I better go masturbate to the Assad regime whilst I still have a chance.

I should up my bet in the prediction contest I'm doing. Thanks.

While we're all having sex, not having sex, trying to make babies, or trying not to make babies,

I guess that really is everyone.

OMG are you implying that people in Syria are neither having nor not having sex? What kind of Islamophobia is this?

Hey, if the Syrians want to do it or want not to do it, that's Alawite with me.

Somebody closer than me go slap Stanley please.

There is an unfortunate, confused subset in that Venn diagram.

Oh sweet Christ, Moby has it exactly right in 6.

Don't listen to the haters, Stanley. That was awesome.

It was. I'm upset because I hadn't thought of it.

Semi-seriously, what is in it for the Russians ans Chinese to keep propping Assad up at this stage? Don't understand.

A FB friend of mine said "Oh well, it looks like Assad is going to be killed. Too bad there wasn't any historical precedent that might have let him know this was coming."

Semi-seriously, what is in it for the Russians ans Chinese to keep propping Assad up at this stage? Don't understand.

It's too late to preserve the international-law norm of non-interference in internal matters, but it's not too late to try to prevent a new norm of active intervention from solidifying. And that's something that Russia and China care very much about.

I should say that the previous comment is totally half-assed, and I know nothing about international relations, and even less about Russia and China.

11: Markets? As in arms and technology sales

Louis Proyect gives a little history and analysis. Proyect is pro "Arab Spring" without reservation, and against much radical left opposition, who see neo-liberal imperialism

From 1967

The founders of the Baath, whether of Arsouzi's or Aflak's current, addressed themselves exclusively to an elite: students, professors, intellectuals and country teachers, who were expected in their turn to carry the good tidings to the people. In effect, the great majority of recruits to the Baath belonged to the small and middle bourgeoisie. Their natural milieu was that which produced the leaders of nationalism throughout the Arab world.

In a country where as late as 1958, 45 per cent of all irrigated land and 30 per cent of non-irrigated land was owned by only 2 per cent of the population, while 70 per cent of the population owned no land at all, this is a very drastic change. The reform has not yet been fully implemented, although the Baath claimed to have redistributed 2,500,000 hectares out of the national total of 6,000,000 by early 1967.

It led to wave of emigrations among the once prosperous Syrian bourgeoisie: there are now 200,000 exiles in the Lebanon. Beirut has become the Miami of this class.

And radically opposed by small and large business classes, and the mullahs.

This shit fascinates me, these coalitions and alliances shifting over time. Can we even imagine land reform and nationalizations of industry anymore? Why not? This whatever happened in my lifetime.

Russian naval base at Tartus, Russian insistence that Syrie not cooperate in any effort to build a gas pipeline that would weaken existing Russian monopoly of supply to europe. This last enforced several times in the past with delayed weapons or parts shipments.

I've been finding Egypt Independent News interesting reading about twice a month:
http://www.egyptindependent.com/rss_feed_term/113/rss.xml

No, 13/14 make perfect sense as they stand. Only if your cynicism has reached the point at which you don't expect any government to do anything, for good or ill, except for short term pecuniary advantage, does that not occur to you.

Pham Binh is a rising star on far-left blogs, and friend of Proyect and Seymour. This is very long, but early in comments is a taste of the opposition:

'As Clay Claiborne said elsewhere, I did not side with U.S. imperialism on the Libyan revolution, U.S. imperialism sided with me.'

Gag us, Unrepentant Dittohead Louis [Proyect], too. Yes, the both of you, Louis and Pham, are siding with US imperialism now, no matter how many times you all try to plead otherwise. Your so-called marxist propaganda would make Marx and Engels turn over in their graves if they could actually listen to these stupid stupid pro-imperialist remarks you are constantly making these days.

'Sometimes standing firm with revolutionary movements and peoples means setting aside abstractions, ideologies, and so-called principles because they get in the way of victory. Now is one of those times.'

