In response to a Ron Paul defender: (btw check out this article on ron paul as well)

having no EPA wouldnt mean there would be no pollution enforcement any more than doing away with the NEA would mean there are no more schools.

right but people's power to "care" is directly proportional to economic power. So poor people have to do this thing call "work" during the day won't have the same economic power that the wealthy have to stay home or pay someone to educate their children. Likewise environmentalist can never match resources of corporations that profit from that same environmental degradation. The idea that you can just point at government flaws and then promptly do away with any collective democratic control over social responsibility of individuals will quickly lead to massive civil violence. As people lacking economic power will exert the power in the only dimension in which they can affect change ie violence. This has happened dozens of times throughout history and would happen again if the likes of Ron Paul where to be elected. You can't possibly expect people to respect others rights to pay slave wages, and fuck the environment however they please.

meanwhile we all go to sleep thinking the big daddy has solved all of our problems for us.

Thats silly, everyone knows that any real social change comes from grass root massive campaigns to shift systems of control of concentrated power back into the hands of the people affected. The "government" is often that very system of control that you are fighting with. The government never helps in positive social change rather is forced to by the people. As a centralized power of course government favors more centralization of power, but it exists as a more malleable structure than the non-representational vertically integrated tyranny of corporate control.
The idea that things would be better off letting capital even more directly dictate our freedoms is a very natural ideological divined on the billions invested into free-market think tanks over the past 30 years. But if you actually look at societies that fully embraced free market ideology you find a rapid decline and quick embrace of fascism just to keep things running. Naomi Klein's shock doctrine offers an good overview.

in response to the common hoopla and fanfare surrounding the common announcement of massive government support of "efficient" systems of violent control. In celebrating this effort one person points to how abstracting away the costs of warfare for "all" parties will improve the situation.

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yea either it will make the situation more calm.. or people will lose any sense of the reality of the situation and play it like a video game... similar to the effect of aerial bombing where the `costs` of war are hidden from the group that has the most firepower and capacity for destruction.

Long term we have to be a bit concerned with the 'efficiency' in controlling large population. The most violent systems of state oppression and apocalyptic weaponry always emerge from the most technologically advanced nations. As technology makes it easier to "fight" stateless wars (the only kind of war we will have until the end) Its only a matter of time before the powerful weaponry inevitable points inward to destroy "all" it's internal "enemies".

The margin in which democratic values overcome fascism is already pretty razor thin. And in fact already completely subverted for sectors of the global population under occupation. Here highly sophisticated military technology is deployed not to address the real social and economic problems that drive people to want to overthrown imposed governments or destabilize society

...rather it institutes violent military control over peoples lives. The military solutions ofcourse never fixes the real social and economic problems so they linger and push those that do not accept oppressive social and economic systems to violence and within hegemonic logic necessitate more military resources and perpetuate a downward spiral of violence ie Iraq. Here one of two things happen the collective decides the "costs" of imposing control are not worth it and seeks a political solution or your left with a planet of "green zones" and violent urban warfare outside of this space carried out by loyal drones.

Reducing these "costs" may seem like a good idea for the short term, especially for those currently living the the green zone nations of the world... but eventually these low "costs" apply inward and subvert democratic systems. Making it easier to impose systems of control on others is the first step of reducing your own freedoms. ...Ultimately what goes around comes around...or more aptly put "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"

So in conclusion we would be much better off investing in technologies that support democratic institutions and give people control over their lives rather than technologies that let the state violently impose a single ridged idea of what freedom is for others.

videoegg.com is demoing their add overlays for user created media. The sample clip they have created for their campaign is highly suspect.



It features a person of color being slapped, poked and flicked by white people while being overlayed with advertisements for bugger king and other white owned corporations famous for their "urban" cool re-appropriations. (a dated excerpt on white vs black ownership)

The metaphor videoegg is self promoting is that these overlays are "nicer" and more effective than the dulled down slap in the face that the consumer is used to. But I can't help but see a different set of "overlays" at work. The shoveling of corporate messages down the throat of a passive apathetic racialized consumer. I see the building transnational corporate power, through psychological warfare against a nation of "consumers". The aesthetics of physical abuse of a black man being sold back to himself. Labor is no longer the only thing to beaten out of people, rather consumer messages have to be beaten into them. We are entering an age where any piece of cultural production that gains significant mind share is can be instantly appropriated algorithmically into the brands of the online context providers. This is essential for the corprate propagandists as the bounding of debate of traditional media deteriorates in the open publishing environment of online communication. These corporate overlays help cloud meaningfully communication with cynicisms and distrust.

When public enemy spits some rap criticizing the bling bling, we will have an add ontop promoting the very thing the creator is trying to communicate is wrong. Or "related video" links that debase the proposed conversation. Videos documenting walmart human rights abuses could be overlaid with a "get the facts" walmart sponsored link and so on and so forth. This transfers the power of popular visual meaning production away from the creators and places it back into the hand of the propagandist for consumer society.

