#hackney uprising

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

Trump's day-one Executive Order blitz contained a lot of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word "systemic":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/

Now, this is an objectively very stupid thing to so. As someone with a recent cancer diagnosis whose illness is still "localized" – and who will need a lot more intensive care should his cancer become "systemic" – I would very much like my government to continue to fund systemic research.

But of course, Trump wasn't intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his real target, which is killing systemic explanations for social phenomena.

This is absolutely in keeping with neoliberal dogma, best expressed in Margaret Thatcher's notorious claim that "there is no such thing as society." In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of homo economicus, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way; you donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.

This selfishness is a feature, not a bug. It's only by pursuing our selfish utility-maximization that we allow the market – a giant, distributed computer – to correctly assess who should be given the power to allocate capital and direct the activities of the lesser among us. When the invisible hand helps these born monarchs to pull capitalism's sword out of the market's stone, they are elevated to the position of power they were destined to hold, from which they can maximize all our social and material progress.

The project of neoliberal economics is to transform the social science of economics into a "hard science" grounded in empirical, mathematical proofs. Economism is a political philosophy that says that human society should only be considered through a lens of mathematical models. As such, it vaporizes all factors that can't be readily quantized and represented in a model:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

It's a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories. If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful. After all, can we really ever be sure that someone feels "powerful" or "desperate"?

This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use. It's a great philosophy if you never want to bargain with a union, because the union is interfering with the "voluntary" transactions between workers and their bosses, and the glittering equations (operating in a Cartesian realm with no room for "power" or other squishy factors) prove that this is "market distorting."

It's also an extremely convenient political philosophy if you are getting rich by stealing from people, or even murdering them. If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that 100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Likewise, if you're enjoying a wildly profitable monopoly, this philosophy acts as antitrust repellent: "if people didn't prefer my monopoly business practices, they'd shop elsewhere":

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

It's great news if you want to destroy the planet with immortal, infinitely toxic plastic packaging, because it lets you claim that the only problem with plastics is "littering" (irresponsible individuals) and not your products:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

It's fantastic news if you're one of a few very large fossil fuel companies who are rendering the only planet in the known universe that's capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable, because it lets you blame the problem on our individual "carbon footprints" (not your depraved greed):

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham

This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It must reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can't even see that it is an ideology.

Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr:

Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring?

Chomsky: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

A systemic view challenges everything about the neoliberal mindset. In 2011, the streets of Hackney (and beyond) erupted in an uprising of protest, which included some looting and arson, though the vast majority of mobilization was of marching and shouting protesters outraged at the murder of a Black man by London police.

In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron declared all systemic explanations for the uprising to be off-limits, calling it "criminality, pure and simple":

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-full-statement-uk-riots

"Criminality, pure and simple" has zero explanatory power. Where did this "criminality" come from? Why did it spike on these days? What happened to it after the uprising was crushed by police? Did it go away? Is it festering in the hearts of Britons up and down the country, awaiting some inaudible signal before detonating again?

How frightening it must be to believe in a world without systemic explanations! It's a world where inexplicable spirits sweep across the land, engendering population-scale effects that are the result of millions of people making voluntary, individual decisions, disconnected from any kind of social phenomena.

It must be terrifying, like living in a world secretly governed by demons or witches.

It's the world of the conspiracy fantasist.

Yesterday, I wrote about the role that the conspiratorial wing of the Trump coalition is playing in keeping the Epstein story alive, and the danger this poses to Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder

Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators. As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes – not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it – bragged about it, even!

But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with imaginary abusers – Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

This is the "mirror world" of right wing conspiracism described in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

It's the world in which real suffering children (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) don't matter at all, while imaginary children (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) take center stage.

Indeed, one of the strangest things about the Epstein case is that it's the rare instance in which right-wing conspiratorialists care about actual people, rather than imaginary ones.

The mirror-world dominates right-wing politics. It's a world in which systemic problems don't exist, because it's a world in which systemic power doesn't exist. It's a world where individual rich people with evil in their heart are to blame for our problems, not a world where a system of impunity for the powerful allows rich people to get away with hurting us.

This is why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools." An antisemite blames their problems on a cabal of Jewish bankers, rather than the dominance of the political system by finance capital.

In response to yesterday's post, reader Garvin Jabusch wrote to say, "your phrase 'blame systemic problems on individuals' does a fantastic job of crystallizing how I feel about the BP-invented concept of the carbon footprint."

This is exactly right, and it's an important connection I'd never drawn before myself. Because while conspiracies have run rampant since time immemorial, the modern conspiracist is a conservative, trapped in the mirror-world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

The mirror-world warps reality, but that warpage has the same curvature as neoliberalism's "There is no such thing as society." Conspiracism – like neoliberalism – insists that the world runs on individual virtue and wickedness, not the systemic properties that make it easier or harder (or impossible) to do the right thing.

This is why Donald Trump banned the word "systemic." To any objective observer, it is plain that Donald Trump is an effect, not a cause. He's too stupid and impulsive to do anything except fill the Donald Trump-shaped hole in our politics, after 40 years of Democrat/Republican consensus that "there is no such thing as society" and insistence that every social problem is the result of a "distorted market" and can only be worsened by state intervention.

Both neoliberalism and conspiracism insist that the world is run by great men, not by social forces. By denying that anything can be "systemic," Trump can deny that he is systemic, merely a conveniently shaped monster suited to our monstrous times.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

[withbriefthanksgiving]

Text ID:

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control. That is why the anathemas which we Russians usually hurl against guerrilla actions go hand in hand with secret, casual, unorganised guerrilla actions which really do disorganise the party. Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.

What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation. It is not guerrilla warfare which demoralises, but unorganised, irregular, non-party guerrilla acts. We shall not rid ourselves one least bit of this most unquestionable demoralisation by condemning and cursing guerrilla actions, for condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes. It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle.

But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.

In a period of civil war the ideal party of the proletariat is a fighting party. This is absolutely incontrovertible. We are quite prepared to grant that it is possible to argue and prove the inexpediency from the standpoint of civil war of particular forms of civil war at any particular moment. We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism, and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.

/end of ID.

V.I. Lenin, ‘On Guerrilla Warfare,’ reprinted in Breakthrough vol. 1, issue #2 (June-July 1997); Prairie Fire Organizing Committee

[hazardous-waste-containment]

Franco’s regime should be classed as semi-fascist rather than fascist; which implies no judgment of value because until 1943 it was far more ferocious than Mussolini’s. [..] Franco’s system even in its hey-day should be described as clerico-bureaucratic military dictatorship – reactionary in the correct sense that it succeeded in reversing the trends and restoring the essential features of the ancien régime. It came into existence through a military uprising and its main props were the army, the police, the Church, the bureaucrats and the wealthy property owners, with the Falange playing only a small part. It is interesting, from the viewpoint of the present thesis, that among the pillars of the regime it was this small fascist party which showed most concern for the non-privileged classes and for the effect of the extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Employing the usual hackneyed metaphors, we can say that even in this case the fascists stood to the left of the conservatives and the clericalists.

Even less amenable to pigeon-holing is the case of Peron who (in his first and the only important reign) combined assorted items of the fascist ideology and institutional arrangements with stridently populist policies. This dictator, an admirer and avowed disciple of Mussolini, liberated the industrial workers from intimidation by their employers, set up unions, substantially raised the wages and organised welfare services, and (especially through Evita) engaged in extravagant flattery of the masses, while humiliating many members of the established upper class. I would not however classify Peron as a fascist because he had no militarised mass party. He was overthrown by the old military élite when they felt threatened by his attempts to set up such a party. Peronism is a very interesting phenomenon because it exhibited a conjunction of features which did not go together in other parts of the world. From the viewpoint of the conventional dichotomy, it could with equal justification be assigned to the Right or the Left or the middle-of-the-road, which shows how misleading these labels can be.

Stanislav Andreski, “Fascists as Moderates,” Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism

[lady-plantagenet]

Unsolicited Book Reviews (n4): The Daisy and the Bear

Rating:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Even before I had an account, I tended to go to tumblr to see people’s opinions before buying a histfic. Certain books are either severely underrepresented, where I feel like there needs to be something on them, whereas others, though talked about enough, something more can still be said about them. So for my quarantine fun, I have decided to start a series where I review every medieval historical fiction novel I read. Hopefully, it will either start interesting discussions or at least be some help for those browsing its tag when considering purchasing it.

TL;DR: Just like ‘Death Be Pardoner To Me’, I really don’t know how to rate a book that isn’t a ‘novel’ in the traditional sense of the word. So I take each book and measure it against what it promises to deliver. This spoof of the Wars of the Roses did just that perfectly! I found myself laughing out loud at least every three pages (a feat for me). I decided to buy this book because I was a long-time reader of the author’s blog: A Nevill Feast, and despite it being a super informative and enlightening blog (she is also a published historian), I always found her humour extremely amusing. The ‘brow height’ of the jokes in this spoof, are of all levels, but almost always smart.

Plot: Alright, who doesn’t love a good crackship? Well be prepared for a crackship so heightening it’s almost cocaine: Margaret of Anjou and Richard Neville 16th Earl of Warwick. This is not even the only thing you will find in the chaotic but short (153 page) spread of this ‘novel’. You will get witchy ‘Elizabeth Woodville Grey Witch Plantagenet Queen’ ‘s love at first sight with Edward ‘The Rose of Ruin’ IV, who (naturally) cannot be mentioned without the words ‘blonde, tall and womanising’ being thrown in; You will also get a random stand-up comedy routine thrown by the Nevilles called ‘A Very Nevill Christmas’, Edgecote Moor, Edward’s capture, the Welles uprising and the Nevilles’ and Clarence’s escape to France summarised in text messages and a whole two-page chapter written in a northern accent! This is frankly what everyone needs in those gloomy times!

It essentially sticks to what actually happens except for the whole Margaret/Warwick thing, which ends up in Edward of Westminster being Warwick’s secret son. This doesn’t really change anything of course, but the part where he and Anne Neville find out and end up playing a prank on the parents is one of the hilights of this book! Is that too spoilery? Oh well. Before moving to characterisation, there is also this absolutely hilarious OC called Dakota FitzPercy which is the ultimate parody of all OCs in historical fiction: all men are overcome with lust just by looking at her even though she’s dressed in men’s garb half of the time (and for no reason!), as Warwick’s spy she knows martial arts as she was ooobviouslyy trained in Cathay and she has an unnecessarily tragic backstory! Of course like most OCs she adds NOTHING to the story and is therefore the perfect parody.

Characterisation: What really really elevates this book in my eyes and rating is that it is so obviously a parody of historical fiction and not the figures themselves. A goodreads reviewer (who I have a lot of respect for btw) has said that this book often crosses the line into ‘defaming the dead’. With all due respect, I have to disagree as it is some of the portrayals in ‘serious’ historical fiction novels about these characters, which are the true offenders. This is what is being lampooned here and, as such, the book defends their reputations by drawing attention to how silly and sometimes downright offensive some authors’ takes on people like Warwick, Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville are.

I can’t tell you how much I laughed at ‘Frail and Angelic © Dickon or Richard’ being so frail and angelic and good, Isabel Neville constantly being reffered to as a ‘prawn’ on her father’s ‘cheeseboard’ (obviously at the hackneyed use of the phrase ‘pawns on a chessboard’, which is incessantly repeated with regards to female characters). Among others: Clarence constantly knocking over his wine when he’s not drinking it, Anne Beauchamp constantly being reffered to as ‘pale and insipid’ (no other reason just because she’s a woman ergo...), Edward IV constantly sleeping with everyone around him, Cecily ‘the Rose of Rabies’ being beautiful, proud and pious (her only three personality traits). Don’t even get me started on Margaret of Anjou’s obnoxious French accent (rofl- it turns into a German one by the end) and nonesensical sluttiness. Another fav part must be the one with Elizabeth Woodville offering to call up a fog at Barnet and Edward being something like ‘well you know, it’s true that they won’t see anything but neither will we. I don’t think you understand how important vision is in a battle’ (like damn straight why has no one even bothered to mention this). Overall, humorous characterisation is done best by someone so well-versed in the history as the author (K L Clark), because she really does a good job teasing out some jokes which only seasoned conoisseurs of this period would know e.g. the Countess of Salisbury’s attainder.

