Pages (a) - Avaluació dels dos primers anys d'escola (Gripia)

Des de fa unes setmanes estem fent l'avaluació del camí que han emprès els alumnes de l'Escola de Pastors, en les seves 2 primeres edicions. Un dels neguits més gran que tenim des de l'organització és el futur que els hi espera a les persones, que un cop acabat el procés de formació, volen continuar l'activitat. La majoria d'aquestes tenen la intenció de portar a terme un projecte propi, amb el que això comporta: cerca de terres per instal·lar-hi la seva nau i ramat. Molts cops això està produint una certa frustració ja que el nostre sistema agrari no preveu ni inclou sistemes àgils de incorporació de persones al cicle ramader i per tant aquests alumnes tot i intentar-ho no hi troben espai. Això és especialment amarg a la zona del Pirineu on tot i que hi ha nombroses explotacions que no presenten relleu, aquestes no estan disposades a confiar en una persona de fora de la família.

 

Pensem que és important remarcar que no es troba en la mateixa situació una persona que es vulgui instal·lar de zero com a agricultor que com a jove ramader. La ramaderia comporta una estructura molt més complexa que demana de molta més inversió i patrimoni per començar l'activitat. El més difícil però és trobar la terra per instal·lar-se. Per tant comencem amb que el be més bàsic per tot just començar no el tenim ni garantit. Això és un fet gravíssim que demana de prendre decisions a nivell polític dins d'una esfera més alta.

 

L'Escola és tot just una eina, una espurna, perquè aquestes persones concretin els seus projectes i es decideixin, un cop han passat pel procés de formació, a tirar endavant allò que imaginaven seria el seu futur.  Des del Projecte Grípia no es pot donar un servei massa més complert més enllà d'això. La nostra feina en el dia a dia, és fer-los-hi un assessorament puntual i mobilitzar totes les ofertes laborals i de cessions que puguin sorgir.

 

EL RESULTAT

 

La incidència del Projecte Grípia al món de la pagesia no podem dir que sigui menor, ja que de les 48 persones que ha passat per les seves instal·lacions en dos anys, n'han sortit 34 que estan en procés o tirant endavant amb el seu projecte tot i les dificultats existents en la incorporació de joves a la ramaderia.

 

Admirem les seves conviccions, ganes i compromís que demostren tenir envers aquest ofici. Endavant i força!

FreeRange story - Palestinian leaders react angrily to leaked documents

palestinian settlements - leaked deal papers

FreeRange user Oliver Luker wanted you to see this:

"Palestinian leaders react angrily to leaked documents"

Senior PLO leader attacks Palestine papers as 'propaganda game', as Hamas accuses PLO of betraying Palestinian interests

• Palestinians offered Israel 'biggest Jerusalem in history'
• East Jerusalem residents dismiss land-swap proposals
• Interactive: browse the documents

Palestinian officials today lashed out at the publication of leaked documents revealing a secret agreement to accept Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in East Jerusalem - one of the most sensitive issues to be resolved in the conflict with Israel.

The unprecedented proposal, revealed by al-Jazeera TV and the Guardian , was one of several concessions that have caused shockwaves among Palestinians and across the Arab world. It appears in a cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations and which provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process.

Yasser Abed-Rabbo, a senior PLO leader, attacked al-Jazeera and its Qatari owners over what he called "a distortion of the truth" designed to create confusion. Speaking in Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, he called the leak "a propaganda game through the media in order to brainwash Palestinian citizens".

Saeb Erekat, the PLO's chief negotiator, who features in many of the documents, said: "We don't have anything to hide. [The papers have been] taken out of context and contain lies ... Al-Jazeera's information is full of distortions and fraud."

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, insisted: "We say things very clearly. We do not have secrets."

Hamas, the Islamist movement which opposes negotiations with Israel and advocates armed resistance, accused the PLO of betraying Palestinian interests. "This leadership is not honest," Osama Hamdan told al-Jazeera. "They have no credibility to negotiate. It is clear from these documents that they have no authorisation from their own people."

Further documents in the cache that will be released over coming days will also reveal:

• The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

• How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.

• The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.

• The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

• How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-09 war in Gaza.

As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere. They also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City - the issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.

The offers were made in 2008-09, in the wake of George Bush's Annapolis conference, and were privately hailed by Erekat as giving Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in history" in order to resolve the world's most intractable conflict. Israeli leaders, backed by the US government, said the offers were inadequate.

Israel's rightwing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, used the revelations to attack the previous government of Ehud Olmert. "Even the leftist government of Olmert and Livni did not succeed in reaching a peace agreement, despite the many concessions," he told Israel Radio today.

Intensive efforts to revive talks by the Obama administration foundered last year over Israel's refusal to extend a 10-month partial freeze on settlement construction. Prospects are now uncertain amid increasing speculation that a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict is no longer attainable - and fears of a new war.

Many of the 1,600 leaked documents have been independently authenticated by the Guardian and corroborated by former participants in the talks and intelligence and diplomatic sources.

The Guardian's coverage is supplemented by WikiLeaks cables, emanating from the US consulate in Jerusalem and embassy in Tel Aviv. Israeli officials also kept their own records of the talks, which may differ from the confidential Palestinian accounts.

The concession in May 2008 by Palestinian leaders to allow Israel to annex the settlements in East Jerusalem - including Gilo, a focus of controversy after Israel gave the go-ahead for 1,400 new homes - has never been made public.

All settlements built on territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war are illegal under international law, but the Jerusalem homes are routinely described, and perceived, by Israel as municipal "neighbourhoods". Israeli governments have consistently sought to annex the largest settlements as part of a peace deal, and came close to doing so at Camp David.

Erekat told Israeli leaders in 2008: "This is the first time in Palestinian-Israeli history in which such a suggestion is officially made." No such concession had been made at Camp David.

But the offer was rejected out of hand by Israel because it did not include a big settlement near the city Ma'ale Adumim as well as Har Homa and several others deeper in the West Bank, including Ariel. "We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands," Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told the Palestinians, "and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it."

The overall impression that emerges from the documents, which stretch from 1999 to 2010, is of the weakness and growing desperation of Palestinian leaders as failure to reach agreement or even halt all settlement temporarily undermines their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals.

The former negotiator Diana Buttu called on Erekat to resign following the revelations. "Saeb must step down and if he doesn't it will only serve to show just how out of touch and unrepresentative the negotiators are," she said.

Palestinian and Israeli officials both point out that any position in negotiations is subject to the principle that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" and therefore is invalid without a over-arching deal.

The PA, set up after the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO, is under pressure from a disaffected Palestinian public and Hamas, which won Palestinian elections in 2006 and has controlled the Gaza Strip since its takeover in 2007.

Unlike the PLO, Hamas rejects negotiations, except for a long-term ceasefire, and refuses to recognise Israel. Supported by Iran and Syria, its charter contains anti-semitic elements. The group is classed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the EU, despite pressure for it to be included in a wider political process.


• The Palestine papers
• Palestinian territories
• Israel
• Middle East

Ian Black

Seumas Milne

Harriet Sherwood


guardian.co.uk fffffc2fffffa9 Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Guardian

FreeRange WebReader - bringing the Internet to your mobile phone like never before!

Reading this on your Windows Smartphone, Palm or Blackberry? Try it now by clicking http://mwap.at

FreeRange story - 'An industrial revolution for food'

industrial revolution for food - report

FreeRange user Oliver Luker wanted you to see this:

"'An industrial revolution for food'"

The existing food system fails half the people on the planet, and needs radical change if world is to feed itself, report warns

The world will not be able to feed itself without destroying the planet unless a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution takes place, a major government report has concluded.

The existing food system is failing half of the people on Earth, the report finds, with 1 billion going hungry, 1 billion lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet and another billion "substantially overconsuming", leading to obesity epidemics. Stresses on the food system are reflected in price spikes but the cost of food will rise sharply in coming decades, the report adds, which will increase the risk of conflict and migration.

"The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and an author of the Global Food and Farming Futures report . An expanding world population combined with the need to stop over-exploiting natural resources such as soil and water means there is a compelling case for urgent action, the report states. Food is responsible for up to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

"We need to act now," said Caroline Spelman, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs , whose department co-commissioned the report from the government's futures thinktank Foresight . "Farmers have to grow more food at less cost to the environment."

