#indigenous is so broad as to basically mean nothing.

[sangfielle]

this feels like an offensively bad way to divide these things

[jewishvitya]

hi riki! this is a bizarre question ngl, but im wondering if you could please tell me about why you are anti-Zionist? Since i have FRESHLY (last month!! Woohoo!!) become bat mitzvah, and I’m not going to beit Sefer every week now, I’m starting to realize that what I was told about Israel and zionism miiiight be innacurate. Please feel free not to, but I would personally feel more comfortable hearing about Antizionism from somebody who is for sure not hiding any antisemitic biases. Thanks and I hope it’s not a bother!

Mazal tov!

I was debating if I should reply to this and how. You're only one year older than my son and I never considered talking about this with a kid other than my own children. But if you're online reading and looking up information about this, I'll just answer the way I would for anyone. Like I said, I don't mind explaining. But I don't have the energy to collect sources for you. I'll do that later if you'd like. For now it'll be a bit of a rant.

Basically, if you ask different people what zionism is, you'll get different answers. Some people say that zionism is just the acknowledgement of our connection to this land. That's not what I'm going against. I'm not denying that this is our ancestral homeland. I've never known a different home, I grew up near Hebron. Our history means everything to me. So maybe you could create some definition of zionism that I wouldn't be against. But then I'll be against the use of the word because in practice, politically, the movement has been colonialist. And that reality is more important to me. So when I say I'm antizionist, I'm not talking about whatever pretty idea someone might have, I'm talking about things that to me are very concrete.

Zionism uses whatever political terminology is useful to it at the time. Currently, it tries to paint itself as a sort of landback movement, placing us as the indigenous population of this land. This is a distraction. If you mean "indigenous" as "this is where we originated" - both us and Palestinians are indigenous, which makes this term pointless to this situation. If you mean "indigenous" as "a local population facing colonization" - they're indigenous and we're the colonizers. That's the more politically useful distinction.

And the thing is, zionists knew they were colonizers. Ben Gurion was welcomed by the local population and expressed hope that they're nomadic and could be persuaded to leave. Ze'ev Jabotinsky argued that no land has been colonized with the consent of its natives, so we should just take what we want like other occupying forces did. They knew what they were doing. At the time, there wasn't the broad political pushback against colonialism that you see today, so they didn't really hide it. They saw themselves as the colonizing force and the Palestinians as the natives and this distinction had them placing themselves above the Palestinians.

When I was in school, I was made to believe that Palestine was never truly a country and the population here was never a cohesive nation. You might see questions like "Who were the Palestinian prime ministers and presidents? What was the Palestinian coin? What Palestinian wars were there before the creation of Israel?"

These questions tell you nothing other than the fact that Palestine has been under foreign occupation for a very long time. They try to lead you to believe that Palestine and the Palestinian identity are fictional constructs designed to deny us our place in this land.

But Palestinians have their own dialect of Arabic. They have their own varieties of Middle Eastern foods. They have their own clothing, their own embroidery patterns, their own dances. They have a very rich culture that wasn't just made up from nothing within the last century. I still have to battle against cognitive dissonance every time I find something of the sort, because Palestinian culture goes against everything I was taught.

The truth is, the British had no right to occupy Palestine, and they had no right to offer it to us. If we pretend there was no population that was wronged when we took Israel, we can be "the good guys" with Palestinians being a sinister plot to ruin us. This turns normal families, normal people, into a conspiracy made to hurt us. We're not fighting a military force - every Palestinian person is a threat to our legitimacy. Israelis don't even really use the term "Palestinians" - they're just Arabs, their individual identity is stripped from them. We pretend that they belong to other countries around us.

Israeli propaganda will tell you that we only ever act in self defense. It's in the name of our military, it's called a defense force. Israel boasts that it has the only ethical military in the world. The only defensive one. But like I said, we define threats very broadly. And we whitewash a lot of history. I was taught in school all our fighting was defensive - and then I spoke to an elderly man and he said "of course we killed whole villages, it was war, that's what you do." Only as an adult I found out about things like the Sabra and Shatila massacre and our involvement in it.

For the existence of Israel as an ethnostate, every Palestinian is a threat. A lot of people are all in favor of Israel, but against the government actions of ethnic cleansing. The truth is, the ethnostate is not sustainable without the ethnic cleansing. You can't accept one and expect it not to lead to the other. An ethnostate is never a justified goal, and that's always been the goal of zionism as a practical movement.

And I know why this exists. We've had two millennia of persecution. Antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of bigotry. And we just experienced an attempt to industrially exterminate us, we lost millions, including from my own family. We want shelter and safety and the ability to defend ourselves. I just can't see that as justification for what we did and continue to do.

You can look up our human rights abuses, but personally, there were moments that hit me. When I saw a whole warehouse of mail intended to reach Gaza, mail that's been kept from them for years, including items like wheelchairs, in such bad conditions that some envelopes got moldy. I still think of the people who spent all that money to get a wheelchair and were prevented mobility because we decided to hold their mail.

I watched the biggest apartment building in Gaza collapse under our bombs and I cried thinking about the people inside, and about the potential survivors and everything they lost.

I watched our people beat up the pallbearers at the funeral of Shireen Abu-Akleh, a Palestinian reporter. They almost dropped the casket from all those beatings. They were no threat. They just carried her. There was no reason to hurt them.

On the news, after Shireen Abu-Akleh died, the description of the Palestinian response to her death was that they're "חוגגים על המוות." The literal translation is that they're celebrating over the death, but that's not what it means. The meaning is that they're exaggerating their pain and their grief. They're acting, pretending, milking the injustice of it for show. And that's a common Israeli narrative, that Palestinians make a big deal out of things and pretend to suffer more just to make us look bad. We've dehumanized them to the point where we don't believe their grief.

And before all of this, growing up, I saw what the "us vs them" mentality caused in children. I grew up in Kiryat Arba and the population there is very strongly zionist. It's a settlement. It's largely Dati Leumi (national religious? I'm not sure how to translate, dati means religious and leumi means national). Over there I saw children as young as six cheerfully talk about joining the military and killing Arabs. I saw a kid throwing chocolate past the electric fence separating us from them, and laughing when a small Palestinian child went looking for that chocolate, calling her a pig. I saw my high school classmates questioning if they should help the family of a six-months-old baby, first demanding to know if the sick infant is Arab.

The Israeli left has a bit of a slogan. הכיבוש משחית. The occupation corrupts. It means that being an oppressive force changes what we are. It ruins us. And I truly believe that. It taints so much about us and our culture, about our compassion and our ability to have solidarity with other humans. Many principles that kept us safe in diaspora are used now to harm gentiles living under our control, and Palestinians suffer most of all.

So these are the reasons I'm antizionist. I hate what we do to Palestinians. I hate what it does to us. And more fundamentally, I'm against colonialism.

[heiserosandhesapollo]

that blazed post was satire right

REAL fucking suspicious that all these rolled into my inbox in a single night, back to back. Almost like you forgot to turn on anon for half of them 🤔🤔🤔

But let's go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt.

"How to be a trans man (according to the internet)" was loosely inspired by Sherman Alexie's "How To Write The Great American Indian Novel" in the sense that I wanted to do non-rhyming couplets that directly contradicted each other to point out how people outside of a marginalized group stereotype and fetishize said group. (Alexie's poem is much, much better than mine. He breaks the format pretty quickly and the last two lines are the greatest gut-punch I've ever read in a poem. I am white and did not want to appropriate an indigenous man's pain, so I tried to only take broad inspiration from the opening lines and go in my own direction.)

Now, with that context, let's examine the title.

"How to be a trans man" denotes a set of instructions or rules for behavior. But the poem has a parenthetical, "(according to the internet)", which implies that these are not the author's (my) rules, but rather something that comes *from* the internet. Reading the poem I used as inspiration, and the last two lines, "In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,/ all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts," we can infer that this is a poem not about representation, but about cultural appropriation (and, really, genocide). It is not meant to be serious advice, but layers of irony about how colonizers use literature as a tool to erase an entire culture.

When you take irony into consideration, you can then look at the structure of my poem.

Every couplet (except the final one) starts with "You must", with the second line starting with "but". This sets an expectation, then immediately limits or contradicts the expectation. For instance:

"You must have a common, boring name,/ but nothing as common as "Aiden."" If you pay any attention to how trans men's names are treated, you may have heard jokes about trans men having the names of "Drowned Victorian orphans", which is just a way to say that trans men pick old fashioned, pretentious, or "weird" names. A trans man who is not out may see these jokes and therefore try to steer towards really common names, especially ones that are common *right now*. This meant that a few years ago, there was a flood of trans mascs naming themselves "Aiden". But again, if you've paid attention to the treatment of trans men the last few years, you'll know that "Aiden" is used to insult trans men with "basic" names.

Again, look to the title of the poem. This is how *the internet* tells trans men to behave - giving them one set of instructions and then immediately punishing them for following it. The poem uses an ironic structure to show the irony that trans men experience daily.

All of the lines in the poem were either things I have been told to my (digital) face, or seen other trans men on Tumblr, Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok been told.

Now, not to be mean, but perhaps do some literary analysis when you find a poem that rubs you the wrong way. Look at the title, structure, imagery. Perhaps even look at the rest of the author's work - if you search my blog for "trans", you'll find multiple poems about the trans male experience (my personal favorite is "I relate to werewolves for more than just aesthetic reasons"). These, taken together, paint a pretty straightforward picture of my views on the trans male experience.

I'll admit, had I gotten these asks when I first posted these poems, I would've freaked out, wondering if I was being too subtle. But at this point, with over 4,000 notes on the post and tons of people in the tags telling me that they have felt the exact emotions of the poem... I think you and anon either aren't taking the time or don't care to actually analyze a (pretty straightforward) poem.

[thorraborinn]

Waywardtravelerfart check in from out of home: what’s our leftist damage control plan for the horned Nazi at the capitol?

You mean because of the heathen imagery? I have a bunch of thoughts.

From what I gather the guy is some kind of weird syncretic spiritual Christian and heathens have been pretty quick to point this out both as a way of distancing themselves from him and just because it’s important context generally. But I think what heathens are missing is that we’re not as unconnected to this guy as they think. While I don’t know the details of what he says or believes or where it comes from, the roots of modern heathenism include syncretic Christian mysticism, Theosophical spiritual racism, and conspiratorial occult revisionist history. The most (or at least second-most) influential author of books about rune magic (Thorsson/Flowers) is keeping alive the theories of a nationalist (Johan Bure) who thought that an order of masters of the “runic mysteries” had guided the transition from pre-Christian heathenry to Christianity such that the important parts are the same in both. We really don’t have the luxury of not knowing this stuff, and if we want to convince others that we have nothing to do with the Q-shaman we better make sure we’re auditing our own influences.

On a different note, I think it might be helpful for heathens to start thinking less in terms of “racist vs. anti-racist” and more in terms of the three-way fight between us, the fascists, and the neoliberal settler state. This is basically what I’m getting at in this post. This is playing out in a very broad way as people argue that we all have a duty to side with the state against the chuds who stormed the capitol, as if this weren’t the same security apparatus that REGULARLY funds, plans, and trains people to enact coups and put down rebellions all over the world. We can’t base our appeals for legitimacy in complicity or nonconflictuality with the settler state. The openly reactionary nationalism of the MAGA people and the neoliberal security state that has finally started taking a minimum of action against the former now that it’s politically convenient (remember, they already had the anti-terror laws they needed to stop this at any time, chose not to, and do not need more), are two different, competing but barely conflicting strategies for preserving white supremacy; both have in common ICE detention facilities, bombing hospitals, seizing Indigenous lands on behalf of corporations, the prison industrial complex, and again, I really can’t stress this enough, staging coups.

The reason this is all so important for our messaging is that when heathens actually do have a real anti-racist movement, we will be discredited in ways that are related (though, not as intensely) to the ways movements in the history of the Black radical tradition have been discredited (or, maybe the environmental movement is a better comparison). The heathen strategy for public relations has usually been to appeal to media and organizations like the SPLC, but we need to learn to speak for ourselves and not beg for approval, because then that's what informs our values and our actions. Let me put it bluntly: liberal heathen anti-racism is an appeal to not be excluded on religious grounds from the benefits of white supremacy.

All of this being said, it remains true that we have to make it clear who we are and what we stand for, vocally denounce folkish heathenry and this Q-shaman loser, because we also have to remember that there are heathens and heathen-curious people out there who aren’t white, are queer, are disabled, and are otherwise marginalized, who need to know that there are people out there that they can relate to and trust. It’s just that making ourselves deserving of that trust comes first.

Since we don’t have a real heathen antifascist, anticolonial movement (i.e. we have antifascist heathens, but no ability to coordinate action as antifascist heathens at a scale beyond the individual affinity group), the best things for heathens to do are to start building the connections to develop one, and simultaneously do work toward these ends with non-heathens. Just to be clear, when I say “coordinate action” I’m not saying that we need another national heathen org that can disseminate orders but this time make it good. I mean building relationships with people who have goals in common and working together to accomplish those goals without collapsing or undermining their unique identities and autonomy. This applies equally among heathens, and between heathens and non-heathens. I think what would be unique about heathenry in this context would be the way that our relationships of solidarity impact the way we express our religion and feed back into the continued development of heathenry. It would also establish a place for heathenry in the histories of other, non-heathen communities, and thereby make these appeals for approval from big platforms less relevant or even obsolete. Undoubtedly this would, over time, develop a wide-ranging diversity of heathen thought and expression that would make its distinction from folkish heathenry self-evident at even the most superficial observation.

[fatehbaz]

Hi, your blog is great, a very good resource and useful. I was wondering if I could ask, have you ever read a book/article about the life cycle of product, I mean an examination of the resource extraction/labor/factory/transport process and how each stage is damaging to people/environment? I've been looking and nothing is useful. Sorry if my English is not great. Thank you for your blog!

Hello. Thank you for such a supportive and kind message. You are always welcome to send me messages. I know that I’m often annoying, so I’m happy if anything I’ve shared/posted has provided an interesting resource.

Thank you for trusting me enough to send me this message, but I don’t think I’m qualified to answer it too well. I think that some of my friends on this site would be better able to provide some recommendations for you. For example, I don’t know anything about the transportation stage of products, or how providers/corporations eventually come to move, say, edible produce from the agricultural source, across borders, and into a grocery store (though I’m mostly-sure that colonial/imperial/corporate powers have obscured these mechanisms of food production, in many/most cases purposely, in order to absolve metropolitan consumers of any potential realization of guilt or complicity in violence). But I don’t know anything about product life cycles generally. So I don’t think I’m a great person to ask, y’know? For example, in the case of, say, lithium production, I’ve not found or read any, like, comprehensive book or singular text that, like, follows the entire process from extraction, through refinement, to use, and then eventual disposal. But I’m sure there are books/articles/texts out there which do describe this process. And that’s why I’d invite someone else, one of my friends or whomstever, to offer recommendations, since I can’t.

------------

That said, I’ve got a couple of recommendations. I’m relatively more interested in plantations; the life cycle of some few very specific products (rubber; palm oil; uranium; lithium); more broad discussion of the damage wrought from industrial-scale resource extraction and development (Anthropocene and Plantationocene concepts; planetary urbanization); or the violence of the first/initial stages of the product life cycle (wastelanding; colonial/imperial institutions dispossessing people of land; poisoning/contamination from mining). So I’ve got some resources here related to these concepts.

------------

The concept of “planetary urbanization” or “planetary urban fabric” basically refers to how, at least in the past two or three centuries, there is no corner of the planet that has been spared ecological damage by or escaped the resource extraction cycles of industrial development and major urban areas. This is the idea that every corner of Earth, no matter how apparently “remote” or “wild”, is altered by and implicated in industrial resource extraction. (For example, even “remote” Siberia hosts pipelines and giant mines that service major urban areas. Ice-loss in Greenland and algae blooms in the open ocean are related to anthropogenic climate alteration. Isolated forests of the Great Bear Rainforerst are still penetrated by logging roads. Industrial cropland disrupts the soil of the West African Sahel, and then Saharan dust storms sweep into the Caribbean; etc.)

Some introductions to the concept: Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “What World? Reframing the World as One City.” December 2016. ////////// Lindsay Bremner. “The Urban Hyperobject.” Geoarchitecture. 24 August 2015. ////////// Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw. “Radical urban political-ecological imaginaries.” Derive. May 2014. ////////// And here’s a compilation post I put together, with short excerpts from several articles about planetary urbanization.

------------

Anyway, seems like this might be more closely related to what you’re looking for. These are some recent things I’ve read that seem related to the violence of the product life cycle.

-- I wrote a post about the violence of the life cycle of uranium (including initial extraction and mining; refinement; and disposal, imposing violence at every stage of production) in Navajo Country and the Colorado Plateau (includes maps of uranium mines; radioactive fallout zones; and radioactive waste disposal sites).

