fatehbaz

[fatehbaz]

while i don’t necessarily agree with all of his politics or condone his actions i do on some level respect the joker for effectively demonstrating that it’s fun to laugh and smile

[fatehbaz]

david cronenberg, "dead ringers" // spongebob, squidward, patrick // hannibal 03.06, "dolce" // jenny holzer, "words tend to be inadequate" // ada limón, "the good fight"

[fatehbaz]

hitting and smacking you moodboard

[fatehbaz]

Consider becoming a penpal to an LGBT prisoner through Black and Pink’s program

[fatehbaz]

"The globe" and the Empire.

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By the dawn of a century christened as both the American and the geographic century, [...] European explorers and cartographers actively filled the last [apparently] remaining terrae incognitae [on their maps and globes] [...] and excited economic [...] interest [...] in near and far parts of the world and their markets. As imagined [...] in ambitious [...] projects such as the "Millionth Map" [...] in 1891, this world was deemed a sufficiently homogeneous entity […]. [A]t least among the white, free populations of various metropoles[,] […] Europeans [...] established one single imaginary of the world, [...] a meticulously surveyed global environment. [...] On the Western side of the Atlantic, on the other hand, maps and globes heralded, braced, and promoted the expansionist projects of [...] a century of national coming of age for the United States [...] [and its] spatially unsettled, globalizing empire. [...] Americans viewed maps and globes [...] as "arbiters of power" [...]. Drawing a direct line between geography and wars of empire, President McKinley, for instance, told an audience of missionaries […] that, once his prayers to God about the “Filipino question” had been answered, his first presidential order was for “the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker) to put the Philippines on the map of the United States” [...]. [H]oping to materialize the "global Monroe Doctrine," [...] Americans [...] needed to pay special attention [...] to those recently-made-cognita regions (such as the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico [occupied by the US]) [...]. Americans' lives were mapped onto a cartographically known, commercially accessible, cognitively smaller world [...]. As [proclaimed in an address from 1898] [...], On our breakfast table lies each morning the toil of Europe, Asia, and Africa, [...] unseen millions, and countless myriads weave and plant for us; we have made [...] life broader by annihilating distance [...]. Americans too were eager to draw their own maps of the world, inscribing it in their own “imperial vernacular” [...].

Text by: Mashid Mayar. "What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 15-2. Summer 2020.

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Simply put, World War II made the United States a planetary presence. State Department officials furiously churned out wartime memos establishing U.S. policy - often for the first time - regarding every nation, colony, region, and sub-duchy on the map. [...] In 1898 imperial expansion had inspired new maps. The 1940s wartime expansion yielded a similar burst of cartographic innovation. [...] Life devoted a fifteen-page spread to the “Dymaxion map” [...]. More popular was the “polar azimuthal projection” perfected by the dean of wartime cartography, [R.E.H.]. [...] The map was an enormous hit, reprinted and copied frequently. [...] The U.S. Army ordered eighteen thousand copies, and the map became the basis for the United Nations logo, designed in 1945. “Never before have persons been so interested in the entire world,” gushed Popular Mechanics. [...] The world must be seen anew, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, as a “round earth in which all the directions eventually meet.” “If we win the war,” he continued, “the image of the age which now is opening will be the image of a global earth, a completed sphere.” That word MacLeish chose, global, was new. [...] If the last war was a world war, this one was, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it in September 1942, “a global war.” That was the first time a sitting president had publicly uttered the word global, though every president since has used it incessantly. For Christmas that year, George Marshall presented FDR with a five-hundred-pound globe for the Oval Office. Placed next to Roosevelt’s desk, it was comically large. It resembled the globe with which Charlie Chaplin had performed an amorous dance two years earlier in The Great Dictator, only bigger. [...] “Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave […],” wrote the journalist John Hersey in 1944. Except it wasn’t only Europe. The “invasion” landed in force on every continent [...].

Text by: Daniel Immerwahr. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. 2019.

