Chamath Palihapitiya on GameStop: "A Pushback Against The Establishment In A Really Important Way"
Friday, January 29, 2021
CEO of Social Capital Chamath Palihapitiya on the meteoric rise of GameStop's stock and Reddit's influence to fight against shorts: "I'm taking all the profits that I made, plus my original positions, I'm going to take $500,000 and I'm going to donate it to the Barstool fund for small business... What I learned over the past couple of days is important for everybody that's watching CNBC. I think that what you're seeing is essentially a pushback against the establishment in a really important want. You have a lot of people, and I would encourage anybody who is dismissive of this thing to go onto /r/WallStreetBets and actually just read the forums. And I think that you're going to see three kinds of posts. The first kind of content are a lot of people doing incredible fundamental diligence on companies trying to think about long-term value and in my opinion, many of them are doing as good, and frankly, a better job than a lot of hedge fund analysts that I work with. The second are a lot of people who believe that coming out of 2008 what happened was Wall Street took an enormous amount of risk and they left retailers as the bag holders. And a lot of these kids were in grade school and high school when that happened. They lost their homes. Their parents lost their jobs. And they've always wondered why did those folks get bailed out for taking enormous amounts of risk and no one showed up to help my family? And the third thing is a realization that instead of having idea dinners or quiet whispered conversations amongst hedge funds in the Hamptons, these kids have the courage to do it transparently in a forum."
The Proud Boys are under growing scrutiny in the Capitol Riot investigation
Thousands of Donald Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol on 6 January to support the former president's baseless claims he won the election. Source: The Washington Post
Officials are trying to determine to what extent far-right groups planned the assault in advance.
BY ALAN FEUER, FRANCES ROBLES
The leadership of the Proud Boys has come under increased scrutiny as agents and prosecutors across the country try to determine how closely members of the far-right nationalist group communicated during the riot at the Capitol this month and to what extent they might have planned the assault in advance, according to federal law enforcement officials.
At least six members of the organisation have now been charged in connection with the riot, including one of its top-ranking leaders, Joseph Biggs. Mr Biggs, a US Army veteran, led a crew of about 100 men on an angry march from the site of President Donald Trump’s speech towards, then into, the Capitol building.
The Proud Boys, who have a history of scuffling with left-wing anti-fascist activists, have long been some of Mr Trump’s most vocal, and violent, supporters, and he has returned the favour, telling them during one of the presidential debates to “stand back and stand by”. Along with the right-wing militia the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys was one of the extremist groups with a large presence at the Capitol incursion, investigators said.
Despite having launched one of the most sprawling inquiries in US history, investigators have yet to unearth clear-cut evidence suggesting there was a widespread conspiracy to assault the Capitol on 6 January.
Still, in recent days, they have turned their attention toward a pair of Proud Boy organisers on the West Coast and have started executing a series of search warrants connected to the group, a federal law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss an ongoing inquiry.
One of the organisers, Ethan Nordean of Auburn, Washington, appeared with Mr Biggs in a YouTube video on the day of Mr Trump’s rally and can be seen shouting orders to a group of Proud Boys through a bullhorn. Mr Nordean — also known as Rufio Panman, investigators said — is named in Mr Biggs’ criminal complaint but has not been charged himself.
The second Proud Boy organiser, Eddie Block of Madera, California, took video of Mr Biggs and Mr Nordean during the event in Washington, according to a photograph included in Mr Biggs’ charging documents. In an hour-long YouTube video that he livestreamed this weekend, Mr Block acknowledged that about 25 federal agents swooped down on his house on Friday, seizing two of his mobile phones, a laptop, an iPad, an Xbox and an old computer.
When reached by phone Tuesday, Mr Block declined to comment further on the federal investigation. Mr Nordean could not be reached for comment.
The FBI has acknowledged it is conducting a similarly serious inquiry into the Oath Keepers, a group largely composed of law enforcement and military personnel, and the Three Percenters, which emerged from the extremist wing of the gun rights movement. Several members of both organisations have already been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, including three defendants who stand accused of the most severe conspiracy allegations levelled so far.
Investigators involved in the Capitol attack have also focused their attention on the chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. Mr Tarrio, who lives in Miami, was scheduled to attend the march in Washington but was thrown out of the city by a judge the day before it happened. When he was arrested 4 January in connection with the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner that had been torn from a historic Black church during a different round of violent protests last month, police officers found he was carrying two high-capacity rifle magazines emblazoned with the Proud Boys’ chicken logo.
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio wears a hat that says The War Boys at a rally in September.
AAP
Prosecutors have noted in documents attached to Mr Biggs’s case that Mr Tarrio first began encouraging the Proud Boys to go to Washington for the “Stop the Steal” march in late December, when he posted a message on the social media app Parler announcing that members of the group would “turn out in record numbers".
In the run-up to the rally, Mr Tarrio also used Parler to urge his members to avoid wearing their traditional black-and-yellow polo shirts but instead to go “incognito” and move about the city in “smaller teams”, prosecutors say.
In an interview with The New York Times one week after the siege, Mr Tarrio, who took over the Proud Boys from founder Gavin McInnes, said that the attack on the Capitol was misguided and that anyone who broke windows or took part in the nearly 140 assaults on police officers should be prosecuted.
He tried to minimise the role that the Proud Boys played in the attack — even though, among the 150 people charged so far, prosecutors have brought charges against Nicholas Ochs, the leader of the group’s Hawaii chapter, and Nicholas DeCarlo, one of its top media figures. Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy from Rochester in New York, was in the first wave of rioters to breach the Capitol, prosecutors say, and stands accused of shattering a window with a plastic police riot shield.
