Posts

Poverty of Morals: Why Liberal Idealism Sucks

Image
-  George Grosz, The Pillars of Society (1926)  This current historical moment is rife with evil, and philosopher Susan Neiman is right that the left should not shy away from naming these evils explicitly. In a recent interview published by Jacobin , Neiman argues for a return to the language of evil, pointing rightfully to the genocide in Gaza. As she notes, words like "Authoritarian" mask the reality of cold blooded slaughter of women, children, medics, journalists, etc. But it is here, right after naming the horror, where Neiman's argument collapses and flattens into anti-material, and by extension anti-reality nonsense.  In setting out to reclaim a Kantian universal morality, Neiman dismisses the material reality that global capitalism creates by flattening class into an identity marker alongside race and gender. She argues that leaning too heavily on materialism is a detriment, suggesting instead that a universal moral framework has the power to change minds across ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beginning of the End

I have so many thoughts on Hurricane Lala that I just need to vomit onto a canvas, so sorry for the complete stream of consciousness style.   I'm laying up here late tonight, my fiancee and two cats asleep by my side. No power since yesterday morning here at the house. The house is a strategically arranged checkpoint system between flashlights, candles and glow sticks. I expect this to be our reality for awhile. Not to say I knew, But I fucking knew this storm was going to be historic when I started really reading and tuning into all the details around Thursday. I'm no expert on hurricanes, but when I first moved to Hawai'i and experienced Tropical Storm Hone, I was fascinated at how primed east side Big Island was for a hurricane disaster despite never really having one in recorded history. I learned so much around that time about how hurricane systems worked and how to judge the impacts of potential dynamically changing systems. Over the few years I've lived here now ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Escaping From Within: Maroon Societies and Modern Fugitivity

  Escaping From Within: Maroon Societies and Modern Fugitivity  On Ontological Refusal and Epistemic Disobedience  Introduction: The Global Prison       What does it mean to be a fugitive? To most the word conjures up the image of someone who has committed a crime and has fled the scene for fear of punishment. But what does Fugitivity mean in the sociological and political sense? In this context, it means that one refuses to be governed, controlled, or contained by oppressive systems. It is a state of existence, rather than an act, whereby marginalized peoples create, sustain, and defend their individual and collective humanities in spaces that exist outside or on the edges of the dominant political structure. This is the concept of Fugitivity I would like to explore. How do we “escape” or transform a global society that grounds its foundations in a modernity built upon systemic violence and extractive exploitation? What alternatives are there and how ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Zealots Mirror: Why Tehran's "Fanatics" Are More Rational Than Washington's Sophists.

Image
      In the Western imagination, the world is divided into two camps: the "rational" heirs of the Enlightenment and the "mindless zealots" of the East. We are taught that our leaders operate from a place of objective, universal reason, while our supposed adversaries are driven by a primitive, unthinking dogma. But if you strip away the propaganda and look at the actual philosophical depth of these men, a jarring inversion of truth emerges.      The so-called zealots in Tehran—men like Abbas Araghchi and the late Ali Larijani—are often more deeply scholared in Western thought than the very people they negotiate against. They have used the tools of Kant and Marx to deconstruct Western liberalism better than the West can deconstruct itself. Meanwhile, the philosopher-statesmen of the West frequently engage in a form of high-level sophistry, using the language of universal rights as a hollow mask for what is essentially a nihilistic will to po...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Dialectical Manual for the 11th Hour

Image
I. The 11th Hour and the Agency of the Wheel   We stand at the "11th Hour" of the human experiment, a time of flickering lights and deepening shadows. The capitalist mode of production has transitioned from a system of expansion into a terminal phase of planetary cannibalism, where the "Wheel of History" spins with a blind, algorithmic momentum, indifferent to the Earth and the many interlinked beings that sustain us. In this state of emergency, the act of "Grabbing the Wheel" is the ultimate revolutionary necessity. It is the refusal to be a passenger on a ship steered by the cold logic of profit.   However, the path to liberation is littered with the wreckage of those who grabbed the wheel only to drive the vehicle into a different abyss. To avoid the traps of the past, the modern revolutionary must consult a "Living Library." This is not a collection of static dogmas, but a dynamic dialectic—a conversation between the raw, sun-dren...
Post a Comment
Read more

America's Curated Philosopher

Image
     I’ve written before about the sanitization of Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy as a radical philosopher, Christian, organizer, and activist that establishment culture has reduced to a man of meaningless platitudes. The bastardization of his legacy and how his thought and politics relates to today is always a question on my mind, especially around this holiday now venerated by the very U.S federal government that persecuted him while he was alive. Reducing a figure like MLK down to a palatable cliche turns him into an opiate for social and political change rather than a dynamic piece of dialectical radical history. His reduction to a figurehead of a toothless liberal resistance is a crying shame.    Social and political change is about mass movements, organized democratic change by regular people, but even so, human psychology naturally sees in individuals the qualities in which we wish to embody within our...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Absurdity of Hegemony

Image
                       The Face of War - Dalí 1940   Anyone that has read a healthy amount of modern history runs into an inevitable. The United States has its hands, in one way or another, in just about every societal atrocity happening globally. The genocide of Palestinians being the latest horrific chapter in this modern deadly epoch. The justifications for America's atrocities are endless and boundless, despite its long track record of heinous crimes. The illegal invasion of Iraq was a "mistake". The recent kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro "misguided" tactically. The genocidal aerial bombardment of Vietnam a "quagmire". A new Orwellian phrase trotted out each time to obscure the truth of murder, genocide, ecocide, & criminal behavior of the highest order enacted through deliberate U.S policy. Both the actions and the excuses for global gangsterism by the United States give a whole new meaning t...
Post a Comment
Read more