Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague

[redsquirrel]

Don't think the latest Cristicuffs/GKN piece has been published yet.

Love of the state in the time of Covid

“The State is back”: the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a new spotlight on the actions of the State. Democratic states have taken steps that seem unthinkable in normal times -- nationalising industries, coordinating the distribution of useful goods, paying the wage bill of millions of workers, effectively closing down many businesses and making it a criminal offence to leave the home without a "reasonable excuse". It is therefore worth asking if the authority ruling over us is remaking itself.

 

[LDC]

Article by author of one of the best books I've read for a long time (Hinterland) in The Brooklyn Rail

Crowned Plague | The Brooklyn Rail

In spring the winter weight of snow trickles off the stone steps of the basilica in small, shimmering rivulets, a microcosm of the many streams glittering through the foothills of the unyielding Dolomites, or maybe more a mirror of the intricate alpine network of alte vie and vie ferrate...

brooklynrail.org

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Yer communizers are at it again:

Onward Barbarians by Endnotes

The struggles of 2011-2013 that shook the world, and the uprisings that began in 2019, are not anomalies. They are part of a growing accumulation of struggles that began with the economic crisis of 2008. In this midstream balance sheet of the current cycle of struggles, which increasingly wear...

endnotes.org.uk

 

[LDC]

Yer communizers are at it again:

Onward Barbarians by Endnotes

The struggles of 2011-2013 that shook the world, and the uprisings that began in 2019, are not anomalies. They are part of a growing accumulation of struggles that began with the economic crisis of 2008. In this midstream balance sheet of the current cycle of struggles, which increasingly wear...

endnotes.org.uk

Downloaded that to read earlier, I think it's by Phil Neel the author of Hinterland. Is it any good? I love me a bit of communization.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

Downloaded that to read earlier, I think it's by Phil Neel the author of Hinterland. Is it any good? I love me a bit of communization.

I'm reading it at the moment. It starts well, with an upbeat account of an uptick over the last decade of protests and strikes. Then some stuff about class perspectives being clouded by identity politics which was... OK. I started glazing over after this when we got heavily into Bordiga territory though. It is quite long and probably not something to get stuck into straight after work

 

[Lurdan]

Yer communizers are at it again:

Onward Barbarians by Endnotes

The struggles of 2011-2013 that shook the world, and the uprisings that began in 2019, are not anomalies. They are part of a growing accumulation of struggles that began with the economic crisis of 2008. In this midstream balance sheet of the current cycle of struggles, which increasingly wear...

endnotes.org.uk

Cheers - been feeling a little glum and the last paragraph of that gave me the first real belly laugh I've had in ages.

(And I see issue 5 is now online. I was a little curious about the debate over one of the articles but had no desire to pay to read it. Now I can 'put it on the to-read list'. Or words to that effect ).

 

[cloudyday]

Short piece by Agamben on pandemic induced state capitalism 2.0

Communist Capitalism • Ill Will

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that a technologically updated configuration of state capitalism now serves as the ruling principle of globalized capitalism.

illwilleditions.com

 

[hitmouse]

I still haven't finished reading that barbarians piece, partly because I kept getting distracted by the endnotes, appropriately enough. I did notice there'd been a bit of follow-up debate on twitter, because of course if you want to discuss the nuances of a ten-million word article, why wouldn't you do it on a site designed for small children with such a strict word limit that you have to post fifty times in a row to make a normal paragraph?
Anyway, to try and summarise:
1) Bue Rubner:


2) Endnotes reply:


3) Bue Rubner's reply to Endnotes' reply:


4) Rodrigo Nunes gets involved:


I was going to try to copy-paste all the relevant text, but stripping out [poster name post date] from every second sentence gets a bit exhausting.

 

[Lurdan]

of course if you want to discuss the nuances of a ten-million word article, why wouldn't you do it on a site designed for small children with such a strict word limit that you have to post fifty times in a row to make a normal paragraph?

Wouldn't be quick to knock it. It does (mostly) stop people banging on. And since it obliges them to focus on the points they wish to make it can also prevent them from concealing or muting those with a lot of fol de rol.

I was going to try to copy-paste all the relevant text, but stripping out [poster name post date] from every second sentence gets a bit exhausting.

If I can offer some tips - apologies if they are old news but they might be useful to others.

Where tweets are threaded they can be archived using the threaderreaderapp service. Reply to the thread with

@threadreaderapp unroll

You will get a reply with a link to a page on threadereaderapp.com with the thread archived as a webpage. Here for example is the reply thread from endnotes.

Worth going to the threadreaderapp home page and putting the twitter handle of the thread author in. It will bring up a page with any already unrolled threads by them. Someone may already have unrolled the thread you're interested in. And you can also see what other pearls the author has previously cast. Here for example are the previously unrolled threads by bue rübner. hmmm.

Threadreaderapp doesn't permanently archive threads. If the original thread gets edited or deleted or made private it's gone. So for 'important' stuff - for example things that might be evidence for the Committee of Public Safety on Day 2 - you will need to back them up yourself. You can save PDFs from the threadreaderapp page. To create online archived pages that you can link to, the service at archive.vn currently works well, and individual pages can also be saved at archive.org.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

 

[Lurdan]

‘What an utter shitstorm!’ – AngryWorkers look back on their 2020 – Angry Workers of the World

Angry review of books

In 2020 we’d surely spent enough time reading on the sofa. This resulted in a few book reviews. We start with Vasily Grossman’s ‘Everything Flows’, followed by thoughts on Endnotes no.5. Did you know that you get 100 times more views if you write about Endnotes compared to reports on week-long violent occupations of multinational automobile factories in India?!

