February 2010
60 posts
“It is a strange moment in jurisprudence. On the one hand, corporations...”
– Corpus Ex Machina (via azspot)
“Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to...”
– Giorgio Agamben (2006) “Metropolis”, tr. Arianna Bove. [via] (via anthropophagous)
January 2010
81 posts
Pinkwashing
Just how aware are you of breast cancer? At least in my experience, it’s virtually the only kind of cancer I see talked about in any mainstream news outlets. I’m not trying to attack anyone who has to deal with the horrific experience of cancer, but the pink ribbon campaigns are approaching it in precisely the wrong way.
Past a certain point, more awareness doesn’t help anyone....
Vancouver's Olympics head for disaster →
hungryghoast:
“The Bailout Games” have already been labelled a staggering financial disaster. While the complete costs are still unknown, the Vancouver and British Columbian governments have hinted at what’s to come by cancelling 24,000 surgeries, laying off 233 government employees, 800 teachers and recommending the closure of 14 schools. It might be enough to make one cynical, but luckily every...
deadmethods asked: do you know of any websites or other publications that keep track of socially and ecologically responsible companies?
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of...”
– from the State Of The Union…. In 1861. (via hungryghoast)
“And we have to look at it in the context of the debt crisis that is occurring at...”
– Naomi Klein
3 tags
“If Marx thought everything was determined by material circumstances he...”
– David Harvey, at the Marxism 2009 conference.
I’m very interested to know what Harvey means by “material circumstances” here. Is he allowing for some possibility of free will (metaphysical libertarianism), because it is in some capacity immaterial? What philosophical basis for...
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Democracy Now: Zelaya to Leave Honduras As Coup Leaders Cleared
In Honduras, ousted president Manuel Zelaya is due to leave the country today after president-elect Porfirio Lobo is sworn into office. Zelaya has taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa since returning to Honduras in September. On Tuesday, the Honduran Supreme Court dismissed all charges against six military...
4 tags
Why You Should Care About Light Pollution
When was the last time you looked up and saw a sky like this?
My best memory of a beautiful night sky was from summer camp, but it pales in comparison to what the stars can look like without mankind around. Maybe I’ve lived too long in suburban New Jersey, but I can’t imagine a time at home when I didn’t see that awful tungsten orange glow above.
Pretty much any major city is...
“The eight-year presidential term of Bill Clinton, a personable, articulate...”
– Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: 2003, p. 426-427
Sounds familiar, wouldn’t you say?
(via thestrain)
Obama Set To Call For Spending Freeze →
Facing voter anger over mounting budget deficits, President Barack Obama will ask Congress to freeze spending for some domestic programs for three years beginning in 2011, administration officials said Monday. Separately, Obama unveiled plans to help a middle class “under assault” pay its bills, save for retirement and care for kids and aging parents.
The spending freeze would apply...
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Today, I read the introduction to Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century by Catherine A. Lutz and the first few pages of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. The problem with working in a bookstore is it affords you the chance to start books, but you almost never get to finish them.
“Of course, the liberal instinct is to blame this urge to compromise on the lack...”
– Doug Henwood (via azspot)
4 tags
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban...”
– David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, p. 23 (Sept. 2008)
“What this saga translates into in real life can be seen in the stark contrast...”
– Seumas Milne (via jhnbrssndn)
To Create Jobs, Build Public Transit, Not Highways →
azspot:
If we’d spent as much federal stimulus money on public transportation as we spent on highways, we would have created twice as much work and put a bigger dent in the unemployment rate.
That’s the analysis of stimulus spending by Smart Growth America, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and U.S. PIRG, the public-policy lobbying group. Smart Growth America found that every billion...
“And of Michelle Malkin you said “a mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk,...”
– Jon Stewart as Keith Olbermann on Keith Olbermann (via soupsoup)
Defense Secretary Robert Gates Confirms Blackwater...
jeremyscahill:
By Jeremy Scahill
In an interview with the Pakistani TV station Express TV, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that the private security firms Blackwater and DynCorp are operating inside Pakistan. “They’re operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,” Gates said, according to a DoD transcript of the interview. “There are rules concerning the contracting companies....
