Politics Archives - Page 69 of 143

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An Interview with Mari Ruti

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

September 27, 2018 • by Mari Ruti and Josh Maserow

In Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Cost of Everyday Life Mari Ruti interweaves theoretical insight, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to lift the lid on the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Emanating from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical ...

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Being and Surrounding

A Review of Gianni Vattimo

September 26, 2018 • by Gabriel Serbu

The imminent end of most life on Earth due to environmental catastrophe is no longer a matter of mythological prophecies or science fiction flicks, but a scientific fact. Yet few scientists speak freely about it as their careers usually depend on external corporate funding. What is needed in the face ...

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A Letter from the Valley of the Fallen

Spain wrestles with its Franquista past

September 25, 2018 • by Anna Oakes

In June, the center-left administration of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s newly appointed prime minister, announced the government’s intention to exhume Francisco Franco’s body and move it to an as-yet-undecided location. Since the announcement, a renewed national debate has broken out in Spain over Franco’s legacy. The Franco family have made clear their intentions ...

Blue Monday

With Outrage and Injustice for All

Itinerary of a thought about the Kavanaugh controversy and the public significance of a fair hearing

September 24, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues.” -Duke Ellington As readers of this column know, I believe that Trumpism -- the Trump administration, the Republican Congress, and the Trumpist Republican party -- represents a profound threat to liberal democracy, human rights, social justice, and public decency. ...

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The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller

Keller is well known for being blind, but deserves to be heralded for her progressive social vision

September 22, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

The Texas Board of Education recently voted to remove Helen Keller from the state’s required social studies curriculum. This is a good excuse to remind people about Keller, who is one of the most iconic public figures of the past century but whose life and legacy is misunderstood. Most people think ...

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The New Political Reality

Trumpism as White Minority Rule

September 21, 2018 • by Sanford Schram

Okay, Trump is not Hitler: that is a less than perfect comparison. And the racists making robocalls are not the Brown Shirts or Storm Troopers of Kristallnacht. Those calls, however, are increasing in frequency, going beyond dog whistling to outright race-baiting, whether it is against African American candidates for Florida’s governor or ...

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Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Technology in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis

September 20, 2018 • by Conrad Moriarty-Cole

“Every society creates its own world, internal and external, and of this creation technique is neither an instrument nor a cause; it is a dimension… an everywhere dense sub-set. For it is present at every point at which the society constitutes what is, for it, the real-rational.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the ...

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

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I Believe Christine Blasey Ford

Republicans have no plausible argument about why Brett Kavanaugh is innocent

September 19, 2018 • by Claire Potter

What will come of the allegation by Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when he was seventeen and she was fifteen? As of today, it is not clear that Ford will testify before the Senate ...

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Rise for the Climate

Shouting marchers took to lower Manhattan on 9/6 to protest Climate Change

September 15, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

Roughly a thousand people marched in lower Manhattan on Thursday, September 6 demanding that the world pay attention to climate change. This was the earliest in a series of climate marches around the globe to draw attention to a summit in San Francisco the following week. When people gathered in Battery ...

Democracy

The Powerlessness of the Powerful

Living in post – truth, seeking alternatives, examining Nicolae Ceausescu and Donald Trump

September 14, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This was most dramatically revealed in the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu on December 21, 1989. As this video documents. A mass rally in support of the leader morphed into a demonstration against the regime, apparently in a flash, though this was not as spontaneous as it appeared at first. In private, ...

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Heroes but Not Saints

How should we judge reformers and radicals who were also racists?

September 13, 2018 • by Peter Dreier

In 2020, America will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Feminists and others are starting to plan the celebrations, which will include conferences, books, postage stamps, and new monuments honoring the women who fought and won that major battle. In anticipation, New York ...

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Judge Kavanaugh’s Cynical Appeal to Precedent

Why resisting Kavanaugh’s appointment is crucial for the future of SCOTUS

September 12, 2018 • by Peter Alexander Meyers

Our hearings in the Senate prove that Brett Kavanaugh has a prodigious memory. Is that why precedent is such an important category for him? Precedent is a special type of memory. For this Judge to call forward precedent as he does, however, is dangerously misleading. Those who decide the future of the Supreme Court ...