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queernuck · 3 years

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The Cleveland Browns made the playoffs. The Islanders made the Eastern Conference Finals.

And that’s enough for me.

So long, so long I have been living like this, pretending that I want to keep on living, that life feels worthwhile, that I don’t want to kill myself. Suicide is for cowards but ive been chickening out for a whole decade, to the point where getting on the subway was itself something that involved convincing myself not to jump in front of it. I remember once while working in the city, I watched and waited as two trains came in and left, trying to get the energy to jump in front of them. I had decided, if I couldn’t do it by the time a second train came and went, I would go to work and save it for another day. I came very close, my legs tense like a linebacker on 4th & Goal, but I didn’t do it. Maybe it would be better if I had, I would have saved not only myself but a lot of other people a lot of pain and suffering. I’ve been dealing with feeling suicidal for a decade, an entire ten years, and made it through. And for what? I lost a retail job at minimum wage, I’ve seen the Giants go from two-time Super Bowl kingslayers to a team that relied on the Eagles for a playoff berth, I got to see Evangelion only for the final Rebuild film to be infinitely delayed, I have a useless non-degree that allows me to eloquently describe how the Democrats and Republicans alike are driving this stolen land to Fascism while sycophants tell me Vote Blue No Matter Who. I’m so tired, I’m not even the person people think me to be, since if I were, I wouldn’t be in this mess.

My paychecks, as hard-earned as they were, never seemed to be mine in any real sense, and it made me so frustrated that something in me broke at the beginning of this year. I made some mistakes, some very stupid ones, and got myself fired. I took money from and distorted the inventory of my store to get what amounted to pocket money, less than two paychecks. I was tempted because I feel so powerless, so much like nothing I could ever say or do matters, and so I decided to lash out against a place that mattered to me, against people I cared about deeply. Chain stores, corporations, all of those things are not really high on my list of things to care about. Barnes & Noble pushed out local booksellers years ago, an irony not lost on me whenever our own competition with Amazon was made apparent. We were reaping what we had sown. But what always interested on top of this irony was how symbolic these things could be to people, how much we figured into so may memories for so many. The Manga Aisle at Barnes & Noble is a staple of 2006 scene culture, a way that kids without the pocket money to afford the newest volume of Bleach it Naruto could keep up before scams became widely available. How the store was a place where people studying for standardized tests could use the test prep guides to try and get ready for the eugenic ritual of the standardized test. And just how much a chain bookstore became a substitute, socially, for the now-absent local bookstore. We bear the guilt for that, but at the same time we were still selling books, giving people a place to get coffee and sit and read and talk, in ways that libraries may not be able to. We certainly can never replace a library, given just what a library does for people. But we did do a lot of good all the same. Before it closed, some of my fondest memories came when I was the exact sort of annoying teenage customer I grew to hate, hanging out at the Columbus Circle Borders. Working at Barnes & Noble was tiring, dehumanizing, difficult, made me feel like I would never measure up to the authors we sold, the people books were written about, that I was a failure. And I am, as my death shows. But it also made me a part of something I was proud of. And that Above & Beyond pin I earned is in my jacket still, a reminder of something.

That something was shown in so many of the coworkers I had, who were incredible in so many ways. I feel awful for what I did, I genuinely do, because of how it may have hurt people who thought so kindly of me, people who deserve so much good. I wish I had the ability to address each of them individually but this decision was hastily made, and i have a feeling it will show in the things I miss in this note. Audra, your help in finding me a way to use the company policies to my advantage as a worker was something that gave me faith even after having seen the despicable firings and cuts the company went through. Linda, I can’t quite square the circle here given my actions, but I want to say your disappointment broke my heart and that while I will not be the one who shows it, your reassurance that everyone makes mistakes was welcome.

To my (former) fellow booksellers at Store 2216, all of my love and my sincerest apologies. You all have so much good in you, your willingness to listen to my ADHD-fueled rants and to discuss so many things with an incredible frankness was always impressive, in addition to part of what I loved about all of you. I want you all to be happy, and the kinship I felt with you was a vital part of what kept me going. It was tough, as you all know. But at times, it almost felt worth it.

The same is true of my CTY friends: it was a weird, magical place that frankly, a lot of us idealized for far too long and which sk many of us eventually outgrew without being able to let go of. And that was tough, that was something we had a great deal of difficulty understanding, that what helped us once was not always going to be helping us, was not always what we needed. But in eventually finding that, we found solace, we realized how life as a whole functions and just what it is that we can take from places like it.

To my other family, my Cleo family, I know I haven’t been terribly active lately, but I can never, ever thank you enough for the belonging you gave me. I have never felt anywhere as welcoming as Cleo. As warm as Cleo (even as we struggled to pay for the oil bill) was. As kind and understanding. As tolerant. As questioning and inquisitive into what that tolerance meant to us. I am thankful, eternally, for what you all did for me. The incredible experiences I had as a Cleo make me proud of what the organization can represent, and one of my dying wishes is that the organization continues to reach out to marginalized communities on Trinity’s campus. There is much work to be done in making sure abusers cannot hide in our family, but I trust you all to do that work. Tucker Carlson is a Trinity grad and we must embody the opposite of what he stands for, no matter how difficult it may be. I could go on about how this means opposing liberals and Liberalism/Neo—Liberalism due to the truth of tolerance resulting in a Popper-esque Paradox of Tolerance that implies Popper is a worthwhile philosopher, but that’s another issue.

To my friends on that Blue Hellsite, tumblr, you made a continual presence worth it, even with all of the bullshit this place brings. It’s the reason I read so much Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, read Žižek against himself, and so on and so on, and the value of that to me can never be overstated. I learned so much from the ways in which I learned to analyze the world, and that in turn became a huge inspiration for why I should try to do what I could to make the world closer to a place of revolution, one where we could perhaps eke out a living for one another. I loved how much I could be an unrepentant nerd and still love hockey on there, and while the

NHL fans on tumblr are incredibly annoying,

I can deal with that compared to the racism of most hockey fans.

Mom, Dad? I just couldn’t live with you any longer. I’m so sorry.

Grandma, I love you.

And the things I leave behind? Donate what can be donated. Hats, please auction, or at least offer to other HatHeads at a reasonable price. I had some nice ones. As for assorted albums, clothing, and other things, sell them and donate to a Harm Reduction organization, or organizations that advocate for PWUD in a radical fashion. WE DESERVE AUTONOMY!

I am a victim of the War on Drugs. Sobriety was always hellish to me, and I could never take it. I want people to be able to live how they want, to see sobriety and being on drugs as equally valuable states, to see the two as no different from one another.

Abolish all gun laws

End the War on Terror

Decriminalize and legalize all drugs, sobriety is what killed me.

I love all of you.

LET’S GO ISLANDERS!

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fandom-necromancer · 3 years

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Coffee, crushes and Complications Prequel

This was prompted by an amazing anon! just a warning, this short got dark real quick. So please, heed the warnings and stay safe! It has a happy ending, but I have said in the other parts Gavin hit rock bottom, so I had to make him hit rock bottom. He does recover in the end and gets back on track that has him being happy as we know from part 1 and 2. It’s just a hard contrast, therefore I wanted to warn you. I hope you still enjoy heavy angst!

Fandom: Detroit become human | Characters: Gavin Reed, Tina Chen (Warnings: depression, description of depressive behaviours, Character thinks about suicide, implied suicide attempt (that doesn’t happen, not even the attempt!), suicidal thoughts) If you want to skip the suicide related part skip from “It was two weeks...” to “Tina! Tina, don’t say anything!”

[Part1] [Part2] [Part3] [Part4]

‚Hey, Boss, what’s up?‘ Gavin marched into Fowlers office with a grin and a spring in his step. He had all his cases solved in record time and had finally endured the cry-babies of machines that had come in lately with stories of assault and attempted murder. What had they expected simply stopping to work to looked like? But he had done nothing wrong, at least nothing Fowler could prove, and that was the most important thing. ‘You are fired, Gavin.’ Gavin blinked. He must have misheard something. ‘The phck?’ ‘You are fired, Detective Reed. Hand in your badge and pistol and pack your things.’ ‘What? Why?’ ‘Why?!’ Fowler stood up and leaned over the table. ‘You really even dare to ask that?’ ‘Errr…. Yes?’ ‘Well, then sit down and get comfortable, because I have a whole fucking list!’, the Captain shouted. ‘And I finally can say what I wanted to tell you for so long, because I will finally get rid of you now!’ Gavin did sit down, but not because he wanted to. His knees had suddenly failed him.

‘First of all: You are a real asshole.’ ‘Yes, I know but-‘ ‘I don’t mean it in a funny way!’, Fowler interrupted. ‘You are a true asshole. A bad person. You treat your co-workers as if they personally attacked you. You are unable to work in a team without sabotaging the whole mission for your benefit. You actively try to make others look worse than you are so you seem like the best one. You are so obsessed with getting promoted you fail to do your work, you are constantly breaking protocol and don’t think I didn’t realise! I did. I just never said anything because, shit, sometimes that was an advantage. But this was the final misstep, Reed! I can’t tolerate your shit any longer!’ Gavin swallowed, then threatened: ‘And what should that be exactly?’ He let his anger speak for himself, but deep inside his guts had twisted into a tight ball.

Fowler leaned back. ‘Your anti-android behaviour. Fucking hell, I thought you would learn with time. I thought you would catch up to the others. But no, you continue calling androids names, calling them “it” instead of he, she or they and treating them like malfunctioning machines. These people come to us for help and you laugh them in the face!’ Gavin huffed amused, then outright laughed in Fowler’s face. ‘Captain, that’s a good joke. You don’t actually believe… They are not human. They will never be. Phck, I wouldn’t even consider them persons. They are some fancy part of machinery, so complexly programmed that maybe they even believe themselves to be persons. But they are not! They are objects, robots. And some fancy revolution and new laws can’t change that simple fact!’ ‘And that’s why I have to fire you. I can’t have you interrogating someone knowing you will personally dismantle them if they don’t talk! They are machines. But they are persons too. And you have to respect that. Fuck, Gavin, what did you think?’ ‘I thought and still think they are not alive. It doesn’t matter what you do to them, it’s just simulated. They don’t feel a thing.’ ‘Are you really sure about that?’, Fowler asked, weirdly calm considering he had been furious just before. ‘Even after Connor?’ ‘Connor is a big reason for me being absolutely certain’, Gavin said.

‘Then hand in your badge and service weapon.’ Gavin stared at the outstretched palm. ‘Oh, come on, Jeffrey, you can’t do this to me. I’m your best man!’ ‘I can, I will and I must. And you haven’t been my best officer for a long time. Hank is back – thanks to that apparently lifeless android Connor – and the RK800 is the best Detective you can wish for. Now, I won’t repeat myself.’ Gavin was sitting there completely numb. He didn’t even have energy left in him to complain and that was saying something. He pulled his pistol out of the holster and handed it over, before unclipping his badge. He looked down on the polished metal with his name on it and thought back to the day he had been handed it. How proud he had been. How much of his pride still was engraved in this piece of metal. He had worked hard for this and by now… Shit, this little piece of leather and metal basically was his whole identity. He pushed his thumb over the letters. G. Reed.

‘The badge, Reed.’ He blinked, took a deep breath, held it and pressed the badge into Fowler’s hand. Then he stood up and pressed out: ‘That’s all?’ ‘That’s all.’ Gavin contemplated saying something. Something witty maybe, or something mean, something that would hurt and gave him that little satisfaction of revenge, even if it didn’t mean much. But he couldn’t think of anything, his head was filled with cotton and everything tingled with numbness. So, he just nodded and left, trying to keep up his composure. It was hard without the added weight on his hip that had made his step a bit broader than it normally was. He stared at the ground not to have to look into their faces. Would they laugh? Would they care? Or worse: would they pity him? Whatever they might feel towards him leaving, he couldn’t face it and so he just took what little possessions he had decorated his table with and left. ‘Hey, Gavin, what’s-‘ That was Tina, but Gavin had already passed the security gates and as soon as he was outside the building he ran to his car, dropping his things on the passenger seat and starting the engine to speed off. He was just moments away from a total breakdown, the fact that others might see him and that he couldn’t drive in that state the only thing keeping his composure up. He parked the car messily in front of his apartment, took his things and stumbled up the stairs in a hurry. He barely managed to unlock the door, dropping his keys once and failing to pick them up first try as his eyes had blurred over.

Then finally he was inside, had closed the door and dropped his things on his sideboard, before leaning on it heavily finally allowing his feelings to spill over. He knelt in front of the small wooden furniture, his hands holding onto the edge to keep him steady somewhere. How could this happen? He was untouchable. He was good at his job. He was damn good at his job. He wasn’t good at anything else. He had only ever been a Detective and… Oh god, he didn’t have a job anymore. He wouldn’t be able to pay his rent. He could make it a few months, but he would have to find something else soon and oh god, what if he had to give his cat away and phck he didn’t have a job anymore and… Did the whole world hate him?

He half kneeled, half sat there, crying, his stomach cramping and heaving and trying to keep his meal down through it all. His shoulders shook and he didn’t trust his hands or his legs for that matter. Standing up was out of question. He crawled over to the wall to prep himself up against it and the sideboard, that was about all he did that day, crying until no more tears would come, his nose was hurting and the muscles of his abdomen aching from overuse. He was thirsty, but at the same time it didn’t matter. He was cold but hell, what did that mean? He needed a shower to get out of his partially wet clothes and maybe feel human again. But he knew he wouldn’t even make it to the living room. So why bother? He didn’t move and tried not to think.

He woke up still in the same position and sat up with his back cracking. Something warm shifted against his legs and stretched. He looked down on his cat, who looked up to him as if asking why her human was so upset. ‘I phcked up, Bready. I’m sorry.’ He scratched her behind the ears. ‘And I haven’t given you anything yet, have I? Sorry. You must be starving. Come on, daddy will get you something.’ With that he finally managed to stand up, but still had to lean against the wall, waiting for his circulation to catch up. He carried himself into the kitchen, gave Bready her food and threw himself a frozen pizza into the oven not wanting any poor delivery guy to see him like this.

He rubbed his forehead that by now hurt like a thousand needles from his dehydration headache. So, he opened the fridge and his eyes fell on his liquor collection. Should he… But it would only make things worse. Could things go worse? To be honest, he just wanted to sleep. He should save the alcohol for tomorrow when he would need it. He ate his pizza, drank his water, forced himself to take a shower and dropped into bed. Maybe this was all just a bad dream.

It wasn’t. He was awoken by his alarm, had sat up and halfway left the bed as he remembered that right, no work to go to. Rubbing his face and scrunching it up as he rested his face in his hand, he thought about what to do. In the end he did stand up to give Bready her food and retreat back to bed. She soon joined him, a welcome weight against his legs. As he woke up hours later, she was still there, and Gavin watched her for a while. Damn, why couldn’t he have been born a fat, carefree housecat? He fetched his phone, tried to switch it on and sighed as it wouldn’t. He struggled to get the charger out without disturbing Bready. When he finally could switch on his phone, he immediately was bombarded with messages and missed calls from Tina. He read over them but deleted the notifications from the calls and left her on read. He didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like anything at all. In the end he flicked through the same apps on his phone, fell asleep and circled them through again once he woke up. He stood up to get his cat some food, then went straight to bed. He didn’t want to eat, so he didn’t.

The next day he managed to eat breakfast, but only because he had switched off his alarm and his cat woke him up with screaming. He threw some water in his face, then returned to bed. Tina had called again. Had messaged too. Gavin put his phone on his nightstand face down.

In the evening he couldn’t lie in bed anymore, never feeling comfortable and always sore. He faced his fridge again and took the next-best bottle. When he fell asleep on the couch hours later it was empty.

The hangover was hard, but Gavin liked the sobering pain. He didn’t like throwing up in the toilet first thing in the morning though. He skipped breakfast and lunch lying in bed. As Tina had called for the millionth time, he finally got the energy to answer the call, shout: ‘Phck off, don’t wanna talk!’ into the mic and drop it back down. Dinner was some instant noodles. With lots of alcohol.

When the weekend came, his reserves had been depleted. He was left to water and stale coke. Maybe that was something good? Gavin didn’t think in these categories anymore. Then the doorbell rang. And it rang again. And again. Gavin would have appreciated it staying this way of it ringing and him not answering, but then the call came from outside: ‘Gavin, you absolute fuck, I know you are home and you know I will kick down this door, now open up before you have to pay for a new door and lock without a job!’ Way to go Tina. Gavin just sighed, but obeyed, opening the door. He had planned to tell her to go, but she somehow already had made it past his sluggish reflexes. ‘Holy fuck it reeks!’ The first thing she did was opening the windows, letting in fresh air. ‘How the fuck did you live like this?’, she asked pointing at the dirty plates on the floor. ‘And fucking hell, you look like death!’ Gavin just shrugged. ‘Feel like death too.’ She took him by the back of his shirt and pushed him towards the bathroom. ‘You will take a shower and if I have to watch you do it!’ Gavin tried to protest, but somehow he was already standing under the stream fully clothed. His hoodie began to weigh him down, but he didn’t care. ‘Gavin, I won’t mother you. You will get out of your clothes on your own. Call me if you need anything, I will cook you something.’ Gavin shook his head violently. ‘Tina!’ She turned around to look him in the eyes sternly. ‘You should go. I need more time.’ ‘You got plenty of time. I won’t let you destroy yourself like this! You got fired. That’s all. No one died. No one is ill. You will find a new job and better days will come.’ ‘Someone died’, Gavin disagreed. ‘I did. I died when I handed in that badge, Tina.’ ‘Oh fuck off you melodramatic asshole. I am speaking to you right now. So you fucking are alive and need to wash yourself. And you need food, so I will cook. And then we will talk.’

She had left, but Gavin still winced as if she had struck him with a knife. Talk. Oh, please, anything but that.

‘Any plans what to do now?’ ‘Any idea what kind of job you would like?’ ‘How about going out to a movie tomorrow?’ ‘Gavin, fucking talk to me!’ Gavin swallowed hard. ‘You should leave, really. Thanks for the food and for kicking my ass, but I’m not ready yet. This job was all I ever wanted and all I ever had.’ ‘Bullshit.’ ‘No! No bullshit! For once I’m completely serious Tina! What do you think I have except for it? Everyone phcking hates me, I can’t do anything else and I don’t have anyone to help me! All I have is this flat and my useless phcking cat! I. Have. Nothing! And I’m sorry if a few nice words from pity-party Tina won’t suddenly make me function again!’ ‘Pity-party?’ ‘That’s what this is, isn’t it?’, Gavin shouted. ‘You secretly enjoy it, don’t you? Oh, look someone that has phcked up! Let’s pretend we actually like the guy and don’t just profit from him! Then we can say: see? See how he got better? That was me!’ ‘Gavin!’ ‘What?’, Gavin spat back. ‘Tell me that’s not what you are trying to do! Tell me you mean it, it will be a real nice joke, I can tell you that!’

Tina stood up and in exactly that moment, Gavin had realised he had made a mistake. Another mistake. He had wanted to be angry, about who and what didn’t matter. But well, it did. ‘You know what, Gavin Reed? I’ve been your friend for a long time. Do you really think I listen to an asshole like you, to talks like this and fake being your friend? What weird twist of logic is that? I wanted to help! I really wanted to. But if this is how you respond to that, I clearly wasted my time! Goodbye.’

And Gavin’s days turned back to lying in bed with his cat and stupid phone games, getting up only when he needed to pee, when Bready needed food or when he couldn’t postpone eating any longer himself. One day he actually went out to get some canned food that was easy to prepare, food for Bready and alcohol. Lots of alcohol.

It was two weeks after he had been fired, that he sat in the corner of the living room, a bottle next to him and the shards of a broken glass in his hand, that he carefully pulled out. He didn’t even feel the pain. Not really. Should he… It was tempting. He had no one, he had no job, no goals… Was it even worth it? He had looked far too long at the blood pooling in his hand and the largest shard in his other. It was just a movement after all. But then Bready’s head suddenly appeared and Gavin cursed. ‘No, bad! Shoo! This is dangerous! Damn cat!’ He let the shard fall to the ground and picked up his cat with his uninjured hand, carrying her over to the kitchen and keeping her busy with some treats. Once he was sure she was occupied, he returned to his corner outfitted with a dustpan to pick up the shards so Bready couldn’t step in them.

