what are you reading now?
shakahislop
Well-known member
oh i thought that thread was your homophobic one, dancehall influence shining through
i didn't quite miss it. it was definitely what i believed when i was like 16, or 25 even. I don't know where I come down on it overall. I'm off work today and listening to an old recording of radio luxembourg and there is a weird way that the present moment it feels like there is a bit of a shift back to that kind of 1960s politeness, the musicians having opinions that fall in line, openly being a dickhead being not tolerated very far, sleeping around not being that tolerated....and so on. and its hard to think of popular musicians who are openly massive drug users, let alone musicians who are heroin addicts. everything has got very clean it think: which is why that older period of celebrated wildness feels like an aberration, when for a long time it felt more like an unchangable trajectory
shakahislop
Well-known member
'“All of us were a bunch of ill-mannered lowlifes. We thought cripples were funny because you could goof off on them—like it was lucky to rub a midget’s head, especially if the midget was bald”
Excerpt From: Dee Dee Ramone. “Lobotomy.” iBooks.
Excerpt From: Dee Dee Ramone. “Lobotomy.” iBooks.
shakahislop
Well-known member
“Iggy didn’t seem to like New York. He told everybody off. He had come on real late because he was shooting up heroin backstage and couldn’t find a vein to get a hit. Iggy was famous for his dog collar, silver elbow-length gloves, and red underpants, but when he finally came out on stage he was only wearing his underpants. He threw a can of silver paint over himself and then rolled around in a bunch of glitter. Then he threw up on the floor and lay there in the vomit, rubbing it on himself. Scott Asheton, the Stooges’ drummer, had a big Nazi sign painted on the back of his motorcycle jacket.”
Excerpt From: Dee Dee Ramone. “Lobotomy.” iBooks.
Excerpt From: Dee Dee Ramone. “Lobotomy.” iBooks.
shakahislop
Well-known member
reading a recent memoir of a guy who was a CIA field guy over the past 15 years or so in south asia and the middle east. it's fairly badly written, but it's a really interesting subject matter. half of it is him grinding axes against specific named people that he worked with, and some of the structural and cultural changes within the CIA that he thinks are a bad thing. which is probably fairly tedious, but its interesting to me to hear about how people in these big bureaucratic state structures are constantly disagreeing with one another about how that structure should work.
there's also some interesting stuff about the social skills needed to recruit informants.
Dee Dee Ramone on the other hand has just had a total drug-induced breakdown on a plane and he's getting help, it's about 1975 i think. the middle bit of those rock memoirs always gets a bit boring. the whole pattern of how these guys are able to keep up the binging and travel etc for quite a long time before not being able to hack it as they get older is pretty instructive though.
there's also some interesting stuff about the social skills needed to recruit informants.
Dee Dee Ramone on the other hand has just had a total drug-induced breakdown on a plane and he's getting help, it's about 1975 i think. the middle bit of those rock memoirs always gets a bit boring. the whole pattern of how these guys are able to keep up the binging and travel etc for quite a long time before not being able to hack it as they get older is pretty instructive though.
shakahislop
Well-known member
these are separate books by the way, Dee Dee Ramone wasn't involved with the CIA in Pakistan (or if he has that part of the book was censored by his handlers)
shakahislop
Well-known member
its totally believable. he looks like he would have been into the Ramones
shakahislop
Well-known member
yeah. i didn't know that but it's not surprising. there's quite a long history of anthropologists and 'area studies' people working with the CIA and other intelligence agencies. it's a pretty natural link to make. i've done bits and pieces which are not a million miles away from that myself. i know the way i've written that leaves a lot of questions but i'm not doing that to create intrigue, the reality is not as interesting as that might imply, it's just that there's a limit to what i want to write about on the internet
there was a really interesting program by the US government in the early to mid days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where they were pouring money into it as part of the 'War on Terror' (a more stupid name than even cultural marxism), where they recruited anthropologists from universities to help them out. big backlash from the American Anthropology Association, a lot of stigma for the academics who did get involved. it is a very interesting use of social scientists to try to, especially in afghanistan, support the statebuilding project though. it didn't work very well. especially the guys who embedded in the military, no one took them seriously. one very sadly got burnt to death by a random person in Kandahar, set on fire on the street, as the war there got more intense than the americans and NATO had bargained for.
actually there is a whole overlap between James Scott and Afghanistan. legibility being one of the main issues that the occupying forces had. their inability to 'see like a state'.
shakahislop
Well-known member
'“All of us were a bunch of ill-mannered lowlifes. We thought cripples were funny because you could goof off on them—like it was lucky to rub a midget’s head, especially if the midget was bald”
Excerpt From: James C. Scott. "The Art Of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of South-East Asia"” iBooks.
Excerpt From: James C. Scott. "The Art Of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of South-East Asia"” iBooks.
shakahislop
Well-known member
“Ian’s legend is now so institutionalized across the greater USIC, and former DCIA Gina Haspel having been so far in his pocket, that Ian continues to influence our course ahead in an extremely combustible part of the world. Subordinates confide in one another at the damage they believe he brings, but out of self-preservation they will neither push back nor dare risk his wrath by usurping the chain of command. It wouldn’t help anyway, as they know he remained among Gina Haspel’s favorites. ”
Excerpt From: Dee Dee Ramone. “Lobotomy.” iBooks.
Excerpt From: Dee Dee Ramone. “Lobotomy.” iBooks.
There's a geologist in William Gaddis' Carpenter's Gothic who may or may not have worked for the CIA in Africa.
Someone's response re: Scott,
"So I looked this up — looks like it has to do with the counterinsurgency stuff in Thailand and mainland SE Asia during the Vietnam War which has been known about for decades — I think AAA has a website about it.
Seems like Scott was basically just being honest about the situation with Area Studies research in the 60’s esp wrt SE Asia which is that it would have found its way to the CIA sooner or later, esp via Cold Warriors like Samuel Huntington. There’s absolutely zero concrete connection to the 1965 killings.
Imo it’s a nothingburger both in that the politics of this research is now well known (it goes back to Edmund Leach, Evans-Pritchard was arguably also doing counterinsurgency in a much more detailed way)—it was much more of an incidental thing and not like Scott was making an active choice to funnel information to the CIA and
b.) he’s really only an anarchist in a vague uncommitted methodological way where he’s critical of the state as an assumption in political science, he’s not like an activist in the way Graeber was.
I generally like Vijay Prashad but the way he’s raising this is shitty wrt Scott personally as far as I can tell. It’s also kind of willingly misunderstanding Scott’s work in that he’s saying ‘if it’s all going to end up in the colonial archive anyway you might as well put something in the archive saying none of this shit works and you’re going to end up digging the wells sideways’ etc.
A mate came up the coinage BILF lately: Book I'd Like to Finish
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
don’tbelievehislies.gif