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loquitor: you cant pull "old man shit" on me...well maybe by a matter of months if you were born before august...but those months can be crucial, i know.
the problem with luttwak's piece and your memory exercise is superficiality.
hegel at least tried to "prove" that history only happened to white people: egypt for example once had history: they "knew there was a riddle" but couldnt figure out how to say it, therefore pyramids. so you see that hegel was able to go from superficial understanding to major tourist attractions and back to superficiality with ease when it came to places he fundamentally knew nothing about. this is obviously not to say that hegel was stupid---which would itself be a ridiculous thing to say--more that his book the philosophy of history is absurd. strict application of dialectical thinking to a world composed entirely of signifiers.
luttwak relies on this philosophy of history to organize his superficiality--but there is not method to be applied with strictness, so there is nothing of any interest to be had from his particular exercise. the idea that his piece could be confused with anything like a history of the region is laughable.
that is why i prefer to think of it as a satire.
it's a way of saying that he cannot possible be serious.
on a related note, over the past week we have seen the following bushworld developments: a clampdown on military personnel blogging from iraq and a piece about new conflicts emerging at guantanomo between detainees and their lawyers. in the first, you see an outline of what the folk in bushworld imagine the problem with iraq to be: bad press. in the second, you see another: legal representation which results in bad press. and you see the response of the bush people to this: try to eliminate or undermine the information.
without information, folk like luttwak can almost seem compelling.
its just a lobotomy away.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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