Spicoli's Daughter

All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine.

[amusementforme]

PUT THIS VIDEO IN A FUCKING MUSEUM. 

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[sunrisingtarot]

PAY ATTENTION !!! 👏🏽👏🏾👏🏿

[asdfghjkllkjjhgfds-deactivated2]

WATCH THIS ENTIRE VIDEO. WATCH THEIR SHOW. SUPPORT PEOPLE WHO COVER THESE ISSUES WITH FACTS.

[mediamattersforamerica]

Ana Navarro rips into a Trump defender: “You seem insane. … He is a bigot, he is a racist, he is a misogynist.”

[thesoftghetto]

Full Story

[thecarvingwitch]

What a wonderful example of a police officer doing their job as meant

[sierralions]

i just referenced Bourdieu in an essay for the first time this year and i feel lighter; cleansed. my bones are stronger and my skin is clear

[gaywrites]

“We both are in the middle, and nobody teases us for it.”

ICYMI: Kumu Hina, an indigenous Hawaiian hula teacher who identifies as mahu (”in the middle” when it comes to gender), comforts a transgender student in the trailer for the upcoming film A Place in the Middle. (via BuzzFeed)

[jedifolk]

This is an incredible mini-documentary, its 25 min out of your day but I seriously recommend watching it. Such a great story about recognizing the gender spectrum and de colonizing one’s history. Bawled my eyes out 10/10 would recommend. 

[rogue-or-ranger]

[emily-voorhees]

When everyone has the snapchat update and u try to fit in

[officialunitedstates]

Many of us know Olive Garden’s slogan When You’re Here, You’re Family.  Well, I recently put that to the test.

The tables were wooden and nice to sit at.  The chairs were also comfortable.  The view wasn’t anything special, but there was a pretty cool looking van in the Walmart parking lot that had flames on its sides. 

I was immediately offered wine, and after admitting I was underage, refused wine.  If you’re going to offer me wine, please don’t rescind your offer.  It’s common courtesy.

The napkins were probably the highlight.  They were cloth and worked really well at cleaning the windows.  One waiter told me I didn’t have to do that, but I insisted.  After all, I like a good, clear view of parking lots.  Who doesn’t.

Finally, it was time to order.  I went with the pizza.  The menu said I could pick four toppings, so I chose half portions of eight toppings.  There were only seven to choose from, though, so I made one up.  “…and blorgaspork.”

“Sorry?  What is blorgaspork?”

“That’s your job to know, now isn’t it.”

After a reasonable wait, my food arrived.  It was a really good meal, not exactly overpriced, but not exactly underpriced either.  It was just priced.

My waiter soon arrived and asked me if I wanted dessert. 

“Steve,” I said, “Have a seat.”

He did.

“I have this business idea.  And while I’m here, and we’re family, I was hoping you could give me a loan.”

Steve tried to laugh it off.  Like it was some kind of joke.  I was offended and he could tell.  “Steve, this isn’t a joke.”

Steve looked a bit nervous.  I grabbed his hands and pinned them to the table.  “Are we family or not, Steve.”

“Not in the literal sense…” said Steve.  I wasn’t going to let him reason his way out of this one. 

“Look, Steve.  I cleaned your windows.  Family does that for each other.  They clean each others’ windows.  Now, don’t you think I deserve that loan?  We’re family, Steve, we’re family.”

Steve handed me 13 bucks.  “Thanks, Steve.”

★★★☆☆

[emily-voorhees]

This is exactly what not to do at a restaurant.

[emily-voorhees]

Curtis Bay? I’ve never met him.

The city of Baltimore has had a tumultuous history. Recently, we experienced an overwhelming outcry for justice regarding police brutality in the Freddie Gray case. Beyond the colloquial rhetoric regarding the murder of Freddie Gray are the underlying economic and political processes influencing the frustration felt by marginalized communities living in the poorest areas of Baltimore. As Tariq Ali, a British Journalist, explains: “this is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis (The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad 2010).” The pressure on communities continues to mount while economic changes intensify the interpersonal, health, and environmental problems within one of Baltimore’s most contentious neighborhoods, Curtis Bay.  

