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unsuspicious@wyrms.de

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Success! reading crustacean has read 53 of 50 books.

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Seeing like a state (1998, Yale University Press) 4 stars

Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased …

Although the geometric, uniform forest was intended to facilitate management and extraction, it quickly became a powerful aesthetic as well. The visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the regularity and neatness of its appearance.

Seeing like a state by  (Page 18)

The Germans are at it again... color me surprised. they even invented something called the "Normalbaum" lol.

this is the kind of forest we still have in many areas of germany btw

www.lr-online.de/imgs/29/1/0/7/6/5/7/0/2/5/tok_cff8f90c6efc4a7d2ebf6620667ec4e7/w1200_h675_x750_y562_IMG_6256.JPG-e23f056822567af0.jpeg

www.bund-brandenburg.de/fileadmin/processed/8/7/csm_Kiefernplantage-Borkheide_c_Annette_Littmeier_80e1fa79f6.jpg

Seeing like a state (1998, Yale University Press) 4 stars

Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased …

Once you have crafted lenses that change your perspective, it is a great temptation to look at everything through the same spectacles.

I do, however, want to plead innocent to two charges that I do not think a careful reading would sustain. The first charge is that my argument is uncritically admiring of the local, the traditional and the customary. I understand that the practical knowledge I describe is often inseparable from the practices of domination, monopoly, and exclusion that offend the modern liberal sensibility. My point is not that practical knowledge is the product of some mythical, egalitarian state of nature. Rather, my point is that formal schemes of order are untenable without some elements of the practical knowledge that they tend to dismiss.

The second charge is that my argument is an anarchist case against the state itself. The state, as I make abundantly clear, is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms. My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and and authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.

Seeing like a state by  (Page 7)

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Radikale Selbstfürsorge. Jetzt!: Eine feministische Perspektive (german language, Eden Books) 3 stars

Svenja Gräfen hielt Self-Care lange für egoistisch, unsolidarisch und allem voran für ein falsches Versprechen …

Yogamatten raus

3 stars

Erwartungsgemäß bietet Svenja Gräfen auch kein Patentlösung, wie man trotz all der krassen Entwicklungen in der Welt, trotz all den Drucks etwas tun zu wollen aber nicht zu können, trotz all der Hilflosigkeit und Überforderung noch gesund bleiben kann. Aber sie fasst ganz gut zusammen, was helfen könnte und begründet, warum Selbstfürsorge kein egoistisches optimierungskonzept sein muss, sondern durchaus sinnvolle solidarische Praxis sein kann. Also holt die Yogamatten raus, oder whatever. Hauptsache ihr macht euch bei allem Aktivismus nicht selber fertig, denn nichts ist weniger hilfreich für progressive gesellschaftliche Veränderungen, als ausgebrannte Aktivistis.

Seeing like a state (1998, Yale University Press) 4 stars

Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased …

Originally, I set out to understand why the state has always been the enemy of "people who move around," to put it crudely. In the context of Southeast Asia, this promised to be a fruitful way of addressing the perennial tensions between mobile, slash-and-burn hill peoples on one hand and wet-rice, valley kingdoms on the other. The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, run-away slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project - perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.

Seeing like a state by  (Page 1)