An Anarchist Defense of Karl Marx
From Chris M. at Black Sun Gazette:
Karl Marx has received a bum rap. Some see him as the godfather of the modern revolutionary movement while others see him as the architect of Stalin’s gulags. I’m in the former camp rather than the latter. This is not to say his he is infallible, his texts are sacred, or his supporters haven’t committed any errors. In fact I think that last point is the cause of most of the controversy.
Few people have bothered to read his works and instead point to the horrors committed by his followers mainly Lenin and the Bolsheviks. After Karl died three main voices appeared in the socialist movement of the 20th century all claiming the mantle of Marx — Bernstein, Lenin, and Luxemburg.
Bernstein who lead the democratic…
Your Corporate Masters Are In Control
Nick P. at Black Sun Gazette writes:
A new poll reveals what you already knew: the economy is fucking depressing. You can’t help but wonder how many people have committed suicide over losing a job or a house, or how many relationships have been strained to the breaking point by a lack of money.
It’s proof that we live in Bizarro world that we even take such things for granted. Much like the tenets of organized religion, if you simply lay out the reality in simple terms — you and I are subject to the whims and vagaries of a tiny group of social parasites who produce nothing while taking everything, and when their investments tank our lives go in the shitter — it’s patently ludicrous.
To those suckling at the teat of corporate…
This Day in History: Al Gore Gives Up … So The Stock Market Could Keep Going Up
Interested in hearing your ideas about what we haven’t heard yet about the 2000 election. I have my ideas, but looking forward to hearing what you have to say, nine years later:
Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” Well, in that same spirit, I say to President-Elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.
— Vice President Al Gore’s concession speech on December 13, 2000, after the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, effectively ending his hopes of becoming the 43rd president of the U.S.
Full text of Vice President Al Gore’s concession speech here.
Facebook: Where Souls Go To Die
On 
The First Church of Mutterhals:
I recently saw graffiti written on a train that said “80% of the internet is pornography.” While I don’t normally give much credence to random statistics scrawled on the sides of fast moving freight trains, I have to say this one struck me as fairly accurate. I would even go as far as characterizing the remaining 20% as being comprised of cat pictures, celebrity gossip and social networking sites appealing to the emotional retard in all of us.
Yeah, I said it. Retard.
Facebook is a place for puerile rumor mongering and passive-aggressive pronouncements made from the safety of your profile page. For all the talk about connecting to people around the world, social utilities really only serve to foster the increasing sense of isolation and narcissism…
Let’s Kick Some Pricks
From Buelahman at Black Sun Gazette
I love to watch the lunatic fringe squirm as they realize that their little kingdom is falling apart. Its not that I get jollies knowing the demoRAT party will probably increase the next election round overall, even if the ObamaMeister will force the reTHUGlicans back into the Whitehouse. It is all crazy shit and I blame Americans for being too partisan, stupid, scared or gullible to clearly back away from those “parties” and the devastation the participation brings to our way of life.
Why Vote for the Lesser Evil?
Chris M. at Black Sun Gazette
I think in the year 2000 we actually entered through the looking glass. It’s almost absurd — left is right, up is down, fight terrorism by going shopping and Afghans are “Enduring Freedom” is an incredible Orwellian mind fuck. A sizable minority live in Fox News World and swallow up conservative dribble, because Bush “kept us safe for eight years” except for the day between 9-10 and 9-12 (snap).
Another sizable liberal minority live in Futurama and believe all would have been fine had Al Gore been elected (no terrorism, no war, no hurricanes, no government corruption) unlike the rest of American history. The fact that the two men were both from old political families that served the interests of the elite didn’t phase most people.…
Show Me the Money
By Robert Singer
We have been conditioned from birth to believe that everything wrong in our society is about Greed: The inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.
However, my research concludes the earth’s environmental damage and pollution was not the result of greed and the unintended consequences of our capitalistic consumer society, but was the goal.
