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Thanks to the anonymous giver of the chocolate userhead virtual gift, as well as to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yggdrasilian for the kiss! As C.J. Cregg says, the theme I’m taking away is “‘learning is delightful and delicious’ -- as, by the way, am I.”
Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability: Collection of reviews and other materials on disability studies, operating from a rejection of the medical model of disability (disability is about individual deficits) and adopting the social model (disability is about structures of exclusion, prejudices, and responses). There are historical essays and film reviews; for me the most challenging pieces were about assisted suicide. By limiting resources for people with disabilities, society can coerce them into accepting that suicide is the best option available—but that’s a false dichotomy: “The rhetoric of ‘choice’ is deployed to hide the realities of coercion.” One man who sought assistance committing suicide lived in a state willing to pay $230 a day to keep him in a nursing home, but under $300 a month for him to live in his own apartment with assistance. It struck me that this was a micro example of how failure to provide for everyone’s medical needs disciplines all workers/potential workers. Longmore writes about the way that social assistance in the US has been divided into programs for “deserving” workers and for the “needy,” both of whom are stigmatized and used to police the bounds of acceptability. Being in need is defined as being deficient, contrary to the realities of human existence. This has obvious general implications for how employees relate to their employers, but consider the nursing home example in this light: because of minimum wage laws, a much higher percentage of the money spent on in-home care would go to the caregiver, and in-home care would also create more jobs because of the economies of scale in a nursing home. So disempowering people with disabilities by only funding nursing home care helps control other workers as well.
Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Oppenheimer was a privileged, awkward prodigy who grew into a privileged, awkward scientific star. Devoted husband to a troubled wife, adulterer, distant parent, devoted friend, capable of great charm and great vitriol and using the latter instead of the former at the worst possible moments, he was clearly a complex figure. He comes off in the book as more amanuensis than self-sufficient scientist, capable of generating great ideas but not interested in working them through, able to see (and show other people) the greatest potential in others’ scientific ideas even though his own individual scientific contributions may not have been as striking. Initially an idea man, he made himself into an excellent administrator at Los Alamos apparently just by realizing that he was in charge now and that it needed to be done. Hailed as the father of the atomic bomb, he then began to worry about its implications (though while opposing the hydrogen bomb he became a serious advocate of strategic nuclear bombing on the battlefield, so he wasn’t exactly a purist), and this as well as his lefty history, combined with his habit of making politically powerful enemies, led to the humiliation of having his security clearance revoked at the height of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. It’s a fascinating story of a contradictory man across a tumultuous period in American society.
F.S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. A short attack on the “economic” story of human existence, where we’re all individualistic rational utility maximizers and therefore we/the people with the power to make decisions about how to allocate resources ignore the long-term effects of our decisions on the environment, the economy, our relationships with other people, and so on. I’m not sure I’m the right audience, since everything seemed perfectly obvious to me (if you think of education as solely a way to get a better job, of course you devalue its other effects and simultaneously are more willing to offload the costs to the individual student who is after all the only one who will benefit from that education). But I wasn’t sure the book could persuade someone that the “economic” story was wrong, since many pointy-headed liberals will simply respond that a lot of current decisions are bad when you do utility maximization the right way. There were some suggestions for what you as an individual could do to fight the destructive selfishness of our current culture, and I do think that individual choices matter, but in the end without political action it’s hard to see how that will change things.
yggdrasilian for the kiss! As C.J. Cregg says, the theme I’m taking away is “‘learning is delightful and delicious’ -- as, by the way, am I.”Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability: Collection of reviews and other materials on disability studies, operating from a rejection of the medical model of disability (disability is about individual deficits) and adopting the social model (disability is about structures of exclusion, prejudices, and responses). There are historical essays and film reviews; for me the most challenging pieces were about assisted suicide. By limiting resources for people with disabilities, society can coerce them into accepting that suicide is the best option available—but that’s a false dichotomy: “The rhetoric of ‘choice’ is deployed to hide the realities of coercion.” One man who sought assistance committing suicide lived in a state willing to pay $230 a day to keep him in a nursing home, but under $300 a month for him to live in his own apartment with assistance. It struck me that this was a micro example of how failure to provide for everyone’s medical needs disciplines all workers/potential workers. Longmore writes about the way that social assistance in the US has been divided into programs for “deserving” workers and for the “needy,” both of whom are stigmatized and used to police the bounds of acceptability. Being in need is defined as being deficient, contrary to the realities of human existence. This has obvious general implications for how employees relate to their employers, but consider the nursing home example in this light: because of minimum wage laws, a much higher percentage of the money spent on in-home care would go to the caregiver, and in-home care would also create more jobs because of the economies of scale in a nursing home. So disempowering people with disabilities by only funding nursing home care helps control other workers as well.
Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Oppenheimer was a privileged, awkward prodigy who grew into a privileged, awkward scientific star. Devoted husband to a troubled wife, adulterer, distant parent, devoted friend, capable of great charm and great vitriol and using the latter instead of the former at the worst possible moments, he was clearly a complex figure. He comes off in the book as more amanuensis than self-sufficient scientist, capable of generating great ideas but not interested in working them through, able to see (and show other people) the greatest potential in others’ scientific ideas even though his own individual scientific contributions may not have been as striking. Initially an idea man, he made himself into an excellent administrator at Los Alamos apparently just by realizing that he was in charge now and that it needed to be done. Hailed as the father of the atomic bomb, he then began to worry about its implications (though while opposing the hydrogen bomb he became a serious advocate of strategic nuclear bombing on the battlefield, so he wasn’t exactly a purist), and this as well as his lefty history, combined with his habit of making politically powerful enemies, led to the humiliation of having his security clearance revoked at the height of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. It’s a fascinating story of a contradictory man across a tumultuous period in American society.
F.S. Michaels, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. A short attack on the “economic” story of human existence, where we’re all individualistic rational utility maximizers and therefore we/the people with the power to make decisions about how to allocate resources ignore the long-term effects of our decisions on the environment, the economy, our relationships with other people, and so on. I’m not sure I’m the right audience, since everything seemed perfectly obvious to me (if you think of education as solely a way to get a better job, of course you devalue its other effects and simultaneously are more willing to offload the costs to the individual student who is after all the only one who will benefit from that education). But I wasn’t sure the book could persuade someone that the “economic” story was wrong, since many pointy-headed liberals will simply respond that a lot of current decisions are bad when you do utility maximization the right way. There were some suggestions for what you as an individual could do to fight the destructive selfishness of our current culture, and I do think that individual choices matter, but in the end without political action it’s hard to see how that will change things.