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  • Liberal Fraying

    While the Camels Back has a virtual mountain of straw piled upon it, this is one tough camel! But it could very well be that the so-called "Danish text" which has emerged at the Copenhagen Climate Summit will finally crush the liberal/ progressive consensus that planet saving reforms are possible [...]
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    Posted: December 09, 2009, 10:32am EST
    by troutsky

  • We've Moved On

    Number of comments: 5
    As I've noted, many American's only geography lessons occur when we attack some country. I heard a lecture by Juan Cole yesterday on the Iraq aftermath; upcoming elections, the broader dispensation and political alignments, etc.. and he pointedly said that "Dick Cheney won." Neocon rhetoric about "democratization" notwithstanding, it was' [...]
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    Posted: December 08, 2009, 10:18am EST
    by troutsky

  • Fred Hampton 1948-1969

    Number of comments: 20
    Last Friday marked 40 years since the murder of "Chairman Fred" and Mark Clark and it is instructive to notice the difference in "martyrdoms" between Hampton the Panther and ML King Jr the pacifist. One gets a baloney sandwich on white bread while the other gets a sumptuous banquet. To [...]
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    Posted: December 06, 2009, 7:43am EST
    by troutsky

  • The Cowboy Way

    Number of comments: 25
    So I'm in my local book store doing a little research for my new story and I see a big coffee table glossy called Cowboy Ethics: What Wall Street Can Learn From the Code of the West. Perfect, my story centers around destructive western mythology! The book is predictably a' [...]
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    Posted: December 02, 2009, 7:47pm EST
    by troutsky

  • Choices

    Number of comments: 17
    I was came over a rise in an old VW decades ago and saw a multi-lane traffic jam below. I went for the brakes but they were suddenly gone. My only choice was which car to slam into. I can't imagine what criteria I used as they drew closer and' [...]
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    Posted: December 02, 2009, 9:17am EST
    by troutsky

  • Crystal Ball Gazing

    Number of comments: 14
    I could wait for tomorrow to say I-Told-You-So but it's more fun to stick my neck out. Obama will send thirty thousand more in a staggered deployment despite Michael Moores heart-felt pleas: "with just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people...into cynics...you will destroy the" [...]
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    Posted: November 30, 2009, 10:27am EST
    by troutsky

  • Moral Imperialism

    Number of comments: 14
    From The United States and Mexico by Howard F Cline:

    By early 1914 President Woodrow Wilson had lost his patience with Mexico, and an incident in Tampico on April 9 furnished an excuse to move against Huerta.Strung along the Panuco river were foreign-owned oil installations...chiefly British. From a dock [...]
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    Posted: November 27, 2009, 12:58pm EST
    by troutsky

  • Heighten The Contradictions?

    Number of comments: 21
    If no change is possible until crisis forces it, should we encourage crisis? Could we actively work to heighten contradictions beyond even their current insane level? Embrace the Spectacle and campaign for Sarah? This is one line of inquiry I've heard lately, cynically pragmatic in a Maoist sort of way.[...]
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    Posted: November 22, 2009, 7:24am EST
    by troutsky

  • The Communist Hypothesis

    Number of comments: 7
    French President Sarkozy said, soon after his depressing election, that "The spirit of May 68 must be done away with once and for all". It was not just the "spectre" of empirical communism, but the very hypothesis (as Alain Badiou puts it) he wanted buried forever.His "renewal" meant to banish [...]
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    Posted: November 20, 2009, 9:24am EST
    by troutsky

  • Nature

    Number of comments: 13
    It is suggested that "pristine" nature or wilderness has curative, restorative powers that can serve to re-connect humans to a deep "rootedness" (possibly ecstatic, feral, harmonious etc..?) The word nature, like environment or place, is contested, controversial and full of multiple meanings, especially when you try to put the word [...]
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    Posted: November 16, 2009, 9:29pm EST
    by troutsky

  • How Long ?

    Number of comments: 14
    I just read where the local "progressive" talk radio station folded after one year.They will now do conservative talk radio, but in the spirit of "centrism" is inviting liberals to call in. This is the second one to go down in five years. Good riddance.If I never have to listen [...]
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    Posted: November 15, 2009, 11:20pm EST
    by troutsky

  • Territory, Place ,Region

    Number of comments: 8
    I may have already quoted from David Harvey's Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom but it is amazingly relevant to many of the topics I have been posting about lately and the position of my esteemed "commentors". I'm thinking of Kultur's emphasis on the paradigmatic shift from forage to farm' [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2009, 10:29am EST
    by troutsky

  • Post Modern Entreprenuers

    Number of comments: 32
    These ads were found scattered throughout the last Harpers and speak to our non-culture:

    "Form a real relationship with someone in extreme poverty!"

    Purveyor of the Worlds Finest Teas

    Seasonal Cookbook by 13 year Ovarian Cancer Survivor

    Date Smart / Party Smart! "Join the introduction" [...]
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    Posted: November 07, 2009, 9:50am EST
    by troutsky

  • More Trouble

    Number of comments: 7
    I wanted to point out a couple more of what I see as the main themes of these celebrating conservatives. On the macro level they definitely are not interested in joining any New World Order.This includes the United Nations or global currencies or any thing having to do with global [...]
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    Posted: November 05, 2009, 9:14pm EST
    by troutsky

  • Trouble in River City

    Number of comments: 5
    As promised, I went to the "Celebrating Conservatism" meeting last night and the best assessment came from my wife who turned to me about a third of the way through and said "We are in deep shit."These people are organized, funded, and well armed. The "master of ceremonies" a tough [...]
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    Posted: November 04, 2009, 9:37am EST
    by troutsky

  • More Agit-prop

    Number of comments: 9
    Here is a letter to the editor published last Friday:

    It hardly seems that a day goes by that some conservative defender of liberty isn't calling President Barack Obama or his policies "socialist" on the opinion page of this paper. And it is not just the new president which' [...]
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    Posted: November 03, 2009, 9:10am EST
    by troutsky

  • CAJA Redux?

    Number of comments: 4
    Some may have noticed the Community Action for Justice in the Americas link on this blog. I was a board member for three years at least? but we fizzled and died last Spring when energy dropped and ideological splits could not be reconciled. I was part of a faction that [...]
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    Posted: October 30, 2009, 12:34pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • Nostalgia

    Number of comments: 11
    I was missing Donald Rumsfeld till Joe Lieberman showed up, promising to scuttle Obamas health reform. Et tu Judas? Could one invent any greater example of what a cesspool "representative" politics has become? Oh..um...Ollie North is now advising the Republican Party on Afghanistan policy? No wait..thats real. Beakerkin must have [...]
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    Posted: October 28, 2009, 10:52am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Moores Capitalism

    Number of comments: 13
    I saw Moores movie last night and left with a jumble of impressions. Like my last post, he starts with populist outrage, but unfortunately, to my mind, never progressives much beyond it. The critique is bold, courageous even, and I don't want to under value it's possible impact but the [...]
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    Posted: October 26, 2009, 9:10am EDT
    by troutsky

  • The Audacity of Greed

    Number of comments: 22
    In a perverse way you can't help but be impressed by these Wall Street cats, I mean, like a patient just hours out of open heart surgery who lights up a cigarette after wolfing down a cheeseburger, these guys display a demonic flair when it comes to risk taking. With' [...]
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    Posted: October 22, 2009, 12:03am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Supply and Demand

    Number of comments: 25
    Not even fishing is immune to the forces of the invisible hand. It seems the rarer steelhead ( a sea run rainbow trout) become, the more people wish to pursue them. These amazing anadromous fish used to be the prized quarry of a select and somewhat fanatical breed of hardy [...]
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    Posted: October 20, 2009, 10:09pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • CO2 Is Green

    Number of comments: 23
    In a classic example of how capitalism is literally killing us, television is being bombarded by an ad campaign called Plants Need CO2. Working the modern TV watchers brain, the logic goes something like this: Plants need CO2 . CO2 is good. Those trying to scare you about CO2 are [...]
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    Posted: October 14, 2009, 9:46am EDT
    by troutsky

  • River Ron

    Number of comments: 14
    Taking my wife to work this chilly morning I saw a local character we call River Ron walking north across Main Street carrying his worldly possessions on his back and muttering occasionally to himself. This is Montana and we are experiencing record cold for this early date but Ron has [...]
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    Posted: October 12, 2009, 10:08am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Reply to Mutualism

    Number of comments: 6
    Keeping with my push to promote ZNet, I will refer to a piece which does a good job of articulating the radical market-libertarian perspective. This comes from a great series called Re-imagining Society , which is what we all need to be doing, with no time to waste! I [...]
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    Posted: October 10, 2009, 8:53am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Fraudulent?

