there's our catastrophe

Jun 15

I talk to men about their feelings regularly, if I’m friends with them, that’s part of what friendship is, if women don’t wanna be friends with men that’s fine but if we do then we have to care about each other, people are people and not just subject positions, either the gulf is too deep to bridge or it is not

but I absolutely draw the line at helping them get through their guilt about primarily using women as emotional supports, like, that’s too much, I’ll start laughing hysterically and probably burst some stitches I didn’t even know I had

cruel ironies of life, no. 516: the immense pressure I experience to display ~appropriate~ affect when men are talking about how it’s really important to learn how to manage their feelings so that women don’t have to take on that work

you can have your men’s circles or positive masculinity mixtapes, they’re probably a good thing, whatever, I just don’t want to have to affirm their value, or talk about them, or hear about them, or be chastised for making a face when they come up, or be aware that that exist

(via memejacker)

nevvzealand:

when a friend buys u food and says u dont have to pay them back u know they are forever

actually backed up by anthropological research

Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria; neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts: “two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts.”* Having no idea what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring some­ thing back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money — there was nothing inappropriate in that — provided one did so at a discreet interval, and above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, “in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received” — and in doing so, they were continually creating their society. …There are endless variations on this sort of tit-for-tat, or almost tit-for-tat, gift exchange.

*(Bohannan, Laura. “Political aspects of Tiv social organization.” Tribes without Rulers: Studies in African Segmentary Systems (1958): 33-66.) Cited in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, 2011, 104-105. 

(Source: moseby, via arakwal-dubay)

Jun 14

to be fair, an anarchist of my acquaintance responded with “don’t buy this terrible magazine!  you can borrow a copy from the zine library” which hits at least three squares on anarchist bingo

the biggest local trotskyist group have a new magazine out and it’s called red flag

presumably because spotting it in your home is an early warning sign that your teen is becoming an unlovable nerd who always picks fights about the spanish civil war

popularity is important and relevant, it’s part of the context that inevitably impacts your reading of a thing, its part of how there’s no such thing as the text (or whatever) in itself, how everything is mediated, and at some point I’ll have more to say about this

“1. no theorist should be dismissed

2. zizek is a theorist

3. zizek should not be dismissed”

like you’re not exactly making a resounding defence of zizek per se, you’re just saying “stop not liking things”