-- Andrea Knutsen. “Scarcity and the Suburban Backyard.” Edge Effects. 1 September 2020. [This article is about food and grocery store supply chains in North America during crises and how British imperialism in the Caribbean in recent centuries relied on the imposition of artificial scarcity and the maintinence of a racialized economic hierarchy which still influences contemporary food supply chains.]

-- Gaston Gordillo. “The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene.” In: Infrastructures, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Edited by Kregg Hetherington. 2019. [This article is about the stages of dispossession, policy, and marketing that support massive soy agriculture/extraction in Latin America, and how soy is an example of how contemporary products involve dispossession at multiple scales in multiple regions driven by forces that transcend national boundaries. This article also describes planetary urbanization.]

-- Martin Arboleda. “Financialization, totality, and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes.” December 2015. [This article is about lithium in Latin America, how lithium extraction relates to the mass “financialization of life” in the neoliberal era, and how local dispossession in Chile is driven by investors and companies from North America.]

-- Yanis Iqbal. “The Ravages of Lithium Extraction in Chile.” 15 July 2020. [This article is about “lithium imperialism” and how so-called “sustainable” electric cars in European and North American markets rely on dispossession and ecological/human violence in Latin America.]

-- Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. December 2016. [Article about the early-20th-century extraction and production of rubber via corporate plantations in West Africa and how US medical institutions and Harvard doctors relied on plantations for access to research; also discusses coffee and fruit plantations in Latin America.]

-- Post I wrote about the difference between a forest and a tree plantation, focused on resource extraction on Mapuche land in the Valdivian temperate rainforest region of “Chile.”

-- Mongabay has done consistent work covering palm oil plantations which service European and North American food markets, especially focused on plantations in Indonesia, which appear to be dependent on Indigenous dispossession in Borneo and Papua. One example of the initial stages of violence: Sophie Chao. “In the plantations there is hunger and loneliness: The cultural dimensions of food insecurity in Papua.” Mongabay 14 July 2020.

-- On a related note, here’s a long and comprehensive look at palm oil: Human Rights Watch. “When We Lost the Forest, We Lost Everything”: Oil Palm Plantations and Rights Violations in Indonesia. September 2019.

-- Melanie K. Yazzie. “Decolonizing Development in Dine Bikeyah: Resource Extraction, Anti-Capitalism, and Relational Futures.” Environment and Society. September 2018. [This article is about the connections between Navajo Country and US border policies; connections between coal mining, uranium, and land dispossession; and ecological/human damage of wastelanding in the region.]

-- Post I wrote about fossil fuel refineries; environmental racism; high c0vid death rates; cancer rates; toxic air; state violence; and local zoning policy in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley (with a bunch of maps, photos, and graphics).

-- Inspired by a good article Mongabay did about the history of one particular major land-owning company, here’s a post I wrote about how a Gilded Age company founded by friends of King Leopold in the infamous rubber plantations of the Congo eventually came, today, to establish and own the major rubber plantations of Southeast Asia which service Euro-American markets, while the same company still maintains many “neo-colonial” land holdings in Africa.

-- Nicholas Jahr. “Workers Organize at Firestone, Liberia’s ‘State Within a State’.” The Nation. 8 July 2010. [Article about contemporary rubber plantations in West Africa and how Firestone -- “official tire of Major League Baseball” -- functions and rules as a de facto colonial/imperial state.]

-------

Let me know if anyone wants links to read these articles for free.

Thank you for reaching out. Thanks again for being so kind.

[sylver-drawer]

A prompt in class had made me realize something deep within me—my hate for physical books.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate books because they’re physical. I’d actually love it, but rather what I despise…

Is what is contained within those books.

Where I live, physical books you can only get when visiting libraries or book stores unless specially ordered online. Yet I am never satisfied with what is offered to me, simply because, I’m tired of it.

I am so absolutely tired of seeing the same exact things over and over again.

To give an example, my tastes aren’t that condensed nor diverse. I love thriller, I love Mystery, but what I find the most interest in, is Fantasy Romance.

And saying that should already tell you exactly what I’m talking about.

I am so tired of seeing the exact same tropes over and over again. This is a problem in all stories, physical or online, in general—however, it appears to me that published and physical books are almost always having these qualities. When searching online, I can always somehow find at least a handful of stories that is different from the others and gives at least a fraction of what I need. But in libraries? Book stores? I can’t do that, because they all follow the same pattern one way or another because those tropes are what people only ever seem to want, which is why a lot of authors who stray from those tropes aren’t as well known.

Frankly, I’m tired of everything being reused or rebranded.

I wouldn’t mind the wizards and demons, the werewolves and vampires, if ONLY they weren’t just there to be there.

Let me explain. Witches and Wizards tend to follow the same pattern. People who use magic, which is simple enough. But the problem is, is that it ends with just that. In most stories I come across, wizards are included in a very weak magic system in which they can use magic to do basically anything they want. Something fell and broke? Use magic to fix it. There’s a fire? Summon water to put it out.

It’s simple. But that repeated simplicity is what makes me tired.

There is never any depth. There is no expansion or lore that explains the nitty gritty details, nor makes it important. Magic in fantasy stories, is most commonly, cause and effect. Problem, and fix. Something bad, changed to good. Hurt, then to heal.

In fantasy, magic is simply one layer—magic people can use magic to do anything. There’s no limit, there’s no depth, there’s nothing that makes it unique. Magic in fantasy, all falls under the broad topic of just ‘magic’. Shooting fireballs, summoning a river, causing a storm to drive away your enemies, lightning bolts to fend them off—all can fall under just magic. Using this, it might be controversial to say, but Harry Potter is an extremely soft magic system. Wizards can cast magic through words, yes, but it’s exactly that. They can cast ‘magic’, and that magic is an umbrella term that essentially means, “With enough training, they can look up the words in a magic dictionary and use whatever magic they want to do anything they want”.

There is no depth. There is no extra layer, it’s simply ‘magic’.

And I’m not even done rambling. I haven’t even touched magical races in fantasy, which I’ll actually transition right into.

I am tired of race conflict in fantasy. Not because its bad, but because they’re more often than not, poorly written. Let’s take Twilight as an example.

Werewolves hate vampires. Vampires hate werewolves. Why? Because werewolves bad, and vampires bad. That’s literally it. No deeper meaning, no actual societal issues, just “ew, icky vampire/werewolf”. In fact, in twilight it doesn’t even appear they hate eachother. If Bella didn’t even exist, what would Edward and Jacob fight about? If you notice, they only use eachother’s race to appeal to Bella and put down the other rival. “Bella, you can’t love him because he’s a dirty vampire”, or, “Bella, you can’t love him because he’s a mangy wolf pup”. Setting aside the obvious racist undertones that’s never important nor addressed critically within the story, the only time dislike about the others’ race is talked about, is only ever addressed not because they hate that specific race, but as a petty remark to bad talk their love rival.

So, in theory, the two races aren’t even… against eachother. Thinking back, all the times it was vampire vs werewolf in twilight, it was all because of Bella wasn’t it. And not because of general dislike of the others’ race, but over a human girl…

I’ve trailed off from my original point, but basically, race vs race within fantasy plots aren’t actually because of the race. I think the only fantasy series I’ve seen that remotely does racial societal conflict well is Lord of the Rings. Elves hate dwarves because they’re greedy, crude, and brutish. Dwarves hate elves because they view them as selfish and always seemingly on their high horse. They stereotype one another, and when they look beyond those stereotypes is when they start bonding and actually forming friendships. They then realize that those stereotypes didn’t matter and were harmful.

That’s an example I would love to see more in fantasy in general. Make the magical races dislike and judge eachother because of their race, and then overcome it while addressing it. Don’t add in races that hate eachother when they’re all literally just the exact same. And also, make the races different! Even humans practice different cultures, and that’s what makes us diverse. In the LOTR franchise, racial bias and hate isn’t simply because, “they’re x race”. It’s because they stereotype people within that race, a stereotype that’s just an exaggerated version of qualities they all just happened to have. In Twilight, I’d argue that there isn’t anything that sets the werewolves and vampires apart other than their superhuman abilities. In LOTR, taking their races away the qualities the characters had were still eminent. Legolas was a bit proud and calm demeanor ed under pressure because he was naturally like that, as well as how he was raised as an elven prince. Gimley fights violently with an axe, and puts his whole body into his fighting style. His words also come off as rough and unfiltered, while Legolas’ voice is smoother and speech well spoken due to his background. The traits they found in eachother due to racial stereotypes still linger and remain. While yes, werewolves were heavily based off of indigenous people, there wasn’t any clear examples of them practicing it that was essential to the conflict and characters other than reminding the audience every once and a while. If Jacob were the only werewolf shown, the Jacob-Bella-Edward conflict could easily just be seen as two roleplaying white boys fighting over a girl. That’s how important their racial identities of vampire and werewolf mattered.

(And please!!! Remember lore. Generations and generations of racism impacts people who grew up with it. Some people change and break away from that stigma of unadultered hate, some can only partly break away even while educated with unconscious internal bias, and some continue to nurture themselves in it and even spread it. Not every person under one umbrella ends up the same, and that applies to characters too. Taking inspiration from real life, look at the time we live in now. Hundreds of years gone by, and while things are certainly better, the dark stains haven’t even gone away and most likely won’t even in the distant future. The past two years are proof of that.)

There’s no point in writing racial conflict in your story if there’s nothing that sets them apart from one another (I’m not saying people need a reason for real life racism because there are so many people who hate certain races just because they’re that race, but story wise, it’s easier to show what’s commonly hate due to stereotypes and stigma that people make for that race). It’s like the spider man pointing meme. How are you supposed to be antagonistic with someone who’s literally the same as you? “I guess you’re not like other spider men” coming from a spider man???

Prefacing, I’m not saying racism is good. I’m saying including race conflict for the sake of race conflict is very empty and purposeless, which is what I often find in fantasy or romance-fantasy. Racial conflict apparently doesn’t matter until the main character is directly involved, in which only then does it affect them that it’s brought up and only because it affects them. A similar example is including LGBTQ+ characters just for the sake of sexual diversity, in which—

That actually leads into my next topic.

Romance.

How many. How many published books must there be of romance that completely overrides the plot as well as the characters’ other relationships? How many stories must be made in which the fantasy aspect is completely pushed aside and no longer included in the plot because the story wants to entirely focus on the romance drama between the main character, love interest, and best friend? Or not even best friend, miscommunication in general!

How hard, is it to write a story where the couple is healthy, and love and don’t doubt eachother, who trust eachother entirely? Like really.

And! And!

The moment when romance is introduced, everything else doesn’t. seem. to. matter! At that point, it’s not even fantasy even more. It’s just a rom com, because watching the couple fight over nothing is hilarious because they’re in the middle of a war. And the other characters don’t seem to matter anymore either. I am so tired of plots being thrown away to focus on the drama between the two leads, and for once just want a fantasy boom of stories depicting healthy relationships with actually unique magic systems and logical well written conflicts.

And diversity! In Relationships! I am so tired of only ever seeing poorly written drama filled heterosexual relationships in romances. In fantasy romances. Give me my wlw wizards who explore their war torn world and have to defend the people they love with intricate, costly, magic systems.

Can we just have. A literary revolution, in which a rise of stories where characters can have relationships—non romantic relationships—with other characters. Can male and female characters finally love eachother to the ends of the world without romance. It’s so easy to write. Love is so easy to write between any gender or sex. So why does it seem to be there can only be one kind predominantly in media? In published media?

Occasionally I can find diverse stories like this on the internet, but never can I find these in libraries.

Like it’s. It’s so, so easy to write love and companionship between characters of diverse identities and cultures. Even in heterosexual fantasy romance stories, I want to be able to see relationships outside the romance being as strong as the main romance. Between the girls, between the boys, and those in between. Men can be in love with men, women in love with women, and men in love with women without needing to force their loves against eachother. A man and woman can be written to love eachother dearly without any romance ever between them, because that’s how it’s like in real life as well. So often do main characters in fantasy stories have some sort of dark past that rid them of any familial love, which in turn ruins them for the capacity of platonic love, which makes people believe the only way for them to find love is romantically. Even in children’s books, there’s always the princess abandoned or overly protected by her parents who eventually finds solace in the pressence of a dry, brooding knight or charming prince. They fall in love, and that’s the only thing that’s ever positively shown. The love between the main character and the love interest. Because to society, romance is seen as the strongest form of affection.

But, it isn’t.

People are different, and to a lot of people who do and don’t have romance in their lives, it doesn’t mean they can’t love anyone else. In society, the only love that seems to exist is romance. It’s the only thing people tend to promote, and yet, people forget what love is. It’s care, it’s worry. Love is painful and happy. It’s sometimes angry and frustrating, but sometimes its something you need. Love is stubborn, yet so easily broken. Love was never just romance, and it feels like the world forgets that.

It’s frustrating, because it feels like anything published at your local library follows the opposite pattern. Because it’s what people believe the public wants, and what the public will only ever accept. Sometimes, it’s all people only know how to write. Sometimes, its all editors and publishers will ever approve of. And sometimes, its all people ever look for. Because either they’re afraid, stigmatize and despise it, or just don’t care for it.

At some point, this had turned from a ramble about how physical books lack diversity, to how media in general lacks diversity.

I do believe that one day in the future, media will change. Literary media will change. But as of now? The majority of published and physical books haven’t diverted from that pattern, and most likely won’t for a long time. I know so many stories are beginning to change online now that the new generation has informed themselves and become interested in new ideas and topics, but as far as physical publication goes? The world won’t accept these changes, not for a long time.

[familyvisionis2020]

Day 6 - The Drive Home

Today was the last day of tour. I wake up in the morning feeling guilty because I have a groggy memory of waking up around 8 to go to the bathroom, Paul was waiting to go, but when the person came out I just fronted him (a word I just now remember from elementary school, cut in line, but southern), used the bathroom and went back to bed. Rude. I am wiping the cold from my eye, taking in the undecorated walls of the apartment, and Jeremy comes from down the hall and says ‘Did you get the memo? Louisville cancelled. Tour’s over.” I said ‘fuck’ and processed it. I feel sad for Jeremy and John and Kabir because I know they wanted to play this last show in Kentucky. It’s not that I didn’t, but also for the last three months and for especially the last month I have been feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about this tour, about feeling out-of-control, about being away from loved ones at home, about being available to show up for people in my life, about completing regular routines of hygiene and spirituality and task completion that make me feel boring and comfortable, both. Touring stirs up dredges of the tea leaves that I had let settle into a fine filmy sediment at the bottom of me. I manufactured a jello mold two years ago and poured myself into it: regular 9-5 in the legal field as a means and precursor to law school, then diligent study for 3 years, then a professional career, abandoning the party life, abandoning trespassing in abandoned buildings, abondoning the luxury of resentment and unproductive time, trying to cool and firm into something reliable, serviceable, dependable, available, a resource people could draw from for once, rather than a leech or slug. And when I go on tour I take that jello mold out of the fridge and it holds its shape but also it warms and the longer I’m out the more liquidy it gets and sloshes over the sides and so forth. So I’m ambivalent because I like what I have to offer to this band, I like the physical process of drumming and expressing myself in the context of music and being a member of a band, but also I feel like I’ve kind of chilled enough and it’s time to settle down. And I’m at a way different point in my life than the other guys in the band it seems like, for the most part. So anyways all this to contextualize the fact that the news of tour ending even earlier than early honestly makes me feel relieved, if not happy, and so then I work to temper that boosted mood for the sake of grim decorum befitting a tour taken before its time. 

All our stuff is locked in the venue from last night and we learn we won’t be able to pick it up until 1pm and so we have about 4 hours to kill in the apartment. Phillip puts on a pot of coffee that will turn out to be some of the wateriest on record, but still, a super kind gesture, and then he also puts on The Wire on HBO Go and we just settle in on the couch and watch for awhile. Some of the scenes are familiar, there’s something seductive about this show, and it brings me back to the precise moment of Summer of 2013 right before I moved to Philadelphia right after I got evicted from the squat/music venue I had been living in that winter and spring, I watched all episodes of The Wire on DVD on Matt Martin’s couch at 3 Pomroy and felt deeply depressed. It ranks up there with when I watched all released episodes of The Office in bed in the winter of 2009 after my girlfriend broke up with me, in terms of memorably devestating life phases offset by the amniotic fluid of full-series of TV. So we watch The Wire and I find myself not too inclined to sit and watch and I want to write so I sit at my laptop on the table nearby and write an email to a female (sorry) but I actually do and its purpose is to make her smile and bring some levity and play and purple prose to a moment in her life that, from how she tells it to me, is just so heavy, nightmares and waking horror and a future that feels like it hangs by a thread. so I’m glad to spend time showing up for her in this small way rather than watching The Wire, and also I write yesterday’s blog post, another activity that feels sort of like a pittance but also like: doing-writing is something I have been putting off, in phases and seasons, for my entire adult life, because to me nothing ever matters enough to write about, or if it does my perspective is deficient, or my research inadequate, or my skill incommensurate with the subject matter, or it won’t properly reflect my feelings, or any number of self-sabotaging excuses to not do this thing I so love doing, and love sharing. So for me, writing this blog is a very meaningful and special act of reclamation of a personal mode of expression that constitutes a break in my winter’s depression and what feels like a new phase of happiness, of believing-i-have-a-future, of feeling more authoratative and qualified to know and describe my own experience in a lifetime marred and dampened by dissociation, oblivion, amnesia, and fugue. So it feels like nourishment to get some paragraphs done and to move slow through my days, get them onto the page.