Prose: Probably the crowning virtue of this book. The author does not only aptly parody the portrayal of these figures in popular histfic, but she EVEN PARODIES THE PROSE. I couldn’t stop laughing whenever we got the ridiculously gratuitous smut extract - you know the ones where the author describes the act in such a ridiculous and metaphorical manner that you don’t even understand what’s happening. She also parodies the repetitive and long-winded tell-don’t-show prose with such mastery it gave me great satisfaction.

An example: “This all made Richard of Dickson sad because he loved his brothers, though he loved Edward more than he loved George. He also loved his cousin, Richard Lord Neville of Warwick. He loved him more than George but less than Edward. He also loved the Earl of Warwick’s daughter, Anne. A lot. He wished his brother had let him marry Anne against his wishes at the same time that George married Anne’s sister Isobel (also the Earl of Warwick’s daughter), though he handn’t let him marry her either, against his wishes or not. It was all making his heart ache so very much”

Not to mention the over-written prose: ‘A bag drips with the blood, hangs from the saddle of a horse whose animal innocence shields it from the horrors of its burden. Black hearted Clifford chortles as he rides, his prize, his gift, his paeon, his song to his mistress oozing, dripping calaminous blood’

I’ll stop now before I get accused of copyright (not sure how it works but oh well).

One last thing I will say is that each chapter varies in type of prose, sometimes it’s written as a play, a soliloquy, first person and sometimes even text messages and letters hahaha.

Overall, A massively chaotic but enjoyably written and quite intelligent hodgepodge. I may have revealed a lot in this review, but this does not even scratch the surface of the multitude of other gags you will find inside! Highly recommend for anyone already familiar with this period and with a sense of humour! Now excuse me while I go back and read something serious lmao

[farahdamji]

Justice and Women’s Rights Campaigner, Farah Damji  - Heroine or a Villain?   ~   by Jazz Kaur

“The aphorist Christopher Spranger wrote: “The author who possesses not only ideas of his own but eloquence with which to clothe and adorn them cannot avoid cutting an impudent figure in this world.” Spranger might have been describing Farah Damji when he wrote those words. For she is such an author, creative, eloquent, and most definitely impudent. And it’s the impudence that makes her memoir Try Me so delightful to read….And oh! What life she led. The kind of life only a very few women have lived. Women like Cleopatra of Egypt, the Queen of Sheba, Theodora, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Women who had style, imagination, élan and a lust for life.”

Randall Radic, ex-con, ex-priest

Farah Damji is a woman in conflict with the law. Since 2010 Farah has dedicated her life to social justice issues. She actively campaigns for the rights of women in the criminal justice system which has often lead to her being at loggerheads with the institutions that damage and fracture women’s lives.

She has previous convictions for perverting the course of justice and theft of services by fraud 2005. These convictions are spent.

A forensic report by Dr Tony Nayani, obtained at the time these offences were committed confirmed a diagnosis of underlying mental health conditions which should have triggered support. Instead, she was handed a severe custodial sentence. She pleaded guilty at the first opportunity. She served 21 months of a 42 month sentence and was released under supervision in the community by probation services.

During that sentence she was studying for an OU degree but a friend who was a fellow inmate, Lilly, was being raped by a governor at HMP Downview. No one took her complaints seriously. She was released on home leave to attend a university lecture but she didn’t return to the prison. In the knowledge that she would not be sent back to HMP Downview, she handed herself in to Plymouth police.

When she was finally adjudicated for this absconding offence and embarrassing the Ministry of Justice, the punishment was loss of canteen, loss of association etc suspended, so effectively, nothing. The governor was later sentenced to 5 years in prison.

In 2008 she fell into an abusive relationship and was bullied and coerced into claiming a higher amount of housing benefit from the local authority, because her then partner Franco Miccolupo. The judge, HHJ Marron QC should have accepted her version of the facts at this hearing because the CPS were unable to produce their star witness, the former partner who had fled the country. The fact that she had been a victim of domestic violence was not taken into account by the courts. Most of the 10 month sentence imposed was spent in the community on home detention curfew.

In 2010 Farah Damji set up a social enterprise called Kazuri Properties which supported and housed 136 women returning to the community from prison, care or domestic violence refuges. This was successful until 2013 when the housing benefit rules changed. The company managed and / owned almost 90 properties. It operated as a regulated Social Enterprise, a Community Interest Company.

In 2010 Farah commissioned King’s College inter alia to conduct a literature review of all the evidence available concerning trauma and women in the criminal justice system. In 2011 she helped to draft an article for Lord KK Patel on women in the criminal justice system and mental health issues for House magazine the parliamentary in-house magazine.

She has also commissioned a report on women in the criminal justice system co-authored with Imran Khan Flo Krause and Julia Gibby, and this was launched in Parliament. This report led to an amendment being proposed by Baroness Joyce Gould for a gendered approach to women in the criminal justice system, as a statutory obligation for the Ministry of Justice. For the first time, trauma was acknowledged as a being a driver for many women’s offending behaviour and Farah was instrumental in bringing that home, in spite of the nurtured complacency of the Women’s Unit in the MoJ (since disbanded).

In 2012 She organised a panel event with the support of Garden Court Chambers with panellists including Eoighan McLennan Murray, the former prison governor and Secretary of the Prison Governors’ Association, Jonathan Aitken and Imran Khan, the human rights solicitor who is renowned for his support of the family of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent Macpherson enquiry into racism within the Metropolitan Police. At this event, Imran Khan described Courts and Prisons as systemically misogynistic. Short clips from the event are available to view on Kazuri’s YouTube channel here.

In 2012 when the Armed Forces bill was being debated in Parliament, she asked Imran Khan and Lord Carlile to help draft an amendment to the Bill, seeking parity in the Military Court Martial system, and the civilian justice system for the person accused to establish, through a fair assessment process whether there were underlying mental health and substance misuse issues. This was so that the accused could be properly diverted to existing mental health and substance misuse programmes, rather than being court-martialled and then slammed into Colchester prison. Baroness Finlay of Llandaff proposed the amendment in the House of Lords and Farah help to write a speech which is available on Hansard. She spoke in private to the Armed Forces Bill team charged with the smooth progress of this bill in Parliament. This amendment lead to significant change in the way the MoD deals with service men and women with mental health issues or substance abuse abroad. They finally acknowledged that PTSD is a real condition, causing real suffering which they had tried to deny previously.

In 2013 Farah commissioned and co-authored a report on the way very vulnerable women are treated under the Home Office’s Compass contract. This provided housing for women and children awaiting the outcome of their asylum applications. G4S and Serco were the contracted providers for housing and support services. The report was published in parliament with the support of Julian Huppert MP, Geoffrey Robinson MP, Sarah Tether MP and Jeremy Corbyn MP. It was then submitted to the Public Accounts Committee members for the scrutiny and examination of contracts. This in turn led to the uncomfortable questioning of the managing directors responsible for these contracts at G4S and Serco, by the Home Affairs committee and the Public Accounts Committee. Major reform of the way these contracts have been tendered and are commissioned was a result of the inquiry.

Also in 2013 Farah was an active campaigner against the legal aid cuts to services and the privatisation of probation services. She edited and contributed to Mike Turner QC’s weekly Monday Message newsletter when he was chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, for a year. She continued to write, including a draft of an article for Karl Turner MP for Hull East for House magazine. This was a piece about women in the criminal justice system and the need for more gendered approach. This led to a debate in Westminster Hall.

In 2014 Farah founded Uprise Community CiC social enterprise providing affordable housing options for local authorities particularly for vulnerable women and their children on the housing list. The company was launched in Parliament with the support of Stephen Timms and Oliver Colvile MP.

Farah has also organised and delivered resilience training for frontline workers in local authorities, chief executives in the third sector and private companies. The resilience training program consists of mindfulness training and proven methods deployed to counteract secondary trauma in the supervision of people who work with severely traumatised veterans at rehabilitation centres in the US. Resilience training has been very well received and was acknowledged in a notable mention in The Spectator magazine after Melanie McDonagh attended as session and found it interesting.

In May 2016 Farah successfully completed the Mayor of London’s Landlord Accreditation Scheme. In May 2016 Uprise bought its own first development site at 312 Hackney Road and Farah raised £1.17m for the purchase price and additional £50,000 in fees. When she was imprisoned on the harassment charges, negotiation was underway with London Borough of Tower Hamlets to provide some of the units proposed for post refuge accommodation for which there is a dire recognised need for post refuge accommodation for women. Women in refuge accommodation in London are turfed out and meant to just supposed to get on with life in the private rented sector with no support. Farah produced the Construction Management Plan, submitted to the local authority describing how the site will be managed and run.

In March 2016 Farah organised a conference the Quaker Friends Meeting House on Euston Road, about the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2013. Partners included the Daily Mail, the FT, the Ministry of Justice and the Cabinet Office, the children’s charity Barnardo's, the YMCA, Nacro, King and Shaxson Investment bank and Big Issue Foundation.

In April 2016 she organised a conference specifically addressing the housing crisis in the capital. The four main candidates were invited to South Bank University, the event partner, to discuss only their plans for housing in London and how they planned to finance these ideas. Over 100 people attended. The report from the conference was hand delivered to the chief of policy at the Treasury and Number 10 Downing Street and London Assembly Members to pave the way forward with practical ideas for raising investment and building new homes. You can hear an interview about Plan A (for Affordable) Housing on Share Radio here.

In August 2016, she was sentenced on 3 counts of S4(a) harassment, to 5 years imprisonment, in spite of two forensic reports stating that she should not go to prison, that mental health diversions in the community were available, by HHJ Timothy Lamb QC at Kingston Crown Court for 18 months, 18 months and 2 years to be served consecutively. Friends of Farah are crowdfunding on CrowdJustice to raise funds and profile for these matters to be taken back to the Court of Appeal on fresh evidence. The matter is now with the CCRC which is considering the safety of the convictions.

She received no mental health support in prison although she repeatedly requested support. She has asked Dr Anton Van Dellen of Goldsmith Chambers in London and renowned forensic medical practitioner Dr Koseen Ford to bring a case against the Ministry of Justice and its providers for failing to provide her with any mental health support, in spite of their knowledge of her diagnoses. This neglect constitutes a breach of Article 3 of the ECHR , in the State’s failure to provide any mental health intervention, in spite of being diagnosed with conditions under the Mental Health Act, and the State’s duty to provide the services for treatment and rehabilitation under UN , European and domestic law. A conference in the House of Lords, supported by MPs and peers from all parties is being organised for the end of October 2018, to discuss these issues and launch Beyond Reason, the experiences of 130 women who have been denied services, with recognised mental health disabilities. The aim of the conference is to look at new ways to provide better services for women in prison, to meet their mental health and rehabilitative needs and to hold the Government accountable for the £500m it spends yearly on justice health contracts. A steering group will prepare amendments for parliamentarians to bring pertinent issues to the Domestic Abuse Bill, due to be debated in parliament in May 2019. You can hear Farah’s interview with Jerry Hayes, leading criminal barrister and talk show host here, discussing the issues of mental health and the criminal justice system.

She is also asking the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, the Judicial Appointments Committee and the Judicial College to review the way that judges repeatedly ignore the Sentencing Guidelines meant to protect vulnerable or mentally disordered offenders and how they fail to take into account the recommendations of forensic experts. The judge in Farah’s case tried to blame her for not having sought CBT when it was not what the forensic reports suggested, and there being no court ordered intervention previously. He decided he was not only a judge, he was also psychologist. Farah is asking for a Mental Health Ombudsman to be appointed with an army of investigators, for every Crown Court, to sit in on proceedings where mental health has been identified as an issue, and to ensure that the Court is abiding by its Public Sector Equalities Duty towards disabled people.

In March 2017 Farah contributed to the Joint Committee on Human Rights enquiry on Mental Health and Deaths in Custody. In November 2017 she compiled a response with several other women prisoners for the Public Accounts Committee into Mental Health in Prison describing the dearth of services let alone any parity of services as would be found in the community. Farah continues to highlight injustice and wrongdoing in the women’s prison estate.

Farah’s explosive report on the sexual harassment to which women in the criminal justice system are subjected was published by the Women and Equalities Select Committee in July 2018. She is due to give evidence in camera to the Committee shortly.

