losing my reputation, somehow, again:
There was a photo of Obama I think on Xinhua, at Goree, the island where captive Africans were held and then embarked in chains toward their new lives as slaves in the New World.That went into moderation at Crooked Timber then disappeared. A thread about the riots by Indian migrant workers in Singapore.
It's a cool stylish image. He's leaning in a 400 yr old doorway, it looks almost but not quite like an 80's Calvin Klein or someone two-page magazine thing. Rough eroded architecture, broad color fields of natural stuff and sky, but he's too far from the camera to be specifically pimping the casualwear.
So I was looking at that, going "Hmm, well...you know, he's got to be thinking, feeling...or no, I'm supposed to be thinking, feeling..." when drowning virtual Somalis and Haitians came pouring over and around and through it, kind of.
People who are actively intentionally on purpose getting into often very sketchy boats, sometimes paying lots of or even all their last moneys, to go and become practically slaves, because that's promising better than the less than nothing and everything collapsing down back home.
So, there's a simple formula, I think. Permeating so much of what's below most of us, lives that are so completely extra they're hard to see until the not-working parts flare up. Even with Salgado and others showing it for years, and Berger and others telling it, for years.
We're taught and feel inherently some kind of human value for all humans, but the practices of the world we live in have been, and still are, reducing people at the bottom to the status of laboratory animals and worse.
Under people.
Surplus we can use. Or some intermediary we use can. And it's okay. Because look, they're working and feeding themselves and they have at least a place to sleep. And because their lives don't really matter and there's millions and millions of them.
Two attempts to alter machine-objectionable possibilities disappeared along with it. Two nonsense comments made it right to the thread. Now I'm off to try it again. Be right back.
Well, the thread's moved on to a girls' school dance of absurdity and bathos, with real gritty reality bits thrown in. Now the comment wouldn't fit even as loosely as it fit right when I sent it.
So this for now.
The Nielsen-Haydens are CIA, they have been from the get.
Somebody is, has to be, the chances of there not being at least a few prominent internet smart-kid bloggers who are company-affiliated, at least to a degree that's indistinguishable from service to those on the other side, are virtual nothing shading to none at all.