The Wire grows tiresome at some point and Jeremy fires up the PS4 and then the PS3 looking for games but none are multiplayer and so eventually he settles on Skyrim and starts from a new file. Me personally I love watching let’s plays and this is as good as TV. There was a moment last tour when we were in this strange small town in Connecticut called Torrington (the town all touring bands are required to go to, we also joked), in this town Jeremy was describing the sort of surrealness he experienced there and he said he felt like the townspeople in Torrington were like NPCs in a FPS RPG like Skyrim wherein you would go up to people and press A to talk, say ‘What news?” and that I thought was really funny then, I like his sense of humor. Really Kabir and Jeremy and Royal represent this sort of humor that is to me equal parts razor wit, cleverness, timing, accents, absurdity, and broad conceptual placticity, all for the most part very clean too, never or at least rarely blue (you’re gonna inevitably make a D’s nuts joke and that’s just that). And during happy times I am so grateful to be nearby this humor and during less happy times I get self conscious about how great their humor is and how I sometimes feel like I don’t measure up. But that feeling doesn’t weigh for long. Skyrim is fun to watch, it kills some time, we all take turns trying to kill wolves with swords before Jeremy finally does it, there’s a dragon, we loot corpses, discuss Bloodborne and Dark Souls and comparable games. A lot of the main media activity in this group is discussing how a given media relates to another media, Kabir and Jeremy and John know it seems like everything between the three of them when it comes to record labels, band narratives, artist’s hometowns, etc. So we play Skyrim for awhile, and then eventually it’s time to go to the venue and we drive back to The Salty Nut, load in all our gear, do a final sweep, and say our goodbyes and thankyous to Phillip. We return to the Bandido place one last time for one last round of free local Taco Bell which we absolutely scarf and are very vocally grateful to the people for giving it to us for free again, it’s clear they really put effort into being hospitable to touring bands here, at least through Phillip. His band, Thomas Function, was signed on Fat Possum Records, which also had bigger indie acts like Jay Reatard (who Phillip tells a story about him demanding $50,000 in cash for a show fee to feed his coke and heroin habit, Reatard died at age 29 from cocaine toxicity with alcohol also), The Black Keys, Andrew Bird, Wavves and Soccer Mommy, but which Kabir postulates has most of its success due to having signed octogenarian southern blues legends like R.L. Burnside and King Ernest and raking in royalties from what Kabir speculates is due to poor management of the estates of these dead leagends who each had more than a dozen children. It’s truly fascinating for me to hear how deep and complex the analysis of music these guys have is. When I feel insecure, which is often, I tend to veneer these sorts of expertises and shibboleths among music-heads as snobby, elitist, exclusionary, petty and asinine. But I think most of that comes from a fear that I lack the insight, cognitive absorbency, and passionate research skills to collate and catalog data about artists in the way these people do, the way my bandmates do. I feel inspired to take time to dig deeper into the musicans I love, to make them real to me, to get a sense of their story, their lived experience, for the sake of corroding the mediation between us somewhat, or at least polishing the media membrane. 

I volunteer to drive for the first half of what will end up being about a 10-hour drive back from Huntsville to Chapel Hill. We go to a Whole Foods in Huntsville upon Kabir’s insistence where I purchase a nootropic snakeoil energy affair in beverage form, Kabir gets hot coffee and a La Colombe Draft can of latte, Jeremy gets a kombucha made from yerba mate (“best of both worlds” he says), John black coffee as per, and Kabir also buys a slice of Tres Leches cake in a clear plastic to-go clamshell: “they can take away my tour, but they can’t take away my tres leches.” Later he’s eating it in the van and he accidentally spills some on himself and he says “shit…spilled some on myself. oh good, it was only one leche” which to me is so funny and perfect humor and just like kind of a paragon of the kind of joke I so treasure from this friend group. Another is when Jeremy and Kabir are recalling a favorite running joke from two tours ago, wherein they were in Philly, home to the famous Schuykill River (pronounced skoo-kill, at least when i lived there, at least around the non-indigenous people i knew), and while there they would affect this blaring Brooklyn accent, deployed heavily on this trip as well for basically any purpose, but back then they would say “UGH MY SKOYKL IS KILLING ME” like Schuykill was lombago or sciatica and also would say “YEAH LET ME GET A KWATA POUND OF SKOYKL ON RYE” like it was a deli meat, and they laughed and laughed. Also they liked doing rhyming jokes like last night there was a chair nearby the combo amp Tired Frontier was going to use for their set and Kabir goes ‘amp on the chair, tone everywhere’ and then I say ‘amp on the ground, makes a bad sound’ and then I tell Jeremy later how Kabir would put me in good spirits whenever I was describing to someone how my LSAT score is very competitive but my checkered past makes the acceptance process a little less than straightforward, and Kabir would see I was getting kinda down and anxious, and he would say ‘You gotta break the law before you make the law,’ and we all laugh and I love that, the function of humor as balm, salve. I want to wield my humor like that.

The drive back is fine, some sprinkles, nothing major, clear traffic for the most part, I feel like I have a good command of the van, keep it around 75 for most of the trip, feel smoth and confident switching lanes, passing, etc. We do another two NYT Wednesday classic crosswords together, Kabir is getting probably 40% of the clues, me maybe 30% Jeremy and John the other 30%, Kabir will just to YEAHHHHHHHH after getting a clue and I start doing that too after Jeremy says “X down, ‘on the table’ 15 letters,” and I say UPFORDISCUSSION after only a couple seconds and it fits and is correct and I feel like a damn genius and we’re all laughing and kind of praising each other half-jokingly for being strong beautiful geniuses who also we know songs. This is a great passtime and the drive flies by and before I know it we’re in Western NC just outside of Asheville and we make a stop to refuel the tank and get dinner. We decide on a Waffle House across the street, not wanting to venture too deep into Asheville for something healthier and better because of the time and money it would likely eat up, Kabir says that FEMA uses the closing of Waffle Houses as a bellweather to indicate the severity of a given natural disaster. We go inside, the waitress says ‘ya’ll aren’t from around here are you?’ in a way that I take to be hostile and I suggest that to the guys and they seem like maybe slightly offput but not very much and we decide not to abort and I later feel foolish because I think I am doing this thing where I become excessively vigilant or sensitive to a perceived slight to a friend who is brown for the putative purpose of interceding on their behalf against racism but what’s actually happening is if someone was racist to them they could just stand up for themselves and make their own call regarding their own comfort or lack thereof and I would do better to act less motivated by white guilt when avoidable. That passes, it’s fine, we eat hash browns and waffles and eggs and grits and toast and cover everything in tobasco and tip well and get back on the road, John takes over for the final stretch. 

I return a call from Marty and catch him up about tour being cancelled and we discuss our fears and hysteria and cancellations and reaction and so forth. Marty remarks that he is a gravedigger during the plague, which is the best possible job to have. It’s not a joke because he actually drives a backhoe working for a cemetary and digs actual graves, super weird and eminently punk/goth and kind of a curiosity but really perfect for the lead singer of one of the South’s premiere punk bands, especially after his being fired from the swish cafe he worked at in Richmond before that. I love Marty and catching up and it feels good to hear his voice. After I get off the phone it sort of becomes campfire spooky story time in the van with everyone proffering their take on the panic, market failure, the likelihood of Capitalism as a superstructure to require perpetual growth even at the peril or death of its working class, the superior response to covid that South Korea and Norway seem to have mounted, a lot of fear of financial insecurity. Eventually this digresses to talk of touring, and the guys discuss all manner of various routes throught the South, Midwest, Northeast, plains states, PNW, Mexico City, Jeremy says ‘I can get us a show in Colombia’ which he can, Argentina or Venezuela through a mutual friend, then Europe so long as the label foots the bill for the plane ticket, then Japan, setting up camp on Honshu would make it easy to hit TOkyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya no problem, except where exactly are people playing shows? there’s gotta be somewhere all these Japanese Noise and Hardcore bands are getting gigs, and then from there of course it’s not hard to get to Australia, John knows a band there, and they go all around the world and this is stressing me out a little bit, only because I wonder about how much they think I would be involved or want to go on such a theoretical tour, and the answer is I don’t 100% know. Part of me wants to say this is my last tour, lean all the way in to law school and leave behind this chapter. Part of me feels like it’s better not to make a hard and fast statement like that because what if the economy collapses and for some reason school is a no-go but being in the band becomes the most plausible source of income or something. I get anxious and psych myself out and quiet down and feel foolish and wish to be home. I fantasize about my future life of stability, but I second guess myself because I just don’t know for sure how my life will be, and want to be careful to work toward the goals I think will be the most fulfilling, self-actualizing, spiritually nourishing, healthy for me; I also want to not forsake the friendships and bonds I’ve forged in these weird intimate moments in the van with the guys. I have the wherewithal to know that nobody is requiring me to make a decision right this second, and that as time passes it’s likely that the best course of action will be revealed one way or another if I can keep from panicking. So I watch videos of the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championships on my phone, eat two candy bars, watch videos of a streamer named Wumbotize play the latest Tetris game, Tetris Effect (2018, PS4, PC), and am pleasantly awed by how crazily far the skill curve of that game has shot up. I have some time ahead of me that is completely free, which is so nice. Before I know it I’m back home in my clean apartment which is tidy like a tetris field at the beginning of a new game and I get into my bed and lay down flat and if my bed is the well than the line of me clears and the well is clean, smooth, primed, for whatever falls tomorrow. 

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

Despite widespread support for the Green New Deal, an ambitious resolution to transform the economy and society to address the climate crisis, the labor movement is not uniting behind it. On March 8, the AFLCIO’s Energy Committee released an open letter to Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) criticizing the plan on grounds it “could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families.”

In contrast, some union locals have come out in support of the resolution, including the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, which noted in January that “climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to all working people.” Groups like Climate Workers, a membership organization of rank-and-file workers, the Labor Network for Sustainability, a labor group that fights for ecological and economic justice, and the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of major unions and environmental groups, have spent years trying to bridge the labor movement and the movement for climate justice, but rifts remain.

The labor movement is divided precisely at a moment when it could ensure the passage of a Green New Deal rooted in justice, self-determination and union rights. The resolution’s call for a just transition emerges from the environmental justice, labor and Indigenous rights movements of the 1980s and 1990s. It is premised on the principle that the shift away from a fossil fuel economy must ensure workers play a lead role in the transition—and that workers are not abandoned in the shift to zero emissions. A jobs guarantee, universal basic income and protection of union rights—all floated as components of a Green New Deal—could play key roles.

In These Times called Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America (AFACWA) and a rising star among union leaders, to discuss the idea.

Nelson captured national attention when she issued a strike threat in the midst of the Trump administration’s infamous government shutdown over border wall funding. Five days later, when some air traffic controllers on the East Coast did not show up for work, she told New York magazine that flight attendants were “mobilizing immediately” to strike. Hours later, Trump announced he’d reached a deal to temporarily reopen the government.

Nelson’s very public challenge has made her a leading contender to replace Richard Trumka as president of the AFL-CIO if he retires as expected, at the end of his term, in two years.

Nelson was born in Corvallis, Ore., to a teacher and a lumber mill worker. She majored in English and education, and applied for a flight attendant position in 1996 to pay the bills. She recalled to the New York Times that her six-week training included “make-up” day for women to learn how to apply mascara while men took the day off. An early pay dispute turned her into a union activist, and she became the union’s president in 2014. One of the few international union presidents who publicly aligns herself with Bernie Sanders, Nelson now works about one flight a year, devoting the rest of her time to her union.

Nelson hails from an industry that poses a problem to the goal of zero emissions: Passenger airplanes account for 1–2% of global carbon emissions, and air travel is expected to double in the next 20 years. Finding alternative energy sources for airplanes has proven trickier than for cars or electrical grids. At the same time, Nelson represents workers whose conditions have already grown more dangerous as the climate crisis has escalated. “Extreme weather is increasing instances of turbulence, which is a serious occupational injury threat,” Nelson notes.

The Green New Deal calls for us to “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.” As a labor publication that cares a lot about climate change, we have been asking ourselves what a “just transition” could actually be. What do you think?

Sara Nelson:

I can tell you what it’s not! A few hours of training is not a just transition. The transition needs to begin before the jobs go away. A just transition must ensure pensions and healthcare are protected for workers who spent their lives powering our country in the fossil fuel industries. A just transition includes bringing the expertise of unions to the table so we don’t create policy that has unintended consequences, such as making it impossible to produce steel needed to create alternative forms of energy. A just transition must also invest in technological innovation to determine whether current energy sources can be utilized in a green way. A just transition includes focus on negotiating fair trade agreements for American workers to keep production in the United States so that, for example, American workers are building wind turbines and solar panels. And finally, a just transition means maintaining income for families who depend on an actual transition of jobs, career training, apprenticeships.

What would it take to build more labor movement support for the Green New Deal?

Sara Nelson: 

Make labor central to the discussion, including labor rights, labor protections and labor expertise. We must recognize that labor unions were among the first to fight for the environment because it was our workspaces that had pollutants, our communities that industry polluted. Let’s not dismiss the labor movement. Let’s recognize and engage the infrastructure and experience of the labor movement to make this work.

We need the airline industry to engage as well. According to an industry analysis, the airline industry has, for the last 40 years, improved fuel efficiency at a rate equivalent to taking 25 million cars off the road each of those years.

The point here is that we need to build a broad coalition, and to do that we can’t start from a position that assumes opposition. If we bring everyone to the table, recognize the efforts to date, draw on the expertise from each affected field, and mobilize a united effort, then we can create allies where we otherwise might have had enemies.

Is increasing fuel efficiency enough? Because of more flights, total airline emissions are still expected to rise. Must flights decrease, and if so, how do we protect workers?

Sara Nelson: 

I think … [laughs] I think that we have to be pretty clear that interstate commerce in the United States, international trade and transportation just don’t work without air travel, right? We can advance technology to help the airlines use an alternative energy source and there is both a moral and a cost incentive to do that.

What are the biggest lies opponents of the Green New Deal tell workers?

Sara Nelson: 

The biggest lie is that the Green New Deal resolution is legislative policy and that it imposes certain strict requirements—for example with air travel, that every plane will stay on the ground in 10 years. There is not a flight attendant or pilot or anyone in aviation who actually believes that aviation is going to be grounded. That’s simply not true. The opposite is true. This resolution seeks to promote technological advancements and policies that will keep flights in the air. Today, airplanes are grounded because of severe weather events, sometimes for long periods because these events destroy infrastructure that is necessary to take off and land. Or, destroy the demand for those locations—there is nothing to fly to.

How can climate campaigners build bridges with organized labor?

Sara Nelson: 

First and foremost, there has to be a recognition that labor has never seen an actual “just transition.” You can say those words all day long, but what people hear is “a couple hours of training and then you’re going to leave my community devastated and alone—like a ghost town.” So, there’s zero trust.

If you want to build trust, you need to do two things. One, you need to shore up the wasteland that’s already been created where there was no just transition. When new environmental regulations promoted low-sulfur mining, collection of coal moved from union mines in Appalachia to nonunion surface mines out West. No one addressed the communities that were hurt in the process. So miners are understandably skeptical.

Now coal companies have filed for bankruptcy and stopped contributing to healthcare and pension funds. We need to push to adopt legislation that keeps America’s promise to coal miners of pensions and healthcare, as well as addresses black lung— that’s the bare minimum to show good faith that this process of taking on climate change will focus on making coal miners’ lives better, not worse. Bipartisan legislation to fund pensions has had support for years, but Mitch McConnell has stopped it from getting to a vote. We can demand H.R. 934/935 and S. 27 get passed now, and show miners and others working in the fossil fuel industry that we’re on their side. My union, AFA-CWA, will be on the Hill with the United Mineworkers of America on May 8 to do just that. Everyone should get behind securing those pensions.

Second, a just transition needs to talk about how we start the transition process early. We need to get into these communities, talk with them about their needs, and get to know them. It’s important that we not write them off and say, “They just have to get over it.” Nobody is ever going to get over not being able to provide healthcare for their families and watching people die in poverty or lose their homes. So, let’s talk with the people about the jobs that are there and what those jobs also support in the community. Every good union coal mining job supports another five jobs in that community. So, we need to start talking about how we are going to put some of these jobs back into those communities. With new technology? With training? And how are we going to support people in the meantime? Who is going to be able to get retrained and learn a new career?

