PRO LIFE GOP STATES

Biden sued by 8 states over program that allows Central American children to legally 

reunite with parents in the US

Connor Perrett

Sat, January 29, 2022, 

President Joe Biden (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

• Republican attorneys general in eight states sued the Biden administration on Friday.

• They asked a federal judge to stop a program that legally allows children to reunite with their parents living in the US.

• The program was enacted under the Obama administration and has been expanded under Biden.

Republican attorneys general in eight states on Friday filed a lawsuit requesting a federal judge stop a Biden administration program that allows children of legal immigrants from Central America living in the US to reunite with their parents.

The attorneys general in Arkansas, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas sued over the program, called the Central American Minors Refugee and Parole Program.

"There are no lawful paths for aliens who lack status to come join other aliens who lack status in the United States—and for good reason. It defies common sense," the attorneys general wrote in the lawsuit.

"No sovereign nation would reward those who break the law by permitting family members abroad to join them in living in the sovereign territory unlawfully, particularly with the assistance of the government itself," they said, adding to "do so would undermine national sovereignty and would be fundamentally unfair to those who pursue lawful immigration channels and patiently wait for their opportunity to immigrate to the United States."

According to the US State Department, the program started in 2014 to "give at-risk children in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras the opportunity to come to the United States as refugees."

The program, created during the administration of former President Barack Obama, expanded under President Joe Biden to include children of legal guardians and parents who have ongoing asylum cases, the Texas Tribune reported.

The program began a two-phase reopening on March 10 last year after it was halted in 2017 under the administration of former President Donald Trump. At the time, according to the Washington Post, Trump's decision to end the program left 2,714 children, who had already received approval, unable to come to the US.

The pause also meant that 1,465 children who had come to the US under the program, which grants a two-year renewable parole for them to legally live in the US, had to find another way to remain in the country when the program expired, according to the Post.

Last March, when the Central American Minors Refugee and Parole Program restarted, it was first focused on opening cases closed without an interview in 2018, when the program ended, according to the State Department.

The State Department announced new guidelines for submissions in June last year, which require parents from the three countries be legally living in the US on "permanent resident status; temporary protected status; parole, deferred action; deferred enforced departure; or withholding of removal," the State Department website said.

In the lawsuit, the attorneys general argued Biden doesn't have the authority to enact such a program without the approval of Congress, arguing the program places a burden on states who are required to provide social services to the children.

The children must be under 21 years old, unmarried, and the parents must submit to DNA testing and provide paperwork to prove their relationship to the child. The process to gain approval can take up to a year, the Texas Tribune reported.

"The Biden Administration has sown nothing but disaster for our country through its illegal, unconstitutional immigration policies," Texas Attorney General Paxton, who has targeted the Biden administration with numerous lawsuits over the past year, said.

"Biden's latest round of flagrant law-breaking includes his Central American Minors Program, which has contributed significantly to many states being forced to take in even more aliens. My fellow attorneys general and I are suing to stop it," he added.

Last year, the Department of State and Homeland Security defended the program's reopening as means to deliver a safer and more humane pathway to protection for migrant children who make an oftentimes dangerous and unaccompanied trek to the US southern border.

"We are firmly committed to welcoming people to the United States with humanity and respect, and reuniting families. We are delivering on our promise to promote safe, orderly, and humane migration from Central America through this expansion of legal pathways to seek humanitarian protection in the United States," the State Department and Homeland Security said in a joint statement.

SE ASIAN STALINIST ALLIANCE

China: UN council should try to avoid civil war on Myanmar

EDITH M. LEDERER
Fri, January 28, 2022

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — China’s U.N. ambassador said Friday the U.N. Security Council’s primary goal in strife-torn Myanmar should be to avoid more violence and a civil war.

Zhang Jun told several reporters after the council heard closed-door briefings from the new Myanmar envoys for the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the United Nations that he hopes their efforts and others “can really continue to calm the situation.”

Almost a year ago -- on Feb. 1, 2021 -- Myanmar’s military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Its takeover was quickly met by nonviolent nationwide demonstrations, which security forces quashed with deadly force, killing over 1,400 civilians, according to a detailed list compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Peaceful protests have continued, but amid the severe crackdown, an armed resistance has also grown, to the point that U.N. experts have warned the country could be sliding into civil war.

The southeast Asian regional group ASEAN, which includes Myanmar, has sought to play a mediating role in Myanmar’s crisis given concerns over how it could affect regional peace, and ambassador Zhang said China believes it should play “a crucial role.”

In April, ASEAN reached consensus on a five-point plan to try to help restore peace and stability including an immediate halt to violence, starting a dialogue among all parties, and appointment of an ASEAN special envoy who would visit Myanmar to meet all concerned parties. But Myanmar has made little effort to implement it.

ASEAN also took months to choose Brunei’s Second Foreign Minister Erywan Yusof as its envoy, but he never visited Myanmar because the military would not allow him to meet Suu Kyi. In October, Cambodia took over ASEAN’s presidency and in mid-December Prime Minister Hun Sen appointed the country’s foreign minister, Prak Sokhonn to be the regional group’s Myanmar envoy.

Hun Sen himself became the first foreign leader to visit Myanmar since the military takeover, a visit that sparked protests at home and criticism abroad. Opponents said his visit earlier this month legitimized the military takeover and broke the generals’ near-total diplomatic isolation — and he didn’t meet Suu Kyi.

But Cambodian foreign minister Sokhonn said afterward that the talks between Hun Sen and Myanmar’s military leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, achieved “a very good, positive result with a progressive step forward” on implementing the ASEAN agreement.

China’s Zhang said Friday that Beijing welcomes the efforts made by Hun Sen, calling his visit “quite good, quite fruitful,"" and saying “we asked them to continue to make further efforts.”

