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Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

Some say the problem in today’s political world is the lack of civility. Others say the problem is civility itself, or the pretense of it (and use of it as a bludgeon), when what is called for is outrage. It seems to me that there is no universal “civility.” Civility is a matter of fitting […]

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Not that this blog has been very active recently, but with Inauguration Day upon us, a little reflection on our situation seems warranted… So, here’s where I see us. If a Clinton-led Democratic administration would have brought to power a coalition of neoliberal plutocrats and social and environmental progressives (with the balance probably tilting towards […]

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I recently found myself in a part of Mississauga, Ontario (a bedroom community of Toronto), in which more than 90% of the visible landscape (excepting the sky) appeared to consist of concrete, in the form of pavement, asphalt, buildings, and such. The remaining 5-10% — rows of evenly spaced short trees, shrubs, a few patches of […]

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“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 […]

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Ukrainian update

Regular readers will know of my interest in Ukraine, where I lived for a year as a Canada-USSR Scholar in 1989-90, and where I’ve visited at least ten times since, for varying lengths of time. I’ve been following events unfolding there from afar, and have begun a blog called UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Autonomous Zone, which […]

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Every violent suppression of dissent is violence against the humanity that is being born. The world to come is at stake in these encounters. That’s what I tweeted last night while watching what looked like the squashing of a revolution, when riot police appeared by the thousands and began moving in on the territory held […]

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Conversation overheard between an ambitious grad student and a simpleminded process-relational philosopher . . .         Jake Wanano-Everton:   Sir, where do you draw the line between what’s real and what’s not real?       Prof. Noah Fewthings:   The only things that are real are the moments of experienced reality — drops of experience, let’s […]

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The metaphor of “occupation” strikes me as a provocative one not only for what the activists in Manhattan and elsewhere are doing, but for what they are struggling against. Some, and perhaps many, of these are people without traditional “occupations,” so they are occupying themselves by re-occupying the public spaces that have been occupied for […]

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While I’ve been too busy to follow the Wall Street occupation very closely, let alone participate in any but the most vicarious ways, I’m encouraged by the persistence of its participants. Isn’t it time Americans started saying basta! to government of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations? Here’s a collection of links […]

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Wall Street occupation

Why are the Wall Street protests not getting the media coverage similar events in other countries, or in Tea Party country, get? (Keith Olbermann asks this, below.)  Discuss. More here and here.

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Okay, it’s just an ad… and for a book that focuses on a single node within a complex, multi-scaled set of relations. But that node ought to be obvious, and the fact that it isn’t tells us as much about the last 40 years as we need to know to start fixing things. More here, […]

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Whatever one may think of Brian Leiter as a philosopher (and I have no strong opinions, not having read any of his books), he has to be commended for having what may be the best philosopher’s blog for conversations on yesterday’s Canadian election. Canadian election, you ask? The comments on his brief post on The […]

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