It is becoming increasingly clear: the secular state is an absolutely illusory concept. Brazil is a very primitive country.
28.9.26
The uninhabitable earth
The photograph indifferent plutocracy
By accidents of geography and by the force of its wealth, the United States has, to this point, been mostly protected from the devastation climate change has already visited on parts of the less-developed world — mostly. The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. All of a sudden, it’s getting a lot harder to protect against what’s coming.
What is coming? Much more fire, much more often, burning much more land. Over the last five decades, the wildfire season in the western United States has already grown by two and a half months; of the ten years with the most wildfire activity on record, nine have occurred since 2000. Globally, since just 1979, the season has grown by nearly 20 percent, and American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970. By 2050, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again, and in some places within the United States the area burned could grow fivefold. For every additional degree of global warming, it could quadruple. What this means is that at three degrees of warming, our likely benchmark for the end of the century, the United States might be dealing with sixteen times as much devastation from fire as we are today, when in a single year ten million acres were burned. At four degrees of warming, the fire season would be four times worse still. The California fire captain believes the term is already outdated: “We don’t even call it fire season anymore,” he said in 2017. “Take the ‘season’ out—it’s year-round.”
But wildfires are not an American affliction; they are a global pandemic. In icy Greenland, fires in 2017 appeared to burn ten times more area than in 2014; and in Sweden, in 2018, forests in the Arctic Circle went up in flames. Fires that far north may seem innocuous, relatively speaking, since there are not so many people up there. But they are increasing more rapidly than fires in lower latitudes, and they concern climate scientists greatly: the soot and ash they give off can land on and blacken ice sheets, which then absorb more of the sun’s rays and melt more quickly. Another Arctic fire broke out on the Russia-Finland border in 2018, and smoke from Siberian fires that summer reached all the way to the mainland United States. That same month, the twenty-first century’s second-deadliest wildfire had swept through the Greek seaside, killing ninety-nine. At one resort, dozens of guests tried to escape the flames by descending a narrow stone staircase into the Aegean, only to be engulfed along the way, dying literally in each other’s arms.
The effects of these fires are not linear or neatly additive. It might be more accurate to say that they initiate a new set of biological cycles. Scientists warn that, even as California is baked into brush by a drier future, making inevitable more and more damaging fires, the probability of unprecedented-seeming rainfalls will grow, too — as much as a threefold increase of events like that which produced the state’s Great Flood of 1862. And mudslides are among the clearest illustrations of what new horrors that heralds; in Santa Barbara that January, the town’s lowlying homes were pounded by the mountains’ detritus cascading down the hillside toward the ocean in an endless brown river. One father, in a panic, put his young children up on his kitchen’s marble countertop, thinking it the strongest feature of the house, then watched as a rolling boulder smashed through the bedroom where the children had been just moments before. One kindergartner who didn’t make it was found close to two miles from his home, in a gulley traced by train tracks close to the waterfront, having been carried there, presumably, on a continuous wave of mud. Two miles.
Each year, globally, between 260,000 and 600,000 people die from smoke from wildfires.
27.9.26
A country of illiterates
Intellectual destitution - misery - does not disappear from the radar of the drunken macaws.
A country of illiterates
The underdeveloped dragged the atheists into the middle of the fight between Lula supporters and Bolsonaro supporters. Unbelievable.
26.9.26
A place for Fantasy
In the garden history that starts in the Renaissance, the grotto reflected all the turns of taste, all the ideas of the theatre. The grotto as artificial ruin. The grotto as a place for foolery and escapades. (A modern, degraded form of this survives in the fairground's papier-mache Tunnel of Love.) The grotto as showcase. The grotto is, as it were, the innately decadent element of the garden ensemble, the one that is most impure, and most ambiguous. It is a space that is complex and accumulative, dimly lit, thickly ornamented. (An appeal to fantasy, and a likely site for the elaboration of bad taste.)