Zhang said Sokhoon told the council Friday that members have to understand Myanmar’s historic background, “unique political structure” and the role the military plays in that structure -- and “only based on that, we can find a solution.”

“Some people do not like the kind of situation (now), but I think what we have to also bear in mind is that we should avoid the worsening of the situation, to avoid more violence, to avoid a civil war,” Zhang said. “That’s, the primary goal we should have bearing in our mind.”

He said China also welcomes the appointment of Noeleen Heyzer as the new U.N. special envoy for Myanmar. She is talking to key parties and has requested to visit Myanmar, he said, and “let’s hope that she can get it done.”

Britain’s deputy U.N. ambassador James Kariuki said Heyzer will try to go to Myanmar soon, “but the condition has to be right.”

He said it was important for the council to hear for the first time from the two envoys, stressing that they have the council’s full support. He said the council is working on a press statement on Myanmar reflecting areas of agreement.

“As the council heard today, 14 million people are in desperate need of life-saving aid now, compared with 1 million before the coup,” Kariuki told The Associated Press. “The longer this goes, the worse it will get. The military need to stop blocking humanitarian access and start honoring their own commitment to implement the five-point consensus. … There can be no further delay.”

Italy top court: Venezuela's ex-oil czar can't be extradited

Fri, January 28, 2022

ROME (AP) — Italy’s highest court confirmed Friday that Venezuela's former oil czar cannot be extradited to face corruption charges at home because of his country's record in violating human rights, his Italian lawyer said.

The Court of Cassation upheld a lower court’s ruling in September which recognized that Rafael Ramirez enjoys international protection as a refugee, lawyer Roberto De Vita said in a statement.

Ramirez, the longtime head of Venezuela’s PDVSA state oil company, fled to Italy after falling out with President Nicolas Maduro and resigning as Venezuela’s United Nations ambassador in 2017. Soon after, Venezuela’s chief prosecutor ordered his arrest on charges of bankrupting the country’s primary source of income.

Ramirez has called the Venezuelan probe a retaliation for his decision to break with Maduro, whom he has accused of running Venezuela’s once-thriving oil industry into the ground and abandoning the socialist ideals of the country’s late leader, Hugo Chavez.

Ramirez, a Venezuelan citizen, was given refugee status in Italy and his lawyers argued that he would face political persecution if he was sent back.

END ICE ECONOMY
Thai beach declared disaster area after oil spill

Oil spills in eastern coast of Thailand

Fri, January 28, 2022

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A beach in eastern Thailand was declared a disaster area on Saturday as oil leaking from an underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Thailand continued to wash ashore and blacken the sand.

The leak from the pipeline owned by Star Petroleum Refining Public Company Limited (SPRC) started late on Tuesday and was brought under control https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/thai-cleanup-underway-after-oil-spill-off-eastern-coast-2022-01-26 a day later after spilling an estimated 50,000 litres (13,209 gallons) of oil into the ocean 20 km (12 miles) from the country's industrialised eastern seaboard.

Some of the oil reached the shoreline https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/oil-workers-race-protect-beaches-spill-off-thai-coast-2022-01-28 at Mae Ramphueng beach in Rayong province late on Friday after spreading over 47 sq km (18 sq miles) of sea in the gulf.

The navy is working with SPRC to contain the leak and said the main oil mass was still offshore with only a small amount washing up on at least two spots along the 12-km-long beach.

About 150 SPRC workers and 200 navy personnel had been deployed to clean up the beach and oil boom barriers had been set up, the navy said.

Twelve navy ships and three civilian ships along with a number of aircraft were also working to contain the spill at sea with booms and dispersant spray.

"We and the company are still working at sea to reduce the amount of oil by cornering the spill and sucking up the oil and spraying dispersant," Rear Admiral Artorn Charapinyo, deputy commander of the first Naval Area command, told reporters.

(Reporting by Panu Wongcha-um; Editing by Stephen Coates)

Mahatma Gandhi: The US shrine that claims to hold India independence leader's ashes


Sat, January 29, 2022

Tushar Gandhi
Great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and the son of journalist Arun Manilal Gandhi

Paramahansa Yogananda
Yogi, Kriya Yoga guru and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship (1893-1952)


Mahatma Gandhi's ashes have turned up in various places over the years

This day marks 74 years since Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, revered as father of the nation, was assassinated. Savita Patel reports from a spiritual retreat in California that claims to be holding his ashes, perhaps the only ones outside India.

Inside Lake Shrine, a spiritual retreat on the famous Sunset Boulevard, just minutes away from Hollywood, is the Gandhi World Peace Memorial. Built in 1950 by the retreat's founder, Paramahansa Yogananda, it lies amid lush gardens and waterfalls with a view of the ocean. And it contains an ancient stone sarcophagus from China which reportedly holds a brass and silver coffer containing Gandhi's ashes.

After Gandhi's funeral in 1948, his ashes were divided into more than 20 portions and dispatched across India so people around the country could mourn his death by holding memorials. Some portions even ended up outside the country.


"There was a lot of demand for Bapu's ashes," says his great-grandson Tushar Gandhi. Bapu, as Gandhi was fondly known by those close to him, was assassinated just months after India won independence from Britain in August 1947.

He says he had heard some 20 years ago that some of Gandhi's ashes were being stored at Lake Shrine and had contacted them, but never received a response.

"Holding them goes against Bapu's wishes as he had said that once he was no more, his ashes should not be kept, but disposed of," he adds.

The mystery surrounding Mahatma Gandhi's killer

The young woman who watched Gandhi die

But Brother Ritananda, one of the monks who now runs the shrine, says: "We will not overturn what our guru established." He adds that the ashes were a gift to Yogananda and people upset about their existence must make peace with it.

