oh no...

versobooks.com/books/4103-tow… just don't think any of this works like this!

any good articles tracing the early 2000s backlash against dependency / world-systems analysis? how central was the Mignolo critique? was it just general academic exhaustion w marxist / third worldist approaches? for some reason, i remembered that bad dsa guy doing a "really? we're doing dependency theory again? that was refuted 20 years ago" or whatever. and just generally thinking back to what i read and didn't read in my comps. just feels bizarre.

just uploaded a prepub version of my forthcoming article examining 2014 debates surrounding climate populism. excited to have this one out there in full soon!

researchgate.net/publication/33… it does 2 things: 1/ begins to work out a genre theory of populism (building on hall + berlant) showing how this differs from Gramscian critics (in part interesting bc gramsci's name was often invoked in the 2014 debates around the PCM)

36/4300 is a pretty low percent positive, which is good. still - that's a number greater than zero, and i would prefer zero.

not sure what the timeframe on this is (a week? a couple days?) but Richmond has only been averaging ~20-30 cases per day.

https://twitter.com/jessmnocera/status/1296513435832930305

i was surprised to see the quote that they're working on a "dashboard," but that's good news too. transparency will be real important to pushing for accountability if/when (please not when) an outbreak happens

trying to figure something out with columns like this - and what appears to be a festering frustration at students seemingly behaving in unsafe ways. while not dismissing that parties are happening, doesn't this moralizing let uni admins off the hook?

nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/… fed gov won't take responsibility for protecting people, defers to states to do so (sort of). but states won't/can't do it, defer to institutions like school boards and unis to make decisions. unis make decisions, then defer responsibility on to individuals. just passing the buck

have you ever read an academic article where the author says "i know I'm not saying anything new..."? like just straight up acknowledging there's a massive load of thought out there and we are all just arranging it differently? the compulsion to state one's "newness" leads to two of the standard critiques of any academic article/book: "this isn't new, somebody else did it" and "you didn't cite X." both can be legitimate critiques but are exacerbated by the compulsion to claim a grandiose contribution

why do cops hate these signs so much UGH

nbc12.com/2020/08/16/sig… the need to exert control over every little thing that happens in "public" (in this case, reclaimed) space is so infuriating!!!

one consistent thing about Minneapolis/St Paul elections over the last few years is that the standard libs talk a lot of smack and spend a lot of money but lose the elections

https://twitter.com/USA_Polling/status/1293359684460716032

Mpls mayor might be the exception, where IRV split resolved itself in an odd way. city council seats still vehemently split. but money seems to be on fading the outspoken Linden Hills / Highland Park style constituencies.

i've reached the point in the summer where i'd rather just get into fb arguments about the ecological benefits of pokeweed one of those species that people hate because it grows wherever they are and you can't eat the berries, so it gets described as "invasive." when in fact it's pretty much endemic to eastern north america.

I've been reading some books about gardening, and it's fascinating to see how major environmental studies works have entered into mainstream. folks like Kimmerer and Cronon are cited. gardening is seen as a social justice and Indigenous rights struggle.

class is totally absent oh there's discussion of the ills of corporate gardening, which pushes fertilizer and pesticides, shaping our ideas of nature. but then all the stories of rewilding are about ppl with five acre properties? and we expect the gardening rev to spread how?

several hundred people out here in richmond (including me) to watch removal of stonewall jackson statue this was unannounced, so we've all shown up somewhat spontaneously

some take monument removal to be simply symbolic (and thus superficial) politics, and certainly that is a very real worry at this time. but monuments shape space - its feel and its desirability - and thus are consequential to the politics of value as well. a short thread 1/ not just symbols of white supremacy, they're ciphers for the role it plays in shaping urban landscapes and thus the related value and affects of contemporary real estate capital. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

sometimes i get intimidated by how many major gaps exist in my knowledge. like really basic history and stuff. but then i remember that knowledge is collective...and one of the best things about comrades is they are generous rather than competitive. "if no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself"

The City of Minneapolis had a civilian review board y'all...isn't one of the lessons that these kinds of police reforms are rendered powerless and do not work?

Auto Zone is going up in flames love to see the elbow taps

join our Saturday workshop on Degrowth Communism at Degrowth Vienna Conference! please note that you have to register to be able to participate -- and the deadline is running out tomorrow! The link is here: degrowthvienna2020.org/en/participant… Our aim is to discuss how these two praxes can and need to be brought together, and what such an approach means politically in the current moment. We will be facilitating a larger introductory session + breakout sessions on labour and degrowth and on social reproduction and care

serious q: has anyone read seriously new thinking happening rn? have the events following covid-19 transformed key assumptions you make about the world? or does it just highlight/exacerbate that which we already knew? this is not an injunction to think, it's really difficult to do in this situation (as any) of course. just wondering out loud.

seems kinda weird that the washington model basically has deaths effectively ending May 7 i don't have anything to say about how models work, but i do think how their numbers are being interpreted - and how they're anchoring our emotional response concerning the near term future - is interesting to think about

the most bizarre accounts of capitalism in academia begin from a critique of the concept as "too totalizing," as if it's critics were in error to suggest it has wide-ranging effects. i can't help but think that every day brings more evidence to the contrary. there's certainly more at stake than this in the assessment: accounting for spatial difference versus an assumed homogeneity, for example. or, for the importance of the dialectics of the capital relation.

anyone have an idea why South Dakota is so hard hit in this NYTimes model?

nytimes.com/interactive/20… just doesn't seem to correspond w anything i can think of. eastern SD has medical infrastructure, I-90 probably matters - but not more than every other interstate in the country. is it just really old right there?

how badly do ppl need cat pictures these days? i am spending days inside with this squeaky weasel and have 40 gigs of memory remaining on my phone. squirrel time