"Facticity denotes the conditions according to which one’s possibilities are determined and limited by one’s circumstances, one’s “being-in-the world.” [Heidegger's] interest in scholasticism focuses on categories of living language that have no correspondence with objects in the world, like marks of privation and negation and categories for non-existent entities like “Nothing”... the empty word “being” figures at the heart of questions about the generation of sense in everyday human experience.

At this stage the problem of what [Heidegger] calls “the hermeneutics of facticity” lies in the self-reflexive puzzle according to which facticity must be considered, already, as a kind of hermeneutics. Everyday experience already articulates and interprets its world, so that any attempt to interpret facticity would be an attempt to interpret interpretation..."

Heidegger's Life and Work

Bruce Schneier on electronic voting

Napalm used in Iraq

The head of Ohio's elections commision, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, "also co-chairs the Ohio committee to re-elect George Bush... he publicly spearheaded Republican efforts in the state to reduce the number of his fellow African-Americans whose votes would go to the Democrats

In some cases, the courts over-ruled him, and - much to their credit - most black voters stood up his harassing tactics. But Blackwell never stopped trying...

Who Counts in Ohio?

Edward S Herman's landmark essay, The Banality of Evil, has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable... It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."

Normalizing colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners... No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American...

Fallujah, The Us Elections And 9/11

Milosevic wants Clinton, Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Madeleine Albright, and Wesley Clark to testify

How the Media Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rumsfeld

Green & Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount
more...