Naomi Klein, Classic or Dud

I always confuse her with Naomi Wolf.

I haven't read it either. It seemed so Kid A (read: dud). ;-)

Ah yes, Wolf. DOn't get me started on <I>that</I> one.

FFS, I pushed the convert button!

i can't believe i never got round to reading 'no logo'. it was something like a phenomenon in 1999-2001.

2001 was the summer nme ran a front page saying 'there's a riot going on what the FUCK are youse doing about it, eh, giles, what?', or something, after that italian guy got shot in an anti-imf beef.

i shit you not that after 9/11 the new statesman printed a story by a no-globo type saying when it happened her corner of the web was all 'omg maybe it was ONE OF US!!1!?'

but things seem to have dried up a bit? i think there's a shindig in mexico now and again.

2001 was the summer nme ran a front page saying 'there's a riot going on what the FUCK are youse doing about it, eh, giles, what?', or something, after that italian guy got shot in an anti-imf beef.

hah, i initially read that as "after that italian guy got shot in an anti-ilx beef" at first. rip dom passatino.

but, uh, cereally, anti-globalisation movement is still pretty alive and kicking. as, sadly, are globalisation's effects...e.g., the environmental and labor conditions in china have, if anything gotten worse in the past six years or so.

sho nuff, i'm just talking about the movement among students, in britain really.

you are being sarcastic huh? the anti-globalization/anti-war/anti-climate change lot are still about duder.

xp but dell has kinda said it now

Did 9/11 change everything? Her new book is actually about that.

has anyone actually read No Logo? or any thing else she's done? is she actually any good on the economic stuff?

It always seeemed one of these unread books which gather dust in a library.

the anti-globalization/anti-war/anti-climate change lot are still about duder.

for realsies? maybe what i meant was that way back when, there seemed to be fewer right-wing types among da yoot. kaiser chiefs, boris johnson facebook groups, all that.

yeh i'll give you that. there was yr Turning Right thread but that went very weird, mark s turned up, do you think brit yoof has swung right post 9/11? maybe it's just that i know a few people into activism stuff but then i'm aquainted with a lot more mini-clarksons so i dunno.

my feeling is the iraq war's immanent critique of liberal intervention has made people slightly weird about the notion of activism, or getting involved in "other people's business" in general.

it's probably not true, but i'm not trying to write a sociology textbook on it, it's more a diffuse and personally inflected feeling.

but all those things on that thread -- add to it the "return of the sloane ranger" phenomenon, people giving a shit about wills and harry -- i do feel the culture in general has swung rightwards over the last ten years.

so we really, really need a new punk, is what i'm saying.

j/k

R n B seems very right wing music to me -- it seems to really celebrate consumerism in a way no other genre of pop music does. so maybe we do need an antidote to that.

Rap critics they say he's "Money Cash Hoes"
I'm from the hood stupid, what type of facts are those
If you grew up with holes in ya zapatos
You'd be celebrating the minute you was havin' dough

yes that's an explanation for it! but it sucks! spend yr money helping those ppl *still* in the hood to live better lives instead of spending it all on yrself you selfish eejit!

People who made it out of the ghetto have been criticised for being too flash with their money since time immemorial.

uh when do the americans get here? this could end up nasty.

i once read a certain ex-ilxor criticising the idea of poptimism / popism with the rather oblique statement: "they are pretending it's still 1999" i wonder if what quitney is getting at was what he meant.

I heard her being interviewed on the radio yesterday, and she seemed okay. The central plank of Shock Doctrine - that the public siege mentality generated by the War on Terror has been exploited by Right governments to push a Libertarian economic agenda - has some merit, I think. But I'm sure like all books that try to analyse a big picture this one will have errors of fact and judgement that neocons and their media allies will use to discredit the entire discussion. That's how politics works now.

I'm American scum.

I actually did read "No Logo". It painted an extremely depressing picture of things. As I recall, I sold it last year to a used bookstore, b/c I needed dough at the time, and couldn't imagine myself reading it again.

I dunno, to me it's like reading Harper's Index or something. It has the profoundly unsettling effect of realizing that things are in facgt much, much, much worse than I ever even imagined they were, in terms of the suffering which is the lot of the majority of people on the planet.

presumably that was carmody, and i feel what he's saying there. carmody never pretends that he wasn't personally happier back then, btw, he's happy to allow that and still make the argument.

i think dom has done a thread on how 1999 was rubbish, not good like you thought.

but it was the Last Hollywood Golden Age too.

xpost to acrobat

has anyone actually read No Logo? or any thing else she's done? is she actually any good on the economic stuff?

