elektrenai posted:

and he does do MMA, but only ironically

members of my highschool wrestling team, usually not an especially humorous or lighthearted bunch, were asked by the yearbook as to what led them to this most unpleasant of intermural sports. with the exception of the emotionally unwell christian kid under too much parental pressure, all independently answered "the spandex"

toy posted:

The Jacobin vs. Twitter outrage machine absurdity makes me want to throw up.

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/06/10/what-amber-alee-frost-actually-wrote/

im obsessed with this, the people defending Kendzior have gone absolutely insane

elektrenai posted:

For some reason this has me totally despondent

incredible display of lack of reading comprehension, or a complete failure to read the material, an eagerness to interpret things in the worst, cartoonishly evil fashion, and ultimately a fall back on "intent doesn't matter"

Edited by toy (June 11, 2014 22:17:34)

chickeon posted:

Ken I liked your most recent piece on yer blog for the most part, I started out thinking I was going to hate it then it got better but then you did a thing. That is, echoing the fairy tale of supposed incompetence and impotence of the CIA and empire in general that is so popular among the folks over in D&D and other practitioners of imperial apologetics. The myth of the cartoonishly incompetent Max Smart Austin Powders intelligence agency might appear at least good for morale at first but it comes with the implication that the peoples of the third world are even more feckless and hopeless than this straw-empire, seeing as any reasonable examination of imperial activity around the world reveals that they have been stunningly successful at completely demolishing the vast majority of attempts to develop independently of the hegemon and especially those societies pursuing any remotely emancipatory secular leftist or quasi leftist vision of such attempted development. As you should know only the most egregious of failed imperial adventures are made widely known, which is what lets hacks like Brown Moses shrug and go hurr CIA those dopes can't do nothin right! to raucous applause from sniveling liberals and pseudoleft while rivers of blood flow through the global south.

e: i just saw and read disciplines reply in yer comments and it's very good and says anything i might have wanted to say 1000x better and much more beyond that

thanks for posting this, ive always just parroted the words of people i know who are in those circles and say this kind of stuff without thinking about it

but looking at it and taking as a given the success of bourgeois repressive apparati thus far, its hard to say that there isnt a gross amount of incompetence that is involved in it.. if you read about western intelligence activity in the middle east during the cold war, for example, it approaches absurdity.

organized crime and intelligence are essentially the same thing. they're deleuze's war-machines. they are tremendously efficient in political repression and thrive off anarchy. they can be both "incompetent" and highly successful because the chaos fuels the repressive function. i dunno i know deleuze is affirmationist or whatever according to noys, i'm not sure how that colors this but it seems a good fit for the model (jools pls comment)

Edited by babyfinland (June 12, 2014 01:37:42)

laika posted:

Apparently an idea i had had already occurred to other people who did a much better job theorizing about it:


Virtualism: A New Political Economy by James G. Carrier (Editor), Daniel Miller (Editor)

We live in a time of economic virtualism, whereby our lives are made to conform to the virtual reality of economic thought. Globalization, transnational capitalism, structural adjustment programmes and the decay of welfare are all signs of the growing power of economics, one of the most potent forces of recent decades. In the last thirty years, economics has ceased to be just an academic discipline concerned with the study of economy, and has come to be the only legitimate way to think about all aspects of society and how we order our lives. Economic models are no longer measured against the world they seek to describe, but instead the world is measured against them, found wanting and made to conform.

read philip mirowski

stegosaurus posted:

I had to hide andrew klimans notifications about candy crush saga lmfao

um http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/11921/