Checkout Book From Amazon — Try Me (Paperback) — 2009

Flowers For Freedom - https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Flowers4freedom

[crimethinc]

Contribution to the Rupture in Progress: A Translation from France on the Yellow Vest Movement

The following text appeared yesterday on the French platform lundimatin; they describe it as the best sociological and political analysis to date on the yellow vest movement. Although we are no more optimistic about the supposedly “non-ideological” character of the first phase of the yellow vest phenomenon than we are about the antiquated tactics and methods of organization it supplanted, the movement itself has become a battleground to determine what form the next wave of opposition to neoliberal austerity will assume, and none can afford to stand aside. This text concludes with a cool-headed appraisal of the risks and possibilities before the gilets jaunes and all who will follow in their wake.

“I’ll end up becoming a communist . . .”

-Brigitte Bardot, interview with Le Parisien, December 1, 2018

“Beautiful as an impure insurrection”

(graffiti seen on a building façade on the Champs-Elysées)

Discompositions

If it might soon prove fragile, for now one of the principle merits of the current mobilization remains to have sent the rhetoric and the tactical repertoire of the left movements of the past century to the Grévin Museum1—all while demanding more justice and equality and without reproducing the anti-tax rhetoric of the post-war right and extreme-right. After the collapse of the Social Democrats signified in France by Macron’s election, we see the collapse of the communists, the (in)soumis,2, the leftists, anarchists, members of the “ultra-left,” and other class struggle professionals or spokespeople of radical chic: and a majority of them, after sneering or holding their noses, are running at full speed after the movement with their factions, unions, parties, media coverage, and blog posts. Welcome to the rearguard!

The delay is obvious, the protest is funereal. Everyone can foresee the calls, editorials, motions, petitions, the route from Place de la République to Bastille announced by the prefecture, their protest marshals and their black bloc, the committees coordinating and negotiating between representatives and rulers, the little theater of representativeness between the leaders or delegates and the “base,” taking the floor through the press or in general assemblies. In short, the final ruins of the welfare state, or rather, of its forms of protest, have gone up in smoke; they are not only useless, but above all obsolete and pathetic, the terms of a completely dead language that may still be spoken for a long time by the ghosts that come to haunt them. One can always count on bureaucrats, professionals, or trainees, and on the army of organic intellectuals of emptiness, to play the ventriloquist, to play the grand game of the Party, to imagine themselves once more in the avant-garde of a movement, for which they are in reality just sad street sweepers bringing up the rear.

Here they are proposing watchwords, soon to be constitutions, enacting rules of good collective conduct, exhorting the inversion of the power struggle, rambling on learnedly about the pre-revolutionary characteristics of the situation, infiltrating protests and meetings, calling for the convergence of struggles… These practices, these speeches were already hollow and incantatory last year during the movements of the railway workers and the students—they are hollower than ever today. For the novelty, the tenacity of the first successes of the “yellow vests” cruelly illuminate the series of almost systematic defeats that have taken place over the past several years in France and the general decomposition into which all the currents of the left, so proud of their heritage and singularity and always so stupidly heroic in their posturing, have sunk little by little over half a century. Far from being an obstacle, it’s precisely the much-disparaged ideological impurity of the movement that has enabled it to spread and rendered obsolete all the unifying voluntarisms of specialized organizations and activists. To the professionals of the leftist order and the insurrectionary dis-order, the movement of “yellow vests” only offers an invitation to travel, to a participation that will finally be free of the established collectivities, like so many ideological and material weights of the past.

Turning Point

The mobilization underway has no need of being inflated—or rather, competed with, if one knows how to read between the lines of the deposed little chiefs’ revanchist declarations—by existing or parallel movements. In the roundabouts and in the streets, by blockade or by riot, it is already bringing together forces that are heterogeneous, politically diverse, or even opposed (though often sociologically close) to encounter and to clash. Instead of using preexisting ideas or shared class consciousness or even videos and messages exchanged on social networks, the movement clings to local sociability, old and commonplace, to interactions outside of the workplace, in the cafés, groups, sports clubs, buildings, neighborhoods. Because the religious character of progressive ideology, with its hackneyed myths and empty rituals, is completely foreign to them, the “yellow vests” don’t appear in the first two weeks of the movement to carry assurances or pat interpretations of their common misery. With suppleness and adaptation, at the risk of division and dissolution, they take to the streets, advance on crossroads and tollbooths without prejudice, without imposed certitude, free of the pathological intellectualism and idealism of the left and of leftists and their fantasy of the proletariat, the historical subject, the universal class.

The movement is situated at the turning point between two periods of capitalism and the modes of government associated with them. In its content more than in its form, it bears the marks of the past, but leaves glimpses of a possible future of struggles or uprisings. The critique of the tax, the demand for redistribution, the correction of inequalities—all these are addressed to a regulating state that has largely disappeared. At the same time, the movement wants less tax and more state. It only attacks the state to the extent to which it has withdrawn from the urban and semi-rural zones. And though until recently the issue was a question of purchasing power, that was the case only as a consequence of ignoring the salaries that for the most part determine the general level of purchasing power even more than taxation does. A remarkable trait of the current period is that no one in the government has thought of blaming the bosses for their wage policies. This tactically incomprehensible restriction of focus demonstrates better than any discourse what interests the leading politicians of the current regime serve, even at their own peril.

Since it defies the parties and expresses itself outside of unions—and even, at the beginning, against them—the movement also confronts the entire system of representation of interests that dates from the Second World War and from the Fifth Republic: a set of mechanisms of delegation attached to the Keynesian administration of capitalism. In thus dismissing the left and leftists to ancient tradition, or better, to formaldehyde, the “yellow vests” complete for some the demands for autonomy that have been expressed since May 1968. But for the same reason, they are also in harmony with the program of destruction of union organizations and democratic institutions that has been implemented under advanced capitalism since the 1970s. Or rather, they are its irreducible remainder, the emergence of which some had prophesied. Keynesian, libertarian, and neoliberal by turns, or all at once, the movement brings with it, in its relationship to the state, the economy, and history, the stigmata of these dying political ideas and the ambivalences of our time.

Nevertheless, the movement proposes, albeit in a still paradoxical form, the first mass politicization of the ecological question in France. This is why one would be wrong to relate the mobilization only to the conditions of class, status, and profession, and to create an oversimplified opposition between the problems of the end of the month and the question of the end of the world. This old reflex is also a remnant of the old regime of regulation and protest. In the movement of the “yellow vests,” labor is not the epicenter any more than purchasing power really is. What the movement protests, beyond ecological injustices (the rich destroy much more of the planet than the poor, even while eating organic and sorting their trash, but the poor are the ones who bear the pressures of the “ecological transition”), is above all the enormous differences existing in the relationship to traffic, which have hardly been politicized until now. Rather than expressing itself in the name of a social position, in this sense the movement makes mobility (and its different regimes: constrained or chosen, diffuse or concentrated) the principal focus of the mobilizations, and, in blocking traffic, the cardinal instrument of the conflict.

The Three Vests

On the level of concrete mobilization, the chief quality of the movement will have been to have invented a new tactic and a new dramaturgy of the social struggle. Weak means, perfectly put into play, will have sufficed to create a level of crisis that has rarely been attained politically in France over the past several decades. The logic of numbers and convergence, which was part and parcel of the mobilizations of the Keynesian period, is no longer the decisive factor: no more need to count on high school and college students, on the unemployed and the retired, on their availability and on their time; nor to seek a central, mediatized, Parisian resonance chamber to give the movement its strength and legitimacy. The unique combination of a proliferation of small groupings in the spaces without spontaneous political life for half a century; of the practice of blockades; and of the obvious, natural, ancestral recourse to the riot, reaching to the very hearts of the local, regional, and national urban centers, has supplanted, at least temporarily, the repertoire of the strike with its imposing and well-established figure.

Beyond this common trait, three practical and tactical tendencies currently appear to divide the movement and determine its future. The first is electoralist in its heart, “citizenist” in its fringes. It already calls for the formation of a brand new political movement, for the constitution of candidacies for the next European elections, and it no doubt dreams of a destiny comparable to the Five Star Movement in Italy, or Podemos in Spain, or the Tea Party in the US. This is a matter of weighing in on the existing political game via representatives whose social characteristics are as similar as possible to the characteristics of their constituents. The most radical ones in this camp are not satisfied with the current political institutions and demand that these be completely transformed immediately: they want their referendum or their “Nuit debout”,3 but in the giant soccer stadiums where they imagine a new deliberative democracy will be invented and put into practice.

A second polarity within the movement is openly in favor of negotiation. It expressed itself in the press last Sunday by calling for discussions with the government and by accepting its invitations before those were retracted. A more or less rebellious fraction of the parliament members and politicians of the majority responded, with representatives of the opposition, the unions, and the heads or seconds-in-command of the party, by calling for a change in course: complete transformations of the Estates General [legislative assemblies], taxation, ecology, inequalities, and other burning subjects. This pole dominated the debates in the third week, but it is quite contested inside the movement, which doesn’t see how a new Grenelle Accords,4 a fortori without unions or legitimate representatives and probably diluted with time, could possibly address the rage. After a false start, the government’s principal advantage is now the time of year; they hope to drown the opposition in end-of-the-year parties and make the discussion last several months. We know as well that, in other circumstances, the Estates General could not dress the wounds.

The third kernel of the movement is dégagiste (oppositional), and in its margins, insurrectionary or even revolutionary. It expressed itself this weekend in Paris and in the prefectures, demanding the immediate resignation of Macron without any other program. It obtained results that are unprecedented for several decades in France by reaching the rich neighborhoods west of the capital and responding to the forces of order with an unheard-of enthusiasm despite the police repression, the numerous victims of violence, hands ripped off, faces battered. A few statistics offer an idea of the violence underway: on December 1, the police shot as many grenades in Paris as they had in France throughout the entirety of 2017 (Libération, December 3, 2018). It is possible that the very acute character of these confrontations has been, in part, the product of a governmental calculation aiming to disqualify the riotous fractions of the movement. This strategy failed last week. It has been the object of mass propaganda once again this week. Whatever happens, the best prospects of this segment of the movement are reminiscent of the Arab revolts of 2011, when a very heterogeneous political mobilization brought down several authoritarian regimes, but without succeeding in going further and affirming a revolutionary positivity.

This portrait wouldn’t be complete without recalling that the neo-fascist possibility spans the three camps of the movement. The extreme right is present in all of them. The identitarian and authoritarian tension is also a possible scenario for all of the tendencies: in alliance with (like in Italy) or by absorption into the electoralists; by disgust or its equivalent, if the negotiators win the day; by backlash or counter-revolution, if the putschists of the left or the insurgents triumph. The extreme right in ambush! All the good spirits are demoralized. Will that be enough to tarnish the movement? In reality, the neo-fascist possibility has been present in France since Macron’s election: it is its necessary double and the most probable consequence. The emergence of the extreme right is occurring everywhere today as the logical consequence of maintaining the neoliberal economic order and police state in conjunction with social crisis, witnessed by the authoritarian turn in many countries since 2008. The existence of this danger is not uplifting, but it is the obvious proof that we are at a crossroads in France, in Europe, and beyond. In critical times, history is always uncertain and molten; the purists and the hygienists of the mind and of politics are at a loss. If they are not yet illiberal, the “yellow vests” are already anti-liberal. But who can say whether they wish for new liberties?

Weak Links

By this measure, the insurrectional riot amounts to nothing, even if the ones that took place November 24 and December 1 in Paris and in some cities in the provinces were of historical scope. We sometimes forget that the French have violently risen up, most often against taxes and the concentration of powers, for nearly four centuries. Over the last hundred years, tolerance for destruction and street violence had considerably weakened. However, since 2016 and the new, fragile understanding between the “black bloc” and assemblies, the demonization of riots has receded. This trend has been reinforced over the past few days by ordinary citizens’ encounters with exacerbated police brutality. A tactical course of action could profit from this advantage, perhaps provisionally, in order to conquer the movement from within and sharpen the precision of its aims.

The storming of the Palace de la Republic will not take place. For the moment, there are still many mechanisms in reserve with which to defuse the situation: the dismissal of the government, the declaration of a state of emergency, the army, et cetera. Let us finish mourning all leftism: revolution itself, understood as event, is no longer a necessity, nor even an absolute horizon. Henceforth, the battle can only take place continuously: that is to say, by attacking, according to priority, the weakest parts of the strategic systems of the presiding power. The media and police, to begin with.

