1) Tell me what you don't understand. I'll explicate, if you're polite.

2) Yeah, I guess I could have just said "be nice," "make love, not war." They do make good sound-bites, don't they...? But were I do go about preaching like that I'd run the risk of being a hippie. I find the idea of humans killing other human beings under the auspices of "we are all animals, right?" completely irrational and utterly repugnant AND has nothing to do with neither "being nice" nor "making war."

3) Please don't conflate yourself with the rest of humanity; in my opinion, it's highly paranoic and unbecoming. Just because you can't take the time to process my post does not necessitate the highly aliening comment:

You are "we" now...? What incredible powers you must possess!!

and 4) I'm going to write howsoever I choose. Bite me.

Hope that's "English" enough for you.

Labour is Labour. Once one sells h/er use-value in the marketplace, it doesn't matter how hard she works. There will always be more widgets to be produced during the time she has sold to the capitalist. And it is also in error - I believe - to assume that even the best widget-maker will out-profit h/er colleagues. (Maybe, if s/he is lucky, she might elicit a feigned congratulations from the person in a higher, hierarchical functionary position). Possible reason: we can only assume the widgets are sent to the next stage in the process of their development en masse with no regard to who may have made them.

This troubles me. I can definitely deduce a sense of inverted logocentrism in your post. Human beings are not animals. Even "animals" are not animals - at least not in the sense you advocate. What you refer to (if I read your post correctly) is the paranoic human ecology. A radical separation of self from world, such that self *becomes* world.

I think it important to stand against human/human crime on the very assertion you make in your original post.

As Martin Niemoller said "We must go on believing there is a god, even though we know there is none." And I think, given the horrors MN experienced in Nazi concentration camps, an intense focus on some thirteen-year-old playing GTA is silly.

Agreed. And then came the '80s. Cocaine, Reagan, and cold cash. And now the boomers feel it their imperative to save "democracies" - ones in which they ironically chose to support under that infernal Reagan. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras...? And that's just Central America. Another failing of the baby-boom generation with regard to its offspring is that old saw about us all being "different" and "special" (as mentioned earlier) and "unique." There is nothing wrong with these ideologies at face value - we *are* different, special, and unique in our own way, but that's no reason to go into an interview and demand an MTV job.

If Obama is truly a socialist, he certainly knows how to hide it pretty well. Compare and contrast the political stances of *real* socialists and Obama's voting record and he looks like a moderate Republican.

I didn't vote for either Obama and McCain - though, despite the fact that McCain and I fundamentally disagree on socioeconomic issues, I'd vote for him over his opponent's alternateen backers. Luckily there are third parties. Do your research. Vote your conscious. And - to be snarky - don't let brainwashed neolibs tell you that a vote for anyone else than Obama is really a vote for McCain.

but whatever - the election's over anyway...yet I think the sense of entitlement felt by Obama-ites is just beginning.

strike "government surveillance" and substitute "marketeering surveillance." I must've had GPS on my mind when I wrote that. Or something...meh.

Adbusters is a truly pathological publication. You buy a copy for $8.99 at a bookstore and get two extremely terse paragraphs on the October Revolution and interviews with well-coiffed third-stream intellectuals. This isn't to say there isn't a payoff: also included are 6 pages of pretty pictures to accompany the article, many of which have nothing to do with the October revolution, but manage to go a long way toward proving Adbusters supports revolution. And you will too, once you buy the magazine, buy the plastic-bottle shoes, and buy into the illusion that Adbusters actually cares. Insurrection this, insurrection that. If, on the off-chance, that insurrection is on the scale they image, a new October 1917 like their publication so cavalierly glosses, Adbusters would likely be one of the first called into question as counterrevolutionary due to their self-conscious posturing and content that is little more than sanctimonious drivel.

NOW - if Adbusters really cared about government surveillance, they probably should have kept their pens silent and not hopped on the persecution of this boogeyman of the month. For let us not forget the amount of insane surveillance goes into producing an issue of Adbusters. The mag's writers, for purposes of research and science, habitually sneak into parties (usually it's parties, but if you're lucky it's a cultural event of some kind), unannounced, sensing the "mental environment," and writing drivel about it a magazine whose title and content could be summed "How to be cool for the next two months until the next issue comes out."

I doubt there are many out there who aren't very passionate about keeping personal information private, but Adbusters is really calling the kettle black on this one. Wrong forum.

OK - I think I see where you're coming from. Cross out 'greedy' and put in 'exploitative.' The only possible way a commodity can be sold above its labor-value is if the productivity of labor is such that more widgets, let's say, can be produced in an hour. The profit from the increase in widgets (accompanied only very rarely by a decrease in price of widgets) is siphoned off the top and used to buy more widget-machines to produce even more widgets to receive in turn even more capital. But the people actually assembling the widgets receive none of the runoff for the increase in the productivity of their labor. I'm not talking about the ethics of "buying low" and "selling high", nor paying more or less because it's "the right thing to do" - macro-economically buying and selling dear all balance in the end. I'd just rather see it balance a little fairer.

I tend to avoid mp3s as much as possible - I like my pops and crackles *authentic*, thank you very much - but I think there is ample evidence that the allure of random pops, farts, buzzes, crackles in music goes back centuries, Berlioz being the first but certainly not the only composer to come to mind. I wonder what would have happened if each listener was allowed to listen to a mp3 clip for, say, 20 times, and then the same in lossless. Somehow pops aren't as fun when you know when they're going to happen.