Archives for December 2019

The Apparatus

"First, at an ideological level, any movement away from social explanations, particularly wider economic and political ones, moved the debate away from looking for causes and solutions, particularly revolutionary political ones, in that area. Economic and political solutions, it could be argued, were not relevant where the problem is biological and individual weakness.{ } Second, the biological approach elevated the status of doctors and chemists as authorities and experts and undermined the standing of sociologists, psychologists, journalists and others with a more social and less individual approach. At the same time, doctors and chemists were just what the rising industrial power of Big … [Read more...]

Gelded Gunfighter

"The patterns of displacement through prison, thus, sever social ties at the same time that they connect distinct places. Society’s margin set in stone, prisons render invisible the mix of poverty, crime, and racial inequality that mark actual punishment and put in its place a compelling mythology of law and order." Volker Janssen ( Sunbelt Lock-Up: Where theSuburbs Met the Super-Max ) "That which had a political face and imagined itself political will unmask itself one day and reveal itself to be a religious movement." Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) "Who is the Dalai Lama? And why does so much of the Italian left tend to accept his “sanctification” and not see his reactionary … [Read more...]