The media are effectively divided on this movement. Some media support the anti-tax position of the “yellow vests” to increase the class interests of their owners, all while fearing popular violence. Other media, ideologically closer to the government, in social affinity with the figure that Macron embodies, are nonetheless held to account by their consumers, who support the “yellow vests” even if they aren’t participating. In a fluid situation, representation is one of the decisive arms of war. However, social networks and various protest sites only partially correct the monopolistic tendency of traditional audiovisual media when they themselves are not won over by shameless counter-truths. We like to imagine a part of the “yellow vests” interfering as soon as possible with one or several radio and television stations, national ones if possible, associating with defecting journalists, thus enablng the historical developments underway to appear more clearly. At the very least, we must immediately expand the instruments of counter-information that we already have.

The police presence is paradoxically the other weak link in the presiding system. It’s a used up, overexploited machine, full of rusty parts and weapons, and whose human cogs experience socio-economic conditions very close to those of the “yellow vests.” This proximity could succeed in dividing the ranks of the police, their unions, if they are pushed where their pains have accumulated, softening the base. The task seems rough, difficult, perhaps impossible, but no uprising occurs without at least a partial reversal of the repressive apparatus. Temporality is tight. We can’t be sure that this Saturday, the plan decided by the Interior Minister will not be more insidious, avoiding frontal conflicts in favor of targeted arrests—in the German manner, as it were—in order to contain the tension to the point of breathlessness. But will that work when a mass radicalization has taken place over the last two weeks against the ordinary practices of the police? At Pau on December 1, the CRS [riot police] took off their helmets in front of the protestors. Didn’t a union (Vigi) already call for an unlimited strike after Saturday? Other unions of civil servants (teachers, fire and rescue departments, the entirety of public services) have formulated similar calls for the next few days and next week. The state apparatus is fissuring slowly.

Aim well, but also persist, above all. Paris is a riot, but Paris is also a trap. A spectacular showcase. The scale of the movement is local. We hope it will remain local and multiply its points of existence as well as the meetings held there. The generalization of the perspective of local “popular” assemblies, like at Saint-Nazare or at Commercy, that are able to draw together other groups beyond the already mobilized “yellow vests,” would head in this direction. This would take resources, energy, force, mutual aid. Locking boxes, both hardware and digital, could be put in place. Politically, the role of the supportive associations and even of sympathetic local elected officials is yet to be determined, like that of the turning of the new year.

All of these considerations, already excessive, are nonetheless small in the face of the questions the movement will face in the future, like those about business and ecology, which have mostly remained on the margins of the current commotion, whereas they are at the heart of all the demands. We will have to return to them. December 8 is only the fourth act of mobilization. All the best tragedies have five.

-Deposed agents of the Imaginary Party December 6, 2018

A wax museum. ↩

The Insoumis, the “untamed” or “not submissive,” is the populist democratic socialist party of Mélenchon. The parentheses in the original French text convey doubt as to whether it is more correct to describe Mélenchon’s devotees as tamed or untamed. ↩

Nuit Debout, “up all night,” was a French knockoff of Occupy that took place in 2016. ↩

The accord that effectively ended the insurrectionary events of May 1968. ↩

[enigma-boi]

Using androids as an allegory for bigotry in general (and racism in particular) isn’t an inherently flawed idea. If you look at typical settings involving robots over science-fiction history, the use of robots as essentially cheap & free labour has always been present, and many stories involving sentient AI often have ideas and fears about a “robot uprising” where the sentient and often humanlike AI recognises it’s basically being used to perform uncompensated labour and is essentially other people’s property with no autonomous power of their own “rising up” and overthrowing humanity - putting humans into the position that they were in. It’s basically your average “white fears of black nationalism” from the 60s or the antifem talking point of “feminism just wants women to rule over and enslave men” fears in a scifi setting (and relatedly, fears of robots “takin’ er jerbs” - so to speak). There’s real tangible stuff there to analyse the depictions of androids in media through the lense of racism. Especially since most allegorical uses of androids from this slant tend to frame it more in the lense of class struggle or the loss of personal autonomy/dehumanization.

It’s just that so many modern media featuring this slant tend to go for the hackneyed “what if racism... but [x thing that aren’t humans]” plot that is annoying even when the end product is good that doesn’t actually properly deconstruct or analyse the use of these tropes in scifi settings and tends to inadvertently downplay real racism in works that feature robots in conjunction to regular humans - either through the form that “yeah racism may exist between humans but the oppression of robots is so much worse” or through the meta-idea that the presumed white audience would relate to or understand racism through fictional creatures more than they would actual racism faced by real POC. 

And/Or they commit the cardinal sin of having the oppressors having legitimate reasons to fear the oppressed class because they are inherently dangerous in some capacity. Overwatch, The X-men Franchise, Zootopia et al all fall victim to this unfortunate trap which muddies the water on the metaphor (yeah racism is bad but like, there are understandable reasons for why people are racist).

Point is that using androids specifically to analyse themes of racism has real merit due to how tropes surrounding robots in scifi could easily be compared to the real life history of oppression faced by POC. It’s just most writers are lazy and go for the very most basic interpretation of this and it would probably have to be handled a) under a lense of specifically deconstructing scifi tropes and b) lbr not handled by a white writer.

[slapmeagain-blog]

I said I was a writer.....

November 8, 2021

Just looked as a post from May 2020 which started with the line, “I can’t believe it’s been 12 days since my last post.” What? I’m delusional.  I never said I would actually write for a living.  And if this blog was any indication of my potential productivity, I’d be living in a trailer.  I suppose I could argue that I’m too busy living to write about it, but that would be hackneyed and simply untrue.  I seldom get up before 8, I take at least a 45 minute nap every afternoon, and I’m in bed every night before midnight.  Sometimes I’m too lazy to take a shower.  Sometimes I just want to stay prone all day long, especially if I’ve been paying too much attention to the news.  I’m such a lazy writer that the Daily News has started quoting my stolen quotes: “Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” (Yet again.)

The 2021 local elections and some gubernatorial races were last week.  The Dems did not do well which bodes ill for the 2022 mid-term elections next year.  The Republicans took back the governorship of Virginia, and the Democrat governor or New Jersey, who was expected to win easily, won by a much smaller margin than expected.  Tomorrow I’m seeing my gastroenterologist because of esophageal problems related to politics (I keep wanting to throw up in my mouth).  I have been suffering from problems swallowing food and liquids as well as acid indigestion for a couple of months now.  It seems to be subsiding for the most part, but want to get it checked out anyway.  Marco’s similar issues have improved dramatically from a few months back with meds and a change in eating habits, but overall I think that both of us have conditions triggered by stress.

Stress.  Everybody’s talking about it these days.  COVID stress, the stress of the state of the nation, the economy.  I’m not sure which is my biggest stressor, but I’m betting on a combination of feeling “homeless’ for the past 18 months, and the continuing hangover from the 2020 election, which Trump and the members of his cult still claim he ‘won’.  Even though all of their claims of election fraud have proven false in more that 60 different legal actions brought by various players in more than a dozen states, they just don’t give up.  January 6th to them was still either a “patriots” uprising, or according to some members of congress, paraphrasing, “.... no different than any group of tourists visiting the Capitol...” What?  One of the so-called ‘patriots’ charged with 6 crimes for his involvement was reported this morning by CNN to have fled the country and is applying for asylum in Belarus.  How’s that for ridiculous?  Someone allegedly participating in Capitol police beatings to ‘save’ US democracy from election fraud seeking asylum from one of the former soviet authoritarian regimes!  

Well, I feel my bile rising, so let’s look at my other main source of acid reflux and find out if it goes up or down.  Both Marco and I, since we sold the house in Brooklyn and closed the B&B last May, have been feeling as if we are drifting, both in terms of earning an income, and in terms of having a place to call home.  

And speaking of “senior moments,” oh, we weren’t?  Well, now we are.  When I logged on earlier to write this post I found three posts that were still in the “draft” folder dating back to as far as September 2020.  I proofread and posted those before I started this one.  But it gets better....... 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiracy fantasy

When we talk about conspiratorialism, we tend to focus (naturally) on the content of the conspiracy. Not only are those stories entertainingly outlandish — they’re also the point of contact between conspiracists and the world.

If your mom is shouting about “Hollywood pedos,” it’s natural that you’ll end up discussing the relationship of this belief to observable reality. But while the content of conspiratorial beliefs gets lots of attention, we tend to neglect the significance of those beliefs.

To the extent that we consider why the beliefs exist and proliferate, the discussion rarely gets further than “irrational people have irrational beliefs.” This is a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board, with all our fingertips on the planchette.

The messages it spells out don’t describe external reality but they do reveal our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspirations.This is why we should read science fiction: not because it predicts the future, but because it diagnoses the present.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#oracles

Sf is an ever-mutating ecosystem of fears and hopes, and readers apply selective pressure to those organisms, extinguishing the ones that don’t capture the zeitgeist and elevating the ones that do, a co-evolution of our fantasies and our narratives.

http://locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html

This is why Alternate Reality Games are so central to their players’ lives. They’re a form of narrative co-creation, with the players throwing out theories and the game-masters actually changing the story to incorporate the best of them.

ARGs are an environment where your coolest and most deliciously scary ideas become reality. It’s a powerful way to galvanize collective action.

As anthropologist Biella Coleman writes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, it’s the organizing principal behind Anonymous.

Anon Ops begin life as victory announcement videos. If the vision of success captures enough Anons, they execute the op.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine

In other words, the degree to which a shared fantasy of victory compels its audience predicts whether the audience realizes its fantasy. Long before the alt-right, Anons were memeing ideas into existence (no coincidence, as both were incubated on 4chan).

On the Conspiracy Games and Counter-Games podcast, three left academics — Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou — analyze “conspiracy fantasies” (as opposed to conspiracies, e.g. the Big Lie behind the Iraq War) for what they reveal about late capitalism’s anxieties.

As leftists, they naturally focus on the relationship between material conditions and people’s behaviors and beliefs. This is an important part of the discourse on conspiratorialism that’s often missing from liberal and right-wing analysis.

Conspiracists aren’t just “irrational” nor are they just “racist.” They may be both of those things, but unless you look at material conditions, then the surges and retreats of conspiracism are mysterious phenomena, strange tides raised by unseen forces.

A decade ago, then-PM David Cameron — the architect of a brutal, authoritarian austerity — dismissed the Hackney Riots as “criminality pure and simple,” and demanded a ban on discussion of the relationship between austerity and unrest.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video

But without that discussion, there’s no explanation. Even if you believe that “criminality” is a thing that is latent within some or all of us, what explains a rise or fall in that criminality? Is it like pollen that alights upon some of us, turning us bad? Or the full moon?

Likewise the “conspiracists are just racists” or “they’re just deranged.” Without looking at the material world, there’s no explanation for why that racism suddenly became more (or less) important to how conspiracists live their lives.

We can’t talk about conspiratorialism without talking about material considerations, and we have to talk about the form and substance of the conspiratorial belief. The ARG-like structure of Qanon is a hugely important part of its popularity:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon

Memeing things into existence in a game-like way is hugely compelling. You can tell when a D&D game is hopping when the players and the DM start co-creating the story, with the DM slyly altering the dungeon and the NPCs to match the players’ super-cool theories.

A recent episode of the CGACG podcast present a mind-blowing analysis of the interplay of the material conditions, mythology and structure of Qanon. It’s a two-part interview with Wu Ming 1:

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-1?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-2?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

Wu Ming 1 is part of Bologna’s Wu Ming Collective, the successor to the 1990s Luther Bissett net-art collective. Bissett did many wild, weird things,including publishing “Q,” an internationally bestselling conspiratorial novel in 1999 (!!)

https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/what-is-the-wu-ming-foundation/

The plot of “Q” involves a high-level government official, privy to top-secret info about a state conspiracy. It closely mirrors Qanon beliefs, right down to a call for a Jan 6 uprising (!!!!). The major difference is that “Q” is set during the Protestant Reformation.

In the interview, Wu Ming 1 talks about the proliferation of conspiratorial, ARG-like 4chan hoaxes that predated Qanon, and hypothesizes that the original Q posts were plagiarized from the novel.

