In a recent article titled “Protest, Violent and Nonviolent,” Judith Butler restates the gist of the argument from her recent book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Continue reading
Category: short
Consequentialism and the protection of fascist entitlement
In 1977, the American National Socialist Party announced a rally in Skokie, Illinois; a predominantly Jewish suburb, which included many Holocaust survivors and their relatives. The city of Chicago moved to bar the event, prohibited the display of swastikas and Nazi uniforms, and sought to relocate the rally away from Skokie. On behalf of the American National Socialist Party, the American Civil Liberties Union won four court decisions, overturning all the ordinances and injunctions against the rally, eventually arguing in the Supreme Court that the swastika should be a protected form of speech. The court ruled in its favour, some 30,000 members resigned from the ACLU in disgust. Continue reading
Natural limits, proliferating limits, lifeboats
Most know something of Garrett Hardin’s in/famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Fewer have read that essay carefully. In many ways, it and Hardin’s subsequent work are the basis of arguments that there are ‘genuine concerns’ about migration. Continue reading
The decline of America first socialism
Robert Brenner was once a leading figure in the US Trotskyist group Solidarity.* Today, Brenner seems to be the elder theoretician of both New Left Review and the US magazine Jacobin. Continue reading
The borders of sociology’s object
Another round of debate within sociology about objectivity, another attempt to revive the distinction between object and subject – ultimately a debate about sociology’s relationship to government and its borders. Continue reading
Journalism Intercepted
Who’s the Deep State now? Continue reading
The impossible world of Donald Trump
Counterfactuals are speculative ‘if … then’ scenarios. Continue reading
Un/Insurable (Moral) Risks and the AHCA
A revised version of this is now here, at the New Inquiry, re-titled “Dispensing God’s Care”
Bannon’s economic nationalist egg
Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, Steve Bannon—ex-Breitbart editor and chief strategist in the White House—now comes with a charming villain origin story. Continue reading
Chaos
Chaos is the dream of order. Continue reading
Identitarianism
Adorno coined the term ‘identitarianism’ in Negative Dialectics (1966), prompted by critique of Kantian and Hegelian philosophies. Continue reading
Mi existir es resistir. Estamos aqui
The murders at Pulse’s Latinx night in Orlando on June 11-12, 2016 were the largest massacre on US soil since the US Cavalry opened fire on the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek just over a century ago.
More so, the erasure of Latinx/Indigenous, transgender and Black queers by the gaystream from the Stonewall Riots of decades ago until today should should not be allowed to go unchallenged. And as the video released from Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement puts it: “It is the system that created this violence since colonization started over 500 years ago.” Queering means dispensing with conventional categories as a matter of survival.
Those on mainstream media who are arguing that it was simply an attack on “people enjoying themselves” or that its significance is some abstract idea about guns and, worse, ‘mental health’ are—let’s be blunt—protecting their queerphobia with a liberal shield of abstract universality and a false enactment of ‘reasonableness.’ Continue reading
