Politics - Bactroid.net

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Politics

In which I post political articles that I don't want to argue about on Facebook.

Acute Fear of the Gigantic Nameless Thing

I recently completed a literary survey of every piece of creative fiction I could find that H. P. Lovecraft wrote or collaborated on. At first, this was motivated by climate grief and my feeling that there is something important for Lovecraft’s work and his personal fears to say about

How to Finish All the Items on Your To-Do List

With the fast pace of modern life and the go-go-go, always-on work culture, it’s easy to get to the end of the day and feel like you didn’t accomplish anything. Heck, sometimes you get to the end of a busy day and you can’t even figure out

On Half Measures

One of the worst parts of this COVID-19 pandemic to me is that we’re seeing in real-time what happens in a capitalist economy when constant consumption and needless production just stop. It’s ugly. I’ve been trying to explain this to people for a few years now, but

On the Tyranny of the Herd

This morning, while writing in my journal, I found myself wondering if pencil sharpeners are allowed on airplanes. This is precisely the sort of question that the human mind can only ponder because the rules for what one can take onto airplanes are arbitrary and subject to change at any

Religion/Spirituality

On Religion, Righteous Anger, and Smashing Structures

I don’t write about religion and my religious beliefs as much these days because, after my year and a day of study and reflection, I feel like I’ve answered most of the big structural questions in a way that works for me. I know quite well what the

On Social Media As Inoculation

This is not to say people shouldn’t seek comfort in art, in TV, in movies. It’s the only way to not go mad! But, in our view, do it knowing what you’re doing is fun and aesthetic, not militant and subversive—it’s never going to substitute

Can I Talk To A Manager?

“Speaking to the manager” is a sort of tyrannical helplessness; it is the haughty demand for intercession on one’s behalf by an array of greater forces you assume are servile. It is worded like a demand, but it is in fact a plea. It relies on a deeply held

Nothing to Syndicate

It should be clear what all these changes in the nature of work mean for syndicalism: It is difficult to organize the workplace if there is no workplace. It is even harder if there are no workers. Of course, there still are workplaces, and we are (mostly) still workers, and

Slacking Off as a Revolutionary Act

Slacking Off as a Revolutionary Act

The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his “workerness.” And in this he is not alone; the same applies to the farmer, the student, the clerk, the soldier, the bureaucrat, the professional — and the Marxist. The worker is no less a “bourgeois”

On Silent Pogroms

If a Jew and a Gentile happened to be arrested on the same charge, it was certain that the Gentile would go free while the Jew would be sent to prison and sometimes even shot. They were all the time exposed to insult and indignities, not to mention the fact

On the Commodification of Everything Beautiful

After my first medical appointments of the day, I find myself hanging out at a Panera and dreaming of a world there were public spaces I could sit on a democratically controlled Internet, spaces truly open to all that didn’t require you to have the money to pay for

What “The Economy” Means

…“the economy,” which was a short-hand term for corporate profit… (A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn) This is a very useful thought technology. We should all implement a substitution in our heads for these two phrases. s/the economy/corporate profits/

On Meritocracy and the Role of Capitalist Inoculation

On Meritocracy and the Role of Capitalist Inoculation

Undoubtedly, ordinary people benefited to some extent from these changes. The system was rich, productive, complex; it could give enough of a share of its riches to enough of the working class to create a protective shield between the bottom and the top of society. A study of immigrants in

On Revolution, Reform, and Capitalism’s Terrifying Escape Room

The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For if some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had the land, the money, the newspapers,

On Ineffectiveness

On Ineffectiveness

When I walked into Starbucks this morning, I ran into a guy with a shirt not unlike this one. Maybe he hasn't been keeping up with his daily pledges?

On Disruption and Underpaid Labor

MoviePass says its model can realize a healthy profit margin, provided it can monetize its user data and sign up enough casual moviegoers. This one sentence says so much about what's wrong with the tech industry from my perspective. Users aren't buyers in a marketplace; they are producers of another

The Intersection of Exploitation and Privilege

The Intersection of Exploitation and Privilege

During the Cold War, defense companies like Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley drew scores of ambitious scientists; these workers seemed to share certain personality traits, including social awkwardness, emotional detachment, and, namely, a single-mindedness about their work to the point at which “they devoted every waking hour to it,

A Passion for Things

A Passion for Things

At IKEA, I found possibly the best short description of capitalism ever.

Apologies as Commodities

A huge multi-national company like Starbucks is inextricably plugged into the system of global capitalism and, as such, is complicit in all the forms of oppression that this system engenders or heightens. But in the age of branding, corporations aren’t just business entities. Our view of ourselves as discerning

Time After Capitalism

Time After Capitalism

A large part of what makes hobbies enjoyable is that, freed from the profit motive, practitioners work at the pace they choose, allowing them to experiment, mess up, quit, and start over. My coworkers make fun of me in a good-natured way because, on many days, I get done working

Land of the Free, My Ass

Under the new guidelines, travelers who are selected by its officers for additional screening could be asked to unlock their electronic devices for inspection or provide passcodes. They will be asked to disable the devices’ data transmission, according to a senior CBP official who briefed reporters on the changes Friday.

God Bless Us Everyone

Working seventy hours a week is about close as you can get to being back in the nineteenth century without a time machine. When most people hear about this situation, they immediately think of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who only reluctantly

The Perils of Authoritarian Censorship

Lately, there have been a lot of Twitter bannings and flagging of videos on YouTube which discuss why white nationalism is wrong. Sadly, this is something I was afraid would happen. Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists and fascists of various stripes have felt far more comfortable spreading

Accumulation Through Dispossession

Jones is a reminder that the migration narrative in Britain needs a rethink. Those who came from the colonies were not foreigners. Britain was an empire, not a nation, and every single colonial “subject” contributed just as much as the so-called indigenous population to these islands. The Caribbean played the

Mutual Aid

Over the next month, Luis, Christine, and ARECMA, took over the group’s storm-ravaged hilltop center and set up the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo (Project for Mutual Aid). I flew back home to New York before I could see it open. They began by feeding hundreds of people a day,