Voyou Desoeuvre

So apparently vegan soul food is really good. Turns out the same things that make chitlins tasty also work for tofu. 14 hrs ago

The internet is having one of its periodic freak-outs about a privacy policy change. Gawker posted a ridiculous, trolling article, which made its way onto Tumblr, and now is showing up in the Washington Post and on Democracy Now. The sentence causing all the concern is:

In a radical privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users across all services—email, Search, YouTube and more—sharing information with no option to opt out. The change was announced in a blog post today, and will go into effect March 1.

Now, as Forbes points out, this is bollocks. This is not a policy shift at all, still less a radical one – tracking users across services has been in Google’s privacy policy since 2005. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is why people are freaking out over this. A couple of possibilities occur to me: Read more↴

In Memoriam January 8, 2012

So. Farewell then Wizards of Waverly Place You were the best Disney Channel Show About egoist anarchism And queer anti-sociality. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” That was almost your Catchphrase
We need to talk about Jason Nevins December 29, 2011

In which I round up unrelated thoughts about this year’s music When “The Edge of Glory” came out, I described it as like Jason Nevins remixing Kelly Clarkson; should probably have clarified that this was intended as praise, an attempt to convey the splendid excessiveness of the song. Indeed, the song has become my favorite [...]
Up to the minute film criticism December 18, 2011

The Terminator (1984) and Terminator: Salvation (2009) make great bookends to neoliberalism. Terminator is about the rise of neoliberalism: a woman is hunted down by a representative of the future, a future manifest in a machine hidden within human flesh. This future seems unstoppable until, in the final scenes the fleshly machine is destroyed by the more honest [...]
Race and the paranoia of awkwardness November 8, 2011

White audience members’ consequent “panic,” she notes, is simultaneously posited as an intended effect, a positing that locates and circumscribes [artist Adrian] Piper as a strategizing subject. Rather than remaining cognizant of how their panic is produced in the moment of their own receptive uptake, white interlocutors instead construe Piper as the sovereign and willful [...]
No-one cares about property damage November 4, 2011

Given the amount of time spent discussing the handful of bank windows smashed during Wednesday’s Oakland general strike, you might imagine that many people care about property damage; and yet, if you look for such people, who are they? Liberals complain about property damage during the various marches and actions, but they’re quick to add [...]