Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

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[...] Thus women's misandry and misanthropy become the products of misogynistic male attempts to escape the despair that is the human condition. [...]

examples: Toni Ware, Faye, Granola Cruncher

—p.140 "By Hirsute Author": Gender and Communication in the Work and Study of David Foster Wallace (128) by Mary K. Holland 7 years, 7 months ago

[...] By eliminating the distance between symbols and meaning, Bruce eliminates the entire structure of signification made possible by a post-structuralist understanding of language, and enlisted by Wallace in all of his fiction. By eliminating the dependence of language on context and association, Bruce makes impossible exactly the connections among the distant points of text, author, reader, and world that language is meant to travel.

Bruce's solipsistic fantasy of a world in which physical and emotional connection are impossible because both we and language are closed loops, sufficient in ourselves (the story ends with Bruce ensconced in a stove) demonstrates the need for distance in the mechanisms of language in order to allow the kinds of translations between people that Julie's vision of love relies on. [...]

on Here and There

—p.143 "By Hirsute Author": Gender and Communication in the Work and Study of David Foster Wallace (128) by Mary K. Holland 7 years, 7 months ago

[...] "Brief Interview #28" features two male students using 90s grad-school jargon (citing Foucault and Lacan) combined with pop-culture logic (citing The Rules) to explain their "postfeminist," "postmodern" sense of women as caught in a "double bind" in which they have no access to agency, fulfillment, or men's respect. By describing women's desire "to be irresponsible" as "a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious" (231), the students demonstrate not the dangers of Lacan's concept of gender--which they totally misrepresent--but the danger of misreading, and the enormous potential for enlisting intellectual argument to defend one's own oppressive desires. Thus the story criticizes male piggishness, not Lacan, and brilliantly parodies not academic feminism but the chauvinism that so often finds a way to cloak itself with it.

—p.144 "By Hirsute Author": Gender and Communication in the Work and Study of David Foster Wallace (128) by Mary K. Holland 7 years, 7 months ago

[...] As Britain and France were withdrawing from their colonies, they needed a new way of explaining the gross inequality that persisted between themselves and the people they had ruled for so long. The story of development--that the nations of the world were simply at different positions along the Great Arrow of Progress--offered a convenient alibi. It allowed them to disavow responsibility for the misery of the colonies, and it was more palatable than the explicit racial theories they had relied on in the past. What is more, it allowed them to shift their role in the eyes of the world: graciously relinquishing imperial power, they would turn to aiding their fellow man.

on development as a clever cover story

—p.10 One (7) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago

Anthropologists tell us that when the structure of a core myth begins to change, everything else about society changes around it, and fresh new possibilities open up that weren't even thinkable before. When myths fall apart, revolutions happen.

I absolutely love the last sentence

—p.13 One (7) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago

[...] It's not that the $128 billion in aid disbursements doesn't exist--it does. But if we broaden our view and look at it in context, we see that it is vastly outstripped by the financial resources that flow in the opposite direction. [...]

[...] in 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a little over $2 trillion, including all aid, investment and income from abroad. But more than twice that amount, some $5 trillion, flowed out of them in the same year. [...] If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $26.5 trillion--that's how much money has been drained out of the global South over the past few decades. To get a sense of the scale of this, $26.5 trillion is roughly the GDP of the United States and Western Europe combined.

  • debt payments: $200 billion/year or $4.2 trillion since 1980
  • foreigners repatriating profits (from foreign corporations, or ownership of stocks/bonds): $500 billion/year
  • capital flight (misinvoicing and tax evasion strategies, mainly): $23.6 trillion since 1980 ($875 billion/year due to trade misinvoicing)
—p.25 One (7) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago

[...] the discourse of aid distracts us from seeing the bigger picture. It hides the patterns of extraction that are actively causing the impoverishment of the global South today and actively impeding meaningful development. The charity paradigm obscures the real issues at stake: it makes it seem as though the West is 'developing' the global South, when in reality the opposite is true. Rich countries aren't developing poor countries; poor countries are effectively developing rich countries--and they have been since the late 15th century. So it's not only that the aid narrative misunderstands what really causes poverty, it's that it actually gets it backwards. Just as in Truman's time, aid serves as a kind of propaganda that makes the takers seem like givers, and conceals how the global economy actually works.

—p.29 One (7) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago

[...] Poor countries don't need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them. Until we target the structural drivers of global poverty--the underlying architecture of wealth extraction and accumulation--development efforts will continue to fail, decade after decade. [...]

—p.32 One (7) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago

[...] global poverty headcount increased during the 1980s and 1990s, while the World Bank was imposing structural adjustment across most of the global South. Today, the extreme poverty headcount is exactly the same as it was in 1981, at just over 1 billion people. In other words, while the good-news story leads us to believe that poverty has been decreasing around the world, in reality the only places this holds true are in China and East Asia. This is a crucial point, because these are some of the only places in the world where free-market capitalism was not forcibly imposed by the World Bank and the IMF. Everywhere else, poverty has been stagnant or getting worse, in aggregate. [...]

—p.42 Two (33) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago

There is a strong consensus among scholars that the $1.25 line is far too low, but it remains in official use because it is the only line that shows any progress against poverty--at least when you include China--and therefore is the only line that justifies the present economic order.

—p.51 Two (33) by Jason Hickel 7 years, 8 months ago