Sánchez offered the most basic liberal discourse, which, nonetheless, today sounds like an act of radical courage. He may well be the only European head of state who has been capable of positioning himself correctly in the last three global conflicts—more so than many public intellectuals, too.
à propos affordability: take a look at what serious government investments in renewables can do to a country’s electricity prices. Go Spain.
ember-energy.org/data/europea...
There was an entire generation of Left intellectuals whose youthful political formation happened under these conditions: the sanctity of the enemies of Capital, whose actions from the private to the public were insulated from criticism. We see the consequences of this training now.
Exceptional text by Negarestani that deserves to be studied.
The dream of a new post-neoliberal consensus in which an updated technocracy reasserts itself without any attention to human rights, political freedom, and social protection. Business as usual, no lessons learned.
State terror is one of the most abject actions that a state can perform. It betrays a fundamental principle assuring citizens’ loyalty to the modern state: the legal and legitimate use of the state’s monopoly of violence. Once that monopoly is used for arbitrary persecution, the state is failing.
"Returning to calm." European leaders seem incapable of learning. They grasp at straws like drowning men, or like elites who dream of maintaining their privileges while the ship sinks. With this cohort running France, Germany, the UK, nothing radically good or even remotely decent will happen.
If a country ran a militarised and masked force with minimal oversight and accountability to harass, detain, and murder minorities and politically opposed citizens, that country would be internationally denounced, and sanctions would likely follow. So how come no state leader speaks out against ICE?
Trump's Greenland narrative is almost a 1:1 copy of Putin's Crimea narrative:
"It belonged to us in the past. Stupid leaders gave it away for no good reason. Now we want it back. We need it for our security. We need to protect it. It will be best for the people who live there."
I wrote about the irruption of ontological difference into the geological register by putting Heidegger and Deleuze together, running their differences through stratigraphy & Earth System Science, and asking what happens to difference when extinction removes the relationality we take for granted?
Instead of being a resource to be hoarded, sovereignty is the power to enter into relations: between persons and groups within a country, and with other states outside. This power is only as good as its deployment, it only works in motion, and it isn’t a fixed quantity but a dynamic force.
Yes! Nationalists misunderstand the nature of sovereignty. They treat it like a scarce resource to be hoarded, like gold for the mercantilists. After Brexit, the UK has hoarded all this sovereignty—to the detriment of GDP, influence, security, etc. It is swimming in sovereignty and losing in wealth.
International law died many deaths over the last 26 years: in Iraq, in Palestine, in Ukraine... Every time, people accepted it because the violations happened in “peripheral” places. And now, as it always does throughout history, the periphery has caught up with the center, and it looks grim.
If you say that Putin should get Crimea or Donbas, then you can't say that Trump shouldn't get Greenland. It's the same redrawing of borders by great powers at the expense of smaller neighbours. Normalizing the annexation of Crimea has paved the way for Trump's Greenland demands.
This is part of the problem: the EU is misrecognizing an ideology issue as a psychology question. Instead of working in a calculated manner to achieve a positive vision of itself in the world, the EU is always reacting to a chaos agent running a superpower. And thus, it is always behind and lagging.
So Trump’s Board of Peace is both a grift aka Tate brothers’ War Room and an attempt to create an alternative global governance organization? Welcome to the new multipolar world, folks. It’s complete nonsense but hey, “at least it’s honest,” right? Unlike that silly UN with its fake values.
To paraphrase McLuhan’s bon mot, discourse not only conveys sense but discourse is sense. And the US official discourse now wields humiliation, impunity, and disregard as the general structure of enunciation. Equating this with “transparency” means having pre-accepted ideology of violence as truth.
EduOpen now hosts an open online course titled “Anthropocene in Venice,” prepared by a multidisciplinary research team at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The course offers video lectures and a free textbook, all in English.
Sign up now :)
learn.eduopen.org/eduopenv2/co...
Nobody wants a liberal Iran: not its authoritarian allies, not its regional competitors, and not even, it seems, the Western anti-capitalist Left. The faithlessness of geopolitics I can understand, but the failure to recognise the universal right to rebel against tyranny is harder to accept.
With the increasingly intense deployment of ICE as a tool of state terror in the US, anyone who used to find “good reasons” to consider Trump preferable to Harris (or even H. Clinton) should be banned from publicly commenting on politics for the next decade.
If we cannot rely on productive forces for progress by default, then several contemporary alternatives become more problematic. For example, substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels while retaining the industrial form is no longer a guarantee of a better—less violent and less despotic—society.
Attributing violence and despotism to privation is convenient because it allows defining progress as the development of productive forces. Alternatively, if industrial society as such can generate support for violence and despotism, then the celebration of productive forces becomes less obvious.
It is convenient to argue that violence and despotism come from privation, such as lack of means or agency. But we see these tendencies in the wealthiest and most capable countries. What if the structure of industrial society conditions this, particularly when it functions well and produces wealth?
The significance of epistemology for politics—and the relationship between “natural philosophy,” or what we now call “science,” and political organization—is a profound question that needs to be revisited with much more depth than simply exalting facts, trust, and science communication.
Two causes of socially disordering epistemology are identified by Hobbes: absurd speech, which enables political manipulation, and theological individualism, which contradicts the public good. Hobbes’s solutions (anti-experimentalism + despotism of the social over itself) were not wonderful, but!
Interesting to return, in contemporary context, to Shapin and Schaffer’s 1985 classic on Hobbes, Leviathan, and the air pump. In their reading, Hobbes considered epistemology to be fundamental in avoiding civil war, hence a theory of knowledge was included in the political theory of the Leviathan.
But is it in a walkable neighborhood?
Unable to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, and incapable of outmanouvering it diplomatically, Russia resorts to its most common tool: blatant, idiotic lying. We should not overstate its effectiveness but still... The fact that some world leaders are willing to retransmit it is depressing enough.
Better than nothing, but not a good outcome. Ru intimidated Europe into not touching the frozen assets. It drove a wedge in the EU as some member states are opting out of this plan. Ru will continue its hybrid war and its efforts to divide Europe, trying to get more Orbans elected to do its bidding.
Is Germany again dragging its feet and undermining a "simple" solution to the Ukraine financing problem, instead pushing the ubercomplex reparations loan?
It's a tempting eurocrisis reflex that if only there were a will in Berlin, there would be a better way.
But there isn't. Here is why:
