Re: I Am For... 1961

[Keith Sanborn]

And don’t forget his stop frame live animation “Fat Feet.”

> On Jul 19, 2022, at 7:52 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> 
> dear d.garcia,
> 
> thank you for posting this manifesto/poem. i read that Oldenburg had died 
> yesterday. another legend to say goodbye to. unfortunately, artists get 
> recognized and then they get interpreted, frequently badly by curators, 
> buyers, art historians and theorists who place them and put them. Often what 
> is said has nothing to do with why or how the artist did what they did and 
> then conceptually, everyone went against this problem  and wanted to 
> self-represent so as to be understood, or so that they would not be 
> misunderstood and then were misunderstood years later when the "simplicity" 
> of making material objects produced less dissonance. thank you for publishing 
> his own words.
> 
> his art can be seen as "bloated corporate pop art" - but, i'd like to credit 
> him with having made art more accessible to people, and for bridging gaps in 
> low-high thinking about art, and certainly as a welcome counter move to AbEX 
> bravado, even with his exaggerated scale. 
> 
> today his iconic works can and should be critiqued for their benign, 
> mid-century modernist appeal, maybe. nationalist? colonialist? banal? 
> white-bred? maybe...democratic...i'd like to think more along these lines... 
> pie, baseball, hamburgers -  there is nothing edgy about these objects and by 
> today's critical standards they may even appear to likeable to be art. not 
> half the critical wit of Duane Hanson, but then, which one would you put in 
> your yard? if you have a yard...he made many of the 'bloated' pieces in the 
> early 1960s right about the time of this text you sent. i am going to give 
> this to  my students 
> 
> Oldenburg brought a non-intimidating abstraction to art - by appealing to 
> ordinary things and people and at a monumental scale. He boosted the little 
> guy or gal; the one who made the pie with meringue. They are ordinary and 
> democratic. There is something to be said for that as lasting monumental 
> mementos of what may now be a failing democracy.  
> 
> The baseball bat in Chicago is hollow.  So tall. Rusting. Admirably iconic 
> engineering achievement in this way, and yet, a kind of surreal Magritte's 
> comb amidst smaller buildings and structures. Left behind by a giant player.
> 
> You can say, why make an icon like that, but I think it is more a relic that 
> no one else thought to make. It doesn't exactly celebrate baseball, more the 
> form of the bat. the giant diaper pin at the deYoung is similarly. Not an 
> orgiastic nod to diaper-changing, rather, it is about the peculiar form of 
> abstraction that occurs when something is oversized and maybe it is a 
> monument to the decades before Pampers! 
> 
> soft sculpture pieces are made from toxic awful materials probably, but i 
> still like them. 
> 
> lastly, the Ray Gun Museum is brilliant, as is the Mouse Museum. These works 
> were so evocative when I saw them in New York in about 1987.
> 
> early installation of a slanted banal motel room is also brilliant. forgot 
> title.
> 
> RIP Claes Oldenburg - he left so much behind to grace the landscape.
> 
> Benign can be a good thing
> 
> molly
> 
> 
> 
>> On Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 6:14 AM  wrote:
>> Yesterday at a ripe old age of 93 Claes Oldenburg died. For those who 
>> may know him only as a purveyor of bloated corporate pop art of his 
>> later years may be surprised just how radical he was when he started out 
>> and just how different he was from the pop-artists who bought 
>> uncritically into consumerist ethos. His early ‘floppy’ sculptures ( 
>> constructed largely by his wife who got little recognition) are raw and 
>> challenging. His drawings are some of the most vivid of the era. But to 
>> get a real flavour of his outlook you can do no better than his 
>> manifesto “I Am For…” 1961. Sixty years later it still rings true.
>> 
>> I Am For… (Statement, 1961)
>> I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something 
>> other than sit on its ass in a museum.
>> I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given 
>> the chance of having a starting point of zero.
>> I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still 
>> comes out on top.
>> I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or 
>> violent, or whatever is necessary.
>> I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that 
>> twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and 
>> coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
>> I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting 
>> signs or hallways.
>> I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in 
>> the sky.
>> I am for art that spills out of an old man’s purse when he is bounced 
>> off a passing fender.
>> I am for the art out of a doggie’s 

Re: Anne Applebaum

[Keith Sanborn]

Debord says somewhere, whenever someone who is an enemy agrees with me, I look 
for the errors in their logic. 

Debord does not use the word ennemi, but it was the most general paraphrase I 
cd invent without access to the original as I am in transit.

Apparently her errors are historical; something concerning when making 
historical comparisons.

It is difficult to measure degrees of debauchery, of murderousness. De Sade 
tried and the surfeit of war porn in the news is comparable if not as inclined 
to resort to a Sadean calculus. War porn appeals to such comparison but relies 
on total excess, the very thing which links them with Sade. 

What is interesting in her comparisons is pointing the finger back at Europe 
and the USA. In a sense, it preempts the kind of argument from hypocrisy in 
response that Putin has already employed, a banner which he hoists at the same 
time he appeals to the sacrifices made by Soviet Union in what is called the 
Great Patriotic War or more literally the Great War of the Fatherland. 

> On May 2, 2022, at 11:42 AM, rob lucas  wrote:
> 
> 
> This recent NLR review of one of Applebaum's books, which includes a bit of a 
> political profile, might be of interest in this discussion:
> 
> https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/susan-watkins-the-fractured-right
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mon, 2 May 2022, 10:32 carl guderian,  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> You can count me among those who used to look askance at Applebaum. Back in 
>> the Noughts, she was a regular and legitimate target of Sadly, No!, a blog I 
>> used to frequent. She’d even received from Orban (I think) the same 
>> far-right Hungarian honor also given to Trump hanger-on Sebastian Gorka, the 
>> one that lets you add “v” to your last name. Her husband is Polish and had 
>> been a cabinet minister in an earlier center-right government there. He and 
>> they were swept out when Poland went further right and, maybe, seeing where 
>> it was leading, she seems to have mellowed somewhat. From her articles since 
>> then, she seems to have stopped moving to the right and maybe even piulled 
>> back a bit, while the right races toward fascism. Or maybe the world going 
>> crazier, she just seems relatively sane and more liberal now.
>> 
>> I still don’t entirely trust her, but she appears to be more of an ally 
>> these days, and did warn about neofascism and Putin. Has she learned 
>> anything since the last Cold War? We’ll see...
>> 
>> Your mileage (kilometrage) may vary, and some settling may occur during 
>> shipping.
>> 
>> Carl
>> 
>> 
>> > On 1 mei 2022, at 22:21, Ted Byfield  wrote:
>> > 
>> > Allan, WRT Russia/Ukraine one notable feature of the current US political 
>> > landscape is that a fair number of ostensible leftists are making 
>> > arguments that are remarkably similar to fascist trolls like Tucker 
>> > Carlson. I'm no fan of Applebaum's at all, so when I saw her name I was 
>> > skeptical; but as I read through her essay, nothing she said jumped out at 
>> > me as outrageously skewed. Since your comment didn't offer any specific 
>> > criticisms, could you be persuaded to do so?
>> > 
>> > Cheers,
>> > Ted
>> > 
>> > On 1 May 2022, at 15:00, allan siegel A Train wrote:
>> > 
>> >> Hello Nettimers
>> >> I find it odd that Anne Applebaum's questionable commentary on the events 
>> >> - and historical references - in Ukraine are uncritically posted here. 
>> >> Anne Applebaum is a notorious right-wing ideologue of the unquestionable 
>> >> neoliberal persuasion who has been lauded for her attacks on left-leaning 
>> >> politics (to say the least). As the conflict in Ukraine becomes 
>> >> increasingly enmeshed in the myopic politics of the cold-war and as 
>> >> America descends into pre-civil rights post war policies it becomes 
>> >> increasingly important to consider who is describing reality and from 
>> >> what vantage point. Most people in the U.S. still believe that the atomic 
>> >> bomb was used to save the lives of U.S. soldiers and to end WW II. A very 
>> >> questionable assumption. Saber rattling by Biden and others indebted to 
>> >> military contractors won't bring democracy to Ukraine or necessarily even 
>> >> peace.
>> >> Best
>> >> Allan
>> > #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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>> > 
>> 
>> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
>> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
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>> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ 

No to war! No to Putin! No to kleptocracy! No to genocide! No to Tucker Carlson’s lies! Join the virtual sit-in NOW! ОСТАНОВИТЕ ВОЙНУ! НЕ ВЕРИТЕ ПРОПАГАНДЕ! ПРИСОЕДИНЯЙТЕСЬ К ВИРТУАЛЬНОЙ СИ

[Keith Sanborn]

Please share widely.



No to war! No to Putin! No to kleptocracy! No to genocide! No to Tucker 
Carlson’s lies!

Join the virtual sit-in NOW! 


www.thing.net/~rdom/NoPutinWar/ 




请加入我们的网上静坐。

Приєднуйся до віртуального сидячого протесту. 

Присоединяйтесь к виртуальной сидячей забастовке. 

Schließen Sie sich dem virtuellen Sit-in an.

Rejoignez le sit-in virtuel.

Únete a la sentada virtual. 

Participe do sit-in virtual.

Share with your Friends!!!

Click and Join! (Until The War Ends!)

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Chair, Department of Visual Arts
UC San Diego#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: nettime-l Digest, Vol 174, Issue 40

[Keith Sanborn]

Shd have been “you’ll”

> On Mar 17, 2022, at 1:27 PM, Keith Sanborn  wrote:
> 
> 
>  If you liked the invasion of Ukraine, you love the Russian invasion when it 
> comes to Beograd. 
> 
>>> On Mar 17, 2022, at 1:08 PM, Miro Visic  wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>> So nettime turned into NATO shit list. 
>> 
>>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 09:48  wrote:
>>> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
>>> nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>>> 
>>> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>>> http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>>> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>>> nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org
>>> 
>>> You can reach the person managing the list at
>>> nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org
>>> 
>>> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>>> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
>>> Today's Topics:
>>> 
>>>1. Re: Irregular Ukraine Linklist (Ted Byfield)
>>>2. Re: Irregular Ukraine Linklist (Stefan Heidenreich)
>>>3. More Ukraine links (Michael Benson)
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- Forwarded message --
>>> From: Ted Byfield 
>>> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>>> Cc: 
>>> Bcc: 
>>> Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2022 07:05:58 -0400
>>> Subject: Re:  Irregular Ukraine Linklist
>>> On 16 Mar 2022, at 4:45, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
>>> 
>>> > add this: Former senior advisor the Secretary of Defense Col. Doug 
>>> > Macgregor on the situation in Ukraine and Washington:
>>> 
>>> It seems strange to see this on nettime.
>>> 
>>> Macgregor is a Putin apologist who's called Zelensky a "puppet," accused 
>>> him of using the Ukrainian people as "human shields," described the wanton 
>>> destruction as "surprisingly little damage," and argued that the Russian 
>>> military should have been *more* violent in the opening days of the war. 
>>> He's a fixture on Fox News because he makes hosts like Tucker Carlson sound 
>>> moderate.
>>> 
>>> The Secretary of Defense that Macgregor advised (for a few months) was 
>>> Chris Miller, who Trump installed just days after losing the election as 
>>> part of a larger purge of mil/intel leadership. There's good reason to 
>>> think that Macgregor actively involved in Trump’s attempted coup.
>>> 
>>> From Wikipedia on Macgregor’s failed nomination (by Trump) to be ambassador 
>>> to Germany:
>>> 
>>> > He has asserted that Muslim immigrants (referred to as "Muslim invaders") 
>>> > come to Europe "with the goal of eventually turning Europe into an 
>>> > Islamic state". Macgregor has argued that the German concept of 
>>> > Vergangenheitsbewältigung, used to cope with Germany's Nazi past and its 
>>> > atrocities during World War II, is a "sick mentality." Macgregor has also 
>>> > stated that martial law should be instituted on the U.S.-Mexico border 
>>> > and argued for the extrajudicial execution of those who cross the border 
>>> > at unofficial ports of entry. Macgregor has also made statements in 
>>> > support of Israel having defensible borders, the annexation of the Golan 
>>> > Heights, and the decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. In a 
>>> > column in The Washington Post he was described as "a racist crackpot who 
>>> > is pro-Russia, anti-Merkel, anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican."
>>> 
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Macgregor?wprov=sfti1
>>> 
>>> Admittedly, Wikipedia is a problematic source — in this case because it 
>>> understates Macgregor's extremism. His view that Ukraine should serve as a 
>>> "neutral" buffer between NATO/EU and RU is consistent with his advocacy for 
>>> summary executions of undocumented migrants at the US/Mex border: he 
>>> doesn't like change, and he's happy to exchange others' lives en masse to 
>>> prevent it.
>>> 
>>> Your suggestion that the INC should add some random rightist-noise YT video 
>>> to their list of practical Ukraine resources seems a bit...tone-deaf?
>>> 
>>> Ted
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- Forwarded message --
>>> From: Stefan Heidenreich 
>>> To: net

Re: nettime-l Digest, Vol 174, Issue 40

[Keith Sanborn]

 If you liked the invasion of Ukraine, you love the Russian invasion when it 
comes to Beograd. 

> On Mar 17, 2022, at 1:08 PM, Miro Visic  wrote:
> 
> 
> So nettime turned into NATO shit list. 
> 
>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 09:48  wrote:
>> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
>> nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>> 
>> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>> http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>> nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org
>> 
>> You can reach the person managing the list at
>> nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org
>> 
>> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
>> Today's Topics:
>> 
>>1. Re: Irregular Ukraine Linklist (Ted Byfield)
>>2. Re: Irregular Ukraine Linklist (Stefan Heidenreich)
>>3. More Ukraine links (Michael Benson)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- Forwarded message --
>> From: Ted Byfield 
>> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>> Cc: 
>> Bcc: 
>> Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2022 07:05:58 -0400
>> Subject: Re:  Irregular Ukraine Linklist
>> On 16 Mar 2022, at 4:45, Stefan Heidenreich wrote:
>> 
>> > add this: Former senior advisor the Secretary of Defense Col. Doug 
>> > Macgregor on the situation in Ukraine and Washington:
>> 
>> It seems strange to see this on nettime.
>> 
>> Macgregor is a Putin apologist who's called Zelensky a "puppet," accused him 
>> of using the Ukrainian people as "human shields," described the wanton 
>> destruction as "surprisingly little damage," and argued that the Russian 
>> military should have been *more* violent in the opening days of the war. 
>> He's a fixture on Fox News because he makes hosts like Tucker Carlson sound 
>> moderate.
>> 
>> The Secretary of Defense that Macgregor advised (for a few months) was Chris 
>> Miller, who Trump installed just days after losing the election as part of a 
>> larger purge of mil/intel leadership. There's good reason to think that 
>> Macgregor actively involved in Trump’s attempted coup.
>> 
>> From Wikipedia on Macgregor’s failed nomination (by Trump) to be ambassador 
>> to Germany:
>> 
>> > He has asserted that Muslim immigrants (referred to as "Muslim invaders") 
>> > come to Europe "with the goal of eventually turning Europe into an Islamic 
>> > state". Macgregor has argued that the German concept of 
>> > Vergangenheitsbewältigung, used to cope with Germany's Nazi past and its 
>> > atrocities during World War II, is a "sick mentality." Macgregor has also 
>> > stated that martial law should be instituted on the U.S.-Mexico border and 
>> > argued for the extrajudicial execution of those who cross the border at 
>> > unofficial ports of entry. Macgregor has also made statements in support 
>> > of Israel having defensible borders, the annexation of the Golan Heights, 
>> > and the decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. In a column in The 
>> > Washington Post he was described as "a racist crackpot who is pro-Russia, 
>> > anti-Merkel, anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican."
>> 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Macgregor?wprov=sfti1
>> 
>> Admittedly, Wikipedia is a problematic source — in this case because it 
>> understates Macgregor's extremism. His view that Ukraine should serve as a 
>> "neutral" buffer between NATO/EU and RU is consistent with his advocacy for 
>> summary executions of undocumented migrants at the US/Mex border: he doesn't 
>> like change, and he's happy to exchange others' lives en masse to prevent it.
>> 
>> Your suggestion that the INC should add some random rightist-noise YT video 
>> to their list of practical Ukraine resources seems a bit...tone-deaf?
>> 
>> Ted
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- Forwarded message --
>> From: Stefan Heidenreich 
>> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>> Cc: 
>> Bcc: 
>> Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2022 12:50:48 +0100
>> Subject: Re:  Irregular Ukraine Linklist
>> Hi Ted, I'm totally with you on one point: Macgregor is very doubtful 
>> and uttered a lot of terrible political nonsense. He comes from 
>> military, after all. I also detest his political views.
>> 
>> But: what if his assessment of the military situation on the ground and 
>> of the political situation in Washington DC is correct?
>> 
>> Could it be, that, following a progressive-liberal flag, we've been led 
>> by the military-industrial complex and the donor class into a hellhole?
>> I think it definitely merits to give a second thought to his possibility.
>> 
>> The issue at stake is:
>> - how can we terminate this war as quickly as possible?
>> - how can we save Europa from being turned into the battlefield between 
>> NATO and Russia/China?
>> (Maybe not by following the calls of the military-complex fake liberalism)
>> 
>> for that matter: if there is only a glimpse of truth in what Macgregor 
>> says, one should think very careful about whom and what to support.
>> 
>> s
>> 
>> Am 

Re: FSB, Christo Grosev, Bellingcat

[Keith Sanborn]

Has it occurred to anyone that Bellingcat cd have been set up by the FSB in an 
attempt to discredit them? I can imagine a scenario where a “trusted insider,” 
who has been allowed to leak certain truthful information, in a time of war 
give false information which he knows will be publicized in order to achieve 
the larger goal of discrediting a very large thorn in the side of the FSB. 

