Pseudospectre

@pseudospectre.bsky.social

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post various things I’m reading, photos, and political/philosophical musings - trans rights are human rights - black lives matter - free palestine - he/him - check out my blog twilliambell.wordpress.com

PROPOSITION 11 Whatsoever increases or diminishes, assists or checks, the power of activity of our body, the idea of the said thing increases or diminishes, assists or checks the power of thought of our mind.
The first important psychoanalytic discussions of the problem of domination occurred in the context of the triumph of fascism in Europe and the consequent failures of lett-wing social movements. Wilhelm Reich, known for his work in both the theoretical and the social pedagogy projects of the twenties, had already begun formulating the idea that authority works through the repression of instinct. His writings, The Mass Psychology of Fascism and "What Is Clas Consciousness," represented the strongest defense of instinct against culture. The alternate point of view, the defense of rational, democratic authority, emerged in the work of the Frankfurt "critical theorists," Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and (for a short time) Erich Fromm. (See Studien über Autorität und Familie.) The critical theorists affirmed Freud's view of the instincts as dangerous, and gradually assumed the position of defending the old moral authority of the paternal superego over the new "seamless" forms of domination in mass society, fascist or bourgeois (see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family Today"; Marcuse, "The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man"). Thus the antinomy of instinct and civilization was reaffirmed, not resolved, by that generation of social psychoanalytic theorists. This antinomy underlies the idea of the "fatherless society" and the defense of paternal authority. See also Alexander Mitscherlich's post-war analysis, Society Without the Father, and Russell Jacoby's discussion of the Frankfurt theorists in Social Amnesia. Rejecting instinct theory, but using Freud's notion of the mass leader /Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Erich Fromm developed the idea of the search for the "magic helper" in Escape from Freedom. Fromm's emphasis on the avoidance of anxiety rather than on instinct, while useful, lost sight of the erotic nature of submission, and the fact that the primal parental relationship…
Chapter 1 - The Woods The shanty man waited anxiously for his precious cargo. Letters had been sent ahead with his signature, JR. The old man was coming to Fossmill
For ex- ample, those whose conception of the good involves widespread partici- pation in civil society will find their good more fully secured by demo- cratic equality than those who prefer to lead their lives in insular religious cults. Democratic equality is therefore biased in favor of certain conceptions of the good. This objection misunderstands the point of neutrality. As Rawls has stressed, given the fact the people hold conflicting conceptions of the good, liberal states need some basis forjudging claims ofjustice that does not rest on partisan views of the good. The point of view of citizens acting collectively- the political point of view- does not claim authority in vir- tue of promoting the objectively best or most important goods but in virtue of being a possible object of collective willing. Neutral goods are the goods we can reasonably agree to collectively provide, given the fact of pluralism.94 Thus, the capabilities citizens need to function as equals in civil society count as neutral goods for purposes ofjustice not because everyone finds these capabilities equally valuable, but because reason- able people can recognize that these form a legitimate basis for making moral claims on one another.95 By contrast, reasonable persons need not recognize the desire to build a temple to their god as a legitimate basis for a claim to public subsidy. A person who does not worship that god could reasonably object to the state taxing her to subsidize someone else's involuntarily expensive religious desires.
A call for papers on Labour in the History of Rivers
My most unfortunate experience Eating a manchineel “beach apple’’ Last year I went on holiday with a non-medical friend to the Caribbean island of Tobago. On the first morning we found one of those idyllic deserted beaches, exactly as described in the brochure: white sand, swaying palms, turquoise sea. While searching for exotic shells and coral fragments, I saw some green fruits among the scattered coconuts and mangoes lying on the beach. They were round, the size of a tangerine, and had apparently fallen from a large tree with a silvery bole and oblique based leaves. I rashly took a bite from this fruit and found it pleasantly sweet. My friend also partook (at my suggestion). Moments later we noticed a strange peppery feeling in our mouths, which gradually progressed to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat. The symptoms worsened over a couple of hours until we could barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain and the feeling of a huge obstructing pharyngeal lump. Sadly, the pain was exacerbated by most alcoholic beverages, although mildly appeased by pina coladas, but more so by milk alone.
