Mixed Noodles #4 | Movements
This week —
Tired and weary of our present surroundings, but inspired by the strength of my peers and the throes of your megaphones.
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Ocasio-Cortez on the ways we think of identity politics, and the importance of bringing varied and representative lenses to our offices of power.
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Justifying the present and repudiating the past: Why Was Korematsu Wrong?
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We’ve talked a lot about tech’s reshaping of blue-collar labor in male-dominated industries — what about domestic workers like housecleaners and nannies?
From Data & Society: Beyond Disruption.
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Vouchers. Cheaper housing. Permanent support.
“We know all that works. It’s not even a question,” Friant says. “People move their lives forward. They get the jobs and education they need.”
“Unfortunately, the ‘everybody’ who wants supportive housing is often quieter than a smaller subset of neighbors who say, ‘We agree it belongs somewhere. It just doesn’t belong here.’ Preferably in a fifth dimension. And invisible.”
This is what NIMBYism looks like.
“You can’t concentrate the poverty. You cannot put all the affordable housing in one place. We went through that in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, and what did we end up with? New ghettos,” says Robert Friant, managing director for external affairs, communications, and training center at the Corporation for Supportive Housing. “Taking 150 people and putting them on some industrial site far away from where they can access services they need only prolongs the poverty.”
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PHIMBYs are instead focused almost exclusively on the production of subsidized, below-market-rate units, and strengthening tenant protections and rent controls for existing residents.
YIMBYs have criticized PHIMBYs for winding up on the same side as wealthy homeowners and rejecting zoning reforms that would likely yield real benefits to their stakeholders. PHIMBYs ding YIMBYs for their religious adherence to supply-side economics and their inability to reach out to, and provide for the needs of, communities that have long been on the losing side of housing policy.
For more information on the housing debate, read the Social Housing Report from People’s Policy Project.
If you’re in California and support PHIMBY, consider joining your local DSA chapter.
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In preparation of Ways of Organizing, the second volume of UnionDoc’s World Records Journal:
how the documentary camera provides agency to those who wield it.
Before the camera does anything else, it is conditional and recursive, providing and renewing possibilities and limits for action within the ecologies in which we are enmeshed.
Reading:
The Skull // Beyond the Door
Two oddities from Philip K. Dick’s early work. Straightforward and hokey, but revealing a tender, dark palette for building small worlds.
There was a whirr. The clock shuddered and all at once the door opened. The cuckoo came out, sliding swiftly. He paused and looked around solemnly, scrutinizing her, the room, the furniture.
Listening:
Ways of assembling and organizing, from Rebel Steps.
You have access to things that no one else has access to. You have friends and family who will listen to you more than they would me, or a book, or an article, or anyone else. Many folks want to sit back and say, “well, that’s not my job, someone else will do the organizing”.
I want to remind you that’s not true. The work you do organizing your own crew is work no one else can do. So get pumped, you’re crucial.
Notes from the Working Desk:
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OpenCensus for stats collection and distributed tracing.
next → refocusing; mobilizing; and attending NYAFF.
reminder → happiness is other people.
The most significant thing we can do for our well-being is not to “find ourselves” or “go within.” It’s to invest as much time and effort as we can into nurturing the relationships we have with the people in our lives.