And by the way, all of these exclamations about how “nothing can be done, we will all be automated away, the liquid capital has won already” is nothing but a socially acceptable form of capitulating to capital, so to speak. I wish people just honestly said, “I’m doing well and everybody else should go screw themselves” instead.
14 responses to “Capitulation”
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Or to paraphrase the late Margaret Thatcher, “there is no other alternative, you will capitulate, #resistance is futile”
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People are afraid if that if they show concern for the losers in the new system then the loser taint will rub off on them, so they side with what seems like the winning side and hope things go their way.
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In this culture, there’s nothing more prestigious than being a loser. People display their losership as a badge of honor.
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“In this culture, there’s nothing more prestigious than being a loser”
I no longer recognize (nor want to recognize) my country, it’s dead and gone, probably forever.
I’m not sure what is there in its place – I hope the people there make better choices than they’ve been making since I left.
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Unfortunately, that’s the trend. I’m stunned because this is not the US I read about back home.
It’s very interesting to me that the way to get into mainstream newspapers and on TV as an expert for me would entail NOT getting an academic job and going around loudly publicizing this fact.
It’s not the knowledge that you have or the success you achieve that makes you an expert on academia, for instance. It’s how wounded you have been by it.
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“It’s not the knowledge that you have or the success you achieve that makes you an expert on academia, for instance. It’s how wounded you have been by it.”
Clearly you need to rebrand yourself as a victim of many, micoragreesions (like everytime somebody thinks you’re Russian…)
I’m thinking a good heuristic for when a social movement is past its peak is the switch from assertiveness and bravery into whining and the glamorization of victimhood, for mainstream femnism that would be around the emergence of third wave feminism with its pre-occupation on the minutiae of social interactions and self-absorbed vanity.
Of course there are still problems with racism and sexism etc but the social movement model seems to have run its course and turned into a dry well.
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” I no longer recognize (nor want to recognize) my country, it’s dead and gone, probably forever.”
LOL.
This is what finally sent Cliff over the edge. A couple of spoiled idiot college kids. Remember, he’s been laughing all this time about librul pussies bitching about Trump. Talk about hysteria.
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This country being run by a petulant, senile, reality TV host, in concert with granny-starvers in the republican establishment, making the world less safe day after day, alienating all allies, denying health care to untold millions, hiring actual fascists in the white house.
ALL that is fine with Cliff. ‘Clinton would’ve been equally bad. Grow up, you whiny losers!’
What hurts his little fee-fees is some 19 year old undergrad who doesn’t know any better writing a stupid inconsequential essay on his privilege.
Boo fucking hoo.
‘I no longer recognize (nor want to recognize) my country, it’s dead and gone, probably forever.’
Imagine this being voiced by Daffy Duck, and try not to laugh.
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The problem is that the inconsequential undergrads don’t show up to vote because nobody is mindful enough of their super important feelings, and we end up with Trump in the White House.
What’s even worse, undergrads think that politics is writing whiny essays, and we end up with a roster of politicians who are well past retirement age and nobody to take their place.
Trump didn’t come here in a spaceship from a different galaxy. He’s a result of a lot of things that have been going on.
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The problem is that the inconsequential undergrads don’t show up to vote because nobody is mindful enough of their super important feelings, and we end up with Trump in the White House.
It was easier for me to vote as an out of state undergraduate in Ohio the first time I voted in my life than it was for me to vote in the last election. If I had been an out of state undergraduate in Florida in this last election, I would not have been able to vote.What’s even worse, undergrads think that politics is writing whiny essays, and we end up with a roster of politicians who are well past retirement age and nobody to take their place.
Snitting about undergraduate maturity and whiny essays feels quaint. Where do you think they get the idea that writing whiny essays is politics, if indeed they write essays? We have a 70 year old president who makes policy announcements and whines on twitter.Get off my lawn-ism is very satisfying. It’s a pity the bildung is dead, because a good writer could mine the idea of coming of age when everyone else around you is in some kind of arrested development or when the ideal of adulthood is to perform infantilism. Or perhaps a novel of someone who is not chronologically young, but forced to grow up in middle age in that same moment.
We are in a moment when people are focused on aged boomers & up and infantile young adults. However the median person in the United States is neither young nor old, but late Generation X. (In 2016 the median person is 37.9 years old, the median woman is 39.3 years old and the median man is 36.6 years old)
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No, it’s not generational. It’s the same crap in my generation. Look, for instance, who is widely known as representatives of academia, getting on TV as experts, getting publishing contracts, colonizing CHE and Inside Higher Ed. Is it people like me? No, of course not. It’s the freaks, the losers, people who are known for failing spectacularly at being academics. I’d never be invited to write for IHE because I don’t perform woundedness. I can tell people how to be successful and happy in academia but that’s not in demand. I can tell people what the real challenges that academia faces are but that’s not in demand either. All that is in demand is describing how one is personally hurt and wounded by something completely minor. Mind you, real hurt doesn’t sell. It has to be something totally out there. And that’s what makes money.
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If it’s not a generational thing, why is performing woundedness en vogue? Academics have been saying the life of the mind is full of angst and woe for as long as I’ve been reading academics talking about themselves.
“Academia is full of doom and horrors, increased cutthroat competition for fewer jobs that suck even harder than our forebears, adjuncting and automation!”
Another title:
Canaries in a Coal Mine: How Academia Is Your Early Warning System For the Coming Transformations in the Job Market
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It’s not just academia. I give it as an example because it’s what I know but it’s everywhere. There is a whole genre of books, websites, videos, Facebook posts, etc of mommies complaining about outlandishly trivial things, like somebody looking at them the wrong way at the grocery store.
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Prediction: In the 30’s (when I’m in my 70’s) there will be a hit TV show called eightysomething.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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