flâneur

Sixian Lim

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on the atlas — 62

highlights — 1121

  • Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson a…
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our se…
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
    On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue | Vogue
  • Will food tech feed billions of people as agricultural systems collapse due to changes in climate and biodiversity? The short answer is no, due to its resource demands, yet if managed and governed well, some novel food technologies will help to feed millions of people, while also presenting some uncertain risk of genetic pollution of the natural world. At present, the understanding is too influenced by, on the one hand, capitalist-funded entrepreneurs and promoters who sometimes mislead with their communications (to both oversell the potential and downplay risks), and on the other hand, people…
    Getting more serious about food system breakdown – Professor Jem Bendell
  • The polarisation reveals how anxious people who work on food and the environment have become. Some wish for a technological salvation from the situation, and so adhere to their view in a quasi-religious fashion. The fact that there are billions of dollars sloshing around food tech now is certainly not a disincentive for their continued devotion.
    Getting more serious about food system breakdown – Professor Jem Bendell
  • With food system breakdown looming, clearly the stakes are high. Unfortunately, the discussion about food tech is polarised by people who think there is a binary choice to make about how to save the world. On the one side, people claim food tech is the answer and on the other side people claim agroecology is the answer.[ix] As a recent organic agroforester myself, I know that mimicking natural processes can successfully replace many of the industrial inputs to agriculture without decimating productivity, while requiring much more manual labour. However, I know there is no one answer to the glo…
    Getting more serious about food system breakdown – Professor Jem Bendell
  • The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • What would remain is the kind of work only human beings will ever be able to do: those forms of caring and helping labor that are at the very center of the crisis that brought about Occupy Wall Street to begin with. What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t eve…
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. What might a revolution in common sense actually look like?
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and po- litical system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circ…
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.
    Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
  • One of the central insights emerging from research on degrowth and climate mitigation is that universal public services are crucial to a just and effective transition. Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expens…
    Jason Hickel Blog — Jason Hickel
  • In classic MMT you use taxation to reduce demand in order to control inflation. But we can also use taxation to reduce demand in order to bring resource and energy use down to target levels.
    Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment — Jason Hickel
  • a “middle-way” between technomic acceleration and decelerated simplicity: namely, that of the mixed-scale, deeply adaptive salvagepatch.
    Global Weirding & Deep Adaptation
  • Successful patches will be those that have already done the work of building-in capacities for resilience – be it viable food and water sources, maintainable energy and fuel supplies, interpersonal trust and bonding, or patch security systems. Successful patches will be open to relinquishing reliance on pre-collapse technology, social practices and norms; and engage in ongoing efforts to restore much needed equipment, infrastructure and abilities that afford the procurement and protection of required resources.
    Global Weirding & Deep Adaptation
  • Without a deep adaptation strategy we run the risk of what Arran Crawford has called, “patchwork psychosis”, ie. patchworking with delusion – detached from the necessities and imperatives encountered when coping-with disruption and fragmentation.
    Global Weirding & Deep Adaptation
  • The probability of radical and unprecedented societal transformation within the next 12 years is very low. The habits, mechanisms and technomic processes of contemporary modes of social and economic production have locked us into a ruinous trajectory of ecological, social and psychological disintegration that are mostly, if not completely, beyond causal intervention by moderate, piecemeal, and compromised lifestyle and policy approaches. Put plainly, we’re fucked.
    Global Weirding & Deep Adaptation
  • In a globally weirding world, with proliferating threats to personal and population security, the need for discernable, cogent, and workable maps, models, strategies and solutions becomes not just about operational efficiency, or planning, but also an urgent and necessary endeavor to attempt to ensure the continuance of anything resembling stable individual, family and communal life.
    Global Weirding & Deep Adaptation
  • I conceptualize patchwork theory as an open source platform to not only attempt the urgent work of improving existing models and techniques for weaving alternative communities and social arrangements, but also a means of psychologically coping-with the reality of such fragmentation. I contend that our ability to accommodate and adapt to the existential and material threats of the present and near future are greatly enhanced by exposure to and adoption of the kinds of systems orientation and compositional approaches that patchwork theorizing seems, almost by necessity, to entail.
    Global Weirding & Deep Adaptation
  • The insight and equanimity cultivated by eco-bodhisattvas support what is most distinctive about Buddhist activism: acting without attachment to the results of action, something that is easily misunderstood to imply a casual attitude. Instead, our task is to do the very best we can, not knowing what the consequences will be—in fact, not knowing if our efforts will make any difference whatsoever. We don’t know if what we do is important, but we do know that it’s important for us to do it. Have we already passed ecological tipping points and civilization as we know it is doomed? We don’t know, a…
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • So it is not surprising that a more secular, this-worldly alternative has become popular, especially in the West: understanding the Buddhist path more psychologically, as a new type of therapy that provides different perspectives on the nature of mental distress and new practices to promote psychological well-being. These include not only reducing greed, ill will, and delusion here and now, but also sorting out our emotional lives and working through personal traumas.
