Shameless Self-promotion Sunday #39
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
It’s Sunday Shameless Sunday.
What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.
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I found a copy of Nock’s Our Enemy: The State in my college library. It’s a government run one too…
There was also a copy of Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture. For those who don’t know, he was a famous anarchist historian.
Looks like my state operated community college is courting its own destruction ( :
I checked out Nock and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. She is so detailed in discussing the history of anti-semitism in the beginning. I am going to be an expert at the end of this one.
On the non-political front: I am reading N Branden and Alice Miller again. I am looking to deal with general anxiety, anger, and related issues. I have an inkling there are some repressed childhood memories at work.
I want to put Origins of Totalitarianism to the top of my reading list.
Antisemitism is just a specific stupidity, but the psychological patterns which anti-semitism historically crystallises seem to be rising in a number of places today on both left and right.
Some ALLies and I began a flyering campaign against ICE http://darianworden.com/blog/?p=500 .
Aster,
What is interesting is her discussion of how the elite classes would welcome educated Jews who became “good” ones due to their distinction from the “rabble”. It was also considered an exotic “vice” of sorts, so the aristocratic classes eschewed them when Jewishness became less of a big deal. She speaks of one famous Salon frequented by high society members run by a Jewess. When Jewishness was no longer a “vice”, she was abandoned…there’s another interesting point she makes about shifts due to the rise of centralist nation-states and nominal equality of rights or under the law.
Wish I could recall it right now, but she’s such a detailed writer.
On another note:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/4587941/Female-FBI-officer-tortured-Mumbai-terror-attacks-suspect-with-sex.html
There’s another bizarre torture allegation. I know it’s easy to joke about being tortured with sex acts, but it unnerves me, so I am not really in a jokey mood about it.
Confessions of an Economic Metaphor discusses various ways economists talk about production. It also makes an observation about the influence of John Ruskin on 19th-century individualist anarchism.
If anyone still wants to talk to me about The Origins of T, then they can look above for my comment. It’s an exciting book well worth conversation.
Anyhow, I am posting an Arthur Silber quote:
“You have to hand it to the Washington Democrats and those commentators and bloggers who continue to shill for them. The Democrats count on the American public and their lobotomized lapdogs not to remember significant events from one week to the next — and the Democrats’ enablers willingly render themselves deaf, dumb and blind. The Democrats first put on a phony show of aggressively questioning Petraeus and doubting his propagandistic claims, and very shortly thereafter they rely on Petraeus’s lies to set the stage for World War III.
I almost admire the Democrats’ defenders in a certain way. The Democrats stab them deep in the gut and, while the knife is disemboweling them, the Democrats continue to lie in their agony-ridden faces — and the victims still tell these bastards they will continue to support them. This collection of subhumans give sado-masochists a bad name. The commitment to cruelty, self-abasement and self-humiliation is all but perfect. It’s no wonder they can regard one genocide after another with equanimity. It appears none of these people has a conscience any longer to be troubled in the smallest degree.
I will not go over the significance of the Revolutionary Guard amendment. I went over that ground in detail in “The Worsening Nightmare.” Let it be noted that, if and when World War III destroys much of the world and the comfortable, ignorance-ridden lives of many Americans, neither the Democrats nor their defenders should look to any remotely civilized person for forgiveness. It will not be forthcoming.
So, still another time, I note that murder, chaos, devastation and human suffering on an ungraspable scale are what the U.S. governing class wants. Is it what you want? For many Americans, the answer is: Yes. Yes, it is.
God damn all such people to hell.
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF UNSOLICITED ADVICE: For any Democrats who read this, and who oppose the Democratic party’s program of perpetual war, corporatism and authoritarianism, here’s what you can do: Tell the Democrats they have to change or die. Be a quitter.
Let it not be said that I never offer constructive suggestions.”
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/09/depravity-of-empire.html
It kind of grabs you with its bitterness, but it’s best to focus on the passion. Sadly, the Bush era aggressive rhetoric via Iran continues under Obama. The question of 2009 will be: will Israel or the U.S. let Iran off the hook? Every person reading this arguably has a life that will be affected by the answer to this question.
Aster, can you elaborate on the rise of anti-semitism on the left and right. It wouldn’t have anything do with, say, Bill Moyers would it?
What does Bill Moyers have to do with anti-semitism? Seriously. I am intrigued here.