Status Updates From The Dialectics of Liberation

Carmichael/Ture - "the resistance to doing anything meaningful about institutionalized racism stems from the fact that western society enjoys its luxury from institutionalized racism, and therefore, were it to end institutionalized racism, it would in fact destroy itself"

Goldmann -- of course the literary analysis chapter is the most dense for no reason 😂 I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly new here but I think I need to reread it to be sure. I will say that his predictions for the future are so far By Far the most accurate. When he was talking about the McDonaldization of higher ed fifty years before the term was even invented? Boy howdy.

Goodman - provoking ideas that would make me want to read more by him but his anti-Blackness is yikes level

Sweezy - his observation of reality is helpful in making the obvious visible but wow his predictions for the future were so off

Gerassi - America was built on prosperity preaching

Jules - selling fear in exchange for docility

Bateson - Malthusianism but make it groovy

Laing - awesome and inspiring and makes me rethink some things about advocacy work

“Needless to say, the dissolution of the existing system is the precondition for such qualitative change.”

... the chief use of schooling is to break the spirit...

“one of the ‘achievements’ of the modern world is to incorporate war directly into the social system, while defining the enemy as outside it”

“My guess is that most people feel guilty at not doing what they are told, even though they think it is wrong, and even though they mistrust those who give the orders. They feel guilty at trusting their own mistrust.”

“I shall give you an example, a story ... that I regard it as only slightly excessively normal. A boy of three is held by his mother out of a sixth-storey window by his neck. His mother says: ‘See how much I love you.’ The demonstration being that if she did not love him she would drop him.”
Is this what the US government thought on September 11th? "We love you so we will aid in killing you for your own benefit"...

“We do not have to ask why an increasing number of the world’s inhabitants hate us Europeans and the U.S.A.”