> On Mar 14, 2022, at 5:51 PM, Michael Benson  wrote:
> 
> 
> So concerning Stefan's position on Bellingcat, evidently grounded in a couple 
> URLs to be taken "with a grain of salt" and the views of Craig Murray, 
> interestingly enough earlier today I was following some argumentation by this 
> same Craig Murray concerning Bellingcat. Which he described in much the same 
> terms as Stefan, in a kind of verbal duel between himself and Andrew 
> MacGregor Marshall, a journalist specializing in Thai affairs:
> 
> https://twitter.com/BensonImages/status/1503395047223480327
> 
> (It opens on my comment at the end, but if you scroll up you'll get the 
> thread.) As you'll see if you take the trouble, Murray describes Bellingcat 
> as a "security service outlet," Marshall disputes this and asks for evidence, 
> and Murray provides a link to a piece in MR Online, as in Monthly Review, a 
> self-described independent socialist magazine. 
> 
> But when I read that piece, which is titled "How Bellingcat launders National 
> Security State talking points in the press," I quickly discovered that their 
> evidence for this rested in part on the "alarming number" of people at 
> Bellingcat who've come from "highly suspect" backgrounds. Such as the US 
> Secret Service and the British Foreign Office. That plus some funding from 
> the National Endowment for Democracy, an NGO funded by the US Government that 
> has been criticized by both the left and right.
> 
> Ok, fair enough. (And let's set aside the rather obvious laundering of 
> Kremlin talking points evident in MR Online as being off topic.) This was the 
> first I'd heard of Murray, so I went to his Twitter profile to check him out 
> — and discovered that he is himself a former UK Ambassador, something he's 
> proud to highlight. And thus is himself a former senior official of the 
> British Foreign Office. (He served in Uzbekistan 2002-2004 and prior to that 
> in a long string of FCO positions in Africa and elsewhere.) 
> 
> Of course with this we enter a hall of mirrors, in which by the same standard 
> Murray himself offers as evidence, he must himself be a "security service 
> outlet." Essentially a version of Epimenides' paradox, in which a Cretan 
> offers up that all Cretans are liars. 
> 
> But let's be charitable and take one resolution to the Epimenides paradox, 
> that Epimenides only meant that all Cretans _tell_ lies, not that every 
> single statement by every Cretan is a lie. And according to Wikipedia (which 
> I then went to, in my ongoing low-budget, low-fi emulation of Bellingcat's 
> methodology, albeit without bank account backdoors to the national security 
> state, alas), Murray was removed from his post at Foreign Office and 
> subsequently became an activist and human rights campaigner. 
> 
> Ok, fair enough again. Still, he was impugning the veracity and motivations 
> of _others_ who'd left _their_ respective official services in government and 
> became investigative journalists specialized in OSINT at Bellingcat. Which, I 
> would submit, apart from its journalistic bona fides, produces outcomes 
> necessary to the furthering of human rights activism. Because I think it 
> undeniable that they've produced some rather spectacular results, even if 
> they simultaneously sometimes evoke Cuban expat cartoonist Antonio Prohias's 
> classic "Spy vs Spy '' strips in Mad Magazine decades ago.
> 
> I mean honestly, who doesn't get a bang out of the fact that in collaboration 
> with other investigative news organizations, Bellingcat was able to use 
> cellphone data to track known FSB operatives who'd attempted to assassinate 
> Alexey Navalny in Tomsk in August 2020, thus using tools traditionally 
> associated with espionage to out FSB assassins, something ultimately allowing 
> a miraculously still-living Navalny to actually _call_ one of his would-be 
> assassins from Germany, impersonate a senior FSB official, and actually get 
> this man (Konstantin Kudryavtsev) to describe to exactly how this attempt _on 
> the life of the man he was speaking to_ was made? Namely by smearing Novichok 
> on Navalny's underwear? Thus confirming both the allegations against him and 
> his own status as Keystone Spook for all the world to know? 
> 
> If that's not for the ages — a story worthy of Pliny the Elder — what is? Let 
> me end simply by observing that regardless of the above, Christo Grozev 
> himself was never an ambassador, secret service agent or military guy (ok ok, 
> "we might never know"), but rather a successful entrepreneurial journalist 
> for over 

Re: Is Russia losing in Ukraine? Indian army generals respond (Times of India video)

[Keith Sanborn]

Interesting perspective. The interview questions were well-researched and posed 
quite pointedly as one might expect.

Otherwise, it seemed that both generals had their own biases, some ideological.

Chauhan was clearly either an apologist for Russia or badly informed ("We don’t 
know what the Ukrainians think about their President." It seems clear we do 
know that Ukrainains, even those who opposed him, are resisting the invasion 
and supporting Zelinsky. "30% of Eastern Ukrainians are pro-Russian." Actually 
they are Russian speakers: so is Zelinsky. That doesn’t make them sympathetic 
to a Russian invasion. This is almost a Putin talking point.) That said, 
Chauhan, while an apologist for Russian military failure, did make a plausible 
argument that this first invasion force, was simply a reconnaissance force and 
that the main invasion would be launched later. If I am recalling correctly, he 
was dead wrong about the impression that Russian bombing campaigns are making 
abroad; he was right that they are designed to wreak havoc on the Ukrainian 
population. How finely calibrated they are, is up for grabs. Putin has not 
appeared “rational,” by offering humanitarian corridors leading to Russia, 
though his larger strategy has proved formidable.

I was especially interested in the discussion of Indian military procurement. 
What happens if Russia can’t supply parts for Indian Migs? General Hasnain 
suggested that Russia was having problems sourcing parts for its own aircraft 
in Ukraine. General Chauhan simply asserted that the supply to India was 
guaranteed. Hasnain seemed a bit more skeptical about Russian military 
competence; not sure if that makes him “pro-western.” He certainly made a point 
of disavowing “western” strategic analysis of the situation in Ukraine. In any 
case, India has been constrained by military dependence on Russia for arms on 
joining any international boycott. There will certainly be some longterm price 
to pay for that, especially as India tries to ramp up its homegrown tech 
industry. I would predict a slow-down in US technology transfer, though there 
are other places they can go. And what’s the future of US visas for Indian 
engineers? In these matters, financial considerations will likely take 
precedence over morality. India has a surfeit of highly trained engineers with 
inadequate employment opportunities at home. That can be a formula for civil 
discontent as we have seen in North Africa.

Ironically, both generals agreed that military procurement and military 
self-sufficiency were long-terms issues and the difficult point of Pakistan as 
part of the Euriasian/Belt and Road initiative also provided insights.

So far, India has been relying on Russia’s support against China in their 
border disputes, at least in the form of weapons  I think they sense that 
support is tenuous as Pakistan is central to the Eurasian project as well as 
stability in Russian client states with large Muslim populations. Who knows who 
is going to get played; the Pakistani military have been playing the US for 
years. Russia is not in a position of strength here, nor is China, though 
Pakistan has bought in to Belt and Road. One has to wonder about blow-back in 
Pakistan concerning the Chinese treatment of Uighur Muslims. Pakistan is a 
country where blasphemy (against Islam) carries the death penalty, even if it’s 
seldom enforced. What happens if Pakistan launches an offensive in Kashmir at 
the same time China attacks in its disputed border regions with India? Neither 
regions are particularly hospitable to Russian made tank warfare, if I am not 
mistaken.

One final point: Did Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons effectively 
“checkmate" a military response from Europe and NATO, as the interviewer 
suggests? Perhaps it's simply a gambit, in short, a bluff. What if the US or 
Europe were to call that bluff, or make military countermoves, like those 
Polish Migs. Whoops.

Guess it’s time to remove my armchair general’s uniform.

Keith



> On Mar 10, 2022, at 1:21 PM, patrice riemens  wrote:
> 
> नमस्ते ,
> 
> "When India speaks, the world listens" -Jawaharlal Nehru
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwj3WtrQZaw 
> 
> 
> (20m46s)
> 
> (with thanks to Harv S)
> 
> सत्यमेव जयते !
> p+7D!
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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Re: The War to come ...

[Keith Sanborn]

It seems the matter is now resolved.

Here’s the link:

https://vimeo.com/user5077443/the-beauty-of-force

Keith

> On Mar 9, 2022, at 7:57 PM, Keith Sanborn  wrote:
> 
> Hi nettimers,
> 
> For some reason my vimeo account has been “automatically flagged” making all 
> my videos suddenly private. Who knows why? Perhaps because there are Cyrillic 
> characters in the title of this one? Very odd.  I have submitted a ticket to 
> vimeo support. I’ll post if/when my account matters are resolved.
> 
> In the meantime anyone interested in the video can download a low rez version 
> here:
> 
> https://we.tl/t-bKVg6QJnZM <https://we.tl/t-bKVg6QJnZM>
> 
> pw:gloom2008
> 
> Apologies to anyone reluctant to download.
> 
> Keith
> 
> 
>> On Mar 8, 2022, at 3:12 PM, Brian Holmes > <mailto:bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Patrice, you have put into words the bitter assessment of many many people.
>> 
>> But you should be checking the twitter status of Andrei V Kozyrev (former 
>> Russian foreign minister) more often!
>> 
>> March 6: "Russian military. The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to 
>> modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on 
>> mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to 
>> the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military"
>> 
>> https://twitter.com/andreivkozyrev/status/1500611398245634050 
>> <https://twitter.com/andreivkozyrev/status/1500611398245634050>
>> 
>> The fearsome Russian fighting force is a cardboard bear in the mud. The 
>> Ukrainians are well armed, they have been training for this since 2014, and 
>> so far they have humiliated their opponent and inflicted an historic defeat 
>> insofar as any future military prestige goes. The Russian capacity to 
>> intimidate Eastern Europe is plunging. They've lost a staggering quantity of 
>> tanks and vehicles of all kinds, along with the soldiers driving them, and 
>> they still have not established air superiority with all the combat-support 
>> capacity that entails, to the point where analysts have begun to wonder if 
>> they are simply incapable of coordinating and flying complex missions:
>> 
>> https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
>>  
>> <https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html>
>> https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations
>>  
>> <https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations>
>> 
>> It's uncertain if they have actually used their thermo-barbaric weapons yet, 
>> and you would think that if their fearsome hypersonic missile is not a dud, 
>> they would have already blown up Zelensky's presidential office where he 
>> sits at a precisely known location (the missile is supposed to arrive in 
>> seconds). Who knows? It may be that Nato support before and during the 
>> conflict has included communications-jamming capacities of some 
>> hitherto-unknown sort, or maybe the armed drones the Ukrainians got from 
>> Turkey are the only real superweapons of the war (so far, they definitely 
>> are). In any case, the performance of the Ukrainian David against the 
>> Russian Goliath doesn't suggest any immediate attack on the Nato 
>> mega-Goliath (including its little fingers, the Baltic states), or even on 
>> Moldova. As for the probability that the Nato countries will seize the 
>> occasion to jump the nuclear tripwire by rashly launching their own massive 
>> attack, well, their 75-year adherence to deterrence doctrine makes that hard 
>> to imagine. I don't think Nato will make the nuclear mistake. Concerning the 
>> other side, however, apparently anything is possible.
>> 
>> Nato has a lot of experience with Just Watching (remember the drawn-out 
>> atrocities of the former Yugoslavia, where there wasn't even a nuclear 
>> threat). I think they're gonna just watch while Russia starts 
>> indiscriminantly dropping bombs from high up in the sky, and the whole thing 
>> will continue to be even more horrible than it already is, until some point 
>> at which Putin can claim to have broken the Ukrainian state (maybe through 
>> the use of tactical nuclear weapons to make their own strategic deterrence 
>> credible). By that point the Russians will be so weakened that they will 
>> fall back to some arbitrary cease-fire line in Eastern Ukraine

Re: The War to come ...

[Keith Sanborn]

Hi nettimers,

For some reason my vimeo account has been “automatically flagged” making all my 
videos suddenly private. Who knows why? Perhaps because there are Cyrillic 
characters in the title of this one? Very odd.  I have submitted a ticket to 
vimeo support. I’ll post if/when my account matters are resolved.

In the meantime anyone interested in the video can download a low rez version 
here:

https://we.tl/t-bKVg6QJnZM

pw:gloom2008

Apologies to anyone reluctant to download.

Keith


> On Mar 8, 2022, at 3:12 PM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> Patrice, you have put into words the bitter assessment of many many people.
> 
> But you should be checking the twitter status of Andrei V Kozyrev (former 
> Russian foreign minister) more often!
> 
> March 6: "Russian military. The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to 
> modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on 
> mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to 
> the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military"
> 
> https://twitter.com/andreivkozyrev/status/1500611398245634050 
> 
> 
> The fearsome Russian fighting force is a cardboard bear in the mud. The 
> Ukrainians are well armed, they have been training for this since 2014, and 
> so far they have humiliated their opponent and inflicted an historic defeat 
> insofar as any future military prestige goes. The Russian capacity to 
> intimidate Eastern Europe is plunging. They've lost a staggering quantity of 
> tanks and vehicles of all kinds, along with the soldiers driving them, and 
> they still have not established air superiority with all the combat-support 
> capacity that entails, to the point where analysts have begun to wonder if 
> they are simply incapable of coordinating and flying complex missions:
> 
> https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html
>  
> 
> https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations
>  
> 
> 
> It's uncertain if they have actually used their thermo-barbaric weapons yet, 
> and you would think that if their fearsome hypersonic missile is not a dud, 
> they would have already blown up Zelensky's presidential office where he sits 
> at a precisely known location (the missile is supposed to arrive in seconds). 
> Who knows? It may be that Nato support before and during the conflict has 
> included communications-jamming capacities of some hitherto-unknown sort, or 
> maybe the armed drones the Ukrainians got from Turkey are the only real 
> superweapons of the war (so far, they definitely are). In any case, the 
> performance of the Ukrainian David against the Russian Goliath doesn't 
> suggest any immediate attack on the Nato mega-Goliath (including its little 
> fingers, the Baltic states), or even on Moldova. As for the probability that 
> the Nato countries will seize the occasion to jump the nuclear tripwire by 
> rashly launching their own massive attack, well, their 75-year adherence to 
> deterrence doctrine makes that hard to imagine. I don't think Nato will make 
> the nuclear mistake. Concerning the other side, however, apparently anything 
> is possible.
> 
> Nato has a lot of experience with Just Watching (remember the drawn-out 
> atrocities of the former Yugoslavia, where there wasn't even a nuclear 
> threat). I think they're gonna just watch while Russia starts 
> indiscriminantly dropping bombs from high up in the sky, and the whole thing 
> will continue to be even more horrible than it already is, until some point 
> at which Putin can claim to have broken the Ukrainian state (maybe through 
> the use of tactical nuclear weapons to make their own strategic deterrence 
> credible). By that point the Russians will be so weakened that they will fall 
> back to some arbitrary cease-fire line in Eastern Ukraine, which they will 
> have a hard time defending. After that a remilitarized Nato, a remilitarized 
> Europe and a host of other allies will use the now standard whole-of-society 
> methods, including every embargo imaginable, to reduce Russia from a 
> third-rate economic power and false military giant to a failed state on a 
> mammoth scale. No problem, the Chinese will manage them for their oil and gas.
> 
> These projections are absolutely no better than yours, Patrice, but I thought 
> I'd try devil's advocate!
> 
> Brian
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 6:21 AM patrice riemens  > wrote:
> ... has already arrived .
> 
> Aloha,
> 
> Even though the last two posts on the list are mine, I have no intention to 
> become (again) nettime's #1 poster! So this will 

Re: The War to come ...

[Keith Sanborn]

When I was in Russia in 2008 for 5.5 months, I recorded a lot of tv footage. 
The piece linked here is based on a series of commercials on Telekanal Zvezda 
(i.e. The military’s own star channel, complete with red star). At the time, 
all I remember them showing besides these commercials were old Soviet era war 
movies.

I paired this with some other footage from Youtube, which I considered equally 
obscene and provocative, though in a different way.

https://vimeo.com/84056896

I asked my students at the Smolny Institute (now defunct, then a collaborative 
project between Bard College and the University of St. Petersburg) what was 
going on in these commercials. They could only say, “Russian incompetence.” The 
Russian titles are a recuperation of the famous inversion of the genitive, so 
dear to the situationists. They read: The Force of Beauty, the Beauty of Force. 
One could translate the word Silo (Сило) by Strength, but it also figures in 
the Russian phrase for the Armed Forces, so I kept it as Force and that 
translation seems more apposite now than ever.

Russia in 2008 practiced and now practices conscription; military service is 
required. It is also brutal, with many incidents of hazing, and of officers 
extorting the grunts for their pay. This is information I heard in Russia from 
Russians, not in the USSA.

This piece, which pairs the commercials with other footage was part of a 
project called “Equivalences” which was a large scale installation, installed 
only once in Antwerp. It was largely based on Youtube footage.

The current invasion in Ukraine is somehow rooted in a very long term plan. 
This footage plays some strange role in it. 

Not for the faint hearted.

Keith

> On Mar 8, 2022, at 7:20 AM, patrice riemens  wrote:
> 
> ... has already arrived .
> 
> Aloha,
> 
> Even though the last two posts on the list are mine, I have no intention to 
> become (again) nettime's #1 poster! So this will be my last one for now.
> 
> This said I still wanted to share my thoughts  - was it only to be relieved 
> of them -  about 'the situation' with fellow nettimers. 
> 
> ExecSum: I think that war in Western Europe is now inevitable, and it will 
> descend on us sooner than we all would wish for. 
> 
> 
> 
> In my mind, there are three options about when NATO will actually go to, or 
> be dragged into a war against Putin's Russia. 
> 
> Option Zero: There will be no war. Putin will enslave Ukraine after having 
> laid it to waste, annex part of it, and transform the rest in a vassal state, 
> or whatever 'solution' he has in mind after achieving 'victory'.  And 'we' in 
> the West, will accommodate with the new situation and try to make the best of 
> it, even if it won't be fun at all on many front.  And yet I would feel 
> insanely optimistic if I gave it half a chance of happening - or even less 
> than that.
> 
> Having put his war machinery in movement, there is no turning back for 
> Vladimir Putin, save a number of scenarios for his demise that have been 
> discussed here and there and which are all entirely speculative. So by 
> keeping it strictly to the current state of the situation, I see only three 
> possible outcomes, all based on the assumption that the political and 
> military deciders in the Western alliance (but also outside of it) have by 
> now concluded that a war can no longer be averted, the only question being 
> when it will start 'for real'. 
> 
> So there are in my mind three 'moments' when NATO will become involved in an 
> armed conflict with Putin's Russia:
> 
> Moment 1: The situation in Ukraine becomes so dire, the 'Grosnyfication' of 
> Ukrainian cities so blatant, the masses of refugees into Ukraine's 
> neighbours, fleeing the violence under the bombs so colossal, that 'in the 
> West', populations, politicians, media, and even the military brass get so 
> agitated as to decide that enough is enough - and that 'we will be next' any 
> way. So there will be more and more support pouring into Ukraine that will 
> less and less distinguishable from direct military intervention, a stage that 
> in the eyes of Putin has been passed long ago in any case.  
> 
> Moment 2 happens if Putin indeed achieve his goals in Ukraine, at whatever 
> cost to the Russian and to the Ukrainian people without NATO actually 
> intervening, it having be paralysed by the fear of consequences Putin has 
> repeatedly, and unequivocally threatened with. In which case there is no 
> reason whatsoever to assume he will stop at that and now will go to menace, 
> and, if unsuccessful,  attack both ex-Soviet, but not NATO members Moldova 
> and Georgia. Russia annexing Moldova will make Romania very angry and very 
> anxious, doing the same with Georgia will rattle Turkey to an even larger 
> extent, and greater consequences. And both Romania and Turkey are NATO 
> members. At which stage the same 'we'll anyway be next'  conclusion might 
> prevail after all ...
> 
> ... or not. Moldova and 

Re: Rebecca Solnit: It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network (Guardian)

[Keith Sanborn]

Again, it’s the Lansing Institute, but…

https://lansinginstitute.org/2021/01/08/russian-involvement-in-the-capitol-building-attack/

The Southern Poverty Law Center identified a "Russian Insider” Charles Bausman, 
linked to various hate groups, among those invading the Capitol wearing a Trump 
hat.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/09/23/jan-6-video-suggests-russia-insider-entered-capitol





> On Mar 3, 2022, at 1:13 AM, patrice riemens  wrote:
> 
> Molly had already send the url, but I think it's worthwhile to have the text 
> in full on the list (& Molly agrees ;-)
> 
> Cheers, & even more: peace, to all
> 
> 
> Original to:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/time-to-confront-trump-putin-network
>  
> 
> 
> It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network
> By Rebecca Solnit, March 2, 2022
> 
> 
> A stunning number of Trump’s closest associates had deep ties to the Kremlin. 
> The significance of this cannot be overstated
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In 2014, the Putin regime invaded Ukraine’s Crimea. In 2016, the same regime 
> invaded 
> 
>  the United States. The former took place as a conventional military 
> operation; the latter was a spectacular case of cyberwarfare 
> ,
>  including disinformation that it was happening at all and promulgation of a 
> lot of talking points still devoutly repeated by many. It was a vast 
> social-media influencing project that took many forms 
> 
>  as it sought to sow discord 
> 
>  and confusion, even attempting to dissuade 
> 
>  Black voters from voting.
> 
> Additionally, Russian intelligence targeted voter rolls 
> 
>  in all 50 states, which is not thought to have had consequences, but 
> demonstrated the reach and ambition of online interference. This weekend, 
> British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr said on Twitter, “We 
> failed to acknowledge Russia had staged a military attack on the West. We 
> called it ’meddling.’ We used words like ‘interference.’ It wasn’t. It was 
> warfare. We’ve been under military attack for eight years now.”
> 
> 
> As she notes, Putin’s minions were not only directing their attention to the 
> United States, and included pro-Brexit efforts and support for France’s 
> far-right racist National Front party. The US interference – you could call 
> it cyberwarfare, or informational invasion – took many forms. Stunningly, a 
> number of left-wing news sources and pundits devoted themselves to denying 
> the reality of the intervention and calling those who were hostile to the 
> Putin regime cold-war red-scare right-wingers, as if contemporary Russia was 
> a glorious socialist republic rather than a country ruled by a dictatorial 
> ex-KGB agent with a record of murdering journalists, imprisoning dissenters, 
> embezzling tens of billions and leading 
> 
>  a global neofascist white supremacist revival. In discrediting the news 
> stories and attacking critics of the Russian government, they provided 
> crucial cover for Trump.
> 
> In her 2019 testimony to House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee 
> on Intelligence, former National Security Agency staffer Fiona Hill declared 
> ,
>  “Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic 
> institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence 
> agencies, confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports. It is beyond 
> dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified. The 
> impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our 
> nation is being torn apart; truth is questioned; our highly professional 
> expert career Foreign Service is being undermined. US support for Ukraine, 
> which continues to face armed aggression, is being politicized. President 
> Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter US foreign policy 
> objectives in Europe, including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert 
> political and economic dominance.”
> 
> The assertions of interference were compelling all along. On October 7, 2016, 
> US intelligence agencies released 
> 

Re: Almost zero

[Keith Sanborn]

More to your point: Avoiding world war 3, or the threat of it, is taken from 
the same playbook Putin used in priming the West for his invasion. The West and 
Ukraine supposedly thought: don’t do anything to antagonize Putin, he’ll use it 
as a pretext for invasion. The invasion was already planned as the US 
Administration pointed out, though pointing that out is at best a long term 
strategy. What are they saying now about Putin very publicly putting his 
nuclear weapons team on high alert? Is the threat of using nuclear weapons 
enough to deter Europe from active involvement? So far. Will Biden call his 
bluff? Is it a bluff?

