the troops, the troops...

the fucking troops!

i think i am going to start stealing those stupid support the troops bumper magnets.

because i have decided, today, inspired by this thoughtful piece, that i fully and one hundred percent do not support the fucking troops.

yes, these are poor, long-suffering folk, who are fighting for what they apparently believe in, and they are poor, have had hard-knock type lives, and are just looking for a way out. and the army seems like a great idea! and now they are out there fighting for our liberty. your grandpa was probably one, how could you possibly be against the troops!?! even michael damn moore is for the troops.

i don't care!

they are a bunch of - and i plagiarise bill hicks here lovingly - hired fucking killers. they are not your grandpa. and generally, when poor people escape poverty through violence, it is more or less frowned upon. and look at what the troops say when you see them on the telly-vision! "we're fighting for freedom!" yes, that entire family you shelled from miles above were posing an enormous threat to your freedom. i'm going out on a limb here, but i'm going to guess that when you're in a fighter jet, nothing without rockets can pose a threat to your personal freedom.

you don't get an exemption from having a conscience just because you were poor and signed up for something you didn't know enough about, and now you're 'just following orders.'

how can we bring about world peace? just stop fucking fighting. for fuck's sakes! stop! it doesn't matter who started it, how much they're paying you, or who told you to do it. you are killing people, and that is wrong. and if you - the troops! - quit doing it, who the fuck do you think is going to? look at the people in government - and in positions of leadership in general, really! once enough of the grunts quit, the draft-dodging fuckwads who run this meat-grinder we call a planet will have nobody left to shoot their guns (and rockets, artillery shells, smart-bombs, bunker-busters, etc. etc. etc.). and we all know that growing up a saudi billionaire or a texan one tends to make one averse to getting one's hands dirty.

da-dum! there it is. ali states the obvious, featuring lots of profanity.

things that piss me off.

so, i haven't posted a thing, for quite a long time. because the seed of misanthropy which has always been present in my wee little congealed heart, has been flourishing under the summer light, and when not enjoying my time off in animalistic self-destruction, my more rational side has been rather hermit-y and sullen, particularly when it comes to the better part of this human race of ours. as every crusty old maid has opined at one time or another, if you haven't got something nice to say, don't say anything at all.

however! i have elected to channel a tidge of this bitterness into some prose for you-all's delectation. 'you-all' being the hypothetical audience of this blog, which has likely dwindled into nothingness by now. if i haven't got something nice to say, i shall at least state my disheartening grievances in a pleasing fashion.

i am at work right now. this is one of the prime things which piss me off. see, for one thing, i hate the fact that i have to engage in this sort of soul-crushing robotic parrot-work in order to support myself and my vices. i hate corporations; all of their doublespeak and euphemism, their blindness and amorality, and most of all the pitiful drones that are my co-workers, who plod through their daily lives unaware of the fact that life could be better in so many ways, if only they were to collectively realize it. quite frankly, there is no reason for my job to exist.

which is one of the many reasons which i hate conservatives. because they are endlessly harping on about how corporations are ever-so efficient, and how all of our problems will be solved by the miracle-working of our brave CEOs. however, the private sector is predominantly composed, like every other 'sector,' of enormous idiots. every corporation with which i have ever dealt has made decisions the likes of which the most inbred retard would be ashamed to have even thought. my employer, for one, has pissed away 100 dollars just today by paying me to be at work for eight hours, doing nothing, posting inflammatory remarks about their idiotic policy choices. even the wacko liberals who deride corporations for being pathological and immoral, completely miss the point. companies don't care only about profit; in fact, they don't care about much of anything. they are fictitious entities, amorphous clouds of silly people bound together only by their suckling at the withered teat of the company payroll.