(Continue Reading)

[frankkjonestx]

How much space does nature need? 30 percent of the planet may not be enough

For millions of years, giants graced the murky depths of China’s Yangtze River. The Chinese Paddlefish (Psephurus gladius), which could reach 7 meters in length, used its swordlike snout to sense the electrical perturbations made by smaller prey, snatching them in the dark. But no more.

The fish was declared extinct in 2019, a victim of overfishing and habitat loss.

Its story is being played out across the world. From winding rivers to the windswept tundra to the dense tropical forests of Borneo, nature is in trouble.

Plants and animals are increasingly threatened by human activities and habitat encroachment. One study estimates a million species face extinction within decades (SN: 5/8/19). That’s 1 million distinct, idiosyncratic answers to the basic question of how to make a living on planet Earth, gone.

The scale of this potential loss has many countries worried. Aside from its inherent value, the natural world makes the planet livable through processes like cleaning the air, filtering water, cycling carbon dioxide and pollinating crops. So to stem this biodiversity loss, governments are now working to draft ambitious plans to set aside more space for natural habitats. Nature, after all, needs room to flourish.

A global plan under negotiation envisions designating 30 percent of land and sea as protected by 2030 — and 50 percent by 2050 — in order to revive ecosystems and safeguard the diversity of species on Earth, according to a draft text of the agreement under the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity.

But is 30 percent, or even 50 percent, enough? And enough for what exactly — to slow extinction rates, or to protect everything that’s possible to protect, or something else entirely?

One basic goal is to preserve what’s left. Humans have altered more than three-fourths of Earth’s surface, and of the 14 terrestrial biomes — such as tropical rainforest, tundra or desert — eight have less than 10 percent of undeveloped wilderness remaining, researchers report in a 2016 study in Current Biology. Many species have already vanished, such as the Chinese Paddlefish and the brilliantly blue Spix’s Macaw, not seen in Brazil’s forests since 2000.

Spix’s Macaw, pictured here in a German zoo, is considered extinct in the wild by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The brilliant blue birds once thrived in the forests of northeastern Brazil, but vanished because of habitat loss and poaching.dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo

At least for marine ecosystems, there’s research to support the 30 percent target as a starting point. There’s less firm evidence for land. But “the scientific consensus is telling us that we need [even] more ambitious targets,” says Oscar Venter, a conservation scientist at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. Targeting 30 percent of Earth’s terrestrial regions for protection by 2030, he says, is “more a reflection of what’s politically feasible, rather than what the best science says.”

Eyeing ambitious targets

An idea like this is not unprecedented. In 2011, more than 190 countries agreed to 20 conservation goals, collectively referred to as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, as part of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Those targets include efforts such as increasing awareness of biodiversity and incorporating the traditional knowledge of indigenous groups into conservation plans. More directly, governments agreed under the convention to each set aside 17 percent of their land and, for coastal countries, 10 percent of their seas, as protected areas by 2020. (The United States is the only country that has not ratified the agreement.)

The Aichi Targets acknowledged two key reasons for preserving the planet. “We have a responsibility to be stewards of the planet, because nature is important in and of itself,” says Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis and a former director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “But also because people benefit directly from healthy, productive and resilient ecosystems and abundant biodiversity.”

The targets, while useful in motivating conservation efforts, still were “not sufficient,” Lubchenco says. Setting targets “often doesn’t translate into actually achieving those targets,” she says, thanks to uneven coordination between scientists, government officials and other key actors like farms or the fishing industry. And while the agreement required that countries publish action plans, it did not demand reports on actual progress toward achieving the Aichi Targets.

As the decade draws to a close, many targets remain unmet. Currently, about 15 percent of land and 7.4 percent of seas are in some way protected, or in line for protection, according to the U.N. Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Even so, current extinction rates are estimated to be 1,000 times higher than historical levels. Even common animals, such as American sparrows, have seen their numbers drop in recent decades (SN: 9/19/19).

That’s led scientists and governments to conclude that the 2011 targets didn’t go far enough.  

Safe spaces

As of April 2020, nearly 15 percent of land (green) and about 7 percent of the seas (blue) were under some level of protection, according to the United Nations Environment Program and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Areas under some form of protection in 2020

www.protectedplanet.net/UNEP-WCMC, 2020

www.protectedplanet.net/UNEP-WCMC, 2020

How much is enough?

Deciding how much of nature should be protected depends on the goal, whether that’s keeping a specific animal from going extinct, preserving a unique ecosystem or ensuring the future of commercial fishing stocks. Different goals necessitate different kinds of protected areas.

The size of a protected area “is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters,” says Samantha Murray, an ocean law and policy expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

When trying to prevent a specific animal from going extinct, biologists first try to figure out the minimum amount of habitat the species needs to persist. Wide-ranging species like North American caribou need about 10 percent of their natural range to be protected. Rarer species in microhabitats like a single valley or a specific island “typically need much more,” Venter says, “potentially all the way up to 100” percent of their range. Figuring out those numbers is tricky, especially for understudied species. Additionally, it can be difficult to design a protected area that meets the diverse range requirements of all the species within it.

Another conservation approach focuses on protecting the rare slices of land and sea brimming with exceptional numbers of species. These so-called biodiversity hot spots include Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon River Basin and parts of the U.S. Great Smoky Mountains. Protecting these areas means protecting many different animals and plants all at once.

Finally, some conservation biologists argue for preserving vast tracts of wilderness not yet altered by human activity. The expansive boreal forests of Canada and Russia don’t harbor as many species as the Amazon, but they do hold up to a third of the globe’s terrestrial carbon and so are a key part of the Earth process of pulling climate-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Protecting these areas, along with other large tracts of wild land, are crucial for solving both the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, says Eric Dinerstein, a conservation biologist at RESOLVE, a conservation nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

Dinerstein and others argue that the situation is now so dire that all approaches are needed to save what’s left. “There are no immutable laws of conservation biology, nothing that says this paradigm for saving nature is better than that paradigm. We need to do it all.”

That same urgency is reflected in the recent flurry proposals and analyses by scientists. Biologist E.O. Wilson says in his 2016 book Half-Earth that 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity can be saved by protecting half of the planet. Dinerstein and colleagues also laid out a plan in the June 2017 BioScience for preserving half the planet in a way that covers a diversity of ecosystems.

Venter and colleagues estimate targeting a little less than that — about 44 percent — can safeguard biodiversity. The team arrived at that number, in a study posted at bioRxiv.org in November 2019, by tweaking boundaries around existing protected areas. The result is a global patchwork of protected areas with enough space for the 28,594 species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, dragonflies and crustaceans the researchers had data for, and includes some of the world’s richest areas of biodiversity.

Mapping a way forward

One recent analysis by a team of conservation biologists finds that 44 percent of land must be protected or soundly managed to stem the biodiversity crisis. This map shows existing protected areas (light blue), key biodiversity areas (purple) and wilderness (dark blue), while new conservation priorities identified by the researchers’ analysis are in green. The Venn Diagram shows the degree of overlap between each category.

Where protections exist and where they are needed

J.R. Allen et al/bioRxiv.org 2019

J.R. Allen et al/bioRxiv.org 2019

Broad and ambitious goals, like preserving 30 percent by 2030, are important for galvanizing international action. “But ambitious targets are only good if countries are strategic in where they place protected areas,” Venter says.

Problems with big targets

Indeed, not all biologists agree that setting such targets is the best strategy. “A big single number [alone] isn’t going to help, and it misses what we need to do to protect biodiversity,” says conservation biologist Stuart Pimm at Duke University. He says it’s more important to focus on the most threatened biodiversity hot spots.

Much of Pimm’s work focuses on connecting forest fragments with natural corridors, which can functionally increase an animal’s habitat even when protecting more land area isn’t feasible. Recent research shows that connecting fragmented habitats can boost biodiversity, for both animals and plants (SN: 9/26/19).

Biodiversity also is not evenly distributed around the globe; coral reefs, for example, account for less than 1 percent of the ocean floor, but house more than 25 percent of marine life. So having all countries aiming for the same targets might be counterproductive. Some countries may need to protect more than 30 percent of their territory, others less.

“If you’re looking at the Amazon, for instance, recent research has shown that we probably need 80 to 90 percent of the Amazon intact,” Pimm says. Otherwise, the rainforest may begin a rapid transformation into drier savannah, compromising the water cycle for whole continent.

Additionally, countries rushing to meet their goals might only go for the low-hanging fruit. “Areas that are too cold, too hot or too remote” to hold any agricultural or commercial promise are easy targets, but not necessarily the areas most in need of protection, Pimm says.

The United States could get to 30 percent relatively quickly by preserving sparsely populated Western tracts of desert or high plains. Most of the country’s biodiversity, however, is in the southeast. For instance, more endemic salamander species are crawling around Appalachian streams and lakes than anywhere else in the world, yet much of their range remains unprotected. Similarly, protecting most of icy Greenland would effectively meet the European Union’s 30 percent obligation.

The mountain streams and forests of Appalachia along the East Coast are one of the United States’ most biodiverse regions, though the bulk of protected areas are in the West. Here, a stream runs through the Great Smoky Mountains.Betty4240/iStock/Getty Images Plus

“Large area targets may just encourage countries to protect areas that aren’t going to do much for biodiversity,” Pimm says. “Do we need to protect more of the planet? Of course, but we should do so in a smart, targeted way.” 

What does protection mean, anyway?

Designating a protected area is just the beginning. Protections need to be enforced through policing and prosecuting for illegal fishing, tree felling, hunting or pollution. Otherwise, protections don’t work — and conservation efforts fall flat. A 2014 report by the U.N. Environment Program found that only 24 percent of protected areas were being soundly managed.

Places designated only on paper as protected “can give the illusion of protection where none really exists,” says Murray, the Scripps ocean law and policy expert. “We could create the largest marine protected area in the world, but if we just walk away, it doesn’t do anyone any good.”

Having fully protected national parks across 30 percent of the globe is probably not feasible, conservationists say. But there are other ways of managing land and sea to meet conservation goals.

“Indigenous lands in Canada are a great example,” Venter says. These lands allow for hunting and gathering activities, but not large-scale habitat clearing. And there is evidence that such an approach works. Indigenous lands in Canada, Brazil and Australia had similar, or slightly higher, levels of vertebrate diversity than non-indigenous protected areas in the same countries, researchers reported in November 2019 in Environmental Science & Policy.

The quarter of Earth’s land now owned, used or occupied by indigenous communities holds about 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity, according to a 2008 World Bank report. So empowering these groups to manage their lands could help countries achieve their targets, Venter suggests.

Moving toward consensus

Still, many biologists say that percentage targets, even if clumsy, do play an important role. Some “countries have taken great pride in getting close or meeting [Aichi] goals,” and that can be a sign of how well countries are preserving nature, says Hugh Possingham, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Brisbane, Australia. But it’s not the whole story.

“Relying solely on targets is a bit like relying only on blood pressure to indicate health,�� Possingham says. He hopes that the eventual agreement incorporates more simple but meaningful metrics, for example, an estimate of how much a country’s biodiversity is captured by existing protected areas. “That would give a fuller picture of how well we’re doing.”

Greenland hosts the world’s largest national park, protecting nearly 1,000,000 square kilometers of its mountainous coast and icy interior (the mountains at Ofjord in Northeast Greenland National Park shown here).GRID Arendal/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Countries are still months away from finalizing a new agreement. A broad outline of the framework was released in January for months of discussions before the next U.N. Convention on Biodiversity. The timeline for those discussions has been extended due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The meeting, originally scheduled for October 15 to 29 in Kunming, China, has been delayed to sometime in 2021

Parts of the outline suggest it will address some of the failings of the Aichi Targets, says Aleksandar Rankovic, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. “There has been a strong cooperative spirit,” he says. “Most delegations seem intent on improving the agreement.”

For example, the outline stipulates that whatever land and sea each country designates as protected, 60 percent of that should be “of particular importance for biodiversity.” What counts as a site of particular importance remains to be determined, but Rankovic says baking this kind of language into the document is a key step towards ensuring countries protect what needs protecting.

Rankovic hopes the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a wake-up call about the importance of keeping wild environments intact, as recent research links deforestation to the emergence of zoonotic diseases, like COVID-19, in humans.

“The fact that we have a biodiversity-related global pandemic that started where we’re supposed to gather to propose ways to solve the biodiversity crisis is quite powerful as a symbol,” he says. Reaching a deal “could be a big moment” in preventing a global extinction crisis. “But if we come out more divided, it will be harder to lay the groundwork for solving this crisis.”

.image-mobile { display: none; } @media (max-width: 400px) { .image-mobile { display: block; } .image-desktop { display: none; } } from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nature-will-protecting-30-percent-earth-prevent-extinction-crisis

[trebaolsmovingcastle]

@saint-just replied to your post: “Are we all gonna die?”

(A) You’ve lumped automation in with  fiercely negative things like climate problems and doom-war. Why? (B) “A minority of people hijacked the country and do evil with it, and somehow it means that it’s all over.” - Are you referring to when a minority of evil people birthed the country then stayed on top, or are we to believe contemporary developments are a significant departure from the norm? When you say “it’s all over”, is the “it” this country? Would that even be bad?

S’alright, so there’s definitely a lot to unpack here and go through. First let me just say that the post in question isn’t a carefully crafted paean or anything, I got an anonymous ask, which got me thinking and I tend to extemporize as I go...which in turn made it a paean to hope of sorts. So I hope you’ll cut me a little slack on certain flourishes, or at the very least on not bogging myself down in some serious semantics.

That aside, let’s take a look at my concerns about automation, mind you I’ve been reading on this topic for the last five years mostly, and I’m not an academic. So I wasn’t smart enough to make a refined list of resources I can constantly drag up or refer back to when I need to reference specific numbers. That’s my fault, I just accrue information and create a holistic image of outcomes.

Also, Saint-Just, I’ll go on at length, which I think won’t bother you, so everyone else feel free to skip all of this.

At face value automation is a savior, imagine, all these jobs, roles, systems suddenly handed off uniformly to AI’s robots, machines, systems that take the human element out of the equation. It’s star trek, it’s the replicator in a way. 3D printers making houses for next to nothing, no more miserable truck drivers pulling dangerous all nighters because the freight industry is automated. no more low wage jobs, they’re all done by the push of a button. Even the white collar jobs, and medical jobs all vanish far enough down the automation line. If you can teach a robotic arm to prepare a meal, you can teach similar arms and AI’s how to close a bleeding heart valve or excise a tumor with more precision than any human surgeon. You can have your markets rise and fall at speeds completely unimaginable as processors crunch numbers and make trades at speeds that we’re basically already at.

Now, this seems all great, when I lived in Seattle I had a friend who worked at Amazon, he was obsessed with automation and the golden future it would create, he also supported a universal basic income. He believed that tech giants would pioneer the way in pushing for a UBI, that automation would render industries nonexistent, and that the capital would get picked up by either the government or that these companies themselves would willingly just hand the money to the public, providing everyone a livable income without the need for work.

The problem is that there is virtually no evidence that any corporation or business entity is likely to start handing off profits to the public for free. Nor is there evidence that the tech field is somehow immune to the corrupting influence of capitalism and for profit enterprise. 

So what seems more likely is that you’ll have industries disappear, even now you can see automation taking over a variety of industries, open a factory that used to employ 5,000 union workers, now you can open that same factory and staff it with a skeleton crew of tech savvy workers who can perform maintenance of the new robotic workers. Meaning rural communities that formerly would depend on these types of jobs can just keep waiting, because their town can’t be saved by a factory with 25 jobs for people with coding skills.

Even looking at analysis made by I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics creates this uniquely grim image. In essence they’ll go through industries and provide long term career analysis for various fields, including factors that could impact the industry in question and how competitive the work environment is for new workers. Anyway, these analyses paint a rosier picture than most, but still list automation as a major threat to a number of fields.

So you have a variety of low paying jobs disappearing from the economy, especially in service jobs, creating more and more underemployment, and stiffer and stiffer competition for these low wage jobs. As a side note consider how many retirement age americans are now expecting to work until they die. So now add in over the years all the competition created by this gradually increasing group of workers. Suddenly we have this extremely broad category of low income, or no income people, uneducated for the new automated economy, without resources to join the existing workforce. You and I know that there is no social mobility now, and that whatever income bracket your parents inhabited is now less likely to be the bracket you will occupy.

Okay, so now we’re setting a stage where you have broad automation cutting a swathe through the jobs held by the 50% of American households that are under the poverty line, then you have automation also hitting at white collar and traditionally upper class jobs. All of this we have to assume will happen without Federal assistance for the working poor, or means to support this growing mass of people unable to find jobs.