What happens when Putin says, if you don’t stop the sanctions I will use 
nuclear weapons as you have threatened Russian domestic security? Putin is at 
least pretending not to be believe in the Cold War doctrine of “Mutually 
Assured Destruction.” He’s saying he doesn’t care, or that he has no choice. 
Does the West believe that? Do Russians generally believe that, and, more 
importantly, do his generals believe that? Would they push the button if 
ordered? The Cuban missile crisis has been evoked more than once in this 
context. But Biden is no JFK. And Neo-liberalism’s belief that good business 
makes people love democracy—yes even “managed democracy”— seems to have run 
aground. Meanwhile China, India, and Israel sit on their hands, minding their 
own strategic interests.

There is some speculation that Putin has either early onset dementia or 
incipient Parkinson’s disease, or cancer of the spine. These speculations are 
based on analysis of his body movements and gait. There is also speculation 
that potential successors are already jockeying for position in his security 
apparatus. It may be possible that someone inside may pull the plug on Putin 
before he can push the button. Wishful thinking perhaps. Or perhaps he just 
doesn’t care because he knows he going to be out of commission soon,

https://lansinginstitute.org/2021/09/29/putins-worsening-health-set-to-be-a-determining-factor-in-russias-policy-over-the-next-four-years/

How reliable these speculations are… well, the Parkinson’s diagnosis originally 
came from that unimpeachable source, The Sun. And the Robert Lansing Institute 
has managed to knock any critique of themselves out of Google Search results. 
They seem to have an anti-authoritarian outlook based on what I can tell, but 
beyond that, I don’t know.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Keith



> On Mar 2, 2022, at 10:40 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> Keith and Brian, 
> 
> There is another clarification that this thread needs, to avoid confusion. 
> 
> Whose troops could have been brought in? The avoidance of WW3 with any 
> country’s troops but Ukrainian, is part of Putins strategy? He knows that US 
> and Europe will not enter into combat and risk WW3. Ursula (EU) was trying to 
> prevent Brussels from engaging w too many weapons! Putin against Ukrainian 
> forces…Russia May well win. Putin knows no other countries will join. Poland 
> and Belgium are maybe doing the most. It could be construed as an effort to 
> kill Russians at which point Russia could attack those nations. 
> 
> Whether this will be contained to Ukraine is one question. Whether or not 
> Ukraine gives up resistance to prevent huge losses of life. 
> 
> Fu*k buildings and Visa cards and the Russian middle class who can’t fly to 
> Turkey. 
> 
> Putin has cooked his goose, yes, but at what point does avoiding huge loss of 
> life take precedence over nationalism. Nationalism is also blind. 
> 
> Molly 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Feb 25, 2022, at 11:29 PM, Brian Holmes  
>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Keith, I think the publication of the intel was not conceived to deter the 
>> attack. It was for us and for the whole non-Russian world. The idea was to 
>> stop the spiral of right-wing disinformation, and to discredit it 
>> retrospectively. That matters because the mental destabilization that has 
>> been unleashed over the last ten years is profound and debilitating. It's 
>> epistemological warfare.
>> 
>> When you say "the Putin clique has so much well hidden wealth they can now 
>> only crave power and real estate," I hear you! And it sounds like you know 
>> from experience.
>> 
>> It does not look to me like the Ukrainians are going to fold. In fact I 
>> still don't understand the strategy. Can a country of 40 millions, with a 
>> large number of combat veterans, reservists and militias, be subdued by 
>> 200,000 foreign troops? As the generals say, tell me where this ends.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 1:13 AM Keith Sanborn > <mailto:mrz...@panix.com>> wrote:
>> Making their intelligence public did nothing except possibly tip Putin of

Re: Almost zero

[Keith Sanborn]

And body bags are body bags. The Nationalism card depends on Putin’s ability to 
invoke “The Great Patriotic War,” known in the West as WWII. This is the reason 
Putin invoked “denatzification.” But turning an aggression on foreign soil into 
defending the Father/motherland is a stretch even with a very intense and 
closed propaganda machine. Younger people — the ones sent to the front — get 
their news from their phones, older people from tv. Cutting off Russian cell 
numbers does hinder gps navigation, it also cuts off other outlets than the 
official ones, hence the battle with Facebook and Twitter, if not with 
Vkontakte.

On the other hands, expecting defections in the ranks is wishful thinking. It’s 
more a battle for “hearts and minds” on the home front. There, every day is a 
potential Kent State, and yet courageous young Russians are turning out to 
protest, knowing full well Putin and his police state machine not can, but will 
arrest them. 

My only hope is that frozen foreign exchange assets will eventually be 
confiscated for reparations, and not be unfrozen in return for a partial 
withdrawal from a country with a shattered infrastructure and a battered and 
displaced nation. 

> On Mar 2, 2022, at 10:40 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> Keith and Brian, 
> 
> There is another clarification that this thread needs, to avoid confusion. 
> 
> Whose troops could have been brought in? The avoidance of WW3 with any 
> country’s troops but Ukrainian, is part of Putins strategy? He knows that US 
> and Europe will not enter into combat and risk WW3. Ursula (EU) was trying to 
> prevent Brussels from engaging w too many weapons! Putin against Ukrainian 
> forces…Russia May well win. Putin knows no other countries will join. Poland 
> and Belgium are maybe doing the most. It could be construed as an effort to 
> kill Russians at which point Russia could attack those nations. 
> 
> Whether this will be contained to Ukraine is one question. Whether or not 
> Ukraine gives up resistance to prevent huge losses of life. 
> 
> Fu*k buildings and Visa cards and the Russian middle class who can’t fly to 
> Turkey. 
> 
> Putin has cooked his goose, yes, but at what point does avoiding huge loss of 
> life take precedence over nationalism. Nationalism is also blind. 
> 
> Molly 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>>> On Feb 25, 2022, at 11:29 PM, Brian Holmes  
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>> Keith, I think the publication of the intel was not conceived to deter the 
>> attack. It was for us and for the whole non-Russian world. The idea was to 
>> stop the spiral of right-wing disinformation, and to discredit it 
>> retrospectively. That matters because the mental destabilization that has 
>> been unleashed over the last ten years is profound and debilitating. It's 
>> epistemological warfare.
>> 
>> When you say "the Putin clique has so much well hidden wealth they can now 
>> only crave power and real estate," I hear you! And it sounds like you know 
>> from experience.
>> 
>> It does not look to me like the Ukrainians are going to fold. In fact I 
>> still don't understand the strategy. Can a country of 40 millions, with a 
>> large number of combat veterans, reservists and militias, be subdued by 
>> 200,000 foreign troops? As the generals say, tell me where this ends.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 1:13 AM Keith Sanborn  wrote:
>>> Making their intelligence public did nothing except possibly tip Putin off 
>>> to its sources. 
>>> 
>>> It was, in the technical register, actionable. And yet there was no action: 
>>> don’t provoke him by bringing in troops. Bringing in troops might have been 
>>> the very thing to deter him from acting though he wd have ratcheted up his 
>>> rants. He likely planned on acting in any case. Forewarned is not prepared. 
>>> The publication of the intel had no effect because he had decided in 
>>> advance to attack no matter what. It might have even forced his hand, if he 
>>> cared what the world or what his subjects thought of him.
>>> 
>>> So wd sending in troops or more sophisticated weapons have deterred him? 
>>> Maybe not, but it wd have made his victory more costly. Making the victory 
>>> Pyrrhic cd have hurt him at home worse than the moral shame: no one wants 
>>> to see their children come home in body bags. But there are worse things. 
>>> Living as a subaltern to Putin’s mafia is one of them. The Ukrainians know 
>>> that. They have known that for a long time. It was Stalin who starved and 
>>> murdered them and that’s where Putin gets his playbook. 
>>> 
>>

Re: Almost zero

[Keith Sanborn]

An interesting perspective but as a strategy against disinformation it failed 
and it will have failed: everyone already knows Putin uses this model of hybrid 
warfare. The obsession with “information “ is precisely what allowed this to 
happen. If you know the tanks are moving in and you tell everyone, that doesn’t 
stop the tanks. I told you don’t doesn’t count for much once a country has been 
invaded.  The element of surprise is over-rated, it’s the element of 
uncertainty that created the space for Western self-deception that economic 
saber rattling wd have an effect. The Swift weapon has not been used because 
Europe needs Russian gas and needs a way to pay for it and for Russian 
sovereign debt to be repaid. 

Hybrid warfare is not only epistemogical. As that cynical bastard Mao said, 
show me your tanks. He shd have added drones to the list. 

A more effective weapon wd be an aggressive seizure of all wealth owned by 
offshore entities in Europe and North America. Then, let God sort em out, as 
the Green Berets used to say. Let people come forward from behind their façades 
of shell companies to reclaim it. That wd take years in the courts and the onus 
wd be on the wealthy and powerful to prove their rightful ownership, which of 
course wd defeat the purpose of coming forward as anonymity wd be lost.  Well, 
it’s a thought experiment anyway, rather than a plan of action. It probably 
wdn’t ever happen because Russian wealth was only 1% of what the Panama paper 
uncovered. And the people in power everywhere wd find themselves “exposed.”

They shd have stopped Putin’s yacht from leaving German waters. That wd have 
sent a very direct message. But they didn’t because European business entities 
have too much “exposure“ in Russia, BP among them. 

Biden’s sanctions against Putin are toothless unless they can uncover and seize 
his hidden wealth, or burn down his palace, the one Navalny referred to. That 
wd be more interesting in its effects. 

I hope you are right about Ukraine’s ability to resist militarily. But a circle 
jerk over their heroic struggle will mean nothing without material support. 



> On Feb 26, 2022, at 2:28 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> 
> Keith, I think the publication of the intel was not conceived to deter the 
> attack. It was for us and for the whole non-Russian world. The idea was to 
> stop the spiral of right-wing disinformation, and to discredit it 
> retrospectively. That matters because the mental destabilization that has 
> been unleashed over the last ten years is profound and debilitating. It's 
> epistemological warfare.
> 
> When you say "the Putin clique has so much well hidden wealth they can now 
> only crave power and real estate," I hear you! And it sounds like you know 
> from experience.
> 
> It does not look to me like the Ukrainians are going to fold. In fact I still 
> don't understand the strategy. Can a country of 40 millions, with a large 
> number of combat veterans, reservists and militias, be subdued by 200,000 
> foreign troops? As the generals say, tell me where this ends.
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2022 at 1:13 AM Keith Sanborn  wrote:
>> Making their intelligence public did nothing except possibly tip Putin off 
>> to its sources. 
>> 
>> It was, in the technical register, actionable. And yet there was no action: 
>> don’t provoke him by bringing in troops. Bringing in troops might have been 
>> the very thing to deter him from acting though he wd have ratcheted up his 
>> rants. He likely planned on acting in any case. Forewarned is not prepared. 
>> The publication of the intel had no effect because he had decided in advance 
>> to attack no matter what. It might have even forced his hand, if he cared 
>> what the world or what his subjects thought of him.
>> 
>> So wd sending in troops or more sophisticated weapons have deterred him? 
>> Maybe not, but it wd have made his victory more costly. Making the victory 
>> Pyrrhic cd have hurt him at home worse than the moral shame: no one wants to 
>> see their children come home in body bags. But there are worse things. 
>> Living as a subaltern to Putin’s mafia is one of them. The Ukrainians know 
>> that. They have known that for a long time. It was Stalin who starved and 
>> murdered them and that’s where Putin gets his playbook. 
>> 
>> There are already courageous protests inside Russia. Putin threatened to 
>> arrest the protesters and still they showed up. And he made good on the 
>> threat. Body bags from the front might have given fuel to that fire. That is 
>> a truth no one can gainsay. And Russian media is keeping their human losses 
>> not or under-reported. But Russians are very sophisticated readers of “news” 
>> and of the lack of it. 
>

Re: Almost zero

[Keith Sanborn]

Making their intelligence public did nothing except possibly tip Putin off to 
its sources. 

It was, in the technical register, actionable. And yet there was no action: 
don’t provoke him by bringing in troops. Bringing in troops might have been the 
very thing to deter him from acting though he wd have ratcheted up his rants. 
He likely planned on acting in any case. Forewarned is not prepared. The 
publication of the intel had no effect because he had decided in advance to 
attack no matter what. It might have even forced his hand, if he cared what the 
world or what his subjects thought of him.

So wd sending in troops or more sophisticated weapons have deterred him? Maybe 
not, but it wd have made his victory more costly. Making the victory Pyrrhic cd 
have hurt him at home worse than the moral shame: no one wants to see their 
children come home in body bags. But there are worse things. Living as a 
subaltern to Putin’s mafia is one of them. The Ukrainians know that. They have 
known that for a long time. It was Stalin who starved and murdered them and 
that’s where Putin gets his playbook. 

There are already courageous protests inside Russia. Putin threatened to arrest 
the protesters and still they showed up. And he made good on the threat. Body 
bags from the front might have given fuel to that fire. That is a truth no one 
can gainsay. And Russian media is keeping their human losses not or 
under-reported. But Russians are very sophisticated readers of “news” and of 
the lack of it. 

Putin is a player of the long game. As is Xi. And yes, it is a matter of east 
and west. During the time I spent in Russia, I was shocked to hear this 
dichotomy, which I thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history, was 
alive and well—at a very deep level and not only by authoritarian politicians. 
The west is enslaved to quarterly thinking. That’s the current state of 
socio-economics, call it feudal or some advanced form of capitalism.  The East 
is dominated by history. But as in China, history determines the present as it 
is rewritten. 

Cost for capitalists means outflow of economic resources. The Putin clique has 
so much well hidden wealth they can now only crave power and real estate. And 
they pay for it in other people’s blood. Putin tries to sell some bullshit 
neo-fascist mythology about Russian history. I don’t think it’s going to stick 
domestically. That is the only hope for the future. It means nothing to cut off 
an oligarch’s allowance. 

> On Feb 26, 2022, at 1:25 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> 
> Does anyone remember Vladislav Surkov, "managed democracy," "non-linear war"?
> 
> Sure, you must, he emerged into view in the West with the Ukraine war of 
> 2014, with the disinformation and the little green men. He was an aesthete 
> and "political technologist," a PR guy and a reality TV fan, able in his 
> position as Putin's chief counselor to conjure up an entire induced political 
> spectrum where multiple truths and decoy dissidence became tools in a 
> strategic calculus of  "democratic" (or demotic, or demonic) power. 
> 
> Anyway, I sure remember him, because his transgressive postmodern cynicism 
> frankly struck fear in my heart, and if memory serves it was a weirdly 
> energizing affect for a whole lot of other people at the time. As Peter 
> Pomerantsev wrote in Politico way back in 2014:
> 
> "If in the 20th century the Kremlin could only lobby through Soviet 
> sympathizers on the left, it now uses a contradictory kaleidoscope of 
> messages to build alliances with quite different groups. European 
> right-nationalists such as Hungary’s Jobbik or France’s Front National are 
> seduced by the anti-EU message; the far-left are brought in by tales of 
> fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the 
> Kremlin’s stance against homosexuality. The result is an array of voices, all 
> working away at Western audiences from different angles, producing a 
> cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support" (1).
> 
> Does any of this sound familiar? Maybe to the tenth power?
> 
> Some people say non-linear or hybrid warfare was a Russian response to US 
> information-war tactics in the era of the "color revolutions" (2). But then 
> the Russian twist became crude American reality in Trump's 2016 campaign. It 
> was the Saint Petersburg troll factories, it was Facebook and the new media 
> system, it was because Trump himself was a real-estate mogul, a conduit for 
> Russian capital flight and a reality TV guy at heart. Surkov's name was never 
> mentioned in the (pathetically faked) Steele Dossier, but as the Democrats 
> tried to save the day with their trials and their Congressional morality 
> plays, the post-truth pathology globalized.
> 
> That was then, this is now.
> 
> The amazing power of Surkovian social management was just on display: Despite 
> the advance of hundreds of thousands of troops with all requisite equipment, 
> most Ukrainians and 

Re: deep humanities initiative

[Keith Sanborn]

Interesting that at a time when planetary survival is in jeopardy, analysts shd 
return to a geological metaphor. Does history then equal stratigraphy?

> On Apr 25, 2021, at 11:27 AM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 3:27 AM  wrote:
> 
>> 
>> This depth narrative has never been without its critics later 
>> structuralists and post-structuralists inverted the story by celebrating 
>> the surface at the expense of depth. [...] From a visual arts standpoint 
>> I have always seen this tussle as echoing the arrival of Warhol on the 
>> scene whose slippery serious anti-seriousness effectively disrupted 
>> Abstract Expressionism’s existentialist claims to psychological depth.
> 
> I think the notion of "depth" stands in for interpretation, aka hermeneutics. 
> There can be a liberating effect when a dominant hermeneutic is swept aside, 
> but then, disorientation ensues. I experienced that pretty strongly in the 
> 1980s, when both the post-structuralist "free play of the signifier" and the 
> recombinant commercial imagery of pop art (eg, Jeff Koons) were at their 
> height in the US. At the time a novel by Don DeLillo, "Mao II" which directly 
> references Warhol, allowed me to understand the relationship between those 
> two trends.
> 
> Today, most societies are affected by profound disorientation in the face of 
> inequality, climate change, and their knock-on effects (fascistic populism, 
> revolt of oppressed peoples). In the US right now there is a pervasive 
> concern with hermeneutics or so-called grand narratives. The analysis of big 
> data is supposed to reveal the hidden mechanisms of social interaction - 
> that's one version, a mathematized hermeneutics. The history of colonialism 
> is supposed to reveal how racialized injustice is rooted in White 
> subjectivity - that's another version, connected to highly active minority 
> struggles. Broader histories of the rise and fall of civilizations (Hariri, 
> Tainter, even David Graeber) are supposed to reveal what comes after the fall 
> of liberal empire. All of these are, for sure, secularized versions of the 
> interpretative practices of religion, particularly Christianity which is 
> hermeneutic to the core.
> 
> I don't think this hermeneutic turn can be brushed away. For people in 
> distress (and that's a lot of us) finding "meaning" is nothing other than 
> reconciling your perception of a damaged world with your aspiration to a 
> better one. Currently I belong to a group called Deep Time Chicago. Its aim 
> is to understand how the relative stability of the earth system is disrupted 
> by the "fossil institutions" that we can see at work in our city - the steel 
> mills, the refineries and petrochemical industries, the airports and 
> freeways, the water and sewage systems, the conversion of all the arable 
> hinterland to GMO agriculture for global trade, etc. Our approach comes 
> directly from geology (the model of scientific depth interpretation, as David 
> pointed out), but it's a geology that in its turn has been transformed by a 
> full-fledged master narrative: earth system science, also known as Gaia 
> Theory.
> 
> Struggles over interpretation are difficult and fractious. But if you want to 
> set a collective course toward a viable existence, I am not sure there is 
> another way.
> 
> thoughtfully, Brian
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Re: THE Q IN QONSPIRACY: QAnon as a Paradigm for Future Social-media-driven Conspiracism

[Keith Sanborn]

Thanks!

