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Hazel McNab, Last Light, linocut.

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if my medication keeps managing my symptoms this well i might be able to eat vegetables and fruits whenever i want again :) excited

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it's early days but self prescribing myself a bunch of shit for my gastro conditions has been like genuinely life changing levels of improvement compared to months at a time of struggling with doctors to try to get them to comprehend like, the basics of the idea of having multiple comorbid conditions

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watching the untamed as background noise for homework i guess

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Kris Ancog

Sacred Land IV, 2021

Oil on canvas

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Shrew from The Sims 3

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The Walk Home - Bernadett Tinko , 2024.

Hungarian , b. 1992 -

Oil on paper , 23 x 25 cm.

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i have a lot of frustration with anti-civ frameworks but i think they make a lot more effort to seriously prioritize ecological harm and its interconnectedness with other kinds of violence first and foremost in our understanding of the world. the idea of 'depleting natural resources' makes no attempt to capture how we already live in the shadow of various extinctions and apocalypses and are on the verge of others whose consequences will be far more reaching than we can foresee

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A Great Auk caught in a fishing line.

intaglio print with hard ground etching + soap ground aquatint, single plate inked in colors.

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Things are bleak when even the insatiable businesses, industrialists, and colonial governors of the British Empire say that wealth and profit should be secondary goals compared to the most important mission and guiding principle of provoking "pain, dread, and terror".

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[There was] development of a penal order or prison disciplinary system in nineteenth-century colonial India designed to extract the labour of convicts [...]. Colonial authorities, particularly in Bengal, the largest presidency of India, which then included the present-day states of West Bengal, Assam, [...] and the nation-state of Bangladesh, increasingly deployed prisoners in intramural [indoor] instead of extramural [outdoor] work. [...] The shift to handicrafts production resulted from the efforts of the colonial state to increase the severity of the conditions of incarceration as per the recommendations of the influential Prison-Discipline Committee of the late 1830s that found the existing penal disciplinary system wanting [...]. According to this Committee, whose report became the primer for penal and judicial reform in the nineteenth century, the employment of prisoners in public works, especially road construction, was definitely ‘the worst method of treatment … ever … provided under the British Government for this class of persons'. [...] In its estimation, [...] such outdoor work [...] had the additional [...] [quality] of developing ‘frightful’ rates of mortality.

Particularly in Bengal, the initial experiments [...] gave way to [...] employment of prisoners indoors in handicrafts production [...]. No one championed that practice more enthusiastically than F. J. Mouat, a medical officer who became the inspector-general of prisons in Bengal in 1855 and convened the first ever province-wide exhibition in Calcutta in 1856 to celebrate and stimulate jail handicrafts in the region. [...] That began to change, however, as administrators at different levels of government raised concerns about the lack of severity of indoor penal regimens [...]. An 1877 conference convened to improve jail discipline concluded that colonial authorities needed to reconsider the merits of public works [favored as a more severe punishment, 'the worst method of treatment ever'] [...]. In the early 1880s Calcutta followed up with a directive urging local officials [...] to employ more inmates in public works [outdoors]. [...] Indeed, colonial debates about mobilizing convict labour to work indoors or outdoors were always centred on concerns about ensuring and maximizing the severity of imprisonment and not the rehabilitation of prisoners. [...]

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At the turn of the nineteenth century [early 1800s], prisoners in Bengal, as in the other presidencies of Bombay and Madras, worked [outdoors on "public works"] [...]. Even at this early juncture, authorities at the highest level of the colonial and imperial government [...] worried that their disciplinary practices were not tasked with chores requiring greater exertion [...]. Consequently, London and Calcutta encouraged local officials to employ prisoners in [...] roads in particular [because the conditions were more brutal] [...]. They also broached the possibility of moving convicts away from their home districts so that they would not have access to friends and family. [...] And with local officials eager to capitalise on prison labour, judicial authorities helped increase convict numbers [...] in the first decade of the nineteenth century that authorized courts to tack on hard labour (and banishment) for particular offences. [...]

[T]he Prison-Discipline Committee [made the] proposal to make imprisonment 'a terror to evil-doers' by compelling inmates to engage in 'dull, wearisome, monotonous tasks' [...].

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[But] Mouat’s plan was to transform jails into ‘schools of industry’ [...]. [He wanted to make jails profitable, de facto businesses. To do this, he advocated indoor handicrafts production.] [H]e singled out certain jails for their productivity, Alipore [...] in particular [...] producing 'an actual profit of £74,232 [...]'. He boasted that this record was unmatched 'in any country or in any prison of the whole world'. [...] Not everyone shared Mouat’s faith in ‘industrial training’ as a punishment [...].

But the 1864 Committee [...], [m]uch more so than the Bengal inspector-general [Mouat] ever did, [in] its report emphasized making imprisonment 'a matter of dread, apprehension, and avoidance'.

Everything was to be secondary to that guiding principle, including making penal labour profitable [...].

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As the lieutenant-governor put it, the prevailing system focused overly on manufactures and sanitary conditions and not enough on the ‘penal effect of imprisonment’. Therefore, it needed revamping to make the punishment of short-term prisoners more ‘stinging’, labour more penal, [...] so that Bengal jails would not be ‘a complete liberty hall’. [...]. For colonial officials, the [initial] interest in establishing [...] [indoor] hand labour in prisons was prompted primarily by their concern with [...] lessening the high costs of incarceration which resulted from the added expenses of employing extra guards to watch over inmates labouring outdoors. [But the government was willing to pay more, and to lose a source of profit, for the sake of making the punishment more severe.] [...] To his [Mouat's] detractors, intramural work in handicrafts production did not add up to hard labour -- it was not rigorous enough, [...] and therefore diminished the severity of imprisonment as a punishment, particularly in comparison to the demands of labouring outdoors on the roads or operating the treadwheels that some authorities wished to introduce to indoor labour.

His opponents also questioned his emphasis on profitability, which they believed distracted prison officials from ensuring that incarceration entailed pain and deprivation.

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Text above by: Anand A. Yang. "The prison-handicraft complex: Convict labour in colonial India". Modern Asian Studies, Volume 57, Issue 3, May 2023, pages 808-834. Published online: 27 February 2023. At DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X22000324 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first heading/sentence in this post added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

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scary how fast agents of empire(s) will set aside their rivalries or inter-imperial competitive squabbling in order to cooperate and transcend their own borders with like an imperial solidarity as they share ideas, exchange technologies, and protect their shared interest in hunting and crushing you

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as always skeptical of everyone foretelling the imminent collapse of the american empire but wouldn't that be nice

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i want to call attention to the fundraiser of my friend mohammed again.

he and his family have returned to north gaza, where their home is nothing but rubble. in the past days he buried the bodies of multiple of his family members that were martyred in late 2023.

a donation is the one thing that can really help to rebuild something among all this grief.

@save-mohamed-family

https://chuffed.org/project/118144-save-mohammed-and-his-family-from-the-gaza-genocide

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it's pretty cool to live inside the hallucinatory nightmare actually

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lots of reasons to be sad and angry all the time these days

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you ever see someone so coked-up on adulthood that they've replaced every shred of interiority with a regurgitation of normative power structures

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i think i've set into motion enough rolling obligations for this year that i'm either going to be too fatigued to have time to be self destructive or i'm going to have a real break with 'reality' at some point and try my luck wandering the desert instead