Month: May 2013

Arbeit Macht Frei

Taking workplace feudalism up a notch: A New York-based real estate firm Rapid Realty has offered its 800 employees a 15% pay raise if they tattoo the company’s logo onto their bodies, and the offer is snowballing, according to CBS New York. So far, nearly 40 employees accepted the challenge, AOL Jobs reported. … Employees who agreed to get inked said getting a substantially larger paycheck was motivation enough to get a tattoo. In a video, Brooklyn-based broker Adam Altman said the ink would be a reminder to work harder.  “I don’t see myself going anywhere, and if I have it on my arm, it’ll force me to keep going and working hard [sic],” Altman said. H/t Douglas Edwards

Obama at Morehouse, LBJ at Howard

Barack Obama at Morehouse College: Well, we’ve got no time for excuses. Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil — many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did — all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned. Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever […]

Everything you know about the movement against the Vietnam War is wrong

Penny Lewis, a sociologist at CUNY’s Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, has a new book out: Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. It’s a revisionist account of the movement against the Vietnam War that completely upends our sense of who was for and against the war. Even more interesting, it tells us how we came to such an upside down view of the antiwar movement. Luckily I don’t have to summarize the book because Penny’s got a terrific piece out in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education where she lays out the argument. Just a quick excerpt: The story we tell ourselves about social division over the war in Vietnam follows […]

Critics respond to “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children”

I’ve been traveling for several days, but in the last 24 hours, a bunch of people have responded, all critically, to my “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children.”  I just got back and have a bunch of teaching to do, so I haven’t had time to read them all and may not be able to get to them for a while. But I thought I’d post them here.  I’ll try to get to them as soon as I can. Kevin Vallier, one of the sharpest libertarian theorists out there with whom I’ve argued in the past, has what seems on a very quick glance to be a thorough critique (not trying to suggest it’s not thorough; I just only had time to skim […]

Ronald Reagan: Ríos Montt is “totally dedicated to democracy”

So much of the discourse around the US and genocide focuses on the sin of omission, the failure of the US to prevent or stop genocide elsewhere. Now that former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison—a fact established by a UN truth commission in 1997 but often ignored in the literature about genocide and intervention, which tends to focus on Rwanda and Bosnia—perhaps we can attend to the sin of commission. For the US support for Rios Montt was extensive. I wrote about it in the London Review of Books in 2004: On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was […]

The Leopold and Loeb of Modern Libertarianism

“Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche.” So said Clarence Darrow at the trial of Leopold and Loeb, the two University of Chicago law students who had murdered young Bobby Franks for no other reason than to prove that they were Nietzschean Supermen who could. When I’m feeling mischievous, I think of using that line as an epigraph for an essay on Nietzsche and libertarianism. How many teenage boys, after all, have found their way into the free market via Nietzsche? None, one insider tells me; a lot, says another. My impression is that the latter is right, but good data is hard to come by. Every ten years, Liberty Magazine polls its readers about their […]

Brooklyn BDS Saga Continues: NYC Councilman Lewis Fidler Demands Poli Sci Hire Pro-Israel Faculty

New York City Councilman Lewis Fidler, the assistant majority leader who led the charge against my department’s co-sponsorship of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) forum in February, is back in the saddle. This time, according to The Jewish Week, he—and four other members of City Council—are demanding that the CUNY administration develop a plan to “level the playing field” at Brooklyn’s political science department by endowing “a chair in the department for a visiting professor from Israel who reflects a more sympathetic view” about the country’s future. Hardcore supporters of the State of Israel, off and on campus, have been gunning for my department for some time. Last month, The Jewish Week reported that the campus Hillel group and the […]

The False Attribution: Our Democratic Poetry

Every two minutes on Twitter, someone tweets, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” and wrongly attributes it to Edmund Burke. Burke never said any such thing. But the myth persists. I’ve long wanted to write an essay on this phenomenon of wrongly attributed statements. If you dig, you often find that no one famous ever said anything like it. Obviously someone had to say it, at some point, but whoever he or she is, is lost to memory. I first came across this phenomenon in 2000 when I was writing a piece for Lingua Franca. You know that saying (or some version thereof): Whoever is not a liberal [or a socialist […]

In the new issue of Jacobin…

The latest issue of Jacobin came out the week before last. It’s already generating a lot of discussion and debate. Just a few highlights. 1.  Jonah Birch’s interview with NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber about Chibber’s new book on subaltern studies and postcolonialism theory has pissed a lot of people off. Here’s Chibber: A typical maneuver of postcolonial theorists is to say something like this: Marxism relies on abstract, universalizing categories. But for these categories to have traction, reality should look exactly like the abstract descriptions of capital, of workers, of the state, etc. But, say the postcolonial theorists, reality is so much more diverse. Workers wear such colorful clothes; they say prayers while working; capitalists consult astrologers — this doesn’t […]

Edmund Burke to Niall Ferguson: You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole theory is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

A minor footnote to the controversy over Niall Ferguson’s homophobic remarks about John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson claimed that the key to Keynes’s economic philosophy is a selfishness and short-termism rooted in the fact that Keynes was gay and had no children. No kids=no future=big deficits. What is supposed to have prompted Ferguson to these meditations was a question comparing Keynes to Edmund Burke. According to the main report, “Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead.” As Ferguson explained in the apology he subsequently issued, “The point I had made in my presentation was that […]

What the F*ck is Katie Roiphe Talking About?

Claire Messud has written a novel that apparently features a character named Nora. Publisher’s Weekly posed the following question to Messud: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” Messud responded: For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep […]

Petraeus may not be quite all in at CUNY

General David Petraeus has been hired to teach at CUNY at the University of Southern California (h/t Anna Law): David H. Petraeus, the former four-star U.S. Army general who resigned as head of the Central Intelligence Agency last year after confessing to an extramarital affair, will teach part-time at USC and help mentor students who are veterans, officials are announcing Thursday. Petraeus, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, will teach and participate in seminars on such issues as international relations, government, leadership, information technology and energy, according to USC… … Petraeus, 60, is supposed to start his faculty position at USC July 1 for an open-ended period, officials said. “I am very grateful to have an opportunity to […]