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whiterosebrian · 3 years ago

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Letter To Democrats

I felt the need to do something besides raising awareness of environmental, indigenous, and socio-economic issues. I’ve decided to compose and then mail multiple printed copies of a letter to multiple politicians across the USA. I did wonder if I should copy-and-paste the letter to social media profiles like I did for the one that I wrote to President Biden. Ultimately, I decided that posting the letter would serve two purposes. First, I wanted to let indigenous activists know that they have another willing accomplice. Second, this could provide a decent template for anyone who also feels a need to write to political leaders and put pressure on them to take much-needed action. Without any further ado…

Greetings,

I am writing a generic letter to send to assorted politicians across the United States. For reasons that I will articulate over the course of this letter, I felt a serious need to address as many members of the American political leadership as possible. I do not intend to call you out personally. If you do take it as a personal callout, please consider why you feel that way.

The reports of wildfires, heat waves, and floods have filled many, many observers with existential terror. Some have even expressed utter despair over whether the world will be inhabitable by any form of life. At times I have been tempted to join the despair, to give up hope of ever leaving a beautiful legacy for future generations. For the sake of all the people of the world, I must fight that temptation. I need to do my part to fight for the future.

There are a large number of activists trying to protect the environment. However, they need help from people who have the power to make really concrete changes. That is why I am writing to you and other Democratic politicians. That does sound very partisan, but the sad fact is that the Republican party is almost a lost cause at this point. I wish to be proven wrong about that. The fact is that it already engaged in brutal obstruction during the Obama administration. A sinister side to the base already started emerging during that time as well. With the rise of Donald Trump, the much of its leadership and nearly all of its electoral base have become increasingly unwilling to offer the kind of compromise needed for a functional democracy.

The Democratic party as a whole has been criticized as very weak in opposing the radicalizing Republican Party. The current President has spoken of a desire for restoring national unity. That desire is certainly laudable in itself when Trump blatantly stoked resentment and division. Again, however, the Republican party and its core supporters have shown a complete unwillingness to work with any opponents in any way. They view their opponents as subversive enemies that need to be crushed underfoot. The Republican party has inched towards neo-fascism at a time when neo-fascism is mainstreaming around the world. The Republican party has also already been beholden to the selfish interests of major corporations for decades. It even seeks to magnify the already dire influence of corporations chiefly responsible for pollution. Its propaganda outlets outright deny pollution and mislead millions of people.

Some Democratic politicians have also been criticized as going along with corporate interests and watering down legislation meant to oppose corporate influence. By now it has become clear that corporate elites do not have the safety of the world and its human and nonhuman denizens in mind. By now it has become clear that they must be reined in for the greater good. The only language that major corporations even comprehend is money. Here I arrive at the first main point of this letter: I urge you to work with other Democratic leaders to divest from major corporations and their executives, especially those most directly responsible for polluting the Earth. I’ve also seen proposals that corporations be forced to contribute to removing as much pollution as possible. Quickening the transition away from fossil fuels is crucial.

However, alternate energy sources are not enough. Switching from gas-powered cars to electric cars is not enough. Building solar or wind farms in place of coal-burning power plants is not enough. Extraction and consumption cause their own serious problems. The problem of environmental degradation has roots that are far too deep and complicated to address here, though I will touch upon one later. Going hand-in-hand with corporate influence are the bad social and urban infrastructures that do not encourage sustainable lifestyles. I barely even know where to begin in this regard. Cities are too often built for cars and not people. Most people have to drive carbon-spewing cars to work at jobs that are not well-suited to their needs in order to pay their bills and feed their families. Too many people are left in poverty or near-poverty, some people are more-or-less isolated in suburbs, and a tiny handful are virtually untouchable in their wealth and privilege. Healthy food is not always accessible, and even when it is, it often has to be shipped very far from the source.

My second main point is this: in addition to transitioning to cleaner energy, the very infrastructure of our society needs to reformed. Local communities need to be lifted up so that they can better care for themselves without the need for distant figures constantly having to provide for them through convoluted supply chains. It’s true that right-wingers speak of “small government” with the unspoken agenda of leaving corporate oligarchs and ultra-conservative clergy to rule over ordinary human beings. Nonetheless, I believe that, at this point, government needs to assist in rebuilding communities so that they can eventually leave denizens to stand on their feet and care for each other. The pandemic, along with the poor responses of many local officials, has shown the need for communities to engage in mutual care.

I will confess that this exhortation is the vaguest one in this letter. I lack in-depth education on such matters. I bring it up in order to further nudge you in a direction that would be far better for the Earth and its people. I can offer one example of what must be done that is slightly clearer: helping communities establish gardens and small-scale farms to better feed themselves.

On a very important side note, this nation needs to divest from the military as well. The largest and most powerful military in history is known to be among the largest polluters on earth. Too many politicians seem to ignore how massive the military already is an insist on subsidizing it at the cost of actually building a peaceful and prosperous society.

I further wish to discuss the need to center indigenous peoples in renewing our society. No, I am no indigenous myself. I simply wish to point to their wisdom. Yes, the sagely magical Indian who is one with Mother Earth is a crude stereotype, and I have no intention of reinforcing it. With that said, I follow a number of indigenous writers, activists, spiritualists, and influencers on social media. I learned about how many indigenous people are attempting to reconnect to previously outlawed and hidden heritages. The stereotype could be rooted in reality.

In most cases, those heritages include animistic spiritualities, in which aspects of the natural world, from plants to animals to waters to stones, are seen as having spirits. Furthermore, these aspects of the natural world are seen as relatives to humans. I should note how some well-meaning white people, wishing to bond with the earth instead of submitting to organized religion, appropriate these indigenous spiritualties and associated practices. Indigenous writers will encourage such people to instead delve into their own pre-Christian heritages, which have similar animistic philosophies, however obscured by time they may be. I have actually been doing just that—though I won’t elaborate because I don’t want to center myself.

You may be asking, what is the relevance said common thread of the spiritualities of indigenous peoples? That animism seems to go hand-in-hand with methods of land care that developed over generations of trial and error, along with the principles behind those methods. With the subjugation and expulsion (and worse) of the land’s original caretakers, though, these practices fell into obscurity. The most dramatic example, perhaps, is the suppression of controlled burnings on the western coastline leading to the wildfires that we have seen in recent years. Indeed, the different lands of different indigenous nations need their own subtly distinct approaches, based on ecosystems, geographies, local histories, and general senses of place. Indigenous activists and figureheads are calling upon governments to heed their words on not only conservation but also regeneration.

One of the main demands that indigenous activists make is for the return of their lands, full sovereignty over them, and the facilitation of cultural revival. Yes, that is a very simple manner of justice and righting a historic wrong. It has become evident that their wisdom is a crucial piece of the puzzle of solving environmental problems as well. Simple “colorblind” or “globalized” liberalism won’t suffice when working for social or environmental justice. Indigenous activists argue that colonialism is at the root of so many of our world’s problems. Many of them even outright state that the “colonial state” in itself is a problem. I can see how colonialism has promoted the rise of an all-devouring capitalism and perpetuated it. The grim historical fact of how the enslavement of Black people and the elimination of indigenous peoples contributed to building this nation remains a grim historical fact.

I myself am figuring out the world and learning many truths, but I am sympathetic to people who have borne the brunt of colonialism. I welcome the humanistic achievements of modernity and utterly oppose fundamentalism and fascism, I assure you, but I’ve come to accept that the modern world is broken. Simple progress won’t heal the world. “Big government” certainly has a role to play in mobilizing the needed social changes, such as what I’ve alluded to above, but the “colonial state” needs to ultimately divest its own power.

I’ll try to summarize my points now. Major corporations and economic elites need to be drastically reined in and disempowered (along with the military). The transition to renewable energies needs to be quickened—but also needs to be accompanied by drastic changes to infrastructures and supply chains so as to result in less extraction and consumption. Localized communities need to be empowered so they can better care for themselves without much out faraway aid. Indigenous peoples need to be given their lands back, be elevated to leadership roles in caring for and regenerating said lands, and be empowered so they can rebuild their cultures. Settlers should learn from them as well. In the end, the state and the socio-economic system that it has upheld need to recede—not for billionaires or grand inquisitors or dictators, but for ordinary people and the earth. In truth, humans are meant to be a part of nature, and the generational challenge is for humanity to reconcile with the rest of nature.

This all may sound idealistic or radical. This past summer has shown us that we shouldn’t settle for anything less than radical social change. This nation, which has been a major world power for over a century, needs to be radically reimagined. This all may sound vague as well. I have little education in politics and governance apart from what I’ve tried to learn for myself across the internet. That is all the more reason for people like you—people with more real-world power than I—to push along radical social change. This letter is meant to raise awareness of your duty as a leader. A leader is meant to be a guide, not a dominator. There’s a chance that you could be recorded in history as a leader who did what was necessary to make the world’s healing and renewal possible.

Thank you.

You may call me Brian Solomon Whiterose.

#environment #environmentalism #indigenous rights #indigenous people #us politics #social justice #social reform #colonialism #capitalism #long text

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notbecauseofvictories · 4 years ago

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Ok sorry if this is a basic knowledge thing but like. Re: amy coney barrett nomination/court "packing" of hard right republican judges - is there really no mechanism in the US court/legal system/organisation to ensure that judges respect the law instead of their own animus? I love reading your tumblr btw im always interested to hear your thoughts and insights!

I am not a Constitutional scholar but, well, here is the problem:

“Respect the law” is a...vague and wobbly proposition that doesn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny. Plessy v. Ferguson was perfectly lawful right up until Brown v. Board of Education overruled it. Obergefell is lawful and so is Masterpiece Cakeshop and so is Bostock, and if Thomas and Alito’s dissent in Davis v. Ermold is advanced to majority opinion, that would be lawful too. Judges---all judges, from probate, juvenile, and criminal, up through Supreme Court Justice---decide how the law works on a practical level. That’s their job: to hear specific facts, think about how those facts fit into the framework of the law (whatever that means) and then make a decision about how that law will effect the people in front of them. You can “appeal,” a word which here means, “see if another judge disagrees with how their colleague reached that conclusion” but even that is a limited remedy---and there’s no appealing the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judges don’t “make” law in a legislative sense, but they very much determine how laws will effect people. So telling judges to “respect the law” is a little like telling butchers to self-enforce health and safety standards---yes, theoretically that could work, but you’re probably still going to find a hair in the sausage.

And truth be told, the Supreme Court has swung both liberal and conservative throughout its history. If Barrett is promoted, we’ll see the court pull right after a few decades of liberal rulings---but that’s not ignorance of the law. It’s a judge taking a particular interpretive bent. (Both Lawrence v. Texas and Planned Parenthood v. Casey came out of the Rehnquist court, as did Bush v. Gore and US v. Lopez...) Right now legal scholars are talking about this being “Lochner 2.0″ which refers to the Lochner era, a time in the early 1900s when the Supreme Court was staunchly anti-worker, ruling against unions but for monopolies and child labor. Debates over the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 (i.e., the original court-packing scheme) were the only thing that seemed to shake the Supreme Court out of its “liberty for all, oppression for most” mode.

This is also why a lot of modern-day legal scholars are arguing for something similar---Elie Mystal (a personal favorite) has written multiple articles about the value of expanding the Supreme Court; Lawfare folks have contributed articles; even Joe Biden, who couldn’t find a radical idea if it bit him in the ass, has admitted that we need a committee to evaluate judicial reform.

Because the thing is...animus is powerful, and not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t think it’s bad for judge to weigh in on the strength of their experience! RBG (may her memory be a blessing) was arguing out of animus when she helped create the idea of sex discrimination. The NAACP, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU have extreme animus when they send their lawyers to DC to argue for equal protection under the law, a woman’s right to choose, and all peoples’ fundamental liberties. Even Gorsuch (blech) has pushed the envelope when it comes to Indian/Native American treaties, recognizing particular contours of Indian law---to the point where his nomination was discussed by important activist groups. Animus is not a bad thing, and the idea that our court system is an objective, pristine body that no personal feeling or suffering touches, does more harm than good. Judges are politicians just like senators or presidents! Laws don’t stop being political just because we hand them over to lawyers to interpret! We as citizens deserve honest conversations about how laws will/could/should/do function, whom that impacts and how judges make that happen.

After all, if they’re the ones deciding how it impacts you and me, so you and I deserve a chance to weigh in.

#''scrutiny'' haHA #this is...not even kind of a complete picture of my feelings and thoughts! but it's somewhere to start #what is lawful is what you can get away with; that does not mean it's good or worthwhile #I just had my ballot accepted and the cook county list of judges was particularly interesting to research #comparing different attorney groups and also activist groups #us politics for ts #uspol for ts #man's unending search for freedom #some things rats won't do

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warsofasoiaf · 3 years ago

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The theory and in practice but let me clarify, it seems that Communism and Fascism both advocate for state control over the economy, both have cult of personality dictatorships with semi regular purges of the military and ruling classes, and both are against liberal democracy/capitalism and individual rights. I mean I guess Communism didn't have the racism of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy but aside from that are the two systems markedly different?

Alright - this will be a long and controversial answer that discusses some unpleasant topics. Any discussion of fascism, even academic, is bound to cause problems, so let me throw a cut in. Also, take into account where I'm coming from. I've studied these movements but I am strongly opposed to them, I consider them both to be movements that depend on a dictatorship that brutally suppresses dissent. So take into account that my reading and interpretation is likely to be vastly different than a supporter of either of these movements.

To understand fascism, you have to understand the theory of fascism. Part of the problems is that fascism is hard to pin down. Part of that is due to the politicization of the term - political tribal emphasize elements of fascism that coincide with their political enemies so that they can guilt-by-association and accuse their political enemies of being fascist or crypto-fascist. This isn't just no-name people on the internet, even historical scholars have used bad scholarship of fascism in an attempt to exonerate and promote their own desired ideological beliefs. Throughout the 20th century, capitalism, socialism, communism, social democracy, libertarianism, liberalism, you name it, it's been called fascist, and 99% of the time, the reason has been bunk.

Fascism has a core ideological belief that is unchangeable and inherent - a need for the mass mobilization of all resources of a society in order to address the complexity of the modern world. Liberalism and democracy were seen as too chaotic and too co-opted by the power elite, politicians, industrial barons, aristocracy, to pursue their own narrow self-interest instead of the good of the nation. A strongman was needed to save civilization (and this apocalyptic crisis is not hyperbole on my part, fascist thinkers frequently talk of those times as a civilizational crisis) and the nation by discerning the true interest of the people - the national will - and utilize their supreme control of the national resources in order to achieve it. Thus, the fascist unites all aspects of society under the national will, putting all forces at its command via the fascist party where all apparati are organs of the state - this is called corporatism and little understood in the modern day; I'd go so far as to say one of the chief reasons why fascism is misunderstood is a lack of understanding of corporatism. This idea of national will is important, fascism articulates a national rebirth in devotion to this national will, where all members of society contribute to the pursuit of the national goals. These typically but do not require the acquisition of territory and resources to further the strength and economic self-sufficiency of the nation. Autarky as an economic goal is a pursuit of national strength, to reduce the nation's vulnerability to trade disruption in the event of a war, since their foreign policy is likely as not to be quite hostile and nations would probably refuse to trade with them. Fascism possesses a cult of technological modernity that stems from the central premise of the dictatorship needed to address the technological challenges of the modern age, particularly in the era of mass mobilization of total war - the strength of the fascist nation is shown through its technological inventions and its industrial prowess - hence why Mussolini took great pains to express (and grossly exaggerate) the efficiency of Italian society in employment and productive output. Total war is important to the tenets of fascism, the industrial base that supported a war led to a belief in warfare that there was no such thing as a non-combatant, that the factory worker was as much a part of the military engine as the soldier. Taken to its extreme, the fascist ideology conceived that as fascism was the nation, all those who opposed fascism were not of the state and thus enemies of the state. Since there are no non-combatants, anyone opposed to fascism is an active combatant against the nation and thus must be removed for the good of the state. Since to be non-fascist is to be an enemy of the state, the fascist party is the only party permitted and permeates all elements of society - as if all of the resources are needed to be mobilized, the fascist must be everywhere to mobilize them. This central concept rationalizes and forms the understanding for fascism as totalitarian.

This wedded itself with the relatively new (1870's is when it started) theory of social Darwinism, an adaptation of Darwinian evolutionary theory into the realm of society and politics. Social Darwinism, in essence, posited that there were "strong" and "weak" groups and that the strong inherently displaced and eliminated the weak in a parallel biological phenomenon of evolution. The fascist ideology would prove its strength by successfully handling the crises that the weak liberal regimes were unable to solve and prove their societal fitness. Communism, with its articulation of the proletariat-bourgeoise conflict, was seen as counterproductive. Economically, fascism saw "productivist" forces as strong, which were workers, soldiers, technicians, entrepreneurs, inventors, and so on, while non-productive forces were primarily relegated to those seen as belonging to parliamentarian, individualistic, or otherwise non-fascist characteristics. So fascist societies saw the removal of all these undesirable forces as necessary to further the full mobilization of all national resources.

Similarly, the theory of communism needs to be understood in order to compare and contrast the two ideologies. Communism as a theory stems from ruminations and expansions on socialism and applying theories toward political science and sociology. Marx articulated that society was where it was largely due to economic forces and the relation of people to the means of production. According to the labor theory of value, the value of goods produced is equivalent to the work needed to produce those goods and the work needed to extract the raw products that went into the production of those goods. Thus, in order to create a profit, a capitalist must increase the price of a good to sell it - thus the capitalist has a parasitic relationship to the worker where it extracts surplus value and artificially increases their own wealth without providing any value, a classic example of rent-seeking behavior. As profits tend to fall over time, the capitalists continual pursuit leads to a constant instability, which will cause the workers to unite against their exploiters. This is not due to a social Darwinist outlook, at least, by Marxist standards (which were articulated decades after when Marx wrote), but as the continuing natural state of historical progression of people and their relationship with the means of production.

Marx articulated the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat, possessing an understanding of history and theory, to act on behalf of the workers to seize the means of production, protect the state from reactionary capitalists and other movements hostile to the new workers' state, and enact central planning to satisfy the economic and social needs of the nation. He cited the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of this dictatorship. As the dictatorship collectivized the means of production and transformed society, the dictatorship would wither away as its coercive power would no longer be required by the transformed people, the new socialist man in a society absent economic classes and distinctions. No longer would the economy be driven by the selfish demands of private enterprise which does not seek to satisfy the physical and social needs of its people, but rather an economy driven by the needs of its citizens.

Perhaps the largest theoretical difference is in regard to the nation itself. Communism is, in theory, an international movement that transcends borders, while fascism is completely focused on the nation and nationhood. One of the largest differences in the theory is the idea of the dictatorship. In communism, the coercive apparatus of the dictatorship withers away as the transformation of society proceeds to full communism - it in essence makes itself obsolete and is abolished as a result. In fascism, the dictatorship is the point - the strongman is in power to discern the national will and to direct the mobilization of society as opposed to the chaotic and selfish desires of private individuals that results in inefficiency and pursuit of objectives contrary to the national renewal and goals. Another chief difference is the role of class in society. In a fascist system, the society is very structured and ordered into classes, that each have their own role for the good of the nation. In a system that has achieved full communism, social classes are a thing of the past - all men are equal to one another regardless of profession as all are workers. Property ownership is different in these theories as well, a communist state has no ownership and is defined instead by usership, while fascist societies have individual members of the party placed in ownership of facilities with direction from the state - not only does the party direct production for the nation's benefit, but this serves as a useful tool to reward high-performing members of the party.

That's just theory, and it's truly bare-bones at that, it doesn't even articulate the differences between Mussolini's fascism with Hitler's Nazism anymore than it does Marxism-Leninism versus libertarian socialism - this is just high-level stuff and so much of those ideas go into implementation when the theory jumps off the page. There's so much that goes into it, and there's so much that goes into just the parts of where these ideas diverged from each other, as well as syndicalism and Sorelianism and other influences. In truth, there are entire reams of scholarship devoted to studying just one of these things and I'm abbreviating it to the point where I've missed a whole lot I wanted to put in. I can do some stuff in practice if you like.

Have a good one, James.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#fascism

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fr-economics · 4 years ago

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A Brief History of Neoliberalism #2

Here's the second post in which I summarize and discuss David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. In this post, you'll learn:

how a specific group of people plotted to advance neoliberal theory and ideology

how the U.S. created the Iraqi and Chilean governments to benefit the wealthy

the historical events that led to the adoption of neoliberal policies

how the Darkest Timeline emerged, as the 1% started to consolidate political and economic power

Please feel free to ask any questions. This post is longer than the previous one and this material is a lot to take in.

Chapter 1: Freedom’s Just Another Word...

The founding figures of neoliberalism specifically aimed for neoliberal thought to become dominant. In order to do this, they advanced a “conceptual apparatus,” as Harvey puts it, that appeals to our intuitions, instincts, values, and desires.

They aligned their theory closely with "political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom." These were, of course, threatened "by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgements for those of individuals free to choose.”

So who were these founders? In 1947, Austrian political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek and a group of advocates (including Ludvig von Mises and Milton Friedman) created the Mont Pelerin Society. They called themselves neoliberals after liberalism, in the traditional European sense, because of their (supposed) commitment to personal freedom, and neoclassical economics from the 19th century.

In the 1970s, advocates of neoliberalism aimed to garner financial and political support, such as in think tanks and academia (most notably, the University of Chicago). The theory also gained credibility "by the award of the Nobel Prize in economics to Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976."

The Creation of Neoliberal States

According to Harvey, a neoliberal state is "a state apparatus whose fundamental mission [is] to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital."

The promotion of "freedom" was used as a key justification for invading Iraq by President Bush. However, Bush had no intention of actually promoting the well-being of the Iraqi people. In 2003, Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, promulgated orders for "full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, elimination of nearly all trade barriers" and more. However, the labor market was strictly regulated. Strikes were forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted.

Some argued these orders violated the Geneva Conventions, "since an occupying power is mandated to guard the assets of an occupied country and not sell them off." However, "they would become legal if confirmed by a ‘sovereign’ government." The interim government appointed by the US was given the power to only confirm the existing laws, not edit them for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

We've seen this creation of a neoliberal state under the "coercive influence of the U.S." before. This famously happened for the first time in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet enacted a coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. This coup was backed not only by "domestic business elites threatened by Allende’s drive towards socialism" but also by U.S. corporations and the CIA.

This coup violently repressed and dismantled leftist social movements and popular organizations, such as community health centers. Pinochet then brought Chicago-trained economists into the government. Since the '50s, the U.S. had funded training of Chilean economists there "as part of a Cold War programme to counteract left-wing tendencies in Latin America." These economists "privatized public assets" and "opened up natural resources to private and unregulated exploitation." They also facilitated direct foreign investment.

Why the Neoliberal Turn?

After WWII, the aim of the "restructuring of state forms and of international relations" was to "prevent a return to the catastrophic conditions that had so threatened the capitalist order in the great slump of the 1930s." The new post-WWII states all accepted that "the state should focus on full employment, economic growth, and the welfare of its citizens, and that state power should be freely deployed, alongside of or, if necessary, intervening in or even substituting for market processes to achieve these ends.”

Keynesian policies were widely deployed to meet these goals. States regulated industry and constructed welfare systems, including healthcare, education, etc. State-led planning and even ownership of specific sectors were not uncommon. "This form of political-economic organization is now usually referred to as ‘embedded liberalism'," and it delivered high rates of economic growth in the '50s and '60s.

However, by the end of the '60s, problems emerged. Unemployed and inflation surged, causing "stagflation" well into the '70s.

One potential solution was to "deepen state control and regulation of the economy." "The left assembled considerable popular power behind such programmes," even in the U.S., where even Republican President Nixon oversaw a wave of regulatory reform, including creating the EPA. There was an "emergence of a socialist alternative to the social compromise between capital and labour" and "popular forces were agitating for widespread reforms and state interventions." This was obviously a threat to ruling elites.

Elites were also threatened by reduced economic growth in the ‘70s. U.S. control of wealth by the 1% plunged during this decade. Implementation of neoliberal policies in the ‘70s, such as deregulation under President Carter, helped the income and wealth of the 1% so much that some writers "have concluded that neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power." "...Increasing social inequality [has] in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project."

However, keen observers of American politics in the past couple of decades will note that there's often a tension or outright clash between actual neoliberal theory and what neoliberal politicians implement. There is even a tension within neoliberalism itself. For example, distrust of the state's intervention sits alongside the need for a coercive state that will enforce private property rights. Harvey says, "when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable."

Harvey concludes that the "theoretical utopianism" of neoliberal theory, meaning all that talk about human freedom and individual liberty, "primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve" the restoration of class power after the crisis of the 70s.

The Reagan Administration

Reagan's presidency was preceded by "the Volcker shock" in 1979. Paul Volcker, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank under President Carter, promoted "a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment." This was in contrast to Keynesian policies that aimed for full employment. By steeply raising interest rates, Volcker jumpstarted a recession "that would empty factories and break unions in the US and drive debtor countries to the brink of insolvency."

Reagan himself, starting with the 1981 air traffic controllers' strike, began an "all-out assault on the powers of organized labour at the very moment when the Volcker-inspired recession was generating high levels of unemployment (10% or more)." This began the long decline in wages, and was accompanied by massive deregulation in many industries and huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy—the top personal tax rate was reduced from 70% to 28%.

A series of events had begun in the '70s which came to a head in the '80s. The OPEC oil crisis of 1973 led to Middle Eastern oil-producing states being pressured militarily by the U.S. to funnel their wealth through New York investment banks. These banks needed new outlets for this influx of funds, and turned their predatory gaze towards foreign governments.

Previously, the U.S. exerted military pressure on various nations to meet its own financial needs, and primarily exploited raw material resources or cultivated specific markets. However, the New York investment banks became more active internationally by lending capital to foreign governments. Developing nations were "encouraged to borrow heavily... at rates that were advantageous to the New York bankers."

However, since the loans were in U.S. dollars, any rise in U.S. interest rates "could easily push vulnerable countries into default," leaving the banks exposed to huge losses. This was proved when the Volcker shock drove Mexico into default in 1982. Reagan's administration oversaw the pioneering of structural adjustment, in which the IMF, World Bank, and other lenders rolled over debt in return for the debtor countries implementing neoliberal reforms, such as cuts in welfare, privatization, and reduction of labor protections.

Remember that tension between neoliberal theory and practice, though? If free market principles were truly implemented, then the lenders would be on the hook for the loss if their borrowers default. They took the risk of lending, so it's their problem. However, in this case, borrowers are forced by the U.S. to repay their debts no matter the consequences for the well-being of their people.

The Meaning of Class Power

"While neoliberalization may have been about the restoration of class power, it has not necessarily meant the restoration of economic power to the same people." There are several trends under neoliberalism that reorganized what it meant to be part of the upper class.

First is the fusion of ownership and management of companies, for example, CEOs being paid in stock options. Stock values are then prioritized rather than production. Second is the reduction of the gap between capital earning dividends/interest and production/manufacturing. Large corporations became more financial in their orientation. An example of this is car companies opening departments to finance car purchases, instead of simply making cars. Mergers helped spur this trend, creating larger and larger diversified conglomerates.

There were also new innovations in financial services, creating "new kinds of financial markets based on securitization, derivatives, and all manner of futures trading." "Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything." Finance's tentacles became embedded in all areas of the economy as well as the state, and companies became more profitable not through gains in manufacturing, but through increased financial services.

All of these changes allowed "new processes of class formation to emerge," for example, the creation of tech millionaires and billionaires who got newly rich on new technologies, as well as newly acquired wealth through creation of conglomerates.

#ABHON #economics #real world #ABHON post

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sanderssidesfanfiction · 4 years ago

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If There’s a Place I Could Be - Chapter Forty One

If There’s a Place I Could Be Tag

October 8th, 1996

Remy dashed after the retreating figure. “George! Hey, hold up!”

George stopped and glared at Remy, and Remy felt frozen in place. “Were you ever going to tell me?” he snapped.

“Tell you what?” Remy asked.

“That you had a crush on me?!” George asked. “You’re sick in the head, Remy! Don’t you know that you can get in serious trouble for being gay?!”

“Who...who told you I had a crush on you?” Remy asked, searching George’s face, blood roaring in his ears. It couldn’t be. No...it couldn’t...please don’t let it be him.

“Jacob told Darren, who told me,” George sneered.

“I...that was last year, George! I don’t have a crush anymore!” Remy lied.

George scoffed. “Whatever! I can’t believe you thought we could be friends. I don’t associate with queers.”

Remy stayed frozen in place as George went to his next class. Remy heard snickering from behind him. Jacob and Darren were standing there, and Darren high-fived Jacob. “Nice one. Want to sit at lunch with me?” Darren asked.

“Sure thing!” Jacob exclaimed.

Jacob told the most popular kids in school. Remy couldn’t move. The whole school must know by now...

August 22nd, 2001

Remy watched Emile closely whenever he could get away with it in their small apartment. Emile had been wearing T-shirts over the summer, so Remy could watch his arms, but he couldn’t see any other exposed skin below Emile’s neck, and Remy was worried that Emile might be hiding fresh injuries. After seeing Emile bang his fists against his head repeatedly in frustration and then hide in his room for the rest of the day and not acknowledge Remy the next morning, well, Remy was worried.

In all honesty, he wasn’t sure he still had the right to worry over Emile, but it didn’t mean he just stopped caring. He kept to himself, too afraid to openly check on Emile, but when he was alone in his room, his head would drop, his tears would fall, and choked sobs would escape their prison. He had screwed up, probably irreparably damaged not only his relationship, but his friendship with Emile. His one friend in life who he could always count on. Who helped him find Kim. Who encouraged him to make more friends. And he had gone and tossed away that bond.

It was one morning when Remy was making breakfast that Emile walked into the kitchen, wincing as he placed a hand on his abdomen. Remy tried not to freak out as he did a mental tally of all the sharp tools in their apartment and their locations. Nothing seemed out of place or bloody this morning, but that only soothed Remy’s nerves so much.

Emile glanced over and caught Remy staring, and Remy turned back to his toast. “What?” Emile snapped.

Remy flinched minutely. “It’s nothing,” he mumbled.

“No, I didn’t cut myself, since I know you’re wondering. My stomach happens to be upset,” Emile growled. “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of hurting myself over your words.”

“Do you honestly think I want that, Emile?” Remy asked. “Because I don’t.”

Emile didn’t even glance in Remy’s direction at that, and Remy felt his stomach sink. “What can I say, Emile? I’m sorry! I crossed a line I didn’t know was there, and I won’t cross it again!” His eyes pricked with tears. “I want to be your friend. I don’t even care if we don’t date anymore, I just want to be your friend again.”

“Well, I don’t,” Emile said, gripping the counter with white knuckles. “Because we’re always doing this. We cycle through good times, and then one bad thing happens and we’re back where we started, at each others’ throats, only this time we know where to find the jugular. I don’t want to keep going through that cycle the rest of my life.”

“But we can get better at that, can’t we? I’ve gotten more stable! I just didn’t realize that we both had strong opinions on this! Can’t we...can’t we at least be friends? Can’t we at least try?” Remy begged. “Please, Emile. I don’t want to lose you.”

Emile’s eyes were hard as he finally looked over, and Remy knew he looked pathetic. Eyes red and puffy, tear tracks on his cheeks because he was always such a crybaby. He would never outgrow that. “It’s a bit late for that,” Emile said simply, pushing himself off the counter.

Remy wilted. “Oh,” he said softly. Then, “Will you take me to therapy still, or should I walk?”

“How did you get there last week?” Emile asked.

“I didn’t. Kim’s getting ready to move practices, and states. We’ve been moving from every week to every other week, in an attempt to get me used to not going to a therapist as often, because if I choose another one, then I might have to be put on a waiting list for a while,” Remy said.

“If?” Emile asked. “Not when?”

“Well, considering this whole situation, I’m pretty sure that I can’t get any better than this,” Remy said, letting his arms spread before falling to his sides. “I didn’t think I needed any more help, two weeks ago. I thought I’d be fine. But clearly, all the change has just been superficial, if I’m still hurting you.” He shook his head. “Why am I even telling you this? You don’t want to be my friend, you don’t want to hear about this.”

Emile looked conflicted for a brief second, before his face returned to its stony, neutral state. “I have to get to work,” he said by way of reply, grabbing some granola and leaving the kitchen. “If you need a ride to therapy, call me. But I’m sure you can walk there just fine in about an hour.”

Remy nodded silently, turning back to his toast. He listened to Emile get dressed in a hurry, and head out the door, slamming it possibly a little harder than necessary. Flinching minutely, Remy went back to eating his toast. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to eat, but he needed it if he was going to be working today. He tried to avoid the thought that Emile would be upset if he didn’t eat. Emile didn’t want to be friends, he had made that very clear. And people who weren’t your friends didn’t actively want you to care for yourself, not in the sense that friends did.

He was alone. He felt so alone, and it wasn’t fair, except it was. He had brought this punishment on himself, and now he had to face the consequences. Remy took a deep breath, forcing the bile crawling up his throat back down. Now was not the time to cry himself sick. He had work to get to, and therapy later tonight.

Remy walked his way to the local coffee shop, wishing not for the first time that he could have gotten that promotion to manager. Instead of him, Steven had been promoted. Which, that wasn’t the worst choice they could have gone with, but Steven didn’t exactly go the extra mile, either. He would look out for himself, and only himself.

As Remy came in the doorway, a couple people nodded at him, and he offered them weak smiles back. He hadn’t been able to tell anyone here about his issues with Emile, just implying that he had a bad couple weeks over a break up, without being able to use Emile’s name, because Steven was always around. It frustrated him to no end that he was constantly forced to hide this part of himself. He wanted to jump on the counters and scream, “I’m here, I’m queer, and if you have a problem with that, then say it to my face!”

But that would be suicide when it came to his job, so he forced himself to keep his mouth shut just a while longer. He didn’t know how much longer he’d have to do it, considering that yeah, Fairview was liberal enough, but not the people inside it who he ran into on a daily basis. He wondered how any of the blue politicians actually got into office around here, if there were so many homophobes, but, he reasoned, if the politicians didn’t reveal their stance on the LGBT community, and focused more on schools or taxes or whatever, then they could slip under the radar and help people like Remy, which he appreciated.

Even if he no longer had any plans to date, or get married. He saw Emile as really the only one he’d be willing to risk hate crimes for. Who he’d find a way in the legislature to marry. And now Emile was gone. Probably never coming back. And that sucked.

One of his coworkers cornered him in the back room as he was tying his apron on. “Boyfriend troubles?” he asked in a low voice. Steven was one of the few people still in the dark about Remy’s identity, because Steven was very vocal about political views, and he was very, very conservative. He also happened to be using the office one room over.

“We broke up. Really messily. Two weeks ago. And he’s still snarling at me, and I feel awful.” Remy shook his head. “I mean, he has the right to, I was the one who provoked him, but I really wish I hadn’t.”

“And he won’t listen to you?”

Remy laughed. “Would you, if I were a complete and utter asshole to you all because I didn’t think you could get hurt?”

“Not at first. But two weeks is a long time, man. He’s not still licking his wounds, he’s holding a grudge.”

“Look, I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine,” Remy insisted. “It’ll be okay, I’ll be okay. I just need a little more time, and maybe a new roommate. I know it would make him feel better, at the very least.”

“Picani! Where are you?!” Steven asked, walking in.

“Right here,” Remy said. “Just struggling a little with the straps on my apron. Bradley was helping me.”

“Well, fix it fast, because I need both of you out here for the morning rush,” Steven snapped.

The second he left Remy breathed a sigh and Bradley grimaced. “Is it just me, or did Steven get worse when he was promoted?”

“Not just you,” Remy said. “Although I always thought he was fishy, so this is less of a surprise to me personally.”

Bradley grimaced again and both of them left the back room to deal with the morning rush. Remy appreciated the distraction so long as he didn’t think about it as a distraction. Because if he did that, he would get memories of the shelter, and hanging out being happy with Emile...and he would get upset and possibly teary-eyed that he couldn’t have that anymore. And no one wants their barista sobbing into their coffee, Remy, so you have to pull it together, man, Remy reminded himself.

A pang in his chest resonated when he remembered Emile calling him “girl” on those days where he was super confused about his gender, and he bit his lip to keep back the tears. He kept biting at every little thing that came into his head that reminded him of Emile, which had to be about half of the world, until he tasted copper. He put a hand to his mouth, pulling it back to see blood. He winced. He hadn’t realized he was biting that hard.

Retreating to the bathroom to wash his hands free of blood, he tried to force all thoughts of Emile out of his mind. It wasn’t working very well, in all honesty, but he had to try. He couldn’t end up sobbing into someone’s coffee. Steven would get mad and all his other coworkers would know something was up and those who had initiative when it came to friends might kill Emile. He didn’t want Emile dead, he just wanted to be friends. But he had squandered that opportunity, unaware of how much he needed Emile’s support until it was gone.

The rest of his shift, Remy was on the edge of crying, but never actually broke down. He got a few concerned looks, and a massive headache from holding the tears back, but he managed to do it in the end. And the second his shift ended, he was out of there. He walked back home, only to realize that Emile would be back at this point too. He turned away from the door and walked back outside the complex, resolving to go to therapy. After all, he didn’t have a lot of time before his next appointment anyway. Not if he had to walk there.

He trudged along the sidewalk, letting himself cry just a little, trying to ease the headache that was killing him. He was tired, and miserable, and he could feel a tickle in the back of his throat. He sincerely hoped he wasn’t getting sick. The last thing he needed was to be stuck at home with Emile before Emile’s classes started up. But knowing his luck, he would end up with the flu and be bedridden for a solid week.

When Kim opened the door to her office and let Remy in, Remy sighed. “I screwed up, Kim. Like, really badly.”

“Let’s talk about it,” Kim said. “I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”

#if there's a place i could be #sanders sides fanfiction #remile #emile picani #ts sleep

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chilenosvivientes · 4 years ago

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Politics, an underrated topic

Welcome or welcome to a new blog

How are you dear readers? Together with my lifelong friends, today we bring you a somewhat peculiar blog because we are going to talk about politics and yes, I know that many people are not attracted to this field at all, since they are only discussions about who is right, but these are important to know, to know which one may be more convenient for your country, province or city

In this blog we will talk about 3 types of political forms of governing, classical Liberalism, Nationalism and Liberal Conservatism, all with different ways of thinking and contributing to society, now, each of us will express each one with a slight summary and history of thes

--THE NATIONALISM--

Nationalism is a third-position political ideology, which considers that the most important thing for a country is that it possesses sovereignty and that it knows how to act effectively towards its compatriots, that is, prioritize the success of the nation.

It is called third position because it follows a path contrary to the Left (communism) and to the right (capitalism), added to this, they are against globalism, therefore against LGBT, uncontrolled emigration, Antifascism, abortion and totalitarianism, but this does not mean that they are racist or homophobic, it refers to the fact that they are against profit and indoctrination, in addition to excessive emigration, or as the saying "Chile for Chileans" says, it can be applied with any country.

Its economic proposal is to value national trade and industry, they could greatly benefit the development of the country and should improve the quality of life of people and life in general, therefore this can cause the problems of international interventionism by Powers like the United States or China, finish.

Nationalism was created by the people who wanted a nation free from foreign interventions, as at present this is difficult, nationalist movements have been created such as: "National Order Front" "Social-Patriot Movement" "We still have a homeland citizens" etc.

They only seek a strong national sovereignty and that their homeland can develop with growth and social justice.

Here I will put some important phrases from prominent Nationalists:

Nicolás Palacios created this phrase: "The Chilean belongs to a superior race, combining brave Mapuche blood with bold Spanish blood"

Pablo Rodríguez Guez created this phrase: "When the Right and the Left fail, the only way is Nationalism"

Pablo Pedro Kunstmann created this phrase: "We can all die, but if we know how to defend our homeland, it will live forever"

By the way, here are other data about nationalism, in Chile more than 3 movements were founded, the national agrarian movement was created by Ibañez del Campo, Patria y Libertad was created by Pablo Rodriguez Guez and finally the Patriot Social Movement was founded by Pablo Pedro Kunstmann.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAX4Ehkp2iE

(A nationalist anthem)

--Classic Liberalism--

The best way to improve the country could be classical liberalism, but first what is classical liberalism, it´s a political and legal philosophy that defends the individual and his freedom, also private property and market freedom,t he greatest exponents Of this they could be Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

This thought eliminated mercantilism and was the generator of capitalism in the nineteenth century, classical liberalism is the one that best respects on the economic issue, since the Market freedom would be a greater economic progress than a market in which the state participates, since the 19th century Until today it has eliminated poverty from 95% to 10% (extreme poverty), and with the free trade promoted by capitalism has increased the quality of life and human prosperity, in Chile the prosperity in 1900 was 23 years and the quality of life improved, currently it is 80, and capitalism has defects such as exploitation, and the state has done it, but the state must ensure the absolute possible efficiency in public institutions and social aid, we know that a Part of the taxation is misused and this should be controlled in a better way, we cannot allow the people with more power to do everything wrong and not have any repercussions, if a businessman does his job badly, he loses it, politicians can have all his work done, but it does not mean that they do it well or even decently, classical liberalism wants the state to have to do their job efficiently, to be one more worker, to be able to do it. lose everything if a serious error is sent, and thus improve the country by making politicians have to give their best efficiency.

---CONSERVATISM---

In political philosophy, Conservatism is called the set of doctrines and political movements that favor the use of political power or the force of the state to preserve or restore traditions- beliefs or customs- of a people or nation that can be religious, social or political. This Is a preference for the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal. In the authoritarian right sector of the political compass, is situated this classic ideology. Therefore, in this model of thought, there must be order. Elements of other political ideologies- such as liberalism o socialism can be rejected by the conservatism.

For example, when communism was installed in the east, The United States was at the top of capitalism, an ideology contrary to the first, so it can´t have established in any way. Now, it is true that some infiltrated agents of the Soviet Union could have entered the country, but most were discovered during close periods and these were only exceptional cases. It couldn´t have been easy for Gorbachev to dictate the end of the Soviet Union…. Anyways, this context is so important when it comes to conservatism during the twentieth century, since it was a beginning of the struggle of the Republican Right of North America against the doctrine of Lenin. This event brought multiple consequences in the sphere during the following years, such as the advance of liberalism and the resurgence of progressivism. Nodaway’s, for a close example, there is no longer the same vision about this thought that is practically obsolete by the new generations.

Well.....we have already talked briefly about the political ideologies that we were going to present, even if they seem different, they all seek the same thing, the development of their country based on following certain ideals and traditions, but all with the aim of improving both the quality of life, such as the development, progress and advancement of the country, added to defending the values that they follow and defend, but we believe that these can very effectively benefit a large number of the countries that surround us.

And so far our blog, it may be very extensive but believe me it is worth reading it, you will be able to learn much more about politics, you will have more general culture and it may even lead you to be interested in it, since it is an interesting topic, remember that if You liked it, do not hesitate to share it, give it your heart and tell us more ideas or ideologies that we could touch in the future, I hope you have an excellent and beautiful day, your favorite authors say goodbye, byeeeeeeeeee.

Enviar mensaje a #general

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thevividgreenmoss · 4 years ago

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What does it mean that groups visibly and proudly identifying as Palestinian felt it necessary to scrub Zionism in order to boost a politician jockeying to supervise US Empire? By what moral calculus did those groups take vital demands off the table? Did they have the consent of refugees for whom right of return is sacrosanct? Of rank-and-file Palestinians in the United States? Or was it an exercise in unilateral leadership by the diasporic professional class?

I know what the response is: we didn’t mythologize anyone; we regularly pointed out his weaknesses. Well, not really. (I didn’t see you pointing out that Sanders is a Zionist, for example.) Exerting tremendous energy to conceptualize Sanders as a benevolent uncle figure and then occasionally saying “he needs more work on this issue” or “we need to keep pushing him” was a cardinal feature of mythologization, as was running interference with points of view more palatable to the mainstream when fellow anti-Zionists dissented from the consensus. Saying “he’s the best on Palestine even though he’s not perfect” was the rankest kind of mythmaking. It confused “being better than a terrible field” with “being good.”

I saw in these statements a yearning to matter, a desire to at long last be taken seriously after decades of abuse and disregard. It’s a normal response to subordination, to the pain of continuous betrayal, but no amount of high-minded talk about an electoral revolution will compel sites of power to care about Palestinian Americans. They shouldn’t be our audience, anyway. Palestinians are admired by people around the world who value justice and resilience and dignity. Let’s not forgot our place, which isn’t among consultants and technocrats, but with the ignominious, the surplus, the unbeloved.

...Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral practice. The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent. That’s how compromise works under capitalism. Every time, every single time, it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised. Never the candidate’s position. Never the system’s inherent conservatism. Never the ongoing march of settler colonization. We’re volunteering to be captured by the settler’s notion of common sense.

And what would have happened if your guy won? You already gave up right of return. A one-state solution. Anti-imperialism. Nobody was talking about general strikes until the pandemic. And nobody ever talks about armed struggle. How did you plan to get these things back on the table after having surrendered them to a person whose first, second, and third priority is appeasing power? You gave up something Palestinians have struggled and died for over the course of decades, and for what? Just to make the apocryphal and frankly useless point that this politician is a more tolerable Zionist than the other ones?

And when your guy loses? This is the question of the moment, isn’t it? You gave up all that leverage for nothing (except for individual benefits). What happens next? God knows I can’t answer that question. I’m not saying don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t be interested in a candidate. That’s not the point. I dislike coercive forms of persuasion. I’m simply trying to convince you not to give up the idea of freedom as it’s articulated by the downtrodden. Not for any reason. Certainly not for a goddamn politician.

There’s a question you ought to ask as necessary (which is to say constantly): what happens to Palestine? When we humor a system calibrated to exclude us, when we pretend that liberation is possible on the margins of a hostile polity, when we imagine liberal Zionism as a prelude to freedom, then what happens to Palestine?

The system you deign to reform ranks nothing above ruling class accumulation—the system, in other words, is designed to betray, and performs its mandate with brutal efficiency. And so the answer to that timeless question never changes: Palestine goes away. Any group that doesn’t facilitate a flow of capital into the imperial core is fit for disappearance. Our mandate, in turn, isn’t to seek the approval of our oppressor, but to earn his contempt.

Instrumentalizing the persecuted is a critical feature of electoralism. Promoting a Zionist presidential candidate and remaining faithful to the core tenets of anti-Zionism? Forget it. It’s not happening. It can’t happen. Electoralism is salted against insurgency. It’s not a space for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy. Liberation has always required tremendous imagination. That’s not on offer when David Sirota is authoring the narrative.

You have no cause to be angry with Sanders. Not now. He hasn’t broken a single pledge. He never hid his intentions. There was plenty of reason for concern when he kept repeating liberal Zionist platitudes. It was you, not Sanders, who folded Palestine into a campaign that always promised to maintain the status quo. The outcome was easy to predict because it has many decades of precedent. Palestinians, victim of a million betrayals, should know this better than anyone. We also know that struggle has no easy trajectory. Mass movements predicated on voting make for attractive sources of relief. Then they go up in smoke and you’re left to find the next shiny figure to exploit, the next fount of excitement and pageantry and social capital. This isn’t a serious politics. It’s terminal naivete, or industrial self-promotion.

