Steve D’Arcy

Frege’s Ambiguous Legacy (guest post) - Daily Nous "We ought to ask ourselves, how did Frege’s claim to expertise in the matter of thinking fare, at that crucial moment when Germany most needed its intellectuals to rise to the defense of the endangere...

On the 100th anniversary of Gottlob Frege’s death, we should think carefully about how to critically engage with this complicated figure. In our time, fascism is attempting a resurgence. What can we learn from the failings of German intellectuals like him in the 1920s?
dailynous.com/2024/08/15/f...

Frege’s Ambiguous Legacy (guest post) - Daily Nous "We ought to ask ourselves, how did Frege’s claim to expertise in the matter of thinking fare, at that crucial moment when Germany most needed its intellectuals to rise to the defense of the endangere...

But there was a very dark side to Frege’s thought, too. In our own time, as fascism attempts a resurgence, we should not overlook Frege’s disastrous decision to embrace the fascist far right, just when Germany most needed its intellectuals to join the fight against it.
dailynous.com/2024/08/15/f...

As Gaza Starves, Remember Writers Who Opposed UNRWA These individuals have written opinion pieces calling for UNRWA to be defunded or dismantled

Those who agitate in support of crimes against humanity are also criminals against humanity. They, too, should be held accountable.

Silenced in our Name: A Jewish Commentary on Canada's IHRA Handbook Read or download Silenced in our Name here (PDF) Across North America, the far right and pro-Israel groups have been leading a repressive crackdown on Palestine solidarity. Canadians are watch...

An important Jewish perspective on the deployment of the notorious “IHRA definition” of antisemitism in Canada and its use to promote the scourge of APR.

Prime Minister Carney must take decisive action to end genocide in Gaza — Alex Neve: Moving Rights Along We write because of the catastrophic human rights and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, now into its twentieth month, which is broadly understood by international law experts and leading human rights organ...

“Waiting, vacillating, remaining silent and failing or, worse, refusing to act in the face of mounting and incontrovertible evidence of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity can no longer be options….”

I don't care if these monstrous ICE raids are a "federal operation". This is authoritarian violence, plain and simple.

Just because Stephen Miller has kidnapping quotas for brown people he doesn't want to see on the street doesn't mean we have to think it's okay.

YouTube video by KTVB 'It will be the last thing I take down': Sarah Inama announces resignation from West Ada

The fascists won this battle, but hopefully it will add fuel to the growing working-class backlash against the white-nationalist Far Right.
youtu.be/wb25OsxDY1w?...

No Labour for Genocide – No Complicity with Apartheid Israel is only able to continue its livestreamed genocide against Palestinians, including daily massacres, burning our children, men and women alive, or starving and thirsting them to death, due to th...

Palestinian unions: “2.3 million sisters & brothers in Gaza who have survived…military aggression, land theft, destruction of entire communities, settler-colonial apartheid & occupation…are counting on meaningful solidarity actions, not just rhetorical support.”
socialistproject.ca/2025/05/no-l...

Some day, after the oligarchs and their bootlickers are permanently defeated, we'll have a world where artists are considered controversial when they *refuse* to condemn Genocide.

“Suddenly, days after calling out [Genocide] at Coachella to applause and solidarity, there is an avalanche of outrage and condemnation by the political classes….The real crimes are not in our performances. The real crimes are in the silence and complicity of those in power. Shame on them.”— KNEECAP

Boycott Columbia Now **To sign please fill out this form.** We, the undersigned, commit to a boycott of Columbia University in solidarity with students, faculty, and staff targeted by the U.S. Government and university ad...

Do consider joining this boycott of Columbia — whose quisling-oriented administration poses a threat to free inquiry and democratic politics on university campuses.

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

“Researchers [in Canada] working on projects funded wholly or in part by American federal agencies…asked to confirm that their research does not include a climate or ‘environmental justice’ component, does not contain diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) elements…, [or] ‘gender ideology’….”

Capitulations only embolden them to demand more. They revel in the weak-kneed groveling and self-humiliation of their adversaries. Every concession Columbia makes will lead to 2, 3, many more demands for further self-abasement and bootlicking. And every time, the attempt to curry favor will fail.

The status-degradation ritual being inflicted on Columbia U. — including placing the Dept of Middle Eastern, S. Asian, & African Studies under “academic receivership” — should convince everyone w/ eyes to see that you can’t appease the fascists. Every concession emboldens them to demand more & more.