Only when he saw the bloody shards, he flinched back. He had seen these pictures far too often. Had filed them away as evidence. Had asked himself how people could do something like this, often leaving family and friends behind. And now… Phck no! Phck no, not him! He wouldn’t… He had always been a fighter, hadn’t he? Then why had he given up just moments ago? No, he wouldn’t… He would. He would finally get his ass up and act! What had Tina done last weekend? What had she done…

Open the windows. He retraced her steps after he had gotten rid of the shards and bandaged his hand. He opened the windows, looked to the ground and fetched the dirty plates. He put them in the dishwasher. He cuddled his phcking lifesaver of a cat extra-long and took a shower – this time without his clothes. Then he took his phone from the shelf he had put it on to ignore it and sat down on the couch. He dialled the number on autopilot and waited until he got an answer. It didn’t take long.

‘Tina! Tina, don’t say anything! I don’t know if I can build up this courage again if you say something. Just listen, please. I was an idiot. I was a total asshole to you, and I understand you completely if you don’t want to talk to me or ever see me again. But I really need your help and I want to make up to the terrible things I said to you. I may not have much left, but I have my fantastic cat, I am still alive, and I hope I still have you. I need someone to kick my ass and I know you are best in that. I need you right now. I want to look for a new job, I want to start again, and I don’t want to lose you as my friend.’ He pressed his eyes closed and waited for an answer. ‘Tina?’ ‘What? You told me to shut up and listen! I’m already on my way over to your place with job offers from a few newspapers, you giant asshole. Should I get takeout? Are you hungry?’ ‘You are not mad?’ ‘Oh, believe me, I am mad. But I am also proud of you, Gavin. And if you think you can get rid of me, you don’t know me!’ Gavin audibly exhaled. ‘Oh, Tina, I don’t know what I would do without you.’ ‘Yeah, sometimes I wonder, too. I’ll hang up now, okay? Gotta go place our order. Just wait for me, okay? We’ll fix this shithole of a situation you are in in no time, believe me!’

Gavin smiled, the first time in two weeks. The call had already ended, but he still whispered: ‘Yes. I believe you.’

[>next part]

#detroit become human #dbh #Gavin Reed #Tina Chen #I cried two times while writing this story #bonus points to the person who finds out where XD #Dont worry I'm good I like writing angst but aaaaaaaaaa #might overdid it with this...

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artsy-hobbitses · 3 years

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ok. i’m sure you’re getting a lot of asks right now. if you get the time/patience to answer this, i’m trying to educate myself on this whole IDW thing. for context, i’ve never read it all the way through, i’m currently only aware of the general plot line and specific events. and when i did read it, i was an ignorant teen that came from a place of privilege and saw hardly anything wrong with the (painfully obvious) fascist/problematic themes in the comics; other than of course, they were shitty things the characters had done in their past — now as an ameteur writer that doesn’t know what the fuck they are doing in terms of character flaws and backstory, im trying to learn what is ok to place into one’s content to create those dimensions and morally gray areas many of us love, and what is not. — my question, albeit stupid and deserving of many o’ eye roll, is this: where does the line stand? what could have been done differently in the comics to keep that dimension but not create something so poorly handled as Coptimus, the tangled mess that is the autobot faction, or otherwise? ~thank you for your time.

Oh man, uh, this is definitely quite a heavy ask! To be honest I’m roughly in the same boat as you ie. I haven’t read the this series all the way through and mainly know of the setting/worldbuilding and pre-war shenanigans.

I feel like I might not be the right person to give you a concrete answer on this but I can try and explain what I think went wrong at least in the very early stages of trying to build the entire Autobot/Decepticon societal dynamic, at least from what I know. Like a very basic explanation, I’m gonna keep it under this cut cause I might get long winded.

IDW 2005 introduced some key concepts I think? That sort of set everything in motion as to why the war started: Cold Construction, Functionism, Beast-mode transformers being seen as a pariah class and the idea of a disposable class. None of it is good, all of it is clearly made out to be horribly oppressively on multiple levels.

So you’ve got two sides, you want to portray the good guys as good guys BUT you also want to give your bad guys more depth/make them more human or relatable which is a good thing!

So how do you do that? All the oppressive stuff I stated above which plagued IDW’s Cybertronan society is like, I’d say the morality baseline. Your readers know This Is Bad. People are suffering. That’s how you’ve written it

You make your Big Bad a member of the underclass who undergoes multiple challenges due to his station in life, things about himself he cannot change---he’s beaten down, persecuted, he’s empathetic to every one else’s suffering, he’s angry and wants to do something about it. He’s proactive about it.

LOGICALLY, because your future bad guy is all these things any sane person would be ROOTING for, you want your future good guy to actually be starting from somewhere of the same point; a good guy who also suffers, goes through major challenges and sees these injustices and wants to do something about it.

Like Magneto and Charles Xavier are generally good examples---they’re both persecuted against in a way we can all emphasize with, they’re not blind to these issues, and they both want to make things better. The biggest divide between them is that they’re going around it in very different ways.

In trying to keep both sides starting from the same morality baseline, imho IDW failed horribly; The major Autobots are not shown, pre-war, to care about what’s going on. Ratchet and Nightbeat seem to be the closest it comes to barely questioning the system (excluding Prime who is implied only got it after reading Megatron’s writings, and even then is too trusting of a system the reader and many others in-story can see is not working). They’re not shown proactively taking steps to fix issues that are affecting everyone who isn’t above a certain class. Most of them come from relatively middle to high stations in life ie. scientists and doctors, who we are told will always have more rights than manual workers, miners, etc, even in life and death situations. More so, the underclass (beast mode transformers, cold constructs, victims of Empurata, the working class in general) is woefully underrepresented in their ranks. They’re very, very clearly privileged and nearly all of them have some degree of power/social standing that the Bad Guys do not. This is, somehow, the group we’re suppose to identify with.

Instead, it’s the Decepticons who are shown to have to fight to get basic rights. It’s Megatron starving himself when he has so little already to save Terminus whose rations have been cut because they can’t work anymore and are seen as worthless. It’s Laserbeak (or Buzzsaw? It wasn’t clear) telling Ravage to not anger a Senator by refusing to serve them their Energon, because “They’d remove your spark for that!!”. Their ranks are made up of people who would be killed for simply questioning their station in life or forcefully ‘rewired’ to conform with the status quo. Their ranks are made up of people we have been told are suffering the worst underneath all these injustices---Megatron and Starscream are Cold Constructs (as are Prowl and Blaster but we don’t see Blaster’s side of things and Prowl is accepting of what he is because he was made in a higher station in life---a cop), Shockwave is an Empurata and Shadowplay survivor, Ravage/Laserbeak/Buzzsaw are Beast Modes (Autobots Steeljaw and Ramhorn also are of course, but they don’t have major roles pre-war and we do not see how they’re affected by all this). This is, pre-war, the group we’re told are suppose to be the Bad Guys.

Orion Pax is portrayed as a cop, one we’re told is very dutiful but also one who rushes to fill jail cells and is clearly more preoccupied with order than anything else. He’s, as good as he likes to try to be, is a cog of the system and he doesn’t do anything proactive to really fix it earlier on outside of shouting in the Senate. If he had been proactive after reading Megatron’s writings ie.a cop fighting the system, tried to be more empathetic to the people in his district? If he had left the police force and tried to make changes by himself? Maybe readers would have accepted him better. All I keep asking is “Why the hell didn’t you do something sooner? Why did you, as a good man, let it get this far even when you knew it was wrong?” Megatron is portrayed as a working man who suffered police brutality for speaking out in his writings and he keeps writing, keeps fostering a revolution to fight the oppressive system. Megatron is the fire, the lead figure here early on who has actual chartable growth, the one who wants to change things even if it it meant violence because that was how the system dealt with him---maybe readers don’t agree with how he goes around things, but who else was really challenging or doing anything to fix it? Why would anyone want to root for Orion Pax over Megatron in this situation?

TLDR: The morality baseline in this entire backstory pre-war was “Fight against societal oppression” which should have been really easy to get behind. Both sides should have started from that baseline. The Decepticons did. The Autobots did not.

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sweater-daddiesdumbdork · 4 years

Text

Life After Snowpiercer: End of the Line

Summery- Matts Alive! Curtis is given a choice, learns the truth about the kids, You are attacked, and also still alive! Some non con implied, but all mild.

Word Count- 5806

Chapter 4 / Masterlist

Curtis just shook his head in disbelief at the man before him, certainly grown up from the eleven year old boy he knew, but somethings never change. His eyes, Your eyes looking back at him, but they held a bit of coldness in them that yours didnt. “H-ow? What is going on. They TOOK you Matt.”Although Curtis always assured you to hold out hope Matt was alive, he knew the likelihood was not good, but he could have hope to keep you from feeling hopeless. Then after you had healed, accepted that it was a possibility, you still had the nightmares, crying in the dark for your brother, Curtis waking to your sobs and cradling you in close to protect you... of course he couldnt let you suffer like that. But here Matt was, alive.

“Yea, Wilford saved me Curtis from a life of shit. You all did this to yourselves back there. Always plotting and scheming to take control of what isnt fucken yours.” Matt looked his nose down at Curtis, glancing away at Claude and smiling fondly at her. “She knew that I wasnt like that, did you sweetheart?” He caressed the womans face and leaned down to peck her lips. “Nams still alive out there, can you watch over him and his daughter till were finished in here.” She complied with a soft nod, leaving the three men alone.

Wilford cleared his throat. “Oh trust me Curtis, Matt took a while to understand what the truth was. But he came around, didnt you son?” Smiling almost loving at Matt. “He understands what the train needs from him, and Im an old man now, I wont be here forever. You and Matt working together, well this train is my legacy and will continue on forever. With some help of course.” He moved to open a cupboard and Timmy crawled out, Curtis eyes widening at this next shock. Timmy to was alive! The boy just ignored Curtis though and proceeded to go up the stairs, and enter in a car.

“Timmy? What are you doing, get back here?!” Curtis called to the boy, but he merely buckled himself in and whoosh, he was gone. Curtis turned to look at Wilford and Matt “Where the fuck did he go?!”

“Into the engine of course, it builds up crud, and kids like Timmy, they clear it out, also run some of the gears that need help. Reason we need all those kids from the tail end is although the train is self sustaining, the parts wear out. Many have gone extinct, and we have no way to replace them anymore. We ran out of metal for workers to mold. So we need someone who can fit into tight spaces. Gotta be about 4 or 5, you tail enders are always so scrawny. When they outsize, we replace them.”

Jesus fucking christ... how many kids have they taken over the years? At least over 2 dozen. Oh Curtis.... He could hear your sorrow now, it broke your voice, picture the tears streaming down your face as you mourned for all those babies you all lost in the tale end. Curtis growled out “What happens once they age out?”

Matt rolled his shoulders nonchalant like “Well if someone here wants one, they can just take them as there own, or if no one else can use them in there service, we execute them. Originally we were just gonna bring them back, but hell over crowding has started becoming an issue. You all really need to learn more creative fucking methods. What was the term you used the other day Wilford? ‘Like a bunch of god damn rabbits back there?” He chuckled at his attempt of wit.

What the fuck did they do to you Matt?!

They have no idea, thought Curtis, all the people they broke taking the children. The parents weve found that died because it broke there heart, shattered there will to live. How many women in the tail end lived in FEAR, not at the dangers of child birth, but that they might lose there children and can not stop it. How many times you confessed to him that you just couldnt get pregnant, it was just to dangerous to bring a life into all this, although he knew that you want nothing more then to be a mom one day. They had no idea they caused all that pain.

Curtis, they fully know. They just dont care. Your voice flat, the truth.

Wilford shook his head, chuckling “Now now, we need them more now then ever. As I said before, the front end and tail end work together. We provide them with shelter, food and safety, they provide us with necessary replacement train parts and the occasional entertainment of cleaning up the excess baggage the train carries. Already were running smoother then before thanks to The Great Curtis Revolution.” That fucker is was still trying to make that a thing, Curtis could already see you rolling your eyes.

Matt cheerfully turned back towards Curtis. “And I heard that Y/N will be coming up to the front, since you two seem to be an item now. I say Curtis you will have more options now then just her if you want. Im sure after all this time your getting bored of her. Although I cant say Im surprised about you two, she always followed you since she met you like a little whimpering puppy. How is she anyways? I haven't thought about her in a while till Wilford brought you up. I suspect shes well.”

Curtis brows came together in anger at the mans words, at everything. That was his sister and he talked about her as if she was just a item Curtis happened to have possession of. “You havent thought about her? Your fucken kidding right? That woman constantly thinks about you, every damn day. Everything she does for others in the tail end is in your memory Matt. Even after all these years she has nightmares about how she couldnt save you, She thinks you will hate her because she cant get to you. And you havent thought about her this whole time?!” Curtis started laughing, shaking his head at all of it. Anger just making him snap at this point. “I cant believe im having this conversation with you of all people Matt. Fuck my life, they brainwashed you man. Everything about this.” Curtis waved his hand around and looked back at Matt, the laughter having died, now it was just cold facts he was raging out. “All this, its maybe more messed up then us starving and eating people, we were just trying to survive. You all think your some kind of gods for supposedly saving us and were a fucking game, you cant see why its so fucked up though, can you?!.”

Matt looked appalled over the outburst and Wilford spoke up “God Curtis your so over dramatic, cant you loosen up? Your acting like the fate of the world rests on you. Trust me, you have no control over that, and sounds like a good thing. I doubt you could handle that pressure. Look at you, so tightly wound.” Wilford made a motion like he had gone stiff, shaking.

Matt snorted in anger at the situation. “You act like you all werent happy for me, that it was my fault I earned my place by Wilfords side.” he basically spat out this next line. “That I should even care about what happened to either of you. That I deserved to be in that same shit hole as you? Wilford you really cant be serious about having Curtis be our Minister. He still lives in the old world view, has yet to embrace new world values. We are FUCKING GODS Curtis, make no mistake. Our word is the law on this train. People like my sister, all this for the people bullshit yall preached back there all the time, have no real place here. You both will get it soon enough.”

This was the final straw, Curtis couldnt, he just couldnt deal with the vile they were spewing, the lives they themselves sacrificed to try to kill him, and it was all a game to them, let alone the friends Curtis dragged into danger to get him here. With a twist, he tackled Wilford first, he had a pistol in his robes, it made sense. His right hand reared back and he caught the man unaware. When Curtis fist impacted, Wilfords head snapped back with a gush of blood exploding from his mouth and nose, those iced blue eyes rolled back and yes, it was that easy to just knock his senses askew.

Matt on the other hand had the upper hand, and he tried locking Curtis arms to his side, but a quick whip with his head backwards cracked against Mats face, and he howled out in anger and pain, releasing his hold against Curtis and cupping his face. “Your Fucker! You son of a bitch, I will kill you!” he screamed out. Clearly Matt forgot anything he learned in the tail end, cause he didnt even prepare for Curtis kick of his heavy treaded boots, hitting squarely in the chest and threw him back into the kitchenette.

Reaching wildly, Matt was able to grasp hold of a butcher knife from a black, slashing it so completely out of sync, that as Curtis ascended on him, he ducked backwards quickly when it wildly arched to him and his hand grabbed Mats wrist, twisting and crushing it in his single hand as he drew in close to the man, his hand grabbing his other hand to keep him from hitting him. “I would like to see you try, I came up here expecting alot more then over privileged cum stains like yourselves. Your finished.” He twisted Matts wrist further till he heard a snap, the knife clashing to the metal floor. Matt howled, not one of those cries out of pain, no this was a howl that almost sounded animalistic, he wrung his hand out of Curtis grasp and cradled it to his chest. Wasting no more time, Curtis ended up bashing his head into the overhead cupboards till he felt him go limp, releasing him to the floor. “Y/N, your brothers a fucking dick...” he muttered to himself.

One last issue to really take care of, Claude, she was out there guarding Yona and Nam. He heard her voice from outside of the gate, and going up behind it, he waited till he could see her yellow arm stretch beyond the gate, gun pointing inwards “Mat? answer me hon” and at that moment, Curtis pushed the door as hard as possible, crushing her into the door frame. She yelped out in pain and Curtis reached around to fist his hand in her hair and drag her into the room, kicking at her hand until it knocked the gun out. “Yona get in here now.” Claude hissed as she twisted and turned to get loose from Curtis and he gave her a vigorous shake to stun her, her hands trying to tug his loose from her scalp. “Your dead buddy, wait till Matt finds out you even touched me with your filthy paws.”

“I dont think hes doing much for a while sweetheart” Curtis promised her when Yona appeared in the room, wrinkling her nose at the scene before her. “We thought they would have killed you Curtis” She said softly while Nam followed along behind, sluggish. His face was pale and the rag he had pressed in his chest was soaked, still dripping big heavy drops of blood, gravity making a steady drip drip drip echo softly in this metal dungeon. “Not yet, they had other ideas apparently. Yona, can you sense where Timmy is? He went into the engine and we got to pull him out.” She had displayed hints of Clairvoyance throughout there journey, and she nodded, turning away to start searching. Claude chose this moment to start up again, smacking Curtis right in his gut and groin causing him to cuss out and tighten his grip in her hair to keep from releasing her.

“Fucken bitch” he hissed and having had enough of her, he knocked her upside the head, her screaming the whole time till she to went silent as her partners, she to was simply dropped to the floor with a thump. Still trying to catch his air once again, the ache going dull easy to ignore. Dont underestimate them Curtis a familiar whispered voice came to him, taking quick glances at the other two. He went to check Wilford, collecting his pistol still in his robe, and hobbled over to where Claude lost hers near the door. Handing one off to Nam, he spoke softly to him, to keep Yona from breaking concentration. “Are you okay?”

“Yea im fine.” The man grunted in his language, loosely translated by the box hanging off his neck. Just then he coughed and spat a wad of blood. It was clear he wasnt fine, just from the way he was wheezing, Curtis guessed at this point his lungs were filling with fluid. He had heard it before with others in the tail end. No one here was trained to drain it either, sure now that anyone who could was probably dead. He gave Nam a knowing look and the man cast a downwards glance. “Dont tell Yona, not yet.”

It was then Yona sprawled to the floor, clawing to pry up a tile “Curtis, hes here! Hes right under the tile.” her fingers scrambled against the smooth tile, and Curtis grabbed the abandoned butcher knife, wedging the tip into a crack, pushing till it popped open. What they opened was unlike anything Curtis had seen before. The small boy was squatting among the gears, digging his hands into chunks of oily gunk and digging it out, flinching every now and then when a piece of metal gear would cut shallowly into him, his arms were covered in bloody shallow knicks. Robotic like motions, he plunged his hand into the gunk and scooped out a handful. “Timmy! Timmy look up!” The little boy looked up, but it wasnt like he was seeing Curtis, more like through him. Curtis whats wrong with him? “Timmy you gotta get out of there, can you go back out?” I dont know Baby, I dont know what they done to him.

The boy just ignored him, his sightless gaze going back to the task at hand, and it was then Wilford made his presence known with a heavy groan, pushing himself up to a sit, swiping at his face. “Maybe I made a mistake with you Curtis... “ His gaze bleary as he sought out Curtis and Yona kneeling over the hole. “You just dont get what were doing here, cant see the bigger picture.” He moved to get up and Nam came between them, wheezing worst then before but ready to defend them. They were running out of time and Curtis knew it. A glance at his hand was the resolve he needed. I mean, it was the sacrifice he originally was going to make in a sense anyways. And into the gears his arm shot, stopping everything in its tracks, almost immediantly the gears all locked up, the train shuddered and wobbled unsteady.

Nam was blocking Wilford from ascending, but was struggling, surprise the gun had no fucking bullets in it, Yona reached in the gaps and stretched to reach for Timmy, who still seemed oblivious to what was going on above them. “Please Timmy, take my hand.” She turned her head to the side and stretched further, facing Matt whom now was starting to groan as well, Yona started to panic “Curtis, fuck hes waking up!” Panting through the pain of his arm getting crushed in the gears, he glanced to see Matt roll to his back, covering his face with a series of curses. Curtis, get my baby out of there, please! This time it was Tonyas voice yelling at him to save her child. Pushing Yona back with his free hand, he shot it into the one slot Timmy might fit through and grasped the boys skinny arm, hauling him up and pushing him to Yona who wrapped him up in her arms and started to pull back.

Matts foot connected squarely with Cutis jaw, wrenching his arm out of the gears, half skinning it in the process, his whole body flinging backwards. The enraged man landed on Curtis, trying to choke him out with his single hand, his broke wrist still cradling against his chest. Even with both short the use of an arm, Curtis was able to overpower him, pushing him to sprawl backwards. In there scuffle, the gun Curtis had tucked away in his jacket fell out and in both of there lunge to retrieve it, they scuffled it across the floor to land in the open hole. Matts eyes widened a bit “Oh shit!” It took a second for Curtis to understand what the issue was, yes that gun was loaded and it was currently twisting into the gears, making the entire train shudder, then a ping ping ping!

