prole

Yeah, I think I will start shopping for guns after all.

[video:youtube]

Some of those shrimpers may be able to get jobs in Afghanistan mining iphoneium though, so that's a plus.

Yeah, too bad it took killing all the shrimp to do it?!? Not much of a "good news/bad news" play there... Wierd.

And this is the political and economic context in which people are pushing for more nuclear power? Uh, fuck that.

Fuckin' balloon-boy bullshit all over again...

If so, it would be an tectonic shift in the way war and intervention is justified and consent is "manufactured" in liberal democracies (if we can be said to live in one). It's not clear who the real target of this message would be given the considerable, if often misguided, amount of populism out there. In what sector is support for the war lagging that this message might resonate? Billcoe's "golly gee, hope and prosperity might be just around the corner, let's stick around a little longer" would seem like the intended response rather than the more cynical one (though mining services stocks probably jumped on the news). It's certainly an odd press release in timing and possible motive.

The minimum wage and other such big government interventions are exactly what keep us from being truly free.

Oh, hell yes! Renewing the fuck out of our commitment to the Afghan people!

Zizek is a trip isn't he? More often than not he totally nails it. The contrast between him and the "geniuses" cited in the original article couldn't be starker. Apparently, communists are the only ones seriously contemplating a living future on Earth instead of trying to jettison off it or attempting to transcend its challenges altogether by wiring an electro-pocket pussy to their Ipads. Hasn't this question always been been central to political practice in the modern era? One Big Union, the Party, and other forms of collective organization lying "outside" these realms have been the means through which subaltern power is expressed. While Zizek is fairly dismissive of democratic socialism, the State is obviously still a terrain of struggle and neither have we somehow transcended the fundamentally mass nature of politics. A "libertarian approach" is a fallacy when our challenges are irreducibly social and global. That's the kernel of communism, as I see it. The failures of the Left post-'68 can largely be placed at the doorstep of "libertarian" identity politics and a retreat from the analytic centrality of capitalism and the move toward lifestyle politics. Is thinking of human history in terms of "stages" helpful for you? The notion that extraordinary concentrations of power are necessary for anything beyond the existence and reproduction of themselves seems a teleological quagmire. Is that what you call this? If so, why would you bother dabbling in anything critical or describing itself as liberatory? Do you see much fanfare regarding anything "real" anymore? We've passed though the looking glass into pure spectacle. Maybe nuking the Gulf Spill or a massive alien landing will wake us from our slumber.

if you're an elitist douchebag, that is...

Trig is stoked.

HAHAHAH! They all look the same, don't they Nitrox?!?

I CAN SEE HER BOOBS FROM MY HOUSE!!!

Presidential stuff here... Is she really doing enough about the oil spill?

Yay? I agree with the interpretation but don't see how it couldn't be anything but a ideological justification for just about any kind of (private) abuse. When one begins from the assumption that any intervention to prevent, redress, remediate social injustice to actually existing human beings (or the environment) is deemed inappropriate and incompatible with a sanctified abstraction, the "way markets function", the scope of said injustices is virtually unlimited. Or rather they're limited by people's willingness to live with them and/or the biosphere's ability to absorb them, both of which we're seeing now. In the real world those injustices and dislocations inevitably generate social dynamics that lead further from rather than closer to market utopia. A companion piece to Hayek is Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation.

Anybody know how to see all the games for free using the miracle of the internet? English language preferable but not necessary.

Unfortunately, your guess would be wrong. Hayek and followers were concerned mostly with justifying, if not outright glorifying undisciplined and insatiable greed.

As usual, it's clear that when, in the context of oil spills, financial meltdowns, crumbling institutions, predatory exploitation, and any of the other highly destructive pathologies wrought by free-market fundamentalism flashing across our screens daily, one must revert to the airless, abstracted world of "consenting adults acting in their interests not harming anyone" to describe the activities of offending corporations and banks, the only utopian in the room is you. What is also clear from this calculus is that, in spite of obvious and overwhelming sensory evidence that the notion of a self-regulating market society is a destructive fiction, you're willing to justify, sweep under the rug, and otherwise obfuscate just about any catastrophe or ongoing horror to salvage, A. the theories you've come to base your identity on or B. your class position or the the class you aspire to become a part of. Sorry Jay, humanity and the other species that live on this ball don't have time for your parlor games.

More free-market mythmaking and obfuscation with regard to both the social dynamics that brought the Pinochet regime down as well as the numerous contemporary authoritarian states where "free markets" have been imposed that are still waiting for that heavenly manna that's "sure to follow" from privatization, deregulation, tax cuts, union busting, cuts to social budgets, and the penetration of American corporations. The kind of "no pain, no gain" moral relativism at the core of your statement also lays bare the false libertarianism and violence at work in the heart of market utopianism: it's our way or the highway, there is no alternative and we have the guns to prove it. Gross. I think that the argument was that economic freedom was necessary, but not sufficient for political freedom. Market processes undermine an authoritarian regime's capacity to enforce obedience. Concentrating all economic power in the state's hands guarantees it. Cuba. Chile. Compare and contrast. No one here is talking about "concentrating all economic power in the State's hands" except you and Hayek, which of course always makes your arguments look better, but doesn't go very far in explaining how many industrialized nations have done better in providing their citizens with a high quality standard of living, protecting their environments, and greater participation in decision-making than those countries and deterritorialized zones that have gone furthest toward "economic freedom". Furthermore, the real blind spot (if you can call implicit and explicit acceptance, if not glorification, a blind spot) in these ideas are their acceptance of class rule and the stark inequalities of access to public goods and political power inevitably generated by the functioning of the capitalist free markets. This is really what "the proper role of government" is all about for you folks: how to maintain control and stability in a system that, by its nature, thrives on inequality and to what extent the State steps in to wipe the ass of the ruling class when its projects inevitably generate crises. Neither of these formulae require or operate very well in the context of political democracy, hence we're back to their authoritarian and antidemocratic underpinnings.

Rather, what kind of State and State power was necessary to maintain capitalism and class rule.

More free-market mythmaking and obfuscation with regard to both the social dynamics that brought the Pinochet regime down as well as the numerous contemporary authoritarian states where "free markets" have been imposed that are still waiting for that heavenly manna that's "sure to follow" from privatization, deregulation, tax cuts, union busting, cuts to social budgets, and the penetration of American corporations. The kind of "no pain, no gain" moral relativism at the core of your statement also lays bare the false libertarianism and violence at work in the heart of market utopianism: it's our way or the highway, there is no alternative and we have the guns to prove it. Gross.

Another underhanded plug for Scott Baio, I'm sure.