Posts Tagged “Politics”

05w06:1 The Good Reader in the White House

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ood Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 6 number 1 (the good reader in the White House)

Of George W. Bush, we may often think of this quote of Mark Twain: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” And yet, apparently Bush does read. Although a few years ago he told reporters that his favorite book was a children’s story, and while he is now historically associated with My Pet Goat an enthralling tale which he couldn’t drag himself away from that Tuesday morning, lately he’s found new books other than the Bible to proselytize about. – Timothy

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The odd couple | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3623386
“Yet for the past few months this paragon of good ol’ boy common sense has been infatuated with a book about an abstract noun by a Jewish intellectual. Mr Bush recommends Natan Sharansky’s ‘The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror’ (Public Affairs) to almost everyone he meets (including Condoleezza Rice, who mentioned the book during her opening remarks at her Senate confirmation hearing). Nine days after winning re-election he spent over an hour discussing the book in the White House with Mr Sharansky himself. The meeting must have sounded extraordinary, given Mr Sharansky’s thick Russian accent and Mr Bush’s Texan drawl. But by all accounts they got on famously. “

White House Letter: Why is Bush reading Tom Wolfe? Don’t ask | Elisabeth Bumiller
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/06/news/letter.html
“What the official list omits in Tom Wolfe’s racy new beer-and-sex soaked novel, ‘I am Charlotte Simmons’. The president, a Wolfe fan, has not only read the book but is enthusiastically recommending it to friends.”

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emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 08 February 2005 @ 3:00 PM

05w05:1 Gay Marriage

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 5 number 1 (gay marriage)

This morning’s The Current was awesome, so today’s Goodread is a link to their shows’ archive. The show is available in 3 seperate Real Audio clips.

——————————————————————— Gay Marriage | The Current
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2005/200502/20050202.html
“I’m encouraged by the majority in favour, particularly the Catholic majority in favour of the legislation, but [through] my own work as an oral historian … I see everywhere and always that life is much more complex richer and diverse than pollsters and some politicians and ever some journalists … would like us to think. And I think some people want to control that complexity and richness, to restrict and limit it but it’s my impression living in the country that nature doesn’t take kindly to that, that it loves the exuberance of diversity. Having said that, I can acknowledge that there are certainly people in rural areas in my experience who are slow to adapt changes, frightened by change, but I think that also true (I’ve certainly encountered people) in the cities who are similarly afraid of change. And I think, to me that’s more of what this divide is about. It’s about fearing diversity and unpredictability and the sort of chaos of nature versus embracing it. “– Micheal Riordon, 12.27/24.00 of Part 2
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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 02 February 2005 @ 3:40 PM

04w50:2 Erasing de Kooning

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 50 number 2 (erasing de Kooning)


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Antonio Negri: The Nostalgic Revolutionary | Adrian Hamilton
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2004/0817negri.htm
“I try to think of a polite way to remind him of the fact that every communist revolution of the 20th century lead to tyranny and mass murder. And a nice way to say that communism was a betrayal of the democratic values of the left. […] Negri recently described the Soviet Union as ‘a society criss-crossed with extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom’, which is more than he has ever said for any democracy. He even says that the Soviet Union fell because it was too successful. I point this out, and he replies: ‘Now you are talking about memory. Who controls memory? Faced with the weight of memory, one must be unreasonable! Reason amounts to eternal Cartesianism. The most beautiful thing is to think ‘against’, to think ‘new’. Memory prevents revolt, rejection, invention, revolution.’ He leans back as though he has brilliantly rebutted any critique of communism. So, is he seriously saying that we should never look at history, that the left should carry on as though communism was a great success, that we should not reconsider our values at all? […] None of the world’s real problems – from poverty to tyranny to climate change – are discussed in Negri’s work, except to claim that the poor are ‘more alive’, and the citizens of liberal democracies are living under the ‘real tyranny’, and… oh, I give up. It’s not just that this preacher of Empire has no clothes; he is living in an intellectual nudist colony. There are some important anti-globalisation writers, such as Monbiot and Joseph Stiglitz. But Negri is trying to keep alive a patient – Marxism – whose heart stopped beating long ago. So, this is where revolutionary Marxism comes to die. It has been reduced to an obscure parlour game for ageing bourgeois nostalgics, played out a few feet from Buckingham Palace by an old terrorist who needs us to forget.”

