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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Here & there (or democracy is coming, sort of)

Posted in Academe, Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, Politics, Visual culture on February 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

To the USA, perhaps… But mostly neither here nor there… There’s an interesting flare-up occurring over Moammar Gaddafi’s son Saif’s Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, involving respected political theorists David Held and Benjamin Barber, among others. (See Eric Schliesser for more.) The issues it raises are as old as the oldest profession: universities’ […]

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Tax evasion & the dismantling of the public sector

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2011 | 8 Comments »

Johann Hari’s article in The Nation on How to Build a Progressive Tea Party is one of the more exciting and inspiring pieces of news I’ve read recently. Hari recounts how a group of Twitter-linked citizens outraged by David Cameron’s £7 billion cuts to social programs when a single company, cellphone giant Vodafone, was allowed […]

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Spreading revolution

Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , on February 15, 2011 | 3 Comments »

The New York Times has a couple of nice pieces on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions: an interactive account of the key events and a more detailed piece outlining the role of the different protest groups, bloggers and Facebook-ites, nonviolent resistance tactics, and the Obama administration. A few quick thoughts: 1) Max Forte is right […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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.

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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 […]

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261 millionnaires in Congress

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

No comment. (Except this.)

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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 […]

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inside job

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

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 that […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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