nin. > Recent Status Updates

“When historical time has ceased to develop qualitatively on the inside and only pertains, as a series of stages, to the outside, it follows, critically, that outside opposition is irrational, if not downright criminal, while political quarrels on the inside can only take the form of an appeal to the principles and promise of the timeless, universal truth of the Origin.” … 1/5

“Yet the very same axioms can result in quite the opposite stance: when the Calvinist trope is fused, as it easily was, with a vibrantly secular and republican ideology, conceived around a spatiotemporal opposition between the New and the Old World, there opens up the possibility of a kind of interventionism drastically to redo the outside, to purify and clear it so to speak.” …

“Arguments along these lines would seem to land me in the diffuse debate about American exceptionalism. However, I do not want to go through all the preliminaries and caveats necessary to say anything substantial in that context.“

y’all don’t get, it’s not clocking to you, not only he’s standing on business, he is so fucking funny

“Ideologically, the US way of being toward the world has been at once massively traditional and strikingly arbitrary. On the one hand there is the inclination to invoke master narratives about the nation’s place in world history; on the other there is the tendency to abrupt changes and arbitrary action in actual policy.” …

“The US attitude toward the European system of international relations had always been problematic: surface acceptance amid relative geopolitical seclusion, punctuated by erratic and limited participation. One reason for this variance was that the United States, far more than the Soviet Union, was (and is) a world empire.” …

“For what drives diplomatic history in the United States is political controversy. Without it, the field has no direction, no character, no shape or form, no vivacity. This central feature is ultimately grounded in the fact that any analysis of the relationship to the outside world puts into question the very identity of the United States as an entity and a project.” …

“Yet beyond the conjuncture here, my attempts were really informed by the alarming fact, true then as it is true today, regrettable then as it is regrettable today, that everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in the world.”

bar.

“European nations pulled this trick off because they could. In other words they, afford it. The fact is, however, that the gas supplies that Europe successfully hoovered up from elsewhere in the world were ones on which other, poorer world regions –now priced out –were themselves substantially relying in order not to be pitched into their very own gas and electricity nightmare. …

yes, i do tune in sometimes to ezra klein sometimes, how did you know????

(also the reviews on this one are wild, wtf?)

he had me in the first half, ngl

“Neofeudalism helps account for why “class” fails to organize politics today, why left politics is so perpetually fragmented, and why the left has a hard time connecting to workers. In the so-called advanced economies, class no longer functions as a powerful political identity. The perspective of working people is not associated with an orientation to the future.“

contd. in the comments.

“Capitalism isn’t an alternative to neofeudalism. The drive to accumulate is transforming its own laws of motion from competition, investment, and improvement to hoarding, predation, and destruction. While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect.”

Capital isn’t dead. It is digging its own grave. Capitalist laws of motion are reflexively folding in on themselves and becoming something no longer recognizably capitalist. Processes long directed outward—through colonialism and imperialism—are turning inward in ways that undermine capitalist laws of motion and repeat accumulation strategies typical of feudalism: rent-seeking, plunder, and political control.

“I believe that Africa’s susceptibility to cynicism and corruption comes from the fact that African independence was not won in the crucible of war. The people have never been united, through crisis, in the self-abnegation, work, and sacrifice that would have prepared them for the tasks of new nationhood. … 1/2

“In the United Nations, in an extraordinary session, men spoke of the young black who had been assassinated “somewhere over there” in Africa, while outside, American blacks rioted and were clubbed down as they shouted, “Long live Lumumba!”

From that day on, a once indifferent world was to have a new recognition of the deep ties binding black people together.”

“From his side of the river Patrice saw his wife brutally seized by the soldiers. It was then he made an unforgivable mistake… [and] betrayed the Congolese people. He ordered the ferryman to take him back across the river. …[Those] with him, begged Patrice not to go back, for the life of the whole nation was at stake. But Lumumba could hear only his wife’s cries on the other side of the river. He returned.”

“The Congo was sinking, the Congo was dying, and the best of its children was soon to be assassinated. Still the Congo danced. Perhaps the heart was less festive, but the dancing did not stop. Before the curfew, around the crates of beer, the Congo danced.
Cut off in his residence, Patrice Lumumba lived his last days with courage and daring.”

“He inherited a scene set for disaster. Government officials and businesspeople were resigning. People in the professions were leaving en masse. The Belgians had not trained replacements. … The workforce was made up only of copying clerks, blue-collar workers, and laborers. The most basic services began to go to pieces. As the Belgians had hoped.”

not me reading fiction 😇

“When people have been abused and deprived of their humanness for too long, it becomes hard for them to imagine that a better life is possible. Even when they realize that they deserve better, they still may lack the means to reach out for it. And once they are resolved that they will be cheated no longer, still they may not know the correct path on which to move forward.”

granted, i don’t usually read dedications/ acknowledgements but this book includes them in the Preface to Edition chapters and the dedication written in the preface to the 1st edition is one of the loveliest and nicest ones i’ve ever seen.

like it unironically made me go “awwwwwww 🥹🥹🥹🫶” out-loud.

“I don’t blame black men for their ways. They were taught to treat their wives the way the whites treated them. This seemed normal in a hierarchy of power rather than a relation of feelings. To show little respect for their wives was the only way that they could assert that they were men. The wife of the black man, then, suffered the double injustice of her husband’s authority as well as the white’s scorn.”

“The mayor was an impressive-looking man. In the colonial system they always were. They were chosen to scare the Africans, to intimidate them with the white man’s authority. He was an insignificant person, about whom no one would have given a second thought in France. But in Africa he had achieved power and prestige. More:he had the privilege of meting out life or death over the people in his little territory.”

“If the whites hadn’t come to Africa, where would the blacks be today?” To which I would answer, “Look at it: if the blacks hadn’t been here, where would the whites be today?”

“I knew that, as a witness to his racism, I was an accomplice to it.”

“I would like to explain the special position that they [Portuguese] held in the colonialist system, and at Brazzaville. Most of the Portuguese had been poor in their own country, and they arrived in Africa as sailors. They were illiterate, with no pretensions of any kind—the proletariat. On Africa’s warm shores they saw they could have a better life than in Portugal. …”

“The historical movement of ‘geopolitical’ expropriation (imperialism) which brought about the partial integration of non-European peoples into the world market (in some cases effected by a forced ‘liberation’ of labour) appears in its outcome, the world of independent ‘nation-states’, as the sovereign emancipation of the peoples.” 1/2

“The main factor which prevented non-European societies from being treated in the same way was the very different social structure of those societies, in which labour was not a ‘thing’ able to be commanded by money, production was oriented towards subsistence, and financial investment was therefore unable to lay hold of the means of wealth-creation.”

“Far from being just another great power [the United States, historically], this great, defining fixture of postwar international relations is the child of the industrial-capitalist transformation of Europe. Indeed, having no formal ethnic definition, its national (constitutional) identity is practically indistinguishable from the purest ideological expression of capitalist relations of production.”

"It would be better to insist upon the simple and powerful conception of fairness that informs the basic principle of carbon pricing, then leave it up to politicians to ply their trade, by devising ways of convincing the electorate to do the right thing."

for book that is self described as the "realistic way to get some climate legislature"-this is your mission statement?your thesis how things are ought to be done??