The report, conducted by 400 scientists from 34 countries, found that food security is inextricably linked with seemingly diverse issues from poverty and economic growth, to water and energy shortages, to climate change and biodiversity loss. "The world has not recognised that this linking is essential" to meeting the challenge of feeding 2 billion more people by 2050 but with less environmental impact, said the government's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington , who oversaw the report. "It is not just science and technology, trade and prices – it is much bigger than that."

No single solution exists, says the report, but it is critical to spread existing knowledge and technology to the developing world to boost yields by "sustainable intensification". Dramatically reducing food waste is also crucial. "Thirty per cent of all food produced is never consumed," said Charles Godfray, at the University of Oxford and another report author. Investing in better trucks, roads and infrastructure is vital to getting food to people before it rots. In rich countries, such as the UK, preventing food being unnecessarily thrown away could save a family fffffc2fffffa3500-700 a year, said Godfray.

There is a place for organic agriculture, found the report, but it "should not be adopted as the main strategy to achieve sustainable and equitable global food security". Scenarios suggesting organic production can satisfy future global demand assume major changes in peoples' diets, which "may be unachievable," says the report.

The report stated that new technologies, such as genetically modified crops and cloned livestock, should not be excluded on ethical or moral grounds , but that investment is "essential in the light of the magnitude of the challenges."

Global food price spikes in 2007-8 and 2010 saw riots and export bans around the world, and the Foresight report predicts further increases as competition for land, water and energy intensifies. Modelling done for the report, which attempted to account for climate change and water requirements as well as economic factors, predicts a doubling in real terms for maize, which feeds 300 million in Africa, between 30-80% rise in the cost of rice and 40-60% rise in the cost of wheat.

"The last three to four years have seen alarming spikes in hunger," said Haddad. "The price rises in 2007-8 were actually quite modest in a historical context but it led to 100 million more people going hungry. Bigger prices rises could wipe out the development gains of the last 20 years and promote violent conflict and migration."

Spelman emphasised the role of free markets and of consumers: "We must open up markets by removing subsidies and stopping protectionism." She said the biggest step forward in tackling food security would be a successful end for the stalled Doha trade talks , which began in 2001, adding that reform of the EU's common agricultural policy should encourage climate and wildlife protection.

In the UK, farmers should produce "more food more sustainably" and she suggested that small price increases represented an economic opportunity for British farmers.

But the report was criticised by some environmental and agricultural experts. The Indian food analyst Devinder Sharma said the report was limited in vision and anti-poor. "The world already produces enough food for 11.5 billion people. Beddington and the government call for radical change but they really want to intensify existing policies. This is just a very clever camouflage for policies which have failed the poor around the world."

Olivier de Schutter , the UN special rapporteur for the right to food, said that hunger was a political question , not just a technical one. "Since the early 1990s, the food bills of many poor countries have been multiplied by five or six, the result not only of population growth, but also of a lack of investment in agriculture that feeds local communities. The focus on export-led agriculture makes these countries vulnerable to price shocks on international markets as well as to currency exchange volatility." He urged G20 countries to address food speculation by banks and financiers, stop the "land grab" of farmland in Africa and elsewhere by rich countries and help countries build food reserves and avoid spikes in food prices.

Tom MacMillan, director of the UK Food Ethics Council said governments should help the most vulnerable people. "Priority must be to give the people most vulnerable to climate change and food insecurity more control over the markets, policies and innovations that affect them. Tackling hunger … is more about power and poverty than about technology."



The Foresight report is significantly different in its conclusions to that of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report – approved by the UK government and 57 others in 2008. This found that small-scale, environmentally friendly and organic production methods, based on local knowledge and protected from globalised markets, were the way forward to avert hunger in the next 40 years and that GM food was not a solution.


• Food
• Farming
• GM
• Food security
• Agriculture

Damian Carrington

John Vidal


guardian.co.uk fffffc2fffffa9 Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Guardian

FreeRange WebReader - bringing the Internet to your mobile phone like never before!

