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Who's up for some legal recognition?

It is one thing to talk about the "virtual corporation" and online commons as new organizational forms. It's quite another to have those forms be legally recognized. Yet in a little-noticed law enacted in June 2008, the State of Vermont has formally conferred "legal personhood" on online communities that wish to form limited-liability partnerships.

The law was tucked into a bill called "Miscellaneous Tax Documents," but the new virtual corporation law has enormous implications. It enables people to come together as virtual businesses, with dispersed partners who may live anywhere, and avoid the usual requirements that the company host in-person board meetings, maintain a physical office and file paper documents with the state.

I finished The Whiskey Rebels, which was enjoyable.  The ending a little brief, maybe, but I suspect Liss is leaving an opening for Captain Ethan Saunders to return in a sequel of sorts, which could be good.

More Critical Theory:

In a similar way, capitalism is a system that seemingly allows for all kinds of individual expression and innovation but only to the extent that it creates a kind of monotheistic attachment to the system itself. It creates a conformism through diversity (an e pluribus unum) in which more and more forms of individualistic 'improvisation' are accommodated on the basis of an underlying collectivist consumer culture.

The legacy of the Frankfurt School has developed in two main and divergent ways. The first of these reflects an optimistic belief in the power of high culture to oppose and transcend the superficial materialism of the bourgeois ethos. Echoes of this approach can be found in the thought of Jürgen Habermas who exhibits a kind of Enlightenment-based faith in the civilizing influence of what he calls 'communicative rationality' and its perceived capacity for overcoming ideological distortion and social conflict.

In stressing the extent of interconnectedness between culture and the economy in an overall configuration there has been a strong tendency in Marxist thought – and especially Marxist structuralism – to endow that configuration with an absolute centre: the functionalist logic of capital. With thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, for example, capitalism is generally affirmed as a totalizing structure that draws all the elements of socio-cultural life ('high' and 'low') together under its instrumentalist rationality. In consequence the popular classes become thoroughly incorporated into the capitalist system. Yet if social identity is subject to such a degree of structuralist closure then how can any form of political resistance ever arise? In effect we would seem to be presented with a simple inversion of Marx's position: instead of being pre-programmed to overthrow capitalism, the masses are doomed to conformist subordination within it.

While the view of the proletarian masses as avenging agents of social revolution is excessively optimistic, the pessimistic Frankfurt School view of the masses as docile Stepford workers is equally extreme. Gramsci rejects both determinism and fatalism and shows identification to be a historico-political matter without any final resolution.

Objects, practices and events can only be apprehended through the assignment of meaning, and this assignment is neither fixed nor neutral but always takes place within a historical framework. As Derrida puts it, 'there are only contexts without any absolute centre or anchorage' (Derrida 1988: 12).

Does this mean that everything is in a constant state of liquidity where meanings change from one moment to the next? Evidently not. People can and do identify with all kinds of positions – the biblical account of the universe, political conspiracies, for and against genetic manipulation, pro-/anti-globalization, etc. – and produce all kinds of material to support their claims. But whether these achieve wider credibility is entirely another matter. And credibility is not the result of any naturalism or imperial measure but is always a human-contextual matter where interpretive collectives – scientists, academics, judges, journalists, policy-makers – broadly establish the nature of 'evidence', 'coherence', 'best practice' and so on. Such categories depend for their constitution on the specific discursive formation in question and the success of the latter depends, in turn, on its ability to exclude/repress other possible formations.

Second, and perhaps more insidiously, the postmodern emphasis on difference is one that tends to assume a kind of level playing-field – all identities must be respected and considered equally without prioritizing one type of identity or social struggle over another. The effect of this, however, is to render real poverty, global hunger and social exclusion virtually invisible and/or abstract (such things happen 'elsewhere').  Thus what is overlooked is precisely this dimension of the necessary exception vis-à-vis the culture, or economy, of differences. Just as slavery showed the symptomatic truth (the embodied negativity) of Athenian democracy as a tyranny of citizens, so too today's abject multitude discloses the truth of postmodern capitalism as a tyranny of differences: a global differential inclusiveness that in order to function relies upon even deeper trenches of exclusion.

