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Maybe you heard: American’s getting into another war.
This legend grew out of the headlines - the ones about how some entity called the U.S. Military was teaching officers to “Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam”. The fine print in the papers makes it sound like Armageddon maybe isn’t here (yet!?). But what did come and go was Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley’s Joint Forces Staff College class on Islam, where he suggested that something fiendish and devious was “theoretical[ly]” at work behind the scenes in the Muslim world:
Given the uncompromising nature of the last 10 years of global conflict, Islam, though it may describe itself an an ideology of peace, as a means of ‘Taqiya’ or deception, is not a religion of tolerance.
Some kind of two-star general had signed off to let the class happen until, hold on, he decided that approval was a bad idea - but not before these kinds of statements were part of a class presentation of “A Counter-Jihad Op Design Model” (pdf).
The Military and the Press seem to agree that this version of events is basically true. (To say that: “The Military and the Press seem to agree that this version of events is basically true” is a performance of the kind of certainty that some simplified objects called ‘they’ might have to put on display over there before ‘we’ can take a look at them in contrast with a more opaque story.) This Other-story-with-a-capital-O looks to be a kind of cosmic predicament that doesn’t mesh well with the habits of the reporters, editors and press-releasers who pass off the way things appear as a congealed and possibly permanent truth. Come to think of it, Dooley was maybe (secretly? accidentally?) hinting at this in his Model.
Read more![Asteroid 1 [Public Domain]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Asteroid_1.png)
The asteroid Apophis will hit the Earth in 2036‽ Then you’ll die‽ Most of us will‽
Maybe would-be-friends-we’ll-never-meet will get to feel vibrations from the rock if they end up flying shuttles in from other planets. The impact dust - and waves - and flames will somehow feed some life-unfriendly clouds around the globe before they part and let in sun in 2037‽
The Earth might miss the rock. But the sun cooks up some waves that blows the stuff in outer space around in mystery-patterns, so there’s still this chance…
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an actual(?) astrophysicist and reveals this possible future in a Wired Magazine article, “We can Survive Killer Asteroids - But It Won’t Be Easy”. Wired.com commenters maybe read about how Apophis “could fill the Rose Bowl” and then they started sorting out some crucial facts involving Sarah Palin, the Republican Party, or possibly the Liberals, or some Plot-Against-the-People. Also: would conservatives have been loyal to the King during the American Revolution(?):
So anti-war libs would have fought the war of independence and pro-constitution conservatives would have stayed under Barack (I mean George) III? To think they let folks like you vote and have children. (Well, abortions.)
Another timestream involves studying physics (for free online or wherever) and deflecting a large object - or maybe writing an inspirational soap opera about teens and asteroids. Obama might be an “Illuminatus”, “Communist”, “Republican”, and even an “Islam”. And somehow it turns out he could have been giving relevant advice (and performing a soap opera) in State of the Union addresses when he said Americans could stand learning more math and science skills.
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Last year, a crowd surrounded Kentucky’s State Capitol, a parade of teens and grandmas holding signs: “Topless Mountains are Obscene” / “Support the Clean Streams ACT” “End Mountaintop Removal” “RENEWABLE ENERGY”. This one gravel-throated man in the thick of it shouted all the way up Capital Avenue: “My daughter’s lungs are black! My eyes are burning too! Dear Mister Governor, Happy Valentine’s to you!”
Maybe they were mad about some scientist legends. There’s that one connecting mining to high rates of cancer and poverty - and some story that coal-fired power plants are killing the world we know.
The thing is, even if a carbon-heavy “biosphere” gets too wild, hot, or toxic for some oxygen breathers, some of us could still live under bubbles or upload our minds into a new kind of digital lifestyle.
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Time is probably rolling by. And years, too?
Somehow years could be relevant. Recycling that one Donovan song, we could also end up with this:
First there is a New Year’s
Then there is no New Year’s
Then there is.
Lifestyles supposedly happen because there’s some latitude for action. Real teens may not make history just as they please, but New Month’s or New ____’s are milestones, good points to believe that things are gonna be different now.
