Intrinsic Anxiety, My Love
“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” - Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, The Toilers of the Sea, 1886
NATO says Ukraine to decide on peace deal with Russia - Washington Post April 5, 2022
With no way out of a worsening war, Zelensky’s options look bad or worse: Pessimism about Ukraine’s battlefield chances has increased in recent months as Russian forces have regained the initiative on the battlefield, largely because Ukrainians are short on troops and ammunition. - Washington Post April 6, 2024
Our desire—our impulse to reach out into the world in quest of things that might satisfy us—may render us vulnerable to injury, but it also ensures that we do not settle into a fixed definition of who we are; it ensures that the meaning of our lives remains malleable and open-ended…, we are invited to translate life’s unpredictable swerves into a calling of some kind. And we are asked to cope with a degree of upheaval, which is exactly why anxiety—and particularly the capacity to bear the uncertainties and ambivalences of existence—tends to be an intrinsic component of a life that feels worth living. - Mari Rudi The Call of Character
The University of Cologne yesterday withdrew its invitation to Nancy Fraser (New School) to take up its 2024 Albertus Magnus Professorship, a visiting position that the university considers a “special honor,” because Professor Fraser had been one of several hundred signatories of the “Philosophy for Palestine” open letter published last November…Article 5, Clause 3 of the German Basic Law states: Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free. The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution. - Higher Education
The point is simple: the more capital we stuff into houses, fuelled by record heaps of debt, the less is invested in enterprises which grow the GDP, throw off jobs and hike tax revenues. Every year more of the economy becomes dependent upon housing. In fact, it’s unclear what size that hunk is. StatsCan suggests something more than the entire mining and oil and gas sectors combined. Re/Max just claimed it’s 40% of GDP. That would be a world record. - GreaterFool.ca
The reality of the other. Now this reality is absolutely bound to his strangeness. How does the human being, the baby, encounter this strangeness? It is in the fact that the messages he receives are enigmatic. His messages are enigmatic because those messages are strange to themselves. That is, if the other was not himself invaded by his own other, his internal other, that is, the unconscious, the messages wouldn’t be strange and enigmatic. So the problem of the other is strictly bound to the fact that the small human being has no unconscious, and he is confronted with messages invaded by the unconscious of the other. When I speak now of the other, I speak of the concrete other, I don’t speak in Lacanian terms, with a big O or a big A. I speak of the concrete other, each other person, adult person, which has to care for the baby…So it is in relation to the seduction theory that the subject builds himself as an individual. He Ptolemizes himself, being at the very beginning Copernican, that is, circulating around the other’s message. He has to internalize this, and he builds an inside in order to internalize (Laplanche, “Unfinished Copernican”). - Laplanche
Receiving a tax-free, non-performance-related income has already alarmed the historical advocates of economic liberalism. In a market-orientated open society, so the credo goes, privileges should only be claimed as a reward for personal contribution to this society - in contrast to aristocracy and feudalism, where privileges, status, and wealth are inherited. In this respect, the socio-political systems of many countries resemble a feudal social order in which one’s fate depends on the status of one’s parents. The very rich, the billionaires, are extremely influential because wealth goes along with increased political power and their power with regard to the media. That’s a major issue. I’ve experienced many devastating things, but one of the most shattering issues was the fact that the EU was not capable of introducing a financial transaction tax despite the fact that the financial sector has caused so much damage to our society. Even the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, and the European Commission were in favor of implementing this kind of tax. Yet it never happened. - Behind bogus promises of job creation and economic growth lies a dangerous agenda to shred social safety nets.
Mexico is breaking diplomatic ties with Ecuador after police stormed the embassy in Quito - ABC
India will enter Pakistan to kill terrorists who run away there, defence minister says
If the US continues to blindly support the Ecuadorian president, it runs the risk of being perceived as an enabler of corruption and authoritarianism by Ecuadorians and others in the region. And as the crisis in the country deepens, Washington may wind up on the wrong side of history. - Aljazeera
No to imperialist intervention in Ecuador! US out of Latin America!
Belying Western media hype that China is losing attractiveness to foreign investors, top US firms began flocking to China last month, pledging commitment to the Chinese market, announcing new investment deals and setting up new shop or factory floors. - Indianpunchline
Piketty’s core thesis is that we have returned to an age of “patrimonial capitalism”, where the elite attain their fortunes through inheritance as opposed to innovation. When the rate of return on capital (r) outstrips economic growth (g), the rich get richer faster than they can spend their money. Inherited fortunes create a class of politically influential rentiers, deepening the unequal distribution of wealth and creating the conditions for social unrest. His conclusion: a global tax on capital. - New Statesman
“It’s what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas. If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.” - US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken
The U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars. As of May 2023, an estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones. The total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown. Civilian deaths have also resulted from U.S. post-9/11 military operations in Somalia and other countries. - Brown University Study
Baltimore Bridge Collapse: If the US Navy had not divested all its salvage equipment, subcontracted most of its salvage work to an overseas company, and still promoted experience hardened salvage masters to the rank of Admiral… this bridge could have been cleared in a few weeks But today’s Admirals won’t be found on the decks of shipwrecks wearing wrinkled khakis. The hundreds of Admirals in today’s Navy prefer wearing starched Army camouflage to office jobs
NATO 60 Year Anniversary 2009: WHAT DOES NATO WANT? We want the continuation of peace and prosperity and stability in this whole Euro-Atlantic space. We want a world of strong democratic states to eliminate the failed, ungovernable and fragile states which act as magnets for terrorism, for crime. We want the capacity to deal with these threats, threats now far away from our shores but which, due to globalization, can be in our front yard in just minutes. We want peace between Israel and her neighbors in the Middle East, and we want democratic stability in Afghanistan and Iraq. - NATO At 60 Symposium: Remarks by Former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson
How NATO’s 2% military spending targets contribute to climate breakdown
Finland has one of the largest wartime strengths in NATO with 280,000 troops, and around 900,000 people out of a total population of 5.5 million have had military training. In historical terms, Finland has a fighter per capita ratio equivalent to ancient Sparta. - Wilson Center