“Obviously, they didn’t help our cause,” Mr Tarrio said.
Investigators are continuing to sift through online posts and messages by Mr Tarrio and Mr Biggs in an effort to determine if they showed any attempt at coordination or planning, the federal law enforcement official said.
On the day of the attack, Mr Tarrio took to Parler, calling members of the Proud Boys who took part in it “revolutionaries” and urging them not to leave.
“For now, I’m enjoying the show,” he wrote, adding, “Do what must be done.”
While investigators are increasingly focused on people who may have preplanned the attack, any evidence that the assault was organised in advance could be a factor in Mr Trump’s second impeachment trial, scheduled for next month.
House Democrats have accused the former president of inciting the riot, which led to the deaths of five people, including one Capitol Police officer. Several defendants have said they joined the siege following Mr Trump’s orders, but if proof emerges that groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers plotted it in the days before it happened, it could undermine some arguments that Mr Trump is entirely to blame.
But such proof could also bolster claims that Mr Trump inspired the attack by pressing his baseless claims about fraud in the election for months.
By Alan Feuer and Frances Robles © 2021 The New York Times
SOURCE THE NEW YORK TIMES
Thousands of Donald Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol on 6 January to support the former president's baseless claims he won the election. Source: The Washington Post
Officials are trying to determine to what extent far-right groups planned the assault in advance.
BY ALAN FEUER, FRANCES ROBLES
The leadership of the Proud Boys has come under increased scrutiny as agents and prosecutors across the country try to determine how closely members of the far-right nationalist group communicated during the riot at the Capitol this month and to what extent they might have planned the assault in advance, according to federal law enforcement officials.
At least six members of the organisation have now been charged in connection with the riot, including one of its top-ranking leaders, Joseph Biggs. Mr Biggs, a US Army veteran, led a crew of about 100 men on an angry march from the site of President Donald Trump’s speech towards, then into, the Capitol building.
The Proud Boys, who have a history of scuffling with left-wing anti-fascist activists, have long been some of Mr Trump’s most vocal, and violent, supporters, and he has returned the favour, telling them during one of the presidential debates to “stand back and stand by”. Along with the right-wing militia the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys was one of the extremist groups with a large presence at the Capitol incursion, investigators said.
Despite having launched one of the most sprawling inquiries in US history, investigators have yet to unearth clear-cut evidence suggesting there was a widespread conspiracy to assault the Capitol on 6 January.
Still, in recent days, they have turned their attention toward a pair of Proud Boy organisers on the West Coast and have started executing a series of search warrants connected to the group, a federal law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss an ongoing inquiry.
One of the organisers, Ethan Nordean of Auburn, Washington, appeared with Mr Biggs in a YouTube video on the day of Mr Trump’s rally and can be seen shouting orders to a group of Proud Boys through a bullhorn. Mr Nordean — also known as Rufio Panman, investigators said — is named in Mr Biggs’ criminal complaint but has not been charged himself.
The second Proud Boy organiser, Eddie Block of Madera, California, took video of Mr Biggs and Mr Nordean during the event in Washington, according to a photograph included in Mr Biggs’ charging documents. In an hour-long YouTube video that he livestreamed this weekend, Mr Block acknowledged that about 25 federal agents swooped down on his house on Friday, seizing two of his mobile phones, a laptop, an iPad, an Xbox and an old computer.
When reached by phone Tuesday, Mr Block declined to comment further on the federal investigation. Mr Nordean could not be reached for comment.
The FBI has acknowledged it is conducting a similarly serious inquiry into the Oath Keepers, a group largely composed of law enforcement and military personnel, and the Three Percenters, which emerged from the extremist wing of the gun rights movement. Several members of both organisations have already been charged in connection with the Capitol attack, including three defendants who stand accused of the most severe conspiracy allegations levelled so far.
Investigators involved in the Capitol attack have also focused their attention on the chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. Mr Tarrio, who lives in Miami, was scheduled to attend the march in Washington but was thrown out of the city by a judge the day before it happened. When he was arrested 4 January in connection with the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner that had been torn from a historic Black church during a different round of violent protests last month, police officers found he was carrying two high-capacity rifle magazines emblazoned with the Proud Boys’ chicken logo.
Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio wears a hat that says The War Boys at a rally in September.
AAP
Prosecutors have noted in documents attached to Mr Biggs’s case that Mr Tarrio first began encouraging the Proud Boys to go to Washington for the “Stop the Steal” march in late December, when he posted a message on the social media app Parler announcing that members of the group would “turn out in record numbers".
In the run-up to the rally, Mr Tarrio also used Parler to urge his members to avoid wearing their traditional black-and-yellow polo shirts but instead to go “incognito” and move about the city in “smaller teams”, prosecutors say.
In an interview with The New York Times one week after the siege, Mr Tarrio, who took over the Proud Boys from founder Gavin McInnes, said that the attack on the Capitol was misguided and that anyone who broke windows or took part in the nearly 140 assaults on police officers should be prosecuted.
He tried to minimise the role that the Proud Boys played in the attack — even though, among the 150 people charged so far, prosecutors have brought charges against Nicholas Ochs, the leader of the group’s Hawaii chapter, and Nicholas DeCarlo, one of its top media figures. Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy from Rochester in New York, was in the first wave of rioters to breach the Capitol, prosecutors say, and stands accused of shattering a window with a plastic police riot shield.
