Posts Tagged ‘links’

recent reads:

Monday, October 19th, 2015

If you’re not paranoid, you’re crazy
how to live in the world of surveillance?
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feminism as an utopian project for universal justice: an interview with nancy fraser

“The mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women! ”
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Funny Money: When the law is lawless.
a wonderful guide to the strange world of counterfeits in china. from fake money to fake universities, fake banks, even a fake government.
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Hipsters on food stamps? Stop exploiting yourselves. Working your asses off in 5 different temp jobs in order to live means the society is unfair.

“The rage directed at the figure of “a hipster on food stamps” is only intelligible in terms of the rotted ideological foundation that supports it: an ideology that simultaneously glorifies the suffering of the exploited and vilifies those among the dispossessed who are deemed to be insufficiently hardworking or self-reliant.”

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notes

Monday, March 23rd, 2015

“[The Silicon Valley]…excels in the manufacture of the immaterial and the incorporeal. It creates ideas to fill Thought Leader columns, TED talks, and conference circuits. It creates stock market flotations based on shareholder belief, and networked companies whose profits lie in disseminating other peoples’ work. Even the silicon in its name is now often manufactured overseas. So good is the Valley at nothing, in fact, that it’s spun it into a kind of cult—the myth of the “frictionless” world.”

and…oh-là-là

“A single Google search (among the billions executed every day) releases half the carbon of a boiling kettle; the company as a whole produces as much CO2 as Laos.”

The Cult of Nothing, from the Baffler

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Welcome to the world, Darling.

“The smartphone facilitates contingent employment models and self-exploitation by linking workers to capitalists without the fixed costs and emotional investment of more traditional employment relations.”

Smartphone Society, from the Jacobin

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Bidding farewell to Microsoft, Apple, and even Google? It’s not too late, yet.

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Big Brother is watching you! Un oeil sur vous – Citoyens sous surveillance. Alexandre Valenti, 2015.

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fight the umbrella fight. demand the infinite.

Thursday, October 23rd, 2014

Regarding my Heimat:

The case of Hong Kong: From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Central *Hong Kong* at LARB

Badlands Unlimited’s Reading List regarding the democracy movement in HK.

Round-up from Libcom.org

China’s choice from Project Syndicate. The delirium from “losing face”.

Guernica’s report on the first 2 weeks of demonstrations.

Salute for the “Ba-Si-Da”‘s of HKGolden on the New Republic.

The amazing language called Cantonese. And its subversive potential.

In other New Yorker news:

Looking forward to Laura Poitra’s Citizenfour

Copyright the back of your head, or not.

The Essay on the Essay’s story

 

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when will androids dream of electric sheep?

Monday, September 22nd, 2014

Why aren’t we having holidays on Mars yet? What about clothes which wash themselves? Or a robot butler which is way much smarter than the slow and stupid Roomba? Of flying cars and the declining rate of profitbureaucratic corporate capitalism, the illusion of post-work society, marketing, privatisation of everything there is, and all those awful things which characterise our societies. From The Baffler, by David Graeber.

“How do politicians who are unresponsive to the interests of the vast majority of their constituents get elected and, more important, re-elected, while doing the bidding mostly of the wealthiest individuals?

A politician who represents the interests primarily of economic elites has to find other means of appealing to the masses. Such an alternative is provided by the politics of nationalism, sectarianism, and identity – a politics based on cultural values and symbolism rather than bread-and-butter interests.”

On How the Rich Rule, from Project Syndicate

Bubble vocabulary: The lazy and pretentious literary show-off in all of us.

Addictive French fries, seductive and sexy Fondant au chocolat. A linguist talks about restaurant reviews à la Américain on the New Republic.

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couch potato

Wednesday, July 30th, 2014

recent consumptions:

*Vol Spécial, by Fernand Melgar, 2011. Highly recommended by G., documentary on the Swiss illegal immigrant detention centre in Geneva

*Zeitbombe Steuerflucht, by Xavier Harel, 2012. Humourous report on the nasty dealings in tax avoidance of the financial world, in which the skyline of HongKong opens the scene

*And here, from the Guardian today, The rich want us to believe that their wealth is good for us all. Of course it could be, but it definitely is not with the present state of affairs, when the same rich elite own everything that controls everything else.