Grottoes are places of fantasy, but the greatest grotto buildings are, and always have been, functional: from the cryptoportici of the Roman villas (underground passageways one could take from one building to another to avoid the heat of the day), or that stupendous achievement of Roman engineering, the emissarium of Lake Albano (the subject of one of Piranesi's most haunting books of engravings), to such modern fantasy lands as the limestone caves, over six hundred feet long, that house the operations of the Brunson Instrument Company in Kansas City, Missouri; or the miles of underground shopping streets in Osaka or the vast caverns dug in the mountain behind the National Museum in Taipei that store the innumerable art treasures that Chiang Kai-shek made off with when he fled from China to Taiwan in 1949; or the Louvre Metro station in Paris, several stations of the Stockholm subway system, and, above all, the justly celebrated Moscow subway, especially the Mayakovsky and Dynamo stations. Modern technology has made it possible to build below ground on a scale never before feasible: the great subterranean installations are bound to multiply. Grottoes of art, grottoes of industry, grottoes of shopkeeping, grottoes of war — all these are functional and yet seem the epitome of the poetry of space. In grottoes the functional and the fantastic are anything but incompatible. Perhaps that is why the museum for his art collection that Philip Johnson put underground next to his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, seems like the famous house's twin — a house with glass walls demands one that is sunk beneath the ground — but is not convincing as an example of the grotto in the garden: it is too purely functional, stripped down.
Susan Sontag
1933 - 2004
Where the stress falls
What a beautiful and intelligent woman. Susan Sontag writes very well. I am becoming increasingly captivated (more passionate) by American women.
Writing as reading
Writing is a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find your own inner freedom.
25.9.26
Necromodernity
Necroeconomy, necrotruth, necroinformation, necrodiagnosis, necrontology, necroheterosexuality, necrohomosexuality, necroaffect, necroimage, necrolove, necrotelevision, necrohospital, necrohumanism, necrostate, necrourbanism, necroprogress, necroliterature, necropaternity, necrojourney, necroEurope, necroindividual, necroarchitecture, necroFrance, necrocountry, necroentertainment, necropeace, necrodiversity, necropolitics, necroterritory, necroborder, necroscience, necromasculinity, necrofemininity, necrocouple, necrobelief, necrolanguage, necrovote, necroschool, necrofamily, nercopornography, necrocongress, necromedicine, necrobeauty, necroculture, necrohouse, necroart, necroauthority, necroresponse, necroexhibition, necroresearch, necrojournalism, necrocinema, necrodesign, necrotourism, necrohistory, necrolandscape, necrocomputer, necroemotion, necroblood, necrocuisine, necroimage, necropragmatism, necrohealth, necroagriculture, necrodesire, necrofashion, necroreason, necrorobotics, necrolaw, necrostimulation, necropedagogy, necrocommunication, necrogeneration, necrogift, necrotest, necroaction, necrosexuality, necrovalue, necroadvertisement, necroidentity, necrohospitality, necroimmunity, necroindustry, necrocommunity, necroorgasm, necroliberty, necromuseum, necrolistening, necrowork, necrofraternity, necroAmerica, necrofetus, necrosatisfaction, necroequality, necroconsumption, necrovision, necrowater, necrosoul, necrofriendship, necromaternity, necroempathy, necrospeed, necroplasticity, necroawareness, necronarrative, necrojoy, necrotransport, necrotheater, necroleisure, necromoney, necrofinance, necrofood, necroChristianity, necro-Islam, necroJudaism, necrocivilization, necroadolescence, necrodebt, necroforgiveness, necrocredit, necrobody, necrocomplicity, necromilk, necroerotics, necrooil, necrosugar, necrosperm, necromythology, necroage, necroalterity, necrodiscourse, necrohappiness, necrotherapy, necrozoo, necromorality, necroperseverance, necrocirculation, necrorace, necroprivacy, necronet, necropublic, necrosubjectivity, necrosovereignty, necroaddiction, necroaccumulation, necrogovernment, necrodance, necrocontract, necropride, necrodirection, necromemory, necrowriting, necroMediterranean, necrochildhood, necrosuccess, necrosex, necropast, necrodream, necroapprenticeship, necroideology, necrohero, necropower, necrobirth, necroknowledge, necroexcitement, necroair, necroministry, necrohonor, necrobreath, necrofuture, necrodomesticity, necro-Disney, necroritual, necrosincerity, necrocareer, necrotraining, necroelection, necrosociety, necrophilosophy, necrodrink, necroreproduction, necrowill, necroinsemination, necrotime, necrocare, necromusic, necrojustice, necrocrisis, necrorepresentation, necroAfrica, necroresilience, necrodignity, necromarriage, necroselfesteem, necrotopia, necrogamy, necroerection, necrohunger, necrointelligence, necrosecurity, necrorights, necrocosmos, necrodetermination, necrobank, necrodemocracy, necroAtlantic, necropsychology, necroarchive, necroMonsanto, necroaesthetics, necrosoftware, necrohardware, necroreality, necroprofitability, necroAmazon, necromarketing, necronegotiation, necroawakening, necroflexibility, necroglobalization, necrosports, necrolife, necrostupidity, necrodialog, necrothirst, necrodiscipline, necroLampedusa, necrogrowth, necrofidelity, necrohygiene, necrosurgery, necrorepublic, necroFacebook, necrophotography, necroprecision, necrobusiness, necrorespect, necrosharing, necroautonomy, necrochange, necrometropolis, necropatience, necroerudition, necroaid, necrotoy, necrodrama, necrokindness, necrocelebration, necroexperience, necroplanet, necroproperty, necroGoogle, necrosurveillance, necrostability, necrocommemoration, necrocolumn, necroappetite, necrofervor, necroamelioration, necroself, necroyou, necrowe...
