We the People. Hey, who you calling WE, white man?
Happy May Day, workers of the world! Enjoy your paid day off, no doubt spent among your fellow labourers, reveling in your special day. Did the head of the local Chamber of Commerce bring you breakfast in bed, or is that just here in Canuckistan? Did you remember to swing by the town square for the big Kick A Newly Homeless Wall Streeter party and bbq? And pick up your share of TARP dollars (application form here)? Remember, today only that cardboard box or ’78 Dodge van you’ve been living in may be redeemed for a 1 bedroom plus den Yaletown condo. Also today only, Urban Fare accepts those food cheques that The Ministry issues, as do C, the chocolate buffet at the Sutton Place Hotel, and Tojo’s sushi.
Fucking Capitalism: how does it work? Here’s a handy-dandy diagram that clears it all up.
Julian Assange in custody. At least Swifter let him keep his cup of cocoa.
Well, that’s that. Julian Paul Assange, the world’s favorite Bond Villain, is headed off on an all-expenses-but-the-one-that-counts-paid trip to Sweden, courtesy of the UK court system, which ruled today that there is no human rights violation in Sweden’s choice to prosecute Assange and, further, none in their decision to do so in a private trial. You can read the whole thing below:
Belmarsh was a rubber stamping process. It comes as no surprise but is nevertheless wrong. It comes as the result of a European arrest warrant system amok.
There was no consideration of the allegations made against me. No consideration of the complaints against me in Sweden.
We have always known we would appeal. We have always known in all likelihood we would have to appeal. Ninety five percent of all European arrest warrants are successful […]
[…] What does the United States have to do with a Swedish Extradition process?
It has been falsely stated that I said the CIA or Pentagon was involved in the initial allegation. I have never said that. I have never said who was behind those allegations, simply that they were untrue.
Why is it that I am subject – a non-profit free speech activist – that I am subject to a £200,000 bail, that I am subject to house arrest when I have never been charged in any country.
The scrutiny of the European arrest warrant system needs to begin now, it cannot be the case that filling two pages with someone’s name and a suspicion – not a charge – can lead to their extradition to one of 26 European nations.
Three people a day are being extradited from the UK under a rubber stamp process.
What’s interesting to me about this image is not so much its historical precursors as the fact that the image, in depicting a human hand, crosses lines of religious law that women in full abayas generally do not cross. It’s transgressive in unexpected ways.
It’s true, though. It’s not like America is complicated anymore.
Back in 2001 (nearly a century ago, if you don’t think about it too hard) the New Yorker published a truly ground-breaking article on the ways that Powerpoint (itself around and changing worldviews since 1987) was reducing the American capacity for original thought.
PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people… The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.
But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.
and, as anyone familiar with human interaction or communications theory could tell you, the way you get information about the world changes your concept of the world, and that in turn changes the world in which you live, if you do in fact live and not just exist. And what does this have to do with burgers, YouTube, and America? Plenty, my friends, plenty.
Think about this: the greatest technological success story of our time is Twitter, which limits what you can say to 140 characters; or we can equally say that it gives you 140 characters of void to fill with existential screaming. Some people have to pad to make the word count.
You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?
Think about the Tea Party, and think about exactly how deeply its members are thinking about the most important issues of the day. You can’t say their politics are not heartfelt, but you’d be hard-pressed to defend this particular capito-populist tribe as an intellectual movement. They make Pat Buchanan look like Bill Kristol. On the opposite side, a relatively intellectual President had to dumb down his message to single-word talking points; not much room for nuance when it has to fit on a Shepard Fairey poster.
Shepard Fairey does Barack Obama in words of one or two syllables
And of course, popular culture is debased to the point where the Kardashians have not one but two television series among them, simply because sister Kim has a sex tape and a legendary caboose. It’s not exactly Witness to Yesterday, my friends.
So, yes, everything you need to know about the USA right at this moment, you can get from two brief YouTube videos and twenty or thirty minutes of cogitation thereon.
Now that immigrant can-do-ism and aspirational capitalism have been explained, it’s time to take on geopolitics, and who better to tackle that nest of vipers than Team America, World Police?
raincoaster 