Sam Menefee-Libey
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sml47.bsky.social
Sam Menefee-Libey
@sml47.bsky.social
620 followers 1.1K following 1.5K posts
Antifascist. Anthropology, Critical Theory, American Studies, dogs, film, music, democratic pedagogy, degrowth and bioregionalism in greater Los Angeles. This world (system) we must leave. https://boxd.it/6oFrP
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sml47.bsky.social
We are living a bleak, “imperial boomerang” afterward to Alfred McCoy’s “Torture and Impunity”
Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation by Alfred W. McCoy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) Introduction Torture occurs in small, secret places and yet has profound global implications. Every act of torture plays out on a narrow stage—not a battlefield with opposing armies arrayed before countless witnesses but a sequestered chamber, closed to the eyes of the world, where one individual accosts another in ways that are intrusively, destructively intimate. As rumors or reports of such transgressions inevitably leak and spread, these private acts become profoundly political. For nearly three centuries, peoples worldwide have reacted in fear and anger as states and empires used their enormous power to inflict unimaginable pain upon hapless individuals. Since the dawn of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, social reformers have worked to ban this ancient punishment, making torture synonymous with tyranny. After two centuries of such struggle, the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously in 1948 to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which stated, unequivocally, in Article 3: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." A year later, the third Geneva Convention stated explicitly in Article 17: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." By focusing its full might to break a hapless individual through torture, an empire, whether French or American, reveals the gross power imbalance otherwise concealed within daily exercise of dominion, turning once-compliant subjects into bitter opponents. Looking back on the occupation of Iraq a half century hence, future historians may well find that the Abu Ghraib scandal was emblematic, as both cause and consequence, of the decline of U.S. global power. … Faced with Washington's ingrained resistance to reform, history itself, the recording of a troubled past, can serve as an antidote to the oblivion that is the prime requisite of impunity. In this unequal struggle between state security's deep institutional memory and the public's media-induced amnesia, history has proven, by default, an effective medium for reconstructing the past and recovering its patterns. Like Penelope unraveling her weaving by night to delay the day of reckoning, state security seeks to tear at the threads of collective memory, making each exposé seem isolated, anecdotal, and, ultimately, insig-nificant. But, by weaving these threads together into the tapestry of collective conscious, history allows the public to discover a larger design, seeing torture as an instrument of state power, impunity as its necessary adjunct, and, in rare circumstances, the past as a path to prevention. Unless such a formal inquiry is convened to investigate this history of coercive interrogation and begin to break the cycle of secrecy, exposé, and im-punity, we are likely in a few years to find ourselves once again facing another major torture scandal arising from some newly discovered dungeon in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. When that happens, the world will not have forgotten those photos from Abu Ghraib. The damage to this country's international standing will likely be nothing short of devastating.
November 29, 2025 at 6:48 AM
sml47.bsky.social
Ditto
Black pit mix asleep in the passenger seat of a car with her face smooshed between the seat and the arm of the driver Black pit mix with spots on her tongue rests amidst fall leaves with a chuck-it ball after lots of fetch A black pit mix invites play with a giant rubber wishbone A black pit mix runs at full speed across a field with a backdrop of trees on summer solstice
November 27, 2025 at 11:01 PM
sml47.bsky.social
Oh damn that’s bleak
Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll (Princeton University Press, 2012)
November 27, 2025 at 10:08 PM
sml47.bsky.social
Operant conditioning, based on the work of behaviorist Psychologist BF Skinner. It’s the basis for MOST dog training and behavior work. This book about the history of dog training techniques has some great stuff unpacking that history and current practices.

brill.com/display/titl...
Genealogy of Obedience: Reading North American Dog Training Literature, 1850s-2000s by Justyna Wlodarcyk (Brill, 2018)
November 26, 2025 at 9:48 PM
sml47.bsky.social
It’s never a bad day to recommend this blood-chilling book (complimentary)

press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll (Princeton University Press, 2012)
November 26, 2025 at 9:40 PM
sml47.bsky.social
What a lovely essay, full of hard-won wisdom. I wish those of us in academia spent a larger portion of our time thinking and talking about this kind of stuff, in this clear and earnest manner, both with each other and with our students.
It was easy to compare the university to the state's mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell. All of this is true, but it's not the only truth. Because several times a week I walked into classrooms of students. Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere else felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful. It was a space for analytic thinking, longform attention, clear expression, cooperative conversation- democratic society and a richer life. All we needed was a poem, a few hours each week, and trust in what we could do, in what we did do, together. All arguments work, at a basic level, in the same way. There is the evidence we all agree on (even if just for the sake of argument), and there is a claim about that evidence; that claim must be able to sustain reasonable counterarguments— it's not obviously the case, or it wouldn't be a claim. And a claim has stakes: implications that follow from the claim, the difference the argument makes. The arguments my students wrote on Renaissance poetry might seem like they worked differently than the arguments made by students who faced down the Board of Governors. But the difference is only superficial. The evidence was different, the claims were different, the stakes were different, but the moves my students made as they argued were not. In both cases, the arguments that students made first required believing that they had the authority to make them. When offered a poem, and time, and attention, and good faith, my students offered their own arguments back as if they had been waiting their whole lives for the chance; they reciprocated my trust many times over. I don't recognize college as written about in the New York Times, where higher education outside of a handful of Ivies scarcely seems to exist, and the misery of ChatGPT-written essays is primarily a story of austerity: the looting of the treasure house of public higher education and the resulting impossible teaching and learning conditions for real humans.