Can financial capitalism produce anything else? Are we still alive? Do we still want to act?
A country of illiterates
To excite the mass of illiterates, it is necessary to provoke religious factions. Brazil will never be modern.
Centuries and centuries for Brazil to cease being a laboratory of underdevelopment.
A country of illiterates
In Brazil, the masses are confused, disorderly, and sentimental. A poor vocabulary, a meager imagination — even in the realm of politics.
Centuries for Brazil to undress its impoverishing provincialism.
Candy Crush Rehab
The American Psychiatric Association (which is by no means a congress of saints) requested a few days ago that the phenomenon of Candy Crush Saga, whose number of addicts keeps increasing, be recognized as a national epidemic, and that a virtual crisis center be put into place to help detox from it.
Created by the British company King in 2012, Candy Crush Saga (along with its Asian equivalent Puzzle & Dragons) is the most widely downloaded application in the world. It counts 80 million users and earns 700,000 Euros in profit every day. Video game analysts wonder: how can such an idiotic app, based on multicolored floating sweets, surpass the most sophisticated games developed for years by Nintendo programmers?
But the key to success for Candy Crush lies precisely in its defects: the childlike, inoffensive nature (there’s no violence or sex), the constant beginning-again (there are up to 410 levels), along with the absence of specific cultural content that could arouse acceptance or rejection. Chastity, idiocy and disinterestedness are the conditions for the globalization of dependence.
Candy Crush is a discipline of the soul, an immaterial prison proposing a constant deferral of desire and action. The game is addressed to generic subjects stripped of their secondary social defenses (which might explain why the largest number of players are what we socially call “women”): the game establishes a closed circuit between the limbic brain (which manages emotional memory), the hand, and the screen. Candy Crush is not a training game that exercises the player’s skill in order to improve it. It is a simple game of chance installed in one of our most accessible, intimate external techno-organs: the mobile phone. It’s Las Vegas in the palm of your hand. The aim of Candy Crush is not to teach the users anything, but to capture the totality of their cognitive capacities during a given amount of time and to appropriate their libidinal resources by making the screen into a surrogate masturbatory surface. In Candy Crush, the players never win anything: when they finish one level, it’s the screen that has the orgasm.
What’s more, Candy Crush calls into question the relationship between freedom and “free” defended by supporters of piracy: the new strategy to colonize the virtual world involves creating a game as simple as possible that is offered for free, so that the potential player spends a maximum number of hours online playing it. Once the game has been grafted into the user’s living habits, it’s the time of the game itself and its associated forms of expense (additional lives and boosters) that produce the profits.
The Candy Crush players manage a multiplicity of screens: they are often physically situated facing a computer or TV screen that no longer functions as main visual frame, but rather as peripheral background, while at the same time they maintain a constant to-and-fro between Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Instagram… The chaste contemporary tele-techno-masturbator is like a virtual traffic controller locked in a quixotic control tower from which with one hand they “update” while with the other they arrange the rows of digital sweets.