When we approached Curtis Bay, we were immediately driving parallel to CSX’s freight trains filled to the brim with coal. This was already demonstrating the layered history of industry in the Curtis Bay area, because we were actually there to learn about proposed incinerator that would neighbor the coal burning power plant. We met our informal neighborhood tour guide, Destiny, at the Benjamin Franklin High School. Thank goodness it was a nice day because we had to walk the entire way from the high school to the site of the proposed incinerator. Although the walking distance may have seemed pretty far for me, it was a mere mile away from the school. As Destiny introduced her neighborhood, you could hear the laugh of a little girl across the street greeting her mother who had just come home from a job that required a safety vest. Early on we learned that even though Curtis Bay was within the Baltimore City borders, many of the people who have lived most of their lives here do not consider themselves Baltimore residents. Perhaps it’s because the social and economic stratification processes that are indisputably a part of a community’s collective identity are so specific to Curtis Bay that Baltimore seems like a completely different place. A place where her job requires a bright green vest, where she commutes in order to collect a wage that leaves her constantly strapped for money, a place that refuses to hire her husband.

Within Curtis Bay is an amalgam of displaced and racialized neighborhoods impacted by industrialization and subsequent deindustrialization processes of capitalist development. The majority black neighborhood of Fairfield and the majority white neighborhood of Wagner’s Point combined when big industry bought their land and displaced the people, forcing them together in Curtis Bay or forcing them completely out into other neighborhoods in Baltimore. The tension that arose out of this process had the timbre of the “there goes the neighborhood” song sung by those living in the segregated neighborhoods of suburban America during the 1960s. Racialized narration of tension caused by an economic industry became the tools used to divide communities and blind them from the encroachment of another problematic entity that will have devastating health and environmental consequences, the incinerator.

The proposed incinerator would be the largest garbage incinerator in the country, larger than the West Palm Beach incinerator that burns 4,000 tons of garbage a day. This incinerator would add to the measured 13.6 million pounds of toxins already in the air within the Curtis Bay zip code (Williams 2015). Burning the trash, intended for the incinerator would emit toxins like mercury and lead within a mile of two schools, in a community with high rates of respiratory problems. The company responsible for the incinerator, Energy Answers, garnered support from the government, school districts, and other public entities by convincing them that their ideas would benefit all involved through efficiency and innovation. Energy Answer’s mission to discover the potential for a landfill’s materials to produce beneficial “raw materials” and electricity did not include the reality that the so-called “raw materials” would contribute to the estimated 130 deaths out of 100,000 caused by airborne toxins (Williams 2015). In addition to that, the economics of the incinerator simply did not make sense as a more efficient or profit producing enterprise. Walking back from the incinerator site, it was starting to get really hot and the smell of truck exhaust, gas, and the tar smell of coal being processed in the background was starting to mesh together. In an interview, a resident explained the smell of the birds that had died from the toxic air as being “like road kill all blended up and someone took the lid off (Williams 2015).” For me it triggered an olfactory memory that brought me back to the summers when I would mistakenly walk into my uncle’s car garage where many a beer coated the floor and the remnants of the work he did on his motorcycle still lingered in the air. Destiny told me as we approached the main Curtis Bay drag that the week before she and her United Worker’s advisor, Greg, had encountered the CEO of Energy Answers as they were filming a speech she wrote. She said he approached them at the site of the incinerator in a white sports car and asked what they were doing there, at which point they explained who they were. Having known that Destiny and her allies were responsible for the divestment of 22 crucial entities, thus stalling the whole project, he proceeded to call her and her organization illegitimate and drove away. I laughed because, to me, that sounded like an exclamation of a little boy on a playground unable to cut inline for the monkey bars. This little anecdote is telling of the battle that occurs between community and big business when a community does not accept the conditions imposed by businesses like Energy Answers.