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Thousands of Argentines disappeared between 1976 and 1983. Friends and family tend to blame the military junta that ruled the country, but who knows? They may have gone on vacation. Given the level of state secrecy at the time, we’re free to imagine crowds of missing dissidents on the beach, at resorts, really getting it going.
The new National Defense Authorization Act could help more people could go on indefinite holiday in a mystery zone outside the public sphere. You could be held, for reasons unknown (to you), at Guantanamo Bay - ‘til death do you part.
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“Being you” could mean that time and space have contents loose enough to let some singing start.
A voice swerves in and asks “Will I be free?”
And then a warbled answer comes “Yes, if you’re flowing.”
This “you” could move into the future like a separate island, or a porous block of ocean water.
Or maybe both together: the underlying oozing-of-the-world may have craved the freedom to become a separate “you” - or to feel the pleasure of believing you’re the master of some futures even if you’re still (deep down - all illusions of supervenience aside) a formulaic outcrop of an ancient geologic shift.
Even with the latitude to pick your urges, these questions may not seem all that compelling if you’re living through their implications in this starlight-twinkled-music.
Right now, with this prog album on, “the mood in the room” may be challenging the sovereignty “you” (or I) thought you had. To put it in non-words: I at least might be dancing at this point. But if Slavoj Žižek were here he might insist that an ocean of fluid uncentered selves spells trouble. When you’re becoming yourself with the cosmos, you may actually be responding to the requirements of the mysterious force of capitalism.
“Capitalism,” he says, “in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society…no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.”
Maybe the human subject has never been wholly distinct from the surrounding evolving substance, but if your company moves you to the Dallas suburbs and then to Salt Lake and then back to Atlanta in three years you may turn into (or already be?) an outstandingly mobile and atomized flow, with little attachment to any particular ecosystem or neighborhood, with an existence mediated by a specific task in the Human Resources department -and that legendary and persistent money-growing urge.
But mumbling on like this is probably talking past the themes of the song I’m jamming to (with you?). If the glass chimes ring with a distant calliope and you think that “Love is the tree suddenly growing”, then the circle where this plays could benefit some critical theorists, who may suddenly have to address (their) feelings to a concrete situation rather than making sweeping abstruse judgments about entire systems. Žižek may be right that railing against a bogeyman called the “patriarchal subject” is a secret way of endorsing a permissive hedonism, a skepticism toward all narratives that is too suspicious of any enduring categories to challenge really-existing capitalism. But if people are still being exploited in favor of enriching powerful corporations, then the handclapping mellowness may still provide an opportunity to create new bonds of solidarity. In this Yes situation we can see a common self hidden in the midst of our steamprep and werequeer costumes.
At this point, you may still have a chance to ask what (y)our freedom is made of.
#zizek #capitalism #yes #prog #steamprep #werequeer #patriarchy #freedom
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Some day we may find the one who really knows how to get something going with Hanukkah - (like) in an unimpeachably legitimate way. You could feel a broken echo from a God who’s working from another mystery zone, who somehow seizes our dimensions and can say, from adding all the olive groves and lifestyles that, yes, yes, the thing that you should do this solstice week is…
But if this YHWH who once saved Jerusalem transcends the spaces we can see and equals universal oneness then you may only hope to be or feel a puzzle piece inside the One-who-is-the-truth. The thing is, the world-overflowing-mystery-surplus is already built into the Hanukkah scripts, so if tradition is some justification, you can have a lifestyle about the ancient efficiency miracle with the oil in the Temple after the pagan managers got run off.
You may wonder how to simulate the Maccabees’ mystery-thrift updated for today: all your lights and stars are burning strong - somehow . This could be a chance to party on the theme of how the world doesn’t fade out into darkness, with the final camp fires, the blackening of the skies, and the last moms eating each other.
But how to transcend a potential Hanukkah contradiction? When you’re in the belly-rolling immediacy of a chocolate gelt dreidel party, how do you square that with the enduring problem of energy flow?
