Abe's tenure as Prime Minister of Japan. Notice that Abe considers Donald Trump an ally, but China and the DPRK threats. I really think international politics is a lot easier to understand if you just cut the Gordian knot and look at things as they are. The USA and Japan are capitalist; the DPRK and China are Communist. One can defend the former and denounce the latter all they please, but there's no objective position from which to do so. Ideology is always present in such distinctions.
An overwhelming majority of Okinawans intend to reject Tokyo's and Washington's plans for a US base in their prefecture. Considering how close the Brexit referendum was and all that resulted from it, I wonder how democratic this outcome will be.
If this situation were to follow the mujahideen example, then the US' weapons will be passed along to the PKK, who will continue their needling of Turkey, which will drive a wedge between Turkey and the US. I'm not predicting that outright; it's just a very familiar pattern. Also interesting that Assad and the YPG seem to be building a coalition based on mutual distrust of the US.
Keeping in mind for future travels: India's first Bollywood museum.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Friday, February 15, 2019
Week 23
I spent time yesterday and today immersing myself in the student debt crisis. And it is an enormous problem. Entire futures are being stripped bare of pleasure and purpose by the US higher education system (or lower ed, as I understand Tressie McMillan Cottom has described it). Previously, I've written on how government inaction on problems like AIDS and poverty are a form of predatory delay, where the powerful have all the time in the world and the powerless have none. Societal responsibility can be deferred altogether for people seen as deserving their fates. This is becoming the case as well for student debt, and, as always, its impact is felt disproportionately by the marginalized.
Yet this is affecting the white and well-off as well. And that's most likely why it's netting some attention lately. The problem is that it's a decentralized problem, so previous efforts to organize (LGBT people against AIDS, the Civil Rights movement against segregated poverty) are not being replicated in a modern context. I think there are two interesting things to consider here. First, the atomized middle class has less sense of social cohesion, so they experience this structural problem as a personal one (with all the attending guilt, shame, and despair). Second, this new and widespread precarity could manifest in unexpected ways. I think back to Bue Rubner's Viewpoint essay on Catalonia all the time, in which he persuasively argues that the 15M movement grew so large because the petulant middle class traversed their usual social strata. It remained a temporary alliance, and one which served Catalonia very little in the end, but it suggests that middle class in anxiety can lead to leftward drift. I believe we are seeing that with the Millennial generation in the US, who are rapidly flanking the Democrats from the left.
The question would then be if this alliance has any more value for the US left than it did for the Catalan/Spanish left. I'm not optimistic. If a pragmatic liberal-leftism is oriented toward gaining what its participants consider "rightfully theirs," then those young white college graduates will wave goodbye to their truly oppressed peers once a middle class lifestyle opens back up to them. It's depressingly easy to imagine this scenario; look how the boomers turned out, after all. The work lies in reframing student debt as something more than an obstacle to the perpetuation of an economic system that's already untenable. A more radical critique would bring down the entire system with it, connecting student debt to financialization, a blight that's afflicted schools and politics and healthcare alike, all to the detriment of life on this slowly collapsing planet. The silver living is that plenty of people, especially the younger generation, have already made and articulated these connections. The dark cloud, however, is a settler-colonial empire whose subjects would largely prefer to sustain an illusion right until they're at the waterfall's edge. For that, I have neither hope nor optimism.
--
Are reparations the only answer for Baltimore? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. On the micro-level, communities of color are being terrorized and traumatized by the everyday violence of this city. But on the macro-level, racism is deeply entrenched and close to intractable without radical change. That's the argument Laurence Brown, one of the smartest scholars on Twitter, makes in this interview. Efforts to redress the historical wrongs suffered by Baltimore have been demonstrably inadequate. Much larger efforts are needed. (Even the Baltimore Sun has been paying attention, and while the paper itself is commonly an embarrassment, it can be a good barometer for how mainstream ideas of racial justice are becoming.) You can look at some very useful maps of the "Black Butterfly" (Brown's coinage) here. Since the conditions are historical, structural, and ongoing, there can be no piece-by-piece amelioration. It must be part of a concerted reconfiguration of how Baltimore is organized along racial boundaries.
Japan will recognize indigenous Ainu people for the first time.
