So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the #NHS, is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.
Mind you, this is not a critique of those people: I’m sure that there may be many excellent reasons why they are not, from fear of liability or of breaking the law to their own exhaustion and burnout. But as I’ve written about extensively, this is something the Greeks did in the depths of the Crisis, this is something the Black Panthers did when institutional racism prevented poor Black people from accessing healthcare. It may be difficult or dangerous, but it can be done.
Why are we not establishing neighbo(u)rhood-based solidarity clinics, to provide communities with at least some access to the kind of acute care such clinics are best able to provide? Would that not both serve obvious humanitarian ends, as well as take some heat off the NHS? We’re not talking about major surgeries, chemotherapy or MRI scans: the Greek solidarity clinics generally had to arrange these things by surreptitious barter with public hospitals & the BPP clinics were generally unable to.
I’m so sorry to have to make this explicit again, but I suppose people keep showing up here (which is good!) and haven’t had a chance yet to fully internalize community norms. So! Please understand that I cannot accept your follow request if you have an empty profile, few or no visible posts, and no other way for me to get a sense of who you are. This goes double if you have a cryptic name and/or an account on an instance that’s likely to be poorly moderated. Thanks for your understanding.
I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.
And what I will never understand, if I live to be one thousand years old, is why some people, out of a perfectly justified desire to hold “the West” or “the global North” or NATO or the United States up to critique, wind up embracing one of the planet’s other bloodthirsty, extractive empires, and rationalizing away its vile deeds. This isn’t a binary choice, you know? You can do better than being a useful idiot for a power that cares nothing for your fate. Putin-senpai will never notice you.
And do not come at me with some line about how the transcendently-justified patriarchal hierarchy of Tibetan culture needed to be smashed. Ethnic cleansing is odious wherever it is practiced, and can never be justified, and if this is not an absolute, non-negotiable baseline for you then I’m afraid I’m not interested in anything else you have to say.
Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m intensely mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.
Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.
What’s vexing me in my PhD at the moment is that the department wants to see a complete introduction and substantive chapter at this checkpoint, and that’s…just not the way I write? How I write is much more like the inkspot theory of counterinsurgency: I start with little sentence- or at most paragraph-length chunks of ideation, and suture them together until they form arguments, then hopefully a fabric. The coherence remains low for most of the way, before going asymptotic toward the very end.
@luis_in_brief I wanna give my parents the gift of having their kid earn this degree. (Of course, each of them could care less, neither of them would be any more or less proud of me with a few letters after my name. It’s entirely my confabulation. Therapy would have been better.)
I had never heard of the Noahopinion blog until a friend sent me a link to it the other day, specifically to a post about this book, “Emergent Tokyo.” Noahpinion characterized it, glowingly, as an empirical defense of market YIMBYism, and it very nearly put me off ordering the book despite its being highly relevant to my interests. That guy’s dumber than a bag of rocks! This book is nothing of the sort! It’s wonderful!
@PaulGrahamRaven Oh. Well then. Duly noted. He certainly seems to have utterly missed the very clearly articulated point (and explicit intent) of this book.
@adamgreenfield That surprises me not in the least. I keep encountering him against my will, because he is also into science fiction, but his misparsings thereof tend likewise to boggle the mind
I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse
If you’ve been enjoying our conversations here about the Long Emergency, the #pragma, assembly-based systems of local self-determination, and the #lifehouse itself as a concrete implementation of #solarpunk values and ideas about the world, and as a way of sheltering ourselves against all the storms to come, I genuinely think you’ll find something useful in this book. 👊
As a student of anarchism, most of my reading has been online or downloaded, but I've begun to get a notion that I want to start a physical library. I've pre-ordered your book as the first official addition! It will join my physical copies of "A People's History of the US", "Debt" and "Dawn of Everything".
So let’s talk about prosopagnosia, or “faceblindness.” I have it! What this means is that I could well have known you for twenty years, but if I see you outside of the context in which I usually encounter you, or even if you change your hairstyle (!), I may simply not recognize you the next time we cross paths. It’s mortifying! I have literally introduced myself to people I’ve worked alongside for years – who are, entirely understandably, generally fairly miffed that I’ve treated them so poorly.
A friend spotted this in Hackney this morning. Just putting folks on notice that if I encounter one of these, I will take preemptive countermeasures, believe it.
What made this even creepier (given its obvious video-capture capability, the propensity for children to be attracted to it, etc.) was that it was being operated by a middle-aged dude between two schoolyards. I dislike stranger-danger hysteria as much as anyone sane, but sometimes the red flags wave harder than the Brezhnev-era Kremlin on May Day.
Anybody care to hazard a guess as to the significance, if any, of the paperback copy of “Dhalgren” that chap is ostentatiously carrying around in “3 Body Problem”? Don’t worry about spoilers: I’ve finished the series, and reread the book every few years. #towoundtheautumnalcity
Here’s what I mean by “low-diligence”: Of the five cultures I’ve lived in as an adult, the American, Japanese, Korean and Finnish in addition to that of the British Isles, the UK is on the lower end of the scale in terms of the care and attention to detail people bring to bear on everyday tasks. As we’ve discussed before, this is true across classes, backgrounds and occupational sectors here. It’s true in the NHS, in the academy, in the trades and above all in business. I can’t explain it –
I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this
Not that he was perfect, or anything of the sort, but I cannot express the joy it gives me to see Stafford Beer’s watchword “the purpose of a system is what it does” at long last pass into common usage, especially among folks with no obvious reason to know who Stafford Beer was. It’s been a vital analytical tool for me this past quarter-century, in all kinds of circumstances. #POSIWID
I’m going to make explicit something I’ve been practicing for a while now: I will not boost posts that contain machine learning- (“AI”) generated images, as surely as I will not boost those without alt text, and I encourage you not to do so either.