Sometimes, when you get distracted from your distraction, it can all seem like a cruel joke. You have paid a lot of money and will no doubt be paying more, once you factor in souvenirs and sustenance, to pass most of your time standing in line. And you are supposed to be celebrating this purgatory, because this is Disneyland, the self-proclaimed “happiest place on Earth.” (More…)
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. (More…)
Blame it on the Baby Boomers. No matter where you go, whether it’s Europe or the United States, there will always be a hippie presence on the left. Partially due to generational mass, partially a consequence of the liberal consensus of the 1960s, their imprimatur on progressive politics is inescapable. (More…)
Many people may know the name Boko Haram, but few understand where the group came from. The group originates in Borno state, Nigeria, where its insurgency began in 2009. The Muslim North is home to the poorest of Nigerians, where illiteracy is at its highest, while most of the wealth is concentrated in the Christian South. (More…)
Propaganda dominates coverage of the Israeli military occupation, and its supporters are used to having the mainstream media repeat their talking points. Our actions aim to turn propaganda on its head, by “subvertising” the reality of the situation. (More…)
War has become the absence of politics by other means. As democratic institutions lose their legitimacy, widespread uncertainty is being mirrored by the performance of civilisational showdown. Baudrillard’s arguments in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place have resonance because of how the War on Terror has radically expanded the spectacle of combat. (More…)
When we consider a country from a politico-economic standpoint, we begin with its population, then analyze the latter according to its subdivision into classes, location in city, country, or by the sea, occupation in different branches of production; then we study its exports and imports, annual production and consumption, prices of commodities, etc. (More…)
It is (currently) illegal in Germany to call Jürgen Elsässer an anti-Semite, and by all accounts, he has very good lawyers. This article merely suggests that articles published in his magazine utilize components of anti-Semitic rhetoric. About what he is or isn’t, the reader is invited to make up her own mind. (More…)
Politics in the world of industrialized neoliberal states is subject to a sort of compression. Neoliberalism, as a mode of thought and organization, is characterized by the shifting of ever greater regions of the social order out of the realm of political deliberation and into the ostensibly more “objective” realm of economic competition. (More…)
Sometimes hardship leads to serendipity. Since I came down with a bad respiratory infection a few weeks ago, my voice has been reduced to a scraping sound. This has forced me to modify my teaching, finding as many ways as I can to avoid talking. It’s why, instead of explaining the rise of the Khmer Rouge to my freshman seminar, I showed them a video instead. (More…)
Jean Baudillard thought that Operation Desert Storm should not be considered a war. Rather, despite containing the material features of one, it was at once real, and a simulation. Baudillard’s logic is that the term “war” was used to legitimise a performance, and it is critical to apply his logic to the War on Terror. (More…)
Few countries agonize more about sending their troops to war than Germany. That doesn’t prevent foreign deployments, however. German forces have been sent abroad for over twenty years nows, beginning with the war in Bosnia. But the ongoing debate highlights the persistence of pacifism in the country, crossing political boundaries in a manner unheard of in the United States. Given German history, one can understand why. (More…)