For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine
Rob Ford, Toronto’s conservative mayor, is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements and randomly slapping refrigerator magnets on cars. One reason for this is that he smokes crack cocaine. I know this because I watched him do it, on a videotape. He was fucking hiiiiigh. It’s for sale if you’ve got six figures.
This is legitimately the most surreal thing I’ve ever read.
Terry Eagleton, “The New Atheism and the War on Terror”
Downloads:
.PDF.
David Harvey’s Companion:
Dr Dimitris Dalakoglou explains the social meltdown which took place in Greece between May 2010 & June 2012 that is on going. This film contains videos and photos shot on the streets, often containing violence and paints a portrait of widespread economic hardship endured by a city’s inhabitants. This film is part of an ongoing research project, which looks at the rapid structural changes which Greece is undergoing. This work in progress can be viewed here: crisis-scape.net
Can everyone please watch this.
"No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter)."
- Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (via howtotalktogirlsdialectically)
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This BBC documentary reveals and analyzes the fact that al-Qaeda does not exist.
There is no such thing as “al Qaeda”, there is no one on earth who calls himself a member of “al Qaeda”. “al Qaeda” is a term made up by the U.S. government to be applied to anyone killed during in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no formal organization. There is no secret terrorist network.I remember reading a few years ago that al-Qaeda was in fact an invisible bogeyman fabricated by the U.S., but could never find much about it, so I disregarded it as conspiracy hearsay. A recent documentary special aired in the UK via the BBC goes into depth about it, however. This ten-minute video focuses on the parts regarding the truth behind al-Qaeda. It’s very important, so please watch it and please reblog it.
This documentary, which has aired globally and has even been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, has yet to air in the United States, of course. Writer/producer Adam Curtis had this to say in 2008:
“Something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11. A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show it. He said, ‘Who are you to say this?’ and then he added, ‘We would get slaughtered if we put this out.’ When I was in New York I took a DVD to the head of documentaries at HBO. I still haven’t heard from him.”For more information about the documentary, read here. For more information on Jamal al-Fadl, the man who was paid to invent al-Qaeda, read here.
I’ve been recommending this to people for years. Here’s the full thing.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGo1DqmfHjY
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0kNNqZk3mg
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qATc5jRbVOA
Also, Jason Burke’s book Al Qaeda is a great read.
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What might a world without work look like? | Nina Power | Comment is free | The Guardian
Interesting stuff, as always, from Nina Power. This is pretty much exactly what my politics of distribution class was about last semester.
"Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race…everything finally piling into a single human body. To write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze. This I know, and yet the question remains: where to start?"
- Eli Clare, Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (via feministsociology)
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"Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crimes - The Communist Manifesto, Rosseau, even Plato. But when one draws attention to the millions who died as a result of capitalist globalization, from the tragedy of Mexico in the sixteenth century through to the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied. All this seems to have just happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned or executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto’ (The one who came closest to writing it was Ayn Rand)"
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Slavoj Žižek, Violence
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Yup. Yup yup yup. Violence is one of his best not-theoretically-hyperfocused books.
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