Category What I'm reading
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What I'm reading: Eschatology and newspaper cabinets
Paul Musgrave, How My Brain Rotted
Over the past twenty years or so, the adult world that I was brought up to expect—a world featuring travel agents, newspapers, and the nightly news—has been more or less deposed, replaced by a creeping goo of permanent adolescence in which everything is social media.
Timothy Burke, Apocalypse Now
They’re not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now. Let us eat, be in a k-hole and have a ton of fun laying waste to an entire society, for tomorrow we might live forever. Even if we don’t, we can’t possibly lose whatever we do.
Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It’s the end times.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Defector
DEFECTOR IS A MODEL for what journalism should be; sport and politics, and independently and worker-owned.
David Roth, 'Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government'.
They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Mob Rule
Mob Rule, by John Ganz
The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.
What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Anglofuturism and uncouth
Richard Jones, Soft Machines:
I agree with the Anglofuturists that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to our current economic failures. I think we need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the variety of capitalism that we have, that has led us to this stagnation. It’s a problem that’s not unique to the UK, but which seems to have affected the UK more seriously than most other developed countries. The slowdown seems to have begun in the 2000s, crystallising in full at the Global Financial Crisis.
Dave Karpf, UNCOUTH, 4 December 2024:
I have come to think of this as the hidden, unspoken ideology of our media and political elites. They behave, in word and in deed, as though what is most important is the protection and maintenance of the status hierarchy.
A thing is wrong and objectionable if it is uncouth — crass behavior that undermines faith in social institutions and the social order.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: William Davies
William Davies, Owning Towards Death, Finance and Society
These brief allusions suggest that if work (or labour or production) were to lose its pivotal position in the justification and organisation of capitalism, the result would be profoundly disorientating. Firstly, it would risk a legitimation crisis for capitalism, should work appear to become disconnected to reward, property or ‘social mobility’. Whether or not capitalism has delivered these outcomes to workers, its moral crisis potentially stems from a breakdown in the public normative conventions which justify hard work and industry, and thereby allow individuals to achieve moral status, recognition, or security through their labour. Secondly, it would risk a kind of existential crisis for individuals, bringing them face to face with the arbitrariness and potential pointlessness of their lives, once notions of ‘career’, ‘earnings’, and ‘merit’ lose their grip on individual life courses and personal development. Instead, individuals may be forced to confront economic activity as nothing other than a flow of time.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading
James Meek, Nobody Wants To Hear This, London Review of Books, v46 n22, 21 November 2024
Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.
Tim Judah, Ukraine Divided, New York Review of Books, 5 December 2024
In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading
David Sessions, ‘Against Bernie Would Have Won’, The Point, 7 November 2024
Undergirding that logic was the classic left-wing belief that the working class is always right, always wants socialism deep in its heart no matter what it does on the surface. The strategic and ideological arguments fused together in a conviction that being ideologically correct—being pure—was the secret to winning. Voters wanted principle, they wanted ideas, they wanted Medicare for All. That was how to win.
Zadie Smith, ‘The Dream of the Raised Arm, 5 December 2024
For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?
James Meek, ‘What are you willing to do’, London Review of Books, 26 May 2022
But the real danger might be that Trump and Republicans loyal to him cheat and lie their way to a victory that is accepted by Congress, federal power passes to an autocrat, and, after a period of mass protest, most liberals just put up with it, judging it not worth the blood and damage to fight for democracy. If it is a real danger that civil war may threaten democracy, it is also a real danger that democracy may die because its defenders refuse to start one.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: depression and the CIA's cameras
Ryan Boyd, LARB, This Long Whine:
Since the 1960s, he emphasizes, medical document-keeping has changed. In privatized health-care markets, where cost and risk are transferred to individuals, therapists write less openly and less interestingly, and contra the rich narration and character descriptions that distinguish his earlier records, now a patient’s archive is about “handing you expeditiously on to the next provider, the notes a sort of bill of lading.” There are plenty of kind, skilled, well-meaning individual doctors and therapists, but the system in which they practice turns patients into sources of revenue trailed by miscellaneous records...
A Very Public Sociologist, A Cultural Sociology of Mass Stupidity:
The neoliberal self comes packaged with other consequences: on how the individual sees themselves in the world. While this mode of governance is prescriptive about individuality, choice, and responsibility, excludes collectivism... and reinforces one's powerlessness in the face of the world, it compensates by endowing the neoliberal self with ontological and epistemological sovereignty. Put plainly, I'm all that matters and I know best. If then the cultural accent is on self-responsibility and effort, there is no higher power dictating what is and isn't true apart from your own opinions.
The Phoblographer, In the 1960s, High Resolution Color Photography Pained The CIA:
The US Government’s relationship with Kodak has always been fascinating. Labs and facilities in Rochester, NY, were developed just to deal with Classified photography and clandestine missions. Processes and films born there catered to Uncle Sam’s needs. But one can only imagine the dismay of the Chairman on September 11th, 1963: the date that Colonel Jack D Ledford filed a report saying that they started work on high-resolution Color Photography on behalf of the CIA. When they sent the negatives to Kodak, the company told the CIA that they needed some time. According to a Declassified document, Kodak wasn’t equipped to process the 9-inch materials and wouldn’t have them until the next month. Even by those standards, that’s a long time for anyone to wait to get their film back.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading—monotype and fossils
Alice Spawls, LRB, At The Type Archive:
Part of what makes the Type Archive unusual is that it has machines and tools from every stage of the process: those that were owned by Monotype and those owned by the printers who used its system. One room contains the original patterns (metal templates) for different typefaces, the giant machines used for pressing the punches and the pantographs that reduce the size of the template to the desired point or pica. (The floors were long ago reinforced for the animals the building once accommodated, so can bear these many-tonned iron beasts.)
Matt Castle, Damn Interesting, Chronicles of Charnia:
Like Mason, Tina realised the frond’s potential significance, and decided she should ask someone in authority. Her parents were supportive, but lacked geological expertise or convenient contacts at local proto-universities. So she mentioned the strange “fern” to her geography teacher at school the next day.
“There are no fossils in Precambrian rocks!” was the teacher’s reply. Tina said she was aware of this; indeed, that was why the find was so perplexing. “Then they are not Precambrian rocks,” her teacher shot back, closing down the discussion.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Folk Horror, Utopian Centrism, Art Deco Planes
Morgan Jones, The Social Review: The Labour Campaign for Folk Horror
The key beats of folk horror are the sense of time and the sense of the land- the relationship between place and past. It is perhaps a stretch to call the ways in which the genre thinks about these things “anti-capitalist” – but only slightly. For the protagonists who fall foul of the weird and the old and the powerful and the land itself, their demise is often as a result of an attempt to own, or to exploit, or to regulate, or even just to comprehend the things that have been there for a long, long time. In folk horror, to monetise is to antagonise…
Hush-Kit, 12 ravishingly beautiful aircraft from the Art Deco era, and one from far later
Louis Bechereau’s racing masterpiece: this is the most important aircraft barely anybody ever talks about today, designed by arguably the most important aircraft designer of the Great War (who hardly anybody talks about today). A flying machine to prove that heartbreaking bloodbaths are not necessarily a requirement for advancing our sense of style or our design and engineering skills.
Chris Dillow, Technocrats and class
At impressionable ages we are brought up to believe that success comes from knowledge and intellect. We thus believe this even in contexts where it is wrong. We’d be better prepared for politics if teachers gave top marks not to the brightest students but to the school bullies.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan