What must it feel, in remote corners of the earth when Western bombs fall on their lands? There you are, doing your chores, getting by on a quiet day, breathing in the breeze as you think about them, the people of your house, nurturing something that happened last time, that moment, resenting something else, many…
Category Archives: Guerilla
[Mother and Child by Esther Leli] [Continues "The Barred S"] The coming-to-be of the Lacanian subject does not end with alienation. The process of becoming a subject, that is, goes beyond the location—the pointing out/to—of the place where it is not (the place where it can potentially be). Differentiating Lacanian psychoanalysis from structuralism strictly speaking,…
[The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street; Image from the New York Times] [Continues "Blood on Our Hands"] Roughly four decades earlier, in the midst of another war, the major newspapers performed an act against the government analogous to the exposés we witnessed of late. In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington…
[Image from masternewmedia.org] [Continues "The Surge"] As the war effort was going on abroad, another war was being waged at home: the war of information, with the news media at the forefront. Frontline chronicles how the mainstream media was used by the White House to help build its case for war in Iraq. The media,…
[Image from University of Texas Library] [Continues "Record of a Neocon War"] The President did change the strategy. Belatedly towards the end of his term, perhaps concerned more for his legacy than the war’s consequences for the country (much less for conditions in the “free world,” much less for conditions in the Middle East, much…
Five years after the invasion, Frontline presents a documentary on the war in Iraq. This latest broadcast is an effort to sum up Frontline‘s investigations of the various phases and aspects of the war. Taken together, these reports make up an excellent archive for studying (and remembering) the war. One important thing to remember, of…
[A map of the "American Empire" from Double Standards] Thanks to occasional mentions over at John Protevi’s Blog, I was led to the incisive, large-scale, long-term, and always-thought provoking commentaries on contemporary politics by world systems scholar Immanuel Wallerstein. Analyzing political developments “from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term,”…
A new group called Radical Thought has been created on Facebook. If you don’t have an account, you can create one there, and then go directly to the group’s site. If that doesn’t work, once you’re already logged-in, go to Groups, and then on the search field, type in “Radical Thought.” (In my experience, there’s…
[Bronze sculpture by Leo Wirth, Citizen of the World] John Rawls, the great Anglophone heir to the social contract tradition, makes a logical shift from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. In the process, he changes the way that he designates the contract participants (i.e. the participants in a particular society with a particular…
My life goes through this cycle where, at one point, I’m really passionate about my work, I’m all functioning and productive (prolific!), having found some purpose, sensing meaning (excited!) in life-and then, all of a sudden, I get tired, I can’t look at the computer (“My eyes hurt so bad!”), I slow down, I don’t get to do as much, I question the worth of what I’m doing (“Who the f**k cares what you think? Why even think about these things? Why center your life on something no one cares about?” It’s not gonna change anything! It doesn’t f**king matter! You don’t f**king matter!”), I get all nihilistic and depressed, I get hypersensitive about everything, insecure about the littlest things, and, deep inside, feel nothing.