November 26, 2025 at 8:30 PM
sml47.bsky.social
Screenshot from "One Battle After Another" (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) at the Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Center
November 25, 2025 at 8:40 PM
sml47.bsky.social
This dude is straight out of Generation Kill.
Captain Dave McGraw from HBO series Generation Kill, derisively referred to as “Captain America”
November 25, 2025 at 8:30 PM
sml47.bsky.social
This is not an inaccurate description of the origins of chiropractic en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropr...
Founding of chiropractic In 1895, Palmer was practicing magnetic healing from an office in Davenport when he encountered the building's janitor, Harvey Lillard. Lillard's hearing was severely impaired, and Palmer theorized that a palpable lump in his back that Palmer had noticed was related to Lillard's hearing deficits. 12. Palmer then treated Lillard's back and claimed to have successfully restored his hearing, 13] a claim which was influential in chiropractic history. This account of how the first adjustment came to be would later be countered by Lillard's daughter who recounts a different interaction between the two men, as told to her by her father. She claims that Palmer overheard Lillard telling a joke just outside his office, and joined the group to catch the end of it. Upon hearing the punchline, Palmer heartily slapped Lillard on the back. A few days later Lillard remarked that his hearing had improved since the incident, inspiring Palmer to pursue vertebral treatment as a means to cure disease. (14] In 1896, D. D. Palmer's first descriptions and underlying philosophy of chiropractic was strikingly similar to Andrew Still's principles of osteopathy established a decade earlier. 15] Both described the body as a "machine" whose parts could be Palmer's beliefs Spiritualism As an active spiritist, D. D. Palmer said he "received chiropractic from the other world" (17) from a deceased medical physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson. [18]| According to his son, B. J. Palmer, "Father often attended the annual Mississippi Valley Spiritualists Camp Meeting where he first claimed to receive messages from Dr. Jim Atkinson on the principles of chiropractic."[19] [20] The knowledge and philosophy given me by Dr. Jim Atkinson, an intelligent spiritual being, together with explanations of phenomena, principles resolved from causes, effects, powers, laws and utility, appealed to my reason. The method by which I obtained an explanation of certain physical phenomena, from an intelligence in the spiritual world, is known in biblical language as inspiration. In a great measure The Chiropractor's Adjuster was written under such spiritual promptings. (p. 5)[20]
November 20, 2025 at 10:04 PM
sml47.bsky.social
The words “KEEP GOING” over a still from a popular clip from the Simpsons
November 20, 2025 at 6:18 PM
sml47.bsky.social
(One of) the first double feature(s) at my movie theater
Chungking Express (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1994) Before Sunrise (dir. Richard Linklater, 1995)
November 18, 2025 at 5:38 AM
sml47.bsky.social
(One of) the first double feature(s) at my movie theater
As Tears Go By (dir. Wong Kar-Wai, 1988) My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (dir. Patrick Tam, 1989)
November 15, 2025 at 10:16 PM
sml47.bsky.social
Micro SF/F stories @MicroSFF The door sign said "Everything you need to be a hero" Many opened it, but backed away when they saw no equipment, only horrible situations. 12:44 PM - 9 Oct 2017
November 15, 2025 at 1:55 AM
sml47.bsky.social
This voracious creature is disappointed that I cannot make it stop raining and thinks that 5 minutes of tug at least 6 times an hour is the only appropriate remedy.
An expectant pit mix looks at the camera hoping it will lead to vigorous exercise
November 14, 2025 at 9:27 PM
sml47.bsky.social
(One of) the first double feature(s) at my movie theater
You Were Never Really Here (dir. Lynne Ramsay, 2017) Catch the Fair One (dir. Josef Kubota Wladyka, 2021)
November 13, 2025 at 7:43 AM
sml47.bsky.social
The blurb for the book is pretty sus, considering how this has been a persistent pattern of thinking against hegemonic consensus on the literature for over fifty years.

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? Why don't they quit out of self-concern? Why does the rat in the experiment, alone in a cage, press the lever again and again for cocaine—to the point of death? In this pathbreaking book, Hanna Pickard proposes a new paradigm for understanding the puzzle of addiction. For too long, our thinking has been hostage to a false dichotomy: either addiction is a brain disease, or it is a moral failing. Pickard argues that it is neither, and that both models stifle addiction research and fail people who need help. Drawing on her expertise as an academic philosopher and her clinical work in a therapeutic community, Pickard explores the meaning of drugs for people with addiction and the diverse factors that keep them using despite the costs. People use drugs to cope with suffering but also to self-harm, or even to die. Some identify as "addicts," while others are in denial or struggle with cravings and self-control. Social, cultural, and economic circumstances are crucial to explaining addiction-but brain pathology may also matter. By integrating addiction science with philosophy, clinical practice, and the psychology and voices of people with addiction themselves, Pickard shows why there is no one-size-fits-all theory or ethics of addiction. The result is a heterogeneous and humanistic paradigm for understanding and treating addiction, and a fresh way of thinking about responsibility, blame, and relationships with people who use drugs.
