We attempt to communicate something, to elicit some feeling, from the people who perceive our art, and we, perceiving, respond somehow — or don’t, which suggests that perhaps that artwork does not speak to us or for us or in our language. (This will come back to haunt us.)
Read MoreThe trajectory is like this: Israel is the last-established Settler-Colonialist project. It is also the last such project I see being feasible. Fundamentally, it is the same kind of state as America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; other states have had Settler-Colonialist phases – such as the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido, the settlement of Taiwan, and basically anywhere you see (nation)-ification or -cization – Russification, Sinocization, Romanization. This refers to the replacement of an indigenous culture with a colonialist one. Sometimes, this is accompanied with political policies that lead to demographic shifts.
Read MoreThe term began on the left. This is easy enough to swallow, because the right has a hard time creating anything. They appropriated the term “libertarian”, they’re trying to appropriate furries, and Norse paganism, and metal, and they tried – and failed – to appropriate punk. They are succeeding in appropriating “Accelerationism”, primarily because there’s no consensus on the meaning of the term, because it took a back-channel from academia to the mainstream.
Read MoreDespite being an educator, you might notice that I don’t discuss education much on this site. Part of this is simply my attempt to put up a wall between my professional life and my public speech – I intend to drill a hole in this wall today, though I’m going to maintain a bit of privacy. I won’t be publicly naming the school(s) I teach at, for example. The reason I decided to write on this subject is quite simple: I’m pretty sure that the American College system is in a state of collapse
Read MoreWhat I want to do today, briefly, is shine a light on the group in the war that is often pushed to the margins. You see, on the Republican side of the war were not simply Spaniards fighting the Fascist takeover of their homeland, but the International Battalions. People from all over the world who poured into Spain to try to stem the tide of Fascist takeover. Many people who know about the International Battalions know about the Abraham Lincoln Battalion – the American contingent, which was largely made up of Jewish men from New York and surrounding environs – and their history is fascinating and important. There was also a German contingent on the Republican side, and they’ve been an object of fascination for me recently. They were called the Thälmann Battalion.
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