The monk said that it is aware that Gandhi's descendants have in the past requested for the ashes to be returned or disposed.

He says he has never seen the box containing the ashes but recalls watching a video of Yogananda placing it in the sarcophagus before it was encased.

There is no other evidence to support the claim that there is a box containing ashes at the shrine, far less that those ashes belong to Gandhi.

The sarcophagus at Lake Shrine is said to hold a portion of Gandhi's ashes

The ashes are believed to have come from VM Nawle, a publisher and journalist based in the Indian city of Pune, who was a friend of Yogananda.

Parmahansa Yogananda was born as Mukunda Lal Ghosh in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and later moved to the US, where he started Lake Shrine.

His autobiography describes a short 1935 visit to Gandhi's ashram in Wardha in western Maharashtra state. It says he met the leader, and even showed him and others at the ashram some yoga poses. He described Gandhi as a "tiny 100-pound saint who radiated physical, mental, and spiritual health… this statesman has matched wits and emerged the victor in a thousand legal, social, and political battles". He also vowed to set up a memorial for him.

But the biography doesn't explain how Mr Nawle ended up in possession of what he claimed were Gandhi's ashes - Yogananda's biography quotes lines from the publisher's letter to him: "Regarding Gandhi's ashes, I may say that [they] are scattered and thrown in almost all important rivers and seas, and nothing is given outside India except the remains which I have sent to you after a great ordeal."

"That could not be true," says Tushar Gandhi, who is also the author of Let's Kill Gandhi, a book that delves into the leader's assassination and its aftermath.

Gandhi's ashes were taken to the Triveni Sangam in a procession after his death in 1948

"Some of Bapu's ashes were immersed in South Africa in 1948 itself. Whether they were sent out officially or someone just carried it with them, we don't know," he adds.

"I don't know who collected and sent the ashes to Paramahansa Yogananda. A committee of cabinet members and eminent Gandhians of that time was in charge [of distributing the ashes]."

After the funeral, most of Gandhi's ashes were immersed in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. The city lies on the banks of the holy Ganges river and close to the Triveni Sangam, the point where the Ganges meets the Yamuna river and the mythical Saraswati river, a confluence Hindus consider sacred. Many of them disperse the ashes of family members here as the holy water is believed to offer salvation to the soul.

Gandhi, a devout Hindu, wished for his ashes to be dispersed in a similar manner.

But not all of them were immersed. Over the years they have turned up in various places.

In 2019, some of Gandhi's ashes were stolen from a memorial in central India. Some turned up as recently as a decade ago in South Africa. "My aunts and cousins immersed them in Durban Bay," Tushar Gandhi says.

Before that, he adds, the Gandhi family received another portion of ashes from a museum - they had been bequeathed to them by an Indian businessman whose father had known Gandhi. Those ashes were immersed in Mumbai city in 2008.

The Gandhi Peace Memorial at Lake Shrine was built in 1950

He also found out, through press reports, about an urn containing Gandhi's ashes in a bank locker in Orissa (also known as Odisha) state in the name of a former bureaucrat. These were immersed at Triveni Sangam in 1997.

The last of Gandhi's ashes - that we know of - in India lie at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune city. They are encased in a marble structure, next to a tomb of his wife, Kasturba (She was cremated on the palace premises).

Tushar Gandhi says he understands the reasons someone might be inclined to hold on to them.

"When I immersed the ashes in Triveni Sangam [in 1997], there was a temptation to keep the brass urn in which they were stored for years. But then I thought - I will surely keep it carefully, but what if later, at some time, it can't be maintained in a proper condition? So I donated it to The National Gandhi Museum in Delhi."

While he respects everybody's right to revere Gandhi and believes Lake Shrine maintains its ashes with care, he adds that the family would be hurt if they were ever desecrated.

"Hence, my request is for the ashes to be disposed of properly."

An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

by Tiernan Morgan & Lauren Purje

August 10, 2016

Guy Debord’s (1931–1994) best-known work, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the “Spectacle,” Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.

Debord defines the spectacle as the “autocratic reign of the market economy.” Though the term “mass media” is often used to describe the spectacle’s form, Debord derides its neutrality. “Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term ‘media,’” he writes, “and by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service.” Instead, Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses. The spectacle takes on many more forms today than it did during Debord’s lifetime. It can be found on every screen that you look at. It is the advertisements plastered on the subway and the pop-up ads that appear in your browser. It is the listicle telling you “10 things you need to know about ‘x.’” The spectacle reduces reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments, while encouraging us to focus on appearances. For Debord, this constituted an unacceptable “degradation” of our lives.

Debord was a founding member of the Situationist International (1957–1972), a group of avant-garde artists and political theorists united by their opposition to advanced capitalism. At varying points the group’s members included the writers Raoul Vaneigem and Michèle Bernstein, the artist Asger Jorn, and the art historian T.J. Clark. Inspired primarily by Dadaism, Surrealism, and Marxist philosophy, the SI rose to public prominence during the May 1968 demonstrations during which members of the group participated in student-led occupations and protests. Though the extent of its influence is disputed, there is little doubt that the SI played an active intellectual role during the year’s events. Graffiti daubed around Paris paraphrased the SI’s ideas and in some cases directly quoted from texts such as The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967).

