Up against the wall.

I’ve felt fairly sympathetic to the UK rioters, all things considered, and coincidentally, here comes Slavoj Zizek with a much, much more eloquent (and smarter) take that dovetails fairly nicely¹:

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?
…
The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Via @Longformorg.

Linkwad.

1. Apple’s next iPhone will launch in early October, might or might not have LTE.
2. Slate on the BART mobile-phone shutdown: “the security of the state, as a goal, is as amoral as the machinery behind it.”
3. Even truer now than it was in 2007: young people are being screwed by the boomers.
4. How the world failed Haiti. Related: Slavoj Zizek’s thoughts on charity.

Linkwad.

1. Designing things to fail better.
2. A torture lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld will go forward. Who knows if this will ultimately accomplish anything–I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it reach the Supreme Court (which most likely means it’ll die there).
3. Edgar Allen Poe house museum is in trouble.
4. Leftover carnitas + the first NFL preseason games = pulled pork empanadas.

C.R.E.A.M.

By far the most interesting nugget from this interview:

The buildings in the 70s and 80s that housed the peeps were mostly place-holders, because porn shops were willing to pay two to three times the rent. The owners were waiting for things to turn around so that the developers could demolish them and make real money. The live girl racket was just a small pawn in the redevelopment game. The peepshow was really just a odd little hustle—a weird loophole in the vice laws.

If that’s not a Markets in Everything post waiting to happen, I don’t know what is.

Linkwad.

1. Although Matt Yglesias has a very good point about rising relative incomes and wedding costs, it’s cold comfort to the soon-to-be-married. Also, the answer to his last three questions is “Well, yeah.”
2. Stuxnet was probably a bad idea for reasons exactly like this.
3. Glenn Greenwald thinks Obama really wanted the awful, terrible, no-good debt ceiling deal.
4. An introduction to the Internet freedom movement.