#Because the nuclear family is inherently bad as is capitalism

[bmoreisapunkrocktown]

Eugenics is explicitly tied to the view of children as "things" that someone owns and controls, and until we do away with that idea, we can never be truly free of eugenics.

And that sucks, but there are a lot of people who claim to be anti eugenics who still very rigidly hold on to the idea of the nuclear family and the "right" to have a child, and that is not and never will be an anti-eugenics opinion, nor will it ever lead to any better conditions for disabled children.

[starlightomatic]

In the tumblr echo chamber it's really easy to forget that a lot of people believe things like "climate change is because we're all greedy and just voluntarily consume too much as individuals" and "food waste is because people buy more food than they can eat." Any luck talking people through these things and helping them understand other factors at play?

For example maybe I could help get across other dimensions to the food waste issue by bringing up a hypothetical mom who bought fresh produce to feed her kids "healthy" meals but is too tired at the end of a workday to prepare them and the produce goes bad. I could talk about how it's not that she bought the produce because she was greedy or careless, and bring in labor issues (so much of her energy is taken by work that she has none left for food prep), the issues with the nuclear family (each family has to prepare its own meals, and doesn't benefit from economies of scale), etc.

Any success with this sort of thing? When people can't identify capitalism and corporate greed as the drivers of issues like overproduction of clothing, rather blaming clothing waste on, again, individual greed and carelessness?

One idea I had was pointing out that if we situate the issue in greed and careless, we're saying that current-day humans are somehow inherently more greedy and careless than previous humans, which doesn't make sense -- so the issues must stem from a source external to individual bad character.

Some people do acknowledge this, eg identifying the industrial revolution as the start of many of these problems. But even though they're able to understand a widespread, systemic catalyst, they still often seem to blame individual consumers and believe the solution is in their hands.

[finer-k0alateez]

tldr: scattered thoughts on barbie with a quick rant on hetero relationships. from a queer dude

my thoughts on barbie(for those who haven’t seen it) is you should go in expecting the leggo movie, not don’t look up. it is funny and does come from the perspective of women(which in this society makes it political) but it’s not a political satire in proper. it’s a movie for kids about toys. it’s for girls specifically so the themes are aimed at their beliefs. like if you’ve had a conversation with a woman about gender relations in the past three years. it’s a kiddie version of that.

maybe i was expecting a thinkpeice just because i haven’t seen any other barbie media(and didn’t really consider the implications of matel making a movie about barbie and it not just being sum sweet for the kids) but idk like… not only the promo but also the initial reaction was very political but again i guess it’s just cause “woman bad”

margot robie crush is definitely getting worsaa

yeah just expect a silly little girl power movie

(for those who have seen it.)

(there’s no spoilers, and nothing to spoil- cuz, again, silly little movie, but i’m gonna make points that are informed by having seen the movie)

i think the themes are really cool. i think getting this glimpse into women’s views on society and gender relations and men has been really interesting for me. not only the makers of the film but also the core audience and fanbase talking about the film i’ve just seen heard the perspective of women in really fresh way

as far as society and patriarchy, women think it sucks, that’s not news.

but the thoughts on hetero relations and men were interesting to me.

i saw one person draw the parallel that in patriarchy-Ken’s “perfect world” they dominate and women are given tasks and jobs whereas in Barbies perfect world men just don’t matter. highlighting the difference in cruelty of forced dominance verses toleration.

i think this really hits home. one of the main themes of the movies is that the kens are like stupid and sad and insecure. which is definitely a lot more progressive of an idea to have of men then evil so i just appreciate the attempt made there.

though i think that line about how kens don’t matter to barbies and are not needed gets at a key feeling that incels hold and that’s that most men do not feel intrinsically valuable or wanted.

common incel recruitment phrase is “only women and children are loved unconditionally. men are only loved if and when they provide something.” and it just represents the subjectification of men that comes along with the objectification of women.

in patriarchy and capitalism boys are raised to be doers, good little worker bees who provide their whole nuclear family’s income on their own. while women are raised to please a man and raise his children.

in patriarchy’s eyes, women’s value comes from being. being pretty, being a warm hole/baby factory, being a wife, and while domestic labor has always been expected, it hasn’t always been understood by misogynists to be real work in any capacity. men on the other hand must do. they must make money, or make good sex, or make the giggles, or make the first move.

i think this objectification/subjectification difference has a lot of bearing on our ability to understand and be intimate with one another. women long to be subjectified. this is what barbie represents. the woman who can do and be anything. the ultimate subject. in her perfect world everything is done by her to her liking, leaving kens without purpose. in kens perfect world he is the ultimate object. the horses, the cars, the dumb movies, all things to be observed and admired. “the horse is an extension of the man.” under patriarchy the thoughts, beliefs and being of a man are inherently more valuable-inherently more important. to draw meaningful breath in kentopia one needed only to be ken.

this shows up in women’s relationships with other women and men’s relationships with other men. women do things for one another. gifts, acts of service, and more importantly they show intamacy by sharing secrets, helping each other cope with things, and providing support in hard times, this is often seen as a failing of male relationships but i’ve always seen it as a difference in values between men and women. male intimacy isn’t about being needed or useful or helpful it’s about being wanted. it’s about ones presence in the other’s life being valued including and especially in the absence of purpose. men watch tv shows and baseball games they could’ve watched alone, together. they buy video games they aren’t excited about just to play them with one another.

these differences (i think) lead to the riffs we see in hetero dating. women and men speak different languages of intimacy. women put forth the effort toward being a true confidant and dependable ally and are disappointed to find that men won’t put forth the effort to pursue and earn the right to be with them and enjoy those benefits. but men put forth the effort of unconditional love and acceptance and desire for their partner and are disappointed to find that women often view them as one option of many who will need to earn and keeping earning his place in her heart.

i think the the most honest part of gretas portrayal of kens and barbies is that the happy ending for the barbies is regaining their sensibilities and capabilities(their power to do) and for the kens it’s learning how to find value in themselves(their right to be).

[edsheerankinnie]

Hey wait im onto something w the fic idea. Just imagine: after Korra a hyper sci-fi world, and a new avatar who does NOT wanna be the avatar so they go into hiding. and their family is in on it. omg maybe give them some siblings too, i dont think we've seen an avatar w siblings yet. Imagine their bending and spirituality, etc is ass. And maybe they're stuck-up and pretentious and worldly and could not give a lesser fuck about the whole avatar thing. and theyre deathly terrified of being found out bc literally why would u wanna be raised in a compound and suffer unimaginable horrors in the name of "keeping balance in the world". The White Lotus has been on the hunt for the new avatar for YEARS after Korra's death. theyre literally HUNTING for them at this point. and idk maybe the world isnt particularly balanced. but maybe benders have somehow been cast into the working class more often than not, yk with all their practical abilities with the elements. they do all of society's dirty work, basically. Maybe throw in some late-stage capitalism while we're at it, why not.

Speaking of late stage capitalism, u remember Kuvira's superweapon? if that isnt a precursor to some devastating *nuclear* weapon idk what is. and also plain old renewable energy. Do spirit vines even count as renewable?? are they more like fossil fuels???

Im getting off track. Different areas of the world are affected to varying degrees with technological advances. More or less, theres like, only a few spiritual places left in the world, those being the air temples and the areas around the spirit portals. Maybe some airbenders break off from traditional airbending tribes in a movement to live a more worldly life. yeah that sounds about right.

Anyways, in my head this new avatar is probably a girl, obviously with the awesome hair and striking green eyes of asami. And shes from Ba Sing Se. all she wishes for is to pursue her education at Republic University and eventually secure a higher-up position at her parents enterprise (or something like that). From the moment she realized she could bend water AND earth her parents told her about the Avatar and the terrifying implications of such a duty ("they'll take you away if they ever find out about this" "remember what happened to Avatar Korra?" etc), and her education only confirmed these fears. Of course, they say/do all this with the best intentions in mind; after all, they don't wanna make their own child suffer or potentially lose her. Oh yeah speaking of education, maybe its more universal and formalized and mandatory, like in real like, like w grades or forms or whatever. Yeah so in short, she grows up into a bratty and materialistic rich girl. lmao if you thought KORRA was bad, just wait till you see this avatar. she is TRULY unlikeable. not a single avatar trait in sight. no conviction to her civic duty, no inherent need to help others, no magical empath abilities, just the standard human emotions and traits and empathy pretty much everyone is predisposed to. she is COMPLETELY out of sorts in the avatar business.

Yeah so and then shes like 20 or something and she doesnt know a lick of bending. Aside from basic earthbending and very very little waterbending, nothing. I was thinking they have standardized bending education for benders and assessments to determine small childrens' bending skills for that reason. and then because of thhat, her parents never sent her to formal bending classes and taught her themselves (maybe they can earthbend, or they know earth benders who wont snitch). But waterbending, she learned that on her own. somethimes, when shes alone and around water, she'll toy with it, just pushing and pulling it; shes not capable of much else. She sometimes wonders what bending other elemnts at their full capacity is like, but she doesnt really care.

Oh yeah adding to the obnoxiousness of this character and her world, they have *phones* and *social media* and *influencers*!!! omg yay !!! I was thinking she either is or is friends with a microinfluencer, so that and her academic and career future are really her only priorities. And so ig she likes vacationing, shopping, blah blah, the kind of things youd expect influencer circles to do.

That all aside, i feel like it would make for a really good plot if for whatever reason she's moved to question her stance on her avoiding her avatar responsibilities. Maybe she fucking hates that Korra has indirectly burdened her of all people with this stupid titanic task, hates Wan for ever coming up with all this. Or does she even know who the hell Wan is? Probably not, actually. But like why couldnt she just kill herself in the avatar state, right?

But yeah anyway, later on she somehow eventually chooses to step into her role as avatar. And then she realizes, shes so goddamn weak. She cant fucking bend anything. she cant even tap into her spirituality, like !! shes so disconnected from it all, like what the hell shes a grown-ass adult and cant bend for shit !! and maybe this causes a rift between her and her family. And then in classic atla style, she has to learn how to bend allll the elements from scratch, just like aang. but because of how much work she also has to do spiritually, unlike aang its sooo hard !! So yeah, just give this girl a bunch of quarter-life crises. thatd be fun. and also figure out how to stop this working-class benders phenomenon. maybe theres sweatshops and she has to get rid of them idk.

Ofc her own gaang is there, idk who its comprised of tho. probably her siblings and then sum1 else like her gf or smth idk

Oh yeah and unlike korra, because of how sheltered she is, shes also really easily shaken up emotionally, by all these i mean. shes such a crier i mean. In fact, after stepping into her avatar role, she goes from selfish basic brat to a massive girlfailure. is it all worth it? Who knows :)

This was fun to write out. i dont think ill ever turn this into a fic tho

[orangerosebush]

Me when I see people espouse comedically inaccurate or shallow readings of a text that in all actuality just belie an even more profound trend regarding a refusal to seriously engage with a text's themes

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Personal Thoughts on Pacific Rim: The Black (2021)

I watched season 1 of Pacific Rim: The Black, which released to Netflix on March 4! I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting much, after disappointments with the movie sequel. But the Pacific Rim franchise means a lot to me, so I wanted to give it a try. I’m very pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this new show and connected with it in various ways. And given how wild my own life has been lately, it was really nice to get lost in something that validated the importance of different kinds of connections, and to not close down when the going gets tough or hard to explain.

PRTB is a pretty emotional, angsty story, and it’s not afraid to explore that over the full 7 episodes. The stakes are high, involving the loss of friends and family. So the characters have a real investment in what they’re doing and why they’re fighting.