November 12, 2025 at 8:32 PM
sml47.bsky.social
I definitely think we need mass accountability for as many of these people as possible, but “trials” are not the way to go about it. This book is a (sometimes frustrating) exploration of what we might pursue instead, available for free here temple.manifoldapp.org/projects/unc...
As Martha Minow has eloquently written, these legal and quasi-legal attempts to identify perpetrators and catalogue crimes have "illuminated the hopes and commitments of individuals and societies seeking, above all, some rejoinder to the unspeakable destruction and degradation of human beings" (1998, 1). Political violence does not end with the last death, however. A common feature of mass murder has been the attempt at destroying any memory of victims, with the aim of eliminating them from history. In the Holocaust, the Aghed (genocide of the Armenians), the Cambodian genocide, the Rape of Nanking, the Rwandan genocide, the Gulag and the Laogai, the tortures and murders of leftists in the Southern Cone, and the rule of apartheid, among many others, perpetrators sought not only to eliminate violently a perceived threat but also to eradicate any possibility of alternate, competing social and national histories. Surprisingly, in some countries complex and difficult engagements with the past have resulted in remarkable transformations of society. South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and a united Germany are all significantly more democratic and open than before. In other places, such as Cambodia and Rwanda, peace and stability are the most that can be hoped for, at least in the near term. However, all of these societies have had to confront a complicated tangle of questions: How should perpetrators, victims, and bystanders be faced? What is the proper balance between punishment and forgiveness? How much memory is too much, and when is it too little? What does it mean to be reconciled with the past and with each other, and how should this be achieved? What, in other words, are the stakes in reconciling? These and similar concerns occupy a central place in societies emerging from massive violence. This book seeks to contribute to these debates by sketching a normative theory of reconciliation that ditters from prevailing approaches. From “Unchopping a Tree” (Verdeja, 2009)
November 9, 2025 at 9:55 PM
sml47.bsky.social
(One of) the first double feature(s) at my movie theater
Peking Opera Blue (dir. Tsui Hark, 1986) Platform (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2000)
November 9, 2025 at 4:23 AM
sml47.bsky.social
Screen capture from after Zohran’s victory speech, with him onstage alongside his wife, Rama Duwaji, and his parents, the great filmmaker, Mira Nair, and the giant of Africana Studies, Dr. Mahmood Mamdani
November 5, 2025 at 5:38 AM
sml47.bsky.social
This detourned logo has never been far from my mind since June.
A detournement of the Dodgers logo reading “Deporters” with silhouettes of a fugitive migrant family above the logo. From www.buriedundertheblue.com
November 1, 2025 at 9:09 PM
sml47.bsky.social
I rewatched Cronenberg’s “The Fly” for the first time since the late 2010s and it just hits differently now…
“The computer is giving us its interpretation if a steak. It’s translating it for us. It’s rethinking it rather than reproducing it, and something is getting lost in the translation.”
—
“That’s made me think very carefully about what I am feeling and why, and I’m beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and put back together again… […] It’s purified me. It’s cleansed me. I think it’s going to allow me to realize the personal potential I’ve been neglecting all these years that I’ve been obsessively pursuing goal after goal.”
—
“You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you? You’re afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren’t you? I’ll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don’t you? But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, gray fear of the flesh. Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring! See what I’m saying? I’m not just talking about sex and penetration. I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh— a deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool!”
—
“You’re jealous! I’ve become free. I’m been released and you can’t stand it. You’ll do anything to bring me down. Look at me. Does this look sick? Does this look like a sick man to you?”
—
“Oh no. What’s happening to me? Am I dying? Is this how it starts? Am I dying?”
October 29, 2025 at 10:39 PM
sml47.bsky.social
"It's what they did in World War II in Japanese detention camps," said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a Washington advocacy group. "This reads similar to rounding up Jews or other people the Nazis didn't like."
October 29, 2025 at 7:22 PM
sml47.bsky.social
NOT A WOLF @SICKOFWOLVES I HOPE THIS E-MAIL DOES NOT FIND YOU I HOPE YOUR CHAIR HAS GROWN OVER WITH MOSS I HOPE A PLEASANT BUT UNOBSERVED BEAM OF LIGHT HITS YOUR DESK PERFECTLY THROUGH THE COLLAPSED CEILING I HOPE THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING 9:35 AM • 2/1/21
October 27, 2025 at 8:19 PM
sml47.bsky.social
If you dig the Criterion cover, check out “Godzilla: The Half-Century War” by James Stokoe (IDW, 2012-2013, 5 issues) wikizilla.org/wiki/Godzill...
Godzilla: The Half Century War by James Stokoe
October 26, 2025 at 9:04 PM
sml47.bsky.social
We really need a 21st century update of this book
Police Riots by Rodney Stark (1972)
October 26, 2025 at 8:39 PM