From Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

What might indeed emerge as the result of the US occupation is precisely a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with a Muslim presence -- in other words, a Muslim "International." And the first signs are already discernible: from the daily Shi'ite demonstrations against the US presence in Iraq to the daily attacks on US soldiers... [Obviously written before we had passed the stage of "first signs."]

At this point, however, I cannot resist a slightly paranoid speculation: what if the people around Bush know all this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of the entire operation? What if the true target of the "war on terror" is not only a global geopolitical rearrangement in the Middle East and beyond, but also American society itself (namely, the repression of whatever remains of its emancipatory potential)? We should therefore be very careful not to fight false battles: the debates about how evil Saddam was, even about the cost of the war, and so forth, are red herrings. The focus should be on what actually transpires in our societies, on what kind of society is emerging here and now as the result of the "war on terror." The ultimate result of the war will be a change in our political order.

Came across this one from a poster (no blog listed) on Yglesias's site. From The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—According to a study released Monday by the Hammond Political Research Group, many of the nation's liberals are suffering from a vastly diminished sense of outrage.

"With so many right-wing shams to choose from, it's simply too daunting for the average, left-leaning citizen to maintain a sense of anger," said Rachel Neas, the study's director. "By our estimation, roughly 70 percent of liberals are experiencing some degree of lethargy resulting from a glut of civil-liberties abuses, education funding cuts, and exorbitant military expenditures."

I've got trackback working now. I have my comments hosted at the Python Community server, but I've moved the trackback back to Radio.

Removing the Python trackback has also, oddly, made my blog load much faster, but from the local server and from the web server. That's odd, because (1) I'm still using the Python server for comments and (2) one of the reasons people switch to that server is because it's supposed to have less load than Radio.

A quote from Pandragon that touches on what I was trying to get at in this post.

To paraphrase Howard Dean: It's not that I believe in the conspiracy theory. It's that everything the Bush folks do prompts people to come up with the theories.

Today's loveliness is the conveniently (and recently) discovered destruction of Bush's TANG records. You know, the ones that could have proven that he showed up for work in 1972 and 1973. What's amazing is that this has been an issue for at least four years, and it's just now they're finding out, oops, we lost 'em.

How do you go about blogging, concretely? I spend a lot of time switching between browser, writing surfaces, news aggregators, and do a lot of back and forth hunting for links, quotes, and then, worst of all, items I wanted to blog about but can't remember where in the hell they came from.

I've tried dumping a bunch of stuff in a scrap file in UltraEdit or notepad, and I'm using other tools I like such as SmartManila, but I still don't have a process that feels... like a process.

I'm forgetting to read pubs on the web that don't have RSS feeds. I just realized that I hadn't taken a look at The New York Review of Books, and I have a paid subscription there (gets you full access to the current edition as well as the achieves). I used to spend hours there every week.

Also: I guess I missed this change during my blog vacation. RSS feeds now seem to carry the full text of the post/news items. Most people used to include only the first 20 or 30 words, just a teaser to get people to visit their actual site. Now it's the full monty.

Update: looking through FeedDemon (where my sub list includes, what, 200 or more now), I do see more tease-feeds than I had thought were there.

Blogger burnout. Say it isn't so.

Nice explanation on daily KOS about how much planning and malice went into Bush's snubbing of the NAACP. To make the most of his insult, he planned far in advance to be in the Philadelphia at the same time as the convention.

 Couldn't resist this one. But I guess I'll have to run out in the street and find some "fine-looking women" and pick them up.

Given where I live, I just hope their girlfriends don't mind.