Luke > Recent Status Updates

Real world in my area's starting to boil over (again), so it's just as well I take a break from Nonfiction November in order to fulfill the next stage of this yearly reading commitment.

I don't know what's more of a mess: the author choosing to blame the non-elite population of Kenya for doing their best to cope with disaster capitalism, or the Wikipedia page on Kenya's economy that tells the same old 'hit them while they're down' story of IMF and the World Bank during the 80's/90's while simultaneously trying to make those organizations look like the heroes.

'Das war ein Vorspeil nur, dort wo man Bücker verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen — 'Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end burn human beings.'

-Heinrich Heine

It's a shame when material with such a great potential to be interesting is so poorly written, and I'm not just talking about the excerpts of Hitler's compositions.

It's fitting to be reading about uncredited Kenyan WWI soldiers on a day that a settler state deems a holiday for those whose extremely high rates of PTSD, sexual trauma, and disability it refuses to adequately care for.

It is not a war that can be won by any country, but winning is not the point.

The violence, these [Iraqi] businessmen realize, is their only competitive edge. It is simple business logic: the more problems there are in Iraq, the harder it is for outsiders to get involved.

-Patrick Graham, Harper

How coincidental that Johnson's list of post-1950s cholera outbreaks so closely follows Klein's history of disaster capitalism targets, right down to Iraq in 2003.

George W. Bush didn't distinguish himself as governor in too many ways, but there was one area in which he excelled: parceling out to private interests the various functions of the government he was elected to run—especially security-related functions, a preview of the privatized War on Terror he would soon unleash.

Paul Rosenfield is writing his biography. He asked me: "Where do I begin?"
I said: "Name, first of all, all the wishes you had, and then tell which ones came true and which ones did not."

I'm not one to say too often that a book could have easily afforded to fit more words per page (quite the opposite, in fact), but this could have been half the length. The fault of the marketing that pushed this on adult readers in the first place, I suppose.

Asked a few years later what went wrong, [Anders Åslund] replied, "Corruption, corruption, and corruption," as if corruption was something other than the unrestrained expression of the "temptations of capitalism" that he had so enthusiastically praised.

I'm beginning to realize how weird it is to deal with someone who almost never reads nonfiction.

Reading this alongside far more complex renderings of the history of communist China is a trip and a half, I can tell you that much.

Once [non-white] countries have opened themselves up to the global market's temperamental moods, any departure from Chicago School orthodoxy is instantly punished by [white] traders in New York and London who bet against the offending country's currency, causing a deeper crisis and the need for more loans, with more conditions attached.

Nin's getting into her Arendt states again. Not surprising, but always disappointing.

Progressing through a series at the speed of one book read per year exponentially increases the chances of forgetting why one's bothering with such, but makes it that much sweeter when the next volume reminds you why.

The [October 1976 Kissinger/Guzzetti] transcript proves that the U.S. government approved loans to the [Argentina] junta knowing they were being used in the midst of a campaign of terror. In the early eighties, it was these odious debts that Washington insisted Argentina's new democratic government had to repay.

What a difference an independent choice in viewpoint makes. Johnson blames high wages for toxic living conditions; I say that landlords refusing to pay proper wages to ensure livable conditions for their tenants is, once again, capitalism at its finest.

The problem is that when so many are dying, the death penalty loses its edge.

Anyone else participating in Nonfiction November 2020? The prompts for this year are:

Time
Movement
Buzz
Discovery

I have no idea what works I'll be fitting where (if any of them even end up fitting), but here's the collection I'll be drawing from during the month: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

The history of Leningrad, Petrograd, St Petersburg may stretch back to the moment Peter put his iron mark on the marshes of the Neva, but you can't eat history.

Once again, the most interesting love story this story has to its name is the one it doesn't have the guts to tell.

So here we are in the middle of nowhere, in the path of the German advance, equipped with entrenching tools instead of the machine-guns and rifles we need, but still arguing about the martyr status of the Decembrists' wives. Nothing, to me, more effectively sums up both our strength and our weakness.

[Orlando Letelier] pointed out that "this particularly convenient concept of a social system, in which 'economic freedom' and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of 'freedom' while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights."

I've seen multiple instances of praise for this work's prose, but translation quibbles aside, when I see a paragraph where almost three quarters of the sentences begin with "I," six of them occuring in a row, I have to wonder.

Most of this stuff's rage inducing, but it's also filling in a lot of gaps. Such is often the case when becoming truly informed about the consequences of history that people are living out today.

If the gender dichotomy weren't such a nauseatingly popular theory, this book would be half the size, if that.

If I'm going to bother with 21st c. works, I at least expect to not have to deal with the r-slur. Otherwise, what's the point?

If someone wants some perspective on the physical experience of reading this, this particularly packed page contains around 480 words. Some pages go by quick with conversational trains averaging no more than three or four words per line, but with almost every page containing forty lines of possibility, it's not hard for any particular page to quickly escalate. It's no 'Women and Men,' but still.