“Obviously, they didn’t help our cause,” Mr Tarrio said.
Investigators are continuing to sift through online posts and messages by Mr Tarrio and Mr Biggs in an effort to determine if they showed any attempt at coordination or planning, the federal law enforcement official said.
On the day of the attack, Mr Tarrio took to Parler, calling members of the Proud Boys who took part in it “revolutionaries” and urging them not to leave.
“For now, I’m enjoying the show,” he wrote, adding, “Do what must be done.”
While investigators are increasingly focused on people who may have preplanned the attack, any evidence that the assault was organised in advance could be a factor in Mr Trump’s second impeachment trial, scheduled for next month.
House Democrats have accused the former president of inciting the riot, which led to the deaths of five people, including one Capitol Police officer. Several defendants have said they joined the siege following Mr Trump’s orders, but if proof emerges that groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers plotted it in the days before it happened, it could undermine some arguments that Mr Trump is entirely to blame.
But such proof could also bolster claims that Mr Trump inspired the attack by pressing his baseless claims about fraud in the election for months.
By Alan Feuer and Frances Robles © 2021 The New York Times
SOURCE THE NEW YORK TIMES
Congresswoman Attempting To Impeach Biden Once Signalled Approval For Executing Democrats
BY : CAMERON FREW ON : 27 JAN 2021
HUH?WHAT?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, recently claimed she’d filed articles of impeachment against Biden for ‘abuse of power’ during his time as vice president in the Obama administration.
From being a relatively unknown quantity, the newly-elected lawmaker is facing worldwide scrutiny with her headline-making moves. However, it’s now been discovered that she once indicated support for killing prominent Democrats prior to running for Congress.
Her statement reads, ‘Over the years, I’ve had teams of people manage my pages. Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views. Especially the ones that CNN is about to spread across the internet.’
It adds, ‘They are taking old Facebook posts from random users to try to cancel me and silence my vote. CNN hasn’t once tried to cancel a Democrat. Even those who called for violence while in office.’ However, she doesn’t give any examples.
Greene continues, ‘Here’s the truth, the Democrats and their spokesmen in the Fake News Media will stop at nothing to defeat conservative Republicans. They are coming after me because I’m a treat to their goal of socialism.’
The statement goes on further, but it continues along the same thread of some grand agenda against Greene, who once wore a ‘censored’ face mask despite continually using her platform to defend herself.
BY : CAMERON FREW ON : 27 JAN 2021
PA Images
HUH?WHAT?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, recently claimed she’d filed articles of impeachment against Biden for ‘abuse of power’ during his time as vice president in the Obama administration.
From being a relatively unknown quantity, the newly-elected lawmaker is facing worldwide scrutiny with her headline-making moves. However, it’s now been discovered that she once indicated support for killing prominent Democrats prior to running for Congress.
PA Images
A CNN KFile review of Greene’s Facebook page revealed a stream of far-right content, from engaging with the QAnon conspiracy theory to other extremist posts.
Back in January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said ‘a bullet to the head would be quicker’ to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Others liked comments included those regarding the execution of FBI agents, who she accused of being part of the ‘deep state’ against the former POTUS.
In April 2019, in response to Greene’s false writing about Obama’s Iran Deal, one comment read, ‘Now do we get to hang them ?? Meaning [Hillary Clinton] and [Obama] ???’
A CNN KFile review of Greene’s Facebook page revealed a stream of far-right content, from engaging with the QAnon conspiracy theory to other extremist posts.
Back in January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said ‘a bullet to the head would be quicker’ to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Others liked comments included those regarding the execution of FBI agents, who she accused of being part of the ‘deep state’ against the former POTUS.
In April 2019, in response to Greene’s false writing about Obama’s Iran Deal, one comment read, ‘Now do we get to hang them ?? Meaning [Hillary Clinton] and [Obama] ???’
PA Images
Greene replied, ‘Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.’
Greene has since responded to her social media history, firmly slamming the outlet for ‘writing yet another hit piece on me focused on my time before running for political office’.
In the below video, you can see Greene earlier discuss how ‘Q’ is an American patriot and how the conspiracy is ‘worth paying attention to’:
Greene replied, ‘Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.’
Greene has since responded to her social media history, firmly slamming the outlet for ‘writing yet another hit piece on me focused on my time before running for political office’.
In the below video, you can see Greene earlier discuss how ‘Q’ is an American patriot and how the conspiracy is ‘worth paying attention to’:
Her statement reads, ‘Over the years, I’ve had teams of people manage my pages. Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views. Especially the ones that CNN is about to spread across the internet.’
It adds, ‘They are taking old Facebook posts from random users to try to cancel me and silence my vote. CNN hasn’t once tried to cancel a Democrat. Even those who called for violence while in office.’ However, she doesn’t give any examples.
Greene continues, ‘Here’s the truth, the Democrats and their spokesmen in the Fake News Media will stop at nothing to defeat conservative Republicans. They are coming after me because I’m a treat to their goal of socialism.’
The statement goes on further, but it continues along the same thread of some grand agenda against Greene, who once wore a ‘censored’ face mask despite continually using her platform to defend herself.
Will the U.S. End its Support for the Apartheid Israeli Regime?
The world is exhaling following the end of the vicious incompetence and corruption of Donald Trump’s presidency. Journalists and political commentators applauded the inaugural address delivered by President Joe Biden, and expressed varying levels of hope about what is called a “return to normalcy” in US public policy. Meanwhile, we wonder whether the Biden administration will finally end US complicity in and support to the Israeli apartheid regime.