As a class, we workers in a capitalist system only have one single way to really enforce our survival and protection...strikes, attacks on production at our jobs. When you eliminate the working class, as automation does, you lose your voice, you lose the only tactic you had within the existing system to demand change, protection, recompense, anything. You’re no longer a part of the system because the system doesn’t need you. For future generations consider trying to plan a college education around what kind of career you’ll need to be in at 40...when you’re 20. We’re already sold the lie of college as an answer to security, I was told at 10 to plan for my 50′s by picking a stable job I could retire with. By the time I entered the workforce the notion of a company keeping you to retirement no longer existed for most workers. As automation comes for some industries there will be a proliferation of jobs in that industry as you can have more people working in these fields as the cost of the fields drops, but that means that those jobs are generally part time and low paying. It has happened to paralegals for example, as well as bank tellers. Sure technology has caused these industries to balloon and meet a greater demand, but now the people in those fields are paid a pittance of what they used to. 

The one thing I didn’t go into at length in that post was that a lot of this all seems to be an area of concern for the decade of 2020-2030. Most fields concerned with the health of a society seem to have this notion that this coming decade is going to be a reckoning, that what is currently modest automation will balloon as the decade progresses, that the inequality we experience now will be enhanced, I imagine that a lot of the people singing praises about the ‘singularity’ ten years ago are now biting their nails as fascism comes back and the surveillance state entrenches itself ahead of all of the increasing economic inequality.

So although automation isn’t in and of itself bad, when handled by the same humans that brought us Google and Amazon...I’m concerned. We can’t depend on capitalism restructuring itself into a system that will care for the public and redefine what it means to work...we can’t hope for a UBI and careers in creative fields and just free cash to pay for the goods generated by an automated economy. We need to see this coming and be prepared for what looks like reality, a world where the jobs for the working classes disappear, with no retraining options, and few new jobs to fight over...jobs that likely will also face automation.

Alright, bear with me, Saint-Just, if you’ve come this far I appreciate that you care enough to go further.

On to the next bit. I need you to accept a series of ideas that may seem in some bizarre or contradictory or just...impossible to accept...but neo-liberalism isn’t ur-fascism and the harm done by one isn’t categorically identical to the other. Does this mean I want a neo-liberal President, a neo-liberal system? No, I want something altogether different, but when given the choice between the agony of millions, without relief, and a boot stomping on them for decades and at least limited option to resist and alter course, I’ll take the altered course.

When you allow fascism to truly take home in your political ecology you introduce the possibility that the softness of people’s resistance to evil will see people in camps in due time. We already have these problems with our government before Trump, but this is virtually asking for an authoritarian neo-feudalism to take over. How likely is a successful revolution against a government of that type? 

So to me, in this moment, the threat George Washington poses to the world is minimal, but the threat Donald Trump poses is more important. And when offered a choice between combative resistance to Clinton and Trump, I would choose Clinton because there’s at least a minimal chance that time, effort, and action would lead to change. Now we’re entering into a realm where information technology and the changing economy will truly render our ability to avert disaster moot. We’ll be against the wall when the fascist revolution comes, and despite the beauty of the White Roses stance wouldn’t you rather they never die along with all the Jews, homosexuals, romani, and other unwanted by the fascists of Germany?

The nation was founded by slavers and self interested businessmen, the nation is crowned with the genocide of the indigenous nations that came before, our national drink isn’t coca cola, it’s blood of everyone our forefathers executed to plant a homesteader in some prairie cabin, to suppress a vote, to sell cotton...both North and South. But right now, in this moment, I have more pressing concerns, the safety of people who aren’t me, the survival of people who aren’t me. When ICE is kicking in doors and baiting families by using their children...we have people suffering on a matter of societal semantics.

As for the ‘it’s all over’ go back and reread it with a question mark, that’s a typo on my part, it’s a rhetorical question. I’m making the case that simply because you have fascists at the gate doesn’t mean that they have to win.

That is what the post is about at heart, it’s what this is all about, that there are alternatives. I’ll still make a point to answer your understandable misread of my message, namely that it wouldn’t be bad if this ended. But you have to be prepared for what happens next. I can’t rail for revolution without conscience of what can happen. I can’t take a stance that says we need to tear it all down this moment, that you, or I, is able to do that. Because in this moment, with these resources, in this world...you most likely hand all the power you need to the people who have made this world categorically worse.

Revolutionary thought isn’t just about action, it’s about vision, goals, and again, as always, over and over, hope, love for mankind, even the people we loathe most. You can’t save everyone, you can’t win without some bloodshed...but you can’t throw it all away early because your ideology can’t accept the current reality. To me, now, in the coming years, all I can do is talk, write, engage with people, stand up and be counted as the counting comes. Resist tooth and nail against the worst of it, but I need to also consider who lives, who comes next, who will benefit. Revolutionaries are better alive and volunteering, helping the living who can’t themselves muster the energy to do more than nod along with a message of something better. Martyring for causes doesn’t bring us any closer to anything better, because the life lost was a life that missed all its future opportunities to enact change.

Look at your name! Look at beloved Robespierre! A slip...a momentary accident of exhaustion, of placement, a misstep, and suddenly the ideals of a transformed society dashed and instead you get Napoleon and two centuries of ‘Bloodthirsty’ Seafoam Incorruptible. Revolutions burn the revolutionaries like kindling, that is history on repeat, so take that and consider what can be done when revolutionary action is needed? That possibly instead of burning out before the job is done, we all try being the ones to decide what comes next. No empires, no neo-feudalism, no fascists, no new Bonapartes, Hitlers, Franco’s, Kim’s, or Jackson’s...that’s the goal, that’s the seemingly impossible demand put on true souls, to think, and plan, to resist, angry, ready, eager, but with the desire to pull as much of the people out of the fire as possible.

My sincere hope is that I can help, in some small fashion, as the times demand. I do not want to be at barricades or on tribunals, I don’t want to daydream about revolutionary councils, I want to dream that the institutions that corrupt this world are dismantled, that the poor don’t suffer, that the starving are fed, that the image of western civilization...white civilization are cast down and something better is achieved. That as needed I can talk my way through problems, that when needed I can go to the streets, that as things get worse my message doesn’t stop. I can’t dream about revolution because revolution is innocent blood heaped with the guiltys for little to no gain. I am not against these things, I am not against a coming change, but when you blow a society apart, you need to have thought about the timing. There is a right time. Right now...be these ideas, life, exist in the face of these awful things. Existing at all can be revolutionary. Being an image of what could be better in the world is more important now than stockpiling brickbats in hopes that tomorrow there will be a window to break.

Now, I do not mean to imply that you’re what I fear from revolutionary thinkers, I’m expressing what I’ve experienced in the past amongst a handful of people on the coast, that there’s this suicidal desire to martyr yourself for a cause, the cause becomes a bloodthirsty god that can only be satisfied by propaganda of the deed. The purpose of revolutionary ideas should be other people, the happiness, security, FUTURE, of other people. God, but a revolutionary should love, love adoringly the world, the suffering and misery of the world should hurt the revolutionary like seeing harm come to someone you care for, multiplied again and again. 

If the time came, for anyone, to rise up, to lead, to declare, to act...surely challenges, cruelty of the times, hardship, terror all would follow, but until then it is so important to focus on what is coming and what all of us are best at, what all of us can do when called upon. I will die, as will you, as will we all, but I must live so that should I die, I will have died unwaveringly standing in my convictions and hope for something better. Let me be of the immortal dead if it means the message of love, of the people, of something better for this dismal future is what gives me voice beyond the grave.

I hope I have been clear, I know I can be long winded, I’m better in person in almost all regards and easier to understand than in writing. I also hope that this satisfies you, that you understand my position better and can see what I mean in what I said before. That post was about hope, about encouraging hope in people who are too terrified of tomorrow to have hope. We need hope, we can’t despair the future because it needs us.

[tipsycad147]

Busted: 7 Myths About Witchcraf

For those of you who plan to come out of the broom closet or already emerged and struggle to defend your beliefs, I compiled the list below to help you address some common misconceptions and stereotypes about witchcraft with your loved ones and friends.

At some point, most serious practitioners of the Craft encounter an uncomfortable situation that requires them to either explain themselves or remain misunderstood.

Please note:  As witchcraft takes many forms in the modern world in many different cultures, I use the word “most” very frequently because there are naturally exceptions to every rule.

It is not my intention to speak for every practitioner or pigeonhole the diversity of witchcraft and paganism as a whole, but to provide meaningful counterpoints to common falsehoods about the alternative spiritual practices often labelled (and self-labeled) as “witchcraft.”

Please feel free to leave accurate, respectful, fact-based additions to this list in the comments.

Myth #1:  Witchcraft includes or is somehow related to devil worship.

The concept of the “devil” as Western society understands it emerged mostly from monotheistic Abrahamic religions like Christianity and Islam.  Belief in the devil as a opponent of the God of Abraham remains a tenant of many faiths, and as a non-Christian, I absolutely respect that.

However, most modern practitioners of witchcraft do not acknowledge a satanic being at all.

(There are some exceptions.  Witches of blended traditions wherein Christian influence imprinted the concept of the devil, or those who identify as “Christian witches,” may recognise an oppositional being known as “the Devil.”  Most mainstream Christians recognise the devil as an entity also—that doesn’t mean they worship him.)

Although Christian thought leaders throughout history sometimes labelled pagan gods as the manifestation of the devil, this approach largely aimed to discredit indigenous religious practices and encourage pagan populations to turn towards monotheism.

For more information on this, see How Witchcraft Became Associated with Evil.

Myth #2:  Wicca and Witchcraft are the same thing.

Many non-practitioners use the word “Wicca” and “witchcraft” interchangeably.  Because Wicca enjoys relatively high popularity in the Western world, it’s easy to understand the confusion.

However, “witchcraft” is a blanket term, and under it, we find Wicca along with a whole host of other practices, including Afro-Caribbean traditions, Celtic traditions, Central American traditions, and many indigenous practices around the world.

To further the confusion, some Wiccans don’t practice witchcraft at all.  Spell casting is merely one component of many, including the honouring of the moon cycles, natural living practices and the Wheel of the Year.

Myth #3:  Typical Christians don’t practice witchcraft.

Well, they may not call it that.  But I would.

During a traditional Mass, the priest is said to turn wine into the blood of Christ, and bread into his flesh.  For some, this transition is meant to be symbolic.  Many Christian traditions even interpret this transformation literally.

Either way, many practising witches would akin this and other common, mainstream Christian traditions to spell craft or at least magickal ritualism.

This comparison is not intended to offend Christians, but to point out that what practising witches do really isn’t that different, at least in form.

We use ritual as a means to commune with the divine and spell craft as a means to express ourselves to a higher power.  We sometimes even use the words “spell” and “prayer” interchangeably.

If you’re Christian, and you’d rather not define your traditions as “witchcraft,” I mean no disrespect.  But if you’re asking me what I call witchcraft, I personally don’t see a whole lot of difference between saying the rosary and chanting over an altar.

Then again, “witchcraft” isn’t a blasphemous slur to me.

So it’s easier not to be offended by it.

Myth #4  Witchcraft is an ancient religion.

Witchcraft is an ancient practice.  The earliest cave dwellers left behind artifacts of shamanistic witchcraft (see The Sorcerer for a solid example) and it absolutely qualifies as a universal archetype.

If we accept Wikipedia’s eloquent-yet-simplistic definition of witchcraft as “broadly . . . the practice of and belief in magical skills and abilities exercised by solitary practitioners and groups” then all known cultures practised some form of witchcraft at one time.

Your ancestors were witches.  Their ancestors were witches.  We are all descended from witchcraft.  No serious archeologist or credible human historian of any kind denies that.

Even the Bible recognises humanity’s ancient roots in witchcraft.

But witchcraft isn’t a religion at all.  It’s a component of various religions, and many religions that acknowledge openly their use of witchcraft are actually quite modern (including and, perhaps especially, Wicca).

Myth #5:  If you let your kids spend time with pagan children, they may be converted or enticed into practicing witchcraft.

In a broad sense (but with a few major exceptions, like Buddhism) proselytism or “enticed conversion” is a feature unique to, or at least most frequently employed by, monotheism.

For cultural as well as theological reasons, a monotheistic child is actually much more likely to try to convert a pagan child than the other way around.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.

I’m just saying, that’s generally not how we roll.

Your kid might end up doing super scary things with his pagan friend, like stop playing video games for a half hour to go watch the stars, or learn how to compost properly.

But spell casting?  Probably not.

Pagan parents usually feel a sensitivity as a community to non-pagan parents and we recognise that you may not appreciate us exposing your child to our beliefs.

We generally don’t even assume it’s okay to conduct a ritual with a pagan child who isn’t ours.   We have no central doctrine; our traditions can be extremely personalised, varying widely from family to family even within the same coven or group.  Therefore, we usually don’t assume what’s okay for our family is okay for someone else.

But if you have any doubts, a simple “We’re happy to send little Jimmy to your house, just please avoid any spiritual topics, as we prefer to discuss those things with him ourselves” will almost certainly go over just fine and get the point across effectively.

Most importantly, it’s not cool to exclude kids because of their parents’ religious or spiritual beliefs, no matter how much you disagree with them.   So don’t.

Myth 6:  Pagans/Witches are unattractive, ugly, socially awkward or otherwise make undesirable friends/partners.

Damn.  Some people can be harsh.

For hundreds of years now, society invested a lot in creating powerfully negative images of pagans and witchcraft in general.

Think for a moment about the old, wart-speckled woman with gnarled, horrifically arthritic knuckles and bad taste in hats.  (Can you stick a feather in that thing?  Some ribbon?   A little colour goes a long way, girl).

Now, the super nerdy, overweight, pock-marked middle-aged woman embodies the new stereotype of a sad, delusional person with a limited social life and nothing better to do than adorn her parade of house cats with exotic crystals from around the world.

Like any other stereotype, those people exist somewhere to confirm this image of witchcraft for you if you look hard enough.

The most open, flamboyant or expressive pagans present themselves like the most open, flamboyant or expressive people in any culture.  They tend to go over the top.  They tend to be very public.

And yeah, sometimes, they come off as kind of weird.

You notice these people because they are so public and loud, and you may get the impression that they are representative of the whole witchcraft world.

But the practitioners you might find more relatable often don’t have the luxury of identifying themselves publicly or even privately.  They work in law, politics or public school teaching jobs that prevent them from speaking openly about their practices.

Or, they may just think it’s nobody’s business.

They dress like you do, they go to Starbucks, they’re obsessed with their !Phones, they set unrealistic New Year’s resolutions and they fret about their dating lives (aka “The Basic White Witch”).

In short:  they’re mostly “normal” in every other respect.  Or as “normal” as any of us get.

Myth #7 Witches are resentful of, or generally intolerant around Christians.

First of all, some practitioners of witchcraft consider themselves Christian.

However, if you had the unpleasant experience of being lectured as a Christian by a pagan witch, then I am very sorry about that.  I find this hypocrisy embarrassing.

I hope it’s not common..

At the very least, know that we’re not all like that.

If it helps, please bear in mind that many people adopt a practice witchcraft after a bad childhood or early adulthood experience with Christianity.  That experience, not the practice of witchcraft itself, informs their ideas and attitudes about Christianity.

I know of no formal tradition that teaches the hatred or intolerance of any religion, including Christianity.

I tell my pagan friends the same thing I will tell you:  the best way to heal other people’s wounds or misconceptions about your spiritual tradition is to be the finest example you can humanely be.

It’s easier to swallow a tiny drop of compassion than ocean of bitterness or contempt.

Let’s all try to love each other a little better.

Blessed be.

https://moodymoons.com/2017/12/27/moody-moons-busts-7-myths-about-witchcraft/

[joescanlan-blog]

Classism: An Introduction

They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte We admire the work, but despise the workman. — Plutarch, Life of Pericles

Art has a long tradition of Class-ism. It will become clear to the reader (and clearer still throughout the pages that follow) that by Class-ism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Class-ism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches popular culture—and this applies whether the person is an cultural critic, sociologist, historian, or economist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is a Class-ist and what he or she does is Class-ism. Compared with American Studies or area studies, it is true that the term Class-ism is distasteful to specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with “ pop culture”  as their main focus, with the cultural critic in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Class-ism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the political economy of culture.

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations and transmissions are in part the subject of this essay, is a more general meaning for Class-ism. Class-ism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “ popular culture”  and (most of the time) “ fine art.”  Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists and museum curators, have accepted the basic distinction between pop culture and art as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions and political accounts concerning pop culture, its people, customs, “ mind,”  destiny, and so on. Class-ism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A little later in this article I shall deal with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a “ field”  as this.

The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Class-ism is a constant one, and since the late nineteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Class-ism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late nineteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Class-ism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with pop culture—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Class-ism as a sophisticated style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over pop culture. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, to identify Class-ism. My contention is that without examining Class-ism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which the art world is able to manage—and even produce—pop culture politically, sociologically, aesthetically, ideologically, critically and imaginatively during the twentieth century. Moreover, so authoritative a position does Class-ism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on pop culture could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Class-ism. In brief, because of Class-ism, pop culture was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Class-ism unilaterally determines what can be said about popular culture, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “ popular culture”  is in question. How this happens is what this article tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that art gains in strength and identity by setting itself off against pop culture as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.

