A Libertarian's Dream? The City of Dubai

by B.J. on 7/18/2008 09:07:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

I've heard about Dubai in Michael Jordan's escapades around the world. His place to golf.

Business people seem to like talking about visiting the luxuries and "modernity" of Dubai.

Some people want to retire there.

But its a city of excess. Malls. Sprawl.

As I've learned from Heather Rodgers' Gone Tomorrow, with tons of excess combined with cleanliness comes a lot of hidden truths.

Essentially, a lot of labor gets fucked out.

Mike Davis was interviewed.

Quotes of interest:

The Barksdale, Stanfield organizations essentially ran Baltimore like the ruling families rule Dubai. However, the difference is that those at the top in Dubai were handed what they got.

-"Economics in Dubai have changed dramatically since 9/11 as the U.S. Administration realized that putting all their economic and political investments in Saudi Arabia was potentially dangerous. Also since the 1970's the Gulf countries learned from their bad experience in knowing that basing the economy on vast oil profits only could mean that with quick changes to oil markets their economies could be left with nothing.

Dubai is the product of a long range investment project and Dubai has been particularly skilled perhaps if not brilliant in this regard. However it must be highlighted that this economic plan doesn't ensure jobs for people within the region, as Dubai has utilized a plantation strategy invented by the British and then copied by the U.S., now being implemented in Dubai."

With such an economy that doesn't ensure jobs, what exactly happens to labor?

-"Stefan Christoff: Concerning labor in Dubai in your article extensive article on Dubai, Sinister Paradise, you write that, "Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor. Trade unions, strikes, and agitators are illegal, and 99% of the private-sector workforce are easily deportable non-citizens. Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai." So regarding this passage can you provide more details concerning labor conditions in Dubai?

Mike Davis: Now the above outlines the theory behind Dubai.s labor policies, however labor has showed that it is capable of fighting and organizing in Dubai. Labor organizing is driven by desperate labor conditions that many visitors to Dubai don't see or willingly ignore. It is estimated that upwards of one-million foreigner workers are currently in Dubai, living in conditions that multiple human rights organizations have condemned.

Hundreds-of-thousands of foreign workers live in camps, often without air conditioning, who are bused each morning to construction sites at which these workers are doing some of the hardest manual labor in the world with temperatures at times reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Dubai is widely accused of covering up high numbers of workers deaths on these massive construction sites, including the Burj Dubai tower currently under construction.

Despite Dubai's friendly face and openness to western vices, people who travel to Dubai to do independent research on the conditions of workers are often deported from the country. Last year an Indian-American academic researcher who wanted to study the labor conditions for foreign workers in Dubai was detained within twenty-four hours upon arrival then deported."

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Intro to Psychogeography by Howard F. Stein

by B.J. on 7/03/2008 07:48:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

Holy crap, I think I've found a way to bridge my interest in neuroanthropology/psycho anthropology and urban planning.

It's called...psychogegoraphy! At least, it's name sounds like the thing I should be interested in.

And apparently it's old enough to be talking about the Soviet Union as if it were a current entity.


http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/stein_psychogeography.html

The Bullet-Point Introduction:

What is Psychogeography? "Psychogeography consists of the representation of developmental time and the playing out of its vicissitudes on the stage of space. Space is often used as metaphor—sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally—for time. Time becomes space's drama; space becomes time's stage."

"The study of psychogeography begins with the still radical Kantian assumption that reality is not neutral, not simply “there” for the seeing. Psychogeography is a study of how and why we mediate reality with the contents of our psyches. Culture is not automatically adaptive to or even accurately perceptive of the real social and physical world. Spatial “otherness” is largely projective (La Barre, 1972; Devereux, 1980; DeMause, 1982)"

"Fantasies about the body and the family are transmuted into descriptions of one's own group, other groups, into shapes and features of the world."

"Psychogeography begins with the vicissitudes of selfhood in a human body within a family context, and proceeds outward to encompass the world."

