Forum Post: Rest In Peace and Rest In Power - DAVID GRAEBER .. dead at only 59. Such sad, sad news :-(
Posted 4 years ago on Sept. 3, 2020, 11:22 a.m. EST by ImNotMe
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RIP: DAVID GRAEBER.
It's 3rd September and my Thursday Thoughts are of TOTAL SHOCK at hearing of the death of David Graeber. I had just done two tweets referencing Occupy Wall Street / OWS and saw "David Graeber" trending on Twitter, thinking what a strange coincidence? Désolé. Here is a memorable article about him and his work:
vale et requiescat in pace ...
RIP https://davidgraeber.org/ ... and please note:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0t50D4lQrs
vale, requeiscat in pace; sic transit gloria mundi!
RIP David Rolfe Graeber (12th Feb 1961 – 2nd Sept 2020)
Consider "David’s autobiography; David wrote about himself"
Last para of which .. "Oh, and since this is a matter of some historical contention: no, I didn’t personally come up with the slogan “We are the 99%.” I did first suggest that we call ourselves the 99%. Then two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist added the “we” - and later a food-not-bombs veteran put the “are” between them. And they say you can’t create something worthwhile by committee! I’d include their names but considering the way Police Intelligence has been coming after early OWS organisers maybe it would be better not to."
multum in parvo!
"‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/07/david-graeber-optimistic-anarchist-rebecca-solnit
"He was hopeful, not foolishly so, but due to the evidence he had amassed that human societies have taken myriad forms, that the people who are supposedly powerless can together wield quite a lot of power, and that ideas matter."
"Hope is a tricky business among intellectuals and activists. Cynicism, though it’s often inaccurate about both human nature and political possibilities, gives the appearance of sophistication; despair is often seen as sophisticated and worldly-wise while hopefulness is seen as naive, when the opposite is not infrequently true. Hope is risky; you can lose, and you often do, but the records show that if you try, sometimes you win."
While many of us feel hopeless now, perhaps we should remember that with hopelessness comes only despair and we can't live with that, can we?
For #S17: "David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep"! ...
"In an essay penned shortly before his death, David Graeber argued that post-pandemic, we can’t slip back into a reality where the way our society is organized — to serve every whim of a small handful of rich people while debasing and degrading the vast majority of us — is seen as sensible or reasonable."
12 months since David Graeber died & he's as relevant today as ever & will be so for decades to come.
respice; adspice; prospice ...
"Human History Gets a Rewrite" by William Deresiewicz:
Subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change." & NB
Subtitled .. "This imaginative attempt to reconfigure humanity’s roots contends that early people were free to shape their own lives." RIP David Graeber - thanx for everything.Your OWS legacy will live on!
respice; adspice; prospice ...
"David Graeber - On Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time":
respice; adspice; prospice ...
"Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers The Radical Imagination", by Professor David R. Graeber (RIP):
For #S17 & imminent 9th anniversary of OWS, from September 2011 & .. in memory of David Graeber.
per ardua ad astra et requiescat in pace ...
David Graeber wrote this on 9/25/11. "It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart."
"Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side."
Above from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/25/occupy-wall-street-protest
We're coming up on the 9th anniversary of Occupy and right, the sweeping changes haven't come and we've got signs of fascism looming, but we also have probably more woke people in America than ever before. So, we forge on....in hope.....
"As Trump Equivocates on White Supremacy, the FBI Warns of Right-Wing Terror", by Ken Klippenstein:
"An intelligence report dated the day of the presidential debate predicts a “violent extremist threat” posed by a far-right militia."
RIP David Graeber et caveat ^ !
White Supremacy led to Capitol Riots/Insurrection.
Whenever there is progress in asserting civil rights, there is right wing backlash. Disgusting. The capitol rioter losers were bringing an insurrection in order to maintain their white privilege, to actually take away the rights of others, not to fight for their own "just" rights.
https://apnews.com/article/white-supremacy-threats-capitol-riots-2d4ba4d1a3d55197489d773b3e0b0f32
“This is a response, and it’s not a new response,” Brooks said. “Every time there is progress in asserting civil rights, there’s a backlash. Confederate iconography is a means to reassert white supremacy when it is thought to be threatened.”