*How fair is Fair Trade? A journey with Donatien Lemaître, Le business du commerce équitable
And the response from FairTrade, a defence for Banelino against the filmmaker.

in other news…
one night i dreamt that i went *back* to chambana to do a PhD. google confirmed that caffé paradiso still exists, so it might still be an option (ha!). and lo, look at the kids at maker space urbana: the wonderful Electric Waste Orchestra!

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weekend discoveries:

Monday, July 21st, 2014

*O.M.G!. AWESOMENESS!!!!! punch a punched card! or punch a perforated tape! <3 NERDS4EVA <3

*the history of holes, plus lots of other incredible stuff from the blog of a specialty book store.

*3D-print your own Duchamp chess set!

*color problems: a practical manual for the lay student of color

*traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau

and, finally,

Language does not shape our thoughts as much as they’d like you to think!
Against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, from the Pacific Standard

…why does this bad idea, apparently without evidence, keep getting re-discovered and confidently touted? It is, after all, not the sort of thing one would expect people to want to believe. It implies that we are prisoners of our dictionaries, and that our words distort our worlds in ways we cannot escape. The belief in a strong version of Sapir-Whorf means that other people are in a sense unknowable, and that some have virtues and skills (skepticism, color perception) that are unattainable to us. Call it a belief in the inevitable inequality of language speakers.

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man, woman, language

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2014

Monde-Meisterschaft: Germany versus France, which will be on stage the day after, has already been *H.I.L.A.R.O.U.S.L.Y.* (ha ha!) made into a match of philosophy on, why, where else of course, ICI/HIER.

Totally Offside: Being the most-hated football star and a human being, a loving family guy and a cannibal, all at the same time. Regarding Luis Suarez. By the way, this was written and published before the most recent bite.

The Albertine Workout – going on a journey with Proust’s heart again for the next vacance en France.

How do people all over the world speak English? The Speech Accent Archive, the next big thing on my list of Ways to Procrastinate.

Meanwhile, 香港。
Commitment and resistance.

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“research” (or, procrastination)

Friday, May 30th, 2014

*Discovering Literature Collection Items at the British Library

*History of Philosophy without any gaps, (srsly?!)

*Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Diderot et d’Alembert: here, here, et ici en français

How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden. By Nancy Fraser, The Guardian

Love what you do? What do you mean? Privileged Fucktards. By Miya Tokumitsu, Slate

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take me somewhere nice

Tuesday, April 1st, 2014

corporation management, discipline, and control: chomsky on the american university system, education, precarity, and vulnerable workers;

about food, and hunger:
Taste the waste! how food is dumped, in immense amounts, every day in almighty Europa (and meanwhile, on earth…);
Süsses Gift – Hilfe als Geschäft, a beautifully filmed, strong critique on development aid in Africa;

…and how all things are related to each other (profit! profit! profit!).

lastly, how did saving the world become big corporate business? and does it have to? for better or worse?
“Narrow thinking, bureaucratic structures and the overriding priority of fundraising lead NGOs to treat people as donors and consumers, rather than to empower them to struggle for social justice.” Spot on.

<edit 22.07.2014> Raid then Aid: Pretending to be saviours. The “developed” world is but looting from down south.

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A propos de somewhere nice, let’s go to the internet black market. Yami-ichi Forever! get the whatever button NOW!

recent reads:

Friday, February 28th, 2014

what are we going to do with the world?

Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine

Calculating the risk of militant ideologies

More from Snowden: what the NSA collects

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but after all, human beings are amazing.

Dentaku – Ototo, a more elaborated version of the Fruitilyzer by the great Tim+Mimi

RijksStudio, to spend hours on end looking at stuff

On the Writing of the Insane

news roundup

Thursday, December 19th, 2013

On Google bots and robotic smog: when bots become omnipotent and omnipresent

Art is a Problem: for it is “becoming so thoroughly assimilated into, or integrated within, global social, economic, ideological, and institutional networks that it may no longer be able to pose any problems to those systems.”

Corporate Organic: promoting the lifestyle of an organic-consuming, iPhone using, yoga-practicing, “socially aware” wealthy hipster nihilist

click here for FUN FUN FUN: the postmodernism generator!

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