Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category Quick Posts

  • Hyperpolitics

    William Davies: Easy to join, easy to leave. London Review of Books.

    Crucially, however, while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence.

    Daniele Palmer: A Crisis of Belonging. Commonweal.

    In place of swarm-like protest, Jäger wants to see not less politicization but more durable forms through which it can become consequential. Throughout the book, he returns to mass parties and trade unions: institutions that, in their heyday, aggregated grievances, trained activists, and translated diffuse discontent into strategic leverage. In the absence of such groups, today’s protests risk resembling not the organized politics of the 1930s but the recurrent peasant uprisings of the ancien régime. While they may register anger, they struggle to alter underlying inequalities.

    Posted | Author

  • Boredom

    Kaleb Horton was an American writer who died in September last year. He had an extraordinarily unique writer's voice, reviewing music, describing culture, and observing life in the 2020s. This paragraph, and particularly the last sentence, is one that keeps rattling in my head:

    You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

    Posted | Author

  • What I'm reading: Heritage Americans and Bigots Don't Know Ball

    Sean at Defector:

    In all of the important ways, this quote and the authors’ broader project sucks. But in one specific way, it’s nice to get such a tidy mission statement: I don’t know anything about this issue, and the consequences don’t impact me anyway, but here’s What It Means About Gender. It’s a studied ignorance; a principled lack of principles. Bigots don’t know ball, and they can’t be bothered to learn.

    Ned Resnikoff, The Great Retcon:

    But we should be clear: when they engage in this project, they are the ones who are rejecting our heritage as Americans. It is the modern-day Calhounists who are repelled by everything that truly makes American identity distinctive: its pluralism, its privileging of a shared creed over a shared gene pool, its history of hard-fought struggles for recognition, freedom, and equality. They might call themselves “heritage Americans” based on their bloodlines and supposed connection to the soil, but they reject the aspects of American identity that really count.

    Posted | Author

  • What I'm reading: Stupidology

    William Davies, N+1, Stupidology:

    To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies, as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum.

    Fintan O'Toole, NYRB, The Lingering Delusion:

    Harris’s book seems more a symptom of distress than a diagnosis of the disorders that have brought American democracy into mortal danger. It is a series of flashbacks to a bad trip, the replaying in her mind of an ultimately traumatic experience.

    Posted | Author

  • Drafting

    WHEN I BEGAN THIS blog a... number of years ago it was because I was unemployed and had a lot of time; cooking blogs were the rage, I had less grey hair, etc. etc. Life intervened of course and I both got work, and stopped blogging intermittently, and the blog description became increasingly less and less descriptive of what it actually did.

    Now, like so many other things in 2025, like fascism, it threatens to become very relevant again. I'm currently about to start a new bit of study, a Cert IV in Residential Drafting at TAFE. I may set up a specific studyblog, or I may not.

    Posted | Author

  • Laudato si'

    232. Not everyone is called to engage directly in political life. Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place (a building, a fountain, an abandoned monument, a landscape, a square), and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges. Thus, a community can break out of the indifference induced by consumerism. These actions cultivate a shared identity, with a story which can be remembered and handed on. In this way, the world, and the quality of life of the poorest, are cared for, with a sense of solidarity which is at the same time aware that we live in a common home which God has entrusted to us. These community actions, when they express self-giving love, can also become intense spiritual experiences.

    Posted | Author

  • Updates

    I HAVE FINALLY UPGRADED the theme and CSS of this blog to something that is actually workable and viewable on a phone. Once in every decade seems about right for that kind of thing. Gentium remains an incredibly cool typeface and you should use it. Also updated is the About page which has additions accruing on top, hiding the old, an archaeological stratum on top of another, like a midden pile slowly growing over a mound of generational garbage, and that is an image I think as appropriate to this website as any there'll ever be.

    Posted | Author

  • What I'm reading: China

    Long Ling, 'Diary: In the new Beijing'. London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 6 · 3 April 2025

    For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’

    Howard W. French: 'Toffler in China'. New York Review of Books, 10 April 2025

    How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.

    The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology.

    Posted | Author

  • Theme

    THE BLOG HAS A default theme for now, by popular demand.

    Posted | Author

  • Language Models

    THE POINT OF MAINTAINING a blog is a fundamentally personal and political one, shared with almost all writing that matters. Now, certainly, this blog will never ever matter; but that infinite irrelevance is even more reason I feel to think out the politics of maintaining it.

    Here is my policy: I don't like AI, and will never use it for writing.

    Posted | Author