The pressure had set off the bullets in the weapon, and all around them steam shot out of the pipes. Everyone stopped what they were doing, looking around with fear at the reaction, and there was another mighty shudder. “Its gonna go off the tracks, good job fuckers!” Wilford hissed out in a panicked rage. Another shudder and the nose of the train must have hit something, an ice block on the tracks Baby your voice sounding scared in his confused mind, cause it jerked upwards, loosing traction on the track, without the wheels working in tandem to keep the forward momentum. It scrambled everyone, slamming them to the left side, Curtis skidded on his backside, crashing into Matt, who slammed into the kitchenette cabinets. The kids they went flying backwards towards the half opened gate, falling into the car just behind, Wilford and Nam entangled together smashed into the bolted down kitchen table. Claude, she screamed in fear at just waking up to everyone being whipped around spinning backwards across the floor. The engine started to tip to its side. The side of the Engine suddenly was ripped away with a screech of metal and sparks, having hit cliff side rocks. Wilford and Nam got sucked out of the giant hole, and thats when Curtis went black, something falling and smashing him in the skull.

During this time, in the tail end, James was dragging you back down the aisle, your body bouncing against random bunks and junk scattered around from where they had torn everything apart. Finally he tossed you to sprawl on the ground and fell on your stomach, bouncing enough to knock the air out of you. “I thought we already talked about this hunny, just be a good girl and spread them. Not that I dont like it when you all fight a bit.” Thinking he had subdued you, he pulled back to hike up your coat and shirts to what he claimed as his prize. .

Taking a chance you twist and shoot a foot out to hit him in his chest to topple backwards and start to crawl away, but a large hand encircled your ankle and jerk you to fall on your belly with a omph! Panicked, your hands shoot out under a bunk to see if theres anything to hold onto. Your hand closes around a small shard, fitting in the palm. You snatch it as he keeps dragging you back, flipping you to your back with a smirk.

Calm down Y/N, wait for the right opportunity. Of course it was Curtis calm voice, the one he used when he was bringing you back from a panic attack. You take a deep breath, and change tactics on James, stopping trying to fight, you hold up a hand in surrender. “Please, I give! What do you want?” James hand fisted in your mess of hair, tipping your head back till your throat was exposed. Dragging his tongue over you, you fight back a wave of bile burning your throat at the feeling of the man all over you. “well what do you think sweetheart, I want your sweet pussy gripping the best dick you ever had and begging for more.” God how the fuck do you not gag at that. Concentrate Baby. Praise how good he is. you shudder in the mans grip as he starts to palm a bruised breast, twisting it painfully like before. Do I really have to Curtis?

Trust me Babygirl

“You made me feel so damn good last time, and I was so ungrateful.” trying to make your voice husky with false lust and looking up at him wide eyed. Reaching up you cup James face and bite your lip, giving it your all. “But how about this time you let me make you feel good? A thank you.” Leaning up your brush your lips against his, really putting your all into drawing him into the kiss. Fucker fell for it, and he got caught up in what you were doing with your tongue, where your hands were running all over him, palming his crotch through his pants. “Biggest ive ever had” Cant believe Im saying this. God I hate you bastards. You were fighting everything in you to not start crying in disgust. Finally when he was panting against your lips, you push him hard enough to make him roll, his hands grasping your hips to have you follow, and now.... now you fucking dick head, I have you right where I want you, you think triumphant when you straddle his stomach.

That you do baby, you know what to do next. Curtis hissed in your mind. Dont hesitate, hard and quick.

Arching up, you smile so sweetly at James looking up at you hazily. “God I knew you were a good fuck, but this is even better then I thought it could be.Tell me im the best, better then whatever his name was.” Tracing his chest, and winking at him to respond. “Oh baby, Curtis was nothing like you.” And with a quick twist of your wrist, you shove that shard of metal in his eye, pressing down hard and quick with your palm as you could. You literally felt it pop, and the warmth of blood shoot against your palm. “Hes every fucking thing a man should be!” Smashing your hand against the next vulnerable part of him, his nose, he bucks in pain underneath you, shooting you off. Tumbling, you scramble up and start running towards the back as James is screeching, dodging the unsuspecting hands of other guards reaching out of the bunks they were laying in, some of them following James choices and there captives started to fight back in the confusion you caused. “GET THAT WHORE!” James screeching, his hand covering his eye as he struggled up, red gore oozing between his fingers.

You were looking for anyplace to hide when thrown off your feet violently.

It wasnt another person, the train started rattling on its tracks and screeching, fishtailing back and forth. One violent turn and you were flung into the bars of a bunk, screaming out as pain blossomed white hot through your spine, tumbling now. Bottom was above you, crashing onto what should have been the roof of the train, items pelting you, bouncing off and crushing you. Your cries of shock and pain turning ragged when it all rolled once more, going right side up, the kids and other survivors going through a similar experience, whipping around and around as it kept rolling and bouncing. The back end of the train had gone off the side of a cliff and falling into a valley under the tracks. everyone whipped around and around, till it crashed to a stand still.

Groaning you push up under a bunch of random debris, and try to focus. Leaning over and puking from the dizziness, you push away from the mess and look around at other passengers and guards pushing themselves out of the mess, somewhere bright light was streaming in. Fuck fuck fuck fuck, you have to figure out how to get one of there guns before they take control again. Pushing up, you stumble around people, some of them eerily still, twisted bodies and blank stares. Not all survived. Relief flooded you as you saw more and more kids scrambling to your side. “Quick, find anything we can use as a weapon.” urging them with a hushed voice, they scattered to fulfill your request. Coming across a dead guard, your quick to strip him off anything valuables. Shouldering a rifle over your shoulder, more children and some of the women came back, fight in the adults eyes, most of the kids holding something they could use.

“Hey, Yall get yer asses back here!” some fucker drawled heavy accented, and a look over your shoulder saw that they had rejoined ranks. “Quick, get out that hole!” You urge your group, scrambling back the opposite way where the light was, bullets whizzed at you, ducking just in time, it clipped a woman next to you, fuck it was the woman who helped you before, Sara. Sara cried out grabbing her shoulder. Grabbing her waist, you tug her to follow along and aim the automatic rifle in your hand, just randomly shooting behind you as she climbed up to fall out of the hole with a yelp. No one followed you as you to scrambled out, maybe for once luck was on your side, there seemed to be alot less of them then there was of you survivors.

Crashing rather ungracefully over the edge of the train car, you land in the snow, and blinded you try looking around, drawing in for the first time in 18 years, fresh air. It burned your lungs,the intense cold and just that it was so god damn clean. Looking around your surrounded by cliffs, and as your eyes go into focus you can see where you all went over the edge, snow still rolling down, and scattered around you was a few more cars, above one hung precariously over the edge. Fuck, how did you all survive that? “Y/N, what do we do?” What do you do? What would Curtis do? You all had never discussed being on the outside. “We have to get away from here, they will be coming out any second after us.” Everyone shivered around you, wrapping arms around themselves. The entire group surrounding you wouldnt make it for long without shelter and heat.

“Curtis” You voice was soft, he missed that.

“Hey baby” He looked over his shoulder and smiled.

“Curtis” You looked lost to him, confused.

“Im right here Babes” He held out an hand to reach for you.

“CURTIS” Why wouldnt you take his hand?

”Babygirl, whats wrong?” Striding over to reach for You, his brows coming together in confusion.

“CURTIS!” Fear and Panic etched all over you

He sat straight up with a gasp, Yona falling back from where she had been leaning over him, her face a look of fear and shock, tears tracking down her face. “What the fuck happened?!” Curtis cussed as he wildly looked around, Timmy was rocking on his heels next to Curtis, and he reached over to touch the boy, make sure he was real. “Yona... wheres Nam?” The girl shook her head, and straightened from where he knocked her over.

“Wilford and Dad are not here. That guy and girl are, over there.” She pointed among the mess. “But they wont wake up, I checked.” Curtis moved to get up, wincing. There was something broken, just ribs hopefully. He wouldnt be taking deep breaths anytime soon. And then his gaze went to his mangled hand, Okay this is more serious. Wincing as he pulled his sleeve over it to protect it, it had at least clotted enough to stop bleeding but had no idea what the real damage was yet on it. Timmy just stayed rocking nearby, Curtis debating what to do, the boy had obviously been traumatized by what had happened. But at this point, there was more pressing matters. “Yona, grab that butcher knife” Somehow they still had it.

Going to a panel, Curtis inspected it and with the knife, they managed to pry it off, and tossing the panel to the side. Ahhh, bingo, Curtis tested the wires and finding them not live wires, he started to pull and yank them out. “Cut these, a good three feet at least” He stretched it out, and Yona started slicing back and forth. Right now his first worry was Matt and Claude coming around before they could be tied up. He probably should just kill them after everything, but Curtis was just done with death. At least for now, and if You ever found out he had killed your brother, He simply couldnt. Claude, well we will see what ends up happening with that bitch. You snigger. Curtis had to hide a bit of a laugh, apparently his imagination made you a bit dark.

Yona, well he would be royally screwed without the girl, she was nimble and quick with her knots, the two of them dragging the still unconscious duo to a wall, tying them tight and far apart so they couldnt help one another, Curtis finally sighed in relief. At least for now he didnt have to worry about them at the moment. Yona again came to the rescue,having found coats in the other car, wrapping her and Timmy up.

“Theres a way out in the other car Curtis, a few are outside, just... standing around. I think they are high still.” Her own eyes bleary, it occurred to Curtis she to was coming down from the kronoles and alcohol she consumed on the trudge to the front. His voice soft “Are you okay yourself?” She twitched a bit and nodded. “Just after effects, nothing I havent felt before.” Curtis didnt like it, but he had to trust her, completely out of options. Yona took Timmys hand and together the three of them worked there way out of the Engine, and the next car, well it wasnt much better off then theres was, completely flipped over, several dead. Curtis was still questioning how they even made it out. What about the tail end? You? The anxiety of not knowing.... A deep breath was drawn in, and made him instantly regret that, fuck my ribs.

Popping his head out, rubbing at his face, he took it in. Oh God your voice echoes, and before him, stretched across the blinding whiteness of where you all ended up, was just destruction, chaos, and more death. Twisted metal cars, split open to spill out its contents to scatter across the snow, it seemed like the end wasnt to bad off the further he looked down the line, but shouldnt there be more?

Wheres the rest of the train Curtis?

Were going to go find out Y/N, Im not leaving you out there alone.

Nearby there was a small group of people, most of them were hiding in heavy fur coats, and watching them for a moment, Curtis pegged Yona to be right. These fuckers are high as a god damn kite. There were a few though, that looked more put together, and Curtis recognized one of them, his eyes narrowing. Right now he didnt have any of the typical gear on, but it was one of the men who would bring there protein bars. Wonder how many you I got to deal with? Curtis sighed, fuck he was so tired suddenly. “TImmy climb on my back” He ordered and squatted enough for the boy to wrap his arms around his neck. Going to the edge, he deemed it safe enough and jumped down, stifling a groan at the jolt in his ribs. His hand, god that was just a steady throb.

Yona inched to the edge, her feet coming over the edge, and she slid off as much as possible till she landed on Curtis shoulder, his arm wrapping around her thighs to keep her from tipping over and easing down for her to get off. As he straightened the men whom he dared guessed were some of the guards came over, they were scuffed, but not bad off as Curtis nearly was, and he braced himself for the typical aggression he knew from them, but they all held up there hands in a peace sign.

“Seriously man, were not going to do anything.” Curtis took a step back from them anyways, keeping the kids behind him. Yona peaked around him warily, studying them.

“Curtis right? weve heard of you. Listen, we have to look for survivors, this group over here is kind of useless right now, and these cars might have people trapped.” One started, another picked up.

“Front, Back.... it makes no difference now, Theres probably not enough left to make it count.”

“Right... suddenly im supposed to believe you all have a good conscious?” Curtis sure as hell wasnt going to trust them, 18 years of entrapment will do that to a man. Yona tugged on his jacket, and he spared her a look.

“Good, they will help us.” He nodded encouragment, and his gut twisted. The girl hadnt been wrong yet, but his mistrust and instinct was still was over riding that. He trusted another, and betrayed everything he believed in.

Curtis she hasnt been wrong yet, shes special.

Alright Alright, he thought, holding out his uninjured hand, he growled out. “truce for now... we wont give you any trouble. Were making our way towards the back to check on our people.” One of the guards winced.

“The back? We were coming over a bridge when the train derailled. Honestly the fact any of this is still here is shocking. Im sure the back end came off the rest of the train and went over the cliff side. A fall like that in a hunk of metal.” The man shrugged in a im sorry motion “The chances are not great anyone in those cars would survive such a fall. The tail end, its gone. Any survivors will be making there way up this way.” He looked over his shoulder and sure enough, people were slowly coming in groups. “Slim, the chances are slim, but... maybe...”

Slim, the chances were slim, but... maybe... it was all Curtis heard after he said those words.

@what-is-your-plan-today @curtisbbq @jtargaryen18 @p8tn0lish @jeremyrennerfanxxxx123

#curtis everett x reader #curtis everett #snowpiercer #chris evans #omg fresh air #they are outside!#so many die though #this one was exhausting #so much thoughts in my head

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riseofthecommonwoodpile · 4 years

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some quick thoughts on Michael Schmidt’s Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism aka I Fucking Hated This Book:

(and also I’m kinda sick and my adhd meds are wearing off for the day so this will be poorly written, sorry)

I picked up Cartography because it seemed like a short but global history of anarchist movements from the 1860′s to today, which sounds great! I’m an anarchist, I like history, what could go wrong? and what i found was genuinely one of the worst books i’ve read in years. i’ve thought about formatting this into a proper review, but no one really cares, so let’s do bullet points:

—the most immediately obvious and glaring problem is that Schmidt treats Marxism as if it is an equal (or sometimes implied to be even greater) enemy to anarchists than capitalism. he at one point literally does the “fascism was bad, but the USSR was just as bad” lib thing, and it comes across as completely ideologically blinded. i am well aware of the ways in which anarchists have been treated under centralized communist states, and let’s just say i am Not A Fan, but even thinking about that, the fact that the only opposition to anarchism we hear about regularly is marxist-leninist opposition, and not fucking CAPITALIST OPPOSITION, skews it into the most blindly and dumbly polemical shit i’ve read since, ironically, Lenin’s State and Revolution —every time he says Maoism he puts it in scare quotes? “Maoism”. it’s silly —he claims that anarcho-syndicalism is the most influential and powerful leftist movement and idea of the 20th century, which like....... —by “anarchism”, he means, specifically, anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism, even that which is not explicitly anarchist. he says anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism are the same thing, basically, so we’ll just call them both anarcho-syndicalism, and also any anarchism that doesn’t follow Bakunin isn’t really anarchism, the only way forward for anarchism is through platformism, and all other forms of anarchism are individualist and don’t care about class struggle. i don’t even need to get into how absurd that all is. even if you agree with it, that shit has to be defended, it is not self-evident as he treats it —the history is both a.) bad and b.) terribly written. this comes across in three main ways: one, there is an equation of all union efforts with anarcho-syndicalism, which, yes, was very influential on union organizing throughout the world (and continues to be very influential), but that equivalence is just not helpful or explanatory. it’s clearly just polemic to make it seem like there were more influential and powerful anarchist groups in the world than there actually were. two, he just throws out numbers for the sizes of some of these groups, and the vast, VAST majority of the time gives no context for them. he will say X group in Uruguay had X amount of members in 1935...but i have no idea if that’s a lot or a little. what percentage of workers in this industry was that? what percentage of the population? how did that compare with other political groups in that same time and place? without context these numbers mean literally nothing. and beyond that, some of the groups he talks about are so tiny and dissolved so quickly that it feels a lot of the time like i’m reading a brief history of global communism that included, in the 8 pages of actual history from 1990-today, an entire paragraph about every splinter group of the US red guards —three, and this one requires its own bullet point because of how much it sucked to read, he goes into way too much detail for the space he’s given himself, and there is no reasonable way for him to adequately discuss or give even an impression of every group he brings up. for example, in the 15 history-focused pages for what he called the “third wave” from 1924-1949 (and these are small pages too, about 4 1/2″ x 7 1/4″, like the size of a sci-fi paper back but with regular medium size text), the following groups are brought up and given abbreviations:

AAUD (General Workers’ Union of Germany)

AAU-E (General Labor Union- Unity Organization)

ACAT (American Continental Workingmen’s Association

ACF (Anarchist Communist Federation)

AFB (Anarchist Federation of Britain)

AFD (German Anarchist Federation)

AFP (Anarchist Federation of Poland)

CCRA (Continental Commission of Anarchist Relations)

CGIL (General Confederation of Italian Workers)

CGIL (General Italian Workers’ Federation) [Yes, they have the same abbreviation, because they are the same thing, but are presented twice with slightly different names and given abbreviations both times]

CGT (General Confederation of Labor, given in a previous chapter but I had to google)

CIA (Anarchist International Commission)

CLU (Conference of Labor Unions)

CNT (National Confederation of Labor)

CNT-DG (General Delegation of the CNT)

CRIA (Anarchist International Relations Commission)

EAAF (East Asian Anarchist Federation)

FAF (Francophone Anarchist Federation)

FAGPL (Federation of Anarchist-Communist Groups of Poland and Lithuania)

FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation)

FAKB (Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria)

FAU (Free Worker’s Union)

FAUD (Free Workers Union of Germany)

FdCAI (Federation of Italian Anarchist Communes)

FFLU (Federation of Free Labor Unions)

FFS (Federation of Libertarian Socialists)

FFSB (Federation of Free Society Builders)

FG (Free Trade Unions)

FIJL (Libertarian Youth Federation of Iberia)

FISR (International Revolutionary Syndicalist Federation)

FKAD (Federation of Communist Anarchists of Germany)

FORV (Venezuelan Regional Workers’ Federation)

FvDG (Free Association of German Trade Unions

GAK (Group of Anarchist Communists, defined in a previous chapter but I had to google just now)

GFP (General Worker’s Federation)

HCH (General League of Koreans)

IFA (Presented without definition, I think defined in a previous chapter but google says it stands for International of Anarchist Federations, but that doesn’t make sense because that was formed in the late 60′s, way after this and the previous chapters, so idk)

IWA (International Workers Association, given in a previous chapter and presented in this one without explanation but that I know of through outside knowledge)

IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, same as previous entry)

JAC (Japanese Anarchist Club)

JAF (Japanese Anarchist Federation)

JJLL (Libertarian Youth)

KACF (Korean Anarchist Communist Federation)

KAF (Korean Anarchist Federation)

KAF-C (Korean Anarchist Federation in China)

KAF-M (Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria)

KRF (Korean Revolutionist Federation)

KSS (Black Front Society)

KYFSC (Korean Youth Federation in South China)

LSC (Libertarian Socialist Council)

MLNA (North African Libertarian Movement)

OVB (Independent League of Trade Unions)

POI (Italian Worker’s Party)

PSAR (Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party

PSI (Italian Socialist Party)

RPAU (Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, presented without definition but defined in a previous chapter and I know of through outside knowledge. Of note, I almost never hear this referred to like this. Everyone says The Black Army)

RR (Worker’s Solidarity)

RRU (Worker’s Solidarity Movement)

SPD (Marxist Social Democratic Party)

SPIRA (Provisional Secretariat on International Relations)

SWF (Syndicalist Worker’s Federation)

UAI (Italian Anarchist Union)

UCAI (Union of Communist Anarchists of Italy)

USI (Italian Syndicalist Union)

VB (Free Union)

ZK (Kronstadt Accords)

ZSP (Polish Syndicalist Union)

ZZZ (Union of Trade Unions)

bruh I am not joking, he brings all of these up in 15 pages and it seems like you are expected to be able to both remember them and keep track of them as you read, although i’m almost certain a great deal of them are given an abbreviation, mentioned in one sentence, and then never mentioned again. however, i can not promise you that, because you KNOW i could not keep this shit straight or remember any of it.

anyways i am so fucking fed up typing all of those that i don’t want to do this anymore. the book fucking sucks, don’t get it.

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allthighsnolies · 4 years

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A quick list of excuses for police violence

1. "a few bad eggs"

If we can't hold the police to a higher ethical standard, tell me again why we should respect them?

Someone might say that even though some cops are abusive, violent and racist, but that they aren't representative of the police force.

If an Amazon employee can't work fast enough, they're fired.

If a doctor puts someone in danger, they lose their license.

If an author can't finish a book, they don't get published.

"a few bad eggs" never EVER applies to those who aren't in power, it apparently only applies to those who wish to not be held accountable for their actions.

So tell me, why do a minority of protestors behaving violently discredit a movement?

2. "But people are being selfish, they're destroying property"

During the pandemic, many stores stayed open, forcing their workers to either put themselves in danger or be replaced without compensation. During the protests, stores are shutting their doors, barricading the windows, and sending their workers home.

