Posts tagged “Politics”
Scholarship is always political
“Sokal Squared” is bad science. Its blatant manipulation of its own “data,” the lack of meaningful controls, and the disconnect between its methods and what it claims to prove are a remarkably poor model for nonpoliticized scholarship, even if it were true (as it clearly is not) that the hoaxers were any less driven by […]
If SV really believes AI is an existential threat…
Paradoxically, all the scenarios, apocalyptic or preventive, come from researchers and leaders of industry involved in the development of the very technology they are mobilising against. Source: Silicon Valley funds our helpless future, by Charles Perragin & Guillaume Renouard (Le Monde diplomatique – English edition, August 2018) If Silicon Valley actually believes AI is an […]
We don’t have an immigration problem, we have a labor problem
Re: Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Moved to Iowa, Employs Undocumented Workers The near total use of undocumented labourers is not news to anyone who’s ever lived in farm country. All the bullshit about illegal immigration is really just about labor exploitation. If a dairy farm would go out of business if it paid workers a […]
Do you really want to impeach Trump?
Impeaching Trump or backing out of Brexit won’t solve our problems. In both scenarios – impeachment or a second referendum – the suspicion of elites would become even greater, and the political alienation and economic marginalisation that contributed to it would still exist. That’s not a reason not to support them. It is a reason […]
There are no edges; the border is everywhere
The practice of centers taking control over their peripheries is as old as states, but it is not innocuous. When the federal government takes control of its periphery, it imposes a kind of alien rule, even on the familiar terrain of the homeland. What we miss, when we focus only on the outward face of […]
Voting with your dollars has some serious problems
Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city, or establish special judicial procedures for Foxconn? Some vanguardists of functional sovereignty believe online rating systems could replace state occupational licensure—so rather […]
Staking a claim
In Laurie Penny’s most excellent review of Ivanka Trump’s book, she includes the following excerpt: Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. […]