Thursday, March 25, 2010

framing

Originally Published Dec 31, 2009



http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/31/2783377.htm?section=w...


The above article is about a group of protesters in Egypt who are opposed to the blockade of Gaza. Most likely if you are reading this it means that you have yet to fall in to the trap of the post-literate world view and are probably aware of Cynthia McKinney's attempts to protest the blockade as well which ended with her being released from an Israeli detention facility.

Many things about this article piqued my interest, but one glaring omission is what motivated me to try to share this with others.

Where are the Palestinians?

In this article there are no Palestinians. There are no Palestinians with a voice. They have become palestinians, this idea/word that steals a voice, that de-politicizes, and therefore dehumanizes. Maybe Palestinians love the blockade its like the greatest thing thats ever happened to some of them. But I don't fucking know that if I view the world through the stimuli available to me such as Disney's ABC. In this life where the world comes to me in sound bites, articles, talking heads/pundits, etc. I have been distanced from the Palestinian, I have been told of the palestinian, that amorphous blob of victims that deserved the collective punishment because they are inhuman.

How am I to know the palestinian? We all know that direct action whether peaceful or violent only has an effect if it has publicity. If I have no methods available to me to access what direct actions Palestinians are taking and what words they are writing/saying I am only learning about how others view the Palestinian, so I am truly only learning about the palestinian.

Where is journalism? Without it a democracy cannot function. Where are readers? Without them a democracy cannot function.

What, if anything, is available to me as an action to effectively achieve the abolition of the blockade? Will these same means help abolish the Cuban blockade? From what I can tell the ability to directly effect either of these things is beyond my economic means(lobbying/corruption), beyond my charismatic means(trying to lead a popular movement), and beyond my intelligence(hacktivism). The only means I have are to speak to others to see if they also see the divide between the human Palestinian and the de-politicizsed palestinian. If I had access to more words of the other, I could disseminate such words this would be effective resistance. Not to speak for the palestinian, but to put the words of the Palestinian through my, albeit small, megaphone is an act of resistance against the blockade. The blockade itself can only be achieved because of the conflation between inhuman de-politicized palestinian and Palestinian in the mainstream media. I can cut away at those assumptions by reproducing the truth of humanity in Palestinians. The truth of the everyday suffering of any human who is proclaimed less than, who is proclaimed a second class citizen, a criminal, a terrorist, who must have their construction helmets marked with a spraypaint X. It is not enough to proclaim the less than human status of the Palestinian, they must be marked off with borders to demarcate where order ends and chaos begins in this fashion the state/identity one was born in to looks so safe. When the other does actually get over the border(because depoliticized subjects make for a great cheap labor source) to do some construction work for example, make sure to spraypaint a large X on their helmets. When a palestinian gets over the border we must mark the border with an X. With this X we can demarcate this inhuman, de-politicized, realm of uncivilized savagery to help us remember that we are peaceful and democratic.

I can't find the picture on the internet, big surprise, and can't remember which book it was in, but palestnians were wearing badges of an x on the helmet when in Israel at certain sites. When certain press outlets found this slightly too dehumanizing it changed because people got angry. We all know that our participation in the dehumanization of Palestinians is part of what keeps it going, but we also know that its wrong. Every last one of us knows at some level as situations like this prove when too big of an increment of change in the ongoing process of dehumanization occur that people actually do get bothered and change it. But of course the adage holds true if you throw a frog in boiling water it jumps right out, if you bring the pot to a boil with the frog in it he'll boil right up. And no the Palestinians are not the frog, you're the frog, we're all the frog who need to re-examine what we take for granted. For example that the water is 10 degrees hotter than it was 10 minutes ago, or that Palestinians are human and have a voice and deserve the opportunity for some sort of self-determination which usually takes the form of the creation of a nation-state as it did for Zionism. Just don't fucking get it, the answer to a depoliticised, dehumanized subject is: a voice, self-determination, and usually a state/autonomy. The problem in creating autonomy/state is everyones already got territory staked out. But in this situation there is already a large chunk of land that nobody has a more legitimate claim to than the Palestinians. They also have the UN backing because Israel according to a UN directive has to relinquish "territories gained in the recent conflict" the UN thing that was written in 1967. The de facto "being on the territory" combined with a UN directive is more than enough legitimacy to create a state. Not to mention that Jordan has formally forfeited all claims on territory outside its current borders.
But Palestinian states have been proclaimed, multiple Palestinian leaders have stepped forward to offer Israel recognition in return for their own recognition. Why is Palestine still not a state?

