Hi

Well, my summer's wrapping up. I traveled all over the world, but soon I'll be back in boring old Eugene.

Some quotes

Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich:

"School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary" (p. 42)

"Until recently, science was the one forum which functioned like an anarchist's dream. Each man capable of doing research had more or less the same opportunity of access to its tools and to a hearing by the community of peers. Now bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing teams. The members as well as the artifacts of the scientific community have been locked into national and corporate program oriented toward practical achievement, to the radical impoverishment of the men who support these nations and corporations" (p. 124)

It was okay, not the best book I've ever read.

Anyway, in more personal news, I dislocated my kneecap yesterday, which was a pain.

Insurgent

I work for the Insurgent (don't particularly like the name), the radical newspaper at University of Oregon. Recently, there was a big controversy over an issue which I chose not to write anything for because I felt it was pretty stupid and offensive. It was an "anti-Christian" issue, filled with juvenile depictions of Jesus Christ in erotic or otherwise offensive poses. Anyway, the issue received way more attention than I could ever have expected; personally I thought people would just laugh at us and ignore it, but so far we've received tons of hate-mail, as well as calls from just about every local news and talk show, and even from CNN and Fox in New York. The O'Reilly Show had a feature about us in which Tyler Graf, the editor of the Commentator (a libertarian newspaper which is our "enemy"), defended our freedom of speech, here's a link:

O'Reilly says UO President should be fired [for not censoring us]

Now Don, the main, in fact really the only force behind this issue, has been doing less and less, leaving us to deal with a lot of the flak that has come out about this issue, which we were barely responsible for.

Well, with all that aside, our latest issue looks pretty nice. Sam and I are both editors of the Insurgent now, and doing a lot of the work.

More recent e-mail exchanges w/former graduate teaching fellow

Sorry for not updating in so long. Jonnah, who was my graduate teaching fellow (gtf) for John Bellamy Foster's class last quarter, never responded to my e-mail about Leninism. Then, about two months later, he sent me this:

since i know your up on these issues, i thought you might enjoy the piece below. also, you can find the 'contentious' article on the israeli lobby here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/print/mear01_.html

as well as the authors' university website:

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011
[the link below didn't work]

hope you are well,

jonna

He then sent me an article by Uri Avnery (Israeli commentator) on the Israel lobby. I responded:

I like the article by Avneri, he always writes good stuff. I'm familiar with the current debate over the article in LRB by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Though I do agree w/Chomsky when he says: "But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion." Here's a good article on why, by Stephen Zunes, originally published in Middle East Policy, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October
1996):

www.eroj.org/Palestina/zunes.htm

I have two more articles for this month's Insurgent, I'm actually an editor now, along w/Sam. I chose not to write anything for last month because I didn't really support what they were doing (I don't know if you're aware of the whole "Anti-Christian issue" controversy)

Did you receive my last e-mail, about Marxism/anarchism, etc?

-Natty

500,000 in Los Angeles

Protests against anti-immigration laws

Writing

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact on the world. -Stanislov Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery

Modernity?

Stupid Chinese History class. I just wrote the most B.S. paper ever, but that's because it's on a B.S. subject. I basically tried to agree w/my postmodern teacher, so I dressed up my sentences in fancy language. Much of what I wrote doesn't even mean anything. Here's a sample:

The problem is that while there have been continuous Thermidorean revolutions in Chinese leadership, the multitudes themselves have found new ways of expressing the desire for a different kind of modernity of their own making, one which may not necessarily follow the rigid confines of Western essentialism.

Yeah, but you should have read the article the paper was based on "Sisyphus in China" by Arif Dirlik. It didn't even make sense. Well, it did, but it was completely trivial, basically about definitions and stuff. At one point he complains that the book is titled The Search for Modern China and not The Struggle for Modern China, which he somehow describes as an example of ethnocentrism. Oh, man. At least this quarter is basically over.

Rock on, Portland

V for Vendetta

I'm intrigued by this new movie, V for Vendetta, which I kind of want to see. My dad and my friend Paul have seen it, and my friend Jake has adamantly refused to see it (except maybe he will. I nagged him to see it quite a bit yesterday):

They must have written this article in conjunction with the release of that movie V for Vendetta, which as someone who enjoyed the comic, I must say looks like trash and I have no interest in seeing (plus there's that whole thing about recuperation and the spectacle, the bastards)

I more want to read the comic that the movie is based on, which someone in my dorm hall has. As Jake has pointed out, Alan Moore, the creator of the comic, has had his name removed from the film, which doesn't bode well for its quality. One of the reasons for this is the fact that the film has downplayed some of the political elements that were important in the comic, in particular erasing any mention of the word "anarchist" which was an important aspect of the comic, which Moore points out here:

So I decided to use this to political effect by coming up with a projected Fascist state in the near future and setting an anarchist against that...This was one of the things I objected to in the recent film, where it seems to be, from the script that I read, sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. There wasn't a mention of anarchy as far as I could see. The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.

However, in the film's defense, David Lloyd, co-creator and illustrator of the comic, has kept his name and commented that: "Watching some of the scenes was like seeing a painting I've done come to life" and "I feel sad about the antagonism towards the film that’s been stimulated by Alan’s view of the script and other matters, because it seems to have caused a lot of people to pre-judge the film - and that’s bad." Also, Comingsoon.net has called it "Easily the most faithful and literal adaptation of an Alan Moore graphic novel to date." Also, it was made by the Wachowski brothers, who made the Matrix, which was awesome, and they were big fans of the comic.

Anyway, infoshop had a thing the other day about how anarchists are using the movie as an opportunity to spread ideas and information about anarchism. Here's a nice website, where a group of anarchists are doing just that:

A is for Anarchy

Here's another interview w/Alan Moore

Anyway, there's my shameless advertisement for the movie.

Rock for sustainable capitalism

I just read an article about "socially responsible" businesses and how they are not much better than the big corporate firms in many respects. They use the term "whole-mart" to parody the yuppie obsession with organic foods and "socially responsible" companies. Here's the article:

"Welcome to 'Whole-Mart': Rotten Apples in the Social Responsibility Industry"

Or, as my friend Paul has often said, "the system does not respond to moral and ethical appeals." This is not to discourage you from buying organic food as opposed to other stuff, just to point out the fact that the amount of change your buying decisions can make is marginal, and hardly worth dwelling over.

The real problem is capitalism itself, as this article explains, which is redundant for me, but perhaps not for you.