The War Against Humanity
A war has been raging for decades. It is a war affecting or involving nearly anyone. As such, it could very well be the first real βworldβ war, not in the least because this war also decides the future of this world and everything that lives on it. There are relatively few βsoldiersβ fighting this war, however, and certainly on our side. Almost all of the violence β and certainly all of the structural violence β is inflicted upon us by the enemy. That enemy is waging a war against humanity. The enemy goes by many different names: the βsuper-richβ,...
Enemies of Our Children
(This is part 4 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In the previous two episodes in this series I argued that there are two possible futures for mankind and our planet. One is global societal collapse, which may take place within a matter of decades. The other is the βLesser Dystopiaβ, a set of policies and adaptations intended to avoid societal collapse and the massive suffering it would cause. The Lesser-Dystopian path is a rather narrow path, however, and significant deviation will inevitably result into a slide towards the Greater Dystopia of global societal collapse. To some extent, both...
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...