Category: Control
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Police Departments Gearing up for War at Home
Congress created the military-transfer program in the early 1990s, when violent crime plagued America’s cities and the police felt outgunned by drug gangs. Today, crime has fallen to its lowest levels in a generation, the wars have wound down, and despite current fears, the number of domestic terrorist attacks has…
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The Reality of College Statistics – UnCollege
Even if you do everything you’re supposed to, there are so many variables at play, many of which you can’t control… The influence of any one of them can void the value of college for you. What you can control are your intrinsic characteristics — work ethic, patience, ambition, resilience,…
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#DontNeedFixin, #DontNeedStonin
As I pointed out earlier today, Oklahoma Tea Party candidate Scott Esk favors stoning LGBTQ to death… you know, like God tells us to do in the Old Testament. Last week, the Texas Republican party decided to add to its Party Platform that it supports “reparative therapy” for gay people.…
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Freed from Gubment, Slaves to Gawd
Libertarianism is a form of anarchism. As an anarchocynic, I am fine with certain forms of American libertarianism. I’ve had very productive dialogs with more than a few very thoughtful folk who have deep libertarian convictions. Unfortunately, that is a minority experience. I can always tell how quickly the conversation…
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College: Class Warfare 101
It seems most are looking at this from the perspective of folks who are in the university rather than those who “need” the university. The piece is not an economic piece. It is a sociological piece. This is the crux of his argument: What I mean to say is that…
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What Can You Do With a Humanities PhD Anyway?
This piece by Elizabeth Segran in The Atlantic (March 31) offers some food for thought if you are entering, already in, or find yourself a director of graduate studies in a humanities program. Here are some highlights that I found important. I recommend the whole thing, however. As the article…
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Paulo Ito, World Cup: A Brazilian street artist has created the World Cup’s first viral image.
On May 10, Brazilian artist Paulo Ito posted this mural on the doors of a schoolhouse in São Paulo’s Pompeia district. Less than a week later, it has become an international sensation, drawing huge attention on Facebook. It has also taken off in Brazil—a post on the popular Facebook page…
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Even Conservative Judges Can’t Deny the Constitutional Logic of Same-Sex Marriage – The Daily Beast
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that the states on the vanguard of marriage equality would be the deepest red states? But here we are: From December’s decision in Utah to the past two weeks in Arkansas and now Idaho, we’ve seen a string of a dozen…
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Injecting Computation Everywhere
At this year’s SXSW Conference, Stephen Wolfram introduced Wolfram Language. Now, video of his presentation shows some of the profound implications of this new technology.
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Moving forward with the Society of Control
Six reasons to fear the evolving alliance of the global corporate techno-economic progress machine and the national security state.
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Swarm and Fuzzy
When the first human colonists land on Mars several decades from now, their habitat will already be waiting. They may not even have to don a space suit, instead simply walking down the gangplank in their civvies into a warm, well-lit Martian home. That’s because if we ever do colonize…
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Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Turbulent Times
…[Noam Chomsky’s] many recent books, articles, and interviews have addressed how the new reign of neoliberal capital is normalized not only through military and economic relations but also through the production of new forms of subjectivity organized around the enslavement of debt, the security-surveillance state, the corporatization of higher education,…
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Cliven Bundy and the Sovereign Movement
While most observers and commentators have focused on Bundy’s recent statements on race, something far more problematic drives the standoff. Bundy, his family, and many of his supporters are part of the modern day Sovereign Movement, a loosely-knit group that subscribes to a complex system of bizarre legal theories. …
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Welcome to the Edu-Factory Collective
We are amidst a great thaw, where the taboo topic of academic exploitation, once privatized and blamed on “failed” individual scholars, is being rendered unavoidable and recognized as a systemic and pervasive problem. More accurately, the university’s most vulnerable academic workers are fighting back against the “externalization” of the crisis…
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Magical Voluntarism
…magical voluntarism is also an indication of desperation. The Deal or No Deal situation is a horrible example of a more general situation. We have as little control over our lives as contestants do over what is in that box. Magical voluntarism is the ideal ideological weapon: it offers an…
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Wolves of Wall Street: Financialization and American Inequality
It’s no secret by now that the recent spike in American inequality, and the gains rapidly accruing to those at the upper end of the income distribution ladder, are driven in large part by “financialization”—the growing scale and profitability of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy,…
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Subsidizing Walmart
“Walmart receives an estimated $6.2 billion annually in mostly federal taxpayer subsidies. The reason: Walmart pays its employees so little that many of them rely on food stamps, health care and other taxpayer-funded programs.” “Walmart avoids an estimated $1 billion in federal taxes each year. The reason: Walmart uses tax…
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Erik Davis on VALIS, P.K.D. and High Weirdness | Reality Sandwich
Great interview after the jump… As part of the inaugural reread series on Reality Sandwich, Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis and Nomad Codes, spoke with me recently about the “High Weirdness” of Philip K. Dick and the postmodern pink-gnosis of VALIS, a partly autobiographic scifi novel where Dick literally wrote himself into…
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