2022 09 09 0930 hours mobile from gym to house having listened to Absolute Radio playing maudlin wrist-slasher music and hushed announcements. Now this is a commercial station but clearly they've taken a lead and there is a bunch of "approved music" you can play at times like these. And it's moments like these you... Continue Reading →
Meso-aggressions: sassy, feisty, “proles can read? well done you” etc.
Very quickly - People like me (white, middle class, cishet male, all the other privileges) usually don't get - long-term - how exhausting it is to be constantly reminded of your place in the "pecking order" (blah blah Aristotle Great Chain of Being etc). The word "sassy" - aimed at young black women. The word... Continue Reading →
Things we can’t see, don’t have the language for, that MATTER (the mechanics of social movement organisations etc etc)
We can't, usually, 'see' carbon dioxide. But we know it is there. Since the 1950s very very accurate measures of its concentration in the atmosphere have been kept (thanks to Uncle Sam and his military industrial complex). While dickheads - to use the technical academic term - like ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott scoff at "invisible... Continue Reading →
Smart but so very very stupid at the same time: Dunning-Kruger among would-be leaders
I've just read Melissa Benn's excellent novel of "New Labour" - "One of Us" (more soon). That - combined with Rishi Sunak's response in the "leadership" "debate" to what he would do about climate change (recycling, wasting less, innovation) has got me to thinking about the question of, well, how our "leaders" are so catastrophically... Continue Reading →
Neologism of the decade: nihiliberalism
(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 →
Big Brother is talking to you…
States don't just create external boundaries. As per Cesaire, the technologies are being brought into the metropole.
Destroy our sense-making – of Cassandras, rotten apples and more
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 →
Sorry seems to be the hardest word: of COVID, #auspol, Brown M&Ms and sociopaths
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 →
Converging what where? – Of helixes, quasi-industrial policy and incantations
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 →
“Assume the position”! Of Gramsci, “transitions” and how someday our modern prince may come (but too late)
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 →
Marc Hudson 