Yes. My work takes me to the research on conspiracy theories (I am creating a database) and I actually read through these because these responses are part of how conspiracy theories function in a culture. eg https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618774270
Again, anecdotally. But - I am a lifelong severe asthmatic. As a kid I was prevented from all running activity. It was the 80s. At 23 I decided, against all advice, to start running. It is now 25 years later and I have run 360 days a year all that time. I still have asthma, but it's just this annoying thing, like hands that grip my lungs a bit. When I get the flu ( I had a terrible flu in January this year ) I do not stop running if I have low/no fever. Running for me is just a walk to others as I do it every day. Since Covid started, so I don't wheeze and sneeze and terrify people and become a social pariah, I take one puff Budesonide, one singulair and a reactine every day. I now have zero asthma and my nasal rhinitis is 70% reduced. (no sniffles just one closed passage as I've had my whole life). I am not recommending anything but building a relationship between my experience, yours and the discussion about this pandemic flu. What is missing from all of these anecdotes is context. This is mine. I am an extremely disciplined runner, I stretch every day ( I have scoliosis which requires it so I remain mostly pain free), I run a Decolinization Think Tank and I live in the Western World and am white and currently upper middle class. I grew up in a trailer with violent neglectful parents and so I also was forced to go through a decade of self work and radical subjectivity was the product . This is my subjectivity, my context and it is directly related to how I recover from disease - or do not. We need numbers and statistics and context.
Our available methods for engaging with the economic are, perhaps functionally, not able to answer for any problems. Walters Streeck describes economic theory as race horses hitched to a plow: The complexity of the models developed do nothing to advance the work to be done. The work of economic analysis has to re-orient according to Streeck - > "I am hungry for facts, not for concepts; concepts I access through facts and through the questions they raise, including the need to organize them into a coherent picture."
Your engagement with this article here makes me see that we are in a new sort of space for these discussions. And I really appreciate the moderator too. I am 47 and it's been a lonely, long haul. Thank you.
Sure. It's reading. (happy to send you a reading list if you let me know your own aptitudes and interests as a point of entry ). It's learning that Western culture structures the normal as a white monyed male and any perspective that interrogates that is too 'political.' This space right here _is_ political, even when you disavow it as so. In this space my experience of working in tech as a woman - which shares many perhaps most of what you experience - but then there are the things you cannot imagine. Ask specific questions. When I post an article about a woman's experience on this site, a user flags it right away. ( see my last post here ). The good news is, all of this is becoming more and more normal. Otherwise I would not even bother here, as I have lurked for over a decade getting what I needed here and trying not to be to demoralized by the shape of content and the common fantasy that one can construct choose where, how and when the political intervenes.
What you call clickbait is something I think about _every_ time I visit this site - years and years. Your experience online is as gendered as mine is - it's just that your perspective is normal and mine is abstracted to 'clickbait'.
Yes to all this. I am a woman who has been online since 1989. For me, what has to happen is not so much moderation difference but about the inner work. Understanding that categories gender and race are always at play, and putting things in that context. That is what we as women or bipoc _have_ to do. My bad experiences are not rages and threats to rape me (that I can place in the category of ridiculous) but these get all the focus. For me it is the 1000s of times I have something to add but when I do, because it is from my gendered perspective, it is considered outside the field of the conversation. The technical term for this is the differend.
Yes. The first 20 years of internet was a mob that kept me from ever commenting and the misogyny I encountered - art videos stolen and shared on boards, attacks on my work - shaped my behavior forever. I do not believe in the concept "innocent lives" - but without placing this discussion about cancel culture in context we just reproduce unequal relationships of power. A better framework would be to do what I had to do to cope - do the inner work.
My takeaway is that is exactly what this article is about - food is one category along with clothing, phones, material culture - and he is not arguing about what we pay. Rather, he is describing a facet of the structure of Western Civilization that requires a de-humanized constantly replenished underclass to provide us with the cheap good food we want. The fact is we cannot have this infinite growth within a finite biosphere and his article explores the relationship between the West and the so-called developing world and how, though we seem opposite we are the same now, because the neocropolitics we practice is now burgeoning within the West and the shape of starvation just has a different mask depending upon context. The book and the article use a genealogical methodology, which is what is the norm now is this work. (I am a Critical Theorist).
We are all the same species herded around imaginary walls that only apply to us as individuals; moreso if we were born inside the imaginary walls that mark us as hollow, dangerous beings. Immigration is a story we tell ourselves to know we are powerful and good. We are poorer indeed by our assertion that some humans are more human and require proper paperwork to gain access to our mythoreligious order of the West.
Nationstates have no meaning beyond mechanism to obscure borderization of humans and boderlessness velocity of capital. It would be more correct for me to say I am a Bezosian or I am a Zuckerbergian than I am Canadian.
As someone who works in Russia for a few months every year, to say that Putin is loved by Russia is the same as saying Trump is loved by America. Putin has a base.
Europe has 400 camps and 47 000 refugees (pg 106 Necropolitics A. Mbembe) so they need to activate the imaginary split between themselves and the failing Empire in hopes they can recuperate enough power to step into it and take charge.
I would push a little further and say that this is a component of Western thought - binaries, enmity and polemics. The disjunction between the metanarrative of what our system is - a democracy based on equality - and what our system is - pro-slavery. The result is we blame, individuals or groups of individuals like 'woodpushers' when it is the entire logical order. Just try breaking any of our main socially-organizing binaries: Male/female (be trans!) or black/white (everyone is both!), sexuality(be pan-sexual!), class (celebrate being poor!) and so on. We meet in enmity to decide what of these categories we are (without ever uttering it) and then we argue our own truth, generated from within, and argue it to the death. Just like folks will when they read this. Go a piece of the way with this. Do some reading - Spivak, Mbembe, Benedict Anderson, Roedigger - there are decades of theory and meaning out there that is now mainstream. The problem is not the 'bad folks' - it's our own western solipsism.
Guns are another way of racializing - if one takes the current definition of racism: Deciding what dies. Reading gun ownership as a relationship of power makes for more meaningful discussion.
The retail investors are fully aware of what the author describes and are pushing their conclusion forward: Nothing matters. Being trapped in binaries we strangle. This is a cultural disavowel landing on an economic register. Dragging white supremacy into the public realm is another such motion.
The concept of Differend -> A wrong or injustice that arises because the discourse in which the wrong might be expressed does not exist. This technology of Western Civilization retains coherence via a white supremacist patriarchal order based economic system. Racism is deciding what dies, guaranteeing profits. All meaning has been surgically drained over centuries of enmity leaving only the calculable.
The book Necropolitics by A. Mbembe makes these conversations more productive. I am part of many groups abandoning the constraints of the assumptions that act as thresholds throughout each back and forth on this page.