What Žižek affirms, by contrast, is a politics of the act. The act (which is derived from Lacan) refers to a radical break with an existing pattern of social existence in such a way that it opens up new possibilities for reconfiguring that social existence.

The primary property of language is that it differentiates. We can confirm that vocabulary is not acquired simply by pointing to referents (things in the world) when we remember that later the child will go on to learn to use words such as 'justice' and 'honesty' [...] If abstract values are not learnt from referents in the world, what about words that name nothing material, but are crucial, even so, to the process of reasoning, such as 'because', 'although', and 'if'? There is nothing for them to correspond to.  Does language name ideas, then? Poststructuralism would say not. On the contrary, ideas come into sharp relief for us when we learn the meanings of the terms.

Language – or signifying practice – does not belong to individuals.  Instead, it already exists before we are born into a world where people reproduce it all round us. Though it constantly changes, these modifications prevail only to the degree that they are shared. In that sense, meanings belong to other people. Lacan calls language 'the Other'. If I opt to hijack it for purely private purposes, I must expect to be seen as psychotic.

The debates about the meaning of a given text continue, but they are located where they belong: in the process of interpreting the text itself, and not in appeals to external authority. There can be no one single correct reading of a text, but there can still be misreadings, as a result of inattention, unfamiliarity with the signifiers, or failure to recognize resemblances or allusions to other texts.

The little human animal, if we can imagine a child that is not already surrounded by signifying practices at birth, would be continuous with the organic world it inhabits, an undifferentiated part of it. But language, Lacan proposes, drawing on Saussure and, to a degree at least, anticipating Derrida, cuts off that direct relation to the world, in so far as the signifier interposes itself between us and our relation to things. The signifier, which differentiates and divides, offers a way to specify our wishes, but at the same time its advent divorces us from a direct apprehension of what Lacan calls 'the real'. The real is unnamed, unnameable, concealed in the shadows cast by the light language throws on the entities it denominates. The signifier names the referent in its absence; it thus relegates the real, obscures it, renders it missing from consciousness by taking its place.

There is no escape, then, even in a world of undecidability, from choosing, and the possibilities, which have material implications, are understood at the level of the signifier. In the poststructuralist account, fiction foregrounds this, makes it explicit. Poststructuralism repudiates the view that fiction reflects the world: the signifier constructs an illusion of reality not its simulacrum. At the same time, however, fiction repeatedly confronts its readers with choices. Which suitor would you marry? Which suspect would you blame? Which account would you rely on? The fictional characters decide – and readers decide whether they are right or wrong. These decisions are not always straightforward. King Lear makes the wrong choice; so does Othello. But what about Hamlet?  Cultural criticism offers a 'safe' environment to practise making choices.

This postmodern way of thinking – which many see as paradoxical – can be characterized as displaying a 'both/and' kind of logic. Making distinctions but not making choices (which would be an 'either/or' kind of logic) between the popular and the elite, the postmodern offered instead a model that would force us to consider equally both sides of this (or any other) binary opposition, and in effect to undo or to 'deconstruct' the seeming opposition between its two terms. There is an obvious parallel here with the theorizing of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and founder of the theory known as deconstruction. Demonstrating how every binary conceals within it an implied hierarchy of values, Derrida strove not to reverse but, more radically, to undo both the opposition and its implicit evaluation of one term as superior. In the process he made us rethink the relationship between not only the oral and the written (his main interest) but also such familiar binaries as high art/popular, white/black, male/female, and so on.

