The writing of this diary was inspired in part by mwmwm’s jeremiad of Monday.  The point is this: the future is cathected negatively because our institutions have failed to catch up with the real future unfolding before our eyes.  

Thus institution-based actions are often ineffective.  Direct action approaches to social problems, however, offer the immediate replacement of power lost through institution-based strategies of “triangulation.”  In relying upon bourgeois, capitalist government in a neoliberal era, we sell out our ideals to that government’s raison d’etre.  Thus anarchist direct action (in such a context) suggests grounds for further thought about methods of political problem-solving (and of redress for lost human rights), even for progressives.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

For four years I attended graduate school at the “Department of Communication” of The Ohio State University.  This is something of a reflection upon what it means to have an advanced degree (in my case, a Ph.D.) in “Communication,” and especially upon what it means not to have any sort of employment gained from it.

Here we go.  Only a few months after teacherken (over at DKos) gave incoming Secretary of Education Arne Duncan a ringing endorsement of “it could have been worse,” we are now in the Twilight Zone of education politics.  Duncan is threatening to withhold money from the already-underfunded California schools if the legislatures here can’t repeal a law which prohibits the state from using test scores to evaluate teachers.

Generally, here, I engage a critique of the “accountability” movement, of which Arne Duncan is the most recent example.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

Recent events have made it somewhat evident that the current system of global governance is inadequate for the problem of abrupt climate change.  A suggestion that is slowly becoming more popular is that of a new system of global governance, and so this is a review of Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver’s (2009) book Right Relationship: Building A Whole Earth Economy. Right Relationship is, to a significant extent, a “Quaker” outline for the reconcilement of economy with ecology; meaningfully, its transformative suggestions do seem quite apropos of the need for post-capitalist environmental design.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This diary is prompted by Muskegon Critic’s “Yes, I Defend Obama” diary of Tuesday, and to a certain extent Budhydharma’s diary of that day and today’s diary about “the honeymoon.”  Here I am interested in how “moderate” memes work, as many of them seem unrelated to the concrete situations in which they are deployed.  My diary will quote a number of “moderate” memes as they have been used in commentary on DailyKos.com, and comment upon these quotes with the hopes of arriving at some productive criticism of our political discourse.

(Folks, I’m reposting this from Big Orange because I thought Edger needed to know about this….)

for a better world?

The basic situation is this: as the noose tightens on the old, capitalist ways of life, very few people appear to be all that interested in creating new ones.  Am I missing something here?

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This diary is a book review of Kees van der Pijl’s (2007) work on “foreign relations,” Nomads, Empires, States.  Van der Pijl argues that the field of “foreign relations” must be rethought, and doing this will allow us to see why relations between nation-states are only one mode of foreign relations, and not necessarily the most important one in this era.  Rethinking foreign relations, then, we should be able to understand why the regime of “global governance” has failed to triumph in a world without endemic warfare between nation-states.

(crossposted at Big Orange)