Enough cannot be said of Glenn Beck’s urging of people to run from any church that advocates social justice. It’s not because Beck’s statement can be reduced to leaving a church (or even Christianity or religion altogether), but that it is the implicit presumption of capitalism. While most of Beck’s ‘Republitarians’ want to remove government oversight, regulation, and functionality with the implication that private citizens and businesses will handle the ’social justice’ stuff by voluntary giving. Given the predisposition of consumerism to always feed the individualised subject, this will not happen. Beck’s comments show the hideous nature of capitalism: nobody should be doing ’social justice’ because it goes against the evolution of humanity. It is social evolution that Glenn Beck and company promote, not just as something alongside capitalism but as the necessary outlook for capitalism to survive. The poor and the homeless are worthless to capitalism if they are not able to consume the everlasting pit of desire, so why waste time and money? After all, both time and money should be spent on worshiping Capital through consumerism and individualisation. Become yourself for only $99 — and enjoy it too!
Archive for the 'Current Events' Category
In an op-ed article a few years back, Zizek mentions the following story:
During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.
From the perspective of social change, Christianity — especially that in America — has largely lost its humanitarian mission to the world to show love. This isn’t to say that American Christians do not participate in mission work or give to humanitarian causes. However, Christianity has done so largely to ’save lost souls’, or out of a fear of some kind of tormented Hell. The pockets of people that do humanitarian projects solely because of some profound ‘love’ or for humanitarian reasons happen to largely be nonreligious. Christianity has been succeeded by the post-Christian, secular world which has promoted ‘Christian’ values better than the Christians. To put this in a more provocative way: in order to love humanity because of divine love, one must be an atheist.
The expected response to videos like this (be warned that this is graphic) is how violence should affect humans. It should be a shocking awakening of violence both without and within. Violence should not be glorified but rather be horrifying–in the purest sense of that word.
The debate about healthcare in the US has provoked my thinking about politics in general. I’ll be upfront in case my point gets lost in the mix: political ideologies are consumer products that are marketed, purchased, and consumed like any ‘trendy’ clothing line.
Right after 9/11, the ‘trendy’ thing was to be conservative and ‘patriotic’. When the Dixie Chicks spoke their opinions about President Bush, they wound up committing public suicide because, from one perspective, they were out-of-sync with the ‘trendy’ political stance. At this point, conservatism was marketed as the minority fighting against the overwhelming liberal majority. They were the sane part of the government who were thankfully in power at the time. In the Autumn of 2008, these conservatives joined with their ‘liberal’ counterparts and pumped millions of dollars into large corporations to keep them afloat. Yes, at that moment in time, ’socialism’ was the trendy thing. It was happening throughout developed nations. Now, as Obama and the Democrats (NB: that would be a cool band name) are trying to reform healthcare, the trendy product has been to reject that healthcare because it is ’socialist’ (ignoring that other ’socialist’ thing that happened before the election even took place). Right now, the hot, trendy political ideology is right-wing Republicanism (both traditional conservatism and neoconservatism), probably in part to the consumption of right-wing leaning products such as FoxNews, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times (two of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch).
With ideologies being consumed like products, there is no independent thought even though most would agree one of the hallmarks of modernity was thought independent of any overbearing institution (be it king or church). Perhaps that should read ‘there has never been independent thought’. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that our thoughts are truly independent, even if they reverberate clearly with the marketed political products. These products have been so successful at fading into the background that we have long forgotten they ever existed as products and accept them as our own core beliefs. I am deliberately echoing Nietzsche’s definition of ‘Truth’ here because we take our political products as things based on some unshakeable Truth. We no longer see ourselves as members of a political party towing the party line but as independent observers who happen to agree with the party lines. We’ll argue that if the party were to change a particular set of beliefs, we would disagree with them, but so far no action in any party has been sufficiently large to really provoke this. Even Arlen Specter’s jumping ship to another party was, for all intents, a non-event.
We have succumbed to the siren song of truth in politics. Even politics has its own advertisements–not just for candidates during election but for every ‘major’ issue. These advertisements succeed in the same way Wikipedia does: cite something, give a source, and hope that nobody reads it well enough. The problem with this comparison, however, is that people on Wikipedia do (sometimes) read things well enough to see the forest for the trees and change it. That doesn’t happen in politics. At best, we get more non-events (like David Cameron publicly rebuking Daniel Hannan while also drumming up support for the same things he’s rebuking Hannan) that are always void of substance. That’s because the substance was never there to begin. It’s always been an empty façade hiding an empty void. The ‘Truth’ in politics is that there is no Truth beyond that which is fabricated for the product…and we all have purchased it.
I’m getting really excited about my upcoming British Isles tours. In one and a half weeks, the madness games begin. First up in July is my wife’s friend from uni is coming to do her own tour of the British Isles. She arrives on a Thursday and will be switching planes here in Glasgow for a weekend trip to Ireland. We’ll be centering ourselves around Belfast on the recommendation of some colleagues here. I’ve planned two separate day trips, one to Giant’s Causeway and another to Newgrange and Knowth. We return to Glasgow late on Monday. Then, our friend takes a trip to England for a few days in the week and returns for the weekend (while my wife and I work). The second weekend of July, we’ll be traveling to see a few castles (possibilities include Scone, Stirling, and Glamis). Then, our first visitor leaves on the following Monday.
Our second set of visitors is my wife’s mother and youngest sister. They arrive on the Friday of that same week (giving us a few days to finish off work, clean up, and tie up any loose ends). It also happens that our anniversary (has it only been four years??) falls between these two visits, so I hope to do something for that in the in-between time. Their first weekend will be a little tamer than our first visitor’s, as we’ll be staying around Glasgow for that weekend. However, once the weekend’s over, we’re heading up north into the Scottish Highlands. We’ll spend a night in Carbisdale Castle, followed by a run through Loch Ness, Skye, Oban (with a photo stop at Castle Stalker), Iona, and Loch Lomond before returning to Glasgow a few days later. We’ll spend the weekend recovering from that run, but it won’t last long.
Part three of our month will be a raid into English territory (finally). We’ll first make a run to London through the eastern part of England, passing through Leeds and Nottingham to see Fountains Abbey, Herriot country, and Nottingham Castle (with the Sherwood Forest). After a few days in London, we’ll begin our journey back through the western part of England (sorry, no Wales this trip), passing through Stonehenge, Avebury, Bath, Manchester, Carlisle (and the Lake District), Hadrian’s Wall, and possibly Edinburgh before returning to Glasgow. With July over, our visitors will return to the New World and leave us to hibernate in the quickly growing night that is winter in the north (we’ll lose two hours of daylight between now and the time they leave in August).
Needless to say, I’ll be very sparse in July.