I've read "No Logo" a few years ago now, I think I still have it on the shelf somewhere. My main memory is that she probably could have hired a fact checker, as there were a bunch of small details which were fairly blatantly RONG. I generally agree w/her worldview, but you've got to get yer shit right! I might pick it up again and have a skim through it, I can't actually remember anything about her take on the economic stuff offhand.

what do you think the 1999 arguement is? world was all gravy befor GWB got in? i imagine Naomi K was writing No Logo well before GWB was a menace.

shurely prior to 9/11 GWB was no better or worse than any other US president with the exceptions of Lincoln, FDR and Wilson.

apart from y know the whole florida thing.

Big fat dud. We all know globalisation creates losers as well as winners, the question is: what do we do about it?

what do you think the 1999 arguement is?

destiny's child, trance anthems, uk garage...

xpost

"we all know"

i don't even understand what you mean there. naomi klein pens widely read book about a thing, people read it even though "we all know" its contents, and for that she is dud?

Dud for not being cute.

post photos with dom passantino in the background

^^^ the post that had to be made

When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.

As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.

Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165053,00.html

Is that right?

wouldn't have thought so, or not in that ddirect kind of way. i don't think much disorder in britain flowed from the war so much as the recession.

and anyway thhe miners' strike was two years later.

though iirc there is a famous story of returning servicemen saying "now for the unions" or somesuch.

That's the thing that worries me about things like this book and that series The Trap. The big picture makes a lot of sense but little details seem rushed and unconvincing, it leaves me with this weird feeling that unless you read the papers everyday and then take a phd in working this shit out your never gonna quite get it. whatever it is.

there's too much to know, no-one could really be an expert in everything. but you do want your popularizers to do a good and thorough job of synthesizing things without too much distortion, or in this case dodgy rhetoric.

when you think about it, the conversion of china to sweat-shop capitalism is not that much like the collapse of the british coal industry.

That sentence about the Falklands war is bizarre, it reads like some nutjob conspiracy theory. I certainly don't remember any disorder after it, unless she is talking about in the Labour party at the time, which anyway predates the Falklands by some time.

i think a friend of mine maybe edited this book lols but srsly

Disorder I don't remember, but the Falklands victory did do a lot to boost the popularity of the Tory government. Before 82 Thatcher was not doing well in the polls. I'm not saying it was decisive in the 1983 election but it was clearly a huge help. The war also arguably helped the Labour party to self-destruct PR-wise. Not decisive in the Tories winning in 83 then, but an important factor, and the Libertarian privatisation-spree only started in earnest after they'd won that huge majority.

did the labour party oppose the falklands war?

I think they tore themselves up over it amongst all the other Left-Right shit that was going down. Michael Foot was an outspoken pacifist, and tho I assume he must have at least offered token support once we were actually at war, the whole thing added an edge to in-party fighting. And from what I remember the party were publically perceived (i.e. in ver Media) as the woolly hippy anti-War party.

I'm an American, I've read No Logo and it was my first exposure to a fair amount of in-depth reporting on "free market zones", sweatshops and manufacturing, oil industry in Nigeria, and other flashpoints of globalization and I thought it was pretty good albeit almost totally depressing. Its one of those things that makes you want to change your choices as a consumer and then you inevitably run into the problem of not being able to find products that aren't somehow tainted by shitty policies, rampant exploitation, etc.

iow one of those books that makes you hate capitalism and realize that there's no escape from it at the same time.

Why failure is the new face of success It may have been the military that invaded but, with Iraq completely dismantled, the reconstruction was to be the preserve of US corporations ... Thus was born 'disaster capitalism', where oil companies profit from a broken country and private security firms grow rich on political chaos, says Naomi Klein in this final extract from her new book.

still "totally depressing".

man i wish i was south african and hard as fuck. i could be making bank.

so as it turns out abundant natural resources and a low cost of living are why poor countries stay that way and it has nothing to do with their own indigenous elite types being rightfully terrified at the spectre of a functionally literate (or numerate) middle class

NEXT

shurely prior to 9/11 GWB was no better or worse than any other US president with the exceptions of Lincoln, FDR and Wilson.

wilson was much worse than bush in almost every respect. (unless yr point was "these are the only three presidents worse than bush.")

