For two months Spain’s coal miners have been on strike; they famously marched on Madrid to take their protest directly to the conservative government; more recently they have been subjected to brutal police repression, fighting back with home-made rockets and dynamite. Their dispute hinges, as do all politics at the moment, on austerity measures. The [...]
Kony’s Island I’ve never been there, but it hardly matters. We will plant this flag on Kony Island, that is, regular people now prosecute terrorism in the name of justice for the love of impossible reconciliation. How is it that ‘American’s’ (whatever that is) think we can make a product out of anything, that we [...]
In about forty-five minutes I will walk out my door. Ten minutes after that, I will attend my local Republican Party Caucus in the gym of my old high school. My neighborhood, it’s fair to say, is democratic. I think there is a Romney supporter up the street, but they posted no yard sign this [...]
Forget for a moment the racist charges, von Mises’ism’ness, anti Civil Rightedness–all of it. The libertarian appeal has had to find sometimes obscure pockets to work its ideas into the American conversation because libertarianism is not properly a traditonal mainstream ideology, only when convenient is it called in. This has changed, and it knows no [...]
“You Wanna a Job Right?” The “hacker group” Anonymous intends to disrupt or shutdown the Iowa Caucuses by targeting campaign offices in Des Moines with a sit-in on caucus night. Anonymous cites corporations and the complicity of both major parties driving “millions” of people into “poverty.” Anonymous, already linked to OWS, is encouraging OWS [...]
Berardi states “[m]oney (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or discipline the world of production, now that its center is not a de-brained force, a uniform and quantifiable time of manual work. That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of intelligence, which eludes [...]
When it comes to language and creative clearing, and more importantly the “idea of order,” Vincent and I have a bit of recent history. It is in the spirit of clearing that I am thinking my response. First, the creative clearing, the “destructive character” in relation to pure force beset by ‘power’ or a [...]
I had this thought when the Tea Party began: they were a joke. This is now underscored by the vaporization of their extremist candidates for president and the poor health of the media when it comes to tensing out their real base of power, the limited audience of financial backers. One assumes when it comes [...]
The following text (in Dutch) has been written as a contribution to the current political debate in the Netherlands concerning the budget cuts in the cultural sector in particular, and the development of right-wing ideology meeting neoliberal austerity measure rhetoric in general. The essay proceeds through a close reading of a recent lecture on [...]
There it was in my inbox, the email from the Dutch embassy I had been waiting for: “Unrest re. elections Tirana.” The ambassador kindly advised me to stay away from the communist-style congress center (between COIN and the football stadium, basically in front of the Dutch embassy), where the Komisioni Qendror i Zgjedhjeve (Central Election [...]