The first English translation of Debord’s text was published in 1970 by Black and Red Books. The book’s cover features J.R. Eyerman’s iconic photograph of the premiere of Bwana Devil (1952), the first 3D color film. Originally reproduced in LIFE magazine, the image captures the film’s audience gazing passively at the screen with the use of anaglyph glasses. In the foreground, a besuited, heavy-set gentleman watches the screen intently, his mouth agape. Eyerman’s photograph reduces the audience members to uniform rows of spectacled spectators. Although the image encapsulates Debord’s contempt for consumer culture, it reductively implies that his work was mediaphobic (Debord later adapted The Society of the Spectacle into his first feature-length film by utilizing footage from advertisements, newsreels, and other movies). If we were to judge The Society of the Spectacle by Black and Red’s cover, we might assume that the book is a straightforward critique of media-driven conformity. Debord’s insights however, were far more profound.

The Society of the Spectacle consists of 221 short theses divided across nine chapters. The first thesis reworks the opening line of Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867):

Marx: The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.

Debord: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.

By paraphrasing Marx, Debord immediately establishes a connection between the spectacle and the economy. The book essentially reworks the Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and alienation for the film, advertising, and television age. This concern is encapsulated by Debord’s fourth thesis (emphasis my own):

The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Debord observed that the spectacle actively alters human interactions and relationships. Images influence our lives and beliefs on a daily basis; advertising manufactures new desires and aspirations. The media interprets (and reduces) the world for us with the use of simple narratives. Photography and film collapses time and geographic distance — providing the illusion of universal connectivity. New products transform the way we live. Debord’s notions can be applied to our present-day reliance on technology. What do you do when you get lost in a foreign city? Do you ask a passer-by for directions, or consult Google Maps on your smartphone? Perhaps Siri can help. Such technology is incredibly useful, but it also engineers our behavior. It reduces our lives into a daily series of commodity exchanges. If Debord were alive today, he would almost certainly extend his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. Debord would no doubt have been horrified by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodifiable assets. Did you tweet today? Why haven’t you posted to Instagram? Did you “like” your friend’s photos on Facebook yet?


To be clear, Debord did not believe that new technology was, in itself, a bad thing. He specifically objected to the use of perceptual technologies for economic gain. The spectacle, which is driven by economic interest and profit, replaces lived reality with the “contemplation of the spectacle.” Being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing. We no longer live. We aspire. We work to get richer. Paradoxically, we find ourselves working in order to have a “vacation.” We can’t seem to actually live without working. Capitalism has thus completely occupied social life. Our lives are now organized and dominated by the needs of the ruling economy:

The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object is expressed in the following way: The more [the spectator] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and desires. – Thesis 30

The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. – Thesis 33

The proliferation of images and desires alienates us, not only from ourselves, but from each other. Debord references the phrase “lonely crowds,” a term coined by the American sociologist David Riesman, to describe our atomization. The Society of the Spectacle’s first chapter is entitled “Separation Perfected,” a quality that Debord describes as the “alpha and omega of the spectacle.” Referring to the Marxist concept of false-consciousness, Debord describes how the spectacle conceals the “relations among men and classes.” The spectacle functions as a pacifier for the masses, a tool that reinforces the status quo and quells dissent. “The Spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears,’” writes Debord. “It demands […] passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.”

Although he characterizes the spectacle as a singular and omnipresent “repressive pseudo-environment,” Debord also acknowledges its warring and contradictory nature. “Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one,” reads thesis 66. As spectators, we regularly experience advertisements for rival products — Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Delta and US Airways, The X-Factor and The Voice. Often we’re presented with conflicting desires or messages. For instance, a television drama depicting an AA meeting might be preceded by a glamorous vodka advertisement. Such logical inconsistencies are buried by the spectacle’s relentless proffering of goods and imagery. Gradually, we begin to conflate visibility with value. If something is being talked about and seen, we assume that it must be important in some way. “Thus by means of a ruse of commodity logic,” writes Debord, “what’s specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves towards its absolute realization.” Put more simply, our fetishization of images and commodities leads us to overlook the spectacle’s contradictory qualities. “The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided,” Debord observes. “Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction.” Debord’s acknowledgement that the spectacle is comprised of competing agents and interests strengthens his critical stance, since it prevents detractors from accusing him of characterizing capitalism as a mindless, monolithic entity.

Debord defines two primary forms of the spectacle — the concentrated and the diffuse. The concentrated spectacle, which Debord attributes to totalitarian and “Stalinist” regimes, is implemented through the cult of personality and the use of force. The diffuse spectacle, which relies on a rich abundance of commodities, is typified by wealthy democracies. The latter is far more effective at placating the masses, since it appears to empower individuals through consumer choice. The diffuse spectacle of modern capitalism propagates itself by exploiting the spectator’s lingering dissatisfaction. Since the pleasure of acquiring a new commodity is fleeting, it is only a matter of time before we pursue a new desire — a new “fragment” of happiness. The consumer is thus mentally enslaved by the spectacle’s inexorable logic: work harder, buy more.

In his 1988 follow-up text, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord introduces a third form: the integrated. As its name suggests, the integrated spectacle is a combination of diffuse and concentrated elements. Debord bleakly concludes that the integrated spectacle now permeates all reality. “There remains nothing, in culture or nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted according to the means and interests of modern industry,” he writes. Today, the integrated spectacle continues to provide abundant commodities while defending itself with the use of misinformation and misdirection. According to Debord, it does this primarily through the specter of terrorism:

Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

Debord’s observation appears particularly prescient today when one compares the amount of media coverage that terrorism receives in comparison to climate change (the latter being the direct consequence of our relentless consumerism). First time readers of Debord’s work may prefer to read Comments first, since it is a brisker and more informal read than The Society of the Spectacle. Unlike his original text, Debord refers to contemporary events to illustrate his arguments, including the Iran-Contra affair, Manuel Noriega’s dictatorship of Panama, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.