Laboratory tests are used widely, especially to test new materials and components where there is little past experience. Such testing is generally expensive and may have limited ability to predict product field reliability. Special care must be taken to assure that test conditions can be related accurately to actual field conditions (as described in Chapters 18-21, laboratory tests are often accelerated with the goal of getting component reliability information more quickly). Carefully collected field data, when available, provide the most accurate information about how components and systems behave in the field. Field data collection, however, is also expensive. Warranty data often have serious deficiencies. For example, warranty data often contain no information on units that do not fail (see Robinson and McDonald, 1991, for further discussion of this and other related issues). Ireson ( 1996) describes some general issues relating to the collection and storage of reliability data. Reliability handbooks and data banks can be useful (e.g., Klinger, Nakada, and Menendez, 1990,and MIL-HDBK 2 17E, 1986). One common complaint about such handbooks, however, is that data become obsolete by the time they are published and that reported hazard rates and failure probabilities may be off by an order of magnitude or more. Technology, in many areas, is moving faster than accurate traditional reliability data can be obtained. Expert knowledge is often used when no other source of information is available. Unless data are collected from carefully conducted statistical studies, quantifying uncertainty may be impossible.
A vista of the Oman coast near the Strait of Hormuz Followed by a DM saying: What if we kissed in the Strait of Hormuz
Industrial and commercial tariffs rose to compensate for India’s high levels of subsidies and theft, becoming some of the most expensive in the world. In states with powerful farmer lobbies, such as Punjab and Andhra Pradesh, this “zero-sum game” sometimes became explicit when governments imposed power cuts on industrial consumers rather than politically important agrarian constituencies (Kale 2014a). The proliferation of subsidies left many states’ power sectors financially crippled, creating a cycle of underinvestment and unreliable supply that particularly harms large consumers sensitive to the quality of power, and discourages private firms from moving into the distribution segment.
The surge in household electrification between 1981 and 2011, when power reached 650 million additional people, could directly explain only 3–4 percent of the huge rise in the country’s total emissions—though up to one-quarter indirectly (Pachauri 2014).
More than this, democracies tend to direct a greater share of electricity to residential rather than industrial consumers (Brown and Mobarak 2009). As this suggests, democratic politics appears to increase opportunities for other socioeconomic groups to challenge “fossil capitalist” interests, directing resources away from capital accumulation towards alternative objectives.
Recent moves to decarbonize electricity sectors have so far more reinforced than disrupted the political logic of fossil developmentalism. In China and India, the rapid development of renewable energy has relied heavily upon state support to facilitate learning and investment, though green industrial policy has been rather more successful in the former (Lewis 2013). Both countries continue to favor huge, on-grid mega-projects such as solar parks, at the cost of the displacement, environmental damage, and local resistance that similarly characterized the earlier generation of big dams. Its advocates claim that decentralized renewables will usher in a new era of participatory “energy democracy,” emancipating marginalized communities through grassroots production. In many Asian countries, electrification has indeed brought a form of halting and incomplete democratization, as we shall see, but solely in the domain of consumption. State utilities and elites will give up control over centralized grid electricity only with the greatest reluctance.
