Category: Whatever
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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What appears tends to disappear
Φύσις δε… kαθ’ Ηραkλειτον… kρύπτεσθαι φιλεΐ Phúsis de… kath’ Erakleiton… krúptesthai phileî (Qtd in Themistius, Orations 5.69b, DK B123) The story I am about to tell therefore begins symbolically at Ephesus, in Asia Minor, around 500 BCE, on the day when tradition reports that Heraclitus, one of the most ancient…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The 21st Century Whitehead Will Be Deleuzian
New piece on Whitehead/Deleuze by my good brother Sam Mickey. …There are two tendencies that show up in the way people juxtapose Whitehead and Deleuze. On one hand, people situate them in combinatorial contrast, bringing together their concepts in ways that are different but not opposed. Example: Deleuze and Whitehead…
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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…
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RIP Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore deserves a spot in the pantheon of great comic actresses like Gracie Allen, Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, and it is for this that she will be most remembered,” said TV historian Robert Thompson of Syracuse University. “Her further accomplishments as a song-and-dance performer, a serious dramatic…
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Digital discs flow into the stream
‘“You’ve gone from a world where digital disturbed the scene, but now digital is falling in terms of ownership [of music],” Bakula said. Today, “the digital consumer has switched to streaming.”’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/12/27/no-mozart-did-not-have-have-2016s-best-selling-cd-what-really-happened-is-even-more-surprising/
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“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’…
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The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class – The Atlantic
The more frightening possibility for liberals is that Clinton didn’t lose because the white working class failed to hear her message, but precisely because they did hear it. Trump’s white voters do support the mommy state, but only so long as it’s mothering them. Most of them don’t seem eager…
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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…
CALL ME MAGGIE 
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