apparently nick land was once given a disciplinary hearing at warwick to explain why the whole of one of his modules in the philosophy department was on the difference between VHS and betamax
scratch that, apparently that thing about scottish independence is bullshit
The 1940s renegotiation which created today’s most modern and most resilient version of British parliamentary sovereignty also created the form of the public which has been criticised ever since, but which remains highly resilient. One of the payoffs for this version of the public, which is at base a modification of eternal British rule, has been that anything outside of British universalism must then be seen as nationalist. Campaigners for self determination then become ‘nationalists’ even when they are working against the nationalism of an overwhelmingly strong state, and when they are arguing for the kinds of commonly accessible services that British nationalism has made impossible.
[…] But given Yes campaigners’ desire to wrest control of shared services from of the seemingly unreachable hands of the establishment, a question for fellow travellers south of the border would be, can we have some more enthusiasm for the kind of sovereignty challenge which comes around only every few decades at most? Can we stop describing this as nationalism? When we find a campaign articulating the desire for nuclear disarmament, open-access education and healthcare, resistance to immigration myths, a space to stand up to a partisan parliament line, wide agreement on the damage of neoliberalism, a wide desire for equality, and the opening of sovereignty, can the UK press really go on convincing its readers that this is a local, nationalist concern?
piece on the operation by which scottish independence is dismissed as nationalism by one of my old lecturers
The middle class American worker is in danger of becoming an endangered species. The politicians are not telling you the truth, and the mainstream media is certainly not telling you the truth, but the reality is that there is nothing but bad news on the horizon for workers in the United States. The American people inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and we have wrecked it. Decades of very foolish decisions have resulted in the period of steady economic decline that we are experiencing now. Today, American workers are living in an economy that is rapidly declining, and their jobs are steadily being stolen by robots, computers and foreign workers that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. Politicians from both political parties refuse to do anything to stop the bleeding because they think that the status quo is working just great. So don’t expect things to get better any time soon. The following are 10 charts that demonstrate the slow, agonizing death of the American worker…Some rather sobering charts….
these charts are insane
Description
Date12 November 2004, 03:27Sourcehumus faceAuthor
Joi Ito from Inbamura, Japan
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maybe some of that $1.1 billion could go towards fixing the thing where it won’t let me reblog most things or publish asks
Marinaleda is run along the lines of a communist Utopia and boasts collectivised lands (1,200 previously unused hectares, seized by a mass land-grab in 1990 from an aristocrat’s estate) which offer every villager the opportunity to work the fields, tending to root crops and olive groves. In Andalusia, where jobs are currently being lost at the rate of about 500 a day, any work is good work.
Marinaleda’s mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, has gained national notoriety and has even been dubbed the “Robin Hood of Spain” after he and a group of labourers refused to pay a supermarket for 10 shopping trolleys filled with food, which they distributed to the area’s food banks, sparking headlines in countries as far away as Iran.
“That was to draw attention to the fact there are so many people in Spain who have a hard time getting enough to eat right now,” says Mr Sánchez Gordillo. “We wanted to say, in the 21st century in Spain, ‘this problem exists’. Gandhi would have supported it.”
But the supermarket “raids” were just the tip of the iceberg for Mr Sánchez Gordillo, who has spent more than 30 years fighting for wealth redistribution via land occupations, cheap housing and co-operatives. In Marinaleda, he has promoted equal wages policies, scrapped the police force and offered mortgages on previously state-owned properties, which cannot be sold on for profit, of just €15 a month.
Stanislaw Lem’s forgotten masterwork Summa Technologiae, now in English half a century after publication, is a heady mix of prescience, philosophy and irony
[…] Take what happens halfway through: suddenly, in a section on chaos and order, Lem recasts the universe as a boarding house inhabited by a bank clerk called Mr Smith, his puritanical aunt, and a female lodger. The house has a glass wall, and all the greats of science have to peer through and draw truths about the universe from what they observe.
Lem’s version of Claudius Ptolemy notes how, when the aunt goes to the cellar to fetch some vegetables, Mr Smith kisses the lodger. Ptolemy develops a purely descriptive theory, so “one can know in advance which position will be taken by the two upper bodies when the lower one finds itself in the lowest position”.
Isaac Newton enters, declaring that “the bodies’ behaviour depends on their mutual attraction”. And so it goes on. Werner Heisenberg notices indeterminacy in their behaviour: “For instance, in the state of kissing, Mr Smith’s arms do not always occupy the same position.” Mathematics comes unstuck in the ensuing complexity, whereby “a neural equivalent of an act of sneezing would be a volume whose cover would have to be lifted with a crane”.
So, science is steadily pushing us into a cul-de-sac where, the more accurate our theory, the closer it comes to the phenomenon itself, in all its indeterminacy. Lem asks where we go from here, and comes to a startling and mordant conclusion: analysis must be abandoned in favour of creative activity – of “imitological practice”, as he would have it.
Intelligence carries conscious beings to a point where their theories are no longer useful to them, where hard-won objectivity drowns in a glut of complexity, and where the only way forward is for the beings to “grow” into the fabric of the world. Why examine the world further when we know enough to rebuild it in our own image? So creative work displaces analysis, and science becomes performative and playful.
What would a civilisation that made this choice and took this path look like? Lem’s answer is: look at the rocks.
stickyembraces replied to your photo: this ‘currently reading’ pile is too damn big
Is that an arrested development DVD? because I am distracted from my enormous currently reading pile by my second rewatch of arrestede development this year
yeah well spotted
don’t know how i’m gonna watch the new series without netflix, best be a stream of it somewhere
though the joke falls a little flat if you’ve read preliminary materials for a theory of the young-girl