For all their talk of liberalization, government agencies were reluctant to relinquish control over bureaucratic turf, natural resources, or the public utilities used to dispense populist electricity subsidies (Chen 2010). Lucrative private deals and public-private partnerships came to coexist with powerful upstream public corporations and politicized and increasingly insolvent public distribution utilities (Victor and Heller 2007). The resulting state- market hybrid systems produced a series of financial scandals and energy crises that further tarnished the so-called “World Bank template” for power reform. Both the political feasibility of the liberalization prescription and its very content were thus increasingly questioned. Although multinational electricity corporations—including some Asian players, such as the Hong Kong firm China Light & Power—remain visible, there is a widespread sense among electricity practitioners that liberalization has had its day. Even its greatest advocates conceded that the sector’s unique characteristics make continued state intervention essential. As the liberalization template has lost its luster, public sector behemoths have flourished. Today the world’s largest utility is the State Grid Corporation of China, with operations across five continents and annual revenues of $339 billion in 2014. Such state-owned enterprises have not survived the liberalization era unchanged. Headed by entrepreneurial officials, the best of them have embraced market discipline while leveraging their political connections to secure resources and room for maneuver (Chatterjee 2017; Xu 2017). The state-led character of fossil developmentalism in Asia has thus proved remarkably resilient even in the face of sustained critiques.
Elsewhere in Asia, in any case, the window for post-fossil development was narrowing as coal dependence solidified. The degree to which fossil developmentalism had been internalized was visible in India’s first major energy planning document, which surveyed the sector in terms of “coal replacement units” (Government of India 1965). After the coal industry was nationalized amid the power shortages of the early 1970s, the country committed to coal as the pillar of its energy policy. In China, meanwhile, coal mining had briefly declined with the disruptions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and on the eve of the reform era scarce electricity was seen as the major bottleneck restricting economic development. For a brief moment in the early 1980s it looked as though hydroelectricity had won the day, with the merger of the water and electricity ministries (Xu 2002: 89–90). Later that decade, however, decentralization and market reforms brought a rapid acceleration of coal mining.
Worldwide, then, the postwar years witnessed rapid expansion of physical electricity assets not in the hands of private “fossil capitalists”—multinational electricity corporations had all but disappeared by 1978—but within broadly state-owned frameworks. Once centralized electricity systems began to be installed, the logic of state-led gigantism took on its own momentum. Some scholars of Anglozone fossil capitalism have seen waterpower as a labor-friendly alternative to the early days of coal (Malm 2016). Yet in postcolonial Asia it was with hydroelectricity that the technonationalist pride and utilitarian calculations characteristic of fossil developmentalism found perhaps their purest expression. Dams were the temples of modern India, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously declared, consoling displaced villagers that “if you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of this country”
At the same time, new political considerations accelerated this convergence on centralization and state direction across the ideological spectrum. Science and technology were increasingly viewed as the key drivers of development. In Lenin’s famous formula, communism meant “soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” an association so close that incandescent bulbs became affectionately known as “Ilyich lamps.” The Soviet Union’s early prototype for later Five-Year Plans, the GOELRO plan, focused on a distinctively centralized mode of electrification as the pillar of economic modernization (Coopersmith 1992). France and Britain nationalized their electricity industries in 1946 and 1948. Even in the United States, powerful interests came to a monopolistic “utility consensus” in the early 1900s: private monopolies operated in non-competitive markets, supplemented by heavy state regulation (Hirsh 2000). The Great Depression prompted a new phase of intensive state intervention, aiming to alleviate market failures through federal mega-initiatives like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration, which more than doubled the number of electrified American farms in just its first five years. At least in the energy realm, then, the most iconic avatars of market capitalism and socialist planning in certain respects looked remarkably similar at least until the 1980s. Both the Soviet Union and the United States pursued energy-intensive heavy industrialization, while preserving a crucial guiding role for the state. The difference may simply have been in their degree of efficiency and environmental destructiveness (Allen 2003).
The relationship between imperialism, geology, and coal was still more complicated in China, where formal European colonialism advanced little beyond port concessions and asymmetric trade treaties. As in India, initial interest in the country’s vast mineral resources was provoked by Western geologists (Wu 2015). Yet further exploration did not simply follow the India model, whereby Europeans established key institutions and amassed data. After training in various European schools—there was no single model of European geological knowledge to be passively assimilated in any case—Chinese researchers established their own geological society, surveys, and journal, trained their own students, and became increasingly bound up with nationalist projects of resistance to the European powers (Shen 2014). As in India, politically connected Chinese entrepreneurs and European engineers together established the first mines and energy-intensive industries. From the 1900s the Qing state increasingly moved to take direct control of mining rights (Wu 2015, 96–147). Nationalists increasingly argued that fossil fuel exploitation was essential for economic development and to resist further European encroachments.
