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The neoliberal state, despite claims to the contrary, wields strong planning powers, which it enacts through close collaboration with corporate and financial interests. No one should be fooled anymore by the democratic aura that neoliberals still hope to evoke when they claim that the market decides. The decision-making market in such statements is a euphemism, at best, for the forces of wealth, including the banks and financial powers, that wield formidable instruments of planning. They determine, for example, what software will be developed, what dams will be built, who will buy a house, and so forth.
Hardt and Negri (Declaration)
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#FitchTheHomeless is a great example of how well-intentioned activism / charity often feeds off of marginalizing images of persons in poverty, who get to be silent objects of pity or, in this case, instrumentally useful because of their yuckiness.
Abercrombie and Fitch is bad, but #FitchTheHomeless is gross in its own noble way.
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The potential for madness in faith is activated…. when their ardent confessions honor a source of morality at odds with the one we construe to be universal, or challenge our demand to dominate public space…. The more relentless the drive to universalize an existential faith, the more its supporters experience otherwise tolerable differences to be forms of persecution demanding reprisal.
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That temptation is not sufficiently modulated through the practice of secularism…. secularists themselves very often have inordinate faith in the self-sufficiency of the public procedures they endorse…. Euro-American secularists typically overplay the autonomy of public reason… and discount the extent to which the concepts of free will, punishment, and public morality that they deploy express the history of the Christendom in which they participate.
William E. Connolly (Pluralism) -
State power restructures temporality itself, since the problem of terrorism is no longer a historically or geographically limited problem: it is limitless and without end, and this means that the state of emergency is potentially limitless and without end, and that the prospects of an exercise of state power in its lawlessness structures the future indefinitely. The future becomes a lawless future, not anarchical, but given over to the discretionary decisions of a set of designated sovereigns… who are beholden to nothing and to no one except the performative power of their own decisions.
Judith Butler (Precarious Life)
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It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life. The connection between more and better has been broken…
André Gorz (Critique of Economic Reason)
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You can only say something is efficient in relation to your objectives. The superior efficiency of the market economy turns out either to be illusory or to have hidden costs. It only functions as well as it does because it assumes continued uncompensated contributions and support from the very non-market institutions it is undermining.
Edgar Cahn
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Any political approach or theoretical claim dependent upon the discovery of the truth of the world or human nature commits a significant error. Such approaches ignore the historical and emergent character of the meaning of truth; the meaning of reality is our common project, disclosed by our actions. When we come to view truth as something to be discovered ‘out there’ we subjugate ourselves to our own creations.
Edward Wingenbach (“Martin Heidegger”)
- One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.
- Cheesus cannot deal with tragedy. Which is why, for the worst sort of Cheesus-loving evangelicals, the cross of Good Friday is actually celebrated as a moment of triumph. This is theologically illiterate. Next week, in the run up to Easter, Christianity goes into existential crisis. It fails.
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Analysis of such data conducted for this report suggests the reduction in the top tax rates has had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth. It is reasonable to assume that a tax rate change limited to a small group of taxpayers at the top of the income distribution would have a negligible effect on economic growth.
CRS Report for Congress, updated 12 Dec. 2012 (‘Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945’)
(In case you needed evidence of the falsity of the claim that raising the marginal tax rate on the rich is tantamount to punching the economy in the face)
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The idea that economic growth is an end in itself implies that society is a means.
François Flahault (Le paradoxe de Robinson. Capitalisme et société)
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Yekaterina Samutsevich: Closing Statement at the Pussy Riot Trial
One of the defendants in the case against feminist punk group Pussy Riot gives a rousing closing statement. An excerpt:
Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.
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Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of this media image, generated and maintained by the authorities for so long, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to combine the visual image of Orthodox culture and protest culture, suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it might also take the side of civic rebellion and protest in Russia.
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I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we now expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. Now the whole world sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, Russia looks different in the eyes of the world from the way Putin tries to present it at daily international meetings. All the steps toward a state governed by the rule of law that he promised have obviously not been made. And his statement that the court in our case will be objective and make a fair decision is another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you. -
Who is more faithful to reason’s call, who hears it with a keener ear, who better sees the difference, the one who offers questions in return and tries to think through the possibility of that summons, or the one who does not want to hear any question about the reason of reason?
Jacques Derrida (‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’)
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NY Times: "Sexual Harassment in Online Gaming Stirs Anger"
When Miranda Pakozdi entered the Cross Assault video game tournament this year, she knew she had a slim chance of winning the $25,000 prize. But she was ready to compete, and promised fans watching online that she would train just as hard as, if not harder than, anyone else.
Over six days of competition, though, her team’s coach, Aris Bakhtanians, interrogated her on camera about her bra size, said “take off your shirt” and focused the team’s webcam on her chest, feet and legs. He leaned in over her shoulder and smelled her.
Ms. Pakozdi, 25, an experienced gamer, has said she always expects a certain amount of trash talk. But as the only woman on the team, this was too much, especially from her coach, she said. It was after she overheard Mr. Bakhtanians defending sexual harassment as part of “the fighting game community” that she forfeited the game.
Sexism, racism, homophobia and general name-calling are longstanding facts of life in certain corners of online video games. But the Cross Assault episode was the first of a series this year that have exposed the severity of the harassment that many women experience in virtual gaming communities.
And a backlash — on Twitter, in videos, on blogs and even in an online comic strip — has moved the issue beyond endless debate among gaming insiders to more public calls for change.
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“For the longest time, people have seen games as a children’s pastime, and we as an industry have stood behind this idea. But that’s not true any longer. We are a real mass medium, and we have a real effect on the culture. We have to take a step beyond this idea that nothing we could possibly do could be negative, or hurt people.”
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[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.
David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
