Category: Uncategorized
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What’s new in civil rights?
Justice under Bush: the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has shifted its focus. New hiring policies. New cases. Fewer offices. via
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Naming of Parts
From Henry Reed’s Lessons of The War: I. Naming of Parts To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday, We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning, We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day, To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens, And to-day we have…
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Re-liberation Theology: Imperialism, Insurrection, Insurgency
It’s old news that the US is scaling back in Afghanistan. With NATO in charge, there seems little chance that various national caveats to the standard rules of engagment will enable the military forces there to beat back the warlords. I doubt that anyone even thinks that’s a legitimate goal; most seem convinced that we…
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“To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception”
My disposition is basically skeptical, but Kierkegaard cuts to the heart of skepticism’s fault here: “If it is true–as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks–that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one…
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Pain as a Propositionless Attitude
The argument for a separate status for the mental extends ultimately to the claim that there is something it is like to hope, believe, or experience redly, and that this likeness is irreducible to any other form of explanation that depends only on third-person arguments. In one form, this can be seen in Frank Jackson’s…
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Badiou and the Philosophy of Religion
Arts and Letters Daily has this piece on Alain Badiou. Badiou theorizes that there are four conditions of philosophy: science, poetry, love, and politics, and as many of his early adopters have pointed out, there’s a clear bias against theological or religious truth in his work. Mr. Badiou also took considerable interest in a question…
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Mike Davis speaks in tongues
BLDGBLOG recently interviewed Mike Davis. This quote, about the rise of Pentacostal Christianity in South America, fascinates me: Frankly, one of the great sources of Pentecostalism’s appeal is that it’s a kind of para-medicine. One of the chief factors in the life of the poor today is a constant, chronic crisis of health and medicine.…
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Gender-Sex Wars and Civil Society
The controversy over John Aravosis’s “big girl” comment reminds me of this book, by Didier Eribon. Aravosis argues that, amongst metropolitan gay men, these effeminate putdowns have no misogynistic overtones, and that, anyway, we should be worried about macropolitical action rather than the nuances of our insults. After all, it’s this sort of infighting that…
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if only…
“If only” is the frustrated utopian refrain of Oliver Ressler and David Thorne’s absurdly dysfunctional URL addresses collectively titled “Boom!”. Utilizing this ubiquitous textual format of the “new economy,” “Boom!” rehearses the defense mechanisms of the neoliberal imagination as it confronts its own internal crises. The acknowledged incompleteness implied by “if only” situates these texts…
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Another day in paradise
Here’s what we needed to know about the NSA wiretapping. 1. How it works. 2. How the telcos will try to get away with it. 3. Why they’ll fail. Thanks to MeFi and DKos for the links.