The article then turns to examine Asian energy sectors and the Great Acceleration. Rather than an imitation of Anglozone fossil capitalism and its logic of commodification, the expansion of electricity across Asia is more accurately characterized as a broadly shared moral project of fossil developmentalism. It was not private capitalists but the state that led electrification, especially favoring monumental mega-projects—an emphasis that persists despite more recent global turns towards electricity liberalization and renewable energy.
The comparative stability of the Holocene climate is coming to an end. Our planet has instead entered the “Anthropocene,” increasing numbers of natural scientists and cultural critics agree, a new epoch in which humanity’s influence has reached geological scale. Stratigraphers may have begun to favor an official start-date of around 1950,1 but many historians and social scientists have responded with their own, quite different definitions. The most influential of these critiques argues that the responsibility for our present environmental predicament lies in the commodification of nature at the hands of a narrow capitalist elite, and accordingly relabels the new epoch the “Capitalocene.” The exemplars are Britain during the First Industrial Revolution, where “fossil capitalism” was invented and exported, and the New World settler colonialism that fueled its emergence. Both of these accounts extrapolate global narratives from a narrow range of regional and temporal examples, centered on the socioeconomic dynamics of Atlantic colonialism or British industrialization. The rest of the world often appears in these accounts as a passive receptacle in which universal logics play out their inevitable historical course. As scholars in these pages have recognized, recentering our field of vision on Asia complicates such grand narratives
Lisa texted, "Sam is going to send his guys to check it out. He says it could be debris from the roof addition." That information might have upset me even if this ceiling situation were not 100 percent Sam's fault, but it is. I've lived here a very long time, and we've never had this kind of visitation before. This was the first winter all my pipes froze solid, and it's also the first winter there's been a cold soulless shell of a house on the other side of my bathroom wall. That's obviously not a coincidence, and this isn't, either. The causal link is not self-evident, but I feel certain this would not be happening if it weren't for the construction next door. Just like I'm certain that, unless there's a type of construction debris that panics, and has little feet that scratch frantically against drywall, this thing that I'm hearing is not construction debris.
You skalds say I'm a troll: I'm Hrungnir's moon-loony. I suck gold from giants. I slay the storm-sun. I work woe for the witch-wife. I'm warden at Death Fjord. I swallow the sky-wheel. What's a troll but that?
Old Norse Women's Poetry: The Voices of Female Skalds Purior Óláfsdóttir pá Eleventh century, Iceland Heiğarviga saga, ch. 22 (ed. Sigurur Nordal and Guỗni Jónsson) FJ IB, 97; Kock I, 103-4 SPSMA (ed. Russell Poole): http://skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au/db.php?table=poems&id=483 Purior, daughter of Oláfr the Peacock, urges her sons (Bardi and his brothers) to avenge their dead brother Hallr This poem is delivered at the climax of an intense hot ("whetting') scene in which Purior serves her three surviving sons an unusual two- course meal: first, a huge ox-leg cut in thirds, to remind them of Hallr's dismembered body; and second, three stones, which are as hard to digest as the fact of Hall's death. The saga goes on to tell us that Purior prepares to go with her sons on their vengeance journey to make sure that they follow through with it, but that Bari has arranged to have her saddle-cinch secretly loosened before she mounts. She falls off her horse and into a creek, and must stay behind. Brátt munu Bara frýja They'll call you full craven, beidendr brimu seiza; my kinsman of ill fame. Ullr munt attar spillir Kin-spoiler, coward, undlinns talior binnar, Bardi the bashful! nema lýbrautar látir Rain blood with your blade láos valdandi falda on these brother-slayers! (lyor nemi ljóo, sem kváum), Pay heed to this poem, for laudhyrs boda raudu. people will scorn you. The demanders-of-the-fish-of-battle will soon insult Bardi's courage; Ullr-of-the-wound-serpent, you will be counted the spoiler of your kin, unless you cause the offerers-of-foam-fire to wear red head- coverings, possessor-of-the-road-of-the-land-fish! May the people note the verse that I have spoken.