The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phone, but directly onto our cognitive apparatus. While René Schérer teaches us that pedagogical disciplines developed during modernity have served to set the masturbating hand to writing and working, we now understand that the new digital disciplines set the assembly-line hand that used to write and work to masturbate the screen of cognitive capitalism.
24.9.26
Radical exploration of writing
Perhaps the most striking difference between Sartre and Barthes is the deep one, of temperament. Sartre has an intellectually brutal, bon enfant view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, transparence; Barthes's view is irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined, irresolute. Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself. Barthes preferred to avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. He defines the writer as "the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses".
Radical exploration of writing
Barthes construes writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness: a way of being both passive and active, social and asocial, present and absent in one's own life. His idea of the writer's vocation excludes the sequestration that Flaubert thought inevitable, would appear to deny any conflict between the writer's necessary inwardness and the pleasures of worldliness. Gide supplied Barthes with the patrician model for the writer who is supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous but also properly egotistical; incapable of being deeply influenced.
23.9.26
Map the intellectual territory
Barthes repeatedly compared teaching to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice became more and more personal, more full of grain, as he called it; his intellectual art more openly a performance, like that of the other great antisystematizers. For Barthes, as for Nietzsche, the point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached.
Writing is Barthe's perennial subject — indeed, perhaps no one since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly, as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is.
22.9.26
Writing itself
Barthe’s writing, with its prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great subject: writing itself.
Barthes was endeavor was the quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing, under a series of doctrinal auspices, the theory of his own mind.
Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay and the anti-essay — he had a resistance to long forms. Typically, his sentences are complex, comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with densely worded entailments of ideas deployed as if these were the materials of a supple prose. It is a style of exposition, recognizably French, whose parent tradition is to be found in the tense, idiosyncratic essays published between the two world wars in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise — a perfected version of the NRFs house style which can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that style, its acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary is large, fastidious, fearlessly mandarin. Even Barthes's less fleet, more jargon-haunted writings — most of them from the 1960s — are full of flavor; he manages to make an exuberant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; it is irrepressibly aphoristic. (Indeed, one could go through Barthes's work extracting superb bits — epigrams, maxims — to make a small book, as has been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes's strengths as an aphorist suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the perception of structure. A method of condensed assertion by means of symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries and complementarities of situations or ideas — their design, their shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for aphorism is one of the signs of what could be called the formalist temperament.
21.9.26
19.9.26
The Poor and the Proletariat
Charlie Chaplin's latest gag has been to transfer half of his Soviet prize into the funds of the Abbé Pierre. At bottom, this amounts to establishing an identity between the nature of the poor man and that of the proletarian. Chaplin has always seen the proletarian under the guise of the poor man: hence the broadly human force of his representations but also their political ambiguity. This is quite evident in this admirable film, Modern Times, in which he repeatedly approaches the proletarian theme, but never endorses it politically. What he presents us with is the proletarian still blind and mystified, defined by the immediate character of his needs, and his total alienation at the hands of his masters (the employers and the police).
For Chaplin, the proletarian is still the man who is hungry; the representations of hunger are always epic with him: excessive size of the sandwiches, rivers of milk, fruit which one tosses aside hardly touched. Ironically, the food-dispensing machine (which is part of the employers' world) delivers only fragmented and obviously flavourless nutriment. Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-Man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police. Historically, Man according to Chaplin roughly corresponds to the worker of the French Restoration, rebelling against the machines, at a loss before strikes, fascinated by the problem of bread-winning (in the literal sense of the word), but as yet unable to reach a knowledge of political causes and an insistence on a collective strategy.
But it is precisely because Chaplin portrays a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside Revolution, that the representative force of the latter is immense. No socialist work has yet succeeded in expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so much violence and generosity. Brecht alone, perhaps, has glimpsed the necessity, for socialist art, of always taking Man on the eve of Revolution, that is to say, alone, still blind, on the point of having his eyes opened to the revolutionary light by the "natural" excess of his wretchedness. Other works, in showing the worker already engaged in a conscious fight, subsumed under the Cause and the Party, give an account of a political reality which is necessary, but lacks aesthetic force.
