a Dear John Letter to blogger

Dear Blogger (and the millions who have followed us),

We have found someone better: http://qtdn.wordpress.com/

Take care,

QDN

the unforgiven II

a definitely middle eastern script

here is some critical analysis:

laura flanders is dumb. I base this involved observation on one thing she says in the very first minute of the video below, which pretty much renders the entire discussion pointless. also based on that one thing, I do not sympathize with anyone who is offended by anything of this sort (including myself), nor do I agree with people who say sacha baron cohen's performance is somehow analytical and "only for smart people to understand." once again a single fuck up is sufficient in order for me to lose all hope in humanity (for the day).

http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/2009/07/17/bruno-panel/

although richard kim does say one thing that is worth thinking about; that these movies are not critiquing homophobia or racism or whatever but tolerance.

My favorite art of the year

Honors papers need mixtape style covers.

Drink a Sake on Suzuki

This:

Victor Serge’s personality and life were typical in an extreme way, almost improbably so. From the middle of the last century onwards the Russian revolutionary movement produced a great many men who spent a considerable part of their lives as exiles abroad, as deportees in Siberia, as prison-inmates. Their ideas and personalities differed in many ways, but one thing they had in common: to be true to themselves was for most of them an obligation. They despised those personal advantages which are gained by accommodation to the existing order.

[...]

Of course, profound historical understanding and real revolutionary activity are impossible within the terms of bureaucratism or romanticism. One of the main hypocrisies of Stalinism was the creation of a system in which bureaucrats posed as revolutionary romantics, and employed romantics, who for their part posed as theorists. (The ideological amalgam of Stalinism combined the vulgarized Marxism of the German Social Democrats with the romanticism of the Russian narodniki.) Serge’s diametrical antiposition to this hypocrisy makes him—in a certain social and anthropological sense—the “anti-stalinist” par excellence. The monstrosity of Stalinism—and at the same time its positive historical significance in a certain period—lay in its formally conservative nature: Stalinist “centrism”—as opposed to Trotskyist “leftism” and Bukharinist “rightism”—was concerned with the conservation of Party and Power; principles and human beings were regarded as of secondary importance. Serge’s outlook was just the opposite. His absolute, emotional opposition to Stalinism produced an understanding which was most remarkable as a corrective (it was certainly not in itself sufficient to provide a historical interpretation).

X

this,
=
How I'm writing my Chechnya essay.

new Zizek, old Lenin

For some reason Zizek's essay in NLR feels dated.

The footnotes,

[1] V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, published posthumously in Pravda, 16 April 1924; Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, pp. 204–7.

[2] Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, Nohow On, London 1992, p. 101.

[3] Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B)’, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 281–3.

[4] Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948, Budapest 1996.

[5] Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle [1968], Ann Arbor, MI 2005. pp. 131–2.

[6] Quoted in Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Appendix 1, pp. 146–7.

[7] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84.

[8] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 133.

[9] Lenin, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 495.

[10] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 125.

[11] Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 124.

[12] Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London and New York 2008, p. 115.

David Simon Murders Everything

The Wire's creator recently got the chance to eviscerate his enemies in front of the United States Congress. Not surprisingly, the casualties from Simon's testimony include just about everyone and everything.

The internet:

it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

Capitalism:

Second, Wall Street and free market logic, having been a destructive force in journalism over the last few decades, is now not suddenly the answer.

Citizens:

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Himself:

Well, so much for new media. But what about old media? Well, anyone listening carefully may have noted that—I’m sorry. Cut that part. Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was brought out of my reporting position in 1995.

Winning:

They had arrived from somewhere else, and they—if they won a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain[...]The self-gratification in my profession does not come, you see, from covering a city and covering it well, from explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world to citizens, from holding basic institutions accountable. It comes from someone handing you a plaque and taking your picture.

I'm sure that after hearing all of this all present members of Congress packed their bags and killed themselves in despair.

back like cooked crack

of course Zizek is on Twitter. what did you think it was gonna be?

in other worrisome news, we might be running out of ready-to-wear zizek iconography on the web and might have to resort to our own labor in the near future. damn it.

the roof vamoose, like a magic show

Illusions


Clipse & Kanye West: "Kind of Like a Big Deal"

so cool you might have to zip your jacket up

n+1: He's always billed as "Slavoj Zizek, Philosopher and Psychoanalyst." That made me wonder, is he really a psychoanalyst in the sense that I could be his patient?

AT: Absolutely not. And he's never successfully gone through analysis. He tells this story about how he lied his way through a few sessions with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. He would invent dreams, tell Miller he was having sexual fantasies that he was making up.

and I still don't know if I want to see Examined Life or not

Carnegie Corp of NY's Scholarships Promote Sharia Law, Islam

This is an actual headline that appeared on Campus Watch. The title links to an article from something called Creeping Sharia. This is the type of thing that appears on Campus Watch all the time and no one seems to care, but I think its important that we stop for a second and think about how ridiculous it is. Money quote,

Two other topics funded: "What's Missing When We Say Shari'a" and "Islamic Law and Legal Change". Get the idea?