Reading this on your Windows Smartphone, Palm or Blackberry? Try it now by clicking http://mwap.at

I Have a Dream - Speechwriter Clarance Jones

Much progress has indeed been made. As a participant in the civil rights movement, I'm proud of that progress. But as long as there is necessity for such a legal category as hate crime, the "Dream" remains unfulfilled. As long as DWB ("Driving While Black") in the presence of police remains a perilous activity for many African Americans throughout our nation, the Dream remains diluted. As long as unemployment among African Americans keeps repeating the historic ratio of double the rate of unemployment among white people, the Dream remains unfulfilled. As long as polarisation of wealth and absence of equal access to economic opportunity continue to escalate and disproportionately affect African Americans, the Dream remains unfulfilled.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/14/martin-luther-king-race

Caroyln Cassady lives in ... Bracknell

When you think of the Beats, you think of free sex and flaming sunsets, of bulbous '49 Hudsons easing towards the horizon on dusty highways that seem to go on for ever. You don't think about roundabouts, recycling centres and Rover estates. But that's what you get in Bracknell and it's in Bracknell, near Windsor, that one of the last surviving members of the Beat generation lives.

Carolyn Cassady opens the door to her pretty green cottage with a lipsticked grin and a shy handshake. She's 87, but looks a decade younger, dressed neatly in a lavender fleece with matching moccasins. The second wife of Beat muse Neal Cassady – the man immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road – Carolyn moved to London in 1983, and relocated here 10 years later. "I was brought up English," she says. "My parents were anglophiles and we had a whole lot of English customs at home. I made the break and I much prefer it."

Her knick-knack-filled Berkshire home has now become a regular, if unlikely, stop on the Beat trail. Walter Salles, the Brazilian director behind the new movie version of On the Road, is her most recent high-profile visitor. "He came four, five times," says Carolyn, with a twang that betrays her Tennessee childhood. "We're good friends."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/16/beat-poets-cassidy-kerouac-ginsberg

Lumumba

It was 50 years ago today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

 

Guardian:

 

Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century

The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, took place 50 years ago today

Sally Ann

Superlinear Scaling

With urban population increasing dramatically worldwide, cities are playing an increasingly critical role in human societies and the sustainability of the planet. An obstacle to effective policy is the lack of meaningful urban metrics based on a quantitative understanding of cities. Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of U.S. metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.

 

Source: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013541 (via kottke)

FUCK THOSE ZODIAC MORONS - I AM THE RAM

Wittgenstein - das Nichts nichtet

We would like to begin ph(ilosophy) with something which should be the foundation of everything to follow, of all the sciences, and yet at the same time it is not supposed to be a ‘foundation’ simply in the sense of the bottom course of bricks in a house. […] This dilemma gives rise to the need to begin philosophy with, so to speak, an inarticulate sound. And a proposition such as ‘The nothing noths’ is in a certain sense a substitute for this sort of inarticulate sound.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20071118020737/http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/Wittgenstein+and+Heidegger+%28final+draft%29.htm

 

Cosby Baby

Idiots with Wings

One cold Sunday morning in 1965, when I was a theological student in Leeds and preaching 30 miles north of my college, my fiancee and I were travelling on my Honda 90.

We were inadequately attired for a particularly cold morning. Somewhere up the A1 the bike ran out of petrol.

We stood at the side of road shaking with cold and not sure what to do.

Suddenly a passing car stopped just past us. The driver got out, popped his boot, took out a gallon can of petrol and poured it in my tank without saying a single word. He put the tank back in his boot and drove off.

We stood there open-mouthed and stunned with gratitude.

To this day we're tempted to think it was an angel.

I get it - it's hyperbole. And I get that you were already a paid-up subscriber. But angels?

30 Greatest Drug Scenes of All Time

22. Dinner Part-Turned-Coke Party
"Jack Goes Boating" (2010)
Directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman

A dinner party goes wrong in hilarious, disastrous, drug-fueled ways at the climax of "Jack Goes Boating," after the shy Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also made his directorial debut with the film) has been spending weeks learning to cook and perfecting a series of dishes for a long-awaited date with Connie (Amy Ryan) at the apartment of the friends who introduced them, Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Clyde (John Ortiz). The pair are falling apart just as Connie and Jack are getting together, but are trying to put on a brave face for the possible couple. "Don't get drunk! Don't get weird!" Lucy admonishes her husband, who insists he'll behave. But as things go off the rails, hash is smoked, dishes burn and tensions rise, Clyde disappears and comes back with cocaine, which he and Lucy, seemingly helpless to resist, proceed to hoover off the coffee table. After that, the gloves are off and the volume has been turned way up. The film, adapted from a play, can frequently seem claustrophobic in ways that get in the way of the viewing experience, but never in that party scene, where the addition of coke is like an accelerant on a fire, heightening the sense that the walls are closing in.

