I don’t usually write about local politics on this blog. But why not? Here’s my prediction for next Tuesday’s Burlington,* Vermont, mayoral election. Let this be a test of how good, or bad, I’ve gotten at observing my city’s politics. (For outsiders: this is the city where Bernie Sanders cut his political chops as mayor […]
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Local election call
Posted in Politics, tagged Ali Dieng, Burlington, local politics, Max Tracy, Miro Weinberger, Vermont on February 26, 2021 | 3 Comments »
Civil crisis, media, & the future of hegemony
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, tagged cultural hegemony, culture wars, Fairness Doctrine, George Lakoff, illiberalism, media ecologies, media ecology, media hegemony, media regimes, political polarization, Trumpism, Walter Cronkite on January 12, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
There’s a fairly straightforward narrative about media and cultural hegemony in the United States that most scholarly observers have come to largely agree on (with the usual spectrum of variations in emphasis), but that more of the public ought to be aware of. It accounts for how we got here, into this situation where media […]
Mob politics, killer selfies, and the future of social media: an ecotopian perspective
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, tagged bioregionalism, Capitol insurrection, cell phones, ecocriticism, ecocultural theory, ecopolitics, ecotopia, ecotopian criticism, Googlization, media ecologies, media ecology, media politics, QAnization, surveillance, surveillance capitalism, Trumpism, twitter, voluntary mass self-surveillance on January 10, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Two points of social media use call for more attention as we make sense of this week’s events at the U. S. Capitol. 1) Videos and selfies from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rallies are circulating online and making it easier to identify those who participated in the attempted coup at the Capitol. Images created and […]
No surprises
Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics, tagged 01-06-21, Capitol, climate denialism, disinformation, far right, fascism, hope, image war, information war, insurrection, January 6 2021, meme magic, QAnon, right-wing media, Trump, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome, Trumpism, Trumplan, U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. on January 7, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
I am an academic who researches, writes, and teaches about the human relationship with the ecological environment within which we live and on which we depend. I recognize that that relationship is deeply troubled, and I want to be working on untroubling it. Politics — the shaping and implementation of policy to steer collective and […]
“I am become Death…”
Posted in Politics, tagged Bhagavad Gita, democracy, Donald Trump, media, public education, public media, public sphere, Trumpism on November 12, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Trump’s parting electoral tantrum puts the exclamation mark on the fundamental flaw of democracy that his presidency has revealed: that a poorly informed electorate can willingly choose its own demise (even as it recites platitudes to the contrary). Two institutions are most implicated in this flaw: public education and the mass media. In well functioning […]
Well, here we go…
Posted in Politics, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump, electoral, Joe Biden, media coverage of U.S. politics, media ecology, negative visualization, political conflict, premortem, Stoicism on November 2, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Cross-posted from e2mc. Note that this post takes the Stoic strategy of preparing for the worst, so as to be pleasantly surprised when the worst fails to come to pass. Deep breath, Americanos. Let’s brace ourselves for what may be the messiest, most litigious and disruptive Interregnum in U.S. history. (“Interregnum” = the 79 day interval between […]
Generalized Floating Dread Event (GFDE)
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, affective contagion, affective politics, dark flow, dark matter, emptiness, political affect, revolutions, Zizek on October 30, 2020 | 2 Comments »
Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose […]
The secret ballot “id”: affect & electoral politics
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged 2020 election, affect, affective politics, Donald Trump, electoral politics, emotional politics, id, Joe Biden, political id, presidential debates, secret ballot, U.S. cultural politics on October 23, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Last night’s presidential debate was, in many ways, superfluous: if a U.S. citizen had not already made up their mind who they will vote for (or not already voted), it’s because they haven’t been paying attention. But there is one factor pollsters and predictors of every stripe have not gotten good at accounting for, which […]
The “what does it have to do with me?” defense
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged colonialism, coloniality, Decolonization, genocide, George Floyd protests, Mignolo, modernity, racism, slavery, Ukraine, United States, US history, white privilege, whiteness, xenophilia, xenophobia on June 11, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.) The […]