[dead_battery]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

who?

a certain user on this board was harassing me but has deleted their posts. we've agreed not to speak to each other anymore so hopefully that will be the end of it.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

a certain user on this board was harassing me but has deleted their posts. we've agreed not to speak to each other anymore so hopefully that will be the end of it.

oh!

[Genteel Death]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

oh!

What poor thing means is that I told him several times his review of VU is garbage and 99% of the opinions he puts into his writing come from elsewhere anyway. He didn't take it well and I can see why. Tough shit. C'est la vie!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Genteel Death

What poor thing means is that I told him several times his review of VU is garbage and 99% of the opinions he puts into his writing come from elsewhere anyway. He didn't take it well and I can see why. Tough shit. C'est la vie!

99% of the opinions everyone puts into writing are from elsewhere-- actually with most people it's 100% and it's from tv and they can't even write. db's quotes are pretty great though and he connects them well.

[dead_battery]

bliss

[evollove]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

bliss

I see that 1 year ago, the user 1chuukriser asked WTF??!!

I only said "...the fuck?"

[floatingslowly]

I fapped.

[dead_battery]

hadouken

[dead_battery]

good stuff in vice about britain turning into a militarized police state

we're only half way through the conservative "austerity" agenda, which is the redistribution of wealth and funds back upwards to the elites. this progresses in tandem with the further destruction of an already demoralized and exhausted middle class. couple that with a moribund economy and the kind of narco nightmare degeneracy that these articles describe will accelerate.

it won't get as bad as mexico, where most of this crap is produced, but a lot more people will be killed for cocaine which is beloved by amateurs too stupid to care or understand its neuro toxicity.

the kids in these articles are the "entrepreneurs" whose "self starting motivation" and "get up and go" enables them to "compete on the free market". they are the real of the tory fantasy that the proles can just energize themselves and magically generate capital through "hard work" and all that other propagandistic bullshit they use to keep their wage slave classes guilty and subservient.

the problem is that these gun weilding scarface wannabes won't be murdering and looting anyone but the rest of the working classes and some scattered remnants of the middle classes. we'll all suffer because of the tory agenda, which has FAILED economically and has reverted to faking the stats to make it look like its working.

[dead_battery]

I miss history, just as I miss my own history, and my childhood visions of the future. In my grander moments I feel like an embodiment of Slavoj Žižek's Living in the End Times, meandering mournfully around Spotify and fretting about the left's intellectual bankruptcy.

As modernist housing projects fall into ruin, it is hard to recall the sincerity of Tomorrow's World or SF that is not ironically space age or steampunk. It is barely possible to articulate a utopia, even (or especially) if you are on the left.

There is no longer … a progressive temporal dimension...

[dead_battery]

 

 

new xiu xiu is the best/only album ive heard this year all year so far

BLACK DICK.

[dead_battery]

召喚篇

[dead_battery]

has or will anyone read testo junkie?


"Men and women are isolated units, creatures condemned to constant self surveillance and self control by a rigid sex gender race system. The time they devote to this brutal political arrangement of their subjectivity is comparable to the whole extent of their lives. Once their own vitality has been put to work to reduce their own somatic multiplicity, they become physically weakened beings, incapable of finding any satisfaction in life and dead politically before they have taken their last breath."

 

i'm halfway through and it's almost embarrassing how precisely the critique elucidates how i've suffered and wasted an awful amount of time and energy on political longings and subjective strivings that are redundant conservative traps.

beatriz is going further than 100% of the hetero/queer theory and politics that i know of. she's abandoning gender and sexuality itself - at least theoretically. if you're frustrated trying to be EITHER male or female and EITHER homo or hetero then this is for you. if you want to understand how sexuality and gender is being inscribed on your body and produced WITHIN you for political purposes, then read it.

she's also gone far beyond the realm of the pronouns in the english language i'm using to describe her.

cannot recommend it highly enough.

[dead_battery]

Beatriz Preciado

Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics


I live in a world where many things I thought impossible are possible.

—Guillaume Dustan, Dans ma chambre (1996)

The day of your death I put a 50-mg dose of Testogel on my skin, so that I can begin to write this book. The carbon chains, O-H3, C-H3, C-OH, gradually penetrate my epidermis and travel through the deep layers of my skin until they reach the blood vessels, nerve endings, glands. I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man, nor as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgendered identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to avenge your death.

