Gilded Age 2: Electric Boogaloo

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FRINGE: May 23, 2003; title stolen for lf posting

Back to the main topic.

High level nerds with a zombie fetish write some stuff.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19800

quote:

In other words, poverty is as omnipresent for the poor as the threat of zombies is for the characters in The Walking Dead. Just as the threat of zombies and reanimation into zombies weigh on the characters� minds and drive their actions 24 hours a day and every day of their lives, poverty too dictates who poor people are and what they do.

Living in constant vigilance against the threat of zombies, ironically, reduces all living humans to their basic compulsions, rendering even living humans more zombie-like than they would want to admit: zombies are only consumers, and humans living under the threat of zombies are primarily survivors.

Living under the weight of poverty is a very real condition that zombie narratives represent in metaphor.

Human behavior, then, is likely a window into larger social contexts and less a reflection of individual strengths and weaknesses.

Because of cultural stereotypes that marginalize and even demonize people in poverty, Mullainathan and Shafir caution against drawing conclusions from observable behaviors by people living in poverty:

Given that we hold highly negative stereotypes about the poor, essentially defined by a failure (they are poor!), it is natural to attribute personal failure to them�.Accidents of birth�such as what continent you are born on�have a large effect on your chance of being poor�.The failures of the poor are part and parcel of the misfortune of being poor in the first place. Under these conditions, we all would have (and have!) failed.

...

Zombie narratives as well as Mullainathan and Shafir�s work on scarcity help highlight an understanding of poverty that rejects stereotypes as well as what people and children living and learning in poverty need: Their state of scarcity must be alleviated.

Until we alleviate poverty, however, we must be vigilant not to increase the consequences of scarcity (such as artificially ramping up stress for teachers and students) and we can no longer ask children and their teachers to work as if poverty doesn�t exist.

Social programs addressing poverty and education reform targeting the achievement gap must begin with embracing a closing claim from Mullainathan and Shafir: �We can go some way toward �scarcity proofing� our environment.�

But that goal cannot be achieved within a deforming idealism that asks impoverished people to live as if poverty doesn�t exist, that asks children living in poverty to pretend they are not impoverished during the school day. It deserves repeating: �One cannot take a vacation from poverty.�

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23998-disposable-futures

quote:

Dystopian politics has become mainstream politics as the practice of disposability has intensified and more and more individuals and groups are now considered excess, consigned to "zones of abandonment," surveillance and incarceration. The expansive politics of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden students whose existing and future prospects remain bleak, those lacking basic necessities amid widening income disparities, the surveillance of immigrants, the school-to-prison pipeline and the widespread destruction of the middle class by new forms of debt servitude.(7) Citizens, as Gilles Deleuze foresaw(8), are now reduced to data, consumers and commodities and, as such, inhabit identities in which they increasingly become unknowables, with no human rights and with no one accountable for their condition.

...

However, instead of following the conventional deconstruction of the zombie here as revealing of the death of subjectivities brought about by commodification, on this occasion there is more to be gained by analyzing the survivors. Let's be under no illusions, what the score narrates, the best that can be imagined, is pure survival. Indeed, the only way to survive is by engaging in a form of self-harm by using a lethal microbe as a form of "camouflage" so that the health of the body no longer registers, hence the body is no longer a target for the undead. It is also further revealing that the eventual fate of the survivors is not in any way certain, as the final scenes tell that this is merely the start of a perpetual state of violence that allows for some strategic gains, but remains ultimately a state infested with the decay of a political and social order that might never recover its humaneness. The movie as such is perhaps less meditation on the already dead, than on the fate of those who are hoping to survive the everywhere war.

It rambles on quite a bit though.

# ? Jun 1, 2014 21:19

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 12:06

Nintendo Kid: Aug 4, 2011; by Smythe

down with slavery posted:

Maybe you missed it but the Deepwater horizon spill happened in 2010, which is after Obama had appointed the head of the MMS (body that regulated offshore drilling before they hosed it up so bad they had to change the name) and well into his presidency.

So yes, if the Democrats had been more intent on assuring that environment regulations and safety were adhered to(let's call it environmentally responsible), Deepwater Horizon would have never happened. Period. As much as you'd like to pretend otherwise, the Democrats are just as complicit if not more so in capital's right to destroy the environment in the name of profit.

