Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: politics

  • geography of fear / fear of geography

    Back when I used to live in Velcro City’s original namesake, I remember being told many times over, by many different sources, that difficult cases of social exclusion or dysfunction were often tagged by overburdened social workers in the area with the acronym NFP—“normal for Portsmouth”. Quite how normal (or not) those cases actually were—and…

  • weapons of mass distraction

    Geoff Manaugh / knows the score*. Your outrage is exactly what they want: … an endless landslide of trivial distractions has been steadily eliminating the ground needed for systemic political change. People who might once have been an opposition—or, even better, people who might once have been leaders capable of articulating a clear way forward,…

  • Burning the village green in order to save it

    Duncan Thomas at Verso: … the geographical unevenness of neoliberal development, in concentrating wealth in the Southern regions of England, has also seen the Conservative Party retreat to its historic heartlands. Exiled from power during the Blair years, the party clung desperately to its decimated membership and receding support. In doing so, it fostered a…

  • The barbarians are within the walls

    Naomi Klein on “climate barbarism” (and more) at LARB: We live in societies, whether they admit it or not, that do rank human life based on race and religion. And climate change forces us to reckon with that, and ask, are we going to live up to the rhetoric of equality and the idea that…

  • La sagesse de l’Oncle Bruno

    Bruno Latour [BL] and Nickolaj Schultz [NS], in conversation with Jakob Stein in late 2018, from a transcript (sadly not open-access) at Theory, Culture & Society: BL: … we are inheriting a history of 200 years of euphemizing and making invisible the material conditions of existence on which we rely. When we see the ecological…