Source

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) was established in 1995 by a group of Palestinian lawyers and human rights activists in order to:

· Protect human rights and promote the rule of law in accordance with international standards.

· Create and develop democratic institutions and an active civil society, while promoting democratic culture within the Palestinian society.

· Support all the efforts aimed at enabling the Palestinian people to exercise its inalienable rights in regard to self-determination and independence in accordance with international Law and UN resolutions.

http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/#

few of us are altogether innocent

However, if giving up revenge and resentment were sufficient to yield forgiveness, then one could forgive simply by forgetting, or through counseling, or by taking the latest version of the nepenthepill.  But none of those really seems to qualify as forgiveness properly speaking, however valuable they may be in their own right as a means of getting over anger.  The reason is that forgiveness is neither just a therapeutic technique nor simply self-regarding in its motivation; it is fundamentally a moral relation between self and other.

 

Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/on-forgiveness/

Flickr Flow Widget

Yo sabia de esto: http://hint.fm/projects/flickr/



Pero no de esto: http://flickrflow.com/ (aunque no funciona en mi maquina, o desde aqui, o algo)

The Problem of Slavoj - or, All Roads Lead to Roma?

1. The talk - at Backdoor Broadcasting Company

 

2. The controversy:

 

a) "I don't claim that Zizek is a fascist, or a "proto-fascist", for all that he seems anxious to provoke such reactions [...] But in the UK [...] the argument from the xenophobes and far right is almost identical to Zizek's: if the liberal elite love the gypsies and Muslims and immigrants so much, let them live with them. Similarly, his anecdotal demagogic style of discussing the issue of Roma is absolutely typical of the far right in Britain ... In a sense, Zizek, the radical firebrand contrarian, is a bourgeois, conformist, national liberal at heart." (Source)

 

b) [Zizek asserts] that certain modes of politically correct tolerance of the Other is grounded upon the belief that certain groups can be judged differently [...]. This ends up being monoculturalism based upon a rather stereotypical ideal of how the Other should act – the point being that the bourgeois liberal, for Zizek, is deluding himself by thinking he is a mutliculturalist, since it is almost a colonial understanding of the foreign Other who he is identifying. [...]

 

The confusion here lies in who we identify as this bourgeois liberal, naïve apologist? For many people who subscribe to multiculturalism this simply doesn't resonate. For me, Zizek's analysis is less a critique of multiculturalism, and more a critique of naïve, neo-colonial monoculturalism [..]. But maybe the word multiculturalism lends itself too easily to the idea that cultural relativism is appropriate– since we're immediately in a struggle to identify what we can call culture. [...]

 

When most people support multiculturalism, what they mean is that a country ought not to have a dominant national character immigrants are obliged to adopt as a guarantee of their debt to their new homeland. Instead a country should allow all to practice what they wish, as they wish, provided that it doesn't harm anyone. Perhaps I'll adopt the term socialist universalism? (Source)

Just One of the Future 500

Obviously 11 days was feasible. It's not really about longevity so much as the fact that the differential in sleep requirement due to damage and normal sleep keeps the damaged side dominant. However, I suspect with further experimentation it would be possible to keep going indefinitely, as the left hemisphere would simply shut down while consciousness switched to the right [...] Whatever sleep the right genuinely needs (and I do not know what this would be) could well be taken during "normal" left dominance.

Source: http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/staying_awake_by_switching_brain_hemispheres.php

The Idea Of Communism

Marx famously insisted that the job of [philosophers] was precisely not to "create recipes for the cookshops of the future" - to speculate on what communism might look like - but instead to analyse precisely the contemporary arrangement of political economy and the balance of forces within it.

 

Strange, then - given the timing of the conference - that there is very little discussion here of the actual ongoing capitalist crisis. Indeed many of these writers seem bent on avoiding any discussion of real-life contemporary struggles in favour of an overly abstract preoccupation with defining and in some instances inventing high-falutin' phrases. [...] Standing out from the pack are Zizek himself who, though usually happy to play the joker, on this occasion comes across as the most serious guy in the room, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. All three identify modern capitalism, despite the professed "anti-statism" of neoliberalism, as becoming ever more reliant on the power of the state.