We were on our way to the community park, whose photos were displayed earlier in this piece, and we passed three liquor stores and a “hop shop” or convenience store. We also saw some of the Curtis Bay residents gathered on their porch across the street from a makeshift memorial for a deceased friend. One of the people in the group noticed an abandoned syringe. All of these things reminded me that the challenges faced by this community are not only linked to problematic industrialization but to other structural issues. The interpersonal violence and addiction problems of communities living at or below the poverty line are a part of a larger process of public divestment in the well-being of a community. To combat these issues, proper access to healthcare and access to stable economic opportunities would be crucial. However far off achieving these goals is, the lack of decent grocery stores that sell more than processed foods and booze is already being addressed by community members. The Filbert Street Community Garden provides members with fresh produce and flowers. It is a collective enterprise that counters the hegemonic capitalist model used by big grocery stores which in turn is a mode of resistance against most forms of contemporary economics. This is an inspiring community that teaches us many things about the potential that marginalized communities have regarding their position in the larger scheme of things. There is much more to do, but seeing it for myself, I can see the incredible resilience and the immense possibilities for Curtis Bay and neighborhoods alike.

Williams, Timothy. 2015. Garbage Incinerators Make Comeback, Kindling Both Garbage and Debate.New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/us/garbage-incinerators-make-comeback-kindling-both-garbage-and-debate.html?_r=0

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[garbagepile-deactivated20140913]

jesus mario what is your damage

[tanknaka]

THIS IS THE MOST FUCKED UP THING IVE EVER SEEN

[emily-voorhees]

😰

[emily-voorhees]

[emily-voorhees]

Alien-Nation

The fundamental issue with neoliberal economic processes is that they are discursively framed in this upwardly mobile trajectory that is supposed to be attainable by everyone living in a liberalized market-economy and nationalized democracy. This frame does not acknowledge what the Camoroff’s describe as a world driven by “the force that determines definitions of value, the construction of identities, even the shape of the global ecumene.” This force is the abstracted market processes of the neoliberal world order. “Determining value” has been mapped on to the social processes of human beings, and in this ideological framework the former dividing lines that were narrated through racial and moral purity are now overarchingly defined using discourse redefined through neoliberal economics. In South Africa this contradiction found within the social conceptualization of the “strangeness of what’s become real (167)” is the fact that reality does not reflect the promise of the neoliberal model. The obsession over the living dead, zombies, is reflective of Taussig’s concept of the devil contract in that it describes the mystical conceptualization of economic circumstances produced by people whose historical identities included this kind of spirituality. This kind of spirituality is utilized by those from the global north and south and its reproduction manifests in different forms. For us it’s the mediated depictions of this post-apocalyptic rationalization process in the Walking Dead are indicative of a kind of Hobbesian view of the “state of nature” that Hobbes thought existed in a pre-colonial context. Imagining that a world full of zombies would lead to the deterioration of economic and social relationships, and ultimately pit humans against each other, is rooted in the fear that these supernatural/biological creatures compromise our ability to live our lives. South Africa’s version stems from a history of insecurity entrenched in the colonial and neocolonial processes of their national identities. I use identities, plural, to demonstrate the fact that homogeneity never existed the way we have legally & economically conceptualized our citizenship here. (I AM TURNING INTO A COMAROFF GUYS) But in the process of cultivating an identity for citizens of South Africa, post-apartheid economics created a defining process that employs the devalued reputation of menial & migrant labor in order to reduce certain demographics to this zombie form. From that, the urban legends of those who perform witchcraft, the women and men who take jobs away from the traditional economic actors that held up the elite, are demonized through this zombie or alien demarcation in order to rationalize the specific economic conditions in the South African context. Within demographics the anxiety over unemployment/social injustice/the degeneration reputation, despite the real cause of this insecurity, has resulted in intergroup violence that only confirms the fear of the protected group of capitalist elites. This is the point at which we can start applying the Comaroff work to the context of our own city. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about………….I refuse to ‘even’.) To conclude with a salient metaphor provided by this chapter: (pg 165 & 166)

The idea that the zombie or witch is eating others in order to absorb their capacity to create value & the concept of the sefifi (a state of eclipse effected by the appropriation of the essential selfhood of a living person, leaving behind a sentient shell as mute witness to the erasure of social being once housed [166]), sound more to me like the ultimate goal of neoliberal entities than they sound like the intrinsic intentions of people experiencing/acting in the context of the system. But who am I to say?

[in-the-shadow-of-happines]

[emily-voorhees]

How I feel after turning in this paper

[emily-voorhees]

To begin to understand the repressive hypothesis, one must understand the nature of power and its influence on the notions of repression. When one thinks of power as something that has control over someone or something. It’s generally understood as a limiting or oppressive act. Its not untrue that...