> On Mar 16, 2021, at 10:11 AM, Tatiana Bazzichelli  wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I answer to Keith's question writing to the whole list because it might
> interest other people, too. If you would like to listen to the
> conversation of last Friday, THE Q IN QONSPIRACY, with Wu Ming 1,
> Florian Cramer and myself, you can find the video here:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD9U9bQUlSs
> 
> More info about the event (scroll down):
> https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
> 
> All the best, and enjoy!
> 
> Tatiana
> 
>> On 13.03.21 05:21, Keith Sanborn wrote:
>> Dear Tatiana:
>> 
>> Was there supposed to be a live feed of that conversation? I couldn’t find 
>> it when accessing your site by phone. Wd like to keep up with the series.
>> 
>> Keith Sanborn
>> 
>>>> On Mar 11, 2021, at 4:41 AM, Tatiana Bazzichelli  
>>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Dear all,
>>> 
>>> I would like to invite you to take part in a conversation with Wu Ming
>>> 1, Florian Cramer and myself tomorrow afternoon (March 12), as part of
>>> our Disruptive Fridays series, at 5PM CET. We can get questions from the
>>> audience via chat.
>>> Read more here (and go to the chat): https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
>>> 
>>> Since 2020 we have been experiencing two pandemics at once: Covid-19 and
>>> conspiracy fantasies about Covid-19. The pandemic emergency accelerated
>>> a process that had been going on for years: the rise of a new kind of
>>> hyper-charged, social-media-driven conspiracism. In this respect, QAnon
>>> is a paradigmatic case.
>>> 
>>> What is QAnon, or what was it? A political movement, a game, a cult, a
>>> terrorist threat? All that and more.
>>> 
>>> In this conversation QAnon is discussed as a template for contemporary
>>> social-media-driven conspiracy fantasies that work simultaneously as
>>> games and a new kind of cults. By focusing on the mutation of conspiracy
>>> myths from countercultural phenomena to contemporary meme and influencer
>>> culture, Florian Cramer and Wu Ming 1 will focus on three conspiracy
>>> narratives: "The Great Replacement" (from Renaud Camus to
>>> Charlottesville), QAnon (from Pizzagate to the Capitol storming) and
>>> "The Great Reset" (as a set of pandemic-inspired variations on the old
>>> New World Order trope).
>>> 
>>> The conversation is centered around Wu Ming 1's forthcoming book "La Q
>>> di Qomplotto" [The Q in qonspiracy], to be published end of March in
>>> Italian by Edizioni Alegre, which describes how conspiracy fantasies
>>> help legitimise systems of control (find here the index in English
>>> https://edizionialegre.it/notizie/the-q-in-conspiracy/).
>>> 
>>> Join us tomorrow here at 5PM CET:
>>> https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
>>> 
>>> Get reminders from here (Facebook video):
>>> https://www.facebook.com/disruptionlab/posts/2664839330428196
>>> 
>>> This is a pre-event of our upcoming conference (March 18-20):
>>> BEHIND THE MASK: WHISTLEBLOWING DURING THE PANDEMIC
>>> Whistleblowers, human rights advocates, journalists, activists, artists,
>>> lawyers and researchers denouncing abuses and wrongdoing in the course
>>> of the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
>>> https://www.disruptionlab.org/behind-the-mask
>>> 
>>> All the best, and see you there!
>>> 
>>> Tatiana
>>> -- 
>>> Tatiana Bazzichelli // Founder & Artistic Director
>>> Disruption Network Lab
>>> http://disruptionlab.org
>>> Twitter: @disruptberlin // @t_bazz
>>> Fingerprint: A87C 3637 03ED 1D1C E6FE E828 1F55 2B2F F5A5 C9A0
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Tatiana Bazzichelli // Artistic Director
>>> Disruption Network Lab
>>> http://disruptionlab.org
>>> Twitter: @disruptberlin // @t_bazz
>>> Fingerprint: A87C 3637 03ED 1D1C E6FE E828 1F55 2B2F F5A5 C9A0
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>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tatiana Bazzichelli // Artistic Director
> Disruption Network Lab
> http://di

Re: A Dead Professor Is Teaching an Art History Class

[Keith Sanborn]

That’s another story. 

> On Feb 1, 2021, at 12:53 PM, Thomas Keenan  wrote:
> 
> 
> "A dead professor Is teaching a university Art History class" - I'm sure many 
> students have felt this way even when the professor was standing right in 
> front of them. 
> 
>> On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 12:43 PM Keith Sanborn  wrote:
>> And academics mostly get screwed on books too. 
>> 
>> > On Feb 1, 2021, at 12:10 PM, tbyfield  wrote:
>> > 
>> > Sort of like a book.
>> > 
>> > Cheers,
>> > Ted
>> > 
>> >> On 1 Feb 2021, at 11:42, nettime's post-mortem slave wrote:
>> >> 
>> >> How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class
>> > <...>
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Re: A Dead Professor Is Teaching an Art History Class

[Keith Sanborn]

And academics mostly get screwed on books too. 

> On Feb 1, 2021, at 12:10 PM, tbyfield  wrote:
> 
> Sort of like a book.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ted
> 
>> On 1 Feb 2021, at 11:42, nettime's post-mortem slave wrote:
>> 
>> How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class
> <...>
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Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Keith Sanborn]

Put another way, was it the burning of the Reichstag or the storming of the 
Winter Palace? or neither?

> On Jan 8, 2021, at 7:47 AM, mp  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 08/01/2021 04:07, Keith Sanborn wrote:
>> Dear John,
>> 
>> There is a difference between a fascist coup attempt lead from above and
>> a mass insurrection. 
> 
> ... when you put it like that, it sounds like there is a difference.
> 
> Does that mean that poor, white Americans have no sense of the local, of
> community, of constitutional rights or anything like a good enlightened
> liberal would?
> 
> Are they all stupid, or all fascists, is that the meaning here?
> 
> Whose values and whose baseline of reality defines the frame of
> reference here?
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Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Keith Sanborn]

Dear John,

There is a difference between a fascist coup attempt lead from above and a mass 
insurrection. 

Keith 

> On Jan 7, 2021, at 5:05 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> 
> LOL John Young...Congressional rituals appeared overly dainty and passe, it 
> is true...
> 
> To Felix...
> 
>  is willing/able to use the new slim majorities to enact transformational
> change. I think there is a strong inclination among the Obama centrists
> who seem to be dominating the new administration to see Trump as an
> aberration -- creating by the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or some
> other force unrelated to them -->
> 
> Yes, very true...a resurgence of the coastal elitism which Trump railed on on 
> behalf of his base.
> 
>  Trump.>
> 
> Attempt to bring about "certainty"?
> 
> 
>  implement change, rather than simply 'restore decency'>
> 
> Let's hope Biden's presidency will not simply slip into this role only...as 
> he, while more comforting than wild Don, 
> can be anemic...
> 
>  changes if
> taken seriously>
> 
> I believe yesterday was an ingenious smokescreen invented by Trump & Co...as 
> patriotism...to obscure the fact that in the last two weeks Trump 
> has auctioned off the Arctic wilderness to fossil fuel companies...
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/trump-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-lease-sales
> 
> and ended endangered species protections for wolves
> 
> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gray-wolf-removed-endangered-species-act/
> 
> and is currently trying to limit civil rights for minorities -
> https://worldnewsera.com/news/us-news/justice-dept-seeks-to-pare-back-civil-rights-protections-for-minorities/
> 
> "The Trump administration has long sought to eliminate protections for groups 
> at risk of suffering such impacts, 
> arguing that the Civil Rights Act as passed by Congress only safeguards 
> against intentional acts of discrimination."
> 
> Elvis is leaving the building...!
> 
> Molly
> 
> 
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:31 PM John Young  wrote:
>> Yesterday was thrilling for its replication of 1968 in challenging 
>> status quo across many stolidities of thought, behavior, belief, 
>> acceptance, complaint, compliance, modest defiance, embrace of 
>> bipartisanship, hypnotic left-right cum socialist-capitalist ifatuous 
>> deology, intellectual vacuity secured by tenure and perquisites, 
>> condescension toward the unlearned, prattling of stale truisms, idle 
>> sophistry of argument, ample funding of compendia of little read 
>> volumes of propriety and profiteering.
>> 
>> 68 tipped the rancid tub of placidity and before injection of 
>> precarity entered the cliche-driven market, there were a few years of 
>> turmoil, some fatalities at Kent State and the West Village, a few 
>> break-ins at FBI offices and blood splatterings at military bases, 
>> levitation of the Pentagon, trials of celebrity dissidents, police 
>> bombings of Philly rowhouses, seeds of feminism implanted, sexual 
>> liberation of birth control narcotics. All this before the aging 
>> rebels were enlisted by academia to herd the young upcoming teens 
>> into chutes of branding and alumnae funding.
>> 
>> The Capitol Liberation, brief as it was, got widespread media play 
>> almost effortlessly, followed by resulsive outpouring of 
>> opportunistic bray about democracy at risk, which by today had become 
>> as stale, rancid and deflated of novelty and significance as days 
>> before the Georgia election.
>> 
>> Congress pulled an all-nighter then left town with nothing to show 
>> for the squeals of rhetoric about Capitol Police failure, 25th 
>> Amendment, impeachment, clipping Trump's social media wings, 
>> amounting to who the fuck cares, let's get back to Covid-19 agoniste.
>> 
>> Is January 2021 to finally supplant May 1968 as navel gazing of the 
>> best and brightest (cliches abundant)? Sleepy Joe and silent Kamala 
>> do not appear to be prepared to combat Pence pardoning Trump than 
>> Gerald Ford Nixon. Bring up the bodies even if QAnon and ilk.
>> 
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Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)

[Keith Sanborn]

The current state of the institutions in the US is that with legislative bodies 
in bitter deadlock, the executive branch, ie, the President, effectively rules 
by fiat (“executive orders”). The bad news is that there is too much 
decision-making power in the hands of the Senate, where a narrow majority rules 
on critical lifetime judicial appointments in “collaboration “ with the 
executive. This pushes critical protections outside of negotiations, since 
judicial appointments are made by bare majority decisions and impeachment 
requires a 2/3 majority. Impeachment being a kind of nuclear form of a 
no-confidence vote. In the current structure, all additional parties do is 
subtract critical numbers from one of the parties: Greens from the Democrats, 
Libertarians from the Republicans. Institutional reform wd have to be massive, 
including a non-partisan bureau of the census, since manipulation of census 
data allows partisan determination of legislative districts.

Polarization is possible even in a EU model where Belgium was unable to form a 
government for 2 years, was it? And Poland and Hungary have echoed the American 
model in their strategic abuse of the executive and the judicial right under 
the noses of the EU. Not sure how you prevent that? Sanctions? Explusion? Will 
institutional reform close the loopholes? Populist authoritarians seem to find 
them over and over. And now they can bypass or abuse mass-media. Trump, in 
part, rules or at least reaches his “base” by Twitter when even Fox cuts away 
from him or his minions. 

The underlying social and economic divisions are reflected in the 
superstructure of “government” to use freighted Marxian terminology. The US 
formally entered the Debordian model when Reagan was elected and Trump is the 
echo-chamber echo of that, courtesy of reality tv and social media. Of course, 
Debord’s model was apposite long before that.

In the longer term, some social consensus about basic values must arise or 
social chaos and authoritarian abuse will continue. My hope is for more 
enfranchisement and participation. That seems to have narrowly turned the tide 
here. It is critical that the Democrats move further to the left if they hope 
to move past damage control which will be difficult unless those same forces 
that put Biden in the White House in Georgia can mobilize radically in the 
Georgia US  Senate run-offs. I am doubtful that will happen since a critical 
small number of votes for Biden came from Republicans who otherwise voted a 
straight ticket down ballot (the American electorialmediaspeak for they only 
voted for Biden/Harris and otherwise voted Republican.)

Keith 

> On Nov 16, 2020, at 4:51 AM, Eric Kluitenberg  wrote:
> 
> HI Ted, all,
> 
> Fascinating discussion in ominous times..
> 
>> On 16 Nov 2020, at 04:02, tbyfield  wrote:
>> 
>> The US is breaking down, so it's not at all surprising that some of its 
>> language for describing the world would as well.
> 
> From a continental European perspective I’m watching this spectacle (don’t 
> know what else to call it, without immediately invoking Debord and beyond), 
> and I’m not well enough informed to have any definite reading, but my 
> impression is not that the US is ‘breaking down’. Much rather it seems that 
> the US is embroiled in a profound political crisis that plays out on many 
> different levels.
> 
> For non-UK Europeans this whole electoral system tied to voting districts and 
> the ‘first-past-the post’ principle does not make much sense, nor does the 
> two party (Republicrat) party system, where none of the other political 
> parties that do exist across the US get represented in the legislature.
> 
> Despite the important consideration that much of ‘democracy’ happens outside 
> the formal legislative institutions (i.e. issue-based displacement of 
> politics, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, referenda, and more 
> spontaneous and/or affect driven forms of assembly), implying that we should 
> not get trapped in a hyper-focus on the formal institutions, still at the 
> moment when these formal institutions enter into a state of crisis, as is 
> apparent now in the US, this warrants attention. At the very least these 
> formal institutions  should be able to guarantee these other ‘democratic’ or 
> civil rights to be exercised extra-institutionally.
> 
> What this signals to me, from my limited Eurocentric (male / straight, etc.) 
> perspective is an urgent need for institutional reform. At the very least 
> some form of proportional representation in the voting system and a much 
> lower threshold for different collective political actors to enter the 
> legislature. Just to ask the most obvious question: ‘Where the f. is the 
> Green Party or something like that in the US???
> 
> It would also allow the so-called ‘populists’ to enter on their own terms, 
> which is a good thing because then they can be confronted head on. Europe has 
> its own severe problems 

Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)

[Keith Sanborn]

Trump has given the military in the US more than adequate reasons to not go 
along with an attempted coup by their “Commander in Chief.” This, however, 
brings up the troubling prospect of their becoming a player in domestic 
politics. They have in the past played a role via the various state run 
National Guard units. Someone will correct me if I am wrong, but their 
deployment in a political context has been infrequent if not without example, 
at least as concerns the 5 now 6 main branches: Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, 
Coast Guard and now Space Force.

I wd speculate that except for the politically appointed heads, the CIA, FBI 
and NSA have little incentive to go along with a Trump coup either. Not sure 
how the Secret Service wd go but who knows?



> On Nov 13, 2020, at 12:25 PM, McCorkle T. Diamond  
> wrote:
> 
> 
> Honestly, the short answer is no.
> 
> McCorkle Terence Diamond
> www.terencediamond.com 
> 646-876-1700
> 
> 
> 
>> On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 11:41 AM John Young  wrote:
>> Comforting to think of a civilian political solution to Mr. Trump's 
>> autocracy agenda. Insufficient critique of how autocratically political are 
>> all military and law enforcement, internationally and domestically, ranked, 
>> uniformed, armed, civilian collateral harm bemedaled. 
>> 
>> At 10:27 AM 11/13/2020, you wrote:
>>> Hello everyone -
>>> 
>>> Dan is basically right about everything, especially the anxiety and horror 
>>> this election produced and the devastating realization that you live in a 
>>> country where almost fifty percent of the population is willing to support 
>>> an openly white supremacist and fascist political formation. Election night 
>>> was the most sobering and profoundly depressing political moment of my life.
>>> 
>>> From my viewpoint though, there has in fact been a lot of attention to the 
>>> danger of a coup. For instance, all the political-ecology and leftist 
>>> organizations that I follow repurposed themselves into anti-coup forces 
>>> starting two months ago. This movement from below was paralleled by 
>>> mobilizations among political figures, career administrators, lawyer types 
>>> and corporates, filtering both down and up into the mainstream, to the 
>>> point where a few days ago, some large unions declared their readiness to 
>>> hold a general strike (gasp! this is the US!) to ensure a proper transition.
>>> 
>>> I kept up with everything through the organizing work of XR Chicago, and 
>>> this Monday, when coup anxieties focused on the possibility that Republican 
>>> legislators could present rival (and illegitimate) slates of Electoral 
>>> College voters to Congress on December 14, I drilled down into 
>>> constitutional law to see how likely this could be. It goes without saying 
>>> that you have to worry. Probably everyone knows that the 2000 election was 
>>> stolen by the Republicans with the ginned-up "Brooks Brothers Riot" that 
>>> stopped the recount in Florida, followed by a Supreme Court decision that 
>>> handed the election to Bush, with all the consequences. Probably it will 
>>> come out soon that the whole "Stop the Steal" movement flourishing just a 
>>> few days ago was similarly ginned-up (though maybe not by Roger Stone 
>>> himself this time). Others might remember that slates of rival electors 
>>> were in fact presented by three states in 1876, leading to tremendous 
>>> chaos, a back-room deal in Washington, and ultimately, the end of 
>>> Reconstruction in the South, with even greater consequences that still face 
>>> us today (the myth of the Confederate "Lost Cause" and the persistence of 
>>> slaveholder racism now extending throughout the country). 
>>> 
>>> However, my conclusion is, this Electoral College scenario is not going to 
>>> happen for many reasons. Not least of which, because the Electoral Count 
>>> Act of 1887 really clarified the process, and it turns out that in case of 
>>> disagreement over the validity of the rival electors, either the House and 
>>> the Senate would have to agree on which ones to support (which they 
>>> obviously wouldn't) or the decision would go back to the Governors of the 
>>> states (and in the case of the Northern swing states that are really at 
>>> issue, those Governors are Democrats). Trump does not have the support to 
>>> overturn all that, his lawsuits are meritless and serve another purpose. 
>>> For anyone who wants to wonk out on the question, read this: 
>>> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3685392.
>>> 
>>> That does not mean the nightmare is over. The explanation of Trump's 
>>> failure to concede that has gradually consolidated over the past three days 
>>> is no longer that he is planning organized fraud or an Electoral College 
>>> coup, but instead, that he is maintaining the fury of his reality-averse 
>>> base in order to keep his hold over the Republican Party, which desperately 
>>> needs his support to win the two Senate seats that go to a 

Re: Not One

[Keith Sanborn]

Not a precise match between modernity and bourgeois democracy, but close enough 
to provoke reflection. Still, while bourgeois democracy and fascism may both 
show aspects of modernity, such as rationalization of “production” and its 
corollary destruction, that does not make them ethically identical. Roosevelt 
does not equal Hitler.