Remember when there was a concern that Campus Watch was the beginning of a serious attempt to run critical scholars out of business? It's great to see that now its purpose has been reduced to reposting articles from slightly crazier blogs. Also, the image which perfectly matches the message of the Campus Watch/Creeping Sharia article is from the website of the "Whites only" British National Party.

ati alan ortadogu'yu gecmis sen hala komplodasin pc'desin

from Visa for top Netenyahu aide in question

U.S. officials are also likely to find Arad, a long-time Netanyahu loyalist, difficult to deal with, apart from his intelligence past. Like Netanyahu, he opposed Israel's pullout from Gaza and as recently as last month suggested that he was against any territorial compromise with Palestinians, telling one television interviewer, "We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of Palestinian populations, not the territories."

...

For all of his academic and professional accomplishments, however, Arad showed remarkably poor judgment in his meeting with Franklin at the cafeteria in the Pentagon "on or about February 20, 2004," (...) In that meeting, according to the indictment, Arad ("...a person previously associated with an intelligence agency of Foreign Nation A") and Franklin discussed "...a Middle Eastern country's nuclear program."

In 2003-04, Lawrence Franklin had been the Iran specialist in the Department of Defense Policy Division headed by Undersecretary Douglas Feith, himself a long-time Likud supporter. Franklin worked in a unit called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which was tasked, among other things, to make the case that Iraq posed a major - and soon-to-be-nuclear - threat to the U.S.

As that case fell apart in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion, Israel began warning about Iran's alleged nuclear-weapons programme, which was apparently the subject of Arad's tete-a-tete with Franklin, who was under covert surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Reading a Crappy Book on the Subway

Today, on my way out to work I was browsing my bookshelf for something to read on the subway. I needed something literary, since reading anything theoretical/academic at that hour is a proven way of putting me to sleep, and I decided to give a shot to Reading Lolita in Tehran, purchased not by me - thank Allah.

I say that because right now I am on page 16, and somewhere around page 10 I started contemplating whether I have to actually finish this book to be able to opine on how self-congratulatory, blah and almost carelessly malicious it is, all at the same time. While I am tempted to think that Oberlin trained me well, this is so blatantly a pile of orientalist bullshit (so much that it excuses employing the otherwise exhausted o-word) that its lack of sincerity should be clear to all, save for white book club ladies and Christopher Hitchens.

You and the people you write about say "Islamic Republic of Iran" every time you refer to your country, really?

Here's the extreme Hamid Dabashi critique:
Native Informers and the Making of American Empire

Here's the idiotic Christopher Hitchens critique:
The Captive Mind Now (I want to believe the whole essay is an exercise in sarcasm, but it might not be)

Here's the one I tend to agree with, mostly because Dabashi's anger is very similar to Finkelstein's too careful study of "Of Time Immemorial"; the book is dishonest alright, but it is also so horrible as literary work that the anger is not worth it:
Pawn of the neocons?

Note that in life reaching total happiness is impossible and thus the last article too manages to fuck up in its last sentence. Which makes me go full circle and end up with Dabashi.

Lastly, for our following immersed in academia:
Reading Nafisi in the West: Authenticity, Orientalism, and "Liberating" Iranian Women

Hamish: New York Times Bestseller don't mean shit.

For the record

I said that I want you all to know that my pariticpation was at the invitation of the University of San Francisco and that I strictly adhere to the boycott of Israel and I call on them all to boycott Israel at all levels. I told them that I met I(armed) Israelis first under occuapation in South Lebanon in 1982, and I resolved then that I would meet them only on my terms. I explained to them that I am strict against terrorists and terrorism: that I am opposed to any deal or negotiations with Al-Qa`idah or with Bin Laden and accordingly, I am opposed to any deal or compromise with the state that pioneered the practice of terrorism in the region.

-As'ad AbuKhalil

I thought we had an international court now..

Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture

from the article:

If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.

This is what we call "sahalarımızda görmek istediğimiz hareketler" in Turkish. But it only makes Spain look good. This investigation could easily fall under ICC's jurisdiction, either via nationalities of the victims, detention centers in Poland and Romania, both of which are parties, or through a security council resolution if the Obama administration had the courage to hold itself up to the same standards they don't miss any opportunity to preach for others. Are the American courts "unable or unwilling" to try their own criminals? Well so are the Sudanese. But we have an international criminal court for those. Inspiring.