its influence unbridled by any scruple. His father had been a methodist preacher, an enthusiastic man with simple intentions; but whose pernicious doctrines of election and special grace had contributed to destroy all conscientious feeling in his son. During the progress of the pestilence he had entered upon various schemes, by which to acquire adherents and power. Adrian had discovered and defeated these attempts; but Adrian was absent; the wolf assumed the shepherds garb, and the flock admitted the deception: he had formed a party during the few weeks he had been in Paris, who zealously propagated the creed of his divine mission, and believed that safety and salvation were to be afforded only to those who put their trust in him.
After these first interventions against private insurers, the wom en's and minority caucuses within ACT UP pushed the organization to take its actions much farther and focus on the systemic exclusion of low-income HIV-infected women from all forms of social insurance, In the late Igoos, activists from ACT UP, the American Civil Liber- ties Union (ACLU), Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM), and legal aid lawyers put pressure on the CDC to revise its defini- tion of AIDS so as to take account of the indicator diseases attecting women.112 The CDC was reluctant to introduce these changes, com- plaining that any revision along the lines proposed by ACT UP would double the official caseload of AIDS patients and dramatically increase the burden on public services. After the failure of negotiations, activ- ists from ACT UP and WHAM staged a mass action against the CDC in early 1990 in which they blockaded the entrance to its headquar- ters in Atlanta and unfurled a banner on the roof with the words "CDC AIDS definition kills women."113 In October of that year, Terry McGovern, a lesbian legal aid lawyer working with women prisoners, filed a lawsuit against the HHS accusing it of knowingly using the CDC's definition of AIDS to restrict the benefits it had to pay.114 To coincide with the event, ACT UP activists, including many low-income women with AIDS, staged a protest outside the Department of Health and Human Resources office that distributed these benefits. In 19gI, the CDC finally offered to compromise, agreeing to add some but not all female-specific opportunistic infections to its official definition of AIDS. Although only a partial victory, the CDC's change of heart had the more important side-effect of convincing the Social Security Administration to change its definition of recognizable AIDS — a deci- sion that at last made Medicare, disability benefits, and other services available to women with symptomatic HIV infection and persuaded many other social servic…
The field of public health, once inseparable from the theory of social medicine, was not immune to the influence of neoliberal health economics, and in the i97os it began to revise many of its found. ing assumptions. By this time, it was becoming clear to epidemiolo- gists that in wealthier societies infectious diseases were giving way to noncommunicable diseases as the leading cause of illness and that many of these could be linked to avoidable behavior such as overeat- ing, smoking, or lack of exercise. Moreover, it seemed that many of the residual infectious diseases that continued to affect wealthier popula- tions (in particular, asymptomatic and undetected STDs) were linked to unprotected sex. In much the same way that neoliberal critiques of public health focused on the limit case of the self-induced harm, public health policies began to orient themselves around the problem of "lifestyle choice" and its presumed social costs. The president of the Rockefeller Foundation, once the leading philanthropic player in international public health, complained that "the cost of sloth, glut. tony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, and smoking is now a national, and not an individual responsibility. This is justified as individual freedom-but one man's freedom in health is another man's shackle in taxes and insurance premiums** Even long-time advocates of universal health insurance began to wonder out loud if inflating healthcare costs could be attributed to the "prevail ing hedonistic lifestyle" of affluent Americans and if responsible tax payers should be expected to bear the cost of such lifestyle choices m In Canada (1974), the United Kingdom (1976), and the United States (1979), health authorities called for the expansion of public health interventions beyond traditional medical and surgical case to encom- Pass preventative measures targeting personal behavior and unhealtir lifestyles.61 No longer should these interventions focus ob the sa nuld …
