philosophy.com
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx en-us2013-02-05T08:30:31+09:30the corporate university + the knowledge economy
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2013/02/the-corporate-u.html
The decline of manufacturing industry and the expansion of student numbers have made universities a much more important factor in the economy of many Australian cities. Hence Adelaide sees itself as an education city. This is at a time when the idea of of the university as a center of critique and a vital democratic public sphere that cultivates the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for the production of a democratic polity is giving way to a view of the university as a corporate enterprise. The established neo-liberal modes of governance, financing, and evaluation, for all intents and purposes, make higher education an adjunct of corporate values and interests. Under a neo-liberal mode of governance the liberal university is reshaped into a corporate one that competes with other universities in the global knowledge economy. In Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge-Driven Economy (1998), Charles Leadbeater, a former UK Downing Street...Gary Sauer-Thompson2013-02-05T08:30:31+09:30neo-liberalism: transforming the economy
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2012/04/neoliberalism-t-1.html
Neo-liberalism isn't simply about the privileged or the elite lining their pockets, as it is a particular mode of governing the capitalist economy. Neo-liberalism is generally associated with free market policies: deregulation, privatisation, competition, small state etc. David Harvey’s contention is that we are witnessing, through this process of neoliberalisation, the deepening penetration of capitalism into political and social institutions as well as cultural consciousness itself. It is the elevation of capitalism, as a mode of production, into an ethic, a set of political imperatives, and a cultural logic. It is also a project: a project to strengthen, restore, or, in some cases, constitute anew the power of economic elites. Neoliberalism is therefore not a new turn in the history of capitalism. It is more simply its intensification, and its resurgence after decades of resistance from the Keynesian welfare state and from experiments with social democratic and welfare state...liberalismGary Sauer-Thompson2012-04-20T09:46:10+09:30Martha Nussbaum on capabilities
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2012/02/nussbaum.html
Martha Nussbaum discusses Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach with California Lawyer Magazine’s Martin Lasden. Nussbaum describes the capabilities approach as a new theoretical paradigm in the development and policy world, which poses the questions: “What are people actually able to do and to be?” By starting from this question, we will shift the focus of policy and development analysis from resources (incomes at micro-level, and GDP per capita at national level) to people’s capabilities: the substantive freedoms or opportunities that are created by a combination of the abilities residing inside a person (like capacities and skills) with their social, economic and political environment. Nussbaum uses the capabilities approach in constructing a theory of basic social justice. In her previous work, Nussbaum has developed a theory of universal fundamental political entitlements. Those entitlements are given, in general terms, by a list of ten central capabilities: Life; bodily health; bodily integrity;...justiceGary Sauer-Thompson2012-02-04T22:05:19+09:30'War on the Internet' event: - Scott Ludlam
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2012/01/war-on-the-inte.html
The War on the Internet event, which was co-hosted by EFA and the Australian Greens, was held at Trades Hall in Melbourne on 21st January 2012. It featured: Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing This is a video of the talk by Scott Ludlam: War on the Internet event #3 - Scott Ludlam from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo. Scott Ludlam is a Greens Senator....internetGary Sauer-Thompson2012-01-23T20:55:01+09:30The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2012/01/the-stop-online.html
Copyright and trademark infringement on the Internet is a very real problem, and reasonable proposals to augment the ample array of enforcement powers already at the disposal of IP rights holders and law enforcement officials may serve the public interest. The other side of the issue is the future of communication on the Internet. The US Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill. The legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader. In the Stanford Law Review Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post argue that the bills take aim not at the Internet’s core technical infrastructure: the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure....internetGary Sauer-Thompson2012-01-14T16:13:22+09:30capitalism + natural boundaries
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2012/01/capitalism-natu.html
Capitalism is in crisis is a recurrent theme as the cycle of unsustainable booms and inevitable crashes means that countries teeter, protests rage, unemployed multiply and inequality increases. The crisis of legitimacy in capitalism deepens. Naomi Klein in Capitalism vs. the Climate in The Nation says that climate change highlights an important characteristic of capitalism. This is: The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing...capitalismGary Sauer-Thompson2012-01-10T08:18:25+09:30the apocalyptic reaction in the US
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2012/01/the-apocalyptic.html
Mark Lilla in Republicans for Revolution in the New York Review of Books says that sometime in the Eighties neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history. He adds: Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times...Apocalypticism trickled down, not up, and is now what binds Republican Party elites to their hard-core base. They all agree that the country must be “taken back” from the usurpers by any means necessary, and are willing to support any candidate, no matter how unworldly or...ConservatismGary Sauer-Thompson2012-01-04T17:38:18+09:30a new techno-economic paradigm?
