Thursday Linkage

By Darragh|Linkage|Be the first to comment!

A couple of things floating about my link space this week.

• Was Marx right? -American fan of capitalism considers whether Karl Marx had some interesting predictions about modern capitalism. His comment on worker’s alienation is amusing and, I suspect, bang on the money for many working in today’s ‘good times’.
  

  If sweating over the font in a PowerPoint deck for the mega-leveraged buyout of a line of designer diapers is the portrait of modern “work,” then call me — and I’d bet most of you — alienated: disengaged, demoralized, unmotivated, uninspired, and about as fulfilled as a stoic Zen Master forced to watch an endless loop of Cowboys and Aliens.

• Breaking Bad: Hermanos – Breaking Bad is in it’s fourth season and – man! – it’s still maintained it brilliance. The latest episode has to rank as one of my favourites, with viewers finally getting a snapshot into the backstory of the mysterious Gustavo Fring. The AV Club continues it’s brilliant analysis of the season, and despite giving this episode a B+, it’s essential reading.
• When to ignore criticism and how to get people to take your critique seriously – Seriously interesting read about criticism by sci-fi author John Scalzi. Links off to an interesting take on the Star Wars prequels.
• Scott Creney on Gotye – I’m not sure if I agree with him, but it’s interesting to see how people outside the reach of Triple J react to Gotye.
• Ten years that shook the world – A great extract from Tim Dunne and Ken Booth’s Terror in our Time (where the authors apparently argue that “terror and counter-terror has significantly shaped the contours of world order. It has not been a nameless decade. This was 9/11 + 10.” I like Tim’s inference about the War on Terror essentially shaping a new rhetoric that permitted arguably reckless, illegitimate acts of state military intervention (in terms of international law) to be undertaken without global consensus (or even majority consensus).