UKR-TAZ announces a new mission: The concept of the TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone, comes from “ontological anarchist” writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson). It is intended to indicate a space of liberation, a space which is at once physical and real, if temporary, and metaphysical — a space of consciousness outside of the […]
Archive for February, 2014
Mission accomplished… not
Posted in Politics, tagged Maidan, TAZ, Ukraine on February 23, 2014 | 2 Comments »
Still warming
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged weather on February 23, 2014 | 1 Comment »
For all the complaints many of us in the U.S. heard or voiced about the cold, this past January was the fourth warmest on record, and the 38th consecutive January and 347th consecutive month (almost 29 years) that global temperatures have been above the average for the 20th century. More here and here.
Ukraine & the threat of direct democracy
Posted in Politics, tagged anarchism, direct democracy, Politics, revolution, Ukraine on February 22, 2014 | 3 Comments »
“Power to the millions, not to the millionaires” (#Leftmaidan) Three forms of democracy vie with each other in Ukraine today. The first of these is what we might call authoritarian democracy. This is a hybrid of democracy and authoritarian rule, in which partially developed democratic institutions can be relatively easily played off against each […]
Apocalypstickle?
Posted in Politics, Visual culture on February 21, 2014 | Leave a Comment »
Just as environmental media have a penchant for the spectacle of “disaster porn,” so does political media reveal a strong attraction to what Politico’s Sarah Kendzior, in “The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine,” calls the “apocalypstickle.” An ugly word for political observers’ weird fascination with apocalyptic imagery. Brueghel, Bosch . . . and […]
‘Country under reconstruction’: Ukraine & the society of the provocation
Posted in Politics, tagged activism, post-Soviet, provocation, revolution, Russia, Ukraine on February 7, 2014 | 14 Comments »
“COUNTRY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” (from Ukrainian anarchist group Blackmaidan) “It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside world has stopped working; as if we have been confronted momentarily with the formless grey emptiness of the screen itself…” (Slavoj Zizek, describing the scene outside a traveling couple’s window in Robert […]
Acceleration & the (long?) Now
Posted in Uncategorized on February 6, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Starting a discussion on these topics here.
Climate denial’s “dark money” smoke machine
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, Science & society, tagged climate denialism, global warming on February 3, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Since I was traveling at the time, I failed to note an interesting story that got covered in the science press about the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement. As reported in articles in Scientific American, The Guardian, and elsewhere, a recent peer-reviewed study published in Climatic Science by sociologist Robert Brulle […]
Geoscene
Posted in Uncategorized on February 1, 2014 | 4 Comments »
Over at A(S)CENE, we are starting to read Nigel Clark’s Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet as well as the Punctum Books open-access collection Making the Geological Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life. Clark’s book has attracted some very intrigued — and a few rather ecstatic — reviews from geographers and social theorists, including […]