Hey, instead of having a two hour lunch during the presentations, why don’t we just fucking eat and present? That might shave off some time that I could use drinking.
I have a presentation to do tomorrow. I’m considering just reading the lyrics to “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and then staring the audience down for five minutes.
“Is he really that left wing?”
“”Nah, he’s an anarchist. He doesn’t even vote.”
Conversation I overheard today.
The only upside of today was a professor telling me that my idea for a thesis is actually really interesting.
People talking about AFI on my dash. That brings back memories of high schools and wearing oversized black AFI shirts.
“The recent efforts to promote lesbian and gay marriage also promote a norm that threatens to render illegitimate and abject those sexual arrangements that do not comply with the marriage norm in either its existing or its revisable form. At the same time, the homophobic objections to lesbian and gay marriage expand out through the culture to affect all queer lives. One critical question thus becomes, how does one oppose the homophobia without embracing the marriage norm as the exclusive or most highly valued social arrangement for queer sexual lives? Similarly, efforts to establish bonds of kinship that are not based on a marriage tie become nearly illegible and unviable when marriage sets the terms for kinship, and kinship itself is collapsed into ‘family.’ The enduring social ties that constitute viable kinship in communities of sexual minorities are threatened with becoming unrecognizable and unviable as long as the marriage bond is the exclusive way in which both sexuality and kinship are organized. A critical relation to this norm involves disarticulating those rights and obligations currently attendant upon marriage so that marriage might remain a symbolic exercise for those who choose to engage in it, but the rights and obligations of kinship may take any number of other forms. What reorganization of sexual norms would be necessary for those who live sexually and affectively outside the marriage bond or in kin relations to the side of marriage either to be legally and culturally recognized for the endurance and importance of their intimate ties or, equally important, to be free of the need for recognition of this kind?” — Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004; p. 5)
(Source: ghostdad-ebooks)
Today was one of those days where it took all I have to not say “Fuck all of you, I’m going to drink.”
(Source: platonic-cuddles, via actuallyaviking)
“Frequently accused since Empire of underplaying the dark side of imperialism, Ferguson seems to have come up with a rhetorical strategy: to describe vividly one spectacular instance of brutality – he expends some moral indignation of his own on the slave trade – and then to use this exception to the general rule of imperial benevolence to absolve himself from admitting to the role of imperialism’s structural violence in the making of the modern world.” —
Pankaj Mishra on Niall Ferguson
This strategy is so key to how many historians and modern day apologists for empire/capitalism/racism work. Instead of grasping these concepts as structural, they look at them as acts of exception and thus dismiss the entire structural violence that their systems impose upon people.
(via fearandwar)“Frequently accused since Empire of underplaying the dark side of imperialism, Ferguson seems to have come up with a rhetorical strategy: to describe vividly one spectacular instance of brutality – he expends some moral indignation of his own on the slave trade – and then to use this exception to the general rule of imperial benevolence to absolve himself from admitting to the role of imperialism’s structural violence in the making of the modern world.” —
Pankaj Mishra on Niall Ferguson
This strategy is so key to how many historians and modern day apologists for empire/capitalism/racism work. Instead of grasping these concepts as structural, they look at them as acts of exception and thus dismiss the entire structural violence that their systems impose upon people.