|
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-041
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
—
Other issues:
Palestine:
China:
Europe:
Trump admin:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Chinese are fleeing the West!
Well, not really fleeing but kind of flocking back to the homeland after having realized that the West isn’t the holy land it promises glossy magazines.
Some snippets – ranging from NZ to Germany to the UK & Canada:
– In China, exercise and travel are often icing on the cake, but in Germany, they’re necessary for maintaining normal mental health
– Moreover, abroad, there’s a strong sense of boundaries between people, and meeting requires scheduling days in advance
– A doctor, who, while expressing “genuine concern” for his condition and stating “I understand your needs,” ultimately resolved to: “If it’s urgent, we can refer you to a specialist.”
– Referred to the specialist, the cycle of redundant phrases repeated, and when asking for an appointment, Shuige was stunned—the earliest appointment was three months away.
– When she asked doctors why she couldn’t sleep, the response was “Many people experience insomnia”; when complaining about eye discomfort, the advice was simply “Blink more.”
– The puzzle solution revealed “Nativity” specifically referred to “the birth of Jesus Christ,” and her teammates nodded in understanding while Sasa applauded with an uneasy smile: “They knew we weren’t religious, but tested us on religious topics anyway.”
– Not only DeepSeek, her company, to ensure data security, prohibited tools like Google and ChatGPT on work computers, while her Chinese friends comfortably trained AI, she was left dealing with outdated local software.
– Half a year passed, filled with repetitive work like bi-weekly web updates and quarterly emails, leaving her creativity stunted.
– Working on botany research with her husband in New Zealand, Liu Lu finds it hard to believe the lab’s setup reflects that of a developed country: the office walls are peeling, the equipment is outdated, reminiscent of China in the ’80s and ’90s, and the precision of the data they generate isn’t even suitable for publication in a paper.
– a single project can be as low as tens of thousands of RMB, with hefty management fees and experimental labor costs, leaving a pitiful amount of money for actual research.
– When she went to study in the UK in 2009, she never imagined that London, once an “promised land,” would become a “lawless zone” a decade later.
– “Yesterday, while shopping in Westminster, my bag was stolen,” “My colleague was held up at knifepoint while buying a bottle of wine…” She first noticed the decline in public safety from stories shared in social groups.
– Mary, fed up, wanted to leave the UK for another Western country, only to find through consultations that the idyllic overseas world described in magazines is collectively collapsing.
Welcome to the West :-/
https://thechinaacademy.org/chinese-immigrants-in-europe-are-queuing-to-return-home/
Posted by: Zet | Mar 3 2025 22:41 utc | 140
Yves Smith posts today, pushing a rationalized, polite company version of anti-wokism (serving as the soft pro-Trumpery she puts first in her politics—but not her economics.) https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/twilight-of-the-woke-or-how-to-historicize-with-a-hammer.html It’s taken from albrt’s review of one Musa al-Gharbi.
In her intro, Smith notes al-Gharbi’s focus on how the PMC making a great pretense of egalitarianism and racial/ethnic tolerance, while relying on a servant underclass composed of people of color…
If Smith doesn’t agree it’s hard to see why she’s promoting this review.
In the review itself, however, we see this:
It seems to me that symbolic capitalists are more aware of their common interests than the working class, and they have acted very effectively to institutionalize their control over the reproduction of symbolic capital, particularly through control of education. But We Have Never Been Woke is primarily focused on the role played by symbolic wokeness rather than on other mechanics of exercising class power. I suspect an economic class angle would become more apparent if the tools and marketable products of symbol-mongering were given more attention—actionable knowledge, intellectual property, eloquence, and all the other reified things that most people think of as the basis of a symbolic economy, but which symbolic capitalists often disregard in favor of credentials and other abstract symbols of status.
As usual, untangling a knot is more tedious than making one. The tl;dr is, this is stupid in the senses of being self-contradictory and willfully ignorant. The notion of PMC is incoherent, useful primarily for political swindlers.
For those with more patience and the (reprehensible?) desire for explanation, we can start with the observation that if the PMC is those people who employ servants (as per Smith) the so-called PMC is more or less indistinguishable from the wealthy people who own income-generating property. The implicit claim the wealthy are the woke is preposterous. Many wealthy people are virulent foes of woke.
As to the notion that the so-called PMC controls education, ignores the fact that education in the US is decentralized, under the control of the states (including a huge portion of the higher education system in the form of the public universities.) The politics of each state vary, but the wealthy are the key donors to the political party (most specific places are effectively one-party, lest it be forgotten.) Many politicians are themselves wealthy. Private and religious (often enough a synonym for segregated, especially by income of students’ families) schools are controlled by owners and funders as well as the fees levied on parents. At the elite levels, private funding of policy institutes is largely by the wealthy who simply own stuff, or by the foundations set up by the wealthy who owned property, or corporations acting directly. Corporations, and the stock of each, are property themselves, largely owned by the wealthy. The endowments and sports and real estate of the most elite universities make them propertied institutions in their own right. The implicit claim that those are controlled by the professors assumes, as they joke, facts not in evidence. Education is not controlled by symbolic capitalists, but indirectly yet thoroughly by…capitalists. The notion of PMC could have been consciously devised to hide this?
Developing this point, it is not clear what investments symbolic capitalists make, or what constitutes a profit, or how they accumulate more symbolic capital. The review does mention intellectual property. But quite aside from the fact that very few PMC own patents, copyrights, trademarks and logos, owning intellectual property makes you a property owner. Categorizing such owners of property as a different class than bourgeois/petty bourgeois is like declaring the owner of a factory is in a different class from the owner of bonds. This is a difference in personal interest, not a class difference.
