The Global Sociology Blog

Really sad news.

Everybody go (re)read Working.

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For those of us who can’t stand kids:

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Denis Colombi is making my life miserable. He keeps writing these great long posts on important sociological topics that I then feel obligated to summarize here in English because he writes on these much better than I could. The latest edition is a lecture note (HA! A note?? Goes to show that the meaning of [...]

Power outages = people don’t have anything to do with themselves, so, they have sex = mini baby boom nine months later… correlation? Causation? You be the judge, via Le Monde. Here is the story:
In Massdriel, Netherlands, the number of births increased by 44% in September 2008 compared to the same month in 2007. Officials [...]

Disgusting, via the Independent.
“Somali Islamists have stoned to death a woman accused of adultery, witnesses said, the first such public killing by the militants for about two years.
The 23-year-old woman was placed in a hole up to her neck for the execution late yesterday in front of hundreds of people in a square in the [...]

It does not happen that often, so it is worth noticing when the good guys win!

BBC NEWS | Africa | Niger ex-slave wins landmark case via kwout

Let’s hope this sets a precedent that former slaves can obtain compensation in court and rebuild their lives. Unfortunately, Ms Mani’s story is both horrific and not unusual [...]

At the very least, there are lessons to be learned from complex societies that collapsed, as Jared Diamond demonstrated.

Rory Carroll: Could climate change and economic collapse consign us to the same fate as the Mayans? | Environment | The Guardian via kwout

Hmmm… let’s see, environmental pressures? Check. Economic collapse? Check. Failure of political leadership? [...]

What is sustainable tourism or eco-tourism? It seems a more and more popular option for globally conscious travellers but what criteria determine exactly what such tourism involve? Who decides? Via the Worldwatch Institute , there are now specific criteria determined by a coalition of tourism professional organizations and environmental groups formed into the Partnership for [...]

What has the world come to:

BBC NEWS | Business | Argentina to take over pensions via kwout

Well, I, for one, welcome our global socialist future!

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As part of the Guardian’s Who Owns The Progressive Future? Series, master social theorist (and a favorite of mine) Zygmunt Bauman wrote a column dealing with the differences between the left and the right on economic matters (or lack thereof). His verdict is quite bleak:

Zygmunt Bauman: There is almost no way to distinguish [...]

Via the indispensable Ampersand:

This should be mandatory material for any introduction to sociology course to explain the simple yet often hard to understand for our students fact that we do not all experience the social structure and interact with its social institutions in a similar fashion. Our social statuses, here race, generate a whole set [...]

This comic, with the previous post on web 2.0, technology and society:

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All the cool kids are talking about this and they’re right. It’s brilliant and worth every minute of anyone’s time:

Michael Wesch is of course the brilliant author of the web 2.0 YouTube video:

These are great materials to discuss issues pertaining to society, culture, technology, social interaction, social capital… and add some stuff on the digital [...]

Even after the big bailout, here is the problem, according to Stiglitz:

Joseph Stiglitz: Regulatory reform is necessary to restore confidence in the financial system | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk via kwout

And part of all this is because, contrary to the dogma (and it is a dogma), markets do not function [...]

Apparently,

Global economy talks call for greater role for IMF | Business | guardian.co.uk via kwout

That is, if DKS (who’s just been cleared of abuse of power) can keep it zipped (what is it with the leaders of multilateral institutions, first Wolfowitz at the World Bank, now DSK at the IMF? Sheesh) and if he [...]