and obviously, if i hate conservatives and liberals in equal measure, i must have a healthy cupful of loathing for the united states, that wonderful case study which shows the rest of the world how easy it is to be disgusted with both sides of an argument, when its premises are sufficiently idiotic. and while i am sure i will hate china when it holds the balance of world power (not, of course, to say that it doesn't already), i will much prefer hating a real authoritarian regime than one which is too pussified to reveal its true nature. america is basically a huge corporation whose board of directors are presently engaged in a process of massive responsibility-liquidation before they get the fuck out of Dodge. and while i'm on about the Great Satan, and different reasons why it and its culture suck bloated testes, how about advertising? everyone who is in involved in advertising: you serve no useful purpose. you are sucking the joy out of being a human being, and ruining everything good about life. your job is to create a desire which only you can fulfil (for a price, of course), and then to endlessly withold the satisfaction of fulfilment. fucking kill yourself, advertisers, you are the scum of the scum of the earth.

so, as these different phenomena which have me bothered are all human concerns and/or constructions, i feel that i should delve deeper, and consider those human traits which are responsible for our society's paucity of redeeming characteristics. foremost, i would say, is confidence. i fucking hate confidence, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that i have little of it. but, i am proud of my lack of confidence! for you confident folk, with your self-assured grins and swaggering gaits, will be the ruin of us all. see, confidence is more or less the supreme arbiter of cultural recognition and social mobility in our society. the determining characteristic of a leader, in particular, is his or her (but most likely his) level of confidence. and with the greatly exaggerated importance of 'leadership' in this herdlike social hierarchy of ours, we are compelled to obey the will of ranks upon ranks of people chosen to command us based solely on how forcefully they can do so. we are social beings, and thus i think it not inappropriate to assert that every shitty decision ever made is because an overconfident idiot drowned out someone with a better idea.

so, i'm sure you're all thinking, gosh, ali. from your privileged and lofty post as some douchebag with a computer, you certainly have ripped into the flawed institutions of our society with equal measures of cleverness and insight! but are there any naturally-occurring phenomena that really piss you off??

of course! how about physics, for one? ever dropped something? tripped over something? gotten tangled up in some wires? it's all the fault of fucking physics! i call for a boycott.

not to mention electricity; how the fuck does that shit work, anyways??

but that's enough heated vitriol for the time being.

in case you're really feeling down and out after reading this, and need to have your faith in humanity restored by something astonishingly hilarious, head on down and give wigu a read. start from the beginning, and read it all - it's even better if you're at work, and you're effectively stealing back some of your surplus labour from the Man!

apologize, america!

please, don't regard this as an overly partisan jab at a particular swath of the Political Spectrum, though that is what this will surely constitute.

but rather, view it as a clever, if somewhat naif suggestion in the realm of Foreign Policy, and Public Relations, and all that manner of bureaucratese.

when, say, you kill at least 18 civilians on foreign soil with goddamn fucking ROBOT PLANES, maybe you could think about - and we're going back to, roughly kindergarten here - maybe the first thing you should do, as a collective entity, is apologize.

and the Official Response, as reported thus far in the press, is - and i quote - that the CIA felt they ordered this attack based upon "good reporting." not, "perhaps that was unwise." not a, "sorry for your loss." not even an insouciant, "sheeeyit, well it looks like that reporting wa'rn't so good after all." but instead, a guarded non-statement that could easily have been, and likely was gathered from some kind of standard Template. thereby, equating the deaths of 18 people with, say, a résumé or party invitation.

there you have it. i'd say that's pretty much the archetypal conservative response. instant damage-control, calculating soulless fuck cover-your-ass bullshit.

and you know what else is archetypally conservative? the response of every reasonably-right conservative who reads this. "well, they were probably harboring terrorists." "the agency can't be blamed for their unreliable information!" or perhaps they'd even call up a time when - gasp! - a LIBERAL caused something similar to happen.

