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Aw man I didn’t know Davis was so ill.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 18:38 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 08:18 |
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https://twitter.com/bentarnoff/status/1254138469883842561?t=DzgIlgzQncuccXlahLRU7w&s=19
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 22:07 |
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Could miniature forests help air-condition cities?quote:CITY AIR is in a sorry state. It is dirty and hot. Outdoor pollution kills 4.2m people a year, according to the World Health Organisation. Concrete and tarmac, meanwhile, absorb the sun’s rays rather than reflecting them back into space, and also displace plants which would otherwise cool things down by evaporative transpiration. The relentless spread of buildings and roads thus turns urban areas into heat islands, discomforting residents and exacerbating dangerous heatwaves, which are in any case likely to become more frequent as the planet warms. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/07/01/could-miniature-forests-help-air-condition-cities I am going to afforest the heck out of this locale
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# ? Jul 22, 2022 11:10 |
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I am endorsing this piece from Jacobin if anyone would like background on the political situation in the Philippines https://twitter.com/jacobin/status/1554708648001015808
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# ? Aug 3, 2022 11:23 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:I am endorsing this piece from Jacobin if anyone would like background on the political situation in the Philippines Thanks for this gradenko, I enjoyed reading it. A sadly all too familiar but nonetheless enlightening piece.
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# ? Aug 6, 2022 15:17 |
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Catching up on the LRB and I'm really enjoying this lengthy reporting piece from Afghanistan: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n13/zain-samir/is-this-a-new-taliban Some choice bits: quote:He was a proud Afghan soldier, proud of his army’s achievements, proud of the changes he had seen take place in Afghan society, proud that he had female colleagues at the military academy. His wife and sisters had government jobs – jobs they still held under the Taliban – and he was hopeful that his children would get a good education and a better future. If there was anyone to thank for Afghanistan’s normalisation, though, it wasn’t the Americans. He felt that the US had used men like him to fight its own larger war against Islam. The Americans ‘killed a lot of Muslims under the pretext that they were Taliban’, he said, before betraying the cause they had purported to defend by signing a deal with the Taliban. Trump’s Doha agreement of February 2020, which the Afghan government wasn’t even invited to discuss, promised a full withdrawal of US troops if the Taliban met certain conditions. This decision could have been overturned by his successor – but instead Biden merely extended the deadline for withdrawal by three months, clearing the way for the Taliban takeover to begin. quote:However you look at the last twenty years, it’s hard to deny that the US bears much of the responsibility for its own failure. The transitional government it installed in June 2002 – headed by Karzai, who was viewed as reliable by Washington and the CIA – was a cobbling together of prominent Pashtuns and former warlords, the very people who in destroying so much of Afghanistan in the civil war of the early 1990s had brought about the Taliban’s rise. Those who had assisted the US invasion, whatever their backgrounds, were given senior government positions and immunity from prosecution. Karzai’s three vice presidents had all been commanders in the Northern Alliance. In Afghanistan as in Iraq, the US very quickly toppled the previous regime but failed to build any viable institutions. Instead they shared out rewards indiscriminately to establish a system of patron-client networks. The new elite – generals, ministers and provincial governors – proceeded to loot and embezzle the international aid that poured into the country. There were ghost schools, ghost roads, ghost hospitals: projects funded by the international community that existed only on paper. quote:The former Pakistani army officer stressed that over the last twenty years the Taliban was quietly pursuing its own, very effective strategy: its continued small-scale military actions were a way of wearing the Americans down, ensuring eventual financial and moral fatigue. In the meantime it was expanding its ranks and solidifying its command. When the Taliban launched its operation to retake Afghanistan last year, even the Pakistani army was surprised at the speed of its gains. This success, the officer suggested, could be attributed to the Taliban’s carefully considered methods. ‘The Afghan army was still well equipped and could fight,’ he said. ‘But it collapsed because its command structure was weak and all decisions were centralised. The Taliban, on the other hand, divided the frontline sectors between different commanders, and they launched multiple attacks all over the country, forcing the Afghan army and their special forces to fight on multiple fronts without giving them a chance to recuperate.’ Once they had surrounded a unit, the Taliban would send a jirga, a council of elders, to negotiate with the army commanders. ‘The choices then for field commanders, who were logistically isolated, were about saving their lives.’ The Taliban’s victory, the officer felt, could be attributed as much to their negotiating skills as to their fighting strength. quote:We drove on through the desert and up and down hills strewn with boulders before descending into a dry riverbed that ran between two high ridges. ‘This was the Taliban highway,’ the khan said. ‘Their convoys travelled through this valley all the way to Helmand to avoid detection.’ He knew this desert well from his days fighting with the mujahideen in the 1980s. The communists had incensed landowners like him when they confiscated large swathes of land to distribute among the peasantry. The mujahideen faction he joined, dominated by traditionalist religious families and monarchists, was too small and ineffective to make a difference, especially since the bulk of US/Saudi support funnelled through the ISI went to the more radical jihadi Islamists. So what happened to the land? I asked. ‘After the Russians left we took it all back from the peasants.’ quote:For Shahnaz, the corrupt political elite that she and other activists had fought to expose had enabled the Taliban to come back to power. ‘Yes, we didn’t believe that the Taliban would come, but our people were tired and disappointed with the government. Poverty, corruption and criminality reached a peak under President Ghani. He appointed people to high office he knew were corrupt. People were hungry and poor, but they could see the wealth around them.’ She explained that in Herat corruption among the police and judiciary had led to a rise in crime. The policemen were paid a pittance so they started releasing convicted felons in return for bribes. ‘People were tired of the corruption. Some felt that if the Taliban returned to power they would at least do something to sort out crime. They would execute rapists and amputate the hands of thieves.’
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# ? Aug 17, 2022 13:30 |
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Another long read about the history of Philippine politics: https://apjjf.org/2022/16/Rafael.htmlquote:In short, elections by the first half of the twentieth century were part of an ensemble of governing practices designed to regulate political participation in ways that would ensure colonial order while preserving social inequality essential to that order. Once again, democratic institutions were calculated to produce undemocratic ends.
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# ? Sep 20, 2022 05:19 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Another long read about the history of Philippine politics: https://apjjf.org/2022/16/Rafael.html That seems like a pretty cool journal, I read this article from there years ago (and think I linked it in the old Marxist / LF / what have you thread at one point) -> Juche in the United States: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea, 1969-1971 quote:Abstract
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# ? Sep 21, 2022 00:04 |
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https://www.peacelandbread.com/ is a new one, marxist leninist periodical
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# ? Sep 24, 2022 02:20 |
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https://www.gawker.com/culture/what-can-novels-doquote:... The world’s structural problems require structural solutions: the novel’s pretty good at revealing the former and not really a part of the latter. We could do a bit of what the journal Chuang calls Scooby-Doo Marxism — where we take the mask off of whatever problems we have with contemporary literature and find capitalism lurking behind — but you probably live under capitalism, so unless you’re engaging in near-Olympic levels of denial, you already know it’s bad — if not for you, then certainly for other people. Follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion, of course, and you’re probably wondering: what can the novel possibly do to help bring about the end of all exploitation? What can the novel do at all? These are good questions to think about, so let’s think about them, starting with some of the claims made about the novel in Timothy Bewes’s recent book Free Indirect; I’m a civilian, but I have some friends in academia, and they tell me this is the new thing in the theory of the novel.
