Words, ideas, videos
(or should that be nihilogism of the decade?) There's this and this bit of an interview with the late Mark Fisher. "Now we are faced with nihiliberalism rather than neoliberalism. The phrases justifying neoliberalism are mechanistically repeated, but there’s no real conviction in it anymore." Hat-tip to @Dant_Lane for bringing this to my attention. Basically,... Continue Reading →
States don't just create external boundaries. As per Cesaire, the technologies are being brought into the metropole.
One of the easiest ways to win is to confuse your opponents so much that they simply don't even know they are in a fight. Saves time and treasure if you can do this, obviously. I could go on and ON about Gramsci this, hegemony that, blah de blah. Let's go for a couple of... Continue Reading →
So Scott Morrison, Australian prime minister, has given a blink-and-you'd-miss-it retraction of yesterday's debacle, when he repeatedly refused to apologise for the consequences of the vaccine stroll-out. Today he came out with I’m sorry that we haven’t been able to achieve the marks that we had hoped for at the beginning of this year. Of course... Continue Reading →
There’s a story, surely apocryphal, of Shakespeare being locked in attic room and only given food in exchange for pages of an overdue play script. That tactic - “sliding pizza under the door in exchange for good ideas” is something that gets talked about in “strategic niche management.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrEYl9Kl4ZU Its cousin, pump-priming and state-agency-as-facilitator/networker was... Continue Reading →
tl:dr - Two academics have written a good "here's how Tony Gramsci can fill in some of the major gaps in the MLP and maybe make it useful" article. On the downside, it's probably only particularly accessible to folks who know their Gramscia and their sustainability transitions stuff. The article is called "Regime resistance and... Continue Reading →
Dr Wifey and I have vegged out through 5 (count 'em, five) seasons of the ludicrous, luscious, delirious and devilish show Lucifer. It's about (spoilers) Lucifer getting sick of Hell and deciding to own a nightclub on Earth. He teams up with an LAPD detective to solve murders, which always miraculously help him/them cope with... Continue Reading →
Somewhere along the line I learnt that metaphors are very powerful things, in shaping/directing/preventing thought. So a for instance – if you frame a crime as a virus or crime as beast, it leads people to support different sets of responses. Autocrats and demagogues know this, instinctively, of course, and those of us who think... Continue Reading →
So naive, I know. There was never a golden age. But omfg it is blatant af at the moment. Nineteen Australian SAS soldiers are under investigation for murder and torture of Afghanis. You're seriously trying to tell me that nobody in the chain of command knew, and found ways not to know, to look the... Continue Reading →
Rule of thumb - If someone commenting on your blog post starts with an attack on you (as opposed to your arguments), then you’ve hit a nerve and - whether they know it or not, whether they can even admit it to themselves or anyone else when it is pointed out - they are trying... Continue Reading →
Marc Hudson 