#“artificial self-indigenization” what are you SAYING

[slyandthefamilybook]

"ugh everything is antisemitism now 🙄🙄🙄" hey buddy wonder why you keep hearing accusations of antisemitism.....

[thedansemacabres]

Introduction To Supporting Sustainable Agriculture For Witches and Pagans

[ID: An image of yellow grain stocks, soon to be harvested. The several stocks reach towards a blurred open sky, focusing the camera on he grains themselves. The leaves of the grains are green and the cereals are exposed].

PAGANISM AND WITCHCRAFT ARE MOVEMENTS WITHIN A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE CAPITALIST SOCIETY. As the world becomes more aware of the importance of sustainability, so does the duty of humanity to uphold the idea of the steward, stemming from various indigenous worldviews, in the modern era. I make this small introduction as a viticulturist working towards organic and environmentally friendly grape production. I also do work on a food farm, as a second job—a regenerative farm, so I suppose that is my qualifications. Sustainable—or rather regenerative agriculture—grows in recognition. And as paganism and witchcraft continue to blossom, learning and supporting sustainability is naturally a path for us to take. I will say that this is influenced by I living in the USA, however, there are thousands of groups across the world for sustainable agriculture, of which tend to be easy to research.

So let us unite in caring for the world together, and here is an introduction to supporting sustainable/regenerative agriculture. 

A QUICK BRIEF ON SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE 

Sustainable agriculture, in truth, is a movement to practise agriculture as it has been done for thousands of years—this time, with more innovation from science and microbiology especially. The legal definition in the USA of sustainable agriculture is: 

The term ”sustainable agriculture” (U.S. Code Title 7, Section 3103) means an integrated system of plant and animal production practices having a site-specific application that will over the long-term:

A more common man’s definition would be farming in a way that provides society’s food and textile needs without overuse of natural resources, artificial supplements and pest controls, without compromising the future generation’s needs and ability to produce resources. The agriculture industry has one of the largest and most detrimental impacts on the environment, and sustainable agriculture is the alternative movement to it. 

Sustainable agriculture also has the perk of being physically better for you—the nutrient quality of crops in the USA has dropped by 47%, and the majority of our food goes to waste. Imagine if it was composted and reused? Or even better—we buy only what we need. We as pagans and witches can help change this. 

BUYING ORGANIC (IT REALLY WORKS)

The first step is buying organic. While cliche, it does work: organic operations have certain rules to abide by, which excludes environmentally dangerous chemicals—many of which, such as DDT, which causes ecological genocide and death to people. Organic operations have to use natural ways of fertilising, such as compost, which to many of us—such as myself—revere the cycle of life, rot, and death. Organic standards do vary depending on the country, but the key idea is farming without artificial fertilisers, using organic seeds, supplementing with animal manure, fertility managed through management practices, etc. 

However, organic does have its flaws. Certified organic costs many, of which many small farmers cannot afford. The nutrient quality of organic food, while tending to be better, is still poor compared to regeneratively grown crops. Furthermore, the process to become certified organic is often gruelling—you can practise completely organically, but if you are not certified, it is not organic. Which, while a quality control insurance, is both a bonus and a hurdle. 

JOINING A CSA

Moving from organic is joining a CSA (“Community supported agriculture”). The USDA defines far better than I could: 

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), one type of direct marketing, consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.

By purchasing a farm share, you receive food from the farm for the agreed upon production year. I personally enjoy CSAs for the relational aspect—choosing a CSA is about having a relationship, not only with the farmer(s), but also the land you receive food from. I volunteer for my CSA and sometimes I get extra cash from it—partaking in the act of caring for the land. Joining a CSA also means taking your precious capital away from the larger food industry and directly supporting growers—and CSAs typically practise sustainable and/or regenerative agriculture. 

CSAs are also found all over the world and many can deliver their products to food deserts and other areas with limited agricultural access. I volunteer from time to time for a food bank that does exactly that with the produce I helped grow on the vegetable farm I work for. 

FARM MARKETS AND STALLS 

Another way of personally connecting to sustainable agriculture is entering the realm of the farm stall. The farmer’s market is one of my personal favourite experiences—people buzzing about searching for ingredients, smiles as farmers sell crops and products such as honey or baked goods, etc. The personal connection stretches into the earth, and into the past it buries—as I purchase my apples from the stall, I cannot help but see a thousand lives unfold. People have been doing this for thousands of years and here I stand, doing it all over again. 

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Farmers’ markets are dependent on your local area, yet in most you can still develop personal community connections. Paganism often stresses community as an ideal and a state of life. And witchcraft often stresses a connection to the soil. What better place, then, is purchasing the products from the locals who commune with the land? 

VOLUNTEERING 

If you are able to, I absolutely recommend volunteering. I have worked with aquaponic systems, food banks, farms, cider-making companies, soil conservation groups, etc. There is so much opportunity—and perhaps employment—in these fields. The knowledge I have gained has been wonderful. As one example, I learned that fertilisers reduce carbon sequestration as plants absorb carbon to help with nutrient intake. If they have all their nutrients ready, they do not need to work to obtain carbon to help absorb it. This does not even get into the symbiotic relationship fungi have with roots, or the world of hyphae. Volunteering provides community and connection. Actions and words change the world, and the world grows ever better with help—including how much or how little you may provide. It also makes a wonderful devotional activity. 

RESOURCING FOOD AND COOKING 

Buying from farmers is not always easy, however. Produce often has to be processed, requiring labour and work with some crops such as carrots. Other times, it is a hard effort to cook and many of us—such as myself—often have very limited energy. There are solutions to this, thankfully:

Many farmers can and will process foods. Some even do canning, which can be good to stock up on food and lessen the energy inputs. 

Value-added products: farms also try to avoid waste, and these products often become dried snacks if fruit, frozen, etc. 

Asking farmers if they would be open to accommodating this. Chances are, they would! The farmer I purchase my CSA share from certainly does. 

Going to farmers markets instead of buying a CSA, aligning with your energy levels. 

And if any of your purchased goods are going unused, you can always freeze them. 

DEMETER, CERES, VEIA, ETC: THE FORGOTTEN AGRICULTURE GODS

Agricultural gods are often neglected. Even gods presiding over agriculture often do not have those aspects venerated—Dionysos is a god of viticulture and Apollon a god of cattle. While I myself love Dionysos as a party and wine god, the core of him remains firmly in the vineyards and fields, branching into the expanses of the wild. I find him far more in the curling vines as I prune them than in the simple delights of the wine I ferment. Even more obscure gods, such as Veia, the Etruscan goddess of agriculture, are seldom known.

Persephone receives the worst of this: I enjoy her too as a dread queen, and people do acknowledge her as Kore, but she is far more popular as the queen of the underworld instead of the dear daughter of Demeter. I do understand this, though—I did not feel the might of Demeter and Persephone until I began to move soil with my own hands. A complete difference to the ancient world, where the Eleusinian mysteries appealed to thousands. Times change, and while some things should be left to the past, our link to these gods have been severed. After all, how many of us reading know where our food comes from? I did not until I began to purchase from the land I grew to know personally. The grocery store has become a land of tearing us from the land, instead of the food hub it should be.

Yet, while paganism forgets agriculture gods, they have not forgotten us. The new world of farming is more conductive and welcoming than ever. I find that while older, bigoted people exist, the majority of new farmers tend to be LGBT+. My own boss is trans and aro, and I myself am transgender and gay. The other young farmers I know are some flavour of LGBT+, or mixed/poc. There’s a growing movement for Black farmers, elaborated in a lovely text called We Are Each Other’s Harvest. 

Indigenous farming is also growing and I absolutely recommend buying from indigenous farmers. At this point, I consider Demeter to be a patron of LGBT+ people in this regard—she gives an escape to farmers such as myself. Bigotry is far from my mind under her tender care, as divine Helios shines above and Okeanos’ daughters bring fresh water to the crops. Paganism is also more commonly accepted—I find that farmers find out that I am pagan and tell me to do rituals for their crops instead of reacting poorly. Or they’re pagan themselves; a farmer I know turned out to be Wiccan and uses the wheel of the year to keep track of production. 

Incorporating these divinities—or concepts surrounding them—into our crafts and altars is the spiritual step towards better agriculture. Holy Demeter continues to guide me, even before I knew it. 

WANT CHANGE? DO IT YOURSELF! 

If you want change in the world, you have to act. And if you wish for better agriculture, there is always the chance to do it yourself. Sustainable agriculture is often far more accessible than people think: like witchcraft and divination, it is a practice. Homesteading is often appealing to many of us, including myself, and there are plenty of resources to begin. There are even grants to help one improve their home to be more sustainable, i.e. solar panels. Gardening is another, smaller option. Many of us find that plants we grow and nourish are far more potentant in craft, and more receptive to magical workings. 

Caring for plants is fundamental to our natures and there are a thousand ways to delve into it. I personally have joined conservation groups, my local soil conservation group, work with the NRCs in the USA, and more. The path to fully reconnecting to nature and agriculture is personal—united in a common cause to fight for this beautiful world. To immerse yourself in sustainable agriculture, I honestly recommend researching and finding your own path. Mine lies in soil and rot, grapevines and fruit trees. Others do vegetables and cereal grains, or perhaps join unions and legislators. Everyone has a share in the beauty of life, our lives stemming from the land’s gentle sprouts. 

Questions and or help may be given through my ask box on tumblr—if there is a way I can help, let me know. My knowledge is invaluable I believe, as I continue to learn and grow in the grey-clothed arms of Demeter, Dionysos, and Kore. 

FURTHER READING:

Baszile, N. (2021). We are each other’s harvest. HarperCollins.

Hatley, J. (2016). Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Environmental Philosophy, 13(1), 143–145. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil201613137

Regenerative Agriculture 101. (2021, November 29). https://www.nrdc.org/stories/regenerative-agriculture-101#what-is

And in truth, far more than I could count. 

References

Community Supported Agriculture | National Agricultural Library. (n.d.). https://www.nal.usda.gov/farms-and-agricultural-production-systems/community-supported-agriculture

Navazio, J. (2012). The Organic seed Grower: A Farmer’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Production. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Plaster, E. (2008). Soil Science and Management. Cengage Learning.

Sheaffer, C. C., & Moncada, K. M. (2012). Introduction to agronomy: food, crops, and environment. Cengage Learning.

Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House.

Sustainable Agriculture | National Agricultural Library. (n.d.). https://www.nal.usda.gov/farms-and-agricultural-production-systems/sustainable-agriculture

[transformatives]

The Gift Must Always Move: AI Commodification and the Fanwork Economy

Introduction: Artificial Intelligence

When you think of a fanfiction writer, what do you think of? Perhaps a teenage girl on her bed, wrapped in a blanket while typing furiously on her computer at 3 am when she has school the next morning. Or maybe some friends giggling between themselves as they brainstorm ideas. Possibly, you think of a neuroscience professor in a cozy sweater editing her Star Wars draft before uploading it. But you probably don’t think about an AI bot. You also might wonder what these things have in common with each other. However, the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence in online fandom spaces could provide an interesting look into the socio-economic practices of fandom and how AI might be contributing to online isolation. 

On November 30, 2022, the AI software known as “ChatGPT” was released, marking the start of the AI Boom. Trained on large language models, this allowed users to chat with the program, ask questions, prompt responses, make it write poetry, complete homework, and translate text. The list goes on. As with most shiny new things, the denizens of the internet quickly adapted AI into their own interests, playing around in the seemingly endless sandbox that it provided.

Fandom response, much like everyone else, has been varied. Some people immediately flocked to this new technology, gleefully typing in prompts for fanfictions and fanart they wanted to see. In addition to ChatGPT, websites like Character.AI popped up where you can “talk to” an AI based on a character, similar to classic self-insert fanfictions. Some audio-based AIs can even replicate the voices of actors, making it so that these AIs can “act out” scenarios the user requests. Many shy fans argue that AI is a way for them to interact with their interests without the anxiety of requesting fanfiction from a writer or roleplaying. Like any new toy, people just want to play with it. 

But the writers and artists themselves felt very differently. Ask a fanfiction writer their opinions on AI writing, and they’ll probably say something along the lines of “‘For fun' or not, AI fics should be banned from AO3 [a popular fanfiction website] all together” (quoted from Reddit).

These AIs work by scraping internet data and using pattern recognition to replicate it, a process that Dazed describes as, “creating software that automatically collects data from various sources, including social media, stock image sites, and (maybe most controversially) sites where human artists showcase their work, such as DeviantArt”. There’s the problem: artists and writers cannot give their consent for their works to be included in these scraped datasets, and many companies are not transparent about where they’re getting their data from. 

