[What follows is a guest column I wrote for The Crescent News (Defiance, OH). It was published on Jan. 18, 2016.] While many celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., his complexity has been largely erased from our memories. He has been sentimentalized to such an extent that the radical nature of his message has been lost. Even…
Killing the Buddha has published my recent piece on “Defying the Certainty of the Christian Right.” Check it out.
“I believe in Jesus Christ, the Christ who was a loser in human history — destroyed by this world — whose life reveals in its generosity and tragedy the most complete and challenging version of theism I know. What the New Atheists do not comprehend is that the crucifix cannot be mocked. It is itself…
I just published What Comes After Occupy? The Regional Politics of Resistance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Here’s the blurb from the back cover: Occupy Wall Street, as centered in New York City, received much publicity. Little attention, however, has been granted to the hundreds of Occupy groups in marginal locations whose creative politics were certainly not limited…
University protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation | Higher Education Network | The Guardian.
Originally posted on LBO News from Doug Henwood:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is just out with its figures on union membership in 2014. Overall membership, aka density, fell to 11.1% of the workforce, from 11.3% in 2013. The decline was more than entirely the result of slippage in the private sector, down from 6.7%…
Another example of a ‘serious’ person not knowing how to do serious work. Carson plagiarizes others to an enormous amount in his book based on this article. Ben Carson’s History Book Plagiarizes SocialismSucks.Net And Many Other Sources – BuzzFeed News.
The New York Times comes out squarely against US torture (undertaken for whatever reason, even 9/11) and takes a stand for prosecuting those Americans who condoned or supported torture: “Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by…
The most interesting part of this article is the following–the person who took the footage of Garner’s death at the hands of the police, which is legal across the nation, was arrested: “Where did this video come from? A young man named Ramsey Orta was standing near Garner on that July 17 afternoon when the…
Fascinating short article on how architecture, which we are to a large extent blind to due to it naturalization, is bound up in social control: “An architect that is running an office, who is in debt and pays salaries, has all the economic incentives to take it [a commission], but must resist it. The punishment…
“The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!”–K. Marx via The Civil War in France.
“What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to ‘uplift the race’ by correcting the ‘bad’ traits of the black poor has now evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama, a governing philosophy that centers on managing the behavior of black people left behind in a society…
Read this small statement from Le Guin (see link): “I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds…
“The American higher education system is broken: between predatory student lenders, rapacious for-profit colleges, skyrocketing tuition rates and the number of people taking on a lifetime’s worth of debt before they can legally drink, the current system is not sustainable. Instead of providing a ladder to a better life, higher education too often reinforces class-…
Strange, disturbing reading material for the day: Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself – Vox.
