It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He [...]
Tag Archives: capitalism
The Fiscal Freedom to Inculcate Evil
The following snippet is from a piece by Andrew Leonard on the SCOTUS ruling striking down the Montana Supreme Court decision to limit political contributions (in the teeth of Citizens United). It’s a clear loss for people and the planet as corporations have ONE interest, creating wealth for their owners (and no, that’s not “shareholders”) [...]
Okay, I Guess, Whatever
The paradox of the mercantile culture we label “capitalism,” or probably more descriptively and truthfully for most of us, consumerism, is in its “false” interconnectedness. At the level of production, at the level of industrialized processes, people are parts of the machinery of the economic system that serves that process. In that sense, we are [...]
Indolence! Undercutting the Cult of Mammon
A recent report on Inequality in America from Stanford details the extent of the wealth disparities. Salon has a brief post on it (United States of Inequality) offering this example of the self-perpetuation of winners in the game of socioeconomic inequality: …in 1972, families in the top income quintile spent an average of $3,536 annually [...]
Clausewitz On the Modern Condition
So, don’t ask me why, but I fell into Clausewitz this morning. From the Ubiquipedia: Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier and military theorist who stressed the moral (in modern terms, “psychological”) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death (1831). This has been [...]
Calculable Obligations: Motivations of Money and Technology
Debt, that is, as opposed to a promise, is a calculable obligation. I was reading a review of two books on the current state of global indebtedness in the London Review of Books (“Forgive Us Our Debts” by Benjamin Kunkel) when it seemed clear to me that this is the basic ground of all domination [...]
Tenure’s Just Another Word for Liberty, So Dump It!
Paul Thomas today at Schools Matter: K-12 Teaching: A Service Industry At The New Republic, “Making the Grade” poses this about the difference between college professors (notice that term “professor,” as in “one who professes”) and K-12 teachers: “The vast majority of states have long granted public school teachers tenure. The way it works is [...]
Educating Business Ethics
The population of the US seems to be experiencing a kind of national awakening regarding the harsh and endemic inequalities of our “Us vs Them” economic reality. Though it seems possible that our bail-out and bubble-induced slogans of solidarity will fade into our historical moment to be studied by the future (should there be one [...]
The Epic of The Once-ler
In an age of too much, too fast, too late we have already shoved the Seussian idea of ecology into the recycle bin of useless messages. I would rage against this idiotic cotton candy confection–but to what purpose? I participated in the very cultural act it’s supposed moral speaks against as I went to the [...]
Calling the Police or Pointing the Gun
Or, If your white and wealthy, do both. Then call your lawyer. Political Science Prof Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, on C-SPAN’s After Words with S.E. Cupp. Worth the time. If SE Cupp is a conservative then Edmund Burke is not. Reactionary is interesting. The reactionary mind [...]
Articles
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The Chaos of Monoculture
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The Custom House: Louis Agassiz with Christoph Irmscher
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The Errant Goes Audible: The Custom House on WFHB
