Simulacra sex

Recently, earthlings have been living under the tyranny of images imposed on them through various media outlets, which shape their expectations of life. When it comes to sex, for example, they keep looking for an exact match of such an image in their brain: the right abs, the right breasts, etc. When they've found a match, they then proceed to fucking that image in the brain, masturbating into or with the help of the other person. Enacting the right sequence of image-induced actions, as Baudrillard's attributes of visible  happiness, is supposed to achieve the prescribed jouissance, and, perhaps, it does. However, to someone outside that tyranny of images, it simply comes across mechanistic and, well, masturbatory.

Frog-boiling: sound familiar?

“The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”

Taste and class: fieldwork delivers a blow to theory

The other day, during a lunch break in an inter-collegiate training seminar in central London, Bourdieu's Distinction, my favourite manual for understanding life on Earth, revealed a gaping chink in the armour.

Just when I thought that I had a good cover and was blending in just right, tucking in my home-made organic brown rice and free-range piperade, two of my lunch buddies, very high-rolling international PhD students from uppity families, went down their candy bars and cola with a child-like gusto, exactly the kind of  food that I, in my ignorance, deemed the staple of the less-educated earthlings. What's more, my declining to partake in this veritable feast of high fructose corn syrup, xantam gum and flavourings identical to natural, was met with gasps of sheer surprise.

- I've never met anyone who would turn this down.

What I learnt today: although class is sure a handy principle of macro-level analysis, individual cases of protein-based social life will defy it, time and over again.

Grabalization

A concept of anything being up for grabs for anyone who knows how to bring down trade barriers or melt down financial markets.

Where is the "invisible hand" pushing us?

It may not be fashionable these days to quote John Sydenham Furnivall, however, when the Euurocentric tinge, the air to breathe of his era, is ignored, his is pure wisdom of a scientist and a hands-on administrator. 

"Everyone would pay twopence rather than threepence for the same thing; that is rational, a matter of universal common sense....but at the same time, unless kept under control, it reduces costs by eliminating all human qualities that are not required to maintain life."