Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: headspace, summer, semantics, anti-civillization, cairo, travel, kvlt, korpiklaani, misty glen, oudoccidentalising america, murakami, aesthetic, the south, folk metal, 3oud, oud, semiotics
I guess I read a lot of Murakami when in Cairo- you wouldn’t necessarily think they’d match, would you? Here’s a bunch more things that don’t match but that I’ve been visually digging lately, diagrammations aside. Many of them from the righteous Acid Sweat Lodge, “organised for the dissemination of outsider knowledge”. Brilliant for mental mapping and planning my circa-August 2009 ¡Occidentalise America! trip which will hopefully be NYC-Nashville-New Orleans shaped, perhaps with many detours. It’s interesting how “The South” seems kind of internally exoticised among Americans? A Northeastern friend from Massachusetts tells me it’s dark and poetic and swampy and beautiful.
kvltising the 3oud?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ally, ☭☭☭, bebsi bolitics, carlos latuff, gaza, israel, not-trot, palestine, passport privilege, semantics, solidarity, we are all, we are all german jews
What does it mean to say ‘we are all Palestinian’, or ‘we are all Gaza‘? (And for many now, ‘we are all Hamas‘ – is this a popular semantic de-bantustanising?) Because we’re not. I really don’t know what I understand by the concept of solidarity anymore. There’s different forms and gradations, sure, ranging from statements and Facebook updates, to protests, boycotts and direct action, perhaps all the way to using your passport privilege to plant yourself in front of an Israeli or Mexican tank or bulldozer. And not to knock or denigrate that in any way, but I wonder if there can be real solidarity until you’re standing at either end of a gun? Or perhaps solidarity must instead be defined by its very passive nature – of relative privilege and thus allyship – always in solidarity but never in the struggle? (With an emphasis on the relative as opposed to absolute, tied to [blank] oppression – there’s of course cross-solidarity between differently oppressed peoples).
Maybe this is stemming from frustration, at being in Dubai-not-DC tomorrow, at lacking the aforementioned passport privilege and protection that my decidedly not navy blue passport will never afford. (If you’re not Rachel Corrie, that is). Thinking of the ‘we are all’ standard phrasing though, where does it come from? I can’t seem to find out, though there are suggestions of it coming from Paris 1968, with the denizens of the Quartier Latin’s slogan, “We are all German Jews” in solidarity with the banned Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Or maybe it comes from anti-Nazi peace activist Rev. Martin Niemöller’s famous statement?
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academic, academic essay, anthropology, ☭☭☭, bebsi bolitics, ben heine, columbia, darfur, denial, ehud barak, ethnic cleansing, eyal weizman, gaza, gaza strip, genocide, ICC, idf, israel, mahmood mamdani, massacre, palestine, politics of naming, semantics, wall, west bank, zionism
Is Gaza a genocide; is Darfur a genocide? Where do you draw the lines between ‘land conflict’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide’, and what are the political value(s) of doing so? And how does something get designated as genocide anyway – is it, legally, only when the ICC at the Hague says so?
These are a couple of things I’ve been thinking through lately, having just taken a fairly broad based intro course with Mahmood Mamdani, which ended by looking at Darfur. To be fair, his somewhat controversial views did not come out explicitly in lecture, but having looked them up, I found myself agreeing, at least in part. With Darfur, as with Palestine I admittedly know only smidgens of the context from what I have read, but even in a vacuum, there’s value in the consideration that naming something a ‘conflict’ or ‘genocide’ has very real political affects. (The above is a real ad by the way, not a culturejam riff on Miranda July as I first thought. It ran in the New York Times Magazine, on April 10, 2008).
It’s especially interesting then as I just wrote a paper on said politics of naming in both Darfur and Palestine. (And ‘interesting’ is such a strange go-to-in-order-to-highlight word, one that I awkwardly cycle with ‘fascinating’, and even the aggrandising ’significant’. Because it is not strange, but indeed heart wrenching and what else can you do in powerlessness but a detatched and masqued quasi-academic commentary?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blow by blow, blue cross, classism, cricket, dctors, fair wage, healthcare, HMO, immigration, insurance, medicare, pay, semantics, single payer, tufts, tufts medical center, universal healthcare
This new mural in Salamanca, Spain is pretty sick. And there’s more sickness – of the not so positive kind – brewing in Boston, where Tufts Medical Centre will break with Blue Cross, the state’s largest insurance provider, over doctor pay. That is, Tufts says that Blue Cross refuses to pay their doctors a “reasonable rate”. My first thought is – how much more can they want? I don’t know specific wage breakdowns, but doctors presumably already earn a whole lot more than the average person, who most likely can’t even afford insurance in the first place. Those left in the lurch by this announcement meanwhile have a couple of weeks to scramble, and choose between changing hospitals or changing providers. If they can even afford to keep their insurance going these days, that is. It’s a little hard to reconcile with wanting to support fair wages – yet do these even exist for doctors?