The grittier tone of the show is a deviation from the movies, which maybe some people would like or dislike more. I think the seriousness helps to balance out having (yet again) inexperienced teenage protagonists. But the show does still get some fun scenes and quips in, and our main jaeger has a snarky AI who provides both humor and critical thinking checks for our protagonists, which is nice.

I liked the 2013 movie because it showed all of humanity coming together to fight a common enemy. Here, there’s enemies and allies on both sides of the Kaiju war, and even some who are in-between. This is a stronger nod to reality while decreasing the fun fantasy violence of the 2013 film. I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing for this series to do, because a series has a lot more space/time to fill than a movie, and even the 2013 film showed that there were significant cracks in the so-called “unity” that the Pacific Rim universe outwardly celebrated. In the midst of the 2013 movie’s talk about countries setting aside old rivalries, we still had politicians who didn’t care, criminals capitalizing off pseudoscience and unsanctioned nuclear weapons deals, religious sectors rising up to worship the title enemy, people being forced into dangerous jobs to keep from starving to death, the rich and powerful experiencing minimal lifestyle impact vs. poor people being abandoned to die or surviving through precarious means, and even toxic hero worship and intriguingly, the glorification of violence for entertainment and toy sales. So in this new show, we’re really seeing the movie’s cracks expanded and focused on. It’s even more front and center, given that the rest of humanity sees Australia as a lost battlefront and has deemed so many left behind as worth less than the effort it’d take to rescue them. So maybe a part of me misses the cool concept of human unity from the first movie, but even that movie was trying to tell people that unity is an illusion. Here, it’s just so front and center that it can’t be ignored in favor of robot fights, and I actually liked that immediate boldness.

(review continued under the cut)

Some of the details feel AU or divergent from what I remember of the movies, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing to me, so long as the show itself can be internally consistent. Transformers franchise spent forever trying to created an aligned continuity to no avail, so it’s not a detraction for me if Pacific Rim franchise wants to just flail in its own playground too.

The animation style grew on me as time passed, as it worked well for animating jaegers and Kaiju even if humans seem a bit stilted. It better captured a sense of scale compared to the sequel film, and the jaegers felt actually integrated in the animated physical space (something I really struggled with in Uprising). The sense of scale is not as good as the 2013 film. But then this show has a significantly lower budget and is a very different medium, so it was easy enough for me to accept it for what it is and to be glad that we got anything halfway decent, really.

The pacing could have been better across the different points of conflict, but honestly if no adult questioned or tried to undercut a couple of teenagers piloting the last active jaeger on an entire continent, that would have felt even more jarring and unbelievable to me.

I think Pacific Rim as a franchise has never been about reinventing the wheel when it comes to characters. But I was definitely interested in the topical similarities between the movie’s Mako Mori and the show’s Hayley Travis. They both do things in want to help/prove themselves, which results in an incredible backlash that they have to emotionally work through and overcome. In comparison, Raleigh Becket and Taylor Travis are both fairly static supporters, but when their hope drops out, it’s Mako and Hayley who kick in with other options, more energy. If we get a season 2, I’d be curious to see how the show further differentiates and humanizes these new characters. 

The 2013 movie had main characters who were very significantly traumatized. So having protagonists in the show who are very significantly traumatized as well didn’t feel like a distraction to me but instead just a nod to the franchise and how it’s closely tied with struggles to obtain mental health and connection. I’d be more worried if the teenage protagonists were people who consistently don’t think of consequences or who don’t take an apocalypse or immense power from a jaeger seriously...

PRTB definitely earned its TV-14 rating. It can be gritty and dark at times, but coming out of several TV-MA shows, the way it’s visibly handled on the human side is a nice break and sometimes even more emotionally effective than if extremely gory scenes were shown. I’m a little hesitant to get too emotionally attached to any character for future seasons, though, given this rating.

Some scenes were more personally engaging to me than others, but I’ve watched several shows lately where I couldn’t stand to actually finish them or was checking to see how much more time was left. With PRTB, I kept wanting to see what happened next, and time really flew by with some episodes.

The Kaiju shown are incredibly diverse, with some really cool designs. There’s something in here I’ve been wanting to write a fic about/daydreaming about since 2013 and this show actually does the thing in its own way, so I was personally excited about that.

If this show gets a season 2, I’d love to see our protagonists meeting up with more people from all walks of life and exploring various ways people have survived and maintained or redefined a culture in this post-apocalyptic world.

There’s an element of “connective regret” in this show that really personally spoke to me, given that I’ve lost a lot of people in real life suddenly. Like, you assume people will always be there until suddenly they aren’t, and that fact of life can really destabilize a family or found family. This show doesn’t shy away from trying to validate that stress, or from validating how important healthy connections still are in the face of loss or decoupling from other toxic relationships.

Mental health relapses, trust issues, and survivor’s guilt are also a thing in this show, which I found really interesting, and that was something we really only had time to see in small measure in the 2013 film.

I still have some worldbuilding questions, but honestly I clicked on this show hoping for a good time to lose myself in—and I feel like I received that in this season. So I ended the show feeling like, actually excited to talk about it with other people.

There’s plot twists and characters I want to flail about so bad, but that would involve dropping very significant spoilers here, so maybe I better hold off for now. 

But yeah, if anyone else watches this show, please feel free to reach out and flail with me about it!

[flowandimagine]

Capitalism = Gaslighting

Through gaslighting seeks to convince you of its necessity and importance... which it needs to do a lot of convincing for because it is inherently unstable and insecure, because it’s very core essence is based on insecurity and scarcity.

Capitalism is the opposite of Resilience. It is weakness and fragile and insecure, and desperately and painfully aware of its own shortcomings which it will do just about anything to keep from people seeing it for what it is. (Which trumps personage is a perfect embodiment of.)

It has no security/stability or sustainability of its own which is why the endless exploitation of people and the planet.

Look into the psychological structure of any billionaire and I bet you will find someone who believes they are utterly worthless.

Advertising – makes you feel insecure and like you need the product

Films – make you think that’s what your life should look/be like and if it’s not you’re wrong and should feel bad about it. / give you examples of compliant behavior to model and repeat / give you psychological experience of fighting back and resistance to deplete your motivation to do so in real life.

Religion – makes you feel like you need an intermediary with the divine; original sin gives you an inescapable sense of shame and guilt and creates your dependence on the institution of religion for the ‘cure’ / your ‘salvation’ by following orders, masked in ‘this is for your own good’. (aka Gaslighting)

School systems- you cannot learn well or enough if you don’t do so through our structures… thereby setting up a whole structure of mandated propaganda proliferation. Having a degree gives unnecessary entitlement to those with and false undermined self-worth to those without.

The guise of Professionalism – False entitlement to authority over others. ‘You cant do it on your own/ you don’t know what you’re talking about / if you haven’t had institutionalized training you’re not qualified enough’ and you are dependent on us for your qualification.

Pharmaceuticals - in general, a duh.

Federal Government – holds threat of chaos over head, and posits itself as savior from it, while it funds chaotic organizations to create/ falsely prove its own point. Cerates the problem and then makes itself appear like the one saving us from it ‘for our own good/ protection.’

+++ Scapegoat and Divide Scapegoat and Divide Scapegoat and Divide Scapegoat and Divide Scapegoat and Divide Scapegoat and Divide Scapegoat and Divide

caveat: every now and then throw them a bone, or actually do something 'positive' and make it seem like 'see this isn't all that bad!' while 95% of system exploits and plunders and collapses all life sustaining systems on planet.

also:

weaken bonds/ create myths:

-monogamy + ‘cheating’

-nuclear family

-‘making it on your own’

-celebrity – if you stay in the system long enough you might get a chance to ‘make it’! (and then be miserable and empty because all your relationships are fake/ opportunistic)

-lottery – buy in for ‘a chance!’

***This is also why i don't overall blame general people even when they act out in hurtful ways, but try and focus all of my disdain upon the systems which created the environments for their behavior in the first place.

‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ (as some would say)

[saltyaro]

If you’re wondering about me flooding your dash today - that’s ‘cause I’m in a pretty good mood today actually?

Yesterday was back to school for me, which was extremely stressful, and I actually felt pretty bad till 8 PM. I don’t know if that’s a normal thing or just a ND thing, but being around a lot of people is extremely tiring to me, even if I already know said people. I’m so alone in my class, like basically I’m invisible and no one really cares about me as I failed to make any friends in one year (also the school’s switch disappeared and like fuck it Zelda and Mario Kart already got stolen, now we can’t play smash anymore? Fuck you unknown thief, give us a break). Despite being exhausted and convinced I would regret that decision, I still followed people to the place they usually go to drink (I don’t drink lmao) to try and be “social”. Which I’m exceedingly bad at.

I tried to inset myself into groups of people who were talking, and I think I managed for like, 2 hours (a lot for me) before it became too much effort and I decided to go home. I went to give back my glass to the owners, and somehow when I got back outside, I stumbled unto 2 people who aren’t in my promotion, they work in the incubators in my school. One of them I’d already talked to, he destroys my promotion in smash, but I didn’t know the other. I was surprised to see them so the one I know tried to explain what they were talking about, thinking I was confused about what I heard. And they were talking about not having children and social norms and the nuclear family and-

Well, you get the idea. I even managed to slip amatonormativity in the conversation, mentioning I had been talking a lot with cool people about capitalism and the way it interacts with amatonormativity lately and. Well, they hadn’t heard of amatonormativity, but when I explained it to them, they were like “oh yeah I see!” and were on board. We didn’t discuss amatonormativity alone because they just acted like its existence was so obvious and didn’t challenge its existence at all, just agreed with it. It felt like they knew about the system, just not the word. Aaand I think that’s what it is because...they’re polyamorous. And nb. Both of them. And I didn’t know about it. I kinda knew the person I already knew wasn’t using their birth name but like, I don’t really care about that, I’m going to use whatever name you use for yourself without question you know? Anyway we agreed on a lot of things, the third person challenged us a bit but it wasn’t aggressive at all, we were really just healthily debating. Probably because we all had the same base values: heteronormativity, capitalism, cisnormativity, patriarchy, racism, etc. = bad. We also jokingly talked shit about cis straight people and honestly I’d missed it. I haven’t done it in months, ever since I got thrown away by my last friend you know? 

Our conversation didn’t stay about that all the way till we each went home, but even after that, I realized something pretty interesting. I’m often really uncomfortable with some topics but with them it was way less uncomfy? Probably because they’re queer but specifically nb and polyam, so the norms they inherently challenge really hit close to home for me, it felt safe. 

Anyway, it kinda reinforced my...disappointment, for lack of a better word, in not having entered my school 1 year sooner, we would have been in the same promotion. Theirs seems so much better, more openly queer, and more generally deconstructed (in my promotion some of us had to put a stop to some guys who were making antisemitic “””jokes””” if you want even just one of the issues I have. Haven’t heard those since then so I guess they’re behaving in front of me at least). 

What I want to say is, it’s extremely important for your emotional and mental health to be around other queer people. I didn’t know before it happened that losing my last friend would not only leave me alone but that just speaking with queer people is so healing and important, the lack of it would almost destroy me. Please don’t neglect interacting with other queer people! It’s soothing and the healthiest interactions you can have. If you don’t have a circle of queer people yet, and you’re not feeling too good, well, it might help you. I have clinical depression and thought I didn’t have spoons anymore before I began talking with them. I’m a very pessimistic, negative person and my ND brain makes bad emotions so much stronger, and it still managed to lift me. I can’t stress how important this is so please, take care of yourself and find queer people to spend time with.  Even if they don’t become close friends, even if you’re not used to spend time with them, I promise it’ll help, at least a bit. You don’t need to actually know them before. 

This post is also a casual invitation to joke about cis straight people whenever you feel like it, it’s fun and relaxing somehow haha. 