http://www.amazon.com/Sharon-My-Mother-Law-Ramallah/dp/0375423796
This book "Sharon and my mother in law" by Suad Amiry is an incredible read. It is the words of a Palestinian the voice of a Palestinian, not Disney giving voice to someone speaking for a palestinian. The book is incredible I noticed two great themes in it. First of all the mundane nature of the occupation from an individual's point of view. The occupation is always there a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head, but it articulates itself in such interesting ways. The absurdity of the form the occupation takes and its intervention in to the daily lives of humans trying to survive and help their loved ones lends itself to this Kafkaesque world that is: occupation, dehumanization, etc it is all these things. Many argue that Kafka was an anti-colonial writer (this article you may have to sneak on to a college campus library to look at it if you're really interested i can find it and copy paste: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/tae/v008/8.3kohn.html ) that article focuses on the book "in the penal colony". If you've ever read Kafka you will find this book doubly amazing. Of course Edward Said is a Palestinian whose book "Orientalism" was apparently just purged from Scribd.

reality will not be televised

Originally published Oct 20, 2009.



The year is 2020 and we are in the back office of a taco bell(because everyone knows taco bell won the fast food wars).
Hiring Manger: "So we got your application here, Mr. Heene...falcon...that name sounds familiar."
falcon heene: "well I called a number of times trying to arrange an interview."
H.mgr: "Falcon...hey, aren't you the balloon boy?"
Falcon: "well i'm 19 now-"
mgr: "ha! balloon man i'm sorry. Hey frank! get in here I gotta show you something!"
Frank: "hey whats up?"
mgr: "guess who this guy is."
frank: "I don't know"
mgr: "balloon boy, we got fuckin balloon boy in our store!"
frank: "wow! Hey I saw that thing on teevee! Are you really him?"
falcon: "...yes..."
mgr: "frank you gotta get my picture with the balloon boy, my wife is never going to believe this."
(pose and picture)
falcon: "So I really want this job, its hard to get hired because of my name. How does it look?"
mgr: "oh, yes, oh, i mean..well no. I mean I can't hire you I'm sorry, bill at corporate would never let me hear the end of it if I hired the balloon boy. But good luck out there, seriously. I'm sure you'll do fine, after all you're famous!"

Rambling

Originally published Oct 2, 2009, around midnight.


cause and effect lol, serendipity? chance luck , writing energy.
I've been listening, no farther back I watched this anime, no even farther back hahahaah.

