By Joseph Orosco (January 22, 2019) By now, a lot of people have heard the story of how Star Trek was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite TV show. It was, according to Nichelle Nichols, the only program he allowed his children to watch because it portrayed African Americans living in a future where they were treated equally and with dignity…
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By Joseph Orosco (December 21, 2018) Jason Wilson has written a good piece in The Guardian outlining how nonviolent action against far right and neo Nazi groups has been effective so far in dismembering those movements. This has been on my mind this week since news broke that notorious Springfield neo-Nazi Jimmy Marr was hospitalized after an altercation with Corvallis…
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By Arun Gupta (November 8, 2018) Everyone should be deeply disturbed what happened in the election. One seasoned electoral activist told me it was “A blue wavelet with a strong red undertow.” The Democrats lost crucial Senate and gubernatorial races, made only modest gains in state legislatures, and had a middling performance in the House. This election should have been…
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By Joseph Orosco (November 5, 2018) The folks at Futurism Studios feel that we have become too entranced by dystopian stories about technology and political developments. These stories can be good as tales of caution, they say, but too much can nurture cynicism and nihilism. We need utopian stories to offer us hope: “So fiction — of the dystopian and…
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By Sean Gelles (November 1, 2018) Hopefully it’s not too soon to address some of the reactions I’ve been seeing to the tragic racist attack in Pittsburgh on October 27th. I’ve been seeing a lot of ideas expressed which are the result not of conscious reflection but of sheer panic and dread. Perhaps right now is not the time to…
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By Joseph Orosco (October 30, 2018) Ever wonder what the post modern anarchist revolution would look like? “To have a successful post-modern anarchist revolution, it is necessary to pragmatically demolish, both conceptually and materially, bourgeois-capitalist socio-economic conditions; i.e., capitalist forces of production and capitalist relations of production, in order to install a patchwork plurality of autonomous-collectives, narratives and worker-cooperatives. Specifically,…
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By S. (October 11, 2018) I HATE THIS MEME! PLEASE DON’T SHARE IT UNLESS YOU ARE GOING TO GO ON A HARD CORE RANT AGAINST IT. So this is a thing that pisses me off. If you care about me, you should care about my sexual orientation. My sexual orientation defines so many aspects of my life and it limits…
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By Irami Osei-Frimpong (October 8, 2018) I’ve read that as a rough rule, political movements initially start out off as free speech movements. In campus life, it makes sense at first blush, especially when you’ve been to Berkeley. But I think it papers over the social question. We still haven’t figured out how political freedom works while you still depend…
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By Harsha Walia (October 1, 2018) I’ve been thinking on something I have been hearing a lot this past year. The critique of capitalism isn’t that we work. Capitalism sucks because it creates conditions where labour is extracted, where we dont control our means of production, we are alienated from the process of production under a proft-driven wage economy, and…
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By Chris Crass (September 7, 2018) Talked with a Mom who reached out for support about her teenage son who she sees drifting towards the alt-right. My heart ached listening to her story. I shared how when I was 15, I was deeply confused, angry and felt alienated. I was trying to figure out who I was and what meaning…
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By Mathilda Bickers (August 13, 2018) Look, to the people who like this or don’t think it’s that bad—I get how from your perspective it seems acceptable. But seriously, REALLY REALLY THINK about what it’s like to be houseless, to lack shelter, and the barriers this not-tangible money that is held by a third person, the barriers to using this money….
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