[A Pleasurable Headache] Hereditary Aristrocracy
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. Antenatal classes, MOT tests, baby worries (false alarm!), and a hellish perfect storm of events that means my workload at the day job has increased exponentially.
There is light on the horizon though (including meeting the tiny person who has given us both buckets of worry and anxiety recently).
Also, I've been reading a lot about habit formation recently. Given I am about to have a hell of a lot less free time I've come to the conclusion that concentrating on a core set of habits every day, rather than being overwhelmed by traditional To Do lists (which still have their place) is going to be key.
The theory seems to ring true. We shall see if it holds once it's tested in the field.
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Links
Here’s How We Beat Amazon
https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/amazon-labor-union-alu-staten-island-organizing
An interview over at Jacobin with Angelika Maldonado on the amazing accomplishments of workers in Staten Island which lead to a succesful unionisation drive.
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Netflix’s Bad Habits Have Caught Up With It
https://www.vulture.com/2022/04/netflix-bad-decisions-have-caught-up-with-it.html
Josef Adalian at Vulture on the recent woese of the streaming platform and the roads that led to the state it finds itself in.
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What using RSS feeds feels like
https://gilest.org/rss-feels.html
RSS is the unsung MVP of the internet in my opinion. It is an incredibly useful, and more importantly, open standard that allows a user to bypass the more modern algorithms of the web and get at the content (for want of a better term) you want.
For an explainer see About Feeds.
If only one reader of this newsletter decided to start using RSS after perusing this newsletter I would be happy. If you are after any recommendations for services, sites to subscribe to, anything at all, feel feel to drop me a line.
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John Darnielle Wants to Tell You a Story
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/john-darnielle-wants-to-tell-you-a-story
A wonderful interview with Mountain Goats frontman, and writer, John Darnielle. Here he is on creating art:
"I consider it work. I don’t know how other people are about it. To me, it is work. The word “work” is degraded by capitalism—capitalism takes work and makes it the thing you’re doing to get money so you can do the stuff you enjoy doing when you’re not working. But I don’t think of it that way. Some of that is because I have a gig that I want. But some of it, in a much more mundane and probably more productive sense, I think, working is just one of the things we do. Psychologists say that play is the work of children. You do not have to teach children to play—they just go out and do it, and they love it. That’s how I feel about work: I want to be working. I’m not miserable when I’m idle; I’m able to be idle, and I enjoy it. Work is one good thing and rest is the other one, but it’s a balance of those two that I think inspires the spirit."
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Sociopath Neocons Sacrifice Ukrainians and Global Poor – Economist Michael Hudson
https://usefulidiots.substack.com/p/sociopath-neocons-sacrifice-ukrainians
A remarkable interview with Michael Hudson by Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper on the current situation in Ukraine.
"And the West is not a democracy anymore. The West is turning into a hereditary aristocracy. And the Chinese are trying to prevent the financial class from becoming an independent class, pursuing policies that impoverish labor, because for them banking and credit is still a public utility. That’s the most important sector to be [saved] in China, and that’s what makes China so different from the United States. You could say that bankers and Wall Street are the central planners of the US, and their central planning is in favor of the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, and bankers are in charge of China through the Treasury, which is run by party officials that are not seeking to make capital gains for wealthy families but are using finance to build up their industry and infrastructure and make themselves independent of the West, so that America can never do to China what it did to Russia."
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Our Misguided Obsession with Twitter
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/our-misguided-obsession-with-twitter
Cal Newport on the outsized influence Twitter has on the zeitgeist. A much more nuanced and interesting take on Twitter however can be found over at Emoly Gorcenski's blog.
"If we are to position Twitter as a Town Square, we should consider that Town Squares were rarely designed as free speech fora. Town squares historically arose from civilization’s tendency to self-organize; they emerged as a gathering space where people could connect with people, for trade, for celebration, for ritual. Town squares arose from humanity’s need to form community. If Twitter wants to position itself as a Town Square, it must focus not on “free speech,” but on the development of community and to improve the features and tooling to allow users to self-select them. This of course includes better tools for users to moderate their community spaces according to self-defined standards."
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Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets
A new strain of Conservative politics is emerging. That guy Thiel lurks behind it once again. After the disastrous attempt(s) at mainstreaming the Alt-Right this new cadre seem much more insidous, fusing a kind of traditional aesthetic with "a tangled set of frameworks critiquing the systems of power and propaganda".
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I’m a Socialist, and I Just Beat the Labour Party in London’s Poorest Borough
In some good news Luftur Rahman has just won the mayoral election in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. A former Labout Party member, Rahman ran as an independent, trumpeting traditional socialist policies and approaches during his campaign.
"I ran again because we live in a different and more dangerous world than when I last held office. After a decade of crippling austerity people are less prepared than ever for this new economic crisis. Fuel bills are up, rent is up, food bank usage is surging, and we have lived through tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths because we faced a pandemic with a stripped-down health service and an approach that put profits before people."
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The Price Of ‘Selective Inattention’ – Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, And The Climate Apocalypse
https://twitter.com/ClimateHuman/status/1513053660128825348
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Alexander Chee on How to Write a Novel
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/alexander-chee-on-how-to-write-a
A good interview, heavy with some process questions, including a methodology I thought few people beside myself used:
"Sometimes they are different by like a chapter. I have a much-abused memory. It just isn’t up to the task of remembering all these things. I was so sure for a while that I’d remember the different drafts. So what I ended up doing was a workaround. I created a process that a lot of my friends have adopted, where I created a journal that was specifically for the novel that I was working on. So each day I would open it when I started working and I’d read the most recent entry so I could remember where I was. And, if I needed to, I could refer to things in the past. And as the day went on, if I needed to dip into old files, I’d list them. It was a way of leaving a trail for myself about my own thoughts. I’d include any questions I had about the manuscript. I’d vent about scenes that I thought were still disgusting or pathetic or unworthy etc. I’d ask questions about why that was the case. Then the next day I’d try to answer them. "
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Elon Musk's Dumb Elden Ring Build Proves The Billionaire Is Maidenless
https://kotaku.com/elon-musk-elden-ring-mage-worst-magic-build-twitter-bil-1848912000
Shocking.
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I am off to prepare for a presentation on 'Gas and Air' for an Antenatal class. See you in two!