White Supremacy is A Real Problem and it is rife in the USA! It is deeply ingrained and coded into US society and it is now also confronted by the facts of demography. The GOP in particular has ruthlessly exploited WS and tried to blame the effects and pressures of Neoliberal Crapitalism on White folk - on something done to them by black and brown people. It's an old trick that the GOP's addicted to & now tRUMP, Bannon, Miller & co. have taken it (and video below) to the next level ...
Caveat Emptor!
"Race as a Mechanism for Social Division"
Dictionary definition in "Brittanica" is pretty interesting.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/Race-as-a-mechanism-of-social-division
"Race as a categorizing term referring to human beings was first used in the English language in the late 16th century. Until the 18th century it had a generalized meaning similar to other classifying terms such as type, sort, or kind. Occasional literature of Shakespeare’s time referred to a “race of saints” or “a race of bishops.” By the 18th century, race was widely used for sorting and ranking the peoples in the English colonies—Europeans who saw themselves as free people, Amerindians who had been conquered, and Africans who were being brought in as slave labour—and this usage continues today."
The rather lengthy entry in the dictionary goes on to discuss "Building the Myth of Black Inferiority."
We are still living with the consequences of hundreds of years of oppression of people of color. Trumpism is a symptom, or legacy, of it.
"Full-Blown Fascism: Is America Teetering on the Brink?" - a warning by Thom Hartmann:
"You can only see Fascism in the rear-view mirror and then it’s too late ..." + Also consider this:
respice et prospice ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley ( Father of Transistor which now serves in almost every electronic device )
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson ( Father of the DNA structure, First Director of the [U.S.] National Human Genome Research Institute )
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
What was the pitfall for these Nobel Prize winners and prominent controllers of [goverment/corporate] funding ?
Here's a hint: my Dad had some undesirable [northern European] affiliations rubbing off onto him, too, in my own opinion, even though he had grown a "horn" from a skirmish fighting against Apartheid. 近朱者赤, 近墨者黑。He worked for Great Britain's shipping so their peoples' disgust looking down upon the Irish rubbed off onto him, too. In a certain sense, he ( who didn't delve into the bad-blood history between the Irish and the English; my take on it was that the English discriminated against the Irish and governed poorly and callously in Ireland therby planting the seed of ethnic hatred ) was proven correct decades later by the many bombings in the U.K. As a reaction to these bombings, London got the then-densest collection of security cameras in the world installed and monitored. Note how essential the U.S. had been in fostering the peace in Ireland and Northern Ireland where Christians, Catholics and Protestants, used to clash, bomb, maim, and snipe at each other. Blessed be the Peacemakers.
In my early days in the U.S., I heard, "Nigger, nigger" quite a few times [in small-group setting]. I somewhat gathered that it pertained to "Negroes" and "Negresses" so I chalked it up to the peculiar vocabulary of certain [White ! ] people. I actually thought that it was a [ sarcastically ¿endearing? -- it's actually far more complicated than I thought because a "Nigger" calling a "hot" chick "Nigga" is endearing but a White calling the same "cool" girl a "Nigga" is perjorative ] diminutive. Of course, nowadays I don't even use these "Neg**" words anymore.
Have you noticed how often we had to change what the darker-skinned people have to be called without getting socially censored: Negro, Black, African American, Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, etc.? Should Italians be called Latinos? Are Jews Asians? Are Jews White? Are there Black Jews? What's the difference between a Jew and an Israeli? Are Israelis Asians? Are Israelis White? Are there Black Israelis? Should these be called African Israelis? Guess how dark a skin color this assailant invokes in the minds of all who reads this news about an assault? "Yet another dark-skinned person !"
"Muslim" doesn't enjoy a great reputation, either. Donald J. Trump grew up in an environment in which it's generally true that the darker-skinned people tended not to pay rents and rip off his father's real-estate holdings so a border caging of Latinx, willy-nilly separation of illegal alien [ asylum seekers aren't illegal but legal ! because according to international law, they generally need to have a physical touchdown with the targeted host country in order to be considered for asylum { unless such country revises its asylum requirements as it desires } although they don't have to be physically held in the targeted host country while the asylum claim is being processed ] families at the border, Muslim ban, etc. were expected. I used to hear often regarding these conditioned attacks, "Just get over it !"
