Reading Wednesday

Just finished: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit. Go read this one if you haven't. It's a mostly uplifting read about the patterns of altruism, solidarity, and mutual aid that emerge in disasters, and why. It's a good pairing with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine; initially it seems contradictory, but they're complementary. Essentially the reaction of ordinary people when faced with adversity is to help each other; the reaction of elites is to try to grab as much as they can. The more empowered regular people are, the less bad behaviour you typically see—hoarding and vigilantism arise when people feel helpless and disconnected. I think it provides a good framework for what we're seeing now: the prevalence of caremongering communities and the heroism of frontline workers vs. attempts to militarize and enhance the surveillance state by the elites. What I don't think is adequately accounted for here is what happens when you have actually functional institutions and authorities. Solnit mentions Cuba's hurricane response but doesn't go into detail. Most of her examples (the US during the San Francisco earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, Mexico during the 1985 earthquake under the PRI) are situations where government interference made things much worse. Which is in line with an anarchist perspective, but I don't actually think it's always the case. The difference between the reactions of governments in, say, Sweden vs Iceland, Denmark, and Norway to the pandemic suggests that evidence-based leadership actually does matter and there is a role for institutions to play.

Currently reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Yay, my hold came back after it expired with my 2/3 through the book, so I'm back on my lesbian space necromancer bullshit. Ahhhhh it's a fun read. Great worldbuilding, fun little mystery, lots of lush description about death and decay.