Critical Theory: An Introduction

Critical theory allows us to explore the cultural production and communication of meanings in precise and nuanced ways, and from a range of different perspectives. It questions the ways in which we might be used to making sense of artistic, historical or cultural artefacts and prompts us to reconsider our beliefs and expectations about the ways individuals interact with material things and with each other

Language is not a transparent medium through which ideas can pass between minds without alteration. Rather, as almost all of the essays and entries in this book acknowledge, it is a set of conventions that influence or even determine the sorts of ideas and experiences people are able to have. Language is cultural (some thinkers even claim it is the essence of culture), and therefore open to criticism and change. If linguistic meaning were naturally given, for example, why would there be more than one language? A word does not mean what it does 'naturally'; rather meanings arise on the basis of complex linguistic and cultural structures that differentiate between truth and falsity, reality and fantasy, and good and evil, and are inextricably tied up with value judgements and political questions, as well as with identity, experience, knowledge and desire.

Structuralism's understanding of the world, then, is that everything that constitutes it – us and the meanings, texts and rituals within which we participate – is not the work of God, or of the mysteries of nature, but rather an effect of the principles that structure us, the meanings we inhabit and so on. The idea is that the world without structures is meaningless – a random and chaotic continuum of possibilities. What structures do is to order that continuum, to organize it according to a certain set of principles, which enable us to make sense of it. In this way, structures make the world tangible to us, conceptually real, and hence meaningful.

In order for the idea 'spinster' to become meaningful in language, the concept of 'women', as the other of 'men' in the duality 'women and men', would have to come first. The idea 'spinster' could not, in other words, exist without a corresponding idea of gender as male and female. But any meaning for 'spinster' is of course also dependent on the prior establishment of the concept of marriage, as well as a differential understanding of the status of 'women' and 'men' in relation to marriage. Indeed, in this example, meaning begins to seem to have a great deal more to do with value, and specifically cultural value, than the model of language as a naming system might suggest. The meaning of spinster is, after all, surely not inevitable, natural or true, but rather the product of a system of cultural values which are open to debate. If this is the case, then far from simply naming an objective reality, language would seem to play an important role in realizing reality, as well as its meaning for us within the linguistic communities we inhabit. If we did not have the linguistic term 'spinster', would we think of female existence in the ways that we do? It is certainly relatively easy to imagine a social community in which the concept of a spinster might have no meaning whatsoever – not necessarily because unmarried women do not exist, but rather because women are not simply valued, or thought of as meaningful, in relation to whether or not they are married to men.

As I have already suggested, for Saussure language is not simply a system for naming a reality which pre-exists it. Turning that notion on its head, Saussure argued instead that language is in fact a primary structure – one that orders, and therefore is responsible for, everything that follows. If this is so, then it seems fairly straightforward that different languages will divide, shape and organize the phenomenal world in different ways. While this understanding of language allows us to see cultures other than 'our' own as relatively different, by implication it must also show us that the culture we claim as 'ours' is in turn neither natural nor inevitable. That is, it demands that we recognize as  structurally produced the culture which seems to us most obvious, most natural and most true. What Saussure's work gave to structuralism, then, was an account of language as a primary structure, a system of signs whose meanings are not obvious, but rather produced as an effect of the logic internal to the structural system that language is.

I could go on. It may be sufficient, however, to draw the following three conclusions from this example: (i) signs function to constitute meaning only within the terms of the system of which they are a part; (ii) while all sign systems function according to their own structural principles, they all function nonetheless like language; (iii) all forms of cultural text can therefore be understood as signifying systems, the meanings of which are not fixed for all time but, rather, are open to change.

narrative can be found in numerous aspects of life: not only in other forms of art (drama, poetry, film) but in the ways in which we construct notions of history, politics, race, religion, identity and time.  All of these things, regardless of their respective claims to truth, might be understood as stories that both explain and construct the ways in which the world is experienced. As Barthes famously said, 'narrative is international, trans-historical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself'.