I was assaulted probably for looking similar to the Japanese @5:15 ( I was "Made in [British-governed leased-from-China] Hong Kong" and I am not Japanese but [Caucasoid, now White] morons abounded { should people attack the Irish because the English invaded and pillaged other peoples' countries because the Irish and English look and sound alike to many culturally distant peoples ? } ) when Japan was killing the U.S. automobile industry with its imports. Well, looking like a Japanese helped my Dad bluff his way through Imperial-Japanese-Army-occupied areas under the protective cover of his Japanese girlfriend/mistress whose boss tasked her to protect him because he was the son of the Big-Shot board director instrumental in founding in "the Orient" their company which was passively ( or so-called "neutrally" ) resisting the Nazis and Japs at the time in Axis-occupied territories.
Here's why I strongly believe that karma exists because my [Big-Shot board-director] paternal Grandpa's deeds allowed my Dad to survive and be rehabilitated after he had been imprisoned twice ( first time by the Kriegsmarine when a U-boat had sunk his ship carrying Appalachian coal from Newport-News to Great Britain and the second time by the South African Afrikaner police for challenging Apartheid--they clubbed him with a nightstick during the skirmish so he grew his "horn" while being imprisoned.) It was natural for him to run back to Hong Kong, his home away from home, although it wasn't safe, either, as Japan conquered it. Having a genuine Japanese companion/spouse definitely helped because it provides for the other end of a soapy molecule ( soap can help water flush away dirt because its inorganic hydrophilic end can hold onto the [polar] water molecules while its organic hydrophobic end can hold onto the [organic] dirt; reflect upon why amino acids, ribonucleaic acids, and deoxyribonucleic acids are so central to life and we talk in hereditary biology about base sequences within acids; why weren't insulators, resistors, and conductors good enough to ignite electronics' explosive growth until transistors had become available ? Authorities used to say that semiconductors were "good for [almost] nothing" and were thus ignored for a long time because they were "inferior" to the other materials: not as insulating as good insulators, not as conducting as good conductors, and notoriously fickle in their conducting properties; it turned out that it's precisely this electronic bipolar manic-depressive fickleness, well-controlled, { sand holding the semiconductor material, silicon, is widely distributed and cheaply available worldwide but why are electronic devices only created in some highly selective places ? why isn't the Sahara Desert with its abundant sand the place to be for the "Silicon Valleys" of the World ? why did Hong Kong grow so wealthy while nearby China languished for decades in poverty ? it had much to do with the 1949 Communist Takeover and subsequent reforms of mainland China as well as its willingness to supply Hong Kong with drinking water/foods and tolerate British rule } which allowed semiconductors to dominate the world of electronics, as evidenced by our measuring progress [Moore's "Law"] by the rapidly increasing count of active devices, i.e. transistors, on a microchip.)
That was likely the reason that he would help rebuild postwar Japan because of the wartime help he got from his Japanese girlfriend/mistress/waifu. I'm pretty sure that there's "good chemistry" because he was handsome looking even decades later in a photograph so I could imagine how much handsomer he had looked in his youthful prime when she was likely in a similar phase of life. A number of his close relatives were killed by the occupying Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War ( 1937-1945 ) so the natural reaction for him was to hate all Japanese but.. there was Love... There was also historical evidence that most people of the now-dominant Japanese Yamato tribe, 大和, were the descendants of the Han Chinese. Is X@ itching for conquering Japan yet ? Or is he just waiting for human genomic proof ? Some aborigines of Japan were definitely Caucasoid ( Ain-u ) as "耳聽是虛, 眼見是實。" especially if it had come from a Twitter feed. The White Supremacists of America may well embark on a war to conquer Japan in order to recover the White Aboriginal Homeland (WAH.) Similarly, based upon the results of comparative genomic analyses, many anthropological and archaelogical studies, Africans should embark on a global conquest to clear out the numerous squatters on banked properties.
