Dark Days is gritty as heck and has an amazing sound track (dj shadow), shot masterfully in black and white (the film they dug out of dumpsters) with shopping cart dollies rigged to rotting train tracks. it's an hour and a half long documentary about a village of homeless people who find community underground in abandoned amtrack tunnels. they hack into the utilities and take pride in building their hovels. they chat about lost family members and their struggles with substance abuse. most of the film is just long shots of conversation between friends discussing the challenges of everyday life, how to make money, how to love and defend themselves in such vulnerable situations.

I'm a straight cisgendered white male so I speak from a position of privilege on basically all issues of gender and sexuality but I find it extremely problematic that the liberal gay rights movement bases its position on a sort of sexual-essentialism, that gays are "born this way" and "cant help it". It is about as scientific and coherent as race science. Sexuality is behavior, and obviously can be controlled and channeled in many, many different ways. This is clear from history and comparative anthropology. There is no such thing as a "gay" person, nor a "straight" person. These are boundaries peculiar to a given culture, and the antagonisms between them are disciplined by the prime socioeconomic forces of the day: i.e. capitalism.

within the unity of the so called 99% there exist that minority (or majority!?) which has learned by the very nature of their environment to stay silent. it's not their place to speak. they just want to eat and live out their peaceful lonely lives out in some shitty suburb, as long as it's away from the incessant violence and retardation of the rest of the human race. (un)fortunately, sometimes those very people, by the activities that they find themselves repeating day after day, find out more about the world around them than the people that walk around yelling what they think is the key to the door of civil stagnation.

A worker at a munitions factory, wondering about the morality of creating weapons, inquires about the proportion of civilian and military deaths caused by any particular bomb he has created. His superior reveals that in Iraq, casualties are roughly 44% women and 39% children; at least 85% of those killed are thus highly likely to be civilians. This realization would require at the very least the worker's conscientious objection and immediate refusal to continue work on the bombs. But the bomb-maker is in a unique position to go farther...

The world-historical consequence of the Occupy movement needs to be put in this perspective. This is the same world and involves one of the same powers. So far, the Occupy movement has involved a tiny minority of Americans, and at very little expense for these people. There are attacks with irritants on protestors, but most violence has been one-sided and limited. Importantly, what are the changes in business-as-usual that this movement seeks to put into place?

right wing parties worldwide point to this migrant labor as the cause of many ills. crime, disease, increased cost of services, depression of wages, whatever. while some might argue we need to drop the "PC" pretenses and man up to these challenges, generally approaching the subject in this way results in passing laws about giving water to "Illegal Humans" dying of thirst in the desert.

A strong point made by Peter Hallward is simply that "waiting" has never made a revolution happen. If you consider capitalism a transformation of slavery, and existing capitalist society to be unjust, then it doesn't matter if the legal paperwork has been done. John Brown didn't leaflet for abolitionism, he tried to arm the people and destroy the institution he despised. "Waiting" for a parliamentary majority, or a well established consensus around some economic alternative, seems like it concedes all the ground to the opposition.

of course all this came crashing down sometime in the last 6 or 8 years, when all of the sudden we were suddenly supposed to be putting ourselves online. the anarchy of identity had to be corralled somehow and exposed to the market. imagine, you go up to a stranger on the street and start to discuss the most personal parts of your sexuality and experiences with them... of course, this is quaint and a little perverted - yet totally acceptable! - within an anonymous framework, when we can never really be sure if the other is telling us the truth (and they always are in a way) and so we chalk it up to the strangeness of the medium. but is the medium changing us now?

Post 1970's abandonment of the Bretton Woods system there came about a fantastic chain of events that threw the entire world on the fast track to destruction. Neoliberalism had been incubating at the University of Chicago for some years, but they were suddenly tapped to provide answers for where a sudden glut of gulf oil revenue should go. Their answer: To The Third World! After all, Mr. Woods was no longer around to lend a helping hand, the Soviet Union was lolling around like fat idiots getting ready to melt, and there's no better time like the present to introduce finance into every market available.

The pipsqueak, by now, is an old, well-explored character in literature. Normally I’d avoid quoting Tao Lin, but he’s one of the few writers today who’s realized that the pipsqueak’s mind-disease has leaked out of literature and now roots in the populace at large—that is, we’re all of us, men and women, rich and poor, smart and dumb, we’re all of us becoming pipsqueaks. Never has this been more clear than at a party I attended last Friday night.