Three Notes Before My Exam posted by Richard Seymour

I'll be huddled in a small, dank room for the next three hours pretending to know stuff about the philosophy of science, political Islam, the scientific revolution, magic in the early-modern period, and all the other piddling crap I wouldn't otherwise touch with barge-pole. So, before I march off to my coffin, I'll leave three last words:

1) A War Criminal is dead. Halle-fuckin-lujah! I don't care how good an actor he was, break his remains up, feed them to the fucking gulls and piss on his wax-preserved face. Any leader who was responsible for the atrocities that he was while President of, say, a brown-skinned nation would not accrue the kinds of ecomiastic bullshit that is currently being heaped on the festering corpse of that illiterate B-actor fucking hillbilly.

2) Queering Palestinian Solidarity . Marxist blogger Yoshie challenges Tatchell's strategy of attending pro-Palestinian rallies with placards implying that "Palestine", tout court, is responsible for the oppression of gays. He agrees with Tatchell's claim that "[f]reedom for Palestine must be freedom for all Palestinians - straight and gay", as do I, but suggests that Tatchell's strategy both involves a misunderstanding of the problem and a poor approach to solving it. A fine contribution.

3) What does it take to get Respect around here? If your name is Nick Cohen, you only have to be a member of the UKIP to be "respectable" , as James at Dead Men Left points out. Well, this is fucking peculiar. Cohen has expended his last dregs of leftist credibility attacking the Respect Coalition, proclaiming it a reactionary organisation, denouncing the inclusion of Muslims in its ranks, earnestly wailing that the far left had become the far right. Yet, put a bunch of Holocaust revisionists, racists, far right theorists, clapped out reactionary celebrities and millionaire businessmen together in one party and "whatever you think of its policies, UKIP is respectable and can appeal to the respectable working and middle classes. None of its leading members has served a prison term - not even Robert Kilroy Silk." Suffice to note that no leading member of Respect has yet been in prison, has denied the Holocaust, been involved with far right organisations or been a millionaire. *Sigh*...