Were poverty a lack of money, in recent years, those countries such as Zimbabwe printing higher and higher denominations of money to satisfy their societies' need for the means of exchange lubricating commerce should have no people living in poverty. An example of one country closer to home is Venezuela. Printing money can only be a short-term band-aid. Structural imbalances need to be addressed with a longer-term view ahead. Exchange requires two parties. Only one who is holding a high-denomination banknote doesn't suffice for an exchange. Having gold and silver doesn't always make a country rich ( Mexico had them galore just next-door.) However, having good soil ( Ice Age glaciers bulldozed topsoil from Canada to the U.S. Midwest ) and water allowed the U.S. to grow rich. The same is true for water buffalo dung and bean plants for China to grow into the wealthiest country in many past centuries of the Common Era. "Dirt, bean, shit; yep, dirt, bean, shit," were the vehicles to wealth. One must largely solve the societal problem of food and sex so one may have leisure to think and create. The U.S. was extremely innovative because it could feed most of its people without them toiling in the fields. Many people could thus engage in pursuing higher levels of needs. There were always events happening ( including some idiotic things but like rocket exhaust, you've got to fart more powerfully to get to New Horizons ! ) A few yielded great innovations.
Neither your racist dad nor U have any interest for me grapes but when I step on U, I'm not surprised that U will inevitably let out a little w(h)ine! Now feel free to fk off &/or read this ..
Your 1st reply ended at "Here's a hint: my Dad had some undesirable affiliations" but do add more!
et temet nosce!
David Graeber on student loans.
“Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.”
https://quotecatalog.com/quote/david-graeber-student-loans-a-87yOMqa
David Graeber: - An Orbituary:
requiescat in pace ...
Remembering David Graeber.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/09/remembering-david-graeber/
"Remembering David Graeber: with Astra Taylor, Jerome Roos and James Schneider" (Audio)
Well worth a listen re. early days of OWS & David Graeber's life and work etc., by folk who knew him.
From your link:"But perhaps David’s most abiding belief; the belief that was the foundation of his politics, his research, and his friendships ... was that people are, at their core, good. More than his writing, more than the organisations he set up, David’s life & ways he impacted the lives of the people he left behind - is a testament to the fact that by believing human beings are capable of great altruism, compassion and solidarity, you are helping to create a world filled with just those qualities. As he put it ... far better than I ever could; “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it‘s something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” + Also Note ... https://strikedebt.org/The-Debt-Resistors-Operations-Manual.pdf
Requiescat In Pace DG - U will be missed.
David Graeber: A Celebration of His Life ...
vale
David Graeber on the disappointments and cover-ups of Postmodernism.
"A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?"
"That last word—simulate—is key. The technologies that have advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the “hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this makes sense in a technological environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new."
From: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit?fbclid=IwAR0-x06uhydkwxCW0ldSiUgSIpjjULnJQPoM22a83y-e0X9rUprUEweYK5s
Business people always inflate their promises. Have you heard of the coefficient of static friction is larger than the coefficient of dynamic friction? Attraction to the old's must be broken first. Business people exaggerate in order to break this fixation to get things started.
We are the 99 percent!
R.I.P. David Graeber.
By David Graeber: "Caring too much. That's the curse of the working classes!" (from 2014) ...
multum in parvo?
"Working-class people may be, as we're ceaselessly reminded, less meticulous about matters of law and propriety than their "betters", but they're also much less self-obsessed. They care more about their friends, families and communities. In aggregate, at least, they're just fundamentally nicer."
"If you think about it, is this not what life is basically about? Human beings are projects of mutual creation. Most of the work we do is on each other. The working classes just do a disproportionate share. They are the caring classes, and always have been. It is just the incessant demonisation directed at the poor by those who benefit from their caring labour that makes it difficult, in a public forum such as this, to acknowledge it." - David Graeber
"The Occupy Movement was a high point for Graeber in his activism; he considered Occupy to be based on anarchist principles - with non-hierarchical decision-making and its refusal to accept the legitimacy of existing social institutions and the legal order. David Graeber was credited with giving The Movement its “We are The 99%” slogan although he later said that he was merely a part of the collective who came up with it. As an organiser of the Occupy Wall Street encampment during its initial stages, he was one of its most prominent advocates and wrote 'The Democracy Project' to tell his story of being involved in OWS, as well as many articles in subsequent years, relating to different aspects of the experience. In 2014, he claimed that he had been evicted from his family home of 50 years for his involvement with OWS &, that many fellow participants had faced harassment for the same reason.
