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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Saturday, December 20, 2003
Politics Hugo has looked at recent debate amongst the Democratic candidates for U.S. President. I like his closer: Clark, Lieberman, and to a lesser degree Kerry and Gephardt were the only ones who sounded like grown-ups when asked about how they'll get us out of Iraq. Dean held up Afghanistan as a model of democracy for Iraq(!?), which made me wonder about him. Rival warlords ruling 90 plus percent of the country with a figurehead president who was chosen by the Americans and gets to stay alive as long as he promises not to enforce any authority outside Kabul and stay in his palace most of the time? Democracy? Deliver us from the lunk-headed feel-good progressives who want us to cut and run in Iraq without re-establishing the rule of law and public safety that ordinary Iraqis had until we pre-emptively attacked them because of all those darn WMDs..Three thoughts from me... -I think Wesley Clark would have the best chance of beating Bush. In part because of his military record but also because he seems to be the most charismatic of the candidates. (I have no opinion on Madonna endorsing the retired general.) -Howard Dean bears a resemblance to John McCain who bears a resemblance to Benjamin Netanyahu. -Yesterday I said that I have a hard time disliking Dean. Maybe I am really going soft but I can't help but have a degree of sympathy for any Democrat who critiques Bill Clinton. I don't plan to vote for him or anything, but it was a nice step. *** Whenever the "big government" term gets thrown around now I think of the following passage from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000): Now that the most radical conservative opponents of big government have collapsed under the weight of the paradox of their position, we want to pick up their banners where they left them in the mud. It is our turn now to cry "Big government is over!" Why should that slogan be the exclusive property of the conservatives? Certainly, having been educated in class struggle, we know well that big government has also been an instrument for the redistribution of social wealth and that, under the pressure of working-class struggle, it has served in the fight for equality and democracy. Today, however, those times are over. In imperial postmodernity big government has become merely the despotic means of domination and the totalitarian production of subjectivity. Big government conducts the great orchestra of subjectivities reduced to commodities. And it is consequently the determination of the limits of desire: these are in fact the lines that, in the biopolitical Empire, establish the new division of labor across the global horizon, in the interest of reproducing the power to exploit and subjugate. We, on the contrary, struggle because desire has no limit and (since the desire to exit and the desire to produce are one and the same thing) because life can be continuously, freely, and equally enjoyed and reproduced.Typing those magnificent words out, I started to wish that I believed them without question. *** " Libya," in the words of the BBC, "has said it will give up its programmes for developing weapons of mass destruction and allow unconditional inspections." Not surprisingly, the likes of Austin Bay and Glenn Reynolds are hailing this as proof of the effectiveness of the Bush Administration's policy towards Iraq. While this move was most likely in response to that policy, one has to wonder how big of a deal this is. Uncle Sam hasn't "liberated" Libya and people in the U.S. can sleep soundly at night knowing that Gaddafi won't attack the U.S. with biological or chemical weapons, if Gaddafi's regime in fact lives up to their pledge. |