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Showing posts from February, 2018
"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World Revisited , published 1958
The Market is God, say the "free market" fundamentalists "I am determined to pursue an aggressive strategy of opening up the markets in all the regions of the world."* — Bill Clinton, firmer U.S. president, address to the WTO, May 18, 1998.  Quoted in  Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank  by Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 One can scratch her head and thinks about what effects that has had in the U.S. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Egypt, South Africa, Argentina, and other countries. Clinton in fact was not pursuing something new, the "shock doctrine" was already apace, and it would be soon complemented by "shock and awe". 
At least there is a mention of the complicity of the capitalist Western companies and the hypocrisy of the "Western leaders" who preach "human rights" and "freedoms" but do business with authoritarianism. The Thoughts of Chairman Xi
Learning assessment has not spurred discussion of the deep structural problems that send so many students to college unprepared to succeed. Instead, it lets politicians and accreditors ignore these problems as long as bureaucratic mechanisms appear to be holding someone — usually a professor — accountable for student performance. All professors could benefit from serious conversations about what is and is not working in their classes. But instead they end up preoccupied with feeding the bureaucratic beast. “It’s a bit like the old Soviet Union. You speak two languages,” said Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Britain, which has a booming assessment culture. “You do a performance for the sake of the auditors, but in reality, you carry on.” The misguided drive to measure 'learning outcomes'
The UK, U.S. and the EU loathe to impose sanctions, "for fear of hurting the ordinary people or derailing a delicate democratic experiment." Hahahah! The humanist imperialists who stood by and watched during Rwanda's genocide, hurt around 200,000 Iraqis, mostly children, and then invaded a country where there was no "democratic experiment". Then they watched again during a Syrian revolution turned into a war in which the regime is the main killer and torturer. Myanmar
"Seven years into this process – first counter-revolutionary and now exterminatory – the Ghouta has tumbled to the lowest pit of hell. This didn’t have to happen. Nor was it an accident. Local, regional and global powers created the tragedy, by their acts and their failures to act. And Arab and international public opinion has contributed, by its apathy and relative silence." The Ghouta Slaughter and Arab Responsibility
"Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess."  Orwell,  What is Science , 1945

New Forms of Industrial Action

"New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public ser
In Arabic The "civilised world", "the human rights defenders" are silent again while the Syrian regime backed by Iran and Russia is committing another massacre . Hang on, the victims are not white Western journalists or Christian Arabs! The very same Syrian regime and its backers that is responsible for 93 percent of the civilian deaths so far. Hang on, what about ISIS? ISIS has killed white Westerners in some European cities and the US.
It is not only the cospiracy theorists and the alt-right, we shouldn't forget "the liberal defense of murder" in the Iraq case prior to 2003. A lesson from Syria
How to "hide" crimes According to a report by the World Bank itself "the development of biofuels has caused a rise of 75 in food prices between 2002 and February 2008 (out of the 100 percent global rise, while the prices of energy and fertilisers accounted for only 15 percent).  This estimate is much higher thatn the 3 percent figure retained by the U.S. administration. According to the World Bank teh hike in prices has already cost consumers $324 billion in poor countries and could drive 105 million more people into poverty. So as not to displease President Bush, the World Bank did not publish this report. It was a leak in the press that allowed the information to emerge. This analysis of the World Bank remains ideologically tainted by neoliberalism. The development of agro-fuels is not responsible for the 'disorganisation of the markets' but reveals their irrational policies and their criminal consequences [my emphasis]. Eat, drink, or drive, the free m
The BBC online:  Britain is set for the coldest February week in five years as freezing air arrives from Russia. Putin's regime has done it again! The sanctions have been proved ineffective.
Italy They also began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again, such as the renationalisation of Italy’s banking, communications, health, transport and energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of Mussolini’s politics, focusing on his “social doctrines” regarding housing, unions, sanitation and a minimum wage. CasaPound accepted that the racial laws of 1938 (which introduced antisemitism and deportation) were “errors”; the movement claimed to be “opposed to any form of discrimination based on racial or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination”. CasaPound was borrowing leftwing clothes: imitating the strategy of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, it aimed for what Gramsci had called “cultural hegemony” by infiltrating the cultural and leisure activities of everyday Italians. In reality ... there was no Italian equivalent of Germany’s denazification: throughout the postwar period, one far-right political party – the Movim
"A social system based on private ownership of production can’t support the kind of planning that could avert environmental catastrophe. The owners of capital are fragmented and compelled by competition to look after their own interests first, and any serious planning would have to override property rights — an action that would be aggressively resisted."  Sam Gindin
"There has been a shift in the mood of liberals. Less than a decade ago, they were confident that progress was ongoing. No doubt there would be periods of regression; we might be in one of those periods at the present time. Today, liberals have lost that always rather incredible faith. Faced with the political reversals of the past few years and the onward march of authoritarianism, they find their view of the world crumbling away. What they need at the present time, more than anything else, is some kind of intellectual anodyne that can soothe their nerves, still their doubts and stave off panic. This is where Pinker comes in. Enlightenment Now is a rationalist sermon delivered to a congregation of wavering souls." John Gray's review of Steven Pinker's "embarrassing book".
In an excellent interview at the Register.com, the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis identifies the contours of this regime of affective management.  TV now tells you what to feel.
It doesn’t tell you what to think any more. From  EastEnders to reality format shows, you’re on the emotional journey of people – and through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. “Hugs and Kisses”, I call it.  I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyse television now it’s a system of guidance – it tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a “hugs and kisses” moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.  Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the ‘empire of the self’ everyone ‘feels the same’ without ever escaping a condition of solipsism. ‘What people suffer from,
“Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time."  Karl Marx

