Articles

Attacks on scientific consensus employ the simulacra of scholarship and a deceptively readable idiom. Those who debunk the deniers tend to be old-fashioned rationalists or committed activists. Neither group are particularly well suited to looking at the deeper reasons behind denialism, warns Keith Kahn-Harris.

Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist control and domination. Machines, not human bodies, are now the subjects of the text.

When newspapers die it can be a slow and painful business. Many of its current problems – loss of revenue and falling readership among them – are of the newspaper industry’s own making, but there are signs that some in the business are finally getting the message and shaping up to the future.

Where hard physics combines with traders’ animal passions, the bestiary of financialized civilization becomes imbued with the relations between hunter and hunted, writes Brian Holmes. Systemic corruption has produced the fundamental disconnect between the informational sky above our heads and the existential ground beneath our feet.

Suspended between negation and anticipation, post-socialist societies are a beginning with no end, writes Ozren Pupovac. A neoliberal order underwritten by the science of transitology ensures that the sole constant of post-socialism is inequality.

The Slovak author and journalist Martin M. Simecka and Hungarian architect and former samizdat publisher László Rajk are not only former dissidents of the younger generation, but also the sons of well-known persecuted communists. László Rajk sr. was the most prominent victim of the Rákosi show trials of 1949; the writer Milan Simecka sr. began his career in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and became a dissident after 1968. In the first debate in the Eurozine series “Europe talks to Europe”, held in Budapest, they discussed the still unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of their fathers’ generation in post-war communism, and the failings of today’s debate about the past in the former communist countries. Moderated by Éva Karádi, editor of Magyar Lettre Internationale.

Is accepting the Foucaultian claim that the subject is constituted by power tantamount to denying the possibility of emancipatory resistance? Not necessarily argues Amy Allen, taking a Habermasian detour to articulate a politics of opposition to gender subordination that is both individual and collective.

Xenophobia is not contained to Europe’s extremist fringes but part of the political mainstream, writes the Forum of Concerned Citizens of Europe in an open letter to Europe’s leaders. Quick-fix political solutions appealing to a mythical Europe of homogenous communities must be replaced by a politics of hospitality, fairness and solidarity.

As China’s star rises, attitudes to the new global superpower range from fearful to hopeful. Are we looking at the end of the world as we have known it, or will the Middle Kingdom redefine the market economy and democracy in its own image? A distinguished Estonian academic argues the toss.

Should artists feel any obligation towards their local community in a global world of markets and international exhibitions? For every one whose work appears on the pages of international art magazines, there are hundreds who opt to “stay at home”, says a Latvian cultural critic.

The Third Way made a virtue out of the necessity to adapt classical social democracy to global market conditions, conjoining high finance with commodified forms of welfare provision. When the US system on which it was modelled collapsed, “modern” social democracy in Europe was in no state to offer an alternative, argues Magnus Ryner.

A media reliant on scandal has colluded with self-promoting but marginal Muslim clerics to create a cycle of self-reinforcing myths around the Mohammed cartoons, writes Kenan Malik. The fear of causing offence has helped undermine progressive trends in Islam and strengthened the hand of religious bigots.

Controversial in her day and not without opponents even now, she became a feminist icon and a hero of the post-religious twenty-first century. Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Gimbutiene) revolutionized ideas of “Old Europe” and reinstated the Great Goddess in her rightful place before the onslaught of the Indo-European male ascendancy dethroned her and left women mere consorts and companions.

Africa’s blogger community is still in its infancy, but it has already demonstrated its importance in mobilising opinion in Kenya and Nigeria and promises to be a significant player in the fight for democracy and free expression across the continent.

A society’s attitudes to innate intelligence are closely correlated with its levels of inequality, writes Danny Dorling. In Britain, the backlash against comprehensive schooling combined with neoliberal policies has created a market-based education system in which schools and universities compete for money and students.