7 Comments
Sep 18Liked by Catherine Liu

I 'woke' up one September morning and was moved by your ideas wrapped in words, Catherine. Keep 'em comin'! :)

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> His cadence is strangely poetic, even as it works to dehumanize immigrants by accusing them of kidnapping and eating Fido.

Reminds me of Ginsberg on Kerouac:

> Cause McCarthy would get up there drunk and would talk funny ... [Kerouac] thought McCarthy was the only honest man in the senate, in the sense of someone who talks from the top of his mind and says outrageous things, while everybody else was trying to keep everything quiet and under the cover. (https://youtu.be/_zAW02FmLiY?si=K7IVCiFCPn95uwra&t=450)

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Your posts and interviews / discussions on Trauma have gotten me thinking about a phenomenon I saw online where therapy was live-streamed by a licensed psychiatrist. This seems to be in contrast to — or at least an evolution of — the kinds of Trauma commodification that you describe on, say, Oprah or Prince Harry’s documentary. By that I mean there seems to have been genuine “therapeutic moments” in his sessions with patients, but nonetheless the livestreams do end up giving a sort of social “passkey to authenticity” for the streamers with whom he collaborates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alok_Kanojia?wprov=sfti1#

Kanojia’s stated mission is that he said the current mental health crisis among young people is so intense that he would rather it be streamed to get others who would otherwise not have any contact with therapy to see what it’s like.

At first glance it’s certainly a terrifying prospect (live streaming personal trauma with 50k + viewers and any misstep is permanently recorded on the internet) but unfortunately I have to admit some of his advice and/or insights have been helpful personally.

Anyway I’m rambling but wondering if any of this is in your book as the guy’s channel is quite popular and controversial and brings all sorts of ethical questions up w/r/t his credentialed profession / class.

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founding

I very much enjoyed your conversation on Doomscroll. I live in Australia and try to keep up with US politics, mostly as a distraction from the cluster fuck of Oz politics and especially in relation to our NDIS. I'm just a couple of years older than you and yearn for a past, now vanished, when I could participate in such conversations.

It was fascinating to hear of the PMC, I recognized I am a member. Although my background is Socialist a, precocious punk child of Marxism, and Anarchist English hippies. There is not much opportunity to have a robust discussion anymore, I really enjoy hanging with non neurotypical Gen X, Y and Z :)

I am autistic and a business manager/owner that works and advocates for people living with disadvantage.

I look forward to exploring more on here, I'd not heard of this platform so rushed to subscribe right after watching Josh #2.

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I would agree with "liberal authoritarian surveillant identity pluralism" as an expansion of "woke" but the term is useful in seeing its transition from an experience some people had and bonded them, which cannot be denied, to its current institutional form. Also, your term buries the strength of wokeness as a dogma that declares the goodness of true believers, held as a kind of weapon to be pulled out when needed to whip the lapsed believers back into shape. The Harris campaign is the prime example of this, downplaying the dogma itself yet incorporating it in the inducement to liberals that takes a step beyond Obama’s win: make a POC woman the world’s leader and you can share in the identitarian victory while continuing to ignore the empire she more truly represents.

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author

I actually think we will go to war bc of the ideology…our allies all adopt it with gusto.

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Gusto: Follow the money.

Will the Jackasses in the Box spring WWIII on us before Trump has a chance to put the brakes on all of it? Likely.

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