Links

Jeffrey St. Clair & James Ridgeway – Articles on New West Vigilantes

Links to articles by Jeffrey St. Clair & James Ridgeway:

“On the Firing Line: Bullies in Stetsons”

“The War to Claim the New West”

Bonus Links: “Cattle, Guns, Birds and Boredom: Inside the Oregon Occupation” and  “9th Circuit Blasts Judge Who Ruled for Rancher”

Slavoj Žižek – The Cologne Attacks Were an Obscene Version of Carnival

Link to an article by Slavoj Žižek:

“The Cologne Attacks Were an Obscene Version of Carnival”

Selected quotes:

  • “being a victim at the bottom of the social ladder does not make you some kind of privileged voice of morality and justice.”
  • “This destructive potential of envy is the base of Rousseau’s well-known distinction between egotism, amour-de-soi (that love of the self which is natural), and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself to others in which a person focuses not on achieving a goal, but on destroying the obstacle to it [quoting Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques, first dialog] . . . An evil person is thus not an egotist, ‘thinking only about his own interests’. A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself.”
  • “The difficult lesson of this entire affair is thus that it is not enough to simply give voice to the underdogs the way they are: in order to enact actual emancipation, they have to be educated (by others and by themselves) into their freedom.”

Michael Scott Christofferson – May 1968’s Black Sheep

Link to an interview with Michael Scott Christofferson conducted by Daniel Zamora:

“May 1968’s Black Sheep”

 

Bonus quote:

“The anarchist denunciations of [state power] from Foucault to James Scott are less worried about transnational monopolies than about the (now defunct) Soviet party state or even the social-democratic nanny state. And as for the intellectual and cultural polemics, they always end up denouncing Marx and Marxism. I think these battles on the left are unproductive politically and intellectually . . . .”

Fredric Jameson, “Afterword: On Eurocentric Lacanians”

Mapping Police Violence – 2015 Report

Link to the group Mapping Police Violence‘s report:

“2015 Police Violence Report”

Bonus links: Interview with Sam Sinyangwe, Campaign Zero (mostly good ideas, with some flaws:  the persistently proposed requirement that “community organizations” nominate civil servants/overseers is flawed [would the KKK qualify as a “community organization”?  If not, then which groups?  And who decides which groups?], and the “fair union contracts” aspect includes important points but then goes too far [banning contacts that allow officers to “receive paid leave or remain on desk-duty during an investigation following a police shooting or other use of deadly force” is anti-due process and anti-worker]; lastly, “unconscious bias” research is still in its infancy and relies on many troubling ideological assumptions [the research has its own bias of the cognitivist and/or liberal variety: “PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias on an apparently neutral statement or gesture“] making it difficult and premature to implement as a mandatory process).