COVID-19: THE SYSTEM, Part 2

In Part 1 we ended with the documentary’s discussion of the type of business model that has been created around COVID-19, or to match the title of the film, a system. The system consists of interlocking and mutually enforcing actors, institutions, and processes: Government, working in tandem with establishment scientists, transnational business interests and the […]

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Donald Trump, Empire, and Globalization: A Reassessment

“Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” Donald Trump recently declared, “I’m both”. The only way in which the two (seemingly contradictory) positions can be reconciled is by introducing a third term, one that is absent from Trump’s vocabulary: imperialism. Trump might not be conscious of the implication of his statement (nor would he be […]

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101 Things We Learned from WikiLeaks’ Podesta Emails

US voters have been given a rare, even unprecedented opportunity to look at the machinery inside an electoral campaign and a foundation, as presented by the insiders themselves. Being afforded this privilege motivated one columnist to assert: “Those voting for Hillary Clinton, defending Clinton and supporting Clinton without reading the information reported by WikiLeaks are […]

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Half-Heads: A Dominant Force in US Politics

Half-head: this signifies a way of approaching problems that involves efficient thinking, where efficiency comes from an intensely selective focus. A half-headed approach could be a combination of unspoken or unconscious interests, the accumulation of taboos around certain subjects, the desire to appeal to select audiences, the product of an ideology—some or all of these, […]

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The Real World of Democracy (and Anthropology)

Review essay, Part 2 (see Part 1) Referring to the process by which he studied Cuban democracy, August explicitly refers to it as “ethnographic research” (p. xiii). This is an important point, because he was trained as a political scientist in Montreal, but he is producing the kind of book that no anthropologist has offered, […]

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