If we treat money as protected speech under the first amendment, then how can “free speech” still be meaningful?
U.S. court rejects corporate campaign spending... →
unburyingthelead:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court struck down on Thursday long-standing limits on corporate spending in U.S. political campaigns, such as this year’s congressional races and the 2012 presidential contest.
The ruling was a defeat for the Obama administration and the campaign finance law’s supporters who said that ending the limits would unleash a flood of corporate...
“Profound geographic transitions have occurred over the past 30-plus years as the...”
– Roger Balm, Bent Planet
It’s pretty cool that my geography class has a unique textbook. It’s also pretty cool that my professor seems to be taking a direct shot at neoliberalism in its introduction.
A class in which the professor plays the Internationale on the first day is a good class.
“The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title of repetition of the French...”
– Slavoj Žižek
3 tags
While shelving books yesterday, I was repeatedly distracted by the books for 790:395:06 - Political Science Seminar (section 6). The full list:
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy
The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.) by Robert C. Tucker
Essay on Liberation by Herbert Marcuse
Love of Worker Bees by Alexandra Kollontai
Socialism Unbound by...
Numbers →
azspot:
GDP of Haiti: $8.5 billion.
Goldman Sachs bonus pool: $20 billion.
“personally i’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions...”
– noam chomsky, business today (may, 1973) (via nosex)
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Haiti, "Classquakes," and American Empire →
Earthquakes are natural developments, but vulnerability to them is richly anthropogenic (“man made”) and is not spread evenly across the fractured and intersecting global landscapes of race, class, and empire. As Mike Davis pointed out in his 2006 book Planet of Slums, a chilling expose of the atrocious living (and dying) conditions that US.-led neoliberal capitalism has imposed on...
Anonymous asked: I've recently exposed myself to David Harvey and began studying social movements--especially anti-capitalism movements. Since then I've been feeling a huge contradiction, I see the injustices that are going on due to American capitalism, yet I'm operating within this system and thus feel like my actions are supporting it. I'm no millionaire, but food will never be a...
“The Devil probably could have cut Haiti a better deal than the French did …...”
– Haiti Is Cursed — By Our Ignorance (via sedatedm:soupsoup)
I got the reading list for 506:361 - History of Socialism & Communism today. The two core texts are Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire: 1875-1914 & Age of Extremes: 1914-1991, and the supplementary books are John Eaton’s Political Economy: A Marxist Textbook & John Somerville’s Philosophy of Marxism. It’s a little intimidating, given that this is the first...
Anonymous asked: What do you think about Marshall McLuhan?
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Democracy Now - Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again
Journalist and author Naomi Klein spoke in New York last night and addressed the crisis in Haiti: “We have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy—which is part natural, part unnatural—must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti and, two, to push through unpopular...
deliciousmaliciousness asked: I appreciate your well thought out response, and apologize that mine will not be as stunning of an intellectual piece. In talking about the process that goes into the two, traditional art vs. advertising. Being a student of neither, I look at the process which goes into creating the two. Is creating a focus group less or more involved than studying a live model or taking reference shots? Is...
7 tags
deliciousmaliciousness asked: Isn't there an argument that advertising is a higher form of art?
The Disposable Worker →
azspot:
You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal. Their situation isn’t likely to improve soon; some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That’s because this recession’s unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of...
“Food sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women.”
– Raj Patel
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Democracy Now: Raj Patel on “The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”
Author and activist Raj Patel joins us to discuss his new book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy. “We’ve come to believe that the only way we can value things is by sticking them in a market,” Patel says. “The trouble is, as we’ve seen through this...
thestrain asked: Have you read any Saul Newman and/or Todd May (the poststructuralist-anarchists)? I considered myself a Marxist throughout much of college, until I read their work. In a nutshell, if we critique capitalism and imperialism in terms of power, I'm not sure that that critique should ignore the state form.
Anonymous asked: Do you realize how you will laugh at this blog when you're older? What self-righteous undergraduate garbage!