Jo’s Reviews > Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World > Status Update

"In Discourse on Colonialism, the Martinician author & politician Aimé Claire charged tht Europeans tolerated 'Nazism before it was inflicted on them.' Until these methods came home2 to European soil, 'they absolved it...shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples."

On conspiracies: "Th point, consciously or not, is2 foster denial & avoidance. Th point is not2have2do hard & uncomfortable things in th face of hard & uncomfortable realities, whether Covid or climate change, or th fact tht our nations were forged in genocide & have never engaged in a remotely serious process of makig repair. Denial is so much easier than looking inward or backwrd or4wrd; so much easier than change.

"As Gilroy-Ware puts it, 'Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy & justifiable political instinct: suspicion."

"...conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get th feelings right - th feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, th feeling that every human misery is someone else's profit; th feeling of being exhausted by predation & extraction, th feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for th system driving those feelings starts with c..."

"Bc an economic order tht contains inequalities as extreme as ours is its own kind of depravity, and that level of injustice reproduces more depravity as a matter of course."

"Power & wealth conspire to2protect themselves. It happens in public, & it happens in private. It happens under th spotlight & it happens in the shadows...we should be v careful not2b so reactive that we end up saying tht sadism & depravity do not happen, tht only a loony conspiracy theorist would believe something like so out-there. CTD

"We r now reaping th rotted harvest of decades of deliberately sown mistrust-mistrust of th very idea that we r members of communities & societies, mistrust of any expectation that governments can & should do anything positive for us. This impoverished way of seeing th world & one another has gone on for so long, expressed itself in so many dialects tht th very concept of a public good has now become foreign."

"In th neoliberal era that began in the 1970s & has not yet ended, every hardship & every difficulty - from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction - has been pathologised as a personal failing. Every success, meanwhile, is lauded as proof of the relative superiority of the supposedly self-made."

Jack Bratich: "Liberal investments in individualism result in thinking of power as residing in individuals & groups rather than structures. Without an analysis if capital or class they end up defaulting to th stories th West tells itself about th power of the individual to change th world. But hero narratives easily flip into villain narratives."

"Th persistent appeal of th vaccine-autism myth, no matter how many times & in how many ways it has been debunked, is tht it gives parents who see difference as tragedy something external to blame."