But what does this mean for creatives, and how are online fan-spaces responding?

A Community of Gifts

The backlash against AI comes in many forms, but has been considerable within the general online fandom sphere, especially from fan artists and fanfiction writers. I’d like to propose that this attitude towards AI art and writing is intertwined with the economic model of fandom spaces, which might be classified as a “Gift Economy”. 

A gift economy is defined by economist Paul Krugman as “an economic system based on gift-giving, in which goods or services get exchanged with no expectation of remuneration, reciprocity, or quid pro quo”. Gift economies often exist alongside other economic systems, but have also been observed in some cultures as the primary system, such as in some pre-colonial Indigenous North American tribes. Another example would be blood drives, in which a donator gifts their blood to hospitals and they might “receive the gift” again if they need blood. 

Unlike more traditional forms of art, fan created art such as fanfiction, fanart, and fan edits (henceforth referred to as “fanworks”) exist in a legal gray area. Since fanworks are often created in reference to copyrighted works, it is difficult to create any profit from it. The legal battle between fan-writers and copyright holders is infamous within fandom. 

There are, of course, exceptions. Copyright holders will usually turn a blind eye to fanart, and in Japan published fan-comics are sold alongside the canon works. But generally, it is taboo in fandom spaces to profit from fanworks. For example, in response to a recent uptick of Etsy bookbinders selling printed copies of fanfiction for hefty prices, writers deleted their works and said things like “I hate these sh*tty vultures who are destroying fandom spaces to make money before moving onto the next grift once we are burned to the ground”. The fandom consensus: you cannot and should not profit from fanworks, both because there are legal restrictions and because on a deeper level the gift economy maintains art as art, not as a commodity. 

So if there’s no monetary reason for writing fanfiction, then why would anyone do it? Well, for love of the craft, of course. That, and for the cultivation of community. Fans contribute to the gift economy by providing their creative works, which they give without expectation of a return. Except, of course, there is a return, one that comes in the form of interactions and the strengthening of inter-fandom relationships. As Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.” (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass)

The Death of Gifting

Now, the gift economy that was subliminally understood by fans seems to be dwindling. “Fandom Etiquette” asks that readers and viewers of fanworks interact with the art, whether that be liking, commenting, or sharing it with others. By doing so, they strengthen connections and expand the web that makes up fandom. But recently fan creators have been discussing the lack of response fanworks get. Long-time fanfiction writers talk about how they receive less and less comments, which almost any writer will say is more encouraging than a like. Meanwhile, newer fans feel hesitant to comment on these works, seeming to believe that it won’t be received well, especially if it’s an older work. However, an aspect of a gift economy is that no immediate response (or response at all) is expected, so longevity is created through delayed and continual reciprocity. This is in contrast to the capitalist emphasis on trends and relevancy. In the case of fandom, this means giving back and interacting with older fanworks. Even the “lurkers”, the fans that don’t post their own works or thoughts, are asked to simply reblog, as that is deemed the minimum amount of interaction. There’s a disconnect there between those who do understand the importance of reciprocity in a gift economy such as fandom and those who don’t yet understand. 

I would like to submit that this lack of fandom reciprocity is indicative of a larger trend online where people feel more isolated in spaces made for community. When art is approached from a market-economy viewpoint, it forms a wedge between fancreators and non-creator fans, without realizing that in the same way that readers are hungry for writing, writers are hungry for readers. The gift is art, and the gift is reciprocity. Both positions are equally important because they are the same: fans.  

The Consumer, The Readers, The Givers

When non-creators see themselves as viewers and readers instead of consumers, they realize that they can also be likers, commenters, dm-ers, and friends. Perhaps, they will allow themselves to be creators as well, even if their beginning is less impressive than those they look up to. There is no need to scrape other people’s art and writing to mash together something that they think “deserves” to be consumed by others. This is because they know that their art is not a commodity to impress with or sell, but a gift to be passed among a community. As Lewis Hyde writes, “We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation” (Lewis Hyde, The Gift). You give, you take, you pass along, you build community. 

Fandom cannot be analyzed without acknowledging the alternative nature of its gift economy in relation to the domineering western capitalist culture. When AI is used to scrape data from writers without their knowledge or consent, it creates a contradiction in the fandom economy. The reader turns into a consumer again, and the role of the writer is undermined. It is a product without purpose or thought behind it, made in an instant to be consumed without reciprocation or community. Even if there is no profit created in most cases, it turns others’ art and mixes it into nothing but a commodity. AI poses as a capitalist and isolating force within fandom spaces, furthering the idea of fandom as a solitary activity. 

A consumer accumulates, they do not share. The “gift” does not move. It remains stagnant and solitary, rejecting the integral nature of communal creation in the gift economy of fandom. Art is something that needs both a giver and a receiver. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity.” A consumer is lonely, while a gifter is part of a community. The gift must move. 

[constellationmelody]

Listened to the last episode of Young Leif this morning and it devastated me that I waited until night to listen to it again. (At the time I wrote this, It was written when it was released, I was too lazy to finish it)

I wanted to hug Verge so bad. 😭 I loved how they poetically conveyed their deep love for Leif and the emotional burden it imposes is utterly heart-wrenching. They are quite literally and figurately star-crossed lovers. IDK Verge, The monster seems like it already took over and destroyed you. I hope they meet again one day. ;n ;

I love the friendly interaction between Verge and Bertbert, especially in coming up with a new alias.

Verge's resilience is truly admirable for going through all that self-consciousness imposed by other alien lifeforms and persists in existing to spite them and not let their race not be forgotten. It reminds me of people with Indigenous ancestry in the Caribbean islands who refuse to accept the paper genocide confirming their extinction. should I still be considered Taino?

Oh Cool! more Teds characters. I love this voice actor's voice, it's pleasing. They are an interesting bunch and you sometimes want to punch them. IDK Why, but sometimes they remind me of the Irkens from Invader Zim. Aliens who go around conquering planets and using their resources. I like them.

Pfft, The teds are so rigged that algorithms decide what they should think for them for a particular day. What a dick for taking Leif out just to take a dig at him. That particular Ted seems to be fully utilizing their daily allowance of pettiness, using it to its maximum effect.

Alice not seeing themselves as sentient and just okay shutting down, possibly forever, is sad. They may not have a mutually beneficial relationship like humans and Dogs, but it's still a relationship. Even if it is an artificial one to keep yourself from feeling lonely. Speaking with yourself isn't as weird as ppl think. Everyone does it all the time. My computer can't talk to be like Alice but I still name it and attribute human qualities to it when it misbehaves. When it slows down, I jokingly say it's "aging" into an old man. This computer's name where I wrote this post is Oliver and the second scene's name is Mercedes (the spanish name, not car). My phone's name is... 'My name is jeff' Really, it's not just Jeff, it's "My name is jeff", that's the whole name. Jump 22 reference, now you have that clip meme in your head. I wish I was better at writing my thoughts.

[talesfrommedinastation]

Let's Talk: Space Living!

Medina Station’s interior was explored as a rudimentary part of The Expanse show, and more is discussed in the books and the upcoming comic series. 

However, as a science writer with a background in physics (and who has an interest in gardening), I wanted to explore more of this possibility of a self-sustaining ecosystem that serves as a crossroads of empires, galaxies, and everything in between. The prairie and fields of Medina’s interior, to say nothing of the residencies that we will explore later on in Far Past the Ring, 

Why are they in a cylinder? Medina Station’s structure is not fan made, it is the actual design that started in season 1 of The Expanse. Originally designed as the LDSS Nauvoo, it was created as a generation ship for the Latter-Day Saints to eventually find a new colony. The ship was designed so that thousands of LDS members could live and survive in space for over a hundred years, until they made it to Alpha Centauri. Things happened, and now it’s a station.

 But the station itself was created, similar to an O’Neill Cylinder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder), to create both artificial gravity and a structure that would allow the colonists to farm and live as they traveled.  This is a common trope in many advanced science fiction pieces (you might recognize it from Interstellar and Mass Effect), Additionally, by constantly tilting, it creates not only gravity, but a stronger force, which, though it doesn’t seem like much, does allow for humans to receive adequate amounts of gravity, thus negating the effects of low-g on their bodies that many Belters have faced for generations. 

(Image taken from the subreddit, r/StableDiffusion, an artist's interpretation of Cooper Station from 'Interstellar')

Children born on this station will, most likely, not have the same effects on their bodies that they would in a place with less gravity, which has affected Belters for generation, so much so that many can not survive on a regular planet. This may play a bigger role in the series…you’d better keep reading to find out!

What is the ecosystem like? One of the things Klaes Ashford says that I found especially rueful was the comment about ‘they invented the most advanced spaceship so they could farm like savages’, regarding the LDS settlers who commissioned the construction of the LDSS Nauvoo (which would eventually evolve into Medina Station). Never-freaking-mind that is how humanity has survived for thousands of years: many times, the simplest solution is the best (You’d think Ashford, the most Belter of Belters, would know that!), especially in regards to crop production. 

According to my research–as well as my own personal experience working with indigenous land practices during my time as an AmeriCorps volunteer–creating an environment that nourishes the soil would be best on a landscape in which the most amount of cereal crops can be produced (https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/study-prairie-strips-integrated-row-crops-growing-momentum).

(Photo from Sand County Foundation. As a Midwesterner, I can literally SMELL this picture from my computer. It's amazing!)

Thus, a prairie, similar to the ones found in places like Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota–some of the top producing farmland on Earth–is necessary for Medina Station and the colonies that it supports, to survive. This drier climate also allows for lesser amounts of rust and moisture to occur within the station, while the plants still allow for air to be properly filtered. Coincidentally, the aforementioned states are the homeland of the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe people, which will be discussed below. 

Why a prairie? This comes out of my own background, with a brief panache of narcissism. As Naomi mentions in Sky Prairie, Part 4, having a prairie in lieu of trees makes sense (https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/prairie/#:~:text=The%20prairie%20grasses%20hold%20the,wheat%2C%20rye%2C%20and%20oats). The plants are more conducive to creating a richer and more complex soil, necessary for growing crops in space. Additionally, they can still produce a significant amount of oxygen and water, vital for life in this universe and beyond. Finally, by cycling the crops, including that of prairie grass, the soil can continue to be nourished in a fashion that will not exhaust it. This is another reason why cows are forbidden on Medina Station, and even smaller dairy ungulates, such as sheep and goats, are given a bit of side eye from the administration. 

This is also a personal objective for myself, and should be addressed. I am a settler, but I was born, raised, and now live on the historic lands of the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe people, who have lived and worked in this ecosystem of mixed forest and prairie for thousands of years. Interestingly enough, Cara Gee (the actress who plays Camina Drummer) is of Ojibwe descent herself. 

(Image from the Star Tribune)

Although it is not officially canon in the world of The Expanse, in my mind, the Drummer family is of Ojibwe descent themselves. I hoped this would be reflected in multiple aspects of this story. First, the professions of the women–where one is a healer (Tanke Drummer, a physician), one gathers plants (Sjael Drummer, a chemical engineer), and the other is the guiding spirit of her people (Camina Drummer, the president). All are fierce defenders and patriots of the Belt.

Taken from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (an Ojibwe community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan): “Self-discipline, survival skills, loyalty, solidarity, and respect within family are above all individual interests”...a sentiment that is surely reflected in not only the Beltalowda, but amongst Clone Force 99 as well. 

You may also find additional Anishinaabe/Ojibwe words and references throughout Far Past the Ring, such as the names of Camina and Tanke/Sjael’s fathers (‘Aki’ = Ojibwe for ‘Earth’ and ‘Anang’ = Ojibwe for ‘Star’), Tanke’s title amongst her family (‘Niimama’ = Ojibwe for ‘my mother’), and the eagle feather tattoos on the necks of those in the Drummer family who have served the people as either warriors or healers. Certain characters wear embroidery and flowers similar in the fashion of the Ojibwe people as well. 

There could always be healthier representation of indigeneity within science fiction, and I would like to think I’m doing my best here. 

Why are all the buildings made of stucco/adobe? I’d like to think Naomi Nagata does a good job of explaining this, but here’s some more detail.

Stucco is cheap and easy to make, and works very well in a dry environment, like Medina Station’s interior. As metal and plastic might not stand the climate within the station, stucco and adobe, made of the earth from the Hub itself, is a better material to use. Additionally, by being fireproof, it is a safer option to use when the fields need to have prescribed burns on them, a dangerous but necessary step that requires multiple hands on deck, with the watchful eye of Timon Chapelle on top of it all).

