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.
The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.
@sofiav No, they’re pointing out the asymmetry of the relation, and observing that this situation generally doesn’t end well for the party on the wrong end of the power relation. Remember that “the first hit is always free.”
@sofiav I wish there were another, less abrasive way to say this, but when you characterize Belt and Road as a fraternal, benevolent and even socialist project, I’m afraid I’m not assuming anything. This is about securing long-term revenue for PLA-owned enterprises, access to captive markets and strategic ports, and influence, and those things only, accompanied by the most extraordinary contempt for local labor.
@sofiav@inquiline I cannot agree with you here. Belt and Road is a transparent attempt to transform its African partners, particularly, into client states dependent on an imperial metropole – a textbook inscription of exploitive and extractive neocolonial relations, reliant on the intercession of an exceedingly narrow comprador class in each polity it touches. If China understood soft power better, and was capable of not being racist, I might even take it seriously.
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.)
"Like most #neoliberal institutions, #Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs"
The number of people imputing things they wanted to hear, seemingly so they could accuse you, but which you didn’t say, and/or not investing any curiosity in what you did actually point them at… was quite something.
It kind of brings home just how much is functionally invisible
@HeavenlyPossum@RD4Anarchy@neonsnake@Loukas Heh. You know I’m torn down the middle of my soul – it should either look like “Search & Destroy” or like Müller-Brockmann did it his ownself.