The way in which artifacts in the built environment are designed to service political agendas, serve power interests, and marginalize or immiserize communities of moral patients is a prominent theme in my thinking. I can't be certain when it started, but it certainly crystallized around my freshman year as an undergraduate, when I was first ( Read more... )

turkishb left a comment in my recent cautionary tale about political centrism in the US, directing me to the work of an author that has inspired me to articulate some thoughts on technology, politics, the relationship between morality and design, and a critical failure of market libertarianism. The explanation is necessarily complex, and will meander ( Read more... )

This morning I was watching the House discuss the Emergency Supplemental Spending Bill. And to my astonishment Bill Young of Florida got up on the podium, and in defiance of our current climate of understanding, intimated a direct connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and the attacks orchestrated on September 11th. His position seemed to be ( Read more... )

It seems to me that political affiliations have become increasingly incestuous in the last ten years. Since February, Lou Dobbs, a free market ideologue with laissez faire commitments tempered by backwards nationalism in his old age, and whom the pop-left imagines as a populist themselves, has been periodically interviewing Jonathan Cowan of the ( Read more... )

There's a thread on the abortiondebate community, here, about pro-life feminism, started by user sunovermountain. Usually, no thinking except the most elementary can escape the crushing gravity of the vast, droning, intellectual black hole that is that community, but a few stray particles of critical thought made it out this time. They originated with the_alchemist, who was ( Read more... )

"This account has been either temporarily or permanently suspended. If you are livejournal user puckish please refer to the livejournal faq ( Read more... )

Drama can go in here, if you're looking for a place to put it.

More to come.

Obituaries are emotionally exhausting, I've found. I hope I don't need to mark the passing of any others soon ( Read more... )

John Galbraith is dead.
I thought I'd mark his passing since this journal has a temporal component.

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/galbraith.htm

"Short Bus" version:

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental, men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what ( Read more... )