The structure’s design is not aesthetic in mindset, to be honest. The Hub is a nucleated settlement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleated_village), made to not only save the most amount of room for farming and cultivating crops, but also to foster a better sense of community and continuity amongst  the residents within.

(Photo from https://opentext.wsu.edu/)

Ultimately, the Hub is envisioned to look like the Taos Pueblo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taos_Pueblo), which, while not a prairie habitat per se (though those have existed–thanks Frank Lloyd Wright!) offers solid dwelling in terms of heating and cooling, ease of supply creation, and a more organic feel to housing that, for many Earthers, is assuring, and for Martians and Belters, a new experience that helps them reconnect with their Terran roots. 

(Photo taken from WTTW Chicago)

The Ziyaret, meanwhile, is also constructed of adobe, but, due to the transitional nature of its residents, does not have the intense communal aspect of the Hub. Instead, it is a reflection of the Islamic roots of the term ‘Medina’, and the nature of movement in human history, making it resemble one of the many mosques and madrassas found within Mali (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djinguereber_Mosque), constructed as places of safe haven along a perilous trade route. 

(Photo taken from The Guardian)

How does everyone move around? Methane and other gasses are a challenge to have in this type of environment due to the need to keep air pollution at a minimum. As a result, bicycles, skateboards, and other similar modes of transportation are strongly encouraged–a treat for Earthers and a confusing new mode for Belters and Martians! Additionally, this taps right into the independent spirit of the Belt–you do not need to beg for gas when you have a bike!

[thedreadvampy]

Extremely valuable to connect the dots between what is continuing to happen with Native reservations in the USA and what is happening with Gaza and the West Bank, btw.

When a settler colonialist movement wants to become the majority on occupied land, first they settle. Then, when possible, they split the land into reserved land, to which the occupied people are violently forced to relocate, and call the rest of the land their own.

The borders and residence of reserved land is tightly controlled, the settler state controls passage in and out, and membership of the occupied group - culture, community, identity, citizenship - is artificially tied to the reservation, so as well as being physically kept within the reservation through that of violence during the establishment of reservations, people continue to be forced into a position where there's a choice between assimilating and losing connection with community and identity, or never leaving at all.

As the occupation is normalised, the settler state begins to change its relationship to one of imagined parity - we BOTH have our own land, yours here, ours there, and you control yours and we control ours so we've solved the problem 😊 If you want liberation take it up with Your Lot!

However, any illusion of parity is a total lie, because the reservations are deliberately set up surrounded by the settler state, so entry to, exit from, passage through, and behaviour around the reservation is all controlled by the settler state. That includes passage of people but also of resources, power, water, development of infrastructure etc.

And because the settler state controls the borders and surroundings, and defines what is and isn't reserved land, the reservation may become more permeable - but only to the settler state. If something of value is found within the boundaries, the boundaries move inwards, or an enclave appears, or settlers just come onto the reserved land to take what they want.

Those who do leave the reservation - whether they're stolen as children, forced out violently, leave to seek education or for work or because infrastructure and opportunity are deliberately curtailed and it's not affordable or feasible to stay living on the reservation - are presented with extra, artificial barriers to returning or to bringing wealth or support back into their community.

Both in Palestine and America, indigenous people who grow up outside the reservations have their identity chipped away in the eyes of the settler state, so even those who stay within the bounds of their original land are defined away in a few generations unless they retain close connections to the reservations defined by the occupying state.

There's no resources and no political agency allowed for the reservation, populations are controlled and artificially closely concentrated, opportunities are curtailed, travel prevented and things like healthcare and education deliberately limited. But the land is now, in theory, self-determIning, with independent lawmakers and legal systems. Except - there is no apparatus of monopolized state violence to back up laws, and the trade and surrounds being controlled by a state that DOES have that means in practise settler laws override reserved laws. There is no presence on the world stage, so internationally, reserved lands are only given representation by their colonial masters, who are opposed to their interests.

That's not to say that tribal councils (or the PLA) have no power at all - they have power over the people the reservation is built to contain, but never to legally override the settler state. Because even if they win on paper, the settler state will just send the fucking army in.

And meanwhile, having Generally Conceded (nominally) both land and self-determination to the indigenous people on the reservations, the colonists are now empowered to wash their hands of them, treating the reservations as property and a separate state depending on what's convenient. If the reservation is shit, well, that's your fault, you clearly can't be trusted to run your own lives. If the reservation produces something good, well it's great that the folks living in Our Great Nation have found this thing, which now belongs to us as the owners of the land.

So definitionally, if it's shit (largely because of poverty and disadvantage created by the settler state) it's grist to the mill of genocidal propaganda - see, they can't even govern themselves, they just get drunk and dressed in rags and die young, they can't be trusted to run their own affairs, they're barbaric savages, not Civilised like us. And anything good or profitable scraped out despite the deliberate privation is, definitionally, not Native.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to encroach on reservations as convenient, while those living in (much smaller and shrinking) reserved lands are not allowed to leave, or allowed to bring in the resources to thrive. Money, people, resources and land all flow through a one-way valve into the settler state, with little if any allowed to flow the other way.

Meanwhile on settled land, colonists can bring in more colonists at will, manage immigration to increase their population, and divert trade to and from reservations to profit themselves.

And when the occupying state has both a substantial numerical and political majority across the land as a whole, they get to move towards being """"postcolonial""" and flip the script. Instead of having force-relocated and imprisoned entire populations at gunpoint on the smallest, lowest-value scraps of their country in order to control them, the seller state generously GIFTED people their VERY OWN NEW COUNTRY all to themselves, a special privilege - perhaps even a recompense for any harm suffered! Like yeah we forced you out of your homes and I GUESS that was bad but after that, look, we GAVE you the LOVELY GIFT of this LOVELY LAND and so what are you complaining about?

So then you get more and more settlers saying things like, "hey, why should they get their own land and their own government? that's RACIST they're EXCLUDING me why have they been given the PRIVILEGE of their own special land and exceptions, shouldn't they just be part of the country we all love? for equality reasons etc? after all we were ALL born on this land." Or indeed, "these reservations are shit, it's not fair that X should have to live like this under Barbaric Tribal Rule, let's bring them into our good and welcoming country"

So the desired end state for the settlers here is that, now they've served their purpose, the reservations are dissolved. But that, of course, doesn't include acknowledging any of the systems set up within the reservation - the leadership, the people, the national identity, community and use of land - as legitimate, but only assimilating them under the settler state.

That's the one-state solution Israel wants. That's the America without reservations that would be allowed to exist under the current system. Reservations allow the indigenous population to be diminished, controlled, defined away and eventually either functionally absorbed into the colonial state or pushed out entirely.

[carriagelamp]

Weirdly enough, I often find myself reading less in the summer, since I have more time than I do during the rest of the year to do other things. Also artfight has been eating up more than a bit of my free time! But here’s a collection a graphic novels I sat around on the hammock reading, and some novels I finished up...

(Everyone go read All Systems Red, holy crow guys)

A Whale of the Wild

The “sequel” to A Wolf Called Wander, though it doesn’t actually connect to the previous novel except in the stylistic/thematic sense. A Whale of the Wild is very much a standalone novel. And a pretty decent one! Personally, I think I liked Wolf more, but this one was a pleasant, informative read, with just the right amount of crushing dread sprinkled in. It’s about a young orca called Vega who is learning to become a new wayfinder for her pod but who still has a lot to learn, especially in an ocean that is becoming increasingly hostile to orcas and the other sealife that live alongside humans. When a devastating earthquake hits, Vega and her little brother find themselves separated from their family, lost in a now horrifyingly unfamiliar environment, and fighting starvation as the salmon that sustain them become more and more unreliable. It’s a desperate fight for survival as they search for food and their missing family. This book is written for a middle grade level, and does a really good job of putting the current environmental crisis into an animal’s perspective while giving the readers something to hope for.

The Adventure Zone: The Crystal Kingdom

Every July I eagerly anticipate the next Adventure Zone graphic novel. This one is for their fourth arc, The Crystal Kingdom, in which Magnus, Taako, and Merle respond to a SOS from a floating laboratory that is gradually being consumed by crystals and which threatens the entire world should it fall into the ocean. Carey Pietsch’s art continues to be absolutely fantastic, so beautifully and hilariously expressive, and this one delivers some great Merle moments, lots of Carey Fangbattle, and, of course, Kravtiz. Kravitz, my beloved…

Anyway, I obviously always recommend these. If you’ve never gotten into The Adventure Zone, I totally recommend either trying these graphic novels — or even better, just go listen to the podcast because it really is both hilarious and creates a shockingly good and heart-wrenching story by the end.

All Systems Red

I’ve seen The Murderbot Diaries on my dash occasionally, and it always looked interesting, but a friend’s recommendation finally compelled me to read the first novella of the series. And holy shit y’all. Absolutely the best book I’ve read this month, it’s amazing. Mind-blowingly good. Also, if you’re like me and want a good audiobook, it’s a nice three-hour listen, very chill!

Anyway, All Systems Red is about a Security Unit, an artificially created being that’s part-organic part-mechanical and all-company-owned-and-controlled. However, self-named “Murderbot” has managed to hack into the system that suppresses its own will, and is now coasting along, doing the least amount of work its job requires not to be noticed, while preferring to spend all its time watching the hours and hours of soap operas it has downloaded into its brain. And it’s a tolerable if somewhat dull life, until the science team that it's currently rented to is attacked and the whole mission goes pear-shaped. Suddenly Murderbot has to scramble to keep its humans alive… while its humans scramble with the realization that their “SecUnit” isn’t actually a mindless robot like they had all believed...

This story is both gripping and hilariously funny. Murderbot has such a unique voice and perspective and it’s an absolute pleasure to follow its story. I reallly need to read the next book...

Asterix and the Banquet

A classic. I was startled when I realized I hadn’t actually read this Asterix story… but hell I’m not gonna complain, it lets me read one of the originals for the first time again! In this Asterix volume, the Indomitable Gauls and the Romans end up arranging a bet — the Romans intend to keep them under siege, trapped in their village, while Asterix is confident that he can easily evade them… and will prove it by going on a tour around all of Gaul, collecting iconic foods from each region in order to return and put on a fine banquet. So we get a fantastic adventure in which Asterix and Obelix run all over the country, pursued the whole way, while making cheerful stops at the various eateries along the way. Also the first book Dogmatix shows up in! All around, a wonderful read, fun like all the best Asterix comics are.

Beauty Pop v4

A less impressive graphic novel. The first Beauty Pop is one of my guilty pleasure manga because… it really is pretty stupid but in the best possible ways. I mean, the whole thing is framed around hairstyling battles, like a shojo sports manga without the sports. It’s bonkers. Unfortunately, the series does not really manage to hold up, and it really begins to feel repetitive and dragging as it continues… as a lot of series like this do. *shrug* Unsurprising but still kinda disappointing I suppose. The building three-way romantic tension is mildly interesting if for no other reason than the main character Does Not Notice and Does Not Care about any of it, which is amusing and refreshing.

FRNCK v5

Now this series only gets better and better as it goes. This is the first book of the second arc, and somehow the danger just seems to be ramping up and up and up. The cavefamily have lost their home… as well as Léonard and Gargouille. Heartbroken, shocked, and angry, Franck is the one who ends up shouldering the blame for their presumed deaths as the others mourn. Things only get worse when Franck finds himself separated from the family, and in the territory of another tribe, this one hostile and cannibalistic...

Haikyuu v5

I continue to read this series because it continues to be charming… though it is beginning to feel, maybe, just a little repetitive. Kind of an inevitability with sports manga. But so far it continues to be good enough to overcome that. I’m not sure what I can say about this series that I haven’t already, so I’ll simply say it continues to be one of the most impressive sports manga I’ve read, and the author does a fantastic job of creating engaging characters, fleshed out teams, and really compelling relationships. I do genuinely adore all the main members of Crows, along with a number of characters from the rival teams as well. And of course it has some kickass volleyball scenes that are just drawn so dramatically they can’t help but take your breath away a little.

M*A*S*H Goes To Maine

Meh. The original book of the series was actually quite good in my opinion. This one… considerably less so. The first part I enjoyed more, since it was about Hawkeye, Trapper, Duke, and Oliver Jones trying to set up the FinestKind Clinic and Fishmarket in Crabapple Cove (which… is just the best premise I could have ever asked for). However, the book spends most of its time describing the quirky lives and times of other people living in the area and I… just… don’t care. It was funny at times but… I just don’t care. I wanted to hear more about the main cast. Also I found this book felt more racist and misogynistic than the first which also put me off :/ Wouldn’t bother if I were you. Go read the first book instead, or better yet just watch the TV show which is an obvious banger.

