Okay Takes

Why on Earth do we consider getting "terrorism" to be applied in a way that's less racially biased to be a legitimate progressive project?

As recently pointed out by CNN, 'The US Code of Federal Regulations defines it as

the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

"Terrorism" is therefore necessarily a reactionary label. It's a word that identifies any kind of political violence with "terror"-as-goal. It's a pejorative for anyone engaged in a violent struggle against a state or political system, whether Osama bin Laden, Che Guevara, Hezbollah, the Zapatistas, ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, or the Black Panthers.

The burden of proof is on whoever invokes the word "terrorism" to demonstrate that its referent actually has "to terrify people" as its goal. It's a hard sell, and almost certainly politically deflationary.

The aesthetic of punk was anticapitalist in its celebration and glorification of the unmarketable. Unmarketability is at the heart of the artistic left’s fascination with the grotesque.

But as Mark Fischer points out, capital is incredibly adept at marketizing. “Punk is dead” announced the moment that capitalists learned how to market to punks. The last inroads of attack on capitalism must remain the Lacanian “Real”:

The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us. Environmental catastrophe is one such Real.
— Capitalist Realism, p. 18

The aesthetization of the grotesque is not so much an uncovering of the Real. It’s a way of taunting capital by flaunting territory it can’t conquer. But the grotesque Real, the unmarketable grotesqueness which capital produces in the world, is not a kind that any humanist could celebrate.

Crust punks might hold some last little bit of territory. But I hear there are nice (somewhat expensive) skin probiotics you can get to manage the healthy ecosystem of your eternally unbathed skin.

And with that, Merry Christmas! 🎄

I often find myself in conversation with people who believe that there is no coherent unique "reality" which all of us perceive and to which we all refer; or that to form consensus about such a reality is impossible.

Interestingly, this is generally defended not on philosophical grounds (on which it's not very defensible), but rather on historical-ethical ones. The idea is that Eurocentric, totalizing theories helped justify and drive imperialism and served as the foundation of imperial ideologies. Therefore, totalizing theories and fixed ontologies are imperialist.

If we are going to advocate relativism on ethical grounds, we have to ask: What is the impact of relativism on the world? If we are going to boil down philosophical claims to their moral import, then perhaps we should subject this approach to its own metric.

With respect to imperialism and neocolonialism, we consult Paul Farmer (well, young, radical Paul Farmer), who works intimately and critically with global systems of development and aid. He points out in Pathologies of Power that moral relativism has been instrumentalized to render acceptable the suffering of nonwhite people. So the anti-imperialist function of relativism seems to have been turned on its head.

Looking at the broader cultural impact of ontological relativism makes it clear that it has failed as a progressive ideological project. The scientific consensus tends to offer a reading of reality conducive to the pursuit of human liberation. It admits that the Armenian, Jewish, and Native American genocides happened; that non-white, trans, and poor people in the US have dramatically worse health outcomes than their wealthy, cis, white counterparts; that there is enough food for everyone to eat and enough houses for everyone to live in.

The most popular, visible, and impactful ways in which people’s versions of reality diverge from this are almost invariably horrifying. Alternative facts like Holocaust denialism; the idea that there is a hell that gay people and everyone who falls within their sphere of influence will go to; Pizzagate — these are the points for divergence from the modern ontological consensus that actually impact the world around us.

Traditional indigenous belief systems, herbal medicines, and the guidance of ancestors are, frankly, comparatively politically irrelevant in the modern US. Yes, we should support cultural rights, and yes, we should oppose capitalist imperialism, which desecrates everything it can turn into a market and forsakes the rest, and yes, we should support the fuck out of indigenous resistance. But the reality of the current political moment is that the alternative ontologies sometimes bundled with left anti-oppression movements hold no political import in the US.

To be a US American leftist advocating for ontological relativism right now he’s like advocating for “states’ rights” while earnestly believing that it’s actually about direct democracy and having a sense of agency in one’s life. It’s simply has nothing to do with present day political reality.

This is not to say that we ought to heed modernist interpretations of reality. Modernism, the regnant philosophical interpretation of capitalism (for its sympathizers) up to the ascendancy of neoliberalism, is defined largely by its optimism. It is the basis of all liberalism. (It is also, it should be noted, the basis of classical statist communism).

Admitting that we are talking about the same world as (most) capitalists and politicians allows us, for one, to excoriate them when they lie about that world. But moreover, it does not restrict the interpretive framework through which we seek to understand the world more broadly. It is these interpretive (not ontological) frameworks that provide a moral evaluation of capitalism, and suggest other possibilities beyond it.

In a friend's class they talked about how maternal death rates in do United States are higher than in any other industrialized country. The explanation offered was sort of two claims that bleed into one another.

