It’s looking increasingly likely that the last 35 years or so will come to be seen as an Interregnum between two world orders: the Cold War order, which emerged from the ashes of World War Two, and whatever it is that is beginning to envelop us now. The question is whether what is enveloping us […]
Posts Tagged ‘Trump’
We are all dispensable: For a revolution of the means of information
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, tagged information revolution, information society, kleptofascism, media ecology, Musk, revolution, tech oligarchs, techno-fascism, techno-oligarchy, technofascism, Trump on February 16, 2025 | 2 Comments »
There’s a clear lesson for us in the mass firings of federal employees, carried out as part of an administrative coup led by the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, in the country that had up till recently been seen as the paragon of stability and prosperity. That lesson is that we are all dispensable now. In […]
Moving fast and breaking things? Critical resources
Posted in Politics, tagged disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Heather Cox Richardson, political analysis, resistance, Trump, Trump 2.0 on February 3, 2025 | 1 Comment »
With its flurry of perplexing and often contradictory initiatives and statements, Donald Trump’s second presidency is leaving traditional media outlets, along with their tired viewers, overwhelmed and incapacitated (qualities exacerbated by the media outlets’ oligarchic owners’ kowtowing to the new administration). There are still many good journalists doing important work. But there’s also a palpable […]
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 […]
Thought exercise (democracy & reality)
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, tagged democracy, tipping points, Trump on September 11, 2020 | 1 Comment »
See how far you follow my line of thinking here: (1) Democracy (institutional and not just majoritarian/representational) is better than the alternatives. Let’s live with it (and defend it). (2) Democracy as practiced in the U.S. today is partial, compromised, and somewhat muzzled, but still better than the alternatives. Let’s fix it up. (3) Democracy, […]
Denial, incompetence, & depravity
Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged circular economy, climate denialism, climate science, ClimateJustice, eco-religion, National Climate Assessment, Paul Krugman, religious conversion, Republican Party, scientific consensus, Trump on November 28, 2018 | 3 Comments »
For many, President Trump’s babbling and incoherent responses to last week’s National Climate Assessment (“I’m too smart to believe it, just look at our air and water and what those other countries are doing…”), following on from his even less coherent responses to California’s wildfire tragedies (“They should rake more, like the Finns”), merely reconfirm that […]
On civility
Posted in Cultural politics, tagged body politic, civics, civillity, communicative discourse, illiberalism, incivility, left politics, Politics, post-truth, Trump on July 13, 2018 | 3 Comments »
Some say the problem in today’s political world is the lack of civility. Others say the problem is civility itself, or the pretense of it (and use of it as a bludgeon), when what is called for is outrage. It seems to me that there is no universal “civility.” Civility is a matter of fitting […]
Trump vs. the world
Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged Nicaragua, Paris climate accord, Trump, U.S. politics on June 2, 2017 | 2 Comments »
Trump’s speech on his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord included so many questionable statements, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, others have. Among the better fact-checks are the Washington Post’s (this one and this one), FactCheck.org’s, NPR’s, PolitiFact’s, and the Huffington Post’s. Foreign Policy’s summary (which comes from a partisan source, but […]