Until the common man became “civilized” he had almost no environmental impact on the earth. Hunters, foragers and gatherers are unable to upset the ecological structures of the planet. [1]
The first civilized societies and their agrarian economies had an environmental impact but the damage was negligible because only 3% of the population, Kings and Lords were consumers.
The earth wasn’t in trouble until the House of…
Two Important Articles: The Collapse of Communism / “Unions”
From Black Sun Gazette
I wanted to recommend two articles to my readership from my most favorite news source, the World Socialist Web Site. I consider this website to be nothing short of the New York Times or The Economist for working class socialists. The two articles I am about to refer people to here express quite succinctly why I consider their analysis to be head and shoulders above anything else on the phony left. In addition, I believe that these two articles really cut to the heart of two problems that plague the fake left. Namely, anti-communism and toadying for the “union” bureaucracy.
Marty Beckerman Hates Fat People … And Tells Them
Marty Beckerman’s really going to make some big enemies with his latest blog rant, Kill Fatty: A Modestly Sized Proposal. Here at disinformation we published his book (mostly) about politics, Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and Other American Idiots, but I’m not sure we would have had he included his latest assault on the weight-challenged. Here’s a sample, and don’t hold back on your comments, Marty likes to feature hate mail on his blog:
Overweight people are fucking abhorrent, which seems like an obvious and uncontroversial statement, but you cannot turn your head these days without gawking at the vile cascades of shapeless distended flesh that ubiquitously engulf your grotesque countrymen.
Look at these nauseating statistics:
1. 33 percent of Americans are overweight, according to the federal government.
2. Another…
Why I Hate The ISO
From Black Sun Gazette
This is an article I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I considered the subject to obscure until my special lady friend assured me that it was not. If you’ve ever been within 50 miles of a college campus you probably know who the International Socialist Organization are. They’re the obviously middle-class kids shilling a banal newspaper in really large type font who curl into a ball and start crying if you ask them a question harder than “but is socialism really possible / aren’t people naturally selfish / didn’t socialism fail in the Soviet Union?” If the ISO weren’t running around claiming to be socialists, I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have any problem with them. If they just fessed up to the fact that…
Nobel Price Farce
From Nick P at Black Sun Gazette
I don’t really need to get into why this is insane, Orwellian, and farcical. But I’m going to anyway. The refusal to dawn down troops in Afghanistan, the continued threads against Iran, the expansion of the War on Terror Truth into Pakistan (using tactics at home in Pinochet’s Chile) and Somalia (while simultaneously cutting food aid), continuing Bush-era police state operations, defending Bush-era torturers while leaving the framework of their policies in place, attacking health care for working class Americans, offering no relief to unemployed workers while giving the bankers who caused the crisis whatever they want at the expense of you and me, and generally fiddling while Rome burns.
Yeah. Dude is really doing his bit to increase the peace.
Final Word: Democrats Are WORSE Than Republicans
Nick P at Black Sun Gazette
I know. You’re totally flabbergasted and think that I’ve gone off the deep end. Well, I haven’t. You’ve just stomached so much blue covered propaganda throughout your life that the title of this entry sounds insane. But I assure you that it is not. Once again, this isn’t a question of “playing radical” and trying to be the most arch. It is an important political question. I’m not advocating that people start voting Republican, nor am I endorsing their politics. What I am advocating is that people make a clear break with both corporate parties and stop pretending that one is the nicer face. It isn’t. Keeping progressive, radical, and working class forces chained to the Democrats is the main impediment to social progress in…
Great power conflicts overhang G20 summit in Pittsburgh
As political leaders and central bankers gather for the Group of 20 summit of major economies, to be held today and Friday in Pittsburgh, they face the task of papering over increasingly open and embittered conflicts over policies to revive the world economy and prevent another financial disaster.