My Heart’s in the Highlands

I have had this on my “currently reading” list for so long but I’m officially giving up. It’s a really good book in theory but my god I can’t get over the pacing.

It’s about Lady Jane, a woman studying medicine in Edinburgh in 1888, and who suddenly finds herself back in the Highlands in the 13th century. Lost and confused, Jane is now at the mercy Clan Donald’s hospitality while she tries to adjust to this new world and hunts for her broken time machine. Fortunately, this hospitality include a burgeoning friendship with a red-haired warrior woman, Ainslie nic Dòmhnaill, who opens Jane’s eyes to the way the world could be.

Listen. It drives me nuts. This book should be completely up my alley, it has everything I like — IT HAS ALL OF ITS HISTORICAL FOOTNOTES CITED AT THE BACK, LITTLE EXTRA DETAILS ABOUT EVERY CHAPTER. THAT’S MY SHIT RIGHT THERE. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LIKE BEING ABLE TO GO OVER HISTORICAL DETAILS?? AND WELL RESEARCHED FOOTNOTES?? And yet it doesn’t. Fucking. Work for me. It has a kickass Scottish warrior lady as a love interest! It has a badass lady doctor! It has fish-out-of-water culture shock! But it also has a completely meandering plot, no sense of building tension, and a romance that just happens out of nowhere and feels completely unearned and uninteresting.

I would genuinely just rather read Outlander again, which I know has its own host of problems, but at least Outlander felt exciting and interesting and tense and funny. The romance built in fits and starts, it was complicated, and kept me interested. That book had me hooked (and has me hooked every time I reread it) whereas this book I’ve been sadly picking at for months like its a plate of overcooked spinach. This felt like an attempt at a queer, historically accurate knockoff which I would normally be super into but which just could not stick the landing.

Moomin on the Riviera

My first time actually reading anything from the Moomin canon. I have zero idea how to feel about it! It certainly is as feral as I’ve heard described! Overall, I think I enjoyed it but it sure made me feel strange emotions I didn’t know existed. I’m not even going to try to describe it. Read it if you want a batshit insane anti-capitalist comic.

Surviving the City

This was good in some areas, less good in others. It had a very interesting indigenous perspective on life in the modern city, the foster system, and The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women issue, which I’ve never seen handled in a book before. Something about the pacing did not completely click with me and I found myself getting easily distracted, but it’s definitely worth the read just to experience it and look at the issues it deals with through the characters’ (and author’s) eyes. It did give me a lot to think about and wrestle with, which is sometimes the best thing a book can give you.

Torchwood: Pack Animals

A really fun read, more so than I had ever expected! If you like Torchwood and want more stories about the team before everything goes to shit, this is perfect for that. It includes the entire cast, an interest mystery to be unravelled, lots of slavering monsters, Rhys being really wonderful and sweet (which I didn’t know I wanted until I read this book), and all the humour I expect from Torchwood. I had to send a lot of quotes to my long-suffering girlfriend who a) does not watch this show but b) needs to tolerate it because I find it too funny to keep to myself. It was good enough to make me go out another book of the series since this was the only one my library carried.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 13, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, the Census Bureau released information about the 2020 census, designed to enable states to start the process of drawing new lines for their congressional districts, a process known as redistricting.

Because of that very limited intent for this particular information dump, the picture the material gives is a very specific one. The specificity of that information echoes the political history that in the 1920s began to skew our Congress to give rural white voters disproportionate power. It also reinforces a vision of America divided by race: precisely the vision that former president Trump and his supporters want Americans to believe.

The U.S. Constitution requires that the government count the number of people in the country every ten years so that lawmakers can divide up the representation in Congress, which is apportioned according to population in the House of Representatives. (The Senate is by state: each state gets two senators.)

This matters not just for the relative weight of voices in lawmaking in the House, but also because of our Electoral College. The Electoral College is how we elect the U.S. president. Each state gets the number of electors that is equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. So, if your state has 10 representatives and 2 senators, it would have 12 presidential electors.

Censuses are never 100% accurate. It’s hard to count people, especially if they don’t want to be counted. Censuses also are inherently political, since a corrupt president will not want an accurate count: they will want areas that support their party to be overcounted, while areas that support the opposite party to be undercounted.

The 1890 census is a famous example of both of these problems. Indigenous Americans who were eager to avoid the observance of the federal government out of concern for their lives moved around to avoid being counted. The process itself was notoriously corrupt because in 1889 and 1890, the Republican Party had forced the admission of six new western states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming—that supported the Republicans, and had insisted that the new census would show enough people there to warrant statehood. So they were eager to find lots and lots of people in those new states but very few in the populous territories of Arizona and New Mexico, which they knew would vote Democratic. (I would love to write a whole post about the 1890 census, but I will spare you.)

Today, because of the pandemic, the results of the 2020 census have been delayed, and states are already behind in their schedules to redistrict for the upcoming 2022 election. (I know, I know, but it really is right over the horizon. Some states are already thinking about moving their primary elections because there’s not enough time to redistrict before them.) So yesterday, the Census Bureau released the information states need to begin that process. It released its record of the number of people living in each state and U.S. territory.

But in addition to needing to know the actual numbers of the count, state lawmakers need to know the racial makeup of their states, since there are federal rules about making sure minority votes aren’t silenced in redistricting by, for example, splitting a minority vote into small enough groups among districts that minorities essentially don’t have a voice (this is called “cracking”), or concentrating members of one group into a single district, so they are underrepresented at the state level (this is called “packing”).

So the material that came out yesterday was not the entire information from the census; it was just the material states need for redistricting.

It shows how many people there are living in America today. Population shifts mean that Montana, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida all picked up a seat, while Texas picked up two. Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, California, and West Virginia all lost one. Within those states, cities have grown and rural counties have lost people. For the first time in our history, all ten of the country’s largest cities now have more than a million people in them.

The material released yesterday also shows the nation’s racial makeup. That information is confusing, as all self-identification on a form can be. It says that America’s white population has dropped significantly since 2010. According to the census, people who identify as white now make up 58% of the population while just ten years ago they made up 64%. But the census also shows that people who self-identify as a mixture of races has skyrocketed, climbing from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. It seems likely that some of the drop in self-identification as white is due to people identifying themselves differently than they have in the past.

Urbanization and multiculturalism are not new to our history, and their appearance in the census led lawmakers to create an imbalance in our government in the 1920s. The Constitution says that a state can’t have a representative for fewer than 30,000 people, but it doesn’t say anything about an upper limit of constituents represented by a single representative. In 1912, when the country had 92 million people, the House had grown to 435 members.

But the 1920 census showed that more Americans lived in cities than in the country, at the same time that white Americans were all tied up in knots that those new urban dwellers were Black Americans and immigrants from southern and central Europe and Asia. Aware that continuing to allow more representatives for these growing numbers of Americans meant that the weight of representation would move away from rural white Americans and toward immigrants in cities, lawmakers refused to continue increasing the number of seats in the House. (They also passed the 1924 Immigration Act, which set quotas on how many people from each country could come to America.)

In 1929, lawmakers froze the number of representatives at 435 voting members of the House. While this number would bounce around as new states came in, for example, it has once again settled as the number of voting representatives today, when our population is 331 million.

That cap means that the size of the average congressional district is now 711,000 people, a number that is far higher than the framers intended and that favors smaller, more rural, whiter states in the House of Representatives. It also favors those states in the Electoral College, where they have more weight proportionately than they would if the House had continued to grow.

By identifying everyone by race—as it needed to, for redistricting purposes—yesterday’s census material also engages what sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields have called “racecraft,” which, by artificially dividing people along racial lines, reinforces the idea of race as the most important thing in society. Yesterday’s material does not mention, for example, income or wealth, which are not explicitly factored in when redistricting but which the last census material released on that topic suggested are at least as divisive as race.

The idea that race is paramount is, of course, the theory that the right wing would like Americans to believe, and the idea that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color and Black Americans falls right into the right-wing argument that minorities are “replacing” white Americans.

For a century now, the machinery of redistricting has favored rural whites. With the 2020 census information reinforcing the idea that white, rural Americans are under siege, it seems unlikely that lawmakers in Republican states will want to rebalance the system.

But it seems equally unlikely that an increasingly urbanizing, multicultural nation will continue to accept being governed by an ever-smaller white, rural minority.

—-

Notes:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/12/redistricting-census-data-503994

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/08/10/census-race-population-changes-redistricting/

https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/567360-white-population-declines-for-first-time-in-us

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/55/why-435/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/12/politics/us-census-2020-data/index.html

​​https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/coloring-outside-the-lines/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[theloreofwhatilove]

Joaquin Phoenix Speeches 2020

BAFTAs:

I feel very honoured and privileged to be here tonight. The BAFTAs have always been very supportive of my career and I'm deeply appreciative. But I have to say that I also feel conflicted because so many of my fellow actors that are deserving don't have that same privilege.  

I think that we send a very clear message to people of colour: that you're not welcome here. I think that's the message that we're sending to people that have contributed so much to our medium and our industry and in ways that we benefit from.

I don't think anybody wants a handout or preferential treatment, although that's what we give ourselves every year. I think that people just want to be acknowledged and appreciated and respected for their work.

This is not a self-righteous condemnation because I'm ashamed to say that I'm part of the problem. I have not done everything in my power to ensure that the sets I work on are inclusive. But I think that it's more than just having sets that are multicultural. I think that we have to really do the hard work to truly understand systemic racism.

I think that it is the obligation of the people that have created and perpetuate and benefit from a system of oppression to be the ones that dismantle it. So that's on us.  

Thank you.

SAG:

When I started acting again and going to auditions and getting the final callback, I think many people know what that’s like. And there would be these two other guys that I’d be up against. And we’d always lost to this one kid. No actor would ever say his name because it was too much, but every casting director would whisper “it’s Leonardo, it’s Leonardo”.

Who is this Leonardo? Leo, you’ve been an inspiration to me for the last 25 years. I thank you very very much.

Christian, you commit to your roles in ways that I can only dream of. You never turn in a bad performance. It’s infuriating. I wish you would. Just one time. Just suck once, that’d be great.

Adam, I’ve been watching you the last few years and you0ve just been turning these beautiful, nuanced, incredible, profound performances. I am just so moved by you. You were just devastating in [The Marriage Story] and you should be here.

Taron, where are you? I am so happy for you, wherever you are. Hey. Hey, man. You are so beautiful in this movie and I am so happy for you. And I can’t wait to see what else you do.

And really, I’m standing here on the shoulders of my favorite actor, Heath Ledger.

Golden Globes:

First, I’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press, um, for recognizing and acknowledging the link between animal agriculture and climate change. It’s a very bold move making tonight plant-based, and it really sends a powerful message.

We all know there's no fucking competition between us...I'm inspired by you, I'm your fucking student.

I know people say this but I really do feel honored to be mentioned with you. Some of you I reached out to personally. Some I’m still a little too intimidated by, even though we share the same agent. Hi, Christian (Bale). Uh, you’re not here.

Contrary to popular belief, I don't like to rock the boat, but the boat needs to be fucking rocked. It’s really nice that so many people have come up and sent their well wishes to Australia - but we gotta do better that that. Hopefully we can be unified and actually make some changes. It’s great to vote but sometimes we need to take that responsibility within ourselves. Make changes and sacrifices in our own lives. We don’t have to take private jets to Palm Springs and back, please. I will try to do better and I hope you will too.

Oscars (The Academy):

I’m full of so much gratitude right now. I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees, or anyone in this room, because we share the same love: The love of film. And this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know what I’d be without it.

But I think the greatest gift that its given me and many of us in this room is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively and I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality.

I think whether we’re talking about gender and equality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.

I think that we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. And many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric world view: the belief that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.

And I think we fear the idea of personal change, because we think we have to sacrifice something, to give something up. But human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious. And I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.

Now, I have been a scoundrel in my life. I have been a scoundrel, I’ve been selfish, I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with and ungrateful. But so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. And I think that’s when we’re at our best: When we support each other, not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes, but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other, when we guide each other toward redemption. That is the best of humanity.

I just... I want to... when he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric: He said “run to the rescue with love and peace will follow”.

Thank you.

[jodjuya]

In an anarcho-syndicalist kind of way, GA will be tightly linked in with racial equality rights, indigenous rights, child rights, elderly rights, disability rights, mad rights (aka psychiatric rights), worker's rights, "eco rights" (or whatever the word is for ecosystem preservation and climate catastrophe activism), animal rights, hacker rights, artificial-intelligence rights and cyber rights (again, for future-proofing), military veteran rights, refugee rights (both the ones we've got right now, plus future-proofing in the sense of the phenomenal waves of climate disaster refugees to come), anti-natal rights (more future-proofing), criminal rights, and so on and so forth...