The philosopher as dangerous liar | Patrick West
http://tinyurl.com/3jsvt
“In his 1977 pamphlet Forget Foucault, the eminent French social historian Jean Baudrillard argued that Foucault’s writings are themselves discourses in power that impose their own narrative, projecting their own will to truth. Those who lionise this ‘author’ today, devoted as they are to this source of power-knowledge, continue to contradict themselves. Perhaps it is time to take heed of Baudrillard’s exhortation. Perhaps it is time to forget Foucault.”

Feeling sorry for Rosalind Krauss | Roger Kimball
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/11/may93/krauss.htm
“It is easy to be exasperated with Rosalind Krauss. She is pretentious, obscurantist, and mean-spirited. Enjoying a position of great academic respect, she has, through her writings, teaching, and editorship of October, exercised a large and baneful influence on contemporary writing and thinking about culture. In the end, however, one’s exasperation is likely to be mixed with pity. Here is a woman who has devoted her professional life to art and ideas but who clearly has no feeling for art and for whom ideas are ghostly playthings utterly cut off from reality.” Article date May 1993

The Derrida Industry | Brian Leiter
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/10/the_derrida_ind.html
“Of course, even Wittgenstein and Heidegger are controversial choices, though in terms of sheer impact, they are plainly in a wholly different league from Derrida, so much so that anyone knowledgeable about 20th-century European and Anglophone philosophy and intellectual culture must laugh out loud at Professor Taylor’s dishonest hyperbole. (Why do those in literary studies think the intellectual world revolves around their once proud discipline, now enfeebled by three decades of bad philosophy, bad history, and bad social science?) […]If he had become a football player as he had apparently hoped, or taken up honest work of some other kind, then we might simply remember him as a ‘good man.’ But he devoted his professional life to obfuscation and increasing the amount of ignorance in the world: by ‘teaching’ legions of earnest individuals how to read badly and think carelessly. He may have been a morally decent man, but he led a bad life, and his legacy is one of shame for the humanities.” NOTE: a blog posting taking Mark Taylor’s opinion piece (orignally in the New York Times and readable here) to task for his ‘dishonest hyperbole’ with a breakdown and argument with his points.

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emailed by Timothy on Friday 10 December 2004 @ 6:30 PM

04w45:1

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 45 number 1

John Kerry has called Bush to concede defeat, meaning yes it’s true: four more years. I for one am burnt out by the past year, hope has turned to ash, enough is enough. I know most of the people on this list are lefties, so I’m going to avoid political articles for the next while. No need preaching to the choir, when most of us are Canadian to begin with and nothing we do or say matters. If a particularly good article comes along showing Bush is as guilty of war crimes as we suspect he is, then maybe I’ll post to it, but that’s not likely to happen. The voters have spoken and they’ve chosen George Bush’s vision of America.
Now I figured, if Bush wins, I’ll send a link to that Guardian Article. Published on Oct 23rd, many of you have probably read it already. If you go to Guardian’s website today, looking for that article, you find:

The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer.

“Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action – an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind.”

The article has now been removed from the Guardian Unlimited website.

The offending sentence is:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr – where are you now that we need you?

I can’t help but agree with the first part – despite of what the Christian Evangelicals think, God in fact does not exist. – Timothy
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A reader’s guide to expatriating on November 3 | Bryant Urstadt
http://harpers.org/ElectingToLeave.html
“So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.”

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 03 November 2004 @ 12:03 PM

04w44:3 Redskins Lose

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 44 number 3 (redskins lose)


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Winning Tradition | Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/sports/football/election.asp
“Claim: The outcome of Washington Redskins home football games has correctly predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1936.

Status: True.

[…]

Update: On 31 October 2004, the Green Bay Packers defeated the Redskins in Washington, 28-14, which – if the established pattern holds true – predicts that Democratic challenger John Kerry will unseat incumbent President George W. Bush in the upcoming presidential election.

Last updated: 31 October 2004″

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emailed by Timothy on Sunday 31 October 2004 @ 10:44 PM

04w40:2 Lawrence Lessig and the guy who cut off his arm

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 40 number 2 (lawrence lessig and the guy who cut off his arm)


——————————————————————— Our Kids Are in Big Trouble | Lawrence Lessig
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.html?pg=5
“But future generations can’t picket. They can’t demand a vote. And the only war on us that they will wage is one of hatred when they recognize what we have done. […] It may always have been like this. I don’t believe in ‘golden age’ histories; the past was not always better than the present. But somehow it seems that we have lost an ethic. When your grandfather spoke of building a better world for you than he knew himself, you believed him. And when you look into the eyes of any 1-year-old child, you may understand what he meant. Which makes it even harder to understand how we’ve become who we are. The Me Generation – which elected the first two presidents to have actively avoided military service (Clinton and Bush) and which will decide this election, too – is in charge, but it has taken its name much too seriously. Gone is the sense of duty that made so compelling Kennedy’s demand ‘ask what you can do for yo ur country.’ We don’t even ask what we, as a nation, can do for our kids. The rhetoric of self-interest so deeply pervades politics that an ideal as fundamental as building a better future has been lost.”