> On Oct 10, 2020, at 3:04 PM, mp  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/10/2020 19:45, Keith Sanborn wrote:
>> Again the "always already.”
>> 
>> What if fascism is not a mask? The voices of the dead should be listened to.
> 
> Waves and particle, apples and oranges. My way, your way, anything goes
> tonight.
> 
> Zygmunt Bauman, who is dead and spend considerable time developing a
> voice that made sense of the Holocaust, to which many students of
> Sociology have been subjected, investigated the relations between
> fascism and modernity, and I wonder if he would readily agree that, as
> you write, "..there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between
> bourgeois democracy and fascism..".
> 
> Here from a random blog:
> 
> "...In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contends that the
> Holocaust should not simply be understood as an accident along the road
> to modernity. Rather, Bauman argues that modernity provided the
> “necessary conditions” (Bauman, 13) for its undertaking. As Bauman puts
> it, the Holocaust was “a legitimate resident in the house of modernity”
> (Bauman, 17). To support this contention, Bauman suggests that the
> principles of rationality and efficiency which so uniquely characterize
> the modern era may have had, in the case of the Holocaust, some
> unintended consequences: “at no point of its long and tortuous execution
> did the Holocaust come into conflict with the principles of rationality.
> The ‘Final Solution’ did not clash at any stage with the rational
> pursuit of efficient, optimal goal-implementation” (Bauman, 17)...".
> 
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Re: Not One

[Keith Sanborn]

Again the "always already.”

What if fascism is not a mask? The voices of the dead should be listened to.

What if it is? 

I will not take a revisionist line, but there is a qualitative and quantitative 
difference between bourgeois democracy and fascism. They are not identical. In 
the larger picture or the smaller picture, either wholesale or retail. The 
problem is that they are in the process of merging: as Debord observed about 
China and elsewhere: the concentrated and the diffuse spectacle are in the 
process of merging. They have merged already in China. Internally and 
externally, the synthesis created in China is a formidable example, NOT to be 
followed. It should be stopped by any means necessary. But don’t take the 
sucker punch. The heads of state command much greater resources of physical and 
psychological violence.

Keith 

> On Oct 10, 2020, at 2:30 PM, mp  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/10/2020 16:37, Brian Holmes wrote:
>> 
>> So in the end, I agree with Zak a lot more than I thought at first, but
>> still not entirely. You ought to post more often, Zak.
>> 
>> Solidarity, Brian
> 
> I don't know what Zak meant exactly and there are certainly immediate,
> good reasons to vote for Biden (and hope his health won't last Harris be
> presidenta) - and if for nothing else, then for the joy of seeing Trumps
> face in defeat.
> 
> Zak made me think about the system as such.
> 
> What does left and right represent other than a legacy of the spatial
> room distribution of the two elitist groups that constituted the
> National Assembly that killed the French Revolution?
> 
> If we suspend disbelief about higher powers at play - beyond agency and
> conspiracy - and think of the political system known as liberal
> democracy as an intelligent (gaia like?) beast that tends towards an
> equilibrium in order to sustain itself and continuously distribute power
> and privilege disproportionally. [For that is its purpose and intent,
> right?].
> 
> Then what could fascism be?
> 
> Imagine fascism as a mask that the elite puts on when the forces of
> exploitation and extraction have spawned too much unrest and rendered an
> otherwise obedient body of people unruly. When the rate of dispossession
> becomes unpalatable, when the addictive and soporific effects of grain
> (bread and beer) and circus no longer can contain the domesticated
> masses, something has got to give. It seems.
> 
> Instead of liberalism giving in, however, the fascist mask comes on.
> 
> Fascism "presents itself" as a threat, as a far worse proposition, and
> even some rebels who used to operate outside of society, and of course
> everyone within the political spectrum not consumed by fascist
> fantasies, including academics, now favour a return to liberal democracy
> - how else can they keep their jobs and their cushioned existence?
> 
> "Look, I know liberalism/capitalism is bad, but don't be insensitive,
> this is worse, we must return".
> 
> Captured, then, we are in a pendular swing of things. No transcendence.
> 
> Fascism as a mirage. Liberalism as a clear-sighted response. Forth and
> back. So history goes and ensures repetition. Fascism makes liberalism
> sustainable. Desirable.
> 
> So, "they" - the Trumpists -  might intend to bring the system down, as
> it was suggested, but they might effectively just be recalibrating it.
> 
> Even though he was awarded the Nobel prize, I still like him, so here goes:
> 
> "...Oh, but you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all
> fears,
> 
> Bury the rag deep in your face, for now's the time for your
> tears..."
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Re: your response

[Keith Sanborn]

I’m sure your workers’ paradise will make you happy. At least in your mind. 
That’s the only place it will ever exist, since you are doing anything about 
the corrupt regime in which you live.

> On Oct 10, 2020, at 5:08 AM, Zak McGregor  wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 10 Oct 2020 05:00:45 -0400
> Keith Sanborn mailto:mrz...@panix.com>> wrote:
> 
>> It’s true. The US Presidents have made violence their major export. And 
>> Biden was a witness to Obama’s drone strike kill lists. But this does not 
>> make Biden worse than Trump. Trump has amplified violence and directed it 
>> towards an internal target. As Stalin used to call it, the enemy within. 
>> Here he uses both state forces and paramilitaries like any 3rd World 
>> dictator. He has also maintained levels of external violence, for example by 
>> strengthening military and diplomatic support for Israeli genocide—besides 
>> encouraging slow violence, supporting Palestinian  starvation through 
>> sub-humanitarian minimums—economic sanctions against Iran and the list goes 
>> on. He has refused to pay the WHO He has taken the us out of the Paris 
>> climate agreement— What greater violence to the entire world cd there be? He 
>> promotes fossil fuels, actively lowers regulations and enforcement critical 
>> to environmental survival. He allowed covid to kill over 200,000 people in 
>> the us alone, promotes fake
>  medical advice by which he financially profits.  He refuses to support 
> international efforts against covid. Trump is already worse both externally 
> and internally than Biden cd possibly be. And Trump listens to no one except 
> maybe Putin. Biden wd be forced into more public accountability. With Trump 
> there is not even the pretense. He is undoubtedly the worst, most destructive 
> President in the history of the us. But, by all means, hold onto those 
> leninist fantasies that strengthening the worst aspects of capitalism will 
> lead inevitably to its salutary self-destruction, which, btw will be the 
> self-immolation of the planet. 
> 
> By all means, go and vote for Real Change™ in November, and be shook
> when nothing changes. That is the real fantasy here.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Zak McGregor mailto:zak.mcgre...@gmail.com>>

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Re: your response

[Keith Sanborn]

It’s true. The US Presidents have made violence their major export. And Biden 
was a witness to Obama’s drone strike kill lists. But this does not make Biden 
worse than Trump. Trump has amplified violence and directed it towards an 
internal target. As Stalin used to call it, the enemy within. Here he uses both 
state forces and paramilitaries like any 3rd World dictator. He has also 
maintained levels of external violence, for example by strengthening military 
and diplomatic support for Israeli genocide—besides encouraging slow violence, 
supporting Palestinian  starvation through sub-humanitarian minimums—economic 
sanctions against Iran and the list goes on. He has refused to pay the WHO He 
has taken the us out of the Paris climate agreement— What greater violence to 
the entire world cd there be? He promotes fossil fuels, actively lowers 
regulations and enforcement critical to environmental survival. He allowed 
covid to kill over 200,000 people in the us alone, promotes fake medical advice 
by which he financially profits.  He refuses to support international efforts 
against covid. Trump is already worse both externally and internally than Biden 
cd possibly be. And Trump listens to no one except maybe Putin. Biden wd be 
forced into more public accountability. With Trump there is not even the 
pretense. He is undoubtedly the worst, most destructive President in the 
history of the us. But, by all means, hold onto those leninist fantasies that 
strengthening the worst aspects of capitalism will lead inevitably to its 
salutary self-destruction, which, btw will be the self-immolation of the 
planet. 

> On Oct 10, 2020, at 4:13 AM, Zak McGregor  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 9 Oct 2020 12:30:03 -0400
> Keith Sanborn  wrote:
> 
>> I wd like to know why you think Biden is worse. A Biden regime wd at least 
>> repress the growing fascist militias here. Perhaps news didn’t reach you 
>> about the plot to kidnap and try (implicitly then execute for treason) the 
>> female Democratic  governor of Michigan foiled by the FBI. Her crime was 
>> making people wear face masks by executive order The Supreme Court of that 
>> Republican-dominated state struck down that lapse into sanity. Trump has 
>> encouraged these groups.
> 
> This is nothing compared to what violence is meted out by the US, directly or 
> indirectly - against people around the world. Both Republican and Democrat 
> parties traditionally support these acts. Obama, for instance, destroyed 
> Libya and attempted to destroy Syria. He only half succeeded. From outside 
> the USA, there is zero difference between any of the 44 presidents (you call 
> Trump 45, but he's only the 44th different person to hold that office, I 
> think).
> 
>> I don’t want to live with the daily levels of violence reported in the media 
>> and by friends in South Africa. Your situation is a bit different I think. 
>> But, perhaps those levels of violence are exaggerated. In that situation I 
>> might think differently. 
> 
> Yours is a violent system. It's always been so, and you always vote to 
> continue that.
> 
> Ciao
> 
> Zak
> 
> -- 
> Zak McGregor 
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your response

[Keith Sanborn]

Hi Zak,

I wd like to know why you think Biden is worse. A Biden regime wd at least 
repress the growing fascist militias here. Perhaps news didn’t reach you about 
the plot to kidnap and try (implicitly then execute for treason) the female 
Democratic  governor of Michigan foiled by the FBI. Her crime was making people 
wear face masks by executive order The Supreme Court of that 
Republican-dominated state struck down that lapse into sanity. Trump has 
encouraged these groups.

I don’t want to live with the daily levels of violence reported in the media 
and by friends in South Africa. Your situation is a bit different I think. But, 
perhaps those levels of violence are exaggerated. In that situation I might 
think differently. 

Keith 
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Re: Not One

[Keith Sanborn]

True with respect to Tienanmin, but Mao was a believer that political power 
grows out of the barrel of a gun. He sent in the army in 1967 to end the 
“cultural revolution” he had begun. The reference to Andrew Jackson, for those 
not familiar with some of the intricacies of US History refers to his refusal 
to abide by a Supreme Court ruling rejecting the enforcement of Georgia laws on 
the Seminole People, among other violations of the Constitution in favor of the 
use of military force.

> On Oct 7, 2020, at 1:26 PM, Dan S Wang  wrote:
> 
> Though there is much in this exchange to discuss, I'll limit myself to a 
> correction on a peripheral point: it wasn't Mao that sent in the army. It was 
> Deng. As long as we're on the issue of how the US is perceived, how 
> homogenous or heterogeneous it is, , I think it's not such a small thing 
> to correctly note a detail about an event (the '89 social movement) that 
> fundamentally shook a country with almost twice the population of the US and 
> the EU combined, and produced world-changing economic and ecological 
> repercussions.
> 
> With you in the political fever,
> 
> Dan w.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center
> IG: type_rounds_1968
> danswang.xyz
> 
> ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐
> On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 9:30 PM, Keith Sanborn  wrote:
> 
> We have even seen those actions in the street here, though more as 
> provocation than as dissent. Mao, Lukashenko, Andrew Jackson, and Trump sent 
> in the Army. Putin perfers poison. The point is: we, as citizens of the 
> United States, have a responsibility to cut off the link between Trump and 
> the Army and the Supreme Court as soon as possible and the most direct route 
> at the moment is the election in a month. Maybe Covid will help in its own 
> special way, if roid-rage doesn't buoy Trump up until the election.
>> 
> 
> 

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Re: Not One

[Keith Sanborn]

 Frederic’s post). I guess what I’m saying is that this is not a 
> new fight for many, and I think it’s important to keep that front-and-center. 
> If that seems somehow reductive, well, I’m not sure what else to say.
> 
> Maybe I’d say to ask those leading the fight in the US right now, with BLM 
> and the Poor People’s Campaign (for example), whether they think this is 
> about *preserving* democracy or *creating* democracy for their 
> constituencies. I think it’s possible to recognize the difference and it 
> matters in understanding what you are fighting for and with whom.
> 
> Apologies for any crossed-wires, misunderstandings.
> 
> best,
> Ryan
> 
>> On Oct 6, 2020, at 6:00 PM, Keith Sanborn  wrote:
>> 
>> Dear Nettimers,
>> 
>> An appeal to the history of settler colonialism and the continued history of 
>> slavery is appropriate and accurate but at this moment used as a reductio ad 
>> absurdum is just dangerous. I am not a believer in justice through bourgeois 
>> democracy but the violence promoted and actualized under the Trump regime 
>> must be stopped. Think of Biden/Harris as a tourniquet applied to staunch 
>> fatal bleeding. 
>> 
>> Let me end with this: the day after Trump was elected, my students at the 
>> New School, most of them women, were in a state of shock and for good 
>> reason: one shared with the class that after Trump’s win had been announced 
>> she was walking down the street near the “campus” in New York City and a 
>> young guy walked up to her and said, “Now I can grab your pussy whenever I 
>> want.” And disease entity called Trump was not even inaugurated yet. The 
>> irresponsible minimization of covid which has lead directly to deaths and 
>> the work of the “Proud Boys” as agents provocateurs, which again lead to 
>> deaths. 
>> 
>> We are talking about the death of even the semblance of bourgeois democracy. 
>> And in its place not revolutionary socialism, or an anarchist utopia, but 
>> death-dealing fascism. Given the choice, I will vote for bourgeois democracy 
>> any time. 
>> 
>> Keith Sanborn
> 

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Re: Not One

[Keith Sanborn]

Dear Nettimers,

An appeal to the history of settler colonialism and the continued history of 
slavery is appropriate and accurate but at this moment used as a reductio ad 
absurdum is just dangerous. I am not a believer in justice through bourgeois 
democracy but the violence promoted and actualized under the Trump regime must 
be stopped. Think of Biden/Harris as a tourniquet applied to staunch fatal 
bleeding. 

Let me end with this: the day after Trump was elected, my students at the New 
School, most of them women, were in a state of shock and for good reason: one 
shared with the class that after Trump’s win had been announced she was walking 
down the street near the “campus” in New York City and a young guy walked up to 
her and said, “Now I can grab your pussy whenever I want.” And disease entity 
called Trump was not even inaugurated yet. The irresponsible minimization of 
covid which has lead directly to deaths and the work of the “Proud Boys” as 
agents provocateurs, which again lead to deaths. 

We are talking about the death of even the semblance of bourgeois democracy. 
And in its place not revolutionary socialism, or an anarchist utopia, but 
death-dealing fascism. Given the choice, I will vote for bourgeois democracy 
any time. 

Keith Sanborn 

> On Oct 6, 2020, at 2:42 PM, Ryan Griffis  wrote:
> 
> Tue, 6 Oct 2020 11:12:55 -0500, Frederic Neyrat wrote:
> 
>> A subject, be it collective or individual, is always divided. The One is an
>> imposture.
> 
> Thank you Frederic, for stating what I would have hoped was a shared 
> understanding of nation-state politics, especially on an international list 
> focused on “networked culture.” 
> 
> I wrote the following just before receiving Frederic's message, then decided 
> not to send it. But, maybe it’s worth adding to Frederic’s rightful call to 
> dispense with the collapsing of people into nation-states? Anyway, here it 
> is...
> 
> I don’t mean to overstate the point here, but discussions of “democracy in 
> the US” (as with discussions of the political economy anywhere in the world) 
> should really be more responsible to actual history. Personally, I think such 
> responsibility is necessary to have a meaningful international leftist 
> perspective on solidarity.
> For starters, the settler-colonial status of the US as an ongoing form of 
> occupation can’t be simply glossed over.
> But specifically to the question of democracy, it might be more useful to 
> understand the situation as the *continued prevention* of democracy, rather 
> than its collapse, as if it was somehow ever stable or even meaningfully 
> democratic in some historical sense.
> Just to provide *some* specifics.
> It would be ridiculous to consider the rollback of voting rights for formerly 
> incarcerated individuals (essentially a poll tax) in my settler home state of 
> Florida without recognizing that the very rights being undermined *were just 
> recently granted* to begin with.
> Exactly 100 years ago there, leading up to the 1920 election, there was 
> widespread mass violence perpetrated against black residents to re-solidify 
> an anti-democratic, white supremacist regime.
> For anyone interested in this specific history who is not familiar, I’d 
> recommend Paul Ortiz’s excellent book “Emancipation Betrayed.”
> 
> Trump may be a glaring and garish example of white supremacist 
> anti-democratic/fascism in the US, but it’s not like the foundation wasn’t 
> already set. 
> IF we’re able to move the US in a more democratic direction, it will be 
> through continued struggle that builds on the history of such struggles that 
> have been occurring for well over 100 years (some would say it’s more like 
> 500 years). IMHO, these struggles are not best understood as trying to 
> *perfect* the US as a democracy, but as part of a movement to achieve (and 
> maintain) liberation for all people (which is no simple concept in a 
> settler-colonial state). Our foundation as a nation-state built on 
> internationally coordinated, genocidal violence (that predates the actual US 
> nation-state, obviously) seems like it begs for us to understand the US 
> beyond the exceptional, cohesive case put forward by the ruling classes (i.e. 
> settler white supremacists and neoliberal oligarchs).
> 
> Apologies if this is all pedantic… I’m just frustrated by the tone of 
> discussions about “American Democracy” that maintains imaginary clean 
> spatio-temporal boundaries that prevents us from talking about actual 
> struggles for liberation, both “inside” and “outside” any enforced borders.
> 
> Best,
> Ryan
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Re: Global Surveillance in the Data Society

[Keith Sanborn]

Let’s don’t forget the other 9/11. The one in Chile. 

> On Sep 11, 2020, at 4:40 AM, Tatiana Bazzichelli  wrote:
> 
> Dear Nettimers,
> 
> I would like to invite you to take part in the discussion at our event
> of today, September 11.
> 
> LIVE today from 5pm CEST: Global Surveillance in the Data Society
> Disruptive Fridays #12 - join at https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
> 
> We'll reflect on the discourse of surveillance and human rights during
> the coronavirus crisis, and reconnect it to another event that reshaped
> our society: 9/11.
> 
> We decided to host it on 9/11 as a symbolic date, which signed
> unprecedented measures on the level of security and surveillance. To
> unfold the discussion we invited three speakers that have been dealing
> with the issues of data, tracking and human rights since long time:
> 
> - Sonia Kennebeck (Film Director, MY/DE/US)
> - Assia Boundaoui (Journalist, Filmmaker, Artists, DZA/US)
> - Jer Thorp (Artist, Writer and Teacher, CA/US)
> 
> Sonia Kennebeck will introduce her last film UNITED STATES VS. REALITY
> WINNER, currently in post-production.
> 
> Assia Boundaoui will present The Inverse Surveillance Project, an AI
> program analysing hundreds of thousands of documents collated by the FBI
> on people of colour over the past 100 years, revealing historic patterns
> on tactics it used during operations.
> 
> Jer Thorp, a data artist that designed (with Jake Barton) an algorithm
> and a software tool to aid in the placement of the names on the 9/11
> Memorial in Manhattan, will discuss his data artistic practice.
> 
> Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Mauro Mondello, as a preview to our
> conference Data Cities: Smart Technologies, Tracking & Human Rights:
> https://www.disruptionlab.org/data-cities
> 
> The public is invited to join via chat and we look forward to seeing you
> there at https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays
> The video will also be available after the talk, at the same URL.
> 
> All the best!
> 
> Tatiana
> 
> -- 
> Tatiana Bazzichelli // Artistic Director
> Disruption Network Lab
> http://disruptionlab.org
> Twitter: @disruptberlin // @t_bazz
> Fingerprint: A87C 3637 03ED 1D1C E6FE E828 1F55 2B2F F5A5 C9A0
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Belarus

[Keith Sanborn]

FYI

There is little theoretical here, just plain ugly facts. 

Keith 

Belarus Presidential Election Exit Poll Abroad: 
Tsikhanouskaya – 86.88%
Lukashenko – 3.90%

These are the results of the exit polls conducted at the polling stations 
located outside of the Republic of Belarus for the presidential election 2020 
(as of 7:20 am GMT on August 10, 2020): 

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya – 86.88% of the votes 
Incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko – 3.90% of the votes. 
The third most popular option is “Refused to answer” with 6.52% of votes.


