What I'm reading (August)

HERE IS A PAIR of articles by Will Davies, both on Brexit, but both also on a broader sense in which negotiation and politics are now strangers to each other.

England’s new rentier alliance

This suggests that Johnson/Farage is a symptom of prolonged financialisation, in which capital pulls increasingly towards unproductive investments, relying on balance sheet manipulation, negative interest rates and liquidity for its returns (aided substantially by quantitative easing over the past decade). To put that more starkly, these are seriously morbid symptoms, in which all productive opportunities have already been seized, no new ideas or technologies are likely, and no new spheres of social or environmental life are left to exploit and commodify.

Leave, and Leave Again

For the time being, Britain appears to be heading towards one of two negatives: ‘no deal’ or ‘no Brexit’. The inability to convert Brexit into an agreed set of tolerable policies tells us something crucial about what sort of thing Brexit is: an ideal of withdrawal that is at odds with basic realities of government and politics.

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dylan · 9 August 2019, 11:02 · #

i destroyed a Banjo poem in my sleep, sorry, but i had to write it down when i woke up.

I had written to him on twitter which I had for want of better
Knowledge, sent to a handle that I met on the LP Blog years ago
He was ranting when I knew him, so I sent the tweeting to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows @liamvhogan urban planning enthusiast

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected
(And I think the same was written with blockchain boosted weblore)
‘Twas a webslave algorithm composed it and verbatim I will quote it:
“Account Suspended Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter rules”

In my wild erratic delirium visions come to me of Liam
Running free of this hell site, where the suspended are so free
As the trams are slowly parading, Liam strolls behind them blogging
For the suspended life has pleasures that the twitterers never know

And the IRL has friends to meet him and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the beer garden and the pool halls and the bars
And he sees the vision splendid of the funiculars extended
And at night the wondrous glory of the lockout zones so quiet

I am sitting with my scratched up screen, where a torrential
Stream of bile sweeps all care and empathy from the minds of one and all
And the foetid minds and shitty words of fucking fascists wankers
Through this glowing portal spread their foulness over all

And in place of clicking pool balls I hear the fiendish rattle
Of the racists and the clueless backing conmen in the polls
And the language uninviting of the quisling traitors biting
Comes fitfully evoking the ceaseless tramp of boots

And I somehow rather feel that I’d like to change with Liam
Like to take a turn at suspension where the sunshine comes and goes
While he returned to face again the dickheads and the pains
But I doubt he’s really ready @liamvhogan urban planning enthusiast

all the best

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Liam · 9 August 2019, 11:06 · #

!

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