"Up against oligarchy, all we have is the power latent in our capacity to unite. Race, gender, sexual orientation, class and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts. We must hold onto those realities *and* build on a shared interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth, while constructing new structures that are infinitely more fair, and more fun."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

That final word is super important. Piousness will not help us here.

(2/3)

Also, this!

"This kind of universalism is hard. There are so many perfectly good reasons for people on the broadly defined left to be fed up, angry, and disappointed with one another, and to latch onto those disappointments to rationalize splintering into smaller and smaller groups. But when power and wealth and weaponry and information technology are concentrated in so few hands ... splintering is tantamount to surrender."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

(1/3)

"'We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people', says the civil rights scholar john. a powell. That is the very opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

This! A billion times this!

"All of which is why, over the course of this now concluding journey, I have come to embrace the Naomi confusion as an unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego. I could never quite get the hang of nonattachment before this; but I think, thanks to her, I have."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

#DavidChapman would likely quibble with the wording. But, I suspect, would still endorse the underlying insight; the self - selves - are not all we have, nor all that really matters.

(2/?)

"So how do we stop averting our gaze? How do we face our second bodies and our mortal bodies in a sustained way, rather than throwing up partitions, performances, and projections to hide from them? What would it take to stop running? To know - really know - what we already know?"

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

Again this seems to converge with my recent reading of #DavidChapman. Which I think is right that - whether or not we do it via Buddhism - this is not something we can do alone.

(2/2)

"So many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death/trouble. And death feels awfully close these days - as close as a fentanyl-laced pill, a heat dome, a hate crime, an intake of virally loaded breath. Much closer for some than for others, as usual - but not far enough, I suspect, for anyone's comfort."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

(1/?)

"Because for me, while Israel is a place, it has also always been a warning. A warning about the perils of building identity based on re-traumatization rather than confronting our collective grief; about the dangers of building a group identity around insiders and outsiders; about what happens when once vibrant debate gives way to fiercely policed speech."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

"It began in the lead-up to the Inquisition, with the burnings, torture, and then expulsion of Muslims and Jews; continued with the bloody conquest of the Americas and the ransacking of Africa for riches and human fuel to power the new colonies; wreaked colonial havoc in Asia; and then returned to Europe for Hitler to distill all the methods forged in those ... - scientific racism, concentration camps, frontier genocide - into his Final Solution."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

(3/4)

"Yet in the crowding of these two, twinned peoples onto this tiny sliver of territory - the wrenching intimacy of the home invasions, the ritualistic regularity of the pummeling of Gaza, the spectacle of once-stateless refugees exiling other people into the sea of statelessness - we see in hyper concentrated form the dead end of this project that dared to call itself 'civilisation'."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

(1/4)

"In truth, any number of identity-based divisions can be marshaled to perform this function: Jews vs. Blacks, Blacks vs. Asians, Muslims vs. Christians, "gender critical" feminists vs. transgender people, migrants vs. citizens."

#NaomiKlein, Doppelganger, 2023

(1/2)