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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their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.

poem by Ben Okri on Grenfell

—p.224 A Place to Call Home (221) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

What will happen now if our growing resistance does not create change? The housing policies of the Tory government will inflict ever-deeper violence of both kinds on the most vulnerable, shored up by moralising around cheap ideas of self-help and responsibility. On 24 June a Guardian headline said it all in quoting a new report from Shelter: ‘Housing Crisis Threatens a Million Families with Eviction by 2020’. There is little that is ‘new’ in this new housing crisis, just new depths to the cuts to benefits already cut to the bone, new breadth to their reach to tear away basic necessities from more and more people. We are watching a car crash in slow motion. [...]

—p.224 A Place to Call Home (221) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

The mass building of council houses, the removal of restrictions on councils building, regulating the private rented sector to secure tenancies, restrain rent raises and ensure adequate conditions, housing-first provision for rough sleepers, reversing benefit sanctions and caps, changing a planning framework that guarantees obscene profits to developers and so much more … the holistic nature of the proposed changes is inspiring. It undercuts the idea of housing as something to generate profits, housing as commodity.

This is the first thing that must be done. Stop the worst of the violence, clear the way to what matters.

We must start there, though, only that we aim higher, do better. That we think about how to make of housing not a commodity nor just a shelter, but a home. That we think of how that process happens, how we are able to take space and make it our own as households, and more collectively in our buildings or estates or neighbourhoods. That we take seriously how home nurtures our selves and futures. That housing associations and councils rip up the petty rules and regulations that treat their tenants as the enemy. That we look at sweat equity, self-build, cooperatives and land trusts. That we transform our unused and unloved spaces to permanent benefit to the community. That we think about how sustainability connects to the wealth of local and natural materials that could be used to retrofit and build or the integration with green space and gardens or the green jobs that could be created. That we think about how we each connect to our home and through it to a vibrant hybrid culture and to a broad and welcoming community where we can grow old gracefully while space remains for our children and their children. Ownership is not necessary for this; rather, secure tenancies and management structures granting the ability to shape our spaces according to needs and desires, to try new things, fail and try again, to build and paint and transform. It sounds utopian until you remember we are conditioned to think of housing as an asset to be managed, not a space that to support our passions and our dreams. Knitted into communities, houses should redefine sustainability and living well upon the earth. [...]

i like her style

—p.226 A Place to Call Home (221) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

[...] These are only a handful of inspiring spatial movements I am aware of. There are so many more. All this is possible.

But we live under logic that justifies buildings boarded up, left to fall apart, investment flats built to sit empty, while crisis rages and people must choose between housing they cannot afford, housing that could kill them, and no housing at all.

again, i like her style

—p.228 A Place to Call Home (221) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

The slogan of the ZAD is ‘ZAD partout,’ (‘ZAD everywhere’), a goal which, however desirable, is ultimately impossible. The ZAD’s emphasis on self-sufficiency obscures the visitors who bring money and alcohol, the supermarket that doesn’t lock its bins, the factories which made the tyres for the barricades, which are all absolutely indispensable elements of the ZAD. The ZAD is self-reflexive but it is not self-sufficient. There’s no doubt that the 200 inhabitants are capable of looking after themselves. They are doing a superb job of growing their own food and organising a complex and peaceful community in a relatively small area of land. But their pride in this achievement ignores that their relations with the outside world, however fragile and minute, maintain the ZAD to an extent beyond that which they would like to be the case. The ZAD, which sets itself against the outside world and simultaneously relies on the outside world to exist, is in contradiction with itself.

kinda cool

—p.246 A Free Zone Unlike Any Other (243) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

In the conventional, thetic, paranoid form of reading imposed on children, every text is a kind of a puzzle. You can read it simply, enjoying the shape of the words in your mouth, their indistinct resonances, their minute associations which seem to hold a special meaning for you and you alone, or the ones which float in the clear vastness of possibility and never need to settle down and become fixed; you can take joy in the act of reading, and understand it as a perpetual collaboration between yourself and an author you've never met. [...]

i do like his writing style tbh

—p.259 Pizza Hermeneutics: Living Before Truth (251) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

The liberal technocrats who complain that truth is being devalued and the determined believers who gibber that it still needs to be uncovered both have their legs broken in the same trap. They're stuck in a world built by bad literary criticism and the grammtological magicians of the CIA. They're stuck in the abyss under words, the land of secret incomprehension.

Our era is not post-truth. It's nowhere near there yet. We're pre-meaning, and we've been there for a very long time.

not sure i fully subscribe to what he's saying at the end but i like the confidence lol

—p.260 Pizza Hermeneutics: Living Before Truth (251) missing author 5 years, 3 months ago

[...] The Gingrich program has several aspects to it. He wants to focus on what he calls “cultural issues.” That makes sense, because when you’re going to rob people blind you don’t want to have them focus their attention on economic issues. The second is the actual programs, robbing people blind and enriching the rich. [...]

[...] In order to push through the social policies that really interest them, like distributing resources even more to the rich than before and reducing the status of the general population and marginalizing them even more than before—in order to carry that off, they have to develop at least some kind of popular support. You have to mobilize some support for what you’re doing. You can’t do that on the social and economic issues. So therefore you turn to what they call “cultural issues.” There’s something that resembles the 1930s about this, Germany in the 1930s. You try to mobilize people on something else. So a large part of the focus of attention in the Gingrich program is what he calls “rebuilding American civilization,” which means cutting back on rights of women, prayer in the schools, narrowing the spectrum of discussion, attacking civil liberties, and so on. Those are things that rich and powerful people don’t like, because they benefit from those. First of all, they tend to be what is called “liberal” on cultural values. [...]

kind of obvious but worth remembering. relevant to my convo with the taxi driver about jordan peterson etc

—p.6 Looking Ahead: Tenth Anniversary Interview (1) by Noam Chomsky 5 years, 3 months ago

[...] none of these people believe in a free market or anything remotely like it. They want a powerful welfare state, directing resources and protection to them. So on the one hand you have a powerful welfare state for a small sector of the population. For the rest, those who you need to do the dirty work, you pay them a pittance, and if they won’t do it, get somebody else. A large part of them are just superfluous. You don’t need them at all. In the Third World, maybe you send out death squads. Here you don’t quite send out death squads, so you lock them into urban slums which are more or less urban concentration camps and make sure they don’t have any resources there so it will collapse and deteriorate. If that won’t work, just throw them into jail.

—p.9 Looking Ahead: Tenth Anniversary Interview (1) by Noam Chomsky 5 years, 3 months ago

[...] He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn them into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.

He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. That’s the argument for them, because he thought equality of condition (not just opportunity) is what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies. He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned the British experiments they were carrying out which were devastating India.

He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. He pointed out that it’s totally senseless to talk about a nation and what we would nowadays call “national interests.” He simply observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is what he’s discussing—and it was the most democratic society of the day—the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and manufacturers,” and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England, who, he argued, suffered from their policies. He didn’t have the data to prove it at the time, but he was probably right.

This truism was a century later called class analysis, but you don’t have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. [...]

—p.19 Rollback: The Return of Predatory Capitalism (13) by Noam Chomsky 5 years, 3 months ago