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • According to Macy, to see this world as illusion is to dwell in an emptiness that is disengaged from its forms, in which the end of suffering involves nonattachment to the fate of beings rather than nonattachment to one’s own ego. But the Buddha did not teach—nor does his life demonstrate—that nonattachment means unconcern about what is happening in the world, to the world. When the Heart Sutra famously asserts that “form is not different from emptiness,” it immediately adds that “emptiness is not other than form.” And forms—including the living beings and ecosystems of this world—suffer.
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • It is for this reason that classical Buddhism confers an essentially instrumental value on socially beneficent activity. Such activity can be a contributing cause for the attainment of nibbana or the realization of buddhahood; it can be valued because it helps create better conditions for the moral and meditative life, or because it helps to lead others to the dharma; but ultimate value, the overriding good, is located in the sphere of transcendent realization. Since socially engaged action pertains to a relatively elementary stage of the path, to the practice of giving or the accumulation of …
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • If we behave ourselves here, we can hope to go to heaven. The issue is whether that approach makes this world a backdrop to the central drama of human salvation. Does that goal devalue one’s life in this troubled world into a means?
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • “absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism.”
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • Imagine Buddhism as an iceberg where all types of social engagement, including ecodharma, form the tip at the top. Beneath them, but still above sea level, is something much bigger and still growing: the mindfulness movement, which has been incredibly successful over the last few years. Within the Buddhist world, however, it has also become increasingly controversial. Here I will not delve into that debate except to note that although mindfulness practices can be very beneficial, they can also discourage critical reflection on the institutional causes of collective suffering, what might be cal…
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • Such “green consumption” is important, of course, yet individual transformation by itself will never be enough.
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” Is there a Buddhist version? Perhaps this: “When Buddhists help homeless people and prison inmates, they are called bodhisattvas. But when Buddhists ask why there are so many more homeless, so many people of color stuck in prison, other Buddhists call them leftists or radicals, saying that such social action has nothing to do with Buddhism.”
    Can Buddhism Meet the Climate Crisis? - Lions Roar
  • Posthuman theory hypothesizes that humans as a species have created a new technological environment in which we can no longer operate independently as living organisms. It widely suggests that the human body is no longer compatible with its technological surroundings, and that we have reached an evolutionary endpoint where the next logical stage of adaptation is for the organic to assimilate to the mechanic.
    Posthuman Architecture — Real Life
  • Feminist theorist Donna Haraway later popularized the term in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” invoking the cyborg as a sophisticated blend of body and machine that challenges the organic composition of the human.
    Posthuman Architecture — Real Life
  • But what I really want to say is this. When I finally turned away from the more obvious catastrophe narratives—and it did feel like a physical pivot—I could see what should have been clear to me all along. Worlds end all the time. Worlds end all the time.
    To Live in the Ending | Journal
  • More importantly, contemporary agrarian thinkers like Wendell Berry revived the forgotten ideas of Thomas Jefferson and the Twelve Southerners. Berry lives on a farm near the small Kentucky town of Port Royal, where he says to his visitors, “One of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here.”10 From this rooted place, he farms, writes, and participates in broader debates and protests on environmental, ecological, agricultural, and community issues. Only by beco…
    The Agrarian Mind - Journal #128 June 2022 - e-flux
  • By the 1990s, agrarianism no longer assumed the scale it had with the hippies, but people did begin “urban farming” and planting vegetables on their balconies. Teachers in schools also became interested in “agricultural literacy,” as seen in initiatives like Edible Schoolyards. “Locavores” became all the rage.
    The Agrarian Mind - Journal #128 June 2022 - e-flux
  • But when there is no food to fill your stomach, even a common green onion exposes its cruel political nature.
    The Agrarian Mind - Journal #128 June 2022 - e-flux
  • Instead of directing people to eat only what is traditional, local and seasonal, we should encourage a widening of the collective palette — both culinary and cultural. Embracing other, newer types of food, produced in as yet unrecognizable ways, will be just as essential to transforming the food system as it was in building the one we have.
    Against Localism In Food
  • Clearly, an intelligent balance must be struck between diversifying trade and creating domestic systems capable of plugging shortfalls. But those systems should not be the field-based monocultures that have long dominated farming.
    Against Localism In Food
  • Food is always both matter and symbol. Cooking and eating are basic human rituals that overlay the metabolic burn essential to all life.
    Against Localism In Food
  • Given the unique climate, regulatory conditions, and population density at different sites around the globe, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a survey of academic literature on the subject found that “strategically diversifying the food supply via trade rather than by limiting it to local production” was a better approach to food security and lowering emissions.
    Against Localism In Food
  • This patchwork of romantic pastoralism has become a veil that frames sun-drenched wheat fields and cud-chewing cattle as a timeless standard rather than a major factor in our present crisis. This continues because we welcome it — and because it deflects attention from political strategies that we know are powerful drivers of rural renewal, pushing the barometer of solutions from the collective to an individual level.
    Against Localism In Food
  • Mock also notes how Thomas Jefferson, himself the owner of a 5,000 acre farm, saw “local farms” as a way to quell tensions rather than a tool to feed a growing population.
    Against Localism In Food