The sentence 'Walking dogs should be encouraged' has a single surface structure (plot) and two deep structures (stories). Accordingly, this single sentence can be read as an invocation to encourage dog owners to exercise their pets (story 1) or as a suggestion that perambulating dogs should be cheered on and applauded (story 2). Conversely, the sentences: 'The dog ate my homework' and 'My homework was eaten by the dog' have different surface structures (plots), i.e. they differ in their word order, but have the same deep structure (story). The meaning of both sentences is the same, despite the variation in its presentation.

Despite these legitimate calls for caution, the distinction between story and plot provides a useful way of approaching narratives. One of the implications of the split is the suggestion that story, which is only ever available as a paraphrase, is translatable from medium to medium, whilst plot appears to be text-specific. This is to say that an individual story can appear in numerous distinct texts and across a wide range of media: for example, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has appeared as a trilogy of novels (1954, 1954, 1955), an animated film (Ralph Bakshi dir. 1978), numerous computer games (1985–2004), a radio play (Brian Sibley, 1981) and, most recently, as Peter Jackson's highly successful trilogy of films (2001, 2002, 2003). Despite this variety of media and 'authors' there is a general consensus that the story of The Lord of the Rings is recognizable in each instance.

'The term History, unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes . . . not less what has happened, than the narration of what has happened' (Hegel 1991: 60). History is not discovered but constructed; in other words, facts do not speak for themselves – the historian selects and interprets facts. Accordingly, histories are always composed, created and situated narratives, and it follows that they should be approached as such.

Attempts to bring narratology into inherently political and ideological theories, such as feminism, gender and race, have met with mixed success.

What Marx demonstrated was that far from comprising an open and neutral environment the capitalist economy is first and foremost a power structure. The basis of this power structure is class oppression.

As emerging enterprises create more advanced, diverse and cheaper products, then not only does this steadily reduce profit margins, it also begins to undermine the entire capitalist structure of property relations. An example of this would be the internet, where all kinds of copyright material and products (texts, music, pharmaceuticals, software and so on) can be obtained freely or at much reduced prices. Faced with this type of threat, the typical response of transnational corporations is to increase monopolization by buying up the smaller enterprises and actively stifle competition, innovation and development in order to protect markets and profits. So there is an inherent tension between the revolutionizing drives within capitalism (technological advances, etc.) and capitalism itself (a productive mode based on profit).

The Czech Marxist Kautsky, for example, was to observe that by the early twentieth-century workers were far more interested in trade unionism and social democratic (party) politics than revolutionary communism. This has led writers such as Lichtheim (1974) to argue that Marx's view of inevitable revolution really only held credibility under the conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. As these conditions have been transformed through social reform/welfarism (not least as a result of trade union activity and social democratic politics) this view is neither relevant nor likely.

A central assertion was that capitalist society was moving to a new level of ideological sophistication through what Horkheimer called the 'culture industry'. Culture had replaced religion as the new 'opium of the masses' in framing a subtle order of conformism. According to Benjamin the emerging context was one in which the possibility of independent art forms was becoming more and more compromised by an ever expanding mass culture whose basic tendency is towards the banal and mediocre. And this tendency is insidiously political. Not only are cultural enterprises and artefacts increasingly managed and produced on a mass scale for consumption purposes but, at a deeper level, they feed into a self-perpetuating milieu of docility. Mainstream theatre, radio, television, internet and so on can be seen to be already in the service of a certain pacifying bourgeois culture. Indeed all such media may be said to be at its most ideological precisely when it aspires to this idea of neutral entertainment: that is to say, when it implicitly accepts, and consequently naturalizes, the power configuration of the capitalist status quo – thereby displacing and eviscerating all sense of critique and critical energy.

