August 2011
2 posts
The Personal is the Political (again)
At least, as it concerns my blogs. I’ve decided to stop branching my opinions between two different blogs. While I have been thrilled with the way this blog has developed, I feel like a unified blog will ultimately be a more interesting read, and give me a more coherent way of expressing my views. I think it will also focus my writing more, so the overall content will be of a higher quality....
Aug 21st
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“There is one common account which can perhaps be disposed of here; the view that...”
– Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 80 (footnote #1).
Aug 3rd
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July 2011
4 posts
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Prison Economics Help Drive Arizona Immigration... →
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry. The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way...
Jul 19th
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What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public... →
While I don’t much care for the headline, or for the way that Madrigal constantly juxtaposes the library with media companies (it’s not a good comparison), this article is a fantastic exploration of what a non-profit organization is capable of.
Jul 12th
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“One of the things I’ve found striking in this discussion is the tendency for...”
– Construction and Materialism (via @ibogost)  (via dropouthangoutspaceout)
Jul 5th
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Open Source Ecology | Global Village Construction... →
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the...
Jul 5th
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May 2011
18 posts
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May 28th
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May 26th
3,696 notes
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“There are lots of useful things we can do to rearrange daily life in the USA...”
– James Howard Kunstler (via azspot)
May 24th
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May Day International | NEW: The Academy is the... →
jhnbrssndn: “The institutions themselves are a key part of the problem. The Left must not content itself with fighting a rearguard action merely to mitigate the successive waves of educational neoliberalisation, but must reclaim the university along the lines Chomsky proposed over 40 years ago. We have the opportunity, as the final nail is driven into the coffin of the public university, to...
May 12th
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May 12th
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Walker wants private sector to run assistance... →
Texas started using a private company in 2005 to screen medical and food assistance applications. By 2010, there were 56,000 unresolved food stamp applications, according to a report by the Dallas Morning News. In addition, 37 percent of all applicants — and more than 50 percent of applicants in the greater Dallas and Houston areas — were not told whether they qualified for benefits within 30...
May 11th
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Banks Are to Blame for Rising Food Costs
mediafreakgodicon: What’s behind the spiraling cost of food? It’s not just oil and the burgeoning appetites of Americans. As Frederick Kaufman, the author of A Short History of the American Stomach explains in an article in this month’s Foreign Policy, titled “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis”: Since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, there has been a 50-fold increase in...
May 11th
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amory’s 17-point guide to graduate school, or ... →
threepennypolly: 12. After surviving the indignities of graduate school, you will gain a little bit of status, prestige, and financial security as faculty. However your academic work will continue to be demoralizing. You feel that you must master and keep up with an impossible amount of material. You will never know enough and you will live in fear of getting...
May 10th
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“In transportation, we are shying away from major new projects like high-speed...”
– Yonah Freemark, “A Note on the Future of American Transportation”
May 9th
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Vermont closing in on single payer - Ezra Klein -...
ziatroyano: Kevin Outterson is an associate professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University, as well as a blogger at the Incidental Economist. He’s also been following the Vermont health-care reform process in some detail, and is one of fairly few people who has actually read the 141-page single-payer bill that the governor is poised to sign. Earlier this afternoon, he...
May 9th
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Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s... →
tsparks: Via: Guernica Mag
May 7th
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“We are, if the president is serious here, a nation that has narrowly constricted...”
– Tim Wise, “Killing One Monster, Unleashing Another: Reflections on Revenge and Revelry”
May 3rd
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Graffiti on Portland mosque under investigation →
Portland police are investigating anti-Islam graffiti painted onto the Maine Muslims Community Center on Anderson Street. The graffiti included: “Osama today, Islam tomorow (sic),” “Long live the West” and “Free Cyprus.” The letters were written in maroon paint on the mosque’s gray cement block wall. The graffiti was written sometime between late Sunday...
May 2nd
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ourtropes: that there are masses of flag waving white people gathering in the streets outside the white house (and possibly other places) may be the most unsettling revelation of the night. 
May 2nd
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ideasandopinions asked: Do you have any Socialist/Communist/Anarchist blogs you'd recommend following?
May 1st
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Anonymous asked: Hi Andrew. Thank you for keeping this tumblr firstly, you make me want to get one too. But of course, laziness dictates otherwise. :) I consider myself leaning towards the left too, but as I read more into Marxism, I find it increasingly a theory that appeals to the underclass as an overly-simplistic explanation of their disposition, not a rigorous and systematic way of analysis. It comes across...