Example: "We animate other peoples and places with aspects of ourselves. Often more literally than figurative, nations become mother- and fatherlands and fusions of the two. We speak of a “family” of nations or of mankind. Enemies become “cancers” which threaten to invade or corrupt the “body” politic. People experience the integrity of the body as coextensive with the integrity of group (e.g., national) boundaries."

"Psychogeography is a study of (a) the role of unconscious factors in the perception of natural and social reality, and (b) the consequences of that perception, i.e., how attributes of the psyche, once projected onto the world, become the basis for action in the world."

Fascinating Tidbits and Reflections:

1) This is a discipline bound up in borders, boundaries, lines, either-ors, rules, standards, insides, outsides, familiarities, and others. The sense of "Self" is defined partly based on who we think we are NOT.

"One's personal boundaries come to be felt as coextensive with and bound up with the fate of the geopolitical boundaries of one's group. Aggression is mobilized in defense of the self (Rochlin, 1973), in the service of keeping a sense of goodness and completeness and safety inside, repudiating in oneself disavowed parts and impulses, putting these disavowed aspects into the enemy, intensifying them in the enemy, engaging them through the enemy, combatting them in the enemy, and restoring what the enemy is seen to have taken away."

2) Despite borders and walls being constantly drawn, we seem to always believe that we can be infiltrated upon and imperiled by that enemy.

"The hallucination that governs the military realm is that the enemy is threateningly close to you, even if he is in reality thousands of miles away. His psychic proximity overrides all mere geographical facts. He attracts your attention and obsesses your unreasoning process just like the “loved one” who is wall-to-wall Breast."


3) There are shared bounaries and fantasies, which hold things for a group together.

"Myths and related phenomena are group-accepted images which serve as further screening devices in the defensive and adaptive functions of the ego. They reinforce the suppression and repression of individual fantasies and personal myths. A shared daydream is a step toward group formation and solidarity and leads to a sense of mutual identification on the basis of common needs."

Myths and these images essentially act as the social memory for a group. In popular discourse, TV sitcoms and movies act as the models and images, from which people negotiate boundaries and form fantasies.

4) The definition of the enemy makes things in our world much easier to define.

"The ability to focus one's anxiety also makes one feel safer; as a group solution to the free-floating anxiety of everyday life, the availability of a common enemy not only allows one to know where to look for danger but prescribes precisely where one should look."

In the same way that numbers are used to model the world, defining our enemies are used to model our world. And just the way numbers seem definite, they are in actuality achieved imperfectly, just as the way enemies seem definite, but they are defined imperfectly.

5) Essentially, we like to project the worse traits we see in ourselves onto our enemies. Apparently our enemies have a monopoly on those terrible traits, while we don't.

A Nazarene physician interviewed by the author said of the countryside in relation to the urban form.

'You're in God's Country here. Peaceful, quiet, decent. None of that crazy stuff you find Back East [a common phrase] or on the West Coast. God's Country is right here in the center; Back East and everything to the West is the Devil's Country. Broken families, drugs, hippies, wierdos of all kinds. Here you have some space to yourself, some privacy, not wall-to-wall people. I wouldn't want to go there. I wouldn't want my children to grow up there; it's not healthy.'

"In this psychogeographic depiction of the official division of labor between regions, respondents never utter a word about the high rates of alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, homicide, incest, and the like within the region; instead, the group myth of safety, freedom, and piety becomes a reality more compelling than reality itself, and what cannot be accepted about that reality magically becomes the distinguishing feature of the outgroups to the East and West."

The country's good traits are emphasized, and exaggerated while the urban side's good are de-emphasized and underplayed.

6) With us defining our enemies to be these people with all the bad traits, it seems that no matter what they do, barring a dramatic shift towards "our" ideology they will almost always remain the static, unchanging enemy.

"Much as we wish the Soviets to change, we depend upon them not to change. For the prospect of peace would eliminate their availability as the externalized focus and (symbolic) object or target of anxiety."

This ideology is this conservative cousin of the mushroom-dropping folks who like to explore the "exotic, unchanging other." The premise is still that we still have the good traits in abundance while they have all the bad ones.