[unproduciblesmackdown]

kinda a funny shtick of mine that i’m aro and have such strong takes about Romance(tm) but also like, it’s also kind of a funny shtick that the stuff that i’m always most inherently opposed to tends to be like, the most truly (tm) of ~romantic~ concepts aka the Magical-y stuff and whatnot so it’s like i’m coldhearted for being like “uhh i hate that” and yet imo like, the way i prefer to think of things strikes me as the warmer perspective on it

for example whenever it’s the ol “romance is isolating!” which like, usually goes along with “romance means caring less about other ppl who aren’t your partner b/c you don’t need them anymore!” like. well usually it feels like the bass-boosted DIE FOR EACH OTHER vine lmao but also like. yeah where it’s like “okay now that we have each other we don’t need anything else from Life, let’s shut ourselves away and be happy about that, if it’s in a mausoleum that’s fine b/c why would i care about anything besides Being Together” or how like, wow being with you is so great that i don’t need to think about my dumbass friends anymore like.........here i come in with my “zero / fun!” knuckle tats to be like “what if loving someone didn’t need to be defined by if you love everyone else Less” and “what if loving someone wasn’t measured by how fine you’d be with isolating yourself and still being happy b/c they’re with you? that’s very convenient for capitalism btw and its Nuclear Family Unit Is All You Need agenda” b/c [that post abt the guy throwing down the capitalismo card]

and in general i just don’t think there’s any “good” isolating forces in any kind of relationship. and that means me stomping on the magical glowing embers of a lot of magical romance concepts but, like i said, i don’t find those kinds of ideas Warm and Idealistic and Romantic in the first place

that “romance = not isolating maybe? let’s consider that??” actually covers a lot of grievances i have lol but furthermore maybe it’s shocking to hear that i don’t go for much of anything that leans too far into the It’s Magical direction like that love transcends the Everyday and us being human like. actually i strongly take the perspective that love is a super ordinary and deeply human experience and like, isn’t that a Nicer idea than that Feeling Love is us glitching out of how we usually are.........like love doesn’t Have to upend your wholeass existence Constantly And Forever and that’s not lesser than if it does for someone else ig.......it doesn’t have to transform every aspect of life into wonderment.........quality time with a significant figure doesn’t need to be like, the most spectacular unspeakably beautiful stuff only and always......not that getting Swept Up In E-Mo-Tion or doing activities with your partner which are Not everyday and which are fairly special / spectacular or finding a relationship to be somewhat dramatic / transformative etc etc whatever is bad just that like. it doesn’t have to be Constant and it’s not going to be and that doesn’t mean that real life is just failing to live up to the Ideal or something......more that sharing the Ordinary Stuff isn’t at all inferior or whatevs

anyways i went off and started talking and lost track of whatever i’m saying here so first of all I Hate The Idea Of Romance Being Isolating and I Prefer To Think Of Romance As Ordinary Rather Than Transcendent and are these not the more “romantic” perspectives honestly and it’s all in line with my would-be “i hate fun” qualities like when i don’t like when something’s trying too hard to be funny-cute all the time or something. hard to describe but i know it when i see it. Anyways it is my demand for things that are Genuine which leads me to respond to stuff with bitterness and opinionated-rant-time and the like. though also i’m like that basically all the time, so plenty of other things lead me to that response too. oh wait no yeah and when things like, are trying to Evoke being Genuine but it’s obviously this non-genuine performance of it and trying too hard and i Know It When I See It and it annoys me sm like don’t insult me. get away with that stuff. pandering to the cute & quirky angle like you know what. i hate this. weirdly enough i don’t find stuff that makes its brand to be like, never being “negative” or “bitter” to Seem Genuine in the first place, so, obviously.........i will Not stop being opinionated as hell about everything, it is just part of my charm at this point. or at least a characteristic of mine that i don’t feel the need to sand down because it’s like, not every difficult trait is a flaw!!! i’m already restricted enough by Being Accommodating And Convenient As Possible for everyone and over-self-critiquing any ~difficult~ or uh-oh Imperfect traits. it’s fine.........anyways and tldr what is romantic about someone’s presence in your life like, diminishing everything else that isn’t Them?? why shouldn’t it be expansive and open someone’s life and their capacity to love rather than narrow the focus of it??? catch my rants about “i hate this trope in fiction or attitude in real life towards Romance” airing basically every day in my head, b/c honestly tf is this

[siryouarebeingmocked]

alyesque

Everytime right wingers come at me with “Communist countries have been bad to queer and trans people in the past” I’m just like… okay and how do you think fucking capitalism has been?

Sure Cuba has a cultural problem of homophobia and transphobia, but so does most of the United States. At least in Cuba a revolutionary state will make sure I’m capable of transitioning medically.

Also Lenin legalized homosexuality nearly a century before most capitalist nations. The US didn’t do so until fucking 2003, Lenin did it in 1917.

But even more importantly, the past failures of communist regimes are irrelevant to the contemporary communist movement. We are not trying to brick by brick exactly rebuild the USSR or PRC. We are trying to build something new which is informed by and honors these state projects legacies, while learning from their failure.

There is nothing inherently homophobic or transphobic about communism. Communists like Alexandra Kollontai argued for the abolition of the nuclear family and more, which would destabilize heteropatriarchy completely. Communist struggle is in opposition to capitalist notions of reproduction. It is at odds with the social structures and impulses that make capitalism inherently homophobic and transphobic.

Communism always has been, and remains, the only hope for trans and gay liberation.

Remember the time some tankie supported communism because they thought it was better for LGBT folks?

I like how she claims what commie countries did in the past is irrelevant to what the future will be like...but ignores how mainstream gay rights are in the developed, capitalist world. Cuba might be highly bigoted against LGBT, but she’s completely sure they’ll change, because, uh, reasons. No, don’t actually compare them to the US, shut up.

The funny thing is that Cuba’s LGBT rights are getting better as they’re moving away from the pure communist system and modernizing.

I also like how “that wasn’t real communism!” also extends to rights issues.

[climatesamurai]

Interview: Mahua Acharya, MD & CEO, Convergence Energy Services Ltd.

In an exclusive interview with Climate Samurai , Mahua Acharya, MD & CEO, Convergence Energy Services Ltd. shared about the company , carbon credits, business models around the second life of batteries and more. Here is the excerpt - You started heading CESL at a time when most of the companies were facing COVID 19 heat and economic turbulence that wrecked the spine of many firms, how has been the journey for CESL during this timeframe and how did you manage to float through? The disruptions around Covid 19 were both good and bad, from a business point of view. CESL was formed in November 2020 and the year-end slowdown, plus slowdowns from Covid 19 gave me the time to learn about the parent company EESL and the two projects that CESL inherited from the parent. It also gave me time to build a business plan, speak with people, plan the organization and its structure, develop a strategy and its business offerings. We hit the ground running, finding little cracks in the travel openings and meeting slots to pitch CESL offerings to Government clients. Things picked up speed very quickly in the new year, and we managed to crack businesses in two wheelers, move ahead on a 110MW project in Goa, build out a business in e-mobility for the Governments of Goa and Kerala, and also earn mandates for places like Leh/Ladakh. Wherever and whenever possible, CESL continued to work on the ground to enable quality and timely delivery of commitments. We made sure that our team's physical and mental health continued to stay strong. We used whatever time we had to reach out to people, understand their needs, help organize for vaccines, and encourage people to take time out if they needed to take care of their families, many of whom were affected by Covid 19. I have been fortunate to have a team that is dedicated and hardworking. - How CESL is bringing together India’s green sectors and initiatives to deliver on its goals? Can you please elaborate how the carbon credits being used by a government company? And, what is the current scenario, the development, plan, engagement in the carbon market and supply of this carbon credits? The energy sector and the electricity sector, in particular, are transitioning in an unprecedented way. It is estimated that energy demand in 2040 in India will rise by 250%, largely due to population growth and urbanisation. More than 40% of the energy supplied will be from renewable sources, as solar and wind reach grid parity, the cost of storage becomes affordable, and countries pursue decarbonisation pathways. Concerns around climate change are likely to make coal, a less preferred option for baseload power and issues related to proliferation and safety may not allow nuclear power to fill the baseload gap. In a further unprecedented way, overlaps with electric mobility have started to take place through multiple uses of batteries for charging cars and selling power to the grid. Against this backdrop, the convergence of three traditional “sectors” namely- power, energy storage, and transportation is set to take place. As the world (and India) moves towards electric mobility, battery storage solutions at charging stations will get widely adopted and will be commercially viable. Climate finance, utilised and designed properly, will play an important role in enhancing the commercial viability of solutions as many are currently sub-commercial. On carbon credits, CESL is developing a base of carbon credits for all of its programs. Take the case of Gram Ujala – a lighting replacement program where LEDs are sold at Rs 10 only to consumers in rural India. The efficiency gains are significant as these LEDs replace old filament lamps, and the ten rupee price makes it affordable to rural homes. This program is based entirely on revenue from carbon credits. Carbon finance has been integrated into all our models and based on the economics, it plays either a catalytic role or a binary role – i.e., make or break an investment because carbon revenues are the only source of income. In decentralised solar, carbon finance will be used to offset the cost of replacing old pumpsets. Carbon finance is a crucial source of revenue to enable the shift to E-Mobility. - Renewable Energy, Electric Vehicles and storage are pushed by the governments across the globe for larger scale adoption. However, afterlife of all these have serious and adverse impact on the environment and climate both. These together set to create urgency for immense recycling and afterlife management services. Does CESL have any plan to dive into this recycling segment, how does it plan to solve the upcoming massive environment crunch and how geared up is the organization? CESL is actively investing in energy storage solutions by associating with technical partners to redesign solutions. CESL is also at the forefront of policy development and recommendations to enable energy storage solutions for the Indian markets. With regards to electric mobility, our goal is to provide an impetus for Indian car/bike manufacturers, charging infrastructure companies, fleet operators, service providers, etc., to gain efficiencies of scale and drive down costs, create local manufacturing facilities, grow technical competencies for the long-term growth of electric mobility in India. There is considerable overlap between e-mobility and battery storage, through multiple uses of batteries for charging cars and selling power to the grid. Secondly, the used batteries from EVs can be repurposed for a second life, with potential off-grid and residential applications. With the decentralised solar programme, we provide affordable clean energy to households in remote areas where proper power supply has been a problem. While DISCOMs benefit from cheaper power and better serviceability, governments save on subsidy costs. Farmers and consumers benefit from access to renewable energy and save up on electricity bills. We are exploring business models around the second life of batteries. We want to promote a circular economy – make sure the material is still usable after their transportation life is completed. There is no market in India – and in most places across the world – for second-life batteries. This is still very new – only a few companies are investing in pilot solutions, and we want to be one of them – because we would like to build an environmentally responsible business. In our businesses, we urge and sometimes require companies to have a take-back or buyback scheme, require and monitor the safe destruction of old material and so on. And we remain open to new ideas. - Since 2005 the emissions trading for climate change has been going on and today, according to World Bank over 64 carbon pricing initiatives has been implemented. The total value of global carbon markets jumped 20% last year to a record 229 billion euros ($277 billion). Can you share with our readers how crucial is the design of trading programmes for their success and what are the design principles that needs to be considered? The current carbon market is valued at USD 277 Bn and the average price of allowances in the European Union is Euro 35/ton. The design of trading programme is critical to their success, as they determine the transaction costs as well as the uncertainty and risk inherent in the trading system. There are plenty of learnings to use—from regulators, scheme operators, participants, auditors, and financiers. There are five design principles that are worth considering: - Design for maximum reach: Deciding whether a scheme is an allowance trading or a credit trading scheme, or both. Credit trading allows emissions reductions above and beyond business-as-usual to be certified as tradable. Allowance trading works by defining an aggregate emissions cap and authorizes tradable quantities of emissions under the cap. Generally speaking, schemes that have allowed both have been the most successful, though care ought to be taken to reduce the regulatory barriers to credit trading. Allowing opt-ins would be a good idea. This is a provision that allows otherwise uncovered sources to enter the program once their uncertainties have been resolved with the regulator. When the time is right, allow for international linkages. Permitting linkages with other international schemes will allow for the discovery of the lowest transaction costs, increase liquidity and options for participation. All this will eventually maximize the scope of scheme coverage, and provide other benefits—such as international markets, access to other forms of capital, and so on. All these mechanisms will ultimately result in maximizing the total quantity of greenhouse gas emissions capped and reduced. - Design for flexibility:  Since the carbon price can vary, costs to participants can be unknown. Allowing mechanisms such as banking of emissions reductions, or the use of offsets gives participants the flexibility to decide which option to use. Banking of credits over a (regulated) period of time allows industries the flexibility to decide things like the price of acquisitions, timing of major investments, or their (degree of) competitiveness in the marketplace. Depending on the scheme, fungibility with other environmental commodities, such as energy efficiency certificates, can be used to meet compliance needs, at least to the extent it is not detrimental to environmental performance, i.e., it does not dilute the cap. - Keep it dynamic and in sync with the economy: Carbon credit prices in the EU emissions trading scheme fell from Euro 30 each to an all-time low of Euro 3 in 2013. Chief amongst the reasons that led to this drop was the economic recession that preceded it, and the subsequent drop in emissions—and hence a (reduced) need for allowances. It was not until 2015 that the EU introduced a corrective measure, and not until 2018 where appropriate revisions were made that allowed prices to come back up again. (This was done by adjusting the supply of allowances to be auctioned). Prices have since been on the rise—deliveries on March 29, 2021, closed at 42 euros. - Think long, think stable: One of the shortcomings of the Kyoto regime is that the commitment period was not long enough. By the time companies started to integrate the notion of a carbon price into their decision-making and discussions reached boardrooms, there were only a few years of the market left. For clean energy projects where gestation periods were long, the lack of a long enough runway triggered discussions around market continuity barely a few years after the scheme started. In contrast, the EU emissions trading scheme had/has compliance periods that progressively increased—giving companies enough certainty to plan, integrate and make investment decisions knowing regulators treated the carbon price seriously and the market was there to stay. Businesses need long time horizons to plan, make investments and decide corporate strategy. Institutions and policymakers need to design accordingly; the climate problem is a long-term issue, anyway. - Keep it simple and transparent: The transaction costs associated with implementing and managing an emissions trading scheme rise with the number of rules, exceptions to rules, and constraints. As transaction costs rise, the number of trades falls—and as the number of trades falls, the cost savings achieved by the program also decline. Deviations from simplicity should only be allowed when such deviations further climate goals. - Gram Ujala is a new scheme launched by CESL that will be supported by carbon finance, can you please share more about the scheme, the progress and it’s reach in terms of area covered. Will the LED Bulbs be available throughout the year in the villages and what will be the savings in terms of electricity units? How and when do you plan to cover all the villages in the country with this scheme? Under the Gram UJALA scheme, CESL is offering rural households to exchange their incandescent bulbs with energy-efficient LED bulbs at an affordable cost of INR 10 per bulb. Consumers can exchange their 60 watt incandescent bulb with a 7 watt LED bulb and 100 watt incandescent bulb with a 12 watt LED bulb for INR 10 per bulb. The bulbs being offered under the Gram Ujala initiative are energy efficient LED bulbs that consume 88% percent less electricity as compared to incandescent bulbs. Switching to LED bulbs will lead to energy savings, monetary savings, and a marked reduction in carbon emissions. We have recently resumed distribution after the second wave of the pandemic in Arah and Buxar districts of Bihar; and Varanasi, Prayagraj, Kaushambi, Pratapgarh, Newadhiya, Pura Raghunathpur, and Bhadohi districts in UP. As on date, we have distributed more than 14 lakh LED bulbs. As much as INR 69.12  crore have been saved because of this programme. Additionally, the scheme has helped in avoiding peak demand of 55.84 MW. The number of bulbs distributed, savings made, etc. can be tracked on the dashboard: http://gramujala.ceslindia.co.in/   After Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Gram Ujala will be taken to Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana and West Bengal. The total potential across the county is an additional 300 million bulbs, and is implementable, provided a sufficient level of carbon finance is achieved. - What will be the major highlights of growth for your company in 2021-22? - Electric Mobility (1st in the country offering all kinds of vehicles to different sets of clients – Individuals, institutional bodies, ULBs, DISCOMs, STUs etc.) - Launch of major tender for Electric bus procurement basis Grand Challenge document and directions from NITI/DHI. - Launch of Battery Energy Storage system program  offering a host of multofold benefits to the DISCOMs - Company will increase its solar capacity – as a milstone of minimum assets of 500 MW on ground in decentralised solar space (which no one else in the country has) - Completion of Solar project in Ladakh (Solar Power plant and a very innovative Solar powered carport)– achieving a milestone to the road of “Carbon Neutral Ladakh” set by Hon’ble PM of India We are attempting to bring together independent sectors such as renewable energy and energy storage to ramp up areas like domestic lighting, energy efficient cooking, and e-mobility. Business models focus on optimising assets, monetising, stacking multiple values, and using innovative financial structures to deliver at scale. As of now, we have partnered with governments in the states of Maharashtra, Kerala, Goa, Andhra Pradesh, the northeastern state of Meghalaya, and even Ladakh in the extreme north. We look forward to intensifying these partnerships both qualitatively and quantitatively. We look forward to achieving greater milestones by enhancing our research and implementing Internet of Things (IoT) to make our offerings more energy-efficient, cost-efficient, and definitely, futuristic. A lot of this can be achieved by shifting our thinking from a damage-reducing perspective to regenerating and enhancing one. - The global economic turbulence and pandemic has almost paralyzed the auto and renewable energy industry globally, what do you think is the need of the hour to help the industry get back to the track and help meet the Government’s renewable energy and electric vehicle targets? India is still at a very nascent stage of EV transition and the path to implementation is ridden with challenges. While the government is prioritizing the shift towards clean mobility with a series of reforms under the FAME II scheme, there is still scope for improvement to establish a seamless EV ecosystem in India. The industry requires a standalone and focused approach towards EVs, including funds for research and the setting up of a manufacturing base. Additionally, there is a tremendous need for incentives to kick-start the production of lithium-ion cells in India. The Government should emphasize on materials like lithium, manganese, nickel, cobalt, and graphite to help reduce costs, and help in the indigenisation of battery packs. As India embarks on its journey to become a manufacturing hub by 2026, e-mobility presents a massive opportunity for growth. Indigenous manufacturing is the only solution to resolve and reduce the cost parity existing in the current regime. The next few years will be crucial in driving the EV narrative in India. Hence, the OEMs and government need to ensure on-ground implementation of the new and existing schemes to facilitate ease of sourcing, manufacturing, and financing in the EV value chain, further encouraging the buyers to purchase EVs. - How will you make batteries affordable? Is the battery swapping – the key to sustainable environment? While battery storage is technologically the most superior solution to energy savings, its costs are too high for applications in formative stages. The union government has undertaken concerted steps and has set up the National Mission on Transformative Mobility and Battery Storage, which seeks to establish large-scale, export-competitive integrated batteries and cell-manufacturing giga-plants in India through a Phased Manufacturing Programme (PMP). This will enable a decrease in the prices of energy storage in the country and also boost indigenous manufacturing. Issuance of Preferential Market Access (PMA) guidelines for battery procurements is another potential measure that can bring down the cost. This would also encourage the domestic manufacturing of batteries in India. Through partnerships with key technical partners, we are making way for opportunities to redesign solutions with battery storage capacity. CESL is at the forefront of policy development and recommendations to enable energy storage solutions for the Indian markets. Battery swapping has the potential to considerably reduce the wait time of charging by mimicking the experience of fuel pumps. It can also optimise Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), reduce resource intensiveness, act as demand responsive units for DISCOMs, and in the future, become an enabler for smart grid, among others. However, we are currently still in the nascent phase of exploring its utility and will be able to gauge its full potential with increased adoption. - CESL has been playing significant role in implementation of EVs, however the motive to implement these green vehicles are not complete until there is green charging infra in the country. Can you please share with our readers about and if the company is working towards developing green charging infrastructure, how many has been developed and the roadmap. CESL has recently entered into agreements and MoUs with state governments of Goa, Kerala and AP to procure over 30,000 two- and three-wheelers. This is the first entry into the 2W and 3W segments in the country, with solutions uniquely designed to deliver affordable financial solutions to buyers. In addition, we have signed an agreement with Andhra Pradesh to provide 25 thousand electric 2 wheelers in the state. These electric vehicles will be provided to state government employees of Andhra Pradesh. Electric 2-wheelers will boost energy and financial savings and hopefully, more and more people will also make a shift to EVs. Read the full article

[keshetchai]

reply

chloeofhills

Disagree, respectfully. At least in my experience my synagogue is very open and loving to people being themselves. I am a little annoyed by this. I agree with @finoliatav that it's a weird very wrong message to send

[context]

I did not say people cannot be themselves. I said that individualism/being individualistic is not a good mindset when approaching conversion to Judaism. 

Like it’s okay if you or @finoliatav disagree with me! You’re definitely allowed! But I think the people who disagree with this are misunderstanding what I’m talking about, and it’s possibly because the western world defaults to individualism as “good” and “natural”. And I think - especially for Americans - we are so enamored with being individualistic that we’ve deeply romanticized its flaws, and feel threatened when people criticize it. We’re a nation of bootstraps and the (singular, successful capitalist) american dream, and disconnected, isolated, nuclear families with concrete backyard walls.

If I were to oversimplify, I would say the extreme of Individualism (as a philosophy and approach to religion) looks like Evangelical prosperity gospel. Or Donald Trump. 

Individualism:  a (1) : a doctrine that the interests of the individual are or ought to be ethically paramount; also : conduct guided by such a doctrine (2) : the conception that all values, rights, and duties originate in individuals b : a theory maintaining the political and economic independence of the individual and stressing individual initiative, action, and interests; also : conduct or practice guided by such a theory Individualist/Individualistic: : one that pursues a markedly independent course in thought or action 2: one that advocates or practices individualism

& 

Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance[3] and advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence over the state or a social group,[3] while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government.[3] Individualism is often defined in contrast to totalitarianism, collectivism, authoritarianism, communitarianism, statism, tribalism, and more corporate social forms.[4][5]

The above things are not necessarily bad in limited respects or specific contexts - just like tribalism or group-community based philosophies or doctrines are not inherently or necessarily good. But the flaws are easy to pick up on, especially if you’ve ever stopped to argue with conservative libertarians before. Capitalism creates homelessness and poverty, the commodification of natural resources and the commons decreases our respect for the lands & waters that keep us alive (see also: No DAPL), privatization destroys our communities and prevents rehabilitation...these things are all fed in part by individualism, especially from those in power. 

Please understand, I am not saying you cannot “Be yourself.” That’s...pretty irrelevant to the point I am trying to make. It also directly ignores what I said in the first post - which clarifies you can still be yourself as a person, but that’s not the same as being individualist in your approach to Judaism. 

Judaism does value individual action and interests, but as far as I can tell, it also highly values communal action and interests, to the point where if your individual action/interests harm the community (and here I mean the tribe, klal yisrael), they are generally not acceptable. The covenant is not merely between G-d and you personally, it is between G-d and Israel. All of it. That includes you as a person and individual, but also expects and even demands that you care about the rest of the Jewish people and the non-Jewish person as well. The importance and necessity of a community is so vital it is required and demanded for a large majority of things! Which is why we gather up a minyan when we need to observe certain holidays or say certain prayers. You may pray on your own but for some things you need nine other people to join you. 

A minyan is important! The collective relationship between the people of Israel and G-d is important. The function of the tribe is important, the valuing of our fellow humans is important, all of these things are highly valued and highly communal. 

you can, disagree, but please disagree with what i am really saying and not what you think i said. 

[liberaleffects]

You could hear the deep sadness in the preacher’s voice as he named “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." With those words, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a scathing indictment of America’s war in Vietnam. It was April 4, 1967.

That first antiwar sermon of his seemed to signal a new high tide of opposition to a brutal set of American policies in Southeast Asia. Just 11 days later, unexpectedly large crowds would come out in New York and San Francisco for the first truly massive antiwar rallies. Back then, a protest of at least a quarter of a million seemed yuge.

King signaled another turning point when he concluded his speech by bringing up “something even more disturbing” -- something that would deeply disturb the developing antiwar movement as well. “The war in Vietnam,” he said, “is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

Read Article Here

Many of those who gathered at antiwar rallies days later were already beginning to suspect the same thing. Even if they could actually force their government to end its war in Vietnam, they would be healing only a symptom of a far more profound illness. With that realization came a shift in consciousness, the clearest sign of which could be found in the sizeable contingent of countercultural hippies who began joining those protests. While antiwar radicals were challenging the unjust political and military policies of their government, the counterculturists were focused on something bigger: trying to revolutionize the whole fabric of American society.

Why recall this history exactly 50 years later, in the age of Donald Trump? Curiously enough, King offered at least a partial answer to that question in his 1967 warning about the deeper malady. “If we ignore this sobering reality,” he said, “we will find ourselves... marching... and attending rallies without end.” The alternative? “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”

Like many of my generation, I feel as if, in lieu of that radical revolution, I have indeed been marching and attending rallies for the last half-century, even if there were also long fallow periods of inactivity. (In those quiet times, of course, there was always organizing and activism going on behind the scenes, preparing for the next wave of marches and demonstrations in response to the next set of obvious outrages.)

If the arc of history bends toward justice, as King claimed, it’s been a strange journey, a bizarre twisting and turning as if we were all on some crazed roller-coaster ride.

The Trump era already seems like the most bizarre twist of all, leaving us little choice but to march and rally at a quickening pace for years to come. A radical revolution in values? Unless you’re thinking of Trump’s plutocrats and environment wreckers, not so much. If anything, the nation once again finds itself facing an exaggerated symptom of a far deeper malady. Perhaps one day, like the antiwar protestors of 1967, anti-Trump protestors will say: If the American system we live under can create this atrocity, there must be something wrong with the whole thing.

But that’s the future. At present, the resistance movement, though as unexpectedly large as the movement of 1967, is still focused mainly on symptoms, the expanding list of inhumane 1% policies the Republicans (themselves in chaos) are preparing to foist on the nation. Yet to come up are the crucial questions: What’s wrong with our system? How could it produce a President Trump, a Republican hegemony, and the society-wrecking policies that go with them both? What would a radically new direction mean and how would we head there?

In 1967, antiwar activists were groping their way toward answers to similar questions. At least we have one advantage. We can look back at their answers and use them to help make sense of our own situation. As it happens, theirs are still depressingly relevant because the systemic malady that produced the Vietnam War is a close cousin to the one that has now given us President Trump.

Diagnosing Our Deep Sickness

The Sixties spawned many analyses of the ills of the American system. The ones that marked that era as revolutionary concluded that the heart of the problem was a distinctive mode of consciousness -- a way of seeing, experiencing, interpreting, and being in the world. Political and cultural radicals converged, as historian Todd Gitlin concluded, in their demand for a transformation of “national if not global (or cosmic) consciousness.”

Nor was such a system uniquely American, they discovered. It was nothing less than the hallmark of Western modernity.

In exploring the nature of that “far deeper malady,” Martin Luther King, for instance, turned to the European philosopher Martin Buber, who found the root of that consciousness in modernity’s “I-It” attitude. From early childhood, he suggested, we learn to see other people as mere objects (“its”) with no inherent relation to us. In the process, we easily lose sight of their full humanity. That, in turn, allows us free rein to manipulate others (or as in Vietnam simply destroy them) for our own imagined benefit.

King particularly decried such dehumanization as it played itself out in American racism: “Segregation substitutes an ‘I-it’ relationship for the ‘I-thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.” But he condemned it no less strongly in the economic sphere, where it affected people of all races. “The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system,” he said, “encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered... Capitalism fails to realize that life is social.”

Another influential thinker of that era was a German-American philosopher, Herbert Marcuse. (Some radicals even marched in rallies carrying signs reading “Marx, Mao, Marcuse.”) For him, the dehumanization of modernity was rooted in the way science and technology led us to view nature as a mere collection of “things” having no inherent relation to us -- things to be analyzed, controlled, and if necessary destroyed for our own benefit.

Capitalists use technology, he explained, to build machines that take charge both of the workers who run them and of aspects of the natural world. The capitalists then treat those workers as so many things, not people. And the same hierarchy -- boss up here, bossed down there -- shows up at every level of society from the nuclear family to the international family of nations (with its nuclear arsenals). In a society riddled with structures of domination, it was no accident that the U.S. was pouring so much lethal effort into devastating Vietnam.

As Marcuse saw it, however, the worst trick those bosses play on us is to manipulate our consciousness, to seduce us into thinking that the whole system makes sense and is for our own good. When those machines are cranking out products that make workers’ lives more comfortable, most of them are willing to embrace and perpetuate a system that treats them as dominated objects.

Marcuse would not have been surprised to see so many workers voting for Donald Trump, a candidate who built his campaign on promises of ever more intensified domination -- of marginalized people at home, of “bad hombres” needing to be destroyed abroad, and of course, of nature itself, especially in the form of fossil fuels on a planet where the very processes he championed ensured a future of utter devastation.

One explanation for the electoral success of Trump was the way he appealed to heartland white working-class voters who saw their standard of living and sense of social status steadily eroding. Living in a world in which hierarchy and domination are taken for granted, it’s hardly surprising that many of them took it for granted as well that the only choice available was either to be a dominator or to be dominated. Vote for me, the billionaire businessman (famed for the phrase “You’re fired!”) implicitly promised and you, too, will be one of the dominators. Vote against me and you’re doomed to remain among the dominated. Like so many other tricks of the system, this one defied reality but worked anyway.

Many Trump voters who bought into the system will find themselves facing even harsher domination by the 1%. And as the Trumpian fantasy of man dominating nature triggers inevitable twenty-first-century blowback on a planetary scale, count on growing environmental and social disasters to bring disproportionate pain to those already suffering most under the present system. In every arena, as Marcuse explained back in the 1960s, the system of hierarchy and domination remains self-perpetuating and self-escalating.

“The Long and Bitter But Beautiful Struggle for a New World”

What’s the remedy for this malady, now as lethally obvious at home as it once was in Vietnam?

“The end of domination [is] the only truly revolutionary exigency,” Marcuse wrote. True freedom, he thought, means freeing humanity from the hierarchical system that locks us into the daily struggle to earn a living by selling our labor. Freedom means liberating our consciousness to search for our own goals and being able to pursue them freely. In Martin Luther King’s words, freedom is “the opportunity to fulfill my total capacity untrammeled by any artificial barrier.”

How to put an end not only to America’s war in Vietnam, but to a whole culture built on domination? King’s answer on that April 4th was deceptively simple: “Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door... The first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

The simplicity in that statement was deceptive because love is itself such a complicated word. King often explained that the Greeks had three words for love: eros (aesthetic or romantic love), philia (friendship), and agape (self-sacrificing devotion to others). He left no doubt that he considered agape far superior to the other two.

The emerging counterculture of those years certainly agreed with him on the centrality of love to human liberation. After all, it was “the love generation.” But its mantra -- “If it feels good, do it” -- made King’s rejection of eros in the name of self-negating agape a non-starter for them.

King, however, offered another view of love, which was far more congenial to the counterculture. Love unites whatever is separated, he preached. This is the kind of love that God uses in his work. We, in turn, are always called upon to imitate God and so to transform our society into what King called a “beloved community.”

Though few people at the time made the connection, King’s Christian understanding of love was strikingly similar to Marcuse’s secular view of erotic love. Marcuse saw eros as the fulfillment of desire. He also saw it as anything but selfish, since it flows from what Freud called the id, which always wants to abolish ego boundaries and recover that sense of oneness with everything we all had as infants.

When we experience anyone or anything erotically, we feel that we are inherently interconnected, “tied together in a single garment of destiny,” as King so eloquently put it. When boundaries and separation dissolve, there can be no question of hierarchy or domination.

Every moment that hints at such unification brings us pleasure. In a revolutionary society that eschews structures of domination for the ideal of unification, all policies are geared toward creating more moments of unity and pleasure.

Think of this as the deep-thought revolution of the Sixties: radically transformed minds would create a radically transformed society. Revolutionaries of that time were, in fact, trying to wage the very utopian struggle that King summoned all Americans to in his April 4th speech, “the long and bitter but beautiful struggle for a new world.”

50 Years Later: The Thread That Binds

At this very moment 50 years ago, a movement resisting a brutal war of domination in a distant land was giving birth to a movement calling for the creation of a new consciousness to heal our ailing society. Will the resistance movement of 2017 head in a similar direction?

At first glance, it seems unlikely. After all, ever since the Vietnam War ended, progressives have had a tendency to focus on single issues of injustice or laundry lists of problems. They have rarely imagined the American system as anything more than a collection of wrong-headed policies and wrong-hearted politicians. In addition, after years of resisting the right wing as it won victory after victory, and of watching the Democrats morph into a neoliberal crew and then into a failing party with its own dreary laundry lists of issues and personalities, the capacity to hope for fundamental change may have gone the way of Herbert Marcuse and Martin Luther King.

Still, for those looking hard, a thread of hope exists. Today’s marches, rallies, and town halls are packed with veterans of the Sixties who can remember, if we try, what it felt like to believe we were fighting not only to stop a war but to start a revolution in consciousness. No question about it, we made plenty of mistakes back then. Now, with so much more experience (however grim) in our memory banks, perhaps we might develop more flexible strategies and a certain faith in taking a more patient, long-term approach to organizing for change.

Don’t forget as well that, whatever our failings and the failings of other past movements, we also have a deep foundation of victories (along with defeats) to build on. No, there was no full-scale revolution in our society -- no surprise there. But in so many facets of our world, advances happened nonetheless. Think of how, in those 50 years just past, views on diversity, social equality, the environment, healthcare, and so many other issues, which once existed only on the fringes of our world, have become thoroughly mainstream. Taken as a whole, they represent a partial but still profound and significant set of changes in American consciousness.

Of course, the Sixties not only can’t be resurrected, but shouldn’t be. (After all, it should never be forgotten that what they led to wasn’t a dreamed of new society but the “Reagan revolution,” as the arc of justice took the first of its many grim twists and turns.) At best, the Sixties critique of the system would have to be updated to include many new developments.

Even the methods of those Sixties radicals would need major revisions, given that our world, especially of communication, now relies so heavily on blindingly fast changes in technology. But every time we log onto the Internet and browse the web, it should remind us that -- shades of the past -- across this embattled Earth of ours, we’re all tied together in a single worldwide web of relations and of destiny. It’s either going to be one for all and all for one, or it’s going to be none for 7.4 billion on a planet heading for hell.

Today is different, too, because our movement was not born out of protest against an odious policy, but against an odious mindset embodied in a deplorable person who nonetheless managed to take the Oval Office. He’s so obviously a symptom of something larger and deeper that perhaps the protesters of this generation will grasp more quickly than the radicals of the Vietnam era that America’s underlying disease is a destructive mode of consciousness (and not just a bad combover).

