society
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The fast fascist creep
It amazes me that 80 years on from the end of World War II, I still must share with my students to show them quotes like this. Look! It is happening around them and they do NOT pay attention… The… Continue reading
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Coordination, Subordination, and Exordination
Yesterday in our class, the discussion led me to talk for a little bit about a distinction originally made by Marcuse, I believe, regarding soft versus hard totalitarianism. I extended this description out to all manner of group structures that lead… Continue reading
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Beyond Savage Politics and Dystopian Nightmares
What kind of society emerges when it is governed by the market-driven assumption that the only value that matters is exchange value, when the common good is denigrated to the status of a mall, and social order is composed only… Continue reading
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Poverty does bad things to your brain | Futurity
Poverty and the worry that goes with it uses up so much mental energy that the poor have little room in their brains for anything else. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and… Continue reading
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8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
My good sister, Stephanie E., with whom I am reading Paulo Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed sent me this article yesterday on FB. It details what the situation that Henry Giroux has been talking about in such texts as Youth… Continue reading
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Madness and (American) Civilization
In “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” (New York Review of Books, 2011), Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discusses over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, pathologizing of normal behaviors, Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry, and the adverse effects… Continue reading
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How to Spot Propaganda
propaganda (n.) 1718, “committee of cardinals in charge of Catholic missionary work,” short for Congregatio de Propaganda Fide “congregation for propagating the faith,” a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions. The word is properly… Continue reading
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Techno-Conspiracy and Control
A link here to a Big Think blog where Teddy Goff considers the power of technology in the Society of Control. Okay… you caught me! He does not call it the Society of Control. I mean, maybe he knows the… Continue reading
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Withdrawing
Engagement with the world happens on many levels. One of the most difficult actions is keeping faith in the good of humankind even as you see folks overladen with distractions. I read Star Wars novels, like to go to blockbuster… Continue reading
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Saturday not Studying
Last assignment due in a class that I have enjoyed. Yet I am that bad student who does not want to put much work in the assignment. I would prefer talking with the teacher one on one about things rather… Continue reading
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The ‘Broader Impacts’ of Sequestration on Science
My colleague Bob Frodeman has some suggestions about the interconnection of research & society in post-austerity world. Now that we’ve been driven off the “fiscal cliff,” perhaps we should look around and assess the results. It turns out that sequestration is… Continue reading
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The Unsurprising Rarity of Homo Economicus
“SOVEREIGN in tastes, steely-eyed and point-on in perception of risk, and relentless in maximisation of happiness.” This was Daniel McFadden’s memorable summation, in 2006, of the idea of Everyman held by economists. That this description is unlike any real person… Continue reading
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This Image Should NOT be Seen by the Whole World | How to be an Anthropologist
I find the Facebook meme distressing, not because of the Belo Monte Dan Project, but because the author and all of the people who share it have fed into and bolstered (even if unknowingly) a narrative that depicts indigenous people… Continue reading
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Thinking without Professional Recognition
I work in and around higher education in the United States, but I am not a professor. I sometimes say that I am in the academy but not necessarily of the academy. This does not imply, however, that I refuse… Continue reading
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The Leisure to be Your Own Self
“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” ― Eckhart Tolle Aware. Awakened. Enlightened. Mindful. Many ways of describing a person who is tuned-in with the Encompassing. Each… Continue reading
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How do #Millennials Define #Happiness? | Breathe and Smile
Very good take on the situation from a GenY perspective with a link to the important notion of “Betterness.” There used to be a ladder to success. It was the college→good job→marriage→house→family→cushy retirement. Sure, not everyone made it, there were… Continue reading
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Mothers of Jews who like bacon: Where Facebook meets identity politics | csid
Super interesting. Tom Scott did something extraordinary last week: he typed in searches on Facebook’s new Graph Search feature and posted images of the results on his tumblr, called ActualFacebookGraphSearches. … which sounds quite un-extraordinary. Except that Scott – something… Continue reading
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