Sunday Reading

by zunguzungu

I’ve been busy with job materials, teaching, writing, more writing, and also sleeping, so this week’s Sunday Reading is more lightly curated than usual. And to pick up some of the slack, a special bonus pinch-hit from the great Bint Battuta, whose twitterfeed is always a treasure trove of smart amazing.

• Libyans as passive tools.
• A 9/11 Coloring Book
• Christian Nightmares.

Mapping Marijuana (price variation):

• This cable is kind of a big deal.
• A great interview with David Graeber on the history of debt.
• Nice one, S&P.
• I agree that TV should be like this sometimes.
• Body Therapy for Your Mind
• Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Obama sticks it to people who need to breathe air. Krugman responds:

As some of us keep trying to point out, the United States is in a liquidity trap: private spending is inadequate to achieve full employment, and with short-term interest rates close to zero, conventional monetary policy is exhausted.

This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.

And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.

• The pipeline (1, 2, 3) and the ozone standards (4, 5, 6) made the Obama sticker come off Gerry’s car.
• Is President Obama a Lost Cause Environmentally — and What Should Progressives Do?
• Endless Disappointment
• Tar Sands Action reaches 1,000 arrests in lead up to final day
• Life in Hooverville
• Revolt of the Elites.
• Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: An Interview with Rob Nixon
• Top CIA official: Obama “changed virtually nothing”
• Zygmunt Bauman: ‘No one is in control. That is the major source of contemporary fear’ – video
• Anwar, a prisoner in Abu Salim during the 1996 massacre, standsin one of the courtyards where the killings took place. (via)
• worker=hipster redux.
• Judith Butler on Hannah Arendt on Eichmann in Jerusalem.
• “a memoir where the author refuses to see either her lover or her husband as anything less than fully human“: Millicent on Cleaving.
• “ancestries of interest“
• Interview with Ali Ahmida, Gilbert Achcar, and David Smith on Situation in Libya.
• Flying While Black & Reading Antique Aviation Books. via @airminded
• Mercy at Abu Salim prison
• Man Hunt
• “Universities exist for a host of reasons, most related to status&social networking rather than actual education”
• Ohio sells a prison to a private company.
• Pankaj Mishra, “after 9-11, our own low, dishonest decade”
• Tripoli files show CIA working with Libya.
• An Around the Web Digest from Savage Minds

This “Top Secret America” reporting is still amazing, and chilling. Part one, two, three, and four:

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine….

• Grading Third-Party Presidential Candidate Websites
• New Media and the People-Powered Uprisings
• Jacob Silverman reviews Where the Wild Frontiers Are
• Teddy Girls, 1950s
• Skateboarders of 1970s California
•  Things [Mike Konczal is] Seeing in the Awful August Job Numbers
• Quick Roundup of Jobs Numbers Reactions
• The State of the Unions
• Picking Someone Out Of A Lineup
• Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga
• Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust (a review from @subabat)
• Intricacies of Bahrain’s Shia-Sunni divide
• What’s Really Pornographic? The Point of Documenting Detroit
• Uganda and North Africa
• The decade’s biggest scam
• George Monbiot on the feudalism of academic publishing (in the UK, but analogous to the situation in the states)
• Government Internet Surveillance Starts With Eyes Built in the West
• Don’t Suspend Scout Finch, Mr. Schmidt. It’s Wrong and It’s Bad for Business.
• Gilbert Achcar on Libya: The Revolution has just begun
• Juan Cole’s War on Anarchism. via southsouth
• The GOP war on voting.
• Adam Kotsko has a Sermon idea

Some selections from Bint Battuta’s twitterfeed:

• “The problem with mercenaries or peacekeepers isn’t their foreignness – it’s their service to dictatorship or empire”
• Stories behind the Ornate Locks of Varanapally Temple. Gorgeous photography.
• Ai Weiwei: Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare”
• Pagans came, o Lord, in thy inheritance:
• “After the service I suggest that six years later, for the three hundredth anniversary it would be good to invite the representatives of the Tatars for reconciliation, we have the contacts for that. My hosts just shake their heads. “It’s too early yet”, they say.”
• How to Write an Earthquake: Fifteen Haitian Writers Respond
• Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle
• How to write about Aboriginal Australia
• Wow: “In an effort to save the memories of a nation, muddied photographs and albums sent from tsunami-hit areas are washed and repackaged by an army of volunteers across Japan before being returned to their owners.”
• The glory of the Raj.
• Kashmir’s literary harvest.
• Oh, Americans:
• “How do you fire this thing?” he asked on Wednesday as a bearded rebel handed him an AK-47. Locating the trigger of the assault rifle and switching off the safety, Mr Jeon fired it in the air in two short bursts. “I want to fight in Sirte!” he proclaimed, using hand gestures and pointing west towards Sirte. Whether the rebels understood him was far from clear. “It’s hard to communicate. I don’t really speak any Arabic,” he said. Nevertheless, the rebels have clearly taken to the mathematics student with no obvious political leanings who decided to slum it as an Arab Spring revolutionary before going back to his calculator for fall semester.
• “The problem with mercenaries or peacekeepers isn’t their foreignness – it’s their service to dictatorship or empire”
• Orpheus and the Nine Eyes of Google Street View
• Earlobe, or the millstone of ideology: “Hungarians, as they are often described, are a peaceful, meek, hospitable people, but for some reason they immediately join all of Europe’s wars with a good instinct for siding with the future losers.”
• Somalia, then and now.
• These songs do not die: overview of contemporary south Asian literature.
• “Despots no longer are the sole face of Arabs. Moustaches seem less problematic than before”
• “Madagascar maids: Misery in the Middle East”
• South/South’s Street art in Cairo. Beautiful.
• On art, hipsters, and cultural production.
• Vertical Panorama: the Rhine and the birth of tourism.
• On the stereotype of ‘the Indian’ in the South African imagination.
• Sartre’s Facebook wall.
• On Bolaño’s Between Parentheses: Do not, tempting as it may be, begin with the occasional prose of Between Parentheses, for though it is a collection full of passion and life, most of the contents will seem of specialized interest, unless you happen to be deeply immersed in the culture of 20th century Chilean literature…Notice I wrote Do not begin, and not Do not read. For I would argue that Between Parentheses is very much a book to pick up at a certain point on the Bolaño trail, not just for the incessant flashes we get of the man’s antic, pugnacious, idealistic, romantic, disaffected and utterly free-spoken personality, but no less important for what his full-throttle engagement with whatever is the literary matter-at-hand suggests about the ideal culture. One after another, the pieces show us how passion fuels polemic, how wit and vitriol sharpen the edge of a sentence, how intellectual reach and reference remind us that the writer is forever looking over his shoulder at those who preceded him. We may not always appreciate the references—many are, as I said, to Chilean writers—but watching Bolaño breast his way forward is heartening and energizing. I thought of Mailer at his best, or Vidal—except that here self-aggrandizement is replaced with far more winning self-irony.
• “Seniors with Spray Cans: Germany’s Older Generations Take Up Graffiti”
• ‘In India I was a Jew, in Israel I am an Indian.’
• The politics of grief.
• Pregnant in Putin’s Russia.
• There is nothing more public than privacy: “How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces?”
• The appeal of American realist fiction eludes Eliot Weinberger, “with its precise evocations of consumer products.” Somewhere, Jonathan Franzen’s ears are burning.
• Ethnic Humor: “Evidently, this is what happens when you rap about the myriad weirdnesses of being brownish in America.”

Postscript additions:

• Robert Reich on “The Limping Middle Class” via @jacremes
• The darker side of blogging: “Publishing material for conversation rather than admiration requires vulnerability.” via @ncecire
• Arab-free labor!
• Looking at (wikileaked) cables on pharmaceuticals drugs and trade pressure via @kmbtweets
• Your fact of the day: “The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, we would have to gain some 18 MILLION jobs.” via @cblatts
• Think Progress: Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners…None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it.”
• From Democracy Journal‘s reflection on the 10 year anniversary of 9-11: Freedom and 9/11 by Orlando Patterson and The Politics of Fear by Corey Robin
• I’m from the police and I’m here to help. via @gerrycanavan
• Political scientists take John Yoo’s side against protester.
• Hisham Matar’s Two Revolutions
• The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech
• What Democrats can do about Obama.
• “The suggestion that Shariah threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in 19th-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious.”
• Darkest Austria:  “Kinshasha University Institute of Ethnology explores the mysterious tribes of Upper Austria” via @timeblind
• Prison-based Gerrymandering.
• Modernity will fucking crush your fragile ass if you’re not careful: