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1. Ter­ri­fying and insane, or, coali­tion gov­ern­ment I’ve recently returned from a month in coalition Britain, and I’ve been trying to figure out how, if at all, the general ideological tenor of the country has changed. Certainly Radio 1 is much more reactionary than it used to be; I think it’s managed to get worse every time...
2. Democ­racy is not for sale Chomo on Democracy Now the other day said: Just take a look at the funding for his campaign. I mean, the final figures haven’t come out, but we have preliminary figures, and it seems to be mostly financial institutions. I mean, the financial institutions preferred him to McCain. They are...
3. And you shouldn’t fucking talk about telekinesis Bush’s press conference a few days back reminded me of the much-ridiculed line from a White House aide about the “reality-based community”: The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious...

One of the advantages of the Internet that Moll points out is that you no longer need to go shopping, something which Second Life has re-introduced, with all the “spending time wandering around trying to find what you want” that that entails; to the extent that people have now re-re-introduced Internet shopping, so you can go on the Internet to buy stuff for Second Life. That about sums up Second Life, I think; it’s a way of avoiding the Internet, the Internet for people who don’t get the Internet. It’s depressing that people are proposing Second Life as some kind of new stage of the Internet, when really it’s a gigantic step backwards: the virtual world of the Internet, with its at least implicit utopianism, sidestepped in favor of a bafflingly unnecessary realism.

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1. Aca­d­emic ma­te­rial DeLillo in White Noise is both funny and astute about the physical embodiment of academic specialization: The chancellor had advised me, back in 1968, to do something about my name and appearance if I wanted to be taken seriously as a Hitler innovator…. We finally agreed that I should invent...
2. You can’t solve a problem with a ter­mi­no­log­ical dis­tinc­tion I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending...
3. FOR THE UNCON­DITIONAL DEFENSE OF PARIS HILTON AGAINST ANTI­SEMITIC WITCH­HUNTS The pious outrage Thursday over heiress Paris Hilton’s “early release” from jail in Los Angeles, accusations of “special treatment” and the vindictive demands that she receive “justice,” i.e., punishment, have nothing healthy or progressive about them. Excellent article about Paris Hilton on the World Socialist Website. While k-punk’s criticisms of...