CALL ME MAGGIE

Category: Control

  • Debtfare: the Commodification of Student Debt

    Debtfare: the Commodification of Student Debt

    Despite the uneasy relationship between the profitable student loan industry and growing student debt defaults, students continue to borrow to pay for college, and educational loans are the only form of consumer debt to increase markedly since 2008. The industry has grown steadily over the past several decades in lockstep…

  • Fate and the Wire

    Fate and the Wire

    Tautological understanding is very much a part of The Wire‘s metaphysics. David Simon directs/authors the series structurally along the lines of Greek Tragedy rather than the Shakesperean variety. Essential paths–following the strict law of identity–play a huge role in instantiating a certain fatefulness as decisions by the Greater Powers–City Hall, the…

  • Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto

    Data are increasingly used to govern science. Research evaluations that were once bespoke and performed by peers are now routine and reliant on metrics1. The problem is that evaluation is now led by the data rather than by judgement. Metrics have proliferated: usually well intentioned, not always well informed, often…

  • How Legalizing Psychedelics Creates a Healthy Competition with Organized Religion

    How Legalizing Psychedelics Creates a Healthy Competition with Organized Religion

    Organized religion is almost always a monopoly. Legalization of mind opening substances would lead to a free market of ideas that dogmatic superstructures cannot survive. In a culture that prides itself on a bizarro academic sense of rationality, there is zero rationality in the popular way we view spirituality period.…

  • Charting more diffuse influences across time

    My colleagues Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman and Britt Holbrook continue their work on the philosophy of impact and the impact of philosophy… Today even the humanities are expected to have an impact. In the 2014 REF, for instance, philosophy formed one of 36 ‘units of assessment’. In a previous post…

  • Remember This: Capitalism IS Race

    Remember This: Capitalism IS Race

    … It’s not just a race. Consider the radical beginning of Memorial Day in the now forgotten Decoration Day, a holiday that originally recalled the violent partisan political struggles of emancipation as a central aspect of remembrance. At least until… 1877, [when] the Northern capitalist establishment decisively turned their backs on…

  • Jerome Bruner, “Creative Wholeness” and How We Limit Our Happiness

    If one is to contain the panicking spread of anxiety, one must be able to identify and put a comprehensible label upon one’s feelings better to treat them again, better to learn from experience… Myth, perhaps, serves in place of or as a filter for experiences… …What is the art…

  • Soundthropology: Eno and Graeber in Dialog

    Soundthropology: Eno and Graeber in Dialog

    The 2014 Artangel Longplayer Conversation between Brian Eno and David Graeber took place 7pm, Tuesday 7 October 2014 at the Royal Geographical Society http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBpOXGLn_o

  • The Real Reason the End of the Embargo Will Unleash the Cuban Tiger

    With access to goods and services from the United States curtailed in the context of Cuba’s economic seclusion, the Castro government had little choice but to pursue an internally focused approach to development. This strategy helped Cuba to develop three characteristics that will interact with open trade and investment to…

  • Whatever, Etc. 0027: #Hyperhumanism under the Stoa

    Whatever, Etc. 0027: #Hyperhumanism under the Stoa

    Sitting out on my porch pondering #transhumanism. Does this lead to something beyond humanity? Or just a logical conclusion of amping up our  cravings… #hyperhumanism.

  • Philosophy as Happening

    Philosophy as Happening

    Public philosophy for the Society of Control? Does this have impact? Despite the circus/rave structure of the event, what does it say that the dominant themes were Stoical? The mental marathon billed as “A Night of Philosophy” began in an analytic frenzy at 7 p.m. on Friday as three speakers…

  • Philosophy Department Fights For Survival | Daily Nous

    Philosophy Department Fights For Survival | Daily Nous

    I’m the chair of the only remaining Department of Philosophy at a public university in the state of Louisiana. (LSU has a department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, which is the only other public university in the state where a student can major in philosophy.) Under our current governor, nearly…

  • Tax (Break) Day – Truthout

    Listening to what corporate America has to say about their taxes, one might draw the conclusion that the US tax system places an unequal burden on big business. However, that’s simply not the case: Over the last 50 years, the corporate share of federal revenues has plunged from a high…

  • Dreaming, Fearing, and Second Chances

    Dreaming, Fearing, and Second Chances

    These are the two Americas that [Anand] Giridharadas sees in this story: “An America that still dreams, strives, imagines that tomorrow can build on today — and an America that has resigned to fate, buckled under stress and chaos, lowered expectations. It was Raisuddin, despite being a newcomer, despite being…

  • Good Mental Hygiene

    Good Mental Hygiene

    … begins with understanding how thoughts are like germs. As always, thanks to the buddy-friend-guy and accomplice in crime, Bob Dobbs, for sharing this CPG Grey video with me originally. The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the…

  • Authentic sharing – The New Inquiry

    I thought I should share this… “Sharing economy,” of course, is a gratingly inappropriate terms to describe a business approach that entails precisely the opposite, that renders the social field an arena for microentrepreneurship and nothing else. Yet the vestiges of “sharing” rhetoric clings to such companies as Airbnb and a host…

  • Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact | Information & Culture

    In a fit of genius, J. Britt Holbrook and colleagues from the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas proposed a list of 56 Indicators of Impact, ranging from “# of citations” to “meetings with important ppl.”[1] Subsequently published in the hallowed pages of Nature…

  • You’re Not the Boss of Me! Why Libertarianism Is a Childish Sham | Alternet

    Wiping away the horizon of significance one tantrum at a time… Libertarians believe they are real rebels, because they’ve politicized the protest of children who scream through tears, “You’re not the boss of me.” The rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability…