New Clear Vision

What’s So Funny About It, Anyway?

from Wireless Services

(AI) — Amid rising tensions and escalating violence, well, everywhere, the Union of Global Hegemons (UGH) announced today that a deal has been reached in principle to abolish war and deploy the vast resources consumed by it for the purpose of establishing world peace.

“We used to talk about providing ‘guns and butter’ as part of our plan for world domination,” said UGH spokesperson Hugh Mennism, “but now we’ll be melting it all down in short order. So everyone will get a World Peace souvenir commemorative key chain, and a tub of delectable non-GMO popcorn to boot!”

The announcement was met with mixed reaction around the world. The entity formerly known as NATO released a statement calling the peace plan “unproductive and naive,” and warned against the pitfalls of appeasement. “We must continue to fight among ourselves in order to win,” the statement read. “To do otherwise is to capitulate to the forces of compassion that have caused the dangerous predicament in which we find ourselves today.” (more…)

Exposing Rightwing Propaganda Through Leftist Humor

by Devon G. Peña

Given recent events in Arizona and Texas, I have been thinking a lot about ideology. So, yesterday I was re-reading the Slovenian social critic and philosopher, Slavoj Žižek considered by many to be the “Elvis of social theory.” He’s good, but I would not deify him.

Anyway, I went back to Žižek’s 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso Books) and found a familiar passage that has been in the back of my mine ever since I first came across the Texas Republican Party Platform and reported it in the piece I did last week on Fear and Loathing in Texas. Žižek makes the following fascinating statement:

“The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ (‘They do not know it, but they are doing it.’) The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.” (more…)

A Diverse Field of Green Party Presidential Candidates for 2012

by Pat LaMarche

Comedic innovator, proud grandma and self-proclaimed domestic goddess Roseanne Barr has announced her candidacy for President of the United States as well as for Prime Minister of Israel.  Although some have argued that the former is so dictated to by the latter that holding both offices is unnecessarily redundant.

In less than 48 hours since Barr submitted her paperwork to the Green Party, a quick web search has yielded more than seven hundred links featuring news stories or commentary.

Many of the articles — like the one that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor — question Barr’s sincerity as she throws her hat into the ring.

And the wild fire of speculation on whether this was just another of Barr’s shenanigans or a true bid for the nomination representing the nation’s hundreds of thousands of Green Party members isn’t unique to the media outlets across the land, but in the discussion topic of rank and file greens as well. (more…)