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Three Good Links

@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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There is an explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation and contemporary forms of resource extraction and appropriation. In each of these instances, there is a constitutive denial of the fact that we, the humans, coevolve with the biosphere, depend on it, are defined with and through it and owe each other a debt of responsibility and care.

Achille Mbembe interviewed by Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen of the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen published in New Frame. Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe

Focusing on the global implications of decolonisation, Achille Mbembe calls for the reformation of reason as a shared human faculty towards repairing and caring for life.

#decolonization#plantationocene#knowledge#world society#algorithms
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This is not about Omar anymore, or the other women of color who have been told by this president to “go back” to their supposed countries of origin. It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans do now, in the face of this, will define us forever.

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. What Americans Do Now Will Define Us Forever

If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.

#white nationalism#whitesupremacy#democracy#civic nationalism#world society
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www.beacon.org

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this significantly prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, we find King’s acute analysis of American race relations and the state of the movement after a decade of civil rights efforts. Here he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America’s future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, powerfully asserting that humankind—for the first time—has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

#book#martin luther king jr#world society
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Can we draw a link between the intricate and often modest work of writers and translators, and the bold and costly actions of people like Pia Klemp and Scott Warren? Is the work of literature connected to the risks some people undertake to save others? I believe so—because acts of language can themselves be acts of courage, just as both literature and activism alert us to the arbitrary and essentially conventional nature of borders

Teju Cole in The New York Review of Books. Carrying a Single Life: On Literature and Translation

Adapted from a keynote address that was given at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, on June 18, 2019.

#borders#crossing borders#world society#literature
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This time is a step forward in the process of geo-genesis. We cannot go back and shut us down, as Trump intends, in our national boundaries with diminished consciousness. We have to adapt to this new step that the Earth has taken, this living super-organism, according to the Gaia thesis. We are at the moment of awareness and understanding of Earth. That is why we are the Earth that feels, thinks, loves, cares and venerates. We are the only beings of nature whose ethical mission is to take care of this sacred heritage, to make it a habitable home for us and for the whole living community. We are not returning this call made by the Earth itself. Therefore, we must wake up and take this noble mission to build planetization.

Leonardo Boff at OpinionSur. Rescuing Planetization

#world society#planetization#earth#consciousness
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Gregory Whitehead

I learned about Extinction Rebellion by way of a post by Antonio Dias linking to Gregory Whitehead's blog Desperado Philosophy. I hadn't ever known Gregory Whitehead before. What a gift that link is! There is so much to explore.

I haven't really had time to explore much, but a recent post with excerpts from Leanne Simpson's essay, Land and Reconciliation, interested me.

All of his excerpts from other people's writing are images. That practice helps to assure a modicum of connection to the original work. The writing is connected with images and links which deeply inform the narratives of the post.

I'm a bit dimwitted,often not comprehending what's right in front of me. Something I'm not sure I grok is narrative structure, for example understanding the difference between comedy and tragedy. It should be so obvious--right?

I respect George Monbiot and tend to agree with his politics--to the extent I understand them. Monbiot has stressed the importance of a new political story. He notes that stories are what animate political movements. And he observes that the stories which animate politics have the same narrative structure. He names this structure the "Restoration Story."

I'm not too clear why the Restoration Story troubles me, but it does. I'm sure part of the trouble is the revanchist MAGA story of Donald Trump. That's a story I don't like very much at all.

"An Ecology of Intimacy" is Whitehead's title for the post engaging with Leanne Simpson. Simpson tells a story of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a restoration of relationships, so indeed reconciliation may fit broadly into Monbiot's "Restoration Story." But "reconciliation" suggests nonlinear linkages past and future: Round and round instead of higher and higher.

In these times where nothing will be as it was, reconciliation, "an ecology of intimacies," right relations, pulls me in a way that restoration does not.

#narratives#gregory whitehead#ecology of mind#network structure#world society#indigenous knowledge
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From our vantage point, the welfare world of the NIEO might appear utopian and unrealistic. But to dismiss the world that decolonization aspired to make is to refuse to reckon with the dilemmas we inherited from the end of empire. It is to evade our responsibility to build a world after empire. Our world, like Manley’s, is characterized by a battleground of widening inequality and ongoing domination. We cannot simply recreate the 1970s vision of a welfare world, but we can take from its architects the insight that building an egalitarian and postimperial world is the only route to true democratic self-governance.

Adom Getachew in Boston Review. When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation

In the 1970s, a bloc of Third World states forced the United Nations to take seriously the unequal distribution of global wealth. Could their example inspire a new generation?

This essay appears in Evil Empire and is adapted from Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.

#decolonize#world society#black history#politics
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If we don’t have an international connection against the imperial forces that are coming at us, we’re going under.

Cornel West in interview with Sharmini Peries at The Real News Network. Dr. Cornel West on the Global Shift Right

From Trump in the U.S. to Bolsonaro in Brazil, ordinary people in large democracies are discontented and shifting right, what can progressives do about it?  Cornel West in conversation with Sharmini Peries

#empire#fascisim#world society#politcs
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We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.

