radthursdays

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 07/11/2019

The daily demarcations of a calendar are overlaid on a drawing of a beach. “Wednesday” and “Thursday” are lined up with the beach approaching the water; beyond that, the days extend into the ocean. A person has stripped off their business clothes and left them on the beach (in Wednesday and Thursday), and is swimming away.  Source.

A bright red warning sign on a fence says “ATTENTION: You are wonderful and deserve every happiness.” Source.

A tiny sign at the end of a concrete path says “This is the end, please turn back”. Source.

Direct Action Item

Stay radical.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A "direct action item" is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 06/20/2019

A woman laughs while sitting on a bed in a light-filled room, a machine gun in her hands. The juxtaposition between gun and bedroom is jarring. Source.

Bodies

Cultivating Joy: Dani McClain Faces Down the Fear of Maternal Mortality: "America is in the throes of a maternal healthcare crisis. Maternal deaths in the United States have been on the rise since 1990. Now, between 700 and 900 new and expectant mothers die every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risk is even greater for pregnant Black and Indigenous people, who are dying at a rate of 3.3 times and 2.5 times greater than whites, respectively, and the majority of these deaths are preventable."

Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia: Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary. "Contrary to popular belief, scientific research helps us better understand the unique and real transgender experience. Specifically, through three subjects: (1) genetics, (2) neurobiology and (3) endocrinology. So, hold onto your parts, whatever they may be. It’s time for 'the talk.'"

A smiling woman holds a coffee cup to her mouth with one hand and a machine gun in her other hand. Branded coffee cups sit beside her on the counter. Source.

Current News

Who Can Adopt a Native American Child? A Texas Couple vs. 573 Tribes: "Forced removal and conversion of Native children continued for decades. Often, Native families were not told where the children had gone. From 1958 to 1967, the federally funded Indian Adoption Project placed nearly 400 Indian children from Western states with white families nationwide."

How the Upheaval in Khartoum Affects One of Sudan’s Longest-Running Crises: "When fighting began in 2011, Sudan’s government cut off all assistance to South Kordofan and Blue Nile. While the situation was bad, locals recall how some aid groups, operating discreetly, still distributed oil, seeds, and tools, making life slightly easier. Since the split in 2017, however, the few organisations present have ceased to operate."

A smiling woman sits with legs crossed on a plush armchair and a very large rifle perched on her lap. Source.

Issues

The hired guns of Instagram: Companies can’t advertise on social media — so they have female influencers do it for them. "When Kimberly Matte captions an Instagram post “suns out, guns out, buns out,” she mostly means it. The sun may be out, but she’s inside. Her buns are definitely out, because she’s wearing a lime-green thong. Technically, there’s only one gun out, but it’s an AR-10 battle rifle, so she’s still overdelivering."

I’ve Climbed Everest 21 Times. It’s not the Mountain It Used to Be: "I also want better opportunities for the Sherpa people. When people in America hear the word Sherpa, they automatically think of us as mountain guides. But the word Sherpa literally means people from the east: 'Sher = East,' and 'Pa = people.' We are an ethnic group believed to have immigrated from eastern Tibet roughly 500 years ago. Not all Sherpas guide on the mountains. Not all of them should have to."

Raytheon Said "Gay Rights!": "June is Pride month, and everywhere I turn, some organic wine company seems to be violently shaking me by the throat while yelling 'GAY RIGHTS!' As a certain kind of queer visibility — married! safe! — has become more palatable to the mainstream, each June we are confronted with the increasingly humiliating attempts of brands to cater to potential LGBTQ customers and virtue signal to well-meaning straights. Logos are rainbow-fied, heartwarming ad campaigns are launched, and nonsensical hashtags (#BeTrue!) are ruthlessly weaponized."

Two people wearing the same brand of shoes stand next to a geometrically arrayed collection of guns on the ground. In the center of the guns is a pair of tiny baby shoes. Source.

Activism

Why Juneteenth is America’s True Independence Day: "The Emancipation Proclamation was many things—a rallying cry for the nation, a means to bringing former slaves into the Union Army ranks—but it did not, on its own, free anyone. So imagine now if you can the effect of Granger’s words as news slowly spread across Texas to the state’s 250,000 former slaves. All at once they found out not only that the war was over, but that they were free. Their joyous, spontaneous celebration gave birth to Juneteenth."

How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean: "The Caribbean archipelago was ground zero for U.S. imperial banking. Wall Street’s first experiments in internationalism occurred in Cuba, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, often with disastrous results—for those countries and colonies, and often for the imperial banks themselves. Yet where there was expansion, there was also pushback. The internationalization of Wall Street was met with local resistance, refusal and revolt. And just as the history of imperialism has been excised from popular narratives, so too has this history of Caribbean anti-imperialism and autonomy."

Direct Action Item

Reparations.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 06/13/2019

Two workers stand in front of a giant inflatable rat while participating in a strike in the snow. The cartoon rat has their front legs raised, claws out and teeth bared in a snarl. The inflatable rat, sometimes known as a “union rat”, are “commonly used in the United States by protesting or striking trade unions”. Source.

Issues

Old Neighbors, New Battles: "On Unist’ot’en territory in what some—for now—call British Columbia, a community has formed against police and industry incursions. The Unist’ot’en are the people of the headwaters, a house group within the Gilseyhu (big frog) clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation. Their land was never ceded or surrendered to colonial government—they made no treaties with the British Crown. For nearly 10 years, Unist’ot’en people have been reoccupying one of their traditional territories along the Wedzin Kwah (Morice River). Now, Coastal GasLink (CGL) is doing preconstruction work for their fracked-gas pipeline on the territory despite having received no consent from the Dinï ze’ and Ts’akë ze’ (highest hereditary chiefs) of the Wet’suwet’en people. The Unist’ot’en are facing a legal injunction against “occupying, obstructing, blocking, physically impeding or delaying access”to Coastal GasLink’s surveying and preconstruction work. Earlier this year, an access route controlled by the neighboring Gidimt’en clan was violently raided by militarized police enforcing the same injunction."

Between the Devil and the Green New Deal: “For now, a revolution is not on the horizon. We’re stuck between the devil and the green new deal and I can hardly blame anyone for committing themselves to the hope at hand rather than ambient despair. Perhaps work on legislative reforms will mean the difference between the unthinkable and the merely unbearable. But let’s not lie to each other.”

A giant inflatable cat wearing a suit jacket and tie clutches a construction worker in one hand and a money bag in the other. The boss cat smokes a cigar and looks down haughtily. Source.

Labor

Silvia Federici in Conversation with Astra Taylor: "Imagine the work that a woman does the first six, seven, eight months. All that work. Imagine billions of children. And they’re telling us that robots will be the end of work. It’s a very masculine view. And what happens to the earth? Where do the robots come from? How much more extractivism do we need? How many more people are we going to kill to make the robots? The robots don’t make themselves. Somebody makes the robots; somebody has to extract the minerals to make the robots. So who are they? Are they not human beings? So robots make robots?"

Workers With Disabilities Are Making Cents Per Hour — and It’s Legal: "Section 214(c) of the FLSA states that workers 'whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury' can be paid based on their 'productivity' or on the 'quality and quantity' of their labor. The underlying assumption is that workers with disabilities are less valuable than workers without disabilities and should thus be paid based on their productivity to incentivize employers to hire them."