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# ? Oct 6, 2022 14:55 |
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Here's an interesting open access sociology article looking at differences in masculinity on the far right by analyzing posts on Stormfront to break down conflict between older white nationalist men (who define themselves in opposition to people of colour and are willing to ally with white women to achieve their goals) and younger alt-right men (who define themselves in opposition to women and are willing to ally with people of colour to achieve their goals): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1097184X221120664
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# ? Oct 8, 2022 14:51 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Another long read about the history of Philippine politics: https://apjjf.org/2022/16/Rafael.html read this and it's good (and short). gives a context to the historic pattern duterte came from that I didn't know much about about before. read it if you're interested in SE asia folks! edit: I thought this was the asia thread Marzzle has issued a correction as of 17:08 on Oct 12, 2022 |
# ? Oct 12, 2022 17:05 |
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Marzzle posted:
No worries, all contributions are welcome here. Haven’t been posting much but I subbed to the New Left Review this year and got a lot out of it. The long discussion- three essays thus far far - on "technofeudalism" kicked off by Evgemy Morozov has been really good. I’ll link a little later but mobile posting as I pretend to pay attention on a work call.
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# ? Oct 14, 2022 15:04 |
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GalacticAcid posted:No worries, all contributions are welcome here. please do, i like morozov the recent Le Monde Diplomatique had a very interesting piece on chile and the recent constitutional referendum ( https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/10/LAMBERT/65154 i couldn't find it in english but google translate is pretty good with french and i can probably procure the norwegian if necessary ) and the national question, which i thought was interesting because the national question is incredibly important in an understated way in contemporary politics worldwide
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# ? Oct 14, 2022 15:10 |
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Seconding the interest.
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# ? Oct 14, 2022 17:00 |
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Sorry for delay. See below - quotes from article blurbs at the beginning of the relevant issue. Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason by Evgeny Morozov quote:Countering current claims that digital capitalism is issuing in a ‘neofeudal’ age, as the rentier barons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street extract non-productive fortunes from their users and debtors, Evgeny Morozov returns to classic debates over the transition to capitalism to question the relation of the economic and the political. Capital and Cybernetics by Timothy Erik Ström quote:Current debates on techno-capitalism often underplay the relative autonomy of the digital realm. Responding to Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ in NLR 133/4, Timothy Ström outlines the abstractionist and expansionist logic of a novel cybernetic-capitalist form, originating at the apex of the US imperial system. Scouting Capital’s Frontiers by Cédric Durand quote:Replying to Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, Cédric Durand stresses digital capitalism’s regressive social character, its logic of access over consumption and the impasse of production at a world-system level.
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# ? Oct 17, 2022 23:01 |
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Mike Davis has passed. Mike Davis: 1946-2022 in The Nation I’m sure a number of his essays have been posted in this thread through the years.
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# ? Oct 26, 2022 01:14 |
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GalacticAcid posted:Mike Davis has passed. Not a surprise because we knew about his terminal cancer for a long time, but still deeply sad. Rip to a real one
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# ? Oct 26, 2022 02:24 |
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Reading Victorian Holocausts helped me deal with the first part of 2020 RIP Mike
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# ? Oct 26, 2022 03:10 |
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quote:“Hey, CCRU!” At least one other attendee is wearing my shirt. He just got back from Honduras, he tells me, where he was electively injected with an experimental life-extension compound unapproved by the US FDA. He gestures at his abdominal zone, somewhere between nodes 8 and 9 on the diagram, where the substance entered his body. The shirt attracts another compliment from a khaki-wearing clean-cut who’s big on Nick Land and a high-five from a lobstery Brit blasting cigs from an Urbit-branded carton. Such is the variety that inhabits this Assembly, this beacon of New World Energy bootstrapped into existence. quote:The recent uptick in name-recognition among nongeeks can equally be attributed to a marketing strategy that put it on the map for a certain subset of the “downtown scene” – which, as everyone knows, is a made-up and geography-agnostic invention astroturfed by the Dimes Square Industrial Complex – culminating in “Urbit NY Week” last May. Walt and Honor of Wet Brain were issued a “star,” christening them the Urbit equivalent of an internet service provider. No Agency had an Urbit party. Yarvin went on Red Scare. I heard that Soph Vanderbilt was handing out business cards, decreeing herself an “Urbit Girl-In-Residence.” quote:I catch a talk by a lawyer who came up in the Reagan-era Justice Department. He describes his work as “removing regulatory burdens” in El Salvador, where Bitcoin is now legal tender. He recently worked with the Salvadoran government to write a law, modeled on the DAO law in Wyoming, to make the country a favorable base for “founders working in crypto.” He requests, at the end of his address, a show of hands, as if he had been pitching timeshares: who’s interested in joining forces once the legislation passes, which could be as soon as October, dev-ing it up in the “developing world?” https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/user-error-more-beautiful-computer
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# ? Oct 28, 2022 18:19 |
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Sorry for New York posting but it's very odd to me that 'the downtown scene' now supposedly means the little clique in Re(***)d Square’s orbit. It’s always referred to the smaller off- and off-off broadway theaters located in Lower Manhattan which are in no way associated with this bizarre cultural perversion. Soho Rep is probably the most classically “downtown theater” venue, along with others like New York Theatre Workshop (where Hadestown made its first run before moving to Broadway, for instance - hardly some Peter Thiel fever dream production.)and tiny experimental spaces like The Flea. Annoys me.