The strange experience of seeing a novel turn into a cult prompted Ming 1 to write “La Q di Qomplotto” (“The Q in Qonspiracy”), a book that defines and analyzes “conspiracy fantasies.”

https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/

Ming 1’s interview digs into this in some depth, including setting out criterial for distinguishing conspiracies from fantasies (for example, a conspiracy doesn’t go on forever, while a fantasy can imagine the Knights Templar running the world for centuries).

I was taken by Ming 1’s discussion of the role that “enchantment” plays in conspiratorialism — the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why “debunkers” fail — they’re like people who spoil a magic trick.

Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist’s oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.

Ming 1 analogizes his “counter-enchantment” to the “double-wow” method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.

He describes how the Luther Bissett collective performed a double-wow during Italy’s Satanic Panic, creating a hoax satanic heavy metal cult and a counter-cult, promulgating stories of their pitched battles, then revealing how they’d faked the whole thing.

The action was taken in solidarity with actual Bolognese heavy metal fans who’d been framed for imaginary Satanic “crimes.” Luther Bissett wanted to demonstrate how a panic could be created from nothing, to reveal the method behind the real hoax with a fake hoax.

The double-wow method reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ manuever in “The Magic of Reality,” his excellent children’s book about the virtues of the scientific world, revealing how the numinous wonder of faith is nothing compared to the wonder of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality

The idea that conspiratorialism is a leading indicator of capitalism’s anxieties is a powerful one, and it ties into other compelling accounts of conspiracy, like Anna Merlan’s REPUBLIC OF LIES, which discusses the importance of trauma to conspiratorial belief.

Like Ming 1, Merlan stresses the kernel of truth underpinning conspiracy fantasies — the real aerospace coverups that make UFO conspiracies plausible, the real pharmaceutical conspiracies to cover up harms from drugs that underpin anti-vax.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

In the podcast, Ming 1 and the hosts stress the importance of identifying and addressing the kernel of truth and the trauma it produces in any counter-conspiratorial work — that is, a successful counter-enchantment must address the material conditions behind the fantasy.

I really like this approach because of its empathy — its attempt to connect with the conditions that produce behaviors and beliefs, not to be confused with sympathy, which might excuse their toxic and hateful nature.

It reminds me a lot of Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose hosts have spent years joining cults and religions and digging into fringe practices and beliefs in an effort to understand them; they laugh a lot, but never AT their subjects.

https://ohnopodcast.com/

But Ming 1 brings something new to this discussion: an analysis of the role that novels have played in conspiracy fantasy formation: not just the plagiarizing of “Q” to make Qanon, but things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarizing Dumas.

The interview also brought to mind Edward Snowden’s recent inaugural blog-post, “Conspiracy: Theory and Practice,” which seeks to separate conspiracy practice (e.g. the NSA spying on everyone) from theories (what Ming 1 calls “fantasies”).

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

Snowden connects the feeling of powerlessness to the urge to explain the world through conspiracies, relating this to his experience of revealing one of the world’s most far-reaching real conspiracies, and then becoming the subject of innumerable conspiracy fantasies.

Snowden’s perspective is one that has heretofore been missing from conspiracy discourse — the perspective of someone who has been part of a real conspiracy and then the central subject of a constellation of bizarre and widespread conspiratorial beliefs.

These different works, focusing as they do on the character of conspiratorial beliefs, the nature of conspiratorial practice, and material conditions of conspiracists, comprise a richer analysis of our screwed-up discourse than, say, theories about “online radicalization.”

As I wrote in my 2020 book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the “online radicalization” narrative requires that you accept Big Tech’s unsupported marketing claims about its power to bypass our critical thoughts at face value.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

Claims to be able to control our minds — whether made by Rasputin, Mesmer, pick-up artists, MK-ULTRA or NLP enthusiasts — always turn out to be cons (though sometimes the con artists are also conning themselves).

But there’s a much more plausible, less controversial set of powers that Big Tech possesses. By spying on us all the time, it can help scammers target people who are ready to hear conspiratorial explanations.

By monopolizing our discourse, it allows SEO scammers to create default answers to our questions. By locking us in, it can keep us using a platform even if the discourse there makes us angry and anxious.

And by corrupting our political process, it creates “kernels of truth” for conspiratorial beliefs.

As with Scooby Doo, the monster turns out to be a familiar villain in a fright mask: a monopolist whose abuses and impunity create the anxiety that make conspiracy plausible.

[showmethemon3y]

What Black History Month means to me - guest post by Pauline Mayers

So it’s October,  and as usual I’m having a lot of thoughts about Black History Month. In advance of my conversation with the wonderful Pauline Mayers tonight for Real Talk, we got talking on the subject. When she told me about this piece she had written, I wanted to read it. And then when I read it, I wanted to pos it. So thank you Pauline for the gift of your words and experience. I will post the rest verbatim from her text here. 

----

What Black History Month Means To Me by Pauline Mayers

Originally written 1st March 2019

The furore over the apparent rebranding of Black History Month (BHM) to Diversity Month by some London boroughs last year (2018) is of no surprise to me.

I remember when the idea and subsequent rolling out of BHM across the UK began in 1987. The following year, I began my dance training at the internationally known dance conservatoire, the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. Being a young Hackney girl and just turning 18 at the end of the 1980’s this was a big deal for me. I decided to specifically audition for the school as I had watched the associated Rambert Dance company and noticed there were no dancers in the company that looked like me. Without really thinking about it, my audition and subsequent training at the school was a challenge to the status quo. Much like BHM in its very beginnings. 

BHM was a challenge to the UK perception that black people were muggers, thieves and rioters, not to trusted and certainly not to be tolerated. Not that I noticed any of this at the time. My awareness of BHM was consigned to a footnote accentuated by seeing Diane Abbott and Bernie Grant every so often on the news. My attention was very firmly placed on becoming a dancer.

In hindsight, my training was the real beginning of being othered. At the school, I wasn’t seen as a pioneer from Hackney, the first cockney girl (to my knowledge) to attend the school. I was viewed by some of the staff as simply a ‘black body’ who was attempting the impossible. ‘Black People don’t do ballet or dance’ was a mantra that was very definitely felt by me. It’s a mantra that Cassa Pancho MBE, creative director of British ballet company, Ballet Black has spoken of recently. And one that still exists today despite the presence of the extraordinary Dance Theatre of Harlem who were a company of twenty years standing at the point I was in training. This was a fact that school staff at the time seemed to have ignored. For teachers who in theory were experts in the ballet world, this omission is rather startling. Indeed, thirty years after I had begun my training, Ballet Black working with Freed of London have launched ballet shoes for darker skin tones. Which tells me by the omission happened.

Given I had begun my training at a local youth centre and went on to train at the Weekend Arts College I had up until this point always been around people who looked and sounded like me. Being a British black girl at a world renowned ballet school was not the ‘Fame’ experience I was expecting.

I never imagined for a second, the colour of my skin would have such a impact on my every day experience at the school. Born and raised in Hackney, it never occurred to me that being British and black would become a serious bone of contention. A couple of teachers seemed to take some sort of exception to my presence at the school. It certainly wasn’t ALL of the teachers... sounds familiar...

There were however, two teachers who made a massive difference to my experience at the school. With staff that had no POC representation, and students predominantly white European, with some students as far afield as Japan, Canada and the US, seeing examples of black excellence in dance was challenging. I needed to see people who looked like me succeed in the arena I had chosen to live my life, to keep going, to be inspired, so that I didn’t falter. Thankfully the director of the school had cottoned on to how I was feeling and gave me a gift, one I have treasured to this day. The biography of African American performer, activist and French resistance agent Josephine Baker called Jazz Cleopatra. It was about how she who took Europe by storm at a point when the idea of a famous black woman seemed impossible. I read the book until it fell apart. And then bought it several times more.

In much the same way, BHM was a way of celebrating Britain’s black community and its contributions to the U.K., which is a home from home. The reach of what was once the British Empire has morphed into the Commonwealth countries, extending to the Caribbean, where the British had ruled for centuries, leaving it’s mark through the Privy Council which various parts of the Caribbean still adhere to today. West Indian citizens had been told through their educational, legal, and political systems for 400 years that they were British. A fact seemingly denied upon independence from and entry into the U.K. during the 1960’s. The British decided that being black and from the Caribbean meant you were not of Britain but something else entirely, “no Blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. And this way of thinking remains to this day as we have seen with last year’s breaking of the Windrush Scandal. Make no mistake, the illegal deporting of Black British citizens had been going on for decades before The Guardian newspaper shed a light on it.

BHM came after the race riots of the beginning of the 1980’s when the black community railed against the overuse by the police of the SUS laws on young black men around the country. In my recollection BHM was a way to build bridges that had been burnt by shining a positive light on the contributions of the UK black community. The recent return of such rudimentary and abusive laws now come in the form of stop and search which has shown, yet again, to disproportionally target the black community… sounds familiar?

My awareness of BHM really came into being as my dance career took off. Cool Britannia was in, as was Suede, the Gallagher Brothers, etc. Soul to Soul, the Young Disciples and Mark Morrison were showing the world that black music didn’t only come from America it was a part of British culture, the MOBO’s were in its infancy and the U.K. perceived itself to be multi-cultural. Everyone was welcome and could be whoever they wanted to be. Britain was in effect was open to all.

My first offers of working on BHM projects came in 2001 at a point of unemployment. Theatres and venues I didn’t know somehow managed to find my details, making enquiries about my availability for October with a view to making collaborations with Black History as a focus. The only downside was there was very little preparation time (enquiries began in August) and not much money. However, I believed it was worth it, considering the opportunity to work with such established organisation could foster new lucrative relationships. I felt at the time the opportunity to work during BHM was a chance for organisations to see the way I worked and witness the success of my projects. They were opportunities that couldn’t be passed up…. or so I thought.

After three years of repeated promises to work in a more sustainable way across the year instead of the one month lead up to BHM and then working across the month for very little money, I decided this particular avenue was like a parasite. BHM was feeding off my very presence. It began to signal to me Whiteness’ attempt to validate its existence by delivering BHM as a means to an end. The idea to working longer term with me would literally disappear into the shadows for the following 10 months without even so much as a thank you for some of the frankly Herculean efforts I was making for such low wages. I know I’m not the only one, this was and is being replicated across the country. At the time, BHM seemed to be nothing more than a way to service the system and give the illusion of a non-existent cohesion. Besides, I was growing tired of the slave narrative that seemed to dominate BHM.

It’s the same slave narrative that keeps being brought up as ‘black history’. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not. It’s history. British history to be exact. 

The slave trade is the history of colonial white European domination inflicted on the world. It’s the story of how the British along with the French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese amongst many others fed and gorged themselves until bloated with gout upon the profits made from enforced “free’ labour entwined with the horrors of enslaving millions of africans for centuries, and how the accrued wealth turned turned Britain into a super power, gifting it an empire which ruled over 23% of the world’s population at it’s height. It’s the continuing narrative of how Britain’s educational, legal, political, financial and social systems were aided by the profits of the slave trade, indeed the rise of the industrial revolution could not have happened without the slave trade. None of this is ‘black history’.

The black history I want to understand speaks of kings and queens, education and empire on the African continent, a time before the europeans enslaved Africans on a mass scale. The black history I’ve come to understand speaks of Bussa, Nanny Maroon, the Haitian Revolution, as well as many other uprisings by the enslaved which continued throughout the entire period of the slave trade against the colonisers who refused to see human beings. It speaks of the British Civil Rights movement (not American) with events like the Bristol Bus Boycott, and hear the stories of activists like Olive Morris. This is the black history I want to see. Others agree with me, indeed Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement for Labour’s proposals to change the way Black history is taught in the U.K. shows there is indeed some sort of a will to do things differently. I want to see such history embedded in the British education system. But this I believe will never happen in my lifetime, not least because it disproves the notion of black people being knife-wielding, uneducated, service providers who should be grateful for being here in the UK. And if a black person doesn’t like how they are being treated then they, and I quote “have the means to leave the country’ as Piers Morgan told Dr. Kehinde Andrews. This insipid ‘othering’ is the thing whiteness always does to protect itself. And too many people racialised as white fall into this diatribe with wild abandonment when faced with accusations of racism. I say this with a vague hope that I’ll be proved wrong… although I doubt it.