The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker

"For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers - just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club." The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker And also a review of  Pinker's previous book on "the decline of
"Human rights concerns are fine when they can be used as an ideological weapon to undermine enemies or to restore popular faith in the nobility of the state. But they are not to interfere with serious matters, such as dispersing and crushing the rascal multitude forming associations against the interests of the men of best quality." Noam Chomsky,  Deterring Democracy  (1991)
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices” George Orwell
"Masters in the art of deceipt, the accused institutions [the IMF and the World Bank] concede some mistakes so as to remain at the center of international affairs. Far from being worried by the increasing poverty that it causes, the World Bank seems more concerned with social troubles that put neoliberal globalisation in jeopardy. In a semi-confidential report, under the guise of a mea culpa , it continues to promote an economic model that has deliberately denied impoverishment people vital protections from the insatiable appetite of the most ferocious economic actors. From now on, the new edifice that ensures the expansion of the model of capitalist agriculture consists in making access to land subject to market forces, but also water resources, which amounts to a privatisation of biological life. Finally, it promote the concentration of agricultural resources and encourages speculation." Debt, IMF, and the World Bank  by E. Toussaint and D. Millet, 2010, p. 123
England Investing in education is investing in future generations. It is passivity, compliance, acquiescence, and more that make the English students and their parents accept the tuition fees. It is the mentality, and the ideology, of business.  It is about packaging and selling debt, hedge funds, etc. It is about creating a teacher-customer relationship. It is the most aggressive neoliberal capitalist economy in Europe. It is the myth of "we cannot afford scrapping tuitions fees" and "it is too costly for the state". It is the objective of reproducing compliant workforce that will think less and be at the service of the same ideological dogma. A Danish at an elite London university has told me how discussions in class are controlled and how they are much more open in Denmark, and how there is much less hierarchy. A better comparison would be a Germany, a country with a bigger population and woth no tuition fees. English and Danish tuition fees compa
"The growth of large-scale migration is after all part of the system of corporate globalisation that took hold in the past 30 years and widened inequality both within and between countries. It's also been fuelled by 15 years of western wars and intervention from Afghanistan to Somalia. And in Eastern Europe, the exploitation and migration of low-waged and skilled workers has been central to the neoliberal model imposed after 1989." Seumas Milne, the Guardian online, 01 January 2013 Italy as an example ' Migrants are more profitable than drugs' Raped, beaten, exploited
"We the signatories of this statement, refuse to separate our opposition to U.S. imperialism and any imperialist war drive on Iran, from our support for the progressive and revolutionary social justice struggles of Iranian women, workers and oppressed minorities against their regime." Statement in Solidarity with Iranian Women
"Algeria's angry young men! Racism in all its splendour. These orientalist cliches of the Arab-Berber man are really hard to dislodge even in the most "progressive" spaces (and I am not talking about the Guardian here). When, as an Arab, you speak up your mind, you show your anger and emotions, you are being upfront and direct in your behaviour, you are dubbed unreasonable, difficult to communicate with, not rational (not cartesian like the European), too emotional and above all you need to be controlled, tone-policed, disciplined and in need of civilising and enlightening in the European ways. I go through this almost every day and it is exhausting and painful!"  — Hamza Hamouchene,  commenting on this . Indeed, you wouldn't see Ms Hannah speaking about the British or Wetsern youth as narcisistic, football addicts,  commody lovers, their ignorance of their history,  indifferent to other people's sufferring, to their governments wars, support of the
How fundamentalism works "As economics is not an exact science, the number of counter-examples is irrelevant. If I put forward a hypothesis in physics which is proved wrong by an experiment, I must question the theory. And the theory progresses through such invalidation. In economics, you can undermine the existence of millions of people, but none of that human evidence will affect the ideology of structural adjustment ." — Susan George, vice president of ATTAC France, December 6, 2000 See also "How poor countries develop rich countries" "A tonne of cocoa is roughly US $1,300, while one 4x4 vehicle is now about US $120,000. So you need about 92 tonnes of cocoa to exchange for one 4x4. But to get one tonne, you will need not less than 20 acres of land. The average cocoa farmer in Ghana has only around 2-3 acres, meaning it would take him or her well over 500 years to produce enough cocoa to buy a 4x4.” John Opoku, human rights lawyer and activist, Gha
"...the British and other governments of the democratic and liberal world, so far from protesting (Saddam Hussein's regime which killed several thousands of his citizens with poison-gas bombs), kept quiet and did their best to keep their citizens in the dark, as they encouraged their businessmen to sell Saddam more arms including the equipment to gas more of his citizens. They were not outraged, until he did something genuinely insupportable...he attacked the oil fields thought vital by the USA."  Eric Hobsbawm, On History, p. 350

