i think this article makes some valid points, but it goes a little too far and in the process exposes the author's reactionary white privilege.

my reading of mandela is essentially that he didn't really know what he was doing. he campaigned from the left based on it's ideals and then found himself in power at the confluence of the collapse of communism and the rise of neo-liberalism. he followed his advisers to the implementation of failed reforms.

i've compared him to trudeau before and will again. people attack trudeau for his economic policies. the truth is trudeau didn't actually understand anything about economics, he was a lawyer with an interest in philosophy, and if you spend some time searching through his biography and reading some of his statements you'll realize he admitted as much. on the one hand, trudeau took power in an economic mess - nixon shock, opec embargo, collapse of keynesian economic theory. even if he did have a clue, the challenges were substantial. he would have had to rely on advice, regardless. and we now know that the experts studying the situation were as flabbergasted as anybody else.

so, trudeau - a social liberal by any concept of the term and one with a background in workplace organizing that ran on an election platform that promised direct democracy - ended up carrying out experiments on behalf of milton friedman. canada liked monetarism before it was cool. and trudeau had no idea what he was implementing.

likewise, when mandela's advisers came to him and presented trickle down as a solution, he went for it because he trusted the advice and believed it was the way forward in a post-communist future. the task, now, is to point out that it failed. there's no need to vilify and no value in it.

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/26519

the situation's sort of complex. apparently, the israeli right (netanyahu is actually in the centre of the heavily rightward-skewed israeli spectrum) rejected the idea of planned resettlement as a sort of welfare.

as mentioned, beyond the problems of resettlement itself, i'm concerned about the ramifications regarding forced resettlement of israeli citizens that happen to be arabs and the collapse of the rule of law in israel. this is a different thing than bulldozing over villages in the occupied territories. like most people on the left, i don't want multiple states in the region that are defined by ethnic or religious identities. that's a formula for perpetual violence, nationalism, racism, etc. rather, i want to see a single cosmopolitan, multicultural, multi-ethnic state that buries the nineteenth century ideal of ethnic nationalism. i reject the idea that jews and arabs are too different to live together. reality is that they're virtually indistinguishable - same genes, same language, same religion.

http://972mag.com/bill-to-displace-israels-bedouin-to-be-scrapped-laws-drafter-says/83525/

in all honesty, the best thing that could happen to the area is an invasion by an outside force. it's interesting to contemplate an alternate history where the ottoman empire maintained control of the area long enough to accommodate jewish resettlement after wwII.

another thing to think about is the possibility of a new messianic cult arising in the region. hey, religion is a statist fantasy to begin with; now's a good time to make a new one up.

i'm really not interested in ideas that maintain the status quo and merely seek to balance power. the problem is that there's a gang of armed morons in charge that think god has the right to grant fiefs. that's what needs to be resolved.

it's not a question of sharing the "holy land", it's a process of bringing people to terms with the truth that there is no such thing as "holy land".

only a secular, multicultural state that rejects ethnic nationalism can get us there.

and this idea of rounding up arabs and putting them on reserves is really damaging to that only possible end goal.

spent hours doing post-production, can't tell the difference between result and initial wave files.

grargh. let me try this again...

i'll never forgive myself for deleting all the source files for this ancient stuff. something as simple as boosting the guitars turns into a math problem about fundamental frequencies and harmonic overtones. ugh...

not to mention those samples. to be 17 again would be to understand what the fuck i was thinking.

the mastering process on this stuff consisted of compressing the wave files to mp3. the fraunhofer method, i suppose. hey, that *is* a type of compression and it was a valid best approach when mastering software was out of the reach of warez on home pcs.

btw, my take on warez is that if intellectual property is to exist at all then it should be very minimal in scope. ten years, tops. i don't tend to go after the newest releases, but i think previous cycle software should be treated as freeware.

anyways, this is long overdue to be run through some stereo imaging and harmonic exciters. but there's just a handful of places where the mix has come out fucked...

so, i'm running over the source material with parametric eqs trying to get just the right frequencies out. almost done. and it's almost painful, really.

^ only a perfectionist, huh? lol.