 

[hitmouse]

Not had time to fully read through the new Research & Destroy yet, but past stuff from them has been very good (imo), and they immediately get points for coining the term Q-pidity:

The Dilemma • Ill Will

Political economy for the time of monsters

illwilleditions.com

 

[butchersapron]

Here's a piece looking at South African shysters but also making a large number of on the ball points about the wider aspects

Long Read | Conspiracies in far-right politics

Paranoia that the Covid-19 vaccine will be used to subjugate people is rampant. The truth, that capitalism doesn’t hide its devilry, is far simpler – and harder to swallow.

www.newframe.com

As South Africa continues to deal with the social and economic turmoil of the pandemic, a vocal anti-vaccine backlash has emerged. Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook are awash with disinformation and unsupported claims about hidden medical cabals, religious paranoia around satanism and the occult overlap with QAnon and other far-right beliefs.

...

The trade union movement in South Africa, and elsewhere, has an impressive record of commitment to science and public health, but Congress of South African Trade Unions president Zingiswa Losi has also come out against vaccines. In Durban, ANC ward councillor S’fiso Mngadi – who grassroots activists have accused of being complicit in a series of violent and unlawful evictions – circulated a voice note with the now-standard set of Covid-19, vaccine and 5G conspiracy theories. It went viral.

...

Suspicion and anger against the authorities is often rooted in daily negative experiences, and in such stressful times, fear and anxiety are entirely understandable. If a political party that calls itself a liberation movement could loot funds allocated to deal with a severe medical crisis and preside over a series of police killings during a pandemic, anything seems possible.

...

Medical conspiracies are not entirely produced by irrational and ungrounded fears. The medical industry is often cold, impersonal and ruthlessly exploitative. The view that the pharmaceutical companies are driven by a monomaniacal search for profit rather than by a real commitment to the public good is not paranoid. It is a rational assessment of the logic of capitalism and the consequences of its capture of medical research, and the production and distribution of medicines.

 

[LDC]

The Year the World Went Viral (Dauvé, 2021)

by Gilles Dauvé, Feb 2021 Until the early days of 2020, when they spoke of “viruses”, Westerners usually meant something was wrong with their computers (Asians were arguably better info…

cominsitu.wordpress.com

 

[hitmouse]

Interesting text about Kenosha and the Rittenhouse case, probably belongs on some of the world news threads but might as well go here too:

Kenosha, I Do Mind Dying • Ill Will

In the ruin and wreckage of Kenosha, our political horizons are being redrawn in real time.

illwill.com

The outcome of this case is likely to be more armed conflicts. The legal precedents set and the unevenness of punishment will make demonstrations increasingly more armed, with participants more prepared to defend themselves against lethal force. Likewise it will set a precedent in the frame of armed conflict for how to be perceived as a citizen rather than a terrorist — because governments know they need both. Visions of social revolution are being replaced by images of the Purge.

Such paranoid narratives are expressions of a world in which consensus reality has collapsed. We are losing not only the epistemological foundations to ground our perceptions, but the very ability to ask ourselves nuanced and difficult questions. Kyle Rittenhouse’s lawyers claim he acted in self-defense. His supporters believe a narrative in which he came to Kenosha as a civic-minded do-gooder, who was then attacked and had to shoot. Pundits on the right believe he was nothing less than a hero who gave Antifa what they had coming. The prosecution claims he acted recklessly and committed homicide. Liberals and portions of the left believe Rittenhouse is a white supremacist who came to Kenosha to act on his fascist beliefs. But on the night of August 25, nothing felt so clear. There were signs of each of these narratives — dog whistles, if you had the ear for them — but truth was obscured by a dark cloud of assumptions and tensions. If you were there, the polarity against the police was suddenly rerouted and the face of the adversary contorted. You had to gaze into a fog of flashing lights, rage, and gunmen to attempt to perceive reality.

Rittenhouse is the logical fusion of the liberal and conservative narratives surrounding the George Floyd Rebellion, which always converged in their paranoid belief that everything that happened that summer was the act of some opportunistic and sinister outsider. Did Rittenhouse act in self-defense? Maybe — I don’t give a shit. Did he act without thought, kill two people and wound another? Yes. Do you want a teenager to die in prison? Not really, but god, fuck him. I don’t know. The story is a tragedy that our conspiracy theories can’t handle. The painful ethical question is: would it have been better that Kyle Rittenhouse met judgement that night, outside the law? Maybe, no? I don't know. Two people would still be dead. The tragedy might have been felt more clearly, the cosmos more balanced in trauma, and maybe some people would have reconsidered how many pounds of flesh they were willing to sacrifice.

 

[Fozzie Bear]

This from some comrades in Greece is very good on anti-authoritarian anti-vaxxers etc

The Reality of Denial and the Denial of Reality

Antithesi / cognord Download PDF This text was written and published in Greek in September 2021. It was meant as a polemic intervention in a debate around the questions of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the…

curedquailjournal.wordpress.com