But, I digress. 

As a black woman, I am constantly called to justify my presence in the U.K. to white people who literally don’t know the history of how the black community came to be in the U.K. Every single day, I’m faced with a continual barrage of micro aggressions, pictures and articles from a media hell bent on demonising people who look like me and constantly triggering of racial trauma. In order to navigate my daily existence, as well as having artistic expertise which is frankly outstanding (you can’t say that as a black woman… yeah, I can) I’ve had to become part historian, psychologist and social scientist simply so I can defend myself against the daily assaults of whiteness. Funny how I feel I have no choice but to become a sort of collector of facts whilst all whiteness needs to question my valid criticisms of the U.K.’s continuous attacks on blackness and the on-going racial injustice in general is a ferocity of opinion. I think it’s fair to say that in the thirty years since BHM came into being, the U.K.’s relationship with the black community has at this point fallen to an all time low. BHM has been become a silo, a mouthpiece to keep black people placated. And given the contexts I’ve given, my thinking is being born out by the facts.

The current and blatant attempts to rebrand BHM to Diversity Month seeks to both service whiteness’ wish to erase black people from the British historical canon and maintain the negative perception of the U.K. black community whilst at the same time, promoting through the back door a heightened sense of whiteness’ diversity as proof that we are ‘all in this together’. From the notion of White Jesus right up to the lack of acknowledgement by the U.K. of the West Indies effort in fighting in the armed forces in both World Wars on behalf of Britain, whiteness merely seeks to maintain itself as top of the food chain. White supremacy has been going on for at least three centuries.

My criticism of BHM is not about denigrating the efforts of the many in the black community who year in, year out are called upon to deliver a programme of work, and depending on where you are in the country, for not much money. Working BHM is a thankless task which is not seen as a very necessary and integral way to celebrating a community whose efforts over the centuries have directly contributed not only to the development of the U.K., but to the world. My criticism is about the response whiteness has to BHM. A response which I feel will always typify how the dominate white culture in the U.K will always see the black community. The systems in place demands there is no alternative to the fake narrative.

BHM to me has become a series of wasted opportunities for discussions around how UK society wishes to view itself in the 21st Century. In my experience, it’s a severely under-resourced month of a string of broken promises. And it serves as yet a further reminder that the system of whiteness will do anything it can to protect itself. U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s statement October 2018 about the importance of BHM to U.K. does nothing more than give lip service in a vain attempt to deflect criticism. 

My feeling is it’s time to do away with this farce. In the face of Brexit, Britain needs to face up to and confront it’s colonial past with honesty and bravery. 

I won’t be holding my breath.

[marysusancarlson]

Food Insecurity in Haiti

The article below, written by Hugh Locke, Co-Founder and President of SFA, provides an update to the current situation in Haiti and gives suggestions on how to tackle Haiti's food crisis. Famine Comes to Haiti - Let the Response be an Agricultural Revolution by Hugh Locke

The following is not easy reading, but I am trying to balance an honest and unvarnished assessment of the current crisis in Haiti with specific suggestions to immediately address the situation.

While the popular uprisings now sweeping through Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador are national in scope, the uprising in Haiti is quickly becoming a full scale international humanitarian crisis as the country runs out of food and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are suffering severe hunger and don't know when they will eat again. The UN's World Food Program has warned that one third of the 11 million people in Haiti are in need of immediate food assistance, with 1 million of those now "on the brink of famine."

Smallholder farmers like this once fed Haiti, but the country now imports up to 60 percent of its food.

A groundswell of public anger at conditions in Haiti led to sporadic protests that began over a year ago. Initially the anger was fueled by outrage over disclosures detailing government corruption. Then came fuel shortages, rampant inflation and food being both expensive and in short supply. These issues coalesced in a new round of much larger and more sustained protests and street demonstrations that began in September, all demanding the removal of President Jovenel Moïse. At first these were raucous but mostly peaceful expressions of the public mood, eventually gaining sufficient momentum to result in a national lockdown known locally as peyi lòk. But the protests were gradually hijacked by armed gangs sponsored by various players in the current national drama. The police force does not have the numbers or capacity to contain the gangs and so they essentially operate without restrictions. Haiti's national lockdown is now an armed conflict that has essentially brought life to a halt and the economy to a standstill. And just as the lockdown and related protests are beginning to lose momentum in recent days and give a glimmer of hope, the country is now faced with the specter of famine. How did this food crisis happen and what can be done to help the country recover? The response represents two sides of a coin called agriculture. And more specifically, agriculture as practiced on the approximately 500,000 smallholder farms of 2 hectares (or 5 acres) or less that constitute the backbone of the country's rural economy, albeit an underperforming economy. Haiti now imports up to 60 percent of it food, including 85 percent of the rice that is the country's most important staple. But as recently as the late 1980s, Haiti's farmers grew almost all the country's food. At that time agriculture accounted for about 35 percent of GDP, 24 percent of all exports, and 66 percent of the labor force. While acknowledging that the country then was desperately in need of institutional and human rights reform, Haiti was nonetheless a self-sufficient agricultural economy. What changed? It boils down to the systematic removal of all forms of support for the smallholder farmers of Haiti. This is not about handouts. It is about the removal of agricultural training, financial services, protective tariffs, crop research, livestock breeding, government supported irrigation (some still exists, but much is in disrepair and it has not been expanded for decades), and reliable and affordable sources of seed and supplies. When a small country like Haiti is dependent on imports, it becomes vulnerable. Any combination of inflation, fuel shortages or disruption of ports can have serious consequences. We now have all three in play at once, along with climate-related lower than average yields from already under-producing farms, leading to food shortages. Add to this a national lockdown reinforced by armed gangs and you have famine. So back to the question of what can be done to help: I would suggest three categories of assistance. First is sending food aid from outside the country, which will also involve the World Food Program releasing the reserves it currently has on hand in Haiti for this purpose (and which they have already begun to do). But there is nowhere near enough food in those reserves to respond to the scale of the crisis. The related challenge will be moving this food aid around the country with armed gangs in control of the major highways. And all this is within the purview of governments and international institutions. The second thing I would suggest, and which may seem out of sync with the gravity of the crisis, involves assisting by changing the narrative regarding Haiti. To all journalists I make this request: stop referring to Haiti as "the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere." To the public I make this request: if you see this in print or online, send a response to the author or website asking them to refrain from using this hackneyed trope. While the phrase may be technically accurate, it relegates an entire country and its people to a write-off category. All Haitians are full status members of the human family without condition. This is a culturally rich country with a unique history and they are following their own sometimes challenging path as an emerging democracy. Haitians are worthy of the kind of compassion and support that is not tainted by being relegated by this offensive phrase to a sub-category not fully worthy of inclusion in the global community of nations. The third action I would like to suggest is a long-term, concerted and coordinated effort by a coalition of NGOs, businesses and the Government of Haiti to revive smallholder agriculture throughout the country and make it productive once again. While a purely Haitian government-led solution is a best-case scenario, that has not happened over the past 30 years and is unlikely to spontaneously manifest in the near future. The Government, as it stands now, simply does not have the capacity to do this on its own. It will soon have even less capacity because of elections having been postponed. Come January, there will technically be 11 elected members left out of 149. There will be no members left in the 118-seat Chamber of Deputies, and only 10 out of 30 members of the Senate (which is not a quorum). Those 10 senators will be joined by the President as the only elected officials left in office representing both the parliamentary and executive branches of government. As of now there is no duly constituted Prime Minister or cabinet because those currently holding these interim positions have not been ratified by the current government, and come January there will be no new government with the authority to make that determination. The current deputies and senators about to leave office may well decide to extend their mandate, but they will, by definition, be operating in an interim capacity. This will leave the President to govern by decree in the absence of a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate that are functioning as defined by the constitution. Without waiting for the government to get back to a full working state (which could take a while), there are highly capable technicians from the Ministry of Agriculture who are ready to work on developing a new smallholder-centric agricultural strategy in concert with some of the Haitian and international NGOs that now work in the agricultural sector, as well as several agricultural businesses. Given the opportunity, such a coalition could put together a strategy to be implemented on a community-by-community basis in the short term. Long term leadership of the operation would revert to the Ministry of Agriculture once they are able to take on that role, and a key part of the strategy from the outset would need to be strengthening the capacity of the Ministry itself. In our small corner of the agricultural world in Haiti, those participating in the Smallholder Farmers Alliance generally see yield increases of at least 40 percent once they have earned high quality seed, good hand tools and basic agricultural training by planting trees. So we know that smallholders have the capacity to feed their country. We are just one group among many that have proven models ready to be replicated and adapted to work in concert with others. Restoring the agricultural prosperity of Haiti is not rocket science, but neither is it business as usual. It will take nothing short of a full-scale agricultural revolution to set things right again. Surely enough citizens have now paid the price for food insecurity. It is up to the rest of us to act now and without delay.

[reviewsandtings]

Plays I have seen in 2018

Tonight, I will see my final show of 2018 so it seems an opportune moment to reflect on my year in theatre. It feels especially fitting that the show is Lynette Linton’s Donmar Warehouse production of Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Among the eighty-six shows I have seen (some of them more than once), I am especially pleased to have seen so many plays written by black women, so many black women in lead roles, and so many black women directing shows; and not just in studio spaces - but on main stages, too. The complete list of every show I saw is below, with links to the ones I reviewed. I was given a lot of complimentary tickets, so I have also noted which shows I paid for and which shows were free to attend. In 2018, I made a new year’s resolution to see more theatre not in London - I make the same resolve for 2019. Here are some of the not-London shows I am looking forward to next year: 

Our Lady of Kibeho - Royal & Derngate

The Princess and the Hustler - Bristol Old Vic

Concubine - Birmingham Rep

Blue/Orange - Birmingham Rep

random - Leeds Playhouse

Two Trains Running - Royal and Derngate

One Night in Miami - HOME Manchester

p.s. follow me on twitter @reviewsandtings for more theatre related musings.

Heretic Voices - a night of new writing Dean McBride Dir. Roy Alexander Weise A Hundred Words for Snow Dir. Max Gill Woman Caught Unaware Dir. Jessica Edwards Arcola Theatre £

Belleville Donmar Warehouse Dir. Michael Longhurst £ Brothers Size Young Vic Dir. Bijan Sheibani £

Amadeus National Theatre Dir. Michael Longhurst £ Black Men Walking Royal Court Dir. Dawn Walton £ The Duchess of Malfi Swan Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon Dir. Maria Aberg £ Hamilton Victoria Palace Theatre Dir. Thomas Kail £ Nine Night National Theatre (Dorfman) Dir. Roy Alexander Weise £

Macbeth National Theatre (Olivier) Dir. Rufus Norris £

Lights Go Out Ovalhouse Dir. Makkala McPherson £ So Many Reasons Ovalhouse Dir. Zoe Lafferty £ Caroline, or Change Hampstead Theatre Dir. Michael Longhurst

Hamlet Hackney Empire Dir. Simon Godwin £ Br’er Cotton Theatre 503 Dir. Roy Alexander Weise £ Circle Mirror Transformation HOME, Manchester Dir. Bijan Sheibani £ The Internet Was Made for Adults The Vaults Dir. Anna Girvan £ The Blind Truth Lyric Hammersmith Dir. Annie Mwapulo £ Stains Lyric Hammersmith Dir. Kwame Asiedu £ The Divide The Old Vic Dir. Annabel Bolton Julie National Theatre (Lyttelton) Dir. Carrie Cracknell £ The Cherry Orchard Royal Exchange Manchester Dir. Michael Boyd £ Misty Bush Theatre Dir. Omar Elerian £

Dance Nation Playwrights Horizons, New York Dir. Lee Sunday Evans £ Cinderella Theatre XIV, New York Dir. Austin McCormick £ Mlima’s Tale Public Theatre, NewYork Dir. Jo Bonney £ The Fall Southwark Playhouse Dir. Matt Harrison Why is the Sky Blue? Southwark Playhouse Dir. Abbey Wright The Jumper Factory HMP Wandsworth Dir. Justin Audibert FREE

