GABlog

We can concentrate all the modern, liberal freedoms and rights into the right to own property: that is, the granting of exclusive use to that which cannot be used without depriving others of its use. If you have the right to property, you can obviously say whatever you like on your property, and others can [...]

Continue reading Property and Pedagogy

I read the comic pages every day because they contain the best writing and art in the newspaper, but I have to take issue with journalist Roland Hedley in Saturday’s Doonesbury, who, in his interview with Ron Paul, claims that the ideal of libertarian government is “pure utopianism.” Actually, libertarianism is the only form of [...]

Continue reading Libertarianism and Utopianism

In Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, he poses the serious question, whether modern society is capable of deferring the violence that it provokes. Describing a mob scene at a Hollywood movie premiere , he writes,

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. [...]

Continue reading The Day of the Locust

This segment from the Daily Show records how the Zuccotti Park occupation was geographically divided by class into “uptown” and “downtown”; a division exemplified by the split between those who owned iPads and those who didn’t. When the TV journalist challenged one of the Protesters to share his iPad2 with those on the other side [...]

Continue reading Elitism in Zuccotti Park

The OWS movement has staked its existence on the issue of inequality of wealth, as evidenced by the “we are the 99%” slogan. The issue of equality goes very deep; the most powerful political movements of the modern era are based on the rhetoric of equality. Indeed, our sense of equality is originary and constitutive [...]

Continue reading Futher Reflections on Occupy Wall Street

Politics is the establishment of an arena in which actors compete perpetually, but with distinctly marked victories and defeats determining the power to make and implement laws, before a qualified audience (qualified in the sense of allowed seats in the arena, so to speak, and in the sense of being the arbiter of victory), and [...]

Continue reading The Problem and Possible Necessity of Politics

Economism has always been associated with reductionism—in the case of Marxism with the assumption that all social and cultural practices could be read directly off of the class position of the agents, or a particular moment in the development of the productive forces, disregarding the mediation of politics and ideology and so on. Similar critiques [...]

Continue reading Economism

By now there can be no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street movement represents the opening of a new strain of American terrorism. There’s no way of knowing how extensive, effective and destructive it will be, but OWS is promoting, very forcefully, the idea that no means are out of bounds if your demands aren’t [...]

Continue reading A Note on OWS

I think this item is worth a little blog post. Indeed, that people spend their time doing things like this is what sustains my faith in humanity:

Oulipo for the masses! This video of Rick Perry, made by a website called Bad Lip Reading, was a big hit on the conservative website HotAir, where [...]

Continue reading Save the Pretzels for the Gas Jets