the lost world

How Web Video Is Igniting a Massive Cycle of Innovation

davidpalestine — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 05:08:09 +0000

or very often a worse sieve. who guards the guardians?
More on Video
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

LAPD Protesters Bombard Rampart Station With Rocks, Eggs

davidpalestine — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:32:15 +0000

I won’t comment on this specific case because I don’t know the facts. Who are these six civilian witnesses and who interviewed them? Just because the LA Times or AP says it happened this way doesn’t make it so. I’ll wait to see what other sources say about it.

But it is a well known fact – by anyone with open eyes – that police have a license to kill in the U.S. Even when they are caught on film they seldom pay the price. The community was reacting to more than just this one instance.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Problem with Hell

davidpalestine — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:49:56 +0000

or to put it another way,
a short poem by me:

PARADISE
paradise is
what is
isn’t
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Problem with Hell

davidpalestine — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:59:14 +0000

i used to think that the problem was hell:
“if god is good he is not god
if god is god he is not good” a paraphrase of Epicurus, taken from JB by Archibald MacLeish

but the real real problem is heaven:
perfect happiness is not compatible with life
there is only one escape from some form or another of unhappiness – death
real death, not some hocus pocus with an imaginary friend
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Howard Zinn Dead, Author Of ‘People’s History Of The United States’ Died At 87

davidpalestine — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:14:27 +0000

My deepest respects. i’ve been so moved to read all the tributes here. His PEOPLES HISTORY filled a great need – the need for truth about our past. His life was an inspiration.
“A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.” Mao writing about Dr. Norman Bethune
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

MIA: “F*** New York Times!!!!!!” (GRAPHIC IMAGE)

davidpalestine — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:27:24 +0000

This is an example of the “two sides of the storyism” that so infuriates huffposters when the mainstream media does it in domestic politics. Yes, there are two sides to this story: one side is the government that has waged a war of genocide against the Tamil people; the other side is the side of those people, who have suffered so much, who are still suffering. Yes, they have fought back. Yes, there have been innocent victims on both sides. But to say both sides are equally culpable is to side with the aggressor against the victim.
More on Sri Lanka
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

New York Times: Lobbyists Fighting Last Big Plans to Cut Health Care Costs

davidpalestine — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:57:42 +0000

This is a dishonest article. The “Cadillac tax” is not a tax on the luxuries of some wealthy elite. It is a tax on working people who have relatively decent health care – the kind that everyone should have, the kind that most people in other industrialized countries already have. To equate the attempt to defend this health care with the strangle-hold that the Health Industry lobbyists have on our greedy money-grubbing lawmakers is to enlist on the side of those lobbyists in their effort to guarante only the health of Big Money’s bottom line.

Tax the Health Industry’s mega profits – not the small numbers of working people who have something like the health care that we should all have.

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

davidpalestine — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:58:42 +0000

I thought it was a joke at first. And with his ears sticking out and that silly little grin, i thought they had photoshopped the picture to make him look a bit like Alfred E. Neuman.

What, me worry?

No, that’s for the orphans of Afghanistan. Let them worry.

Another war criminal honored with a peace prize funded by the inventor of dynamite. How appropriate.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Arianna On “Morning Joe”: The Current Financial System Is Not Capitalism (VIDEO)

davidpalestine — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:24:30 +0000

IT IS Capitalism!
Capitalism isn’t just pure competition. It never has been. Name a time when monopolies have not dominated the national economy. Their power waxes and wanes but it is always the domiant force. Pure competition is merely the fantasy that is used to justify the rule of the mega-rich.
Capitalism IS the drive for monopoly.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider

davidpalestine — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:28:47 +0000

Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider

David Morgan, University of Newcastle

(paper presented at the 2009 Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. 27-29 August 2009.)

Abstract:

Badiou’s project in Theory of the Subject can be read as an appraisal of Hegel’s dialectics in the light of Mao’s quite different dialectical approach as laid out in On Practice, On Contradiction and as further developed in the Cultural Revolution. But Badiou makes key changes in Mao’s terminology and uses this new terminology to develop a distinct revision of classical Marxism and a misreading of Mao. In Theory of the Subject, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is treated as essentially passive and structural, and the role of driving force in history is assigned to the proletariat in their confrontation with the bourgeoisie. However, when this confrontation is not understood as grounded in the creativity and initiative unleashed in productive activity, there are two consequences for Badiou’s theory of the subject, consequences that are carried over into his later work in Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds:

a) The subject is located outside the structure of the situation. In Theory of the Subject, this is described as the contradiction between the splace and the outplace.

b) The subject is essentially passive, reacting to oppression and exploitation, rather than driven by its own creative impulses.

Thus Badiou is unable to give an account of structural change that arises out of empirically identifiable internal forces and that places the subject at centre of this process.

For the complete paper, go to http://davidpalestine.wordpress.com/hegel-mao-badiou/ on this blog