You Are a Zombie
For reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, zombie movies remain fairly popular. There has been a notable change in the genre, however. A few decades ago, zombie movies were probably best classified as a sub-genre of horror, while nowadays they seem to be a variety of disaster movie β particularly, a variety of end-of-the-world disaster movie. Picking up on this subtle, but telling genre shift, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux write in Disposable Futures, a book on the role of (depictions of) violence in contemporary society, that the zombie figure βspeaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes...
A Toy Model of Production Costs and Supply
In Economics as Malignant Make Believe I showed that the derivation of the supply curve in mainstream (neoclassical) economics is nonsense because production costs are nothing like they are assumed to be. This made me wonder, however, what would happen if youβd use a more realistic model of production costs β What would production and supply look like then? This isnβt that hard to model, so I built a simulation model on a free afternoon. In the following, I will first explain the model and after that I will discuss the results of running the model at different settings as...
Crisis and Inertia (4) β Economic, Political, and Cultural Crises
(This is part 4 in the βCrisis and Inertiaβ series.) While climate change constitutes a major if not terminal crisis for civilization (and possibly even for mankind) and certain technologies may also become existential threats in the wrong hands, there are many other crises and threats that seem to be less severe. All economic, political, and cultural crises appear to fall in this βless severeβ category, for example β at least, it doesnβt seem likely that another economic crisis or the gradual collapse of democracy will lead to the end of civilization. Nevertheless, they are crises in the sense adopted...
The Hegemony of Psychopathy (Excerpt)
This is an edited collection of excerpts from my book/pamphlet The Hegemony of Psychopathy that was just published. (It can be purchased in paperback or downloaded for free in PDF format at the publisher’s website.) * * * The Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention from social and political philosophers. This is surprising because the scale and extent of the atrocities involved in the Holocaust should be impossible to ignore. If we humans can do that, then that makes a difference β or should make a difference β for our beliefs about the ideal society, for example. At the very...