[emily-voorhees]

Foucault Forever

To begin to understand the repressive hypothesis, one must understand the nature of power and its influence on the notions of repression. When one thinks of power as something that has control over someone or something. It's generally understood as a limiting or oppressive act. Its not untrue that the discourse on power has a tone that insinuates a repressive form of regulation. Foucault asserts that the repressive hypothesis is interpreted as a consent-less effort to repress useless energy through power mechanisms stemming from all realms of daily life. Power seeks to negate "the effort to speak freely about sex and accept it in its reality (9-10)." Foucault argues that this is "so alien to a historical sequence that has gone unbroken for a thousand years," as in this sort of sexual repression is unique to the processes of the Victorian era. It has created an intrinsic acknowledgement of the power mechanism acting upon an individual which creates a kind of permissiveness in the relationship. Foucault then describes the repressive hypothesis with his doubts. He asks first if sexual repression was a "historical fact." Next he wonders if the "workings of power and in particular these mechanisms that are brought into societies such as 'ours' really belong in the category of repression." From this doubt he derives a profound assertion (that he frames as a doubt) that the repressive hypothesis is a part of the "same historical [maybe power] network as the thing it denounces." In other words, the discursive practices of this so-called repression has actually created new roads for expanded expression within the acknowledged power mechanisms while increasing the permission to let them act on you.

Power in the case of the Victorian Era found routes in theemergence of discourse surrounding sex. During the rise of scientificexploration, the mechanisms of power were given new ways to insert it into thedaily practices of power’s subjects. He asserts that “multiplication ofdiscourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself (p 18).”What this means is that the more we formulate the discourse the more ways we are able to internalize the power mechanisms acting on us. This internalization expresses itself in, what Foucault calls, the “will to knowledge” and the incitement to discourse. Therefore the “institutional incitement to speak about it [sex] and to do so more and more is a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about (p. 25).” This is the way Foucault reworks the notions of power to include the “agentive” processes of the individual in the act of acquiring knowledge because it is a part of the productive rather than repressive aspect of power. An individual’s supplication to power is how you really see power’s power (lol), and the development of scientific discourse is how knowledge and power work in tandem.

To Foucault, discourse works as the “intrinsic technology of power (p. 73).” The power knowledge pleasure principle relies on the use of discourse because it defines the pathology of sex and sex is the private transference of power. He believes that discourse is the crucial element that ties the productive processes of power to the intimate process of sex. Power and discourse are extraordinarily interactive. Understanding sex as a pathway for the positive mechanisms of power is crucial because this path is a way to “produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleasure and generate power (p.71-72).” Power, knowledge, and pleasure are intimately connected through the discourse of sex.

The development of specialized knowledge through the scientific exploration and defining processes in accordance to specific power mechanisms, has returned with the new understandings of the confessional. In the western sense the confessional relies on the practice of anonymity within the daily lives of individuals. That anonymity and secrecy is largely misinterpreted as the repressive. However Foucault analyzes this as a productive rather than stagnated process because in its regulation through anonymity and secrecy the specialized knowledge of sex and new pathways of control is the result. The confessional has contributed to these productive pathways in a way that’s very specific to the western context. It has the power of liberation and that liberation has become the desire therefore the power of the confession space has begun constituting desire. It has defined the words of desire, it has placed desire in the context of the power mechanism, and it is reproduced in the home. The confessional has been scientifically validated through the medicalization of sex, it has been politically valorized through demography, and it has been moralized by the socializing processes of religion.

Foucault asserts that those who are “confronted by a power that is law” is the “subject who is constituted as subject who is subjected is he who obeys (p. 85).” Obeying to the processes of confessing and conducting sexual acts while navigating through the mechanisms of power is the way Foucault recreates the formerly top down notions of power. Secrecy is indispensable to the operations of power and people obey because it leaves a measure of freedom in the compliance. Understanding the deployment of sexuality as a process that proliferates the intensification of the body is crucial because it is a process that exploits the body as “an object of knowledge and an element of power (p. 107).” Therefore the intrinsic compliance to the systems of power is in our will to confess and our will to knowledge. We are the bodies who receive the knowledge, and where the power incubates.

