Commodity of Commodities
Avoiding climate catastrophe requires of democratic capitalism that it embrace its own absolute contradiction – catastrophically. Continue reading
Avoiding climate catastrophe requires of democratic capitalism that it embrace its own absolute contradiction – catastrophically. Continue reading →
miguel cervantes: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/02/21/is-john-carter-going-to-be-a-250-million-flop/
miguel cervantes: Romney stands for little of significance, and ultimately that comes through, despite his resources
fuster: Romney stands for everything that made Utah great and the place that, unique among all the world except for the Dominican Republic, is concerned with helping Ann Frank now, when she really needs it.
Obama and his radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood campaign staff sure aren't offering to baptize Ann.
miguel cervantes: That's so far down the objections to the Don Draper wannabe that it's not worth noting
fuster: miggs, beloved of Allah, have you hugged a mohel today?
Who's this Donnie the draper?
miguel cervantes: Don Draper, (actually not his real name) is the smooth talking
Organization Man of Mad Men,
the post-CU world is a world in which the 0.0001% are financing a remarkably effective satire undermining themselves and their chosen spokespeople: Diminishing returns as morality play. →
The real nightmare is already ongoing, and everyone in the family knows it: of a party splintering, each main ideological element of the Reagan Era coalition exposed both as insufficient on its own terms and as unable to discover a compelling rationale for uniting with its customary allies. →
The Tsar of Capsaici →
The economic liberal whose personality is another “private equity” is the human exponent of the universal equivalent, money, and approximates its mode of operation in his chameleonlike adaptability. Yesterday he was a social liberal, today he’s a social conservative. He doesn’t “really” care. He isn’t “really” anyone, at least as far as we’re concerned. And that’s who he is for political purposes - same as what he comes across as – no one in particular. →
there's a degenerative conditi →
It is, of course, a crucifixion. →
| The Tsar, Who Is Above the Law, Declares Nothing To Be Above the Law | |
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In short: "It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves." | |
| not necessarily great like good great | |
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In short: "Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself..." | |
| among others | |
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In short: "Inner things or outer things, what are they but things and things!" | |
| What a Concept | |
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In short: The perceived intellectual exhaustion of liberalism, along with receding memories of the 1930s, has in recent years led to renewed interest in Carl Schmitt's work, including this tract, written at the time that Schmitt was urging Hindenburg to save the Weimar Republic from itself. Hindenburg had other ideas. The author was a German who joined the Nazi Party in the same month as Martin Heidegger, and was active in subequent years as an ideological anti-semite, but THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL remains arguably one of the most important and challenging pieces of political writing of the last 100 years. | |
| Enigma wrapped in the obvious | |
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In short: "A synoptic view of the current crisis would say: while the epicentre lies in the technologies and organisational forms of the credit system and the state-finance nexus, the underlying problem is excessive capitalist empowerment vis-a-vis labour and consequent wage repression, leading to problems of effective demand papered over by credit-fuelled consumerism of excess in one part of the world and a too rapid expansion of production in new product lines in another." | |
| Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful | |
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In short: Throughout the book, which mainly consists of political-historical essays written over the last fifteen years, Robin describes reactionary conservatism as a movement that cannot live without an enemy, and that, as seen many times in its history going back to Edmund Burke and up to the present day, is therefore endangered by its own success. More at The Ages of Reagans. | |
| Eghel Lehge Gheel Ghele Leegh | |
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In short: Fredric Jameson re-reads Hegel's most perplexing work - intended to be a dispensable preface, but translated since Hegel's time into a core statement - for the (for whatever) present moment. He therefore begins at the end: "Absolute Spirit cannot be considered as a terminus of any kind, without transforming Phenomenology of Spirit into a developmental narrative, one that can be characterized variously as teleological or cyclical, but which in either case is to be vigorously repudiated by modern, or at least by contemporary, thought of whatever persuasion." | |