Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor: Arguably, when…
Category: Government & Politics
Teeming Links – July 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and required reading, here’s a not-so-idle speculation from Damien Walter about the momentous fact of our collective cultural obsession with losing ourselves in the ever more immersive fantasy worlds that digital technology has enabled for us: I am a writer and critic…
Jimmy Carter speaks out on NSA scandal and more: “America has no functioning democracy”
I just caught wind of this, and I find it to be entirely worth bringing to the attention of anybody who hasn’t heard about it. In a word: wow. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of American democracy….
Teeming Links – July 19, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Locking Out the Voices of Dissent (Truthdig) Chris Hedges on how the security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising….
“In Praise of Shadows”: Morris Berman’s acceptance speech for the 2013 Neil Postman Award
Last month Morris Berman delivered a speech titled “In Praise of Shadows” as he accepted this year’s Neil Postman Award for Public Intellectual Activity.
Teeming Links – July 12, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net This week, a change in format: The Teeming Brain’s long-running “Recommended Reading” series will henceforth be titled “Teeming Links.” It will also shift to a streamlined format that does away with the former practice of including extensive excerpts and publication information from the linked items. I want to…
America’s post 9/11 surveillance state: Orwell mets Kafka in the Long Emergency
Here in the midst of the still-building storm and scandal over the revelations about PRISM — referring (in case you’ve recently been living under a rock or sunk in a coma) to “the system the NSA uses to gain access to the private communications of users of nine popular Internet services” — journalist and social…
Conspiracy theories are a mythologization of capitalism
From an essay published on May 21 at The New Inquiry and bearing the teaser line “Just because we can hear the black helicopters doesn’t mean they don’t exist”: The modern conspiracy theory is a mythologization of capitalism. That humanity writhes in the grip of a power alien to itself is so palpable that the…
Pentagon claims domestic authority “to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances”
Is it just me, or is this profoundly disturbing? No, it’s not just me. From the Long Island Press, May 14: The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United…
Recommended Reading 40
In this installment: A report on the new type of futurism that’s being spearheaded by highly regarded scientists and scholars for the purpose of studying the reality and scope of existential threats to human survival. The triumph of fear as a central motivating reality in contemporary geopolitics. The global plague of feral pigs. Renowned author…