The Politics of Forgetting
May 13, 2010 politics, reading, theology
Tim Wise has been all over the Web lately with his article, “What If the Tea Party Were Black?” I had my dose of Wise last week via a six-part series on YouTube that contains his 2007 lecture, “The Pathology of White Privilege: Racism, White Denial, and the Costs of Inequality.” The videos are roughly [...]
Tags: Belgium, Christianity, colonialism, Congo, Glenn Beck, history, Hochschild, Joseph Conrad, Leopold, Mother Jones, privilege, racism, slavery, Tea Party, William Sheppard
Obamapocalypse
When the passage of H.R.3590 kicked up a shitstorm two weeks ago, I thought of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story entitled “The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro.” This 1911 piece tells of Arthur Orton, a ne’er-do-well operating under the alias of “Tom Castro.” When he meets fellow conman Ebenezer Bogle, the two men hatch a plan [...]
Tags: Borges, healthcare, Obama
On the Supposed Birth of the Altermodern
Feb 27, 2010 philosophy, politics
Adbusters — the de facto magazine of choice for leftist fundamentalists — has an interesting article by Micah White on the (too oft-heralded) death of postmodernism and the birth of “altermodernism.” I think he gets things half-right, and we’ll start with his conception of postmodernism: “…[A]n essential precept of postmodern philosophy: Western thought has hitherto [...]
Tags: Adbusters, binaries, capitalism, consumerism, corporatism, deconstruction, Derrida, differance, fundamentalism, Lyotard, Marcuse, Marx, Micah White, modernism, postmodernism
The Paradox of Capitalist Realism
Feb 9, 2010 philosophy, politics
“…The politics of Western powers, and of the American government in particular, are utterly destitute of ingenuity…” So says Alain Badiou, in an interview I stumbled upon since my last post. As an interesting complement to that discussion, I read through Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and he coincidentally discussed some of [...]
Tags: Badiou, capitalism, conservatism, consumerism, Deleuze & Guattari, free market, Huxley, imagination, Jameson, Lacan, Mark Fisher, Marx, Marxism, mental health, Orwell, Zizek
An Idiotarian Without Imagination
Jan 25, 2010 philosophy, politics
Little Green Footballs named Glenn Beck their Idiotarian-of-the-Year for 2009, which is a fitting, if obvious, selection. It made me wonder about the Idiotarian-of-the-Decade. My nemesis, G. Walker Bush, is perhaps a too-easy candidate. I’ve ultimately decided that such a ignominious award should go to Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama is best known for “The End of [...]
Tags: anarchism, Bush, capitalism, communism, consumerism, contingency, corporatism, dialectics, economics, fascism, Fukuyama, Glenn Beck, Hegel, history, ideology, imperialism, Leo Tolstoy, metanarratives, neo-conservatism, progress, socialism, violence, war
Decade Recap
Has this been, like, the worst decade ever or what? Time Magazine seems to think so. They don’t hold back: “Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want  just give thanks that it is nearly over.” I’m surprised [...]
Tags: Afghanistan, Eisenhower, Michael Haneke, NYT, Obama, Slavoj Zizek, war
Lessons in Sensationalism (Palin Edition)
Nov 27, 2009 politics
Reddit was all hot-n-bothered yesterday because a Daily Kos blogger (citing another blogger, citing an anonymous blog commenter) says Sarah Palin’s bus tour is a sham & a fraud. More specifically, that Palin has been jetting around to book signings via private plane and only pretending she’s touring the country by bus. Furthermore, there’s the [...]
Tags: Billy Graham, Charity Navigator, Daily Kos, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Franklin Graham, Glenn Beck, Palin, Samaritan's Purse
Maguindanao Massacre
Nov 25, 2009 politics
If you look at a map just right — try squinting or unfocusing — the islands of the Philippines together look like the profile of the head of a donkey. I assure you this is no commentary on the character of the Filipino people. In fact, I was born in a small town in the [...]
Tags: alay dangal, Ampatuan, Cotabato, elections, Maguindanao, massacre, non-violence, People Power, Philippines
Terry Eagleton on Waking the Dead
Nov 14, 2009 philosophy, politics
Speaking of Walter Benjamin, the eminent Terry Eagleton has an article in New Statesman entitled “Waking the Dead” about Benjamin and history. What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives [...]
Tags: history, memory, New Statesman, nostalgia, Taleb, Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin
Republican Jesus Invites You to Read the Constitution
Speaking of great art (and blasphemy), you simply cannot top this: This is One Nation Under God by Jon McNaughton, who is the Luke Skywalker to Thomas Kinkade’s Darth Vader. Most of what you need to know about this masterpiece is made plain when you see that one of the “positive” characters is holding Cleon [...]
Tags: Americanism, art, Christianism, constitution, Jesus, Kinkade, kitsch, Republicans, Skousen
What Life Was Like
Oct 18, 2009 politics, television, videos
Maudlin showman Glenn Beck has the blogosphere yapping over a new schlocky spiel that features saccharine eulogizing for a mythical lost era of innocence and sweetness. In a popular YouTube clip from last Thursday’s show, Beck is seen tearing up repeatedly while fondly remembering “what life was like” during “simpler times.” The insidious nature of [...]
