–“Margaret Thatcher got it wrong when she famously said that ‘there is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayer’s money’. The opposite is correct: there is only public money and all taxpayers use that money to pay their taxes. . . .When money returns to the government via taxes, it stops being money.”
–“If saving the planet requires a shift to a largely electrified economy powered by renewable energy, well, long-distance shipping — including air freight — looks much harder to electrify than, say, home heating and local driving.”
–“Domestically, the Confucian revival [in China] dates to the 1980s, raising the question of whether Orientalism and its objectification of the Orient are a thing of the past—as proclaimed by postcolonial critics—or if Orientalism, now re-appropriated by ‘Orientals’ themselves, has emerged victorious in the age of global capitalism.”
–“Beds have been the center of urgent political struggles — be they in prisons, detention centers, hospitals, or nursing homes. Our virtual conversation series centers ‘bed activism,’ [as] complex forms of resistance and visionary care that emerge from the intimate spaces of sick, disabled, detained, and imprisoned peoples.”
–“Kyle Powys Whyte describes the importance of not seeing the climate crisis as novel or unprecedented, explaining ‘today’s status quo, of course, is already an Indigenous ecological dystopia’ . . .”
–“Municipalization of domestic work will make it a public good and constitute domestic workers as public employees. . . .In countries where municipalities are rendering services and utilities to large impoverished sections of society, domestic work can be added on as municipal service.”
–“Kalecki did consider the possibility that capitalists might respond to the loss of their power with an investment strike. . .” [my italics]
–“Projects of queer worldmaking articulate queerness not only as a product of subordination and repression, but also as the site of pleasure, enjoyment, and sociality. What unites these social movements, it is argued, is their conviction that the pursuit of Eros could create openings for the supersession of the existing global order and the instantiation of egalitarian systems through which we can collectively and cooperatively determine our gender and sexual lives.”
–“Consider a concrete example. Policymakers, disappointed by the results of existing frameworks for reporting AI safety incidents,. . . design a bounty scheme whereby technologists and members of the public who discover vulnerabilities in high-risk automated systems receive financial rewards. . .
To evaluate the effectiveness of this scheme, policymakers compare the quality and quantity of safety information it uncovers to the information collected from existing reporting frameworks. Policymakers randomly assign bounty hunters to different groups, which receive different rewards, in order to discover which rewards most successfully elicit critical safety information. Finally, after finding that the bounty scheme offers some improvements over existing reporting frameworks, policymakers propose a stress test: . .they deliberately insert vulnerabilities into several high-risk automated systems and observe whether any bounty hunters catch the bait.”
–“In what might be called a timescape of Anthropocene anxiety, only emergency action can forestall looming catastrophe.. . . .We emphasize [instead] the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.” [my italics]
–“I mentioned to you earlier that when we were in the Young Lords, one-third of Puerto Ricans were in the United States and two-thirds in Puerto Rico. Today, it’s 5.8 million Puerto Ricans in the United States and only three million on the island. There are more Puerto Ricans in the United States than there are on the island of Puerto Rico! So the numbers have been reversed. In fact, the Puerto Ricans in the United States are the most powerful part of the Puerto Rican nation, because they have elected officials, and they have an influence that the Puerto Ricans on the island don’t have.”
–“. . .and attempts to dispatch [US] troops to shore up the Guomindang government in 1945-6 were derailed by a transnational wave of GI protests. . .On bases and outposts across the Pacific, soldiers organized mass meetings and demonstrations demanding their rapid demobilization and opposing American military involvement in China, and their efforts were backed by comrades in Europe. Largely airbrushed out of history, the largest strike-mutiny in American history was a rare historical moment. . .”
References available on request.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 