Month: August 2024
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A certain Rigor
The humanities, a sprawling, amorphous beast, lumber through the intellectual landscape with all the grace of a mastodon in heat. While STEM, the sleek, metallic titan of academia, marches purposefully towards a quantifiable, deterministic utopia, the humanities flounder amidst a swamp of subjectivity, where meaning is a capricious, shape-shifting entity. The humanists, bless their cotton-picking…
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Running On Vibes
First, the avoidance of contentious primaries is not merely a pragmatic decision; it reflects the way power operates in a postmodern political landscape. The elimination of primary challenges serves to short-circuit the democratic process, revealing the truth that democracy, in its late-capitalist form, has become a ritualistic performance rather than a genuine contest of ideas.…
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Capitalism Unimagined
The concept we’re describing touches on the cyclical nature of capitalism, where rules and regulations—designed to maintain fairness and accountability—are often subverted by those with capital. The Dance of Loopholes and Capital In capitalist systems, regulations are established to ensure fair competition, protect consumers, and maintain economic stability. However, these rules are frequently navigated by…
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Dark Humor/American Collapse
Collapse, a word for the wordless. No laughter here, only the echo of a joke lost in the static. Soviet black, French absinthe green, Spanish crimson – these were the hues of humor, once. Now, the palette is gray, the canvas smeared with the fingerprints of empire. Vonnegut, Pynchon, high-rise clowns juggling fire in a burning circus. We are the ground floor,the crushed and trampled, the dirt beneath their manicured…
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History of Violence
Man, a junkie scratching at the scabs of history, digging for the bone beneath the plaster. Also Man, a junkie for clean hands. His story a wet dream of innocence, a snow job centuries deep. Violence, the original sin, painted over like a cheap whorehouse facade History, a junkie’s needle, tracks the red line of violence. A…
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The Machinery of Violence
The Machine is hungry. Republican hands reach for the Big Red Button—no hesitation, no pause, just the itch, the primal need to blow something to dust. Preferably brown, preferably Other, preferably something distant enough to forget but close enough to feel the shockwave. Boom, boom, boom. A symphony of obliteration. Brown bodies turned to statistics,…
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Intersectional Racism
When he does it, it’s the old-time religion, the serpent’s tongue forked and hissing in the jungle night. Bad blood, pure and simple. A virus in the bloodstream, a tumor on the soul. But when we do it, it’s a quantum leap, a fractal unfolding of consciousness. Intersectionality, they call it, a buzzword for the new age witch doctor, a mantra for the chemically lobotomized masses. When they…
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Middle East as Event Horizon
The Middle East: Crucible of Eschatology The arid sands of the Middle East have long served as a metaphysical desert, a barren expanse where the world’s most potent eschatologies converge and collide. It is a region where prophecy and politics intertwine, where the divine and the mundane clash in a perpetual struggle for dominance. From the Islamic vision of…