Imagine if Melissa McEwan or the freaks on Feministing or Slate heard something about the erosion of the nation-state and decided to share the news with their excitable followers. The trajectory of the nation-state model is a complex subject that requires a nuanced treatment. Here on the blog we have spent years trying to figure it out.
But what if the subject is stumbled upon by the people who are incapable of nuance and mistake psychological problems for a political stance? They would produce something along the lines of “the nation-state is collapsing and the pieces will fall down on your head and give you a concussion and then the job market would reject you and you’ll die! And we will all die! Immediately!”
I’m reading The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame by David J Blacker, and by God, he is the Melissa McEwan of the nation-state erosion. He is in love with the concept of eliminationism that prompts McEwan to see every ad featuring thin people as an attempt to eliminate fat people and that, in Blacker’s case, translates into the idea that standardized school testing has as its goal the physical elimination of students. Like in causing their physical death. And that’s just one of his insights.
The writing is so overwrought and intense that it reads like a parody of everything Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck ever wrote. I enjoyed being a popularizer of these ideas on the blog and in my book but now I have seen what will happen if the over-eager yet intellectually unsophisticated folks stumble across them. And it’s not pretty.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment