By Gérard Bökenkamp · Tuesday, October 12, 2021 The following essay first appeared in Achgut.com on September 18, 2021, and appears here with the permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
From the very start of the pandemic, corona and climate change have always been mentioned in the same breath. Indeed, the parallels are unmistakable. In both cases it is a matter of invisible threats from natural phenomena. In both cases, the discussion is shaped by scientists with data and modelings that are difficult to follow, as they demonstrate the need to limit personal freedoms. In both cases, large parts of the population submit to these prohibitions and limitations on freedom. In both cases, we have seen radical movements emerge, like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Zero-Covid, that demand even more extreme measures, reminiscent of charismatic conversion cults and chiliastic sects. In both cases, “deniers” and “skeptics” are denounced as dangers who stand in the way of preventing a catastrophe. After the COVID lockdown, a climate lockdown will take place, with the one transitioning into the other seamlessly.
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By Mark G. E. Kelly · Friday, October 23, 2020 As we near the denouement of the 2020 U.S. general election, the actual in-person one-day ballot—which will surely be less decisive this year than previously, due to the relative prevalence of early voting—Donald J. Trump’s presidency looks doomed. Polling resolutely predicts his demise. Of course, pollsters are cautious this year after almost equally decisive predictions in 2016 proved misguided, and indeed there is still reason to think that Trump might nonetheless triumph (see in particular Isaac Lopez’s recent prediction to this effect in this very blog in his “Why Trump Will Win”).
Trump’s defeat would in a way provide a logical end point to a consistent wailing for his blood from the most vocal sectors of the American public sphere, which began well before he became president. The consistency of the discourse against Trump is nothing short of uncanny—indeed, in some ways it seems unchanged, fossilized, left over from when it was intended to prevent the unthinkable election of Trump from ever taking place. We might read in this determined carrying-on of the rhetorical electioneering of 2016 over the entirety of Trump’s term a kind of denial that Trump’s election ever happened. Indeed, Trump’s election was for urbane liberals so unthinkable that their capitalized “Resistance” to Trump has not been so much a political resistance movement as a reaction of psychological resistance to the very existence of his presidency. From such a perspective, Trump’s defeat might seem to offer a return to sanity and normality, one that will allow “Resisters” to pretend his presidency never happened.
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By Rolf von Uslar · Tuesday, July 19, 2016 Most people think that the military is all about killing other people. I, on the contrary, follow van Creveld. He states that serving in the military means more to be prepared and willing to risk one’s life then to endanger other lives. You could argue that military technology provides tools that have kinetic effects over huge distances without any risk for one’s personnel. Drones, for example, are such weapons. However, can you win a war with only drones? We have relearned the lesson that it takes “boots on the ground” to win “the better peace,” as Clausewitz carefully worded it. It takes soldiers on the ground to control an area, to protect the population, to de-escalate a situation, and to win hearts and minds.
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By Philip Roscoe · Monday, July 18, 2016 Sacrifice, or at least the discourse of sacrifice, is a recognizable aspect of popular management discourse and management scholarship of the “post-bureaucratic” variety, especially popular in America from the 1980s to the 2000s. The absence of bureaucratic structures of command necessitates other forms of authority, and notions of sacrifice form part of the symbolic armory of the post-bureaucratic chief executive—though, of course, post-bureaucracy is itself a symbolic myth more than a practical solution. In this talk I will set out some aspects and suggest, playfully, that there are crypto-theologies at work in management discourse and scholarship; I will finish by connecting these to the sacrifice and excess inherent in neoliberal forms of organization.
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