May 1st
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May 1st
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“Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them...”
– Bertolt Brecht
May 1st
April 2011
27 posts
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David Harvey - Nice Day for a Revolution →
Why May Day should be a date to stand up and change the system May Day is the occasion we celebrate the grand achievements of the workers of the world in making our world a far, far better place to live in. There is, unfortunately, not too much to celebrate these days. The past 30 years are littered with battles and skirmishes that have resulted in defeat after defeat for organised labour. A...
Apr 30th
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Now that national news outlets have picked up the story, the student union will be having a press conference today at noon (EST). We were also ordered a pizza by some wonderful people in Madison, Wisconsin in a show of solidarity.
Apr 28th
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NY Times - Students at Rutgers Occupy a Building →
These are my friends! They are still in the building at the time of this writing. Given that the newly-elected student government is overwhelmingly affiliated with the student unions, this is quite an excellent way to introduce the new student administration.
Apr 28th
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“This brings us to the first of the three legacies of the Jacobsian turn: It...”
– Thomas J. Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” Design Observer
Apr 27th
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The rally for which I made a flyer has just become a rally to support the students currently occupying the administration’s office in Old Queens, one of the original campus buildings at Rutgers. My friends in the student union are having a ‘study-in’ to protest the administration’s complicity with the gradual privatization of the university.
Apr 27th
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Apr 24th
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Apr 23rd
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We're #1 -- Ten Depressing Ways America Is... →
nosex: Let me make it clear at the outset. I too believe in American exceptionalism, although I don’t think God has anything to do with it. But I suspect my perspective will find little favor among Republicans in general and Tea Party members in particular. For I believe that America is exceptional in the advantages we’ve had over other nations, not what we’ve done with those...
Apr 23rd
106 notes
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Test Tube Truths →
Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it. He does not wish to engage “more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy”, he explains in a footnote, because he did not develop his arguments “by...
Apr 22nd
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“The dogmas are tediously familiar: All multiplicity, decentering, or dispersion...”
– Terry Eagleton, “Couples Therapy,” Artforum
Apr 19th
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“There are other ways in which, if people understand and think about object-given...”
– Derek Parfit, On What Matters, p. 462-463
Apr 19th
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“In Pakistan, when we hear Obama’s rhetoric on Libya, we can only laugh. If...”
– Fatima Bhutto
Apr 19th
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“More generally, qualitative methods such as interactive interviews and...”
– Henry Wai-chung Yeun, “Critical realism and realist research in human geography: a method or a philosophy in search of a method?” Progress in Human Geography 21,1 (1997) p. 57
Apr 17th
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“Philosophy is a business where one learns to live with spindly brown grass in...”
– Fred Dretske
Apr 16th
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“I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to...”
– Bertrand Russell
Apr 15th
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“Finally, I also think we have to ask ourselves what kind of practices would...”
– Keith Basset, “Is There Progress in Human Geography? The problem of progress in the light of recent work in the philosophy and sociology of science,” Progress in Human Geography 23,1 (1999) p. 37–38 The honors thesis proposal is coming up soon.
Apr 15th
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Apr 15th
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Apr 9th
11 notes
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“…but it is harmful to overlook the fundamental identity of the social...”
– Alan Donagan, “Historical Understanding and the History of Philosophy” The writings on the philosophy of geography are pretty thin on the ground, but it seems that many approaches from the philosophy of history are relevant to the research I want to do. History and geography deal with...
Apr 9th
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University needs participation, not spectacle →
I got a letter published in my school’s newspaper, The Daily Targum. A bit of background: RUPA, the student-run programming association, recently hosted Jersey Shore’s Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi for two events on campus, which cost RUPA $32,000. It was very popular, with 2,000 students attending two sold-out shows. A controversy was ignited, however, because the school...
Apr 8th
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Awesome "guerrilla urbanism" ideas for... →
Apr 7th
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The City that Ended Hunger →
nosex: To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in...
Apr 6th
72 notes
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“Art is important only to the extent that it helps the liberation of our...”
– Elizabeth Catlett, 1971 (via forexample)
Apr 5th
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Apr 4th
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lointaine-3 asked: Thought this might interest you. It's a talk at the Brecht Forum in NYC featuring Grace Lee Boggs.

http://brechtforum.org/civicrm/event/info?id=11899&reset=1
Apr 3rd
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“There’s an opportunity for a new society to be built on people who are...”
– Grace Lee Boggs
Apr 3rd
14 notes