"To take the point further: Americans prize “freedom,” a freedom which the Soviets are perceived as menacingly and unremittingly trying to take away. The U.S.S.R. serves as the image of what might be called The Great Depriver. Surely religiously devout Americans do not possess rebellious, irreverent impulses: it is those atheist Russian Communists (who are contending with resurgent Orthodoxy at home) who are bent upon taking away American religion. While Americans look longingly at the putative paternalism and maternalism of Japanese corporations, and reinstate religious fundamentalism and political authoritarianism at home, we keep our illusion of precious freedom by accusing the Soviets all the more of seeking to take it away."

This applies to today's popular discourse on China, North Korea, Cuba, etc.

7) "Scholars, not unlike political and military strategists, spend entirely too much time and effort divining the nature and characteristics of the adversary, and devote virtually no time or effort into exploring the relationship between adversaries, together with the investment of each (and all) participant in that relationship."

Reservations:

1) I'm not sure that I like the definition and implications of the "ethnic group." In fact, it's kind of a nuisance, especially done by a bunch of white guys, people who have never been considered "outsiders" to the degree that racial and ethnic "groups" experience.

"George DeVos (1975, p. 9) defines an ethnic group as “a self-perceived group of people who hold in common a set of traditions not shared by the others with whom they are in contact.”

"Max Weber introduced the concept of ethnic honor: “belief in a specific ‘honor’ of their members, not shared by outsiders, i.e., the sense of ethnic honor” (1961, p. 307)."

While there is some type of "pride" that some people do engage in, it's not some empty-ass "honor" to just be part of a racial or ethnic group. Being part of a group is not something people celebrate as an honor or achievement.

As a message boarder once put it in the context of relating Jewish performances of ethnic pride after the Holocaust to current performances of ethnic pride in the context of the United States, celebrating the ethnicity is like saying a fuck-you back to an imagined otherized but centralized dominant, oppressive people. It's saying that no matter what "you" did to my ancestors, we've survived, I'm here and fuck you again. It's mostly imaginary-broad enemy-driven rather than "self-driven".

Just as its definitions and gradual proliferations were for purposes of violence, there is still violence inherent in it, only in this age of globalizing interconnectedness, the power and violence has seemingly transferred from the enemy group to that ethnic and racial group.

Summing up...

There is definitely a lot more to the article.

However, the discourse seems to be bound up in bordership and boundaries. There are definitely implications for international and domestic studies and conflict resolution. I was hoping to find something about spatiality or space and psychology within the urban form, as I am interested in those ambiguous open spaces, garbage, and graff, and hopefully within this discipline I can eventually happen across it. I like the quip about the proximities of enemies because it never seems like they are too far away from you.

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Beijing Kicking Out Foreigners

by B.J. on 7/01/2008 07:02:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

"Aparently they need to get a higher class of foreigners for the games." - 'Yell

Yesterday, at about 7:30 PM Pacific Time, I get a call from one, Daniel Larson, Oakland native with the sailor's discourse, Leon Powe's classmate, future mother-fuckin' Golden Gate University Law school graduate.

He says he's in LA! Back from another year at Beijing. Just like he said on the facebook, but I rarely take anyone's promises seriously on facebook.


During his time there, he carved up a niche as an English language teacher. He went from university students to rich kids. He had enough money to rent an apartment and pile it on when he got here. He even got some of that live orange-tang. This motherfucker was living the life.

Then they tell him that they won't be able to renew his visa.

So he was here. First thing he did was go to the 99 cents store to buy a pair of socks and toothpaste. 99 Cents store is unabomber crazy ridic. Went to eat expensive-ass hipster Mexican food, with 'Yell putting his Negro O Modelo in a fuckin' wine glass. Then simmered down with a string of NBA Street 2 games.

I just found it interesting this when I read in the LA Times this article about Chinese visas not being renewed.

Turns out the 'Yell is just one small part of a mass eviction. So I was basically chilling with a live-walking news story yesterday.

If he renewed his visa, it would've cost him $1100 US dollars as opposed to the $20 he usually paid. Somewhat out of range for a guy who got his money under the table and in cash.

Apparently, during the olympics people will now have to walk around at all times with their papers. Now that's immigration enforcement to the max. Kinda ironic that the borders are getting tighter at a time when they want to show their connection to the international community.

