Posts Tagged ‘biopolitics’
Monday Morning Links
* There’s always money in the banana stand: After closing 50 schools, Chicago Public Schools has proposals for 31 new Charter Schools. This is how much your kid’s school’s budget has been cut (state-by-state averages). “The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students.”
* Fiduciary duty: Shareholder sues IBM for spying on China, wiping $12.9B off its market cap.
* Can Science Fiction Survive in Saudi Arabia?
* Incarceration rate per 100,000 Black males in South Africa under apartheid (1993) 610: 851. Incarceration rate per 100,000 African-American males in the United States under George W. Bush (2001) 611: 4,848. The Bush tag is such a redding herring there. This is a bipartisan consensus.
* What crimes did prisoners commit?
Almost two-thirds of court admissions to state prison are for property and drug offenses, including drug possession (16 percent), drug sales (15 percent), burglary (9 percent), and auto theft (6 percent).
Then, she says, the prosecutor began rattling off names and showing photographs of people, asking about their social contacts and political opinions. Olejnik guesses he asked “at least 50 questions” in that vein, compared to the four about May Day. That’s when she shut down, refused to answer, was found in contempt of court, and was sent to SeaTac FDC.
* Texas Judge Who Resigned After Allegedly Colluding With Prosecutor Now Running For Prosecutor.
* If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We’d Ground Our Fleet. How NY Times Covers Yemen Drone Strikes.
* A Tale of Two Cities: America’s Bipolar Climate Future. New York City and New Bern, North Carolina both face the same projected rise in sea levels, but while one is preparing for the worst, the other is doing nothing on principle.
* Scientists Turn Their Gaze Toward Tiny Threats to Great Lakes.
* Iowa Republican’s 2-year investigation finds no statistically significant evidence of voter fraud.
* There’s always money in the banana stand, part two: Highest paid college presidents.
* Two House Democrats Lead Effort to Protect For-Profit Colleges, Betraying Students and Vets.
* Son of a: A New Study Suggests That People Who Don’t Drink Alcohol Are More Likely To Die Young.
* The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder.
* Postscript on the Societies of Control, life insurance edition.
* I’ve been saying this for years: Online advertising has a fraud problem. Millions of ad impressions are being served to bots and non-human traffic, and ad tech companies are doing little to stop it.
* The Kellers are caught up in a little-known horror of the U.S. housing bust: the zombie title. Six years in, thousands of homeowners are finding themselves legally liable for houses they didn’t know they still owned after banks decided it wasn’t worth their while to complete foreclosures on them.
* True crime: 100 cited in Wisconsin probe of illegal ginseng harvesting.
* The Walker miracle: The U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday that 4,420 people in Wisconsin filed initial unemployment claims during the last week of November. That is more claims than the next two highest states combined: Ohio with 2,597 and Kentucky with 1,538.
* Israel, BDS, and delegitimization. ASA Members Vote To Endorse Academic Boycott of Israel.
* The Pope: Not a Marxist!
* What does it mean to be privileged? It means not having to think about any of this, ever.
* Public Influence: The Immortalization of an Anonymous Death.
‘The Need for Dissatisfaction Is Implicitly Recognized by Keynesian Economics, Which Sees the Capitalist System as Threatened by the Possibility of Individual or Collective Satisfaction, Manifest as a Demand Shortfall’
Depression is the iconic illness in this respect. Indeed, we might say that if ‘immaterial’ labour is now the hegemonic form of production, depression is the hegemonic form of incapacity. Typically, depression is characterized by a lack of any clear clinical definition; indeed it is often defined as anything that can be treated with anti-depressants. [5] Depression is just sheer incapacity, a distinctly neo-liberal form of psychological deficiency, representing the flipside of an ethos that implores individuals to act, enjoy, perform, create, achieve and maximize. In an economy based in large part on services, enthusiasm, dynamism and optimism are vital workplace resources. The depressed employee is stricken by a chronic deflation of these psycho-economic capacities, which can lead him or her to feel economically useless, and consequently more depressed. The workplace therefore acquires a therapeutic function, for if people can somehow be persuaded to remain in work despite mental or physical illness, then their self-esteem will be prevented from falling too low, and their bio-psycho-economic potential might be rescued. Many of the UK government’s strategies for reducing incapacity-benefit claims and health-related absence focus on reorienting the Human Resources profession, such that managers become better able to recognize and support depressed and anxious employees. Lifting the taboo surrounding mental illness, so as to address it better, has become an economic-policy priority.
William Davies, “The Political Economy of Unhappiness.” Via Marc Bousquet.
Optimistic theorists of cognitive capitalism, such as Hardt and Negri, believe that the positive externalities or spill-over effects associated with immaterial production create the conditions for a new commons. Efforts to measure and privatize human, intellectual and cultural resources must ultimately fail; the hegemonic character of immaterial labour means that the most valuable economic resources are becoming socialized, despite the best efforts of capital to prevent this. The proposition I wish to investigate here is in some ways the inverse: while policy-makers, doctors and economists seek to contain the negative externality of unhappiness as a measurable psychological deficiency and economic cost, it has inherently political and sociological qualities that lend it critical potential. One contradiction of neo-liberalism is that it demands levels of enthusiasm, energy and hope whose conditions it destroys through insecurity, powerlessness and the valorization of unattainable ego ideals via advertising. What is most intriguing about the turn towards happiness amongst political elites and orthodox economists is that it is bringing this truth to the fore, and granting it official statistical endorsement. Even a cursory examination of the evidence on unhappiness in neo-liberal societies draws the observer beyond the limits of psychology, and into questions of political economy.
Zombies, Reavers, Butchers, Actuals, and Joss Whedon
We’re traveling back east most of day, but I wanted to throw up a link to my contribution to PopMatters’s Joss Whedon Spotlight: “Zombies, Reavers, Butchers, and Actuals in Joss Whedon’s Work.” This is a sliver from my long zombie chapter with some new stuff about Joss, Buffy, and Angel added in. I saw there was a link to the piece this morning at Whedonesque, which was really fun for me; I’ve had that site in my RSS reader for years…
Back in Durham tonight.
Survival Under Atomic Attack
Survival under atomic attack: it’s easier than you think! Via Cynical-C.