I agree. I retired at 35 by saving 90% of what I made and lucked into living in Toronto at the beginning of the property ladder in the 90s. Like a diet, it's more about the determination to live with what seems like privation but really it is just being free of all kinds of crap - furniture, creams, soaps, appliances, clothes, decor - that provide social acceptance but ends in indentured servitude.
Yep.It's a long complicated boring story but I lived in a car from the ages 2-4 (kidnapped by my dad). During that time (we had no money and were on the run from the RCMP) we ate only fish. Once I was 'rescued' by the RCMP I was returned home but lived there only briefly then left home young and lived on the road/cars/in Colombia and various deserts because in South America and in deserts I have no allergies. This is a way of saying the food doesn't matter ( I was raw food vegan for 3 years; vegetarian for 20 and eating very very simple foods as I am happy that way as any)
I have asthma and take this along with Montelukast which is also studied in various places now as Covid treatment. I have allergic rhinitis asthma which means I've lost my sense of smell and taste for months from allergic cytokine storm. My grandma took Budesonide her whole life and the side effect is she lost all pain-sensing in her skin (hit her leg on a stool and didn't notice she needed 80 stitches. But that was after 60 years on it. I'm allergic to basically all forms of animal and plant life.
I thought so. At 20 I used to go out dancing every night for fun. After being repeatedly groped I decided I should get paid for dancing. It was a perfect decision. But not for the money. The thing is it's not the 'getting literally fucked' that is bad. It's that when you choose that as a way to avoid starving their is a social cost: You are a fucking dirty whore. And it follows you the rest of your life. I became a sex worker activist because in Toronto being a stripper/sex worker meant no protection from the law (if cops found you doing a lap dance or on the street they arrest you if you don't give them a hand job (stripper) blow job (hooker).
I've been to Hacienda Napoles (Pablo's estate where the hippos - and zebras, and rhinos and pretend dinosaurs with fake roaring speakers are). There are hotels you can stay in there ( I did not - I stayed in Doradal the nearby city with schools and hospitals built by Escobar). But if you stay in the park you must be in your hotel by 6pm say signs posted everywhere - because the hippos are nocturnal. They stay in the water all day and come out and ...roam and potentially kill at night. I stood for an hour with my toes in the water watching the hippos swim and I fed Vanessa - that is Pablo's pet pigmy hippo who is 'tame'. You buy (for about $1) a tupperware of carrots and celery and feed her. She let me scratch her nose. All of this is to say, Colombians on the ground where the hippos are spreading from have worked out ways to coexist with them.
Capitalism makes one feel like they are touching the absolute a not an example of human universality but rather as the universal. Each individuated human identifies as universal. This makes the entire article merely a description of our economic order. We don't need a new approach to nature we need to imagine a different economic order.
Perhaps love is actually the thing that makes us different from animals. We will ruin our lives for it. It is not that it is 'not special' but rather the antagonism (being stuck on someone and never being able to really full reach them across the abyss of the real)that creates our subjectivity.In love we recognizes ourselves AS universal (vs as an example of universality)through the act of falling, risking, trying to mean something. These are the ideas of the Slovenian Philosophical group including Dolar and Zizek right now. (Sex and the Failed Absolute is a good start)
I had a high school teacher who used my IQ test results to justify my 'old soul' status enough to sexually assault me. As a working class person, most of my friends did not finish highschool or go to college and I did but I hated the people there. My father skipped to grades and got a full scholarship to the University of Toronto quit and joined the Hells Angels and died at 40. I found my groove (my partner is a finnish physicist) but the ability to read and think fast in the context of female and working class can be hell - at least in one's youth.
Ok. I am going to push back on this: So, you believe that african-americans, working class women, LGBT+ and homelessness has improved over the past 20 years? I know that culturally all of these things have changed. There is no socially acceptable forum to be sexist, homophobic, racist (8ken, redpillsubreddits aside). But - has any actual change happened for anyone outside the 20% of us in the, from Peter Sloterdijk's 'spherology, cupoloa of privilege? Or are we imagining an outside of improvement from inside our safety? Thinking of the work of Moten/Harney/Agamben here and destituent power. How do we, in here, know these things work? Or do these stories circulate to buy our peace at night? Like buying products from black-owned stores or RT Rose McGowan or put up rainbow flags.