Colonialism is alive in the exploited tech work force: Companies like Facebook and Google continue to unfairly burden English-speaking workers abroad with their worst kinds of labor. "While social media users in the West peruse social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, we are largely unaware of the invisible chain of workers in the Global South who are subjected to excruciatingly violent, pornographic, and other disturbing content while being paid a fraction of U.S. wages."

Workers talk and stand around a giant inflatable rat, which has red eyes, sharp teeth, and claws at the ready. Source.

Direct Action Item

Support the Unist’ot’en camp and the Gidimt’en access point.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 06/06/2019

A “white knight” in shining armor, grinning heroically, stabs his lance through the laptop of a very annoyed person who was just minding their own business. Source.

Issues

The end of the world will be a non-event: As long as we keep imagining one future climate catastrophe, we can ignore all the ones already here. "But — and this is not meant to be callous, or to wave away the magnitude of potential coming crises — we don’t need to imagine a post-apocalypse of walled enclaves and tens of millions of migratory climate refugees to grasp the direct effect of a human-altered biosphere on our own little lives right now. If anything, conjuring up an End Times becomes a comforting kind of fantasy, because so long as the crack of thunder and flash of divine judgment doesn’t arrive, the emergency is always in the future."

The intersectionality wars: When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 30 years ago, it was a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it went viral. "Intersectionality operates as both the observance and analysis of power imbalances, and the tool by which those power imbalances could be eliminated altogether. And the observance of power imbalances, as is so frequently true, is far less controversial than the tool that could eliminate them."

Sex, lies, and surveillance: Something's wrong with the war on sex trafficking: ‘Silicon Valley's biggest companies have partnered with a single organization to fight sex trafficking -- one that maintains a data collection pipeline, is partnered with Palantir, and helps law enforcement profile and track sex workers without their consent. Major websites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others are working with a nonprofit called Thorn ("digital defenders of children") and, perhaps predictably, its methods are dubious.’

Still life by Spanish studio QUATRE CAPS showing many modern foodstuffs laid out on a table, all in excessive plastic packaging. Source.

Housing

The Racist Origins of San Francisco’s Housing Crisis: "For decades, the city used strict zoning laws to target the poor and people of color. Today, liberal NIMBYs are fighting to preserve them."

“I Got Mine”: "Apartment bans are a case of rich vs. poor, longtime resident vs. newcomer, and, all too often, white vs. black, but they are something else too: generational warfare, a showdown in which older homeowners are telling younger renters that there’s no more room. Seen that way, the housing affordability crisis serves as a useful framework for understanding a handful of urgent American issues that have stalled out, particularly intraparty conflicts on the left like those over student debt and climate change. Whether by intention or simply in effect, it has begun to feel like the politics of an older generation saying, 'Fuck you, I got mine.'"

Mural by artist Onur, showing a polar bear standing on a tiny chunk of ice and cautiously pawing at the ocean. Beneath the water’s surface, everything is on fire. Source.

Food

Meat alternatives: an integrative comparison: “Current levels of meat consumption not only exceed dietary protein requirements in many countries, they are also unsustainable. [...] Our analysis suggests that high tech and potentially disruptive novel options require a high degree of societal coordination to make them viable. At the same time, their potential sustainability benefits may turn out to be disappointing, due to the extensive processing that is required, which takes energy and leads to losses during the transformation from raw material into final products. Widespread expectations that such innovations are required to solve the problems of meat imply a relative neglect of existing alternatives that allow more immediate and significant sustainability gains.”

Direct Action Item

Learn more about where you live. Native-Land.ca is a resource to help North Americans learn more about their local history. The Google Mountain View campus is on Tamyen, Awaswas, and Ramaytush territories, which are part of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 05/30/2019

A split image by Turkish artist Uğur Gallenkuş. One half of the image shows a pristine, expensive-looking bathroom with a large round bathtub. The other half of the image shows small children sitting in a bombed-out, debris-filled building, washing in a similarly-shaped bathtub. Source.

Our Climate Future

A Full Life: A science-fiction story about America in the age of climate change. "'How do you know all these things?' Rue asked. Nona laughed. 'Well, I lived a full life. And it was much cheaper to fly back then. It’s harder now with all the aero-taxes.' 'I wish I could fly places.' 'Well, maybe we’ll save our money and go to Italy.'"

The Green Green Grass of Utah: Golf courses! Water parks! Man-made lakes! If Utah has its way, the retiree oasis of St. George will explode with growth, turning red rock to bluegrass and slaking its thirst with a new billion-dollar pipeline from the Colorado River. "'What do you say to the critics,' I asked [Mike Noel] at his house. 'The people who wonder if we’re spending a billion dollars so people in St. George can water their lawns?' He let out a sigh, the kind an adult gives a child who insists Santa Claus isn’t real. 'Don’t they like lawns?' he said, grinning, sinking deeper into the cushions. 'I like lawns.'"

Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing: "In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last."

US Department of Energy is now referring to fossil fuels as “freedom gas”: "In a press release published on Tuesday, two Department of Energy officials used the terms 'freedom gas' and 'molecules of US freedom' to replace your average, everyday term 'natural gas.'"

A split image by Turkish artist Uğur Gallenkuş. One half of the split shows a child doing additions on the chalkboard in a well-equipped classroom filled with attentive students. The other half shows a child standing in front of a messy chalkboard on a wall with a hole blown in it. Source.

Technology

The Automation Charade: The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve? "Our general lack of curiosity about how the platforms and services we use every day really work means that we often believe the hype, giving automation more credit than it’s actually due. In the process, we fail to see—and to value—the labor of our fellow human beings. We mistake fauxtomation for the real thing, reinforcing the illusion that machines are smarter than they really are."

Ill at Ease: The app-enabled economy sells a fantasy of frictionlessness at a human cost. "As well as being literal geographic areas sacrificed in the name of capital, the idea of a 'sacrifice zone' is also a rich metaphor for the things that we as citizens or consumers are willing to abnegate, or to betray, in the name of convenience and seamlessness. The technocapitalist sacrifice zone is the out-of-sight arena where our goods are produced and services are procured, conveniently hidden behind the scrim of frictionless technology. What looks like a smooth platform that brings us the things we need turns out to be a global network of people and things that stretches from the great Pacific garbage patch to the server farms that power our transactions."

A split image by Turkish artist Uğur Gallenkuş. One half of the image shows Lady Gaga, dressed in fancy clothes and jewelry, crying as she accepts an Oscar. The other half of the image shows a small child with a bandaged head sitting on a hospital bed in a barren building, comforting an adult. The image is split to look like the hurt child is comforting Lady Gaga. Source.

Issues

Mommie Dearest: Adoption stories usually begin with the conceit of orphans, when oftentimes the mothers are still alive. "Most adoption narratives follow colonial salvation myths, framing the U.S. as a generous and benevolent patriarchal figure and Korea as a country ravaged by poverty, in need of rescuing. But Kim’s book, Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practices in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, traces how South Korea’s modern nation-state has deployed the biopolitics of transnational adoption to effect normalized, everyday, gendered violence against working-class, poor, single mothers in South Korea. It is also a story of how their reproductive labor has been appropriated to serve the agenda of national security and economic development, under the aegis of both the cold war and today’s globalized, neoliberal capitalist state."

Being Frugal Is For The Rich: The Frugalwoods made a name for themselves teaching millennials how to save money. Trouble is, you have to start with a lot of it. "What evangelists like these have embraced is a model of advice-giving that mostly involves telling self-congratulatory stories about how they achieved financial independence by being frugal. Sometimes the stories pander to Millennials by touching on issues like climate change — 'Frugality is environmentalism!' — or the grim projections for Social Security and Medicare that Millennials should anticipate. But these stories are often missing the same pieces the Frugalwoods narrative lacks. Factors like above-average income (see: Millennial Money Man’s oft-mentioned 'marketing business') and access to capital and information (see: Broke Millennial’s oft-referenced 'financially literate and savvy parents') are often glossed over and not given the weight they deserve."

How Many Bones Would You Break to Get Laid?: “Incels” are going under the knife to reshape their faces, and their dating prospects. "'The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,' reads one meme."

Direct Action Item

Picture a "full life". What if all 7 billion people in the world got to live that life? Would it be sustainable? What would the planet look like? This week, examine if your ideal "full life" is in line with your values.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 05/23/2019

Plastic debris blankets the north side of one of the Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. Flip-flops, bottles, bags, and other trash cover most of the visible ground while palm trees can be seen in the background. Researchers found a huge amount of plastic both onshore and buried in the sand. Source.

Issues

The Squad: In Venezuela, a glamorous career becomes a means of survival: "With hyperinflation and a monthly minimum wage currently at 18,000 bolívares, or about $3.50, it’s become difficult to survive even with a steady income. For some, relief comes in the form of remittances; others work the black market. For Katho, and a team of about 30 other women, stability comes from SecoCheers. The group, founded by athletic trainer and dancer Caridad Seco in 1998, a year before Chávez was sworn into office, is a freelance team of cheerleaders that performs at sports games and other events across the country."

Update from Nicaragua: "A year has passed since the uprising that threatened the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua—a largely left uprising against a nominally socialist government. Today, as the US government seeks to promote a civil war in Venezuela in order to expand its sphere of political and economic interests, the questions raised by the Nicaraguan insurrection are more pressing than ever."

Society

Just Ride: "The instant availability of everything, brought initially by the car, becomes an impenetrable cage if you cannot use a car — being too young, too old, or otherwise incompatible with the physical and mental demands of the automobile makes you a second-class citizen. The car also becomes a point of control, so that the drivers’ license suddenly becomes a de facto license to participate in society. The struggle over issuing drivers’ licenses for women in Saudi Arabia and undocumented immigrants in the United States are two clear examples of this. When transportation itself is diverse, the rest of the society follows."

Exposing the Dirty Business Behind the Designer Label: "Even before it gets worn once, that new T-shirt you bought is already dirtier than you can imagine. It’s soaked through with toxic waste, factory smog and plastic debris—all of which is likely just a few spin cycles away from an incinerator, or maybe a landfill halfway around the world. Our obsession with style rivals our hunger for oil, making fashion the world’s second-most polluting industry after the oil industry."

Brightly colored pieces of microplastic mar one of the 27 islands in the Cocos Keeling chain. Much of the plastic is hidden under the sand. The sun breaks down plastic debris, and the tiny pieces get buried in the sand. Source.

Technology

Too Human: The more “lifelike” simulations are, the less effective they risk becoming: "By definition, simulation training involves substituting one medium for another — silicone for skin, screens for bodies — with the belief that the skills will transfer smoothly from the practice setting to performance. But we know that the design of built objects, including simulators, isn’t neutral or objective: It reveals a set of beliefs and values. […] A human decides which features to include and which experiences to recreate; this in turn determines how skills are developed, and how these biases are reinforced."

How we might protect ourselves from malicious AI: "As we’ve noted many times before, deep learning’s power comes from its excellent ability to recognize patterns in data. […] But deep-learning models are also brittle. Because an image recognition system relies only on pixel patterns rather than a deeper conceptual understanding of what it sees, it’s easy to trick the system into seeing something else entirely—just by disturbing the patterns in the right way. Here’s a classic example: add a little noise to an image of a panda, and a system will classify it as a gibbon with nearly 100% confidence. The noise, here, is the adversarial attack."

New Feature Lets Uber Black Car Riders Tell Their Filthy Pleb Drivers to Shut the Fuck Up: "Uber’s revolution for the world wasn’t in creating a transportation app, which plenty of people have done successfully. The real revolution was devising a way to flout labor laws that otherwise provide a livable wage for workers and driving down costs through any means necessary. And with Uber going public, the long con seems to have worked out. At least for Uber’s executives and investors."

History

How the US has hidden its empire: The United States likes to think of itself as a republic, but it holds territories all over the world – the map you always see doesn’t tell the whole story.

Marshallese-Americans Commemorate 73 Years In Exile: "From 1946-1958, the U.S. tested sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, each a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. At the time, the Marshall Islands were under U.S. control as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The peoples of Bikini and Enewetak Atolls were asked by the U.S. military to sacrifice their homelands 'for the good of mankind'. Their islands were used as ground zero for the weapons tests."

How Vietnamese Americans Took Over The Nails Business: A Documentary: "The salons are everywhere — in nearly every city, state and strip mall across the United States. So how did Vietnamese entrepreneurs come to dominate the multibillion-dollar nail economy? Filmmaker Adele Free Pham set out to answer that question in a documentary called Nailed It."

A worker pours a trash can full of plastic soda bottles into a dumpster in the foreground while large stone moai face the ocean in the background. The moai are world-renowned carved statues by the Rapa Nui people, making Rapa Nui (Easter Island) a popular tourist destination. However, tourists and rapid development create tons of trash on the small island. Source.

Direct Action Item

Our trash is destroying the planet, and (as usual) most affecting those without the money or power to make trash somebody else’s problem. One day this week, carry your trash with you for a full day to get an idea of how much you produce.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 05/16/2019

An anti-union ad by Delta says in large block letters, "Union dues cost around $700 a year," with the subtitle, "A new video game system with the latest hit sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union." Source.

Issues

The mess that is elite college admissions, explained by a former dean: “The mechanisms of affirmative action for wealthy white people are so well-oiled that few would know to name it. The process begins well before college: It’s societal and holistic and reaches beyond clichéd talking points about donated buildings and the influence of celebrity and prestige.”

Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs: “Work has ruled our lives for centuries, and it does so today more than ever. But a new generation of thinkers insists there is an alternative.”

A parody of the Delta anti-union ad says in large block letters, "A guillotine only costs $1200 to build," with the subtitle, "Delta's CEO made $13.2 million dollars last year. Get outside with your buddies, share some brews—sounds like fun." Source.

Technology

A poignant story: Excerpt from How to Hide an Empire by historian Daniel Immerwahr, about how Fritz Haber was an asshole.