How the West Won

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” ―  Samuel P. Huntington ,  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , 1996, p. 51
"The interesting thing about Rojava is that while the YPG and YPJ are lauded worldwide for their struggle against the Islamic State, the fact remains that the solidarity shown for the Syrian Kurds is based on a notion of a common enemy rather than shared truths. While ISIS was globally understood in the terms of science fictional apocalypse, the city of Kobane became a metaphor for secularism, heroism, anti-terrorism and patriotism, all values assumed to prevent the arrival of the doomsday and behind which, the world, specifically the western world, would securely stand. Ironically however, the ideas that inspire what’s happening in Rojava developed from a critique of western paradigms of capitalism, positivism, individualism and professionalism. Therefore, it is urgent to become informed about the ideals of the Kurdish Liberation Movement and what it does on the ground so that now a larger support can be mobilized for it as it is dealing with Turkish attacks and its abandonment

Western Values?

" A lot of truth in this . But there is a real problem with the tendency to see all this in terms of ‘turning away from western values’-as if fascism wasn’t a western value-as if justice was the sole possession of the west-as if movements for democracy were all about a desire to be western. In so many ways this whole discourse is part of the problem-people who have never expanded their universalism beyond a constricted eurocentric post-war vision. I do think we’re confronted by discursively similar discourses in this respect-both flowing out of an amazing theoretical laziness and ennui." — John Gamey Indeed, is Germany's complicity with Isreal in crimes a Western value or not? The decades long of Western states support of dictatorships in the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere a Western value or not? Is the state of Europe today, including the consequences of neolibral capitalism, the rise of the far-right, corruption, relentless privatisation, curtailing unions

Jimmy Carter: ‘The US is an Oligarchy’

