In These Times

Latest Comments view all 6

• • 16 May 06
  • 2:48 pm

  Didn't anyone ever wonder why the exurbs are the growth of this religious fundamentalism? Usually isn't it the poor and oppressed that turn to the security offered by religious fantasy and the promise of an eternal reward? I offer that the most interesting aspect of all this is that it is the people who have lived the dream, who did what they were told and now live the life they were promised, who are now desperately seeking the consolation offered by fundamentalism. They seek the one thing that capitalism and wage-slavery denies them, even at its best, meaning. They exist in …

  Posted to Saving Secular Society

• • 02 May 06
  • 11:58 am

  Its not outrage fatigue, it's the realization that things might have gotten so bad that the energy and destruction required to change them endangers their survival more than the status quo. It is the ultimate corruption provided by the wage -slave system that it encourages us to believe that we are individual units in competition, and that turning from that competition in order to affect the rules of the game means losing out on material reward, means not being the one chosen for promotion, means endangering the success of your children, means facing the possibility of demise and ruin as a …

  Posted to What Ails Us?

• • 20 Apr 06
  • 9:49 pm

  Why should someone with "more skill" get paid more? Does that extra knowledge somehow make a person more valuable? I say we pay everyone the same and let people work where they want to. Obviously though, we can’t do that, then there would be no way to convince people that the they should spend half their lives doing something they don't want to do. How many useless and harmful industries would dry up and disappear if people didn't have to work there in order for their children to eat? It's called wage-slavery, and it's the "freedom" we live under. Hasta la …

  Posted to Hotel Workers Rising Tide

• • 13 Apr 06
  • 3:32 pm

  This is the one aspect of progressivism that America, in general, fails to grasp. The problem is the very structure of our economic system. The problem is also one of education. The author of this article has obviously read a great deal on this subject, authors that few Americans hear about, ever. I have 48 credits in philosophy at an American college, enough to graduate, and the closest we got to economic theory, was maybe Heidegger’s "The Question Concerning Technology" which basically lays out the problem we face here: That by embracing a worldview in which the world becomes a resource …

  Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos

• • 17 Apr 06
  • 2:25 pm

  You people rock! The thing is we can get wrapped in a lot of very serious talk about issues that are far removed from the point. That's the nature of philosophic discussion. The point ultimately is this. We have moved from a world in which the actions of our day, how we spend our time, were dictated by the needs of survival, to one in which we face the possibility of not "having" to do anything. After all, that was and is the entire reason for the technological drive of the enlightenment, the end of scarcity. Well, guess what, its here. …

  Posted to The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos