#Capitalism Journalism Politics Technology and ice ice baby

[absolute-decay]

They are rotting my brain again. Psychopathic Cult Leading freaks. I love them so much and it makes me sad how badly Studio Bones fumbled them, leading to less content of them. It's not like they were ruined, but they could have been so much more, and were so much more, because the Manga is right there.

Anyhow that was all just preamble for the point of this post, Fic Recs! Any cool fics involving any combination of these characters, please! Any length, any genre, just. As long as any of these guys have the spotlight.

[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 07/19/2018

Comic by Kasia Babis called “Give a Man a Fish…”. In the first frame, a well-groomed and well-dressed businessperson holds a fishing rod up in front of an emaciated, naked, greenish-skinned person, saying “I could give you fish, but that would only feed you for a day.” The next frame shows the businessperson sailing away from the green peoples’ island on a ship towing an enormous amount of fish. The business person shoulds “good luck!” to the green people, who stand with their single fishing pole over a fishless sea. Source.

Issues

An atlas of real utopias?: ‘In an age of Trump and trolls, it may be strange to talk about utopia. Not only has a divisive reactionary right-wing privileged minority surged to the fore, but social inequality, militarism and the climate crisis have worsened too. There does seem, however, to be one arena for hope for progressive solutions and that is in the city. [...] The question remains: can these cities offer solutions that address multiple systemic crises instead of pursuing, as Greg Sharzer suggests, a “way to avoid, rather than confront capitalism” by focusing on “piecemeal reforms around the edges”? Can a group of cities really offer any fundamental solutions to a crisis created by the immense power of corporate capital?’

Avatar revisited: Gesturing at decolonization of the great epistemological divides: “The seeming postcolonialism and ecofeminism of Avatar can be read as a symptom of white guilt: one that reinforces the ultimate stereotype of a heroic white warrior leading through the justified violence the oppressed to freedom, which remains very problematic in terms of race, gender, ability, and the idealized version of nature.”

The Abandonment of Flint: "Environmental harm is not evenly distributed—nor is the loss of democratic control that residents suffer when emergency management is imposed up on them. Both are products of long neglect. The financial insolvency or deficits of cities like Flint were not often treated as the outcomes of structural problems—such as de-industrialization or state retrenchment—or of the mistakes of politicians in those places. Rather, they were blamed on the choices of local residents, portrayed as spendthrift and lazy. As such, emergency management was intended not just to fix the problems in these communities, but to punish the local residents too, ensuring—in the manner of 1990s welfare reform—that the poor receive only what they 'deserve.' Emergency programs slashed public programs and sold off, privatized, or downgraded state assets like public housing, libraries, and, in this case, water infrastructure."

‘Treated Worse than Dogs’: Immigrant Kids in Detention Give Firsthand Accounts of Squalid Conditions: "Hundreds of immigrant children and parents in federal detention facilities say they’ve endured inedible food, verbal and physical abuse and a lack of medical treatment." Includes court documents describing kids' experiences.

Black Panther poster, showing a pouncing black panther jumping towards the viewer, surrounded by the words “Move on over or … we’ll move on over you”. Source.

Feminism

Made to Suffer for Her Sins: "Some of these acts may appear incongruous. Don’t the people whose moral compasses point toward fetal rights want infants to get proper nutrition? Don’t they want the fetuses inside pregnant detainees to survive? If children are precious and motherhood is a woman’s 'most important job,' as Ivanka Trump has said, shouldn’t asylum-seeking parents get to keep their kids? But these policies aren’t contradictory at all. They are rooted in a consistent worldview that casts women as vessels whose reproductive capacity is the property of the state, and whose pain is fitting punishment for any supposed offense."

For the love of goddesses, stop deifying women: "Women who post daily affirmations on Instagram are in no way the moral equivalents of powerful, piece of shit Republican politicians, but the idea that womanhood can be boiled down to a collection of stereotypical, reproductive qualities, especially when that stance is supposed to be emancipatory, is worth critical attention regardless of who espouses it."

Technology

Will 2018 be the year of the neo-luddite?: ‘There are signs that full-blown neo-luddism is already here. In November last year, La Casemate, a tech “fab lab” based in Grenoble, France, was vandalised and burned. The attackers called it “a notoriously harmful institution by its diffusion of digital culture”. [...] The French attackers’ communique was published by the environmentalist/anarchist journal Earth First! and explained how the internet’s promise of liberation for anticapitalists has evaporated amid more surveillance, more control, more capitalism. “Tonight, we burned the Casemate,” it concludes. “Tomorrow, it will be something else, and our lives will be too short, in prison or in free air, because everything we hate can burn.”’

Tech Workers' Revolutionary Roundup: "From Microsoft workers refusing to help ICE to Amazon workers striking on Prime Day, the past few months have seen renewed political organizing from within the tech world. Here’s a roundup of recent tech organizing, led by workers at various tech companies and organizations like the Tech Workers Coalition."

Activism

The U.S. and Canada Are Preparing for a New Standing Rock Over the Trans Mountain Tar Sands Pipeline: "On May 29, the Canadian government announced that it would nationalize the Trans Mountain pipeline to assure the expansion would be built, putting up 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.5 billion) to acquire the pipeline and other assets from the Texas-based energy giant Kinder Morgan. The purchase has dramatically raised the stakes of the fight for both the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and pipeline opponents like Manuel."

Using art to build bridges between people living in prison and people outside: An interview with three artists who investigate “how art can be deployed to establish empathy and communication between incarcerated people and the public outside the prison.”

Direct Action Item

Do you enjoy making art, of any kind? Make some radical art and share it with us :)

Porky Pig, wearing a gasmask, stands in front of a smoke-belching factory and oil-spilling wells and, arms oustretched, says “That’s all foks!”. Source.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.