The move from resisting individual policies to transforming American consciousness may already have begun in small ways. After all, “love trumps hate” has become the most common slogan of the progressive movement. And the word love is being heard in hard-edged political discourse, not only on the left, but among mainstream political voices like Van Jones and Cory Booker. Once again, there is even talk of “revolutionary love.”

Of course, the specific policies of the Republicans and this president (including his developing war policies) must be resisted and the bleeding of the immediate moment staunched. Yet the urgent question of the late 1960s remains: What can be done when there are so many fronts on which to struggle and the entire system demands constant vigilant attention? In the age of a president who regularly sucks all the air out of the room, how do we even talk about all of this without being overwhelmed?

In many ways, the current wave of regressive change and increasing chaos in Washington should be treated as a caricature of the system that we all have been living under for so long. Turn to that broader dimension and the quest for a new consciousness may prove the thread that, though hardly noticed, already ties together the many facets of the developing resistance movement.

The largest mobilization for progressive politics since the Vietnam era offers a unique opportunity to go beyond simply treating symptoms and start offering cures for the underlying illness. If this opportunity is missed, versions of the same symptoms are likely to recur, while unpredictable new ones will undoubtedly emerge for the next 50 years, and as Martin Luther King predicted, we will go on marching without end. Surely we deserve a better future and a better fate.

Ira Chernus, a TomDispatch regular, is professor emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the online MythicAmerica: Essays.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Ira Chernus _______

ABOUT AUTHOR

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea and the forthcoming book "Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin." He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu

[biofunmy]

I Don’t Know How To Talk To My Parents About Kashmir

Lucy Jones for BuzzFeed News

I didn’t have a great year, if I’m being honest. In all fairness, my most recent years haven’t been great thanks to my own inherent pessimism, and I really did think that 2018 was going to kill me. But I was wrong. 2019 is the one that almost did me in: I moved to another country, tried to navigate an incredibly hostile city, survived the first year of marriage, and almost bought out the entire country’s worth of antibiotics thanks to a litany of increasingly rare and peculiar illnesses. When I recently complained to my doctor about toe stiffness, he suggested it might be gout, like I’m a rich baby living in the 19th century. (Don’t worry, it’s merely the debilitating arthritis I inherited from my mother.)

Maybe I could’ve navigated 2019 better if I didn’t simultaneously feel like my family was cracking under the pressure of a confusing geopolitical conflict. I talk to my parents a lot — every day, which is shocking even to other brown people. But in my defense, what if one of them dies and haunts me, saying, “Oh, and this is what you were doing that made you too busy to pick up a call from your mother???” This year, though, I called less and less. I just couldn’t do it. My mom is smart and my dad is funny, and I like wrapping up my worst days by complaining to them and having them calm me down and build me back up. But lately, they’ve just made me feel alone.

This is confusing and somewhat niche, but bear with me, because you’ll need it to understand why I’ve blocked or muted about half of my family on WhatsApp: In August, the Indian government revoked Article 370, which up until then, had given the state of Jammu and Kashmir a special status within India, preserving its autonomy. Kashmir, tucked between Pakistan and India, is a much-contested region both India and Pakistan have fought over in a conflict that has spanned decades. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Kashmiri Hindus were driven out of the land after being targeted by Muslim insurgents. This is, at least, the narrative my family, along with other Hindu Indians, tells me, but according to some separatist leaders, the Indian state constructed the exodus in order to incite further conflict and be able to intervene. A hundred thousand Hindus left the valley, with only a few thousand remaining. My family considers their forced removal to be an ethnic cleansing; Kashmiri Hindus have lived in refugee camps for decades since. The conflict in Kashmir is long and complicated, but this New Yorker story is a solid primer on recent tensions in the region.

Since the revocation, Kashmir has been placed under curfew, there are internet and cell service blackouts, journalists trying to report on the region are being turned away, and Muslim residents live in fear. None of this is necessarily new, just better reported, and it’s certainly not unique behavior from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist government. Modi’s record as an Indian politician has been punctuated by his anti-Muslim rhetoric, namely during the 2002 Gujarat riots. India is a stark example of how any country can fall into the deep, dark trap of religious nationalism.

Both of my parents were born and raised in Kashmir, as Hindus in the Muslim-majority state. My mom waxes poetic about Srinagar, her hometown and the largest city in Kashmir; a tourism poster of the city hangs in my brother’s home, and my half-white niece ignores it every day, proof of the privilege my parents wanted her to have when they moved to Canada. As a kid, my mom always told me stories about how my grandparents fled in the early ’90s; they were, as my dad tells me, fearful of being ethnically cleansed as Hindus in the region. I accepted these stories, believing — as I continue to believe — their fear to be sincere. Why wouldn’t I? Children of immigrants often have little history to hang on to — my brother, who was the last of our nuclear family to be born in India, has a birth certificate that’s just a handwritten note that reads “Boy, Koul.” There’s no reason to suspect your parents of biases you’re too naive to understand at 6 or 7. Other than these little stories, I dutifully ignored Kashmir. It was complicated, and I was just trying to fit in around white people. The solution, as far as my child brain was concerned, didn’t involve trying to understand the specificity of a conflict between two brown countries that I didn’t really feel a part of to begin with.

The Indian government’s logic behind the revocation was to create a space for Hindus to return to the region, decades after they had been run out or killed. But what the government did — imposing curfews, blocking internet access, creating a police state — has cut Kashmir off from the rest of the world. Kashmiri Muslims are being targeted by a government that wants to control India’s only Muslim-majority state.

As a human being, it’s been heartbreaking to watch. As a Kashmiri, it’s fucked with my sense of self.

Getty Images

Kashmiri protesters save themselves from the tear gas during a protest against Indian rule and the revocation of Kashmir’s special status in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, Aug. 30.

I don’t talk about Kashmir a lot because I don’t feel like I have a right to. I was born in Canada, and nothing really betrays my particular heritage other than my last name. Only other Kashmiris can pinpoint where I’m from, and they do it with glee, which does indeed tickle me, for some reason. Kashmiris find each other all over the world and we cling to the specificity of our heritage. Your mom screams at you all the time? Me too!!!! Kashmiris eat a ton of meat, we perfected rogan josh, we love nadru and tsiri tsot and sheer chai (this last one is truly one of our worst culinary contributions to the world and we should be ashamed). We were raised on Kashmiri ghazals that our other brown friends didn’t understand, because our language was particular, with no real script, and a set of some of the most specific insults known to man. Who knew there were so many ways to tell someone you’re going to fuck their sister? My mom was proud of me when I graduated high school, but she was really proud of me when I got two conch piercings in my mid-twenties.

I wouldn’t argue that 2019 is the worst that Kashmir has been through — 1990 and 2001 and 2016 were pretty bad too. But this year, the revocation of Article 370 led to more visible coverage about Kashmir than I had really seen in recent memory. It’s a region of the world rarely reported on, and the research coming out of the area is often written by and for Kashmiri Hindus. The Hindu narrative is now the prevailing one in most Indian media, aided by the current Indian government, which is deeply nationalistic and outright hostile to Muslims.

The confluence of my age, my recent status as an immigrant (but, like, from Canada so, you know, come on, Scaachi), and my increasing existential dread forced me to read more and pay better attention and, ultimately, get angrier. Maybe the only thing that’s really changed is now, in my late twenties, it’s not really possible for me to say nothing. The privilege of passivity isn’t mine anymore. I’m the youngest in my family by far, and have been treated as such for most of my life, but you can’t get away with acting like you’re 12 just because your dad still can’t believe you’re competent enough to pay your own rent. (That said, please send money. Beti here needs a new coat.)

There’s no reason to suspect your parents of biases you’re too naive to understand at 6 or 7.

But also, my god, does it not feel like every book and television show and movie and article has been about Kashmir this year? I know, logically, that’s not true, but when I was browsing the selection at a bookstore in Miami’s airport last week and found a book about Kashmir tucked between romance novels and thrillers, I felt like I was being followed by a heritage I’ve ignored for most of my life. Information and art about Kashmir reached a fever pitch in my own brain and, seemingly, in the world around me.

It’s easy, when you’re young, to tell yourself that you’ll deal with the hard things when you’re grown: I’ll learn how taxes work when I’m bigger, or, The electoral college will make more sense to me after college. These excuses work just fine when you’re a kid, but time moves faster than you do, and one day you’re 28 and sunstroked and half-drunk in the Miami International Airport and trying not to cry because you don’t understand who you are or where you came from or what you’re supposed to believe. You know you should buy the book about Kashmir, but it feels like an anvil in your hands, like it could crush your own heart. Instead, you get a bottle opener shaped like a woman, her butt connected by springs. She twerks, so you can ignore the fact that your mother’s mother tongue is dying and that you’re fighting with your whole family about the future of your little community.

My family is Hindu — so Hindu that, for years, their stories about Kashmir didn’t include the existence of Muslims at all. Like a lot of Hindus, we were taught to be friendly to Muslims, but not too friendly. We couldn’t marry them or foster any kind of real intimacy. Friendship was fine, but we were warned to not get too close. I didn’t interrogate this with my family. I merely ignored their advice, dated whom I wanted, made close friends with whomever else I wanted, and did my best.

My best wasn’t very good. It rarely is. This year, when I saw my cousins posting celebratory meals and messages of joy after the revocation, I felt like they were living in an alternate reality. It was hard for me to fathom that my own family, who is otherwise quite liberal and thoughtful, could sustain such heartlessness about Muslims in Kashmir. The seeming focus of my family, and of other Hindus in general, was that the ends would justify the means. By disrupting the region further, by creating a larger Indian military presence in the area, by refusing to protect Muslims as a minority class in the region at large, “we” would somehow be able to “return” “home.” For the first time in my life, I engaged in a pastime that I thought was largely reserved for white people: fighting with my family on Facebook about their terrible politics.

Nurphoto / Getty Images

Kashmiri women shout pro-freedom slogans during protests after Friday prayers in Srinagar in September.

One particular cousin and I went back and forth for a day, on his page and then mine. One of his friends watched our exchange and called me “a fucker” in Hindi (finally, my weekly lessons are proving useful). My smart, educated, thoughtful family referred to the New York Times’ coverage of Kashmir as “fake news” and the “biased media” refusing to hear the “Kashmiri Pandit side.” The Kashmiri Facebook groups and email lists I’m part of stopped being fun; instead, I was bombarded with chains of people trying to figure out how to get “the real story out there.” On Facebook, my conversation with my cousin dwindled thusly: “It is pretty arrogant to talk as if you have mastered the constitution of India and are able to pass judgment,” he said to me. “Your arguments are passionate but hollow to me, because you haven’t lived the life in that part of the world.” My cousin grew up in Rajasthan, a hot, arid state in Western India, hundreds of miles away from Kashmir’s cold mountains. His context is uniquely Indian and Hindu and exclusionary. Mine is global and anxious and lonely.

We haven’t talked since. I haven’t attempted to. I’m too tired.

My husband, who is white enough to get mad that turmeric stains our kitchen countertops instead of accepting placidly that everything in our home is now yellow, initially found this very funny. “See, now you’re going to have an awkward Thanksgiving dinner too!” He compared it to white people going home to their relatives to argue about their Trump-voting ways, which I guess is apt, but somehow mine feels much worse: My family has real trauma in their history, real fear, and real marginalization. It complicates their narrative significantly. I get where they’re coming from. I just think they’re wrong.

What makes my conflict with my family over Kashmir different than, say, a white person begging their relatives not to vote for Trump, is that my family is suffering from intergenerational trauma. A lot of white people don’t have a history of ethnic cleansing, a family line that’s been disrupted by government and war and death. When my mother talks about her parents having to flee Kashmir in the middle of the night, I believe her, because I can see the light in her eyes dim. I wish I could fix it for her, as if I could make the world less cruel. That doesn’t mean we should consider it acceptable that another family — any family, different from us only by religion — will suffer the same fate, decades later.

