°Gaping wounds

June 11, 2008

Yes, spoilers - if you’ve not watched ‘The Hub’, rewind. Or throw caution to the wind. **[Spoilers for episodes 9 and 10, season 4]**

°Border softwars [aka there are many copies]

From Graeme Philipson’s piece in the Age:

If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion. They would be able to seize any device - laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc - and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

While the borders proliferate, they’re being proposed as the means to stem proliferations of another kind. The leak of the US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement is here, scheduled to be discussed at the G8 in Tokyo, next month.

°Pogroms pt2 - nomadi, clandestini, rifiuti

May 22, 2008


°Pogroms, pt1 - Amakwere-kwere


°Enjoying democracy

April 15, 2008

From Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas, by Gillian Cowlishaw, in the chapter titled “Enjoying Democracy”:

the paraphernalia of everyday life on a station was a compelling element in the pastoralists’ domination of their untutored workers; the mastery of pragmatic technology confirmed their grasp of the meaning of the world. It is technologies of governance, systems of political representation, of funding and accountability and practices known as democracy, which are now being taught with the same assumptions as were attached to farming technologies in an earlier time. These are the necessary tools for the Aboriginal people’s future, an invariant reality, a morally neutral common sense. Aborigines are now being enticed into exercising the same rights as whitefellas, rights which are supposed to ensure that we are all equal citizens.

Sharply ironic.

°XI

April 3, 2008

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.

°Reconciling one’s self

March 25, 2008

An extract from Mbembe’s “Passages to Freedom: The Politics of Racial Reconciliation in South Africa” (Public Culture, 20:1, 2008):



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