"Graeber continued to appear at demonstrations and actions, giving a speech at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square about the relationship between “bullshit jobs” and the environmental impacts of such jobs. He also pushed the plight of the Kurdish revolutionaries in Syria, writing articles attempting to draw popular attention to them.He maintained membership of the Industrial Workers of the World and gave his time to promoting the union." from ...
https://www.redblacknotes.com/2020/09/04/david-graeber-1961-2020/ and also fyi, see:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/04/david-graeber-is-gone-revisiting-his-wrongful-termination-from-yale/
RIP DG- what a loss U are :-(
R.I.P. David Graeber.
So sad to hear of his passing. Coming up on the 9th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street on September 17th, so let's remember one of the major contributors (he was too humble to take all the credit) of the phrase "We are the 99%" which has become a household phrase and which awakened class consciousness in America.
Thank you, David Graeber, for standing with us, the people, and for never wavering. We'll never forget you and we will continue the fight.
"David Graeber: Debt and what the government doesn't want you to know" (Video from Oct.2015)
radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...
"There is one taboo of economics that the government is hiding from the public, argues David Graeber: it is the fact that if the government balances its books, it becomes impossible for the private sector to do the same. And, he claims, this inevitable debt often gets landed on those in society least able to pay it back"
"Money is debt"
From: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/oct/28/david-graeber-what-government-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-debt-video
"If the government balances IT's books, it makes it almost impossible for you to balance yours."
"Against Economics" by David Graeber:
respice; adspice; prospice ...
RIP: DAVID GRAEBER. It is 3rd September & my Thursday Thoughts are of TOTAL SHOCK at hearing of the death of David Graeber. I had just done two tweets referencing Occupy Wall Street / OWS & saw "David Graeber" trending on Twitter .. thinking what a coincidence? Désolé. Here is a memorable article about him and his work:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2018/05/us-anarchist-david-graeber-s-crusade-against-rise-bullshit-jobs
from 3rd Sept. 2020 tweet .. https://twitter.com/Shadz66Shadz6t6/status/1301534323003318273
je suis désolé :-(
A 2 part podcast by David Graeber on Debt ...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b07mclw8
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b07mmcn0
"This is excellent and well worth your time. It's awful that he passed, he was an intellectual giant" - by a young American ( https://twitter.com/mlake9/status/1301534394751086592 ) There's hope for USA yet!
RIP David Graeber.
David Graeber (RIP) re. OWS at inception on DemocracyNow!
respice; adspice; prospice ...
"The system is not going to save us, we are going to have to save ourselves."
"If there is going to be any kind of society worth living in, we're going to have to create it ourselves."
David Graeber on September 19, 2011, 2 days after the occupation began.
From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPeaFKvszKI
For #S17, David Graeber (RIP) - on September 19th 2011 ...
respice; adspice; prospice ...
RIP David R. Graeber, died in Venice, Italy on Wednesday 2nd Sept.'02. Here are 3 early obituaries:
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/anthropologist-author-and-activist-david-graeber-dies-aged-59
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59
https://www.salon.com/2020/09/03/david-graeber-author-of-debt-who-coined-the-term-bullsht-jobs-dies-at-59/ & this tweet ...
https://twitter.com/LSEAnthropology/status/1301588955037605888 by his current college LSE
désolé.
Rise in Power, with the Midnight Sun. David Graeber. We let go of the Gem of the Indian Ocean in "Stage-2 Separation, Completed { in New York }."
Chicken { "at every meal" } said: 》Irrtum hat seinen Wert, aber nur hie' und da. Nicht jeder der nach Indien fährt, entdeckt Amerika.《
At 39,000 feet pushing the envelope of minimal fuel consumption for the later 747SPs ( Clipper Lindbergh/NASA's 747SP bearing SOFIA,) the Heart of the Sea does go on.
"I can't breathe. There's no atmosphere back there."
Docking... already? at a ¿premature? 16th hole.
