Long Sunday

Nylon Research

Out of NYU, apparently.   Looks doubly promising.

Fascism checklist: legalized torture, legalized surveillance

The LA Times article excerpted below is horrifying. So are the views expressed. Amnesty International is 'concerned' about the upcoming bill, primarily because of it's 'ambiguity.' There is 'worry' that the Bush administration 'would use the language to claim approval of tough methods.' 

What kind of nonsense is this? Why the soft language? Why the diplomacy? WHERE IS THE FUCKING OUTRAGE? The whole purpose of the new bill is to make legal practices that are currently illegal. That's it. That's why the Bush regime wants it. It wants the power to torture--and it wants the rest of us to know that it can torture and surveill and detain without cause, without explanation, without limit.

Defense Lawyers Assail Legislation on Detainees - Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON — Military defense lawyers assailed compromise legislation for interrogating and prosecuting terrorism suspects, contending Friday that proposed rules would prevent them from learning whether evidence used against their clients was obtained through coercion or torture.

At the same time, rights groups that initially endorsed the compromise between the Bush administration and key Senate Republicans expressed reservations, saying it appeared on closer reading to be vague and could give President Bush and future presidents too much latitude.

turning: the voice that tickles

[A guest post by blah-feme.]

What do you want of me, siren?  Why do you turn me so, why do I stop and listen?  How am I to remain after your song?  What am I after you fall silent again?  Where will I have moved to?  The siting (and citing) of the voice in song with the feminine has a long and continuous history, and it marks a certain texture of the Western episteme, a certain materiality that is formidable.  To turn to that voice is not to be hailed in the Althusserian moment of becoming-again, but to wonder.  It is to raise a question, to pose the nature of agency, of self, of the ground of the resources of subjectivity as we think it has arrived to us.

If there is one thing that makes thinking about voices, especially the voice in song, infuriatingly complex, it is its parallax function:  the singing voice shortcircuits the mythological composure of he-who-speaks and invokes the troublesome knave-who-feigns.  This Narrenschiff, this ship of singing jesters, has long since set its course for the heart of Arcadia, and threatens to bring the most impudent thuggery to its heart.  Sing and you shall lose who you are and, what is worse, listen to that song and you are forever lost.   Proust was one who saw this with extraordinary clarity, in this much-quoted passage from The Fugitive:

My mind ...was entirely occupied with following the successive phrases of O sole mio, singing them to myself with the singer, anticipating each surge of melody, soaring aloft with it, sinking down with it once more... Each note that the singer's voice uttered with a force and ostentation that were almost muscular stabbed me to the heart ... This I remained motionless, my will dissolved.

This sirencic trope of song as seduction is very old and always remarkable for its fidelity to the structure of the parallax: 

The Third Awakening

I find it fascinating that in the same week President Bush speculated that America may be  in the midst of a "Third Awakening," he also passionately defended the need for torture  [U-Tube].  Though it appears paradoxical, perhaps it is the intense pleasures of righteousness that are really on display–we are awakened from our secular slumber  by the profound confrontation with radical evil:  "President Bush said yesterday that he senses a 'Third Awakening' of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as 'a confrontation between good and evil.'  In a manner that I think resonates with many folks, the President went on to say "he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history.  Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people 'who saw life in terms of good and evil' and who believed that slavery was evil.  Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms. . . ."

Spooked

In Australia recently, a number of universities have advised phd students researching terrorism that, under current laws, the information they gather "might" be passed on to security agencies.  A student in the Terrorism Research Project at Monash University was questioned by Federal Police after borrowing books from the library on terrorism.  At least one prominent sociologist has, after receiving a grant, abandoned research into the motivations of suicide bombers.  A paper by the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre urges universities to do more to counter "extremism" on campuses and insists that researchers should "be willing to share the findings of their work with government before publishing". Responding to questions regarding the conduct of research under the so-called 'Anti-Terror' laws, the Attorney-General insisted that prospective researchers should first discuss their research with him, personally, but urged the research to continue.  In other words, the issue here is not censorship (or not quite), so much as ensuring that academics become either de facto or unwitting spooks.  Somewhat sharpens the meaning of 'informant' as used in Qualitative Research Methods 101, does it not?

Happy 9/11/06

Two things hereby commended:  today's s lot (from whence the image, and the story of the image); and a terrific, highly educative film, "9/11:  Press for Truth" (courtesy of here).  That is all.

Canada Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, addresses Canada in his first national speech since becoming PM.  Watch his whole body follow the dot on his teleprompter. (ed - Craig.)

Hear the Kossacks Call

What's funniest about all of this "Path to 9/11" humbug:  the 9/11 Commission Report was itself politically white-washed crock of shit.    Sorry to spoil the party (and sign the petition, please*) but still someone had to say it.

*particularly if–like most LS lurkers–you are a centrist with any cred.

Update 9/10:  Oh wouldn't you know it, "The Path to 9/11" is linked directly to David Horowitz (where does that man get all his money?):

Theory and the Man

Why is it that even the most post of the posties end up caught up in adulation of or resistance to single great thinkers? Why is the hold of a Master so strong even after decades upon decades of critiques of the subject, of agency, of originality, of individuality, of authenticity? Is it precisely because of these critiques? That answer seems too easy.

Perhaps one answer lies more in the structure of the academy, in its patterns of the transmission of knowledge and structures of authentication and validation. If that's the case, should those committed to ideas of structures, systems, contingencies, networks, assemblages, and discourses eschew identifying views with single persons--Agamben, Badiou, Foucault, Lacan, and, why not, Zizek?

War portraiture

Terror Town | The Duct Tape Guys | Sovereign Authority

.. face down, face up to, facing off, losing face, prima facie, saving face ...

deleuze guatarri heidegger

The position of many writers with respect to democracy is complex and ambiguous. The Heidegger affair has complicated matters: a great philosopher actually had to be reterritorialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to meet up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question and sometimes absolving it through such complicated and convoluted arguments that we are still in the dark.