About a year ago there was a very dismissive review written by Lisa Levy published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) of the essay collection The Essential Ellen Willis (“Irritated Critics“) . Ellen Wills is a wonderful writer…
Posts tagged politics
Whose Killer-in-Chief?
Does your tribe trust the killer-in-chief? From Gawker…go there, watch the video, and, if you please, come back. Ask the DNC: Is Romney Ready for the Kill List? John Cook As you may have heard…
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…
Addendum: Intruding Quantification Where It Has No Place
The question of whether politics can in fact be studied like the natural sciences is bewildering; it involves questions of free will and determinism, the nature of human action as distinct from animal behavior, the…
Studied Corruption
For some weeks (months?) my mind has not been very focused. Rather, perhaps, I do not know how to speak of a right or a wrong when they are so plainly intermixed in our dailiness. …
The Mind of the Archgod of the Earth
Yesterday, late, I posted the following as, “If Not Equality, then Broad’s Advantage,” and I wanted to start with it here because I just read it’s philosophical underpinnings in Lawrence (again, Women in Love). So,…
Master and Commander: Can a Mormon Be Man Enough for the Murder Machine?
Today I opened my morning paper to discover a very large headline in the “Neighbors/Religion” section (we don’t have time to discuss this formatting decision, focus!): “Would Monroe County vote for a Mormon?” This was…
Politics + Interest = Liberty?
Can you discover your own mind in the below from George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. I’m pretty sure we’re all in there somewhere. From Chapter 51 of Middlemarch. Politics and self-interest in 1871 and…
Framing the Family: No Moms Allowed
I’ll be honest, I feel somewhat in denial. Perhaps it’s a stage in a kind of intellectual grief. If, as I wrote yesterday, our politics is a “play of frames”–a “turning on” of certain metaphoric…
Politicians, Corporations, Unions…In None Do We Trust
First, who’s this “we”? I don’t know…”Americans”? Is there such a thing? So, on the heels of recent cursory research into the salaries of our local major liberal arts university as well as a report…