I did not believe YouTube capable of producing constructive debate, but I’ve been proved wrong by vlogger GrandNarratives.
I’d like to draw some attention to the last part of Žižek’s recent class on the embedness of ideology, which was a response to another response by Sara Ahmed to his plenary talk on liberal multiculturalism that was [...]

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Some notes I’ve made on Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
The problem
Five billion people in the world are living in developing and growing economies. One billion people in the world are living in conditions no better than in the preindustrial era, in areas [...]

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A number of interesting posts this week.
Harry Brighouse reports on a new book discussing Basic Income Grants, a central tenet of Green policy. The book discusses BIGs against Stakeholder Grants, not entirely dissimilar to Labour’s baby bond:
I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a [...]

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From Žižek’s “Against the Double Blackmail“
So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin — the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from [...]

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On Wednesday, I had the great privilege of getting a few moments of time to speak with the great man himself. I want to leave what we talked about for later though. On Monday, I saw Saba Mahmood give her Milliband lecture on Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Her thesis is that [...]

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Ulrich Beck is lecturing at LSE next month on “A Cosmopolitan Perspective on the Sociology of Generations” (iCal available at link).

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