Classic for being cute (prolly too skinny for Dom) and talking about Showgirls with me despite the rest of our dinner-table populated by activist-wannabes trying to brown-nose...

ahahahahahaha this film of 'the shock doctine' is the stupidest shit of all time.

is that why she disowned it?

Her last article in Harpers was pretty poorly written and unpersuasive. That said, I generally like her.

she came off pretty well on Bill Maher once.

it's probably a dumbed-down version of her book. nonetheless, she figures in it prominently (not as narrator but in footage of her lectures) and it does seem to be her argument. her name is still in the credits (as in 'based on the book by').

it kind of attributes the whole of world history since 1973 to milton friedman.

it's like a retarded adam curtis.

Yeah... I think she overreaches a lot.

I heard she was trying to distance herself from the adaptation although having read the book this: "it kind of attributes the whole of world history since 1973 to milton friedman." is a pretty accurate summary.

noticed five minutes after it finished that it was actually on TV tonight. damn.

Which documentary is it (I think it's The Corporation maybe?) where Naomi Klein is interviewed while sprawled come-hither style over a divan, and the camera subtly drifts towards her legs? Meanwhile she is delivering critique/analysis as if nothing weird is going on.

I'm stuck around page 150 of Shock Doctrine right now. Will I get anything that I haven't already gotten out of the first 150 pages if I read 400 more?

i think i got to page 260 and it had to go back to the library. i don't feel any kind of loss.

milton friedman was bad tho

harbl OTM. I'm probably going to give up soon.

i like her in principle but No Logo is flat-out dumb

I just imagined reading that as an "endorsement" on the back of the book and I burst out laughing.

No Logo is the only book of hers I've read, but this new one sounds v. interesting:

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us—and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

Blurbs by Bill McKibben, Judith Butler, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, China Mieville, and Kim Stanley Robinson!

The "doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own" is Naomi Wolf, btw

people on ilx have confused the two before!

Wolf is the one who is afraid of vaxxed ppl's feces

death recorded

keeping track of things with the following rhyme:

if the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

— bela lugosi's dad (@markpopham) October 23, 2019

John Hiatt should write a memoir about John Prine

Before she left, Naomi Wolf left us with one of the funniest tweets in the history of this garbage site. pic.twitter.com/KgCrE1b2o3

— Mike Beauvais (@MikeBeauvais) June 5, 2021

at long last james wood composes his nabokovian masterpiece

The Big Bad Wolf is the way to remember it

Well, the excerpt from Doppelganger is beyond fascinating

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-conspiracy-theories

And she had noticed something even more bizarre: “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent any more. You can’t smell them. I’m not saying like, they don’t smell bad or they don’t smell – like I’m not talking about deodorant. I’m saying they don’t smell like there’s a human being in the room, and they don’t feel like there’s a human being in the room.”

This, she explained to the host, was all due to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up”. Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialing down its ability to transmit”. She concluded, “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.”

That is not how lipid nanoparticles work. It is not how vaccines work. It is not how anything works. Also, and I can’t quite believe I am typing these words, vaccinated people still smell like humans.

that's crazy. the mixup between the two has even happened ITT too.

Wow

Marc Maron has been absolutely raving about this book on almost every episode of his show lately, sounds fantastic.

I liked this part:

“I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the neofascist and authoritarian right that goes something like: narcissism (grandiosity) + social media addiction + midlife crisis ÷ public shaming = rightwing meltdown.“

Everything she is typing about the Mirror World is so interesting, I think I’ve wanted this book to exist for several years now

started this last night and it's extremely good. weirder still are the amazon reviews from readers who appear to be naomi wolf fans who ... like the book?

I can’t quite believe I am typing these words, vaccinated people still smell like humans.

My wife would like to testify to this truth.

tbf, Wolf was roundly criticized for contrafactual claims as far back as when she wrote The Beauty Myth. She's always been quite the self-promoter.

people will make lots of noise about how they want well-researched, reasoned books and media when it comes to the social sphere. but what they really like is someone who's a little goofy with it

No need to check facts if you’ve got good prose style

can you really check Emotional Facts?

What about Factual Feelings?

Book is excellent, even if it got a little diffuse by the end in attempting to tick off too many boxes. The last few chapters were more like spokes leading towards generic leftwing touchpoints which, while creditable, were only tenuous to the book's premise. Did enjoy it a lot though