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“I don’t like this expression ‘First World problems.’ It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”

— Teju Cole

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secondhand time: the last of the soviets, by svetlana alexeivich

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Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones. But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. 'A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts', Mead said. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.

Ira Bycock, The Best Care Possible

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Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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The probable origin of my years-long pursuit of alternative - utopian -surrogacy is a memory from childhood I only lately realized I’ve been harboring. It is a memory that pertains to a traumatic conversation with my father. He was driving me, my mother, and my brother home from an amateur play that some friends had staged in their garden. Musing incredulously on its themes, I recall cheerfully asking from the back seat: ‘but, Dad, it’s ridiculous. If you found out that we (my brother and I) were actually the biological children of the milkman, you wouldn’t love us any less all of a sudden, would you?’ I had meant it as a rhetorical question only. But there was a stony, awkward silence that made clear to me I was not going to get the answer I needed. I felt so devastated that, for the rest of the drive, I could not speak.

Sophie Lewis - Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family (via class-struggle-anarchism)

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“Rather than returning to the family in the face of its destruction under capitalism, we should seek to create a world where the haven of the family is not necessary. Rather than a society full of broken families, we need a society where someone without a family can thrive as well as someone with family intact. This is what “abolishing the family” truly means: to end the economic relations of dependence of wives and children on the patriarch so that kinship is based on voluntary relationships of genuine love and community. This would entail not ending the ability of parents to raise their children, but instead giving children the option to leave their families if they are abusive, while retaining support networks beyond the misery of foster care. It would mean ending the unpaid domestic labor of women that reproduces the nuclear family, by socializing this work and removing its gendered connotations.”

— Donald Parkinson, Faith, Family and Folk: Against the Trad Left

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This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!

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“Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. ‘Cops don’t beat up burglars,’ he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from the police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts it, ‘define the situation.’ That is, to say ‘no, this isn’t a possible crime situation, this is a citizen-who-pays-your-salary-walking-his-dog situation, so shove off,’ let alone the invariably disastrous, ‘wait, why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn’t do anything!’ It’s ‘talking back’ above all that inspires beat-downs, and that means challenging whatever administrative rubric has been applied by the officer’s discretionary judgment. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together.”

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.  (via locusimperium)

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“If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed.”

— Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation

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Thatcher was also thoroughly neglectful of the scope for her economic reforms to unbalance the British economy. As Moore acknowledges, she never thought through the possibility that her right-to-buy scheme for council homes would create a housing shortage in the long run and fuel a destructive property bubble. The present mess in British politics owes as much to the incoherence of her political thinking as it does to her supposed radicalism.

David Runciman, “Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat”, LRB

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Thatcher’s focused, blinkered, relentless style of politics didn’t bring clarity as is so often claimed. It brought a hotchpotch of small revolutions that could appear like, but didn’t amount to, a much larger one. Along with her fixations she had massive blind spots.

David Runciman, “Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat”, LRB

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The truth is that ideas were weapons for Thatcher, and she liked to use them in hand-to-hand combat. She was not, contrary to her reputation, a big-picture politician. She took the big pictures of others and fashioned them into sticks she could beat people with. The famous story of her banging a table with a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty – ‘This, gentlemen, is what we believe!’ – is revealing more for what she was doing than for what she was reading. Books were for making a point, forcefully enough for the point to carry.

David Runciman, “Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat”, LRB

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Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

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There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist - most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn’t seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction - even from those who call themselves “progressives” - is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (via probablyasocialecologist)

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“Capitalism, he [Berger] wrote in Ways of Seeing, “survives by forcing the majority to define their own interests as narrowly as possible”. It was narrowness he set himself against, the toxic impulse to wall in or wall off. Be kin to the strange, be open to difference, cross-pollinate freely. He put his faith in the people, the whole host of us. Host: there’s another curious word, lurking at the root of both hospitality and hospital. It means both the person who offers hospitality, and the group, the flock, the horde. It has two origins: the Latin for stranger or enemy, and also for guest. It was Berger’s gift, I think, to see that this kind of perception or judgment is always a choice, and to make a case for kindness: for being humane, whatever the cost.”

— Olivia Laing. (via kuanios)

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“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale. […] There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.”

— Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 

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—MARK FISHER, from ‘The Weird and the Eerie’.