Grey Wool Knickers They breathe

February 4, 2009

Economic Sustainability

Filed under: Santa Cruz — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 12:52 am

This post actually started as a comment on a friend’s blog, but it turned into a bit of a diatribe that seemed to deserve its own post.  My apologies to those of you for whom the references to day-old bagels, cement boats and opportunivores will make no sense.  And I apologize also for the corny, overblown metaphors.  I’ll hopefully be writing in Arabic soon, which I’m sure will sufficiently alienate what audience I had in the fist place, if that’s any consolation.  Here it goes anyway: (more…)

December 2, 2007

Surrender is Surrender

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 5:38 am

A friend of mine handed me a recent (November 15) article by Slavoj Žižek, entitled “Resistance Is Surrender”. It comes from the London Review of Books. This friend wanted to know my opinion. My answer? The short version is not appropriate for a public audience, so I’ll share with you the long version. Just about everything in the article is worthy of a counterpoint, but I’ll try to limit myself.  I encourage the reader to read Žižek’s article in full first.  Most of it has been quoted below, but there are a few chunks I left out: (more…)

November 9, 2007

Long-Range Resistance at UCSC

Filed under: Santa Cruz — Tags: , , , — admin @ 3:10 pm

UC Santa Cruz not UC Silicon ValleyRiot Police on UCSC Campus

I was heartened to hear about this action at my alma mater, the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was a long time in coming. The Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), proposed by the Regents of the university, has long been the subject of considerable ire on the part of many in the campus community and that of Santa Cruz in general. The issue has become urgent enough, and the options for constructively engaging with the administration so completely exhausted, that the movement opposed to the LRDP was able to gain enough traction in the public to pull off what appears, at least from all the way out here in Cairo, to have been a very successful direct action, and, perhaps more importantly, one which does not simply stand on its own, but signals the beginning of a new and more radical phase of struggle. (more…)

October 28, 2007

Islam and Capital—الإسلام و الرأسمال

Filed under: Masr —مصر — Tags: , — admin @ 11:46 pm

A perhaps too-authoritative title for a post that is much more of the beginning of an exploration than an unequivocal pronouncement. I came across a number of readings over the past weekend that have piqued my interest in the subject. The first was a forthcoming essay (by a for-now-unnamed author) on neo-authoritarianism in Egypt and the second a 2003 thesis by Lindsey Wise on the “new preachers”, in which she explores the phenomenon of a new crop of lay preachers of Islam. Lastly, and, most especially, an article in Le Monde dipomatique on the same phenomenon, though much more brief, and with a stronger focus on the ways in which these preachers have enlisted not just the outward trappings of modernity, but the specific modes of articulation of business management. (more…)

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