Red Wyndham’s Theatre Dir. Michael Grandage Schism Park Theatre Dir. Lily Mcleish Nightfall The Bridge Dir. Laurie Samson random/generations Minerva Theatre, Chichester Dir. Tinuke Craig £ Year of the Rooster Monk Pleasance Theatre Dir. Nathalie Adlam Leave Taking Bush Theatre Dir. Madani Younis £ Sancho: An Act of Remembrance Wilton’s Music Hall Dir. Simon Godwin An Octoroon National Theatre (Dorfman) Dir. Ned Bennett Shebeen Theatre Royal Stratford East Dir. Matthew Xia A Night at the Musicals Soho Theatre Dir. Le Gateau Chocolate/Jonny Woo Sea Wall Old Vic Theatre Dir. George Perrin Uprising - a night of new writing Orange Tree Theatre Dir. Roy Alexander Weise £ The Play About My Dad Jermyn Street Theatre Dir. Stella Powell-Jones POT  Ovalhouse Dir. Sophie Moniram The Jungle Playhouse Theatre Dir. Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin SS Mendi: Dancing the Death Drill NST, Southampton Dir. Mark Dornford-May Fun Home Young Vic Theatre Dir. Sam Gold Allelujah Bridge Theatre Dir. Nicholas Hytner The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives Arcola Theatre Dir. Femi Olufowoju £ Hoard Bush Theatre Dir. Tinuke Craig £ Diamond Bush Theatre Dir. Jane Moriarty £ Genesis Inc Hampstead Theatre Dir. Laurie Sansom £ Aristocrats Donmar Warehouse Dir. Lyndsey Turner Papa Don’t Preach That Little Car on Drury Lane FREE

Emilia Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Dir. Nicole Charles £ Things of Dry Hours Young Vic (Clare) Dir. Debbie Hannan Run It Back Hackney Showrooms Dir. Coral Messam £ An Adventure Bush Theatre Dir. Madani Younis Women in Power NST City, Southampton Dir. Blanche McIntyre The Prisoner National Theatre (Dorfman) Dir. Peter Brook and The Fishermen Arcola Theatre Dir. Jack McNamara £ The Other Place Park Theatre Dir. Claire van Kampen Poet in da Corner Royal Court Dir. Ola Ince Dance Nation Almeida Theatre Dir. Bijan Sheibani £

Bullet Hole Park Theatre Dir. Lara Genovese ear for eye Royal Court Dir. debbie tucker green £ Dust Playhouse Theatre Dir. Sara Joyce £ The Ball Tristan Bates Theatre Dir. Garan Abel Unokan £ Love Thy Fro Theatre Peckham Dir. Malachi Green and Ronald Nsubuga The Wolves Theatre Royal Stratford East Dir. Ellen McDougall £ Sweet Like Chocolate Boy Studio Jack Theatre Dir. Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu The Hoes Hampstead Theatre Dir. Lakesha Arie-Angelo £ Misty West End (understudy run) Trafalgar Studios Dir. Omar Elerian £ A Small Place Gate Theatre Dir. Anna Himali Howard The Dark Ovalhouse Dir. Roy Alexander Weise £ Twelfth Night Young Vic Theatre Dir. Kwame Kwei-Armah and Oskar Eustis £ Porgy and Bess ENO Dir. James Robinson Rockets and Blue Lights (Alfred Fagon Award rehearsed reading) Dorfman Theatre Dir. Nicole Charles All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Bush Theatre Dir. Paul Smith £ The Funeral Director Southwark Playhouse Dir. Hannah Hauer-King £ Hole Royal Court Dir. Abby Greenland and Helen Goalen Dr Faustus Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Dir. Paulette Randall Aladdin Broadway Theatre Catford Dir. Richard Cheshire The Worst Witch Royal & Derngate Dir. Theresa Heskins The Convert Young Vic Theatre Dir. Ola Ince Sweat Donmar Warehouse Dir. Lynette Linton

[coldlipsmag]

Liu Bolin’s Parody of Protest Art

Liu Bolin, otherwise known as The Invisible Man, began his famous series of photographs in 2005 as a protest at the destruction of Beijing artist village, Suo Jia Cun, where he worked. The device of painting himself to disappear into the background served to demonstrate the erasure of the human and the helplessness of the individual in modern society.

Fast forward to 2017 and Bolin is now a successful international artist, currently in London for his first ever ‘art fair/live/time-based performance’.

I went to witness this at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea.

What I found was a confused corporatisation of protest art.

The piece has been sponsored by BRICKLIVE [whose tagline reads: there is something for all LEGO® fans]. The background is an image designed by the artist of a sunflower made of Lego.The press release references Van Gogh, the sunflower as a symbol of obedience in China (remember Ai Wei Wei at the Tate?), and a Taiwanese uprising called the ‘Sunflower Student Movement’; it then claims that as the artist becomes lost in this image it will echo “the feeling many feel at the loss of the right to voice their own opinion”. It goes on to claim that the use of LEGO® resonates with the artist’s examination of popular and consumer culture.

If all this is true then that’s fantastic but witnessing this I felt none of the edge of protest art. It felt like a convenient PR sponsorship mishmash to make sales of commercial art. Of course there is nothing whatsoever wrong with commercial art but in a city where our resident artists are being evicted daily by property developers who want to sell flats that will sit as empty investments for (often) Chinese millionaires, it feels tasteless to say the least to have this kind of commercial art promoted as any kind of protest comment.

It would be great to see a collaboration with Liu Bolin and some of the Hackney Wick artists who are fighting for the survival of their arts community.However, to witness a leather-trousered, international art scene guy sit in a room paid for by advertising surrounded by PR and press with women who attended expensive private art school, painting him in front of a famous brand of petrochemical based toy was really kind of dull and unfortunately left a bit of a bad taste. Looked good though!

You can buy tickets to the START art fair, an international art fair initiative by Saatchi Gallery & Parallel Contemporary Art (a programme funded by Prudential insurance), where this brand collaboration with Liu Bolin is headlining, for £12.

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Words & photographs by COLD LIPS resident writer, artist & photographer, Rachel Megawhat. Follow her. We dig Rachel.

[b-sidemusic]

EAST ANGLIAN GIG LISTINGS: 2ND-16TH NOVEMBER 2017

Every Thursday we present you with a cornucopia of consonant corkers 'pon which to merrily feast.  To submit your own news and listings, click here! Thursday 2nd Cambridge, Junction J1 Ghostpoet £16.50 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction J2 Hugh Cornwell £25 - 8pm - Tickets Cambridge, Portland Arms Sound Of The Sirens & Smalltown Jones £11 - 7.30pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Dingus Khan, Quay Street Whalers & Tr-33n £7 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, LCR Switchfoot & guests £18.15 - 7.00pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Super Hans Big Beat Manifesto & Bloghaus DJs £16.50 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio Krept and Konan £7.70 - 7.30pm - Tickets Friday 3rd Cambridge, Corn Exchange OMD £37.75 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Portland Arms The Frank and Walters & S*M*A*S*H £16.50 - 7.30pm - Tickets Colchester Bull Hurricane Alley Free entry - 9pm - Event page Colchester, Three Wise Monkeys Open Mic £3 - 7pm - Event page Colchester, Three Wise Monkeys Les Frères Zeugma Free entry - 9pm - Event page Ipswich, Smokehouse Leaone, Softer Still, Jetstream Pony & Flame of the Lizard Birds £5 - 8pm - Event page Ipswich, Steamboat Open Mic Free entry - 8.30pm - Event page Norwich, Arts Centre Zola Jesus & Devon Walsh £16.50 - 8pm - Tickets Norwich, LCR Ghetts, D Double E, Fekky, Devlin, P Money & more £19.80-£27.50 - 9pm - Tickets Norwich, Open The Urban Voodoo Machine £15.40 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio Ruts DC £17.60 - 6.30pm - Tickets Saturday 4th Bury St Edmunds, Hunter Club Siah, The Virtues, Stealing Signs, Young States & Enterlude £5 - 6pm - Event page Cambridge, Blue Moon Dye the Flux & GrassRoof £3 - 7pm - Event page Cambridge, Corn Exchange John Mayall £25.25-£32.25 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction J2 Hackney Colliery Band £17 - 8pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Hugh Cornwell £22.50 - 7.30pm - Tickets Colchester, Bull Wully Bully Free entry - 9pm - Event page Ipswich, Smokehouse Red Flag 77 & Ducking Punches £6 - 7pm - Event page Norwich, Open Burn the Headlines £7.70 - 7.30pm - Tickets Stowmarket, John Peel Center Lisbee Stainton & Sian Cross £12 - 7.30pm - Tickets Sunday 5th Cambridge, Junction J3 SJ and The Flying Pigs £6 - 7pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Monk Misterioso: A Journey Into The Silence of Thelonious Monk £14 - 7pm - Tickets Ipswich, Smokehouse Angel Snow & Ida Wenøe £11 - 8pm - Event page Norwich, LCR Oh Wonder & Jaymes Young £16.50 - 7pm - Tickets Monday 6th Cambridge, Corn Exchange Amy McDonald £27.75-£47.75 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction J2 Saz’iso £11 - 8pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Cardboard Fox £11 - 7.45pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio Pins, Assassin & Sink Ya Teeth £9.90 - 7.30pm - Tickets Tuesday 7th Bury St Edmunds, Apex Lulu £45-£70 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Corn Exchange Sleaford Mods £21.25 - 7.30pm - Tickets Harlow, Playhouse Joe Finn & Cameron Sanderson PWYC - 8pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio King Parrot, Pain Penitentiary & Thicket of Antlers £9.35 - 7.30pm - Tickets Wednesday 8th Bury St Edmunds, Apex Mawkin £12 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction J1 Billy Bragg SOLD OUT - Info Cambridge, Portland Arms John Kirkpatrick £12.65 - 8pm - Tickets Norwich, LCR Sleaford Mods £20.35 - 7pm - Tickets Norwich, Open Jon Bowden £22 - 7pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio The JB Conspiracy & Tree House Fire £11 - 7.30pm - Tickets Stowmarket, John Peel Centre Justin Sullivan £15 - 7.30pm - Tickets Thursday 9th Bury St Edmunds, Apex The Levellers £25 - 8pm - Tickets Bury St Edmunds, Constitutional Club Bury Music Productions presents… Price tbc - 7.30pm - Event page Cambridge, Corn Exchange Joanne Shaw Taylor £22.75-£30.25 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction J1 Spoon & Husky Loops £25 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, St Philips Church Martin Simpson £19.80 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Epic Studios Rews & Kingdom Keys £7.70 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Owl Sanctuary Project Mork, Bono!, The Bad Apples & Hyperfox Entry by donation - 7pm - Event page Norwich, Waterfront Cradle of Filth & Savage Messiah £20.35 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio Wildwood Kin & William the Conqueror £12.10 - 7.30pm - Tickets Stowmarket, John Peel Centre Emerge £3 - 7.30pm - Tickets Friday 10th November Bury St Edmunds, Hunter Club Ben Holder Quartet £12 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Corn Exchange Collabro £42.15 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction Big Country £25 - 7pm - Tickets Colchester, Bull The Hit List Free entry - 9pm - Event page Colchester, Three Wise Monkeys LeVendore Rogue, The Knock-Offs, My Man Jeeves, Gavin Bowern & DJ Sam Leppard £5 - 8pm - Event page Ipswich, Steamboat Tavern Ady Johnson & Reb Capper Free entry - 7.30pm - Event page Norwich, Arts Centre Macka B and the Roots Reggae Band £14 - 8pm - Tickets Norwich, Epic Studios Mammal Hands £10 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Open Worry Dolls & Lisa Redford £10 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Owl Sanctuary The Black Sharks, Stromm & The Fools Moon £3 - 7pm - Event page Norwich, Waterfront Studio The Rezillos, Rampton Disco, Smart Alex & Hotwired £17.60 - 6.30pm - Tickets Saturday 11th November Bury St Edmunds, Apex Eddi Reader & Dan Whitehouse £23 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, St John's College Fisher Building The Dissolute Society £8.80 - 9pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction System 7 & Mirror System £18 - 8pm - Tickets Colchester, Bull Beautiful Dangerous Free entry - 9pm - Event page Colchester, Soundhouse Low Frequency Free entry - 9pm - Event page Colchester, Three Wise Monkeys Cosmic Puffindoors All-Dayer w/Deferred Success, Ghosts Of Men, Pet Needs, Les Carter, Rad Pitt, The Thinking Men & more £15 - 12pm - Tickets Norwich, Arts Centre JBXM, Kulk & Front Bangs PWYC - 1pm - Tickets Norwich, Epic Studios Elegy All-Dayer w/Beneath The Embers, Baithead, Collapse The Sky, Feral Sun, Scream Serenity, The High Points, Junkyard, Suburban Tide, Hollow Reign, Kaine & Nihilist £15 - 2pm - Tickets Norwich, Owl Sanctuary Diabetes Benefit Weekender w/The Restarts, Knock Off, Butcher Baby, Overload, Addictive Philosophy, The Minor Discomfort Band, Nelson County Steppers, Wreck-Age & Ambition Demolition £13.20 - 12pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Big Country & Beautiful Mechanica £25.31 - 7pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio A Foreigner's Journey & Uprising £13.20 - 6.30pm - Tickets Southend, Chinnerys John Otway £17 - 7pm - Tickets Sunday 12th November Cambridge, Corn Exchange Alison Moyet SOLD OUT - Info Cambridge, Junction Deaf Havana £18.50 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, Portland Arms Ryan Buxton, The Jam Club House Band & Dan Wilde £5 - 6.30pm - Tickets Ipswich, Smokehouse Caves and Clouds, Curtis Garrett & Jim Morehouse £4 - 8.30pm - Event page Ipswich, Steamboat Tavern The Gipping Valley Stompers Free entry - 2pm - Event page Norwich, Arts Centre Ghostpoet & Eera £17.50 - 8pm - Tickets Norwich, Owl Sanctuary Diabetes Benefit Weekender w/Infa-Riot, Braindance, Backdown or Die, Rotten Foxes, The Blue Carpet Band, Abandon Cause, Skurvi, Feral State & J'aime Rachelle £13.20 - 12pm - Tickets Monday 13th November Cambridge, Murray Edwards College Jazz Philosophy ft. James Tartaglia £5.50 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Portland Arms Weaves, Dama Scout & Grieving £9.90 - 7pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Gigspanner £13 - 7.45pm - Tickets Norwich, Arts Centre Emily Barker & Pete Roe £14 - 8pm - Tickets Tuesday 14th November Cambridge, Corn Exchange Gareth Malone £37.75 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Portland Arms Jared and the Mill £6.60 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, Trinity College Chapel Venetian Coronation £36 - 8pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Dälek & Palindromes £10 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Arts Centre Catfish Keith £14 - 8pm - Tickets Norwich, LCR Nothing But Thieves, July Talk & Darlia SOLD OUT - Info Norwich, Waterfront Studio Von Hertzen Brothers & Walkway £16.50 - 7.30pm - Tickets Wednesday 15th November Cambridge, Corn Exchange The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain £29.75 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Emmanuel United Reformed Church Channel Crossings £28.13 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, Junction Afro Celt Sound System £27.50 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, Unitarian Church Black Top with Cleveland Watkiss & Tiago Coimbra £8.80 - 7.30pm - Tickets Cambridge, West Road Concert Hall The Endellion String Quartet £27 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Epic Studios Newton Faulkner £22 - 7pm - Tickets Norwich, LCR The Cadillac Three & Brothers Osborne £20.35 - 7.30pm - Tickets Norwich, Waterfront Studio As Lions, Greyhaven & Lightscape £8.80 - 7.30pm - Tickets Southend, Chinnerys Mawkin £11 - 7.30pm - Tickets Thursday 16th November Cambridge, CMJ Hidden Rooms Soft Machine SOLD OUT - Info Cambridge, Junction Newton Faulkner £24.50 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, Portland Arms Yonaka, Black Cortinas & Eeyore £6.60 - 7pm - Tickets Cambridge, St John's College Divinity School Annelien Van Wauwe, Eivind Holtsmark Ringstad & Pavel Kolesnikov £16.88 - 6pm - Tickets Cambridge, West Road Concert Hall Academy of St Martin in the Fields & Joshua Bell£ 47.50 - 8pm - Tickets Colchester, Arts Centre Afro Celt Sound System & The Dhol Foundation £25 - 7.30pm - Tickets Ipswich, Swan Blues Jam Free entry - 9pm - Event page Norwich, LCR Status Quo (Aquostic), Fraser Churchill & Richard Malone £49.50 - 7.30pm - Tickets Stowmarket, John Peel Centre Mighty Sands, Animal Noise, Warm Winters & Sun Scream £8 - 7.30pm - Tickets