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[A]n empire's use of narratives of technological progress to expand towards the "ends of the earth" [...] naturalize[d] dominance over the global commons [...]. As the Pentagon declared in 1961, the “environment in which the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps will operate covers the entire globe and extends from the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of interplanetary space” […]. Extraterritorial spaces, such as the high seas, Antarctica, and outer space, are imaginatively, historically, and juridically interconnected. Their international legal regimes […] [were] developed in the midst of the Cold War […]. [M]odern ways of imagining the earth as a totality [...] claimed for militarism […] derive from colonial histories of spatial enclosure. Denis Cosgrove [...] points to the [...] [late eighteenth-century British Empire's] encirclement of the globe through Cook's navigation of the seas, which allowed for colonial claims to expand to a planetary scale. [...] This circumnavigation in turn led to [...] establishment of Greenwich mean time as a world standard [...]. [T]his encirclement is both a spatial claim to the planet and a temporal one, in that it plots time from a British center. [...] In the memorable words of [...] McLuhan [from 1974, relating to US surveying] [...]: "For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container [...]." The first photograph of the earth from outer space was taken by a V-2 rocket shot from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 1946 […]. [A]n Apollonian eye, [...] the [...] photographs [...] were part of a context in which […] popular US magazines used wartime cartography in ways that naturalized militarism and empire under the guise of a unifying view of the globe.

Text by: Elizabeth DeLoughrey. "Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth". Public Culture, Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 257-280. Spring 2014.

[fatehbaz]

debbie downer and negative nancy should lez out

[fatehbaz]

lets all post all night until we get yelled at

[fatehbaz]

"defending civilization against bugs"

lol the mosquito sculpture

see Pratik Chakrabarti's Medicine and Empire: 1600-1960 (2013) and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics (2012)

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Sir Ronald Ross had just returned from an expedition to Sierra Leone. The British doctor had been leading efforts to tackle the malaria that so often killed English colonists in the country, and in December 1899 he gave a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce [...]. [H]e argued that "in the coming century, the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with the microscope."

Text by: Rohan Deb Roy. "Decolonise science - time to end another imperial era." The Conversation. 5 April 2018.

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[A]s [...] Diane Nelson explains: The creation of transportation infrastructure such as canals and railroads, the deployment of armies, and the clearing of ground to plant tropical products all had to confront [...] microbial resistance. The French, British, and US raced to find a cure for malaria [...]. One French colonial official complained in 1908: “fever and dysentery are the ‘generals’ that defend hot countries against our incursions and prevent us from replacing the aborigines that we have to make use of.” [...] [T]ropical medicine was assigned the role of a “counterinsurgent field.” [...] [T]he discovery of mosquitoes as malaria and yellow fever carriers reawakened long-cherished plans such as the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) [...]. In 1916, the director of the US Bureau of Entomology and longtime general secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science rejoiced at this success as “an object lesson for the sanitarians of the world” - it demonstrated “that it is possible for the white race to live healthfully in the tropics.” [...] The [...] measures to combat dangerous diseases always had the collateral benefit of social pacification. In 1918, [G.V.], president of the Rockefeller Foundation, candidly declared: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some decided advantages over machine guns." The construction of the Panama Canal [...] advanced the military expansion of the United States in the Caribbean. The US occupation of the Canal Zone had already brought racist Jim Crow laws [to Panama] [...]. Besides the [...] expansion of vice squads and prophylaxis stations, during the night women were picked up all over the city [by US authorities] and forcibly tested for [...] diseases [...] [and] they were detained in something between a prison and hospital for up to six months [...] [as] women in Panama were becoming objects of surveillance [...].

Text by: Fahim Amir. "Cloudy Swords." e-flux Journal Issue #115. February 2021.

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Richard P. Strong [had been] recently appointed director of Harvard’s new Department of Tropical Medicine [...]. In 1914 [the same year of the Panama Canal's completion], just one year after the creation of Harvard’s Department of Tropical Medicine, Strong took on an additional assignment that cemented the ties between his department and American business interests abroad. As newly appointed director of the Laboratories of the Hospitals and of Research Work of United Fruit Company, he set sail in July 1914 to United Fruit plantations in Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. […] As a shareholder in two British rubber plantations, [...] Strong approached Harvey Firestone, chief executive of the tire and rubber-processing conglomerate that bore his name, in December 1925 with a proposal [...]. Firestone had negotiated tentative agreements in 1925 with the Liberian government for [...] a 99-year concession to optionally lease up to a million acres of Liberian land for rubber plantations. [...]

[I]nfluenced by the recommendations and financial backing of Harvard alumni such as Philippine governor Gen. William Cameron Forbes [the Philippines were under US military occupation] and patrons such as Edward Atkins, who were making their wealth in the banana and sugarcane industries, Harvard hired Strong, then head of the Philippine Bureau of Science’s Biological Laboratory [where he fatally infected unknowing test subject prisoners with bubonic plague], and personal physician to Forbes, to establish the second Department of Tropical Medicine in the United States [...]. Strong and Forbes both left Manila [Philippines] for Boston in 1913. [...] Forbes [US military governor of occupied Philippines] became an overseer to Harvard University and a director of United Fruit Company, the agricultural products marketing conglomerate best known for its extensive holdings of banana plantations throughout Central America. […] In 1912 United Fruit controlled over 300,000 acres of land in the tropics [...] and a ready supply of [...] samples taken from the company’s hospitals and surrounding plantations, Strong boasted that no “tropical school of medicine in the world … had such an asset. [...] It is something of a victory [...]. We could not for a million dollars procure such advantages.” Over the next two decades, he established a research funding model reliant on the medical and biological services the Harvard department could provide US-based multinational firms in enhancing their overseas production and trade in coffee, bananas, rubber, oil, and other tropical commodities [...] as they transformed landscapes across the globe.

