Fred Halliday a favor and read the full interview here

Don't be coy with me you cocksucker! It's time for neo-con COMSTAT

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You don't have to be a Jew to join Jews Against Obama

Gendering that mannequin must have been a bitch.


The title here is an invitation from a group called, Jews Against Obama

I willfully misconstrued the group's purpose though and signed us both up. 

The picture is from an Israeli owned store on the LES. From the Likudist New York Sun,

The owner of the store, Doron Braunshtein, an Israeli immigrant who also goes by the alias "Apollo Braun," which is the name of his store, said he created the T-shirt and designed the display window.

He said he was once a supporter of Mr. Obama's, but was turned off by the senator's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and after learning Mr. Obama once visited Pakistan.


He said he the design of the display window was no accident, and that he wants the keffiyeh to become permanently associated with anti-Obama sentiment. The Levi book is meant as a warning, he said: "You open the door for Obama, you have no idea what can come your way."

Classy.