Scott F replied to emmadilemma's status
@emmadilemma@book.dansmonorage.blue this was good!
Voracious reader.
This link opens in a pop-up window
@emmadilemma@book.dansmonorage.blue this was good!
Woe betide a bus that happened to arrive just after a train had come in. Within seconds it would fall victim to the sort of feeding frenzy usually associated with the jungle: a grazing beast laid low by predators.
— The maintenance of headway by Magnus Mills (Page 67)
It was a clothbound octavo volume that had clearly passed through many hands. ... The text was cramped, and composed into versicles.
— Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (Page 481)
octavo, n. A sheet of paper 7 to 10 inches high and 4.5 to 6 inches wide. It is made by folding the original sheet three times to produce eight leaves.
versicle, n. In poetry and songs, one of a series of lines that are shorter than a standard line of verse.
from "The Book of Sand"
A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."
To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins …
A great book, recommended if the subject of whether or not capitalism is somehow natural or inevitable interests you. It grounds that question in history while being written in approachable everyday language that presumes no specialized knowledge — not an academic tome. I learned so much and agree with the blurb by Adrienne Rich on the back: "The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution."
To summarize: there's a pervasive notion that capitalism is inevitable as a result of drives built into human nature. This is SO pervasive in fact that even capitalism's biggest critics — committed Marxists — have often assumed it, writing histories in which capitalism naturally resulted once international trade reached a certain level, or once barriers that were holding capitalism back (feudal privilege, etc) were removed. Ellen Meiksins Wood says, actually no: those histories are using capitalism to explain capitalism, assuming that even before capitalism, people wanted above all to do things like lower the unit cost of production that only make sense according to capitalist logic. International trade and urbanization did not result in capitalism in the golden age of the Dutch Republic, and the end of feudalism did not result in capitalism in France. Specific changes to the relations of production and property in England created, not just market opportunities, but market imperatives in which people were forced to turn to the market for everyday needs. That created capitalism, and England then spread the reach of those imperatives to the rest of the world.
What's not sketched out here, only vaguely hinted at in the conclusion, is how we can use this knowledge to theorize (let alone build) a better system. After all, Wood is under no illusions that the immediate pre-capitalist system of feudalism provided a great life for most people, acknowledging frankly that there, too, there was a privileged class that exploited another. Knowing how the world transitioned from one bad system to another doesn't provide you with a good system, but it does at least show us that market imperatives are not, in fact, the automatic result of inescapable human nature.
@sanae I liked how Eskor David Johnson's Pay As You Go invented its own fictional city that although obviously inspired by New York City allowed the author to kind of go wild without us being all, "nooooo that building is on 27th Street not 34th!"
To date, lacking a complete theory of statistical learning, artificial neural networks and deep learning are still at the epistemic stage of experiments. In other words, they are machines of unknown potentialities and unpredictable failures.
— Eye of the Master by Matteo Pasquinelli (Page 217)
Tanton's individual persistence was at its root made possible by the greater persistence of wealth across generations in the United States, coming to fruition in the hundreds of millions of dollars that Cordelia Scaife May left to the Colcom Foundation when she died. What endures is not any individual or personality but capital and institutions. Tanton's best political skill was not his analysis or his rhetoric but his ability to flatter wealthy racists. He was not a great theoretician, leader, or organizer but an adroit servant of capitalists' self-interest. This is how the capitalist class exerts power—not by engaging in democratic politics but by creating a bulwark against it.
— Blood Red Lines by Brendan O'Connor (Page 74)
🔥🔥🔥 (on an influential dude in the anti-immigrant movement)
@jacky I was surprised how much this book turned out to be about US foreign policy as opposed to the workings of the media in general. They could easily have used domestic examples for the concept of manufacturing consent as well. For example, the recent manufacturing of consent to push Biden to drop out. (Not knocking it; I learned a lot)
At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.
The book is organized in four chapters:
At its best (chapters 2-3), this is an informative overview and analysis of various mutual aid programs and experiments in radical democracy that have been tried. Unfortunately, when it got around to its core concept of the "lifehouse," a maximally self-reliant community center and mutual aid hub, I felt like I was reading something closer to a daydream than the "practical guide" advertised on the back cover. The author doesn't appear to have drawn on any experience actually trying to build such a thing, despite having criticized Murray Bookchin precisely for lacking practical knowledge of how his (Bookchin's) proposed municipal assemblies would actually work.
The book is organized in four chapters:
@emmadilemma@book.dansmonorage.blue I wasn't going to say anything, but cringed when you started it: his consulting work in SF did not impress me.
Violence is about the only way to influence another that does not require some sort of mediation. This has two effects. For one thing, it means that violence is one of the simplest forms of action to represent. Its representation requires the least psychological skill or subtlety. But more important, perhaps, by concentrating on violence as the ultimate form of politics, the narrators deny the very importance of what they are doing in telling these stories. It could even be taken as a way of disguising the actual mechanisms by which power is reproduced in the very act of its reproduction.
— Lost People by David Graeber (Page 134)
@kingrat@sfba.club why is this book having a moment now? did it just win some award?
apparently, Graeber considered this to be his best book. although it seems like it would only be of interest to researchers on Malagasy history and culture, he explains, "This is a book...about what it means to act politically; to act historically; and about the point at which one begins to slip into the other" and argues "the best way to gain insight into such pan-human questions is to look at people who seem to go about the same things in the most unfamiliar ways." (30-1)
if you read Pirate Enlightenment, which was marketed (dubiously) as the next great hit from the co-author of the bestselling Dawn of Everything, you've read what was really intended as something more like an appendix to this.
In the nineties, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose[...] cell phones and Web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance[...]
— The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (Page 302 - 303)
a trend even more true today, despite the dated use of "Web surfing"