Yet this is affecting the white and well-off as well. And that's most likely why it's netting some attention lately. The problem is that it's a decentralized problem, so previous efforts to organize (LGBT people against AIDS, the Civil Rights movement against segregated poverty) are not being replicated in a modern context. I think there are two interesting things to consider here. First, the atomized middle class has less sense of social cohesion, so they experience this structural problem as a personal one (with all the attending guilt, shame, and despair). Second, this new and widespread precarity could manifest in unexpected ways. I think back to Bue Rubner's Viewpoint essay on Catalonia all the time, in which he persuasively argues that the 15M movement grew so large because the petulant middle class traversed their usual social strata. It remained a temporary alliance, and one which served Catalonia very little in the end, but it suggests that middle class in anxiety can lead to leftward drift. I believe we are seeing that with the Millennial generation in the US, who are rapidly flanking the Democrats from the left.
The question would then be if this alliance has any more value for the US left than it did for the Catalan/Spanish left. I'm not optimistic. If a pragmatic liberal-leftism is oriented toward gaining what its participants consider "rightfully theirs," then those young white college graduates will wave goodbye to their truly oppressed peers once a middle class lifestyle opens back up to them. It's depressingly easy to imagine this scenario; look how the boomers turned out, after all. The work lies in reframing student debt as something more than an obstacle to the perpetuation of an economic system that's already untenable. A more radical critique would bring down the entire system with it, connecting student debt to financialization, a blight that's afflicted schools and politics and healthcare alike, all to the detriment of life on this slowly collapsing planet. The silver living is that plenty of people, especially the younger generation, have already made and articulated these connections. The dark cloud, however, is a settler-colonial empire whose subjects would largely prefer to sustain an illusion right until they're at the waterfall's edge. For that, I have neither hope nor optimism.
--
Are reparations the only answer for Baltimore? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. On the micro-level, communities of color are being terrorized and traumatized by the everyday violence of this city. But on the macro-level, racism is deeply entrenched and close to intractable without radical change. That's the argument Laurence Brown, one of the smartest scholars on Twitter, makes in this interview. Efforts to redress the historical wrongs suffered by Baltimore have been demonstrably inadequate. Much larger efforts are needed. (Even the Baltimore Sun has been paying attention, and while the paper itself is commonly an embarrassment, it can be a good barometer for how mainstream ideas of racial justice are becoming.) You can look at some very useful maps of the "Black Butterfly" (Brown's coinage) here. Since the conditions are historical, structural, and ongoing, there can be no piece-by-piece amelioration. It must be part of a concerted reconfiguration of how Baltimore is organized along racial boundaries.
Japan will recognize indigenous Ainu people for the first time.
Friday, February 8, 2019
Week 21
Absolutely fantastic writing from one of my favorite thinkers. There are tons of things going on in her prepared talk, but the musical trend observations alone are worth savoring:
Next, a great post from Isiah Medina on pseudo-intellectualism masquerading as its opposite, and how that plays out aesthetically + politically.
This one's not an endorsement: MarketWatch considers the ailing US economy and its stressful impact on kids and families. They are largely right in their structural orientation, but their enthusiastic assent to the economic status quo under study is just bizarre. I found this article through Malcolm Harris, who wryly noted that it covered the same topic as his own book and decided that, more or less, everything's fine as is.
Some fun reflections from the Sugarhill Gang on hip-hop's 40th birthday.
No one will miss cars when they're gone, and I'm breathlessly awaiting that day. Car culture is a death cult I don't want to be killed by.
Digging into Rivette's film criticism. I need a lot more context than I have right now, but I was intrigued by the characterization of the Cahiers critics as being indifferent/hostile to material-based experimental cinema. I guess this is where more Bazin might help! Still, it's definitely an avenue worth walking down at some point.
This one's not an endorsement: MarketWatch considers the ailing US economy and its stressful impact on kids and families. They are largely right in their structural orientation, but their enthusiastic assent to the economic status quo under study is just bizarre. I found this article through Malcolm Harris, who wryly noted that it covered the same topic as his own book and decided that, more or less, everything's fine as is.
Some fun reflections from the Sugarhill Gang on hip-hop's 40th birthday.
No one will miss cars when they're gone, and I'm breathlessly awaiting that day. Car culture is a death cult I don't want to be killed by.
Digging into Rivette's film criticism. I need a lot more context than I have right now, but I was intrigued by the characterization of the Cahiers critics as being indifferent/hostile to material-based experimental cinema. I guess this is where more Bazin might help! Still, it's definitely an avenue worth walking down at some point.
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