Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘neoliberalism’

No common (sense) world

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 12, 2024 | Leave a Comment »

Here are my thoughts on the US election, and on the challenges it presents us, in four parts. 1. The informational catastrophe, and the sadness of it For all the reasons to be dismayed about these elections, there’s one that saddens me most. It’s that all the people (me among them) who’ve given their professional […]

Read Full Post »

The hurricane conspiracy complex

Posted in Climate change, Cultural politics, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 15, 2024 | 1 Comment »

The big question around these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast U.S. is not why they are happening (that’s easy enough to answer), but why so many people find it easier to believe they were artificially generated by the U.S. government, the “deep state,” FEMA, industry, or some euphemistic “they” (and we know who “they” are) […]

Read Full Post »

The colonization of scholarly publishing

Posted in Academe, tagged , , , , , , , on October 3, 2017 | 8 Comments »

For those following the debate over the article “The Case for Colonialism,” the following adds little new. It’s mostly a way of summarizing the issue and collecting some useful links in one place.  There’s a lesson for academia in the flare-up over the Third World Quarterly article “The Case for Colonialism” by Bruce Gilley. The […]

Read Full Post »

Inequality and environmental crisis

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 5, 2017 | 18 Comments »

As part of its Ford Foundation supported Inequality Project, The Guardian is providing a provocative glimpse of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling’s important research into inequality and the environment. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the complexities surrounding causes and potential solutions to the environmental crisis. Read the article here. No surprise that the US […]

Read Full Post »

May Day thoughts: on labor & livelihood

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 1, 2017 | 4 Comments »

May Day (Beltane, Walpurga’s Day, et al.) is a good time for reflecting on politics, ecology, and possibility. The following can be considered part of a series on this blog. When neoliberalism is understood as the alliance between economic liberalization and social liberalization — that is, between those who would “liberate” capitalist markets (who sometimes get called fiscal […]

Read Full Post »

In search of silver linings

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2016 | 8 Comments »

So, Donald Trump will be president of the United States and both Congress and Senate will be dominated by Republicans. Environmentalists and social justice activists, almost universally, find this idea horrifying. But there are silver linings to be found amidst the wreckage. Let’s explore a few of them.

Read Full Post »

The human cost of neoliberalism

Posted in Politics, tagged , 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 […]

Read Full Post »

What’s behind the U.K. riots?

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , 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, […]

Read Full Post »

Invictus & the politics of affect

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged , , , on January 2, 2010 | 14 Comments »

There are many things one can say about Invictus: about Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela, Eastwood’s directorial prowess and editorial conceits (e.g., masculinity and its transformation through individual experience), the film’s characterization of post-Apartheid South Africa, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of its portrayal of the actual story of the South African national rugby team’s, the Springboks’, stunning rise to victory in the 1995 World Cup. What interests me most, though, is its depiction of mass affect and collective emotion, which are portrayed in two of the main variants these take in today’s world: sports and politics. [. . .]

The film’s crystal moments, those affect-carrying plateaus or peak moments embodying its main tensions, are those surrounding the combat on the field and its emanation into the crowd: slowed down crunches of bodies against bodies (unprotected, unlike in American football), sweat leaping between them out of their crushing impact, rapid cuts between on-field plays that occur too quickly to be followed and can only be enjoyed as sheer spectacle, and crowds leaping for joy, singing, applauding, and dancing, their emotions spreading like waves across the stadium, the streets, and the nation. [. . .]

Read Full Post »

Skip to toolbar