Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Thoughts from Thesis Hell

Mikaela whines:
Here at Flying Star slaving away while I imagine my compatriot m's enjoying their families and watching movies!

No time to ponder the crushing weight of the news (although holy god, are you following the latest Bush administration crisis? Are they seriously trying to justify the wholesale dismantling of our civil liberties? Really? Despite the fact that each and every justification they offer has holes the size of galaxies?), so instead I offer a little light pondering regarding the spatial effect of globalization on our cities and social movements. Ahem.

This from David Harvey's Spaces of Hope:

How has the conception of globalization been used politically? Has adoption of the term signaled a confession of powerlessness on the part of national, regional, and local working-class or other anti-capitalist movements? Has belief in the term operated as a powerful deterrent to localized and even national political action? Has the form of solidarity hitherto represented by the nation state become ‘hollowed out’ as some now claim? Are all oppositional movements to capitalism within nation states and localities such insignificant cogs in the vast infernal global machine of the international market place that there is no room for political maneuver anywhere?
Well, what do we think?

Welcome to the new American century. I heard the protestors outside the WTO chanted, "This is what democracy looks like!" -- one of my personal favorites at demonstrations.

I just gotta ask, looking at our own country: Is this what democracy looks like?