An article in the January 11, 2021 issue of The Guardian described a position paper issued by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights advocacy organization, which disputes the popular narrative about Israel being a democracy. Instead, the position paper makes the following assertion: “One organising [sic.] principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.”
The B’Tselem position paper does not stand alone. In June 2020, Yesh Din, yet another Israeli human rights organization, issued a legal opinion that concluded that the Israeli regime is committing the crime of apartheid in the West Bank against Palestinians. Although the Yesh Din legal opinion (which cites international law as its controlling authority) limits its apartheid indictment to the West Bank, the B’Tselem position paper makes the more sweeping indictment that Israel exists as one apartheid regime “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” an area that includes the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
We agree that Israel is an apartheid regime. One of us (Raouf Halaby) is a Palestinian-American who was born in Jerusalem; in 1959 his family was forced from their home by Jewish persecution. One of us (Lauri Umansky) is ancestrally Jewish. One of us (Wendell Griffen), who is ancestrally African American, was born during (and vividly recalls what life was like during) the last years of Jim Crow segregation in the United States. One of us (Allan Boesak) is a native of South Africa who was a leading opponent to the apartheid regime of South Africa.
We each, and separately, have first-hand knowledge about the political, social, and legal oppression perpetrated by the Israeli regime against Palestinians. That first-hand knowledge is the foundation for our agreement with the B’tselem position paper. Contrary to the popular narrative mouthed by US politicians and media pundits, Israel is an apartheid regime, not a democracy. The Yesh Din legal opinion provides a clear explanation for this conclusion based on universally accepted principles of international law.
The Israeli apartheid regime is subsidized, politically and economically, by US tax dollars, US corporations, and by US-based charitable organizations. A 2015 article reported that the US government has provided $139 billion in direct assistance to Israel since 1949. The article also mentions how US taxpayers receive favorable tax deductions by making charitable donations to organizations that fund illegal Israeli settler activities in the West Bank.
For generations, people in the United States have turned a blind eye to the ongoing crimes against humanity practiced by the state of Israel against non-Jews generally and against Palestinians, especially. Israel’s racial disdain of Ethiopian Jews and other African nationals has been duly noted. And Israeli and non-Israeli Jews who dare criticize Israel’s racist policies are labeled as self-hating Jews. Now that the Biden-Harris administration has entered office, we should open our eyes to the apartheid that former US President Jimmy Carter documented in his book titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster, 2006). In that book, President Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt, detailed Israeli violations of key United Nations resolutions, official US policy, and an international “road map” for peace by subsidizing illegal Israeli settlements on Arab lands and by militarized enforcement of political, social, and economic oppression of the Palestinians.
In some respects, Israeli apartheid is even worse than South African apartheid. Yet, oppressed South Africans, after decades of struggle, and especially after first the Sharpeville massacre, and then the slaughter of the children in 1976, found allies in the international community. They joined together in a nonviolent, targeted, and highly effective boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign without which the struggle against that system would never have been successful. How many more massacres of Palestinians must it take for the West, and the US in particular to rediscover that spark of moral indignation and political integrity regarding Palestine that made them choose the side of the oppressed in South Africa?
It is high time people who believe that apartheid and racism are illegal call on the United States to stop subsidizing apartheid and racism under the guise of supporting Israel. It is time for us to quit pretending that Israel is a US partner for democracy. It is time for an all-out challenge to the anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) laws and resolutions that have been introduced in thirty-two U.S. states. It is time, once and for all, to call out the ruse, whether enshrined in law or propaganda, that criticism of the apartheid Israeli regime is tantamount to anti-Semitism: as B’Tselem and Yesh Din make clear, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism cannot and must not be falsely equated. It is high time for the US, if it is to be a creditable force for “democracy,” to recognize Israel for what it is: an apartheid regime that depends on US financial and political support to maintain the oppressions it inflicts on Palestinians.
We call on the Biden-Harris administration to end U.S. support for the Israeli regime’s apartheid policies and practices. And we urge other persons who believe in justice and the rule of law to join the rising chorus of voices in Israel, such as B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and around the world, who are making the same demands.
Žižek on the Žhip of Fools Again
JANUARY 29, 2021
How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning– Midnight Oil, “Beds Are Burning”
Musing through Slavoj Žižek’s new anti-tome, Pandemic 2! Chronicles of a Time Lost, his much-anticipated follow-up to Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World, I recall reading somewhere in time how Bob Dylan, the Bard of Duluth, used to sit down at the kitchen table, presumably at some sad-eyed lady of the lowland’s place (i.e., Lower East Side soho type), and read newspapers and clip out interesting pieces that he thought would make good subjects for songs.
Reading Pandemic! 2 is kind of like looking over the Bard’s shoulders, in the early tarantella days of his career, as he peruses and muses over some NYT or Post piece about some old ‘defunct’ injustice like police brutality or racial disenfranchisement somewhere out there, away from the kitchen, where the riot squads were restless. Such a habit would account for a couple of stray songs off Desire that probably don’t belong on the same album together — “Joey” (Gallo) and “Hurricane” (Rubin Carter). Or maybe they do. WTF do I know about Mr. Alias Anything You Please, when it comes right down to it, other than what I’ve heard?
Reading Žižek is like that. In Pandemic 1 he was called out of his bed in his ‘jamas and urgently asked to write a polemic against rising pandemic-driven values. He was up to the task. Žižek is always up to the task; he’s not like other men that way. But looking over his shoulder this time, while he was with laptop in bed, it was a little more constricted, as he had Lacan in bed with him now. Reading Žižek this go, sometimes I felt like a ménage à twat. Pandemic! 2 is largely an elaborate exercise in reader-response theory. He makes dialectical love to Hegel using a Lacanian psychoanalytic prophylactic. Noone gets hurt that way and there’s no hard feelings.