The first is that in the US medical complex, pregnancy is pathologized. The second, which is possibly supposed to be read as a result of the first, is that pregnancy in the US medical system is supposed to be tightly controlled, that everything about the mother and fetus need to be a certain way, that everything needs to be done a certain way, and these constraints don’t allow for the natural variations in the course of pregnancy and birth. That many unnecessary C-sections are given.

This is the culture of biomedicine, the claim goes, further exhibited by the fact that “birthing happens from the perspective of the doctor rather than the mother.”

Two things stand out to me about this.

The first is how surprising this interpretation is. While many statistics do a good job of obfuscating inequality, I would expect maternal death rate to be a good measure of the quality, or lack thereof, of healthcare among those least provided for. I would expect the US to have a high maternal death rate based solely on its famously inequitable medical system. I would believe the offered explanation only if it is demonstrated that the higher maternal death rate actually correlates positively with some aspect of medical care. That is, for instance, if a disproportionate number of maternal deaths occur secondary to C-sections.

All of this constraint, this opposition to nature, is chalked up to culture of biomedicine. This is a perfectly typical postmodern anthropological take, not just in its content, but in its completely ignoring the structural context in which the culture of biomedicine is subsumed.

The practical critiques offered, those of the ways in which pregnancy and birth are contorted to fit an unnatural and homogeneous template, are probably sound. We probably preform a ton of unnecessary C-sections, at the very least. But to attribute this to the culture of biomedicine, rather than the complex of insurance companies, hospital finance, statistics-based doctor pay, and pharmaceutical boards which surrounds it, is plain capitalist apologism.

The culture of biomedicine is, after all, scientific one, and therefore one that’s capable of responding at least to maternal mortality rates, even if not to the fleshy critiques about humanity and what gives life meaning. Capitalist medicine is neither scientific nor concerned with human life.

The tendency of online US leftists to refuse solidarity with social movements on account of their secondary characteristics, e.g., the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) on account of 1/3 of them being racists, is a mode of expression of the consumer model of activism.

This model views social movements not as malleable, living entities, which through participation can be reworked and redefined. Rather it sees them as fixed objects, against which the "activist" defines themselves.

Occurred to me after listening to the Aufhebunga Bunga analysis of gilets jaunes, which is recommendable. They characterize the movement as centrally a movement of the rural poor against anti-poor policy. They point out that it could easily turn left or right, and that for the left to forsake the movement would be to hand it to the right.

I'm at the airport, the capitalist fantasy prefigured. Rolex and Royal Quartz ahead of me, Swarovski behind and to the right. Hundreds of glittering jewels in every case.

Sierra Leone, one of the places I'm liable to work in the next few years, slogged through a brutal and bloody civil war for a decade starting in 1991. My colleagues say that when you ask around among Sierra Leoneans, they'll generally tell you it's unclear what the war was about. That it was a mess of violence, but definitely, clearly, that it was fueled by diamonds. A one-way flight from Sierra Leone to Paris CDG runs about three months of median Sierra Leonean salary. Good luck with a visa.

I'm reading Drug War Capitalism by Dawn Paley. Paley advances the thesis that the system of events, actors, and violence in Mexico and Colombia commonly referred to as "the war on drugs" doesn't really cohere when read as a war on drugs. She suggests that we understand it rather as expressions of power and interests, mostly of the extractive industries. It's about a month of median Mexican salary to get from Tamaulipas to Paris CDG. Or you can get tear gassed at the US border, if you prefer.

Since Paley's book is so brutal and dense, I'm taking a little break with Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy. In it, Roy describes the lives and struggles of Maoist rebels in central-eastern India. Against them is a complex of state, paramilitary, media, and bauxite mining companies. This complex is mobilized to clear people from their land and homes, which are located inconveniently with respect to the metal in the ground. If you plan ahead, you can get from Jharkhand to Paris CDG for about six months of median Indian income.

But here is a temple of pure commodities, clean, precisely arranged, abstracted entirely from the context which produced them.

I'm in Nairobi, and trying to catch a cab here generally involves negotiating the price down from about 1.5 times San Francisco taxi rates. Uber here, meanwhile, is about 1/3 San Francisco rates. As far as I can tell, the Uber rates approximate what drivers take locals around for.

So while Uber charges a flat rate, regardless of who you are, Kenyan taxi drivers charge a rate that loosely correlates to your perceived income. This is ultimately progressive and redistributive.

It's also crazy annoying when you're a white US American. And while I want to support workers against the neoliberalizing machine, I find it hard to stomach paying double the "going rate."

Uber is amazingly adept at restructuring labor economies. In Africa, this takes on a neocolonial flavor. The taxi drivers are apparently protesting Uber a few times a month, bringing Nairobi traffic to a standstill.

So I took a boda back here. That's the back of a motorcycle, named as such because they used to be the usual way to cross the Kenya-Uganda border. The helmet didn't have padding, I tied the strap in an overhand knot, and realized halfway through that the driver was in warp drive (no headlight, hazard lights on). I'm not dead yet.