Over 2 million have signed on to these letters opposing the persecution of anti-Apartheid activist Mahmoud Khalil. Please do so, if you haven’t already.

old Soviet joke for our times:

Guy stops by the newsstand every day, scans the front page, doesn’t buy the paper. One day the vendor asks what he’s up to.

Guy says: “looking for an obituary.”

Vendor says “those are towards the back of the paper, comrade.”

Guy says: “not the one I’m looking for.”

Christie's AI art auction draws big-money bids — and thousands of protests signatures The auction house sees the sale as a transformative moment in art history, but critics claim that many of the pieces on display were made using AI models built on copyrighted work.

“All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.”
— Karl Marx, 1856.

OCUFA's Pre-budget Submission:
Risking Ontario’s Future: The Dangers of Underfunding Ontario
Universities
ocufa.on.ca/assets/2024....

How Many Americans are Fascists? It is not easy to determine how many fascists there are in the United States. I think it’s fully clear that, by a considerable majority, Americans largely reject fascism, in part because they suppo…

Polling re: support for the legitimacy of political violence by right-wing nationalist militants (14%) and for enforcement by the Trump Admin of presidential decrees in defiance of court orders invalidating them (11%) supports an estimate of between 19-28 million.
publicautonomy.org/2025/02/23/h...

Dead Letter: Rescuing Free Speech from the Liberals who Claim to be Defending It For the past six weeks, the USA has been mired in the grip of a profound crisis of free speech. In response to a sharp rise in public expressions of dissent and attempts by ordinary working-class p…

The mistake is that there was a free speech crisis at the time, but the letter completely ignored it. publicautonomy.org/2020/07/09/f...

I wouldn‘t assume that they‘re not occupation soldiers or cops.

Giller Foundation, lead sponsor Scotiabank end partnership The foundation that administers the Giller Prize didn’t say why the partnership ended, but the sponsorship has recently come under fire over a Scotiabank subsidiary’s investment in an Israeli arms com...

This is good news! The Giller Prize can return to being an important literary prize, after listening to those who wanted it to break with its now former sponsor, Scotiabank, which invests heavily in Elbit Systems, a Genocide-oriented military technology firm that played a bloody role in Gaza.

Far-Right trade union presidents, Sean O’Brien (@teamsters.bsky.social) and Ed Kelly (International Association of Fire Fighters), posing at the Trump inauguration with Musk-sycophant Ramaswamy. They should be chased out of the labor movement and exposed as enemies of working-class people.

🧵 Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hold close the memories of all who were murdered by the Nazi regime. 6 million Jews and millions more victims — including Roma, queer and trans people, disabled people, and political dissenters — were killed by the Nazis.

Hegel: “the diversity of philosophical systems [is] the progressive unfolding of truth…. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the
blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter…. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity….” (Phen. #2).

Statement by Professor Katherine Franke BY KATHERINE FRANKE The following is the text of a statement issued on January 10, 2025 by Katherine Franke, formerly the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University.  It is posted here w…

This is truly shameful of @columbiauniversity.bsky.social. They fired @katherinefranke.bsky.social. @aaup.bsky.social stands with Professor Franke and against this repression of pro-Palestinian speech. academeblog.org/2025/01/10/s...

Historians opposing scholasticide. 👏👏👏✊✊✊

A ★★★★½ review of A Complete Unknown (2024) I heard someone say that “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t have “anything to say.” If so, it’s not for want of trying. This film is trying very deliberately to pose a question about art and artists. That q...

“[W]hat should we want from an artist, and what kind of person would someone have to be to give us what we have reason to want from an artist? [This] film addresses that very general question by reformulating it into one that is very specific: who is the real heir to Woody Guthrie?” 
boxd.it/8fHVI5

A brief paper I published a few yrs ago, on “the ethical basis of trade unionism,” namely, the principle of solidarity, according to which “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

From the book, “We Resist: Defending the Common Good in Hostile Times“ (eds. Levine-Rasky & Kowalchuk; 2020).

Musk’s wealth in 2012: $2 Billion
Musk’s wealth in 2024: $447 Billion

Bezos’s wealth in 2012: $18 Billion
Bezos’s wealth in 2024: $249 Billion

Zuckerberg’s wealth in 2012: $44 Billion
Zuckerberg’s wealth in 2024: $224 Billion

Minimum wage in 2012: $7.25
Minimum wage in 2024: $7.25