Žižek reads a paper, usually the Guardian, because he’s about as Left as the Guardian is, I reckon, and responds with journal-type entries he calls chapters. Then I (sometimes) look up the piece and gauge his response and write a review of his responses, and then you, reader, respond-perform my read of Žižek, trotting out your little totemic dogmas and ideogrammatic nuances — different from mine, and maybe post it to your Facebook timeline, where it becomes a feed to your hungry readership — different from mine, who respond with Likes or retweets, and on and on it goes, reading/responding, until it’s like a case of Narcissus with a small army of Echos ego-riffing at the same time, and nobody can tell who’s Narcissus and who’s Echo. Like Marx said all those years ago: Talk, talk, talk: Where is it getting you? Jeesh, no wonder Žižek is always bananas in his pajamas in the morning.
Well, as Žižek indicated in Pandemic! 1, he was called upon by publishers to respond to the Covid-19 ‘hysteria’ sweeping the world like the Real pandemic behind Corona, and was especially caustic to liberal points of view, who wanted to connect the virus to Trump and his viral influence. In Pandemic! 2, he reiterates:
…we do not need psychoanalysis to explore the “pathology” of Trump’s success—the only thing to psychoanalyze is the irrational stupidity of Left liberal reactions to it, the stupidity that makes it increasingly probable that Trump will be reelected. To appropriate what is perhaps the lowest point of Trump’s vulgarities, the Left has not yet learned how to grab Trump by his p****.
As Žižek points out late in this text, we have seen the rise of the vulgar and obscene with the new populism sweeping the globe, but though the pussy-grabbing St. Grobian was a buffoon; Caligula has yet to come, sow and canker.
Pandemic! 2 is, like P!1, a hoot in its own way. Žižek is all over the place, says things in a way here that makes me wonder about translation problems, or if I’m sane. Acolytes and zealots can work through these serious changes of chord, the way you do at an all-night jazz riffing of horns into the morning, where it helps if you’re high to get to the upper registers of the player’s abstract theorizing. Pandemic! 2 is segmented into 14 chapters of wholesome neo-commie goodness slices lathered with Lacanian pepperschnippel sandwiched between an intro and concluding No Time (To Conclude). Pass the bong.
In his Introduction: Why A Philosopher Should Write About Bringing In The Harvest, Žižek uses the pandemic-driven agro crisis to take a potshot at capitalism. There’s trouble in Gütersloh, a no-doubt paradisiacal town “north-by-northwest” in Germany; there’s trouble in Tennessee, where still waters run deep; there’s trouble in south Florida near MaralagoLand; trouble in Italy and Spain, UK, France, and Russia. As Dylan would croon, “Go all the way to the other side of the world / you’ll find trouble there.” And Žižek surely does:
The same bad smell is spreading all around the world… tons and tons of unpicked fruits and vegetables. Why?…Because of the pandemic, we are faced with a typically absurd capitalist crisis: thousands of eager workers cannot get work and sit idly by while tons of produce rots in the fields.
The stench of change is in the wind. Potter’s field has become a potter’s field for fruit and vegetables. Hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Our sadness Dooley noted, as Bogie would say.
CNN and Jacobin help Žižek see a new social order emerging from Covid-19’s dialectical masquerade at our expense. He’s careful to point out that the conditions were already there, but 19 has brought our troubles out in bas relief. There’s an upstairs-downstairsing happening. Some of us get to stay home and read self-important philosophy tracts and zoom-bookclub about it, while others have to go out and risk life and lung performing necessary services, trash pick-ups, running pies (pizza), NSA wiretaps (someone has to do it). He writes,
This new working class was here all along, the pandemic just propelled it into visibility…Much of this class is not exploited in the classic Marxist sense of working for those who own the means of production; they are “exploited” with regard to the way they relate to the material conditions of their life: access to water and clean air, health, safety…
Žižek has averred in his Pandemic! franchise that we are in an age of permanent viral interpenetrations: “Just think about all the long-frozen bacteria and viruses waiting to be reactivated with the thawing of permafrost!” I’m thinking.
Consequently, as the Woke viruses come at us, Žižek sees the “new working class” as a permanent feature of our social order, especially as the weaselly upper crust hunker down in the under crust, or, as Žižek puts it:
Expecting some kind of catastrophe, the rich are buying villas in New Zealand or renovating Cold War nuclear bunkers in the Rocky Mountains, but the problem with a pandemic is that one cannot isolate from it completely—like an umbilical cord that cannot be severed, a minimal link with polluted reality is unavoidable.
Beginning to seem like the Time Machine is in our future, Eloi and Morlocks, the fey and the fucked. Ouch.
And then, by way of Yahoo News, Žižek segues into Texas, the lone star state, healthily represented at the recent HeeHaw event in the Capitol, and inexplicably has one Brenden Dilley explain how Texans manhandle the pandemic. Telling the reader that mask-wearing is serious business — in fact, he says, it’s existential! He writes,
Here is how Brenden Dilley, a Texas chat-show host, explained why he doesn’t wear a mask: “Better to be dead than a dork. Yes, I mean that literally. I’d rather die than look like an idiot right now.” Dilley refuses to wear a mask since, for him, wearing one is incompatible with human dignity at its most basic level.