It appears that they care more about protecting their property than protecting human life, the destruction of property sends a clear message and hits companies where it hurts: the wallet.

3. "The protestors should be peaceful"

THEY ARE. In most cases the protestors were peaceful, nonviolent, and did not engage in violence until provoked or put in danger.

Let's also not forget that politicians and companies have been paying people (and compelling their employees) for YEARS to go out and "protest." Unfortunately, there are people who will incite public violence for a few bucks, and they are not representative of the movement.

4. "Peaceful protest is the only way to get anything done"

Wrong again. Peaceful protests have rarely been effective, and when they are it's because they were coupled with other (non-peaceful, economically damaging) methods of protest. Civil rights movement? There were sure as HELL riots. LGBTQ movement? Stonewall was NOT peaceful.

Suffragettes? Shit hit the fan.

The American revolution was violent and cost many lives, and people seem to be proud of that movement.

Civil war? Absolute bloodbath. And the modern-day Confederates seem to be pretty proud of that.

It is in the best interest of the government (which is funded by the rich), to push the lie of successful peaceful protests so that people can go chant for an hour, feel better, and then feel accomplished and go back to complacency for a while.

If you only like violent unrest when white people are doing it, reevaluate.

5. "police are human too, they might get scared and overreact"

The police are supposed to be trained, elite, and responsible. They're armed. They get the benefit of the doubt in the eyes of the law, and most times in the eyes of a jury.

You tend to hear this one in the same breath as "they shouldn't have resisted" "they should have been calmer" "they should have been more polite"

Just for kicks, let's say that those statements are true. Say that someone is mouthing off or resisting.

If we make excuses for trained officers, who often have time to prepare for a situation, why do we not make excuses for untrained civilians ambushed with an encounter with an officer?

Police are scary, I'm white passing and they scare me. Talking to one is stressful, getting arrested is usually painful, and the instinct to run or fight back is biologically engrained in us. You always expect a civilian to respond calmly in such a high stress situation, especially not a civilian with a gun pointed at them.

We need to be able to trust our officers to remain calm and not act like teenagers when they're in a dangerous situation. For all the money we pour into law enforcement, it sure seems to be spent more on guns, tanks, and missiles than on training police to behave ethically.

I spent my grade school years in schools where the students were mostly POC, and none of the students were ever shot or beaten.

Now, in highschool I saw people running from the SRO, resisting him, even fighting him. We were teens, we acted up. From time to time someone would bring a gun or knife to school, which is completely inexcusable, but none of the students were ever shot or beaten.

Now, whether this was because the SRO was expected to deescalate, whether he knew he was surrounded by witnesses, or whether he just wanted to behave ethically, I'm sure there were times when kicking someone's ass crossed his mind. But he never did it. It's VERY reasonable to expect police officers to deescalate, or use non-lethal force at the very least. I've seen it happen under extreme circumstances, there's no reason for extralegal murder.

6. "but ALL lives matter"

I hear this the most, so I'm going to explain it nicely because I think people just genuinely don't understand:

There is an implied "too" at the end of the phrase.

"black lives matter (too)"

As in, we all know that all lives matter, which is why we don't say it, we don't have to.

We apparently DO have to tell people that black lives matter. Black people and other POC face systemic inequality and real danger. Systemic means that some police officers might be good people, but the laws and status quo that they protect perpetuate inequality.

"stop and frisk" who is more likely to get stopped?

Who is more likely to get pulled over?

Who is more likely to be unfairly sexualized?

Who is more likely to be assumed to be violent?

Who is less likely to get the benefit of the doubt?

If you talk to black children, they know about it. Most black children have already experienced racism by a very young age, and sadly understand it better than many adults.

When we say black lives matter, it's because some people need to learn it. If there are systemic issues that perpetuate inequality for black people, clearly not everyone is on the same page.

Even if racism disappeared tomorrow in entirety, that would not account for centuries of oppression that make black people more likely to be poor, food insecure, underemployed, and have insecure housing. Black Lives Matter would still be necessary.

The tags are to get this to a broader audience, not to reflect the content of the post.

I'm so proud of everyone out protesting.

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robhorninginternalexile · 4 years

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pleasure and protest

An essay about Covid-19 and the quarantine by Paul Preciado, published in early May in Artforum, concludes with a remarkably prescient sentiment:

It is imperative to modify the relationship between our bodies and biovigilant machines of biocontrol: They are not only communication devices. We must learn collectively to alter them. We must also learn to de-alienate ourselves. Governments are calling for confinement and telecommuting. We know they are calling for de-collectivization and telecontrol. Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. Let us turn off our cell phones, let us disconnect from the internet. Let us stage a big blackout against the satellites observing us, and let us consider the coming revolution together.

When I first read it a month ago, it seemed far-fetched to me. It struck me as the kind of tacked-on rallying-cry conclusion that many critical essays end with, sounding a note of hope when their critique otherwise suggests the futility of resistance. But now it seems as though ”the time and strength of confinement” has actually turned into a surprisingly broad commitment to “study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now” for those thousands of people now joining protests whose tone has been set and adopted from Black Lives Matter and other police- and prison-abolition movements. It can appear as though the “coming revolution” has indeed come, and de-alienation is taking place night after night in the streets.

But that development doesn’t seem to have followed from Preciado’s plea that we “turn off our cell phones” and "disconnect from the Internet.” The uprising is not currently shaping up as a unified resistance to technology; rather it has manifested as a collective rejection of racist policing and all the societal manifestations of structural racism more broadly. That’s not to say that contemporary technology is not deeply implicated in sustaining and extending racism. The webs of surveillance it facilitates makes possible not only the old forms of discrimination and targeted oppression but new forms of embedded, infrastructural racism, whether that is a matter of the racist search results Safiya Umoja Noble details in Algorithms of Oppression, the systematic misidentifications of facial recognition technology that Joy Buolamwini has detailed, or the ways race is encoded and reified and leveraged, as Ruha Benjamin outlines in Race After Technology. Day after day, Chris Gilliard’s Twitter feed documents the tech industry’s complicity in structural discrimination and racist policing. Especially egregious are “neighborhood watch” platforms like Nextdoor, which are vectors for racist intimidation, and surveillance systems like Amazon’s Ring, which have proliferated through the company’s partnerships with police departments.

So Preciado’s implied sequence of events seems backward: Our relationship to “biovigilant machines of biocontrol” — a.k.a. phones — begins to change when our relationship to resistance and liberation struggles changes first. (And then changes in relationships to technology feed into protest tactics and strategy, and so on.)

For now, tech companies seem like they are on the defensive: For instance, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon have been pushed (thanks in part to the researchers cited here) to abandon their development of facial recognition technology or temporarily halt its sale to police departments. Some workers at companies like Facebook have questioned their roles in fomenting fascism and racism. Yet it is also easy to imagine that tech companies will try to capitalize on any progress toward police abolition by proposing as alternatives its surveillance-driven forms of predictive policing and pre-emptive discrimination (like “cashless stores” which effectively prescreen customers, and other tech-driven forms of “targeting” that allow businesses to shop for customers). All the many forms of algorithmic screening will likely be touted as useful planks in efforts to “defund the police” by automating the police’s current function of enforcing modes of segregation and unevenly distributed economic exploitation. In Cloud Ethics, Louise Amoore details how companies have tried to sell AI tools to police departments that would, for instance, anticipate protests or identify targets for ICE by scanning social media and other forms of location data and network activity. These tools are marketed as police aids but they could be repositioned as automating the police away. Of course, this would not solve the problems presented by policing, but encode them in systems that would be just as impervious to change, abetted by the false sense of computational neutrality.

It will likely require sustained protest and pressure to prevent tech companies from putting forward their usual methods (datafication, surveillance, solutionism, regulatory capture) that their business models demand. “Decollectivization and telecontrol” will certainly be attempted to contain the protests, even if they did not necessarily spark them.

In part, Preciado’s essay focuses on ideas of immunization as protection, as exemption from risks others are made to bear, and how these kinds of exclusions become the basis for communities. "The management of epidemics stages an idea of community, reveals a society’s immunitary fantasies, and exposes sovereignty’s dreams of omnipotence—and its impotence,“ he writes. (This makes me think now of the “qualified immunity” that U.S. police are granted to protect them from legal accountability for their actions, as well as how Nextdoor permits neighborhoods to defend their whiteness.)

Epidemics are “sociopolitical constructions rather than strictly biological phenomena.” They don’t unfold according to some script dictated by a virus’s level of contagiousness; they enter into existing social relations and present an occasion for their rearticulation. Thus, Preciado argues, “the virus actually reproduces, materializes, widens, and intensifies (from the individual body to the population as a whole) the dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already operating over sexual, racial, or migrant minorities before the state of exception.” With Coivd-19, this is evident in the how white people have been disproportionately less affected, an index of their relative privilege. The refusal among white people to wear masks reflects and celebrates this privilege as well, which helps explain why health officials who recommend masking have been harassed and threatened by white mobs.

Similarly, “cures” for diseases don’t proceed inevitably to those who need them; they aren’t distributed any more evenly than power, wealth, or opportunity. They too must first reannounce the existing power relations, which delineate who deserves to become “well” or immune and who should be lastingly pathologized. (If a cure threatened existing power relations, those in power would seek to suppress it.)

For Preciado, the social course of pandemics and “cures” reflect the more general logic of “pharmacopornographic” forms of control — “microprosthetic and media-cybernetic control” administered through communication technology and pharmaceuticals, visual and literal stimulants. As Foucault argued about power generally, these mechanisms of control are experienced not as restrictive but as subjectivity-granting, an expansion of pleasurable possibilities that secure the subjects’ assent. Preciado writes: “These management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.”

I’m often tempted by this line of analysis to treat all forms of pleasure with suspicion — anything proposed as “fun” is probably a thinly disguised form of social control, enjoyment of which establishes just how much my psyche has already been formatted by the apparatus of domination. It then follows that anything that makes me uncomfortable proves I’m engaging in a form of resistance. But that unsustainable line of thinking leads nowhere. The point is not to demonize pleasure but to explicitly politicize it, to engage in political practices that sustain a different kind of subjectivity that enjoys other kinds of joy. In this conversation with Zoé Samudzi, Vicky Osterweil explains:

One of the things that scares police and politicians the most when they enter a riot zone — and there are quotes from across the 20th century of police and politicians saying this — is that it was happy: Everyone was happy ... The playwright Charles Fuller, who happened to be a young man starting out his career during the Philadelphia riots of 1964 ... talks about the incredible sense of safety and joy and carnival that happens in the streets.

I think riots and militant violent action in general get slandered as being macho and bro-y, and lots of our male comrades like to project that sort of image. That definitely happens, but I actually think riots are incredibly femme. Riots are really emotive, an emotional way of expressing yourself. It is about pleasure and social reproduction. You care for one another by getting rid of the thing that makes that impossible, which is the police and property. You attack the thing that makes caring impossible in order to have things for free, to share pleasure on the street. Obviously, riots are not the revolution in and of themselves. But they gesture toward the world to come, where the streets are spaces where we are free to be happy, and be with each other, and care for each other.

This is the obverse of the pleasure in consumption and individuation that Preciado describes, which in his analysis is anchored in the technologies that allow us to consume in physical isolation at home like would-be Hugh Hefners in our multimedia-enabled “soft prisons,” adrift in a fantasy of dematerialized insubstantiation.

The subjects of the neoliberal technical-patriarchal societies that Covid-19 is in the midst of creating do not have skin; they are untouchable; they do not have hands. They do not exchange physical goods, nor do they pay with money. They are digital consumers equipped with credit cards. They do not have lips or tongues. They do not speak directly; they leave a voice mail. They do not gather together and they do not collectivize. They are radically un-dividual. They do not have faces; they have masks.

There seems to be a lot of fetishization of “real” communication implied here — again as if digital communication were the main obstacle preventing people from collectivizing their bodies for revolution. But the protests now seem to suggest that while consumerism may have been an obstacle (i.e. the right-wing talking point that the protests are popular because people can’t go shopping), digital technology, which many have been leaning on and living through more than ever under lockdown conditions, hasn’t been, at least not yet, and not in the ways Preciado is suggesting.

The threat posed by technology is not so much that it prevents people from having “real” encounters but that it can facilitate such encounters on terms that are already fully contained — imagine, for example, protests operating only within parameters deemed acceptable in advance by machine-learning simulations, or conversations that are pre-mediated to a degree that they can’t exceed the anticipated possibilities. Preciado is right that these experiences will be pleasurable; people generally take pleasure in being accommodated, from being recognized. But to detect the kinds of pleasure that are complicit with oppressive forms of social control, it is not enough to simply look for situations where screens are foregrounded and bodies are suppressed. It’s not enough to check our voice mail.

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chavire · 4 years

Photo

We answered a few questions about the band during quarantine, for the spanish fanzine Face The Lie. As we were pretty excited about the questions and thought it could have some interest, here it is in its english version.

(photo : Manon Monjaret)

Hi guys! How are you doing? Before starting maybe we should put ourselves in a situation. Who are Chaviré? In which other bands do you play or have you played? What motivates you to tour, make songs?

Hi, thank you for giving us some space to talk about CHAVIRÉ and what we put behind this band. As a presentation, we could say that the band started at the end of 2013 and that we played our first shows at the end of the next year, in 2014. We previously played — or still play — in A.S.T.R.O., COLD HEART DAYS, DÉDALE, GHOST FRIENDS, HOMESICK and WATERTANK to name some of our other bands. We started to play together as some friends, convinced by our love for the same songs and the desire to bind them with some politics we felt connected with. Six years later, it is still those three main reasons that hold us together, writing songs and play them live.

Last summer you released your new album, titled Maintenant Que Les Flammes Sont Partout ("now that flames are everywhere"). What did you wanted to express with this title? And what can you tell us about this album?

We tried to give this record a title that would be the testimony of the era that surrounded its creation. We think it's pretty clear for everyone who looked at the world around us that we couldn't possibly spend three months without seeing the people from a country rising up against their leaders and taking the streets against them. We wanted to dedicate the album to those involved in the increase of those flames all around the world and sing for their constant multiplication.

The lyrics of this album seem to me a bit more convoluted than those of your previous albums, you have to give them more readings to understand them. Did you wanted to change your way of composing the lyrics or was it an involuntary evolution?

As usual, our lyrics are very influenced by the books and authors that go with the writing process. You are right saying that maybe it is a bit different from the previous records. We always said that the lyrics were very influenced by some texts and that we stole a lot to put it in our songs. This time it's still the case but we tried to give some more space to poetry and theater. As time goes by, we were a bit scared to look like those anarchist bands that repeat slogans song after song... We are glad to hear that you noticed this change of things, it is obvious to say that there is politics everywhere but it is better to show it, by using an unexpected extract of a anthropologic book or some lines from a poem. For the first time with this record, we tried to quote most of the references so maybe it will give some ideas and things to dig in.

What is the story or background behind "Alice, 1977"?

Radio Alice is an Italian radio from the end of the 1970s located in Bologna. It's closely linked with the italian autonomous movement from the same era and more precisely the A/Traverso collective. The quotation «Le pouvoir n'est pas seulement là où se prennent des décisions horribles, mais partout où le discours enlève le corps, la rage, le hurlement, le geste de vivre» comes directly from an A/Traverso leaflet. Overall, the song was written in opposition with some of the quirks of the communities that surround us, where it is more valuable to look radical, rather than actively trying to change the world. At some point in the italian movement, there was this turning point where it didn't make sense for some of them to claim their worker identity, their women identity, mostly because all of these categories were those of the power, of this world, and these communities wanted to split up with this world and its categories.

With “Alice, 1977”, the idea was to put this era to the attention of people who perhaps don't know it, allowing them to find some inspiration in it. Most of the questions we're passing through are obviously not new, and it was in our opinion a political sequence where these questions found some interesting treatment.

What does CHAVIRÉ mean?

It could be translated in english as “capsized”, it refers to the moment right after a boat has overturned. We won't lie, this name is at first the result of a joke, more or less.

One of the things that surprised me in a good way when I first knew about you was that you didn't have Facebook, but instead you have a Tumblr page with, in addition to information about the band, a lot of political texts. Do you just don’t care about Facebook and those networks? Why did you chose Tumblr?

We “chose” to make a Tumblr page at first because it seemed to be the easiest thing to put something a bit more “personal” than just a Bandcamp page. Moreover we were so unable to manage a website by ourselves, and none of our close friends seemed able to build one that we could manage easily... In fact, the way we decided to be visible on the Internet has been very determined by our poor capacities and the fact that we decided, since the beginning of the band, that we preferred to make us visible only when we had something to say rather than just be here to be here — it is pointless to try to tackle professional rock bands in this game, doesn't it? And yet, we recently created an instagram account... We also wanted to upset some diehards from the other side!

What do you think of the term emocore? For you, when does a group cross the hardcore barrier to enter emocore? Is it a matter of lyrics, sound, attitude,...?

Well, it's just a subgenre doesn't it? The barrier is just crossed when the one who makes the poster decides to call a band this way. It has been historically a way to gather bands that were playing at the same time from the same area (for the Revolution Summer it basically works like this), but at some point, it is a way to play punk music.

It was said about you that you take music too seriously, belittling those who play only for having a good time without sending a message. Don't you conceive how someone can do it or is it simply not your thing? Do you have friend bands like that?

Well, if music obviously contains a game aspect — who would deny it? —, we would rather play it with smart people. It's not about any kind of content or attitude, it is mostly about having the feeling that we share more with some bands than some chords or shirts. We are still sorry for those who felt judged by us, we couldn't fill the lack of interest they seem to have for themselves, and at some point we still can't understand why they needed our approval so much.

Do you conceive a hardcore scene without politicizing? And a DIY without a political background?

We have to be careful with this sentence that repeats to anyone who would listen that “personal is political”: the recent history proved us that it led us to believe that we just had to buy at organic stores and not to say swear words to become a potential ally for an ongoing revolution, to simplify. But music contains this interesting idea that it can't be undone from its whole production process: its material production obviously (from gear to electricity), but mostly because its production is tied in a network (people who play, who release, who book to make it easy), under technical and aesthetically pleasing considerations (how do we want to sound? do we play well enough? does the interpretation fit to the idea?). At some point, the choices and the answers to those questions imply to get you into some positions that translate political views about the world. Depending on how they fit with others, it can create friendships and even “scenes”. In order to answer your initial question, we could say that obviously we do conceive a scene without politicizing (but it is even more than that, we'd rather say “with views about the world that are radically different from ours”), the question consequently becomes “do we have something to share together then?” and it is immediately easier to answer.

In Maintenant Que Les Flammes Sont Partout you included a song about May 68, something that lately interests me a lot. How influential is this and the situationist movement today?

There is a very tenuous link between the uprising of May 68 in French universities and the Situationist International, as you may already know it. It is hard to fully understand why, but a part of this relation seems a bit forgotten today in the official history, one of the main reason is to be found in the fact that Situationists refused to be represented as leaders, as opposed to some figures at this time. Fortunately, Kristin Ross relates this incomplete story in her fascinating book May '68 and Its Afterlives, talking about how this political sequence has been erased and captured by the freshly reshaped neoliberalism to present it as a liberal and individual revolution. As we already said for the autonomous movement that took place in Italy during the second part of the '70s, these moments are very inspiring and rich in lessons. They refer to insurrectionary times when the power could really be overthrown.

In the case of the Situationist International, it's important to understand that since the late '50s the group theorized and wrote about the reconfigurations of the post-war capitalism, and the advent of the consumer society which really arose at this moment. It was a moment of radical artistic avant-gardes: Antonin Artaud just died ten years before, the surrealist and lettrist movements were still recent experiences for the situationists, the Beat Generation was experiencing overseas and this artistic emulation gave them paths to explore and to renew the forms of art without separating it from the revolutionary horizon.

With these months that have passed since the appearance of the Mouvement des gilets jaunes, what balance do you make of it?

We lived something that could be considered as the most unsettling political event of the decade or even more, with the appearance of this gilets jaunes movement last year. Still today, it is hard to gauge the political and existential impact created by the outbreak of these yellow vests on some roundabouts in the November dawn. We're not overplaying it by saying that they helped to re-draw the lines of the political division, in that they opposed the revolutionary action to the revolutionary posture and bliss, and proved us that revolution was a question of desire instead of a rational one. For a part, they were people that never took part in radical politics as we can understand it, that never attended a demonstration or organized a strike, etc. In some areas they created what could be considered as communes, existing as a community in a world — this unbearable fiction — that had always made them existing as individuals.

It seems that in the whole world people are waking up and taking back the streets seriously. Either in Chile, Venezuela, or in France itself. Have we reached the maximum pressure point for people to explode?