Comments also examines the phenomenon of celebrity culture. Debord observes that fame “has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing.” Although The Society of the Spectacle largely focuses on broader themes such as alienation, Debord dedicates two extended theses to the subject of “stars.” He is particularly contemptuous of celebrities, branding them the “enemy of the individual.” The star markets a lifestyle of leisure, “compensat[ing] for the fragmented productive specializations that are actually lived.”

As embodiments of the spectacle, celebrities necessarily “renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify [themselves] with the general law of obedience to the course of things.” Their Individuality is sacrificed in order to become a figurehead of the profit-driven system. After all, celebrities not only peddle commodities, but are commodities themselves. They serve as projections of our false aspirations. For Debord, this makes them less than human:

The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. – Thesis 61

Debord had an equally withering attitude towards the art world. In Comments, Debord blithely declares that “art is dead,” describing current artistic practices as “recuperated neo-dadaism.” His conclusion is unsurprising given the anti-art stance he extolled as a member of Paris’ avant-garde scene. His attitude towards art and art history is exemplified by two key passages in The Society of the Spectacle:

The affirmation of [art’s] independence is the beginning of its disintegration. – Thesis 186

When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. – Thesis 193

Debord believed that Dadaism and Surrealism marked the end of modern art, describing them as “the last great assault of the revolutionary proletarian movement.” For Debord, art was another phenomenon that had been subsumed by the spectacle. Its commodification reduced art movements into “congealed past culture:”

Once this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes possible, it is also the end of the world of art. In this age of museums, when artistic communication can no longer exist, all the former moments of art can be admitted equally. – Thesis 189

Debord cites a study by Clark Kerr in which the economist suggested that industries involving the “consumption of knowledge” (i.e. arts, tech, and entertainment) would become the “driving force” in the development of the US economy. It marks another instance in which Debord’s observations appear to parallel our contemporary situation.

The Society of the Spectacle’s critical longevity can be partly attributed to Debord’s refusal to describe the spectacle’s form. By focusing instead on the spectacle’s ever-shifting qualities, Debord encourages the reader to scrutinize the world around them. It is for this reason that the book is routinely celebrated for its prescience. A contemporary reader can readily apply Debord’s analysis to the fracturing of the media industry, the rise of the internet, or to the use of social media. Note how Debord starts multiple sentences with the phrase “the spectacle is…”:

The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. – Thesis 49

The spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery. – Thesis 63

The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot really achieve any solid dogma. – Thesis 71

Debord’s aggressive use of repetition parallels the spectacle’s omnipresence and reinforces his critique. It’s a clever rhetorical device. Full of pithy aphorisms, The Society of the Spectacle reads less like an academic text and more like a manifesto — a call to arms against passive spectatorship. One of the book’s most cited passages is the ninth thesis: “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.” As with the book’s opening sentence, the ninth thesis plays off the work of another philosopher. Debord’s aphorism is an inversion of a passage from the preface of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): “The false is a moment of the true.” The Society of the Spectacle is littered with both subtle and explicit references to the work of other thinkers. Aside from Hegel and Marx, Debord also references György Lukács, William Shakespeare, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Niccolò Machiavelli. This meta-textual approach places Debord’s work into a lineage of celebrated texts whilst also embodying the SI’s concept of détournement, a term variously translated as “diversion,” “detour,” “reroute,” and “hijack.”

The concept was initially devised by the Letterist International (founded by Debord) and later revised by the SI. In a 1957 essay entitled “A User’s Guide to Détournement” Debord and the artist Gil J. Wolman define the concept as:

The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersed[ing] the original elements and produc[ing] a synthetic organization of greater efficacy.

The SI championed détournement as a means of interrupting the fabric of the everyday — whether it be repurposing old film reels, subverting iconic images or slogans, or devising literature inspired by the works of other writers. The concept bridges the appropriating practices of avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, with the activist “culture jamming” of groups such as The Yes Men and the Billboard Liberation Front. In subverting and referencing the work of other authors, Debord uses The Society of the Spectacle as a means of demonstrating its practical use. The act of détournement imbues revered and historicized works of art and literature with new life, thereby overcoming their congealment at the hands of the spectacle. As Debord and Wolman write:

Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of real class struggle.

The concept of Détournement represented the synthesis of many of Debord’s ideas, particularly his anti-art and anti-commodity stances. He did however, acknowledge its weaknesses, namely that an act of détournement requires the viewer’s familiarity with the original, pre-détourned subject matter. Debord compensates for this in The Society of the Spectacle by preceding each chapter with a prominent quote, thereby alerting the reader to the meta-textual nature of his work. Despite its cultural influence, the concept of détournement raises a number of questions. For instance, how does one measure the efficacy of a détourned work? Can a détourned work be subsumed by the spectacle, and if so, how does one prevent such an action?

Although The Society of the Spectacle is recognized as an incisive indictment of the consumerist experience, readers may well reject Debord’s assertion that capitalism has inherently degraded our social lives. After all, how can society produce new services and products without some form of industrialization? On this particular point, Debord is unrelenting, arguing that capitalism — having already served our most basic survival needs (the means to food, shelter, etc.) — relies on fabricating new desires and distractions in order to propagate itself and maintain its oppression over the working classes:


The new privation is not far removed from the old penury since it requires most men to participate as wage workers in the endless pursuit of […] attainment … everyone knows he must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail accounts for the general acceptance of the illusion at the heart of the consumption of modern commodities. – Thesis 47

At the heart of Debord’s critique is his belief that capitalism is an inherently uncreative system. The obsession with profit demonstrably works against human interest, especially when it comes to the protection of the environment. In Comments, Debord quotes Daniel Verilhe, a representative of Elf-Aquitaine’s chemicals subsidiary, who, at a conference regarding a ban of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) argued that it would take at “least three years to develop substitutes and the costs will be quadrupled.” “As we know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one and has no market value,” scoffs Debord.