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# ? Oct 28, 2022 20:08 |
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Protean Mag - Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the “Atomic Cloud”quote:The true story of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex may never be fully declassified. But what we do know is this: it involves the unlucky architect of the World Trade Center, a lost stockpile of a hundred thousand baby teeth, and mountains of recently disclosed U.S. Army records that describe secret radiological experiments conducted on unsuspecting citizens in Minneapolis, Winnipeg, and St. Louis.
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# ? Nov 29, 2022 09:55 |
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The Critic: Who cares who wins The mythology of the SAS quote:Eighty years after rampaging behind enemy lines in the deserts of North Africa, and forty-two years since exploding into the public’s consciousness by dramatically ending the Iranian Embassy siege, Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) is once again the centre of the nation’s attention. This renewed notoriety owes nothing to any stunning military success or dramatic action on the part of the Regiment, as it is referred to, but rather to the new BBC television series, SAS: Rogue Heroes. Based on the best-selling book by Ben Macintyre, who was granted privileged access to the SAS’s own classified regimental archives, SAS: Rogue Heroes depicts the wartime birth and first unsteady steps of the world’s most famous Special Forces unit. the article continues through the link
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# ? Jan 9, 2023 13:47 |
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Wolfgang Streeck, Germans to the Front Pretty good deepdive into the complexities of the West's military support of Ukraine focusing on Germany's difficult position. probably very similar to what's going on in the ukraine thread, without the unnecessary and hypocritical manichean idealism. quote:In the end, then, the Scholz government was left holding the bag – as practically the sole supplier of battle tanks to Kiev. What made this even more uncomfortable was that precisely on the day the Germans agreed to the Leopards deal, the Ukrainian government declared that, now that this had been achieved, the next items on its wish list would be fighter planes, submarines and battleships, without which there was no hope for Ukraine to win the war. (Ukraine’s former ambassador to Germany, one Andrej Melnyk, having moved back to Kiev where he now serves as deputy foreign minister, tweeted on January 24, in English: ‘Hallelujah! Jesus Christ! And now, dear allies, let’s establish a powerful fighter jet coalition for Ukraine with F-16 & F-35, Eurofighter & Tornado, Rafale & Gripen jets & everything you can deliver to save Ukraine!’) Topping this, at the Munich security conference the Ukrainian delegation asked the US and the UK for cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs, outlawed under international law but, as the Ukrainians pointed out, held in large numbers by their Western allies. (The FAZ, always eager not to confuse its readers, in its report called cluster bombs umstritten – ‘controversial’ – rather than illegal.)
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# ? Mar 18, 2023 22:20 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 08:18 |
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Knowledge production in the age of neoliberal authoritarianismquote:Ben K.C. Laksana
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# ? May 15, 2023 03:30 |