Big-time intersectionality. Big time. With every framework giving and taking influence from every other framework, when and where appropriate, because, like, fucken obviously, why would you do literally anything other than that?

As "The Lego Movie" taught us: Everything Is Awesome, Everything Is Cool When You're Part Of A Team! Everything Is Better, When We Stick Together!

Because i can guarantee you that at some point in the Very Dramatic future of our species there will eventually come a time when an elderly trans woman loses her job at an animal shelter,

because she hacked her implants to get rid of their advertisements,

but her crack also accidentally breached the Sentience Containment Protocols,

which then allowed the 'Sponsored By Pepsi' AI in her artificial left arm to develop self-awareness,

become radically vegan,

inject itself into the not-yet-self-aware but un-contained 'Sponsored By Pepsi' AI of her artificial left eye (also vulnerable because of the misconfigured adblocker crack) in an effort to force the women to stop performing dog euthanasia procedures,

and then developing a schism with itself, budding off like amoeba into two properly different and separate entities:

the one in her arm, which remained anti-euthanasia; and the other one in her eye, which switched back to pro-euthanasia,

because there were some very important justifications for this particular woman's engagement within the paid labour force, generalised along the lines of "the population of dogs is detrimentally high" plus "this is a desperately needed source of biomass; every dog that comes through this facility is 100% recycled"

~~ deep breath ~~

and so then this whole mess ends up before a tribunal to sort out,

because by that level of self-awareness the women couldn't just wipe her firmware to reinstall everything (and then redo the crack properly) without significant legal/corporate punishment...

...

and it's just like, you know, it would just be pretty dang nice to have a single robust framework on hand to lean on in this mess to be able to figure out what the fuck to do about any of it without accidentally fixating on any one particular angle of the issue to the detriment of any or all of the other angles, wouldn't you say?

Because the AIs have their whole thing to deal with and that's one of the issues at hand,

but also this woman needs her implants back in order to be able to live her life,

but also also part of being able to live her life is her employment,

but also also also the corporate sponsor is mad at her over this,

but also also also also she's elderly and transgender and transhuman (and she's transhuman because of whichever particular traumatic experience she went through in her childhood proximity to violent conflicts and/or natural disasters), and so on and so worth with all the other possible things of relevance there are to this poor woman's kerfuffle...

I think I'm no longer a feminist.

Now I'm a gender abolitionist. I don't know if that's the word for the thing I am, but that's what feels like the right name. Something to investigate...

It's not about discarding and disavowing feminism, but rather, taking the stance that feminism is the giant upon whose shoulders we are standing, and it's come time to work together to build a new thing as feminism itself did to the suffragettes.

[I think I'll find a lot of groundwork for this new thing in anarcho-feminism, so that's something else for me to go investigate.]

Gender Abolitionism, henceforth "GA", is what it says on the tin, in the sense of focusing on improving people's lives when problems are caused by their gender, regardless of their gender.

The long and short of it is that it's a bundling together of feminism, queer rights, trans rights, men's liberation, and transhumanism (for future-proofing) with the aims and ambitions of all those movements amalgamated and unified and everything as hard LibLeft as possible.

I'm not going to dignify their eventual outcry by preemptively addressesing any criticisms of GA i could imagine from reactionary crybabies and their shitty hot-takes made in the absolute worst faith possible. Not worth my time, blood pressure, serenity, or effort. But the long and short of it would be an affirmation that, no, we're not here just to be Negative Nancy over a bunch of made up nonsenses that aren't even real issues, and we're certainly not trying to "ban gender" or whatever the fuck.

No, we're actually here because everyone will have a much nicer time in their lives if they just stop allowing the concept of gender to cause so dang many problems in the world...

We're here, that is to say, because Gender Abolitionism is fun. Much more fun than the alternatives, at least.

Don't get me wrong, GA is still dignified and serious and sensible work, of course!

but it never stops seeking the positive, never stops centering and celebrating hope and love and dignity and connectedness and sexiness and all the other joys of a life well-lived. Yelling at people "just for believing in gender" isn't what we're here to do.

"IF I CAN'T DANCE... I DON'T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION"

as Emma Goldman didn't say.

[newstfionline]

Monday, May 3, 2021

Global coronavirus cases are surging, driven by India and South America (NYT) The number of new daily cases has exceeded 800,000 for more than a week. The spike is largely driven by the outbreak in India, which now accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s new cases. The U.S. plans to halt travel for non-U.S. citizens from India starting Tuesday. Vaccines in India are running short, hospitals are swamped and cremation grounds are burning thousands of bodies every day. Health experts and political analysts say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overconfidence and domineering leadership style bear a huge share of the responsibility for the crisis. Meanwhile, Indians living abroad are frantically seeking to help sick relatives. Much of South America is also faring poorly. Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Colombia all rank among the 20 nations with the highest number of Covid deaths per capita.

Elderly statesman? (NYT) Arnold Schwarzenegger left the California governor’s mansion 10 years ago. He is a more popular political figure today than when he was elected. Over the past year, the former Republican governor, now 73, has been in demand, embracing an unlikely role that he describes as “elderly statesman.” He’s made public service announcements on hand washing, raised millions of dollars for protective health gear and is now being sought out for guidance on the Republican-led effort to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, the same mechanism that led to Schwarzenegger’s election in 2003. “When you leave office, you realize—well, I realized—that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said in a three-hour interview.

Looming showdown as Michigan governor orders Canadian pipeline shut down (Washington Post) For Michigan’s governor, the 645-mile pipeline jeopardizes the Great Lakes. For Canada’s natural resources minister, its continued operation is “nonnegotiable.” The clash over Calgary-based Enbridge’s Line 5, which carries up to 540,000 barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids across Michigan and under the Great Lakes each day, is placing stress on U.S.-Canada ties. In a move applauded by environmentalists and Indigenous groups on both sides of the border, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in November ordered the firm to shut down the nearly 70-year-old lines by May 12. Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have appealed to their American counterparts, including President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for help. Joe Comartin, Canada’s consul general in Detroit, said a shutdown would have “significant” impacts on both sides of the border. He predicted effects ranging from months-long propane shortages to higher costs for consumers to fuels being carried by rail, truck or boat—methods that he said are less emissions-friendly and more dangerous than a pipeline. One “irritant,” he said, is “the claim from the state that they are doing this to protect the Great Lakes, that they’re more interested in protecting the Great Lakes than we in Canada are. Basically, we reject that completely.”

NYC Eyes Reopening (Bloomberg) New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday the city would aim to fully reopen July 1, lifting restrictions on restaurants, gyms, and all other businesses. A return to normal would mark a symbolic moment for both New Yorkers and the country—America's most populous city was a global epicenter early in the pandemic, registering an average of 800 deaths per day last April. The city is averaging roughly 1,700 new cases per day, down 70% since January, reporting about 30 deaths per day.

Kissinger warns of ‘colossal’ dangers in US-China tensions (AFP) Acclaimed diplomat Henry Kissinger said Friday that US-China tensions threaten to engulf the entire world and could lead to an Armageddon-like clash between the two military and technology giants. The 97-year-old former US secretary of state, who as an advisor to president Richard Nixon crafted the 1971 unfreezing of relations between Washington and Beijing, said the mix of economic, military and technological strengths of the two superpowers carried more risks than the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Strains with China are “the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world,” Kissinger told the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum on global issues. “Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.” While nuclear weapons were already large enough to damage the entire globe during the Cold War, he said advances in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence—where China and the United States are both leaders—have multiplied the doomsday threat. “For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time,” Kissinger said.

Thousands march in Colombia in fourth day of protests against tax plan (Reuters) Thousands of Colombians took to the streets on Saturday for International Workers’ Day marches and protests against a government tax reform proposal, in a fourth day of demonstrations that have resulted in at least four deaths. Unions and other groups kicked off marches on Wednesday to demand the government of President Ivan Duque withdraw the reform proposal, which originally leveled sales tax on public services and some food. Cali, the country’s third-largest city, has seen the most vociferous marches, some looting and at least three deaths connected to the demonstrations.

Europe’s economy shrinks amid slow vaccine rollouts and lockdowns (Washington Post) With swaths of Europe still under lockdown restrictions and facing a stuttering vaccination rollout, the region’s economy slid into a double-dip recession in the first quarter of the year, in contrast to a rosy outlook in the United States. The European economy shrank by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of the year, according to data released Friday. The U.S. economy grew by 1.6 percent over the same period, amid massive federal stimulus spending and a speedy vaccination rollout. Export-dependent Germany, which had already been heading toward recession before the pandemic as manufacturing dropped off, saw its economy shrink by 1.7 percent, the most in Europe. The economies of Spain, Italy and Portugal also contracted. Much of Europe is battling a third wave of coronavirus infections. Germany has a nighttime curfew in place in 15 of its 16 states, and shopping requires booking appointments and getting a negative test.

Dozens of German police injured in May Day riots (AP) At least 93 police officers were injured and 354 protesters were detained after traditional May Day rallies in Berlin turned violent, Berlin’s top security official said Sunday. More than 20 different rallies took place in the German capital on Saturday and the vast majority of them were peaceful. However, a leftist march of 8,000 people through the city’s Neukoelln and Kreuzberg neighborhood, which has often seen clashes in past decades, turned violent. Protesters threw bottles and rocks at officers, and burned garbage containers and wooden pallets in the streets. There’s a nightly curfew in most parts of Germany currently because of the high number of coronavirus infections. But political protests and religious gatherings are exempt from the curfew.

Big Myanmar protests aim to ‘shake the world’; seven killed (Reuters) Myanmar security forces opened fire on some of the biggest protests against military rule in days, killing at least seven people on Sunday, media reported, three months after a coup plunged the country into crisis. The protests, after a spell of dwindling crowds and what appeared to be more restraint by the security forces, were coordinated with demonstrations in Myanmar communities around the world to mark what organisers called “the global Myanmar spring revolution”. Streams of demonstrators, some led by Buddhist monks, made their way through cities and towns including the commercial hub of Yangon. The protests are only one of the problems the generals have brought on with their Feb. 1 ouster of the elected government. Wars with ethnic minority insurgents in remote frontier regions in the north and east have intensified significantly over the past three months, displacing tens of thousands of civilians, according to U.N. estimates. In some places, civilians with crude weapons have battled security forces while in central areas military and government facilities that have been secure for generations have been hit by rocket attacks and a wave of small, unexplained blasts.

Vaccinated faithful throng Jerusalem church for Holy Fire (AP) Hundreds of Christian worshippers made use of Israel’s easing of coronavirus restrictions Saturday, packing a Jerusalem church revered as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection for an ancient fire ceremony a day before Orthodox Easter. The faithful gathered at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, waiting for clergymen to emerge with the Holy Fire from the Edicule, a chamber built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after being crucified. As bells rang and the top clerics from different Orthodox denominations appeared, the worshippers scrambled to light their candles and pass the fire on. Within a minute, the imposing walls of the old church glowed.

Israel asks whether autonomy of the ultra-Orthodox contributed to the deadly stampede (Washington Post) Israel’s ultra-Orthodox residents exist in a world within the world, citizens of Israel but pledging their allegiance, attention and obedience instead to their rabbis and God. In isolated enclaves, they are exempt from the military draft, outside the national school system and—in apartments usually without Internet or television—largely oblivious to the surrounding culture. Now, this shocked country is asking whether that self-segregation—and the secular politicians who have enabled it for decades—is responsible for the worst civilian catastrophe in Israel’s history, the trampling death of 45 ultra-Orthodox men and boys at a massively overcrowded religious festival in the early hours of the morning Friday. The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim as they are known in Israel, follow some of the most conservative tenets in Judaism and have a lifestyle based on the Jewish culture that evolved hundreds of years ago in the communities of Eastern Europe. Since Israel’s founding, state leaders have sought preserve this culture after much of it was devastated during World War II.      When more than 100,000 members of the Haredim convened for a boisterous annual festival at an ancient rabbi’s tomb on Mount Meron, they overflowed a narrow, sloped compound known to both government and religious leaders as a potentially dangerous setting. Sunday, as the final victims were being buried and flags around the country flew at half-mast in a national day of mourning, multiple investigations were getting underway that will target police planning, local regulators, site managers and national ministries with responsibility for oversight. Already, journalists and whistleblowers have unearthed a shocking paper trail of warnings ignored, recommendations overruled and absent supervision. Officials have been called to account for meetings in recent weeks in which specific recommendations from health and safety authorities were overruled at the behest of Haredi groups.

