Clik here to view.
Dedicated, well-armed sociopaths who’ll stop at nothing
1 I’m just waking up. News radio. Listening for the weather. The solemn voice of a commentator: . . . what we’re dealing with . . . dedicated, well-armed sociopaths who’ll stop at nothing to impose...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Representative Democracy is a Waste of Time
Greece is, in many ways, representative of the world right now. Its economy is floundering due to, among other things, bad loans taken out by self-interested ruling parties aided and abetted by Goldman...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Cultural Revolution in Hindsight
I’ve just read The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust, a collection of essays that consider the social, political, economic, and psychological factors that contributed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What might poetry give us?
sometimes I forget what country I’m in I could write poems in bed I think have some Americans look at your awful mov- ie to tell you when you’re wrong & just racist. I got this bug bite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Black Panthers: Revolutions and Dinner Parties
I recently watched Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution. While the documentary is clearly pro-Panther, I nevertheless found it to be a surprisingly critical examination of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eyes on the Street
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ most acclaimed contribution to urban studies in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her “eyes on the street” theory. “[T]here must be eyes upon the street, eyes...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Film, Marxism: Tanner, Berger, Jonas
If now largely ignored, Alain Tanner and John Berger’s 1976 film Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (For Jonas Who Will Be 25 In The Year 2000), remains warm, charming, lovable.[1] And the movie is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Halloween as Social Movement
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the evolution of carnivals; from tribal societies masking and dancing to manufacture...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paris, Terrorism, Religion, Justice
The recent documentary about the Black Panthers called attention, among other things, to that group’s ten-point platform, which included such demands as “We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fun, Football, and Carnality before Paris
♦ ♦ ♦ This post was largely finished before the Paris terror attacks. I criticized costumes that mock and mimic violence. These outfits “cut too close to the bone.” Those words of mid-week...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Class Warfare Poverty Death
Out of the hundred million people living in Soviet Russia, we should be able get 90 million behind us. The others, there’s no talking with them, they have to be annihilated. — Bolshevik leader Grigory...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity
Note: a rough draft of this essay was posted in error mid-week The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Donald Trump the Fascist?
Seemingly every statement regarding Donald Trump in recent weeks either explicitly or implicitly compares him to Hitler. It’s almost as though both social and mainstream media are trying to pay homage...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Brains, Literature, Disposable Selves
The Self is Disposable, Isn’t It? Not for most of us for most of the time. But its reality can be brought into question. There are exotic cases of apparent persons who seem to lack a self....
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Independent” analysis; class warfare (think tanks)
A follow-up to a previous discussion of how experts, and the media that aids and abets them, and the class interests that pay these experts’ salaries—they’re in the mask-making business. A January 26...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Airplanes, environment, capital, giving up!
A.k.a., Littlering There is a strain of environmental thinking that proposes (with more than a little sense) that we need to learn how to do more with less. Or perhaps we need (yet again?) to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Technology in the Age of Inequality
Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trump, de Tocqueville, Democracy, Materialism
Many people in Europe believe without saying, or say without believing, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is that it calls men worthy of the people’s confidence to take charge of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Privacy and Power
Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Consumers, Apprentices, Failed Universities
I have no complaints about living in Maine. I find good music, good restaurants, good friends in the small city of Portland. I’ve taught inland and upstate in Bangor – just this side of Old Town,...
View Article