 

Profits are increasingly made, they argue, not so much through the extraction of the surplus value of the labourer as through the monopolisation and renting out of access to - what should be - "the commons."

 

Source: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/99373

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Idea-Communism-Slavoj-Zizek/dp/1844674592

Gilbert & George are taking the piss (again)

Gilbert & George, the self-styled "living sculptures", who have created provocative and explicit art with unflinching realism, are among Britain's foremost artists. The couple met at St Martins school of art in the 1960s and found recognition as artists by standing on a table, their faces daubed with gold paint, performing Flanagan and Allen's song Underneath the Arches about tramps sleeping rough.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/02/gilbert-and-george-prostitutes-cards

♥♥♥|̲̲̅̅P̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅A̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅L̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅E̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅S̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅T̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅I̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅N̲̲̅̅||̲̲̅̅E̲̲̅̅|♥♥♥ - GAZAN YOUTH’S MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16's breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world. 
There is a revolution growing inside of us, an immense dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us unless we find a way of canalizing this energy into something that can challenge the status quo and give us some kind of hope. The final drop that made our hearts tremble with frustration and hopelessness happened 30rd November, when Hamas' officers came to Sharek Youth Forum, a leading youth organization (www.sharek.ps) with their guns, lies and aggressiveness, throwing everybody outside, incarcerating some and prohibiting Sharek from working. A few days later, demonstrators in front of Sharek were beaten and some incarcerated. We are really living a nightmare inside a nightmare. It is difficult to find words for the pressure we are under. We barely survived the Operation Cast Lead, where Israel very effectively bombed the shit out of us, destroying thousands of homes and even more lives and dreams. They did not get rid of Hamas, as they intended, but they sure scared us forever and distributed post traumatic stress syndrome to everybody, as there was nowhere to run. 

We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them? We smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war. We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now. During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country. 

History is repeating itself in its most cruel way and nobody seems to care. We are scared. Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we even cant think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to shed endless tears of frustration and rage! 

We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want! 

We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask? We are a peace movement consistent of young people in Gaza and supporters elsewhere that will not rest until the truth about Gaza is known by everybody in this whole world and in such a degree that no more silent consent or loud indifference will be accepted. 

This is the Gazan youth's manifesto for change! 

We will start by destroying the occupation that surrounds ourselves, we will break free from this mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect. We will carry our heads high even though we will face resistance. We will work day and night in order to change these miserable conditions we are living under. We will build dreams where we meet walls. 

We only hope that you – yes, you reading this statement right now! – can support us. In order to find out how, please write on our wall or contact us directly: freegazayouth@hotmail.com 

We want to be free, we want to live, we want peace. 
FREE GAZA YOUTH!
GYBO
December, 2010
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gaza-Youth-Breaks-Out-GYBO/118914244840679?v=info

What is a liberal communist? (Bert Olivier)

"...liberal communists are [...] a sugar-coated (or, as Zizek would say, chocolate-coated) pill in relation to society.

In a nutshell, the adoption of this self-description is supposed to indicate that one way of seeing the function or justification of socialism (or communism, for that matter), namely, to provide in the needs of a broader society than that catered for by capitalism, can indeed be met by capitalists (note: not capitalism per se) themselves — hence liberal communist as description of the individual agents capable of giving the notion content.

So who are these individual agents who think of themselves as liberal communists, and why is this not a directly systemic function of capitalism, but something wholly dependent on the agency — in fact, the whims — of individuals? Slavoj Zizek (in Violence, 2009) points out that the global entrepreneurs who are among the global elites that regularly attend the meetings (in a virtual “state of siege”) at the Swiss resort of Davos to discuss the global economy (pg. 13-14):

… no longer accept the opposition between Davos (global capitalism) and Porto Alegre (the new social movements alternative to global capitalism). Their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake, i.e. thrive as profitable entrepreneurs, and eat it, too, ie. endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility and ecological concern. No need for Porto Alegre, since Davos itself can become Porto Davos … The new liberal communists are, of course, our usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as their court philosophers, most notably the journalist Thomas Friedman.