We took so long answering this interview that in the meantime Lebanon went up in flames too, and while most of these countries were facing some major representation crisis with the whole institutional politics, a virus sent us back in our respective homes as separated individuals. We're insisting on the concept of “individual” because it's fundamental to understand that this category is a pretty recent one that has emerged with the modern definition of “society”. It's very clear now that both the “individual” and the “society” have emerged in order to defeat communities that were an ungovernable model for the powers, or at least less easily governable in that they were indivisible entities. We have to consider the return of this hypothesis after two hundred years of capitalism, the need of community (this is basically what communism is all about) comes back to the point, by every means, and the people go out, fight the police, and take the streets.

I read that in your first concerts you distributed sheets with the lyrics and explanations. Do you keep doing it? What was the reason, make clear parts that were open to various interpretations, expand information on the subject or try to make people really listen to what you have to say?

We distributed our lyrics for quite a long time, but to be honest we haven't done it for a while. This move was influenced by some bands before us, mostly from this first french emo wave with band that used to do so. The idea was to put the lyrics right in front of the audience, as something we could claimed but also as a starting point to talk about. One of the reason that led us to stop was also the idea that there are other ways to “talk”: gesture, music and intensity that can become languages when we start to take them seriously and make a good use of it, they can convey things that words sometimes cannot.

Do you read / do fanzines? What importance do you give them in the hardcore / anarchist scene? Lately I have heard more than one person saying that it isn’t coherent to continue to make fanzines on paper and contributing to the environmental impact having such powerful networks which reach as many people as the Internet. What do you think of this?

Some of us used to write fanzines back in the days, and we also have to recognize that after have been serious fanzine-readers we're less curious these days. Because of it, we are tempted to say that there are less issues than a few years ago, which is probably wrong and mostly influenced by the fact that we don't really dig in. We talked above of this idea of “network”, and fanzines do participate from this idea that autonomy should be earned everywhere it is possible. At some point, we could say that there is victory everytime a fanzine can bypass the traditional plan established by the music industry.

About the fact that 200 printed zines could possibly contribute to the environmental impact, well... maybe some people should try to think about how “green” their online datas are, in fact it really is a stupid accusation. Once again it mostly lies on the idea that politics is an affair of separated individuals doing their own parts more or less, which is the one of the lies of the liberalism. We can continue to pee while taking a shower and turning the lights off when leaving a room, it's pointless if we don't take seriously the idea of overthrowing economy and industries.

Related to the previous question, what is your opinion of the Internet? Does it make us better or worse?

Do you really think that four guys who have a hell of a job creating a Tumblr page could have any useful opinion on this internet thing?

A few days ago a friend told me that if one day I go to France I must go to Nantes, because it is the best city in the state. What happens in Nantes to have earned such fame? Is it really that cool? Because one of the things that you talk about on your album Interstices is about the feeling of apathy generated by living in a gentrified and clonic city, isn't it? What good things happen in your city?

With Interstices, we wanted to summarize what creates this unified feeling from one metropolis to another, from almost every gentrified city center. This is the fascinating thing with the metropolis paradox: on this captured-by-control-dispositives territory, there are at the same time desertion acts and zones that try to re-think autonomy and rooms of manoeuvre. What makes Nantes pretty specific at some point is this relation between the city center and its countryside. In fact we can't fully understand what makes this city special without talking of the well-known ZAD of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes right? Everybody knows it for the resistance against the airport that was supposed to be built there (and that will never be) but the thing is that the ZAD was, and still is, a territory fighting for its material autonomy, which tries to bind metropolitan resistances with the experience of building a form-of-life from the community: an attempt to build a commune for real.

Three of us have lived in Nantes for almost ten years now. Is the city really hype these days? It is hard to tell in our cases, we're living there and cannot really take this stance to measure the impact from elsewhere. Let's just say that this is a city with many secret stories, artistic and political ones, and since we're living in Nantes we felt connected to some of them and tried to take part of. I guess this is what holds us here. In concrete terms, we could talk about La Dérive which is a bar and a community canteen we're involved in. It's a place where you can drink, eat, attend a book presentation or a movie or just come to play chess with a friend. There are places like Les Ateliers de Bitche where you can attend nice shows, and La Commune de Dalby Football Club to play football on Sunday afternoon with some friends.

In your Tumblr you include a very interesting text about the pros and cons of the free price. It attracts me a lot, because besides allowing anyone to feel excluded based on their economy, it empowers you in the process and makes you abandon the role of passive consumer, but I share the opinion that if it becomes institutionalized and becomes something systematic it can lose the critical and anti-capitalist background. Have you set or have you considered putting your albums and merch at free price?

When we first read this text about donation in Maximum Cuvette (a french zine from Grenoble), we thought it was smart enough to practically ask the question of the economy inside a microcosm that tends to get rid of it, to examine the institutional process always contained in economy and at the same time how this “name your price” thing could bypass the rigidity always contained in standard economy. You're absolutely right and the text says so, at some point donations can feed the illusion that we got rid of the economy which is obviously a lie, it is just an attempt to manage with its rigidity but under a re-institutionalized form: this is never enough and it is important to be aware that donations are just a way to make the best of the situation.

Since we started CHAVIRÉ, our merch as always been on donation. It was at first the easiest way to manage with selling merch to us. We talk about it together from time to time, we sometimes evoke the idea to sell merch at a flexible-fixed-price, like “a record costs 10€, if you really can't afford it, well, less is fine too”. For now we keep it this way, also because it became a kind of a habit, but to be honest this donation thing is so ritualized around us that it often works as a disguised fixed price, and does not really empowers anyone at the merch table because almost everyone there can afford what you sale. To be honest, we're more and more lax with our whole merch stuff and barely see the point in having five different shirt models and buttons and patches and so on mostly because we're not really into it anymore...

Many times I feel frustrated in some way by trying to explain the operation and ethics of DIY to people who are not involved in it. How would you explain this?

Well, we would point at the fact that the ethics behind the whole DIY thing in punk community is mostly based on the increase of a practical autonomy. This is mostly about what DIY should be all about, the growth of a network that could exist by itself, for itself without depending on any power or institution. This idea of a proper existence is important, because it implies some requirements with ourselves trying to build something that is not just an “alternative”, a counter-model based on a mirror effect from the cultural institutions, because this just reinforces the legitimacy of it, putting us back to the margins. When this is said, we didn't say much, but let's keep in mind that the operation led by DIY is one of the many attempts where autonomy is experienced (we talked about the ZAD and the late '70s Italy already, there are many examples). These autonomous experiences can be sometimes hard to translate with words, most of the time they are understood when they're lived, when they overtake the words to become perceptible, incarnate. In fact, the words can't describe the mixed feelings of joy, mutual requirement, friendship of these autonomous attempts that hold people together, how can it be explained as something else than the promise of a fast-track life?

You have made some very cool ripoffs of Orchid, Embrace, Portraits Of Past, ... for stickers and merch. Do you have any more in mind?

Let's say we have already done way too much of them for just one band. So everyone knows that we have great tastes and that we're not too bad at Photoshop (s/o to our best ripoff that you did not mentioned which was a Chanel one), but it has to stop now!

In addition your flyers, covers, "logos" like the (A) made of flowers are very worked up and for me they have very good taste. Do you take care of this or do you entrust it to friends? Which graphic artists inspire you the most?

For sure this whole artwork thing is something that matters to us, we wouldn't deny it. But it is pretty clear that it has evolved a lot since the moment we started the band from things more “traditional” — not to say expected, such as the combo of typewriter font and linocut drawings which is the perfect example — to more personal artwork: since the last record, the Atelier McClane duo took care of the whole graphic thing to tie the images with the sound and the words. Some of us have an interest in visual arts and we have friends who consider that any revolutionary act will need to find its own form, which implies to think about its graphic one. Let's just mention the work of the Atelier McClane obviously but the Capital Taboulé collective from Rennes too, the Super Terrain collective from Nantes, Bonjour Grisaille and the Atelier Summercity from Brest, Marine Le Thellec from Marseille to talk about our friends and favourite ones. We couldn't end this list without also mentioning Hugues Pzzl who made the artwork of Interstices and our split with BASTOS, and who contributed a lot to renew the visual forms of the punk scene in France — a renewal that was so much needed.

Which situations, books, movies, people, actions, bands have inspired you the most, both to do things with Chaviré and to do things on your personal life?

This is always a touchy question, fortunately we left as much references as possible in the whole interview that could be used as a part of the answer. And obviously we'll be happy to develop if anyone wants to know more, our mailbox is always open!

What are you most keen on to lately? What do you like to do in your free time? What frees you from everyday boredom?

Since we are, as a large part of the world population, currently cloistered home while answering this interview, we have plenty of this free time you're talking about. Here in France, it's been a month of quarantine and we mostly spent it separated from each other but with friends and families. We tried to take advantage of the situation writing new songs, sharing playlists and movie recommendations, keeping in touch together. We don't know when the zine will be out but this moment is very decisive and we have to be really attentive, in order to act as soon as it will be possible. A few weeks ago, an absolutely incredible text entitled “Monologue du virus” has been published in the French media Lundi Matin and has since been translated in various languages (https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said). Recently we also discovered the Leftove.rs archives (https://leftove.rs) which is an incredible database about autonomy with many leaflets, zines and books from pretty much everywhere around the world.

Future plans?

Improving dad skills.

Doing more muay thai.

Getting degrees.

So far, thank you very much for the patience of answering all this! Anything else to add? See you, hugs!

Thanks again for sending this absolutely fascinating interview, which is hands down one of the most interesting we've ever answered to. Hope we've been precise enough, feel free to write us if it's not the case in these troubled times.

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gardenglowswithdesign · 5 years

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I was getting ready to post a rant that I wrote titled: How long held hostage? Then I stopped and thought about it. I have been through all kinds of bad stuff. I have friends that have been through similar things. That’s just what life is all about, I think. Yes, we can stand up and fight against some of the things we don’t agree with – sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But if the Zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow, who would you want to be with? Yes, I know you are thinking – WHAT DID I JUST SAY; but hang with me here. I do have a method to my madness.

I don’t plan out my blog posts. I jot down little ideas that I have while running about (I carry a little notebook with me everywhere I go), but I never know what I want to say until I start at it. The first post, How long held hostage, was about trying to define (mainly in my own head) exactly what our government is doing to us. I used the help of Merriam-Webster.com for the following:

Bully: Definition of bully 1a : a blustering, browbeating person especially: one who is habitually cruel, insulting, or threatening to others who are weaker, smaller, or in some way vulnerable tormented by the neighborhood bully Extortion: Definition of extortion 1: the act or practice of extorting especially money or other property especially : the offense committed by an official engaging in such practice Terrorist: Definition of terrorism 1 : an advocate or practitioner of terrorism as a means of coercion Coercion: Definition of coercion 1 : the act, process, or power of coercing They used coercion to obtain the confession. (this didn’t give me much of an answer so I read on…) Legal Definition of coercion 2 : the use of express or implied threats of violence or reprisal (as discharge from employment) or other intimidating behavior that puts a person in immediate fear of the consequences in order to compel that person to act against his or her will

I was traveling that road because I have friends, family, people that I love and care about that are hurting right now due to the stupid (yes, I said stupid, and I mean it) Government Shutdown. I used to work for our government, and I know first-hand how the decisions they make from their ivory tower can inflict severe damage. Several regulations they passed from their thrones, were shuffled down to our level and then we were expected to implement them. They had no clue what it actually took to do said act. They also didn’t see the “bigger picture” of what happens when you make those kinds of decisions on We The People. All of that story just kept making me more upset, more angry, and feeling more out-of-control. So I stopped and slept on it, then I came up with an epiphany.

What if the zombie apocalypse happened tomorrow?

I just picked zombie because I am hooked on The Walking Dead show. I don’t watch for the gore (some of it is just too graphic), I watch for the creator’s rendition of the human condition involved in a story of that type. So, what if the world went to hell tomorrow? I’m not talking about complete annihilation but something severe. I watched a series called Revolution (there were only two seasons) which examined the possible human condition if all the electricity suddenly stopped. Could you imagine?

• No cel phones, • no heat, • no cars, • no internet, • no anything that needed electricity to run.

One last example that strikes a chord with me is Day After Tomorrow. Yes, I am a big Dennis Quaid fan, but I love the concept of the movie.

The whole epiphany for me was this:

Who would I choose to have in my group to survive?

It all boiled down to one simple truth for me. A person CAN choose who they want to be around – even family can be disowned. I have the family I have, the friends and loved ones that I have not because of money, power, fame or anything else so petty. I have these people in my life because they either:

• Have things in common with me. • Make me laugh. • I can trust them. • We can share thoughts and ideas.

I didn’t realize until I started writing the other post how important the last one is. I may not always see eye-to-eye with someone in my circle. We may have arguments or heated discussions about a subject. The key is that no matter what is said, what is thought, or what is felt; at the end of the day they are still a part of my circle. So if the world went to hell tomorrow, my circle is who I would want around me. They are a farmer, gardeners, retirees, Government workers, military, police, firemen/women, Social Service workers, plumbers, electricians you name it; we have a walk-of-life in it. They are part of my circle because we value and respect each other. We can have a difference of opinion, but we would never turn on each other over it.

Before our fire of 2014, I worked for the government for over eleven years. I became extremely bitter by the end of my employment with them. The job left me feeling that people, in general, were all users. They will suck you dry of life, love, and laughter if you let them. I held many different jobs before that one, but never did I have such a low and bitter view of humans until that job. The fire brought me back to reality. People are good. They are caring, compassionate, warm, funny, loving, loyal, and thoughtful. I realized in my epiphany that the government made me feel like my hands were tied all the time. I used to call Congress, send letters, I even got through to someone once who listened; but nothing ever changed. The only thing I have in life is my circle of people. These are the ones to hold close, protect, defend, laugh, cry, and grow with. This is the way changes happen when we hold tight to each other and stand together as one. The bottom line for this post is I hate that the government is holding us, hostage, to get what they want. It is our (very) hard earned tax dollars that secure us – not a wall, not regulations, or Congress, or even by a President – but by We The People holding strong to one-another. Everything shitty that has happened in my life was overcome with the help of my circle of friends, family, and loved ones. I could never have made it past age eighteen if I didn’t have all of them for support. THANK YOU ALL!

You can also check me out at: www.helbergfarmstories.com for fun stories from our farm.

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Who Would Be In Your Circle? I was getting ready to post a rant that I wrote titled: How long held hostage?

#family #friends #laughter #Life

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marxistduboisist · 6 years

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Comments on “Where’s the Winter Palace”

I have two main critiques of this interesting but, I argue, ultimately unpersuasive essay on the Marxist-Leninist movement in the US. This note grew out of a Facebook comment, and it presumes familiarity with the general subject as well as the essay linked above. I left aside several other critiques which were made by other people on the thread, so this is an incomplete critique.

First, I found the critique of line-centrism (laid out in "Dogmatism and 'Line'") less than persuasive; I thought it misidentified the cause of the NCM’s failing in the first place (here I disagree with Max Elbaum who is the original source for this claim); applies with far less force to the Marxist-Leninist movement at present than it did to the NCM; and, finally, is unrealistic in the sense that it takes an unfortunate truth about large group organization, Marxist-Leninist or otherwise (that the determination of some kind of a minimal line and the holding of it is crucially necessary to effective politics and will also never satisfy every individual party member entirely) and makes it an avoidable, volitional failure borne of dogmatism (whereas I think it is just a feature of doing politics as such); I also think that the argument that certain issues are simply not ones on which lines should be tightly drawn (e.g., imperialist wars of aggression) is unpersuasive.

Second, I thought that the attempted historicization of Marxism-Leninism (i.e., the reading of it as an analysis which was true “then” but is now “outdated Cold War politics”) was also unpersuasive. I don’t think that the authors really argued for this point with as much evidence as such a strong claim merits; I do take up, in detail, what evidence they do provide at the end of “The Sect System”, and I argue that this evidence does not provide a foundation for their claims. I also address some of their specific study suggestions for Marxist-Leninists, which I argue are inconsistent and, in some cases, difficult or impossible to reconcile with Lenin’s work or the Third International tradition generally.

To the first point. I’ll set aside the first sub-point (about the NCM) since that’s something of a different topic. On the second point, I think, viewed historically, the three organizations which the authors are talking about are far less strict about adherence to lines on every conceivable issue than during the NCM, less strict than the Trotskyist movement (from its inception to present), and, to some degree, less strict than the official CP movement; the movement in all of those subsections of the left and on the left, generally, during the 1930s-1980s was substantially larger in the US than it is now. So, I think this provides some prima facie evidence that adherence to a strict line is, at the very least, not a huge brake on the size and influence of the left, all else equal. The NCM failed, for sure, and its genuinely ouroboros-character with regard to line-struggle clearly contributed to that (although again, I think the emphasis on that is overstated); but, the fact that line-struggle is now far less heated and that the movement is smaller means that this can’t be the only, or primary, cause (WWP goes far out of its way to avoid polemics against other groups, e.g.—one would never see from WWP the kind of personalization of politics that was common during the NCM, such as the adoption of hyper-specific name-based epithets or condemning the line of fellow leaders of tiny groups, by name, in print, as, quite literally, “evil”). I can't speak for all the groups in question, but certainly the ones I'm most familiar with have no restrictions on members disagreeing with assessments of other members on a great variety of questions—it's just disagreements which would threaten unity of action which are prohibited (I think it's perfectly reasonable to prohibit people from publicly saying things like "I fundamentally think this strike that we're supporting as a group is wrong"—there just isn’t a point in having a political organization that can’t agree on some baseline goals and strategies, in my view). For some groups, that could well reasonably include discussions about China; if one believes that the particular method of organizing socialist revolution in China ineluctably led to a counterrevolution or ineluctably led to a socialist-developmental state, then it would be good to avoid or pursue those methods (or at least learn the lessons that can be learned from them and apply them to a different context)—that actually would be a question of great importance (and, in a way, the author sare implicitly entering into that debate without intending to by arguing that the experience of those countries is probably irrelevant—that is “a position” in that debate, in my view). [I should acknowledge that this last point is also laid out in a comment on the original post concerning Cuba, made by one Daniel Sullivan].

To the third sub-point of the first point: the policy of presenting a united front on questions of great import seems to me to be a pretty standard organizational practice of most political orgs., small communist ones and large liberal ones; in the absence of this kind of minimal discipline, the group can and almost certainly would simply cease to reproduce itself as a group (or turn into an inert federation). Even the DSA draws lines somewhere (and I think the only reason that they can be so lax about what lines they do draw is that they don't actually get much done, conditional on their size). Where the lines of disagreement should be drawn is a good and open question, in my view, and I think it would be better to be more specific about which kinds of lines of disagreement are wise and which aren't; I think it overstates the question to say that groups are too fixated on the proper line as such, since surely nearly everyone would agree that lines need be drawn somewhere—the more specific question of what kinds of lines are or aren’t relevant is much harder to answer at the level of principle. The conclusion to the essay and the “further reading” includes a number of suggestions which are actually adequate to the level of generality posed by this argument—in other words, the fact that this critique could apply to almost an effective organization—by simply advocating very loose organizations, the DSA among them. It is fine to make this argument, of course, but I think it’s wrong; those types of groups are, as a rule, typically not productive ones (I think this is pretty well-established by social movements sociology; I don’t have much time here to elaborate on that, but the empirical question is kind of moot—I would imagine that a pre-condition of being a Marxist or even simply a social democrat, as opposed to an anarchist, would mean holding that view as a precept).

I’d like to end my commentary on this point by suggesting the great relevance of such line struggles on the specific question of Syria since the authors specifically raise this point: they suggest that positions on Syria are basically of little relevance to the left (presumably they mean the left outside of Syria) because of the negligible practical outcomes of those positions: "[i]f you don’t 'uphold' Bashar al-Assad, you’re 'no better than the State Department', despite the fact that 'uphold' in this context means little more than voicing support". By contrast, it seems to me that the relevance of one's position on Syria is very clear: if one doesn't think that Assad is a leading a national-bourgeois war of liberation but instead is prosecuting an imperialist war of conquest, then there would be a far less clear imperative for the workers' movement to oppose the war. In fact, if it were true that Syria (and Russia) were after all imperialist powers, socialists here would need to be careful to not demand an antiwar politics with such fervor that they reduced the ability of the United States to genuinely defend itself against larger imperialist powers (and it would imply a need to coordinate very closely with workers in Syria and Russia, closer than is possible at present thanks to the degeneration of the left in Russia and the US, to ensure that neither wing of the communist movement inadvertently assisted one imperialist power over another). The urgent need to unilaterally call off the war on Syria and the strategy that has developed around that (which is not dissimilar in many ways to the strategy that developed around the war on Vietnam for instance) flows/flowed from a Leninist analysis of the situation. A different analysis could lead to an entirely different political strategy. Even more fundamentally than that, an analysis which says that this question just isn’t that relevant to the first world left—because it can’t do anything about the war—is an analysis which leads us to a position that we shouldn’t do anything about the war (the position “the war shouldn’t matter to us that much” implies a position of “we shouldn’t do much about it”, which compounds the problem of “we can’t do much about it”, which further fuels the position “the war shouldn’t matter much to us”—it’s a classic vicious cycle).

