Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

More thoughts on Egypt

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on February 11, 2011 | 6 Comments »

Max Forte at Zero Anthropology* has a perceptive assessment of what he takes to be a (Hillary) “Clinton doctrine,” which he describes as the U.S. hedging [its] bets by keeping a foot in almost all camps, by maintaining contact with diverse sectors in a society critical to U.S. national security interests, emphasizing “stability” when regime […]

Read Full Post »

The affective resonance of Tahrir Square

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on February 7, 2011 | 1 Comment »

My thoughts on the “affective contagion” of revolutionary events such as those in Tehran a year and a half ago, or those currently happening in Cairo, have always been somewhat undertheorized. Posthegemony‘s Jon Beasley-Murray points to an exhilarating piece written by his UBC colleague Gastón Gordillo on Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution that is helpful […]

Read Full Post »

Egypt & everywhere

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, tagged , , , on February 1, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Uprisings, revolutions, and sudden political realignments are perfect subjects for process-relational philosophical reflection. Their causes are always somewhat mysterious; historians may reconstruct the events that led up to them, and may come up with theories to account for them, but these almost always remain highly contestable. They are moments when suddenly much more is at stake than is normally the case.
[. . .]
But the effort will have been worth it because, as Antonio says, “To behold such a space is a beautiful thing” and “to unlearn it is impossible.” The role of the theory of self-determination and civil disobedience (alongside the practice of social networking) in these uprisings cannot be underestimated. And every time those streams get watered, they deepen.

Read Full Post »

Capitalism

Posted in Politics, tagged on December 15, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Quick thought after listening to Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” today about the estate tax: Any system, as a coordinated set of actants and relations, will disproportionately favor those of its members who know how to work it for their own benefit. A pragmatic egalitarianism will attempt to minimize the opportunities for such disproportionate favoritism, without […]

Read Full Post »

261 millionnaires in Congress

Posted in Politics on November 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

No comment. (Except this.)

Read Full Post »

puppets & mediums in the battle over Amerika

Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , on November 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Jon Stewart does Glenn Beck (again), spinning his George-Soros-as-Darth-Vader routine to its logical culmination… “Only Rupert Murdoch” — well, with this ragtag bunch of conservative billionnaires, media organizations, PACs, et al. — “stands between George Soros and Amerika.” This is laugh-(or-cry)-out-loud hilarious. Part 1: Part 2: Or watch the whole episode at the Daily Show […]

Read Full Post »

inside job

Posted in Cinema, Politics, tagged , , , , on November 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2DRm5ES-uA?fs=1&hl=en_US It’s not as good a film as I would have liked — there are too many talking heads, and director/interviewer Charles Ferguson (who remains conveniently invisible throughout) has an annoying tendency to look for “gotcha” moments, when his interview subjects hesitate and stumble in answering his questions, as if these provide the smoking gun […]

Read Full Post »

progressive priorities: jobs, movement-building, Jon Stewart

Posted in Politics, tagged , , on November 3, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Now that the election results are in, we can all go back to thinking about what U.S. citizens (and non-citizen residents like me) can do about the sad state of affairs in this country. Gara LaMarche’s and Deepak Bhargava’s recent Nation piece The Road Ahead for Progressives: Back to Basics captures the overall picture quite […]

Read Full Post »

vote

Posted in Politics, tagged on October 27, 2010 | 5 Comments »

Jodi Dean, whose work I respect a lot, won’t vote in the upcoming U.S. elections. The election, she argues, “won’t do anything but secure a false sense of connectedness from those who do vote to the oligarchy that continues to exploit us.” Mark Lance is agreeing with her that voting is the opiate of the […]

Read Full Post »

on Buddhism, objects, Zizek, Morton, etc.

Posted in Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , on October 25, 2010 | 5 Comments »

I’ve been meaning to catch up on the discussions over Buddhism and objects/relations, Slavoj Zizek’s critique of “Western Buddhism,” and related topics, which have been continuing on Tim Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, Jeffrey Bell’s Aberrant Monism, Skholiast’s Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere. I haven’t quite caught up, but here are a few quick notes on […]

Read Full Post »

letter to a Tea Party sympathizer

Posted in Politics, tagged , on October 23, 2010 | 2 Comments »

As another political season (leading to the midterm elections) winds down here in the US, people get wound up. Here’s part of something I wrote to a friend who happens to be a Tea Party sympathizer – which surprised me when I found this out, but life is full of surprises, and meeting them mindfully […]

Read Full Post »

fomenting “rebellion”

Posted in Politics, tagged , on September 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve just read Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on “The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama”, which I’m happy to see is publicly available online. It’s a good summary of what corporate watchers have been saying for years (see, e.g., here and here), but with a lot of interview material updating what the libertarian duo […]

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Skip to toolbar