Tags: advertising, Coke, commercials, consumerism, corporatism, Fox News, Glenn Beck, kitsch, Kodak, nostalgia, postmodernity, simulacra, simulacrum
It Felt Like a Trap
Oct 16, 2009 movies, politics, videos
I’ve spent the last couple of days of soaking up more films by Adam Curtis, one of the best living documentary filmmakers. Last year I watched The Power of Nightmares; earlier this year I saw The Century of the Self; lately I’ve been working through his two most recent: The Trap (2007) and It Felt [...]
Tags: Adam Curtis, Algeria, anthropology, Blair, Bush, Cambodia, capitalism, CIA, Clinton, Cold War, communism, conservatism, consumerism, Damon Albarn, documentaries, economics, free market, game theory, Hayek, ICM, John Nash, Lee Harvey Oswald, logic, neo-conservatism, poker, Prisoner's Dilemma, psychiatry, psychology, rationality, Reagan, revolution, Saddam Hussein, selfishness, Thatcher
God’s Word Has a Liberal Bias
Oct 8, 2009 Cedarville, politics, theology
The Conservative Bible Project is a tragi-comic effort by some politically conservative Christians to produce a translation paraphrase of the Bible that removes/edits anything that can even remotely be considered “liberal.” It’s not worth writing much about this because the problems with this approach should be so LOLobvious that I won’t waste my time. I [...]
Tags: beatitudes, bias, Bible, Conservapedia, conservatism, justice, liberalism, non-violence, pacifism, peace, prejudice, war, WorldNetDaily, Worldview Weekend
The Least of These: Buenos Aires (Pt. 1)
Sep 12, 2009 Argentina, politics, theology
It won’t take long visiting Buenos Aires to discover that not everyone’s living large in this “Paris of the South,” even if you’re comfortably sequestered in a posh condo in Palermo or a swanky hotel in Puerto Madero. Argentina’s unemployment rate is currently lower than that of the United States, but this country’s own painful [...]
Tags: activism, anarchism, beggars, capitalism, cartoneros, communism, consumerism, favelas, homeless, IMF, Orwell, poverty, public space, recycling, slums, urbanization, villas
Unconscionable Math
Aug 5, 2009 politics
Post-of-the-week is an entry by “Taunter” that’s blowing up the internets. His must-read essay entitled “Unconscionable Math” explains the healthcare industry’s practice of canceling your policy — known as “rescission” — right when you need it most. The money quote: If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases – the top [...]
Tags: corporatism, healthcare, HMO, probability, rescission, statistics
The Perils of Sloganeering (healthcare edition)
Jul 31, 2009 politics
There’s so much political stupidity on Facebook that I have to just ignore 99% of it. But yesterday I noticed a very conservative friend — known for his opposition to universal healthcare in any form — quip that “the city of Pittsburgh has more MRI machines then [sic] all of Canada…” I took a particular [...]
Tags: acute care, Canada, developed nations, healthcare, hospitals, infant mortality, life expectancy, MRI, MRI machines, OECD, Pittsburgh, single-payer, universal healthcare
Dangerous Knowledge
Jul 26, 2009 movies, philosophy, politics
I guess I’m on a philosophy film kick. The latest was the BBC’s Dangerous Knowledge, a documentary on mathematicians Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing — four geniuses whose neuroses drove them fatally mad. It’s debatable the extent to which their respective theories made them insane — the film obviously plays this [...]
Tags: fascism, Georg Cantor, Germany, Godel, Hitler, logic, Ludwig Boltzmann, mathematics, modernism, Nazism, philosophy, postmodernism, Prussia, Third Reich, Turing, WWI, WWII
Examined Life
Jul 25, 2009 movies, philosophy, politics, videos
I finally got to see Examined Life, a pseudo-intellectual documentary that aims to make philosophy a tad more accessible. The film uses some of academia’s rock stars to talk shop outside of normal confines, which is interesting, but probably still of limited appeal. We get, in order: Cornel West on philosophy Avital Ronell on alterity [...]
Tags: alterity, Avital Ronell, Cornel West, cosmopolitanism, deconstruction, ecology, ethics, feminism, Judith Butler, justice, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Otherness, Peter Singer, philosophy, politics, revolution, Slavoj Zizek, social contract, Socrates
Anarcho-Bokononism
Jul 3, 2009 politics
Ok, there’s no such thing as anarcho-Bokononism. But Bokononism, the fictional true religion created by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, does have some interesting similarities with Christian anarchism. Perhaps the most obvious is the Bokononist repudiation of granfalloons, or false communities. A “textbook example” of a granfalloon (or false karass) is the association of Hoosiers, [...]
Tags: anarchism, Bokononism, Caesar, Cat's Cradle, Christianity, government, Vonnegut
The Great American Bubble Machine
Jul 2, 2009 politics
Matt Taibbi has a really excellent article in Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs and their financial tomfoolery: “The Great American Bubble Machine.” As usual, Taibbi has good research and good wit: “[Goldman Sachs] is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” [...]
Tags: capitalism, Eliot Spitzer, Goldman Sachs, housing bubble, junk bonds, Matt Taibbi, recession, Rolling Stone, stock market, subprime mortgages, tech bubble, Wall Street