Walking north and meeting others, Olamina gains experience and gradually elucidates and articulates her ideals. For self-preservation Olamina must learn to think and behave in ways that ran counter to her Christian religious training and morality: she must learn to be careful, even “paranoid” of others (Sower 161), to threaten with her gun those who even hint at threatening her, and to kill, search, and scavenge from anyone who attacks.
very fallout-esque
politics and politicians, except as symbols of past stability
i cant annotate a line thats split between two pages but like...bruh
CA Crusaders kill Bankole and take their daughter
very handmaids tale
The CA emphasis on family is another mask, for the children of Acorn are taken from their parents, labelled orphans, adopted by CA families, and renamed;
im gonna run out of 😳's but honestly its faster than repeatedly saying 'hey just like real life!' sightly less depressing too.
the United States’s internal fragmentation means that foreign multinational corporations now dominate the American scene. They control land, water, and other physical resources. They pay workers wages below subsistence. They buy out democracy, purchasing and running formerly self-governing towns. The United States is no longer the storied land of freedom and plenty
😳😳😳😳
Talents’s final entry, dated 2090, indicates that Earthseed has spread widely and that the religion’s followers are sending spaceship expeditions to other planets and stars, “fulfilling their destiny” of seeking species immortality by establishing multiple space colonies that can survive the destruction of human civilization on earth or anywhere else. Both Parable of the Sower and Parable o f the Talents, then, map dystopian near-futures to delineate their dangers and to suggest utopian possibilities,
is this the first time we get a dystopian with a happy ending?
a United States where governments at all levels have lost even the minimal ability to maintain order, defend human rights, and protect the environment; where multi-national corporations act freely and repressively without fetters; and where extreme income inequalities exist.
😳
No one who was making these decisions meant to do anything to harm individuals' or the working-class population'sbodies;theaimwastocontrolinternationalmarkets,bankrupt struggling southern and Pacific Rim production communities
it feels really disengenious to say no one mean to do anything to harm individuals. They did want to harm individals, they just werent intended to be american individuals
The obesity epidemic is also a way of talking about the destruction of life, of bodies, imag- inaries, and environments by and under contemporary regimes of capital.
Healthy food costs more than cheap, fattening alternatives
This is why, to turn ordinary life into crisis ordinariness, social justice activists engage in the actuarial imaginary of biopolitics; what seem like cool facts of suffering become hot weapons in arguments about agency and ur- gencythatextendfromimperiledbodies.*
are social justice groups' work more effective when within the framework of the priviliged and using their (maybe inaccurate) vocabulary to be more likely to gain their support, or when they use the more accurate vocabulary the priviliged may feel alienated by?
an even
a singular event, rather than a series of smaller instances or systems that cause an intrinsic issue
Often when scholars and activists apprehend the phenomenon of slow death in long-term conditions of privation they choose to misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by callingacrisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives it as a fact in ordinary time.
demonstrates the tendency of society toward an all-or-nothing mentality. Either nothing is wrong or there is a horrendous crisis happening all at once, rather than a slow build.
but in temporal environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself, that domainoflivingon,inwhicheverydayactivity
if im reading this correctly, the events that lend themself to slow death are those that can be ignored or noticed by those they do not affect, similar to the principals of hostile design or microaagressions. this forms an affect like that of gaslighting, where the victims of slow death may feel that their experiences did not happen as they feel they did, or do not justify the response victims have.
ameson’s point is that these diverse cultural phenomena seem to share a common ability to resist the homogenizing tendencies of global capitalism and to tap into collective experience in ways that are denied the more mainstream culture of a world system thoroughly saturated the capitalist market and commodity system.
would these marginalized groups' literature still be 'authentic' if it were adopted into the mainstream and treated with greater acceptance? would new form of 'authentic' experience inevitably replace it?
But then Loyaan is a far cry from the individualist heroes of most Western detective fiction, and it is clear throughout Sweet and Sour Milk that Farah’s focus is on Somali society and not on his protagonist Loyaan. For one thing, the split between the twins Soyaan and Loyaan already destabilizes the bourgeois notion of unique identity. For another, Soyaan is far more “heroic” in his opposition to tyranny than is Loyaan, and the focus on the relatively passive Loyaan undermines any attempt to read the book as a story of individual heroism
Reminds me of the points made by Marcia Lynx Qualey about how Non-western writing bucks conventions and standards of western genres
The capital must give regard to their conduct of good morals. 20 The capital must be the place where the the example orators are the best and are best heard
seems very utopian, considering the amount of corruption in most modern capitals
Must a country have a capital city, and in what should it consist?
as this was written in the 17th century, im interested in the ways this idea must have developed with the rise of colonialism and imperialism
What is the average rate of criminality for this [type]*? How can we can predict statistically the number of thefts at a given momen
Big Bloomberg energy
cost society,
This feels like a difficult question, because oftentimes something that is said to "cost society" in reality "costs privileged elites, with very little impact on the greater majority". similarly things that actually cost society, that the elites can afford to pay, go widely ignored
Second indication of choice: the relations, the set of relations, or rather, the set of procedures whose role is to establish, maintain, and transform mechanisms of power, are not "self-generating"* or "self..suhsistent"t; they are not founded on themselves.
Mood for when anyone claims ___ will regulate itself and does not require interference
was defined by the interlacing of function and instinct, finality and signification; moreover, this was the form in whichit was manifested, more clearly than anywhere else, in themodel perversion, in that “fetishism” which, from at least asearly as 1877, served as the guiding thread for analyzing allthe other deviations.
This is a very useful distinction for discussions about how much portrayals of sex can be subversive or liberating to some groups, or how they can reinforce hierarchies.
the sexualization of children was accomplished in the form of a campaign for the health of therace (
feels relevant to the increasing sexualization of children's bodies at a time when children are being considered more mature for political activism and awareness of important issues.
Power would no longer bedealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimatedominion was death, but with living beings, and the masteryit would be able to exercise over them would have to beapplied at the level of life itself
is this person saying that before the french revolution the only way power affected people was death? I really hope not because thats stupid but i dont know what else this is trying to say.
capitalism
this is interesting but im failing to see what connection this has to sexuality outside of the surface-level similarity of a loss of bodily autonomy
As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up
the tendency (in both lit and reality) for people suffering under systems like this to distract themselves from the inhuman conditions with different indulgences
objectification
objectification can also be interpreted as dehumanization
labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions
this goes back to our discussion last week about the gig economy and the struggle for job stability those entering the workforce now experience
whose passive danger is jamming
what does the passive danger become in an era where computer jamming isnt really a thing anymore? bad wifi?
The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We
This is a common philisophical talking point, as well as one for discussions of class, that somehwat goes against the merit argument discussed in the factory metaphor previously. The idea that as long as you know the right things to say you have access to what you need takes merit out of the equation altogether.
The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself.
Big Amazon warehouse energy
The different internments or spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical
this entire concept is incredibly confusing to me.