"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jan 13, 2010

Double Heh

Over @ SMBIVA:

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2010/01/sometimes_i_feel_discouraged_a.html

*

Slightly off to the left of MJS' yummy point: President Obama's deliberate confusion of terms leaves me all warm and tingly. Here we have Company assassins (those "sacrifices of more brave Americans in Afghanistan...seven dedicated men and women") lionized as defenders of American life, as brave little lambie kins gone to the slaughter, and then to hallowed History's finest hagio-heap.

Death squads as noble sacrifices.

Oh, President Hope, how you inspire!

How eloquently you lift the hearts of these Brave Defenders, these noble Praetorians, tirelessly, anonymously doing the unsung work of Empire, er, keeping banks in liquid bliss, um, giving transnats so much cheap labor and easy rent, protecting widdle Amurricans from the dangerous and angry Other...

Pornography: Covering Haiti

I should feel no surprise.

I really shouldn't.

But (against all earned experience and solid instinct) I clicked the "on" button on my telly remote, and voici, voila: death porn, disaster porn.

Actually pornography - the prurience of the concealed angle, the alleged objectivity of the camera lens, the incipient fascism of predetermined experience, the glee and horror of commentary and condemnation.

The great white saviors  shown in image, explicitly, the stupid black indigenes implied, shown in modern sack cloth poses, perennial victims in need of some first world salvation.

Imaginary fates and unreal gods, sometimes my own disgust amuses me - the magnitude of it in the face of our primate worst.

And I don't mean distraught brown people facing one more calamity and the inevitable gentrification-as-foreign-aid.

I mean, by our primate worst, the fucking camera and the fucking people who peer into the distorting lens of "news" and "information."

I mean the fucking pornographers themselves.