Dangerous & Lazy

It is said of Babylon that its capture was, two days later, still unknown to parts of the city.

— The Politics

A striking parenthesis in Aristotle, a propos the recent suggestions at I cite, Poetix, and k-punk that the world has already ended.

The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

— Marx, The German Ideology

Read more↴

…but communicative capitalism is interested in you. Read more↴

Extraordinary video about language, the construction of a world, thinking and personhood. Lots to think about (and more on the filmmaker’s blog), for instance: Read more↴

One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and affects caught up in them. My current research focuses on who is really responsible for the Celebrity Big Brother racism row. My money is on the BNP and Ken Livingstone, hand-in-glove; doubtless one of the housemates was their cat’s-paw (Jo O’Meara, perhaps? Or Ian “H” Watkins, his lovable camp persona just a front). Read more↴

So it turns out Hillary Clinton isn’t just an isolated Communist conspirator, either:

We know that in 1991, the Soviet Union “spontaneously” collapsed and that its leaders, who remain in power to this day, suddenly, independently, at precisely the same moment, inexplicably transformed into…Democrats!

He continues: Read more↴