Optimize What?: “Yet in positioning itself as tech’s moral compass, academic computer science belies the fact that its own intellectual tools are the source of the technology industry’s dangerous power. A significant part of the problem is the kind of ideology it instills in students, researchers, and society at large. It’s not just that engineering education teaches students to think that all problems deserve technical solutions (which it certainly does); rather, the curriculum is built around an entire value system that knows only utility functions, symbolic manipulations, and objective maximization.”

A meme has the Delta anti-union ad on the left. On the right, Homer Simpson looks at a dollar bill and says, "Aww, higher wages? I wanted a video game!". Then Homer's brain thinks, "Higher wages can buy many video games." Source.

Direct Action Item

Donate to National Bail Out: "The National Bail Out is a Black-led and Black-centered collective of abolitionist organizers, lawyers and activists building a community-based movement to support our folks and end systems of pretrial detention and ultimately mass incarceration. With your generous support we are able to continue to bail out community members, provide life-changing supportive services and resource groups who are organizing to transform the criminal justice system."

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 05/09/2019

A painting of Mary and baby Jesus looking really annoyed. Their halos are vibrant rainbows. From an article where “a woman has been arrested on suspicion of offending religious sentiment, after posters bearing an image of the Virgin Mary with her halo painted in the colours of the rainbow flag appeared in the city of Płock in central Poland.” Source.

Issues

Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies: "It’s the time year for watery eyes and itchy noses, and if you’re among the afflicted, you may be surprised to learn that decades of botanical sexism in urban landscapes have contributed to your woes."

Self-made métis: "The fact that new claims to a Métis identity have piled up so quickly has led to widespread confusion among non-Indigenous people, who don’t tend to know how Indigenous peoples traditionally recognize kinship and belonging. If all French descendants with a seventeenth-century Indigenous ancestor suddenly claimed to be Indigenous there would be over six million new Indigenous people in Canada, more than tripling the current number. At a time when Canadians are in reflection about their history, and the meaning of truth and reconciliation, these claims can threaten Indigenous peoples in the most basic of ways, by undermining their sovereignty and self-determination."

The Price of Meat: America’s obsession with beef was born of conquest and exploitation. "[…] the wide availability of beef has long been deeply entwined with the expansion of American commerce and power. As cattle ranching and meat-packing transformed the economy in the late nineteenth century, the United States acquired new territories, the apparatus of the state grew, and Americans came to expect cheap and plentiful meat. Our desire for hamburgers is inseparable from the economic system we have set up."

A painting of many white men sitting around, looking pleased with themselves and watching Spongbob Squarepants act like a chicken. The painting is Washington as Statesman at the Constitutional Convention by Junius Brutus Stearns, except George Washington has been replaced with Spongebob. Source.

Bearing the Burden

We celebrated Michael Phelps’s genetic differences. Why punish Caster Semenya for hers?: "While we’re talking about the diversity of gender experiences in the field of athletics, we could be talking about a lot of different things. […] Most of all, we could talk about what it means to be a woman. And what it means to insist someone is not a woman. And why Michael Phelps was treated like a marvel, and Caster Semenya is treated like a mutant."

Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden: Toxic masculinity—and the persistent idea that feelings are a "female thing"—has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally-stunted island, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It's women who are paying the price. "Since vulnerability is, unfortunately, still perceived as a weakness instead of a strength, having hard conversations that involve vulnerability is something men often try to avoid. It’s for this reason that to yield positive results from men’s support groups, men must enter such groups with that very intention—not just to find buddies."

Nail Art Is Bigger Than Ever — So Why Aren't Black Women Getting Any Credit?: As intricate nail art enters the mainstream, Black women are being left out of a conversation they started. "Long, artificial nails in an array of shades and designs have gone mainstream, but the origins are separated from the Black women who routinely wore them more than a generation ago, despite being ridiculed and considered 'ghetto' for their manicures."

A photo of four missiles being launched from the ground in a desert. A giant (photoshopped) kitten paws at them from behind. Source.

Activism

Meet the Petrochallengers: A new generation wants to bring accountability to Haiti: Leaders are accused of embezzling well over a billion dollars earmarked for social and development projects in Haiti, fueling protests that shut down the country. "The resistance underway in Haiti started, as modern-day revolutions do, on Twitter. It was August 2018, and tensions were still high after the Haitian government announced — then retracted — a plan to raise the price of fuel by as much as 51%. Gilbert Mirambeau Jr., a 35-year-old Haitian filmmaker and writer, tweeted a photo of himself blindfolded, holding a handwritten cardboard sign reading, 'Kot Kòb Petwo Karibe a???' or 'Where is the PetroCaribe money???'"

Meet the Mother-Son Duo Translating Astrophysics Into Blackfoot: Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly want to bring gravitational wave astronomy to speakers of the language. "Right before the announcement deadline, Yellowfly completed a full translation of the press release into Blackfoot , one of the 17 languages it appeared in. The mother-son duo also released a video of Yellowfly reading the release out loud. Since 2015, she has translated five additional press releases on LIGO discoveries."

This Traveling Library Is Making Sure "Black Women’s Literature Has the Place It Deserves": "History has proven that the Black community is unmatched in its ability to adapt and make something out of nothing in the face of deprivation. There is perhaps no better illustration of this skill than the community’s literary space—the ways in which we interact with books and, in turn, one another. Functioning as a book-filled, community-building paradise, the Library combines everything the Black community loves about literary spaces. And a major aspect of these spaces is simply being together."

Direct Action Item

Manipulating media is easier than ever, and will continue to get easier and more convincing with the proliferation of techniques like deepfakes. This week, take time to prepare yourself.

How deep learning fakes videos (Deepfake) and how to detect it?

Which Face Is Real?

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 05/02/2019

Part of an article in Interrupt 10, published in April 1970. "…Good technological solutions take time to develop. Otherwise they create side effects which may be worse than the original problem. DDT got rid of insects (for awhile until they developed a resistance). Now how do we get rid of DDT when almost all that was ever sprayed is still concentrating itself in the food chain? How do we get rid of the DDT in you and me? Phosphate based detergents (the 2nd generation detergents) solved the problem of biodegradability created by earlier types of detergents. But phosphate is a powerful nutrient for plant life. So now how do we keep it from mucking up the ecology of such rivers, lakes, and oceans as are still functioning? And how do we keep yesterday's dishwater from being tomorrow's drinking water? And what about the side effects of that marvelous solution to the transportation problem, the automobile? Is suburbia a solution to the housing problem? Maybe smog will be a solution to the population problem. So when the technologists announce the next great breakthrough, think twice. The solution may be worse than the problem." Source.

Issues

Lies, Damn Lies, and Abortion: "In the decades since Roe, a proliferation of restrictions has cast a long and intimidating state shadow over abortion care and its providers — and it works: There are now six states that have just a single abortion provider. In Texas, restrictions passed in 2013 swiftly closed nearly half the state’s clinics before they were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016."

Selling Self-Defense: "A look at the history of women’s self-defense shows that complicated, conflicting ideas about race, gender, and vulnerability are embedded in the movement’s very DNA. According to Wendy Rouse, author of Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when women first began to study boxing and jiu-jitsu for both practical and political purposes, white men justified the sports as a way for white women to protect themselves from men of color when they weren’t around."

