The Chatterbox

On Jan. 29, President Trump ordered the expansion of facilities at Guantanamo Bay to hold migrants being deported from the United States. It was the latest—and perhaps most aggressive—move to deploy the U.S. military in pursuit of the administration's immigration policies. And it's not at all clear that there's a solid legal basis for doing it. Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Chris Mirasola, Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and author of a recent piece in Lawfare on this subject, to talk through the legal issues, the administration's strategy, and what it all means for Trump's unconventional use of the military.

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On European decline and inertia.

[For full episode: patreon.com/bungacast]

Anton Jäger is back, talking to Alex and George about Belgium's new right-wing government, American hyperpolitics, and the lack of a European future.

The radical right has prevailed in Belgium, despite having factors that should impede this, like higher union density, lower inequality and so on. Why?

Why is the US particularly 'hyperpolitical'?

Are those who say hyperpolitics is over correct?

Why is Europe now a pale imitation of authoritarians in the East and the unbridled capitalism to its West?

Is it Europe's capitalists – not its workers or pensioners – who are in need of strict market discipline?

Links:

Things Are Terrible in Europe, and They’re Only Going to Get Worse, Anton Jäger, NYT

Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over, Ross Barkan, NYT

My Country Shows What Europe Has Become, Anton Jäger, NYT

Hyperpolitics in America, Anton Jäger, New Left Review 

Is Trump 2 the End of ‘Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome’?, Lee Jones, The North Star

/454/ The Last Man at the Euro Tango ft. Michael Wilkinson

“Identity politics” is among the most contentious terms in recent debates about art. And now, the most powerful people in the United States are blaming just about everything on “DEI” and “wokeness.” The very concept of diversity as a positive ideal seems to be under threat.

At the same time, so far there has been nowhere near the protest you would expect. Civil society feels stunned. At least part of this seems to be confusion about what has gone wrong to bring us here, with sections of the population now seeming to reject or just tune out progressive ideas that were all but dominant in mainstream culture just a few short years ago.

Maybe backlash was always inevitable. But how do we find a way forward? How do you talk about real criticisms of what may have made the social justice culture of the recent past confusing or alienating—without adopting the terms of a truly destructive culture war that is now all around?

A few weeks ago, we had the art critic Dean Kissick on the podcast to talk about his December cover story for Harper’s magazine, which argued that identity politics had, in his words, “ruined contemporary art.” In Ben Davis' essay for Artnet responding to him, called “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?”, Davis concluded by saying that those looking for a constructive way forward should read the theorist Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).

Táíwò teaches philosophy at Georgetown University and has written pieces for outlets including Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He’s written two books of political theory, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture. Davis has found the concepts that he’s developed, which include “elite capture,” “deference politics,” and “being-in-the-room privilege” very useful in thinking about some of these problems, which are some of the most important problems of the day—so Davis brought him on to discuss.

Jacob Blumenfeld discusses the concept of “managing decline”, the subject of fossil capitalism and the implications of transitioning away from it.

Info on Creative Construction Book Launch:

Date: March 4th, 19h

About the book:

Groos, J. & Sorg, C. (2025). Creative Construction - Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond. Bristol University Press. [for a review copy, please contact: amber.lanfranchi[at]bristol.ac.uk]

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction

If you are interested in democratic economic planning, these resources might be of help:

https://www.democratic-planning.com/

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ccha/29/1

https://www.indep.network/

https://www.planningresearch.net/

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https://criticaltheoryinberlin.de/

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12596

https://sfb294-eigentum.de/en/blog/what-was-socialization-a-look-back/

https://curedquail.com/Managing-Decline

https://www.routledge.com/The-Concept-of-Property-in-Kant-Fichte-and-Hegel-Freedom-Right-and-Recognition/Blumenfeld/p/book/9781032575186

https://www.break-down.org/post/socialising-nature

https://brooklynrail.org/2024/07/field-notes/Welcome-to-the-Anderscene/

https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/umkaempftes-eigentum-t-9783518300503

https://www.verbrecherverlag.de/shop/klimawandel-und-gesellschaftskritik/

https://www.versobooks.com/products/2735-ending-fossil-fuels

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm

https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/philipp-staab-anpassung-t-9783518127797

https://www.versobooks.com/products/841-the-great-adaptation

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3131-overshoot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promethean_gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Neurath

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_principle

https://archive.org/details/HerbertMarcuseErosandCivilization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

https://www.versobooks.com/products/520-climate-leviathan

https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-rise-of-ecofascism-climate-change-and-the-far-right--9781509545377

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_theory

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Deluge/Stephen-Markley/9781982123109