Carter told Brzezinski and secretary of state  Cyrus Vance  as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of the unrest in Iran.  One initiative Carter authorized to achieve this goal was a collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan's  Inter-Services Intelligence  (ISI); through the ISI, the CIA began providing some $500,000 worth of non-lethal assistance to the mujahideen on July 3, 1979—several months prior to the Soviet invasion. The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by CIA official  Robert Gates , "that a substantial U.S. covert aid program" might have "raise[d] the stakes" thereby causing "the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended. That same Carter now considers the U.S. an oligarchy
Germany "The neoliberal bourgeoisie no longer acts according to the rules of classical Marxism. The CEOs of the DAX 30 companies will not suddenly arrive like Batman to save centrist politics. The economic elite is, after all, the client of the state – always dependent on handouts, outsourcing, deregulation and implicit subsidies. Both Trump and Brexit show: the corporate elite will take what it they are given – and they usually learn to like it. So the German left must outline a new long-term strategy . The first question is: what does it mean to be progressive in 21st century Germany? At a micro-level this is answered every day by the altruistic actions of young people and trade unionists: to do volunteer work with migrants and refugees; to attend democratic political and cultural events; to cycle and to recycle; to uphold the rights of women, ethnic minorities and gay people. To confront unflinchingly the memory of the Holocaust. To trace, as the Marxist philosopher Geo
"We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom." — Thimothy Snyder, a Professor of History at Yale, US. An interesting perspective. Stalin vs. Hitler: who was worse? Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?
White do white people like what I write? The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass imprisonment and housing discrimination. But the chain of causality that can trace the complex process of exclusion in America to its grisly consequences – the election of a racist and serial groper – is missing from his book. Nor can we understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most incredible of eras, and an underestimation of its continuities with the past and present.  ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to  We Were Eight Years in Power . ‘But ever
Russia "Russia’s economic decline continued, but this could now be presented as the price of foreign glory. Through September 2015, the main subject could be Ukraine. That October, it changed to Syria. The new Russian wars are a Bonapartism without a Napoleon, temporarily resolving domestic tensions in doomed foreign adventures , but lacking a vision for the world. Ideals are recognized in order to be mocked. In the parts of southeastern Ukraine under Russian and separatist control, millions of people have lost their homes and thousands their lives, but the property of the oligarchs is untouched—and those separatists who believed they were fighting against oligarchy have been murdered."
"Malm presented his dissertation  Fossil Capital  in 2014, at Swedens’ Lund University. The book is a tome of 797 pages in total, and a breakthrough in the debate on climate change." "Without a mass movement, we don't stand a chance against fossil capital"
"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.”  In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people.  Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against the
England It is easy to forget that in 2005 Theresa May was a shadow minister going into a general election with a Conservative manifesto promising to scrap all tuition fees, the BBC reminds us. "People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises." — L.
“The State Farm of Al-Assad between Rejection, Adaptation and Re-Appropriation (1971-2010): Revisiting the Authoritarian Construction of a Territory in the Syrian Countryside”
"we might note that for the underachieving Arab countries, which is in fact the overwhelming majority of them, the crunch on their course of development is fourfold." Development under the threat of war in the Arab World
Italy " Social phantoms always emerge in moments of crisis. Hatred of the foreigner is the result of a lethal cocktail of bad politics, irresponsible information and economic crisis. Now in Italy all bearings have been completely lost and a climate of endless electoral campaigning has triggered a chain reaction that no one seems able to keep in check: the entire political campaign is focused on the subject of immigration." Keep silent. Don't talk about it
Britain Michael Roberts reporting from a Labour Party conference Models of public ownership and   Why did Labour lose in 1983? "In a way, the myth that it was the 'hard Left' that cost Labour the election is an inverted form of Bennite optimism. It lays all the emphasis upon ideology, agency and leadership, albeit in a thin, polemical way that asks no searching questions of the Labour Right and Centre, long its dominant forces. But, then as now, agency and leadership turn out to depend on far bigger historical processes. And it's their obliviousness to those larger processes that leaves Corbyn's right-wing critics out in the cold, fantasising about re-staging the battles of the 1980s."
Stay out of it Like Houda Sharawi, Jamila Bouhired, Nawal Saadawi, and thousands others, many more today are fighting all sorts of oppression. Fatma Ramadan (an Egyptian trade unionist) Narges Hosseini (currently detained for her protest against compulsory 'hijab') Tunisian women protesting against the IMF Iraqi women protesting against new law that would allow child marriage Western women, you who consider Arab and Muslim women unfit and want to "empower" them, and  claim "to defend human rights", stay out of it. Arab countries and people have had enough of  - imperialist states wars and destruction   - support of stability and dictatorship  - co-opting uprisings,  - hypocrisy  - the "rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'democracy' - marketing this or that Arab/Muslim woman to your public - promoting a Clooney or a Jolie as embassadors  Invest in a regime change at home, and in empowering women exploited in workplaces and co