    Number of comments: 15
    The problem is not so much that one third of Karzias votes are "fraudulent" ,as Ambassador Kenneth Galbraith insists, it's the other third of the votes that a warlord named Dostum "suggested" his Uzbek minions cast. C'mon, heroin, refugee camps, tribal/ ethnic civil war, who are we kidding? Most of [...]
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    Posted: October 07, 2009, 9:23am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Silver Bullet

    Number of comments: 11
    A customer walks into the store and thinks " thank God for the free enterprise system, protected by the blood of patriots, because it creates the actual freedom for me to pick whatever damn product I choose!" Standing before the beer cooler, surveying the wide array of brands, he picks [...]
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    Posted: October 05, 2009, 10:19am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Agit- prop

    Number of comments: 6
    Can symbolic representation substitute for "real" action? No. But is it a good adjunct (and lots of fun) ? Me thinks so.

    Our local IWW branch organized a little street theatre last night that engages this question and caused an interesting debate among our membership. Celebrating the 100 year [...]
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    Posted: October 03, 2009, 10:35am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Theory Weary

    Number of comments: 8
    Checking in on "current events" ( as my teachers used to call them) , How About That Max Baucus ? "Co-ops" Max?, really? Could you find a slimier creature under any rock under the Big Sky ? Taking single payer "off the table" before the debate even started was pathetic, [...]
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    Posted: October 01, 2009, 10:55am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Shadow Play

    Number of comments: 14
    "But certainly ,for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred ,truth profane."

    Fuerbach, Preface to The Essence of Christianity

    I want to continue this line of inquiry into [...]
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    Posted: September 28, 2009, 8:42am EDT
    by troutsky

  • The Liberal State?

    Number of comments: 25
    I think I mentioned that I'm reading Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics. (Thanks for the recommendation Beakerkin!) The author, John McGowan, disagrees with Foucault's belief in the States power of subject-formation, saying "The liberal state...does not explicitly aim for a unified whole of which it is'" [...]
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    Posted: September 20, 2009, 10:39am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Protest

    Number of comments: 13
    I am wondering what Conservative Marchers on Washington will think of the protesters who come to Pittsburgh for the G20 meetings? Will they support the "right to assembly" now that they have felt a little pushback, media criticism, negative commentary etc..? We've got a protest planned here in Hamilton Montana' [...]
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    Posted: September 16, 2009, 12:27pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • The End Is Near

    Number of comments: 13
    Following my compulsive -obsession to understand what makes people tick, I attended the second installment of the Revelation Now seminar at the church across the road. Oh yeah, demons, beasts, dragons "bad angels" ( a long discussion on how you tell the bad angels from the good angels) the whole [...]
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    Posted: September 14, 2009, 11:50am EDT
    by troutsky

  • We The People

    Number of comments: 6
    We had a good discussion the other night about the "We" that must be constructed in order to effect transformational societal change. It brings up lots of interesting points of inquiry, such as the interplay between solidarity and pluralism, the idea of autonomy and individuals comprising a multitude of subject [...]
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    Posted: September 11, 2009, 3:35pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • Tragedy or Farce

    Number of comments: 6
    History repeats itself as a tragic farce I suppose. I dreamed I saw Joe Mc Carthy last night , alive as you or me... but it was just Glen Beck casually calling all pinkos trators. I'm sure if I dialed in Rush right now I woud hear the same message.' [...]
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    Posted: September 09, 2009, 8:41am EDT
    by troutsky

  • The Empire Strikes Back

    Number of comments: 11
    As I predicted some time ago, this "health care reform" was indeed perceived as a substantial threat to capitalist forces ( hence the irrational zeal of the shock troops) and though these forces are themselves far from united as to how to proceed, it is obvious that those most concerned [...]
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    Posted: September 06, 2009, 10:56am EDT
    by troutsky

  • The Blood of Tyrants

    Number of comments: 11
    In social contract theory, the public must give that authority it enjoys in a "state of nature" to a sovereign with the power to enforce contracts. What is widely assumed to be the "genius" of the US constitution is the "right to keep and bear arms" so that individuals keep [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2009, 6:41am EDT
    by troutsky

  • More Democracy Deficit

    Number of comments: 4
    While yours truly was enjoying a day off by picking numerous large trout out of a Big Hole riffle, my dedicated wife decided to go see what a "Listening Session" by Montana's right-wing Representative Dennis Rehberg might entail. After all, in a Democracy, it is important that our elected representatives [...]
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    Posted: August 22, 2009, 7:42am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Hold This Max

    Number of comments: 6
    There was one beautiful moment during the Montana "Town hall" healthcare reform meeting that probably escaped most watchers but early into it, Barack Obama took off his coat to do the old "roll-up-my-sleeves-and-get-to-work routine , turned around, and handed it to the slightly mortified "smilin" Max Baucus, Montanas senior Senator." [...]
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    Posted: August 19, 2009, 8:33am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Awakening?

