Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Libertarianism is perhaps the most toxic mixture of liberalism (ala Hobbes and Locke) and capitalism.” It should not be a huge surprise for anyone who reads this blog to learn that I am not a huge fan of the political philosophy known as libertarianism. One of the things I hate most about libertarianism is it’s…
“If a political party receives a tenth of all votes but no representation in government, can we claim the system is democratic and people’s voices are being heard? Should an international political body, bank or committee be able to decide the destiny of a country and its government? It is clear that democracy is struggling,…
“One of the problems with capitalism is that it produces mediocrity but also renders that mediocrity unsustainable: capitalism needs average workers, but capitalist ideology insists that only the exceptional deserve the rewards that would allow them to live a decent life. We see this in almost parodic form in Silicon Valley tech boosterism, where every…
“It is arguably the single most important concept in the entire logic of capitalism: commodification, more specifically the commodification of labour. A commodified world is one in which the vast majority of the population is dependent for their economic survival on the sale of their labour power as a commodity in the form of wage…
“We follow Aryeh Neier in describing the three types as “blue,” “red,” and “green” rights. Roughly, on his model “blue” rights are civil and political rights: the rights to individual liberties…“Red” rights are economic and social rights, rights that focus more on the quality of life. “Green” rights are collective rights such as the right…
“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…
“The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers…These and other measures protecting workers and the public came to be known as the social “safety net”. In this analogy, the participants in the capitalist system are like acrobats swinging on a trapeze far above the floor…
“Ritual for me is a kind of like serious play. It’s play that you take seriously. As play, though, it doesn’t have an end outside of itself. It’s not like work or labor then in that sense, where you might be doing something now that may be grueling and difficult in order to produce a…
Existentialism in all its forms (existential, scientific, religious or atheistic) affirms the individuality of an individual as the end and beginning of everything. Absurdism, as a movement, rejected traditional and secularist progressivist accounts of the fate of man. It expressed the condition of individual as it is, not as it should be. Man, according to…
You might, for example, want to design a tablet to be pristine and platonic, without any physical buttons, but only a touchscreen. Wouldn’t that be more perfect and true to the ideal? But you can’t ever quite do it. Some extra physical buttons, to turn the thing on, for instance, turn out to be indispensable….