It was hard for me to fathom that my own family, who is otherwise quite liberal and thoughtful, could sustain such heartlessness about Muslims in Kashmir. 

I’m not interested in fighting over who I think is or isn’t responsible for Kashmir’s lifetime of havoc; I’m similarly not interested in hearing arguments that Muslims need to be “punished” for whatever hand a few of them may have had in destabilizing the area. But for my family, there is real fear there. They remember losing their home. My mom was already in Canada when her parents were driven out.

That’s cold comfort when it comes to seeing my own community commit the same infractions against others. The cruelty that Kashmiri Pandits experienced doesn’t mitigate our callousness toward displaced Muslims. If our home was taken from us, why would we foist that onto someone — anyone — else? None of our trauma, real or interpreted, is a valid reason for generations of lies and propaganda spread about Muslim people. It doesn’t justify Hindus reacting placidly to the subjugation of another religious group. It’s not a mistake that Modi’s government has made Muslims the target of his campaign: It’s a great, quick way to whip up Hindus.

It’s a deceptively simple thought that I keep returning to: When this happens to us, we call it ethnic cleansing. When it happens to Muslims, we call it righteous. In one context, Kashmiri Pandits are victims looking for retribution. In another, we’re a privileged class: fair-skinned, high-caste, with a religion that isn’t constantly being policed by white and brown people alike. (Or, at least, just not in the same way that Muslims are interrogated globally.)

It’s a conflict not dissimilar to the ones progressive American Jews are having now about Palestine. Though the specifics of these conflicts are different at heart, there’s a commonality there. There has to be a way to maintain and understand the historical context of your own people’s suffering while also refusing to pass that legacy down to other disenfranchised groups. There has to be a way to ask for accountability for your family’s grief and displacement without displacing others. Right? I say this to myself every few days, and sometimes it rings so naive and gullible that I can’t trust myself anymore.

I don’t know how to talk about Kashmir with my family, which makes it hard for me to know how to talk about it publicly. I have been told by some of my own blood that I’m not entitled to an opinion on it because I’ve never been to Kashmir, and because I’m not really Kashmiri since I’ve been so whitewashed by the West. But this, to me, just feels like a silencing tactic. If Hindus who live comfortably around the world, who don’t worry about being oppressed by other brown people, aren’t going to speak publicly about the harm their own community is doing, who will?

Over the course of the year, I have attempted to write about Kashmir six or seven times, both for my day job and just for myself. I interviewed other Kashmiris for my forthcoming book to try to make sense of it. At our company holiday party a few weeks ago, I cornered the only Indian immigrant I know in the newsroom and forced her to talk about Kashmir, which mostly meant me screaming in her ear over Pitbull songs. (Sorry, Tasneem, I got excited.) All of my attempts have felt like failures, mainly because this doesn’t feel like my story to tell, and yet it’s the only thing I want to talk about. The topic makes me feel stupid and uneducated and illiterate. My dad, whom I love terribly, finds my anxiety about this all very funny. He has always been liberal, believed in the same things I did, full of compassion, and has always been mindful of how racism and religious prejudices have affected me and our family. Kashmir is his big blind spot. I feel almost desperate when I talk to him about Kashmir, like I just want him to be better about this.

Weeks ago, we fought about the lack of internet and cell service in Kashmir. I argued that it was a tool to keep the people there even more oppressed. He brushed me off, laughed at me, his silly pyari beti. I didn’t call him for a few days after that. My dad has, many times in my life, launched silent treatments against me because of whatever disrespect he seemed to glean from my behavior. This year was the only time in my life I felt completely unwilling to speak to him, a Koul family first.

I don’t even think he noticed.

In March, my family is supposed to go back to India for a wedding, and I’ve asked my mother to go to Kashmir with me. It feels dishonest, somehow, to keep visiting the same places — Agra, Jaipur, Jammu, Delhi — and never go to the valley. My mom hasn’t been back there since she first left, now more than 40 years ago. She’s been afraid to return and refused to bring me as a child in case of regional unrest. She’s willing to go now, but my father is trying to chip away at the idea. His current argument is, incredibly, that it will “rain,” so why bother taking my mother to the very place she was born and grew up? As if rain might wash away the roads completely. As if he isn’t afraid of something darker, more nefarious in the region.

We may have been the hunted, sure, but now we’re the hunters. We know better, but we’re not doing better.

My parents are old as hell. Their parents are dead. My brother has forgotten his Kashmiri, and his daughter is so detached from it I’m not sure if she even knows where it is. I feel like I’m running out of time to understand a family history that will soon turn into dust. All year, I felt like something indescribable was being wrestled away from me, and I want some of it back. But do I have the right to it to begin with?

India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir for my lifetime and my parents’ lifetimes. I’m not arrogant enough to think that it’ll get solved in 2020. What I’d actually like is for the unafflicted in this conflict, people like myself, young first- and second-generation kids, to recognize the legacy of trauma that we’re encouraging. I’m not asking for an answer or a definitive explanation. All I really want, to close out this terrible, year, is for my family to acknowledge a hard, complex, and unfair fact: We may have been the hunted, sure, but now we’re the hunters. We know better, but we’re not doing better.

It used to be that when an Indian person heard my last name, or where my family emigrated from, they’d smile and say, “Oh sure,” and we’d move on. But now we talk with trepidation. We’re all trying to figure out where the other has landed. Muslim Kashmiris have, rightfully, treated me with caution. Pandits, meanwhile, assume we all agree. I’ve been most disappointed with the twentysomething kids with no attachment to Kashmir beyond their grandparents’ birthplaces, who parrot what their elders are telling them about Hindus and India’s superiority. India — a country I’ve never lived in but a place that, I assumed, had to take me as I was, in a way that Canada or the US never could — has become more foreign to me.

Does being Indian mean anything, namely as someone who very much might not be Indian? Does it mean anything good? Can I, this late in my life, eons detached from the place itself, begin to refer to myself as Kashmiri instead?

In my parents’ house, on a long table in the living room, they have a few model shikaras, wooden river boats found on Dal Lake in Srinagar. As a kid, these were merely toys that represented a fantasy world to me, like something you’d see if you fell through the looking glass. It was easy to pretend as if Kashmir wasn’t real, that it was a dream my parents had, and I’d never have to think about it beyond looking at those little boats. I wasn’t allowed to, but I’d play with those boats anyway — tipping them back and forward, peering inside their windows, pushing them along the table, all while imagining a world much less fraught than the one I ended up living in. ●

Sahred From Source link World News

from WordPress http://bit.ly/37mtyyY via IFTTT

[topsolarpanels]

Fifty Years The new Silicon Valley VC that wants to save the world AND make money

We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these components separately under a suitable medium. Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished. That gloomy Utopia of tabloid dinners require never be invaded. The new foods will be practically indistinguishable from the natural products from the outset, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation .

That prediction was made by Winston Churchill in the March 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics in an essay entitled Fifty Years Hence. Yes, the yet-to-be wartime prime minister of England predicted lab-grown meat, nuclear power, cell phones, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. In 1932.

ButSeth Bannon, who had to deal with major missteps stimulated early in his career, said that what struck him most when he read it was how much this far-sighted believing chimedwith the mission of the Impact VC he planned to create with his partner and co-founder Ela Madej. The two( who are also a couple) wanted to nurture industries that would have an impact 50 years hence. So it seemed a good idea to borrow Churchills essay title for their company name.

Fifty Years( Facebook, Twitter) wants to tackle a few cases a matter that seem to plague the relationship between entrepreneur, investor and the demands of capitalism.

While working as entrepreneurs themselves, the two had seen it hard to find savvy investors that could both help them scale their businesses, but would also back the actual mission of the company. They tended to do the first but not the second.

They also found that maximizing shareholder value did not speak to their values in business , nor to their fellow millennials, who are often at least as interested in creating a real, profit-led business that can also have a positive societal or environmental impact.

So they decided to create Fifty Years to support entrepreneurs solving the worlds biggest problems with technology. But they didnt want to turn into something like a charity or traditional impact investor. They still wanted to back companies that could be both massively profitable and make a serious dent in solving big problems like climate change, education and health.

Fifty Years will expend at the seed stage, based on a built product, and ideally some marketplace validation. Right now, Fifty Years is into synthetic biology and food tech, but it doesnt limit its investments to any particular horizontals. It only needs to be presented with big business potentials and the opportunity to solve a big problem in the world.

The pair make for an interesting combination.

Madej, who was a serial tech entrepreneur and a Y Combinator alum( YC S12 ), is also a vegan, skier and contemporary dancer.

Outside of a short break as a dancer in NYC in the summer of 2013, Madej has been in tech since 2006. She co-founded and was a CEO of the Ruby on Rails software house Applicake( acquired in 2013) in Krakow in her native Poland and co-founded Base CRM. She had also been very active in the Polish& European tech scenes, becoming a partner at Innovation Nest, a leading early stage venture fund in Eastern Europe, until moving permanently to the US in 2014. She became interested in impact investing after realising that many of todays tech unicorns were being built largely for a privileged, developed society rather than the world as a whole.

Bannon, an avid chess player, was the founder and CEO of Amicus, a startup that constructs digital organising tools for nonprofits and political campaigns. A graduate of Y Combinator, Bannon was named twice to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social entrepreneurship. He was inspired to think this style because of his Mom, a social and community activist, who became disabled after a freak gas detonation in the family home. He afterward worked for Obama and built a digital organising tool.

But it hasnt all been an upward curve. Lack of experience at the time entail Bannon constructed serious mistakes at Amicus which almost killed the company, missteps he subsequently published in detail before anyone else. These included the big mistake of not paying payroll taxes for several years after a simple filing error stopped the company being alerted to the problem.

The main style it consequences Fifty Years is in our ability to help our founders, says Bannon. Our combined experience induces us better investors. Ela has made a bunch of good decisions, and Ive made a bunch of mistakes. Our founders learn from both.

That difficult period means hes perhaps more attuned to the harsh realities founders face. When Fifty Years thinks about the future we think about the why not the what . In other terms, he says , not the method of delivery( like, tell, dronings) but why the startup exists in the first place, its mission.

Bannon thinks society is moving towards a position of wanting to make money and solve real problems. And he doesnt entail changing the world by lessening enterprise churn, or matching socks to trousers. We entail fixing the climate crisis, training people etc. We guess these businesses will be the most valuable over the next decade. And those that dont solve these problems wont be able to compete.

He admits this motivation is largely driven by a general millennial reasoning( though not exclusively ), but that this attitude actually came to the fore this year. We want Fifty years to be a source of capital for these people, he says. His opinion is backed up by research. By 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be millennials, the generation born between 1982 and 2000. Millennials, although we are tagged selfie-obsessed, entitled and self-indulgent, are significantly more engaged with sustainability and social justice than previous generations. Theyre generally highly educated, theyve had strong awareness of social and environmental issues from an early age and are keenly aware of current challenges faced by climate change.

Admittedly the short-termism inherent in most businesses works, in theory, against the Fifty Years model. But Bannon is relaxed about that: Its a problem for the entire industry, but it doesnt affect us more than anyone else. Were only money companies that tie in their earnings to their impact very closely.

Impact investors have been around for a very long time. They will fund a cash flow business in Kenya for instance. But were funding very typically high growth Silicon Valley companies that are solving a big issue.

He tells the language of Silicon Valley has tended to debase what it actually means to change the world. We often joke about the doorknob startup that are linked people to their homes. Its the language of Silicon Valley we bump up against.