Well, that’s the Lacanian approach to his point of view, and very generous.
But speaking of masks in Texas, which bandits there were wont to wear for ages, there’s a fella that comes to mind out of Galveston, a homeless Black guy named Donald Neely led away by rope by cops on horses, who was going around wearing a welder’s mask. One cop, a nagmare, threatened to drag him. Nobody ever asked him why he wore a welder’s mask. Did he know a mad virus was on the way? Maybe something from across the border, Santa Ana way, his mask a personal Alamo? Did he qualify as a “dork?” one wonders. What would Lacan say? Even Žižek doesn’t explain the mask, the persona, the deep-seated ego flower free-floating on the surface of our consciousness like, well, like a lotus on a pacific pond.
As if to drive his Pandemic!1 point home about our losing ourselves in the romance of disease, some of us seeing punishment for our ecocidal behavior over the years, some of us zooming up to notions of benign lefty change chances ahead, but Žižek warns, through German virologist Henry Streeck, who is quoted in Die Welt newspaper Z.is reading, “[There is] No second or third wave—we are in a permanent wave.”And instead of futilely reiterating these thoughts in Pandemic! 2, Žižek introduces us to the Worldometer. It’s seemingly self-explanatory, but one finds an edge of sadism attached to its referencing, as if Žižek wanted to rub reality in our faces. Full disclosure: I find Žižek wonderfully scatological in this book, but sometimes he seems like a crypto-fascist. These stats in the face are borderline Mussolini. If the birth rate (he shows real time — how I don’t know) is double the death rate, then Covid-19 just ain’t up to the task IMHO. He seems to say.
Žižek continues to see us responding to Covid-19’s almost-luna-like influences on our tidal alpha waves as if we were possessed (I’m thinking Camus, but he doesn’t seem to be), and by way of the Guardian and CNN, chews his cuttlefish over crazinesses happening in Stuttgart and England. He scribbles:
“[O]n June 21 German authorities were shocked over a rampage of an “unprecedented scale” in the center of Stuttgart: four to five hundred partygoers ran riot overnight, smashing shop windows, plundering stores, and attacking police.
Smashed glass in Stuttgarrt to protest racism — like Nazis who’ve broke Abbie gone kristalnachting for the hell of it! Putting fascists on the cattle trains to Disneyland. Ee-Ha.
And similarly, on the beaches of Dover — what’s that? — I mean, on beaches across England, lads and “ladies” were kicking up a sandstorm for no apparent reason, brazenly bronzing while ignoring social distancing. First Brexit, now ‘breaks it.’
Protests, during a pandemic. Can you believe it? Žižek opines that these days there are only two kinds of protests going on — the sentimentalist-driven, retro-Tiananmen Square,
catch-up protests that enjoy the support of Western liberal media; for instance, those in Hong Kong and Minsk. On the other side, we have much more troubling protests that react to the limits of the liberal-democratic project itself, such as the Yellow Vests, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion.
Add to that the putsch Trump ‘pushed’ in DC recently that got him naughtily impeached a second time for his troubles, Nancy doing that done-and-dusted thing with her hands and demanding that her podium be returned by the Florida nutjob who nicked it. “What the fuck would a Trump illiterate do with a podium anyway,” she is said to have remarked, her mascara running, as if from her, “Yell duh and doh and dese and Dems?”
Žižek compares these two protest types to the Achilles and the Hare legend made famous in modern times by the Elvis song, “Confidence.” But here the mighty mind of Z. clarifies matters:
If we replace Achilles by “forces of democratic uprising” and the tortoise by the ideal of “liberal democratic capitalism”, we soon realize that most countries cannot get close to this ideal, and that their failure to reach it expresses weaknesses of the global capitalist system itself.
Well, my grandpa used to say: time wounds all heels, and the only reason “slow poke” won that race is because Achilles had a bad heel, but unlike Trump with debilitating toenail problem, Achilles manned up and went to Troy and became a hermaphrodisiac’s delight getting grease-rubbed whenever the movie action lagged, riveting men and women alike.
I dunno, sometimes I get lost in Žižek”s maze, as when he starts talking about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror and referencing “inert, humid matter,” and the next thing you know, as in Pandemic!1, he’s bringing masturbation to the table — again. Quoting Tarkovsky’s father (“A soul is sinful without a body, like a body without clothes.”), and then, BAM: “Masturbating to hardcore images is sinful, while bodily contact is a path to spirit.” End of chapter. Whoa. Let me down easy, Slavoj.
Things get kinkier, as you’d expect them to, when he begins to muse about the future, trotting in Elon Musk’s smelly pigs to hallucidate the situation. Elon Musk’s taken some hits in recent years, starting out as a Flash Gordon, at least in his own mind, then releasing bad vibes into the already traumatized ecology. A while back, Melon asked for volunteers to sign up for a one way trip to Palookaville (i.e., Mars) and 200,000 people signed up for the horrific suicide. Suddenly, he’s like the Pied Piper of Hamelin with the rat problem.Then, he mouthed off about a spelunker who helped rescue Thai children stranded in a watered-in cave, calling the Brit hero “suss” and “the pedo guy” on Twitter. What an asshole. And now, Žižek was worrying us with Melon’s latest seemingly misanthropic venture into pig mind control, no doubt with a view to eventually taking out anyone who didn’t volunteer for his Mars venture.
