This is your farewell kiss, dog

Wired Magazine has a great roundup of the viral parodies of Muntadar al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at Bush.

My quick thoughts on the al-Zaidi phenomenon:

Meta Monday: Participate in a project to promote SDS blogs

Not too long ago, there was an exchange of emails amongst a few bloggers in SDS about trying to tie together SDS’ers blogs into some common project, something a bit more coherent.

As many such exchanges go, it generated some excitement but fell by the wayside in the middle of a crunch around Finals-time. So maybe it’s time to take that idea off the bikerack and put it into effect.

There’s several potential solutions. One of the ones I would like to commit to would be passive, wouldn’t require a lot of effort, but could help boost up readership and interest in blogging from the SDS angle.

It’d involve the following:

• Consolidating the RSS feeds from SDS’ers blogs into a single, easily-to-subscribe-to RSS feed.
• Using that feed to power a Feedburner Headline Animator displaying the headlines of SDS’ers blogs that anybody with a blog or MySpace page could add.
• Taking some time to promote both the feed and Headline Animator on Facebook.

What’s all this jibber jabber about RSS and some Headline Animator? Here’s explanations of both:

RSS feeds explained in plain English

Now check out some info on the Headline Animator from Feedburner. All it does is take the RSS feed and does a ticker of the headlines from an RSS feed. In this case, it’d be SDS’ers blogs.

If you’re an SDS’er and would like to participate, please leave a comment to this story that includes your site’s address plus the address of your RSS feed. This is a volunteer project, so give this about a week to start up.

Greetings on May Day

At under ten hours to a verdict in the Sean Bell case

A random observation with under 10 hours to go to the verdict in the Sean Bell case:

A helicopter — I’m pretty sure it was an NYPD helicopter — was circling my area in Bedford Stuyvestant, Brooklyn, shining a spotlight down onto the direction of the projects.

They watch and await. We are watching as well.

Is “Anti-Oppression” enough?

This is a comradely criticism/critique of the current theory and practice of Students for a Democratic Society. It’s assembled from notes and recollections of various conversations. By no means is it meant to tear down anyone’s work in SDS. I understand this is controversial, but I hope that as a comradely critique this leads to a deepening of both theory and practice in SDS.

Anti-oppression. It’s this buzzword I’ve only recently encountered due to heavy involvement with SDS. I have to say, I have an almost constitutional dislike for the modern-Leftist fixation with “anti” formulations (anti-[fill in the blank]ism”), perhaps due to an early love of Elements of Style, but also because I find that it reflects the modern ideology of neverending resistance struggle without revolution — for a sharp discussion of that, here’s Zizek.

Anti-oppression, as it’s been put before SDS at least, is a catch-all term for the praxis built around political/popular education against forms of systemic oppression — white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and capitalism — for the sake of having the male, pale, and stale Left confront these things as they show themselves in both society and in the movement (as a reflection of society, however distorted). It gets translated into organizations usually running down a laundry list of oppressions they oppose, and the stances they take up in opposition (i.e., “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexist” etc.)