Category Archives: War

Orwell 2.0

By Ray Watkins | Published: May 3, 2010
Every time I broke my arm as a kid, I started noticing people in casts everywhere. I've been mulling over a paper presentation about consumerism in my field, and I am having a similar experience. Suddenly, everywhere I look there's an article suggesting something about new communication technologies, good or bad. Most recently it's a Slate piece called, "War is Gaga." It's written, in typical bourgeois journalistic style, from the point of view of "our troops." The point, in other words, is that these "ridiculous dance routines on the Internet" (as the subtitle notes) are a way for soldiers to blow off steam. No doubt. There's a brief nod to the creepier side of some of these videos...
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Nodding Like Stanley Fish

By Ray Watkins | Published: August 31, 2009
Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education. The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years...
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Ours and Mine

By Ray Watkins | Published: April 10, 2009
I use roads that I don't own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same "better than owning" benefits. The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are "owned" by the public, but in terms of public access...
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Wishful Thinking

By Ray Watkins | Published: March 30, 2009
The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals—global targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability—by 2015, and escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent. With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages' specific needs and designed to achieve the the Millennium Development Goals. About the...
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Capitalism 101: Market Think

By Ray Watkins | Published: March 9, 2009
[caption id="attachment_1212" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="“Mixed Drive for Autovehicles.”"]“Mixed Drive for Autovehicles.”[/caption] “Be it known that I, Henri Pieper, a subject of the King of Belgium, residing at 18 Rue des Bayards, in Liege, Belgium, have invented new and useful Improvements in Mixed Drives for Autovehicles…The invention…comprises an internal combustion or similar engine, a dynamo motor direct connected therewith, and a storage battery or accumulator in circuit with the dynamo motor, these elements being cooperatively related so that the dynamo motor may be run as a motor by the electrical energy stored in the accumulator to start the engine or to furnish a portion of the power delivered by the set, or may be...
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American Watch

By Ray Watkins | Published: February 16, 2009
US labor law currently permits a wide range of employer conduct that interferes with worker organizing. Enforcement delays are endemic, regularly denying aggrieved workers their right to an “effective remedy.” Sanctions for illegal conduct are too feeble to adequately discourage employer law breaking, breaching the international law requirement that penalties be “sufficiently dissuasive” to deter violations. Unfair union election rules allow employers to engage in one-sided, aggressive anti-union campaigning while denying union advocates a similar chance to respond and banning union organizers from the workplace or even from distributing information on company property. If confronted with clear evidence of employee support for a union, employers can force a formal election and manipulate the often lengthy pre-election period to pound their anti-union...
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