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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on April 26, 2009 | 34 Comments »

Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that’s coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how both of those dates, along […]

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green frames & nudges

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , on April 26, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Last week’s “Green Mind” issue of the New York Times Magazine shows how behavioral science is making an impact on environmental policy and decision-making. In particular, Jon Gertner’s “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” provides a useful summary of how the trendy fields of behavioral economics and ‘decision science’ are being applied to thinking about climate […]

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amidst the ruins of Motor City

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , on April 13, 2009 | 20 Comments »

As goes Motor City, so should go the world – or at least eco-activists might like to argue that. The archetypal home of American car culture, Detroit, has been decaying for years. It’s now collapsed from a city of two million to less than half of that, and in the process it has opened up […]

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‘After 1968’ & the blessedness of the Buddho-Spinozan

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 11, 2009 | 2 Comments »

There’s a wealth of material in post-marxist and poststructuralist political philosophy to be found at the After 1968 web site, which documents a series of seminars and lectures held in Maastricht over the last few years. You can find texts by Agamben, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere, Baudrillard, Negri, Derrida, Nancy, and others there, though it will […]

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trusting Obama or not

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on April 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

With protests gearing up today to push the Obama administration away from its current timidity with its economic policies (see A New Way Forward and Democracy Now’s broadcast on it), it seems apropos to ask whether and to what extent the Obama administration should be trusted by progressives. Open Left, one of the better progressive […]

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from Huxley to Obama & NLP

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , on April 2, 2009 | 4 Comments »

I’ve mentioned Aldous Huxley here before. This 1958 interview with Mike Wallace shows him to be as broad-rangingly perceptive as anyone at the time – with insightful comments on persuasion techniques, Foucauldian surveillance and control (before Foucault wrote a word about the topic), television (which he thought was already “being used too much to distract […]

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scenes from a recession

Posted in Politics, Visual culture, tagged , on March 26, 2009 | 2 Comments »

There are some great pictures to be found here, at The Big Picture: abandoned subdivisions and building sites, landscapes of unused freight containers (#34) and disused newspaper racks (#30), and “Free Weekly Tours of Quality Foreclosed Homes, Prices Won’t Last!!!” (#9, from Las Vegas). There’s something Ed Burtynskyesque about them… On the topic of Ed […]

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nightmare is over

Posted in Politics on January 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

I moved to the States from Canada in December of 2000, as the Bush-Gore election was being decided. (Almost turned back at the border, thinking, what am I doing?) Now, eight years later, the bad dream is over. Forty years after Martin Luther King’s assassination, that bad dream seems over, too. We can only hope […]

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this moment

Posted in Politics, Visual culture on December 14, 2008 | 1 Comment »

…the moment Wall Street crashed into the woods, its train having pushed as far as it could go off the rails it thought it had built. The photo is from my series of Haida Gwaii nature-culture collaborations, where the detritus of industrial civilization, having reached as far as it could — in this case, the […]

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