Archive for April 9, 2006
Al Qaeda
Kathy Acker once said, and I can't find the quote, that terrorism is the only effective means of politics. When you think about it Al Queda has gotten what they want. We are rethinking middle eastern politics. From the Isreali lobby (and why 1/5th of our foreign aid goes to a country with an income equal to or better than South Korea) to films ranging from Control Room to Munich. And as a nation we're finally waking up to the fact that Americans voting needs to take in consideration that we're a military super power with both positive (stopping genocides in Africa and the first Iraq war) and negative (less than 27% of nation building attempts succeed) effects. While stupid things like blocking the Dubai port deal out of the rather ignorant assumption that it would somehow threaten "security" still happen, the U.S. has woken up to the possibities that maybe we're not doing the right thing in the middle east i.e. Syriana and on a more grandeous scale, we're coming to terms with the end of the post-holocaust mind set (sorry had to throw one intellectualism in there). I'm rambling a bit on a minor point: terrorism has suceeded in making people realize just how alien a mindset people in other countries might have, and why they have it. What's to be learned from this isn't entirely a lesson in security, it's a lesson in listening. If we can not consider others views on the same level as our own we'll always have zealots. People wonder how do terrorists emerge, but they exist in any culture and society wether it's christian lobbyists, crazed environmental zealots, activists of all sorts, people are inherintly drawn to the specter of power in mass protest and destruction, trying to police it's more destructive acts will always be a problem, trying to abate it through better foreign policy and a more constructive approach to cultural difference would create a cushion that softens the blow. Granted that few of the terrorist organizations represent a majority of muslims (or so the arabaic blogosphere seems to beckon) and the pressue the U.S. and Israel have put on Hamas has effectively forced it's hand in finding quaified legitimate professionals to create their cabniet these methodologies have been in force for years, and their net effect has yet to be paved over by a "freedom tower".
On another note on the post-hollocaust mind set, I do hope that recent films like Munich and other media do start to show that victims are far from innocent in their actions. While I think the jews were due a country and that their security checks are needed (hamas smuggles bombs in ambulances) to make exceptions for their actions and their taking of life in the middle east is to say becuase you were persecuted it's ok for you to act immorally. It is arguably worse for the oppressed to become the oppressor, but I'm no expert in middle eastern politics and American culture is still to heavily indebited to the idea of the victim to really begin to deal with the problems of the world maturely.
technorati tags: politics
p.s. and yes I misspelled Al Qaeda in the title and then fixed it. yeah I'm good at these things sure.
Rangdebasanti
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about sums it up.
Frying balloons
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picture from the opening of a baseball game.
Interestingness
Flickr: Explore interesting photos from the last 7 days in FlickrLand…
I don’t like this. Flickr’s new interestingness option seems to bring up a lot of clip art.
Each picture feels poised like a magazine ad. I want blurry and low-res and well done
and everything else. It’s a little disturbing to find that so many of the pictues deemed
interesting by their algorithim turn up as what are essentially magazine shots, you can
almost feel the photoshop filter sliding off of them. A little grease and wear wouldn’t hurt.
I’m sure as this function becomes popular and people figure out the combination of links,
trackbacks, views, and comments… it will get more monotenous, becuase those people suck to begin with.
Anyway, maybe something decent will pop up. BTW check the new orleans shots I found. It’s really rather amazing.
technorati tags: flickr
links for 2006-04-09
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french comic books from bibi’s box.
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dude in Africa on It and the development of communications there. there’s also a lot of what appear to be fleas all my feet right now. damn these pants…
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older brother’s new job
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from the economist a summary in recent research in neutrinos as a possible source of dark matter. “The researchers created a beam of muon neutrinos by firing an intense stream of protons into a block of carbon. On the other side of the target sat a partic
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my old’ thread at Fucked Gaijin.
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I haven’t been in Orlando in around 2 – 3 years. I find this amazing. There’s actually a buiding going up.
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new movie about fast food culture in Japan. from alt-mat
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Charles Murray was reformed welfare, made school vouchers and charter schools part of the U.S. and is now proposing we just give people 10,000 a year instead of bothering with programs. Who wants to engage in this experiment?
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Yuki’s blog.
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economist on urban planning and other ills.
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ye olde picture of Andreas when he was doing dub + techno. was an amazing set.
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basically the arguement is: southern blacks inherited a violent anti-educational stance and that’s what’s keeping them back.
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Robot Chicken is made by Seth Green that guy who’s always the annoying kid in any movie you watch. Anyway, usually I’m one to diss anything that appears geeky, but there is a quality to the show that keeps you watching. Like a lot of Adult Swim’s aquistio
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Brainy and Papa Smurf investigate a series of Seven like murders in the smurg world. features Gargamel admitting, “Well my intentions never were that clear.”