Now Chaplin, in conformity with Brecht's idea, shows the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see: thus, at a Punch and Judy show, it is the children who announce to Punch what he pretends not to see. For instance, Charlie Chaplin is in a cell, pampered by the warders, and lives there according to the ideal of the American petit-bourgeois: with legs crossed, he reads the paper under a portrait of Lincoln; but his delightfully selfsatisfied posture discredits this ideal completely, so that it is no longer possible for anyone to take refuge in it without noticing the new alienation which it contains. The slightest ensnarements are thus made harmless, and the man who is poor is repeatedly cut off from temptation. All told, it is perhaps because of this that Chaplin-Man triumphs over everything: because he escapes from everything, eschews any kind of sleeping partner, and never invests in man anything but man himself. His anarchy, politically open to discussion, perhaps represents the most efficient form of revolution in the realm of art.
Roland Barthes
1915 - 1980
The delinquents
The delinquents
To me are horrible creatures
Standing on street corners
And carrying knives
And inspiring terror in the heart of the casual passerby.
We are not at all friendly
And I avoid Such illiterate confrères
Feeling that my gift for language
Entitles me to other rewards
Than are theirs
For which I thank my teachers
And my early editors
Carl Solomon
1928 - 1993
18.9.26
A country of illiterates
Scientific-philosophical discourse is not part of the lives of the of the Brazilian people. People shout; they don't know how to converse. They were not taught to be polite.
17.9.26
A country of illiterates
What kind of experience does the underdeveloped person have in their ugly and dirty cities other than drinking and doing drugs? Gossip? Bullshit? Yell? Lie?
A mind in mourning
Is literary greatness still possible? Given the implacable devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects, what would a noble literary enterprise look like now?
Fiction and factuality are not opposed. One of the founding claims for the novel in English is that it is a true history. What makes a work fiction is not that the story is untrue — it may well be true, in part or in whole — but its use, or extension, of a variety of devices (including false or forged documents) which produce what literary theorists call "the effect of the real".
Questions of travel
The choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?
Elizabeth Bishop
1911 - 1979
Porque não me ufano
O peso neonazista está sendo subestimado. A extrema direita não é insignificante. Assaltou São Paulo e vai continuar no poder. E vai assaltar o sul por completo. Uma província marcada pelo desemprego, pobreza e uma educação limitada, os partidos xenófobos e populistas conseguem votações consideráveis entre os cristãos. Ainda há na estrutura pública nacional uma nostalgia que valoriza as "realizações positivas" do nazismo. O miliciano fundamentalista foi a sua maior expressão e deixou sucessores por todos os poros da periferia do capitalismo.
Mein Kampf está entre nós. A bíblia nazista representa a negação da sociedade democrática, das liberdades fundamentais, do Iluminismo, do progressismo, da igualdade entre os indivíduos. Mein Kampf ainda percorre o submundo do inconsciente coletivo dos subdesenvolvidos.
A barbárie ainda convive facilmente com a plutocracia nacional. O nazismo aninhou-se nas falhas da democracia e conseguiu assentos nas estruturas públicas.
Um futuro ditador está em gestação. E será endeusado por milhões de pobres e ignorantes do terceiro mundo.
A country of illiterates
Scientific-philosophical discourse is not part of the lives of the representatives of the Brazilian people.
The Window
you are my bread
and the hairline
noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea
you are not stone
or molten sound
I think
you have no hands
this kind of bird flies backward
and this love
breaks on a windowpane
where no light talks
this is not time
for crossing tongues
(the sand here
never shifts)
I think
tomorrow
turned you with his toe
and you will
shine
and shine
unspent and underground
Diane di Prima
1934 - 2020
16.9.26
A critic at large
Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel was Tristam Shandy is not quite as original a judgment as it may seem. Sterne has been an especially potent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages as is reflected in the centrly of the example of Tristam Shandy in the theories of Shklovsky and other Russian formalists, from the nineteen-twenties foward. Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose literature has been issuing for decades from Central and Eastern Europe is not only that writers there have been suffering under monstrous tyrannies and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subjects, relevant irony bestowed on them (as many writers in Western Europe and the United States have half-enviously concluded) but also that these are the parts of the world where for over a century the author of Tristam Shandy has been the most admired.