A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley. Source. Why do so many startups fail? Why are all the hosts on CouchSurfing male? Are we going to be tweeting for the rest of our lives? Why do Silicon Valley billionaires choose average-looking wives? What makes a startup ecosystem thrive? What do people plan to do once they’re over 35? Is an income of $160K enough to survive? What kind of car does Mark Zuckerberg drive? Are the real estate prices in Palo Alto crazy? Do welfare programs make poor people lazy? What are some of the biggest lies ever told? How do I explain Bitcoin to a 6-year-old? Why is Powdered Alcohol not successful so far? How does UberX handle vomiting in the car? Is being worth $10 million considered ‘rich’? What can be causing my upper lip to twitch? Why has crowdfunding not worked for me? Is it worth pre-ordering a Tesla Model 3? How is Clinkle different from Venmo and Square? Can karma, sometimes, be unfair? Why are successful entrepreneurs stereotypically jerks? Which Silicon Valley company has the best intern perks? What looks easy until you actually try it? How did your excretions change under a full Soylent diet? What are alternatives to online dating? Is living in small apartments debilitating? Why don’t more entrepreneurs focus on solving world hunger? What do you regret not doing when you were younger?

Technology

Disabled people don’t need so many fancy new gadgets. We just need more ramps: "Stair-climbing wheelchairs are an excellent example of the overlapping problems with disability dongles; people with mobility impairments know that there’s a problem (stairs), and they’ve repeatedly articulated solutions. But those solutions are not new gadgets. The problem here isn’t that most wheelchair users find stairs challenging. Rather, it’s that most built environments rely heavily on stairs, and that while elevators and ramps both exist, many designers choose not to use them."

'It's not play if you're making money': how Instagram and YouTube disrupted child labor laws: "They open boxes, play with toys, pull pranks and make slime. They sing, they dance, and they remember their lines: 'Subscribe to my channel!' […] But while today’s child stars can achieve incredible fame and fortune without ever setting foot in a Hollywood studio, they may be missing out on one of the less glitzy features of working in the southern California-based entertainment industry: the strongest child labor laws for performers in the country."

Part of an article in Interrupt 13, published in December 1970. “We don’t have democracy in our workplaces. Rather, we are part of an alienating class structure, that we, by working, support and enforce. Quitting work is not the way to remove the structure. We must understand the nature of our work in order to change it. We don’t have democracy because we are part of a labor force that is told what to produce and how to produce it by a capitalist class. What’s wrong with capitalism? Take a look at the increasing abundance of consumer goods that give decreasing satisfaction and fulfill less and less human aspirations, emotions and needs. Look at the unsolved contradictions between the wasteful standard of living in the rich countries and the impoverished conditions in the rest of the world. Look at the international monetary problems, the current trend toward economic recession in the whole capitalist world, the repression of the working class (like the restrictions on free wage bargaining when Congress passes laws telling railway workers when they can strike and what they can earn). Look finally at the tremendous gap between what we could make of this world with the power that science and technology have given us and the destructive horrors of war to which automation is being applied.” Source.

The Right

Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too: "At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?"

An Eye on ‘The Base’: Transatlantic Militant Fascists continue to interact: ‘The Base is a militant fascist network formed in July 2018. [...] The group has been called by it’s spokesperson “Roman Wolf” an “international fraternal network of survivalists” but content posted online tells a story of a militant white supremacist group that promote violence and aim to instigate racial conflict.’

Flipping the Switch: “Michael Hari’s story shows how our increasingly divisive, conspiracy-laden culture is pushing troubled people toward extremism and violence.”

Activism

Missing Piece Project: "The Missing Piece Project envisions a nationwide, coordinated, mass dedication of objects at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial of Washington DC (the Wall) by Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, and other communities still affected today by the legacy of the conflict in Southeast Asia, allowing these communities to reclaim their past experiences, history, and memories, on their own terms."

Direct Action Item

Do you enjoy making art, of any kind? Make some radical art and share it with us :)

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 04/25/2019

A four-panel comic: In the first panel, a lone hand reaches up out of the water as if someone is drowning; the hand is labeled “People barely making ends meet”. The second panel shows the original hand but slightly lower, and a new hand labeled “employers” is reaching down as if to rescue the drowning person. The third panel shows the rescuing hand high-fiving the drowning hand, labeled “$10.00 per hour”. The fourth panel shows the rescuing hand having retreated and the drowning hand nearly completely submerged. Source.

Issues

Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind: In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice. "Gilmore has come to understand that there are certain narratives people cling to that are not only false but that allow for policy positions aimed at minor or misdirected — rather than fundamental and meaningful — reforms. Gilmore takes apart these narratives: that a significant number of people are in prison for nonviolent drug convictions; that prison is a modified continuation of slavery, and, by extension, that most everyone in prison is black; and, as she explained in Chicago, that corporate profit motive is the primary engine of incarceration."

The Internet’s Back-to-the-Land Movement: “As we come to realize that even our digital growth has its limits, we’re once again faced with a choice: stay within the strictures of existing structures, or go off-grid and build our own.”

Meet the YouTube star who’s deradicalizing young, right-wing men: ‘The far right is the dominant political community on YouTube. It's a flourishing world of men's rights activists, libertarians, anti-feminist atheists, and white nationalists. There are whole channels dedicated to showing "social justice warriors" getting "owned" by various conservative provocateurs. And this has gone largely unanswered by the left. Enter Natalie Wynn, who's trying to de-radicalize this part of YouTube with an unexpected mix of philosophy and elaborate costumes. And she's making some headway.’

Tweet from @yo_its_simba: “I’m not really into politics. Anyway, let me tell you how much I hate my job, my boss, my landlord, my shitty health insurance, my student loans, my town’s public transportation and the fact that I come home too tired to do anything after work every day.” Source.

Activism

The People's Emergency: "In France, the neon-yellow vests known as gilets jaunes are like proverbial opinions: Everyone has one, or at least every motorist does. In case of a breakdown, drivers are supposed to don these reflective garments and lay a high-visibility “warning triangle” (also provided in one’s kit de sécurité) on the road in front of their vehicles. When men and women wearing yellow vests began slowing down traffic at hundreds of ronds-points (traffic circles) throughout the countryside last November, and then massing by the thousands on Saturdays in Paris, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, it was hard to dismiss them as a bunch of radical-fringe demonstrators. They were wearing the uniform the government itself had asked good citizens to wear to make themselves visible in an emergency."

Tweet from @accidentalhurt: “I know that the Notre Dame is a very important landmark but the fact that billionaires have pledged over 600 million dollars in under 24 hours to help fix it just really puts into perspective how easily rich people could help solve world issues if they cared” Source.

Direct Action Item

Do you consume a substantial amount of entertainment created by others for profit? Such entertainment is pervasive, and substitutes a select few's interpretations and representations of the world for your own experiences. This week, find a way to entertain yourself without consuming anything made by someone else for profit—for example, think of a game you could play with natural materials around you, or plan a performance to put on. You have the power to create! Consider sharing what you’ve made with friends, or co-creating activities with them!

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 04/11/2019

Mural of a brown-skinned person in vibrant clothing kneels and holds a cup-and-string to their ear, while their head explodes into abstract shapes. Mural by Bicicleta sem Freio, part of the project Titanes. Source.