Dear "I'm too chickenshit to face an 'angry mob' and so I didn't publish your article" Editor

You dirty shyster bastard!  You know how long I spent on that article, right?  And you go and spike it because "the public might be upset"?  Fuck the public, buncha whining little crybabies.  If they're not upset, then I'm not doing my job right.  So they see a little blood and guts on their computer screen, so what?  If it offends them that much, they should probably stop reading the internet.  And pluck out their eyes, just in case.  Oh, and fuck the advertisers too, those milquetoast jackoffs.  Like anyone would actually write anything near the truth if they had anything to do with it.

Try to censor me again, and I'll make sure the next letter of complaint get's thrown through your window wrapped around a grenade instead of a brick.

Yours
Cain

I always realized I was a hawt Discordian.

I wondered if you had read this or not.

I think the desire to read some sort of ethical meaning into science or scientists is unhealthy.  I can understand why, and the impulse is strong, but when you read about, say, the scientists working for Unit 731 in Japan, or those doing experiments in Nazi Germany, it quickly becomes clear that systematic inquiry into the rules of the Universe do not necessarily preclude one from being a monster, nor do they necessarily even reduce the chances of that when compared with other groupings.  Suggestions, even cultural ones, that scientists are somehow more moral and more humane than most people seems to play into some sort of naive secularism which replaces the priesthood as a model of conduct with the scientific community, and perhaps encourages more faith in the decency of scientists (as a group) than they deserve.

Yeah, copyright laws are crazy, yo. It never hurts to have your ass covered.

There was something about Inanna and Eris...but I forgot it.  It doesn't help that the Greeks tend to view foreign gods as just slightly wierd versions of their own (Hermes as Thoth, for example).

Edit image tags, have troll du jour whine about oppression.

Mockery and namecalling.

Because I want to help, and time is brief

http://uploading.com/files/DB8ID8SL/ComedWrit.rar.html

Think you're funny? Writing successful comedy isn't just about having a gift for gags; you need to hone your talent and polish your humour to earn a living from making people laugh. If you want to write stand-up comedy, sketches, sitcoms or even a comic novel or film, How to be a Comedy Writer tells you all you need to know and more about the business, the structure of jokes and the nuts and bolts of a craft that can be learnt. Comedy guru Marc Blake has written for Spitting Image, Frankie Howerd and Craig Charles, and had his own TV show and BBC Radio 4 series Whining for England. The author of several humour books and comic novels including the bestselling Sunstroke, he has taught comedy writing across the UK for ten years.


It may not be very useful, but its a framework you can build from.

Also http://www.uploading.com/files/LBWYI71F/ComBibl.rar.html

On Killing by David Grossman.

Some of you might have heard of this, as it was a rather controversial book.  Grossman's thesis is that it used to be very hard to actually get soldiers to kill in combat, for a number of psychological and evolutionary reasons.  He goes through shooting rates and death tallies in certain conflicts to drive home the point that in reality, very few soldiers were capable, in combat, of just upping and shooting the enemy.  He then goes on a much longer tangent as to the group psychology which may help overcome such inhibitions, and I think the upcoming part of the book is that on Pavlovian conditioning and overcoming the desire not to kill the enemy.  Because, as he points out himself, while the shooting percentages were shockingly low in WWII (~40%), by the time of the Korean war that was up to 55% and by Vietnam it was over 75%.

Grossman also has a thing about media and video violence essentially breaking down the inhibitions to killing.  Its not exactly the zomg vidya gaems make people violent!!12! routine, its (blessedly) somewhat more complex and subtle than that.  He thinks the media can transmit what it essentially a violence immunency disease which makes people "vulnerable to violence-enabling factors, such as poverty, discrimination, drug addiction (which can provide powerful motives for crime in order to fulfill real or perceived needs), or guns and gangs (which can provide the means and "support structure" to commit violent acts)."

But I haven't got to that part so far.

I'm pretty sure it picks up as you go along, IIRC.  Izzat an e-book?

Sadly, not. Paper library copy.

Ah well.

So I hear HIMEOBS                         We're all totally                                                 
are buying out the company              fucked then                                               
\                                                  /