CALL ME MAGGIE

Category: Control

  • Whiteness is Dead | The Wild Hunt

    Highly recommend a read through of this… Whiteness is dead. James Baldwin proclaimed it back in 1972, prophesying ominously that there would be “bloody holding actions all over the world, for years to come.” The holding actions have gotten bloodier and bloodier with the rise of Trump and the self-described…

  • AnarchoCynic as Queer or recognizing the gravity well of domination

    We are forsaken to our existential condition. We can simply make-do with what is already underway, or we can accept responsibility for having the power to explore in a fashion otherwise than tradition teaches. Anarchocynicism only works so long as it adopts a queer praxis. Queer means inhabiting the world…

  • Freedom, Choice, and the Death of Us

    Originally posted on dr. p.l. (paul) thomas: “they did not stop to think they died instead” “‘next to of course god america i,’” e.e. cummings Over the course of a couple hours after my mother was discovered comatose, the ER doctor offered us a choice: airlift my mother to a…

  • AnarchoCynic Praxis, Faith and Sacred Tradition

    What makes our praxis specifically AnarchoCynic  concerns how we take on none of the authority to be gained from established hierarchies, seek to take no privileged position for ourselves, and specifically engage folks about the customs that hold most currency in our community. An AnarchoCynic cannot afford to be non-praxical. Through praxis, the…

  • ExxonMobil Still Funding Climate Science Deniers

    ExxonMobil executives repeatedly claim their company supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement. The company’s checkbook ledger, however, tells a far different story. Recently, the company released its annual list of its “public information and policy research” grantees, which shows that it spent $1.65 million in 2016 on a…

  • Charity or philanthropy

    One of the reasons for the possible rehabilitation of charity is especially paradoxical, given philanthropy’s technocratic pretensions. Over the past decade, as groups have become more sophisticated at assessing the impact of their work, and as digital payment systems have advanced throughout the developing world, a number of carefully designed…

  • AnarchoCynic Praxis

    While I am very knowledgeable about the workings of our political system–and I even vote, esp. locally–my energy and time goes to helping establish temporary autonomous zones wherein friends and allies can work together. If Paulo Freire is right that our collective vocation is humanization, then my own expression of…

  • necrophilia

    necrophilia

    Originally posted on coromandal: This excerpt by Erich Fromm describes necrophilia in terms of sadism, control, work and technology.  Necrophilia is literally love of death, which on its face sounds absurd, until we realize, with a closer look, that it’s actually a description of our lives. In an advanced stage…

  • Veteran Organizer Gives Inside Look at the First $15 Minimum Wage Campaign

    Veteran Organizer Gives Inside Look at the First $15 Minimum Wage Campaign

    …more than just a collection of war stories, Rosenblum’s purpose in Beyond $15 is to persuade other advocates to follow his lead. The book uses Sea-Tac’s success to argue for a “social movement union” approach to organizing that grounds labor advocacy in moral terms, challenges the existing economic and political…

  • Can we overcome a white supremacy that has permeated our politics and culture? Part 2

    Anis Shivani continues his rumination upon white supremacy by tracing the tendrils of it throughout contemporary American society. He traces its presence not only within the commonly understood movements that are openly racist, but also into the neoliberal policies and globalizing structures of the last thirty years. For Shivani, there is…

  • Brief history of a term and a movement: White Supremacy Part 1

    First part of Anis Shivani‘s very nice introduction to the issues surrounding the meaning of “white supremacy” and how the term has been at the heart of a number of movements in America. Yet we may conceive of white supremacy, as it has always been practiced in this country, as…

  • Standing Rock: Counterterrorism Tactics Used by Energy Transfer Mercenaries to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”

    I really wish that reporters would just call “private security firms”–military-for-hire–what they really are: Mercenaries. More than 100 internal documents leaked to The Intercept by a TigerSwan contractor, as well as a set of over 1,000 documents obtained via public records requests, reveal that TigerSwan spearheaded a multifaceted private security…

  • Of girls, bulls, and the authenticity of subversion

    “…March 7th of this year, the day before International Women’s Day. Fearless Girl appeared, standing in front of Charging Bull. On the surface, it appears to be another work of guerrilla art — but it’s not. Unlike Di Modica’s work, Fearless Girl was commissioned. Commissioned not by an individual, but by…

  • Notes on Immaterialism | Becoming Integral

    Notes on Immaterialism | Becoming Integral

    In Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Polity Press, 2016), Graham Harman applies his object-oriented philosophy to social objects. The book functions as “a compact list of the first principles of object-oriented social theory, which I have also called ‘immaterialism’” (126). This presentation of an object-oriented social theory includes a detailed…

  • Pedagogies within the Crises of Uncertainty

    Pedagogies within the Crises of Uncertainty

    I am having a very good time this semester studying one on one with one of the academics at the University of North Texas who has agreed to be on my dissertation committee down the line–when I get to that part of my work. We are reading Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid…

  • False equivalency not fake news our biggest media problem

    Unfortunately, the mainstream media still tends to treat figures like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter as “conservative commentators,” as if they were nothing more than slightly rabid versions of William Safire, or right-wing counterparts to Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd. The term suggests a tidy equivalence between left and right, in…

  • More Deadly Police Encounters Than We Thought

    The Guardian US determined that police killed 1,146 people last year during interactions on the street. By contrast, police departments reported just 444 police shootings to the FBI in 2014. Source: More People Die in Police Encounters Than We Thought | Mother Jones

  • Anti-Fascism vs. Nostalgia in “Rogue One”

    Thanks to my old high school friend, John F., for pointing this out to me. Great summary of why Rogue One may be the best Star Wars film yet. The author is at pains, sometimes, to be sufficiently critical; maybe errs a bit much on heavy handed readings to get the…