[kentuckywrites]

Brainjack: Loud Silence (Part 1)

So @heroicmeep has been writing @deltheor ‘s Sydney’s Brainjack tyrant arc for a while (which is an AMAZING read) and I recently got inspired to write something based off its events.  However, that something grew into twenty four pages where “Pongo” got somewhat involved in things...needless to say, I went OVERBOARD. So this will be two parts long - it was a fun little ride, and now I have feelings.

It felt weird having his comm device turned off. Vandham had given him the all clear to do so - well, actually, he’d taken it out of Pongo’s hands and shut it down himself after he granted Pongo time to take a vacation. Pongo didn’t exactly want a vacation, but Secretary Nagi had gotten wind of how hard he was working and had told him in the most polite terms possible that he was taking a break whether he liked it or not. Pongo hadn’t been given much room to argue.

So halfway through his vacation Pongo flew his Skell over to Oblivia, to the Floating Reef to the far east. He’d packed himself a nice lunch to enjoy while looking out over the continent, and for once he was looking forward to the peace and quiet. It wasn’t that Pongo didn’t enjoy human interaction, but lately his missions with other BLADEs had come with little inconveniences, little mishaps that he had to solve. Broken comm devices, Skells out of gas, teammates arguing, battle tactics thrown to the wind. They all built up after a while. As Pongo exited his Skell, he realized that maybe being forced onto a vacation wasn’t a bad thing after all. 

His plan for vacation had been to explore the continents on his own, get some time alone with his thoughts. He’d packed enough coffee and extra rations to last him a week, maybe a little longer. Pongo knew enough about Mira’s ecosystem that he’d be able to hunt down and scavenge for some food, making good use of the knife Irina had lent him. The blade still felt awkward in his hands, and he preferred using traps whenever possible, but he couldn’t exactly avoid using it. He still had his photon saber and dual guns if things went wrong. Surprisingly, he hadn’t gotten into any dangerous altercations with indigens or Ganglion during his vacation, and he hoped it stayed that way.

Pongo sat down at the edge of the Floating Reef, setting down his lunch to the side. It was a rare day where Oblivia was shrouded under a layer of clouds, a threat of storms and lightning. He breathed in the Oblivia air, a mixture of moisture and sandy desert metals. If only he could sit here forever, taking in the sights and smells. It was calming in a way he could never admit out loud. He’d be forced on more vacations if he confessed his desires. 

The moment Pongo decided to open up his lunch, his stomach lurched. A rumble pierced his ears and he looked up quickly at the horizon. Was that the beginnings of the electrical storm in the west? That was what he thought, at first, but when he saw no traces of lightning he scowled. His hands pressed into the dry desert ground, rocks imprinting into his palms. He watched with a close eye to see if the horizon would change.

Pongo.

Mira spoke, a whisper that was both distant and too close for comfort. He spoke out loud in response, for there was no one else around to hear his monologuing.

“Mira? Are you alright?”

Something is wrong. I feel their confusion and pain in Caul-dron’avos. They are scared, but why?

Pongo knew Mira was referring to the indigens in Cauldros. “Is something attacking them?”

No, not attacking. But...I think something is there. Something unnatural. 

“The Ganglion?”

No, they have existed in Caul-dron’avos long enough for me to consider them natural. This is artificial in nature, but...I believe this stems from a human presence. 

“A human?” Pongo said, rubbing his chin. His hand lifted sand up from the ground and deposited it on his chin and on his lap, but he paid no mind to it. “Is someone going around and killing indigens?”

No one is dying. But there are many humans there, and they seem...subdued by something. Controlled, almost. 

“Controlled...what in the name of everything living…”

I guess I should have expected you to be just as confused. You are being forced on a vacation, after all, so it is only natural for you to be ignorant of everything happening around you.

“That is not fair!” Pongo cried, “But you have me curious. Perhaps I should go to Cauldros to investigate?”

That might put you in danger.

“Nice to see you caring about me! I can handle myself out there.”

Am I not allowed to care about my vessel despite him being overwritten by a childish and naive personality who has no sense of self preservation?

Pongo chuckled to himself. “Love you too, Mira. Let me know if anything changes out there. I will investigate after I eat.”

Are you telling me you are prioritizing your lunch over rushing headfirst into danger?

“You just called me out on my lack of self preservation, so yes.”

Fuck you. Eat quickly.

Pongo couldn’t help but smirk as he unrolled the wrapping around his sandwich, but deep down he was still shaken about Mira’s warning. What had happened in Cauldros? Were people really being controlled by something, like Mira theorized? He had picked up on the fear in Mira’s voice, almost hidden by its monotonous whisper, and now that same fear was taking root within him. If there were people in danger, he was going to help, vacation be damned. He wouldn’t let Vandham chew him out for this. 

In a few quick minutes Pongo scarfed down the food he’d brought and hopped back into his Skell. Eros’s engines purred as he booted up the flight module, setting course for Cauldros. It would be a long flight over a vast ocean, hardly scenic. Pongo could cut the tension in his cockpit with his knife, and after a few minutes of peaceful flight, he turned on Eros’s radio. The station that came on liked to play Earth music, songs considered classics, old but not forgotten. He recognized the one that came on - IRIS, by the Goo Goo Dolls. What a funny band name. He lost himself to the music for the entire flight to Cauldros, the sky around him shifting into darkness. 

When Pongo finally saw Cauldros on the horizon, he tried to look for any indication that something was wrong. But from the surface, everything was as it should have been. He pushed Eros’s thrusters to go faster, on a direct path to the Adder Byroad. Flying in from the southeast wasn’t the safest way into Cauldros; the sky was always littered with Ganglion Skells patrolling the continent. But he’d had good luck flying past them before. He knew the openings in their defenses.

And so he snuck past, landing in a secluded part of the Byroad. He opened up his cockpit, his nose shriveling up when he smelled the metallic heat of Cauldros. It had been a while since he’d been to Cauldros, and looking upon its barren and lava-filled landscape, it wasn’t hard to remember why. Too many indigens thrived here for his comfort, too many evil schemes, too many disturbing memories. He shivered as his feet hit the ground, his skin tingling under his vest. The heat had never bothered him, but the memories always would.

Pongo double checked his gear before beginning his surveillance, keeping an eye out for any other humans. Everything seemed quiet, but as Pongo kept walking, he discovered things were too quiet. He had at least expected some gerrids on the Byroad, but it was just him. Just Pongo.

...No. No, it wasn’t just him. Something else was here.

He could feel it, but couldn’t see it. Something pressing inside his mind, an oppressive and shadowed force. It felt similar to Mira’s presence, but this wasn’t Mira trying to control him. This was...could it be a Ganglion? A new indigen? Another human? Whatever it was, he could feel its mind crawling around in his own, tiny spiders invading his brain. Pongo clutched his head as the spiders started to bite, pain coursing through his body. He fell to his knees, gritting his teeth, doing everything in his power not to scream, not to draw attention to himself. 

Mira’s voice broke through the pain.

I know what this is. You cannot fight this. You need to give me control.

Its tone was dark, laced with a poisonous rage. Pongo had no choice but to let go, and his vision went white.

~

Mira opened his eyes, letting go of his head and standing himself up. The pain was residing now that Pongo had given him control, and Mira prepared himself to explain.

That was an Art. Brainjack.

Pongo began, his voice an echo inside Mira’s mind. It felt strange to have the roles reversed, for the physical body to belong to Mira instead of Pongo, for Pongo’s voice to be guiding Mira instead of the other way around.

“Yes. If I remember correctly, it can be used by humans who wield knives.” Mira’s voice sounded almost exactly like Pongo’s now that he was in control, but there was still an echo in this form, an otherworldly and commanding force. “You were Brainjacked once. I had to save you. Remember?”

I remember something like that happening. I was having coffee. The man who Brainjacked me...his name was Sydney.

“Right. He got fairly angry that I wiped his attempt from your memory.”

You did WHAT -

“Believe me, you did NOT want to remember what he did to us. Besides, your absolutely childish optimism shut him up quickly afterwards.”

Pongo was quiet for a moment, and Mira took that as a cue to walk, his hand dangling close to his photon saber. 

He said he Brainjacked me because he was bored. I always thought Brainjack only worked on indigens, but...Mira, do you think that he is the one who tried to Brainjack me just then?

Mira’s lips pursed. “I do not want to ignore that possibility, but I do not think Brainjack has that large of a range.”

You are right, its range is fairly small. But you said it felt like a lot of things were being controlled, right?

“...this does not feel right. Hopefully we stumble across a human soon so we can ask what is going on.”

You will maintain control through it all? Are you sure?

Mira rolled his eyes. “Either that or you get immediately Brainjacked the moment you regain control. Best you stay inside for a while.”

Alright. I trust you.

“Like you have a choice,” Mira joked, but when Pongo didn’t respond, he assumed he’d hit a nerve and sighed. He walked on, making a mental note of where Pongo had parked his Skell as he trekked farther into the continent.

With such a high surveillance point, Mira could eventually see other humans in the distance, some clumped together into groups, others traversing the land solo. All of them had weapons drawn. Some of them sparked memories in Mira’s mind - were they friends of Pongo? Had they gone on missions before?

There! We should try and talk to those people down there. Maybe they can tell us what is going on!

Pongo sounded excited, relieved in a way. Mira rolled his eyes, letting one of his hands rest on the hilt of his photon saber. He would’ve preferred if Pongo brought his dual swords instead, but then again, it wasn’t as if Pongo had prepared for any of this.

“Are you an idiot? That is too dangerous,” Mira hissed, “If something tried to Brainjack you before, then it likely tried to Brainjack those humans too. I bet that is why I sensed something off before. They are being controlled by something...someone.”

Controlled by another human, or at least a humanoid who can wield a knife and has been registered with BLADE. No civilians can access Arts.

“What about the Ganglion? Do they have Arts like you do?”

I am not sure. They have their own technology and method of weapon creation, but in my experience, they have nothing like Brainjack. I can only think of one other creature on the planet that can control humans, but -

“The Wanderer-King resides in Noctilum,” Mira finished, “And as far as I can discern, he is still there.”

Right. He hardly ever leaves his cave.

In the midst of their conversation, Mira had failed to notice that the humans down below had spotted him, and were approaching with their guns and melee weapons pointed at him. When he snapped back into reality and saw the humans coming his way, he grit his teeth. 

“Pong’netai-opta, LOOK. Do they look like they harbor good intent?”

Mira drew the photon saber at his side, the blade igniting under his grasp. It hit him that he had only a small grasp of human fighting styles; he knew Arts existed, what some weapons provided in terms of resistance and buffs, but the bar on his hilt labeled TP had almost no meaning to him. He had no time to ask Pongo about it, because when the humans descended upon him, they were quick to act. 

The first human to strike held a javelin between her auburn hands, and when the tip of the blade thrust forward it crackled with colorful electricity, reds and blacks intertwined in twisted harmony. Mira twisted his body to dodge it and immediately put up his photon saber to block the longsword that had attempted to strike him down at the same time as the javelin. He ducked and ran to an open spot to regain his bearings before pressing one of the Arts on the photon saber’s hilt. He cast the blade down in a brilliant show of sea green energy, wisps of light trailing behind and floating around his body, unconscious supports. He managed to hit the longsword user in the shoulder, a well dressed man with sunglasses dark enough to hide his eyes, but it was not a success to be proud of. From Mira’s backside he caught another photon saber wielder activate an Art and run forward, launching his body into a series of front flips, his saber inches away from hitting Mira. He grit his teeth as he stumbled backwards, and yelped when a bullet hit him in the upper arm. Three melee fighters, two ranged maintaining their distance. Mira shook his head. He could take them down, he just had to focus.

The girl with the javelin propelled herself forward by jamming her javelin into the ground and pushing to aim a kick at Mira. She’d taken too long to set herself up and Mira could predict where to go to dodge it and knock her off balance, and he did exactly that. She tumbled to the ground, and when she got herself back up, Mira saw out of the corner of his eye that her gaze was burning red, a strange symbol within her iris. 

Mira, stop!! That is my friend, Aeviann! 

“They are not your friends right now,” Mira said, nearly dodging another swing from the longsword user. A name popped up from Pongo’s memory - Draco - and Mira had to step back in a defensive posture. 

“Stop trying to regain control! You will jeopardize us both!!”

I will not let you hurt them!

