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I have experimented in the past on other platforms with a reading (b)log. I spend a lot of time reading, partly as a procrastination exercise but also as a way to stave off the inevitable collapse of ego and the dissolution of the self. A lot of this reading passes through me as though my brain folds were a porous sieve; I get to keep the big stuff but all the little bits are lost to time. So maybe writing down little blurbs, summaries, reactions to the day's (or few days') readings will help nail them down. I was taught that the act of writing is a way to make learning actualized, like the collapse of a quantum wave function into a single particle.
My intention is to include various forms of "reading," be it audio, text, or video. Like if I was a youtube react guy but hopefully cooler.
[youtube video] Celebrities are turning into bookworms (why though?)
Recommended by Hussein Kesvani, who I think generally has a clear-eyed and interesting understanding of cultural theory in the digital age. To be honest, not a lot of interesting ideas here. She does bring out some Bourdieu in the formulation of transclasse and cultural capital (vs economic and social capital), which is always a good framework to look back on and think about. Talks a bit about emrata, RM from BTS and Jisoo from BP, though I think she assigns celebrities too much consciously political (though not politicized) agency, esp in Kpop, and in turn places too much power in the specific people.
[article] Chartbook #15
I've been doing my best to read more Tooze lately. Went back and read his overview on fiat, money, and crypto. A round up of recent readings he did to sharpen his thinking on money. Some choice quotes from Tooze himself:
The fiat money world is the world that we have inhabited since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1971 and 1973. It is normally contrasted to the gold standard world that preceded it. But are gold and “fiat” really that different? To back a currency with gold is a political choice too, anchored in structures of expectation on the part of creditors, debtors and investors, on systems for gold production, storage, relationships between banks and central banks, in other words structures of power.
[...]
To paraphrase Gramsci, crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born. Crypto is the libertarian spawn of neoliberalism’s ultimately doomed effort to depoliticize money.
[...]
To paraphrase Gramsci, crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born. Crypto is the libertarian spawn of neoliberalism’s ultimately doomed effort to depoliticize money.
This tweet thread he links to is fairly illuminating on the whole "fiat is fake money/soft money" arg that libertarians like to throw around.
[article] Democrats Still Don't Understand Asian American Voters
Very straightforward Kang expanding on Kangthought. Here he talks about the NYC and Virginia races, where the failure of Democrats to speak at all to material concerns, leading in NYC to a huge swing of Asians towards the Republican candidate, made the Republicans seem like caring, pragmatic, and even progressive. In the larger context, he reiterates, the insistence that there is some inherently progressive coalition in America is simply wrong, a failing strategy for both the Democrats and the left.
In the case of Asian Americans, while it's true that younger and second generation Asian Americans tend to vote not-Republican, 60% of Asians here are new immigrants, who haven't been politicized in the same way. This way of understanding the world, as an assemblage of complex, imperfect, and small bodies moving through the sea, propelled by their own agency but also by the broader currents, is classic Kangthought.
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