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Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Good Labour Rhet



Wish Labour was more consistently anti-Brexit, but won't quibble when their ads are this effectively educational. Also wish business school undergrads (if they must exist) watched this and skipped the libertopian macroeconomic miseducations they receive too often instead.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Sounds About Right...

Given that Biden is the candidate I'm least excited about I suppose there is a certain inevitability about his eventual nomination. I'm still liking Elizabeth Warren best, still paying attention to Kamala Harris (Barbara Lee's endorsement isn't something to sneeze at in my book), still open to finding Beto or Booker interesting if they manage to change course in time, still utterly unimpressed with Bernie (only his fauxvolutionary noise brigade online are worse). Sure, I'll vote for any of them over the Business School Nazi Dumbass, that should go without saying. But I will not vote for Joe Biden (or Bernie or Beto for that matter, for now) with anything remotely like joy. Given the realities of our politics and our moment, joylessness in voting is probably not the worst thing -- we should find our political joy in fighting for enlightenment creation and change at a level partisan politics and voting (however necessary, however compromised) is rarely capable of conceiving let alone managing on its own.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday Walk and Brunch

A longer than usual stroll through the summerlike beauty of this cheerful sweet-breathing April day... The upcoming week is a writing workshop and a matter of finishing up a couple of independent studies Monday, then a dense catch-up lecture Friday on Combahee and Lorde and Haraway, but also, if we can find the time, a move into environmental justice and disability studies before the queer performativity texts of the culminating week. It's something of a fever pitch, union stuff, end of term stuff, summer intensive prep, not to mention the forever ongoing staving off of fear, rage and despair in stupid disgusting Trumpmerica, etc etc etc.

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Corpse Compost

I have always found Frank Herbert's rather incidental observation of the Bene Gesserit practice of planting the dead beneath fruit trees in burial orchards a rather lovely sfnal conceit, and tho' I often declared it my own preference I knew there was little chance the option would be on offer when my own time comes. It turns out, however, that the state of Washington is on the verge of making available the next-best option I've heard of: In last year's Record of a Spaceborn Few Becky Chambers managed to make composting the dead seem quite a congenial prospect. It seems a safe bet that California will take this up soon enough if Washington reveals there is a demand for it without unforeseen downsides. Definitely I think being returned quickly to the living world after I die as compost sounds more appealing than cremation or coffin confinement, and as zany disposal methods Californians go for it sure beats pharaohnic cryonics, or getting shot into orbit, or compressed into costume jewelry (well, I can appreciate the high camp appeal of that last, even if it's not my sort of thing).

Friday, April 26, 2019

Insomniac Attack!

Teaching Foucault and Angela Davis on prisons and prison abolition again today, such a crucial pairing at any time, but the timing of the lecture co-incides fortuitously with the unusual vitality of felon franchise and abolition discussions on social media and elsewhere right now. Such important work, I'm wishing I weren't caught up in one of my periods of chronic insomnia again. I'll be lecturing on about three hours sleep today, the night before was four hours and the night before that was five. Occasionally stress, stagefright, background noise and bad habits align ruinously to bring me back to sleeplessness. I actually went into therapy a few months last year to address an especially terrible bout. Fortunately, the strategies I learned then remain mostly effective if I make sustained efforts, so I'm not really panicking about all this. I'm sure sleep will resume soon enough. For now, it rather sucks. And end of term isn't exactly the best imaginable timing for this, but there it is.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Today's Random Wilde

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Ayep

TPM:
The simple takeaway from the Mueller Report is the President betrayed his country and spent two years lying and breaking the law to try to hide that fact. He should resign and be tried for his crimes.

Sunday Walk And Brunch

April, but it might as well be June, bottle-blue sky, psychedelic blooms everywhere. Still feeling strung out and burned out and ready for end of term, frankly, three weeks out. Michel Foucault and Angela Davis on the prison this week. Enraging, inspiring, exhausting. Hope all goes well, I think the Angela Davis piece Are Prisons Obsolete? is the first piece I've taught all term with which I actually completely agree. That's rare.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, April 20, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Friday, April 19, 2019

Endorsing This Not-Yet Endorsement



Same. Same. Same.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Impeach

Not saying they will, insisting we must.

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Green New Deal Futurism

Shows what a mainstream vision the GND really amounts to, and it exposes (yet again) the bleak blinkered limits of capitalist imagination that this provokes the panic and patronizing prognostication it does... All that said, this is a heartening change of direction for Democratic framing of this issue and it is a heartening change as well how comparatively well this seems to be resonating and provoking, at least so far...

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

How About All Of Time And Space?

I have a few days' break before the final push for end-of-term and I am feeling queasy after an illness and also utterly burned out and in need of a restorative vacation... but where can I go for a few short days that will take my mind off this cruel stupid world and all the work to do done?

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, April 15, 2019

Ten Theses On Taxes And Democracy

An Amor Mundi Tax Day tradition:
One 
Hostility to taxes is commonplace among self-styled anarchists, as well as for right-wing "conservatives" whose advocacy of "smaller" or "more limited" government might as well be anarchism, since always only advocating ever smaller, ever more limited government without ever indicating what good government actually should be and alone can accomplish is substantially equivalent to blanket anti-governmentality in principle. Exploitation of discontent over taxes is also commonplace among neoliberal/neoconservative right-wing politicians and thinkers who want to ensure taxes subsidize primarily the fortunes of incumbent elites through extractive-industrial-financial corporate-militarism backed by complacent consumerism and organized violence. I for one do not want to smash states, but to democratize them. And an understanding and championing of taxes should be no less indispensable to the work of democratization as its obfuscation and demonization is indispensable to the work of anti-democratization.
Two 
Taxes are not really the price we pay for a civilized society -- in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s, influential phrase -- for civilization is priceless. This is just to say that commonwealth is not a private commodity but a public good. Taxes are not, for example, fees for discrete services that might be provided otherwise, nor are taxes a price for which there might be discount alternatives. Perhaps the true spirit of Holmes' phrase is captured best in a negative formulation: anti-tax zealots would appear to believe that civilization is the only free lunch.
Three 
Certainly taxes are not theft, as anarchists of the right and the left are so pleased to declare, since taxation is a precondition for the constitution and ongoing intelligibility of the claim to ownership on which notions of theft depend in the first place.
Four 
Neither should taxes be mischaracterized as forced contributions to what might instead be charitable causes, since the basic rights secured through taxation cannot be regarded as matters of charity else they are not truly rights but mere favors bestowed by privileged elites.
Five 
Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, burdens on our freedom so much as essential enablers of freedom. Taxes, government bonds, and public fees support the public investments maintaining the legal, infrastructural, and administrative material conditions alone within which political freedom can abide.
Six 
Taxes ameliorate undemocratic concentrations of wealth and authority to secure sufficient equity among citizens of diverse fortune. The equity valued by democracy ensures that the diversity also valued by democracy does not disable the demanding and costly democratic processes facilitating collective responsibility, expression, criticism, problem-solving and the interminable reconciliation of the aspirations of all the people with whom we share and contest the present world.
Seven 
Taxes pay for the maintenance of institutions providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes. Taxes pay to secure basic needs to ensure that the scene of consent to everyday association is reliably informed and is non-duressed by the threat of deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. And taxes pay for the accountable administration of commons and public goods without which they are inevitably violated and exploited for short-term profit-taking by minorities to the cost and risk of majorities. Far from representing quintessential state violence, taxes are the enabling condition of a democratic state facilitating nonviolence.
Eight 
Taxes coupled to representation itself ("No Taxation Without Representation") tie the maintenance of government as such -- an organization invested with legitimate recourse to force with all the clear dangers inhering in that state of affairs -- inextricably to public accountability and democratic legitimacy.
Nine 
Taxing more those who profit more by their personal recourse to the shared inheritance of human knowledge and culture, to the shared substance of precarious environmental resources on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing, and to the ongoing benefits of collaboratively maintained infrastructure, institutions, norms, trust, legitimacy, and security is not unfair in the least. Progressive taxation follows quite simply from a recognition of the indisputable fact of our radical inter-dependence as both productive and vulnerable beings in the world. This same recognition, of course, is also the foundation for fairness.
Ten 
Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, or corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is revealing his intentions. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people, to be anti-government always means to be against the great majority of the people.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Sunday Walk And Brunch

Beautiful out, but a bit subdued in the aftermath of a rough week wrestling with a bug in my head and stomach... Buying new earplugs at the Piedmont Avenue CVS after brunch I scooped up a chocolate Easter Bunny from the shelf and found that the pleasure of biting off the hollow head is quite as fun as I remembered from the last time I did it, probably well over ten years ago. Definitely will not be waiting another ten years to repeat that purest of pleasures... Last month of Spring term is upon us by now, and things will soon get a bit wild with deadlines and cancellations and end-of-term workshopping and presentations. Just a couple more lectures, then the lunacy of final grading, then we're off to summer intensives at Berkeley again for a bit. Adjunct life on the habitrail wheel.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Today's Random Wilde

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily (#IStandWithIlhanOmar Edition)

Friday, April 12, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Today's Random Wilde

And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.

Tuesday, April 09, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, April 08, 2019

Pennyversary!

We got our little kitten Penny one year ago today. Baby, playby, grayby she is, and a little softy, too.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Sunday, April 07, 2019

Sunday Walk

Wrestling with a bug, shortened our walk a bit today, feeling muzzy-headed and my stomach's rebelling against something, but my oh my how beautiful it is out today! The air is a bouquet. The breeze, lush. Spending the rest of the day prepping tomorrow's lecture, looking at a thesis draft and a couple thesis proposals as well. Perhaps some time in a nice bath with Iris Wildthyme would be just the thing.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Saturday, April 06, 2019

Today's Random Wilde

For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Friday, April 05, 2019

Teaching Day

Off to the City. So many student meetings today it's hard to keep track. In lecture today, some more Arendt, some more Foucault, some Fanon, and if time allows some Laura Mulvey and Kobena Mercer. I stuff these critical theory survey courses like Thanksgiving tofurkeys. May have a faculty observer in today, which makes it all just that much more nerve wracking. Ugh. Needless to say, insomnia reared its goblin head last night and so my brain is feeling just that much more frayed and fried as I embark on today's adventures. Promised rain appears not to be falling, which is a mercy as I'll be pounding the pavement.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Mee Daily

Thursday, April 04, 2019

Today's Random Wilde

The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Wednesday, April 03, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Tuesday, April 02, 2019

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily

Monday, April 01, 2019

Teaching Day

Off to the City. Going over lecture notes, prepping for office hours, looking at a thesis proposal, thinking through a sticky adjunct union situation, Mondays always do feel like a lot, and wouldn't you know it... it's looking like rain today, rain all week long...

Barbara Lee Speaks For Me Daily