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Personal research

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The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on, you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.

Guttorm Fløistad Slow Thought: A Manifesto | Vincenzo Di Nicola

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While 97 percent of active climate scientists believe humans are a major cause of climate change, the numbers are radically different among 'economic geologists'—scientists who study natural formations so that they can be commercially exploited by the extractive industries. Only 47 percent of these scientists believe in human-caused climate change. The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!'

Naomi Klein, Part 1: Bad Timing, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, p. 58 (iBooks epub version)

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The overseas parts of the United States have triggered wars, brought fourth interventions, raised up presidents, and helped define what it means to be 'American.' Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country―not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.

Daniel Immerwahr, Introduction: Looking Beyond The Logo Map, How To Hide An Empire, P. 19

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White Americana was always just kitsch with delusions of grandeur. Its tropes were invented as a therapy and propaganda for fears over every kind of border, geographic to racial.

Ayesha A. Siddiqi ARCHIVING THE 20TEENS WITH AYESHA A. SIDDIQIOn Track Pant Globalism, Alternative Nationalisms, Crisis Palettes, And More

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I find it hard not to want to live longer. I also want to live without pain. This means I want 'health.' But when I place myself at a point within the vast constellation of health knowledge and health behaviors, I can't help feeling that these system don't match up with my simple projects of longevity and freedom from pain. There is something too much, or too many, or too arbitrary, or too directed—too doom-laden, too managerial, too controlling.

Mark Greif On Food

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We add the value of our intellectual labor, our 'finishing' of the world's raw materials. Foodieism is a natural hobby for the first-world professionals, ostensibly taking up the world, but referring back to the domination and the perfection of the enriched, physical self.

Mark Greif On Food

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The best hopes for humanity will be used to pick the pockets of mankind.

Mark Greif  On Food

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The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl hailed Hope [by Shepherd Fairey] as “epic poetry in an everyday tongue,” but to me the portrait seemed like the output of a viral-marketing firm charged with compressing a candidate into a religious icon. What was the effect besides the worshippers being satisfied and the image entering the meme hall of fame?

Alexander Provan https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/they-the-people/

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The imagination of the artist has been surpassed by the techniques of the behavioral economist, filmmaker, advertiser, pollster, lobbyist, data scientist, and social media analyst. And politicians have become mediums through which messages are tested and refined, demographics are established and tweaked.

Alexander Provan https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/they-the-people/

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Contemporary advertisements pay saccharine tribute to the notion of diversity because corporations are seeking consumers not citizens, and they’ll take anyone’s money in their quest to amass profits.

Astra Taylor https://thebaffler.com/salvos/who-the-people-taylor

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At the base of the production line sits one pure object, a tool that cannot be further distilled without eliminating usefulness. It also unconsciously reflects the inherently productive nature of what we usually label “art.” You can’t take a course in looking at naked ladies in an art school, remember: you have to draw or write about them.

Anne Elizabeth Moore Milton Friedman’s Pencil

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What gets in the way of artists’ making substantive political contributions? The collection’s title essay proposes that artists’ class position opposes their interests to those of typical protesters, even when both are concerned with economic survival. Because artists, unlike wage laborers, have a direct stake in what they produce and face no workplace discipline other than what they impose on themselves, their political attitudes are structurally different from those of the working class, who know they are interchangeable parts in the machine of capitalism and must organize collectively to resist it. “The predominant character” of the contemporary art scene, on the other hand, “is middle class,” Davis contends, referring not to a particular income or earning potential but rather to artists’ relation to their labor. Artists work for themselves, own what they make, and must concern themselves with how to sell it. Though art has often made a mission of shocking middlebrow taste and artists have often congregated in urban Bohemian enclaves in working-class neighborhoods, they are less vanguard proletarians than petit bourgeois.

Creative Tyranny Rob Horning

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If either e-flux or deviantART were granted the right to develop and distribute the .art gTLD, a board of art-world professionals would screen potential registrants, ensuring that every .art site hosted only trusted and “reputable” content pertaining to the arts community. Collectors, art professionals, academics, and the general public could use “.art” as a search term to find content backed by the reputation of e-flux or deviantART. Web addresses ending in .art would thereby be imbued with some of the same art-world prestige that is conserved by IRL galleries.

Eminent Domain Loney Abrams

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Escapism is adult because it is childish. When we escape into booze or drugs or spending money, what we are actually trying to do is to get back to childhood, or more accurately the idea of a childhood most of us never had. Childhood, understood as a longing imaginary, is a time when there were no consequences to drinking, eating, or spending money. There were no consequences to decisions because someone made decisions for you. There was no regret because there had as yet been no past. Being a kid is being able to look out back window of a car without feeling sad.

Escapism and Art For Lonely People by Helena Fitzgerald

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The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was white supremacy. This claim is not the result of revisionism. It does not require reading between the lines. It is the plain meaning of the words of those who bore the Confederate flag across history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in What This Cruel War Was Over

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The danger of being hit by an automobile is a consequence of living in one kind of environment; the danger of being hit by a falling coconut or lost in a seagoing canoe is the consequence of a different way of life.

Marston Bates  The Forest and The Sea

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More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think 'transversally'. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mutant algae, so our television screens are peopled and saturated by 'degenerate' images and utterances. In the realm of social ecology, Donald Trump and his ilk - another form of algae - are permitted to proliferate unchecked. In the name of renovation, Trump takes over whole districts of New York or Atlantic City, raises rents, and squeezes out tens of thousands of poor families. Those who Trump condemns to homelessness are the social equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.

Felix Guattari The Three Ecologies.   Published in Summer of 1989.