Tag: critical commentary

Lyn Alden: The credit-based global financial system we have participated in over the past century has to continually grow or die

Several of the major central banks are stuck in a trap of their own making. This includes the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and others. The credit-based global financial system we have constructed and participated in over the past century has to continually grow or die. It’s like a game of… Read More Lyn Alden: The credit-based global financial system we have participated in over the past century has to continually grow or die

Dilip

Anjan Basu: The Crisis in Civilisation that Rabindranath Tagore red-flagged Is back upon us

NB: A very well written and timely reminder. My two caveats are 1) with the word back; and 2) with the positioning of the word crisis. It is not ‘back’, because after the Napoleonic wars it never went away; and a more appropriate title description  of our time (with due respect to Gurudev), would be… Read More Anjan Basu: The Crisis in Civilisation that Rabindranath Tagore red-flagged Is back upon us

Dilip

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Harmful Is Social Media?

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political… Read More Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Harmful Is Social Media?

Dilip

Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later

In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published a seemingly pretentious but otherwise innocuous paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the postmodern journal Social Text. After its publication, Sokal announced that the paper was designed as a deliberate parody of post-modernism’s appropriation of scientific jargon. It was filled with largely meaningless or even… Read More Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later

Dilip

Alexei Yurchak on why Putin hates Lenin and how today’s Russia resembles the late Soviet Union

‘It’s impossible for the system not to change’    While waging war on Ukraine, the Russian state has intensified its already tight control over the Internet, press, and opposition at home. Meanwhile, the anti-war opposition has resorted to what are essentially guerilla tactics. Many politicians, journalists, and activists were forced to leave the country to avoid… Read More Alexei Yurchak on why Putin hates Lenin and how today’s Russia resembles the late Soviet Union

Dilip

Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance… Read More Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?

Dilip

RICHARD SEYMOUR – Musk & Twitter: the first lab rat to take over the laboratory

Social media platforms are devised by a Californian tech scene committed to competition and social hierarchy. Twitter’s protocols treat us as wannabe celebrities, striving to produce storms of admiration and rage. It is a complex evolutionary system that selects the vacuous grandstanding and sniggering boorishness of adolescent personalities… So much the better if, like Musk,… Read More RICHARD SEYMOUR – Musk & Twitter: the first lab rat to take over the laboratory

Dilip

Big Oil, Rising Authoritarianism and worsening climate. By Eve Darian-Smith

Around the world, many countries are becoming less democratic. This backsliding on democracy and “creeping authoritarianism,” as the U.S. State Department puts it, is often supported by the same industries that are escalating climate change. In my new book, “Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis,” I lay out connections between these industries and the… Read More Big Oil, Rising Authoritarianism and worsening climate. By Eve Darian-Smith

Dilip

Jonathan Haidt: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

NB: Yes, however the stupidity is not confined to the USA… DS The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or… Read More Jonathan Haidt: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

Dilip