Specifically, Žižek, reading a piece in the Guardian, is worried that Melon’s Neuralink project could lead to human mind control. Žižek writes, “Musk emphasized the health benefits of Neuralink (skirting over its potential for an unprecedented control of our inner life), and announced that he is now looking for human volunteers.” One minute we got a pandemic and climate change to worry about, with masturbation as one solution, and now you’re thinking asshole’s actually P.T. Barnum and the Mars “success” made him realize people are sheeple when they’re not capitalist pigs (probably the formula is reversed in China). Turns out, Snowball got off easy; what if Napoleon had been named Musk instead? He frets some more,
Both extremes are to be avoided in interpreting the significance of Neuralink: we should neither celebrate it as an invention that opens the path toward Singularity (a divine\collective self-awareness) nor fear it as a signal that we will lose our individual autonomy and become cogs in a digital machine.
Hmph. Fuck it, let’s hook up Melon. He’s not an asshole, he’s a black hole.
There’s more, The Independent tells Žižek that Melon expects human brains to get pigged within 12 months and he predicts human language will be obsolete maybe within 5 years — but that aside, Žižek’s not happy with the ontological and teleological questions raised by such experiments:
Once our inner life is directly linked to reality so that our thoughts have immediate material consequences (or can be manipulated by a machine that is part of reality) and are in this sense no longer “ours,” we effectively enter a post-human state . . . Neuralink should thus prompt us to raise not only the question of whether we will still be human if we are immersed in a wired brain, but also: what do we understand by “human” when we say this?
These are meet, and potato, questions. There’s so much meat in Pandemic! 2 that a good ol’ anti-colonial colonic is recommended, I dunno, maybe some Byron, she walks in beauty yada-ya.
When Žižek takes on Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, my ears are pricked, because Schmidt’s a prick who I had to circumscribe in my review of The Digital Age (originally titled The Empire of the Mind, and presumably dropped for omerta reasons), because he proposed hologram machines in “every” household (read: every elite household) that could transport people to other lands and cultures. At one point he suggests, “Worried your kids are becoming spoiled? Have them spend some time wandering around the Dharavi slum in Mumbai.” He cites The Intercept’s Naomi Klein taking the mickey out of Schmidt’s notion of another notion:
“to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life. Klein calls this proposal the “Screen New Deal”; it promises safety from infection while maintaining all the personal freedoms liberals care for—but can it work?
And Jeff Bezos is another one. Long ago, when a journalist asked president LBJ why we were in VietNam if even he thought it was a losing proposition, he unzipped and pulled out his johnson, and said that’s why (true story). Bezos is sleazier. He’s like the film What Women Want. Check out a close-up of the Amazon logo shlong. Like LBJ, He thinks we’re all fems. F*ck Bezos. And f*ck Eric Schmidt and his empire of our minds. Over my habeas corpus.
Žižek has fun with movies that speak to our crises. I liked that he brought up Soylent Green, the ironic movie that has the fascist state taking the lefty Green economy to heart by recycling human cadavers into wafers called Soylent Green. Who knew fascists had such a sense of humor? And, returning to a NYT piece on Musk (again), he likes The Matrix, telling us we need to choose, like Neo, between the red pill and the blue pill, which is to say, says Žižek, between Woke reality and ordinary reality. I’m exhausted by the time he points to the coming locusts, and warns that the liberal anarchy of commerce needs to be controlled, and I wonder what Lacan would make of all this, ready to go all Roberto Duran on the whole thing, no mas.
One other bit captures the imagination however. Žižek references the 1958 sci-fi story, “Store of the Worlds ,” which is a tale about the potential interchangeability of reality and wishful thinking, even more so than is our current wont. In the story, he writes,
The eccentric old owner of the store explains to Wayne what he is selling: in exchange for all of their earthly possessions, he temporarily transposes his customers into an alternate reality where they can live according to their most intimate wishes.
A link to the award-winning16-minute 2017 film, The Escape, is included, and is highly recommended.
“Store of the Worlds” recalled, The Veldt, a welcome episode of the film The Illustrated Man, in which a boy and his sister, are given a hologram machine they use to ‘transport’ themselves to Africa, where they hang out with the lions on the savannah, spending more and more time there, until, worried, their parents try to take away the machine. The kids respond by luring their parents into the ‘savannah’ where they are promptly eaten by the lions. Just their clothes remain. I thought of Eric Schmidt and his kids luring their millionaire parents into Mumbai slumdog territory and throwing away the key.
In the end, Žižek shrugs meaningfully at us and tells us we needs must make a choice between our current regimen of the will-to-ignorance (some kind of weird Nietzschean thing, I guess) or choose brave new thinking, blue or red. He concludes with Appendix: Four Reflections on Power, Appearance, and Obscenity. He has left plenty to wonder about and one can only imagine what might be included in the next installment of Pandemic!
JANUARY 29, 2021
TO THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD:
TO PEOPLE FIGHTING IN EUROPE:
BROTHERS, SISTERS AND COMPAÑERAS:
During these previous months, we have established contact between us by various means. We are women, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, transvestites, transsexuals, intersex, queer and more, men, groups, collectives, associations, organizations, social movements, indigenous peoples, neighbourhood associations, communities and a long etcetera that gives us identity.
We are differentiated and separated by lands, skies, mountains, valleys, steppes, jungles, deserts, oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, lagoons, races, cultures, languages, histories, ages, geographies, sexual and non-sexual identities, roots, borders, forms of organization, social classes, purchasing power, social prestige, fame, popularity, followers, likes, coins, educational level, ways of being, tasks, virtues, defects, pros, cons, buts, howevers, rivalries, enmities, conceptions, arguments, counterarguments, debates, disputes, complaints, accusations, contempts, phobias, philias, praises, repudiations, boos, applauses, divinities, demons, dogmas, heresies, likes, dislikes, ways, and a long etcetera that makes us different and, not infrequently, opposites.
