[Some of the PhD programs I applied to wanted to know more about my person and how it has shaped the kind of work that I do. This is the statement of “personal history and philosophy” I wrote in addition to the “purpose of study.”] I was born in cosmopolitan Manila, capital of the Philippines,…
Tag Archives: Liberalism
From a new map: a new dawn, a new day? The election of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States is a milestone: 1. It signals the end of neoconservative control of the state that banked on fear and jingoism, free-market dogmatism predicated on greed and self-interest, and submission to a secretive hierarchy…
[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,…
[Bartholomäus Strobel's The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist] The current electoral season in America has been built up–especially on the Democratic side–by the mainstream media (as was also my impression) as one of the most exciting in recent history, where, after what seemed to be exceptionally dark days in American politics (that witnessed, among…
[Ideology, the strategy game] To take the term literally, a system (-logy) of ideas (ideo-). That is to say, a collection of ideas (either about different things/aspects, e.g. on the economy, on social issues, on political power, etc. or as more or less similar positions (i.e. variants) on a given issue (whose differences are not…
[Title page of Hobbes' Leviathan] In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser contributes to the Marxist discourse on the relationship between the base and the superstructure in order (as implied by his rhetoric) to go beyond it. Recounting the basic framework of what he calls a “metaphor of topography,” Althusser explains that “Marx conceived…
[A chart of secret societies] In an overture to fascism, a preliminary suggestion as to what underlies its potency (to capture the masses, to make one desire to be led, one’s own repression, that then connects with social oppression (of the other, e.g. the Jews, but also of the supporting populace itself, i.e. of oneself)),…
[Alexander at the Battle of Issos; from a mosaic in Pompeii] Antonio Gramsci (as is apparent in this collection of his writings) makes more nuanced and dynamic the base-superstructure model described by Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) in The German Ideology and the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy. In doing this, he turns…
This is certainly one of the most interesting electoral seasons in America. After the dominance of aggressive foreign interventionism (that got us into Iraq and is embroiling us now in Iran) (not to mention its threat to expand the power of the executive) (whose efforts are now being turned to us, simple tax-paying citizens!), a…
