Alberta separatism makes zero sense if you are a landlocked province. How would adding the bureaucracy of having to go through an additional country make exporting oil easier? 🤨
Everything you need to know about the modern oil industry and their apologists is that they consider not building a pipeline a bigger existential threat to them than climate change.
As a Brit I genuinely cannot comprehend how anyone can look at the absolute clusterfuck that is Brexit and think “let’s copy them”.
A take people could have but choose not to: The prevalence of what is classified as “sociopathic behavior” actually seems to function as a description of a large part of the population with the only real difference between the average person and a “crazy” person is discursive and usually the product of material conditions.
The take people instead choose to have: It’s so scary that we’ve allowed actual crazy people into positions of power and authority. We must extend the reach of the medical industrial complex so that no one, not even our elected officials and business leaders, can escape its disciplinary power!
“The Times reviewed more than 270 pages of reports generated by the system — records that reflect just a portion of Facebook’s wide-ranging deals. Among the revelations was that Facebook obtained data from multiple partners for a controversial friend-suggestion tool called “People You May Know.” The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim. Facebook, in turn, used contact lists from the partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and the Chinese company Huawei — which has been flagged as a security threat by American intelligence officials — to gain deeper insight into people’s relationships and suggest more connections, the records show. Some of the access deals described in the documents were limited to sharing non-identifying information with research firms or enabling game makers to accommodate huge numbers of players. These raised no privacy concerns. But agreements with about a dozen companies did. Some enabled partners to see users’ contact information through their friends — even after the social network, responding to complaints, said in 2014 that it was stripping all applications of that power. As of 2017, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon and others could obtain users’ email addresses through their friends.”
Bennett’s personal experiences are merely anecdotal, but his history of the relationships between the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the explosion of MFA programs in the last 40 years under its influence, and the CIA and other groups’ active sponsorship are well-researched and substantiated. What he finds, as Timothy Aubry summarizes at The New York Times, is that “writing programs during the postwar period” imposed a discipline instituted by Engle, “teaching aspiring authors certain rules of propriety.“
“Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’” These rules have become so embedded in the aesthetic canons that govern literary fiction that they almost go without question, even if we encounter thousands of examples in history that break them and still manage to meet the bar of “good literature.” What is meant by the phrase is a kind of currency—literature that will be supported, published, marketed, and celebrated. Much of it is very good, and much happens to have sufficiently satisfied the gatekeepers’ requirements.
In a reductive, but interesting analogy, Motherboard’s Brian Merchant describes “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.” As Aubry notes, quoting from Bennett’s book:
Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-serving successor, who taught Bennett, “wanted literary craft to be a pyramid.” At the base was syntax and grammar, or “Meaning, Sense, Clarity,” and the higher levels tapered off into abstraction. “Then came character, then metaphor … everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as ‘the fancy stuff.’ At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.”
The direct influence of the CIA on the country’s preeminent literary institutions may have waned, or faded entirely, who can say—and in any case, the institutions Whitney and Bennett write about have less cultural valence than they once did. But even so, we can see the effect on American creative writing, which continues to occupy a fairly narrow range and show some hostility to work deemed too abstract, argumentative, experimental, or “postmodern.” One result may be that writers who want to get funded and published have to conform to rules designed to co-opt and corral literary writing.
long and complex article, but basically we now have confirmation that there were actually two separate programs of torture run by two different cia departments, rather than a monolithic program. the first, run by the cia’s counterterrorism center, was a loose array of black sites around the world for interrogating the tens of thousands of prisoners taken under the auspices of the war on terror, which was poorly documented and produced deaths like that of gul rahman at the salt pit in afghanistan. the second was the more famous “rendition group”, run by the cia’s office of technical services and office of medical services, of MKULTRA fame. this was initially to compartmentalize the interrogation of high level al qaeda operatives from the more ground level work interrogating those associated with active combat in nations like iraq, somalia, and afghanistan, but quickly became a program of human medical experimentation in the hopes of producing the perfect torture system. it was hoped that co-operation with the federal bureau of prisons would insulate the cia from any criminal charges over conduct, given that human experimentation of this kind is technically illegal. both programs shared many personnel, especially at the higher levels, but were still separate.
League of Extraordinary Renditioners
The CIA: actually twice as evil as previously thought.
could also be “I’ll die but so will 90% of humanity, and future generations won’t have these problems due to selection” I guess. if almost everybody else is dying too it seems only fair
i guess? i feel like whenever i read primivitists they have a individually-centered ideology (there’s some ive seen that are egoists?), but i guess you could have a solely altruist primitivism…hmm
man I feel like that if you have a plan that’s going to ruin the lives of even a third of the population and you’re like “ya it’s rough but it’s tough love” then you need to volunteer to be one of the ones who has their life ruined for credibility’s sake
TIL consigning 30% to 90% of the population to death and/or terrible suffering is pure altruism. like, I get the point op’s going for here, but also consider that maybe primitivism is just extremely bad.
My boyfriend, who takes a cocktail of prescription medications, often gets into these arguments with “burn down the system [and, by extension, any kind of medical infrastructure]” types. My favorite was one in which he got accused of “thinking only of himself”. Yeah, okay, the disabled person with the bare-minimum request to not die is the one thinking only of themself.
If you’re a solely egoistic primitivist then you’re at least consistent, but I’ve seen quite a few who call themselves socialists and even communists.
“I [Carole A. Stabile] was looking at a documentary interview with Hazel Scott that I found at the Schomburg. She was incredible. She did not back down from a fight. She tells this story in the interview where she had been performing in a USO show, and they stopped in Pasco, Washington. It was cold, everyone was tired. They were miserable. And she and her traveling companion were refused service at a restaurant because they were black. She went to the police station, and she tells this story about the police chief saying to her, you better just leave this alone or I’ll arrest you for disturbing the peace. But then she went back to the hotel, talked to her agent and said to her agent, I want three things: I want a hot bath, I want a cold drink, and I want a lawyer. And she sued the state of Washington, she got a record settlement, and she gave all the money to the NAACP.”
Fredi Washington, Shirley Graham Du Bois,and Lena Horne are also mentioned in the interview.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.