Issues

Raising Boys With a Broader Definition of Masculinity: "The key, he writes is 'a relationship in which a boy can tell that he matters … A young man’s self confidence is not accidental or serendipitous but derives from experiences of being accurately understood, loved, and supported.' I spoke with Reichert about how parents, teachers, and other adults can strengthen their relationships with boys, even when those boys act out, and in so doing help them create a broader expression of masculinity for themselves."

What Just Happened? Ohio Just Effectively Banned Abortion: "Since January 2019, 12 states have introduced so-called heartbeat bills that outlaw abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Today’s decision makes Ohio the fifth state to sign that bill into law, alongside Kentucky, Mississippi, Iowa, and North Dakota. Georgia’s ban, passed in March, is likely to be next in line."

Nobody’s history is innocent. We must be brave enough to claim it: Youth activists speak out about what matters to them: from societies admitting their mistakes, to climate change and race.

A tessellated, rainbow-colored face and body abut a rainbow patterned column. Mural by Okuda San Miguel, part of the project Titanes. Source.

Messaging

Down to Earth: Why is the story of climate catastrophe so hard to tell?: "How do you talk about an emergency when it seems as if no one is listening? For years, journalists, scientists, and activists concerned with the ongoing horror of climate catastrophe have faced this problem. Arguably the most important issue of our time, climate change is a known ratings killer. If you aren’t already a victim of climate-related disaster, the issue can feel far away, and many readers find the unrelenting rise of global warming too disturbing, or simply too overwhelming, to contemplate. 'No one wants to read about climate,' a literary agent once told me, 'It’s too depressing.'"

The radical possibility of common sense: "Love Trumps Hate and the Resistance and We’re Better Than This America and Immigrants Are Welcome Here and We Believe In Science and the Future Is Female. The supposed obviousness is the point. All these slogans are built on top of this country’s foundational myths — about American democracy and the inevitability of justice and of meritocracy. Their appeal depends on the extent to which you find these myths compelling, because common sense is really just the everyday form of ideology."

A face in profile with its tongue sticking out shoots lasers out of its eyes at a colorful, pixellated wall. Mural by Demsky J and Smithe, part of the project Titanes. Source.

Stories

Stories of transracial adoptees must be heard – even uncomfortable ones: "As an adoptee, I’ve been asked to make this distinction over and over: only one family can be 'good'. Only one family can be 'real'. So I must choose between the white adoptive parents that have been regularly portrayed (by others) as selfless saviors, and the Korean immigrant family that, by default, has been relegated to illegitimacy, selfishness, otherness. And if I am not prepared to choose and love only my white family and forswear all others, then I am unworthy of any family’s love."

[CW: war trauma] As ICE cracks down on Cambodian communities, a mother says goodbye to her son: "TJ’s immigration status has been in a state of limbo for years. Immigrants can be stripped of their green cards for a range of different crimes, but Cambodia was one of 23 nations that refused to repatriate its deported citizens. As a result, TJ and other Cambodians immigrants have remained in the United States for decades after they were stripped of their legal status."

The Death of an Adjunct: Thea Hunter was a promising, brilliant scholar. And then she got trapped in academia’s permanent underclass. "To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues."

Direct Action Item

Substitute alternatives for ableist words and terms: "Being aware of language—for those of us who have the privilege of being able to change our language—can help us understand how pervasive ableism is. Ableism is systematic, institutional devaluing of bodies and minds deemed deviant, abnormal, defective, subhuman, less than." There's a list of replacement words in the link. Some favorites: contemptible, insipid, ridiculous, vomit-inducing.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 04/11/2019

A photograph of a Black person’s face, speckled with minute glowing dots so they look like a starry night sky. “Kinya”, a photograph from Mikael Chukwuma Owunna’s collection, Infinite Essence. “Hand-painted using fluorescent paints and photographed in complete darkness, Owunna’s subjects are illuminated by a flash outfitted with a UV filter, which turns their nude bodies into glowing celestial figures”. Source.

Issues

Counting the Countless: Why data science is a profound threat for queer people: "This example demonstrates how administrative violence reinforces the gender binary (good luck getting an ID that doesn’t have 'male' or 'female' on it) and the medicalized model of trans lives — the idea that being trans is a thing that is diagnosed, should one meet certain, medically decided criteria. It communicates that gender is not contextual, that you can only be one thing, everywhere. It enables control and surveillance, because now, even aside from all the rigid gatekeeping, a load of people have a note somewhere in their official records that you’re trans."

X-Ray Architecture: “X-Ray had an even more profound impact on architecture. Its dicovery refashioned the perception of space and in particular the relation between inside and outside. After x-ray, modern buildings started to look like medical imaging with transparent glass walls that revealed the inner structure. Furniture, light bulbs, pyrex cookware followed their lead. And because x-ray also changed the concept of what is visible and what is invisible, the private became the subject of public scrutiny.”

Self-defense moves against technology: From the Center for Technological Pain, a repository of “DIY solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies”. “Self-Defense Against Technology is a set of tactics of resistance against our own digital aids. The moves that constitute these tactics are based and adapted from real self-defense practice, so they are to be used carefully and with a sense of purpose.”

Three smiling models, each standing with a nearly identical pose, stand beside plates of their x-ray during a “Chiropractor Beauty contest”. Source.

Direct Action Item

This week, think about how your relationship with your body is mediated by cultural context.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 04/04/2019

A picture of Dorothy Counts, one of the first black students admitted to the Harry Harding High School in North Carolina, walking to school in 1956 while a crowd of white boys harass her. Source.

Issues

How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans: “If the idea that transphobic harassment could be “feminist” bewilders you, you are not alone. In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.”

Little War on the Prairie: “So we invent a fake history for ourselves that doesn't deal with the complexities. And I think that, in some ways, that's what the South and the upper Midwest have in common is that there's a delusion at work about who we were. And that's why we have a hard time about who we are. So that the kind of self-congratulatory history that passes for heritage, it keeps us from seeing ourselves and doing better.”

Georgia Is Latest State to Ban Abortion After Six Weeks: "Georgia, which has a population that is 40 percent people of color, already faces numerous challenges regarding women’s health care. It has a shortage of obstetricians and one of the highest maternal death rates in the country, reports The New York Times."

Picture of a cluster of shiny gold surveillance cameras mounted to a golden pole. Source.

Technology

Real Black Activists Worry Fake Ones Will Drown Them Out On Twitter: “We don’t have bots, we have real black people,” one activist said. “The danger of these accusations is that Facebook and YouTube latches on to this and tries to undermine our ability to have a black political dialogue.”

Spoken For: The new “genderless virtual assistant” is not a neutral voice: "In pretending not to have any, Q enacts a neoliberal fantasy of gender, suggesting that the best way to address gender discrimination is to remove gender from the equation entirely. But gender is not a texture that can be filed away when inconvenient . It’s an intricate and deeply embedded relational system with normative maleness at its unsteady center. The robot shifts the goalposts without even trying to change the game."

