#book journal

[autisticwriterblog]

Definitely went too hard on the decoration here 😅

[hereiamsilly]

Book Journal: We Have Never Been Woke by Musa Al-Gharbi

So, I’ve started reading We Have Never Been Woke. I don’t want to get too deeply into heavy topics on this blog because I want it to be mostly relaxing for me but I would love to talk books here and this book looks pretty promising.  I have literally only read the instruction as of this writing, but Al-Gharbi’s insights are already clarifying to me. I had a hard time choosing which quotes to highlight for my little review here!

In particular, the idea that it’s very difficult for most people to espouse things that they don’t believe in so they find a way to make themselves believe them is rotating in my brain. It’s starting to explain to me why people who were formerly climate activists are now anti-Jewish activists who claim that we’re controlling the world and the weather and everything. It’s helping antisemitic conspiracy theories in general make some kind of twisted sense. If you care about anything, literally anything, and want to throw your a lot in the anti-Jewish groups (because it’s trendy, because they’re strong and you want them to be on your side, any other reason)… just pretend we’re somehow responsible for whatever other real, imagined, or wildly mistaken wrong you’re trying to right. It’s alluring. Of course it’s alluring. We humans want things to be easy, and why wouldn’t we? We don’t want to have to fight through hand-grinding flour, hand-copying books, or suffering through an Iron Lung with polio, and this has spurred a great deal of human progress in terms of child labor laws, labor laws in general, medical advances, machines that make work safer and more efficient, and more.

It’s also helping reframe why, as many of us have seen, it’s become so trendy to racefake. The book Conspirituality also goes into some depth on this (I also LOVED that book). The new “elites,” the current most powerful class in society, are largely (as Al-Gharbi calls us) “symbolic capitalists - seems to be roughly analogous to people who work white collar information jobs.  In many societies around the world right now, these symbolic capitalists are, at least on the face of it, against racism, misogyny, etc. Most people believe what they say, so let’s go with that. There is less, and I love this quote, “open and casual sadism” against people who have historically been degraded and otherwise treated unfairly – people with disabilities, people not of the dominant ethnic group , LGBTQ folks, etc. That’s fantastic! it has saved and improved many lives. But that doesn’t mean that the dominant group never take advantage of anyone else unfairly or twist things just a bit to advantage themselves where they shouldn’t. So that belief that it would be good to right wrongs historically committed against indigenous people, say, leads people to want to fake being Jewish so their opinions will carry more weight.

I also like that the analysis isn’t as… identity based? As it otherwise could be. LGBTQ spaces have a persistent issue with anti-masculinity, something that grated on me even prior to the current deluge of antisemitism. I think it comes from second wave feminism, and its Marxist influences, and they way it framed men as an oppressor class on the basis of being men and women as a subjugated class on the basis of being women. It leads to the idea that being from a group that historically not been disadvantaged as much/been advantaged is ITSELF wrong, dangerous or oppressive. men being men is not the problem, Cis people being cis is not the problem. White people being white isn’t the problem. People who are (perceived as) belonging to these groups have more societal power to abuse someone and get away with it in some specific ways, but that doesn’t mean they have to take it. Rape are innately bad; manhood isn’t. Attacking Jews is innately bad; being White or Arab or any non-Jewish group isn’t. And that’s before you even start on the fact that, as Al-Gharbi is starting to say in the introduction above, people can victimize other members of the same group!

tl;dr just because racism, sexism, etc are still real forces and real problems doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the strongest forces at work in any given situation 

[yarnicornchronicles]

🚨 ATTENTION, AGENTS. 🚨 The Bureau of Reader Affairs is officially accepting new recruits. If you've ever: 📚 Fallen in love with a fictional character 💔 Suffered emotional damage from a book ending 🌶️ Needed to document suspicious levels of chemistry 👀 Collected quotes you'll never recover from 📖 Finished a book and immediately needed to talk about it... This case file was made for you. Inside you'll find themed reports including: ✨ Character Dossiers 💔 Emotional Damage Reports 🌶️ Spice Assessment Reports 📂 Plot Twist Incident Reports ❤️ Relationship Trackers 📝 Quote Archives …and much more. Download your printable Reader Case File and begin your first investigation. #BookTok #Bookstagram #BookJournal #ReadingJournal #BureauofReaderAffairs

Why I Started the Bureau of Reader Affairs

[rekatur]

06.26

[rekatur]

06.26

[regressingintoreading]

Anarchist’s Cookbook: Spoilers

This is probably gonna be a divisive tough one 😬I really wish I liked it more than I did. 

[autisticwriterblog]

I adored this book!