A critic at large
The novel as an exercise in anticipating old age is a venture to which writers of a melancholy temperament continue to be drawn.
Surely Machado de Assis would be better know if he hadn't been brazilian and hadn't spent his whole life in Rio de Janeiro - if he were, say, Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese.
Being dead may stand for a point of view that cannot be accused of being provincial. Surely Epitah of a small winner is one of the most entertainingly unprovincial books ever written. And to love his book is to become a little less provincial about literature oneself.
A tour of the inside of someone's head
A marvellous book by Xavier de Maistre, a french expatriate aristocrat (he lived mos of his long life in Russia), who invented the literary micro-journey with his Journey around my room, which was written in 1794, when he was in prison for duelling, and which recounts his diagonal and zig zag visits to such diverting sites as the armchair, the desk, and the bed. A confinement, mental or physical, that is not acknowledged as such can make a very funny story as well as one charged with pathos.
14.9.26
Beauty no accident
Greeks remain the first event in culture — they knew and they did what was needful. Christianity with its contempt of the body is the greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.
A country of illiterates
You can't garner votes without a gospel jingle. You have to keep the people in the medieval era.
A country of illiterates
Without the development of an education grounded in scientific-philosophical knowledge, society will not produce responsible individuals.
A city of illiterates
Children deprived of literary stimuli suffer the effects - mentally. It's well known that neural development simply is reduced by low levels. It has permanent effects on them, it has a permanent effect on their minds - they never get over it.
Child neglect in rich nations
Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote a study about treatment of children in the rich countries. She identifies two basic patterns of treatment, a "Continental-European/Japanese" model and an "Anglo-American". Her conclusion is, the Continental European/Japanese pattern has improved the status of children and families; the Anglo-American pattern has been what she calls "a war" against children and families.
No alternative
What would have to happen for people to be able to do more of the real work of society - like supporting each other and educating children - instead of just spending our whole lives working at lame jobs for corporations?
There's tremendous disillusionment all across the country
The point is to try to get to a situation where the society and all its institutions and arrangements are set up so as to maximize the options for people to pursue the healthier alternatives. And I really don't think there's been a better period in modern history for organizing towards that than there is right now, actually. In the United States, for example, about three-quarters of the population thinks that the future is going to be "objectively worse" than the pastin other words, that their children won't live like they do. About half the American population thinks that both political parties just ought to be disbanded, they're useless. The disaffection from institutions is always high, and it's been going up very consistently in past years. These are conditions under which organizing for social change ought to be very much possible-if we're not doing it, it's our own fault: these factors have not been true in the past.
But at the same time, it's also true that people feel hopeless. I mean, part of the disillusionment is that they just don't see anything else-they don't see a solution, or any alternatives. Even at the depths of the 1930s Depression, which was objectively much worse than today, people were never hopeless the way they are today. Most people felt it's going to get better, we can do something about it, we can organize, we can work. I mean, they had illusions too, like there were a lot of illusions about Roosevelt, for examplebut the illusions were combined with something real going on. Today what people mainly feel is, it's going to get worse, and there's nothing we can do about it.
So what we're faced with is a combination of a very high degree of disillusionment, and a very low degree of hope and perception of alternatives. And that's exactly where serious organizers ought to be able to step in.
13.9.26
Moral values
Take an issue on which people were really split, take slavery. It wasn't just an intellectual debate, obviously - there was a huge amount of struggle involved - but insofar as there was an intellectual debate, it had a certain shared moral ground to it. In fact, the slave owners' arguments are not so simple to answer-some of them are valid, and have a lot of implications. They were taken very seriously by American workers in the late nineteenth century, for example.
For instance, the slave owners argued, "You take better care of a slave if you own it than if you rent it." Like, you take better care of your car if you own it than if you rent it, so you take better care of your worker if you own it than if you rent it - so slavery's benevolent and "free market" is morally atrocious. And the slave owners in fact said, "Look, we're a lot more benevolent than you guys with your capitalist wage-slave system." And if you look back at the literature by workers who organized into, say, the Knights of Labor and other working-class organizations of the late nineteenth century, you'll also see a strain running through their position which said: "We fought to end slavery, not to impose it" [i.e. the industrial wagelabor system became dominant after the Civil War]. So the point is, on all sides of debates like these, people understand that they have to appeal to the same basic moral principles, even if what they're doing is totally venal.