In the most benign sense, Class-ism is a way for art to come to terms with popular culture and the special place it holds in daily life. Indigenous or “pop” cultures are not only adjacent to art; they are also the place of art’s greatest and richest and oldest traditions, the source of its imagery and its languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring specters of the Other. In the United States in particular, pop culture has helped to define art (and its institutions) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of pop culture is merely imaginative. Popular culture is an integral part of visual art’s material organization and context. As a mode of discourse, Class-ism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically through supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even bureaucracies and styles. In America, the understanding of pop culture is considerably more complicated than in Europe, although the influence of China, India and global consumerism in general is creating a more sober, more realistic awareness of the cultural power of consumers. In response, the vastly expanded political and economic role of art museums and international biennials makes great claims on our understanding of exactly where art originates and how its cultural value is determined. This expanded role—and the assumed usurpation and dominance that is inherent to it—is what I call Class-ism.

Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the art world’s involvement with popular culture and—until the ascendancy of the Independent Group and Pop Art after World War II—the involvement of every other middle class consumer. To speak of Class-ism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a detached, ruling class cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, thewhole of America and Madison Avenue, cinema and Hollywood, consumer products, fashion and a long tradition of taste makers, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable pop culture “ experts”  and “ hands,”  a pop culture professorate, a complex array of “ pop culture”  ideas (glamour, gender, camp, sensuality, “ dumbness” ), many popular subcultures, philosophies and wisdoms domesticated for local use—the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point is that Class-ism derives from a particular closeness experienced between the “detached” class and popular culture, which until the early twentieth century was an extremely local affair, its broad definition being largely limited to common knowledge of the Bible, Greek mythology and archetypal notions of Nature. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength and performance of the ruling class, comes the large body of texts and strategies I call Class-ism.

It should be said at once that even with the generous number of books, artworks, authors and artists that I have examined, there is a much larger number that I have had to leave out. My argument, however, depends neither upon an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with pop culture nor upon a clearly delimited set of artworks, authors and ideas that together make up the canon of Class-ism. I have depended instead upon a different methodological alternative—whose backbone in a sense is the set of historical generalizations I have so far been making—and it is these I want now to discuss in more detail.

II

Pop culture, or even indigenous culture, is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as art is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to economics: as both economic and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such communities, locales and economic values as “ popular culture”  and “ fine art”  are manmade. Therefore, as much as art itself, pop culture is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the ruling class. The two economic entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that pop culture was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. When Hal Foster said in his exhibition Damaged Goods that appropriation strategy was a career, he meant that to be interested in commodity display was something bright young artists would find to be an all-consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying it was only a career. There were—and are—nations and cultures whose daily lives are organized around sites of commerce, be they Vancouver, the Niger River or suburban shopping malls. Their lives, histories and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the

world of art. About that fact this study of Class-ism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Class-ism as I study it deals principally, not with a correspondence between Class-ism and its ideas about pop culture, but with the internal consistency of Class-ism and its ideas about pop culture (appropriation strategy as a career, etc.) despite or beyond any correspondence with, or lack thereof, a “ real”  popular culture. My point is that Foster’s statement about appropriation strategy mainly refers to that fabricated consistency, that regular constellation of ideas, as the pre-eminent thing about pop culture and not to its mere being, as the Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.  Pop culture only exists to the extent that it conforms to what the art world thinks of it.A second qualification is that ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that pop culture was created—or more precisely, “ aestheticized”—and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between the art world and pop or indigenous culture is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, as is quite accurately indicated in the title of William Rubin’s classic, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Pop culture—and we would be prejudiced to think of Rubin’s “ primitive”  African artifacts as anything other than just another form of popular culture, as examples of a particular society’s daily objects, no more or less fetishized than our cars and stoves and handbags—has been aestheticized not only because it was discovered to be “ popular”  in all those ways considered commonplace by the Baby Boom generation, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made popular. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Jack Kerouac’s encounters with jazz music produced a widely influential model of the African-American man. In On The Road, the black man never spoke of himself, he never represented his emotions, presence, or history. Kerouac spoke for and represented him. Kerouac was white, comparatively wealthy and male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess that musician creatively but to speak for him and tell his readers in what way he was “ typically black.”  My argument is that Kerouac’s situation of strength in relation to the jazz musician was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between art (in this case, literature) and popular culture and the discourse about popular culture that it enabled.

This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Class-ism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths which, were the truth be told about them, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Class-ism is more particularly valuable as a sign of curatorial-theoretical power over pop culture than it is a reliable discourse about pop culture (which is what, in its glossy or scholarly form, it claims to be). Nevertheless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Class-ist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political network of high-powered commercial galleries, trade journals and museums and its redoubtable durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom in the United States (in academies, books, congresses, universities, biennials) from the period of Jasper

Johns in the late 1950s until the present must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Class-ism, therefore, is not an airy, ivory tower fantasy about pop culture, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Class-ism, as a system of knowledge about popular culture, an accepted grid for filtering pop culture through and into high art consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied—indeed, made truly productive—the statements proliferating out of Class-ism into the general culture.Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, institutions and colleagues works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrialized world. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Class-ism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far. Class-ism is never far from what Reyner Banham has called the pretense of Art, a collective notion identifying “ us”  cultural authorities as against all “ those”  mere consumers, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in high art is precisely what made it hegemonic both inside and outside the art world: the idea of art appreciation as superior to the everyday actions of consumers, however similar (indeed, identical) their preferences often are to those of art professionals. There is in addition the hegemony of art world ideas about pop culture, themselves reiterating aesthetic sensitivity over commercial crassness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have different views on the matter.

In a quite constant way, Class-ism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the art professional in a whole series of possible relationships with pop culture without ever losing the relative upper hand. And why should it be otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary artistic ascendancy from World War II to the present? The artist, the critic, the curator, the collector, or the viewer is in, or thinks about, pop culture because he or she can be, or can think about it, with very little resistance on pop culture’s part. Under the general heading of knowledge about popular culture and within the umbrella of high art’s hegemony over pop culture since World War II, there emerged a complex pop culture suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the artist’s studio, for theoretical illustration in art historical, curatorial, linguistic, pictorial and racial theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national character or religious affiliation. Additionally, the imaginative examination of things popular was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign art consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality a popular world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what constituted popularity, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections. If we can point to great Class-ist works of genuine scholarship like Lucy Lippard’s Pop Art or Dave Hickey’s AirGuitar, we should note that Lippard’s and Hickey’s ideas come out of the same impulse (as did a great many postmodern novels by the likes of Donald Barthelme or Don Delillo). This impulse, by turns respectful, awestruck or contemptuous, recognizes the shiny, lurid, delusional, melancholic absurdities of popular culture, marvels at them and  resigns itself to them, and even makes use of them. Ultimately, though, such uses, however skeptical or sympathetic, can only have the consequence of proposing that this or that fragment of popular culture is worthy of consideration as Art. In other words, is a worthy subject of Class-ism.

[hayleybaaaby-blog]

because I really haven't taken a survey in years - I miss MySpace bulletin board or whatever, lmao.

1. What’s one thing that’s happened to you that has made you a stronger person?
• I'm not sure, honestly. I was in a severely abusive relationship for well over 4 years, ending in January when he was incarcerated for brutally beating me, raping me, & attacking me, all with our two children present. Our 5 year anniversary would be in a few days, the 28th. 😐 Truthfully, I don't know if I'm stronger, but I definitely know that I'll never tolerate anything like that again. Never. 2. What’s one thing that’s happened to you in your life that made you feel weak?
• being abused over & over again, physically, emotionally, sexually. All in front of my children. I feel pathetic, weak, & disgusted with myself to have kept taking him back.. 3. Where is one place you feel most like yourself?
• uh, well. I don't know. I feel trapped in the house I live in with my parents & 2 kids, but that's because of what Luis did to me in my very bedroom - on my bed - and in my kitchen + living room. I feel HAPPIEST at the park or library with the kiddos. Or outside in general. 4. Where is your favorite place to escape to?
• outside with my kids, walking up the dirt driveway. 🌞 5. Who do you think has had the largest influence on the person you are today?
• my kids' father. He's made me the MESS I am today.. 6. If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?
• I can't just name one thing. I hate my mental health issues (severe anxiety, depression, & ADHD), dealing with constant migraines, the fact that I don't have a car, & the way I'm constantly beating myself up about everything. 7. If you had one day left to live, what would you do first?
• hmm. Take my kiddos to an amusement park or somewhere fun for kiddos. 🌸 8. What decade do you feel you most belong in?
• none. 😂 they're all awful tbh. The only one I kinda like is the 1980's. 9. Who are you closest to in your family? Why?
• my children, of course 👩‍👧‍👦 I birthed them, ya know 🤰🏼 But aside from my kiddos, I guess my mother. We butt heads a lot, but she's a very strong & motivated person. My sis & I used to be close.... it hurts. 10. Who is the one person in this world that knows you best?
• no one, shit I hardly know myself. 🙅🏼 11. What is your favorite quality about your best friend?
• how they grew inside of me, came from my body, love me unconditionally, & NEVER want to leave my side. 💘 if y'all can't tell who I'm talking about, that'd be my 2 darling babies. 💜💙💗 12. When you were younger what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?
• as a youngin', I wanted to be a teacher. Then as I got a lil older, I desired to be a Psychologist. But then I fell pregnant with Miranda & only took one semester in college.. 13. If you could identify with one fictional character (from a book, show, or movie) who would it be?
• honestly not sure. 14. Do you easily accept compliments? Or do you hate compliments?
• oh, who doesn't love compliments. They're brighten your spirit. Especially seeing as I suffered years of being told that I'm bad looking 🙄 but I'm also extremely self-conscious & awkward when I receive a compliment, so 🙈 tis the anxiety. 15. Is your favorite attribute about yourself physical or non-physical?
• I guess non-physical? I like how understanding and caring I am. I tend to care too much, tho. 16. What is your favorite attribute about yourself?
• I'm caring. 17. What is your favorite non-physical attribute about yourself?
• I've literally just said that 😂😂 18. Do you believe in love at first sight?
• I used to believe that anything was possible, until I met a monster who destroyed all my positivity. 19. Do you believe in soul mates?
• don't think so. 20. How seriously do you take horoscopes?
• I don't really check them lol. 21. Have you ever been in love? How many times?
• true, blindly, awful love: once. Puppy love: twice. 22. What makes you fall in love with someone?
• everything.... 💔 23. What does vulnerability mean to you? What has the ability to make you vulnerable?
• vulnerability just perfectly describe me currently. I'm fairly low in my emotions, so yeah. My kids' dad is who always made me feel that way. Also heartbreak, being betrayed, & embarrassment make me feel like that. 24. What’s one thing you’re scared to ask a man, but really want to?
• ain't nothing to scary to ask a man 🤔😬 25. If you were a man for a day, what would be the first thing you do?
• nothing lol I have no desire to be a man. 😳 26. What do you find most attractive about each sex? * men would be probably their eyes, smile, hands, arms, build. women would be their hair, eyes, smile, passion, body. 27. What’s one thing you’d love to learn more about?
• psychology. 28. What is something you’ve never done that you’ve always wanted to do?
• take my kids to the beach. 🌊☀️🏊🏼‍♀️🚣🏽‍♀️ I've been before, a handful of times in my childhood & teenager years, but not since I was 17 with my mother, my ex (their dad), & a few other people. I would be so incredibly happy to take my babies to the beach, lie out in the sand & tan while we build sand castles & then take off running to the water to swim 💙🙌🖤 Another thing I'd love to do is go on a cruise. I want to travel the world someday, also. I want to rock climb. Attempt to surf or ski. 🏄🏼‍♀️⛸⛷ Even like to try to ride a horse. 🏇🏼 I want to take self-defense classes 🥋🥊🤼‍♀️ that'll protect me & my kids once my ex does get released. I ALWAYS wanted to learn how to play the piano or keyboard 🎹 I wanted to learn to ACTUALLY dance, take dance lessons & also I'm OBSESSED with gymnastics. But since I'm in my twenties, I'll settle for asking my babygirl to join gymnastics 🤸🏽‍♀️ & just maybe, she'll become an Olympian 🥇🎖🏅 hehe. I played softball for 7 years. I hope so much that my kiddos are athletic 😄😅 29. Why haven’t you done it yet?
• because that's A LOT of stuff, & I don't have the 💵💰💸 for all that. Kids are expensive lil creatures, ya know. 🤑 but so worth it. 🙌💕 30. If money didn’t matter, what would your dream job be?
• I definitely would love to go into Photography. 🖤📸🎥📱 honestly, I want to be a Psychologist & earn my PhD, but that's so many years in school. With two kids, that's going to be fairly difficult when my main focus & top priority is them. I dunno. I have even considered nursing because it's only 2 years in school, fair pair, good insurance, & different hours. 31. If you had off from work today, what would you do?
• I don't have a job currently. Just a stay-at-home mama. It's 7:35am. I've done nothing but stay up all night, lying on the couch, playing on my phone or tablet. 😂🤷🏼‍♀️ I'll regret it later 🤦🏼‍♀️😅 32. What was the last thing that made you cry?
• some dude. Talking about how I need to get over what Luis did to me because it's "in the past" && how I'm not a perfect mother basically. Here's this: Eff You 🤔🖕 33. What was the last thing that made you laugh?
• my son. 💙 his smile & laughter are contagious 👶🏽 34. What is your favorite memory?
• the first time I held each of my child, most definitely. 💓 also, the first time I ever breastfed them, kissed them, & pretty much all of the good memories with them. 😍😭 35. What’s the last thing that REALLY embarrassed you?
• I'm VERY easily embarrassed, like it's terrible. So, there's no telling. Everything literally bothers or embarrasses me. #anxietyproblems 36. What is your biggest fear?
• losing my children. death. my ex. 37. Do you have any regrets? What’s your biggest one?
• yes, I have 2 very big ones. The first regret I have is taking Luis back AFTER I left him for around 2.5 months. I was newly pregnant with Leonardo, like maybe 3 months pregnant but had only just found out a few weeks before. He attacked me, and I called my dad. Left him & only took Miranda to see him during daytime in broad daylight, never was alone with him for too long, & did not spend the night. The second regret I have is letting him come in my window the morning he intended on killing me.. 38. Have you ever broken a law? If you haven’t what is one law you’d love to break?
• of course I have. I've been arrested before 🤦🏼‍♀️🙅🏼 All to protect my piece of shit ex because HE ditched my car while drunk. It taught me a valuable lesson, though. I didn't drink after that & still don't. He, on the other hand, didn't learn anything. I ended up with obstruction of justice charges & underaged possession 🙎🏼 I had 100 hours of fucking community service!!! Had to even take an AA class & driving class EVEN after they found out I wasn't driving. Oh, & the magistrate wanted to lock me up for 10 days to "teach" me a lesson about lying to authority 😭 39. What is the craziest thing you’ve ever done? * stay with my ex. 40. Would you have a conversation with a stranger?
• sure would. would give me anxiety, but some people need their day brightened. 41. Would you tell a stranger they have toilet paper hanging from their shoe? Or their dress tucked into their underwear? (Or anything else that is embarrassing to be seen in public)? * yup sure would. 42. What’s your favorite joke? * I'm not sure . 43. Are you a dog person or a cat person?
• can I be both & neither 😂 I love animals, but all of my babies have passed away. I used to have a ferret, who passed in December. She was my girl 🌝🌚 miss my Loca Luna. 🐾 44. If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?
• a cat 🐱 45. What’s one show, movie, or book, you’re embarrassed to admit you enjoy?
• Jerry Springer & Maury 🙈🙊 46. How do you think your parents would describe you as a child?
• like Angelica from the Rugrats 👧🏼 47. If you could go back to any age or time of your life, what age or time would it be?
• when I was like 18 & pregnant. Everything was so new & exciting. I loved my ex with all of my heart, too. So blind. 48. What’s something you believe in that not everyone else does?
• that women have the right to their own bodies. & that borders are imaginary lines that were only created after this country was stolen from the indigenous people.. 49. What’s one thing you would say that makes you unique from other people?
• I'm a single mommy who's been through hell & back but am surviving && thriving 💋 50. What is one thing you feel your life is missing?
• a vehicle ..

[truthseeker33-33]

We Have No HOME

I’ve finally had some free time to reflect upon my recent trip to East Africa - especially, in terms of my general “Back-to-Africa” outlook. And by “reflection,” I’m referring to the life-engaging process that deepens one’s thoughtfulness and distinguishes between a) reflection on experience, and b) reflection on the conditions that shape our experiences (Van Manen, 1991).

First of all, as Black Americans were are NOT African! Certainly, there’s much more to being African than simply being black (dark-skinned). If a man gets a boob job would we call him a woman? Obviously not! Biologically, chemically, skeletally he’ll always be a man despite having the outer appearance/features of a woman. And so the same concept applies for the Black American. Being black (dark-skinned) doesn’t make us African - though we share common physical attributes. 