Photo: Zola Jesus (playing Norwich Arts Centre, 3rd Nov), from Facebook Listings Editor: Kate Quigley

[londonbrewersmarket-blog]

Get ready for our next London Brewers’ Market at Old Spitalfields Market on Saturday, the 8th of July!

We’ve got a solid line-up of London’s brewing stalwarts alongside a boss selection of newer brewers rocking the stalls for our summer session at Old Spitalfields Market. There will be 25 breweries in total from all across London, repping this city from Brixton to Bounds Green with incredible IPAs, luscious lagers, stupendous saisons, gorgeous goses, palatable porters, superb stouts, and a plethora of pale ales. There will be plenty of beers on draught to enjoy in the beer garden or while perusing the records and wares at Independent Label Market, and grab some take-away beers in can and bottle for the rest of the weekend.

Here are the breweries we will be bringing to our next London Brewers’ Market on the 8th of July:

  The Five Points Brewing Company – Organisers and parent brewery of the London Brewers’ Market, The Five Points will be bringing along their popular Field Day Citrus Pale, which has been an absolute summer banger! Stop by for their legendary Railway Porter as well if you’re after something from the dark side of the beer spectrum.

Brixton Brewery – The colourful brews from Brixton Brewery will once again be at London Brewers’ Market in July! Their Atlantic APA, is an incredible beer for any time of year, and their new Coldharbour Lager is also a refreshing beverage to tuck into while chilling in the beer garden. Make it happen.

Wild Card Brewery – Those Walthamstow winners Wild Card are rocking out at our market once again with their incredible beers. The Queen of Diamonds, which is their “ostentatiously-hopped IPA”  is well peng, but you can’t go wrong with their Jack of Clubs, a ruby ale that would be delicious alongside some food from the OSM traders.

Husk Brewing – Happy to have the folks from Husk back in the fray of London Brewers’ Market this round! Check out their Mandarin & Earl Grey IPA (hello, tasty!), or if you’re after something super classic, their aptly named Old School Bitter will surely please the palates of people making their way to their stall.

Beavertown Brewery – The folks at Beavertown hardly need an introduction! If you get in early, you’ll find their stall groaning under the weight of their can mountain. Pop around for brews to take home and for favourites like Gamma Ray and Lupuloid on draught for enjoying at the market.

Umbrella Brewing – We are thrilled to be featuring those top folks at Umbrella Brewing, who are making their Spitalfields debut at our next session. Enjoy their incredibly zippy alcoholic ginger beer in the beer garden, and enjoy it in their sister venue Discount Suit Company–a top choice to head to after the market for more drinks!

Moncada Brewery – Notting Hill’s Moncada will be bringing the West London vibes once again to London Brewers’ Market in July. Check in with them for their aptly-named Notting Hill Summer to toast the sunshine of the season, or go for their Notting Hill Sour for a punchier pick.

Windsor & Eton – The award-winning Windsor & Eton crew return to Old Spitalfields with their proudly brilliant brews. Get involved in a sup of the light and tasty Windsor Knot, or cool down with a cold pint of their Republika lager or the Uprising Treason West Coast IPA.

London Brewing Co. – Those North London legends London Brewing Co. are in the house for our summertime Spitalfields market. Their Upright session IPA will make an excellent beer to ease yourself into the festivities, or go straight in for the Skyline chock-full of hoppy action.

Bianca Road Brew Co. – Another brewery making its debut turn at Old Spitalfields, Bianca Road have been bossing the beer scene from their Peckham environs. Get acquainted with their beers in can and on draught, including their super lush Session IPA and their Red Rye IPA.

Earth Ale Brewery – Those eco-motivated folks at Earth Ale Brewery are showcasing their beers once again at the London Brewers’ Market. Get a taste of their Spicy Weiss for a piquant pint in the beer garden, or grab a bottle of their Dandy Stout to enjoy at home–dark beers are awesome alongside grilled food!

Affinity Brew Co. – The crew from Affinity Brew Co. will be coming at us from their Tottenham perch to bring us their thirst-quenching brews. We’re looking forward to Parasol, a Belgian pale fermented with saison yeast, and also up for a bit of Spritz, which is a sour-mashed beer featuring hibiscus flowers. Oh yes.

London Beer Lab – Our pals at London Beer Lab are bringing their open source microbrewery attitude to our East End market this July. We would recommend getting a can or three of their Coldharbour Pils–a great beer to enjoy alongside one of the boss burgers from Bleecker Burger at Old Spitalfields Market.

Fourpure Brewing Co. – One word: Juicebox. This summertime sensation from Fourpure in its tallboy cans bobbing in ice buckets is the ideal antidote to a hot day. Discover why this citrusy IPA is the absolute bee’s knees, plus enjoy other exceptional beers from this Bermondsey brewery at our next London Brewers’ Market.

Villages – This Deptford brewery will be featured at Old Spitalfields Market for the first time! The lovely team of Villages are expected to feature their colourful cans alongside draught offerings of their brews. Taste the Toucan, a session IPA, or wet your whistle with… Whistle, their Czech lager.

Crate Brewery – Those kids at Crate got it goin’ on with their sweet canalside location in Hackney Wick, crispy pizzas and enjoyable beer. There’s the classics of Crate Lager and Crate Pale, but look out for shiny tins of their other brews, like their smashing Sour. We see evidence of a Watermelon Wheat as well, which has us all sorts of excited.

ODDLY – Our quirky friends at ODDLY have relocated since their last London Brewers’ Market with us. Now hailing from Twickenham, these folks brew a Masala Chai IPA, for you to relive your Glastonbury days in a beerier but just as festive form. Fans of less-spiced beers are catered for, too: golden ale fans will revel in their RHIA.

Brew By Numbers – Swing by the Brew By Numbers stall to see what excellent saisons they’ll have on draught, because that’s 100% what we’ll be doing on market day! Don’t miss a chance to try their other brews, running the gamut of pales, IPAs, red ales, stouts and beyond. It’s no wonder why these guys are so popular on the Bermondsey Beer Mile.

Solvay Society – Solvay Society brew beers with a Belgian accent and a scientific mind in glorious Ilford, and we’re pleased to have them at London Brewers’ Market again. They brew a deliciously drinkable pale ale called Structure of Matter, which should bring all the geeks (beery and otherwise) to the yard.

Gipsy Hill Brewing Company – Those characterful guys and gals of Gipsy Hill have come far since their original appearance at London Brewers’ Market three years ago (which also was our first summer one–wheeey!). Southpaw, their super seshy amber ale, was their first beer and an excellent one to start your market visit with.

Bohem Brewery – London’s very own Czech brewery will be busting out of their Bounds Green neighbourhood and pouring their crisp collection of lagers, including a black lager called Druid, at Old Spitalfields. We are excited to be featuring Bohem Brewery, and their lagers will be well-suited to the summery vibes of our next market.

Partizan Brewing – The remarkably talented forces from Partizan are back amongst our brewers line-up, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Their Lemongrass Saison is a darling of London restaurants, but if you want something with more of a wallop, we see that their DIPA Citra is now available. Nice.

Mondo Brewing Company – We are welcoming the beery mavens of Mondo, who will be bringing their brews from Battersea. Their Coco Loco is a popular tropical-tinged porter for fans of dark beer. If you’re looking for something lighter and fruitier, their blueberry wit, Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It, is definitely one to fill your glass with. *slurp*

The London Beer Factory – The engaging brews from The London Beer Factory are back in their notable 360º removable lid cans. Buy a few tins of their easy-drinking Beyond the Pale, a pale ale with Cascade, Magnum and Mosaic hops for future park times, or enjoy a pint of their Paxton IPA in the Spitalfields beer garden.

The London Brewers’ Market on the 8th of July will be running from 11am until 6:30pm and, like the Independent Label Market running alongside it, it is free entry. So come see us at Old Spitalfields Market for a staggering selection of beers from London breweries!

Line-up for London Brewers’ Market Summer Sesh at Old Spitalfields Get ready for our next London Brewers' Market at Old Spitalfields Market on Saturday, the 8th of July!