My second point is that I don't find the near-relegation of Marxism-Leninism to the dustbin of history as unambiguous as the authors seem to argue. They imply in the introduction that Leninism is "outdated Cold War politics" (or at least, that appears to be the meaning from the context, although it's not explicit). Later they expand on this claim, and though they do argue that “the world is still in the era of imperialism as Lenin defined it”, they then append a long list of changing historical conditions and ask rhetorically whether we are “in the same period that Stalin speaks of”; they don’t answer in completely unequivocal terms, but since the sub-section is titled “can Marxism-Leninism be salvaged” and since they reply to their rhetorical question with “certainly a lot has changed”, it seems to me that they are, without saying so outright, arguing that at the very least its relevance has been severely weakened. So, I’d like to look at the evidence they offer. Their list of changed conditions is as follows: “the Eastern Bloc has collapsed, formal colonialism has largely been replaced with neo-colonialism, Keynesianism has been replaced with neo-liberalism, and the United States has emerged as the dominant imperialist power”.

It seems to me that it would be better to be clear about the exact stakes of each of these historical changes and how exactly they render Lenin's analysis outdated or not. It's easy, as the authors say, to list changes, but it's equally easy to list continuities: we still live in a capitalist world; most of the African continent, Latin America, and the Arab world are under the heel of “Western” powers; the threat of inter-imperialist wars has returned to the horizon; the continued slide towards the full restoration of capitalism in China and the destruction from within of the USSR mean that we actually have a world which looks much more like the world just before 1914 than the world of 1975 did; and so on. Without a more detailed and clearer explication, this kind of list-making practice doesn’t tell us all that much, in my opinion. And to the implicit claim that simply being old makes the practice of Leninism outdate, I would counter that the dominant political practices of the imperialist countries (right-liberalism and conservative modernization politics) are virtually as old as capitalism itself (and of course, Marx is also older than Lenin, and the democratic socialist politics which the authors end by halfway-advocating are roughly as old).

Looking specifically at the examples here, I would suggest that the relevance of these examples is left unstated and that each example seems to me to be less-than-sufficient to invalidate a Leninist analysis. The Eastern Bloc didn't even exist when Stalin provided that definition (1924), so the relevance of that point is indeterminate, in my view; formal colonialism was also more or less conquered by the workers movement just a few years after the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, and so it, too, has not existed in most of the world for long after Marxism-Leninism seems to have clearly been a relevant analytical framework (and I also don't think that Lenin or other leading Third International politicians assumed that the existence or not of formal colonialism was of life-or-death relevance to their analysis of imperialism); I think it's probably premature to say that Keynesianism has replaced neoliberalism—that seems, to me, to be an outcome of the class struggle (and it's also unclear whether Keynesianism was ever "dominant" or what the exact content of neoliberalism is)—and, in the first place, the relevance of this point is unclear; and, finally, it seems highly uncertain in what precise sense the United States is the dominant imperialist power, how long this conjuncture will continue to last, and how exactly that would invalidate Lenin's analysis of imperialism (there is a great text by a guy called Alec Abbott which can be found here; in pretty fine detail it goes over, from a Leninist perspective, the question of whether we really are in an epoch of ultra-imperialism thanks to the US' primus inter pares status).

I now want to address the authors’ argument that the “M-L canon” is too often presented out-of-context and with minimal updates, demonstrating that the canon is of conjunctural, historical relevance but not of great relevance to the present day. I should begin by saying that I do think that the lack of context given for older texts in that one, specific study guide on Reddit is bad pedagogy, but I also think that this online study guide is probably not broadly representative of the internal education policy of these groups (I know that it isn't for at least one), where older members and people who know this history can often supply that crucial background knowledge; it would be a major publishing undertaking to provide that kind of annotated study guide, although it’s something that I have finally begun myself for a specific subset of the M-L “canon”). I agree with the authors that the exclusion from the one specific Reddit canon of newer writers like Samir Amin is lamentable (again, setting aside that this does not characterize very adequately, in my view, the attitude of actual *parties* to newer analysis), but I again think they’d do better to argue exactly why authors should be included (such as Etienne Balibar who is a philosopher and, aside from his interesting work on global racism with Immanuel Wallerstein, seems like he doesn’t have much to say which is of direct relevance to the US communist left). To argue for a more expansive canon sounds intuitively appealing when pitched at a high level of abstraction, but for the critique to really have teeth, I think a specific critique should argue for adding certain people for certain reasons (I do think the arguments for adding Ho or Gramsci or Luxemburg are fairly self-evident, although it should be noted that Luxemburg sharply disagreed with the Bolsheviks on a number of questions and that Gramsci, though a consistent Leninist, is simply difficult to read in a way that Ho, who I know for a fact appears on one of the candidacy reading lists of one of the parties mentioned, is not—I don’t think this means that people should ignore Gramsci or Luxemburg, but it does mean that it is not a great crime, in my view, to set them aside in some contexts). Let me also note that the critique of the line-centrism made earlier is to some degree in tension with the argument that organizers in M-L parties unduly restrict their canon or are movementists in the sense that they do not reflect adequately on their strategies—to add more and more authors to the canon is to add more and more things to debate lines on (if we are to take seriously the suggestion that we add, for instance, two people who think exactly-opposite things to the canon).

Much of their critique feels sort of formalistic and procedural in this specific sense: the authors advocate for more diversity in terms of what kind of analysis and strategy communist activists should consider, and that’s desirable in the abstract, but they bring together under that heading a jumble of examples of other traditions which are either already well-covered by the expansive vision of Marxism-Leninism that characterizes WWP, PSL, and FRSO, or ones which are, at the end of the day, not compatible with one another because the traditions in question are directly opposed on key questions: “autonomism & operaismo, Marxist-feminism, [and] pre-war social democracy”. I’ve never encountered a single person claiming to advocate Leninism, in roughly eight years of being around people who call themselves that, who thought that Marxist-feminism was anything but of the highest importance, and of course, it’s almost impossible to study Lenin without simultaneously studying pre-war social democracy; anyone who’s read Lenin has, in a partial sense, studied the shortcomings and successes of pre-war social democracy (also, surely if M-L is conjuncturally dated, so, too, is the pre-war SPD). And, finally, it’s something of a contradiction in terms to ask Marxist-Leninists to study operaismo since one of the foundational analyses of Leninism as a political practice and analysis is that approaches such as operaismo are ultimately premised on mistaken analyses (Lenin didn’t live to see this tendency but he was very familiar with some of its precursors). That doesn’t mean it’s without merit—I recommend Bologna’s work on Marx as a crisis theorist and the electoral base of fascism to many people, for instance. But to say that communists must take an interest, necessarily, in this long-dead variant of the workers’ movement (which did not prove to be any kind of silver bullet—of course, its major theorist Tronti ultimately rejoined the PCI and has since become an open defeatist); we simply don’t have the time to study every last possible strategic analysis that exists. I again think that it would be far preferable for the authors to advocate the specific reasons why this analysis is important and how communists can learn from it even though the authors also advocate learning from Lenin, some of whose key precepts are actually, in a way, pre-emptive critiques of the very basis of operaismo (I agree that it would be good for Marxist-Leninist parties to have some people around who study or know this historical material, but it seems unduly onerous for all cadre to know this material). I think it’s good to study everything that we can, but at the end of the day, either Lenin was right or the autonomists were right—we simply have to draw lines, even if “drawing lines” just means “pursuing this strategy and not another”. There is no way to believe A and ¬A, dialectics aside. As I said earlier, I think their recommendations here are formalistic: it’s good and well to advocate greater diversity in an abstract sense, and we of course all agree on the maximum diversity possible in terms of our “canon”, but the devil really is in the details of what is “possible”. Some of their suggestions in this regard seem aimed to ask Marxist-Leninists to simply not be Marxist-Leninists (but their post doesn’t exactly offer a general or comprehensive critique of Marxism-Leninism, which I believe would have made for a more consistent essay).

While the essay offers an interesting historical overview of the Marxist-Leninist movement at present, it is ultimately premised on what I think is a very formal and, to put a finer point on it, simply vague criticism. The authors close their essay by arguing that “in the U.S. in 2018, the truly important theoretical tasks have not been solved” but what these tasks are is left unstated as far as I can tell, let alone what kinds of answers might need to be supplied. Even just a rough sketch of the type of question to which this pronouncement refers would have made it easier for people to engage the essay in a more nuanced fashion, I think. As I noted above, it would have been better to simply argue clearly and directly against Leninism as a theory of the epoch of imperialism outright (the essay comes close to being, but is not, that); instead, the argument is often couched in procedural terms (the form of organization is wrong, the willingness to draw lines is wrong, the selective reading of texts and general seeking of a correct analysis rather than as many analyses as possible is wrong) rather than in concrete, substantial terms. I think the essay would have benefited from simply being more precise on these questions: why exactly does the non-existence of the Eastern Bloc, which didn’t exist when Lenin lived, matter? How, precisely? Why is it that it actually does not matter whether people in the imperialist countries argue against the war on Syria and spread antiwar propaganda? What, then, should communists do? How is it that Draper’s quasi-Bolshevik advice, which is recapitulated on the last page, can be reconciled with a DSA whose merits, in the opinion of the authors, are that it is has no effective national unity or consistency among locals? Despite some points about concrete strategy and political practice throughout the essay which are worth taking seriously, ultimately the essay aims for a very general case against Leninism (and, I would argue, communism and Marxism, given what the authors write about the dictatorship of the proletariat, although I don’t think the authors would agree with this reading) but fails to make that coherent case beyond highly impressionistic sketches of history.

J. Seratsky, 12 Mar 2018.

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colewebberblog · 4 years

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7660 — Stupidity or Malice?

There are a lot of insane things happening in the world right now, and I am often stricken as to whether it is being done by psychopaths who are pulling one over on us, or idiots who really mean it. Malice is the far more terrifying option, because it implies a shadow world with ties and powers so vast as to be unbreakable, un-overcome-able… fortunately it is the least likely option. There are many people who have no regard for other human beings, and unfortunately for us a great many of them are demonstrably ‘in power’ — but just because they are ‘evil’ does not also mean they are not ‘stupid’. They can be — and often are — both. Psychopaths are not evil geniuses for lacking empathy. Nor are they even normal geniuses. Human’s value is in collaboration, and the value of our technological tools is in doing more with less: which is always, has to be, to find a win-win. Anything else is not a value-add, is not revolutionary — it is a con, even if it may be earnestly meant by the conman, and engendered out of an inability of empathy rather than disregard-of-it maliciousness. I was recently thinking about the economic downturn we seem to be headed to, which is still very odd and very much up in the air: there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the economy. To tell a business to completely close all activity and income for a quarter, and to find it goes bankrupt is not at all to point out that business doesn’t work. It would work if it was working. Many are still going bankrupt now. But ultimately, we can ‘flip the switch back on’. There was no fundamental economic crisis, rather everything was on hold. So we may very well be able to try to pick up from where we left off — if of course leadership is smart enough to push the pause button for everyone, which I am increasingly worried they will not do. The only real solution is to suspend collections across the board. Not just rent (the renter pays the landlord — who still often has to pay the bank — who still has to pay its clients, you). When the Depression happened — as is happening now — there is still the same amount of money in the world. People have just begun to desperately cringingly hold on to it. Economic disasters are funny, because they make people want to save, but are driven by not spending. But once again: are the state organizers Machiavellians, scheming to withhold precious dollars from us? It would be easy to say so, except that they lose too. Even if they mean it, they’re being stupid. It is completely short sighted. The beautiful case in point is Mr. Henry Ford, who, well not good in a lot of ways, pioneered the improvements in efficiencies that have brought many of the staples of everyday life to everyone — and in a sustainable way. Ford was one of the last ‘titans of industry’ to actually build a company — not just borrow one, or sell one on speculative stock price to guild-gaurunteed income-underwritten siphoning professionals (doctors, lawyers) looking to gullibly expand their investments. People act as if Jeff Bezos is a panderer to a corporate elite (which surely also he is). But he is the richest person in the world. He could not have curried favour with just one person, who bestowed it on him. He is the richest. Where did that money come from? Stock valuations, by the people buying the stocks, or the people providing the money to the investment bankers to provide the stocks. They’re not the ‘1%’ as we usually think of it, but the 10%: doctors, lawyers, and other licensed professionals who generally want investments but don’t want to make their own investments. They are not looking carefully, and easily swayed by image and promise, making Amazon, in name only, the largest company on Earth — even though their ‘revolutionary’ idea is simply to ‘own everything’, and their ‘skyrocketing’ margins are a little over 1%, only for a few years of their existence. With them, as much as with Tesla, Google, Facebook, almost every other ‘meteoric riser’, most of the value is just not there, only up-bid by perception. Ford on the other hand did build a car, and built a way for almost all the population to have it (not just promise to). And how did he do it? He made the simple and very accurate observation: that thinking of the whole system, his employees are also his customers. And his suppliers are also his customers. And all the rest. So he built company housing for his employees, and designed his entire supply chain, not freelancingly outsourcing to lowest bidder (as we see is causing great issues now as global trade is halted). Most importantly, he paid his workers more: far more than minimum wage at the time, ushering in the era of America where you could own a house on a factory worker’s salary. And why did he do it? He was clearly not a selfless man, just the opposite. But he was smart. As Buckminster Fuller notes in his books (he knew Ford) an economic calculation was literally run, which concluded: at this scale, your employees are your customers. Paying them enough to buy your products will allow you both to grow. That seems to be the message lost on founders of companies that tank in a quarter and buy a private jet — of the founders even of the largest companies on Earth today. Where is this mentality in requiring Amazon employees to pee in bottles? In bailing out the big corporations, and letting unemployment claims flood? I am worried for many people in the short term, and my heart goes out to them. But I am not worried for ‘the masses’ in the long term. We always win. Because the simple truth, which is only irrevocably accelerated in an interrelated and connected world, is that it is stupid to screw someone over. Not just cold, or psychopathic, or selfish, or cold blooded. Not just morality guides against it: it is stupid. Human beings are collaborators. Technology is win-win. Everything that is not these things are frauds. Which is why, though maybe these efforts succeed sometimes in the short term, over the very long millions of years of human beings on board the planet, and since civilization records began, the long and large overwhelming trending is for the rich to get less rich, the powerful less powerful, quality of life to expand, and people to have more say. If you are afraid of Amazon — which, fairly you should be — well wait until you hear about Standard Oil. Or the monarchies, who literally owned everything in their country. Even the great power players of today are not very powerful. The largest cash hoard in the world owned by one person (as per Mr. Bezos) is equal to only 0.17% of the money that is made in the world in one year. Not all of the money in the world; only all of it in one year. Not all the money in one year — only that which is ‘made’, not what stays tucked away. The richest man’s pile is just 0.03% of all the money to change hands in just five years. There are more resources and potential than anyone realizes, it is only that our brains have trouble dealing with numbers over a certain amount: a number such as that of humanity’s enormous present resting potential. The world is much bigger than you can even comprehend. People will be able to fix it — just perhaps not the present people ‘in’. It will be fixed. Which only makes me existentially worried for them. Because: even if a quarter of our population is unemployed, if debt flows up, and all the rest… that part is not real. The only real value of the real economy is the technological capacity of humanity. The factories are still there. The people that know how to use them are still here. The machines are still in the field, and the crops are still planted. We simply cannot lose it all overnight — we only can, somehow, on paper, which would call into question the validity of those approximating accounting methods in the first place. There have at times been events like this, which have usually resulted in massive restructurings. Debts can be cancelled. People can be put back to work. Countries even, can change governments — not just in name, but completely. And so while I am deeply worried for many of the masses in the short term, we are the force that must not be controlled but reckoned with in the long term. Always. You cannot simply beat us. You cannot lay off 25% of humanity — there is still the work to be done, and the capacity to take care of us! We will be employed, just not by you. I am called to the phrase ‘eat the rich’ which I originally detested as overly violent but only recently learned the full quote and origin of. It is greatly misused today. It is from the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau living very close to the French Revolution. It is not a grotesque call to action, but rather a simple and patient observation — and warning… to the rich. The full quote is: When the poor have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich. Simple and matter of fact and true. Their dollars are part of this economy too: they can’t crash it and then walk out with the bags of gold. They have to make it work, or else they will go down too. They have to figure it out, or else be toppled. If anything, I am not worried about a dystopia but a revolution. In the past months the governments of the world have proved that they can do, rapidly, what they usually pretend they cannot. They can completely alter society, form new organizations, develop new technologies, create programs to catalogue every citizen, raise and spend trillions of dollars — nearly overnight. Nobody on Earth has not noticed this. When the immediate threat begins to subside, if they say they cannot levy the same to deal with the run off problems: evictions, unaffordable housing, debts, etc. etc. — nobody is going to believe them. They can do it, and the must or be replaced.

colewebber.com

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lettucetacoboatsix · 5 years

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A Little Back and Forth: An Introduction to the Swinging Lifestyle

Recommended Reading

The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers by Terry Gould

If you’re curious about a club, here’s an FAQ section from one in Columbus, Ohio: http://www.clubprinceton.com/faq

Before We Begin…

I want to say that if you’re active within the swinging lifestyle, please talk to me. A lot of this information comes from studies on the swinging community between the ‘70s and ‘90s, so it may very well be outdated. I have no qualms with the idea of sex for sex’s sake. If that is what you’re into, and everyone you engage with is on board and understands the rules and what’s expected, go for it. However, swinging’s origins and early incarnations were problematic, and homophobia and racism very much shaped the community, and that troubling history is just something I cannot support and I probably do not do well to hide my judgment in dealing with the information I found.

What are we talking about?

Compared to polyamory, swinging is much easier to define and to limit in its scope. Unlike polyamory, swinging is very rigid and almost conservative in its approach to consensual non-monogamy. Swinging, or “the lifestyle,” is a type of open relationship in which one or more partners in a committed relationship and singles, usually women, engage in sexually explicit behavior with others as a recreational or social activity, typically on a habitual or recurring basis. Swinging is a form of consensual non-monogamy and is very much laden with rules. People may be interested in swinging for a variety of reasons, but generally swinging is about sex—whether that is engaging in more sex in an attempt to improve both quality and quantity, to add variety into their otherwise conventional sex lives or due to their curiosity, or to strengthen their relationship.

For most in the know, swinging, or at least its less apocryphal existence, arose from the freer attitudes towards sexual activity after the social/sexual revolutions of the 1960s and in the early 1970s due to the invention and availability of the contraceptive pill and hormonal birth control, the emergence of treatments for many of the sexually transmitted diseases that were known at that time, and, later, the adoption of safe sex practices (1980s and beyond). However, it has probably been around a lot longer than that, and swinging as we know it in the United States actually began a little earlier. Per Terry Gould in The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, swinging began among American Air Force pilots and their wives during World War II, so mid-1940s, before pilots left for overseas duty. With the mortality rate of military pilots being so high, a close bond would sometimes develop between pilot families that implied that pilot husbands would care for all the wives as their own – emotionally and sexually – if the husbands were lost, hence wife-swapping (notice how the women didn’t really ever have a say in the matter). The realities of the demographics and basing of US Army Air Force (USAAF) pilots and crew suggest that this arrangement did not evolve during WWII, instead evolving later. Though the origins of swinging are somewhat contested, it is assumed American swinging was practiced in some American military communities in the 1950s. By the time the Korean War ended, swinging had spread from the military to the suburbs.

Isn’t this just wife swapping?

The problem with the term "wife swapping," looking beyond the fact that it’s generally patriarchal and heteronormative, is that it implies that the men are in control when, in fact, within lifestyle groups, women are almost always the ones calling the shots.

Who swings?

Please take this with a grain of salt. Most of the studies I found were at least ten years old, and many of them were actually older. I would hope that as attitudes shift, the lifestyle would become a little less “Old Boys Club” and a little more “Free Love,” so please let me know if you know any of this information to be factually inaccurate.

(As a general side note, a pretty consistent problem with any socio-sexual study is that it relies almost exclusively on self-reporting, so data can be skewed and depending on how the questionnaires are worded, people might just view the term “swinging” as outdated or reserved exclusively for this more conservative crowd. Also, if you ever have the chance to participate in any sort of social study or socio-sexual study with a reputable institution, please do so. Anonymity and safety for the participants is always paramount, but this is how people like me collect data.)

