CALL ME MAGGIE

Category: Control

  • “Coming Apart” – Harper’s Magazine

              The term we commonly use for what is happening in the Mission is “gentrification.” But the changes at hand are taking place on a far greater scale, and are connected to a nationwide reorganization of places, resources, and possibilities. In his new book, We Gon’…

  • Public infrastructure, private investment

    #Infrastructure is a new buzzword… should NOT be a buzzword as it is absolutely crucial to the life of any civilization. But it is the buzzword because the president-elect promises to go heavy and hard on upkeep/new projects. Of course, what will come of all this will be further neoliberal…

  • Richest administration in modern American history

    Billionaires and millionaires meeting with president elect inside the Trump Tower: “What kind of government have you made for us?” Donald the Trumpeter to elite followers: “An unabashedly open plutocracy if you can ravage it!” How can anyone still believe that the in-coming administration is doing things radically differently? The only…

  • Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy

    Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trump’s was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems. “The special interests, the arrogant media, and the political insiders, don’t…

  • All about the clicks for cash

    Thanks to my friend Adam Briggle for pointing out this article. This gets at much more of what is going on in the society of control. Donald the Trumpeter is an outward effect of this kind of networking–a body making sounds that folks can point to and say, I hear that…

  • What Normalization Means – The New Yorker

    Normalization isn’t just a matter of human-interest stories and a faith in checks and balances. What we think of as normal shapes our field of vision; it tells a story of the world and its possibilities. Racism, sexism, and the other hatreds and phobias lately on display didn’t become normalized…

  • More clickbait about Clinton

    Not really sure how the Trumpistas can keep yelling that the media is bending over backwards to elect Clinton at all costs when every paper and news channel, even “friendly” and “supportive” ones like the WaPo keep creating these clickbait titled reports. Republicans only read the clickbait and never parse…

  • Becoming Other: Foucault, Deleuze, and the Political Nature of Thought   | Learning Philosophy of Change

    In this paper–linked after the jump–Giorgio Bertini employs the notion of the ‘thought of the outside’ as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of ‘elitism,’ ‘aristocratism,’ and ‘political indifference’–famously leveled by Alain Badiou  and Peter Hallward… Source: Becoming Other: Foucault, Deleuze, and…

  • Trump supporters are not the wretched of the earth

    It’s about race, culture, and identity — not economics. …The press has gotten extremely comfortable with describing a Trump electorate that simply doesn’t exist. Cottle describes his supporters as “white voters living on the edges of the economy.” This is, in nearly every particular, wrong. There is absolutely no evidence…

  • It’s come to this: 2016 is the Rape Election – The Washington Post

    It would be nice if this election could contain zero people who sexually assault. Source: It’s come to this: 2016 is the Rape Election – The Washington Post

  • Hacked WikiLeaks show nothing we don’t already know

    I’m really not sure what the purpose of these emails leaks is supposed to be. They are not showing anything that most voters don’t already know. In fact, I would almost go far so far as to say the WikiLeaks folks have little or nothing all that significant to reveal…

  • It’s Not Cool to Hate the ‘Star Wars’ Prequels Anymore | Inverse

    I am super happy to see this. A struggle for me over the last 20 years has been to get folks to see the Star Wars prequels as films in their own right that contribute visually and allegorically to mythography established in the original trilogy. I’ve often wondered if the subtlety…

  • How American Politics Became So Ineffective – The Atlantic

    This article at the Atlantic is much, much more in-depth thoughtful piece than what I’ve covered with a few quick gestures over the last couple of weeks on FB and here at my blog. The more intrinsic hazard with middlemen and machines is the ever-present potential for corruption, which is…

  • The brave new world of robots and lost jobs

    Automation is more of a threat to job security than trade deals or immigration. The political debate needs to engage the taboo topic of guaranteeing economic security to families — through a universal basic income, or a greatly expanded earned-income tax credit, or a 1930s-style plan for public-works employment. Ranting…

  • AirSpace: on the way to being everywhere and nowhere

    In his 1992 book Non-Places, Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, wrote that with the emergence of such identity-less space, “people are always, and never, at home.” If we can be equally at home everywhere, as Roam and Airbnb suggest, doesn’t that mean we are also at home nowhere? The next…

  • Serial art biography immortalizes social justice lawyer Leonard Weinglass

    Leonard Weinglass stands in the grand tradition of the legendary 20th century lawyers who themselves joined social justice movements and helped the popular forces to move history forward — including Clarence Darrow, Constance Baker Motley, Thurgood Marshall, Bill Kunstler, Florynce Kennedy, Arthur Kinoy, Lew Steele, Jeff Haas, Michael Ratner, Jan…

  • When critical thinking challenges reality

    The biggest problem with those who begin coordinating rigged facts into weak–and very often invalid–arguments is that they have given up critique for criticism and argument for arguing.

  • Commissioner of Sanitation

    Commissioner of Sanitation