mkmk > Recent Status Updates

Absolutely perfect. I cried thrice already, something I didn't think I'd do for a non-fiction book about training dogs.

I've read many important books in the past year, but this one is perhaps the most important. Agroecology is not just about ecological food production within the capitalist system but it is actively working against the market logics in order to create a truly ecological food production with taking into account concepts such as food sovereignty, social justice and the rethinking of the metaphysics of economy.

This book is very good for beginners. The bibliography is very useful.

Subjectivation also has a physical aspect. Class, gender and race become – as we already indicated with reference to Pierre Bourdieu – bodies. They are inscribed into modes of movement, feeling and taste. Through this avenue, power is ‘naturalized’. It is reproduced by masking differences through consumption, by affirming one’s social position and by ‘self-actualizing’ oneself.

Thus the assurance that adhering to planetary boundaries gives humankind a ‘safe operating space’, as the subtitle of Rockström et al.’s famous article puts it, is not only not safe, it is even somewhat cynical. For there are already many victims today, all over the world, as a result of heavy rains, floods and droughts.

[...] an ecological state, which places ecological considerations at the core of its activities. [...] the ecological state involves an extension of state authority to new areas of social life, provides a response to perceived failures of markets and voluntary action, alters patterns of “normal” economic interaction, represents a continuing adjustment of state activity to new ecological problems [...]

preparing to read the chapter about "economic rationalism" as problem-solving for environmental problems. wish me luck...

prometheans: people who believe in earth's "endless" resources (that nature will "correct" itself) and that technology (esp geoengineering) will save us and fix climate change. HAHA crazy

Many people see themselves as enlightened when they argue that
the nonhuman world ought to be preserved: [...] as material for scientific study; for recreation, [...] Although enlightened, these reasons are all related to the instrumental value of the nonhuman world. What is missing is any sense of a more impartial, biocentric view in which the nonhuman world is considered to be of intrinsic value.

Phenomenal!

I disagree with a lot the author says, especially the chapter about ideology and hegemony.

What is accepted as a legitimate exercise of liberty is simultaneously declared illegitimate as a political institution. From the restrictive statutes governing associations to the rules applicable to petitions and demonstrations, we see the same narrowly legalistic interpretation of democracy recurring again and again [...]

Read chapter 4 for class, now going to read the whole book from the begining. It's all I've thought about for years now but couldn't put into words because I had no vocabulary to do it. Conclusion of the book: the modern renting of human beings (in the workplace) is the same as buying and selling humam beings (under slavery); it is not democratic and should be abolished!

Democracy is not just voting!

[I]f current social developments and dilemmas of public life cannot be grasped in the categories of current social theories, it is more likely that the problem lies with the theories than that ‘reality’ itself has become intrinsically ungraspable. […] If this is so, the challenge is to re-construct its explanatory categories, not to de-construct the explanatory undertaking. (Holmwood 1996: 25)

A couple adopts a cat and it's about that cat's mischiefs. Very entertaining!

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. Karl Marx and Frederick Engles (1846), Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis XI

That’s intense, he said. Thank you for saying that. I have to laugh now or I’m going to start crying.

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. [...] Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was ‘kindness’ just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

Though she said she hated the rich, her family was rich, and other wealthy people recognised her as one of their own. They took her radical politics as a kind of bourgeois self-deprecation, nothing very serious, and talked to her about restaurants or where to stay in Rome. I felt out of place in these situations, ignorant and bitter, but also fearful of being discovered as a moderately poor person and a

reading for phd be like: Afterwards I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.

life-changing, truly. pls read this if you're interested in hierarchy and if you believe it's a hoax of a modern society and that we were never meant to life like this