From the Editors Archives - Page 127 of 172

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What Berkeley Needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad

Reflections from a civil rights veteran

September 8, 2017 • by Jo Freeman

Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then, we were the equivalent of the "fascists" that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, ...

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Why Colin Kaepernick Isn’t Working

Football’s Sketchy Labor History

September 7, 2017 • by Claire Potter

Football may be entertainment for most of us, but it is labor for those who play it, a kind of work that requires as much preparation and discipline as any academic or white collar professional training. In fact, many parents begin fantasizing about an NFL career when their children are ...

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The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter

A Memoir

September 6, 2017 • by Jane Lazarre

My father was a Communist Party organizer, a fervent believer in the political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the intellectual foundation of what became a faith, ideas that had nurtured and inspired him since his adolescence in “the old country” of Kishinev, Romania. Or Russia -- he would always add -- Russia, Romania ...

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Remembering Romanian Fascism; Worrying About America

Losing Our Moral Compass between Past and Future

September 3, 2017 • by Maria Bucur

Living under Ceausescu was in some ways like living with Donald Trump as president. There was a lot of nationalist swagger, posturing, and boasting about independence from the Soviets. When Ceausescu refused to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact crackdown on student protests, people ...

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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

September 1, 2017 • by Marci Shore

The end of “The End of History” arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter ...

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Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump

The Post-Truth Perspective

August 31, 2017 • by Emmanuel Alloa

This is a true story. The acclaimed TV series Fargo starts off exactly in the same way as the movie of the same name in 1996. Just as the cult film by the Coen brothers, the TV drama whose first season was aired in 2014 displays the warning “This is a true story.” ...

Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump

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Once Upon a Time in 1989

How the West is now learning the hard lessons of the East

August 30, 2017 • by Slavenka Drakulić

In the first of a series of articles from the landmark 50th edition of Transit (to be published in September), author Slavenka Drakulić casts a rueful glance over the expectations -- some fulfilled, many frustrated -- of the generations that have lived through the changes since 1989. I imagine a cosy ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere IV

Concluding Remarks

August 29, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It has been an eventful summer. As my dear friend and colleague Robin Wagner-Pacifici would put it, a restless eventful summer: “The world seems out of whack, and everyday routines are, at the least, disrupted. People … experience a vertiginous sensation that a new reality or era may be in the ...

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere IV

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Will the Internet be the Death of Metaphysics?

Thinking Gianni Vattimo through Black Mirror, the ‘Nosedive’ Episode

August 29, 2017 • by Alkim Erol

The philosopher Gianni Vattimo formulated his hermeneutics on ‘Weak Thought’, in his work Art’s Claim to Truth (1979). Weak Thought is “nothing other than the knowledge, acceptance, and recognition that philosophy, after the deconstruction of metaphysics, cannot capture the ultimate essence of its objects but must comply with multiplicity of ...

Will the Internet be the Death of Metaphysics?

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Before Charlottesville There Was Jamestown

An Essay

August 28, 2017 • by Mindy Fullilove, Robert Fullilove, William Morrish and Robert Sember

Nearly 400 years of division have created an apartheid society: we need a new social infrastructure to carry us through the challenges of climate change, decaying physical infrastructure, rapidly evolving jobs, underperforming schools, uneven access to health care and lack of affordable housing. Our central task is to engage as ...

Before Charlottesville There Was Jamestown

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Aristotle on Charlottesville

‘Mixed Actions’ and Exercising Judgement on Violence

August 28, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

In the opening movement of book 3 of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that, at bottom, each and every human being is responsible for essentially every action they undertake; put another way: there is nothing a human being does for which they ought not to be praised or blamed. This ...

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American Idiot

Rethinking Anti-Intellectualism in the Age of Trump

August 25, 2017 • by Nicholas Baer

“On my arrival in the United States I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the subjects, and so little among the heads of the Government.” We may fairly assume that Alexis de Tocqueville would be even more surprised if he were to visit today. For while Tocqueville ...