Link to an article by Jacques Pauwels:
“1918: How the Allies Surfed to Victory on a Wave of Oil”
Bonus link: “Foreign Interventions in Revolutionary Russia”
Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article by Jacques Pauwels:
“1918: How the Allies Surfed to Victory on a Wave of Oil”
Bonus link: “Foreign Interventions in Revolutionary Russia”
Link to an article by Rob Urie:
Link to an article by John Pilger:
“Hold the Front Page. The Reporters Are Missing”
Bonus links: Critique of Cynical Reason, and “Three Variations on Trump Quote”, and “The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine”
Bonus quote:
“in the analysis of ideology, it is not simply a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest being the least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already — whether we know it or not — made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on.”
Rex Butler, “What Is a Master-Signifier”
Link to an article by Rob Urie:
Link to an article by Chip Gibbons about George Crockett Jr. and the FBI:
Link to an article by Haydar Khan:
Bonus links: “Intersectionalism, the Highest Stage of Western Stalinism?” and “The Politics of Identity” and The Trouble With Diversity and “What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics)” and Liberalism: A Counter-History (“Liberalism has always pivoted, Losurdo argues, on drawing a dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – those who are worthy or capable (morally, intellectually, biologically/racially) of the gamut of rights and liberties we associate with liberalism and those who are not.”); see also “Remarks on Gender”
Link to an article by T.J. Coles:
“Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Celebrity Salesman for the Military-Industrial-Complex”
Note that this identified deGrasse Tyson as an old-fashioned shill rather than part of the “idiot pool”. Anyway, this article doesn’t explicitly reach deGrasse Tyson’s secular humanist “scientism” ideology which is really what drives his sociopolitical status quo boosterism:
“The relevance of these practices is that they account for Tyson’s scientism as a tactic in a culture war. I’ll lay out some principles of Tyson’s apparent culture to show how the conflict arises. Tyson’s all-business impatience with philosophy and his allusion to progress indicate that he stands not just for the supremacy of science, but for the modern institutions (capitalism, private industry, democracy) that have exploited scientific knowledge. The liberal values (freedom of thought, environmentalism, admiration for underdog scientists) and inchoate pantheism that surface in his series, Cosmos, show that he stands also for secular humanism. Put these together and you have a culture that reduces to neoliberalism, an ideology that’s analyzed thoroughly by Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Neoliberalism is the rebirth of the social policies that led to the Great Depression, which rebirth was made possible by some propagandists’ mastery of the double standard. Neoliberalism is what powerful Republicans and Democrats have in common, the understanding that capitalism runs counter to democracy, but that a semblance of the latter is needed as the noble lie to sustain the magic of the former. Thus, neoliberals are both populists and technocrats, depending on their audience. In any case, in so far as Tyson despises philosophy for being useless in contrast to science, he must approve of the modern applications of science—not just the medical breakthroughs and technological advances, but the egoistic, materialistic mass culture of consumerism that bankrolls the loftier work of scientific inquiry.”
Benjamin Cain, “Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Scientism and the Scapegoating of Philosophy”
Bonus links: “Book Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science” (“Capitalism portrays science as a purely objective phenomenon and considers any attempt at understanding the political implications of science to be an intrusion of ideology into the sphere of objective, scientific neutrality.” *** “‘Positivism’ refers to the rejection of philosophy in favor of adopting an (often oversimplified) understanding of natural science as the basis for all theoretical and practical activity.”) and “Where Is the Rift? Marx, Lacan, Capitalism, and Ecology” (“modern science is ‘untrue’ insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the “social mediation” of its activity.”) and Making Peace With the Planet (“Since a standard represents a point on a scale, its practical meaning depends entirely on the nature of the scale. Although the position of the pointer is simply a number and therefore objective, the choice of the scale and therefore the meaning of the number is entirely arbitrary. This creates an opportunity to disguise self-interest as science, for the scale is readily manipulated to govern the apparent meaning of the standard.”)
Link to an article by Rob Urie:
Link to an interview of Matt Christman, co-host of the podcast Chapo Trap House, conducted by Micah Uetricht:
“The Horror and the Hopefulness of Chapo Trap House“
Bonus link: Diamondback Interview