Thats the Point of Selling Crack

Mos Def reciting MF Doom. 

find five differences between israel and turkey*

IHD 2008 Turkiye Insan Haklari Raporu/Turkey's 2008 Human Rights Report

I am currently on page 50 of 696. It's a fascinating read, gets better by the page**.

On page 49, I came across the incident I talked about
here. Or rather, I was talking shit about the reporting of the incident and the lack of clarity in terms of what's what and who's who. There are only so many W questions a reporter needs to answer, it shouldn't take a human rights report to do the job.

IHD: 30 Eylül'de Balıkesir'in Ayvalık Ilçesi'nin Altınova Beldesi'nde Murat Aygün, husumetli olduğu Oğuz Dörtkardes'le (23) “yüksek sesle müzik dinlediği” için baslayan tartısmanın kavgaya dönmesinin ardından, Dörtkardes ve yanındakilerin üzerine kamyonetini sürdü. Aracın altında sürüklenen Dörtkardes ile Ezer Kırcalı (31) adlı iki kisi öldü, 6 kisi yaralandı. Olayı duyanlar ise Murat Aksu'nun Kürt olmasını bahane ederek Altınova'da oturan Kürtlerin evlerini ve isyerlerini tahrip etti, bir ev ve minibüs atese verildi. Çıkan olaylarda 36 ev ve isyerinin hasar gördü. Güvenlik güçleri önlem aldığı Altınova'ya gelen Balıkesir Valisi Selahattin Hatipoğlu ise kalabalığı sakinlestirmeye çalısarak Kürtlerin evlerinin ve isyerlerinin tahrip edilmesinin anlayısla karsıladıklarını açıkladı. Saldırılar esnasında gruba herhangi bir müdahalede bulunmayan güvenlik güçleri 37 kisiyi gözaltına aldı ve aralarında Murat Aygün'ün de bulunduğu 10 kisi tutuklandı. Öte yandan Balıkesir Valiliği, bölgeye inceleme yapmak için bir heyet gönderen Demokratik Toplum Partisi'ne, heyetin “halkı kıskırtabilecekleri” gerekçesiyle izin vermedi.


some other things I learned from this report:
-legal institutions think The Republic of Turkey has so much extra time and money that they start a process for investigating Ocalan's 28 lawyers for addressing him "many times" using the word 'Sayin' in their faxes, which for all practical purposes means "Mr."
-following the above, investigation was started for 40 PKK member inmates in Adiyaman's high security prison who filed a petition saying "we call Ocalan 'Sayin' and hereby give ourselves in".
-within that investigation the Kurdish inmates gave their depositions in Kurdish. following this a second investigation was started about them.
-it kinda goes on likes this for 50 pages. I am bored.


*try harder
**no access to those who only speak a little Spanish

Hardliner Avigdor Lieberman set to become Israel's foreign minister

Let me make a prediction: This fascist is going to help Palestinians in the long run, involuntarily of course.

I spoke too soon about Dershowitz. Here's to a day without bullies.

The Brooklyn of the Middle East

Honestly, I'd rather be friends with the mountains.

Christopher Hitchens finds himself in Beirut this week. Yeah, I know, but it gets even better. The first report about what Hitch's Lawrence of Arabia type mission was that he provided decisively less gully* than some SSNP members. From AngryArab:

At the invitation of Hariri-Saudi group, Hitchens is visiting Lebanon. A source sent me this: "I dont know if you find this as news worthy or not, but Christopher Hitchens is currently in Beirut sponsored by the same group that owns that crap NOW Lebanon. He got in a few nights ago and surprisingly went out drinking. On his way out of the bar he saw an SSNP poster and wrote on it "Fuck the SSNP". There just happened to be some SSNP thugs near by--most likely asking people for their ID, and most likely to no avail--and saw him write on the poster and kicked his ass. He is still walking with a limp."

Theres lots of intellectuals who QDN would support the slapping up of**. Hitchens isn't one of them. Still, you think afterbeing waterboarded a few fists wouldn't be a problem for him. Then again, like some of Hitchens' other experiences this slapping may not have even happened. AngryArab again,

After spending two days in Lebanon, Christopher Hitchens now poses as an expert on Lebanese developments. I wonder if he will claim that he interviewed (the dead) Abu Nidal, as he once did in the 1980s.

A report on some of the less emasculating experiences Hitchens had in Beirut can be found here

* I know you don't know what this means.
** They know who they are.

oh Dersh...

I know that the recent accomplishment of our comrades at Hampshire's SJP deserves its own post, but rest assured that I will be congratulating them in person.

This all has been very moving and inspiring to follow. Meanwhile here's something funny from SJP's website:

Alan Dershowitz has just called SJP members and has threatened to start an international campaign to divest from Hampshire College.

Read the comments too.

Happy Valentine's Day Dersh!