I mean, it's extremely rare even for an S.S. guard or a torturer to say, "I'm doing this because I like to be a son of a bitch." We all do bad things in our lives, and if you think back, it's very rare that you've said, "I'm doing this just because I feel like it" - people reinterpret things in order to fit them into a basic framework of moral values, which in fact we all share.
Discovering Morality
It's a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animal rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like, to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals? I mean, yes, you want to do animal experimentation for the prevention of diseases. But what's the balance, where's the tradeoff? There's obviously got to be some. Like, we'd all agree that too much torture of animals for treating a disease would not be permissible. But what are the principles on which we draw such conclusions? That's not a trivial question.
You don't have to go back very far in history to find gratuitous torture of animals. So in Cartesian philosophy, they thought they'd proven that humans had minds and everything else in the world was a machine - so there's no difference between a cat and a watch, let's say, just the cat's a little more complicated.
12.9.26
Human nature
If you saw someone beating a child to death, should you say, "Well, you know how it is — that’s just the human nature of the underdeveloped" — which, in fact, it is?
The decision
The effort to overcome "wage slavery" - that's been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven't advanced an inch. In fact, we're worse off than we were a hundred years ago.
Understanding power
You look at the "Fortune 500" every year and you figure out pretty well who owns the country. The country is basically owned by a network of conglomerates that control production and investment and banking and so on, and are tightly inter-linked and very highly concentrated-they own the country. And the principle of American democracy is that they also ought to govern it. And to a very large extent, they do. Now, whenever you have a concentration of power like that, you can be certain that the people who have the power are going to try to maximize it-and they're going to maximize it at the expense of others, both in their own country and abroad.
Noam Chomsky
11.9.26
A city of illiterates
In Porto Alegre, people don't study. And it makes no sense to promote national literature. The more one defends literature, the more aggressive the southerner becomes.
Universal education in Porto Alegre is deteriorating. Worse every day.
Education in Porto Alegre serves to perpetuate misery and vulgarization. Don't even cultivate readers. And it is urgent to privatize schools.
I want to see the elderly of Porto Alegre educated in terms of philosophical knowledge. Unachievable, impossible.
The poor person living trapped in the chains of deprivation does not seek to hear words of wisdom.
A country of illiterates
Observe the French reading on the metro and southerners on the train. The cultural difference is immense.
Brazil possesses no noble qualities
To write about beauty in the brazilian context, the writer must write fantasy. Only in this way. Brazilian cities are extremely ugly places to look for charm.
Waiting for new insults
Why do brazilians keep using drugs? Their cities are ugly and lack quality, and besides, they use drugs. Suicide would be better.
A country of illiterates
Brazil still faces immense challenges in educating its youth and adults in terms of scientific and philosophical knowledge.
A city of illiterates
Anti-intellectualism is a cultural characteristic of Porto Alegre. The province of noise and bullshit. The most disorganized society on the periphery of capitalism.
The perversity in power
Paraná
Santa Catarina
Rio Grande do Sul
A country of illiterates
Paraná
Santa Catarina
Rio Grande do Sul
A city of illiterates
In Porto Alegre's educational system, there is an appearance of teaching and an appearance of learning. It is intellectual laziness.
The young boys and girls of the south have no contact with brazilian or world literature. What a disaster universal education is.
Intellectual laziness
The young teacher walked into the secondhand bookstore and asked the bookseller for Zibia Gaspareto. Nothing more.
23.8.26
Porto Alegre is dead
Noise pollution everywhere.
Poverty, misery, homeless people
Miseducation, rivers-sewage,
etc.
etc.
21.8.26
Wildfire
The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.
Joan Didion was writing about the fires that had swept through Malibu in 1956, Bel Air in 1961, Santa Barbara in 1964, and Watts in 1965; she updated her list in 1989 with “Fire Season”, in which she described the fires of 1968, 1970, 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1982: “Since 1919, when the county began keeping records of its fires, some areas have burned eight times”.
Drowning
Every year, the average americans emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets - enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.
Capitalism
There aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.
Aphorism of underdevelopment
Brazil is the second-largest absolute market for cocaine on the planet.
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