One year after the near-collapse of the global financial system, mutual pledges of multi-lateral coordination and rejection of protectionist policies proclaimed at last November’s G20 summit in Washington and the April summit in London are being overshadowed by divisions over economic policy. These differences correspond to the national interests of the ruling elites of the US, Europe and rising economic powers in Asia and Latin America—above all, China.
Who Will Harness the Rage?
Ever since the economy crashed and the government paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the fat-cats who were responsible, a populist rage has been seething away across the country.
Home values have collapsed, more than two million homes have been foreclosed on, retirement nest eggs are decimated, seven million jobs have been lost. Hard-won feelings of financial security now seem like a distant memory. The economy is turning around, they say, but where are the jobs? And what about all the money that’s been lost?
Russell Simmons: Twenty-Seven Million Slaves
Human trafficking, otherwise known as child labor, migrant smuggling, sex worker trafficking, debt bondage, or good old fashioned slavery, adds up to one inescapable reality. An estimated 27 million human beings worldwide today are living lives of exploitation and humanity stripped bare beyond the bone of basic human rights. This is a bigger number than at any point in documented history.
They are objects of ownership, forgotten as children in need of love, nurturing and protection; forgotten as flesh and blood creatures that bruise and bleed and are more than vessels for sex; forgotten as individuals with the desire for purpose and peace and protection from the violence and intimidation they face every day. If they are not a source of revenue for those who own them, they are a useless,…
Open Thread: Race in America
The subject of the alleged racism of the Obama “Joker” poster associated (I believe- though please correct me if I’m wrong) with the Alex Jonesephiles came up at a PDX0 BBQ recently. A friend asked me if I thought it was racist. I said that I hadn’t even seen the poster, but that my intuition told me that it probably is. I’m still not really sure what I think of it, other than that it seems stupid, irritating, and vaguely fascistic. I’d reproduce the image here, but I’m really kind of grossed out by it for reasons that I can’t articulate.
Then comes Jimmy Carter’s assertion that Joe Wilson’s recent outburst worthy of the NSDAP (who were always ready to disrupt parliamentary procedure in the Reichstag and then cry out that “democracy…
Open Thread: Race in America
The subject of the alleged racism of the Obama “Joker” poster associated (I believe- though please correct me if I’m wrong) with the Alex Jonesephiles came up at a PDX0 BBQ recently. A friend asked me if I thought it was racist. I said that I hadn’t even seen the poster, but that my intuition told me that it probably is. I’m still not really sure what I think of it, other than that it seems stupid, irritating, and vaguely fascistic. I’d reproduce the image here, but I’m really kind of grossed out by it for reasons that I can’t articulate.
Then comes Jimmy Carter’s assertion that Joe Wilson’s recent outburst worthy of the NSDAP (who were always ready to disrupt parliamentary procedure in the Reichstag and then cry out that…
Verner Vinge Again Says: ‘A.I. Will Surpass Human Intelligence By 2020′
Luke McKinney, Daily Galaxy: “It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future,” says scifi legend Vernor Vinge, “create (or become) creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such an event — such a singularity — are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.”
“The Singularity” is seen by some as the end point of our current culture, when the ever-accelerating evolution of technology finally overtakes us and changes everything. It’s been represented as everything from the end of all life to the beginning of a utopian age, which you might recognize as the endgames of most other religious beliefs.
While the definitions of the Singularity are as varied as people’s fantasies of the future, with a very obvious reason,…
Obamaphilia Deconstructed
Every four years (constantly, actually, as people attempt to argue away their shame between elections with this line) I am forced to listen to hysterical liberals, craven reformist leftists, and nervous anarchists lecture me on the relative merits of corporate sponsored politicians.
This hit an arguable peak in the last election as white guilt, media distortions, and eight years of Bush added up to the perfect storm of prostration before the Democratic Party. Even to this day, friends of mine, intelligent friends who ought to know better, take the tone of a frightened child when referring to John McCain bleating without thinking “but at least he was better than McCain.”
Not getting scared into voting for the puppet on the left hand of our corporate masters every four years is precisely why…
