Yet, despite the widening of the general frame, Orientalism still reigns; though it’s not as brazen, its subtle forms are everywhere.
Same As It Ever Was: Orientalism Forty Years Later.
I think we need to be alert to the historical context in which we speak about violence, including structural violence. Too frequently we take physical harm and/or killing as the only paradigm of violence. But this can blind us to other forms of violence that involve humiliation and suffering.
But what is even more important is that there are forms of behavior that are not considered to be violent at one stage of history that need to be exposed as violent in another.
Richard J. Bernstein, in an insightful interview with Brad Evans about violence in the works of Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and what their concepts mean in today’s world: The Intellectual Life of Violence
The case against Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” is a triumph of style over substance, of clamorous white grievance over knowable facts.
This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers.
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/188044513/stream?client_id=N2eHz8D7GtXSl6fTtcGHdSJiS74xqOUI?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
Last week on NPR’s Bullseye, host Jesse Thorn talked with Jeff Chang, author of the new book Who We Be: The Colorization of America, about culture and art, the history of multiculturalism in the US, the rise of ethnic studies, microaggressions in Berkley, the LA riots, hip hop, and more. It’s a great, in-depth conversation (as it so often is on Bullseye) and I’ll check out the book as soon as I can.
If you want to help bust the fuck out of the toxic culture that produces men like Elliot Rodger, you have to stop writing pieces that effectively explain how there’s a “nice way” to be like Elliot Rodger. Don’t write a piece about how you learned how to get laid. Write a piece about how you learned that women are human beings.
I think we still live in a culture that assumes that men are single by choice and women are single because no one wants them.
Sara Eckel, This is Why You’re Still Single (It’s Not Why You Think)
[…]
I think the average guy thinks they’re pro-woman, just because they think they’re a nice guy and someone has told them that they’re awesome. But the truth is far from it. Unless you are actively, consciously working against the gravitational pull of the culture, you will predictably, thematically, create these sort of fucked-up representations.
Junot Diaz (via luciaferr)
The common ground between coffee geeks and growers | Kathryn Hughes | Comment | The Guardian
Make your coffee matter.
The common ground between coffee geeks and growers | Kathryn Hughes | Comment | The Guardian
My intention is to make a contribution to the sociology of intellectual production, […] as well as to analysis of fetishism and magic. There too, you might say, “But why not go and study magic in "primitive” societies, rather than in the Paris fashion scene?“ I think that one of the functions of ethnological discourse is to say things that are bearable so long as they apply to remote populations, with the respect we owe them, but much less so when they are related to Western societies.
Pierre Bourdieu “Haute Couture and Haute Culture." Sociology in Question. London: Sage (1993) 132-3