Gag us again, Pham and Lou. You simply just make us real anti capitalists and anti imperialists want to throw up. I don't believe even people like David Horowitz can outdo you folk with this sort of pro Empire crap? 'Victory' you speak of here? This sort of stuff YES is the ideological ilk that a Horowitz or a Rush Limbaugh would be saying at this time in support of Pentagon goals. But you guys, too? It simply is just totally nauseating.

I was in Turkey recently for vacation. The Russian-language TV station broadcast there went on at length about inflation and economic difficulties in Syria. I do not think that the Russian establishment cares about Assad as long as their interests are preserved. Since Syrian Sunnis would in principle be happy to build a pipeline connecting Iraq and Europe, Russians have no other natural ally there; I think that a credible agreement about gas transmission would be their price for withdrawing support.

Juan Cole if you care

5. The rocket-propelled grenades smuggled to the opposition by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as part of their proxy war against Iran, are allowing the rebels occasionally to kill tanks and take down helicopter gunships.

And this is probably a more substantive ultraleft comment at North Star than 18

Aaron Aarons July 18, 2012 at 10:37 pm

The problem with Binh, et al., is that they can't distinguish between a world in which there are two rival imperialist camps at war and a world in which one imperialist camp is overwhelmingly dominant and is the main threat to planetary survival.

In World War I, it was right for people in a conflict with one imperialist power to take aid from the rival camp. That applied not only to the limited aid that Lenin and the Bolsheviks got from Germany, but also the aid that Irish revolutionaries may have gotten, or almost got, from Germany.

In World War II, we not only had Ho Chi Minh, Tito and others getting aid from the U.S., et al., to fight the Japanese and Germans, but the Indian National Army getting help from the Japanese to fight the British. There was nothing wrong in principle in either case, although in some cases those helped by one imperialist bloc may have (wrongly) helped that bloc more directly than by just weakening the side they had a conflict with.

In the present world situation, taking aid and direct military support from the main imperialist bloc to fight against the local oppressor is entirely another matter. And, especially when those taking the aid or support have no revolutionary credentials, calling what they are doing a "revolution" in order to have an excuse to support it is absurd.

Sauds and Qatar! Subsidizing the Freedom!

I don't give a fuck anymore. Elizabeth Edwards' last words*:"Now they'll take everything." should be my own.

Proyect and Binh are just sad.

*true if I want it to be

lw, do you have good link that is specifically about the pipeline situation?

18: Speaking of Libya, this is discouraging but not at all surprising. We will never learn.

What happened to Qaddafi's stockpile of weapons could easily happen in Syria. This is especially concerning, given that the Syrian regime's arsenal includes vast quantities of chemical weapons. Imagine what would happen if those things wind up scattered around the Middle East.

Your so-called marxist propaganda would make Marx and Engels turn over in their graves if they could actually listen to these stupid stupid pro-imperialist remarks

Is it too much to ask of budding M-L stars to know that Marx and Engels thought imperialism was fine and dandy?

The link in 22 breaks my heart.

22:We will never learn.

Assumes facts not in evidence

Samantha Power is not an idiot

Which reminds me

The rocket-propelled grenades smuggled to the opposition by Saudi Arabia and Qatar Juan Cole

Anybody able to tell me about the big munitions factories in Riyadh?

I would like to see the labels, no I don't care enough, surely we have offshored that part of the America Way to China by now.

Bob, however smart Powers may be, I feel certain that replacing a relatively stable, pro-Western, multiparty democracy that had been steadily privatizing government industries with rule by an international Salafist militia wasn't part of her vision for the region.

That's what she wants you think, you fool.

28:Why?

She is a committed liberal interventionist and an unstable "dangerous" Mali could become an opportunity a sad necessity. For Seals and drones.

Where are the Salafists/Islamists/AQ coming from, where do they get their arms?

Look, don't assume, don't be so "certain" based on what? Tribal loyalties?