    Number of comments: 7
    This angry exhortation by Helmut over at his great blog Phronesisaical perfectly expresses the irate, liberal refusal to accept the obvious.

    "To back off legislation because a small minority who haven't actually read and tried to understand the bills, incited by demagogic "news" sources and cynical and immoral Republican'" [...]
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    Posted: August 09, 2009, 5:40am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Suicide

    Number of comments: 11
    "Just as the scorpion threatened by fire shoots it's own venom into itself, democracy encircled by the flames of free market economics and the new world order pumps the searing venom of corruption into it's veins."

    Jean Braudrillard Cool Memories 4



    Old Jean is a pessimistic [...]
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    Posted: July 29, 2009, 8:31am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Southern Man

    Number of comments: 8
    A couple of articles in the new Harpers jumped out at me because I have been thinking about the southern states of the US and what kulturcritic called"the perennial political and social forces of manipulation, monitoring and control" in his last blog. Add Economic to that list and we are [...]
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    Posted: July 26, 2009, 2:50pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • Democrats and Labor

    Number of comments: 11
    What is already a rather uneasy alliance should become even more so now that the "card check" provision of the Employee Free Choice Act has been dropped at the behest of "moderate Democrats". Unions spent 80 million dollars and tons of time on this campaign and are trying to present [...]
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    Posted: July 18, 2009, 3:14pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • A New Reason to Struggle

    Number of comments: 10
    A week ago Friday Troutsky became a grandfather and so increased his own responsibility to find a sustainable alternative to the capitalistic juggernaut. The imperative here is to somehow re- develop a sense of stewardship, such as the native Americans incorporated into their life-ways and a renewed sense of egalitarian [...]
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    Posted: July 12, 2009, 6:10pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • 4th of July in Butte America

    Number of comments: 9
    I walked for two hours down the middle of the main street of the most working class city in the universe yesterday, carrying a sign saying People Over Profit. Amongst the contingent of 35 or so single-payer advocates in the annual parade, I was the one wearing an IWW shirt [...]
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    Posted: July 05, 2009, 6:25am EDT
    by troutsky

  • The Confused Nation

    Number of comments: 23
    I refer here specifically to the "progressive" magazine which considers itself the standard bearer for the left in the US, such as it is. On one page we have an article titled "Europe Lurches Right" explaining how neoliberal social democracy is a dead project, especially the variation known as New [...]
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    Posted: June 28, 2009, 6:01pm EDT
    by troutsky

  • Everybody In

    Number of comments: 11
    The last discussion about the resistance to a "public option" in the healthcare reform leads to some critical points. First, I believe such a two tiered plan is bound to fail because those with the greatest risk factors are statistically poorer and so will end up in the "second tier", [...]
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    Posted: June 20, 2009, 9:02am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Single Payer

    Number of comments: 18
    I see upon my return ( I live without computer or news throughout the week) that they have brought out the "Big Guns" to fight against any form of "public option" in the healthcare reform battle. Excellent. It confirms my own instinctual reaction that this fight is more critical than [...]
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    Posted: June 13, 2009, 9:09am EDT
    by troutsky

  • http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779337&ts=2008-09-30%2020:01:05.0

    Number of comments: 3
    [www.tvo.org]

    Shared via AddThis

    [...]
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    Posted: June 07, 2009, 2:21pm EDT
    by Ché Bob

  • Subjectivity, Laws and Ethics

    Number of comments: 3
    My worthy opponent over at Thoughts and Ideas, hoping to reconcile free market capitalism with his Catholic libertarianism, tells us that "...the laws of economics are comprehensible to man through the use of his reason alone...The nature of economics then, is such that it is not concerned with ethics." He [...]
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    Posted: June 07, 2009, 8:26am EDT
    by troutsky

  • Extracting the Truth

    Number of comments: 9
    There is a quick way to find out if this Sotomayor woman is indeed a "reverse racist" ( Limbaugh) and that would be to have Dick Cheney waterboard her. Perhaps as a television special, with contestants guessing how long she can hold out! The difficulty I am having personally is [...]
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    Posted: June 02, 2009, 9:39am EDT
    by troutsky
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