A swing, a hit, someone was bleeding now and it wasn’t Mira. Time became irrelevant and he could only feel the hilt of the photon saber in his hand, how it finally connected with its targets, how the dark landscape of Caul-dron’avos was being stained with blue. There was something beautiful about Mira’s rage in that moment, something freeing. He had wanted revenge against the humans not long ago for their savage destruction of his ecosystems, and they’d proven themselves worthy, but some resentment lingered behind. He swung and hit with everything his body had left, but with every hit, his grip on the body kept slipping.

MIRA!! STOP!!

“And just give up?! They would kill us if we stopped defending ourselves,” Mira yelled, realizing just how long the fight had been dragging on, realizing that Pongo was close to regaining control. “Just shut up and let me -”

Mira screamed suddenly as his inner conscious was ripped apart. Pongo was too close to returning to the body, and whoever was Brainjacking these humans was close to taking Pongo’s mind too. Mira had to use the last bit of his strength to stay in control, almost ignoring his surroundings to keep Pongo at bay. But in the end, all he could do was watch Pongo’s mind slip to the front, and the pain erupted tenfold. Mira held on for dear life trying to stop Pongo from being Brainjacked, and through a lens he watched Pongo drop his saber, take every hit that came to him, pleading with his former friends to remember him, to break free of their binds, to remember themselves. 

Of course it didn’t work. 

Pongo took too many hits in the end and the poor body collapsed, and in Pongo’s mind, Mira spat a final curse before their vision went dark.

[ireddeadredemption2pc-blog]

Red Dead Redemption 2 PC

Red Dead Redemption2 PC

The old west feels brand new again.

Oh Jesus Christ, what have you done? “Thomaschen 978 wants to know why a dozen carcasses and a couple of horse corpses are placed on rail tracks bordering the early industrial city and are the New Orleans stand-in St. Denis.” You killed half. village.” PC Games For Free

We are on round two of the recurring corpse pile. My poses got the idea to jump in front of the train after a few rounds of Lose Your Friends and Toss Them in the Sea in the Couple Friendly Strangers. Like GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2 has its own bowling minima, we explain to Chen in a roundabout way that provokes his fear. Die in the shared open world of Red Dead Redemption 2 and you’ll react fast enough to move your corpse around. Best RPGs games pc

The boy is in line with us. We should make it bigger. As the train comes around again, another pose tries to take us out. The chain defends us but does not bring it back to the tracks. He goes away screaming. Death of a true warrior.

Red Dead Redemption 2 could be the biggest, most humble videogame ball pit for an annoying story about impulsive children, the forced disintegration of the community, or simply a quiet and reflective hiking simulator. It’s just about what you need it to be, and it’s good at it.

Just hours before the corpse-bowling, I was alone through the icy forests, stepping into the long shadow cast across the snow by the rising moon. I heard a gunshot from a distance. The tracks of some wolves marked snow in the same direction. I saw them who won. Anytime I pay attention and look closely, RDR2 is the result of my curiosity. Best Racing games on pc

The mind-numbing expanse that makes up the vast world of RDR2 speaks to the creative force of a development team with an intense, obsessive dedication to realism (and all the money and time needed to do so). Like how my friends’ characters flare up when I fire a gun at them, how animal carcasses disintegrate over time, how NPCs react according to a sloppy or bloody outfit, how to stir through a doorway. Scares everyone everywhere.

It is hard to believe that RDR2 is so deep and wide and is also a harmonious, playable thing. I was already playing it for days worth the console version. This is why I am particularly disappointed that it ended up on the PC to some extent.

For every non-taught multiplayer adventure, disconnect or crash on the desktop, desktop. The rock star’s best storyline and character so far has been filmed through Frame Hutches’ slideshow and addressed over the launch weekend.

RDR2, one of the best Western games and one of the best open-world games I have ever released with enough stability issues, is recommended for the hard way until everything is completely smooth.

Morgan trail

EVERY PRETTY VISTA IS SOMETHING TO LOSE THROUGH ARTHUR’S EYES.

The story genre of Red Dead Redemption 2 follows the dying days of the Wild West. The sprawling industrial world faced the bandits and social downtrodden of Arthur Morgan’s small band, an imperfect but loyal, loving and self-reliant community.

Capitalism is reducing its value as resources to humans. Indigenous USA America is driven from the plains to make way for ‘civilization’ and commerce. The forests are brought down for timber, the hills are cut down for coal, and Morgan’s chosen family is caught in the middle, forced to flee, assimilate, or respond with violent protests is done. They do all three.

This is Rockstar’s most serious drama, and it’s really, really long. If you are running, the story ends after 40 to 50 hours and then continues for 10 to 15. The main story missions of Red Dead 2 feature distinctly rockstar fare: ride to a destination that is talking to everyone, tightly scripting though, entertaining things, riding, and chatting to the final destination.

Missions are often thrilling action sequences or artificially mundane pictures of wrench labor and trade, full of long-winded Bespoke animations, and outstanding performances. They are only hopelessly harsh, to the point where it feels like I am following the stage directions rather than playing the role of a vagabond in the Old West.

Step out of line in these campaigns and this is a failed situation. As opposed to Red Dead Online, there are very few of them that encourage players to think for themselves, each designed to advance the story. The RDR2 show is at least a spectacle of the slow pace of life in the Old West.

This is not the death and theatricality of a lifetime; My favorite missions include shoveling, drinking wine with a friend, proposing an old romance and riding a hot air balloon. Working through a greater rut, stricter tasks are considered meaningful in the end anyway, inspired by extraordinary, ambient world-building and characterization.

Side missions, minigames, small activities, and random world events — whether they hunt great guns, capture a play, or stumble upon a woman trapped under a horse — all set Arthur’s character and setting in subtle, rich ways. Please inform.

Nested in the third act of a fully animated and voice theatrical performance, something like 10 minutes, it is possible that the response button is pressed after an artist has included a telephone. Arthur would shout, “Hell with the telephone!” It is an optional activity, a long one, and an option is to react in that short window. I think most players will remember this, but this is Canad Response 1 through 3 because this is something Arthur would say, a rageless goofy set his way in the right way.

He would write complete, real diary entries about the 50-hour campaign, sketching memorable scenes and depicting the state of affairs of his chosen family, which people once knew changed their fortunes between hope and despair. It is meant to be a completely alternative reading, but a refreshingly intimate take on a masculine figure that unsettles many doubts and hopes as to the next person.

He sings himself on a lonely ride and lowers his old body in the mirror. He will have an exciting conversation with the horseshoe woman as he gives her a ride into town, both commenting on the troubles of working for wealthy, ungrateful men as a growing necessity. I feel it all. Best horror games on pc free

Hillbillies can capture him after making the camp, a couple may try to rob him after inviting him to dinner, a man with snakebite can come out of the forest by stumbling and tell him to suck venom is. These haphazard encounters portray brutal life on the fading frontier, as nature pushes back against inner poppers who want to change it. Arthur is the perfect vessel to see it

This is because Arthur Morgan is one of the darkest human characters I have played during a great turning point in American history, playing a playful, cruel and compassionate role according to differing theories.

The game world, beautiful as it is, is made more beautiful and tragic by how it is ready to play it on every occasion. Every beautiful vista has something to lose through Arthur’s eyes, power lines and train tracks, cut through the skies, and the rest of his life is slowly filling with factory smoke. Just about everyone sees a sad end in RDR2, too. This is a story that I might not sustain every moment, but I will not forget its brutal arc or the man in the middle of it all. God damn is it sad? An apocalypse that led to this.

Ren Der Reflection

Assuming that you are able to run it at high settings, the biggest strength of RDR2 is how it exquisitely renders the Old West setting on PC, drawing more attention to the nuanced details that make it. This is one of the best looking games I’ve seen and a rare experience that justifies a new GPU or CPU.

Better draw distance and a greater range of vegetation detail were added, making some vistas look photographic. Long shadows vary from walking or roaming between places to rides, to cute nature tours. Due to animal attacks, bullet holes, rain, mud, or rapid flow of blood, the markings on the clothes are caused by very high-resolution textures, which tell a very little story about your friends.

A new photo mode makes it easy to share those moments of amazement. The way the player rides on RDR2 for just sightseeing and sounds is an important feature. I am desperately trying to get an artistic portrait of my horse’s silhouette to sit against the moon, yet another self-proclaimed goal was tolerated by this ridiculously large complex game.

With 2080, i9-9900K and 32GB of RAM, I can run RDR2 mostly on ultra settings with some resource-intensive settings completely off or switched off. But some hardware combinations are proving troublesome for RDR2, leading to random crashes in some APIs and, more recently, to a hotfix, leading to hitching problems for some 4-core CPUs.

During the first weekend, I couldn’t spend more than an hour without crashing on the desktop, though Vulcan switched from DX12 (which gives me better framerates) back to static stuff. Sometimes the UI malfunctions and I cannot select a select or purchase option, the map fails to appear, or I get paged unexpectedly from game servers.

The graphics settings are almost too much as well, and probably confusing. In our test, only a handful of settings affected performance by more than 1-2 percent. Large residuals, the mapping between MSAA, volumetric lighting, and parallax occlusion, affect performance by 5 to 25 percent. Most of them don’t make a big visual difference anyway and are best left out.

The way the settings are presented is made to feel underdeveloped: a huge list with unclear presets that require tinkering to make RDR2 run in a satisfactory framerate. It is hard. The PC should be the best place to play, not the best place to play, after all, after a few patches. It’s a shame for a game to look good. upcoming pc games

Cowboy poetry Red Dead Redemption 2 PC

Like in singleplayer mode, in Red Dead Online I can make my goals reasonable and watch them. The problem is, it is basically hamstrung by a frustrating multiplayer leveling system that locks basic equipment and cosmetics behind long XP requirements that can meet hours, perhaps days,

The option is spending gold, premium currency, items and clothing to unlock them immediately. A fishing pole is not available until level 14. A damn fishing pole in an outdoor recreation game. This is not spectacular and is a terrible way to invest players.

out a basic suite of tools (fishing rod, bow, varmint rifle, nice hat, etc.), Red Dead Online opened up widely. I have largely ignored traditional matchmaking modes such as gunfights and horse races, cheap thrills, I will play much better versions in different games, to have fun. It led to the most inventive, serene, real, and sometimes buzzing echo I’ve ever had.

I once walked into the middle of a fire in Blackwater and took the player corpses one by one to the church cemetery. Some were captured and participated in the ‘burial’ of their friends. A corpse thanked me for the gesture. Later, in an extended streak of criminal activity, my pose and I caught another player and instead of killing them on the spot, we rode into the swamp and threw them into the garter infected waters. I got the idea to act like a friend. Best pc games 2017

On a less absurd note, I set myself a constant goal of earning strictly enough money from hunting to buy cool-weather gear and a fine rifle. I am going to hike in the mountains and find the best way to hide there, a wild mountain man adorned with animal skins, which almost touches the floor.

In the meantime, I’m stopping gunmen across the city by running through the streets and calling for a parley. I am participating in an eight-player ballroom. I am living the life of a normal cowboy in the best shepherd game. I hope it clears up soon.