Not only so, but even native Africans themselves don’t consider us to be “African.” And why would they? We have almost no explicit connection to the culture, no direct tribal affiliations, nor do we speak a native African language (albeit, French is spoken in several African countries). As such, native Africans will always consider us to be mere Americans, Brits, or any other nationalities that we represent outside the continent. Let’s think about that and allow it to sink in for a moment???

While in Kenya, I had a great time going around and visiting many of the popular sites/attractions within Nairobi. By nature, Kenyans are very open to outsiders. I’m sure that being a former British colony has influenced them a great deal in this regard. And with English being a very widely spoken second language, it’s quite easy to strike up a conversation with anyone at random throughout the country. But again, though very outgoing and open to chatter, Kenyans will never consider Black Americans to be truly African. Therefore, I find it quite odd that we’re so quick to latch on to the label of “African-American.” This along with several others are labels that we’ve been branded with over history. Nigger, Negro, Afro-American, African-American, etc. But remember, these are names and labels that we were given - not ones which we as a people have actually coined for ourselves. 

African-American? What does that really mean? Especially, when you personally visit an African nation and come to the very firm conclusion that we are not at all African in the least. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm supporter of Marcus Garvey (d. 1940) and those other like-minded, early black pioneers who helped wake up the black masses from their long-standing delusions. America is not HOME, nor will it ever be! That was their slogan. These leaders clearly saw the writing on the wall, and it was time to start making preparations to migrate elsewhere. It’s as if Garvey could foresee decades into the future and envision black assassinations, political infiltrations, communal disenfranchisement, as well as, the present-day “Black Lives Matter” movement. For Garvey, it was much brighter on the other side of the rainbow (i.e Africa). And above all, his view was quite simple: 

If you can’t beat ‘em, leave ‘em! 

But yet despite this, there are also other factors which I do happen to disagree with concerning Garveyites. For instance, although fervent and sincere in his approach I don’t believe that he fully recognized both the social and logistical hardships with masses of Black Americans migrating to African lands. I have in fact researched about several small communities of Black Americans having some limited range of success with overseas migration. For example, the African Hebrew Israelite community that took refuge in Dimona, Israel under the leadership of the late, Ben Ammi (d. 2014). This community in particular is quite notable – as after decades of political and social campaigning many of their members were in fact able to secure Israeli citizenship via Israel’s Repatriation Program. But of course, this also came with several sharp stipulations including, mandatory military service in the IDF for young men/women under the age of 25. There’s also the Rastafari movement coming from both North America and the Caribbean in the 60s who were allocated small plots of land in Shashamane (Ethiopia) under the auspices of His Highness Emperor Haile Salisse (d. 1975). Several migrant Rastafari’s were given personal land of the Emperor in order to resettle in Ethiopia. Though successful in most respects, many Rastafari’s were never actually given full citizenship (residence permits only) and subsequently had to return back to the West. Nonetheless, these do serve as modern examples of how migrating in small numbers/communities and being persistent in your pursuits can eventually pay off quite rewardingly over the long term. However, I’m speaking more in terms of the “mass migrations” proposed by Garveyites and other Back-to-Africa movements. 

In the broad sense, this is just simply impractical – and not mention, very unreasonable. You also have to keep in mind that even if mass hordes of Black Americans left North America to “resettle” in Africa (or elsewhere for that matter), they’d do nothing more than eventually cause an economic and social strain on the local, indigenous peoples. And sadly, this is exactly what many Americans (melanin-deficient ones in particular) use to overly criticize Latino immigrants in the US, and war-torn Arab migrants in Europe. So while Black migrants seeking African asylum would consider themselves as humbly “returning to the Motherland,” the native populous would come to view them with bitterness and discontent. And how can you blame them? Mass migrants would over-occupy jobs and exhaust other limited resources - especially seeing, that most African nations are still quite infant in their overall development. 

So what does that all mean? Very simple; just like the title represents – we have no HOME! As a people we’re just going to have to get over this in one way or another. And even the idea of “home” itself – what or where is HOME exactly? Is it necessarily your land of origin (i.e. place of birth)? How about your passport – does it by itself truly elicit your “home?” For me, in many years of extensive travels around the world, I’ve humbly learned that HOME is wherever you can forge a social, economic and political future for both yourself and for your family. That’s HOME! Politics aside, you’ll need a place where you can have a feasible opportunity to buy land, own property, secure financial stability, establish business(es), while also having access to affordable education, healthcare and so on. And hey, if you can accomplish all of that from US living, then so be it. But I’m talking about the whole lot – not just a few of the above benefits. Having “partial” benefits definitely wont’ suffice. And so, beyond the meager 2-3% of black celebrities, entertainers, sports figures and a few notable politicians, etc, where does that leave the rest of the Black American masses? Can this remaining lot really acquire land, property, businesses, quality healthcare, and the like? Obviously not. Which means essentially, that the overwhelming majority of Black Americans are living on mere subsistence (i.e. just enough to survive). And so in total agreement with Garvey and others – the question remains…how long will Black Americans be satisfied with living in America on the outer periphery? This question certainly demands an answer. Does it not? Living paycheck to paycheck, and having just enough to get by every month certainly isn’t “success” by any stretch of the imagination. So what’s the solution – migration. And to where? Again, wherever you can accomplish the above mentioned social and economic distinctions. 

Let me give a practical example. I have a good friend/colleague who took up residence in the Philippines after working several years in the country as an English teacher. By marriage to a local Filipina, this gave him direct access to all the rights and basic privileges of a local. In two years time he built a new home from the ground up in a promising residential area just near the beach – all for a fraction of the cost that you’d expect to pay in the US. Along with teaching, he also established a small English language school (private) and opened a restaurant catering to both American and local Filipino cuisines. He also has a young son from a previous relationship who spends a part of the year with him in the Philippines. Under the contract of his current international school he receives a tuition allowance for up to 2 dependents – which covers 100% of their tuition expenses. 

Not only does his company offer Class A medical coverage for his entire family, they also provided free, furnished housing which he declined, as he has his own accommodation. He opted instead for the annual housing allowance which he then used to open his restaurant alongside his part-time English school. Make sense? And when asked about his own personal views concerning overseas living he says this: “For me, I’m all about looking ahead and being innovative in my thinking and world views. Personally speaking, I’ve never really felt like an ‘American’ while living in the United States. Our people have always lived on the outer fringes of American society. And obviously this isn’t going to change anytime soon. Therefore, as a people we must survive and advance - there’s no other alternative. It’s that simple! And so, I’ve found that living abroad can not only be financially and socially very rewarding, but it has also given me the chance to do and experience things that I never would’ve gotten from life in America - especially as a man of color. The US is like one big powder keg just waiting to explode! Black Lives Matter is only the beginning. I believe that another major civil rights movement is well under way in the United States. History always repeats itself. That nation was founded on prejudice and racial indifference. And therefore, race relations and other forms of racial discrimination will always be present in one way or another. And for me, life is simply way too short to be wasted away living in a nation with those types of principles. Not me. I’ve always wanted more for myself and my family. Not to bring up religion, but even the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and his people had to migrate away from their native land in Mecca as a means to preserve themselves and their religious integrity. I would say our situation as a people is much similar to this in certain respects. It all comes down to one’s outlook, and where your standards are set in life…"

Now the Philippines is certainly not Africa; not even close. But who cares! Which continent or country is beside the point. According to my view, my good friend is truly “successful,“ indeed. What more could you ask for? Above all, less than winning the lottery he could NEVER attain this level of status and privilege living in America. Overseas, he doesn’t have the daily worries of how he’ll pay the bills and provide for his family. No police brutalities or wondering whether he’ll make it home tonight to tuck his son in bed. No unfair labor practices that constantly keep him economically disenfranchised. Etc, etc, etc.

There are probably dozens of other factors which I could list in reference to my topic, but I believe that this quick snapshot is more than sufficient to make the matter very clear. But at the end of day, of course, to each his own. I just believe that it’s long overdue for us as Black Americans to start facing our apparent reality, and finding reasonable, viable solutions - elsewhere.

Works Cited: Van Manen, Max “The Tact of Teaching: The Meaning of Pedagogical Thoughtfulness,” 1991

[straydogstory]

Divest From the Video Games Industry! by Marina Kittaka

https://medium.com/@even_kei/divest-from-the-video-games-industry-814a1381092d

This piece seeks to contextualize the problems of the video games industry within its own mythology, and from there, to imagine and celebrate new directions through a lens of anti-capitalist and embodied compassion.

My name is Marina Ayano Kittaka (she/her), I’m a 4th gen Japanese American trans woman from middle class background. I work in a variety of different art forms but my bread and butter are the video games I make with my friend Melos Han-Tani, e.g. the Anodyne series.

I am not an authority on any of these topics, and it’s not my intention to speak over anyone else or offer comprehensive solutions, only to be one small piece of a larger conversation and movement. I use declarative and imperative sentences for clarity, not certainty.

I seek to follow the leadership of BIPOC abolitionist thinkers such as Ejeris Dixon, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, adrienne maree brown and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, along with the work of local (to me) groups like Black Visions Collective and MPD150. I welcome feedback, especially if you believe that something I’ve said is harmful.

This piece is inspired by the latest wave of survivors bravely sharing their stories (it is June 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic and global uprising against anti-Black racism and the unjust institution of police). I believe and stand with survivors.

The Problems

The video games industry has many deep, tragic, and intertwining problems. It’s beyond the scope of this piece to examine the entirety of games culture (I will focus on development and, to a lesser degree, distribution). It’s also beyond the scope of this piece to convince anyone that these problems exist, but I’ll be moving forward with the assumption that we agree that they do. Here is an incomplete list:

Pervasive sexual abuse

Workplace abuse, bullying, crunch, burnout, generally exploitative labor conditions

Sexism, racism, and other bigotry — the above abuses are accentuated along these intersections (e.g. the sexual abuse of marginalized genders or the exclusion of racial minorities).

Supply chain problems including conflict minerals and exploitative factory conditions

Heavy environmental impacts

Non-Judgement

This conversation may spark hurt or defensive feelings. I want to address this directly. Many people love video games, and not only that, but are deeply invested in the world of games. I’m particularly sensitive to marginalized creators who have fought hard to find a foothold in the games industry and deserve to follow their dreams. I exist more on the periphery of the games industry and my goal is not to center my personal anger or disdain — but instead to push toward a world with better games, played by happier audiences, made by creators who feel safe and appreciated.

Additionally, this conversation is not about the merits of any individual AAA (large studio) game. It’s not about creating strict rules about media consumption. It’s not about shaming people into certain beliefs or behaviors. When we try to act like our personal tastes must align with our most high-minded ideals, we encourage shame or denial — things that distance us from others.

Nor is this exclusively about AAA. This is about any situation where the power becomes the point. There can be gradations of industrial complexes and power complexes existing from the smallest micro-communities to the largest corporations. We can divest on all levels.

The Industry Promise

I believe that many of us as game creators and audiences have (consciously or not) bought into the idea that happiness and wonder are scarce and fragile commodities — precious gems mined via arcane and costly processes. Life can often be isolating, alienating, and traumatic, and many of us cope by numbing some parts of ourselves¹. The poignance and pleasure of simply feeling becomes rare.

In answer to this perceived scarcity, The Industry swoops in with a promise that technological and design mastery can “make” people feel. It does this not only blatantly in marketing copy or developer interviews, but also in unwieldy assertions that games can make you empathic, or through the widespread notion that games are an exceptionally “immersive” art form due to “interactivity”. Embedded in this promise is the ever-alluring assumption that technological progress is linear: games overall must be getting better, more beautiful, more moving, because that is simply how technology works! Or perhaps it is the progress itself that is beautiful — each impressive jump towards photorealism delivering the elusive sense of wonder that we crave.

At this point, I could argue that the benefits are not worth the cost, that the aforementioned Problems outweigh even this idealized vision of what games provide. But I’m guessing many of you might find that unsatisfying, right? Why don’t we simply reform the system? Spread awareness and training about sexism and racism, create more art that engenders empathy, encourage diversity? Isn’t it throwing the baby out with the bathwater to “halt” technological progress in order to fix some issues of bad leadership here or abusive superstar there?

Here we come to my main purpose in writing this piece: to expand the imaginative space around video games by tearing out The Industry Promise at its roots. If wonder is not scarce and progress is not linear, then the world that rises from the ashes of the Video Games Industry can be more exciting and more technologically vibrant than ever before.

Precious Gems

Take a deep breath and picture some of the happy moments of your life. Maybe some of them look like this:

Staying up late and getting slaphappy with a friend; looking out over a beautiful landscape; a passionate kiss; collaborating with friends in a session of DnD or Minecraft; a thoughtful gift from someone you admire; a cool drink on a hot summer day; making a new friend who feels like they really see you; singing a song; a hug from someone who smells nice; getting junk food late at night and feeling naughty about it; the vivid colors and sounds of a rainy city evening; drifting to sleep in the cottony silence of a smalltown homestead; getting a crew together to see a new movie; the scent of the air at sunrise; having a meaningful conversation with a nonverbal baby.

Picture the games you loved most as a child, the games that felt full of possibility and mystery and fun. Were they all the most technologically advanced? The most critically revered?

Maybe your happy moments look nothing like this. Or maybe you can’t recall feeling happy and that’s the whole problem. But my point is that happiness, joy, fun… these things are at their core fluid, social, narrative, contextual, chemical. In both its best and most common incarnations, happiness is not shoved into your passive body by the objective “high quality” of an experience. Both recent psychological research and traditions from around the world (e.g. Buddhist monks) suggest that happiness and well-being are growable skills rooted in compassion.

Think of all the billions of people who have ever lived, across time, across cultures, with video games and without, living nomadically or settling in cities or jungles. In every moment there are infinite reasons to suffer and infinite reasons to be happy². Giant industry’s monopolistic claims to “art” or “entertainment” have always been a capitalist lie, nonsensical yet inescapable.

The Narrative of Technology and Progress

Is this an anti-technology screed? Am I suggesting we must all go outside like in the good old days and play “hoop and stick” until the end of time? Let’s start by unpacking what we mean when we say “technology”. Here’s one definition:

Technology is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives. — Wikipedia

Honestly, technology is such a vague and broad concept that nearly anything anyone ever does could be considered technological! As such, how we use the term in practice is very revealing of our cultural values. Computing power, massive scale, photorealistic graphics, complex AI, VR experiences that attempt to recreate the visual and aural components of a real or imagined situation… certainly these are all technologies that can and have grown in sophistication over time. But what The Industry considers technological progress actually consists of fairly niche goals that have been artificially inflated because capitalists have figured out they can make money this way. Notably, I don’t use “niche” here as an insult — aren’t many of the most fascinating things intrinsically niche? But when one restrictive narrative sucks all the air out of the room and leaves a swath of emotional and physical devastation in its wake… isn’t it time to question it?

What if humans having basic needs met is “technological progress”? What if indigenous models of sustainable living are “hi-tech”? What if creating a more accessible world where people have freedom of movement opens up numerous high-fidelity multisensory experiences? These questions go far beyond the scope of the video games industry, sure, but in the words of adrienne maree brown, “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system”³.

What We Hope to Gain

The kneejerk reaction to dismantling an existing structure tends to be a subtractive vision. Here we are, living in the exact same world, but all blockbuster video games have been magically snapped out of existence… only hipster indie games remain! Missing from this vision is the understanding that our current existence is itself subtractive — what we cling to now comes at the expense of so much good. The loss of maturing vision and skill when people leave the industry due to burnout, sexual assault, and racist belittlement. Corporate IP laws and progress narratives that disincentivize preservation and rob us of our rich and fertile history. The ad-centric, sanitized, and consolidated internet that chokes out democratized community spaces. The fighting-for-scraps mentality that the larger industry places on small creators with its sparing and self-interested investment. Our current value system limits not only what AAA games are but also what everything else has the capacity to be.

Utopia does not have an aesthetic. We don’t need to prescribe the correct “alt” taste. Games can be high and low, sacred and profane, cute and ugly, left brain and right. Destroying the games industry does not mean picking an alternate niche to replace it. Instead, we seek to open the floodgates to a world in which countless decentralized, intimate, and overlapping niches might thrive.

When we decentralize power, we not only create the conditions for more and better games, we also diminish the conditions under which abuse can flourish. Many of the stories of abuse hinge on the abuser wielding the power to dramatically help or harm the careers of others. The consolidation of this power is enhanced by our collective investment in The Industry Promise (not forgetting the wider cultural intersections of oppression). Mythologized figures ascend along a linear axis of greatness, shielded by the horrifying notion that they are less replaceable than others because their ranking in The Industry evidences their mystical importance.

What’s Next?

Here is a fundamental truth: we do not need video games. Paradoxically, this truth opens up the world of video games to be as full and varied and strange and contradictory as life itself.

So. Say you agree with all or part of my assertions that collectively we may proceed to end the video games industry by divesting our attention, time, and money, and building something new with each other. But what does that look like in practice? I don’t have all the answers. I find community very difficult due to my own trauma. Nonetheless, I’ll do some brainstorming. Skim this and read what speaks to you personally, or do your own brainstorming!