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/10/a-new-technoeco.html
In her Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages Carlota Perez argues that the sequence, technological revolution–financial bubble–collapse–golden age–political unrest, recurs about every half century and is based on causal mechanisms that are in the nature of capitalism. These mechanisms stem from three features of the system, which interact with and influence one another: 1. the fact that technological change occurs by clusters of radical innovations forming successive and distinct revolutions that modernize the whole productive structure; 2. the functional separation between financial and production capital, each pursuing profits by different means; and 3. the much greater inertia and resistance to change of the socio-institutional framework in comparison with the techno-economic sphere, which is spurred by competitive pressures. One of her main ideas is that each of these revolutions is accompanied by a set of ‘best-practice’ principles, in the form of a techno-economic paradigm, which...Gary Sauer-Thompson2011-10-17T14:59:38+09:30American conservatism + populism
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/10/american-conser-1.html
The economic news out of the US suggests that America could well be facing a long recession one with negative growth or low growth or no growth for a long time and high unemployment. That generates anger on the street about an economic regime that is impoverishing the economy, accelerating foreclosures, pushing state and city budgets further into deficit and forcing cuts in social spending. That is the left of centre populism of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Occupy Wall Street movement, in contrast, puts the finger on the fault line where ordinary citizens have been on the wrong side of the greatest transfer of wealth, and virtually all of their supposed protectors stood by or had their hands in the till; and that the government no longer represent the people. The Government represents the financial interests of Wall Street that are impoverishing the economy. The Democrats are acting...PopulismGary Sauer-Thompson2011-10-11T17:49:12+09:30the shit hits the fan
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/09/the-shit-hits-t.html
Michael Lewis in It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! in Vanity Fair says with respect to Greek crisis and the European Union says that from the German perspective if the Greeks and the Germans are to coexist in a currency union, the Greeks need to change who they are. It is an article based on national stereotypes or the idea of national character. Lewis says of the German expectation that the Greeks need to change who they are that: This is unlikely to happen soon enough to matter. The Greeks not only have massive debts but are still running big deficits. Trapped by an artificially strong currency, they cannot turn these deficits into surpluses, even if they do everything that outsiders ask them to do. Their exports, priced in euros, remain expensive. The German government wants the Greeks to slash the size of their government, but that will also slow economic growth...EconomicsGary Sauer-Thompson2011-09-11T21:44:11+09:30the rule of law
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/09/the-rule-of-law-1.html
The traditional conception of the rule of law is given by A.V. Dicey, who created a classical formulation of the rule of law in his Introduction to the study of the law of the Constitution (1885). There he stated that the rule of law has three meanings: It means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power... Englishmen are ruled by the law, and by the law alone; a man may with us be punished for a breach of law, but he can be punished for nothing else. It means, again, equality before the law or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary law courts; the 'rule of law' in this sense excludes the idea of any exemption of officials or others from the duty of obedience to...lawGary Sauer-Thompson2011-09-01T10:02:29+09:30the image is a commodity
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/08/the-image-is-a.html
In his essay Transformations of the Image in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 Frederic Jameson says that postmodernity has most often been characterized as the end of something and the emergence of a whole new mode of living the quotidian. The essay sketches the changes to the visual or the image and the role of aesthetics in the culture of the postmodern and its celebratory affirmation of some post McLuhanite vision of culture transmogrified by computers and cyberspace. In this world the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed...aestheticsGary Sauer-Thompson2011-08-31T15:21:24+09:30 the aesthetic attitude
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/08/the-aesthetic-a.html
The aesthetic can be found in this statement: "If looking at a picture and attending closely to how it looks is not really to be in the aesthetic attitude, then what on earth is?" It seems to be the case that when we look at a flower in the way that the scientist does, we see the flower in one way, but when we look at the flower in a way as to view it as a thing of beauty, charm, elegance, we see it in a different way; we see it as an aesthetic object. Viewing the flower in such a way as to see it, or any object, as an aesthetic object, is to be in the aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude has figured prominently in aesthetics from the Enlightenment until the present. Its most important formulations are disinterestedness (Kant, Schopenhauer, Stolnitz), Psychical Distance (Bullough), Aldrich's Impressionistic Viewing,...aestheticsGary Sauer-Thompson2011-08-30T20:42:07+09:30 governing poverty
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/08/governing-pover.html
In The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age at Open Democracy Loïc Wacquant argues that the ramping up of the penal wing of the state (eg., “zero tolerance” policing and Three Strikes and You’re Out) is a response to social insecurity, and not a reaction to crime trends. Wacquant, who is the author of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, goes on to argue that under a neo-liberal mode of governance we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. He says: we must re-link shifts in penal and social policy, instead of isolating them from one another. The downsizing of public aid, complemented by the shift from the right to welfare to obligation of workfare (that is, forced participation in sub par employment as a condition of support),...liberalismGary Sauer-Thompson2011-08-06T16:36:11+09:30the contradictory sides of capitalism
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2011/08/the-contradicto.html
Chapter 5 of David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is now online. It is entitled the Enigma of Capital and it highlights the contradictory processes of capitalism. Harvey says that the saga and history of capitalism is full of paradoxes, even as most forms of social theory –economic theory in particular – abstract entirely from consideration of them. He adds: On the negative side we have not only the periodic and often localised economic crises that have punctuated capitalism’s evolution, including inter-capitalist and inter- imperialist world wars, problems of environmental degradation, loss of biodiverse habitats, spiralling poverty among burgeoning populations, neocolonialism, serious crises in public health, alienations and social exclusions galore and the anxieties of insecurity, violence and unfulfilled desires. On the positive side: some of us live in a world where standards of material living and well-being have never been higher, where travel and...capitalismGary Sauer-Thompson2011-08-05T23:25:57+09:30