A distant light illuminates undulating fog with a blue glow, creating the illusion of a rippling surface of water floating above the ground. “Dutch artist and designer Daan Roosegaarde created WATERLICHT to raise awareness about rising water levels and the need to continue to innovate and adapt to our changing environment. The ethereal projection uses a combination of LED and lenses, which forms a constantly shifting layer of billowing blue light above the heads of viewers.” Source.

Who Wins When We're Divided?

Forget Your Middle-Class Dreams: "[…] those who believe that working class is a morally imbued identity, rather than a relationship to capital, are shaking their heads, groaning about its gentrification. But categorizing people as 'workers' isn’t gradational, based on income, nor is it a judgement on their moral or ethical value — after all, working-class people are simply people; they can be as shitty as anyone else. While 'working class' can be an identity (almost anything imaginable can be an identity these days, and that’s fine), that’s neither here nor there: either one sells one’s labor to survive, or one does not. To insist on cutting off white-collar workers from recourse to collective action is the logic of anti-union ideologues."

How Black-Asian Conflict Plays Out In New York City's Elite High Schools: "Their argument boils down to the ideology of meritocracy, that as marginalized people we were able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, study hard and gain entry, which of course ignores the centuries of redlining and institutional racism experienced by Black and brown communities and that many middle schools in Black and Latinx neighborhoods do not have advanced programs or educators who are equipped to prepare their students for the test."

Direct Action Item

Do you feel like you’re part of a community? This week, think about ways to grow and strengthen your community.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 03/28/2019

A tweet by @gilbertjasono reads, "Inspiring! This CEO Saw One of His Employees Digging Through the Dumpster for Food, So He Bought Her a Headlamp to Make It Easier to Sift through the Garbage". Source.

Issues

Meritocracy doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you: “Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. [...] In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.”

The Homeless 8-Year-Old Chess Champion and Other Horrific ‘Uplifting’ Stories: "The questions of why a government worker is so desperate that she has to pawn her wedding ring, or why we live in a system where disabled children don’t have adequate wheelchairs and are at the mercy of the charity of their teenage friends, are not asked. The media simply invite readers to delight in these tales of generosity."

[Video] What do sex workers want?: “Everyone has an opinion about sex work, but what does sex worker Juno Mac think? Juno takes us through four different legal models addressing the sex industry and explains why they -- and sex workers around the world -- believe decriminalization and self-determination are the only way to keep sex workers safe.”

A tweet by @realDonaldTrump from September 15, 2017 says, "Loser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner.The internet is their main recruitment tool which we must cut off & use better!" Source.

Christchurch

Tech Platforms Obliterated ISIS Online. They Could Use The Same Tools On White Nationalism: “Tech companies and governments can easily agree on removing violent terrorist content; they’ve been less inclined to do this with white nationalist content, which cloaks itself in free speech arguments and which a new wave of populist world leaders are loath to criticize. Christchurch could be another moment for platforms to draw a line in the sand between what is and is not acceptable on their platforms.”

The Death of Fascist Irony: “What the Christchurch mass shooter's manifesto reveals about the way jokes and memes are used on the racist right.”

The Responsibility Isn’t Theirs Alone: "To leave terrorism out of the analysis of what produced the New Zealand shooting is an attempt to narrow the scope of who is responsible. Clutching its knees to its chest and rocking back and forth, the news media self-soothes with the thought that Donald Trump and the internet are to blame for everything. The internet provided these isolated racists with a forum, they say, a place to refine their ideas and build solidarity, and then Trump brought it all out into the open with his vile demagoguery, his mastery over and susceptibility to the whims of agitated, frothing crowds. But the childishness of this explanation becomes clear as soon as you consider the full spectrum of what Muslims around the world have been subjected to over the past two decades."

A tweet by @MatthewPCrowley says, “We take it for granted today, but a single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.” Source.

History

The Student Strike That Changed Higher Ed Forever: "Today, ethnic studies is an accepted part of academia. Many if not most college students have taken a course or two. But 50 years ago, studying the history and culture of any people who were not white and Western was considered radical. Then came the longest student strike in U.S. history, at San Francisco State College, which changed everything."

Direct Action Item

This week, remember: “pain and violence tend to replicate themselves, like a virus. punishment does not end violence; on the contrary, it breeds it”. Before you punish or shame, ask yourself: “why has harm occurred? who is responsible, beyond the individual perpetrator — as in, how is community implicated? how can this harm be prevented in future?

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 03/21/2019

Pictures of two people, both smiling — except the picture on the left has been generated by a computer and the extremely realistic person depicted is actually from the imagination of an artificial neural network. One of the only clues that the person depicted isn't real is an image artifact on the exposed ear where an earring might be. Source.

Technology

How Hate Groups’ Secret Sound System Works: White supremacists exploit the weaknesses in the social-media ecosystem as Facebook and Google struggle to keep up. "Weeks before Friday’s attack, the New Zealand shooter littered other social-media platforms with memes and articles about immigrants and Muslims to ensure that journalists would have plenty of material to scour. These sorts of cryptic trails are becoming an increasingly common tactic of media manipulators, who anticipate how journalists will cover them."

How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny: Authoritarians’ love for digital technology is no fluke — it’s a product of Silicon Valley’s “smart” paternalism. "So far, Big Tech companies have presented issues of incitement, algorithmic radicalization, and 'fake news' as merely bumps on the road of progress, glitches and bugs to be patched over. In fact, the problem goes deeper, to fundamental questions of human nature. Tools based on the premise that access to information will only enlighten us and social connectivity will only make us more humane have instead fanned conspiracy theories, information bubbles, and social fracture."

Bad Metaphors: I Don’t Have the Bandwidth: "Personal 'bandwidth' implies that we must move through the world like machines; and that experience is, to use a different metaphor, something that we need to process, and process, and, process, up until we hit some kind of capacity. It implies that beyond that capacity, we have nothing left."

Pictures of two people, both smiling — except the picture on the left has been generated by a computer. Some of the only clues that the person depicted isn't real is an image artifact above the hair and a particularly bright highlight on one tooth. Source.

Issues

Escaping the Iron Cage of Consumerism: "Society is faced with a profound dilemma. To resist economic growth is to court economic and social collapse. To pursue it relentlessly is to endanger the ecosystems on which we depend for long-term survival. For the most part, this dilemma goes unrecognised in government policy. It is only marginally more visible as a public debate. When reality begins to impinge on the collective consciousness, the best suggestion to hand is that we can somehow ‘decouple’ growth from its material impacts. And continue to do so while the economy expands exponentially."

Looking for economic prosperity without growth: "The last 200 years, we lived in a capitalist society where growth is fundamental for the stability of the system. Maybe there is no alternative, and the only way is to have growth. If this is becoming catastrophic, what do we do? Do we bow our heads to catastrophe, to disaster, or can we think outside of that? We know that we humans are very inventive. Why can’t we think of alternatives? Why is this the only thing where we can’t think differently?"

The real college admissions scandal is what’s legal: "A lawsuit on Harvard’s admission practices recently revealed that the college maintains a secret list of applicants who are the relatives of major donors. One student whose family donated $1.1 million got a special campus tour from the former head tennis coach — 'we rolled out the red carpet,' he said, according to the Harvard Crimson. It’s not clear if the student was eventually admitted, but students on the donor list have a 42 percent acceptance rate. Harvard overall accepted 4.6 percent of students in 2018."