I spread the gel over my shoulders. First instant: the feeling of a light slap on the skin. The feeling changes into one of coldness before it disappears. Then nothing for a day or two. Nothing. Waiting. Then an extraordinary lucidity settles in gradually, accompanied by an explosion of the desire to fuck, walk, go out everywhere in the city. This is the climax in which the spiritual force of the testosterone mixing with my blood takes the fore. Absolutely all the unpleasant sensations disappear. Unlike speed, the movement going on inside has nothing to do with agitation, noise. It’s simply the feeling of being in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the city. Unlike coke, there is no distortion in the perception of self, no logorrhea nor any feeling of superiority. Nothing but the feeling of strength reflecting the increased capacity of my muscles, my brain. My body is present to itself. Unlike speed and coke, there is no immediate come down. A few days go by, and the movement inside calms, but the feeling of strength, like a pyramid revealed by a sandstorm, remains.

How can I explain what is happening to me? What can I do about my desire for transformation? What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist? What kind of feminist am I today? A feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgendered body hooked on feminism? I have no other alternative but to revise my classics, to subject those theories to the shock that was provoked in me by the practice of taking testosterone. To accept the fact that the change happening in me is the metamorphosis of an era.

The changes within neoliberalism that we are witnessing are characterized not only by the transformation of “gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,” “sexual identity,” and “pleasure” into objects of the political management of living, but also by the fact that this management itself is carried out through the new dynamics of advanced techno-capitalism, global media, and biotechnologies. We are being confronted with a new type of hot, psychotropic punk capitalism. These recent transformations are imposing an ensemble of new micro-prosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols. Our world economy is dependent upon the production and circulation of hundreds of tons of synthetic steroids, on the global diffusion of a flood of pornographic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new varieties of synthetic legal and illegal psychotropic drugs (e.g., enaltestovis, Special K., Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac, ecstasy, poppers, heroin, Prilosec), on the flood of signs and circuits of the digital transmission of information, on the extension of a form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire planet in which megacities of misery are knotted into high concentrations of sex-capital.

In order to distinguish this new capitalism from the nineteenth century disciplinary regime, I shall call “pharmacopornographic capitalism” this new regime of the production of sex and sexual subjectivity.

After World War II, the somatopolitical context of the production of subjectivity seems dominated by a series of new technologies of the body (which include biotechnology, surgery, endocrinology, and so forth) and representation (photography, cinema, television, cybernetics, videogames, and so forth) that infiltrate and penetrate daily life like never before. These are biomolecular, digital, and broadband data transmission technologies. The invention of the notion of gender in the 1950s as a clinical technique of sexual reassignment, and the commercialization of the Pill as a contraceptive technique, characterized the shift from discipline to pharmacopornographic control. This is the age of soft, feather-weight, viscous, gelatinous technologies that can be injected, inhaled—“incorporated.” The testosterone that I use belongs to these new gelatinous biopolitical technologies.

When I take a dose of testosterone in gel form or inject it in liquid form, what I’m actually giving myself is a chain of political signifiers that have been materialized in order to acquire the form of a molecule that can be absorbed by my body. I’m not only taking the hormone, the molecule, but also the concept of a hormone, a series of signs, texts, and discourses, the process through which the hormone came to be synthesized, the technical sequences that produce it in the laboratory. I inject a crystalline, oil-soluble steroid carbon chain of molecules, and with it a fragment of the history of modernity. I administer to myself a series of economic transactions, a collection of pharmaceutical decisions, clinical tests, focus groups, and business management techniques. I connect to a baroque network of exchange and to economic and political flow-chains for the patenting of the living. I am linked by T to electricity, to genetic research projects, to mega-urbanization, to the destruction of forests and the biosphere, to pharmaceutical exploitation of living species, to Dolly the cloned sheep, to the advance of the Ebola virus, to HIV mutation, to antipersonnel mines and the broadband transmission of information. In this way, I become one of the somatic connectives that make possible the circulation of power, desire, release, submission, capital, rubbish, and rebellion.