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e23-andreas-malm-on-overshooting-into-climate-breakdown/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e30-matt-huber-kohei-saito-on-growth-progress-and-left-imaginaries/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e03-planning-for-entropy-on-sociometabolic-planning/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e55-kohei-saito-on-degrowth-communism/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e47-matt-huber-on-building-socialism-climate-change-class-war/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e27-nick-dyer-witheford-on-biocommunism/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e18-drew-pendergrass-and-troy-vettese-on-half-earth-socialism/

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Contact: [email protected]

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Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@FutureHistories

English webpage:

https://futurehistories-international.com

Episode Keywords

 #JacobBlumenfeld, #Podcast, #JanGroos, #Interview, #FutureHistories, #futurehistoriesinternational, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #Degrowth, #Socialism, #Capitalism, #GreenNewDeal, #ClimateJustice, #PoliticalEconomy, #ClimateCrisis, #FossilCapitalism, #EcoSocialism, #Marx, #DemocraticEconomicPlanning, #Market, #Adaption, #Mitigation, #AndreasMalm, #Marcuse, #Freud, #DemocraticPlanning, #PostCapitalism, #ClimatePolitics, #RadicalEcology, #JustTransition, #Prometheanism

James Bond, Ian Fleming’s irrepressible and ubiquitous ‘spy,’ is often understood as a Cold Warrior, but James Bond’s Cold War diverged from the actual global conflict in subtle but significant ways.

That tension between the real and fictional provides perspectives into Cold War culture transcending ideological and geopolitical divides. The Bondiverse is complex and multi-textual, including novels, films, video games, and even a comic strip, and has also inspired an array of homages, copies, and competitors. Awareness of its rich possibilities only becomes apparent through a multi-disciplinary lens.

The desire to consider current trends in Bondian studies inspired a conference entitled ‘The Bondian Cold War,’ convened at Tallinn University, Estonia in June 2019. Conference participants, drawn from three continents and multiple disciplines – film studies, history, intelligence studies, and literature, as well as intelligence practitioners – offered papers on the literary and cinematic aspects of the ‘spy’, discussed fact versus fiction in the Bond canon, went in search of a global Bond, and pondered gender and sexuality across the Bondiverse.

The Bondian Cold War: The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon (Routledge, 2024) is suitable for students, researchers, and anyone interested in Cold War culture, makes vital contributions to understanding Bond as a global phenomenon, across traditional divisions of East and West, and beyond the end of the Cold War from which he emerged.

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This week we read and discussed an article by Richard Seymour that explores Marxism's relationship with materialism and idealism. Seymour argues that the Hegelian inheritance within Marxism forces it in the direction of an idealism which is essential for a successful revolutionary politics.

Duel and duality, or, degrowth and dialectics https://www.patreon.com/posts/81735357?pr=true&fbclid=IwAR2ftGQudDJQhykIW4rv_3F34xqP8RGHZdyZyb4JsGQgxzQ7qxvRNI9BP7k

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Commercial sex and imperialism — army bases and brothels — have often gone hand in hand. But in the early 20th century an emergent U.S. empire defined itself as rooted in sexual purity. Historian Eva Payne describes how a heavy price for this notion of American exceptionalism was paid by women in the United States, who were policed and punished, along with those in U.S. colonies like the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone.

Resources:

Eva Payne, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution Princeton University Press, 2025

The post U.S. Empire and Sexual Morality appeared first on KPFA.

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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the interim head of USAID, for however much longer the agency lasts. For 60 years, the massive bureaucracy was a vehicle for American soft power abroad. Trump, Elon Musk, and all their creatures don’t like it. It might soon be gone.

Nicole Widdersheim is the deputy Washington director of Human Rights Watch with a long history of humanitarian work. She’s here on Angry Planet today to walk us through this new era of the American Empire.

• A brief history of USAID
• The size and cost of USAID
• Critiquing a bureaucracy
• People like you when you give them stuff
• Defense, diplomacy, development
• The real world consequences of the ending of foreign aid
• A mallet, not a scalpel
• Supporters need to get cynical
• USAID did a bad job of defending itself
• Americans don’t care about the human cost
• The Glorious Republic of Jasonvania wants food aid
• Congressionally approved rice to North Korea
• It turns out the cruelty is, in fact, the point
• At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep
• No one read those reports on Afghanistan
• How China’s “Belt and Road” actually works
• The end of USAID will screw over American farmers
• Trumpism is a lack of consistency 

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In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia UP, 2025) argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance. This idea suggests routes to self-rule even when faced with implacable obstacles, and it defines righteous action amid the grime and grief of politics and war.

Surya Namaskar 1928 by Raja of Anundah.

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