Monthly Shaarli
July, 2013
"This 80-minute documentary focuses on the growing 'wealth gap' in America, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Jamie Johnson, a 27-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune."
Worth watching if only for the people he was able to get interviews with. And also if you'd like to lose any respect you might have had for Milton Friedman.
Portland to evict a politically-conscious homeless camp.
By Iain McKay. "This is an introduction to Proudhon’s economic ideas and their influence on revolutionary anarchism. It is a chapter from the new book The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics (AK Press)"
A reading list on the "Right to the City."
"The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups."
Portland uses prisoners to help clear out a camp protesting the criminalization of homelessness.
Archive of writing (and audio recordings) by the author of the https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/ weblog.
I know the mutualism->collectivism->communism narrative is a simplification, but I think this is a good overview.
Because coyotes are the real American cynics.
(Interview with Egyptian anarchist discussing the military coup and Muslim Brotherhood.)
I think this is a succinct summary and agreeable conclusion regarding the whole RadFem thing.
As I understand the "RadFem" position, it rejects gender (man/woman) as socially constructed and oppressive to those in the Woman role, but embraces sex (male/female) as real and seeks to create safe spaces for Females. Yet such a sex realism simply moves the gender essentialism, whereby gender is an inescapable consequence of "socialization" as informed by anatomy, to a further remove. Essentialism in sheep's clothing. The motivation behind the whole fruitless endeavor seems to be to exclude trans-women from female liberation movements.
RadFems hold that women who are male (by some ostensibly scientific standard, I guess, or by some less-than-scientific claims of "socialization") are members of an oppressive class. Which, on its face, is ridiculous in my view. Trans*-identifying people are one of the most marginalized and vulnerable segments of society, and any movement which considers them to be oppressive is highly suspect to me.
This is [should be] very embarrassing for McDonalds. The kicker is at the end: the whole "helpful" budget guide seems to be just a joint scam with Visa to fleece McDonalds employees a little bit more through payroll card fees.
"Philosophers' ships is the collective name of several boats that carried Soviet expellees abroad, most notably prominent intellectuals."
I like how Žižek contrasts "radically leftist notion" with "something that exists [...] and functions basically relatively well."
A nice collection of Chesterton quotations.