Month: May 2010

"I repeat the slogan “drill here, drill now” not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills – my family and my state and I know firsthand those consequences. How could I still believe in drilling America’s domestic supply of energy after having seen the devastation of the Exxon-Valdez spill? I continue to believe in it because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation,"- Sarah Palin, repeating a slogan.

Jake Weisberg checks in with the remarkable Rory Stewart, as he tries to win over a bleak, windswept Northern English constituency. Yes, he walked across it. And he'll win.

A gripping, enlightening, taboo-breaking dialogue on the Israel-Palestine question on Bloggingheads. Worth watching in full. Seriously. This is what the web is for: expanding the boundaries of permissible debate on often emotive matters. And reality. Yes: reality.

David Graeber thinks it all began with slavery:

In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him; a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle

extract anything he wants, and all debts – obligations – you may owe to

others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that

others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your

owner is all that now exists.

He connects this thought to various early societies:

A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and finally take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do). Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, also, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Twentynine Palms, California, 8 am