[Xmca-l] Re: Burning...

Thu Aug 22 15:38:23 PDT 2019

Last night I had a dream. It's a recurring nightmare, vaguely connected to
something that actually did happen to me once--I was in a rape centre
somewhere, and I could hear voices of people being raped, without being
able to tell if they were men or women, children or adults. But with every
scream, a large red mark would appear on a whitewashed wall in front of me,
and the marks were slowly descending towards me. As they reached the level
of my head, I began to wonder if they somehow meant that I was next, or
maybe that I would be murdered, or something out of some silly horror
movie. But of course, because it is only my old familiar nightmare, when
the marks reached the level of my nose and eyebrows, the door flies open,
and I wake up--free and with a very full bladder ("O welche lust....")

I must admit that when I first wake up from the dream, I feel what Vygotsky
calls "incoherent coherence", that everything is connected to everything.
But two things about this dream seem, nevertheless, actually relevant to
the two threads on this list. First of all, Martin's question is based on
the same kind of Levy-Bruhlesque "participation" as my dream--the fires of
Notre Dame and the fires of Amazonia are mystically linked by some
underground tunnel, either through the liberal conciousness (should you
save the baby in the pram or the old woman on a crutch from the driverless
Google car descending upon them?) or through the generalization of
capitalism quite beyond any useful meaning ("no es fuego--es capitalismo!"
seems almost like Bolsinaro's actual response to the fires--"Do you want me
to blame Indians or Martians?"). Secondly, this dream, which is rather
indicative of my mindset, at least when I am asleep, is really what Thomas
Nagel meant when she asked "What is it like to be a bat?"  What it is like
to be a bat--that is, the mindset of the bat--is that everything is
connected to echo-location, and that suggests, quite wrongly and
even deceitfully, the way only our own mindset can ever deceive us, that
everything is connected to everything and that therefore nothing is
connected to me.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 4:19 AM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> Yes, from what I’ve read, the fires in the Amazon are no accident.
>
> It speaks volumes that people see the value of saving a burned building,
> but not of saving the planet on which we depend. Or am I wrong: have
> billionaires been declaring their dedication to rebuild the Amazon?
>
> A colleague here in Colombia, Lina Paola Negrette, wrote this on Facebook
> today:
>
> La ridiculez del día: Facebook me pregunta qué estoy pensando. A
> continuación me bombardea con las imágenes de la selva en llamas, de los
> animales muertos y de hombres y mujeres, casi sin voz, que gritan con el
> fuego en los talones. Me recuerda la estupidez escondida en considerar que
> podemos mitigar el daño causado comprando una botella de vidrio. Los únicos
> que saben cuidar la Amazonía son los pueblos ancestrales y por eso mismo
> son los primeros en la fila del exterminio.
>
> Respuesta: estoy pensando que fracasamos como especie.
>
> El problema es el consumo, el problema es la distribución inequitativa de
> la riqueza, el problema es el monocultivo, el problema es comer carne y
> criar vacas, cerdos, peces, pollos para ser sacrificados. El problema es la
> avaricia de los que arrasan las selvas, los bosques, las llanuras, las
> montañas los ríos, los mares, las ciénagas, los páramos, para hacerse cada
> día más ricos. El problema es desear un diamante y desestimar la sangre que
> bañó otros dedos antes de que brille en uno de los nuestros. El problema es
> votar por quienes defienden a quienes nos matan de tantas formas
> horrorosas. El problema es la obsolescencia programada, la publicidad
> engañosa y la aturdidora propaganda permanente. El problema es el corto
> plazo, la comodidad egoísta, el desperdicio, la falta de solidaridad, la
> ingratitud. El problema es el bienestar basado en el consumo. El problema
> somos todas las personas que olvidamos, que abandonamos, que cerramos los
> ojos, que no escuchamos. El problema somos usted y yo, que nos resistimos a
> dejar que otras personas y otras especies sean. La peor ceguera es que no
> vemos cuántas especies (incluida la vergonzosa humanidad) están ahora mismo
> esclavizadas, en alguna otra parte del mundo, en el patio de al lado o en
> el propio clóset, por el capricho de parecer ricos mientras unos cuantos se
> hacen verdaderamente millonarios a costa de nuestras vidas, de las vidas de
> todas nosotras en el mundo mayoritario (la minoría son los ricos).
>
> La única solución es cambiar ya mismo el modelo económico depredador en el
> que vivimos y que solo favorece a una infame minoría. Dejemos de jugar con
> las reglas del consumo, paremos ya esta masacre contra todas las vidas
> -incluida la nuestra.
>
> Facebook ya sabía, de antemano, lo que estoy pensando.
> La frase del día: "no es fuego, es capitalismo".
>
>
>
> *"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss
> matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my
> partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with
> the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)*
>
>
>
> On Aug 22, 2019, at 12:57 PM, Wagner Luiz Schmit <wagner.schmit@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Amazon is burning, but also:
>
> There is a genocide of indigenous people.
> There is a genocide of the poor (helicopters are dropping grenades on
> favelas, but only favelas  not controlled by the militias - because the
> Bolsonaro family is very very close to the militias).
> There is a total privatization of the Brazilian State.
> There is the destruction of Brazilian science (probably I won't go to
> ISCAR next year for I do not have money, nor the public university where I
> study).
> There is a total subservience to USA.
>
> Back to the forest, why it burns? For the profit of big real state
> speculators, to grow soy (to sell to China) and to make beef (to many parts
> of the world).
>
> There is strong evidence that all this started with the lawfare promoted
> in Brazil by USA government through the Car Wash movement and the same
> fascist powers that moved Brexit, Trump and now the protests at Hong Kong
> (You can see Steve Bannon's fingers everywhere). USA done this in 1964 with
> the military, and in 2016 through a legislative coup.
>
> Some people say that it is not impossible for Brazil to became the Puerto
> Rico of this century.
>
> What keeps me going is the application of Marx and Vygotsky in my classes
> and my understanding of the world, without it there would be only despair.
>
> Wagner
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 1:53 PM JULIE WADDINGTON <julie.waddington@udg.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> And which of the two have the media in our different countries chosen to
>> focus our attention on?
>>
>> Very big sigh,
>>
>> Julie
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________________
>> De: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] en
>> nom de Martin Packer [mpacker@cantab.net]
>> Enviat el: dijous, 22 / agost / 2019 16:32
>> Per a: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> Tema: [Xmca-l]  Burning...
>>
>> Which is more important to save from the flames? Notre Dame, or the
>> Amazon forests?
>>
>> <
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/world/europe/notre-dame-paris-lead-reconstruction.html
>> >
>>
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/americas/amazon-rainforest.html
>> >
>>
>> sigh
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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