Biotech and Innovation

1) Is there a way to adapt capitalism to a non-neoliberalist framework, or is it inherent in the model? In other words, is there a substitute for "profit" as a driving motivation for experimentation? One of the reasons biotech engineers plants that can't reproduce on their own is to hold on to the profit to be gained to offset the millions in research to develop higher-sustaining foods, etc., while allowing it to still be sold at a lower price so that more people can buy it over and over again than would be able to buy it if it was a one-shot deal. Non-reproducing plants also help ensure that even a ecologically unsustainable plant can be a) grown, and b)not get "loose". Given these conditions, would it be better to encourage biotech to sell to "exclusive" farmers and let the plants reproduce on their own?

2) Mohan discusses the difference between innovation and improvement. Since "innovation" is merely "different than what was there before", why does it carry the association with improvement? Is is actually driven by our need as neoliberalists to be "free", which then makes us curious as to our boundaries, and that leads to a need to know what is out there? In other words, is our thirst for all things new simply driven by our thirst for knowledge (a consequence of trying to find all our options under neoliberalism)?

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

Disinformation, Zionist propaganda, and free speech: Far right cancel culture

Thursday October 12, 2023. The settler colonial occupation had unleashed its infrastructure of violence over the Palestinian people over a period of five days. Gaza was being indiscriminately bombarded, with mass civilian casualties that Amnesty International noted " must be investigated as war crimes ." At 3:32 p.m., my office phone rang. I was occupied and the call went to the voicemail. "Dutta, you are a murderous, f***ing, racist c***. Go back to where you belong...I will see to your termination in New Zealand." A couple of hours before that, an email had gone out from the Zionist Dane Giraud to the email listserv of the Free Speech Union, performed as a supposed apology for attacking my academic freedom. In the email, Giraud referred to my earlier b log post on the interlinkages between far-right Zionism, attacks on academic freedom, and the free speech union, noting how he had been enraged by the following statement on my blog: "I was therefore not surpri

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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