User Profile

This book is one of the few that I found that talk about sex workers in a nuanced light. This is largely because it's a book that's by sex workers, and that makes all the difference.

As someone reads through it, they'll start seeing the connections between a lot of different issues and sex work in particular: trans and queer issues, homelessness, misogyny and violence against women, migrant issues, race, and so on. It provides one more link in a chain that highlights the ways in which everything is connected, which is something that more people really need to be cognizant of.

There are a few parts that I take issue with, and it's largely because they try to be... more polite to people than I think they ought to be. There's a part of the text where they say something along the lines that they want to sit down and have genuine conversations with anti-prostitution feminists who they openly acknowledge they disagree with to make their positions clear, but many of those people that they list are also known TERFs (Julie Bindel). I think such additions of "wanting to talk" are really just pointless, and they most certainly were in 2018 (when the book was published). The belief that we can just talk to these people and make them change their minds... I struggle with that because a lot of time has been wasted on just talking with these people, and they haven't budged an inch. In fact, they've entrenched further.

So while everything else was great and really informative and helped build a lot of connections between issues, I really just wish they would've removed these elements of "sitting down and nicely talking" with people who have shown themselves to be openly hostile and violently aggressive to calm discourse.

I can't tell if it's because of the translation or if it's just... not great. Or maybe it's both? But either way, it really is quite tedious for something that you think would be engaging and interesting. It really was a struggle for it to hold my attention, which was... weird considering expropriation is a topic that I'm rather interested in.

There's also little real commentary about expropriation and the ways of doing it. It's more like a bit of a story of individual events that all were, to some extent connected. Which is fine, but that wasn't really what I was sold. And it comes off as being a bit... obnoxious because it refuses to really acknowledge that there is a place for expropriation, though we need to have less of a masculinist tendency behind it (which would've been an interesting point to engage with, since it was also hyper-focused on such tendencies).

Just... felt lacking. Not horrible, not great.... Disappointing? To an extent.

I love the concept: Some huge event practically (but not really) wipes humanity out for years by petrifying them. One day, thousands of years later, a handful of teens start ... de-petrifying? Effectively putting them back at 'square one' for the Modern Stone Age.

My biggest issue is that the characters feel a bit flimsy throughout the first volume. They immediately take on specific roles without growing into them. Senku's probably the most fleshed out, being given a bit more characterisation prior to the petrification of humanity. However, because they focus the most on making him a know-it-all rather than building a lot of his personality or his relationships with others? He's not really that engaging as a character. Taiju is a bit more interesting, but he also slips into just being stereotypically daft.

The same thing happens with Tsukasa who has about five seconds of being really interesting! Until he then decides he wants to genocide the adults and smash all the petrified adults while de-petrifying the youth. Also, he has some of the best logic about the world! But because he then ties his frustration with the world into genocide? The reader is, as always seems to be the case, not allowed to engage the anti-capitalist ideas because they're put into the villain and used in a way to justify atrocities, meaning that the other characters and the audience won't really engage with them.

It's so shallow.

The book details a lot of the author's growing discomfort working in the UN and with international diplomacy through formal organisations. Each essay focuses on slightly different topics, though most of them are interconnected and refer back to each other.

A lot of it is pretty interesting from an 'insider' perspective, but it also doesn't really go far enough. Perhaps it was because I was introduced to Carne Ross through It's Going Down, but I was expecting something... more.

It completes with an essay about their Independent Diplomat organisation, which is... I guess useful. But I don't think it does what the author's pointing out is the problem. Just because Ross helps the government of Kosovo in the UN, it doesn't mean that they're helping Kosovars in the world. Perhaps it's making it slightly easier, but it's also still maintaining the hierarchies that people still suffer under. Maybe the context is slightly different, maybe sometimes there are 'good' people in power, but... It doesn't stop to deal with the consideration of what happens when someone manipulates the goodwill they've built through seemingly generous acts? What happens when, if that person was 'good', the next person takes over and their work is for naught because it's so easy to destroy things under hierarchical power structures?

Certainly those were considerations?