Text by: Gregg Mitman. "Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia's Plantation Economy." Environmental History, Volume 22, Number 1. January 2017. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity and context.]

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[On] February 20, 1915, [...] [t]o signal the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), [...] [t]he fair did not officially commence [...] until President Wilson [...] pressed a golden key linked to an aerial tower [...] whose radio waves sparked the top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a galvanometer, [...] swinging open the doors of the Palace of Machinery, where a massive diesel engine started to rotate. [...] [W]ith lavish festivities [...] nineteen million people has passed through the PPIE's turnstiles. [...] As one of the many promotional pamphlets declared, "California marks the limit of the geographical progress of civilization. For unnumbered centuries the course of empire has been steadily to the west." [...] One subject that received an enormous amount of time and space was [...] the areas of race betterment and tropical medicine. Indeed, the fair's official poster, the "Thirteenth Labor of Hercules," [the construction of the Panama Canal] symbolized the intertwined significance of these two concerns [...]. [I]n the 1910s public health and eugenics crusaders alike moved with little or no friction between [...] [calls] for classification of human intelligence, for immigration restriction, for the promotion of the sterilization and segregation of the "unfit," [...]. It was during this [...] moment, [...] that California's burgeoning eugenicist movement coalesced [...]. At meetings convened during the PPIE, a heterogenous group of sanitary experts, [...] medical superintendents, psychologists, [...] and anthropologists established a social network that would influence eugenics on the national level in the years to come. [...]

In his address titled "The Physician as Pioneer," the president-elect of the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Woods Hutchinson, credited the colonization of the Mississippi Valley to the discovery of quinine [...] and then told his audience that for progress to proceed apace in the current "age of the insect," the stringent sanitary regime imposed and perfected by Gorgas in the Canal Zone was the sine qua non. [...]

Blue also took part in the conference of the American Society for Tropical Medicine, which Gorgas had cofounded five years after the annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Invoking the narrative of medico-military conquest [...], [t]he scientific skill of the United States was also touted at the Pan-American Medical Congress, where its president, Dr. Charles L. Reed, delivered a lengthy address praising the hemispheric security ensured by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and "the combined genius of American medical scientists [...]" in quelling tropical diseases, above all yellow fever, in the Canal Zone. [...] [A]s Reed's lecture ultimately disclosed, his understanding of Pan-American medical progress was based [...] on the enlightened effects of "Aryan blood" in American lands. [...] [T]he week after the PPIE ended, Pierce was ordered to Laredo, Texas, to investigate several incidents of typhus fever on the border [...]. Pierce was instrumental in fusing tropical medicine and race betterment [...] guided by more than a decade of experience in [...] sanitation in Panama [...]. [I]n August 1915, Stanford's chancellor, David Starr Jordan [...] and Pierce were the guests of honor at a luncheon hosted by the Race Betterment Foundation. [...] [At the PPIE] [t]he Race Betterment booth [...] exhibit [...] won a bronze medal for "illustrating evidences and causes of race degeneration and methods and agencies of race betterment," [and] made eugenics a daily feature of the PPIE. [...] [T]he American Genetics Association's Eugenics Section convened [...] [and] talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, [...] the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants [...]. Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society.

Text by: Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Second Edition. 2016.

[fatehbaz]

everything in this life fucking matters and love is devastatingly real

[fatehbaz]

*guy who doesnt know* i wonder

[fatehbaz]

Northern Rubber Boa (Charina bottae), family Boidae, found in the western United States

Photograph by Zach Lim 

[fatehbaz]

now more than ever there was a sewer man

[fatehbaz]

America will be a manufacturing nation once more , We're going to build great and terrible machines, so great and terrible they carve the land they walk on, the sun will set and it will rise and the forge will still burn and the hammer will still ring true folks

[fatehbaz]

amoking slutweed, to refine myh technique,

[fatehbaz]

Welcome To Countess Vanessa's Castle, 1998

[fatehbaz]

Our Connection