As a body—and this is the only important thing about being a subject-body, a techno-living system—I’m the platform that makes possible the materialization of political imagination. I am my own guinea pig for an experiment on the effects of intentionally increasing the level of testosterone in the body of a bio-female. Instantly, the testosterone turns me into something radically different than a cis-female. Even when the changes generated by this molecule are socially imperceptible. The lab rat is becoming human. The human being is becoming a rodent. And, as for me: neither testo-girl nor techno-boy. I am just a port of insertion for C19H28O2. I’m both the terminal of one of the apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality and the vanishing point through which escapes the will to control of the system. I’m the molecule and the State, and I’m the laboratory rat and the scientific subject that conducts the research; I’m the residue of a biochemical process. I am the future common artificial ancestor for the elaboration of new species in the perpetually random process of mutation and genetic drift. I am T.

I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the State will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. I am a copyleft biopolitical agent that considers sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the State commandeered by pharmaceutical companies.

The consumption of testosterone, like that of estrogen and progesterone in the case of the Pill, does not depend upon any ideal constructions of gender that would come to influence the way we act and think. We are confronted directly by the production of the materiality of gender. Everything is a matter of doses, of melting and crystallization points, of the rotary power of the molecule, of regularity, of milligrams, of the form and mode of administration, of habit, of praxis. What is happening to me could be described in terms of a “molecular revolution.” In detailing this concept in order to refer to the revolt of May ’68, Félix Guattari certainly was not thinking of cis-females who self-administer testosterone. On the other hand, he was attentive to structural modifications generated by micropolitical changes such as the consumption of drugs, changes in perception, in sexual conducts, in the invention of new languages. It is a question of becomings, of multiplicities. In such a context, “molecular revolution” could point to a kind of political homeopathy of gender. It’s not a matter of going from woman to man, from man to woman, but of contaminating the molecular bases of the production of sexual difference, with the understanding that these two states of being, male and female, only exist as “biopolitical fictions,” as somatic effects of the technical process of normalization. It’s a matter of intervening intentionally in this process of production in order to end up with viable forms of incorporated gender, to produce a new sexual and affective platform that is neither male nor female in the pharmacopornographic sense of these terms, which would make possible the transformation of the species. T is only a threshold, a molecular door, a becoming between multiplicities.

[EVOLghost]

lol....people really moshing at a baby metal concert? I don't believe it.

[EVOLghost]

also...witch....love that song. thanks for that!

[dead_battery]

i've also talked about my belief that if nothern ireland ever did build a totally unified state (which is not possible) it would go into a war of conquest with its neighbours instead of itself.

as for anarcho anything - these ideas are not worth taking seriously. they don't describe anything. the state would simply reform in these situations, if you can't see that, then you're blinded by the american ideology of individualism.

you can say that the state is a parasite and an instrument of war. fine, thats true. but the idea that taking it away would resolve these problems? absurd.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

conservative "austerity" agenda, which is the redistribution of wealth and funds back upwards to the elites.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...ance-threshold

You couldn't make it up.

[!@#$%!]

i got me a pdf of testo yonqui (in spanish).

the first chapter reads pretty good. it's really good actually-- but i haven't found it mind-blowing yet. it's very cyberpunk, and people have been doing that since the 80s/90s (first the writers and the artists, then donna haraway and all those college "technoculture" anthologies). not saying that she's not making her own contribution to this-- but she's part of a long storied tradition (as far as i can see anyway) of human animal as machine/ body modification/hacking. i did like the story about the cars a lot. i'm eager to get further into this.

she's also made me curious about guillaume dustan-- whose death launches the book. anyone here read him?

[dead_battery]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...ance-threshold

You couldn't make it up.

tax cuts for the rich, workfare and riot police batons for the rest of us.

here's the thing though - people tolerate the tories because they think "this evil will make us rich". but it isn't working. the economic revival is a lie based on false statistics. they've got nothing and privately they are terrified.

it's working for the 0.1%. there's like a 40% of striving working people and pensioners that think they can move up a bit, but they are deluded. the individualist "fuck everyone but my bank manager" ethic cannot work because it relies on the masses working and spending enough to prop you up. but there are no jobs and nothing new is coming.

bill gates recently said what i was saying even before him - software is going to replace jobs on a scale people cannot imagine. all those admin and managerial posts will be replaced by algorithms. thatcher thought computers were a "fad" that would bring no economic benefit. the majority of people in the uk and elsewhere are too ignorant of technology to see what is coming. especially tories.

they've got nothing to offer but a return to victorian era inequality. but even that is IMO not sustainable.

global warming is already starting to sink these islands and it will slowly ruin more land and creep up the thames. the next few decades are probably the ones in which the uk and parts of europe loses its power as china and russia rise.