In Washington, D.C. as of 7:20 GMT (+3), 97.58% of respondents voted for 
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and 0,24% voted for Alexander Lukashenka. 

In New York, 96.15% voted for Tsikhanouskaya, and 0.79% for Lukashenka. 

The Exit Poll Abroad is an independent initiative that united Belarusians 
living in 23 countries, including the U.S. The purpose of the Exit Poll Abroad 
project is to ensure transparency and fairness of the Belarusian elections in 
2020. Projects like this one are outlawed in Belarus because of the legislative 
restrictions imposed on independent polling. 

For the first time in the 29-year history of independent Belarus the OSCE/ODIHR 
election observation mission was not monitoring the elections due to the 
failure of the Belarusian government to send invitations in due manner and on 
time. 

No independent members or representatives of alternative presidential 
candidates were registered as members of election commissions counting votes. 
Thousands of independent local observers were denied access to the polling 
stations, and dozens of them were detained by the police. 

The Exit Poll Abroad is a unique project which reveals the results of the 
Belarus Elections transparently and communicates these results to the world. 
The details of the exit polls methodology are explained in the attachment.

Please let us know if you have any questions, need more information or want to 
be connected with our spokesperson.

Thank you for your interest in Belarus!

Ihar Hrachyshka
Belarus Exit Poll-2020 in Washington, D.C.
669-377-6250
belarusexitpol...@gmail.com

Natalia Khatkouskaya 
Belarus Exit Poll-2020 in New-York
201-233-8753 
natallia.khatkousk...@gmail.com 

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Re: Minneapolis notebook: The terribly complex environment of 2020

[Keith Sanborn]

Dear Max,

You might want to direct your call for non-violence to the police, who on live 
tv tossed tear gas into a peaceful protest, attacked journalists and 
protesters. Or to the police agents provocateurs or to the out of town Bugaloo 
crowd responsible for a lot of the  destruction. Or to organized criminal gangs 
taking advantage of the chaos. Or even to the tiny Black Block before implying 
the protesters were somehow responsible for violence and damage to property. 
Before deploring violence in blanket fashion, you might want to sort out its 
precise origins and agents.

Keith 

> On Jun 5, 2020, at 10:35 AM, Max Herman  wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Recently I made a reference to a Native American historical archive that was 
> lost in the fires last week; some context and details are here:
> 
> https://www.migizi.org/
> 
> https://www.migizi.org/post/loss-of-home
> 
> https://www.nativebusinessmag.com/migizi-set-on-fire-during-minneapolis-protests-despite-flames-we-as-a-community-burn-brighter/
> 



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Re: The Communist Manifesto 2015 WTF

[Keith Sanborn]

Either Morlock was pranking or it's a case the greatest skeptics being the most 
gullible.




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Re: Latin as revolutionary act?

[Keith Sanborn]

Well, doesn’t one have to assume the proposition was presented as an ironic 
gesture?

I can’t really judge the sophistication of the schoolboy phrase presented on 
the basis of style but in the age of machine translation it was easily decoded 
by google translate. 

Consider the source. 

> On Nov 10, 2019, at 3:20 PM, Garnet Hertz  wrote:
> 
> 
> Retreating into a dead language is the most idiotic thing I've heard in a 
> while - unless this is a symbolic parody of how isolated much of the academic 
> humanities is. Why not just stick w the outdated 1970s critical theory that 
> everyone already regularly invokes?
> 
> Garnet Hertz
> 
> 
>> On Sun, Nov 10, 2019, 11:44 AM Iain Boal  wrote:
>> Eheu Sean,
>> 
>> As you say, 'Obscurity, especially in latin, is not a guarantee of 
>> anything.’  A training in Latin used to be regarded as a portal to the full 
>> resources of the English language, which is in effect a post-1066 
>> Anglo-Norman creole.  Historically this involved a training in “classics” 
>> (no accident that “classics” is cognate with “class”) and typically 
>> correlated with a privileged education.  
>> 
>> The Welsh critic and tribunus plebis Raymond Williams grappled head-on with 
>> the problem of English as a two-tiered diglossia. (He was looking in at 
>> English from the outside, approaching the language as a native Welsh 
>> speaker.) He saw clearly the problems produced by a language with class 
>> inscribed so deeply in the structure, and for that reason he suggested a 
>> regular column in the Tribune newspaper on 'difficult' words, especially 
>> those with polysyllabic Greek and Latin roots. The editors turned the 
>> proposal down, and so Williams published Keywords, never having had the 
>> chance to take on, in the pages of Tribune, what he thought was the 
>> disastrous policy of George Orwell, who had suggested that proletarians (or 
>> ‘nobodies’, in Morlock’s formula) stick to simple Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, 
>> more honest and less liable to fall into Stalinist obscurantism and 
>> gobbledegook. Williams considered this strategy a bogus and condescending 
>> populism that was all too easy a recommendation coming from the dissident 
>> Etonian and classical scholar Eric Blair. Ironically, learning Latin was, 
>> for Williams, a means to the precise antithesis of Morlock’s conceited 
>> proposal. 
>> 
>> Iain
>> 
>> 
>> On 10 Nov 2019, at 07:14, Sean Cubitt  wrote:
>> 
>> Eheu Morlock
>> 
>> sadly you picked the wrong language: the UK premiere B Johnson has made a 
>> habit of adding latin tags to his outrageous posh-boy persona behind which 
>> hides a refusal to publish a budget, the official financial predictions for 
>> Brexit, the results of an enquiry into alleged financial impropriety and the 
>> results of a major enquiry into Russian interference and donations to his 
>> party. Obscurity, especially in latin, is not a gurantee of anything
>> 
>> perhaps ancient Greek . . . 
>> 
>> Sean Cubitt
>> Goldsmiths, University of London
>> (U of Melbourne from Jan 2020)
>> From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
>> behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
>> Sent: 10 November 2019 11:00
>> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
>> Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 146, Issue 17
>>  
>> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
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>> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
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>> 
>> Today's Topics:
>> 
>>1. Latin as revolutionary act? (Morlock Elloi)
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> 
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2019 14:48:36 -0800
>> From: Morlock Elloi 
>> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
>> Subject:  Latin as revolutionary act?
>> Message-ID: <5dc74244.8090...@gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>> 
>> What would be consequences of using Latin language among 
>> group/clique/cabal/underground/elite for discourse, publishing, idea 
>> exchange, tweets? (let's ignore for the moment how does one get the 
>> above set to learn Latin)
>> 
>> First of all, the noise goes down, as there is intellectual effort 
>> barrier involved. Feeble-minded, distracted, low IQ, vacuous, and other 
>> nobodies are out. It would be like early Internet (1990s) - only nice 
>> and interesting people, no rabble. Only more resilient, because the 
>> 'price' of learning tongue will never go down, unlike computer equipment 
>> and access.
>> 
>> Second, the cross-pollution from deluge of mechanically augmented media 
>> firehoses goes way down. Language is the medium, and, of 

Re: Shame of going against the tribe

[Keith Sanborn]

Shd have said, “they do not have…” though the aggression of the masculinist 
discourse stinks of testosterone even if it shd not keep them out of competing 
in the Olympics under whatever gender flag they fly. 

> On May 3, 2019, at 9:59 PM, Keith Sanborn  wrote:
> 
> It a world of pseudo-futility, true nihilism has its uses. An acid test. 
> Though it is hard to credit observation without knowing the location of the 
> observer, I don’t think Morlock causes so much disruption to civil discourse 
> as to warrant exclusion. You can always simply ignore them. After all, as far 
> as we know, he does not have the codes for the nuclear football. 
> 
> Keith Sanborn 
> 
>>> On May 3, 2019, at 6:27 PM, Jaromil  wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, 29 Apr 2019, Joseph Rabie wrote:
>>> 
>>> Perhaps Morlock should be given the choice between coming out - that
>>> is to say, no longer hiding behind a pseudonym - or he should be
>>> asked to leave.
>> 
>> Has been a while since I spew my few poisoned bytes on the matter, not
>> without regret as in some romantic past I did enjoy the caustic mood
>> Morlock shared; and a certain taste for humor-noir (Andre' Breton
>> style?)
>> 
>> However, times have changed and the same cynical rethoric about iphone
>> and martini people has moved on different shores and topics, where the
>> blame is for supposed "SJWs" and the very term of social justice is
>> derided. I am afraid there will be more similar mutations and more
>> occasions for us to be disgusted.
>> 
>> However, there is no more mystery around who Morlock is. Not that it
>> would really make interesting news, nor anyone would jump on the
>> chair, however sooner or later someone will out him.
>> 
>> Not me. But I second Brian of course, Morlock's stuff rots the list.
>> The dark /dev/null corner in my procmail recipe is ready, but I don't
>> dare to put him there just yet, hoping one day the bar rises again.
>> 
>> ciao
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Re: Shame of going against the tribe

[Keith Sanborn]

It a world of pseudo-futility, true nihilism has its uses. An acid test. Though 
it is hard to credit observation without knowing the location of the observer, 
I don’t think Morlock causes so much disruption to civil discourse as to 
warrant exclusion. You can always simply ignore them. After all, as far as we 
know, he does not have the codes for the nuclear football. 

Keith Sanborn 

> On May 3, 2019, at 6:27 PM, Jaromil  wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 29 Apr 2019, Joseph Rabie wrote:
>> 
>> Perhaps Morlock should be given the choice between coming out - that
>> is to say, no longer hiding behind a pseudonym - or he should be
>> asked to leave.
> 
> Has been a while since I spew my few poisoned bytes on the matter, not
> without regret as in some romantic past I did enjoy the caustic mood
> Morlock shared; and a certain taste for humor-noir (Andre' Breton
> style?)
> 
> However, times have changed and the same cynical rethoric about iphone
> and martini people has moved on different shores and topics, where the
> blame is for supposed "SJWs" and the very term of social justice is
> derided. I am afraid there will be more similar mutations and more
> occasions for us to be disgusted.
> 
> However, there is no more mystery around who Morlock is. Not that it
> would really make interesting news, nor anyone would jump on the
> chair, however sooner or later someone will out him.
> 
> Not me. But I second Brian of course, Morlock's stuff rots the list.
> The dark /dev/null corner in my procmail recipe is ready, but I don't
> dare to put him there just yet, hoping one day the bar rises again.
> 
> ciao
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Re: Managing complexity?

[Keith Sanborn]

I have not read Castells, but your paraphrase brings an interesting memory to 
mind. The day after Brezhnev’s death, I found on the street in NYC, near the 
Mission of the USSR to the United Nations, a number of 16mm films, including 
B’s massive biopic, “Life Story of a Communist.” More interesting in this 
context was a short film called “Machine Construction in the Soviet Union.” In 
it, the latest achievements in computerization and applied robotics were 
extolled. The configuration of devices depicted was symptomatic of a certain 
kind of “oversight” in both senses: it was a computer controlled-robot which 
assembled with great precision mechanical wrist watches. Further East, the 
first Casio watches were soon to appear. 

Keith Sanborn 

> On Mar 30, 2019, at 4:19 PM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> The idea that the current global disorder results from a failure to manage 
> complexity is an elegant formulation. It offers a concise guide through a 
> welter of contradictions, ranging from domestic political squabbles all the 
> way to inter-state disputes, declines in corporate profit rates and 
> ecological breakdowns. Plus, where could one find a more striking observation 
> than that of Manuel Castells, when he says that the Soviet Union fell into 
> terminal stagnation due to its inability to produce a personal computer 
> industry? After all, computers bring order to large amounts of data, and 
> personal computers extend that ordering capacity to ever larger amounts of 
> people. Maybe a better computer (AI) could solve our present problems?
> 
> However, the surging sense of intellectual mastery brought by the phrase, 
> "managing complexity," declines percipitously when you try to define either 
> "management" or "complexity." The latter is vexing because  the disorder 
> comes from so many sources: faulty airplane equipment, disgruntled voters in 
> the north of England, the harvesting of behavioral data by Internet 
> companies, persistent trade imbalances between Germany and Southern Europe, 
> the volatile relations of US and North Korean leaders, etc. When exactly does 
> complexity get bloody complicated, and for whom?
> 
> Management looks easier to define, since it's just about resolving problems. 
> But how do we even know what counts as resolution? Is Kim Jong Un his own 
> self-contained problem or is he inseparable from nuclear proliferation, the 
> rearmement of Japan, Iranian centrifuges, the emergence of a Chinese 
> blue-water navy and the US "pivot to Asia"? Is all that international 
> complexity even an issue, or is it just a distraction from the more urgent 
> conundrums of feminism and race relations? Who decides and why does their 
> decision matter? Is it a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty situation where a 
> clear definition of resolution makes a full enumeration of complexity 
> impossible, and vice versa?
> 
> Felix, I am totally curious about how one could redo, for the present 
> conjuncture, Castells' fascinating observations about the Western countries' 
> long search for new ways to manage complexity in the 70s and 80s. Does one 
> first need to define a systemic order in which certain phenomena become too 
> complex? Does one need to develop categories allowing for the identification 
> of significant perturbations? Do the complexities also have to be sorted as 
> to scale? Are there functional or normative criteria that could help one 
> decide when complexity is sufficiently well managed? How could one create an 
> anticipatory image of a new (meta)stable state? How to develop a practical 
> approach to the spiraling chaos of the present?
> 
> best, Brian
> 
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Re: scaling the humiliation

[Keith Sanborn]

The dualism is so Debordian: the integrated spectacle has split again into 
slightly mutually contaminated variants of the concentrated and diffuse 
spectacles. 

> On Feb 14, 2019, at 6:33 PM, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> Rampant hypocrisy aside, it's interesting to note that regulating MAGAf would 
> result in the almost exact "chinese" model as it is today. Which may explain 
> the rabid opposition to it from the surveillance-industrial complex.
> 
> For those that didn't pay attention, what Huawei is accused of was never 
> confirmed, but collusion between Cisco (our "good guys") and the government 
> was confirmed:
> 
> https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/internet-privacy/snowden--the-nsa-planted-backdoors-in-cisco-products.htm
> https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/21/nsa-technique-for-cisco-spying/
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden
> 
> The whole thing boils down to data harvesting and channeling rights. Like 
> water rights, they will shape the future.
> 
> 
>> On 2/14/19, 14:21, Roel Roscam Abbing wrote:
>> The global internet is splitting in two.
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Re: Taking sides

[Keith Sanborn]

One can say gender and identity are de facto markers of disenfranchisement and 
hence of class. It is the understanding of “class” which needs deeper analysis. 
And it is the undoing of hierarchies of gender and identity within class 
struggle which might make possible future advances. 

On Nov 6, 2018, at 8:24 AM, Alice Yang  wrote:

>> These two young women do they exactly what I have been asking for, they put 
>> class first and identities second and thereby arrive at a Marxist analysis 
>> of contemporary society from which we can build a proper left for the future.
> 
> God! Asking women to put a gender and race neutral class first and “identity” 
> second is asking them to support masculinity over themselves!
> 
> I also support removing or banning Alexander Bard from the list.
> 
> Alice 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Nov 6, 2018, at 6:50 AM, David Garcia 
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> Yes please. This tiny splinter of the  community says. 
>> Bard just stop.
>> 
>> David 
>> 
>>> On 6 Nov 2018, at 04:30, Lunenfeld, Peter B.  
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello All -
>>> 
>>> Bard asked if the  community wanted him to cease and desist. My 
>>> vote is yes. Not only are his politics abhorrent, he’s not here to engage 
>>> in dialogue at all, from what I gleaned from his shit-postings. He’s just a 
>>> typist with a broadband connection and a Tourette twitch that compels him 
>>> to type “Marxist” and “Rousseauvian” every 45th and 48th word. Fuck his 
>>> Charlottesville nazi-coddling and fuck him.
>>> 
>>> Kudos, Ted -
>>> 
>>> Peter
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>> 
 On Nov 5, 2018, at 7:08 PM, tbyfield  wrote:
 
 On 6 Nov 2018, at 3:50, Ryan Griffis wrote:
 
>> I take neither side at Charlottesville
> 
> Need anyone say more?
 
 Nope. 'Charlottesville' was a neo-nazi riot in which a person was 
 murdered. That's a good reason to take a side — against neo-nazis. To not 
 take a side is, in effect, to condone that murder. I think it's reasonable 
 to say that condoning murders, however indirectly, crosses a clear line on 
 this list. For that reason, I just flipped the mod switch on Bard: his 
 messages will be held for review. He's given us a lot to think about 
 lately, so reviewing new ones won't be a high priority.
 
 This decision is mine alone — I haven't talked with Felix about it.
 
 Comments and criticisms are warmly welcome.
 
 Cheers,
 Ted
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Re: Quick Review..

[Keith Sanborn]

It is a suitable conflation, considering the reductive appropriation by Nazis 
of F. Nietzsche. 

> On Sep 11, 2018, at 4:43 PM, bronac ferran  wrote:
> 
> Happens all the time 
> "There are also red secrets in the world, actually, only reds.
> Notices about Filtered Results
> 
> 
>> On 11 September 2018 at 14:10, David Garcia 
>>  wrote:
>> Whoops
>> Sorry yes it should have read Hermann Nitsch
>> 
>>> On 11 Sep 2018, at 14:02, bronac ferran  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Has Hermann become Friedrich here? 
>>> Or is it vice versa? 
>>> 
 On 11 September 2018 at 08:56, David Garcia 
  wrote:
 Yes thanks Florian- so interesting to read this mangling of Gramsci by 
 Yiannopolous. The extraordinary images of him cavorting in a bath of 
 pig’s blood in a scandalously naive (or simply cynical) NY Chelsea 
 gallery, purportedly 
 mourning the lives lost to Islamic fundementalism- he looked for all the 
 world  like 
 a "bargain basement" Herman Nietzsche. This plumbed new depths of 
 shock/kitch (is 
 that a genre there days- looking at Yiannopolous’s erstwhile friend Lucien 
 Wintrich 
 photo series Twinks for Trump its beginning to look that way). 
 Actually this hides the more serious development that Yiannopolous’s 
 tactics have 
 re-purposed the venerable Camp sensibility which he cleverly connects with 
 Lulz, as 
 sharing the ability to be shocking whilst simultaneously using their 
 respective modes 
 as solvents to neutralize moral indignation. 
 
 1. A couple of asides at the end of last year Wolfgang Streeck wrote a very
 interesting piece for London review of Books called ‘You Need a Gun’ which 
 argued that Gramsci concept of hegemony could not be understood if it were 
 seen 
 to be coercion free- but that coercion takes many forms with violence as a 
 background 
 option always available if all else fails. Though there is much that there 
 may be much 
 that Bannon and the other Gramscian’s of the new American far right get 
 wrong but this 
 is one aspect they have understood quite well. 
 
 2. This is quite tenuous association but listening to your talk I thought 
 of the English Marxist
 philosopher Peter Dews’s book -The Idea of Evil- interrogates a certain 
 bias in history 
 and political thought that ‘people who are pessiistic about human nature 
 tend to be 
 right wing, while left wing thinkers tend to be optimistic about human 
 nature (in Dews’s 
 view naively so) in a recent interview Dews declared that he wanted to 
 disrupt this 
 alignment.. Whilst listening to your talk in Berlin I wondered if there 
 was something like an 
 exploration of the affective consequences of such a re-alignment in your 
 talk and the questions 
 that this might ask of us.
 
