Department Of Omnishambles: JACQUES DERRIDA
From Exergue Upon GlobomanagerialisationWhat can be said of the manager’s tendency to always already both manage, that is, get by, make do, survive, in other words live, and simultaneously manage, that is, ossify, systematize, deaden, that is, kill? In this autoinoculation of the system…
“Feminists Oppress Men? Wow, You Are So Radical!” (Taken with instagram)
To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined 'militant' to mean 'all military-age males in strike zone'
By Glenn Greenwald
This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
(via jhnbrssndn)
Fugazi, Instrument (2003).
SMACK!
Terrifying, bizarre, incalculable, sickening, bathetic and strangely majestic, The Atomic Cafe assembles footage from the earliest nuclear tests through Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the paranoid and not-so-paranoid exercises of 1950s America. A must-watch.
(Source: daiseas, via spitzenprodukte)
Ticket for dinner that triggered the Priestley Riots against English Dissenters and supporters of the French Revolution. Joseph Priestly, whose home was destroyed in the riot named after him, was a scientist and controversial theologian. He was also the inventor of soda water.
“Knowledge is power. You can be black as a crow, or white as snow, but if you don’t know, and you ain’t got no dough, you can’t go, and that’s for sho’.” — Lewis Michaux
Alfie Meadows, The Police Truncheon and the Bureaucratic Imperative
“A former LAPD officer turned sociologist observed that the overwhelming majority of those beaten by police turn out not to be guilty of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars”, he observed. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to “define the situation.”…The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema, and its monopoly of coercive force, come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.”
David Graeber, ‘Beyond Power/Knowledge: An Exploration of the Relation of Power, Ignorance and Stupidity’ (2006)