Kwame Anthony Appiah in iainews.  The Lies That Bind Us

Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses how identities form, trap or set us free

#identity#world society#morality
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This legacy is important for us today, because James understood that the Enlightenment, though conceived and initiated (for historical reasons, not genetic ones) mainly by privileged white European men, is the common property of all of humanity. Indeed, it was the struggle of those who were initially excluded, like black people, against a background of colonial domination and racial subordination that brought the seemingly abstract Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality closer to concrete reality; the Haitian revolution, which he documented so majestically in The Black Jacobins, is an embodiment of this struggle. What the French started in 1789, the Haitians completed in 1804. For James, then, the Enlightenment, and the struggle to complete it, was and still is a global, and hence a universal, project.

Ralph Leonard at UnHerd. CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

He rails against the superficial nonsense that masquerades as 'anti-racism'

#clr james#humaanism#world society
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Despite a foreign policy that frequently retreated into isolationism or hyper-nationalism or brutal wars, since the end of World War II a surprising number of Americans have immersed themselves in the wider world, arguably far more deeply than any other people on the planet. The old European colonial empires were state enterprises, but the U.S. imperium has been, in significant ways, a people’s project (as well, of course, in Washington’s coups and wars, as an anti-people’s project).

Alfred McCoy in TomDispatch. Beyond Golden Shower Diplomacy Preserving the Positive Legacy of an Empire in Decline

#american foreign policy#law#world society
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In short, human rights, while not culpable for neoliberalism, have served, to paraphrase Rousseau, as “garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down […] [making] them love their slavery [by turning] them into what are called civilized people.” To use a different metaphor: Human rights served as the spoonful of moral sugar that made the bitter medicine of neoliberalism easier to swallow.

Nils Gilman at Los Angeles Review of Books. Human Rights and Neoliberalism

Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World  by Samuel Moyn

#world society#neoliberalism#capitalism#human rights#law#book
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Twenty-five years on from the publication of the first edition of The Black Atlantic in 1993, we live in a world once more besotted by various inflections of old and dated ideas of ethnic or cultural purity, a resurgence of right-wing populism and its attendant and interlinked nationalism and racism. One of many lasting merits of Gilroy’s work is his anti-essentialism, his vernacular cosmopolitanism, and his attempts to think of “the flows, exchanges, and in-between elements that call the very desire to be centered into question.” In the dark times in which we happen to live, this is easier said than done for all of us. But that is no excuse for not heeding Gilroy’s resonant calls for trying to live up to the aspirations of what is ultimately a shared human heritage.

Sindre Bangstad at Africa Is A Country. The double consciousness of Paul Gilroy

2018 marks 25 years since the publication of Gilroy’s seminal work, The Black Atlantic.

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness

#black atlantic#book#culture#epistemology#world society
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The old, ‘new racism’ remains influential, even as it gives way to today’s emergent genomic and bio-social explanations. It was the characteristic product of a phase of mass migration. And the resulting culturalist tones are still audible in the anthropological subtleties, disavowals and evasions of the raciological discourse to which it gives voice. Genteel, common sense racism finds it difficult to be overt. The cruder and more belligerent expressions of racial antipathy associated with imperial and colonial domination are regarded as unsavoury, disreputable and offensive. Nationalism and patriotism, on the other hand, are seldom judged so harshly. At least when viewed from above, those forms of solidarity are welcomed as desirable features of social and political life. They endow national communities with a necessary strength and confidence. Under their respectable banners, the standard of what counts as acceptable political commentary can become quite different. Arranged reverently around the national flagpole, the mean spirited people who sounded like nativists, racists, ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists turn out instead to be plain old patriots.

Paul Gilroy in Open Democracy, September 11, 2002. Raise your eyes

#9/11#world society#neoliberalism#racism#anti colonialism#another world is possible
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I don’t have the solutions, but if we want to come back to the question of why we exist, we at this point can say we certainly don’t exist to do routine work. We perhaps exist to create. We perhaps exist to love. And if we want to create, let’s create new types of jobs that people can be employed in. Let’s create new ways in which countries can work together. If we think we exist to love, let’s first think how we can love the people who will be disadvantaged.

Kai-Fu Lee at Edge. We Are Here To Create

#internet#world society#AI#technology#inequality
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How do we think the poor, displaced or occupied can exist when their societies are destroyed? Should they simply disappear? Can we recognise that their continued existence is an essential part of our shared humanity? If we fail to recognise this, how can we speak of “civilised” development? The refugee crisis is not about refugees, rather, it is about us. Our prioritisation of financial gain over people’s struggle for the necessities of life is the primary cause of much of this crisis. The west has all but abandoned its belief in humanity and support for the precious ideals contained in declarations on universal human rights. It has sacrificed these ideals for short-sighted cowardice and greed.

Ai Weiwei in The Guardian. The refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. It’s about us

I was a child refugee, writes the Chinese artist and activist. I know how it feels to live in a camp, robbed of my humanity. Refugees must be seen to be an essential part of our shared humanity

#the human flow#refugees#politics#world society
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