My Big Brother, with me hugging his waist hanging on tightly, motorcycled back 》Warum !《 to urban Kowloon at faster than 60 mph on the Lai Chi Kok big bridge from a fishing trip to the New Territories like a shooting arrow. I've never caught any fish, except on this trip I'd got one on my fishing line but as I pulled it up, it wriggled back into the seawater. With too many poly-ticks, "It's like China," says the new boy новичок just before the rickety wooden bridge rocks the budding courtship in the car.
Learning can be far more productive materially ( and fulfill Global Silencing Association's aim of "новичок on every handle" { It's like Redfuckgina } ) than fishing but the latter is contemplative and restorative as sleeping is.
A dictatorship is inherently brittle because all redundancies that can support the society are removed so that only the dictator can rule [ by threatening to destroy and in effect destroying the society inevitably ] { a one-cylinder engine however powerful can never outdo a multi-cylinder engine in the long run because things break down.. a dictator always dies and the heir usually cannot measure up in handling the vast scope and machinery of the hitherto one-willed governance } and rule with one single will having everyone and everything else just being appendages.
"Is Your Job Bullshit? David Graeber on Capitalism’s Endless Busywork" ... by Dayton Martindale:
"In his new book, the anarchist and anthropologist .. looks at why almost 40 percent of us think our jobs are meaningless." Ring any bells for U gropes?
Why don't U read that & formulate some kind of reply based on it or any of David Graeber's wider ouvre gripes U fkn fk-wit, instead of infecting my threads (this one in particular re.DG) with your usual schizoid and irrelevant b-s?!
temet nosce ...
Fitting for Labor Day, DG on Bullsh*t Jobs:
"...convenient to a system of financed based capital....where you're not even concentrating on making or selling stuff as much as extracting and creating artificial debt... you have a certain amount of unemployed who you make fun of, then the structurally unemployed who you give these meaningless jobs to where you're basically buying their loyalty."
This is basically the only way capitalism can exist - through exploitation and bull sh*t phony jobs is part of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kikzjTfos0s&fbclid=IwAR2gLrYZEexYFtO9HCqfq7svPLvUqtElvaJAx47Lmv-tqjIO7nhmxdob6OU
Also for US Labor Day, this by David Graeber re. UK's BoE & its Fiat Money Scam (& cf. US Fed):
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity
and this Tweet by Robert Reich .. https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1302986230611800071
radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...
Meaning is what one creates, not something that others can force upon oneself. It's about connections and one's consciousness about them. Having it requires a certain level of understanding so it takes much work and the resulting knowledge.
A great philosopher still lives an outwardly mundane life but not a meaningless life because of "the inner passage" strenuously traversed. There is no seeing beyond physics and mathematics but every level of complexity affords a new understanding via "renormalization" formulating new rules. All chemistry is physics. All biology is chemistry and physics. All politics is biology, chemistry, and physics. People without a solid grounding in the physical sciences are forever stewing with heads in the clouds, being foggy, arguing about the irrelevant, and grandstanding for the gullible ones.
Aren't you glad that our U.S.A. has achieved its Manifest Destiny by lighting itself up gloriously red in this pandemic? U.S.A. is number one again, thanks to M.A.G.A., just don't ask which end of an ordered list is really great.
What Graeber describes is true because I know that most managers really don't do anything useful except for eternal posturing, putting up air, defending turf, and playing the information censorship and sharing game. The larger the scope of the target of the management is, the higher the level of abstraction has to be required by the higher-ups in order to exert some semblance of "control." ( It's a bit ironic that one may actually have more freedom to do what one wants in a large organization with a purported dictator or supreme leader on top than in a small one; the ancient Romans resorted to gruesome tortures, depraved treatments of enemy combatants, etc. precisely because the Roman Empire was rather brittle so great force had to be used for keeping people in line to preserve the empire. An emperor forced the Cantonese to call cucumbers 青瓜 instead of 黃瓜, which happens to sound the same as calling in the Cantonese sublanguage/dialect for the death of the emperor as in 皇瓜. The Cantonese had a saying: 山高皇帝遠 or mountains are high ( plains such as the northern European plain are difficult to be defended but mountains are easier ) and the emperor is very far away. It bespoke the lack of control of the South of China by the central government very far away in North China. There was indeed some truth to that saying, I believe. It might explain why so much crazy effort was put in to subdue Hong Kong. The Red Dragon had to crush the Pearl lodged in its throat to "breathe" due to its over-eagerness to swallow it whole. ) Most people in this world admire the biggest, largest, tallest, craziest, etc. which garner prestige and power.
