Elisabeth Bronfen: "What amazes me most is the stubborn ability to repress" (tags)
We've greatly reduced the required reading... Five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, plus the one compulsory piece of Shakespeare from the basic course and vampire and fantasy stories. If very little is read, diversity goes out the window, too.
Normal Catastrophes and The Industrialization of Thinking (tags)
Instead of offering enlightenment about social reality, the media function as an amusement enterprise and immobilizing machine. Information mutates into infotainment... Advanced civilization is marginalized in many social areas into a sanctuary of the elites.
The Future of the Social State (tags)
The extended family as a kind of "self-help group" replaces the social state in the backward-oriented utopia of liberal-conservatism. Nothing hurts families more than the "rebuilding" or dismantling of the social state and the marketing of interpersonal relations.
Bankruptcy of the Last Utopia (tags)
The economy should be a part of life, not a steamroller crushing creativity and self-realization. The economy should serve humankind; humanity should not serve bankers, SUVs and sports stadiums. The same Chinese letter represents crisis & opportunity.Will future be more human?
America in Decline: Richard Sennett (tags)
In the race to the bottom, the worship of profit and the self-healing market, education, retraining workers, social mobility and intercultural learning fall by the wayside. School districts spend 600 times more for sports than for natural sciences. The US imports engineers and programmers.
"From 200 years of American history, we have learned nothing is impossible." (Reagan) Occasionally this president replaced reality with his fictions. "The world changed every time a new technique of storytelling was intented." (Brian Ferren)
"New networks arise that support people without locking them in a cage.. We need positive freedom, the freedom to something..For that we must create new institutions. We may not return to the old.."
Purgatory of the Market (tags)
"The new capitalism is also a totalitarian movement that cannot or will not rest until it has seized the whole world and put everything in private hands that previously was subject to state or civil control.."
Disinformation as a Strategy of Power (Part II) (tags)
"Perpetual growth is not possible in nature or anywhere else..Globalization, the free market with its absolute competition protected by the WTO agreements doesn't have anything to do with fair competition...A global network of resistance is developing.."
US After the Election: Permanent Alarm (tags)
The election was an expression of fear combined with ignorance about the economy. The American majority that voted for Bush is a case study of repression. That the economy is sick, the country isolated and the ground begins to totter is denied.
On the Human Right to Laziness (tags)
"Paul Lafargue spoke satirically about the first sinister acceleration thrusts of early industry: "All individual and social misery comes from a passion for work. O laziness, be merciful with your endless misery!: O laziness, you are the balm for the pains!"
The Hyper-Power (book review) (tags)
Noam Chomsky speaks of a completely de-politicized society that has left the monopoly of decisions to an anonymous leadership caste..The war against Iraq should be considered as a kind of domestic political necessity. Translated from the German
Hundreds of millions of people are forced to work migration between countries and continents.. People are transformed into socially uprooted vagabonds of markets..Flexibility means ..more output and more stress for less money. From German