And here is some narrative with some crap on the top A liberal is telling us how/why "the West" should have saved Syria. I know that amnesia is prevalent nowadays, but I personally remember well how "the West", "the international community" and "the free world" have "saved" Iraq and Afghanistan, and Rwanda before that. "Syria: the failure of our age" Also The boy who started the Syrian revolution, before it became a war
There were no red banners in Navalny’s largely teenage and twenty-something audience. But if Russia has any revolutionary energy left, it isn’t to be found among Stepakhno’s ‘left patriotic youth’, but here, among Navalny’s supporters. Not that 1917 itself is much of a marker these days: young people are taught next to nothing about the October Revolution, said Violetta Grudina, who heads Navalny’s small but active Murmansk cell. ‘The very word “revolution” has been branded extremist. Better not to talk about it – what if people find out that it’s possible?’   [A Russian] Diary
A rare use of the word bougreoisie by the Financial Times, without inverted commas. Before 2008 the word 'capitalism' itself was almost absent except among some far left-wingers. The Western ruling class, the corportae media and other defenders of the system see Trump as a liability, but also some other 'excesses' of the system (such as inequality) might threaten the 'credibility' of capitalism. The discreet terror of the American bourgeoisie
Britain " this account rather downplays the role of collectivities, especially trade unions, which probably did more to shape Britain’s distinctive labour relations, and certainly did more to sustain working-class incomes, than any state programme. More troubling to me, however, is the way Renwick’s teleological narrative approach limits the analytical power of the book. We are told a story of how this welfare state came about, but because there is neither a comparative framework nor any real analysis of the way social structures (not just people) shape both visions and outcomes, the distinctiveness of Britain’s choices never really emerges. The book does provide a good and readable account of the making of the Beveridgean welfare state. But without a sharper analytical focus, and especially some attention to Beveridge’s ideas about how to provide income security without disordering family life, the book not only ignores the welfare state’s disciplinary function but also rather
Germany When doves cry Note: there is no word about the selling of submarines, for example, to the settler colonial state of Israel.  Complicity in crimes for jobs and accumulation of capital.
"Under the new, ‘improved’ system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a ‘light’ inspection. But the downside of this ‘light’ inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirro
" The Parallax View is in a sense a meta-conspiracy film: a film not only about conspiracies but about the impotence of attempts to uncover them; or, much worse than that, about the way in which particular kinds of investigation feed the very conspiracies they intend to uncover. It is not only that the Warren Beatty character is framed/killed for the crime he is investigating, neatly eliminating him and undermining his investigations with one pull of a corporate assassins trigger; it’s that, as Jameson noted in his commentary on the film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic , his very tenacity, quasi-sociopathic individualism, make him eminently frameable. 
The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View – when the silhouette of Beatty’s anonymous assassin appears against migraine-white space – for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very different film, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show . But where the door in the horizon opening onto black space at the end of Weir
"In posing the question, ‘ who is the subject supposed to recycle?’ [Campbell] Jones denaturalizes an imperative that is now so taken for granted that resisting it seems senseless, never mind unethical. Everyone is supposed to recycle; no-one , whatever their political persuasion, ought to resist this injunction. The demand that we recycle is precisely posited as a pre- or post-ideological imperative; in other words, it is positioned in precisely the space where ideology always does its work. But the subject supposed to recycle, Jones argued, presupposed the structure not supposed to recycle: in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure contracts out its responsibility to consumers, by itself receding into invisibility. Now, when the appeal to individual ethical responsibility has never been more clamorous – in her book Frames Of War , Judith Butler uses the term ‘responsibi-lization’ to refer to this phenomenon – it is necessary to wager instead on struct
England " The analysis of Department for Education figures by researchers at Huddersfield and Sheffield universities shows that since 2010, council areas with the highest levels of deprivation and need have faced the biggest cuts." Another proof that "there is a class war, and they are winning it." (The quote is originally Warrent Buffet's) Poorest areas face biggest cuts in children's services
"How does a rationality that is expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means (neoliberalism) intersect with one that is expressly moral and regulatory (neoconservatism)? How does a project that empties the world of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits desire, intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire? How does support for governance modeled on the firm and a normative social fabric of self-interest marry or jostle against support for governance modeled on church authority and a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty, the very fabric shredded by unbridled capitalism?  [T]he choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites ... Frankfurt school intellectuals and, before them, Plato theorized the open compatibility between individual choice and political domination, and depicted democratic subjects who are available