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Ten Years of Terror: Zygmunt Bauman

No one is in con­trol. That is the major source of con­tem­po­rary fear. The fears are scat­tered. The fears are dif­fused. We can’t pin­point the sources where­from they are com­ing. They seem to be ubiquitous.

Ten Years of Terror: Michael Hardt

What’s most sig­nif­i­cant about September 11th ten years on I think is the illu­sion that it cre­at­ed of the end of pol­i­tics. By the end of pol­i­tics I mean the notion that force could rule. That ter­ror could effectively…be suf­fi­cient for pow­er. And this was an illu­sion I think that was rec­og­niz­able at the time of September 11th but almost impos­si­ble to say. Almost impos­si­ble to say because of a vari­ety of con­di­tions of the dra­mat­ic nature of the event, and also of the forces of pow­er that are arraigned with it.

Political Culture, Donald Trump and Education

Donald Trump is not an American phe­nom­e­non, sole­ly an American phe­nom­e­non. We see Trumps emerg­ing all across the West, all across Europe—Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And they are repeat­ing them­selves in very sim­i­lar ways. 

Sidney Blumenthal on the Crisis of Democracy

There’s always been this strain, par­tic­u­lar­ly in American pol­i­tics, a skep­ti­cism about politi­cians. We’re in one of these peri­ods where there is such skep­ti­cism, but it runs deeper.

The Divided States of America

I think there’s a great deal of naiveté about how pol­i­tics actu­al­ly works. And this is where either wing—the Trump wing or the Sanders wing—don’t under­stand how pol­i­tics actu­al­ly works in Washington.

Liberalism in the Anthropocene

This emerg­ing nar­ra­tive of cat­a­stro­phe is putting enor­mous pres­sure on all our polit­i­cal beliefs. Now there’s still some con­ser­v­a­tive par­ties, some US Republicans for exam­ple, who deny the basic facts, but we can be pret­ty sure I think that any pol­i­tics that denies the facts does­n’t have much of a future.

How Should We Do Politics?

I think that pol­i­tics has always been sus­cep­ti­ble to con­ver­sion so that it’s not actu­al­ly about liv­ing peo­ple it’s about sig­nal­ing mem­ber­ship with­in a par­tic­u­lar community.

Post-Enlightenment, Media, and Democracy

I think this is the end of the news. Not the end of jour­nal­ism, end of news. And I think the whole dis­cus­sion about busi­ness mod­els, or qual­i­ty, or trust, or ethics are sec­ondary to what is the real prob­lem, which is a cul­tur­al prob­lem and a social problem.

From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes

I think we need to real­ly think hard about what has been hap­pen­ing to social class rela­tions. And the con­clu­sion that I came to is that essen­tial­ly the left is apply­ing an out­dat­ed par­a­digm. You know, they’re still think­ing in terms of boss­es and work­ers and a kind of old-fashioned indus­tri­al sense. Where what’s real­ly going on is that for most peo­ple the key class oppo­si­tion is care­givers ver­sus man­agers. And essen­tial­ly, left­ist par­ties are try­ing to rep­re­sent both sides at the same time, but they’re real­ly dom­i­nat­ed by the latter.

Managing Online Partisan Conflict in r/politics with CivilServant

Liberal users com­prise a larg­er per­cent­age of these r/politics users, while con­ser­v­a­tives will com­prise a small­er per­cent­age. Through those users and through their vot­ing, they can con­trol what is seen and what is not seen. So a lib­er­al user, as a block, will down­vote more often than not some­thing they don’t agree with necessarily. 

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