Well, you could build a solar menora.
You could also perform Asimov’s “The Last Question” with your teen and family tribe. An elaborate computer who may be the same thing as some other long-time cosmic totality has to grapple with the universe’s slide toward heat death. And so could you.
#hanukkah #tzimtzum #asimov #enthalpy #entropy #menora #YHWH
In Kim Jong-Il’s imagination, the world may have been split in two: in one bloc, an oppressive and imperialist outside organized around commodities and in the other, an isolated nation united around the Juche principles of self-reliance and state socialism.
But who can say? Maybe the deceased Supreme Leader recognized the similarities underlying this divide when he wasn’t spaced out on one of his 20,000 movies.
As the old Marxist legend goes, commodities are concepts that subsume the messy and ambiguous ingredients of the world into convenient standardized forms, which can start to look like the inevitable products of nature instead of the work of our imagination. In North Korea, like in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the state’s institutions are set up as the totalitarian unifying framework that can protect a malleable people from an equally totalizing, false-consciousness-breeding enemy. Notwithstanding claims about the inevitable march of history toward communism, the “product” system in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea has all the trappings of another arbitrary commodified apparatus, a continuation of capitalist good circulation in a more explicitly regimented form, with stipulations in the Constitution that the State, “establish a new socialist way of life in every sphere” including a “cost accounting system” utilizing “such economic levers as prime costs, prices, and profits”.
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Absolute truth could be something to search for. Maybe it’s a little like what Dante found climbing through the heavens: an unalloyed essence that could clarify the workings of the worlds that it penetrates:
Wherever merited, celestial light
Glides freely, and no obstacle prevents.
The pilgrim finally reaches the crowd of elaborate women and angels surrounding a spinning orb:
Here vigour fail’d the tow’ring fantasy:
But yet the will roll’d onward, like a wheel
In even motion, by the Love impell’d,
That moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars.
It take 14,233 lines of Comedy for this absolute to arrive. Then again, if the absolute is everywhere, the search leading up to the end was always already part of it, from before the first moment when Dante recognizes that he’s lost in the woods. Midway on life’s journey he’s both himself and animated (retroactively?) by a phantom celestial truth.
We may not be content to let his journey stand as unequivocal evidence of the great clarifying secret, especially if his ethereal love truth seems foreign to the particulars of your world.
At this point, one proper(?) thing for a structuralizing dialectician to attempt could be a study of the set of possible comparable searches for something called “the absolute”. Then again, if you’re watching this at home and waiting to be changed, this might put us back in the realm of spectacular theodicies - distant and never pretending to bear fruit, unless there’s a regulative principle that might enlighten you in the digested sum of the particulars of your world and your grandma’s, and in the set of all possible teens, aliens, birds, ontologies, futures, etc.
Instead of trying that, I’ll probably keep believing that reality is the set of facts that obtains (with or without a big Other signing off on them), and stay biased in favor of creating futures where I could be anyone and still have the chance to ask this kind of question.
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At one point a magazine was just a place to store artillery. There’s no overriding reason why this has to be a crucial precedent, but the narrative could still be compelling: a tumblr zine could arm its readers with an awareness of the textures and situations that they might encounter in their lifestyles. Another nice thing about some zines is the words. Somehow these can lift people out of the apparent immediacy of their surrounding and suggest how symbols mediate their world.
If this were a really good zine these possible-truths might be in the form of a vivid story, with some reposted features thrown in for good measure.
Consider money: we could link to this illustrated feature from The Guardian - and have unlicensed pictures up of the new $6.66 warbler bill that Jonathan Franzen somehow designed to express his dismay about the hidden ecological costs of our financial system. Then we would reflect on the institution of currency, and then solicit our readers to submit new legal tender reflecting their relation to the times.
After that piece was up we might go to The New Inquiry to check out their tumblr presence and read some sweeping yet critical pronouncements in essay form.
(And then on to Spacezine to scope out their ways. )
#zine #franzen #thenewinquiry #currency #lifestyles