 Best
 
 David 
 
 
 

> On 10 Sep 2018, at 23:58, Florian Cramer  wrote:
> 
> Thanks, David - as I said in the discussion in Berlin, Stewart and I 
> ended up
> in a weird place where we practically taught the "Alt-Right" its own 
> history.
> One shouldn't read too much into its grasp of Gramsci though. This is 
> what Milo
> Yiannopolous wrote about him in the original manuscript of his book
> 'Dangerous' (that Simon & Schuster ended up not publishing):
> And so, in the 1920s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci decided that the
> time had come for a new form of revolution -- one based on culture, not
> class. According to Gramsci, the reason why the proletariat had failed to
> rise up was because old, conservative ideas like loyalty to one's country,
> family values, and religion held too much sway in working-class 
> communities.
> If that sounds familiar to Obama's comment about guns and religion, that's
> because it should. His line of thinking, as we shall see, is directly
> descended from the ideological tradition of Gramsci. Gramsci argued that 
> as a
> precursor to revolution, the old traditions of the west -- or the 
> 'cultural
> hegemony,' as he called it -- would have to be systematically broken 
> down. To
> do so, Gramsci argued that "proletarian" intellectuals should seek to
> challenge the dominance of traditionalism in education and the media, and
> create a new revolutionary culture. Gramsci's ideas would prove 
> phenomenally
> influential. If you've ever wondered why forced to take diversity or 
> gender
> studies courses at university, or why your professors all seem to hate
> western civilization ... Well ' ..new you knew who to blame Gramsci.
> (Because of the lawsuit, the manuscript is publicly available here:
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjc0n5dll244o2w/Milo%20Y%20book%20with%20edits.pdf?dl=0
> )
> -F
> --
> blog: 

Re: Mechanical Turkish

[Keith Sanborn]

A simple matter of an algorithm. I almost said automation 

> On Jan 28, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Morlock Elloi  wrote:
> 
> The Ludovico Technique has certainly been improved.
> 
> I wonder if the handset operators have already started to time and serve 
> political/ideological content in sync with positive (or negative) social 
> messaging: you receive a message from child/lover - and at the same time link 
> to the article praising neoliberal something is displayed; or, you receive a 
> hate message, and at the same time something about Russia or China is 
> mentioned.
> 
> They probably have, it seems obvious, and very hard to detect. In business 
> parlance: the low hanging fruit.
> 
>> Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange after he has been subjected to aversion
>> therapy. But without the personal melodrama.
> 
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Re: Mechanical Turkish

[Keith Sanborn]

Reading the report—shd I call it that?—I kept thinking of Bataille: the impact 
of facing up to, or facing down images of extreme violence, sexuality, or 
sexual violence. Bataille’s contemplation of the image of the 100 cuts 
(so-called). But without the space or time for contemplation and the creation 
of meaning or the experience of the lack of it,  the experience of the content 
moderator can only be numbing and deeply damaging. Like Alex in A Clockwork 
Orange after he has been subjected to aversion therapy. But without the 
personal melodrama. I can only wonder what the average longevity in their job 
is of the content moderator. Wd the digital natives fare any better than the 
digital immigrants who have had experience of “the real”?

Keith Sanborn

> On Jan 27, 2018, at 7:01 PM, Morlock Elloi <morlockel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Agree. It's about machine-mediated 'socializing', not about who runs it.
> 
> As I mentioned earlier, open sourcing/democratizing the dystopia is not 
> solving anything - it might even make it worse.
> 
> 
>> On 1/27/18, 14:24, Florian Cramer wrote:
>> Thanks for sharing this. None of the issues described in this write-up
>> can be blamed on the corporate ownership of the currently popular social
>> media. If people used Open Source, community-owned and community-run
>> social media instead (like, for example, Mastodon or diaspora), there
>> would be the same problems or worse.
> 
> 
> 
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Re: Catalonia And Brexit: The Same Nationalism

[Keith Sanborn]

I wonder how the potus wd handle a California or New York independence vote? 
Since he’s trying his best to fragment and crash the country, he might welcome 
it.

> On Oct 9, 2017, at 7:50 AM, "i...@conservas.tk"  wrote:
> 
> I absolutely agree with the content, but ... really? I'm not allowed to do a 
> flame and troll the title of this mail? ;P
> 
> 1 small Example: Catalan independentism is mainly pro european and often no 
> nationalist. They are far to be the same...
> 
>> El 7/10/17 a las 19:15, Siegel Allan escribió:
>> Hello,
>> A reasonable appraisal of the situation:
>> 
>> “The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, will not enter the history books 
>> as an enlightened leader. However, when in 2014 he had to decide to allow 
>> the Scottish referendum, he used his brain and opened the door for the 
>> referendum. It took place on October 14, 2014. Only 45% of the Scots voted 
>> for independence. The contrast with the referendum in Catalonia could not be 
>> greater. The Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy stupidly decided to use violence 
>> to prevent a referendum in Catalonia, despite the fact that a peaceful 
>> referendum would most probably have led to a similar outcome as in Read 
>> Here: https://www.socialeurope.eu/catalonia-brexit-nationalism”
>> 
>> Allan
>> P   Nyomtatás előtt gondoljunk a természetre! Please consider the 
>> environment before printing this email.
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Re: New "thought rhythms'

[Keith Sanborn]

The displacements in artistic labor are at once predictable—at least in « the 
West »—and often merely generation. What interests me more is what you might 
call the grandfather effect. Where a new generation goes in search of an 
artistic forbearer. It cd be an heroic forbearer two generations back or a 
marginalized artist of the previous generation who can be configured, or “read” 
or even misread as a precursor to the current generation who offers them a kind 
of pa- or maternity, a way into art historical legitimacy. This legitimator 
will be given new interest and even shown along side their work. A case in 
point is the “discovery” of John Baldessari by the “pictures generation” 
artists in ny, some of whom had studied with Baldessari at Calarts, notably 
David Salle, who also lead the charge for the rediscovery of Picabia in the US. 
Baldessari’s career reached new heights after this “discovery.”

One’s father, it seems, is better ignored than killed. 

> On Oct 4, 2017, at 10:42 PM, David ca  wrote:
> 
> This has been going on forever in popular music--maybe *all* music, and 
> probably all art, for that matter.
> 
> Every new musical generation that comes along inevitably has some 
> spokespeople who really want you to know that the previous generations, 
> especially the generation they're bent on displacing, are a bunch of 
> dinosaurs and jokers. "Get out of the way!" You can practically set your 
> watch by it.
> 
> Sometimes the revolutionaries show how revolutionary they are by re-making a 
> dinosaur classic in the new style-that-will-live forever. I put together a 
> piece on this subject for the Rumpus a few years ago, though it appears the 
> YouTube links are now broken. The affectless, cold-wave Flying Lizards doing 
> the R classic "Money," Riot Grrrls Lunachicks eviscerating cock-rock 
> neanderthals Bad Company, Sid Vicious doing *Sinatra* (OMFG):
> 
> https://therumpus.net/2012/10/heres-what-we-think-of-your-classic/
> 
> I would also claim that insurmountable differences between warring musical 
> schools often get flattened out over time, so that twenty years later people 
> can't understand what all the fighting was about. But that's another story.
> 
>   --Dave.
> 
> 
>> On Oct 4, 2017, at 5:58 AM, David Garcia 
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> New "thought rhythms'- announce the fact that Rock (including Punk) is dead. 
>> 
>> The old rhymes of largely white indy (largely white) guitar bands superseded 
>> by Hip Hop and Grime.. 
>> As my kids grow up I realise that though I can hear that the UK movement 
>> Grime and US Hip Hop 
>> are powerful .. on some level honestly.. deep in my bones.. I just don't get 
>> it yet. I'm stuck in the past. 
>> 
>> This sensation was summed up in recent essay by Martin Amis who asserts that 
>> it is natural that older 
>> writers should find younger writers irritating because younger writers are 
>> sending them an un-welcome message ..
>> they are saying its not like that anymore its like this”.. he goes on that 
>> in the present context “that and this” can be 
>> loosely described as the –thought rhythms- peculiar to the time-.. I love 
>> the term "thought rhythms".. It crystallises 
>> what we respond to in writing and indeed any art form. As implicit in the 
>> "thought rhythms” peculiar to any era are the 
>> distinctive values, moral, social and aesthetic.. And is it too pessimistic 
>> for me to feel that when they move on they 
>> move on they leave previous generations floundering or worse still faking an 
>> appreciation they don't actually feel. 
>> 
>> Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say.
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> 
> --
> Dave Mandl
> david.ma...@gmail.com
> da...@wfmu.org
> Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
> Twitter: @dmandl
> Instagram: dmandl
> 
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Re: [spectre] the EU's first rogue state

[Keith Sanborn]

Rupture or rapture: limited nuclear war is an oxymoron, no matter who believes 
it to be meaningful. 

> On Aug 14, 2017, at 7:29 AM, Morlock Elloi  wrote:
> 
> Urban populations ... no one will waste nukes on peasants. Peasants and the 
> ruling class will survive.
> 
> Do a search on "luxury shelters" or "doomsday bunkers" - from $1MM to $40MM a 
> pop. It doesn't matter if they will work or not - what matters is that the 
> buyers believe they will, and these buyers are the ones making the nuking 
> decisions.
> 
> Between the Silicon Valley psychopaths working on personal immortality, 5 
> megacorps amassing trillions in cash and not spending it, and the top 0.001% 
> becoming preppers, it's obvious that there is a general belief among the 
> ruling class that these tumultuous times will end in some kind of rupture, 
> and they are getting ready. No one likes the times we live in. I don't have 
> any doubts that those of them loosely identifying as "Americans" will opt for 
> the nuclear gamble if faced with losing the imperial status. They are 
> certainly ready to play the nuclear gamble for far less - like losing the 
> elections.
> 
>> On 8/13/17, 19:44, Thomas Keenan wrote:
>> "A limited nuclear war" ... limited to whom?
> 
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Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[Keith Sanborn]

This is nicely put. And your point about context is especially apt. It's
comparable—though not identical—to the liberal misunderstanding which
attempts to substitute "All lives matter" for "Black lives matter." The
matter is context: Science is systematically under attack as Black
people are systemically under attack in the US. One has to note that
while the military/police state is mounting rising numbers of attacks on
us all, it has an especial affinity for attacking minorities, both
currently and historically. These are legacies of slavery, colonialism,
and other exercises of hieratchical power. 

Ironically, in the us, the right and its growing allies in the state
began with an attack on "secular humanists," the easier target— since
both have roots in textual exegesis— before attacking climate science
and attempting to substitute "creation science" for "hard science." One
of their typical popular arguments is to fix on the word "theory" in
"the theory of evolution" and reduce it to the popular sense of "theory"
as "opinion" as in, "Well that's your theory."

Keith Sanborn

> On Apr 24, 2017, at 12:25 AM, Prem Chandavarkar <prem@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> It is a problem when an issue is polarised across two extremes without
> exploring some substantive middle ground.  Am reading Thomas Nagel,
> whose views are quite useful on this subject.  He argues that the
> objective viewpoint that science prescribes is extremely useful, but
> ifyou extend this viewpoint to all of truth, then it is destructive.
> Scientific objectivism only allows intelligence and is relatively
> impotent in handling consciousness.
 <...>

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Re: CEU

[Keith Sanborn]

How can I add my name to a letter of support, or to whom shd I address a letter 
of support for CEU? I did not find that information on the links provided. Did 
I miss it?

Keith Sanborn

> On Apr 3, 2017, at 7:49 AM, János Sugár <s...@c3.hu> wrote:
> 
> (btw in Hungary only government politicians and right wing-media calls CEU as 
> Soros university)
> 


<...>



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Re: BComu Global: America needs a network of rebel cities

[Keith Sanborn]

While this is good to remember, it is not the only step to take.

It reminds me eerily of the last ditch claims of "states' rights" in the 1960s 
in attempting to resist the enforcement of the voting rights act. Think: George 
Wallace on the steps of the Alabama Governor's Mansion, or the blocking of the 
entrance to the University of Mississippi by State Troopers. The rhetoric 
constructs it as an attack on local sovereignty, which it is. It's a short step 
from there to water canons and police dogs, the kind deployed in Mississippi in 
the past and employed now against the sovereign nations resisting the Dakota 
Access Pipeline. 

If Brexit goes forward, I think Scotland will exit the UK and possibly Northern 
Ireland. In short, the breakup of the UK. 

Those seem not to be viable options in the US. The US Civil War was fought over 
just such concerns. Or maybe we will see the break up of the United States? 
That wd be a wet dream for the radical right. 

It is a strategy also employed by the far right as they attempted to resist the 
civil right of marriage equality: passing discriminatory state and local 
legislation, the kind that backfired economically on Mike Pence and North 
Carolina. In the latter case, things fell into place only after the supreme 
court—in the majority radical right wing—made an unequivocal decision. I am not 
against this strategy but it is not enough.

New York State by an executive order by Mario Cuomo and a radical pro-Likud 
lobbying group prohibits the state of new york from doing business with any 
firms participating in the BDS movement against the Israeli occupation of the 
West Bank. This underscores just how powerful a weapon economic boycotts can 
be. We cannot allow this weapon to be taken away from us. Boycotting the red 
states economically is an option. A difficult complex one, but one with effect. 

We need to resist at every level to slow down the swing to the right in the us 
and abroad. It will become more difficult to resist with each day and the 
consequences more dire.

The final irony—for the moment—is that while in the transformation from what 
might be called the "dualistic" spectacle (my way of referring to Debord's 
formulation of the concentrated vs the diffuse soectacle) to the integrated 
spectacle, China moved closer to capitalism for growth, Europe, the US, 
Australia, et al. have moved closer to China and Russia in authoritarianism. 

Keith Sanborn

> On Nov 28, 2016, at 11:51 AM, Sandra Braman <bramansan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Over 350 cities in the US took the position that they would not go along
> with particular provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.
> 
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Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

[Keith Sanborn]

A lot of theorectical speculation. One of my female students had this 
experience, the day after Trump was elected. She was walking down the street 
around 14th street, on the West side in New York. A man approached her and 
said: “Now I can grab your pussy any time I want.” She is afraid to go outside. 
This isn’t the friend, or the friend of a friend, or an ubran myth, but from 
the mouth of the person who experienced it first hand.

This isn’t some cracker in rural Arkansas, but a cracker in New York City. He 
may have lost the state, but he has lots of sympathizers and opportunists even 
in New York City. The assaults on Muslims that followed Trump’s “election” are 
already well documented. There will be many more. This is an uprising on the 
very far white right. The angry white young men with no future, just like their 
parents, betrayed by neo-liberalism. They are making the future for all of us. 
This is thuggery and Mussolinian fascism.

There are very dark days ahead in the wake of the Trump victory.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

It IS worse than you are making it out to be.

Keith Sanborn



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Re: Arrest Warrant Issued for Amy Goodman in North Dakota After Covering

[Keith Sanborn]

Amy Goodman showed courage by being there and her reporting may have helped 
deescalate the violence deployed against the protesters but click on the link 
and watch the video of the protesters, who kept their heads, who refused 
violence, who cd have killed the dogs, dogs with their own blood dripping from 
their mouths, on the spot.

Everyone showed courage, except the company goons, who used dogs for proxy 
violence, who themselves are only proxies for the tar sands oil companies and 
the pipeline builders. 

I am old enough to remember Mississippi in the 1960s and the dogs unleashed on 
those asserting their right to be. The parallels are too great to ignore, only 
now it is the corporate state who metes out violence, instead of the juridical 
state. And since it's public land, the legal state, through its own special 
conduit for violence, the Army, who made the decision to allow the pipeline to 
go on, is still the ultimate author of the violence committed against the 
protesters, in the Name of "We the People," as we say here in the ussa. 



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Re: Adam Phillips > Doomsday Savior? How Paul Ryan Will Pick the Next President

[Keith Sanborn]

This strategy can be defeated, but with grave consequences:

1. The Democrats obtain a majority in the Senate. 

2. The Democrats refuse to attend the House of Representatives until
January 3rd. At that time the next clause of 12th Amendment kicks in and
then the 20th Amendment and now we are in deep shit, because the 20th
Amendment seems to conflict with the remainder of the 12th. Unless the
Senate, as specified in the last part of the 12th Amendment chooses the
Vice President who acts as President indefinitely.

3. However, Republicans in the Senate can refuse to attend the Senate so
no quorum can be met. And there is no stated time limit here. 

4. We are then thrown back to the vague language of the 20th Amendment
whereby the Congress, i.e. both parties together choose the President.

5. More deep shit: Republican House v. Democratic Congress. In an era of
division we are thrown into a Constitutional crisis which a deadlocked
Supreme Court cannot resolve. 

Is Mitch McConnell is in effect creating the groundwork for a coup
d'??tat?

Keith Sanborn

> On Mar 18, 2016, at 11:45 AM, nettime's_workaround <nett...@kein.org> wrote:
> 
> < 
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-nicholas-phillips/doomsday-savior-how-paul-ryan_b_9474788.html
>  >
> 
> Doomsday Savior? How Paul Ryan Will Pick the Next President
 <...>

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Re: Tagging Banksy: Using Geographic Profiling to Investigate a Modern Art Mystery

[Keith Sanborn]

It wd be interesting to see these techniques applied to areas of high
levels of police violence to solidify the links to particular precinct
houses, i.e. police stations. Then, one might try a reverse correlation
starting with the addresses of police officers in that station and
seeing whether particular originating districts were more prone to
produce violent officers. 

Keith Sanborn

> On Mar 4, 2016, at 8:02 AM, nettime's evil scientist <nett...@kein.org> wrote:
> 
> The pseudonymous artist Banksy is one of the UK?s most successful
> contemporary artists, but his identity remains a mystery. Here, we use
> a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) model of geographic profiling, a
> mathematical technique developed in criminology and finding increasing
> application within ecology and epidemiology, to analyse the spatial
> patterns of Banksy artworks in Bristol and London. The model takes as
> input the locations of these artworks, and calculates the probability
> of ?offender? residence across the study area. Our analysis highlights
> areas associated with one prominent candidate (e.g., his home),
> supporting his identification as Banksy. More broadly, these results
> support previous suggestions that analysis of minor terrorism-related
> acts (e.g., graffiti) could be used to help locate terrorist bases
> before more serious incidents occur, and provides a fascinating
> example of the application of the model to a complex, real-world problem.
 <...>

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Re: nettime Spanish woman fined €800 for po

[Keith Sanborn]

Franco is back from the dead and bigger than ever. 


 On Aug 19, 2015, at 6:25 AM, nettime's gagged reader nett...@kein.org wrote:
 
 
 Stephen Burgen in Barcelona
 Sunday 16 August 2015 12.09 BST
 Last modified on Monday 17 August 2015 00.00 BST
 
 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/16/spanish-woman-fined-gagging-law-photographing-police
 


...



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Re: nettime nottime: the end of nettime

[Keith Sanborn]

April folz!

 On Apr 1, 2015, at 1:35 AM, nettime mod squad nett...@kein.org wrote:
 
 Dear Nettimers, present and past --
 ...


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Re: nettime Call for publication of all Snowden papers gets louder

[Keith Sanborn]

I think Geert is right to call for the full publication of the Snowden
dossier.

1. We don't know what else is in it. So far it's been interesting
and important. We shd know the horizons of what Snowden saw and was
able to take away. It will allow us to know more and possibly to gain
perspective on his choices.

2. Who cares if it's only a partial sampling? Isn't everything limited
that is edited either by accident or design?

3. Cdnt it be done in Germany or Russia, or some other sovereign
state outside the reach of US Imperial power? Whether cynical or not
in their motives for hosting such a document? There are problems in
relying on any state actor, but they are the only ones who can't
be shut down by the state in which they are located. I wd suggest
a Tor site but that now seems to be a fantasy of anonymity rather
than a reality. Perhaps there are non- or pseudo-state actors who cd
publish the documents. Unofficially but with enough tacit support for
a limited amount of time to let the cat out of the bag.

4. It wd be interesting to see what effect the release of the
documents wd have on Internet traffic worldwide. To see who and how
many wd care enough to download the documents. Cd one person even
with a very fast connection download them all? Then there's The I'm
Spartacus! effect. Does the US Government really want to out itself
as being opposed to the free flow of information in such an obvious
public way? Or wd they just chose a few to make examples of them pour
encourager les autres.

