September 2011
23 posts
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“‘Studying up’ as well as down would lead us to ask many...”
– Laura Nader from her 1972 piece “Studying Up”. She was as right then as she would be still today.
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David Graeber: Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the...
Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks...
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Hegel and Haiti - How Western Freedom is built on...
By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery - the...
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“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely...”
– Noam Chomsky (via cultureofresistance)
Also interesting in the context of how States have moved away from providing free education over the last decade
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““The age of cheap food is over,” predicts Knuckman, noting that this...”
– How Global Investors Make Money Out of Hunger
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Trinidad and Tobago: Gangs and the Golden Age,...
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Gangs_and_the_Golden_Age-129628553.html
The same impulses that form criminal gangs inform the creation of all male-bonding groups. Examples of male organizations formed with these same principles include: football and sporting clubs; music bands; forms of priesthood; religious sects; and military and para-military organizations. ‘Police and tief’ are...
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Commodity Traitors: Financial Speculation on...
Research now shows the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East this year were triggered by spikes in global food prices fueled by speculators betting on the price of agricultural commodities [see my earlier piece Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence]. This is the conclusion of a new study released today by Marco Lagi, Yavni Bar-Yam, Karla Bertrand, and Yaneer ...
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“The political right, ever since Ronald Reagan, has identified government as the...”
– The False Dichotomy of Greed
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“So we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex; but rather...”
– Michel Foucault (1979) The history of sexuality, Volume 1, p157 (via geogthoughts)
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For the immediate withdrawal of MINUSTAH troops...
The following Open Letter has been sent to the United Nations Secretary General and the members of the Security Council by several signatories including Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Laureate; Nora Cortiñas, Mother of May Square-Founders’ Line; Beverly Keene, International Coordinator Jubilee South; Jubilee South/Americas; Peace and Justice Service of Latin America; Foundation Peace and...
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W.A.R. Stories: Walter Anthony Rodney →
Im going to see this documentary tomorrow morning. The screening is 10.00am, Institute of Critical Thinking, UWI, St Augustine Campus.
Walter Rodney is one of my heroes. He understood how social and economic relations keep people down. He understood the purpose of poverty and why it will not be solved under capitalism. He was teaching the post-colonial world about the evils of US/European Empire....
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Try different tactic in drug war - Why are...
Letter in today’s Trinidad Express
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/letters/Try_different_tactic_in_drug_war-130328538.html
Those of you who follow the war on drugs would notice that Sir Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin group, and a member of the UN Global Commission on Drug policy has publicly come out in favour of ending the war on drugs by decriminalising the use of illegal ...
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“The story of anthropology and colonialism is part of a larger narrative which...”
– These are the opening paragraphs of Talal Asad’s 1991 “Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (George Stocking, ed). It’s a short passage,...
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Fire In Babylon →
Just saw this at the Trinidad and Tobago Film fest.
Really good documentary on sport and social justice. CLR James would have been proud. Really does a good job of showing how cricket provided a social space where inequalities, injustices and racism could be challenged - even overcome. The spill over of such challenges into other areas of life may not have been immense but as the docu showed the...
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“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but...”
– Michel Foucault (via the-altway)
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“The current model of “class-mobility” reinforces separatism and a...”
– -Megan Lee: “Maybe I’m Not Class-Mobile; Maybe I’m Class-Queer”, from the anthology Feminism For Real: Deconstructing The Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism. Quoted at Racialicious, March 8, 2011.
This spoke to me deeply. I’m not sure if I agree with every bit of it- and I certainly want to...
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“Absolutely. And this is what makes the current situation so dangerous is you...”
– Gillian Tett - Cultural anthropologist and journalist at the Financial Times,
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“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the...”
– Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (via whoretoculture)
“In a remarkable way, the effects of marijuana have led to the still unfolding...”
– The Brain’s Own Marijuana 