If the ME is becoming less stable, more volatile and yet less centralized and so possibly less dangerous, don't imagine because you (and I) don't understand why it is being done that it is not actually "being done."

Look, were Saddam, Assad, Ghadddafi, Mubarek that inimicable to Imperial profits and projects? Why were they so hated?

I have been taking notes:

The bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels so convincingly show, arrived at its own distinctive form of cosmopolitanism (now represented by the frequent flier corporate and business elite, the global accountants and consultants, the employees of international institutions, professional and technological elites, and the like) by revolutionizing the geography of capital accumulation. It built radically new relative spaces of transport and communications, facilitating rapid motion of commodities, money, and people, around a relational form of labor value (represented by the various money forms). It created new places that carry ancient names like Beijing ...Harvey

Well, Harvey, we have a new Post-Fordist, post-industrial, lightspeed Capitalism now, needing a whole lot of difference and variations in entropy in order to create the surplus.

Chaos may now be profitable.

9/11 sure was a profit opportunity for some.

There are lots of ways to look at this.

Empire needs a dangerous periphery/frontier in order to justify its programs at the core.

Anyone named Power who doesn't insist on the nickname "Max" is inherently untrustworthy.

I haven't read the thread. I was just watching PBS Newshour, on which it was reported that some worry that Assad may use chemical weapons. There was another UN Security Council vote in which Russia and China again declined to sign on to .. some sort of condemnation. The reason they gave: this would give sanction for military intervention.

I don't know, man. It seems really, really bad. Now I'll read the thread.

For a while I thought Turkey might intervene. One of their planes got shot down a couple weeks back, and then there was some saber-rattling. But nothing seems to have come of it.

||

The politics of women's language, in other words, is not only about its power to name as deviant those who might consciously resist or to exclude those who do not take sufficient steps to discipline themselves to its regime. Nor is it only about the power of the discourse of women's language to designate the positions from which "resistance" to it is thinkable or possible. Nor is the politics of women's language only about its linkage with sexism and patriarchy as a key site and means of their perpetual reproduction and their violent recasting of politics as aesthetics.

All of these forms of power are important, surely. But this book will argue that we must include in our vision of the politics of women's language its status as a materialization of the logical contradictions of Japan's industrial modernity. This politics dissimulates the ever growing hierarchy and inequality among women and recalls differences and surplus that those who would belong to the domain of the abject--dialect speakers, the working class, or the non-Japanese--produce vis-à-vis women's language to the "nationalized" gender binary.

What is abjected in the production of the subject of women's language approximates what is abjected in the production of Japan as a modern capitalist nation-state. In other words, what defines the boundary between the subject and the abject in the cultural category of women's language and guarantees its stability has to do with the multiple forces constituting the social formation of Japan as a modern capitalist nation-state.

Inoue Miyako grew up in regional Japan, and never heard "woman's language" from a live human until she visited Tokyo age 10. The book, besides history, appears to be focused on women office workers in Tokyo, and how the correct use of gendered language helps their careers.

I am so loving this book already, and am only in the intro. I even like the way she presents her name for the American scholar audience, if I read it correctly.

|>

Amazon page

Review

"Miyako Inoue's Vicarious Language is a work of scholarly distinction and cultural insight..."

Miyako Inoue is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.

Nope, they don't get it. That is obviously not how she self-presented her name.

|| I see some are blaming me in the other thread for the blog's lack of diversity. Suffice it to say if you really want more black (for example) commenters perhaps you should try adding some black people to the roll of posters. |>

I don't think black people would like to be rolled up in a bunch of posters.

37: Would changing the background color be good enough?

Or post titles.

Pipeline link with context: http://www.thenational.ae/business/banking/russias-new-great-game#full

Topically: This article on the prices of weapons seemed reasonably informative. Also, it was my last NYT article for the month so now I'm free from that burden of choice.

37: Thank you, James. I can now end my search for the real racists.

Suffice it to say if you really want more black (for example) commenters perhaps you should try adding some black people to the roll of posters

This is probably right.