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“While understanding what ‘could have happened’ in the absence of each particular project does mean funneling intellectual effort into speculation about hypothetical worlds, the hypothetical worlds that are relevant to determining ‘what would have happened’ without any particular project will all necessarily closely resemble the world with the project” (Lohmann 2005, 218).
Ways Not to Think About Climate Change
Kysar, Doug
As a general principle, I would propose the following: in any political-economic system based on appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than on actually making, moving, or maintaining them, and therefore, where a substantial portion of the population is engaged in funneling resources up and down the system, that portion of the population will tend to organize itself into an elaborately ranked hierarchy of multiple tiers (at least three, and sometimes ten, twelve, or even more).
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
As Amrit Rai points out, the tendency to ‘purify’ Urdu by dropping the vocabulary of Sanskrit–Prakrit lineage and incorporating a new Persian diction, had already set in during the eighteenth century (Rai 1984). This resulted in Urdu becoming a ‘class dialect’ of a nervous aristocracy and its identification with Islam, an association that the English administration showed no laziness in underlining. The reaction to this identification took the only available form of associating Hindi and the Nagari script with Hinduism, and of its ‘purification’ by the removal of words of Arabic– Persian lineage.
Political Agenda of Education
Krishna Kumar
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