There is a reference to credentials. The thing is, the struggle for credentials is not the PMC being aware of its class interests. It’s a competition within this social stratum. It would make much more sense to argue that the so-called PMC emphasis on wokeness is much more about the effort to acquire credentials for previously marginal members, advocating for their promotion as DEI. The right-wing identity politics version, where DEI is promotion of the woke rather than the qualified, then is the previously dominant groups defending their turf, as they imagine they have a natural right. It is not even obvious that credentials give one independent class power (which means in the long run property.) It’s more about excluding competition.
The right-wing identity politics version were credentials are markers of superiority reinforces the basic idea of class as a social status: Some people are better than others, period. But this is not a woke notion, not now and now in all the previous centuries of class society. What constituted a credential has changed, some. People still think a name like Kennedy is a credential. Others think an honorable discharge and graduating Yale Law School and writing a book (made into a Netflix movie!) and engaging in business are credentials. The notion that credentials are only PMC if the person holding them is deemed woke, is nonsense.
The review also cites actionable knowledge, which means nothing I think, and eloquence. I say that the perception of eloquence is highly dependent on the social markers of the speaker and their stage, so much so that it can be almost meaningless. Except maybe as a regret that albrt’s Substack doesn’t pay according to albrt’s eloquence?
Posted by: steven t johnson | Mar 4 2025 19:03 utc | 179
Salaam to all.
I once heard a man
While passing through the quarter
Of hapless drinkers, say
‘My people have forgotten more
than those foreign devils on the “other side”’
Firmly bound to the points of compass
He gave expression to dark and boastful pride.
Neglecting to remember
That the Light of God pervades
The entirety of His Creation
“Lord of the East and the West and all points in between”,
I gently reminded him,
“have you forgot?”
And what is this taking pride
In forgetting?
Is not the question to ponder this:
That how is it that you once possessed knowledge
And now it is lost?
Was it not perhaps,
The cause of this forgetfulness,
The burning of libraries and books
And the suppression of ancient wisdoms
And adopting the narrow-minded ways
Of those who make their trade
In beguiling the common man
While covering themselves
In garb of holiness
Claiming themselves to be divines?
Then he said
‘What is necessary for effective government
Is the presence of a strong lord
To bend the will of the people
To his lofty standards.
The people are but cattle, quadrupeds,
Donkeys, sheep, and horses’.
And I said to myself
This being a time of a Sacred Moon
It is perchance a good thing to remind
Of the lessons lost and forgotten.
~!~ ~!.!~ ~!.!~
庄子 (Master Zhuang) | The Wise Tender of Horses
When the Yellow Emperor went to see TAO upon the Chu-tz’u Mountain, Fang Ming was his charioteer, Chang You sat on his right, Chang Jo and His P’eng were his outriders, and K’un Hun and Hua Chi brought the rear.
On Reaching the the wilds of Hsiang-ch’eng, these Seven Sages lost their way and there was no one of whom to ask the road. By and by, the fell in with a boy who was grazing horses, and asked him, saying:
‘Do you know the Chu-tz’u Mountain?’
‘I do’, replied the boy.
‘And can you tell us’, continued the Sages, ‘where the TAO abides?’
‘I can’, replied the boy.
‘This is a strange lad’, cried the Yellow Emperor. ‘Not only does he know the the Chu-tz’u Mountain is, but also where TAO abides! Come, pray tell me, how would you govern the empire?’
‘I should govern the empire’, said the boy, ‘just the same as I look after my horses. What else should I do?’
‘When I was a little boy’, the boy continued, ‘and used to live within the points of the compass, my eyes got dim of sight. An old man advised me to mount the Chariot of the Sun and visit the Wilds of Hsiang-ch’eng.
‘My Sight is now much better, and I continue to dwell without the points of the compass. I should govern the empire in just the same way. What else should I do?’
‘Of course’, replied the Yellow Empire, ‘government is not your trade. Still, I should be glad to hear what you would do.’
The boy declined to answer, but on being urged again, he cried out:
‘What difference is there between governing the empire, and looking after horses? See that no harm is comes to the horses, that is all!’
Thereupon, the Emperor prostrated himself before the boy, and addressing him as Divine Teacher, took his leave.
~!~ ~!!! 道 !!!~ ~!~
اللَّهُ نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ مَثَلُ نُورِهِ كَمِشْكَاةٍ فِيهَا مِصْبَاحٌ ۖ الْمِصْبَاحُ فِي زُجَاجَةٍ ۖ الزُّجَاجَةُ كَأَنَّهَا كَوْكَبٌ دُرِّيٌّ يُوقَدُ مِنْ شَجَرَةٍ مُبَارَكَةٍ زَيْتُونَةٍ لَا شَرْقِيَّةٍ وَلَا غَرْبِيَّةٍ يَكَادُ زَيْتُهَا يُضِيءُ وَلَوْ لَمْ تَمْسَسْهُ نَارٌ ۚ نُورٌ عَلَىٰ نُورٍ ۗ يَهْدِي اللَّهُ لِنُورِهِ مَنْ يَشَاءُ ۚ وَيَضْرِبُ اللَّهُ الْأَمْثَالَ لِلنَّاسِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ
Allah is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth
The parable of His Light is a niche
Wherein is a Lamp
The lamp is in a glass
The glass as it were a Glittering Star
Lit from a Blessed Olive Tree
Neither Eastern nor Western
Whose Oil almost lights up
Though fire touchs it not.
Light upon light.
Allah Guides to His Light whomever He Please.
Allah Draws parables for Mankind
And Allah has Knowledge of all things!
The Glorious and Illuminating Al-Qur’an – Sura (24) An-Noor (The Light) – Sign 35
~!M!~ ~!M!~ ~!M!~
& Salaam!
Posted by: sunof27 | Mar 5 2025 13:10 utc | 198
|