Only very few things unite us:
That we make the pains of the earth our own: violence against women; persecution and contempt of those who are different in their affective, emotional, and sexual identity; annihilation of childhood; genocide against the native peoples; racism; militarism; exploitation; dispossession; the destruction of nature.
The understanding that a system is responsible for these pains. The executioner is an exploitative, patriarchal, pyramidal, racist, thievish and criminal system: capitalism.
The knowledge that it is not possible to reform this system, to educate it, to attenuate it, to soften it, to domesticate it, to humanize it.
The commitment to fight, everywhere and at all times – each and everyone on their own terrain – against this system until we destroy it completely. The survival of humanity depends on the destruction of capitalism. We do not surrender, we do not sell out, and we do not give up.
The certainty that the fight for humanity is global. Just as the ongoing destruction does not recognize borders, nationalities, flags, languages, cultures, races; so the fight for humanity is everywhere, all the time.
The conviction that there are many worlds that live and fight within the world. And that any pretence of homogeneity and hegemony threatens the essence of the human being: freedom. The equality of humanity lies in the respect for difference. In its diversity resides its likeness.
The understanding that what allows us to move forward is not the intention to impose our gaze, our steps, companies, paths and destinations. What allows us to move forward is the listening to and the observation of the Other that, distinct and different, has the same vocation of freedom and justice.
Due to these commonalities, and without abandoning our convictions or ceasing to be who we are, we have agreed:
First.- To carry out meetings, dialogues, exchanges of ideas, experiences, analyses and evaluations among those of us who are committed, from different conceptions and from different areas, to the struggle for life. Afterwards, each one will go their own way, or not. Looking and listening to the Other may or may not help us in our steps. But knowing what is different is also part of our struggle and our endeavour, of our humanity.
Second.- That these meetings and activities take place on the five continents. That, regarding the European continent, they take place in the months of July, August, September and October of the year 2021, with the direct participation of a Mexican delegation integrated by the CNI-CIG, the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa del Agua y de la Tierra de Morelos, Puebla y Tlaxcala, and the EZLN. And, at later dates to be specified, we will support according to our possibilities the encounters to be carried out in Asia, Africa, Oceania and America.
Third.- To invite those who share the same concerns and similar struggles, all honest people and all those belows that rebel and resist in the many corners of the world, to join, contribute, support and participate in these meetings and activities; and to sign and make this statement FOR LIFE their own.
From the bridge of dignity that connects the Europe from Below and on the Left with the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
We.
Planet Earth.
January 1, 2021. Desde las montañas del Sureste Mexicano. Por las mujeres, hombres, otroas, niñas y ancianas delEjército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional:
Comandante Don Pablo Contreras y Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
México.
Anyone who supports this vision and wishes to sign onto this statement should send their name, organization, and geographical place to: firmasporlavida@ezln.org.mx.
JANUARY 29, 2021
As I wrote in a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer published today under the headline: “Punish All Rioters”:
An article in the Sunday Inquirer said that federal prosecutors are discussing not prosecuting all who participated in the fatal US Capitol insurrectional assault on Jan. 6. The reason: Fears of “overloading” the courts.
Balderdash. During the 1967 MOBE march and demonstration by several hundred thousand antiwar activists on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, the feds didn’t hesitate about arresting, charging, and then busing me and 700 other activists to federal prison in Occoquan, Va. There we were held and arraigned over the next few days with most, like me, released with minor penalties like my five-day suspended misdemeanor trespass sentence and $25 fine.
Surely today’s justice system can handle these far more serious 800 Capitol insurrectionist cases. While not all violent, all suspects clearly illegally entered or broke into the nation’s Capitol, disrupting Congress. Charge them appropriately, let them plead, and take it from there. The courts won’t be “overloaded.”
Take a look at the lower photo above showing the image the Inquirer ran with my letter of the 2006 Capitol building attackers, girded for violence and swarming the Capitol Police (who are showing amazing restraint) and consider how most of those wannabe insurrections may now perhaps escape any prosecution as federal prosecutors express concern about “congesting” the court system.
Now take a close look at top image above showing the peacefully seated protesters “occupying” the front mall entrance to the Pentagon in ’67. You can clearly see the confrontational federal troops threatening the protesters with their rifles, and also a white-helmeted federal marshal gratuitously and violently beating protesters’ about their heads and shoulders with his wooden baton as they just sit calmly in place. Some 700 or more of us peaceful protesters were eventually yanked away by those marshals and were beaten as we were dragged to vans and buses to be hauled off to a federal prison in Occoquan, Virginia. All those of us who were snatched away were charged with various offenses, often grossly inflated. Many of those I shared a dormitory cell with were injured during their arrests, some seriously, and I only saw perhaps at most 100 of those arrested at the time. (For a contemporaneous account of my experience being busted and jailed at the ’67 Pentagon demonstration, click here.)
Meanwhile, while a Capitol Police cop was beaten and killed in the 2021 Capitol insurrection attempt, and one insurrectionist was shot by Capitol Police as she was trying to break into the Hall of the Senate, and while three others died in the melee, no troops guarding the Pentagon, as far as I know, were injured or killed by the peaceful 1967 protesters.
Clearly it’s a case of different strokes for different folks. Peaceful leftists were and still are considered far more serious and deserving of punishment when they protest than are violent and even murderous rightist fascists and wannabe insurrectionists.
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