their Lord, be called accursed. Oh, my sisters, what nothingness is all that we have given up, and all that we are doing, or can ever do, for a God Who is pleased to communicate Himself in this way to a worm! If we have the hope of enjoying this blessing while we are still in this life, what are we doing about it and why are we waiting? What sufficient reason is there for delaying even a short time instead of seeking this Lord, as the Bride did, through streets and squares?' Oh, what a mockery
96 Interior Castle CHAPTER Ш Treats of the same subject and describes the way in which, when He is pleased to do so, God speaks to the soul. Gives instructions as to how we should behave in such a case: we must not be guided by our own opinions. Sets down a few signs by which we may know when this favour is, and when it is not, a deception. This chapter is very profitable. THerE is another way in which God awakens the soul, and which, although in some respects it seems a greater favour than the others, may also be more perilous. For this reason I will spend a short time in describing it. This awakening of the soul is effected by means of locutions, which are of many kinds.' Some of them seem to come from without; others from the innermost depths of the soul; others from its higher part; while others, again, are so completely outside the soul that they can be heard with our ears, and seem to be uttered by a human voice. Sometimes-often, indeed-this may be a fancy, especially in persons who are melancholy—I mean, are affected by real melancholy—or have feeble imaginations. Of persons of these two kinds no notice should be taken, in my view, even if they say they see or hear or are given to understand things, nor should one upset them by telling them that their experi- ences come from the devil. One should listen to them as one would to sick persons; and the prioress, or the confessor, or whatever person they confide in, should advise them to pay no heed to the matter, because the service of God does not consist in things like these, over which many have been deceived by the devil, although this may not be so with them. One should humour such people so as not to distress them further. If one tells them they are suffering from melan- dec...
A TV news broadcast with the headline “Winter remains in control”
The penances done by these persons are as carefully ordered as their lives. They have a great desire for penance, so that by means of it they may serve Our Lord-and there is nothing wrong in that— and for this reason they observe great discretion in their penances, lest they should injure their health. You need never fear that they will kill themselves: they are eminently reasonable folk! Their love is not yet ardent enough to overwhelm their reason. How I wish ours would make us dissatisfied with this habit of always serving God at a snail's pace. As long as we do that we shall never get to the end of the road. And as we seem to be walking along and getting fatigued all the time—for, believe me, it is an exhausting road—we shall be very lucky if we escape getting lost. Do you think, daughters, if we could get from one country to another in a week, it would be advisable, with all the winds and snow and floods and bad roads, to take a year over it? Would it not be better to get the journey over and done with? For there are all these obstacles for us to meet and there is also the danger of serpents. Oh, what a lot I could tell you about that!
The box is locked, it is dangerous. I have to live with it overnight And I can't keep away from it. There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there. There is only a little grid, no exit. I put my eye to the grid. It is dark, dark, With the swarmy feeling of African hands Minute and shrunk for export, Black on black, angrily clambering. How can I let them out? It is the noise that appalls me most of all, The unintelligible syllables. It is like a Roman mob, Small, taken one by one, but my god, together! I lay my ear to furious Latin. I am not a Caesar. I have simply ordered a box of maniacs. They can be sent back. They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner. I wonder how hungry they are. I wonder if they would forget me If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree. There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades, And the petticoats of the cherry. They might ignore me immediately In my moon suit and funeral veil. I am no source of honey So why should they turn on me? Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
Car getting jumped
1962 Crossing the Water Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people. Where do the black trees go that drink here? Their shadows must cover Canada. A little light is filtering from the water flowers. Their leaves do not wish us to hurry: They are round and flat and full of dark advice. Cold worlds shake from the oar. The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand; Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls. 4 April 1962