Limited, Inc.

Unexpected consequences fascinate us here at LI. Last year, we pondered whether the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would actually free the administration to engage elsewhere on its patented path to maximum criminal activity. Well, LI worried in vain. We were not counting on the pure incompetence of the Bush people. Rumsfeld has squandered the army the way Bush squandered the budget surplus. The result is that the army is breaking. The real question is whether the U.S. is going to be in the odd position of spending half a trillion dollars per on the War Department while fielding an army consisting of 100 fatigued frag victims. While the anti-war movement in this country has either hibernated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, suffering the curious death from asphyxiation that befalls mammals who spend too much time with their heads up their assholes – or rallied its invite only, vegan lefty undergrad troops to acts of high, symbolic impotence – the real antiw

In an article on Iranian bloggers in der Spiegel, my friend, the Brooding Persian, got almost a whole paragraph. Congratulations! I told him I’d translate the graf and insert a link "The tone is of absolute earnestness. A blogger who goes under the melancholic moniker of the Brooding Persion writes, commenting on Iran’s nuclear plans, “a country that can’t even keep its public toilets clean shouldn’t be laying a finger on nuclear technology.” The “brooding persian” is stupifyingly learned. He debates the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss and writes clear sighted columns about the spiritual kinship of Iranian and American neo-conservatives. His blog, written in elegant English, burgeons with social-critique. Iranian weblogs give us a unique instance of the human soul under religious dictatorship. Young people who pursue the struggle against the bigotry of the rulers on the internet, speaking of a hollowed out life, are beyond anger. They don’t want to be seen as

I said – or perhaps threatened – that I had two more posts on Nietzsche, having felt a fiery call to deliver my message to the unheeding heathen. He who has ears can get his hat – there is probably some raree blog controversy much more interesting elsewhere. So, without further ado, and taking up where we left off last time: The influence of Nietzsche on the concepts or tactics of fascism is, I think, nill. Tactically, Nazism employed tactics that have spontaneously occured to your average ten year old bully for millenia, amplified by modern technology and enriched with all the bile and acids of ethnic hatred and the bodyslamming effect of the business cycle. Conceptually, even Nietzsche’s most ardent Nazi followers admitted that he was anti-antisemitic, anti-nationalist, and anti-state. These are constants in his work from the post Wagner period to the very end. Nietzsche's closest experience with fascist art and rhetoric -- in the Wagner circle -- made him very unhappy. In atte

As we all know, the Bush administration has been so innovative in the field of corrupt practices, misprision, and fraud, that it is no longer possible to tell the government apart from a RICO target. So we were amused by the latest incident of malfeasance with the intent to defraud the taxpayer. Also, a few lesser lives without the law, i.e., innocent Iraqi lives, were sacrificed -- but on the plus side, another GOP lobbyist has been rewarded for his inherent love of freedom. Freedom is a good thing. Freedom to mark up your invoices for undelivered goods 400 percent is an even better thing. And having friends in high places in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is the best thing of all. A nice little rundown on Custer Battles in Business Week includes the following fun to know and tell facts: a. Custer Battles is formed in 2002 by “former Army Rangers Mike Battles and Scott Custer … before the Iraq invasion to seek rebuilding contracts. Battles, a GOP campaign contributor and a former CIA case w

LI is tempted, at this point, to go ballistically Germanistic and talk about the circle around Stefan George. Lehmann, after dismissing the early wave of Nietzsche interpreters as bunglers who missed the great man’s message, believes that here, finally, with the Aryan brotherhood around George, the proper ecclesia of Nietzsche interpretation finds its footing. Of course, the five hundred thousand printing of Thus Spake Zarathustra, distributed to the troops at the front, planted the seed. One imagines that Elisabeth Nietzsche, finally wealthy, got her revenge in attending the Bayreuth festival in style in the postwar years. Lehmann divides the rightwing school into three divisions, with a cursory glance at what he calls the “inauthentic” school of Nietzsche interpretation, which includes Max Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, Graf Keyslering and Oswald Spengler. About the George circle, the best philosopher in his view was Ludwig Klages. Actually, we have read a little of Klages ourselves. Lehm