The most significant criticism that can be leveled at The Society of the Spectacle is Debord’s failure to proffer any convincing solutions for countering the spectacle, other than describing an abstract need to put “practical force into action.” In his final thesis, Debord declares the pressing need for “self-emancipation” from the spectacle:

This “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is only possible where individuals are “directly linked to universal history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.” – Thesis 221

In 1994, six years after he described the spectacle as “the most important event to have occurred this century,” Debord killed himself at his home in the remote French village of Champot. A life of hard drinking had led to a diagnosis of peripheral neuritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition whereby the body’s nerve endings burn away. By most accounts, Debord had long since retreated from the French intellectual scene, spending his days drinking with friends and obsessively engaged in games of strategy (Atlas Press republished A Game of War, which Debord co-authored with his wife Alice Becker-Ho, in 2008). Andrew Hussey, a biographer of Debord, described his decline as “a slow suicide.” In an 2001 article for the Guardian, Hussey wrote:


It depressed him in his later years that [his] insight had long since ceased to be a revolutionary call to arms but the most accurate, if banal, description of modern life […] While Debord’s public life was predicated upon his revolutionary intentions, in private he sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism.


“Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best,” Debord quips in his 1989 memoir. “Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.” Indeed, for someone who wrote comparatively little, Debord cast a huge shadow over postmodern theory and discourse. His interrogation of capitalism and visual culture preempted the work of theorists such as Jean Braudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard, each of whom dedicated their work to the frenetic and orgiastic world of images in which we live.

Although the ‘spectacle’ has become a clichéd term for the modern condition, there is no denying the richness of Debord’s original text. The Society of the Spectacle is littered with tangential lines of enquiry such as the psychological impact of modernist architecture, or the nature of celebrity. Each successive reading unveils another layer of nuance. For instance, take this passage in which Debord reflects upon a quote by the sociologist Joseph Gabel:


The need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a completely different pathological level, “the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence.” – Thesis 219

Note the words “need” and “representation.” Ask yourself — what compels us to buy the latest tech gadget? Why do we spill our feelings out on Facebook, in posts that are archived on servers deep underground? Which is more important, the expression of the feeling itself, or the knowledge that it will be documented and seen by others? Why do we incessantly take selfies, or record our every moment for posterity? Are we afraid of being a nobody — of being on “the margin of existence?” If you’re concerned with how you appear, then are you really living? Even now, almost 50 years after its original publication, The Society of the Spectacle reads as if it were written for our time:

The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.” – Thesis 218

Related

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE - Libcom.org

The first version of this translation of The Society of the Spectacle was 

completed and posted online at my "Bureau of Public Secrets" website in 2002.

THE ROARING TWENTIES

The spectacular risk of cryptocurrency investing

Don't let Matt Damon neg you into losing all your money

Illustrated | iStock

RYAN COOPER
JANUARY 27, 2022

The biggest cryptocurrencies have had a rough few months. If you listened to Matt Damon's Crypto.com ad implying you're a sissy girly-man for not buying some crypto, which started running at about the market peak, you'd have lost nearly half your money by now. At the time of writing, both bitcoin and ethereum were down by about 45 percent compared to their highs from last November; BNB was down 42 percent.

Now, they may well go back up again at some point — crashes and recoveries have happened before many times. But it's an illustration of the incredible risk of cryptocurrency investment. These things are not a futuristic way to get guaranteed returns through the computer; they're a scammy, useless, and quite possibly doomed hot potato asset.

One amusing thing about the timing of the crypto crash is how it obliterates one of the concept's principal ideological underpinnings. Bitcoin "is ultimately the only long-term protection against inflation," wrote Tyler Winklevoss in a blog post in 2020, arguing that it is a better store of value than gold and predicting that it would eventually soar to $500,000. In reality, right now inflation is spiking to its highest levels in decades, and instead of a rush to crypto "safety," the top coins are all crashing in value — and not by 7 percent but by hundreds of percent on an annual basis.

This is largely because crypto is heavily tied to the functioning of the real economy. In particular, both the big coins eat up abominable amounts of both electricity and advanced computer chips. The "proof of work" system used by both bitcoin and ethereum to create new coins and validate transactions eats up roughly 109 terawatt-hours for ethereum and 204 terawatt-hours per year for bitcoin — or about what the Netherlands and South Africa use, respectively.

Now, ethereum developers have been promising to move to a more efficient "proof of stake" system for years (meaning you would need about $83,000 in ether at current prices to be able to participate as a validator), but they still haven't done it and there's no sign of them starting soon.

Bitcoin miners have therefore been chased all over the globe in search of the cheapest possible electricity, often from old, filth-spewing coal power plants, often in impoverished authoritarian countries where relevant officials can be bribed to look the other way at gigantic power overuse. China kicked them out in late 2021 both to cut down on power use and financial fraud.

The current decline of bitcoin is related to the government of Kazakhstan apparently cutting off its miners and eyeing new controls to cut down on their power usage. (Even a dictatorship is well advised to provide a reasonably consistent supply of electric power to keep its population quiescent.)

Major powers around the world are also cottoning onto the fact that the crypto craze is badly exacerbating the computer chip shortage, and thence the shortage of cars, appliances, consumer electronics, and everything else that needs chips, and thence the inflation that is deeply unpopular among voting citizens. Regulations are likely coming in both the United States and Europe that would address the absolute bonanza of scams and frauds in crypto, the resulting systemic financial risk, and also free up capacity at semiconductor fabs for real industries

That doesn't speak well of the immediate prospects for crypto prices.

