January 2012
43 posts
“It’s the oldest trick in the book. You create the illusion of terror, then you get credit for stamping it out; you get funds, you get power. And that’s exactly what’s going on.”
— Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City
“Nationalism provides Eurocentric solutions to a Eurocentric global problem as it reproduces an internal coloniality of power within each nation-state and reifies the nation-state as the privileged location of social change. Struggles above and below the nation-state are not considered in nationalist political strategies. Moreover, nationalist responses to global capitalism reinforce the nation-state as the political institutional form par excellence of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system.”
—Ramón Grosfoguel
“How then, are we to interpret the current mess? Does this crisis signal, for example, the end of free market neoliberalism as a dominant economic model for capitalist development? The answer depends on what is meant by the word neoliberalism. My view is that it refers to a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatisation, the free market and free trade, it legitimized draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power. The project has been successful, judging by the incredible centralisation of wealth and power observable in all those countries that took the neoliberal road. And there is no evidence that it is dead.”
—David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (via pragmatica)
“The existing Victorian system of education was created to mass-produce identical human beings, mainly to serve an aristocracy, and, in modern times, an industrial elite. Governments find it difficult to move away from this model, because it has worked. But in a tech-driven knowledge economy this method is not needed anymore, and it will not serve us. But too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.”
—can changing how we teach make our kids smarter, more creative?
“In Chicago , for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway.”
—
Adolph Reed in the Village Voice, 1998
“The world was saved from the terrors of the great depression not by some glorious ‘new deal’ or the magic touch of Keynesian economics in the treasuries of the world, but by the destruction and death of global war… the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the levels of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production?”
—David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, afterword (via daplaney)
Amazing Spider-Man poster 3
Here is my final poster for The Amazing Spider-Man. With this one I wanted a moodier feel with an 80’s vibe going on… I hope folks like it!
Matt.
“On Foucault’s account, modern control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminality by making sex (like crime) an object of allegedly scientific disciplines, which simultaneously offer knowledge and domination of their objects. However, it becomes apparent that there is a further dimension in the power associated with the sciences of sexuality. Not only is there control exercised via others’ knowledge of individuals; there is also control via individuals’ knowledge of themselves. Individuals internalize the norms laid down by the sciences of sexuality and monitor themselves in an effort to conform to these norms. Thus, they are controlled not only as objects of disciplines but also as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects.”
—Gutting, Gary, “Michel Foucault”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/foucault/>. (via hummussexual)
An Abundance of Exoplanets Changes our Universe
The bottom line is, I think, very clear; there really are planets everywhere, and they must number in the hundreds of billions in the Milky Way.
Thus, the sheer abundance of planets profoundly impacts the nature of our exploration of the universe and our quest to understand our own significance or insignificance. There is nothing trivial about the discovery of planetary plentitude, because it means that we are finally on the cusp of seeing whether a statement made two and a half thousand years ago is correct or not:Despite where we find ourselves, on a small rocky world, there was no reason to believe that the universe would make planets as efficiently as it seems to. Our situation is merely one data point, and a horribly biased a posteori one at that, and our models of planet formation are, to be quite frank, struggling to keep up with the flood of new data. Nonetheless, from the point of view of astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere, planetary bodies remain the primary, critical, target. There are simply no other environments in the cosmos that offer the same potential for diverse and complex chemistry in multiple phases of matter, and the potential for such long-term equilibrium (albeit a dynamic type of equilibrium with energy and chemistry in both sporadic and cyclical flux).
“To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow”
- Metrodorus of Chios (Fourth Century B.C.)
“The owner of the biggest art gallery in St. Louis has far less influence on American artistic taste than the owner of the biggest gallery in Los Angeles; the president of Chad has far less power over global environmental policy than the president of Russia. Structures, in short, empower agents differentially, which also implies that they embody the desires, intentions, and knowledge of agents differentially as well. Structures, and the human agencies they endow, are laden with differences in power.” (Sewell 1992, 21)”
—
A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation
William H. Sewell, Jr.
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98, No. 1. (Jul., 1992), pp. 1-29.
(via massadaydone)
“You and I, in fact everyone all over the world, we’re literally African under the skin; brothers and sisters separated by a mere two thousand generations. Old-fashioned concepts of race are not only socially divisive, but scientifically wrong.”
—
- Spencer Wells, PhD, Genetic Anthropologist, Explorer In Residence, National Geographic Society (via wearerising)
Cool job title - Explorer In Residence. Although one would think an explorer would definitely not be in residence but out and about somewhere. Maybe they are exploring from their armchair, looking through their tumblr window.