Maybe not surprising based on that limited history, the lifestyle seems to skew a little older compared to other types of consensual non-monogamy, and is very much focused within middle class, white families, although not exclusively so. The demographic profile of the swingers suggests that they are for the most part white, between 36 and 55 years of age, mostly college educated, married for at least 11 to 20 years, and with an average household income between $40,000 and $200,000. Many professions and occupations are represented, from blue-collar and white-collar workers to individuals with advanced professional degrees; however, a large portion of men identified as salespeople and a large portion of women who self-identified tended to be stay-at-home wives, typically with children. If this sounds like your white picket fence suburbanite nuclear family, you’re not wrong.

Swingers also tended to be conservative in other ideologies, apart from the whole having-extramarital-sex thing. Sex within most swinging circles is typically conventional or “vanilla.” Of course, there are some exceptions. Views towards the LGBTQ+ community were typically not favorable: women might pair off (female bisexuality is even encouraged, and the holy grail of the swinging world is the fabled “unicorn,” a single woman interested in engaging in sexual activity with both parts of a heterosexual couple—all of which kind of points to the patriarchal origins of swinging and the idea of playing towards the male fantasy of watching two women together/being with two women at the same time), but two men rarely do so within the lifestyle. Historically, swinging culture was viewed as distinct from the gay scene (it wasn’t just homophobia either, people of color were typically not welcome at early-70s swinging parties.) Interestingly, expressing affection for a partner was considered bad form, often manifesting in rules against kissing. After all, these brief encounters were not supposed to develop into romantic relationships. Contrary to what most critics of swinging believe, swingers also tend to be anti-drug and “anti-hippie,” not at all aligned with the ideals or lifestyle of the counterculture.

The men in the studies I found, for the most part, were heterosexual, although about 20% did consider themselves bisexual or bi-curious. The majority of the women considered themselves bi-curious, with a small minority fancying themselves as bisexual (and, yes, bisexuality is definitely a thing. Please end the bi-erasure). Female bisexuality is accepted within the swinging lifestyle; however, male bisexuality is discouraged and not welcomed (remember when this all became relatively popular and accepted, though. This crowd was living through the early ‘70s and ‘80s during the AIDs epidemic, and homophobia was the general climate of the time). Perhaps one of the reasons why women are attracted to swinging is the opportunity to express their bisexuality in a safe and accepting environment.

Most swingers are married or cohabiting, and the overwhelming majority had been in a relationship for well over 10 years, and for most this was their first marriage/long-term committed relationship. A small number had been married more than once, and there were no apparent differences between men and women in the length of and frequency of marriage. Most have been swinging anywhere between three years and 12 years, and another study found that as many as 10% of marriages engaged in some form of swinging.

A Glossary of Swinging Terminology

Being a lifestyle, it should not be surprising that swinging has its own language, and if its something you are interested in, here are a few terms with which you should familiarize yourself (it’s worth noting that many of these things could have their own post in the future and they are not exclusive to swinging):

Bi-curious: A person interested in engaging in sexual activities with a person of the same sex.

Candaulism: The pleasure of seeing your partner engage with a third person in front of you and with your consent. This could involve full, penetrative sex, or anything short of that, but still of a sexual nature. This is somewhat related to the practice of cuckoldry/cukqueaning although, candaulism is typically within the same room, and may or may not involve an aspect of sexual humiliation.

Closed-door/Closed swinging: The practice of swapping partners and having sex separately in different rooms or setting. Although as swinging typically happens within clubs or at parties, it is generally within the same general locale.

Exhibitionism: Finding sexual pleasure in having sex in public or being watched, specifically for the pleasure of voyeurs, but who do not necessarily swing.

Full-swap: The practice of exchanging partners and having full, penetrative sex.

Open/Same-room swinging: The practice of swapping partners simultaneously in the same room. This might include both a full- or a soft swap.

Soft-swap: swapping partners but limiting sexual activity to kissing, oral sex and heavy petting.

Swinger: A person who enjoys swapping his sexual partner with another. It can be soft-swapping or full-swapping.

The Lifestyle: A euphemism for the “swinging lifestyle”. However, for most people within the community, it encompasses more than just swinging. It implies sexual open-mindedness in general.

Troilism: Sex involving three persons. In short: a threesome.

Unicorns: Bisexual women who are sexually “single” and available to join couples for a threesome. Called unicorns because of their rarity, but they do exist.

Voyeursim: The practice of watching people engaging in sexual activity. Ethically, it should be done with their consent – which is the case in swinging clubs.

Why do People Swing?

First and foremost, having sex with other people/couples can be really hot… if you're all on the same page. Whether you get off on the idea that your partner is your own private porn star and you want to watch them in their element, want to share a lover/an experience in order to bring you closer together, or simply acknowledge that your partner is going to have sexual fantasies/desires/needs that you’re just never going to be able to comfortably fulfill, swinging may very well be for you. Apart from that obvious answer, though, it’s worth noting a few other trends within swingers.

Swingers typically have less trouble reaching orgasm. Within the general population, 25% of women report having trouble reaching orgasm with their partners (the number is even higher when the defined sexual activity is restricted solely to vaginal, penetrative sex only). Men, especially men over 50, also report issues with reaching climax during sex. However, participants within the swinging lifestyle seem to have a little less trouble, as less than 5% of women and only 1% of men reported having trouble reaching orgasm. Correlation does not equal causation, though, so this may also be attributed to the fact that people interested in swinging are more attuned to what their own body wants and needs.

Swingers and other practitioners of consensual non-monogamy tend to be more open and honest with their partners. Again, in order for a consensual non-monogamous relationship to work, there have to be clear channels of communication. Breaking the rules can be dangerous. Not only for your relationship, but for your personal health as well.

So there are real benefits to swinging, if you and your partner can handle it and are sure it’s something you want to pursue.

Honey, I think this Might be for Us:

Swinging tends to be a little more strict than other forms of consensual non-monogamy. This is out of necessity because the emphasis tends to be placed on sex rather than the potential for developing relationships outside of an existing love. But, if you and your partner think swinging might be for you (and more power to you!), here are some things to consider:

Why do we want to swing?

There are many reasons for swinging. Maybe you both want to experience the pleasure of a shared sexual relationship or simply want to spice up your intimate life with new adventures. Regardless of your personal reason, the first step really is to communicate your desires and wants with your partner. This isn’t really something to try just for the sake of it. Both partners should first openly communicate their feelings to each other to create a comfortable atmosphere and establish a channel of communication should anything change for either partner in the future. But, as with the decision to open up any struggling relationship, if you're looking for ways to fix the problems in your relationship, you'll be left severely disappointed. The swinging lifestyle is only for healthy couples looking for sheer pleasure.

How do we want to swing?

Even though swinging tends to be laden with rules, there are still plenty of varieties of swinging. Are you interested in open swinging in front of your partner or do you want to try closed swinging away from each other? Are you interested in full-swap or soft-swap? Is only one of you interested in pursuing additional sexual partners and the other is just perfectly happy watching? How are you going to meet people? You can begin with locally organized swinger parties or jump to lavish swinger cruises and vacations at lifestyle resorts. You can also try to meet people through online personal ads. The choice is totally yours. It would depend on your budget, kink preferences, and the degree of excitement you're looking for. The chances are you may be looking forward to playing with a few of your fantasies that you may have never explored before.

Set some ground rules.

If you're new to this lifestyle, it is important to set some rules for each other before indulging in any extracurricular activity. For example, if you are both going to a swinging event and either one of you wants to leave early, is it fine for one of you to stay behind or do you both need to leave together? Other rules may include factors related to being in the same room or being comfortable seeing your partner having intimacy with the same sex. Make sure you talk about all these things up front, and most importantly be able to stick to these rules for the sake of your relationship. Negotiation should never occur mid-scene. Sex, especially great sex, can induce a euphoric state and this will definitely cloud your judgment. If you’re breaking the rules while swinging, you’re cheating. It’s as simple as that. And because consensual non-monogamous relationships are built on trust, honesty, and openness, infidelity of this manner can be absolutely devastating.

What have we got to offer?

Swinging is a choice, and there’s going to be a lot of judgment up front. You should start by working on your persona and inspiring each other’s confidence. Whether in a club, at a party, or with someone you met online, you’re essentially peacocking, so bring your A game. And yes, for many swingers, it is exactly that: a persona. While this practically helps to protect people from being publicly outed, it can also be self-liberating and allow you to communicate your desires more freely.

Consider meeting couples online first.

If you're not sure about attending a live swinger party or joining a club initially, you can always find other not-so-open swinger couples online. It's a great place to meet others swingers. The magical interwebs is full of online dating sites where you get to find a lot of people sharing this similar interest. All you need to is create a catchy profile, upload your photos and start your search through member profiles.

Plan to meet before hooking up.

After you've found the couples or individuals matching your criteria, you can talk to them on the phone or simply arrange a meeting. It is ideal to meet the potential swinger couples the first time first, so you can see whether they look or talk the same as they did online. There’s a lot of rejection that goes on within the swinging community. It comes with the territory, and it’s important to remember that you don’t owe anyone anything, nor does anyone owe you anything. If you don't feel a connection or if scene negotiations are too difficult, simply move on.

Respecting everyone’s rules is mandatory.

This tends to be a bigger issue for couples who are swinging with other couples, but anyone who is part of the community is going to have their own rules. These need to be acknowledged before engaging sexually and respected during that sexual activity.

Safety is key for everyone.

Practice safe sex. By their very nature, swingers have sex with more partners. The exchange of bodily fluids can expose people to sexually transmitted infections. Some clubs may even require regular blood tests for their members. But apart from safe sex, look out for your partner while swinging but try not to get in their way. It may be helpful to have a safe word to use when one of you thinks a situation might be getting dangerous or out of hand. Also, it’s a club’s right to judge its members. Self-policing is key and you may need to meet exacting standards. Outsiders pose a threat to anonymity and can potentially bring in diseases, and this is something you need to be prepared for.

Be ready for gatekeepers.

Along those same lines, prepared to be judged. Many clubs require an interview process, and body positivity isn’t always at the forefront of the interviewer’s mind. They want people who will potentially draw other people into the club (this is typically why single females get a discount, while single males require sponsorship). I also read several community postings that describe single men as the vermin of the swinging world. Again, it is absolutely their right to pass judgment on you; after all, you will more than likely be doing the same to their members should you be accepted.

Eventually, if you’re up for it, check out a swinging club.

Clubs provide access to experienced swingers who know the ins and outs of the lifestyle. You will typically be safe within a club, and people may be more readily understanding to your needs and wants. If you can handle that initial judgment, it might provide you with exactly what you’re looking for.

One final thought…

Although it’s a far cry from the free love movement that arose in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, swinging does provide an opportunity to engage in sex for sex’s sake. If that’s what you’re looking for, by all means go for it, but please remember to play safe and respect the rules of the lifestyle.

#swinging #lifestyle #consensual non-monogamy #open relationships #sexuality

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newsnigeria · 6 years

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/religion-saves-the-americans/

Religion saves ‘The Americans’ – the superb (semi) pro-socialist TV show

by Ramin Mazaheri for Ooduarere

(NOTE: This review contains spoilers for the TV show “The Americans”)

The US television show “The Americans” has been considered the best TV show for the past few years, and it aired its finale on May 30, and to rave reviews.

What has gone unappreciated, and of course rarely commented-upon among the fake-leftist cultural gurus of the US, is that “The Americans”was the first show to ever sympathetically portray committed socialists in US history. For leftists, it was truly ground-breaking and long-awaited television.

The show revolves around two dedicated, highly-trained Soviets who have been implanted as long-term spies in America to work for the cause of global socialism, all while appearing as a normal,entrepreneurial American family with two children.

Watching the show I was happily astounded to see – time and time again – that the spies were portrayed as truly devoted, impassioned, intelligent socialists. Throughout the show’s 6 seasons there were socialist critiques of American culture; of capitalism, imperialism, militarism, racism, individualism, etc., and all delivered without a hint of irony or doubt. Never before have Americans been so capably presented with a socialist critique of their society on the TV in their own home.

Continue reading after the page break African-American militants and Vietnamese communists had major storylines, and they too are treated realistically. Their political ideas and experiences as the victims of imperialist capitalism are presented with truly unprecedented sympathy and honesty. All the socialist characters demanded that they be treated as honest members working on behalf of a progressive, enlightened political system – socialism. Of course they all lose in the end, but it is amazing that they got past US censors in the first place.

“The Americans” also did a better job of discussing Soviet history than American journalists – to give just one recent example, they actually talked about the fact that the Soviets won World War II (the Western front) and that 25 million Soviets died. If you tried to give that number in a US news-debate show you’d probably be shouted down. Time and again the female spy character cites facts, achievements and principles to defend the socialist cause and is an ardent Soviet nationalist.

And that makes “The Americans” revolutionary viewing. Socialist motivations and ideology have never been even objectively presented in American television. It seems that 30 years after the implosion of the USSR, US television executives finally decided to end the decades of non-stop lies and propaganda which the idiot box had broadcast regarding the USSR, socialism, communism, anti-imperialism and their related ideologies.

Of course, being an American show, the real Americans win in the end. But for leftists the show is worth watching for the female spy, Elizabeth, and her ideological monologues. She is a rock-hard socialist revolutionary, and her many years living in the US has only given her even more reasons to fundamentally reject Western capitalist culture; thus, her critiques are relevant to American society today.

It is also, much like Mad Men did for the late 1950s and early 1960s, a “time-capsule show”. The 1980s have been been replicated with big-budget production values, so the nostalgia factor is sentimentally present as well.

I spoke to a young journalist colleague in Russia – she had never heard of “The Americans”. I was quite surprised, because the portrayal of her Soviet 1980s-era ancestors is really quite thorough and flattering, even to non-socialists. There are plenty of real-life references to Soviet culture and personalities which would make it sentimentally attractive to Russian viewer, as well.

Perhaps the best thing about the finale is that there was no absurd negative foreshadowing of the Putin era; to me, this reflects the serious nature with which the Russians and Soviets are treated with thought the series. If the Russians are waiting for a better, reasonably honest, big-budget TV series about the Soviet era…they will be waiting quite a long time.

Most Americans TV shows revolve around fame, death or sports, so I really must recommend this drama as a politically-enlightened form of escapism.

Analysing the finale: another ‘deathbed conversion’ by Hollywood

Of course the real Americans were going to win, but the question was how?

It is unfortunate that the show’s final storyline so unbelievable: After 5.9 seasons of determined, shining, staunch support for socialism, Elizabeth (the female spy) listens to a nuclear arms reduction speech from a fictitious minister of Gorbachev…and promptly decides to defy her KGB handlers in order to support the Gorbachev faction and world peace.

She thus turns on the ideals of the revolution, her KGB comrades, her life’s work and successfully keeps Gorbachev from being deposed in a coup. I found this personality-shift unconvincing, but hey: this is Hollywood.

How different would the world have been if Gorbachev – despised in Russia today – had been deposed? At least we have this TV series to raise such a question, even if if it is answered in a way which affirms the America’s mistaken pro-imperialist & anti-socialist ideology.

Paige, the Jesus-loving teenager who was savvy enough to realize something was fishy about her parents and who then willingly signed as a junior KGB-kid, is left doing something stereotypically Russian – drinking vodka. Our final image of her is slamming a shot of vodka all alone, as she has retreated to the safe house where she was schooled on Soviet history and culture.

Clearly, she represents the upcoming post-Gorbachev “lost generation” – one which falls into alcoholism, depression and bitterness towards the failures of the older generations which have gutted her future. Paige is the trained Soviet youth that will sit in waste until Putin turns the country around.

Paige could have continued to Canada and then on to the USSR with her parents, but – in one of the show’s biggest final twists – she leaves the train at the last stop before Canada, abandoning her parents. And that shows that Paige is truly an “American”: like all members of Generation X and beyond, American children are culturally instructed to hate their parents and rebel at every opportunity. Paige might have gone to the USSR she had come to admire and even work for…if only her stupid parents weren’t there too!

However, Paige – who has descended from the socialist future to bitter brat – won’t have time to be snottily depressed for long: it’s impossible for the neophyte spy to survive on her own in America, and we can be sure she will soon be waterboarded and cattle-prodded for all she knows, and likely executed like the Rosenbergs for treason. Little wonder she is drinking.

Henry: As is the case in many top TV shows these days (notably the Sopranos), young adult female characters are extremely capable, but young adult male characters are essentially clueless and drags on society. Henry continues this trend, as he was never told of his parents’ secret life nor was he smart enough to figure it out like his sister. He was, however, smart enough to get into a rich, private, capitalist boarding school, where he thrived (and also took the boring problem of his existence off the hands of the show’s writers).

The parents decide, in another twist, to not bring Henry to the USSR. He is at home in America, they decide, and thus has proved he is truly an “American”. In a final family phone call to Henry – where they do not tell him of their double life – Philip (the spy father) continues his American-style parenting of encouraging egotistical individualism (telling him “You’re great”) and non-stop work / personal achievement / consumption (telling him to “Go go go”).

Philip then immediately goes to buy three huge bags of McDonald’s for just three people, in one last effort to get dangerously obese and thus be a typical American family. They eat in the car and on the run for work, like most Americans do.

The future of Henry is pretty grim: no parents, a tough battle to prove he was unaware of his parents spying, lifelong enormous overcompensation to prove his “American-ness” and endless bitterness towards socialism. Thus the gifted, elite-schooled, “socialism ruined my life” Henry is likely to wind up a supremely useful tool of the 1%: possibly president, like the son of a Communist-deposed Hungarian aristocrat (Nicolas Sarkozy), or the CEO of the most anti-worker American company today, Uber (headed by Iranian Revolution-fleeing Dara Khosrowshahi).

Regardless, Henry is another fine catch of the American brain drain, and his talents will not be used in Russia during their upcoming years of stagnation caused by switching form their socialist-inspired model.

Philip and Stan – spies unlike us, or each other

Philip, the father-husband-spy, was always less committed as a socialist than his wife, and this provided much of the show’s domestic tension. Philip’s does not ultimately cease his spy work in the final season because he loves the US, but more because he has becomes disillusioned with spydom.

Indeed, for a trained, embedded, murdering spy with an arranged wife…Philip was always a rather happy-go-lucky sort – he cared more for family life and his travel agency than promoting socialism. One wonders at the KGB’s selection process, especially in the area of testing ideological rigor? However, as was unambiguously implied, Philip endured homosexual sex as part of his spy training, so he was clearly VERY committed at one point in his life (I would say “too committed”!).

Philip is the one who is saved – from his feelings of guilt and the anti-American evils of socialism – by religion, and thus shifts the show’s moral centre from Paige (of course, Elizabeth for socialists like myself) to himself in Season 3.

While American baby boomers undoubtedly failed in a political sense – unlike their Chinese and Iranian counterparts – a fair case can be made that they succeeded in a spiritual sense. The recently-departed journalist-novelist Tom Wolfe correctly described the 1960s and 70s in America as the “Third Great Awakening” (a third period of American religious revivalism); there is no doubt that American spiritual values changed for a huge part of their population, though the value of these changes are in the eye of the beholder.

In a very good piece of writing, Philip embodies this post-Woodstock reality as he attends seminars for the now-deduct EST movement. EST was a quasi-religious, corporate, Scientology-like, semi-cult which focused on pure individualism and personal empowerment. EST helped Philip get in touch with his feelings, forgive himself for his many murders (one even committed before he became a spy) and to find a new level of spirituality…one which led him to abandon his comrades, political ideals, homeland, and society in favor of his own personal desires. EST is clearly a “new world” type of religion.

Stan Beeman was an FBI agent working on fighting Soviet spies who moved next door to the Soviet spy couple. The unlikely friendship between Philip and Stan is another of the show’s key plot devices.

Stan is – in classic American WASP fashion – unable to emotionally connect with his wife and son, both of whom leave him. Philip invited Stan to EST, although acting class may have been a better choice, as the actor playing Stan undoubtedly set a record for number of subtle one-way upper-lip twists per on-screen minute.

Capitalist new-age spirituality – the authentic American religion – saves the day

I include Philip and Stan here together because the show’s finale clearly wanted us to view them that way – as “best friends”. Of course, the climatic scene of the entire series is when Stan inevitably finds out that his neighbors are Soviet spies – will he let them escape or arrest them?

Cornered in a garage, Philip finally breaks his cover and appeals to Stan’s sensibilities…not with a defense of socialism, but with the Nazi Nurembourg defense of “We had a job to do.” Stan, being an FBI fascist, sympathizes of course, and his anger lessens.

Philip then repudiates his entire socialist past, describing how his life has become one big sob-story and how he and his wife have been betrayed by their comrades into trying to depose peace-loving Gorbachev. Stan responds with a statement never-before uttered by an FBI or CIA agent: “I could care less who runs your country.”

