By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
BBC News, Beijing

The Chinese government says there is no need to be alarmed. So far, the only deaths reported from the latest bird flu outbreak are 178 wild geese found on the shores of Lake Qinghai earlier this month.

By M. Junaid Alam – Seven Oaks Magazine

John Holloway, well-known left intellectual and author of the popular anarchist polemic Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, recently offered a concise presentation of his strategic vision on revolutionary change at ZNet. In his essay there, he strongly rejects the idea of approaching or seizing the state as an instrument for achieving social change, and encourages the notion of multiplying various kinds of incipient rebellions that bypass the state as the most fruitful path to human self-determination.

BY Federico Fuentes

In 1967, Che Guevara died at the hands of CIA-backed Bolivian soldiers
while attempting to lead a guerrilla struggle in Bolivia. In the small
town where his body was uncovered 30 years later, graffiti is scrawled
declaring: “Che: Alive as they never wanted you to be.”

Stan Goff
May 20, 2005

Almost invariably after I publish a rant or re-post anything that charges up people’s capacity for outrage, I observe a two-fold and contradictory response. Half of that response is “Hell YEAH! This is outrageous!” The other half of the response is almost always, “But what can we mere mortals do?” I can only speculate about the American tendency, pronounced among progressives, to reflexively demoralize oursleves. Something to do with concurrently demobilizing ourselves so we don’t have to do anything except express outrage? So I am not ranting now. I am making a concrete suggestion for anyone who has been repining about not knowing what to do.

by Jessica Benjamin

Submerged beneath the universal claims of [the] individual… is not only his historic and cultural specificity, but also his gender. Whilemost modern theory has considered the masculine identity too self-evident to be mentioned (the patriarchy of gender would compromise his individuality), it is, nevertheless, retained as an “option”: when necessary, it can always be mobilized to exclude or devalue women.

I am writing this open letter to call your attention to the remarks made yesterday, May 17, 2005, to the United States Senate, by British MP George Galloway of the independent Respect Party. I do this because he serves as an example of why your party should be abandoned by the U.S. working class, by U.S. women, by oppressed nationalities in the United States, and by anyone who professes to be a progressive or a leftist.

Mick Leach

[Citation: Leach, Mike. (1994). The Politics of Masculinity: An Overview of Contemporary Theory. Social Alternatives, 12(4), January, pp. 36-37.]

The political and theoretical challenges issued by contemporary feminisrn have provoked a range of cultural responses about men, and about masculinity.

There have been a series of articles published recently in major American newspapers addressing the question of the degree to which men are victims of intimate violence. (Cathy Young , “In abuse, men are victims, too”, published in the Boston Globe, June 16, 2003, and Karen S. Peterson, “Studies shatter myth about abuse”, published in USA TODAY, June 24, 2003).

circa July 7, 2001, on the pen-l list.

After the oil is gone

Say goodbye to your suburban house, yoke up that horse, and stand by to
repel pirates! Author James Howard Kunstler talks about the dire world of
his new book, “The Long Emergency.”

By Katharine Mieszkowski