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Posts Tagged ‘Trump’

Trump’s border frenzy: a tale of two elephants

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2025 | Leave a Comment »

As a Canadian who has long valued this country’s differences from the United States, I’m as concerned as anyone about the Trump administration’s threats of annexation toward Canada. This is mostly for obvious reasons: threats of annexation against sovereign nations violate Article One of the United Nations charter, and these threats are being made in […]

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End of the Interregnum, or just the beginning of its end?

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2025 | Leave a Comment »

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 […]

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We are all dispensable: For a revolution of the means of information

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Moving fast and breaking things? Critical resources

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

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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 […]

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No surprises

Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Thought exercise (democracy & reality)

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , 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, […]

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Network propaganda, American style

Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve just begun teaching a media course, entitled Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics, which I designed several years ago but have revised this year to focus on the issues of our current moment: the upcoming election, the Covid-19 pandemic, the crisis of racial justice, and what some have called the “crisis of information.” Preparing for […]

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More conspiratology: the internet as monochord & storm machine

Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2020 | 5 Comments »

At a time when the U.S. itself appears on the brink of collapse — with riots in the streets, a pandemic crippling the country’s heath care system and wreaking havoc on its economy, a president tweeting out nods of recognition to his QAnon fan base and hinting at “the Storm” that is coming — the sense-making apparatus of digital media is rife with opportunities for disinformational entrepreneurs to make headway in various directions. […]

The internet is like a huge instrument — a hyper-complex, Robert Fluddian monochord, that works by allowing for an infinity of connections through which flow the sounds and vibrations of human emotional and affective contagion. When protests erupt across the country over the senseless killing of a black man in Minneapolis, the time scale in which large-scale action occurs speeds up and become affect-driven time, not a time in which collective deliberation is really possible. This means that informational, and therefore “disinformational,” bursts into that monochord become all the more powerful.

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Denial, incompetence, & depravity

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

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“Illiberalism” & the utopian deficit

Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 17, 2018 | 4 Comments »

An off-the-cuff essay, written not for any particular occasion, but just to get it out of me. It’s probably mostly common knowledge (among people on the green left), just maybe not well articulated yet, and too easily forgotten. Politically, we’re all playing a little catch-up these days. Understanding the apparent global turn we are seeing […]

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On civility

Posted in Cultural politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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