The only reason I originally gave a fuck about the internet is because of 2 games one called Mechwarrior 2 and the other called ultima online. Mechwarrior 2 I purchased specifically because it had this shit called netmech so I could turn on my game in my room, I could connect to some motherfucker really far away and play them in the game, just like you'd play against a friend in nintendo.
I wished to be the best player alive, by the time I saved my nickels to purchase the game, the game had been around. I was the n00b, and just like every other fucking online game since I went about getting my shit kicked routinely. In order to get better I had to get fights.
Mechwarrior was a game where you're in a big bipedal robot trying to shoot the shit out of another bipedal robot. When playing against someone you would play first to 2, 3, etc kills. So once you landed a kill you were damaged and had to face a new mech, it was hard to turn around if you didn't get the first kill(this is before q2 made everyone say "frag" for online kill[i had understood fragging to be the practice of vietnam foot soldiers fragmentation(frag) grenading terrible POGs]).
In order to get better one could not own noobs constantly, one had to fight against those better than oneself. But in your mission to become the greatest swordsman you cannot just attack the Master of the dojo. You have to fight your way up, prove yourself, or why would they waste their time on you? Unless...You can goad them in to fighting you, find their buttons through stimuli such as conversation or just observing other conditioning elements happening to the target. Lie, insult, shame yourself whatever it takes to get that battle on even terms with everyone watching, talk more shit than is generally a good idea. Make them passionate about beating you, rile them up focus their spirit and mind. Make it so incredibly shameful to lose this match, knowing full well there is 50%+ chance you'll be the loser. If your goal is to make people like your presence, or your goal to become some sort of leader among humanity then these are the opposite of the actions you should take. If your goal is to improve yourself in one specific way, combat or competition can help. You will lose most of these matches, that one that you do win because you used some cheap strat like ranging make sure to add as much insult to injury as possible, it is the only way they will play even harder next time. Altruism doesn't exist, there is nothing pure or real in this world, we are mired in a sewage pool of reified intellectual diarreah. Its too late, just lament the downfall. Laugh, laugh out loud, lol if you will at the fucking IDEA of sustainable humanity. We are the descendents of those members of our species that murdered the other humans. Human evolution at this point(and in the recent history)is based on murder. Those who survived the thousands of life/death struggles with other humans they found themselves in during our probably half a milliion year history on earth(more than half spent in Africa).
Napster fucking rocked, fuck the RIAA, fuck the MPAA, fuck lars and u other greedy ass celebrities. Just to get it out of the way i'm not "stealing" and thinking its ok. The legal definition of theft is dispossession or deprivation.
If I: 1. Never intended to purchase said piece of information
AND
2. Did not dispossess anyone of the information in order to obtain it
THEN
it is not theft.
You can hire expensive lawyers to argue otherwise but the above will still be true. Also if you already owned a hard copy of the information purchased through the free market (LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL). So if you ever get court papers and you're the example: call every1 u know and get copies of the shit you d/led and just say you lost the receipts.
The internet has a culture, a culture being a shared set of values, rituals, and language. The internet has all three ad nauseum, individuals who are on the internet are far more likely to support the freedom of information and oppose censorship. Apart from those 2 issues opinions seem to diverge. They killed napster, they killed scour, they killed gnutella, they killed limewire with fucking spyware. Then: Enter the Torrent.
They made it to transfer big files fast, it turned out to be the perfect vehicle for the information trade movement on the internet. This is because the file is not hosted on some website, it is not connected directly to some dude's harddrive, it was uploaded, but now its on every1's computer. Downlaod little random pieces of information in 1 or 2 mb chunks(i forgot). If you open up any of these little chunks they are garbled and useless. Can downloading a few useless pieces of information from jim and a few useless pieces of information from sally and putting 'em together to make a britney spears song be illegal? Illegal for who? lol what a clusterfuck.
Its the internet and I know not to take it to seriously, but what if the internet could be responsible for a flowering of human thought before the end of this recent 20,000 year population boom. What if the last few generations before Malthus turns out to be right have the ability to become more enlightened than any other generation in history. For the first time you(you being the person reading this and I(being the person you think i am due to the image i've inadvertently marketed for myself through words) have FREE (no economic requirement) access to the entire breadth of human art, knowledge, and history.
