Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph…
“Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.” –Colin Wright I had a conversation with a friend…
“Nothing endures but change” –Heraclitus Throughout my life I have encountered people who think differently than me; people who have different beliefs, ideas, convictions, and ideologies than me. This is inevitable. But what I’ve found to be most problematic about engaging with someone who has a differing opinion, stance, viewpoint or idea on something is…
“The concept of it being a luxury to have your young son play with a water gun in a public park is a problem…luxury is the wrong word to describe childhood. The idea of white privilege being the ability to interact with police and not be treated like a fully armed terrorist is not privilege,…
“The genesis of this book has been a long-standing belief that the problems facing the world today—poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, hatred, violence and more—cannot even be addressed properly, much less resolved, within the confines of a capitalist economic system. Based supposedly on competition, even at its best capitalism must generate losers as well as winners….
“In order to be a friend, neighbor, or lover, for example, I must have a friend, neighbor, or lover. Other persons are not merely accidental or contingent to my goal of following the path of being as fully human as possible, they are fundamental to it. My life can only have meaning as I contribute…
“Here is where Bellah’s approach becomes really interesting. He posits that early hominids developed the first ritual activities out of complexified forms of play, and that once our symbolic capacities developed sufficiently, these ritualized activities took on religious significance. Religion, then, grows out of the implications of ritual. Religion is not therefore primarily something you…
“What bio-cultural sciences show us is that exactly this in-group anxiety and out-group antagonism is intensified by religion, i.e., shared imaginative engagement with supernatural agents. Priming people to think about invisible agents that may be watching them, and participating in emotionally-arousing, synchronically organized, causally opaque rituals, reinforces superstitious beliefs and segregative behaviors. This has been…
“If democracy is a genuine foundational social value, it ought to govern the workplace first and foremost” – Richard Wolff I was recently engaged in an (admittedly obsessive) online debate about the ramifications of certain cities like Seattle raising their minimum wage to $15/hr. I kind of hate to link to it, but an article…
Psychoanalysis is a peculiar protest against the casual dismissal [of] religion as an archaic anomaly that shall soon pass. It concordantly rejects the liberal dream of a politics without theology and claims instead the political is necessarily theological. The conscious rationale manifesting as justification for any religious belief or policy position can be addressed, mitigated,…