It's worth emphasizing that all that electricity and all those computer chips are being used up to do things that are explicitly pointless. The entire idea is to force crypto participants to expend useless effort to make it difficult to attack the system (something that is already accomplished quite well on the internet). Here we have the fire of the gods — a fundamental force of physics harnessed to do the bidding of humanity — being created in unimaginable quantities by burning the dirtiest fuel available. And here we have that power driving some of the most sophisticated objects ever made, wearing them out by the train car-load in order to … guess random numbers a quadrillion times a second.

The waste, pollution, and damage to the climate are beyond nightmarish. It's as if there were a trillion-dollar baseball card or Beanie Babies collecting frenzy, but every time you wanted to create, trade, or sell one, you had to throw an entire litter of kittens into a wood chipper.

And contrary to Winklevoss's arguments about gold: While that metal is hugely overvalued on any rational business basis, it does have legitimate industrial uses, plus thousands of years of history as a real currency, and (most importantly) it actually physically exists in a hefty and eye-pleasing form that is nice for jewelry or decoration.

Cryptocurrencies, by contrast, are imaginary computer funny money with operations that are totally incomprehensible to the layman and a substantial portion of the crypto enthusiast base alike. As Dan Olson argues in a brilliant investigation of the cryptocurrency and NFT space, crypto is not good at anything it sets out to do. As the wildly gyrating value shows today, it is not a good store of value. It is a horrendous medium of exchange: It's very slow compared to the dollar payments system and dramatically more expensive, with just one transaction costing at least a few bucks and up to hundreds of dollars, depending on conditions.

Finally, crypto is exceptionally vulnerable to most kinds of hacking, because it's virtually impossible to reverse a transaction on the blockchain, and most lack elementary security features other services take for granted. For instance, you can "airdrop" a malware NFT into certain kinds of ethereum wallets without needing permission, and if its owner ever clicks on it, you will receive all the contents of the wallet immediately.

Crypto is ultimately a greater fool scam where the only way to profit is by passing off the hot potato to the next sucker. It has a snazzy techno gloss of cryptography that is hooked into libertarian notions about hard money and general suspicion of the financial sector, but that is only a facade. The only reason cryptocurrencies have value is the general conviction that in future, the line will keep going up. That has made a few people rich beyond the dreams of avarice, because scams can be very profitable if you get out in time.

But as we see today, the line does not in fact always go up. And if a critical mass of crypto owners ever lose faith at once, bitcoin, ethereum, and all the rest are toast.

Why Experts Think This New Crypto Is A Scam

by Emma Newbery | Published on Jan. 28, 2022

Image source: Getty Images

A new LGBTQ token called MariCoin raises concerns.

Key points

• A new LGBTQ token in Spain promises to create an ethical and transparent form of payment.
• Critics have raised a number of concerns, such as the lack of a whitepaper.

One of the many potential benefits of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology is it can empower marginalized communities. Cryptos can build communities, increase financial accessibility, and help people escape stigma.

Unfortunately, the lack of regulation and proliferation of scams also means there's little to stop unscrupulous players attempting to exploit those potential benefits. Which is exactly what some fear a new Spanish LGBTQ token called MariCoin could be trying to do.

MariCoin isn't the first LGBTQ crypto project

Before we get into the reasons experts are concerned about MariCoin, let's touch on some positive ways cryptocurrency and blockchain could help the LGBTQ community.

• There's a blockchain marriage certificate project that helps couples in countries where same-sex marriage is illegal.
• Launched in 2021, the Pride token (PRIDE) wants to create a payment system capable of funding meaningful change.
• The LGBT Token (LGBT) that launched in 2018 aims to harness the economic potential of the LGBTQ economy and put some of the proceeds back into the community.
• The anonymous nature of the blockchain could help people who live in countries where same-sex activity is criminalized to move money freely and avoid having their assets frozen by authorities.

Why MariCoin raises red flags

According to its website, MariCoin will be, "A social, ethical, transparent and transversal means of payment." The idea is the tokens would work as a form of payment in various businesses that have signed up to an equality manifesto. The coin completed a week-long pilot in Madrid before it launched in 2022.

Co-founder Juan Belmonte told Reuters, "Since we move this economy, why shouldn't our community profit from it, instead of banks, insurance companies or big corporations that often don't help LGBT+ people?" The idea itself sounds great. But as a potential investment, it raises a lot of red flags.

1. The name plays on a homophobic slur

The name MariCoin comes from an offensive homophobic word in Spanish. Now, it could be an attempt to reclaim the term -- as the founders told CoinTelegraph it was. But if that's the case, given the token's mission and the unfavorable responses on social media, it seems misguided.

2. It doesn't have a whitepaper

When you're evaluating a cryptocurrency, one of the first ports of call should be its whitepaper. This is where you'll find information about what problems the token plans to solve, and how it plans to do it. Responding to criticisms, on Jan. 7, MariCoin's co-founder Juan Belmonte promised CoinTelegraph the first version of its whitepaper would be available "next week." But over two weeks later at time of writing (Jan. 24) there's no sign of the whitepaper.

3. There are errors on its website

The website is pretty basic. In fact, there's really only one page and you'll get more information from the Reuters and CoinTelegraph articles than from the site. Even the basic navigation doesn't add up. For example, there are three 'waiting list' buttons. One goes to a Google form where you can sign up to the new extended waiting list, and the other two go to a page that says the waiting list is closed. Moreover, Google Forms is not the most professional way to do a token pre-sale.

The other links go to a Change.org petition that hasn't yet received 200 signatures and an email contact form. Given the project says 10,000 people signed up to the initial pre-sale waiting list, this itself is suspect -- it means less than 2% of them signed the petition. Though this could be because it isn't clear what the petition is trying to achieve.

