Dubai?

What does this mean? Can anyone tell me? I've been checking around in various news media, CounterPunch, Znet, NYTimes, and not one of them has come close to telling me what all of this angriness is about.

Republicans are pissed because we're handing US economic interests over to a middle eastern company and they are worried about national security risks. Dems give the same reasons but that is no surprise.

But why is it happening?

Transnational interests are at play but, then again, they were before.
The ports are already privatized.

I know there is something I should be up in arms about, but I cant figure out what.

Can someone please explain this?


I just hope all of this confusion is a crack in things.

After a Hiatus

Preparing for a life in Acedemia

I'm walking on well trodden ground, perhaps: what roles should acedemics in elite institutions take in politics? It seems that the most effective one would be as builders of tools that can be used in political struggles: theory and careful consideration should be used to better understand political changes beyond one's immediate surroundings allowing politics to be carried out more effectively. A career limited to acedemic life is a life always in waiting- refering constantly to the operation of politics, but never quite reaching a point where we act on it. The role of criticism in politics should remain as a stepping stone rather than a fetish.

Duncan

Incoherance adhered to

Right now I feel completely drained of all academic energy. Somehow doing work feels like throwing up- not only regurgitating words and thoughts in your own form but it leaves you exhausted and ill. I feel no creative drive to exist in school there just has to be something more. I’m tired of being faced with this literature literature literature and just being told to write another paper. I could tell you again why I think hegemonic norms are bad news but I’ll be damned if we ever get to a place where someone will listen to me. Hearing, listening- there’s a difference and whoever I’m speaking to when I write is probably just going to hear what I say without listening. Monotony should be easy by now, but that’s the problem, these ideas come too easy, thoughts and description, eloquence and rhetoric, subtracted from the real world while eulogizing the passing of the good things. I would ask “when do we get there?” but I wouldn’t know where “there” was or if I’d know it when I saw it. What terrifies me more is that I’m already here and that all this is just me trying to displace the emptiness of the exercise by imposing a teleos. I would sure like to think this matters but maybe it does only to the degree it’s hurting me. There is probably a way to write this into a paper, into the voice of academics, into active tense with no be verbs and, fuck, I probably will write it into that one day. That sickens me, the detached scholarly thought that arranges things just so as to remove their meaning and leave you with nothing to hold onto but a collection of the symbolic.

I don’t make sense but that’s the damn point.

Irony, elitism, Robin Hood

Some practices undertaken in academia and 'liberal' circles become painted by the world-at-large (or other people in these circles) as elitist, ivory tower panderings, or even as strategic errors in the battle against other illiberal forces. I find this strategy particularly unsettling and repelant because it replicates the form it seeks to end in the articulation of its argument. Designating an elitist practice requires the ability to speak from, or at least know in a 'truer' way, the voice of the 'common person.' The assumption of this position of responsibility turns the speaker/critic into a Robin Hood figure, someone who knows the game for what it's worth, fighting on behalf of the common person. The practice becomes scapegoating, the orientalization of academia by externalizing/locating what disturbs us about ourselves in the body of another, and seperating ourselves from that which we would rather not see in the mirror.

This process also is a more subtle and casual form of elitism. It rests on the belief that an authentic, real, universal body of knowledge and thought exists, and that by god, someone has to be there to protect the truth. It places the speaker above the regular academic/political plane as a savior figure protecting others who stray from the true and rightous path.

In the end, no one can be truely avoid elitism or some form of exclusionary practices because no shared body of common experience or thought exists. There is no 'man on the street' representing the typical voice of America (or where-ever else), and so the attempt to salvage any project in their interests or voice will fail. Every person occupies a particular social location and speaks primarily from that location.

Strangely, this has something to do with social irony. Write about this later.

Where do ideas come from?

I think ideas appear like an explosion; not from nowhere but from a number of other concepts/conversations/thoughts coexisting in your mind at once until they reach a critical density whereby any other contribution can strike them in such a way that they explode outwards and become an external idea.

I have no idea how I think about things.