For example, "sputnik" which ignited the Space Race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had started with the U.S.S.R. needing a vastly more powerful rocket to launch the bigger and heavier nuclear bombs ( to be made first ! ) which were so because of the U.S.S.R.'s inferior nuclear technology and the lack of numerous count of long-range heavy-load strategic bombers. And yet people were awed by the rocketry developed to cover up the inferiority. ( The U.S.S.R. enjoyed its moment of glory and its people lived better than before their being enslaved by Stalinism and Marxism. )
That having been said, I have to say that whoever thought up spending so much effort and money to launch a beeping whiskered metallic basketball into orbit was an absolute genius of propaganda ! It's truly the beginning of "beating swords into plowshares/ploughshares." Yeah, Союз(soyuz/union)'s still there as a baby of Détente ! I like watching rocket launches, too. There's something heroic about its apparently defying gravity but for all the ones in the know, they see the rocket exhaust and know that the exhaust balances out the rise of the rocket to make sure that for the overall system there is a running down.
The destiny of all things is the heat death but we can strive to see how high we can climb, hop, or jump before we all fall down. The "Skeleton Pit" is real for everyone but I know that I have been there and seen far and wide from there because of my strenuous climb for hours to get up to there. Yeah, it transformed my attitude regarding what people said whenever I had my "head in the clouds." Been there. Done that. Clouds came under my feet which were still planted firmly on solid rock but.. for me { others may benefit from facing death and being transformed coming out from "the other side," though } No more "Skeleton Pit" crossing !
Refrigeration technology merits much praise. It's the American invention of a "time machine." Time to food spoilage was greatly stretched out. Possibilities abound. Mom worked more by planning ahead, visiting the market far less often, and could save money after shelling out to pay for the electricity used in storing food.
Moving away from the Equator and assuming no other special features but its latitudes, the colder a country is, the more productive it tends to be, in the artificial arts and crafts, but of course, it shouldn't be too cold for human comfort either. Singapore being near the Equator and thus very hot and humid, for example, made a very early bold decision after it had gained independence, to adopt air conditioning en masse for its workplaces. People being comfortable at work ( including being online at home nowadays living with this pandemic ) meant that they could produce more and quicker. The wealth of a nation mostly lies in its productive capacity as long as there is a market for its output. There is some truth to the statement that the U.S.A. ( guess where the poorest part of the U.S. lies ) is the wealthiest nation in the world ( yeah, we also owe the most, too, but one may argue that wealthy people carry a big credit card balance because they can and besides, our monetary policy has always bailed them out { stock market has broken new records since the pandemic began ! } through generating persistent inflationary pressure: debt pays so few save enough.) Of course, we are really fifty states which are sub-countries so we aren't really particularly exceptional in having approximately one quarter ( 50/200 ) to one fifth ( 50/249 ) of the world's production considering that there are around two hundred (the U.S.A. is counted as only one) countries in the world. Singapore got rich very fast. I have nothing against everyone getting wealthier but we must take our commons seriously and take care of them with prescience, though, because absolutely no one can escape the environment for a long while. I have an uneasy feeling that Redfuckgina has already driven this pop stand off of a cliff. I can only rejoice in the fact that it's unlikely to be my problem ( because I'll likely already be dead when the fully frontal effects hit ! Death can indeed be rejoiced over if one has already accepted its inevitability. )
A comfortable job isn't a bullshit job according to my humble standard ( I did enjoy one of my jobs working upon destroying selective things in comfort inside of an underground facility after all ! ) My Dad had a job once before, checking over things so that they wouldn't get outside of limits. It sounded boring alright but it was important to keep an eye on things lest all hell broke loose. The job was to ensure that "nothing unusual happens" so I consider it as not being a bullshit job. Of course, striving for meaning in one's job is good for everyone but the quest is largely personal.