Category: Control
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Smoke and Mirrors: Essential Questions About “Prison Reform”
It is vitally important for those of us who have been fighting the prison-industrial complex PIC – and the brutalities foundational to it – to inquire more deeply into the reform measures being offered and the data that seem to tell us the nation is actually stumbling toward unity on…
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Why There’s a Real Chance My Texas Town Might Ban Fracking
The gas industry has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into this election to convince us that this referendum is “irresponsible,” but the history of our struggle with the industry lays bare a tale that has proved much the opposite – an irresponsible industry that has backed residents into a…
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Hannah Arendt’s challenge to Adolf Eichmann | Judith Butler | Comment is free | theguardian.com
At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense “banal” it was precisely because it was committed in a…
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ISIS, the Spectacle of Terrorism: Resisting Mainstream Workstations of Fear
Fear drives the loss of both our personal and our social power. Fear separates us from our own thinking which stagnates. Fear clouds our evolving presence in the globalizing superstructure. Henry Giroux reveals here how fearfulness is a major component of the Society of Control and, oddly enough, how this proliferation of fear is…
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Policing for Wealth
For Bratton to cite changes in gentrified Williamsburg and Fort Greene as justification for a focus on minor crimes means the strategy is about something other than the reduction of crime: Its about the reduction of the perception of crime. But the perception that really matters is the one harbored…
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A Gentlemans Guide To Sex In Prison
But the hunger for touch does not always involve sex. Men in prison slap each other on the back and rub each others necks and hug and give elaborate handshakes and do strange exercises in which the men use each others body weight. It is all an excuse for touch.…
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The Fear Soaked Victim at the Heart of the Police State
We live in a culture where the victim is always the criminal and the criminal is always the victim. When it is a murderer–one without a police shield, of course–this is the sort of thing shouted by all kinds of pro “security-above-all-else” folks. Of course when it is a gay…
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America Is Not For Black People
Michael Brown is not special. In all its specificity, the 18-year olds death remains just the most recent example of police officers killing unarmed black men.Part of the reason were seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated…
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Still, a Colonial Palestine
From The New Republic, an overview of Israel as colonial power and Palestinians as the colonized. Colonial regimes breed anti-colonial resistance. It has been happening since Biblical times. Sometimes, the resistance takes an ugly form. Think of the Algerian or Irish resistance. And that has certainly been the case with the…
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How to Repurpose the First Amendment as Corporate Weapon
Originally—and up until fairly recently—the First Amendment was understood to be a shield protecting individual liberty. But the Roberts Court seems increasingly intent on turning the First Amendment into a weapon against the American people, not to mention basic fairness and common sense. via The Supreme Court Turns the First…
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Teachers must Care; Students must Attend
That is, mentors must be engaged with mentoring people, seeing the student as an Existenz, with all of the possibility that this entails. And learners must attend, being fully now/here wherever they are, focused on this happening with the mentor. It must be a loving struggle for elucidation of each other,…
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Why Heterosexuality Didn’t Really Exist Until the 19th Century | Alternet
Very enlightening interview with author Hanne Blank. “Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made…
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Our twin presiding deities: irony and violence
The current mainstream debate regarding the crisis in Iraq and Syria offers a near perfect example of both the death of historical memory and the collapse of critical thinking in the United States. It also signifies the emergence of a profoundly anti-democratic culture of manufactured ignorance and social indifference… History…
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Conservatives, liberals, and the importance of brand names
In a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business and his colleagues apply an ever-growing body of research on the psychological traits of liberals and conservatives to their consumer choices. The result? A stark left-right difference when it comes to…
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A Prefabricated and Spent Life
Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and…
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Farming for the Future
As a growing number of US citizens wonder what they might be able to do to take care of themselves as [climate change’s] dystopian future comes into focus, silver linings are emerging from the darkening clouds.One of them is a small farm on the outskirts of one of the largest cities…
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Women in India Aren’t Safe on Twitter Either — Matter — Medium
In addition to harassing women simply because they are women with opinions that differ to their own, some of these men have also imported India’s fault lines of caste and communalism onto social media. They attack women who belong to marginalized communities, tarnishing the modern world with their hateful old…
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Serial Shamelessness
Andrew Sullivan, at the Dish, on the noble lies–i.e. the completely and utterly shameless bullshit–of people like Paul Wolfowitz. It’s not just that these people refuse to be held accountable for their incompetence, war crimes and catastrophic foreign policy. It is that they are still prepared to go on television…
CALL ME MAGGIE 
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