not that i'd expect a conventionally liberal (read: "mainstream") government to behave much differently. nevertheless, america in particular just desperately needs to inject some humanity into their international image. so all i can say is just maybe - it'd be a good idea to apologize first, and ask questions later. even a noncommital, "we regret that such and such has occurred etc. etc. and will do our best to uncover the reasons behind the deaths of etc. etc." would be a better choice than having the first statement that is leaked to the Arab World - and i'm having faint recollections of a conservative bonerfest concerning Newsweek here - is that you attacked some of their citizens sans diplomacy or any such thing because you were pretty sure they deserved it.

fuck sakes! world war I started because some duke nobody even REMEMBERS (except for that lame band) got shot in a country that was barely even involved! and the country you attacked has nukes, for fuck's sakes!

but of course, never will a businessperson understand that sometimes the best response might not be to cover your ass.

gawrsh.

i haven't posted a thing in a loooooong time. i've mostly been reading over the break, really. got through the baroque cycle, the new marquez.... and after i typed that, i spent like an hour looking at wikipedia and completely forgot about this post.

but i'd just like to say that, in light of recent climate-related events, i am fully in favour of global warming. while once upon a time, i too cringed at the prospect of our impending doom beneath the ever-growing oceans. but it's just so nice out! it's almost like winter has called in sick for the year. so now that i've seen the light, you hippie granola fags can shut up, because i think canada, as a nation, needs to stand behind our brave fossil fuel and petrochemical industries and say, with one proud voice - fuck you, polar ice caps!

if anyone has a refrigerator or car radiator that they'd like disposed of inappropriately, or maybe some aerosol cans that still contain CFCs, please, let me know. i'll be happy to contribute to my pal, the greenhouse effect.

that'll be all.

just for the record...

i think i'll post again later today.

but i've been reading kos and redstate today and feeling rather bitter about the state of the political discourse.

so i just thought i'd say, briefly, for the record - this goes out to you, osama bin laden and ayman al-zawahiri or whatever the fuck your name is, and you, george bush, and you, NSA computers who are likely reading this site along with everything else published on the internet.

I don't give a flying fuck about terrorism.

I've cared more about the contents of my stools than I care about terrorism. the question of who I'm going to buy buds from over the next two weeks is far more pressing than anything to do with dumbass brown fanatics who feel like blowing shit up.

now, all I ask is why politicians won't espouse this viewpoint. in the immortal words of bill hicks, where's my fucking commercial? apparently, my voice was not heard. let me repeat.

Terrorism does not fucking matter, in the least.

Got it?

all this crap that Bush is spewing about how he needs to violate your civil liberties in order to defend freedom yada yada and so on, is retarded. let me get this straight. America has managed to keep its civil liberties intact through:

- a Civil War (well; posse comitatus notwithstanding.)
- two World wars (except for that pesky internment camp thing)
- a Holocaust
- countless Presidential assassinations
- the threat of nuclear annihilation by a foreign state having several thousand warheads
- Joseph McCarthy
- and any number of other things I forgot

yet for some reason, a handful of brown guys with box cutters gives this stupid yahoo licence to piss all over your bill of rights?

9/11 was a tragedy, yeah. but it was a DROP IN THE FUCKING BUCKET compared to the vast array of avoidable deaths each year.

so, let it go. i hate the fact that the framework of political discourse won't allow anyone to CALL IT LIKE IT IS and out the Bush administration on the fact that terrorism DOES NOT MATTER and is nothing more than a CONTRIVED ENEMY so that the MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX has a reason to sell their guns.

alright?

good. glad that's out there. oh yeah, and go see syriana.

how to talk to a conservative (if you must).

well, now that school is winding down, i took a break from readings at work to bait some young conservative.

which made me realize something. although i may take it as a given that conservatism in our day is little more than a rhetorical fallacy with the intention of perpetuating the ongoing subjugation of the polis by de facto corporate rule .............. there's a lot of people who don't even understand what the fuck i just said, let alone what's wrong with conservativism. please, regardless of your political affiliations, read this. it's a fairly concise synopsis of the genesis of conservativism. if you read it openly and consider the nature of the neo/paleoconservative movement (and aren't in business), i think that you'll never give conservatism a second thought ever again.