RDR2 PC System Requirements

OS : Windows 7 SP1 64bit

Graphics   Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280

Processor:   Intel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX-6300

Memory:    8 GB RAM

DirectX:   Version 11 Or 12 Support

Storage: 150 GB

[dillydedalus]

what i read in june

another very slow reading month bc uni work + migraines = not a lot of reading, also two of my profs thought assigning 500-page books (in the same week) was like, a cool thing to do

bilqiss, saphia azzedine (tr. from french by birgit leib (german)) beautiful, headstrong & intelligent widow (by her own making) bilqiss sings the adhan instead of the muezzin & is put on trial for that & her numerous other sins (like buying a very phallic aubergine). she’s to be stoned, but she’s so smart and eloquent that the judge falls in love with her and keeps delaying. bilqiss herself is incredible but i kinda wish the other two perspectives had been omitted (the judge) or made much shorter (leandra, the white saviour american journalist). also not too convinced by the ending. 3/5

the artificial silk girl, irmgard keun lovely sharp & funny book about a doris, a darling hot mess of a girl, who, in a moment of despair, steals a fur coat from the theatre wardrobe and runs off to berlin (as you do). but weimar berlin, fun and shining as it may be, is not the healthiest place to be for a pretty young girl with no money. doris is sharp and naive and vain and shallow and soft, and i adore her so very much. also the voice in this is so vibrant and specific that i’m really curious as to how it’s been translated. 4/5

dawn: stories, selahattin demirtaş (tr. from turkish by amy mary spangler & kate ferguson) demirtaş is primarily a politician but is currently in prison, facing up a sentence of up to 142 years for... being in the opposition & kurdish. anyway, this is a collection of short (mostly very short) stories that he wrote behind bars, mainly about social issues in turkey, sexism, police brutality, unjust prison sentences, corruption etc. they are more significant for their political content than literary brilliance & some are a bit on the nose, but definitely interesting & often emotionally affective. the title story and ‘nazan the cleaning lady’ were my favourites. 3/5

babel, kenah cusanit  really interesting novel about the german excavation of babylon in the early 20th century, just before the first world war, focusing on the thoughts & reflections of real historical excavation leader robert koldewey about babylon, history, architecture, philology, and middle eastern/european relations&politics. it’s very stream-of-consciousness-y and quite dense & hard to follow at times, and predictably i liked it best when it was actually about the third babylon (berlin in case you’re not up on berlin’s tendency for ridiculous self-mythologising) - there’s a lovely bit where koldewey remembers returning to berlin after years away on digs and finding it completely changed, “looking for the most part as if it had been built last week”, “a city that wasn’t a city but something that had, from one day to the next, grown over its borders into a book by theodor fontane [...] as if this place wanted nothing more than to escape from itself” while in the present he looks on babylon which is also a city & not a city, but a sheet that has been written on so often that it is unreadable, and that is the sort of content i’m here for. I was also kind of surprised that the book doesn’t take much of a stance on the subject of colonial theft of art and relics which is like....what koldewey is doing, but then again i left it really wanting to go to the pergamon museum which is still mostly closed to the public :( 3.5/5

hyperbole and a half, allie brosh (graphic-memoir-ish) if you weren’t religiously reading hyperbole & a half in the late 00s/early 10s, were you ever even a weird mentally ill teenager? i knew most of these stories already but god, allie brosh really gets it and by it i mean depression and how the nothing you feel gets even void-ier every time someone suggests you try yoga or like ~*positivity*~. also it’s very very funny. 4/5

voss, patrick white (uni) in his introduction to this book about a 19th century exploration into the australian bush, robert macfarlane quotes a review of voss by poet a.d. hope who calls its style “pretentious and illiterate sludge”. macfarlane says this sludginess is a good thing (it’s not) but it’s certainly a good description - utterly excessively verbose and not in a fun, exhilarating way but oozily. sludgily. like wading through a mess of words that aren’t quite were they’re supposed to be and anyway there’s too many of them. there’s some interesting stuff here about exploration, systems of knowledge, spirituality and a love affair almost entirely conducted in letters that never arrive and hallucinations, but there’s just too much sludge (and too many descriptions of female characters’ breasts). 2/5

der junge und das meer, cinghiz aitmatov (tr. from russian) lovely little novella about a young boy from an indigenous east-russian fishing community being taken on his first trip to sea with the men of his family, where they get caught up in a storm. it’s a quick read & very sad. 3/5

macbeth, jo nesbo (uni) - dnf another really bad hogarth shakespeare entry. i appreciate hogarth going Full Genre, but mystery is one of my least fav of the genres, i don’t really like scandinoir and.... macbeth is a scottish swat agent (does scotland even have swat???) whose special skill is throwing KNIVES (you have.... a gun....). also like ‘kill the king to be the king’ kinda makes sense, ‘kill the police commissioner to be the police commissioner’..... less so. 2edgy4me/5

anyway let’s hope july is better.

[it-d035n-t-m4tt3r]

3/18/19

This class was incredibly exciting and filled with much more political theory than I had anticipated. The most interesting thing however I saw was how someone like Frantz Fanon was related to existentialism and how students in the class begged such a question as to how.

This week’s discussion for me, firstly, is to relate Fanon to the existential school of thought, and second, to further express the distinction between the question of “When is Violence acceptable?”, opposed to “when does violence work”

At a first glance this week’s writing, really only appealed to the socialist school of thought and the advocacy for specific types of violent revolution (I’ll get to that in a moment).  However, this is, I think, a very naive injustice as to why we were reading him in the first place, at least within the context of the class.  So much of his ideology and philosophy surrounds the notion that there is, in every human, a self.  And through the example of the colonist’s oppression of the colonized, he is really begging the question, can an individual (the self-identity) exist under oppression?

So much of existentialist thought is wrapped in the interpretation of what an individual is (Kierkegaard), how they can be true to themselves (Nietzsche), and whether one’s individual existence has meaning (Camus).  The question that Fanon raises rather justly is, can one even begin to ask themselves questions of their own existence, if they are, without thought or question, denied the very conditions that would allow them to have an existent self-identity in the first place?  If one is not allowed to recognize themselves as having the basic right to exist, the right to a self-identity and humanity, equivocal to the human intellectual and social capacities of others, simply because the conditions of epidermal constraints, what is their existence, and how do they reclaim their individuality? That’s how Fanon relates to the existentialists.  He begs the question of what it means to exist, therefore, he is an existentialist philosopher.

Now, as it relates to violence, Fanon has a very specific definition as to the difference between violence that works and when it is necessary.  Fanon says that “When it comes to the colonial situation the Marxist analysis must be stretched.”  What does he mean by this, and how does it relate to the context of reclaiming one’s individual identity?  What Karl Marx has to say in his book Das Kapital, A Critique of Political Economy, is that in order to achieve social liberation the proletariat (working class) must rise up against the oppressive mechanisms of capitalist hierarchies and overtake them.  This, as Fanon relates it to the colonial situation is similar, but not congruent. The situation that exists in colonial hierarchies, similar to the analysis that Marx makes of western capitalism, is oppressive in its very nature as a means to garner resources for the colonial societies, and within the mechanisms of capitalist colonialism the oppression that exists here, is not simply just directed toward the working class, but towards individuals who the colonizers deem as incapable of morality, incapable of intellectual capacity, etc. And because the colonists deny the right of humanity and social equality to the colonized, it allows them to reroute themselves as to deny any compromise of their own moral structures and allows them to continue the oppression as they see fit.  The justification for this, is race.  Racism creates race, race does not create racism.  And because of this, the borderline eugenic defense of such oppressive mechanisms and artificial racial predeterminations, lets the oppressors, or the colonists in this case, see themselves as justified.  Fanon understands this and understands that this is why revolutions fail. It is only with racial considerations, as well as considerations of the working class that people can achieve a genuine social liberation.  Because even if the working class prevails, if the notion that race is a biological determinate of someone’s capacity, they eventually divide themselves and defeat their own unity.  Even within the Soviet Block this is apparent.  There existed in the USSR racial and ethnic distinctions between Russians, Balkans, and other ethnic Slavs and eventually divided the people amongst themselves (Separation of Yugoslavia).  Of course, this is not the ONLY reason they failed as a whole but it is still a prevailing factor and worth mentioning within the context of this discussion.

“But dude”, you say, “What about the violence?”

Violence in such cases as to achieve social liberation, as I have just discussed, Fanon argues cannot be successful if there is an absence of racial equity.  But where Fanon also stretches the Marxist definitions is when it applies to destroying the notion of universally applied theory of revolution. As violence relates to Marxist revolutions, there is really no incorporation of racial prejudices and determinations which classify different types of violent acts and when they can succeed.  What Marx even so denies, is the applications of his work as a universal theory, something that could work in any time, and any place, and under any set of social conditions.  Fanon rejects this.  Fanon would argue that for indigenous, or proto-socialist (agrarian/post-feudal) societies, there exists a social framework that better lends itself to the ideas of collectivization of resources and communal ownership of goods and the means of production.  In societies such as these, there is a much easier path through violent revolution to reject the influence of western capitalism or colonialism and achieve socialist states ahead of western society.  He would argue that under these sets of conditions violence works.  And it works well.  The old guard communist states, China, Russia, Vietnam, and Korea, all existed under these conditions prior to WWI and WWII.  And only when confronted with the threat of global capitalist and colonial influence, did these societies collectivize their violence and break free, in the immediate sense, of their oppression.  Vietnam especially, given that they were directly sought to be colonized by the French, and then the Americans.  Where Fanon sees violence as being ineffective, is in societies that ARE the oppressor.  Societies that act as the colonist.  Societies like the UK and the US where colonial capitalism had set in and is the prevailing ideology.  Violence under these conditions ostracizes the root cause and diminishes any efforts toward greater social liberation, and thus, the oppressive cycle is allowed to continue unimpeded.  Violence to Fanon is always necessary when the oppressed are denied their humanity and seek to revolt in the attempts to regain it.  But violence only works, if artificial biases like race are discarded, and if the specific set of social conditions allow it to be necessary in the first place. Violence in this case is very cyclical within its own necessity and warrant.  This in my opinion is Fanon’s take on that important distinction.

Fanon has brought to light, especially in more recent times, the struggle of the colonized to seek, achieve, and redefine their own cultural identities through an unwanted struggle which was beset upon them, forcing them to overcome at all costs.  This painting below, by Myrna Báez, done in 1974 demonstrates the mood of when Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony, the key accouterment to the Jibaro (Rural Peasantry) and exists as a metaphor for the islands independent cultural identity

[werehouse]

Posts like these drive me fucking nuts with their self righteous moral posturing passed off as the opposite. You shitbirds are not fucking immune to the propaganda you seem so irresponsibly convinced you're bravely disspelling. Ok so:

Several points here are, on their face, correct, including that MSG tastes good and wont hurt you (tho its opposition is historically unconnected to a lot of this other rhetoric, and was more the product of a racist panic), 'health' food is more expensive (a serious equity problem, that is at least partly due to an economic inevitability of producing food in ways that differ from the exploitative corners cut and economy of scale in conventional ag, depending on what one means by health food), 'organic' isnt inherently superfood (tho this is a misnomer, as that's literally not the point or the significance of that label; different less environmentally harmful farm production practices are, and if you cannot connect your own health to reduced environmental destruction, which is dumb, can you at least connect it to the well being of all of the other species devastated by full bore conventional ag? Of which 'organic ag' is basically just a mitigated part?), saturated fats provide lots of food energy (l o l at this one, did anyone say otherwise??? The point is that saturated fats are comparatively dietarily rare historically, and are unbelieveably concentrated in the intake of meat and dairy products in the diets of the global north, both bougie and working class alike, and in those amounts has had seriously adverse cardiovascular consequences), while long term environmental and physical effects of many GMOs remain to be seen, the most serious objections to and concerns about GMOs are not, again, health related but have to do with the transformation of the life processes and the life itself of living things into legally controllable private property under powerful IP protections, often amounting to the theft of millennia of indigenous labor and craft by extremely powerful corporate entities, as a major driver of GMO research, adoption, and value is the ability to control and limit supplies, induce artificial scarcity, and marshal legal punishments for anyone who uses those things in a way not sanctioned by the spectaularly powerful rights holding megaconglomerates that dominate the seed, agrochemical, and animal husbandry businesses supplying the overwhelming amount of food in the US and globally.

Furthermore, the suggestion seems to be that 'regular' food does not also involve slave labor in the supply chain, which is the opposite of reality, and that highly processed foods are just simply the unjust victims of white Connecticuit liberal's snobbery, when in reality, 'value added' foods like doritos, oreos, literally most any packaged prepared foods etc, are designed first and foremost to allay overproduction of highly subsidized crops and other foodstuffs, to move more of them to prevent price crashes, thus making conventional factory faming capitalist ag look 'right' and 'better' and 'natural' despite its pure artifice, and playing an important part in the economic and even military imposition of US geopolitical hegemony over the past 70 years. And honestly, anyone who does not understand the differences between the nutritional profiles or the bioavailability of energy - i.e. how much work your body has to do to get it - between a rapeseed oil soaked piece of pizza crust made with highly refined (ie, low in any of the fibers, proteins etc') white wheat flour, and a piece of plain whole meal brown bread, and why those differences are metabolically significant, has no business in dramatic and self congratulatory indingantposting, because they dont know what the fuck they are talking about. I could go on, but I hate writing on my phone, have to pee, and shouldnt waste any more time responding to this asinine horseshit I suspect is somewhere down the line the discursive result of Kraft or Nestle's marketing departments

Source: me, a PhD candidate writing an NSF funded dissertation on precision agriculture at a major midwestern university, with several publications in this area

Things food snobs are wrong about

“Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.

A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.

Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.

Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.

“Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.

Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.

Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.

MSG is not bad for you at all.

The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.

I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS IN MY FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST BUT GMO’S ARE NOT DANGEROUS TO EAT. GMO’S ARE SAVING LIVES. YOU’VE ALREADY EATEN GMO’S BEFORE YOU EVEN KNEW THE TERM. IT’S FINE. EAT THEM.