The slightly odd English can be attributed to sub-optimal Spanish translation. But, there's also no information about the team, no details on how the token will work -- such as how many will be issued, and no info on which merchants will accept the token. Finally, it claims to be the first coin aimed at the LGBTQ community, but it isn't.

Buyer beware

MariCoin raises a number of red flags, even if you're trying to give it the benefit of the doubt. On the plus side, it received an Algorand (ALGO) accelerator program grant, which gives it more legitimacy. It could be a genuine project run by people who aren't super familiar with the crypto world. There's a chance they've rushed to get something to market, and not realized a crypto token with no whitepaper and a poor website would cause concern. However, there's also a chance there's something more concerning going on.

Its website says the coin will be released on main cryptocurrency exchanges in February and offers people the chance to reserve MariCoins beforehand at the starting price of $0.025 by joining the extended waiting list. This seems like an extremely risky proposition. Nobody knows what will happen to MariCoin's price when it (and if) is released on crypto exchanges. There's no info about how many tokens will be issued, how many are owned by MariCoin's founders, and where it might be traded.

If you want to support MariCoin, the best bet is to wait until there's a lot more information available. You need to see its whitepaper and understand the details of how the token works before you spend a cent. Try not to get blinded by the project's ideals and evaluate it as an investment. If it didn't promise to do something good for the LGBTQ community, would you give it a second glance? I know I wouldn't.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emma Newbery

Emma owns the English-language newspaper The Bogota Post. She began her editorial career at a financial website in the U.K. over 20 years ago and has been contributing to The Ascent since 2019.

The US Supreme Court is a bastion of unearned privilege

Ryan Cooper, National correspondent
Fri, January 28, 2022

The Supreme Court. Illustrated | iStock

The Supreme Court is set to hear a pair of cases about racial preference in college admissions, or "affirmative action." As Nicholas Lemann writes at The New Yorker, it's highly likely that the court will ban the practice as part of their general assault on civil rights.

One case, in classic right-wing troll fashion, is suing Harvard for discriminating against Asian-Americans' applications. Now, as Jay Kaspian Kang points out at The New York Times, there actually is quite strong evidence this has happened. That's indefensible and should be rectified immediately.

But it is ludicrously unfair to use that alleged fact to abolish affirmative action entirely. Elites enjoy their own system of affirmative action that is a hundred times more powerful than the halting and halfhearted efforts at prestigious universities to make their student bodies somewhat more diverse. Wealthy conservatives want to make the system even more unfair than it already is through judicial rule-by-decree.

Just look at the Supreme Court itself. For most of the court's recent history, almost every justice has gone to Harvard or Yale for law school — the sole exception today is Amy Coney Barrett, who went to Notre Dame. Indeed, there are two justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who went to the same prep school. There are about 27,000 high schools in this country; it simply beggars belief to argue that of the nine "best" legal minds in the country, 22 percent of them just happened to come from the same one. Come on. (Also, if Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing was any guide, Georgetown Prep would seem to be a place where our future judicial overlords learn about utter moral debauchery and early-onset cirrhosis instead of Aristotle or whatever.)

Let's not be children about this. The pipeline from Georgetown Prep to Yale or Harvard Law to the federal bench is a system of privilege. High-status people use their money (Georgetown Prep's tuition is $60,000 a year, though there is some financial aid) and influence to place their family and friends into exclusive institutions where they more or less succeed automatically, even if you're — to pick a completely random example — a handsy beer-swilling moron. See also Jared Kushner, a titanic dullard who got to go to Harvard despite atrocious grades and test scores because his father made a strategic $2.5 million "donation."

Kavanaugh even had legacy preference at Yale because his grandfather went there (which he lied about under oath), and that was even more important in the 1980s than it is today. They don't make hypocrisy more egregious than this guy almost certainly ruling against race-based affirmative action.

It is obviously the case that without consistent pressure against it, the power of the rich will undermine the integrity of any supposedly "neutral" process. Base admission simply on test scores, and you run into the fact well-to-do parents can afford testing prep services, re-tests, tutors, and so forth (not to mention actual bribes to admission officers).

Base it on more nebulous criteria like essays, letters of recommendation, sports, or community service (as is now standard in most college admissions), and it's even easier for the rich to squirm in with expensive consultants and careful preparation. Indeed, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out some years back, this style of application originated in a literal anti-Semitic conspiracy. Too many high-achieving Jews from working-class families were getting into the Ivy League in the early 20th century, so the WASP elite at the time had to invent some way to discriminate in a plausibly-deniable fashion.

The power of money shows even in affirmative action systems today. As Kang details, diversity initiatives in many schools have greatly increased the share of minority students, but have overwhelmingly selected from the wealthiest members of those groups.

Fundamentally, there is no way to avoid making a choice about what kind of student body a school wants, and hence establishing some kind of preferential system. Even if it were possible to measure academic ability with perfect accuracy (it isn't), making that the sole criterion for admission would entrench the privilege of the rich. A different system that ensures a supply of students from under-represented or lower-class backgrounds is simply a different choice — one that is a lot fairer than the current system of tests, application consultants, and straight-up bribery.

If I were in charge, I would do college admissions for a big national school through a demographically-adjusted lottery. Set up a reasonable test score threshold for applications, and then draw names such that the resulting class is as close to representative of the country as a whole as possible — including race, gender, income, and geography. That would be facially fair, less easy for the wealthy to cheat, and abolish the Byzantine nightmare of college applications today.

But in any case, in the likely event that the reactionary legal clerics who lord over this country decide to abolish affirmative action for college admissions, don't be fooled. They'll just be further insulating the power of a narrow elite clique against any kind of challenge.