rather than rehash agre's wonderful piece, i thought i'd compile a brief little glossary. see, conservatism functions by co-opting language (thank you 204!) and altering its connotations, or exploiting its pre-existing connotations for nefarious goals. so when a conservative ideologue talks, they're not necessarily lying. what's happening is that they're selectively citing statistics and engaging in doublespeak - that is to say, repurposing facts and languages for their own purposes. liberals do this too, and often in the same ways. but either way, the meanings they attribute to the words they use don't correlate with the meanings assumed by the general public to do so. thus, when one is voting conservative, one is voting based on one's own conception of the conservative platform, which is essentially false.

as Agre notes, "Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice." so, when a conservative says certain things, they actually mean different things to us. this is an attempt to translate some common conservative turns of phrase into the common vernacular.

freedom is the main one, so there'll be a few:
freedom: the freedom to internalize (on penalty of legal sanction) the values of the aristocracy.
freedom of the press: the freedom for my friends and associates in the business world to own all of the press.
free trade: the freedom of much larger corporations to get all the profit which might otherwise be accrued to smaller or foreign ones, and thereby consolidate the ranks of the aristocracy.
freedom of speech: the freedom to engage in blatant sophistry, misleading citation of facts, and ad hominem attacks, and then to pretend that you've made a logical argument. (sure, freedom of speech does entitle them to do this. it also entitles me to call those who do it rabid kitten-eating child-raping heroin-addicted cum-guzzling self-serving profit junkies without a soul or semblance of dignity. and please do note that i didn't claim that was a logical assertion.)
freedom in the Middle East: the freedom of the brown folks to submit wholeheartedly to the values of free trade, empty consumerism and American cultural hegemony.
freedom in school choice/health care/daycare/etc.: freedom for the aristocracy to develop their own, far better schools, hospitals, and daycare centres without having to benefit the proletarian masses and (god forbid!) maybe letting them get a share of the profits.

and here's some more grab-bag entries.

democracy: the ability of a populace to choose at will an elected dictator who will systematically institutionalize the interests of the corporate power structure.
traditional values: the rule of the common people by a quasi-hereditary aristocracy and the universal imposition of the economic, political, and moral values of that aristocracy by force of law.
economic growth: an increase in the amount of profit acquired by the aristocratic capitalist class (generally, the top 5% of all earners), regardless of the costs accrued to the working class and/or the vast majority of humanity.
culture of entitlement: the ridiculous claim that, perhaps by virtue of one's being born on this earth, one ought to be entitled at the very least to a free and equitable enjoyment of its resources, and the profit accrued from such. (digression: conservatives piqued at this claim, please note the Lockean proviso. 'as much and as good for others' ought to entitle people to a substistence-level stipend, regardless of your greed.)
Liberal waste: the usage of surplus income to benefit society as a whole, rather than the aristocracy.
Liberal corruption: cronyism and backdoor dealings which don't wholly benefit the aristocracy.
a strong military: a strong mercenary contingent to serve the global policy goals of the aristocracy where force is necessary, and not incidentally keep the global arms race running strongly and funding the military-industrial complex.
the war on terror: the perpetuation of a constant militaristic devotion to aristocratic rule and the ideological construction of an enemy to justify an authoritarian state.

....

alright, that's about all i could stomach for the moment. and hey; for equal opportunity's sake, i'll throw out a few bits of liberal doublespeak that are equally nauseating. but i think anybody rational person will agree with me that the conservative ones are a bit more worrisome. and also note how much more, and more complicated writing i had to do for the conservative ones. this, i think, is one of the great strengths of the conservative movement: a vast majority of the population is far too stupid to even comprehend the explanations of the real conservative agenda, or read the material necessary to do so. haha. anyways:

support for the arts: a nice fat grant for my pet project.
public broadcasting: TV and radio stations that'll play all the lame shit nobody would watch on an advertiser-funded network.

and of course...

