If you don’t have the ability to bleed off excess pressure – if you don’t have that safety valve, if the exhaust can’t escape from the gas engine, whatever – then what you have is a very different machine: a bomb.
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There’s a lot of reason to feel gloomy about the world. It feels like we’re back where we started. This summer has been unprecedentedly hot and unpleasant in some parts of the world (the heat wave in the pacific northwest has been terrible, obviously – but some parts of Russia above the arctic circle recorded temperatures as high as 48 Celsius. That’s 118 degrees Fahrenheit.) What we see is that, throughout the world, but especially in North America and Western Europe, there is a dwindling of state capacity. We can see this in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen this in regard to climate change.
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I call this “the social zamboni.” It is something that smooths out the rough edges and fields of intensity. I do not think that this particular social formation is one that was designed – such thinking would be conspiracism – but one that has gradually emerged to make the environment in which it occurs more stable.
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The trajectory is like this: Israel is the last-established Settler-Colonialist project. It is also the last such project I see being feasible. Fundamentally, it is the same kind of state as America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; other states have had Settler-Colonialist phases – such as the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido, the settlement of Taiwan, and basically anywhere you see (nation)-ification or -cization – Russification, Sinocization, Romanization. This refers to the replacement of an indigenous culture with a colonialist one. Sometimes, this is accompanied with political policies that lead to demographic shifts.
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I tend to set my reading goal a lot lower than Edgar, for a variety of reasons. One of them is the fact that I think aiming to read a large number of books over the course of a year means that you engage less deeply with them. Or, at least, when I do that, that’s how it works for me. Still, I have read a few extremely good books this year.
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