Egypt bans flogging in jails

[cgrimes at rawbw.com]

Those god-damned Human rights groups are just providing cover for the
New Imperialism. These NGOs are just "mendicant orders" like the
Dominicans and Jesuits of old. In reality its the religious zealots of
Egypt who have forced the government to mend its ways. Of course,
if/when they take power they'll reinstitute torture but that's besides
the point.

Peter
-------

Yes, I got up to about that part of Empire. But you know, you have to
have worked in something like NGOs or community service projects to
see how close to an accurate assessment the concept of mendicant order
is to the realities.

The conceptual function is something like the humanitarian pretense of
volunteer organizations. For example the Bush administration response
to the WTC victims was to hand them off to an ad hoc volunteer
effort---almost literally a mendicant order. That's how much the US
govt gave a shit.

I don't want to get too far into it just yet, but I can already see
why Empire pissed off the older more material minded crowd. The one
thing that seems to be conceptually missing is the in-depth
understanding that government, particular the US government has
deliberately constructed Empire in its broad outline, and in its
detail and has been more than just instrumental in its design and
function. I would say that since about the mid-Seventies, Empire is
all the US govt has been about. 

So, provisionally I think Hardt and Negri have missed this kind of
direct `hands-on' view. I think this might be a somewhat deliberate
tract in an attempt to write a more sweeping assessment. After all,
getting into the detailed history of post-Vietnam developments in
geopolitical and technological detail would be a much more vast
undertaking. Following the communications industry, as just one
example would easily cover a book. So I think H&N must have decided to
go the cultural critique route instead, leaving the empirical detail
out.

The trouble with this tract it that it makes it impossible to imagine
how specifically to do battle with these interlocking systems that are
in fact the concrete Empire. 

Also, they do make a point of elaborating Empire as a virtual reality,
which is a kind of intellectual mistake. It would have been more clear
what they were doing, if they had grounded this so-called virtual
reality in an already well defined and understood cultural matrix. As
it is so far, they have made their construction a kind of imaginary
entity, and therefore posited it beyond direct engagement.

Gotta go back to work

Chuck Grimes