another sample of the left's blindspot

another indymain newswire item purporting to speak for the ban-lieueurs, palestine and everybody else in thrall to the clumpiness of bigger monies.

A World Infernoa From paris to Baghdad to Shanghai to Rio...
Marcel 13 Nov 2005 21:43 GMT ttp://mib.ouvaton.org MOUVEMENT DE L'IMMIGRATION ET DES BANLIEUES (a uninteractive tiny website)

"escalate the violence"? ---- I go: why not voluntarize it? Sad and telling that the thing the left noticed most about the right (an aspect that disturbs them enough to keep harping on it, righteously associating 'the right' with holocaustics in perpetuity) is exactly the stuff they're all too willing to indulge in themselves (who's gonna trust them to not go for the industrial strength versions (rather than the cheap and lazy ass match and molotov) once/if/when they do succeed in directing the sorry show governance has become ever since the difference in fast low trust very hard money (dangerous from beginning to end; mining to stored in/as big backer hoard) and the soft, lightfooted, consensus based, elegantly fluttering, artful and contract kind.

You all lefties just don't know your history. Try Peter Myers if you want to understand why left and right are mirror images of each other, polarized postions robbed of all but fitfull dynamics.

The type of leftism worse than religious delirium

http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/827810.shtml
More on French Riots, from MIB (Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues)
MIB 12 Nov 2005 22:00 GMT --
"It is all too easy to give a lesson in civics and to point
the finger at the 'scum' or the 'savages', thus throwing them to
populist vindictiveness. And this strategy is all too profitable."

I go: ooaahhh, indhe a good liddulleftissss??

first of all, mass media manipulated public opinion is not populism.

you call a mix of calls for justice and mercy (as ever since populism is balance once you tally the flavors all up and set them off against each other; just like all race gender and class divisions run a gamut) 'vindictive'?

Whaddo you call poisoning the air all the way to hollland for cries ache?
yeah!!! I smelled your fucked up riot and felt quite oppressed by the violent non-greenness of it all as far away as that. I'd like to hear about all the wonderful yet obstructed initiatives to autonomize and keep 'ban-lieueurs' busy learning something (going out on organic farms as wwoofers and all that*) before I believe they anything drastic was necessary and the fact they had to use fire tells me they are all spoiled lazy bastards cause fire is the poor man's substitute for power.

* Go get some saudi money, restore the fertility around and repopulate the southern french (or even better, algerian) derelict and abandoned villages; go ask Ghaddafi, he's wanting to look good, lead africa, and all that jazz.



http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20051114/024652.html
Wojtek:

So the bottom line is that, indeed, the US left does
not have much to say lately. The more conventional
liberals simply chase after the shadows of the past,
while the more "radical" crowd is really a bunch of
enfants terribles seeking fun and excitement by
pissing off their parents, teachers, and other
authority figures. They all kvetch about the right
and its policies, but offer no credible alternative to
the vision of the right - which while poisonous and
detrimental in the long run, at least sound appealing
to the "medial voter."

================


All of this is true, as far as it goes.

That is, what you describe is undeniable but is not a
comprehensive overview of the situation.

I suggest you pay as little attention as possible to
those you call "conventional liberals" who, indeed,
have less and less of relevance to say regarding our
current troubles (these are the sorts of people, for
Ares' sake, who insisted that 'Bush stumbled but
something had to be done' about Saddam, as if their
fantasies of a
straight-out-of-a-Hollywood-pitch-meeting nuclear
armed Arab madman were terrifyingly true).

Also, the "more radical crowd", (by which you mean, I
guess, those who talk about 'smashing the state'
without having a real world plan for how this might be
accomplished or what comes after the smashing is done)
should be similarly ignored.

The more time you spend in feverish contemplation of
useless words -- for example, nearly the entire post
9/11 output of Hitchens -- the more you spin, like a
dervish, in a self-perpetuating spiral of abyss
gazing.

There are serious people pursuing serious analysis and
action without resorting to nostalgia or fantasy
which, I suppose, are really pretty much the same
thing.

I've decided to seek these people out, acquaint myself
with their works and words and spend as little time as
possible complaining about how awful things are.


Regarding hopelessness...

Zizek, during his appearance on Doug's radio show a
few years back, stated that it was necessary to know
the full extent of your helplessness and lack of ideas
-- to stare this reality squarely in the eyes --
before you could hope to progress.

He went on to say that the West's increasingly broken
social contracts ('behave and most, or at least many,
of you will prosper and enjoy relative freedom from
coercion') will lead to a general crisis that will
produce alternatives -- not all of which will be
pleasant.

Right now, in corners you're not watching, new things
are happening. Some of these new things are
incubating in places you don't care to look such as
components of pop and techno culture.

Others are still very young and need to mature.


The trick is to talk less and listen more for these
faint signals.



.d. http://monroelab.net/



http://exxposeexxon.blogspot.com/

http://www.planetgeneration.org radical multimedia site

from paris, they know their music there as this page proves: http://varttina.calabashmusic.com/
Varttina (meaning spindle) has its origins in 1983, as the project of singers and kantele players Sari and Mari Kaasinen. The original Varttina line-up (15 young girls singing and playing kantele...

good anthropoly blog

http://savageminds.org/category/public-anthropology/

For Melanesianists 1988 was also a very good year, since we had the two gender books: Gender of the Gift by Marilyn Strathern and What Gifts Engender by Rena Lederman. Both of these books were trying to come to terms with the problems with studying social organization that had plagued Melanesianists for two decades. Briefly, African lineage models didn’t work in the New Guinea Highlands. But then again, by 1988 it was clear they also didn’t fit in Africa (see Kupers 1982 article on Lineage Theory in Annual Reviews of Anthropology). Their focus, along with Roy Wagner (in his less, shall we say, Cosmic Modality) on how how groups are constituted in the act of exchange proved to have all sorts of dividends. Although Partial Connections is maddening to read, it did play a part in the renaissance of kinship studies as “relatedness” that I associate with Janet Carsten (the best place to start is probably Cultures of Relatedness rather than After Kinship). Merlan and Rumsey’s Ku Waru has been particularly important to me as a synthesis of work on social organization in Papua New Guinea that combines Sahlins’s work on structure with this Melanesianist. It also combines one more thing—an interest in language.