5. Even if it can't be done, it shd be done for reason #1. 

Keith



 On Nov 17, 2014, at 2:36 PM, Molly Hankwitz
mollyhankw...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi Ted, Thanks for this long set of ideas. I guess I was naively
 thinking or assuming --and thinking Geert was championing, to some
 extent, with grateful acknowledgement of his past collaborative
 accomlpishments in to publishing from the networks so to speak
 ---that by publishing the leaked information that Snowden list his
 citizenship for, that (we) could demonstrate support for free press,
 against censorship, against surveillance with a re-circulation which
 would escape the silence, even of colleagues numbed out on Google,
 NSA, etcover response to Snowden--


...





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Re: nettime Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of Highbrow Journalism.

[Keith Sanborn]

What occurs to me in this affair, is the New Yorker's presumption of its own 
cutting edge originality. The editors assumed they were going to the source, or 
at least the best informed and most highly pedigreed (read: fashionable) 
journalist when they went to Morozov.

The New Yorker has never been terribly strong on footnotes but their fact 
checkers were clearly out of their depth: they had no idea how even to research 
Morozov's claims, let alone to realize he was lifting the major arguments of 
his piece from elsewhere without suitable attribution. Or were just too lazy or 
poorly trained to do so. 

M simulated journalistic authenticity well enough to their poorly trained or 
indifferent eyes, they didn't go back to the sources to check the quotes.

Wd they even have known what questions to ask? Or if they did, wd they bother 
to make certain the words quoted were uttered directly to M and not to the 
author he quotes without attribution. Or did they care? Was it enough to 
satisfy their low standards, that the quotes were correct and not that they 
were not direct?

The bottom line: this is lazy failed journalism as it is widely practiced 
on-line by people who've simply handed over editorial discretion to those who 
have no idea what it is—or worse the print people have abdicated their own role 
as editors because they are fooled by the form and know nothing about the 
content.

The BBC news writing on the website is a model of sloppy journalism down to 
sentence structure and grammar; it seems at best only to go through a spell 
check before going live. And sometimes not even that. But then journalism has 
very infrequently possessed anything like what might be called integrity.

Keith Sanborn

 On Oct 20, 2014, at 10:32 AM, t byfield tbyfi...@panix.com wrote:

 John (H), I'm not sure how it helps anyone to say that the declining
 editorial quality of a posh magazine is inexorably linked in some
 thermodynamicky way with the ultimate fate of the universe.
 ...


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Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?

[Keith Sanborn]

It wd be interesting to make public how that figures into actuarial tables. 

 On Apr 14, 2014, at 5:02 AM, mp m...@aktivix.org wrote:
 
 On 14/04/14 09:58, Felix Stalder wrote:
 
 We continue to feel this product will differentiate itself with
 existing wearable products primarily from a health perspective with a
 number of key innovations including noninvasive blood cell count and
 blood pressure and other more pedestrian features like heart rate,
 
 ---and of course wearing a wifi/gps device is really good for you.
 ...


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Re: nettime Douglas Belkin, Caroline Porter: Corporate Cash Alters University Curricula (WSJ)

[Keith Sanborn]

Wonder how long that specific skill set will last before those who invested 
their time and lives in it are chucked out in the trash. Meanwhile their Ivy 
League managers with less specialization will continue to adapt and to reign. 
These are the new cyberserfs. Learning security at a University wd seem 
ludicrous if it weren't a waste of people's lives. Database programmers will 
not be the engineers of the future but the machinists and without unions. 

 On Apr 13, 2014, at 2:54 AM, Patrice Riemens patr...@xs4all.nl wrote:


 Here an 'objectivist' description of the phenomenon that regularly stirs
 up the discussion on this list. Kind of reality check on mainstream
 oppinion.
 ...


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Re: nettime Post-Postism,

[Keith Sanborn]

It's sometimes difficult to distinguish between a Luddite geezer (in
the Ame rican sense) and a person of age and wisdom with an historical
perspective.

...



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Re: nettime The Californian Reality (from: New Geography)

[Keith Sanborn]

Though there are ups and downs, the numbers published here do support
your interpretation of a general downward trend.

 On Jan 23, 2014, at 6:33 AM, Matthew White m...@vne.net wrote:

 On Jan 21, 2014 11:48 PM, Keith Sanborn mrz...@panix.com wrote:

 Where do your numbers come from!

 Here are some numbers compiled from the NTSB.

 http://www.aopa.org/About-AOPA/Statistical-Reference-Guide/General-Aviation-Safety-Record-Current-and-Historic.aspx
 ...


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Re: nettime The Californian Reality (from: New Geography)

[Keith Sanborn]

One detail, which begs others: California was NOT historically the
birthplace of mass entertainment. That dubious honor belongs to the
combined forces of NY and NJ. The industry moved west to avoid the grip of
the motion picture patents trust, for better year round conditions for
filming outside and in order to better bootleg existing product. I wonder
how many other details are incorrect in this essay? Not that the basic
narrative of stabilizing class divisions and downward mobility is not true.
The elephants in the room are the breaking of the unions (starting with
Reagan's breaking of the air-traffic controllers, a blow still being felt
both as implied threat and lowered safety of air travel in the us) and the
off-shoring of the jobs in the industries where unions were strongest.

The new oligarchs are frequently Randians, radical right libertarians,
when they are not Straussian elitists. They are hardly conservatives, a
term which has grown both useless and deceptive as it covers the radical
right aggressions of the Koch brothers with the mask of classical old
school stability and respectability. Defending traditional values like
the rule of elites through conscious mass-deception, slavery and wage
slavery, racism, the relegation of non-heteronormative behavior to pariah
status and the repression of women to the biological determinism of child
bearing along with corporate personhood.

Even this portrayal of things in Ronnie's home state is vastly understated.


 On Jan 21, 2014, at 5:05 PM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 In 2009 I had a visceral experience of the world described in this post.
 ...


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nettime Fwd: [mfalist] More Rotterdam

[Keith Sanborn]

Begin forwarded message:

   From: Keith J. Sanborn ksanb...@princeton.edu
   Date: January 15, 2014 at 6:20:11 PM EST
   To: mfal...@bard.edu mfal...@bard.edu mfal...@bard.edu
   Subject: [mfalist] More Rotterdam
   Reply-To: Keith J. Sanborn ksanb...@princeton.edu
   
   For any of you who might happen to be in the vicinity, there will be a
   day-long symposium (10h-16h) on Monday January 27 around the exhibition
   called Post-Script (in which I have a piece) at the Piet Zwart Institute
   featuring talks by Rick Prelinger, Pablo Sigg, and yours truly.
   
   Here the official press release:
   
   Dates: Monday 27th January
   
   Doors Open at 10:30 and lectures begin at 11:00
   
   POST SCRIPT
   
   A symposium organized by the Piet Zwart Institute, Creating 010  The
   43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam Location: Karel Doormanhof 45
   
   3012GC Rotterdam
   
   POST SCRIPT is a symposium exploring contemporary approaches to
   narrative.  Organized within the context of the IFFR, the Master Media
   Design and Communication programme, in collaboration with Creating 010,
   has invited significant moving-image artists and filmmakers to talk
   about their work and strategies of representing stories. 
   
   Working with new and archival material, montage and found footage, these
   contemporary practices employ the languages of art, cinema, theatre,
   documentary and fiction in unexpected ways. 
   
   Rather than being driven by conventional storytelling or a script, they
   are often non-linear, fragmentary and rely upon the viewer to lend
   cohesion and continuity. Gaps are not omissions, but rather
   choreographed spaces for projection, induced memories, and public
   participation. In other words, these artists not only test narrative as
   a variable form, but also expand the notion of spectatorship.
   
   
   Confirmed Speakers:
   
   Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker.  He is best known
   as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 60,000
   educational, industrial, and sponsored films acquired by the Library of
   Congress in 2002.  His recent work, No More Road Trips? is a
   live-performance, interactive film presentation culled from home movies
   of American car trips and family vacations spanning the 20th century.
   Like most of his 8mm and Super 8mm source material, Road Trips has no
   sound:  the audience provide real-time audio commentary.
   
   Pablo Sigg is a filmmaker and writer based in Mexico City. He has
   exhibited in venues such as the Museum of the Center for Curatorial
   Studies, BARD College, Museo de Arte Contempor??nea de Vigo, and Lule??
   Art Biennial . He is also author of the books Zarathustra. Estudios
   nietzscheanos, Georges Bataille: Meditaciones nietzscheanas, and editor
   of Microhistorias y macromundos 2  and together with Tommy Simoens, Luc
   Tuymans. Is it Safe? (Phaidon Press).  In 2013, his first American solo
   exhibition, ???The Swedenborg Room??? researched the cinematographic
   space as a utopian space. 
   
   Keith Sanborn is a media artist and theorist based in New York. His
   theoretical work has featured in a range of publications such as
   Artforum, and books to catalogues published by MoMA, Exit Art, and the
   San Francisco Cinematheque.  His projects have been selected for major
   surveys, including the Whitney Biennial, and festivals such as OVNI, and
   the Toronto International Film Festival. His single channel and
   installation works focus primarily on the re-contextualization and
   transformation of pre-existing images.
   

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Re: nettime Modern Computer Systems Are Complex - Film at 11

[Keith Sanborn]

Both are good articles. IMHO, yours is the better one as it speaks from grim
experience rather than making a pastiche of famous names and sexy quotes. I
had read your piece when you first posted it. It squares clearly with what I
know from small experience using assembly language years ago and from many 
cautionary tales I have heard over the years: the uncommented code is not 
worth writing.

Funny that programming falls victim to the same pitfalls afflicting natural 
language: even with fixed rules, language evolves over time, leaving past 
utterances of doubtful meaning.

And since programming consists of what English Analytic philosophers used to
call speech acts, cryptic utterances of personal idiolects can become the
equivalent of yelling FIRE! In a crowded theater. We are all collateral 
damage in this world.

Keith

On Aug 24, 2013, at 12:25 AM, David Mandl dma...@panix.com wrote:

 Lots of interesting things going on here:

 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/23/nasdaq-crash-data

 Anyone who has worked on an electronic trading system and didn't
 see this coming shouldn't be allowed to work on electronic trading
 systems. As a technologist I actually found working on these kinds
 of systems uninteresting and often frightening. Its clear that they
 are simply too complex for comfort--I'd say that many of the biggest
 systems are literally beyond the ken of *anyone*, even the smartest
 programmers. There are too many thousands of moving parts, too much
 spit and scotch tape, too many barely compatible components written
 by a dozen people of varying skill levels who left the company three
 years ago.
 ...



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Re: nettime The Vegetative Prince Will Not Wake Up: Dutch Prince Friso medical ethics and the ordeal of social inequality

[Keith Sanborn]

I was incredulous myself. Google Remenlink report and you will find the numbers 
are closer to 6,000 involuntary terminations of life

On Aug 28, 2012, at 9:47 AM, Karin Spaink ka...@spaink.net wrote:

 On Aug 28, 2012, at 06:12 , martin hardie wrote:
 
 he figures i refer to were from the first years of the Dutch law. They
 were from the 1990s.
 
 That's quite unlikely. In the 1990s, the number of euthanasia cases varied 
 between 2300 and 3200. If there were officially 2000 cases of unwanted 
 euthanasia per year, as you claim, the law would *never* have passed.
 ...


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Re: nettime Naomi Wolf: This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers (Gu...

[Keith Sanborn]

This is the psychology of global capital. It is the psychology of the 
spectacle. Its not clear the concerns you mention are primary for people in 
Damascus whose families are being bombed, raped, shot, and mutilated, or for 
the various liberation armies throughout sub-Saharan Africa who are doing the 
bombing, raping, shooting and mutilating there. 

My response was to the previous text, which was eliminated in your reply, which 
claimed that war was now primarily psychological. I think you missed my point: 
I agree that war has a psychological component, but without real credible 
threat terror means nothing. And that means plenty of examples, as Voltaire 
said, pour encourager les autres.

Keith



On Jul 18, 2012, at 11:53 PM, Heiko Recktenwald 
Iheikorecktenw...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Shure, but psychology plays a role in those wars as well. The
 psychologty of terror. Of permanent war without end. Interests and
 drones everywhere. See also the psychology of the renaming of the Westbank
 
 
 Syria is a very good example as well. Are there freedom lovers against a
 bloody dictator or is it just A against B with B being the perfectly
 legal gouvernement? The role of Mrs. Clinton, the role of talking and
 not talking with the other side. The blame game. To win hearts and minds
 at home.
 ...


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Re: nettime Naomi Wolf: This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers (Gu...

[Keith Sanborn]

Sorry, guns are in very high fashion. Go to Syria, Afghanistan, Waziristan… 
this war as solely the war on desire is one of the root misapprehensions of 
high capitalism, perhaps a product of that very propaganda. Not that it doesn't 
supplement the wars fought with guns. But Industry didn't disappear, it just 
moved to East and South Asia, where working conditions are militarized on a 
scale the 19th century steel magnates of PGH cd only have dreamed of. The 
fields of battle have moved back to former colonies: Africa and South Asia 
and are coming soon to a demonstration near you. Do you ever listen to the 
daily news from Africa?

You are living on Fantasy Island, boss. And apparently you did not witness 
OWwherever police tactics (physical high and low tech ones as well as 
information technology based ones) first hand.

Keith Sanborn


On Jul 17, 2012, at 10:44 AM, newme...@aol.com wrote:

 Marc:
 
 Very interesting!  Those who keep insisting that the army who are  coming 
 after us will use guns are, of course, WAY out-of-date.
 
 Warfare became (overwhelmingly) PSYCHOLOGICAL over 70+ years ago and the  
 weapons being used against us -- for all of our lives -- have been  
 (by-and-large) ADVERTS!
 ...


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Re: nettime The insult of the 1 percent: Art-history majors

[Keith Sanborn]

The phrase Let's be honest has strong echoes of what the relatively 
non-political Barthes says about Let's be frank…: it opens the door to 
stupidity or worse: to the naturalization of opinion as fact, I.e. reification. 



On May 6, 2012, at 2:59 AM, Armin Medosch ar...@easynet.co.uk wrote:


...






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nettime OWC

[Keith Sanborn]

Simply put, OWC and its homologues are the inversion of what Agamben calls, if 
memory serves, the permanent State of Exception. In Berkeley, various efforts 
to disrupt the flow of commodities went under the rubric of No more Business as 
Usual. This is a related but distinct phenomenon. A non-univocal series of 
declaration(s) of a State of Exception from the bottom up. An exception to the 
exception. 

Keith Sanborn




On Oct 21, 2011, at 3:47 PM, Moritz Geremus mor...@randomcreations.org wrote:

 On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 22:20 -0500, Brian Holmes wrote:
 
 On 10/18/2011 03:47 PM, Moritz Geremus wrote (concerning the idea
 that FINAZISM will produce violence):
 
 First: The simplification of branding an enemy based solely on
 material wealth, is something I thought left over for populist
 right wing-parties (as in artists swallow up all our tax-money
 for left hobbies), and secondly, the radical Marxist materialism
 of submitting to money obsessively while describing the greed
 of the one's who comparatively have more than themselves as the
 opposite position of their own.
 ...


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Re: nettime Karl Rove: Occupy Wall Street protesters are just plain kooky (WSJ Op-ed)

[Keith Sanborn]

Of course, Rove is disingenuous. The tea party was specially created and 
financed to heal the split in the Republican party between it's right and far 
right wings. No party of their own, just recommendations of which Republican 
candidates to vote for in meaningless or near meaningless primaries in order to 
close ranks around the victor. They haven't yet called for the boycott of 
elections. I have to say that so far it has worked brilliantly and with the far 
right cash flowing in and their taste for power whetted, they aren't likely to 
go for 3rd party candidates any time soon. 

On the other hand, the OWS as far as I can tell from only a couple of visits 
was at some point a typical relatively quickly planned but intelligently 
symbolic and strategically done occupation to register the protest stated: the 
increasingly disproportionate distribution of wealth in the US and world. 
Marxian predictions of this nature in the abundance of the post-war period 
supported by social spending not surprisingly halted this process. With the 
withdrawal of social support structures and the favoring of unrestricted 
financial manipulations in a fashion directly parallel to the pre-1929 crash, 
the dialectical forces of the economy have swung back to something congruent 
with classical Marxism.

There are no Koch Bros on the left in the US, though there might be some 
Mensheviks with a conscience. There is evidence of the late 1990s piggybacking 
of the RCP at work though. They have gone from a more Maoist strategy to one 
more nearly akin to Bakunin's strategy of becoming the secret pilots at the 
center of the storm. What remains to be seen is how soon they will come out of 
the closet, like Facebook when it began to accept advertising though 
data-mining may have been there from the beginning. 

OWS is not a pony for someone to ride. Who knows, maybe it will change the RCP 
or Democratic Party before either can recuperate it.

To paraphrase Debord: OWC is not a product of theory, and I wd add, nor of 
ideology but of shared lived experience. 

An army of unemployed college graduates and displaced workers from all sectors 
of the economy--the well-known North African mixture--will find their way to 
power by other means than those provided for them so far.

Right now unemployment benefits are all that stand between protests and 
uprisings. And for growing numbers they are already gone.

Keith Sanborn


On Oct 15, 2011, at 10:30 AM, Patrice Riemens patr...@xs4all.nl wrote:

 
 
 Now you're all back from your local 'occupy' demo (I was at the
 Amsterdam one, which was fun. My favorite placard, featuring the
 famous Muppet Show character, read: 99% of all cookies are eaten by
 1% of the monsters!), you might want some comic relief, graciously
 provided by Karl Rove, Buba's infamous front  henchman.
 ...


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Re: nettime some more nuanced thoughts on SWARTZ

[Keith Sanborn]

It's actually worse than that: academic journals in my limited experience 
refuse to pay any rights for images and the writer of an article (at least in 
the USSA) using images has to submit proof that s/he has secured copyright 
permission for reproducing them, which means s/he has to pay for them or try to 
persuade the maker/owner of the image to yield rights of reproduction to the 
journal in my experience on absurd terms. Your mileage may vary.

I wd love to know if there is any general research on the economics of academic 
journals--print or electronic.

It is my perception that writers generally financially support the journals to 
which they submit work and receive no direct compensation. Their 
payback--besides the joy of sharing their knowledge and the satisfaction of 
inflecting discourse within their field--comes in terms of enhanced prestige, 
which can translate into employment security--albeit temporary these days--or 
some other form of career advancement, if they teach in a university.

So, in some sense, it's a pay to play situation, which in the best cases may be 
reimbursed or otherwise supported by a well-endowed university employer, but in 
the increasingly adjunct-based world, is increasingly rare. 

The inference that anyone advocates people working for free or not being 
compensated for their efforts is not simply incorrect, it's irrelevant. It is 
my distinct impression that even academic superstars derive most of their 
income from university salaries or public lectures, rather than from publishing 
contracts, unless they happen to write something that becomes the odd NY TIMES 
Best seller.

Someone please correct me if I've gotten this wrong, but it is my experience 
that academia, like other arenas of intellectual endeavor, functions more 
according to the logic of potlatch than that of capitalist accumulation. 

Keith Sanborn

On Jul 25, 2011, at 6:54 AM, Marco Ricci and...@fatbombers.com wrote:

 sorry David Golumbia, but.. ehm.. do you get any money from JSTOR if one of
 your articles is being purchased?
 If yes, well that weakens my point, by i think it will make sense anyway.
 However, i really don't think a researcher gets anything from JSTOR. As far
 as I know, he doesn't even get money from a paper edition academic journal
 which publishes his articles and sells them to the public for mostly
 illogically high prices. (I won't enter here the discussion about the
 barriers that such publications present on the other side, that is to the
 access to publication and academic recognition). If, as i reckon, no
 researcher gets a cent from Jstor for his articles, why do you associate
 retribution for your work with payment to Jstor?

 ...


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