Pictures of two people, both smiling — except the picture on the left has been generated by a computer. One of the only clues that the person depicted isn't real is an unrealistically textured shirt with an odd collar and a sharp delineation where the sleeve of the shirt should continue. Source.

History

The Longer History of the Christchurch Attacks: "White supremacy has a long, global history, and New Zealand and Australia have played central and interrelated roles in that history. This most recent horror is not just testament to a more recent uptick in far-right violence. It is also the latest episode in the ongoing story of antipodean white supremacism at the heart of both New Zealand’s and Australia’s national histories. And then, as now, American white supremacy has been intimately linked to that story."

A Lakota Historian on What Climate Organizers Can Learn From Two Centuries of Indigenous Resistance: "The argument I’m making is that within our own traditions of Indigenous resistance, we have always been a future-oriented people, whether it was taking up arms against the United States government, whether it was taking ceremonies underground into clandestine spaces, whether it was learning the enemy’s language. This pushes back against the dominant narrative that Indigenous people are a dying, diminishing race desperately holding on to the last vestiges of their culture or their land base."

Smithsonian Shines Light on Hawaiian Queens for Women's History Month: "The Learning Lab, an online resource for educators and parents, now includes a wide range of new content focusing on Queen Kapi‘olani (1834-1899) and Queen Liliʻuokalani (1838-1917)—two of the most important leaders in a rich native culture that existed long before the establishment of the United States."

Pictures of two people, both smiling — except the picture on the right has been generated by a computer. One of the only clues that the person depicted isn't real is an image artifact above the hair and slightly blending into the hairlines. Source.

Science Fiction

Home: "I didn’t tell G that the Corporation hardly ever brings back the corpses of employees who’ve died in space; that they just collect them up for a while then thrust a batch out through an atmosphere to incinerate them."

Mother Tongues: "'Yes, but we can’t afford it.' C-grade English sells at only a fraction of A-grade English; you’d rather keep your English than sell it for such a paltry sum that would barely put a dent in textbooks and supplies, never mind tuition and housing."

Life Sentence: "'But honestly though, you should feel grateful you weren’t born somewhere that still has prisons.' Lindsay reaches for her purse. 'Do you know what would have happened to you a century ago for doing what you did? The judge would have locked you up and thrown away the key!' Lindsay says brightly, and then stands to leave."

Direct Action Item

If you've never been to a mosque before, attend a vigil, support your local mosque, and support your local Muslim communities.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 03/14/2019

Picture of a restaurant with vibrant green columns and a green and red ceiling covered with interesting geometric patterns inspired by Aymaran weaving. Designed by architect Freddy Mamani. Source.

Issues

What Happened to Turkey's Ancient Utopia?: “One of the enduring mysteries of Çatalhöyük is how this early society was organized: The hundreds of homes excavated thus far exhibit remarkable unity in how they were built, arranged and decorated, with no sign of any distinctive structure that could have served as an administrative or religious center. In most of the layers of successive settlement, each household seems to have had a similar amount of goods and wealth, and a very similar lifestyle. It’s primarily in the most recent uppermost layers, after about 6500 B.C., that signs of inequality begin to emerge. [...] Ongoing research may link the arrival of domesticated cattle with emerging inequality between households, and increasingly individualistic behavior among Çatalhöyük residents.”

Hopepunk: “Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.”

[CW: moving text, not screen reader-friendly] 17776, or What Football Will Look Like in the Future: “what year is it?”

Picture of a build lobby with intricately-colored columns and a ceiling covered with interesting geometric patterns inspired by Aymaran weaving. Designed by architect Freddy Mamani. Source.

Bugs

The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: ‘Insects are the vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere. [...] The most disquieting thing wasn’t the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry, shared by Riis and many others, that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways. “We notice the losses,” says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. “It’s the diminishment that we don’t see.”’

Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers: “Biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide. Here, we present a comprehensive review of 73 historical reports of insect declines from across the globe, and systematically assess the underlying drivers. [...] The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance: i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation; ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers; iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and iv) climate change.”

Direct Action Item

Learn more about where you live. Native-Land.ca is a resource to help North Americans learn more about their local history. The Google Mountain View campus is on Tamyen, Awaswas, and Ramaytush territories, which are part of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 03/07/2019

A Black teenager wearing vibrant clothes and glasses looks confidently at the viewer. Detail from “Three Kings”, a quilt by Bisa Butler. Source.

Issues

What Is Settler-Colonialism?: “A crucial aspect of social justice education is learning to differentiate between intent and impact. For students with privilege, particularly, this means understanding where and how their own actions align with or amplify power structures that benefit them while oppressing others.”

Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong: “What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.”

A Black child, hair up in pigtails, looks skeptically at the viewer. The background is a pattern of orange slices. From “Anaya with Oranges”, a quilt by Bisa Butler. Source.

Towards Dystopia

Scientists are working on a pill for loneliness: “Just as thirst is a signal that you are dehydrated, loneliness is an indication that you are already suffering from a lack of connection, Stephanie Cacioppo tells me. It’s true that many of us manage to pull ourselves out of a lonely funk, but she argues that we could still benefit from a pharmacological intervention to prevent descent into social isolation.”

Deepfakes and Synthetic Media: What should we fear? What can we do?: “People have started to panic about the increasing possibility of manipulating images, video, and audio, often popularly described as “deepfakes”. [...] The barriers to entry to create and manipulate audio and video in multiple, more sophisticated ways are beginning to fall, requiring less cost, less technical expertise and drawing on widely available cloud computing power. At the same time, the sophistication of manipulation of social media spaces by bad actors has led to increased opportunities to weaponize these manipulations.”

Collapse: You cannot prepare for what remains unthinkable: “In the early days of the collapse, the global logistical system will continue operating and become militarised. Wealthy countries will protect their shipments of food and energy, increasingly by force. Borders will be closed to a compounding number of climate refugees, leaving them with nowhere to go, as their environment and livelihoods erode ever faster.”

Two Black children are stopped by a third, maybe at a crosswalk. Detail from “The Safety Patrol”, a quilt by Bisa Butler. Source.

The Environment

Anti-Colonial Science & The Ubiquity of Plastic: “Every moment of science has these sort of legacies. There's lots and lots and lots of room for doing anti-colonial science and feminist science. Those are different things, but they're related in that they both find that science isn't neutral. It is deeply political.”

Bolsonaro government reveals plan to develop the ‘Unproductive Amazon’: “With Brazil’s Bolsonaro administration not even a month old, the new president’s Chief of Strategic Affairs last week announced plans to build a bridge over the Amazon River in Pará state in order to begin developing what he called an “unproductive, desertlike” region ­– a reference to the Amazon rainforest.”

Direct Action Item

Do you feel lonely? The physical, social, and technological spaces we live in do more to alienate us than bring us together. This week, try out some “Social Fitness Exercises” to help overcome these obstacles! Some examples: “making an effort to express gratitude, doing something nice for someone else without expecting something in return, choosing to engage with strangers, and sharing good news with others.” (Source). More Social Fitness Exercises.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.