Center BIPOC/queer leadership

I.e. people who have been often forcibly divested from the majority culture and have experience in creating alternatives. Draw on influences outside of media e.g. transformative justice, police abolition, and prison abolition. Books like Beyond Survival and Emergent Strategy are based in far deeper understanding of organizing than anything written here, and are much more relevant to the direct and immediate issues of things like responding to sexual assault in our communities.

Divest from celebrity/authority

Many people will tell you that their most rewarding artistic relationships are with peers, not mentors and certainly not idols. Disengage from social media-as-spectator sport where larger-than-life personalities duke it out via hot take. Question genius narratives wherever they arise. Cultivate your own power and the power of those adjacent to you. If you feel yourself becoming a celebrity: take a step back, recognize the power that you wield over others, redirect opportunities to marginalized creators whose work you respect, invest in completely unrelated areas of your life, go to therapy.

Divest from video games exceptionalism

Academics have delved into video games’ inferiority complex and the topic of “video games exceptionalism”, which is tied into what I frame as The Industry Promise above — the idea that video games as a technological vanguard are brimming with inherent value due to all the things they can do that other forms of media cannot. This ensures that gobs of money get thrown around, but it’s an ahistorical and isolating notion that does nothing to actually advance our understanding of games as a form (Interesting discussion on this here, which reminds me of Richard Terrell’s work regarding vocabulary).

Reimagine scale

Rigorously question the notion that “bigger is better” at every turn. With regards to projects, studios, events, continually ask “why?” in the face of any pressure to make something bigger, and then try to determine what might be lost as well as what might be gained. Compromising on values tends to be inevitable at scale, workplace abuse or deals with questionable entities. For me this calls to mind the research led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman suggesting that the happiness benefits of wealth taper off dramatically once a comfortable standard of living is reached. Anyone who’s ever had a tweet go viral can tell you that it’s fun at first and then it just becomes annoying. Living in a conglomerated, global world, we regularly have to face and process social metrics that are completely incomprehensible to the way our social brains are programmed, and the results are messy. Are there ever legitimate uses for a huge team working on a project for many years? Sure, probably, but the idea that this is some sort of ideal normal situation that everyone should strive for is based on nothing but propaganda.

Redefine niche

Above I suggest that AAA is niche. I believe it’s true broadly, but that it’s definitely true relative to their budgets. What do I mean by this? AAA marketing budgets are reported to be an additional 75–100% relative to development costs (possibly even higher in some cases). Isn’t this mindblowing? If a game naturally appealed to proportionately mass numbers of people by virtue of its High Quality or Advanced Technology, then would we really need to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars just to convince people to play it? For contrast, Melos estimates that our marketing budget for Anodyne 2 was an added 10% of development costs and it was a modest commercial success. Certainly marketing is a complex field that can be ethical, but to me, there is something deeply unhealthy about the capacity of large studios to straight up purchase their own relevance (according to some research, marketing influences game revenue three times more than high review scores).

On a separate but related note, I don’t buy that all the perceived benefits of AAA such as advancements in photorealism will vanish without the machine of The Industry to back them. People are astonishing and passionate! It won’t always necessarily look like a 60 hour adventure world, but it will be a niche that we can support like any other.

Ground yourself in your body

Self-compassion, mindfulness, meditation, exercise, breathing, nature, inter-being. There are many ways to build your capacity to experience joy, wonder, and happiness. One of the difficult things about this process though is that if you approach these topics head on, you’ll often be overwhelmed with Extremely Specific Aesthetics that might not fit you (e.g. New Agey or culturally appropriative). My advice is to 1) be open to learning from practices that don’t fit your brand while also 2) being able to adapt the spirit of advice into something that actually works for you. The benefit of locating our capacity for joy internally is that it reveals that The Industry is fundamentally superfluous and so we are free to take what we want and throw the rest in the compost pile.

As a side note, some artists (who otherwise have structural access to things like mental health services) fear becoming healthy, because they’re worried that they will lose the spark and no longer make good art. Speaking as an artist whose creative capacity has consistently increased with my mental health, there are multiple reasons why I don’t think people should worry about this.

You carry your past selves within you, even as you change. “Our bodies are neural and physiological reservoirs of all our significant experiences starting in our prenatal past to the present.”⁴

You can lose a spark and gain another. You can gain 6 sparks in place of the one you lost.

What is it that you ultimately seek from being “good at art”? Ego satisfaction? Human connection? Self-respect? All of these things would be easier to come by in the feared scenario in which you are so happy and healthy that you can no longer make art. Cut out the middleman! Art is for nerds!

Invest outside of games

Games culture often encourages a total identification with video games. This pressures developers into working and audiences into buying, conveniently benefitting executives and shareholders to everyone else’s detriment. Investing in interests wholly unrelated to video games is beneficial in many ways and there’s something for everyone! Personally, I love books. A novel is “low-tech” in nearly every way that a AAA game is “high-tech”, and yet books are affordable, data-light, easy-to-preserve, stimulating, challenging, immersive, and entertaining. What is technology, again?

Another pertinent thought: while there’s nothing inherently wrong with dating a fellow game developer, you should not enter industry/work spaces or events looking for romantic connection. Particularly if you have any sort of institutional power, you will inevitably put others in uncomfortable situations and prime yourself to commit abuse. If you want sex, relationships, etc, find other outlets, shared interests, and dating pools.

Work towards a more accessible world

In the context of an often systemically ableist world, video games can — at their best — be fun, valuable, and accessible experiences for disabled audiences. Consequently, when I say “divest from the video games industry”, I don’t want to gloss over the fact that divestment comes with a different cost for different people. Certainly accessibility within video games continues to be as important as ever, but if I’m asking, e.g., for people to “invest outside of games”, then a commitment to a more accessible out-of-game world is also extremely vital. For instance, non-disabled people can be attuned during this particular moment to the unique perspectives and leadership of disabled people regarding Covid lockdowns and widespread work-from-home, and be wary as we gradually lift restrictions of reverting to a selective and hypocritical approach to accommodations.

Invest in alternative technological advancements

What might we have the resources, attention, and energy to grow if our industry weren’t so laser focused on a constricted definition of technological advancement? For example, audio-only games appear to me an incredibly fertile area for technological advancement that has been under-resourced. How about further advancements towards biodegradable/recyclable microchips and batteries? A fundamental rethinking of the “home console” model in which each successive generation strives to obsolete the last and sell tens of millions new hardware units? Something like an arcade or those gaming lounges (but do they all have to have the same aggressive aesthetics?). The success of Pokemon GO seems to gesture at potential for social, non-remote video game experiences with broader demographic/aesthetic appeal. At the Portland (Maine) Public Library, there’s a console setup in the teen section where local kids would play and they also had a selection of console games for checkout — that was really cool! Local game dev organizations like GLITCH creating events where local devs show and playtest games with the public…

Look to small tools

Small tools such as hobbyist-centered game engines very naturally and successfully act as springboards to community. Look at ZZT, early Game Maker (e.g. gamemakergames), OHRRPGCE. Look at bitsy, PuzzleScript, Pico-8! Look at Electric Zine Maker by Nathalie Lawhead as well as this post they wrote on small tools. Small tools, by virtue of their limitations, tend to lend themselves to particular aesthetics and goals. Whether you’re ultimately playing to or against the core gravitational pull of a small tool, I think it grounds you within a certain design conversation that is conducive to community. Participating in these communities as a child (even though I rarely interacted directly) fundamentally instilled in me ideas like: people make their own fun; wonder is uncorrelated with budget; being strangely specific has value. Can other structures learn from small tools? Events, meetings, parties… what happens if we think of these as communal “engines” — structures built around a conversational core that people can use to create things or express themselves…?

Something that crosses my mind often is that it may be fundamentally healthy for us all to be “big fish in small ponds” in one way or another. The idea that there exists One True Big Pond that reflects all of our collective values simultaneously is a harmful myth that serves to direct all admiration and energy towards corporate interests and robs the rest of us of our accomplishments.

Sucking as praxis

“Professional artistry” as the capacity to maintain the shared illusion that there are indisputable measures of beauty and worth. When you allow the illusion to fail — often against your will — 1) capitalist powers will be disappointed in their inability to wield you with proper efficiency and 2) fellow small creators will be heartened because you bypassed the illusion and still offered something worthy. Failure in a backwards system can be strength. Growing as an artist can be a gloriously paradoxical affair.

Fight for history

We miss out on so much when history is lost to us, and video games are extraordinarily susceptible due to their technical dependencies on ever-shifting hardware. The Industry’s current incarnation goes beyond history-apathy to a downright historical hostility. Sustaining the narrative of linear technological progress inevitably involves shitting on the past (there are a chosen few old games that are kept accessible, but they feel like exceptions proving the rule). Emulation is a vital resource, ever on the verge of outlaw (See Nintendo’s legal actions), Internet Archive is under attack, and Disney warps copyright laws to keep their stranglehold on media intact. Overviews and longplays of difficult-to-play older games are incredibly valuable and I’m truly grateful for people who do this vital work. Off the top of my head, I’ve enjoyed Nitro Rad’s comprehensive work in 3D platformers, and Cannot Be Tamed’s retro reviews. See also: the Video Game History Foundation.

Public libraries could be a vital ally in this cause. What if libraries had access to legacy tech or specialized emulation software that made playing, researching, or recording from old video games more feasible? What if small creators or defunct small studios could get grants or support in preserving their own old work? Would disappointing institutional responses to Gamergate have played out differently if knowledge of and respect for the ongoing historic contributions of BIPOC, female, and/or queer developers were built into the core fabric of video games spaces? Would it be so easy to accept the AAA model as the pinnacle of technology if we contextualized the astounding complexity of past games like Dwarf Fortress, or the Wizardry or Ultima series — technological complexity that would not have been possible had the games been beholden to modern AAA priorities? (Talking out of my ass here, as I have never played these games. See also: modern work on Dwarf Fortress). See also: The Spriter’s Resource and it’s affiliate sites.

Expand government arts funding

I don’t know a lot about this, but… there should be more of it! I see it happening more in other countries besides the US.

Labor organizing

We can look into studio structures like co-ops. We can join unions. Those unions must be intersectional to the core (see recent events regarding GWU international). How about dual power? Many small studios could combine in overlapping networks of varying formality. They could integrate their audiences, cross-promote, build collective power so as to not be totally beholden to the will of corporations. I’m not an expert on labor though, look to others who know more.

Collaborative / open source resources

E.g. The Open Source Afro Hair Library, Open Game Art, Rrrrrose Azerty’s prolific CC0 music and the broader Free Music Archive community.

Give money

Normalize mutual aid. Normalize buying small games. Contribute to things like Galaxy Fund.

Just Play!

Play something totally random on itch.io (or another community-oriented site) with no outside recommendation. Compliment and/or pay the developer if you like something about it!

Conclusion

Thank you for engaging with these thoughts! I hope that they spark thoughts for you, and that we can all learn from each other. Feel free to reach out to me on twitter or via email: marinakittaka@gmail.com

[Edit: at 11:20PM CDT, 6/25/20, I changed the audio games link from a wikipedia article to the more relevant-seeming: https://audiogames.net/]

[cwdcshows]

Well, I can't believe it; first Arrow, now the Flash is going to come to an end this year too?   What's that?  The show's not ending?  But how can the show continue if the speed force is going to die in this episode? You say it's probably not actually going to die in this episode; and the title is just a ploy to make us watch?  Yeah, alright.

"Why is it every time I visit all hell breaks loose?" Because you're dating a semi-retired, quasi-superhero who's on a team of superheroes, in a city in constant dire need of saving?  Or maybe because the producers like the woman who portrays you and just want an excuse to have you around? Either way, acknowledging that you're developing a tendency to be at Star Labs during moments of crisis, without actually offering an explanation, is not itself an explanation.  You're just making it more obvious that there is no reason for you to be there; something I hadn't really given much thought until you mentioned it.  I just chalked it up to the fact that you're in the know now and, in spite of Cisco's absence, have becomes friends with the rest of team Flash; which makes you a de facto member of the team, if albeit maybe an auxiliary one.  It's basically the Scooby Gang of Buffy; no one asked why Cordelia all of a sudden started hanging around before she started dating Xander, or after they broke up.  She was there because Charisma Carpenter was on contract, dammit.  This would be like Cecile exclaiming, "why am I even in this episode?"  It's a level of self-awareness that isn't necessary; especially if the writers do their job and make-up a fucking reason. I'm much more interested in the fact Caitlin actually gets to be Caitlin in this scene and not Frost. So the Star Labs equipment can tell them when a speedster is running around somewhere in the city, but isn't programmed to tell the difference between Barry or Wally.... Yeah, alright... Random observation - would Eva really still be wearing heels in this mirror dimension after 6 years?  I mean, I supposed all of that could be relative, given some of the other things that are relatively, like needing to eat or change clothes periodically in general.  And while I've never worn heels myself, I understand they can get pretty uncomfortable pretty quickly; so what would be the point in wearing them in a universe you're alone in, or even now where you have just one other companion? Wait, Eva's husband knows she's in the mirror and spend time trying to get her out?  I feel like they glossed over that little tidbit. Wait a fuck second, Eva's drinking water?  How the fuck is she drinking anything?  Does this mean they do get hungry and thirsty in this dimension after all?  Where the fuck is she getting fresh food, much less water?  I've brought up before that it makes no sense for some of the other trappings of this world to even exist; like a marker board or canisters of liquid nitrogen.  Do they somehow have running water in this backwards reality with all the stuff humans made, but no actual humans beside  these two people?   I'm not even going to broach the logistics of the other end of the digestive cycle. So how much of this mental breakdown is an act and how much of it is actually Eva?  Because in the previous episode when Iris walked away, Eva's mentality switched from someone on the razor's edge of sanity, to someone much more composed and intent.  This episode would suggest that things like her nervousness and focusing on the number of days she's been in this dimension are real, given how she's involuntarily manifested all of that in the Iris double. Yeah, Barry, let's just assume there's absolutely nothing wrong with the speed force; and not, I don't know, look into and check.  I'm sure if your speed force guide was dead, they'd have told you. Okay, two things.  First, if this meta-of-the-week can kill whomever this woman was with the wave of her hand; why not just do that in the first place, rather than whatever they apparently did to the helicopter at the start of the show? Second, not that I want to see the transition, I take the show poured the vast majority of its effects budget into some combination of Crisis and the recent Grodd episode; which would explain why all we're going to get is the rendering of a green bubble forming over the victim and then a shot that goes on for too long of the other woman just waving her hand, before cutting to the woman on the ground mummified.  And we're just going to have to fill in the exact effect of that with our imagination. "Other people? From other Earths? Not really, because any doppelgangers who managed to make it here, they would all be dead by no due to neurological degeneration." Shit, they must be dropping like fucking flies in National City.Good thing Other Winn snuffed it when he did.  And let's not forget that it's not just the doubles, but their counterparts who are indigenous to this Earth start to die too; and without some type of intervention that would allow one of them to die first, both would die at the same time.  That's a whole lot of fucking deaths; and a shit ton of stupidity they're carrying over from Batwoman. Wow, I never noticed how cluttered Star Labs is, or how many counters it has until recently.  You'd think they'd design the set better, to give a clearer shot of people; especially Caitlin.  But I guess on the upside, they're making up for it with a lot of close-ups; I assume because she's so beautiful, which she is.   On a completely unrelated note, I look forward to next season's story arc for Supergirl, where the big bad will be a hoarder; who fills National City is 3' tall stacks of old magazines and others odds and ends that Kara will spend most of the season wading through. Jesus Christ, Crisis is the shitty gift that keeps on giving.  So during Crisis they made it seem like Oliver was connected to a source that was somehow related to the Speed Force; or that it was all somehow different names for the same broad reaching thing and that they were as much entering Oliver as the Spectre as they were entering the Speed Force.  And they sure as hell acted like Oliver supercharging Barry was a good thing.  Oliver even says, "I've unlocked your potential, Barry." Which would suggest that Oliver, the man who had the power to reboot the universe and reshape it into a better world where all his loved ones didn't die and crime wouldn't happen in Star City for decades, knew what the fuck he was doing; and that it was a good and safe thing to do.   Now it would seem that Oliver basically gave the speed force syphilis. The speed force avatar speaking to Barry as if it really were his mother is just fucking weird. "We still have a residual amount of speed force left in us...." Wait, wait, I've seen this one. I've seen this one.  They need to stop Rita from burning the green candle, before it kills Tommy; I mean, Barry.  And then the other Rangers will need to use some of the energy from their power coins to infuse him with power.  But eventually he's going to lose his powers entirely, until Zordon makes him the White Ranger. I'll give them this, "Thawne" not realizing he has no powers in Nash's body, while predictable, was still funny. Ah, why do they have a season 1 Flash costume hung up at Star Labs, where his current costume usually hangs?