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 […]
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
The groundlessness of revolution
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged Eastern Europe, Europe, Politics, post-Soviet, revolutions, Ukraine on December 12, 2013 | 3 Comments »
Documenting the act of killing
Posted in Cinema, Politics, Visual culture, tagged atrocities, documentary, Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing on October 23, 2013 | 4 Comments »
The following is reblogged, excerpted and modified, from e²mc. How do films deal with historical atrocities? And how might they enable them in the first place? The Act of Killing is Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling documentary about the perpetrators of the mass murders committed by the Suharto regime’s paramilitary death squads in mid-1960s Indonesia. The filmmakers […]
Take Back the Economy interview
Posted in Politics, tagged Gibson-Graham on February 23, 2013 | 1 Comment »
Society & Space has an interview with the authors of Take Back the Economy, the final book co-written by the geographical-political theory duo J. K. Gibson-Graham, this time with co-authors and Community Economies collaborators Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. Gibson-Graham were Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, authors of The End of Capitalism (As We Know […]
The human cost of neoliberalism
Posted in Politics, tagged Eastern Europe, neoliberalism on December 17, 2012 | 1 Comment »
A new study in The Lancet has determined that mass privatization in former Communist Eastern Europe — what was once called “shock therapy,” but is more usefully considered a form of “shock neoliberalization” — resulted in an excess of about a million deaths in that part of the world. A few quotes from the Oxford […]
A little riot going on
Posted in Politics, Spirit matter, tagged Connolly, global civil religion, globalism, globalization, liberalism, media, progressivism, Pussy Riot on August 22, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Little time this week, unfortunately, for me to keep up with the Pussy Riot conviction (as promised here) or anything else. But I recommend Charles Cameron’s series of posts (six so far, and counting) over at Zenpundit, including his annotated summary of their closing statements. The statements themselves are very lucid and articulate, as one […]
Post-Soviet riot grrls
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged Eastern Europe, Femen, music, protest, Pussy Riot, Ukraine on August 20, 2012 | 6 Comments »
While this doesn’t have much to do with the usual themes of this blog, it is an interesting case study of media culture and political protest (and one that my Ukrainian studies background qualifies me to comment on). It’s the case of Pussy Riot supporter Inna Shevchenko, an activist with the Ukrainian feminist protest group […]
The 1% correlation
Posted in Politics on October 21, 2011 | 1 Comment »
No comments necessary.
For the Separation of Capital & State: 5 Demands
Posted in Politics, tagged banking, finance, Occupy Wall Street on October 21, 2011 | 1 Comment »
This list of demands is simple, yet demanding, as it should be. See below for explanatory notes. Please share these demands widely. In recognition of the primary role played by oversized and deregulated financial institutions in causing the current economic crisis, WE DEMAND: 1) That all persons who have served as directors or chief executives […]
The Occupation
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged activism, Adbusters, anarchism, left, media activism, Occupy Wall Street, Politics on October 19, 2011 | 5 Comments »
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 […]
Reforest Wall Street
Posted in Politics, tagged anarchism, direct action, Politics, Wall Street occupation on October 5, 2011 | 4 Comments »
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 […]
Shaviro responds
Posted in Cinema, Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged affect, Shaviro on September 2, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Steven Shaviro has posted his response to my and three other “curators’ notes” on his Post-Cinematic Affect. The twists and turns of the discussions that have followed each of the daily commentaries have been fascinating. Somehow we’ve gone from a discussion of recent cinema to theorizing about affect and the limitations of recent affect theory […]
What’s behind the U.K. riots?
Posted in Politics, tagged inequality, neoliberalism, Politics, riots on August 10, 2011 | 3 Comments »
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, […]