NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

My position on Martin Luther King Jr. is somewhat similar to my position on Jesus Christ. I have a strong affinity for both of them in their radical dimensions, the way they challenged system of oppression in their time and proposed a powerful message of social change into something that was potentially more equitable. Both of them have of course been edited and watered down significantly in their message, to the point where both of them can be invoked in the name of so many things that they would have violently detested in their lives. Gof ya-hu si Jesus Kristo komo un zealot. Lao anggen un lahen Yu'us, hmmm, ti bali nu Guahu i mensahi-ña. Parehu yan si MLK. Gof annok gi sinangån-ña yan gi bidå-ña na zealot lokkue'. Lao atan ha' på'go, i manracist na taotao, ma u'usa i estoria-ña para u ma puni i tinailayi yan taihustisia gi på'go na tiempo.  Below is a great article that outlines the radical dimensions of Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy.  ******

Published on Monday, December 9, 2013 by The Guardian If Nelson Mandela Really Had Won, He Wouldn't Be Seen as a Universal Hero Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honor his legacy, we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to by Slavoj Žižek     ‘It is all too simple to criticize Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?’ (Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images) In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market

I've seen Slavoj Zizek use the example of "the red ink" many times over the years in many books. Interesting to see him now use it to describe what the Occupy movement is attempting to describe.  ************************** Published on Tuesday, April 24, 2012 by The Guardian/UK Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done... Next? How a protest movement without a program can confront a capitalist system that defies reform by Slavoj Žižek What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the center, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s: "They are asking us what is our program

Published on Monday, March 5, 2012 by The Guardian/UK How Ayn Rand Became the New Right's Version of Marx Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats by George Monbiot   It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand , who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential. Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism.

"What is Normal?" Simon Critchley Adbusters Dec. 14, 2011 We are living through a dramatic and ever-widening separation between normal state politics and power. Many citizens still believe that state politics has power. They believe that governments, elected through a parliamentary system, represent the interests of those who elect them and that governments have the power to create effective, progressive change. But they don't and they can't. We do not live in democracies. We inhabit plutocracies: government by the rich. The corporate elites have overwhelming economic power with no political accountability. In the past decades, with the complicity and connivance of the political class, the Western world has become a kind of college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders. This situation has led to the disgusting and ever-growing gulf that separates the superrich from the rest of us. St

I got an email the other day which featured the "purest" example of ideology I've seen in quite a while. It contained an email that had been sent to my friend (who I won’t name in case she wants her identity kept secret) from a “Marxist” professor which basically attacked her for not being Marxist enough. I only know some of the context, but she had just recently helped organize an Ethnic Studies summit in San Diego and so the listserv for the conference has been the site for a lot of pointless posturing, of which this purely ideological email is a perfect example. Reading the snarky, snippy Marxist email was both hysterical and depressing. It represented on the one hand something so hilarious in the way in which the author took himself and his orthodox defense of Marxist theory, thought and intellectualism so seriously. It was depressing because it made him look like someone so sublimely out of touch with reality and even the nature of the very theories he was shrou

The DEIS comment period created the impression of a significant amount of people being against the buildup or changing their opinion on the buildup, or being more engaged about it. Since the period ended, much of that feeling of things moving or shifting has changed or evaporated. The comment period did after all provide the perfect space, a window of time and a series of public events where a new image of the island could be forged. Since that time however, I've heard regular complaints from all sectors of society, that the feel of things moving or changing, or as I've written on this blog, of the buildup "breaking down," was not real, was all just media manipulations and spectacles of dissent. That public opinion on the buildup has always been taihinasso positive, and overwhelmingly supportive. That although the surface of public opinion may have changed from November of last year to February of this year, this is the work of a small minority of people, who staged

Hegel once said that every great thing, whether it be a person, event or thing, will appear not just once, but twice. Karl Marx later added on to this notion, that every potentially revolution moment or figure, must emerge and then be exorcised, by agreeing with Hegel’s thesis, but augmenting it as follows: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” As Guam winds down to the end of the second term of Felix Camacho as governor, this philosophical notion has for some reason been heavily on my mind. In the United States last year, when George W. Bush was officially no longer the President of the United States, it signified the end of an era, since for close to an entire decade, the great ship of the American state, had him at its helm. You would have to be a fool not to look back at such a length of time, and either blur things to where they wer