David Harvey:

We’re running out of both space and time right now. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary capitalism.

Daniel Denvir:

You talked about the future being foreclosed upon. That term is very applicable when it comes to debt on homes, obviously.

David Harvey:

That’s why I think the term “foreclosure” is very interesting. Millions of people lost their houses in the crash. Their future was foreclosed upon. But at the same time, the debt economy has not gone away. You would’ve thought that after 2007-8 there would’ve been a pause in debt creation. But actually, what you see is a huge debt increase.

Contemporary capitalism is increasingly loading us down with debt. That should concern all of us. How is it going to be repaid? And by what means? And are we going to end up with more and more money creation, which then has nowhere to go except speculation and asset values?

That’s when we start actually building things for people to invest in, not for people to live in. One of the most amazing things about contemporary China, for instance, is that there are whole cities that have been built and not yet lived in. Yet people have bought them, because it’s a good investment.

Daniel Denvir:

It’s precisely that issue of credit that led you to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, “the madness of economic reason.” Colloquially, madness and insanity are invoked to stigmatize or pathologize individuals with mental illness. But what Marx shows us, and what your book shows us, is that the system is actually insane.

Ω Ω Ω

David Harvey:

The neoliberal argument had a lot of legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s as being liberatory in some way. But nobody believes that anymore. Everybody realizes it’s a con job in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But we’re beginning to see the possible emergence of an ethno-nationalist protectionism-autarky, which is a different model. That doesn’t sit very well with neoliberal ideals. We could be headed into something which is much less pleasant than neoliberalism, the division of the world into warring and protectionist factions who are fighting each other over trade and everything else.

Associated Press:

Judge won’t block law banning most Mississippi abortions

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — As attorneys argued about abortion laws across the South on Tuesday, a Mississippi judge rejected a request by the state’s only abortion clinic to temporarily block a law that would ban most abortions.

Without other developments in the Mississippi lawsuit, the clinic will close at the end of business Wednesday and the state law will take effect Thursday.

One of the clinic’s attorneys, Hillary Schneller of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the judge should have blocked the law.

“People in Mississippi who need abortions right now are in a state of panic, trying to get into the clinic before it’s too late,” Schneller said. “No one should be forced to live in fear like that.”

Craig Murray:

Acres have been written in the mainstream media about Johnson’s lying and personal immorality, but there is very little serious effort to understand why so many in society have been prepared to tolerate this. The answer is that neo-liberalism has succeeded in destroying societal values, to the extent that anti-social and even sociopathic behaviour no longer appears peculiar.

In a society where authority condones, and constructs a system to enable, personal fortunes of US $200 billion or more while millions of children in the same country are genuinely hungry and poorly housed, what values is the socio-political structure telling people to hold? What value is placed on empathy? Ruthless ambition and resource grabbing is applauded, encouraged and held up as the model to be followed.

More and more, you are either part of the elite or you are struggling.

Julia Hertäg, New Left Review:

Mainstream film critics have charged that the boom in historical drama has gone hand-in-hand with a shift towards commercialized productions, and away from risky or challenging films. Funding has increasingly gone to films that ‘stay inside a corset of conventional narrative’, wrote taz film critic Cristina Nord. ‘The subjects can be controversial, not the form.’ The result, claimed veteran cultural commentator Georg Seeßlen in Die Zeit, was ‘cineastic low-fat quark’.³

Valstybės diena – Lietuvos valstybinė šventė, kuri yra švenčiama liepos 6 d. minint pirmojo ir vienintelio Lietuvos karaliaus Mindaugo karūnaciją. Diena oficialiai yra švenčiama nuo 1991 m.

Kasmet liepos 6 d. 21 val. viso pasaulio lietuviai raginami vienybės vardan sugiedoti „Tautišką giesmę“. Ši tradicija gyvuoja nuo 2009-ųjų, kai himnas buvo giedamas minint Lietuvos vardo tūkstantmetį. Tyrimų duomenimis, 2015 m. Tautišką giesmę giedojo 46 proc. Lietuvos gyventojų.^[3]

BBC:

Troops patrolled Nukus on Sunday

Officials in the Uzbek region of Karakalpakstan say thousands of people are being treated in hospital, after being injured during unrest on Friday.