The rich international community.

This was supposed to be a big coming out party in terms of certifying itself as a cosmopolitan globalized middle-class burgeoisie-lifestyle and experience. Stadiums were to be built, new infrastructure and transportation was developed, slums were to be cleared.

But everything seems to have been sour so far: from the international torch relays being crashed by protestors to the fact that tourism is down.

Maybe it's my reactionary response to American media discourse, but I feel bad for Beijing in relation to the rest of the world cities who've hosted Olympics. Didn't seem like those other cities had to go through half the crap that they have.

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Big Events, Big Exploitation!

by B.J. on 4/23/2008 10:47:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

Big Events, Big Exploitation!

What's behind these big events...the Olympics, the World Cup. What happens behind the scenes to make the event happen and what happens outside of it?

Obviously, it's a great stage to make social statements, as the camps from Darfur and Tibet have already made some noise, but nowadays I wonder what kind of social injustices are perpetuated by having these large-scale events themsleves.

Last year, I was reading the book Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. I read a particularly interesting piece about the various measures numerous governments have taken against folks living in "slums" during big events.

Long and repeated story short, when there's a big event coming to town, governments have generally responded by strong-arming their way through people's housing.


Its happened anytime anywhere from the Berlin Olympics in 1936, to the bunches of conferences during the Marcos Regime, to Atlanta in 1996, and is happening now in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 1.5 million folks suddenly homeless. Folks pushed off their dwellings to "sanitize" the city for visitors and tourists.

http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=11469&size=A

So much for "Communist" China.

It's also interesting (and disturbing) that a report came out about the spike in the sex trafficking trade in the 2006 World Cup.

Trafficking in the World Cup

But I guess that's not terribly shocking. Anytime there's an event like that, there's bound to be lots of dubious contact like that.

So to answer the question I posed about what social injustices happen in preparation for a large scale event:

1) Housing losses
2) Lots of sex trafficking
...

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The World Explained.

by B.J. on 11/30/2007 10:25:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

This here is an Eco-Map of the world's dynamics.

A World Map

It takes more than one sitting to really get a feel for what this work is.

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What You Will Know From This Post Should Make You, A Westerner on a Computer, Happier

by B.J. on 6/22/2004 09:24:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

Reading the Everything But Basketball message boards at basketballboards.net, I realize how much I don't know anything about the situations around the world like in the Middle East and South Korea. And when I don't know too much about something, I rely upon my imagination to fill in the blanks.

When I think about these "other" situations around the world outside of the USA, I always think about how easy I have it compared to them, how they would glide if they were handed a life like mine right now.

The problems I imagine they have especially in Sudan and the Middle East always have to deal with something like gunshots everywhere, other physical threats combined with the raping of civilian's/people's human rights. My imagination's primarily from watching movies like the Gaza Strip and reading stuff like stopthewall.org and watching CNN. Maybe I'm way too easily swayed by media, but I'll continue cause this is my imagination and you can tell me what's wrong with it.


These people in Sudan and the Middle East are entrenched in a world of massive uncertainty while the most uncertain thing of my day is taking my mom to work (hey in South Central LA though) or probably some math test that I could make up (hopefully if I ever fail there would be another chance to make it up, please ? :)) I imagine that the ways they cope/survive with this massive uncertainty and stress, would ensure them success here.

On that tip, I suggest we trade certain useless spoiled straight white male upper middle class college kids named Colin, who fuck the shit out of all the blondes with no intentions of ever doing anything productive or the anti-affirmative action Bitch Chris also shooting for that prestigious business major who suggests that immigrants quit immigranting.

Heh, I think back to these people's problems, you know, the outright shooting of people, the disregard of human life, etc. and finally end thinking: how do these people get used to that ? Specifically, I occasionally see pictures of them smiling and I think damn, you guys can actually do that ?

It's weird. I'm just here living the easy life doing nothing more stressful than washing my clothes (I know some of you are amazed that I can wash my clothes). Why me ? Did I do some sexual favors for a god/(hopefully)goddess in a past life or something ?

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