If we understand power as if it lives and works inside of us, if it remains in our psyches, with the language and the sentiment analyzed by Foucault, then we can start reworking what it means to have the long lost agency anthropologists want to believe still exists. Steven Sangran focuses his analysis of Foucault on the idea that there are agentive processes despite the fact that power mechanisms have become intrinsic to the understanding of our existence. He believes that “culture must be conceived in terms that accommodate individual motive and desire.” He would like us to read The History of Sexuality as a revelation of the tensions in which agency can be identified. The cognitive dissonance between what someone actually wants and what he or she is told they want through the power processes is where the remnants of agency exists. This contradicts Foucault’s analysis of desire, which he believes is constituted by the mechanization of confession. Sangran thinks that sex “uncovered beneath defensive layers of social/psychological repression” can produce the truth of sex. Repression can produce the truth because of the “cultural production of the person” in which there is an acknowledgement of this repression and cognitive tension as a result.  This is extremely interesting despite the fact that Sangran’s argument can be completely negated by Foucault’s argument that resistance to power acknowledges that power exists. This is not the vantage Sangran takes, he critiques Foucault by asserting that experiencing pleasure can be done without the binds of discourse (p.115). Psychoanalysis then performs as an attempt to realize this pleasure while conducting itself within those binds, but acknowledging that those binds do not encompass the whole of human agency.  

Sangran’s fundamental assertion is that desire is subjective and influenced by power only as far as our consciousness. Modern forms of subjectivity are laden in these responses to power. Anyone who believes they are separate from this subjectivity are misled. The subject is a product of discursive procedures but also as the producer of its own intension (p. 113). The pedagogy of childhood sexual exploration has been manipulated to fuel the sphere of regulation into anonymity. Lena Dunham was a victim of the backlash of expressing this because of her experience as a child is an immensely relevant example of the processes of Victorian Era power still working on us. These potential actors in the appropriate sphere of sexuality, are subject to the silence required of them because of the confessional society in which we live. If the parents are being secretive about sexuality and if the powers of this regulation are reproduced in the home to the extent that Foucault thinks, then desire would be completely constructed. However, Sangren believes that desire/sexuality is organized by fantasies whereas Foucault believes sexuality organizes fantasies. This is something that would be very difficult to prove, but childhood sexual exploration because children are at the very beginning of their socialization process.

[emily-voorhees]

David Harvey

[emily-voorhees]

David Harvey

David Harvey

David Harvey was born in 1935 in England. He is still alive.He studied  geography at the University of Cambridge. He taught at Johns Hopkins, and the landscape of Baltimore had something to do with theorizing the geography of uneven economic development, but he has been all over the world analyzing and teaching and being great. He is known as a political economist and social theorist. He used his knowledge of geography and development to create an immensely important framework for understanding the unique circumstances of the modern capitalist world. From this he was able to outline the framework for understanding the individual manifestations of the structure of the global economy. He is our best friend when it comes to the articulation of the political economy of personhood during the neoliberal era.

If you need someone to use to help you write any and all of your papers, read anything by him. I personally use Spaces of Global Capitalism Geographical Development: a theory of uneven geographic development. But if you ever go to Red Emma’s they sell A Brief History of Neoliberalism and really good coffee.

I’m going to outline his argument in Spaces of Global Capitalism Geographical Development: a theory of uneven geographic development to demonstrate the frameworks necessary for understanding his vantage. His argument in this work is four fold:

The material embedding of capitalism and capital accumulation processes in the web of socio-ecological life.

Accumulation by dispossession (when pre-existing assets are assembled as labor powers, money, productive capacity or as commodities and put into circulation as capital –ya boi Marx).

The law-like character of capital accumulation in space and time.

Political, social and “class” struggles exist at a variety of geographical scales.

Essentially, “uneven geographical developments is interpreted as the product of a differentiated diffusion process from the center that leaves behind residuals from proceeding eras or meets with pockets of resistance towards the progress and modernization that capitalism promotes.”

He is the real MVP and he is on twitter. @profdavidharvey

[emily-voorhees]

Stunner.