pathologizing the present
Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh is primed to be Trump's bulwark against any future indictment by the Mueller investigation - given his subscription to the unitary executive theory. Not only that, with the aid of dark money forces and the ultimate sanctioning of the Federalist Society, Kavanaugh is also tabbed to be Corporate America's… Continue reading Kavanaugh and the Myth of Judicial Independence
Jordan Peterson’s tonic for navigating a chaotic social order conceals a reactionary politics.
Many readers here have no doubt spent at least some time thinking about the Singularity, whether in a spirit of hope or fear, or perhaps more reasonably some admixture of both. For my part, though, I am much less worried about a coming Singularity than I am about a Sofalarity in which our ability to create realistic illusions of achievement and adventure convinces the majority of humans that reality isn’t really worth all the trouble after all. Let me run through the evidence of an approaching Sofalarity. I hope you’re sitting down… well… actually I hope you’re not.
I would define a Sofalarity as a hypothetical point in human history would when the majority of human beings spend most of their time engaged in activities that have little or no connection to actual life in the physical world. It’s not hard to see the outline of this today: on…
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Traversing the complex terrain of information nihilism that fuels a reactionary disposition towards the war in Syria.
Yesterday, the US stock market fell by the most in one day since mid-2007, just before the credit crunch, the banking crash and the start of the Great Recession.
Is history set to repeat itself? Well, the old saying goes that history never repeats itself but it rhymes. In other words, there are echoes of the past in the present. But what are the echoes this time. There are three possibilities.
This crash will be similar to that 1987 and be followed by a quick and decisive recovery and the stock market and the US economy will resume its recent march upward. The crash will be seen as blip in the recovery from the Long Depression of the last ten years.
Or this could be like 2007. Then the stock market crash heralded the beginning of the mightiest collapse in global capitalist production since the 1930s and biggest collapse in…
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Omar Eliud Villarreal Robledo's 2016 thesis The Ontological Sociology of Cryptocurrency: A Theoretical Exploration of Bitcoin has yielded some interesting insights, applying a sociological lens upon the 21st century pecuniary techno-phenomenon of cryptocurrency - Bitcoin being the object of analysis - and its ontological characteristics. From Marx's Theory of Money Commodity (i.e., value-forms), bitcoin could be exchanged… Continue reading Bitcoin as Commodity Fetishism
*This is a fictional story. CW: scenes describing sexual violence and misogyny, though not in graphic detail.
Welcome to Rape Culture: The Opera. It’s opening night. The controversial and much talked about show has been shrouded in mystery, already sold out months in advance. Brad is attending with Lisa, an attractive younger woman he had a one-night fling with a few months back. Honestly, he is surprised that she has reached out to invite him. Their last date didn’t seem to go well though Brad could not figure out why. He had called and left messages but no response until tonight and he was happy to get another chance. He was also down to attend this edgy new show that had so many people in the art scene buzzing and he thought it would do good for his image to be seen attending, especially to be seen attending with a…
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