The regional health minister said hospitals in the regional capital, Nukus, were full of patients.

Clashes broke out with the security forces when protesters took to the streets over plans to withdraw the territory’s right to secede.

…

It led to President Mirziyoyev visiting Karakalpakstan twice over the weekend.

…

„Taking advantage of their numerical superiority, these men attacked law enforcement officers, severely beating them and inflicting severe injuries,“ he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

FAZ:

Bei Demonstrationen in der Provinz Karakalpakstan sind mehrere Menschen getötet worden. Die Opposition spricht von fünf Toten. Zudem sollen Tausende Menschen verletzt worden sein.

After being attacked, Uzbek law enforcement officers washed unrest off the street.

Wolfgang Streeck:

Currently the declared war aims of Ukraine include driving all Russian forces back to Russia, the unconditional return of Crimea to Ukraine, the return of the breakaway provinces to the central authority of Kyiv, and Ukrainian membership, if not of NATO, then at least of the EU. NATO and the EU have publicly committed themselves to leaving it to the Ukrainians to decide what to aim for, when to negotiate and what to agree. To the delight of the Ukrainian government, the US and other Western countries including the UK have also indicated that for them, the objective of the war is a ‘victory’ over Russia that would ‘decisively weaken’ its military and economy, while having Putin stand trial in an international criminal court. (Scholz’s line on this is that Russia must not win the war and Ukraine must not lose it, rather than Ukraine having to win and Russia to lose.) It is against this background that Ukrainian access to advanced military hardware matters, since it affects whether Ukraine, fighting on its own without US and NATO forces by its side, might be able to withstand a war lasting, potentially, several years, with a chance, slight as it may be, of ‘winning’ one way or another. For this, the Ukrainian government would have to ask its citizens to accept massive losses of life and wealth for the sake of maximalist national objectives, in a conflict that amounts to a proxy war on behalf of the ‘West’, aimed at eliminating Russia as an independent economic and political power.

Ω Ω Ω

For Europe, the nuclearization of the Ukrainian war would be a catastrophe, whereas the US would hardly be affected if at all. Germany in particular is less interested than the US in a long war fought with freely supplied Western equipment. For Scholz, going slow on arms delivery may be an attempt, if a weak one, to make the Ukrainian government consider a settlement short of Putin having to be handed over to The Hague, provided a Normandy-like deal is still available. (Attempts to affect the Ukrainian war aims by a country threatened by nuclear fallout could be reflected in a slogan like ‘No annihilation without representation’.)

Ω Ω Ω

Unspeakably awful as it is for the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian war is no more than a sideshow in a much larger story: that of an approaching shoot-out between a declining and a rising would-be global hegemon. One function served by the war in this context is the consolidation of the US hold over its European allies, who are required as backing for the American ‘pivot to Asia’ (Obama) – to what used to be the South China Sea and is now referred to by the loyal Western mediacracy as the Indo-Pacific.

Jacob Collins, Jacobin:

Lévy targeted the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in Barbarism, arguing that his book Anti-Oedipus (cowritten with Félix Guattari) was a plea for amoral individualism (and the pursuit of gratification), and as such an enabling condition for fascism. Deleuze delivered a stinging reply, which he had printed and distributed in bookshops for free: “I think that their thought is worthless. [. . .] They have constituted a stifling, asphyxiating space where a little air used to get through. It is the negation of all politics, all experimentation.” Deleuze sensed that a new moment had arrived in French intellectual life, when publicity triumphed over ideas; media access over reason. The philosopher Régis Debray came to a similar conclusion, observing that this was not so much a “new philosophy” as a “new logistics (in that it is not known to have any specific theoretical essence or even ever to have needed one).”