AnarchoCynicism
My personal brand of philosophy.
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Travis Wright reviews Latour’s Down to Earth
Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth is, functionally, a call to rethink and re-describe our political reality in accordance with the changing forces that shape it. Latour lays out his argument in 20 brief sections, each deceptively quick to read. Section… Continue reading
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Wonder of dawn
The shared reason of the day says, “See, the sun comes up in the east as the earth stands still.” Or maybe, “See, the earth turns on its axis as it swings around the sun.” Yet neither truly responds to… Continue reading
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On Bullshit Jobs – RSA
According to a 2015 YouGov poll, 37% of the UK population believe their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world. And despite the time-saving advances promised by technology, we’re now working longer hours than ever. How has this situation… Continue reading
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Team Human – RSA
Influential thinker Douglas Rushkoff argues that there is an anti-human agenda embedded in our markets and technologies, which has turned them from means of human connection into ones of isolation and repression. Our corporations and the culture they create glorify… Continue reading
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Nice addition to the list of fifteen books I posted yesterday. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free… Continue reading
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When anything goes, no one is safe
“A new and chilling normal is coming into view,” Miliband concluded. “Civilians seen as fair game for armed combatants, humanitarians seen as an impediment to military tactics and therefore unfortunate but expendable collateral, and investigations of and accountability for war… Continue reading
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My teaching philosophy
This is really the first assignment I give for reading in all of my courses. It is to let students know why I believe they should make a place for philosophizing throughout their life. I have taken to sending this… Continue reading
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AOC visits CBP concentration camp
I am not in any way outraged or even slightly surprised by the kinds of things that folx are seeing in these camps. I am not outraged or even slightly surprised because THIS IS NOT ALL THAT NEW. This is… Continue reading
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2019 — Summer Course
Here you will find the readings for my 2019 Summer II course. Check back frequently for updates. Back to Call Me Maggie homepage Have the assigned readings completed by the time you get to class. The first part of class… Continue reading
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Concentration Camp Czar Quits
Trump’s Border “Protection” chief–John “I Love To Make Foreign Children Suffer” Sanders–has resigned from his position. Vice News reports that not long after attorneys working for refugees and migrants found kids separated from parents by Custom and Border Patrol in… Continue reading
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The Corporate Capture of Social Change
Rather than discussing social change as being rooted in rights, justice and systemic reform, the new corporate conception of social change sees inequality, climate change and poverty as a set of technical problems with market solutions. For these people fixing… Continue reading
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Queering and Wyrding
‘Q’ then, will never be a coherent letter tacked as a bridge on some list of identities. The past decade shows the poverty or ruin of every attempt to do so. We’ve said already that these words are magic. We… Continue reading
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A long tradition… Black Women leading a charge for justice with little or no help
Why has it taken more than 20 years and testimony by about 50 accusers to get to this moment [R. Kelly finally charged for all of his sexual abuses]? Because we live in a country where a history of racism… Continue reading
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Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider | Books | The Guardian
Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian… Continue reading
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Escape From the Trump Cult
Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it? …manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to… Continue reading
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The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet
About the only class of people who seem unable to grasp this new reality are intellectuals. Just as during Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s self-appointed “leadership” seemed unable or unwilling to accept the idea that horizontal forms of organization… Continue reading
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Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche
Wow. Cyber capitalism fetishized to the point of apotheosis. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session… Continue reading
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American Geographic Polarization
Research shows that partisans aren’t purposefully walling themselves off. There is no intentional Big Sort. Such geographic polarization—where supporters of one or the other party cluster together in homogeneous enclaves, producing localities with lopsided distributions of political preferences—has been growing… Continue reading
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