The original headline for this article in The Atlantic was “Climate Relief Can’t Wait for Utopia.” It’s an attack on leftist environmentalism. I’m watching them edit the headline in real time. I refreshed the page and it was “What Progressives Misunderstand About Fighting Climate Change.” Almost immediately, that was softened to “What Many Progressives Misunderstand…
Most of the time, the trans movement isn’t very big on the reality principle. When I first saw this article in The Nation, my first thought was to wonder whether we’ve hit peak trans. It’s the first time I’ve seen a concession that TERFs are winning a debate, instead of just hysterically denouncing them. Of…
I had a problem with the general emotional dishonesty of Bad Sex, the book by Nona Willis Aronowitz (NWA), but I raised my eyebrows at some race-related things too. Why does she feel the need to justify her “sex positive” beliefs in terms of black feminism? What’s black sexuality mean to her, anyway? The demand…
Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution is important because it perfectly captures the essence of “sex positive feminism”, which is that it’s a bullshit story. It’s probably the definitive account, because NWA is Ellen Willis’ daughter, and “sex positivity” was her mom’s idea. It’s embarrassing that after 2 generations of…
No Logo ends with a consideration of its own limitations. In retrospect, those limitations were…greater than anticipated. She comes right out and admits that fundamentally addressing the problem would be too hard for “most of us mortals”, so let’s fight one company at a time as a symbolic token. The problem is that not wanting…
Here I’ll be reviewing the last division of No Logo, which is her thoughts on strategy, starting with “culture jamming.” The term “culture jamming” was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland. “The skillfully reworked billboard…directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy,” a band member states on…
Chapter 5 of No Logo is amazing because it’s pretty much an apology for breaking identity politics. Since we’re having the same arguments in circles and calling it “wokeness” or “cancel culture” now instead of “political correctness”, it’s timely. As I’ve stressed many times, “identity politics” comes from black socialist women. When people complain about…
Politically, I came of age during peak No Logo, although I hadn’t read the book until just now. I did “policy debate” in high school, and my specialty was postmodernism applied to whatever the topic was. I didn’t actually go to protests or anything, but I lived in Washington state when the WTO riots happened…
I just read Jackson and Jensen’s An Inconvenient Apocalypse, after seeing this review by Veronica Esposito in The Guardian. As a long-time doomer, I was more interested in the review than the book. It’s much more socially acceptable to talk about the apocalypse now than it was 15 years ago, but I’m never quite sure…
Chris Wright is your typical white guy history professor. “I’m a Marxist, but the fact is that any far-reaching social transformation is going to be much more gradual than Marxists have traditionally thought.” He says stuff like this: Fascist repression, it’s true, is very useful, but fascist regimes can hardly remain in power indefinitely in…