Madej says: The big contribution we can induce is to get more fund committed to vehicles that make the next Teslas. Over hour the idea is to change the narrative of business to address social and environmental externalities. Like feeding people bad food and then realising you have to have expensive healthcare to offset the side effects.

Okay, but how are they going to measure all this? How are they going to realise the value in the social impact?

Right now we dont have enough calculating power to model where the dollar value is in true value terms, but we will have it eventually, tells Madej.

We use as a rough rubric the UN Sustainable Development Goals( SDGs ). We look at a company that could have massive returns and have an impact on some of these goals. We fully expect to have amazing returns from this fund, then be able to create further funds, she says.

We have been involved in tech startups as entrepreneurs and we feel comfy advising other entrepreneurs. We already know we could create a bigger fund later on. But we want to get the basics right first, she adds.

And it turns out investors/ LPs in the fund are interested, especially as its being run as if it were a traditional VC fund with traditional returns.

Bannon says they started quickly and created enough to attain some investments, then raised the remainder: After that it was much easier.

Their investing doctrine is that they dont care about the sector the startup is in. But the founder needs to be care about capital returns, making a dent in the SDGs and, ultimately, care about doing both at the same time.

Madej: All our companies have the potential to solve problems globally but their initial markets will be in the US, because its so much easier to start and scale from here.

Eleven of the 15 theyve invested in in so far have been in the YC universe, showing that, although they dont get special access, Madej and Bannon are sufficiently close enough to that ecosystem to be able to meet companies they might typically invest in.

Will they be copied in their approach? Do challengers loom on the horizon? They admit to feeling a little lonely out there but that the Obvious Corp founded by Evan Williams is closest to their reasoning right now.

We want there to be an ecosystem of other funds like us. Well need others to fill out rounds, of course says Madej.

We think this is an urgent problem. A plenty of non-profits are severely positioned to solve big scalable, global problems, while tech companies are. But there needs to be a lot more people in this space, tells Bannon.

Next year the pair plan to double the portfolio sizing and also work on their related meetup Impact.Tech, which has mushroomed into a 500 person event in San Francisco, with the potential for multiple locations.

This runs monthly events with the goal of exploring all the areas of business activity in which tech entrepreneurship can solve big social and environmental problems.

We eventually want to get to the Al Gores, and maybe even the Obamas, of this world and get them on board says Bannon.

And with this kind of thinking, they probably will.

THE FIFTY YEARS PORTFOLIO SO FAR

Astranis: Small, low-cost telecommunications satellites. Their mission is to help bring the 4 billion people online who are without internet.

Cofactor Genomics: Next generation of disease diagnostics using RNA.

Geltor: They use biology to produce food ingredients in a safe, sustainable way, starting with gelatin.

Lygos: Genetically modify yeast to produce sustainable chemicals without petroleum.

Maderight: Building it easy and affordable for way brands to fabricate ethically.

Medella Health: Building a contact lens that continuously and non-invasively measures glucose through the interstitial fluid in the eye.

Memphis Meats: Growing real meat, without the animals. Mission is to bring to the world a tastier, healthier, more sustainable, and more humane meat.

Nurx: On-demand birth control delivered to your door.

Oolu: Affordable solar energy for off-grid populations.

OpenTrons: Open, affordable laboratory robots to accelerate research.

ExVivo: Noninvasive scalp patch for allergy testing. Mission is to make it easy and affordable for anyone to get tested for allergies.

Read more:

The post Fifty Years The new Silicon Valley VC that wants to save the world AND make money appeared first on Top Rated Solar Panels.

from Top Rated Solar Panels http://ift.tt/2gFXFJ2 via IFTTT

[caustic-pixie]

On Radicalization

I was talking with a friend about the tricky social splinter of finding out that acquaintances are one step away from enemies by way of how they handle their discomfort brought on by critique and confrontation.

There are many kinds of “work” we face in life. What I am focusing on here is a certain kind. I'll say Work, with a Capital W. Work, defined here as “reaching the threshold of uncomfortable, unknown-result, unmovable set of concepts and tasks that are not only expected of us, but have reached a culminating point of no-turning-back being -required- for us to change in a way that better integrates us into an immediate group – and that increases the health and decreases the toxicity of that group”.

The “group” is subjective, but intentionally close by. Maybe it's a job, a blood family, a chosen family, a music scene, friends, religion, whatever – maybe it has national/global levels – but the Work is tied directly in to immediate degrees of connection with others that are involved in one's daily/weekly life and activities.

- - -

Big chunks of the USA have a problem with a kind of toxic masculinity that has been progressing since after World War II, when families were forming and propagating in an age of ever-expanding technology and opportunity. Houses had been popping up in towns, and those houses and towns were ready-made for the auto industry – homes were in suburbs away from work, which was away from the stores, which was away from nature, which was away from schools. The idea of community became location-role specific, the nuclear family became an echo chamber of “Mine deserve the best – better than the rest”. Slowly, over decades and generations and cohorts, we put on blinders so we could better focus on looking forward – and the only time we looked in to other lanes was to check and make sure we had a far enough head-start. Buy more, better, bigger, faster – for you and your family – so you can -be- more, so you can -be- better, so you can -be- bigger, so you can -be- faster. Work long enough to take the money you've earned to leverage it with a bank to purchase things to give you and your kids the best shot at winning the chance to work long enough to take the money -

When we hear jeers about “every kid getting a medal for everything”, we see the true success of the above. Adults of all ages complain about a system that was set up not only by their own parents, but by their grandparents, and is now insidiously motivating in what they do themselves: Grown men and women want enough medals taken away so -their- kid's medal is special again, so -they- are special – again.

Again.

Again. As if there was a “before”. As if there was a first time, that they were special. Why can't they remember when they were special? What... was that thing, that used to feel so good? Do you remember?

Schools and sports slowly rolled over the country in to being the only refuge for kids, and soon there would be no refuge for older kids, for adults. Gender-restrictive, but still deep and supportive, relationships fell to the wayside for whole swaths of men. Women had their friendships demonized and devalued until or unless they could be commodified in some darkly competitive way.

What is that special feeling that one wants to reclaim again? Community. Belonging. Validation. Efficacy. Meaning.

Humans are social. We can't help it. If you, reader, has gone “Tch.” in your head – has gone “I'M antisocial. People are awful. I want to be away in the woods with my pets/art/music” - this post is not for you. Go read the first two related links on the top and come back here later. Seriously, I don't want you on this post, it's a waste of your time and mine. Go, go.

Humans are social. We can't help it. Biologically, it's what we do, it's in our coding, we -need- each other, each of us. It takes a lot of work and Work alike to make sure we all get those needs met. Loneliness is not only deadly, but it's almost viral – it weakens the mind's immunity to other mental illnesses: Isolation, paranoia, self-neglect, depression, anger, delusions. Too much time alone, and the brain will begin to construct its -own- world to compensate for the needs left unfulfilled – like a body living off its own fat reserves until it starts reaching the muscles and it needs to eat those too. We need to see that our existence positively effects the existences of those around us, we need to see that we are seen, we need to see that others see us seeing them. We need our actions to bee like they -matter-.

When we're punished for wanting to look to our sides because it might mean we're willing to fall behind to match pace with others in our cohort, when we're given so many medals and rewards that we can no longer trust the praise of others as a way to mark our progress or acknowledge our Work, when we're encouraged to only team up with others to accomplish one goal and then disperse -

when do we get to find a sustainable sense of meaning? Where do we get taught to do the Work to make it happen?

We're not encouraged to perform emotional labor – some humans (especially men, especially people in different power brackets) are discouraged from even learning how. We don't possess a language to think about building, let alone -maintaining-, long-term connections to those closest to us (mentally or physically).

Once you've hit a certain age, then, fully indoctrinated to the above: your only choice is forward-motion towards power. Power will mean you're far enough ahead that you are safe. Power will mean reaching the goal. Top score. Good grades. Medals. House. Car. Food. The best, fastest, most. It always has before.

Anyone who tries to connect with you must therefore be trying to take your power away. There's no motivation toward a group project here. The Work is obviously not real, because you never had to do any of it before, right? Your friends, family, coworkers will all inevitably betray you because -you would absolutely betray them-, and this knowledge churns around an ever deepening fear of self that becomes projected out into a fear of others so that neither fear is distinguishable from the other and they both harden in to something that feels like a Fact of Life.

That Fact of Life means that any deviation from running ahead must mean that someone is trying to run you off your road. Work is frivolous, menat for someone else to do, because you're already working -so- hard-. Critique is a confrontation. Emotional vulnerability is a manipulative trap. Invitation to engage is a demand on your time to waste it away from this important thing you're trying to do. Any questioning of behavior is an obvious attempt to -hurt you-.

Now imagine if you looked ahead and saw a group of people who Get It. Who live this Fact of Life so perfectly that they're reaching all the goals. They're powerful. They're not alone. They have attention, love, success; and it’s not even slowing them down or making them look weak. They figured it out. They lash out at the problem and people listen. They're winners.

Wouldn't you want it? Why wouldn't you want it? It's perfect. Everything you were brought up to believe was real, all along. You can be special again.

One's friend group from school, sports, childhood has been receding. The ones still present have begun to say that one has changed. One gets defensive – what's changed, what are these guys even talking about? One has always been this way. It's THEM that have changed. They can't see the obvious truth that their power is getting leeched away from them, and by association they're making everyone else give up that power too. Everyone's rushing to become weak and slow. Everyone's denying their destiny to go pursue the goal-grade-score-star. Why are they rejecting this? Why can't they see the truth?

Those other folks who have found their own groups that match up with their own lanes, those folks are spouting crazy talk. It's -One- who has always stayed the same... and that's actually true, from all angles. Those other folks are just finally having to acknowledge the behaviors and beliefs they could formally take for granted as being inherent/good or that they could at least sweep under the rug as just common/inevitable. None of them have ever learned the emotional skills to not only spot the red flags early enough to matter, and none of them have ever learned how to want to -act upon- those red flags even if they could see them in time. Loneliness has seeded and sprouted and seeps. So those blinders keep the eyes on the prize and these people who seem to be already achieving it. So this One person submits.

So they are special. Again. Community. Belonging. Validation. Efficacy. Meaning.

Again and again and again, the cure to loneliness is viral in its own right – this desperate, unnamed need to connect without any language or skills to do so; this self/other fear and goal-power-chasing that lays the bedrock for every other belief. The drive to be in anything but Last Place means joining any other group of people that will help you keep -any other group- in last so you never have to be. If the group gets too big to gather new members, it'll just splinter into smaller subgroups for the same goal.

The good feelings that should come with being special are impossible to feel, because that would create vulnerability. This specialness is only safe if it sneaks in like a feeling of -survival-. You are special because of your fear, because of your anger, because of how many enemies there are in front of you to unite those to the sides of you. There will always need to be an enemy to rail again, for there to be a special way to feel.

Who is good, and who is bad? One, or the other folks? Do you know which side of the fence this One fell over to? Surprise, it could be any, all, and either. It could start on one and end on the other. Are you listening? It's all a long-term lack of skills.

It's irrelevant from which ideology we spring from, but only in a detached sense, which is from wence I am writing this today. All of this results in violence, and all of that results in all of us being slowed down even further. People are dying for dreams that were not designed to remember them.

The answer to all things is rehabilitation and reintegration, witnessing, watchfulness, work, Work. One by one, one by the many, the many by one. The village raising the child, the Scotsman taking ownership of culture's complex and sometimes unflattering results. The healthy display of anger and hurt and sorrow, the strength and patience and self-preparation of holding space when we just don't want to.

No excusing, and, consistent acknowledgment of what-is. Context can coexist beside confrontation. Tolerance and acceptance do not negate boundaries and expectations, instead they work together to build towards progress.