There is a large body of philosophical work over the past 2 decades that argues that no rules is precisely the marker of an iron-clad ideological structure wherein the citizenry self-discipline so that the order functions with total freedom of choice between given options. Meanwhile, we never get any access to the frame or the economic and political decisions (QE, Current War with China and Russia through Sanctions). China, on the other hand, the argument goes, requires strict rules because the people there know that they live in a strict ideological structure and fight against it constantly. While we in the west are so certain we are free because we can choose between two candidates, zillions of types of products and popping off polemically on all our platforms.
Fully accepting this, can you give me one example in the past 20 years that this cacophony of political discourse led to changes in political economy in the Western World for those who have no inherited wealth?
Agreed. I would add to this, after reading through the comments, that there is a naive idea of how a civilization or order works. The question is not whether or not we are worse in the west than China, but why we need the supplement of China to maintain the coherence of our order. If we are in fact reacting to timing and criticism to China, how come, as superpower, the US even compares itself in any way? In what ways do we create China/Russia/X as enemy to crisis manage the collapse in the belief of the goodness in the West? The current line of thought across all platforms about China ask questions that guarantee no answers save for reactions and war.
There are not major flaws in human thinking there is human thinking, framed. There are thousands of years of human thinking on human thinking that one could refer to, and do. Ignoring the question of what is a human subject, reality and thought maps it as another polemic cultural battle of the Global West. It's super fun. Start maybe at Plato, Kant, Hegel, Foucault, Badiou, Ljubljana school, Mbembe, Moten/Harney/Undercommons, Agamben, Butler, Spivak, Hall, and on and on. So many people dedicating their lives to this question always seems like a good place to start, if one is seriously asking the question and not just reproducing status quo. Which, if that is the purpose of this forum, I apologize.
Identity politics and group thinking squished together loses a dangerous amount of nuance. Identity poltics is how self-identified liberals assert their form of universal subjectivity by splitting the working class racially (read Wilderson, Hartman, Moten and afropessimistic thought and of course Lacan). While Groupthink is naively but generally defined as: " a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome". The distinction thus becomes clear. Identity politics is born of the desire to divide the working classes using the disharmony of racialization causing irrational decision making, while Groupthink has the same ending but with explicitly the opposite desire.
Just breaking this down so we can map the possibilities and not fall apart into binaries: First, the female gender has, until very recently been literally hobbled and socialized to avoid sweat and any kind of physical efforts. My grandmother wore girdles and her mother wore corsets and they both only wore heels. So, we are new to sport and training and, we are catching up. Give us a century. Second, It depends on how you define stronger: “The hypothesis that the survival advantage of women has fundamental biological underpinnings is supported by the fact that under very harsh conditions females survive better than males even at infant ages when behavioral and social differences may be minimal or favor males.” https://www.pnas.org/content/115/4/E832.full and https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/7b6484fb-3b00-46d6-a5...
I'm old. I opted out of the order as a solution and I orbit around it making incursions of support and encouragement. Try techniques described in the Undercommons by Moten/Harney. Spend your attention carefully.
I was tested and told I was gifted at 11. (IQ152) I had hippy parents who let me do anything. I left home at 15. I retired at 35 to pursue my life's work of being in service of tearing down and re-imagining the Global West pro-slavery democracy. Currently working in The Undercommons (Moten/Harney).
"the contemporary era is, undeniably, one of separation, hate movements, hostility, and, above all, struggle against an enemy. Consequently, liberal democracies - already considerably leached by the forces of capital, technology, and militarism - are now being sucked into a colossal process of inversion." - Necropolitics pg 42.
What is really being discussed when the word anarchy is produced in contexts like this, is power. Those who see themselves as connected to power will of course vote no. Those who do not see themselves connected to power know enough to shut up about it.
Yep. It's stunning to me as someone who is on both banks of humanities and STEM how the STEM side has simultaneously the assertion of how great Western science is and the total aversion to critical thought about that assertion. It's a system of power called patriarchy which works in tandem with white supremacy yoked to timespace of capitalism that underpins the logic of our order. Necropower is the term. Millions of pages of peer-reviewed articles beneath science to engage with impoverishing science. It's sad.