Category

culture

The Manliest of All Rituals: Critical and Creative Nonviolent Reflections on Hunting

“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…

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The Kitchen Bunker: Paul Virilio and the War Logic of Fine Dining

“All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it… The great stroke of luck for the military class’s terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don’t recognize the militarized part of their identity.” –Paul Virilio, Pure War. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Semiotext(e), 1983. p. 18 We normally don’t think about Paul Virilio while…

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Paterfamilias: JD Vance and The Imperial Caste System

“The normalization of hierarchy starts right away in our lives, with adults ruling over children (or minors as the state defines them). In the patriarchal bourgeois family, imposed as the norm over the last couple of hundred years of colonial conquest and industrial development, the father reins over the mother and the children. This model…

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Pennsylvania: Reclaiming the Land of Religious Anarchy

“Obedience presupposes duality: one who speaks and one who listens; one who knows and one who is ignorant; a ruler and ruled ones. Religious groups who broke away from the spirit of dependency and obedience cherish different values such as mutuality and interdependence…The main virtue of an authoritarian religion is obedience…God’s love and righteousness are…

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Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation: Tad Delay and the Future of Denial

“Nobody is spared from the logic of a mode of production built on exploitation. As Lacan put it, capitalism is the discourse or algorithm in which, instead of communicating to another person as a person, we are forced to negotiate through cloudy signifiers. We are workers relating to other workers in an environment mediated by…

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Too Many Unnecessary Things Everywhere: Brian McLaren, Kohei Saito, Dieter Rams and Use-Value

“As people who have been shaped by the current empire–first the European, and then Euro-American, and then the global economic empire that we’re a part of now–we have to realize our survival now depends on disentangling our identities from the values and assumptions of this empire.“ –Brian McLaren The above quote comes from an interview…

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Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously: Difference, Repetition, Implicit Cognition, and Gibberish

“Such a situation may be better understood if we consider that concepts with indefinite comprehension are concepts of Nature. As such, they are always in something else: they are not in Nature but in the mind which contemplates it or observes it, and represents it to itself. That is why it is said that Nature…

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Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Feelings, I think: Media Ecology, Feelings, and the Decline of Abstract Rational Thought

“Regardless of what is being depicted in a photograph, the form itself evokes in us a particular pattern of intuitive, holistic thinking and emotion—the exact opposite of the pattern evoked by printed works. We have all heard the cliché “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Implied in this sentiment is the idea that images…

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