Against Progress
PM Modi to visit Russia next week, his first since Ukraine war
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." — Hannah Arendt
Finnish policymakers understand that if homelessness is going to be brought to an end people need to be able to afford their homes. This means that speculators, financialized firms, and other predacious investors have to be kept in check. To accomplish this, the government made up-front investments to build, own, and develop housing as a state. The city of Helsinki, for example, owns its own construction company, constructs purpose-built housing designed specifically to accommodate low-income citizens, and owns 60,000 social housing units. One in seven residents of the city live in city-owned housing. This creates a price floor that keeps rents low for everybody. - Canadian Dimension
“This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis and fiction cinema: We are responsible for our dreams. Our dreams stage our desires and our desires are not objective facts. We created them, we sustained them, we are responsible for them.” - Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
These days, for both men and women in Korea, anger is the dominant emotion, a marked shift for a country that normally prides itself on promoting a sense of hope and a can-do attitude. The economy is tanking, housing prices are at an all-time high, income inequality continues to grow, and fertility and marriage rates are far lower than a decade ago. But instead of lobbying for change, as younger generations have done for centuries, young Koreans are fighting among one another over gender rights — and both men and women insist they are the ones who are the real victims. - Politico
Calls for Israel to launch a nuclear attack on Iran by historian Benny Morris and many others, including those on the left, is the continuation of a strategy of vengeance that would destroy everything. We must take to the streets and protest, while we still can. - Haaretz
Russia’s government revenue from the oil industry was almost 50% higher in June compared with a year earlier as the nation’s producers adapted to international sanctions and obtained higher prices for their crude exports. - Bloomberg
“You leave people … for the same reason that attracted you in the first place.” - Vincent Cassel being Georgio in Mon Roi, 2015
The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will. - Lacan.com
How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed, and begin to build a better world? - Zizek
“The subject does not speak to the Other and, equally, the Other does not speak to him. What is called the Other is rather that the subject speaks to himself through the Other. In this vein, the Other is the puppet of the subject. You have to be psychotic to think otherwise.” - Jacques-Alain Miller, We are all Ventriloquists, The Lacanian Review 9, STILL LIFE
ICE started its undercover operation in 2015, creating a fake office on Northwestern Highway near 13 Mile with a website and an admissions process like a regular university. The University of Farmington was even listed on the website of ICE as a school approved by the U.S. government for students. It seemed real to its 600-plus students, a majority of them immigrants from India interested in studying technology and science. Many students are able to live and work legally in the U.S. through university programs such as the one the University of Farmington touted. The students had arrived legally in the U.S. and were on F-1 student visa programs when they enrolled. But it was all an elaborate operation by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations to trick foreign-born students they allege were trying to "pay to stay" in the U.S., a claim the students deny. ICE arrested hundreds of students, deported many of them and others left the U.S. on their own….Records reveal the Department of Homeland Security went to great lengths to deceive the students, said their attorneys. The fake university was incorporated in the state of Michigan in January 2016, records with the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs show. The Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, which was working with the U.S. on its sting operation, also listed the university as legitimate…Ravi said he had paid $12,500 in tuition to the University of Farmington when he enrolled in March 2018. He and other students became suspicious when classes didn't start and contacted the university to find out what was happening, but were not helped. - Detroit Free Press