Ralston’s choice | Aron Ralston
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1315388,00.html
“I’ve created a mess once again. To brush the dirt off my trapped arm, away from the open wound, I pick up my knife. Sweeping the grit off my thumb, I accidentally gouge myself and rip away a thin piece of decayed flesh. It peels back like a skin of boiled milk before I catch what is going on. I already knew my hand had to be decomposing. Without circulation, it has been dying since I became entrapped. Whenever I considered amputation, it had always been under the premise that the hand was dead and would have to be amputated once I was freed. But I hadn’t known how fast the putrefaction had advanced since Saturday afternoon.”

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 29 September 2004 @ 10:06 PM

04w39:2 Bush-Bashing

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 39 number 2 (bush-bashing)

On Wednesday September 22nd , CBC’s morning radio program The Current analyzed the “Bush Bashing” phenomenon, noting among other things that 7,435 anti-Bush books have been published. A link to an archived Real Audio stream of the conversation is provided below. – Timothy

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Bush-Bashing | The Current
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200409/20040922thecurrent_sec3.ram
Real Audio File, 28:00
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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 22 September 2004 @ 11:49 PM

04w38:4 Yo Rummy!

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 38 number 4 (yo rummy!)

The Fuck New York video which I sent a link to in 0435:1 is one of the most brilliant things I’ve seen all summer and easily will make this year’s top ten list. Since it’s that good I’m obviously not the only one out there who thinks so. Hiphopmusic.com reporter Irina Slutsky got an interview with the filmmakers, the link to which is posted below. – Timothy

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The Guys Behind The “F*** New York” Video | Irina Slutsky
http://www.hiphopmusic.com/archives/000651.html
“If we saw one more poster with a fist on it, in stark black/white contrast, telling me to go fight whatever, I was gonna puke. We feel like protesting needs to be fun and have some sex appeal. We want to get younger people involved. In the 1960s, a lot of people were getting laid for protesting – not that we’re getting laid cuz of this movie – (laughs) But protesting is a way to align like minded individuals. […] These kids are punk-ass young republican prep school kids. We wanted to have a next generation of Republicans shown as the antithesis of the people we want to reach. […] Throwing in the fact that the kids are these thugged out individuals is showing that the whole Bush family is the most thugged-out crew in the world. We wanted to write it the way kids tal k on the street. ”

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emailed by Timothy on Thursday 16 September 2004 @ 12:44 PM

04w38:2 Creative Bush Craziness x2

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 38 number 2 (creative bush craziness x2)

The thing about running a mailing list is that people hate spam. So ISP’s and servers go through all this effort to help reduce the efforts of American and African businesspeople. Which means that sometimes your messages to friends and family and people who want on your list just don’t get through. Running a list means that you also sometimes have “problems with the server” as technical people working with the machines between you and the recipient try to deal with issues surrounding spam. Not that I’m saying this is spam nor that the problems were my fault! (Goodreads does not what to be considered synonymous with faux-meat products so please take advantage of the link to unsubscribe in each message if you would rather not get these anymore). So yesterday, I had “problems with the server” and I’ve been told it’s been fixed, and which means that some of you (I think) are getting this for the first time while others are getting it twice, only this note is new. But the one below isn’t:
Both these posts come via Mark Federman’s What is the Message? weblog at the U of T McLuhan Centre. – Timothy
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Bush vs. Jesus | Mad Magazine
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/09/bush-vs-jesus.html
What if W was runnin’ against his homeboy in the sky?

George Bush sings ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ | rx
http://www.audiostreet.net/artists/006/407/song_sunday_bloody_sunday.html
the ironic joys of sampling

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 15 September 2004 @ 11:35 PM

04w38:2 Creative Bush Craziness

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 38 number 2 (creative bush craziness)

Both these posts come via Mark Federman’s What is the Message? weblog at the U of T McLuhan Centre. – Timothy

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Bush vs. Jesus | Mad Magazine
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/09/bush-vs-jesus.html
What if W was runnin’ against his homeboy in the sky?

George Bush sings ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ | rx
http://www.audiostreet.net/artists/006/407/song_sunday_bloody_sunday.html
the ironic joys of sampling

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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 15 September 2004 @ 1:44 AM