Category: Uncategorised

Reddit longform seems bizarrely invisible to search engines. Search ‘reddit longform’ anywhere and you won’t reach it; wonder what happened?

For the record: there are few corners of the internet that I loathe as completely as I loathe twitter. If I love you very much, it’s possible I may still read your tweets. But it’ll be through gritted teeth, with constant frustration at the impossibility of having a decent conversation there, and I’d much, much rather follow you to almost any other online forum.

Often I hate the hoops we jump through in order to provide the illusion of security:

Amazon CloudFront HTTPS delivery can be used to transfer inherently sensitive objects to your users,

to avoid security warnings that some browsers present when viewing a mix of HTTP and HTTPS content

, or for anything else that needs to be encrypted when transferred. [email from Amazon today, announcing the new service]

Yes, I know that every step along the way here is reasonable. It just feels wrong, y’know?

A bit of Debian lore I always forget: finding which package is responsible for a certain file:

$ dpkg -S filename

e.g:

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/lintian

lintian: /usr/bin/lintian

Diaspora politics is identity politics in its purest form. Struggling to maintain and demonstrate identity in a foreign land, migrants adopt symbols and political doctrines from their hoemland. These are exaggerated to fill the gaps left by other forms of identity, and lack the pragmatic restraints that could come from actually living in a place.

A long article in the New York Review of Books considers the growing division betwen Zionists and liberal Jews, both in Israel and the US. It touches on the diaspora politics overall, but also connects to the impact of personal experience, memory, and generational divisions:

When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.

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It occurred to me last night that having a name that Google can’t process well might actually be entirely deliberate. On the internet, there is no real underground anymore. So if you wanted to create an underground for yourself, the first thing you might do is generate a sort of lexical darknet by using keyterms search engines can’t parse.

[from here, although there’s not much else to click through to]

Back last year, the Telegraph thought the Phantom MEPs would be on to a cushy number:

the European Parliament has decided to give the MEPs only “observer” status from next year.

The deal will mean they can draw full salaries and allowances at an annual cost of over £6 million without any legislative duties to carry out.

The 18 MEPs, from 12 EU countries, including Britain’s West Midlands region, will be paid more than £76,000 a year, with staff and office allowances worth £210,000.

[That is, I was under the impression that the Phanton MEPs weren’t being paid. As usual, there’s a strong possibility that I’m just totally wrong]

One of many, many things I love about Zero Books is their continual willingness, even eagerness, to call out the cultural and intellectual conservatism of the time. Take the blurb to Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman:

That the height of supposed female emancipation coincides so perfectly with consumerism is a miserable index of a politically desolate time. Much contemporary feminism, particularly in its American formulation, doesn’t seem too concerned about this coincidence. This short book is partly an attack on the apparent abdication of any systematic political thought on the part of today’s positive, up-beat feminists. It suggests alternative ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture that, while seemingly far-fetched in the current ideological climate, may provide more serious material for future feminism.

Have just ordered the book (and narrowly restrained myself from simultaneously ordering Militant Dysphoria); massively excited to see if it’s as good as Capitalist Realism.

k-punk on top form

“Azzellini and Ressler’s daring hypothesis is that Latin America is not some atavism, a residual space yet to be subsumed into global capital, but the vanguard – the first area of the world to adopt neoliberalism and the first to seriously propose an alternative to it.”

I’m not sure I’d count this as

daring

, quite; the collective ability of Latin American populations to see through, around and beyond capitalism is a wonder to behold.

Also:

it is important at this point to stress the aesthetic dimension of capitalist realism, its echoes of socialist realism’s disdain for abstraction and montage, and its similar preference for the homely, the populist, the familiar: that which pushes already-existing emotional triggers.

This is in superficial conflict with the usual understanding of neophilia capitalism in general, and within the culture industry in particular. But at a deeper level, I suspect it really is true; much surface change, but nothing fundamental.