Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip. (NB: As Karl Marx put it; capital is dead labour ruling over human life. Lets recall the slogan the… Read More The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk
Levine describes the early concept of the internet as “an operating system for the American empire, an information system that could collect all this data and that could provide useful, meaningful information to the managers of the world.” Yasha Levine / The Chris Hedges Report The internet, from its inception, was created to be a… Read More The Secret Military History of the Internet
The last decade in India has been marred by the institutionalisation of arbitrary power. Raghu Kesavan Kunal Kamra is an unlikely hero. He stands slightly hunched over, mic loosely held in one hand, the other occasionally pressed into service to express disbelief but often stuffed into a trouser pocket. His most recent special, Naya Bharat, reprises the… Read More How the attacks on Kunal Kamra undermine the freedoms of all Indians
Kenan Malik ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have… Read More Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets
Yet Orwell has shaped his life. “My father was devoted to me,” he says. “Absolutely devoted.” And Blair is equally devoted to him. He regards himself as the keeper of the sacred flame for his father. ‘My father was devoted to me’ … Blair with Orwell. Photograph: Vernon Richards Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three… Read More George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father
Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg November 1966 On the Poverty of Student Life: The Little Pamphlet that Started a Revolution The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 by a half-dozen European avant-garde artists. Recent historical events, chiefly workers uprisings in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, convinced them that a social revolution was… Read More On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It (Strasbourg, 1966)
Are we in that moment, in the belly of a bubble that has burst and taken ‘liberal democracy’ along, kicking and screaming, or perhaps not? Are we living the Hobbesian description? One of the ennobling gifts of literature is the light it shines on our essential condition beyond the frontiers of time or context or… Read More Sankarshan Thakur: Bubble democracy
The sophists taught, rather publicly, the view that the summit of happiness is to combine the appearance of justice with actual injustice: Gregory McBrayer; in Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss. (Professor at Center of Columbia University Deportation Scandal Is Former Israeli Spy) Mahmoud Khalil, 30–year-old holder of a green card permitting him permanently to live and… Read More Patrick Lawrence: Season of the Sophists
The problem is becoming worse than the condition of inter-passivity, with student disengagement now often leading to mass chronic non-attendance in lectures and seminars. Rather than go through the motions of learning, many students simply do not bother to go through the motions, except to submit essays and often that is done with the assistance… Read More Apathy and the neoliberal university
Chris Hedges Education is meant to be subversive. It gives students the ability and the language to ask questions about reigning assumptions and ideas. It questions dogma and ideology. It can, as Zinn writes, “counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate.” ************* The attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some… Read More Trump’s War on Education
After the truth-shower 