But EST makes a surprising re-appearance at this time of supreme dramatic decision. Philip tells Stan: “But we’re getting in that car, and we’re driving away. (Big sigh) I wish you had stayed with me at EST – you might know what to do here.”

Stan pauses, remembers EST’s “Me Generation” new-age religion principles and is inspired to know what to do here: He does not stop them as Philip, Elizabeth and Paige slowly move to the car. The family (minus pouting Paige) makes it back to the USSR. Three cheers for EST!

Thus it is actually religion which saves “The Americans” in “The Americans”. Not a standard religion, not even a successful new-age religion like Scientology, but an ideology which is “spiritual but not religious”, and which serves no societal and only an individualist function.

Even if Stan’s brief EST training hadn’t kicked in, religion still would have saved the spy family: the finale also included a Russian Orthodox clergy member who, under the threat of being unable to climb up the church ladder, breaks his vows and gives them up to the FBI. This is in pointed contrast to the previous episode, where the spy family’s WASP pastor (who knew they were spies) does not break his vows when questioned by the FBI, giving the average American viewer a cheap thrill of perceived religious superiority.

But it is EST which ultimately saves the day, the bad socialists, Stan from being a bad friend, and the protagonists with whom we must partially sympathise and root for or else we change the channel.

As the audience rests from the emotional climax, the song that plays is “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits, which aims to underscore the kinship between the two male intelligence operatives.

However, this actually only reveals the true political leanings of the writers – political and historical nihilism – as it implies that Philip and Stan are essentially the same, even though they were motivated for decades by two totally different ideologies. Stan and Philip were violent enemies and definitely not brothers-in-arms…at least not until Philip was deluded by new-age, individualist spirituality.

EST, of course, is no religion. EST is no longer even taught. But EST lives on in America in Oprah, in the selfie, in America’s refusal to deal honestly with their imperialist past, in their hedonistic worship of the present, in their desire for perpetual youth, in their efforts to make “getting what you want” somehow a positive moral value, and in the idea that we must constantly improve and transform ourselves because the American system itself is perfect and thus must not be tampered with via socialist modernisations.

EST, we can see, was always present in America’s 400+ year history in one form or another. It is little wonder that it was chosen by the writers to be the supreme, modern ideology to prevail over socialism.

Of course, EST is Reagan-era bullplop.

Reagan-era bullplop – neoliberalism – is the dominant Western ideology now, and we all knew that the series’ climactic scene would not end with Elizabeth orchestrating a socialist victory but with exhortations to more neoliberalism.

Elizabeth – another leftist misled by Gorbachev

Elizabeth is played with grim emaciation by Keri Russell, an actress who had been best-known for unexpectedly cutting off her trademark long curly hair, ruining her appeal and quickly causing the end of her poplar series “Felicity”. She appears to have learned her lesson, because whenever she is not in disguise she prominently “wears her hair forward” in this series.

Being a typical male, I had no idea what “wearing hair forward” meant until an ex-girlfriend told me as we watched this show. I defended my male obtuseness and lack of style by remarking that if she had “worn her hair sideways” I would have surely noticed. Female readers will perhaps understand why, with such bad jokes, this girlfriend is now an ex. But I end this digression….

Because Elizabeth was the unrepentant socialist (at least until the Hollywood ending) there was no doubt that the writers would finish by assassinating her character as much as possible.

One of the last scenes of her involves an unsettling dream she has while flying back to the USSR. She is in bed with her ideologically-solid African-American militant lover, whom she respected and loved more than Philip; he is rubbing her belly as she says, “I don’t want a kid anyway.” (Of course, a half-Black baby would blow her cover.) Metaphorically, this is to imply that Elizabeth does not have a soul. Literally, it is to show that she was an frigid spy queen who wanted to be motherless and thus is fine leaving her children behind; children being the only sacred family tie in Western society, which cares not for extended family as in other cultures.

In American television it is fine to denigrate the older generation, but rarely is prime motherhood portrayed as anything but as American as apple pie; it’s quite a damnation, and thus primes the viewer to interpret her socialist commitment as similarly soulless and damned. She never stopped being a committed socialist, of course, just a right-wing, Gorbachevian one. Not good enough for the West, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth gets the series very final line – “We’ll get used to it” – which is a response to Philip’s “I feel strange”. This is a continuation of the last-second effort to portray Elizabeth as a fundamentally inauthentic and soulless person. The writers clearly do not want viewers to ultimately sympathise with the socialist Elizabeth, and they thus make a deathbed confession to Hollywood that they repudiate the socialist ideas they quite ably wrote for years.

The two characters say this as the two look out over a dark, polluted, factory-filled, ominous Russian city…and the series ends.

Americans love music – analysing the song choices

Music in TV show finales is always often much discussed: Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” in the TV show “Breaking Bad’ and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” for the “Sopranos”.

The previously mentioned “Brothers in Arms” was an inspired choice, even if it was instrumentalized to support political and historical nihilism.

The other use of music was far less original – U2’s “With Or Without You”, which at any given moment is being played simultaneously on roughly 900 different Western radio stations. This song played as Paige walked off the train, abandoning her parents in a fit of short-sighted Gen X resentment.

More than just explaining family dynamics, the choice of that song represents the series as a whole: It serves as a sort of love letter from America to the USSR. After all, the 1980s were a much simpler time: The world was either capitalist or communist, and you picked your camp.

Today, Islamophobia has replaced communism, and it is a far less-satisfying ideological war for everybody. The US is winning the body count race by many factors of 10, but that is only barely enough to satisfy rabid Westerners – in the age of Political Correctness they cannot full-throatedly hate Muslims as they could communists. Also, they are losing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, unlike versus the Soviets.

Subconsciously, Westerners know that it is they who have ruined the Arab Spring, proving that they aren’t committed to democracy (nor ever were). Quite consciously, the supremacy of capitalism has only brought lower wages, austerity and economic & social instability – “this is victory?” It is no wonder that many long for the good-old Reagan-era days, when neoliberalism was just sprouting its terrible tentacles, the enemies were clear, wages and purchasing power weren’t stagnant, and flying wasn’t such a hassle.

So the song represents that the US misses the USSR as an adversary – the West could not and cannot live with or without the Soviets.

Fortunately, socialism can never die.

Unfortunately, the final music accompanying the spy couple’s return to Russia is simply a maudlin, European violin.

This is as artistically and emotionally unsatisfying as the West’s alleged “victory” over socialism. However, what choice did the writers have but phony sentimentality when they fundamentally are anti-socialist and pro-imperialist status quo?

When is the Iranian version getting broadcast?

I liked this series very much because it makes me think that: if the US can make a (semi) pro-socialist TV show 30 years after the fall of the USSR, perhaps a (semi) pro-Iranian Islamic revolution show is just 30 years away!

As of now, the archetypal TV/cinematic portrayal of modern Iran is not the Oscar-nominated Argo, but Hollywood’s 1991’s propaganda piece Not Without My Daughter. In the movie an Iranian man who tries to kidnap his daughter to Iran from his wife (Sally Field). This movie set the mould for all movies about Iran as well as all movies from Iran which receive Western praise and distribution: the plot must include tremendous oppression of women. Roger Ebert, America’s greatest and most popular movie critic ever, courageously wrote, “If a movie of such a vitriolic and spiteful nature were to be made in America about any other ethnic group, it would be denounced as racist and prejudiced.” But anything goes for Iran….

Yet “The Americans” shows that Hollywood does eventually let down their propaganda guard! Of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran learned from the Soviet implosion and will not suffer the same anti-socialist fate, but maybe in 30 years there will be a similar big-budget TV show in the US?

And so I propose: “The Christians”. Tentative broadcast date: 2048

In this TV series two Iranian Christian refugees (Why are they refugees when Christians are constitutionally represented and protected in Iran, and that Prophet Mohammad repeatedly confirms and upholds the Scriptures? No matter, this is Hollywood.) are actually secret spies for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The series is set in Chicago, the home of the only Bahai church in North America, providing further subplots and a place where the “asylum-seeking” couple can work, applying the knowledge from their Iranian background.

The male spy, Fazlollah, is eventually disillusioned with Iranian Islamic Socialism and is won over by the corrupt and merciless “Chicago Way”: alternately rendered as “get them before they get you,” or, “If he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. If he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” He renounces his political and religious faith, and becomes a Bahai.

Fazlollah’s wife is not pleased about this change -she wants nothing more than to come from a hard day’s work spying, kick off her shoes, and put on her burka (her ethnic heritage is Irani Afghan).

One child joins the University of Chicago and becomes a rabid neoliberal and disciple of Milton Friedman. The other willingly becomes an Iranian Islamic Socialist and works to subvert US banking sanctions by funnelling money from the Chicago Board of Trade to Iran via their Bitcoin futures contracts. Like Paige, both “abandon” their Iranian parents by cruelly moving into homes next door after each gets married around the age of 30.

Other plot lines can involve Catholic socialists in Latin America, and even Chinese socialists – the writers of “The Americans” surprisingly never found a way to include them.

The final twist is that the couple flees the US and returns to Iran, only to find that the IRI is so strong that they no longer care about a couple of sellout spies.

On second thought, maybe the US needs 60 years to produce such a show…90 tops.

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook.

#Religion #U.S.A

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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says AI taking US jobs is '50-100 years away' — but it's already beginning to happen

On Friday, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin answered a slew of questions in an interview with Axios' Mike Allen about the global economy and US labor market, including about the threat of artificial intelligence (AI) affecting American jobs.

Mnuchin is not overly worried. Concerns about AI and jobs are so far way "it's not even on our radar screen... 50-100 years" away, he said, according to Axios.

"I'm not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future, he said, before adding, "In fact, I'm optimistic."

However, studies have estimated that AI could affect jobs much sooner than that. And, crucially, technological advancements will likely not only be impacting the manufacturing sector.

In a paper published in 2013, Oxford University's Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne looked at which current jobs are susceptible to technological innovations such as machine learning, and estimated the probability that the 702 different occupations they looked at will be computerized.

Notably, they did not estimate the number of jobs that will actually be automated, but rather a given occupation's "potential job automatability" over an unspecified number of years.

They found that about 47% of total US employment is in the high risk category, which the team defined as jobs they expect could be automated "relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two."

They discuss the model and its results in greater detail (emphasis ours):

"Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistical occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labor in production occupations, are at risk. These finds are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations, where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013) are highly susceptible to computerization. Additional support for this finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI, 2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human labor in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013)."

Osborne and Frey included a chart in their paper showing the probability of computerization for a given job versus the number of people employed in that job:

High-skill jobs under the categories of "management, business, and financial," "healthcare practitioners and technical," and "computer, engineering, and science" saw lower likelihoods of automation, while "service," "sales and related," "transportation and material moving," and "office and administrative support" have higher probabilities.

One particularly notable thing here, as the authors write in the above paragraph, is many of the jobs that are highly susceptible to computerization are in the services sector, which has seen the most job growth over the past few decades as the US has transitioned from a manufacturing-based economy to a services-based one.

In other words, although the recent political cycle has focused primarily on manufacturing and construction jobs — and, indeed, those are susceptible to being automated away, according to Frey and Osbourne — this study suggests that they are not the only jobs "at risk." To take it a step further, this suggests manufacturing jobs are not the only jobs economists, politicians, and policymakers should be focusing on.

For a clearer but less detailed look, a Morgan Stanley team led by Elga Bartsche put together a chart last year using select data from Frey and Osborne, showing the probability of some of the more popular service sector jobs becoming automatable.

As you can see below, within the services sector, jobs that requiring high-level analytical thinking and problem solving (physicians or surgeons), originality and/or performance (musicians and singers), and even highly unpredictable personal interactions (elementary school teachers) have lower probabilities of becoming automated.

On the other hand, low-skill services sector jobs such as receptionists, paralegals, and even taxi drivers, are more likely to be automated.

Already we are seeing some of this happen in real-time. As an example of a low-skill service sector job getting automated, we can look at Panera Bread, a fast-casual restaurant chain, which has started replacing human cashiers with kiosks. Moreover, Uber is testing self-driving cars.

In their paper, Frey and Osborne cite the example of computerization entering legal services. They write, "specifically, law firms now rely on computers that can scan thousands of legal briefs and precedents to assist in pre-trial research."

Of course, the effects of technological advancements on the US labor market aren't all negative. For example, with computerization entering legal services and taking care of the more mindless, repetitive work, a legal team can allocate resources and people to other tasks and hire more people with different skill sets. And so, in a sense, the team as a whole works with the computer as opposed to against it for a net-advantage.

But the question of what will happen to folks who will lose their jobs to automation remains.

Looking ahead, the authors write in their conclusion:

"Finally, we provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with the probability of computerization. We note that this finding implies a discontinuity between the 19th, 20th and the 21st century in the impact of capital deepening on the relative demand for skilled labour. While nineteenth century manufacturing technologies largely substituted for skilled labour through the simplification of tasks, the Computer Revolution of the twentieth century caused a hollowing-out of middle-income jobs.

Our model predicts a truncation in the current trend towards labor market polarization, with computerization being principally confined to low-skill and low-wage occupations. Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization – i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills."

In other words, they write that low-skill workers would theoretically have to re-adjust to find jobs that require creative and social intelligence skills.

However, as we have seen with the US' transition from manufacturing to services, re-adjusting sometimes takes time as some workers benefit significantly more than others.

SEE ALSO: Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe

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literateape · 7 years

Text

My Mass Shooter Fantasy

By Keith Gatchel

I have a fantasy where I stop a mass shooter by talking to him. I can’t be the only one.

In it, I hear the gunfire near the entrance to my office, but I don’t know what it is at first. A co-worker I never talk to yells, “Get under your desk!”, as it’s the first thing you’re supposed to do, as told to us in the workshop. I stand up from my chair.

Everyone else tells me to get down. My boss next to me grabs my sleeve, but I pull it away and keep walking. Much like my fantasy of getting mugged in a dark alley, I want a chance to stand up to someone with a gun. Whether I’d survive or not, I want to know if I could do it. “If he wants to shoot me he’d better kill me,” is what I tell myself I’d say. If the gunshot didn’t kill me, I could get maimed. In that scenario, he always shoots off my lower jaw. That’s the worst that could happen. From everyone who loves me, I’d never hear the end of it.

I turn a corner out to the tables and chairs in the foyer and see him in the other hall leading into it. I picture him wearing nothing but black clothes and a trench coat, carrying a shotgun with two other pistols, because I’ve never seen a mass shooter for real, and he sees me enter.

Chances are, at this point, I’d be shot. Let’s be real.

I’ve also fantasized about shooting him. Best case scenario, I’ve pictured it like a John Woo film, where I spin around in slow motion and pull out two .45ACP Mil-Specs from holsters behind my lower back with each hand and shoot them sideways. Doves fly up out of nowhere.

But, you guys already know why another gun probably won’t work. In my case, I’ve never even fired one before, and I don’t know the difference between a Weaver and a Chapman stance. In the videos I’ve seen of guys shooting at assailants, pretty much all the defenders are off-duty cops or ex-soldiers.

But, aside from the fact that a mass shooter might be ready and expecting me to be there, the average size of a head is 22 inches in circumference, with a side of 6 or 7 inches, the width of the human face, which is probably looking right at you. Yes, you could hit it, especially up close. Or, you could aim for the arms and shoulders, or chest, but neither of those guarantee that he doesn’t shoot you back as well. And, you could just miss entirely, giving him the shot. So, it’s both of you just firing at each other for at least a second, and you would get hit. Again, everyone you know is hiding, and annoyed that you’re out here with a gun. Imagine going into a duel with someone, but no one counts to ten before you fire.

Or, you have a standoff, with both of your guns pointed at each other. Then, be ready to hold 2.4 lbs of metal out at arm’s length for however long you think you can while watching someone else do it in front of you with death on the line.

So, you don’t have a gun. You have a knife. I’ve had that fantasy, too. For that you’d have to sneak up on him. Imagining that you do, you have to realize what it takes to stab a person. Bodies don't just go down like a henchman on TV. If you’ve ever carved a turkey, or just meat in general, you know what this entails. Assuming you go for the throat, the Adam’s apple is directly in front, composed of the thyroid cartilage made of two plates called laminae. You can try to stab up through the jaw, but expect to hit the hard palate. You could slice a disc in the back of his neck, but it’s mostly protected by vertebrae. And, again, all this implies that you can get close enough to hug him.

You think you could stab him in the back. Again, you’d need to go through his heart to kill him instantly. If he’s not dead immediately, you’re going to get shot. But, then you have to slip the blade through the rib cage, and do any of us know how to do that without practice?

Also, I assume I don’t need to cover what it takes to use piano wire.

Literally anything else could cause him to turn around and shoot you.

Plus, you’ve just killed someone. You’ve just sprung a leak into a human body. Yes, he would have shot at you first. But, you’ve just drained and dissolved the dreams and memories within a person. And it still takes more than a few seconds of you holding it to work. Imagine how he feels. The human body doesn’t want to die.

I think I’d fall on the ground with him. My clothes would be soaked with warm blood. I imagine I’d sit up with my back against the front desk. There would probably only be one shooter, it would take a few minutes for my co-workers to come out. I’d let them take care of the details after that. They’d loan me some fresh clothes and let me have a bathroom all to myself. Our office also has a shower. I’d get to leave for the day.

The cops would never arrest me. I’d have a perfect defense. I’d make the news. I’d be thought of as a hero, aside from everyone who’d still call me crazy. But, I don’t think I want the people who would call me a hero to call me a hero. Those tend to be the people who think this is how this sort of thing works, or how they would do it. Most of them have never lived it.

But, I don’t think that counts as a fantasy if I don’t ever want it to happen.

When I try to talk to him, I know I’d have to have my hands up. From what I know of the typical mass shooter is that they don’t think of their victims as people. In the moment, none of us are human. I’d have to look like a person, and connect with him. I’d just need him to hesitate, and I think he’d stop.

For whatever reason this person is doing this, it’s not because they are reasonable. But, they are broken. No one would do this if they didn’t feel like something’s wrong.

And, wouldn’t it really confirm how likable I think I am as a person?

I’d ask him what’s wrong. Chances are I’d say, “What’s up?”, but in a caring way, probably a few times. I throw in a fews “Whoa”s. I’d have to make eye contact. He’d need to think of me as a person. He’d need to know I was listening.

That would take a few seconds, with the rifle still trained on me.

I’d want to ask him what we don’t understand about him. This person has a past, or he thinks he’s starting a revolution, or maybe he has a mental disorder. There’s a very real chance he’s going through some kind of episode. But, that’s what I want to understand. What makes someone do this? I want a chance to ask the shooter directly. I don’t want to hear about it on the news, or listen to a bunch of people who don’t know him act like they do. What is this person thinking?

He tells me.

We talk for what would probably feel like hours. And, I don’t deny that at some point I’d try to identify with him, or tell him what he should do. I’d have to fight every urge I had to make it about me, and listen. I could still very easy get shot.

I’m sure he’d have a lot to tell me.

A person like this feels alone. We all have.

I’ve imagined myself as a mass shooter. I’ve gone through days and weeks where I thought nobody liked me, and in some cases with good reason. What if I did want to end my life by taking down a few people I’ve hated and then getting shot up by the cops? All these buildings, and computers, and gyms aren’t even supposed to be here anyway. None of this is even natural.

But, it all makes me safer and happier. It’s what history has done for us.

I remind myself that there’s people who’ve loved me, or will love me again. Or, there will be new ones. Or, I reach out to friends. When it’s a real problem, I say, “I’m not feeling funny”. When you reach out you don’t feel so trapped. When you put yourself out there, you just keep getting better at it. You get out of your head. If I hadn’t found the support of an artistic community, I can’t imagine I would feel the need to kill anyone. But, at some point in their lives, they thought that, too.

So, after however many hours we’d be sitting at a table talking. I assume he’s put down the gun, but it’s still in front of him. I feel like a big theme in the conversation we’d have would be that he’s got people’s attention. He’s now not alone. The world is watching. And, if he got out of this alive, everyone would listen to him. I think I could convince him that the best case scenario is for him to walk out into the parking lot, where 50 police officers have their guns drawn outside, with his hands up.

I’d get one the news for that, too. I want to say that I’d be modest and refuse any interviews. I’d maintain a mystique. Conspiracy theories would emerge. I’d be sainted for my humility after defeating evil with peace. But, it’s a fantasy. This becomes all about me. I’d be on every TV show that would have me, telling people what my views are, and what we need to change about our lives. My clear common sense insight would just spread across the world, each new idea more brilliant than the last. Everyone would listen to me. I’d be known and the guy who talked down Death. I’d be seen as the hero I’ve always wanted to be.

#mass shooter #fantasy #gun violence

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