Which had nothing to do with the disaster happening.

Again, this has nothing to do with the disaster happening.

You don't know what you're talking about, once again. You're just madly waving your hands to try to defend a horrible attempted example of your original contention.

Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jun 1, 2014

# ? Jun 1, 2014 21:25

Franks Happy Place: Mar 15, 2011; It is by weed alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the dank of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by weed alone I set my mind in motion.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Which had nothing to do with the disaster happening.

Again, this has nothing to do with the disaster happening.

You don't know what you're talking about, once again.

Please please please shut the gently caress up unless you have something to say about Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book written by Thomas Piketty that is the subject of this thread.

# ? Jun 1, 2014 21:27

Paper With Lines: Aug 21, 2013; The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

So I'm about 250 pages through this book. There is a lot of stuff there but one thing that I found extremely distracting was his reliance on depictions of economics in novels. He supposedly has all this sweet and original data which took years to collect but he spends a not insignificant amount of time relating his arguments back to loving Jane Austen and whomever else. Why?

# ? Jun 5, 2014 03:19

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

Paper With Lines posted:

So I'm about 250 pages through this book. There is a lot of stuff there but one thing that I found extremely distracting was his reliance on depictions of economics in novels. He supposedly has all this sweet and original data which took years to collect but he spends a not insignificant amount of time relating his arguments back to loving Jane Austen and whomever else. Why?

It's just a framing device. A lot of the times he mentions it he expounds on a point using his data, then says something like "authors like Austen and Balzac took xyz for granted" or talks about how much it factored into their work. I guess to try to reach a non-academic audience, though I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a popular book or not.

# ? Jun 5, 2014 06:17

Rodatose: Jul 8, 2008; corn, corn, corn

I thought someone said earlier in the thread or in one of the links that it was to show a reflection of the 'conventional wisdom' of the discussed time period, namely that being wealthy throughout the ages has been a matter of inheritance, and that literature of the time took it as a given esp. with the culture built around wealth immobility.

# ? Jun 5, 2014 06:31

Ardennes: May 12, 2002

Paper With Lines posted:

So I'm about 250 pages through this book. There is a lot of stuff there but one thing that I found extremely distracting was his reliance on depictions of economics in novels. He supposedly has all this sweet and original data which took years to collect but he spends a not insignificant amount of time relating his arguments back to loving Jane Austen and whomever else. Why?

He is trying to connect to nonacademics, for the most part the book has a fairly light touch.

# ? Jun 5, 2014 12:56

Danger: Jan 4, 2004; all desire - the thirst for oil, war, religious salvation - needs to be understood according to what he calls 'the demonogrammatical decoding of the Earth's body'

Ardennes posted:

He is trying to connect to nonacademics, for the most part the book has a fairly light touch.

I wonder if he's trying to do some of this in publicity as well, at least in the way he is trying to distance himself from (obvious) comparisons to Marx. I love how one of his criticisms of Marx is that, "in the books of Marx there�s no data" which is a hilarious thing to say.

# ? Jun 5, 2014 17:08

Paper With Lines: Aug 21, 2013; The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

Danger posted:

I wonder if he's trying to do some of this in publicity as well, at least in the way he is trying to distance himself from (obvious) comparisons to Marx. I love how one of his criticisms of Marx is that, "in the books of Marx there�s no data" which is a hilarious thing to say.

That's also his criticism of his own work and, seemingly, American economics as well.

# ? Jun 5, 2014 19:03

That Irish Gal: Jul 8, 2012; Your existence amounts to nothing more than a goldfish swimming upriver.

^{PS: We are all actually cats}

Paper With Lines posted:

That's also his criticism of his own work and, seemingly, American economics as well.

Hmm...

Hand all NSA archive data to him, sack every fucker working there and declare Piketty "Economic Data ~~Czar of The Glorious Revolution~~ Secretary"

Make it happen Obama! :ussr:

# ? Jun 5, 2014 19:14

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# ? Apr 26, 2024 12:06

Paper With Lines: Aug 21, 2013; The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

Not to thread necro, but it seems like this book is still reverberating among academics. Here is a round table with some big names in the Guardian.

# ? Sep 21, 2014 22:23

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