the aristocracy: people that are a fuckin' hell of a lot richer than i'll ever be.

on criticism.

note: this is a very slightly edited crosspost from my alternative media journal, since this is primarily to do with my MPI project. thought it might benefit from a bit of additional traffic though, so i stuck it up on here, too.

i've got something to write about today that relates to the inevitable (minor, meaningless, and laughable) stir caused in certain circles of lame people by my rude little zine article. i'm going to try and make this about how alternative media relates to its audience, and avoid making it about how little fratboy tools can't take criticism. if it veers off toward the latter, i apologize.

now, one of the main focuses of my project thus far has been the withdrawal of mainstream media. the corporate-run media is so isolated and separate from the polis as a whole that it's nearly impossible for it to function as a truly empowering outlet for civil discourse. alternative media might seem to be the solution to these ills, in that it offers citizens an unprecedented level of enfranchisement in producing media content and contributing to the discourse, rather than simply consuming it.

however, to say that alternative media is universally better than corporate is to create a false dichotomy of good/evil that really has no place in ethnographic research. and criticism is one thing that alternative media does really well, but also in a sense really poorly.

the independent nature of alternative media makes it easy to criticize establishment institutions, like i did in my first essay for the zine, without any problems. nobody minds if you diss the war on terror, 'cos it's a favourite punching bag of the quasi-intellectual wannabe media literate folks who constitute the greatest part of the zine's audience.

however, the insular nature of forms like the zine mean that it's a lot more difficult to be critical of those who might also be members of the incestuous little community that forms its audience. since people are bred and indoctrinated to see the corporate media as fundamentally Other, as separate from society as a whole, people tend to respect the right of criticism. growing up with a professional musician as a parent, i can say with some confidence that it's not exactly kosher to confront a reviewer about a review that one feels is unjustified. and especially not to decry them for criticising you "in this kind of environment," as i was. (note also: what is that supposed to mean?)

the band members that i wrote the terrible review of seem to have this expectation in a 'scene' zine that one won't be critical of members of that scene, that a reviewer has an obligation to be 'encouraging' or some such crap. certainly, i do feel some measure of obligtaion to encourage talent where i see it, especially locally - but i do not feel any obligation to encourage shit, anywhere. sorry, but being in the same faculty as me doesn't entitle you to the complete suspension of my critical faculties. i would have been happy to write some encouraging things, if there was a single thing i legitimately liked about the band.

certainly, the band members are entitled to their (incorrect) opinion of the quality of their music, based upon countless stoned mumblings in a frat-house basement. indeed, they are free to call my tastes misplaced, my verbosity pretentious, and my weight gargantuan. i ripped on them pretty bad in my article, and i'd be a pansy if i expected anything less from them in return. but for one of them to walk up to me in class and look me in the eye with disappointment and ask why i'd criticize them so harshly, as though i have some responsibility to cheerlead every bunch of jam-band wannabes that happens to be involved in MIT... well now that's just asking for propaganda.

and if anyone thinks that's gonna come from me before i've even committed myself to a job in the self-censored world of corporate-shill media... they're sadly (and hilariously) mistaken. not to mention completely out of place in this faculty.

oh. and let it be noted - if any interested parties happen to see this post - that my vitriol is owing not to the bass player approaching me in class, or giving me the finger. he was actually quite friendly, and took the whole thing in stride, as befits a respectable musician. any sincere rage he may have had was held back and/or muffled by sarcasm, at least to my face. thoughtful.

such mild irritation as may exist on my part is owing largely to the fact that the band members and their "manager" (stifles laughter) chose to pester my roommate for hours on end last night. also, i'm a pretentious little fucker, who bristles at the slightest suggestion that he restrain his critical apparatus (heh... apparatus). note also: a little college-rock band does not need a 'manager' to play bar shows with minuscule audiences. 'manager' is in fact euphemism for "guy without musical ability who still wants to feel cool due solely to his association with people that have talent."

alright, that's enough.