Science/Technology

The View from Bohemia

For most of my adult life I have lived in bohemia, that marginal filament of US culture wedged in the cracks between the sterile, necrotic suburbs, the bunkered mansions of the urban rich, and the trash-blown decay of the ghetto. It exists, as it ever has, only in our larger cities, and perhaps no longer all of those. It is at risk of extinction in San Francisco, once its Mecca.

The Mont Order’s Globalism

In October, the Mont Order society’s top bloggers talked about the central role of technology in political and social change. Mentioning that the Mont Order and other modern political gatherings depend on the internet to exist in their current state, the second point in the Mont Order society’s value system alluded to inevitable forms of globalization brought about by technology.

The Neoliberal Engineering of Gender and Social Acceptance

The modification of gender from being a variable of sex to an independent cultural order of knowledge entailed a shift in the intelligibility and governability of sexual lives, bodies and selves. By defining it as explicitly separated from sex with its own series of data, [Robert J.] Stoller introduced gender as a phenomenon with its own constituent parts (gender, gender role, gender identity) and formative mechanisms that needed to be discovered, examined and exploited to cure, placate and normalize sexual deviancy.

A Liberal Canada

Canada’s prime minister for the past nine years, Stephen Harper, led a charmed life until the 19 October federal election. Canada’s first-past-the-post elector system, where three parties — two left-liberal and one conservative — have split the vote election after election, allowed him to hold power with a third of the popular vote.

Hospices to the Rescue: Helping Us Advance toward the End of Life

We live in a very particular death-denying society. We isolate both the dying and the old, and it serves a purpose. They are reminders of our own mortality. We should not institutionalize people. We can give families more help with home care and visiting nurses, giving the families and the patients the spiritual, emotional, and financial help in order to facilitate the final care at home.
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 1969

US-China Relations: The Pentagon versus High Tech

Step by step, Washington is inexorably setting up a major provocation against China. Until now, the Obama regime tightened a military encirclement of China, expanding its armed forces agreements with Japan, the Philippines and Australia. In addition, it has promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a regional trade agreement which openly excludes China.