Letters to the Editor
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
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@ william timberman
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glad you liked my musings. I tried to read Levi-Strauss, but it just didn't work for me. Whenever anyone says anything is "structured like a language" my bullshit detector goes off. (even Lacan).
Anyway, although we agreed to ignore the advertisements, the combination of the ads which are obviously specific to Salon, and the ads which are chosen for me personally by Google Ads, in accordance with my personal browsing practice, is freaking me out, because I can't always decide which are which.
I mean, right now, I have a woman in the right hand column wearing very little except a grin and a pair of brightly coloured panties, on the left I have "learn biblical hebrew", and underneath I have something about "moments of guilt."
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Google personalised ads are structured like a language
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]but leaving that aside, I claim that I already got an enormous amount out of Lacan, and I tried to demonstrate this in an earlier comment on this very thread:
http://tinyurl.com/54sbvp
Now changing the subject, a trifle too hastily, to lying military disinfologists who take advantage of what one would like to believe about the order of battle between the forces of colonialism and anticolonialism in the near east, I want to say that several times in the last week or two I have had an eerie sense that people in such places as Haaretz are keeping rather too quiet when I cite some dubious source, because they want to see how credulous I am, and what it says about my subconscious will to believe that they, the Haaretzians, are part of a great wall of zionist liars. It's this eerie silence that gives them away, you see. And this is the only rational explanation for it : they know that the writings of "Franklin Lamb" (at CounterPunch) and "Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya" (at Global Research) are sometimes or always fakes. I often become certain subsequently that certain items by these writers are fakes, when I blog something by one of them, start editing it for clarity, and begin to see holes in it. It's fascinating. It quite takes my mind off those pesky advertisements. Today's Franklin Lamb effort is especially implausible, when you look at it closely.
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Thank heavens, Glenn has taken a breather
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This seems like the first day for a week or so I haven't found a new article by him up here, and a hundred or so comments already posted underneath it. I can't keep up with his prodigious output.
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Who is Franklin Lamb?
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You'd think that if he was an accredited American academic in Beirut there would be some web CV, but there isn't.
http://tinyurl.com/676xxl
I've emailed Counterpunch to ask for some background and some assessment of his stuff in terms of its actual corroborability, among other things. This is obviously nothing to do with this thread, but it is interesting in that Glenn has devoted a great deal of his own time (and credibility) to scrutinising the mechanism whereby Pentagon propaganda gets pumped via ostensibly neutral journalism into the public domain, and by doing so he has incurred charges of pandering to kumbaya singing lefties, so rather than engage in ad hominems, it seems appropriate to ask whether the lefties also have their own phony journalists pumping out propaganda.
I find the psychology of it fascinating anyway, in that when the propaganda is designed to support positions I actually sympathise with (and I can't say that about the Pentagon stuff) I get a chance to observe my own psychology doing something dodgy.
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wiki wars
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]there has been a humdinger there recently. Alex Beam discussed it in the Boston Globe recently, here:
http://tinyurl.com/6o8jup
but the original two sides are here:
http://tinyurl.com/3t6tgt
versus here:
http://tinyurl.com/44rykg
there are infinite extensions of this dispute on Oboler's own wesbite, where it becomes apparent that it is part of an endless war of attrition:
http://www.zionismontheweb.org/
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It's funny Salon being San Francisco based
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I see from the 'about' page that the central office is in San Francisco. I had looked at that page before, but somehow my eye had jumped straight to the New York office. Don't blame me for that : any assumptions I may have made about the USA are strictly derived from its own mass media.
Anyway, it's funny, because, as I hinted earlier, I think the truly distinctive thing about post-1967, or more accurately post-1973, American Jewish Zionism is that it's "psychedelic" : it's the result of the fact that a rather large proportion of US Jews who turned on to acid in the 1960s and early 1970s experienced a sort of disillusion - not unknown to the rest of us, or to other Jews in other contexts - which led them to seek for less known, and in some cases more Jewish, ways of developing their psychedelic experience. Again, in some cases, this led them to the Lubavitcher movement, which underwent a surge of rapid growth in those years. In other cases, it led them to the specifically religious-zionist doctrines of Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook, zt""l, which had been regarded by Orthodox Jews until that time with some horror, as being the product of an unholy alliance of pragmatism between religious and political forces. In both cases, what was attractive was the kabbalah, which was front and center.
Now, as I have explained, I am a Crowleyan, I may even say, a Crowleyan adept, though I am not on good terms with the Ordo Templi Orientis, or 'Caliphate OTO' as it is known by those who wish to deny its sole claim to the name OTO and to distinguish it ironically from other OTOs. In fact, I am not a member of anything. Honestly. I'm a sort of one-man mission into a difficult, troubled space that started in San Francisco back in 1967 or so, and now badly needs unwinding.
Now, about that job I was looking for...
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nine princes in amber
[Read the article: California's marriage ruling -- what it means and what it doesn't mean]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]zelazny, wasn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Princes_in_Amber