There are efforts to stop this. To bring the internet under corporate control, to scare people with billion dollar lawsuits against people that make 25k a year, and legal prosecution of torrent hosting websites(TPB). I do not mention this as a call to action against such efforts, most likely you are not in a position to influence the outcomes of these examples. I point this out because you and I should be taking full advantage of this. Download every piece of art you've heard about, YES they do have shittons of books that you can torrent, yes classics are already free on gutenberg.org and manybooks.org and sometimes obscure texts can be found on pdf-search-engine.com (watch out last one full of popups and such). Books.google.com and scholar.google.com you can search through journals and books. MOst of these books you can read the vast majority for free, some pages are gone that sucks but you can read thsoe pages later if you don't get it from what you read.
Information is free, both as an ethical statement and as an objective observation of our present reality.
There is the one caveat: the haves and have nots. This is why direct action protests and activism are great, but do not lose sight of your community. Make sure you have a library, that your school is well funded(sorry illich), and support efforts to get tools of information gathering to the youth. The people who do not own a computer or are not adept at navigating through information on the internet are exactly the people that need to learn how to. I'm sure you meet them everyday. Oh you're talking about tv(jesus everyone talks about tv, i guess i catch a few shows on hulu but don't have an actual tv anymore). Oh they know about hulu? DO they know what a torrent is? They speak a different language? is there any show or music they can't find here thats in their native language? do they know about torrents? It IS activism to educate someone on how to use a tool of information gathering. It may the most non-hierarchical and non-manipulative way to empower people.
But they got azureus...now its vuze and it give me advertisements, i fucking hate advertisements(as my eyes drift rightward to bernakes debt solution, is your bank in trouble, save on heating oil now, ann coulter-free, buy anarchism apparel) I guess google words is somewhat entertaining guessing at which keywords it stole out of your history to make the ads. Who knows when torrents will disappaear.
So I used torrents like fucking crazy downloading discographies, shows, and movies. I love comics, I hadn't seen much anime in my life apart from ninja scroll, akira, and ghost in the shell. But I downloaded all these fucking awesome anime series. Downloaded obscure movies i could never find, downloaded the commercial movie the day it was out in theatres, downloaded movies by following writers and directors of movies I liked that I would have NEVER heard of if I hadn't downloaded the movie I originally associated with them in the first place.
I downloaded this anime called "death note". Little did I know that this was the fucking rage worldwide. The manga had been banned from China's classrooms or criminalized i can't remember. Everyone has read the manga and seen the anime(I haven't finished the manga hehe). Great story about this guy who...i can't tell you I won't do it justice. Mangas and anime are the best at starting with a premise and completely turning it upside down over and over. In the second half of the series the opening and closing songs piqued my interest, watched a youtube video, youtube video led to another, torrent the discography. This japanese band called Maximum The Hormone, I can't put them in a genre because I would just be ascribing values I ascribe to genres. They combine a lot of styles and sometimes get real poppy, but I guess I can tolerate the poppy cause it makes the scream vocals contrast so much more. Could never find much information about the band, lyrics or anything just the music which I really liked. It was all in japanese, but for some reason i felt like I could understand them sometimes. Then there is my attraction to scream vocals, the entropy, I fucking love it. Destroying yourself to make your art, so romantic eh? makes me want to read hunger artist again. The lead singer is having throat surgery, the guy does both screamo and growl vocals, how long can you keep that up? I mean a live show, you're screaming so hard your throat is taking permanent damage every time no matter how much training you've had to scream from the back of your throat. Not even recording, destroying oneself to create a piece of art that will disappear forever as soon as it has been created. But it can be done wrong haha, what if thats you? screaming away for an album nobody will listen to lol won't be able to afford throat surgery.
So recently I found a single they put out with a couple songs and one of 'em is this song F.
I mean I really dig all their songs so its just another to throw on the pile of great songs. But just recently I found this video on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVwZxyeKZoc
Finally translation!!! I can never understand what they're saying because when its english its engrish and sung so its fucking impossible, when its japanese I dont' knwo what they're saying and I haven't found any lyric translations that didn't suck. So it turns out this song is about well you have to see the lyrics. First there is this:

"Overfishing, deforestation, overdevelopment
The repetitive destruction of the environment
Oppression, torture, no human rights
Propaganda is implanted within us "

I love it, and then this:

His upper arms are pink pink pink
His head is sick sick sick
He has a floating vehicle
And a power level of 530,000

The song is about Dragon Ball Z, the title and song are about frieza lol!

There is no point to all this, but I do want to ask you for some help.

I seek stimuli that I have not been exposed to.