But given network neutrality at least in the online context we need not be the apathetic abused racialized consumers that the propagandists thinks we are. We can build our own content distribution networks because the same techno-social-economic conditions that allow for corporations to cheaply host and appropriate popular visual medium production enables collectives with alternative motives host it (relatively) cheaply as well.

Take wikipedia for example a collective/NGO that has committed to an advertisement free knowledge repository, forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisement revenue in favor of community support. This model is able to function on a transnational scale surpassing corporations that invest many orders of magnitude more resources into their services that end up attracting many orders of magnitude less participants. This enabled by conscience choice by participants to participate in free systems rather then contributing to proprietary systems where your contribution is subverted with commercial messages in the margins and private control over the byproduct of our collective labor.

Enforcing the law become "anit humanitarian" because the system is criminal and those being targeted are the ones profiting the least. The Agro industry flooding the Mexican markets, the profiters of US based low wage service industry, the huge border enforcement contracts, all profiting off of particular labor and trade regulation that they engineered. They lean on racism, economic & ideological warfare to make the poor white see the poor Mexican as his enemy while they laugh their way to the bank.

They count on the fact that US populations will point the finger at the least powerful when US society faces transformations they have engineered to maximize their profits. They know perfectly well the rational decision process of a population as its deprived of economic sustainability. It has nothing to do with "you" breaking the law & "you" dealing with the consequences. It has everything to do with sectors of the Latin American population making a predictable decision based on conditions that are established to maximize the profit of the corporations that wrote the trade, labor and immigration regulations. These laws are written to be broken, and designed so that the labor market is the ones targeted rather then the corporations which rake in the profit off of the marginalized labor market which they have created.

In my partners 1st grade class room a girl came to class acting very odd. When asked about it her mother described in tears that her husband the girls father had been detained and possibly deported...they had no idea where he was. ICE agents came into their home at 4am and forcibly removed him from his family while calling him names humiliating him with his family watching. If this is not anti humanitarian what is? The family is devastated and destroyed for what? So that the labor market remains flexible and subordinate? So that politicians can give face time to an ideology that has been trained to see the consequences of engineered economic transformations for the corporatacracy not as the culprit of their hardships but instead the individuals of this shifting racial, cultural and national identity as the root cause. This seeds debilitating racism and a lack of tolerance, for other cultural identities. The think tanks and public relations engineers redirect the blame of hardships faced by all people as a consequence of economic restructuring to a the most marginal and happily carry on with maximizing their profits.

in response to a post asking how do you leave a country?

But nothing happens in a vacuum; if we leave Iraq, Iraq is still there, and a pullout carries consequences for Iraqis, for the region and for the next thirty years of our foreign policy. What’s the best-case scenario if we go? What’s the worst thing that could happen?

We should be asking "What’s the best-case scenario if we stay". Things have continuously gotten worse since the US started its occupation. This is not to say violence is not part of national unification, in fact I can't think of a single case were the process of forming a nation state has not been violent. But contrary to the dogma pushed the massive US government public information industry the presence of a foreign military occupying power clouds this process of nation unification.

Inevitable the occupying military aligns with sympathetic section of the domestic Iraqi population which inevitably draw lines along ethnic/religious identities. A killed female translator working with the occupation becomes a Shia killed by a Sunni with a debut of violence for the Shia to return. This greatly magnifies the violence that takes place in the process of unification. (hence the extreamly violent civil war). Even the domestic occupation sympathizers are conscience of this and have call for timetables for withdrawal.

But these calls fall on the death ears of the dogmatic imperialists that are ironically fighting for a lost cause that will quickly lose relevance as we transition into micro-energy production, renewables and global increased transport efficiency. As for their more commonly stated goals of regional stability looks less and less plausible every day. Elections prop up extremist in extrema situations (ie Hamas), violence continues to increases in Iraq, and every index of terrorist activity is on the rise.

The powers that be would have you believe that terrorism will be fueled by the absence of occupation as opposed to being fueled by the presence of occupation. Withdrawal will not give the neo-cons the type of government which they want, but if we aim to minimize the amount of violence its the only choice. Unfortunately for the neocons minimizing violence is simply not as important as selective control over governing structures (we could also call it convenient morality). They would have you believe this selective control reduces violence in the future but this same logic kept Saddam supported and the same logic again ravaging the Iraqi people.

Beyond all above logistical arguments its the more basic and essential point. That we have no right to continuously occupy other peoples territory to ostensibly befit them and our selves. The idea that we can just occupy a country with no timetable until it reflects a un-declared imaged state thats in our "leader" head is the basic definition of a war aggression. In a functioning democracy this would be impossible.

Long time no post... I have been busy with the metavid project here I demo the external embed feature:

The previous post is part of a discussion with DanS,
He runs a blog right wing of the gods
Check it out :) He currently has a fairly detailed article on the misrepresentation of counter-recruiters. He is well articulated and well informed while ideologically different from my point of view.