And now what? You disposed of the most radical members of our community, systematically excluding so many brethren from the life-sustaining pleasure of shared resistance, in order to assuage a bunch of faceless assholes waiting for the first opportunity to dispose of you, all that love sacrificed for no reward beyond some retweets and an evanescent sense of importance, your moment of being accepted by the polity now replaced by angry regret for having again succumbed to the gravitational pull of authority, of the state and its functionaries, of the very institutions that maintain our dispossession. But our nation, Palestine, is neither temporary nor ephemeral. Our politics should match the condition.

#:(#this piece does a great job of illustrating the problems inherent within electoralism and how it distorts political imagination/strategy &#preemptively limits the terrain of struggle well past the point of inadequacy in general in addition to the core subject of palestine withi #the context of american presidential politis #we should've all learned twelve years ago but idm #essays #*

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mirrormirrormag · 4 years ago

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systems of racism in america

Over the last 244 years, the only consistent thing about America is our inability to change our society for the better. Despite the myriad of amendments and legislation, in 2020, we are still exactly where we started, just under a different and more politically correct name. The lynching of Black bodies hasn’t stopped. The brutalization and exploitation hasn’t stopped. The only thing we are innovative in is our modernization of slavery under the guise of public safety and this is because the preservation of America is contingent on the continuation of the oppression that Black people across numerous generations are familiar with. Not only are Black Americans living with generational trauma, but they are still forced to live the same realities as their ancestors, just through a different lens. These trends are no coincidence, and are simply a byproduct of the racism and anti-Blackness that is rooted in the intentions and ideals of the slave owners who created this country.

The thing about systemic racism is that it has a propensity of cropping up in the least expected areas, even places where power dynamics are supposedly deconstructed to advocate for the equality of marginalized groups *cough* *cough* feminism *cough* *cough*. It’s a result of a centuries long effort to condition Americans to subconsciously think of others, and possibly themselves, as inferior. Since it’s so normalized, we cannot fathom a reality where our thought process isn’t directed in such a way making it difficult for people, even Black people themselves, to look into the way our society operates from a 3rd person point of view and realize how saturated American culture is saturated with racism.

How dense the topic of systemic racism itself should be enough to indicate to you how pervasive it is, and more importantly, how important it is to actively seek ways to dismantle any internalized racism you may have learned.

We are currently reliving a reality that America has just seen in 2015, in 2014, in 1992, in 1968, in 1831, all rooted from a same place of exhaustion and frustration of being forced to live a reality that is inferior and less than to others by virtue of the color of their skin. This pent up anger and frustration against those in places of power is nothing new, and the way we’ve reacted to them is not new either as history tells us, yet America has been unable to take this into account and consider that, perhaps, the meaningless lip service and futile legislation that has passed over the years have done little to nothing to liberate Black Americans.

I saw something on Twitter the other day that was discussing how the things that we get from politicians like the civil rights act for example, are only given because it doesn’t threaten their power or privilege. If it was in the interest of politicians to actually give minorities the equal rights they deserve, America wouldn’t exist as we know it. Over the years, the so-called progress that we have made were the result of desire to satiate citizens and satisfy them with a piece of legislation that ultimately wouldn’t change anything about their standards of living. For every step of progress we made, politicians were able to slip their agenda in there to not make it too easy for Black Americans. Though the passage of the Civil Rights Act was a milestone for racial equality, redlining and other unfair housing policies that still existed made it difficult for Black Americans to use the boost that the Act gave them to create a better life for themselves.

What this tells us is that America’s race relations aren’t reformable. As long as America exists in its current form, Black liberation will never be, which is an important realization to have to understand where to go next and where to target your advocacy.

The two most notorious systems in America that are a direct result of systemic racism exists in our criminal justice system: the police and prisons. Throughout the Antebellum Era, Black Americans, especially Black men, were vilified and sexualized by white Americans to paint them as criminals who would stop at nothing to violate Southern Belles. This set a precedent for what would ultimately become the basis for the mass incarceration crisis we have today as well as the practices that police use for Black Americans. After slavery was abolished through the 13th Amendment, the clause that says “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” became a loophole that southerners heavily exploited, and all of America exploits to this day. The criminalization of Black Americans aided in the normalization of incarcerating Black Americans, even for the slightest infraction. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty has never applied to Black people for this reason because our society viewed them as criminal by their very nature, and over time, along with other various racist initiatives, America has managed to create a legalized institution of slavery. Prisoners, 34% of whom are Black, are forced to do labor at no pay, and privatized prisons, which are an especially heinous form of prisons, allow shareholders the ability to profit off of prisons and prison labor, thus profiting off of Black Americans which sounds exactly like slavery to me.

The people assisting the highest rate of incarceration are the police which were initially known as slave patrols. They would catch runaway enslaved people who would often end up being brutalized and even killed by them in similar fashions to the way Black Americans continue to be murdered today. The history of the police is rooted in the perpetuation of racism and white supremacy which is why it comes to no surprise that their practices heavily promote racial profiling and unnecessary methods of violence and aggression to create peace in our neighborhoods. Today, the police have proven to exist solely to police majority Black and Brown communities, protect property, and incite violence. The police that operate in inner city neighborhoods as opposed to suburban police are two completely different methods of policing that prove that through the investment in community building and organizing, the job of the police becomes useless. It further highlights the stark contrast between the lives of white America and Black America and shows that if we really wanted to, that reality can be expended to all Americans (granted, there’s a lot of things wrong with suburbia too but you know what I mean).

America as a whole is archaic. It’s rooted in a mindset that promotes white supremacy and racism and if we want it to change or be better, we have to reinvent what we want America to mean for us as opposed to what we were forced to believe about it. We have to address the ugly side of it, because if we’re being honest, 95% of it is ugly anyways, in order to create a sustainable society for all.

#society #politics #racism #police brutality #systemic racism #mass incarceration #modern slavery #legalized slavery #antiblackness #antiblack racism #black liberation #black august

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years ago

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Lone wolves are not alone…

Today we live in the time of fear, the kingdom of degeneration. All around us spreads a sick world which refuses however to die. The world of economy falls but does not collapse. All preachers of every ideology, scientists, economists, journalists, politicians, sociologists, syndicalists, leftists, humanitarians, agree to a common truth, called “economic crisis”.

Thus the ghost of the economic crisis hovers above the formerly privileged territory of the western civilization, after leaving behind it hecatombs of dead people and ruins of war in the “undeveloped countries” of the rest of the world.

But we refuse the truth they offer us. We refuse to be lost in mathematical equations, economical terms and loan contracts. We refuse to accept that life is shoved into statistics. Numbers cannot explain why our existence gets poorer. We speak of a different poverty and not only the poverty of the supermarkets. We speak of the poverty in words, emotions, thoughts, wanderings, tensions. We speak of the unity which resides inside the modern people-pets of the cages of the metropolis who by themselves imprisoned themselves.

Today there is a crisis which makes our life poorer, but this is not the economic crisis, it is the crisis of values. Society traded the values of freedom, respect, solidarity, dignity, with a position in consumerist paradise. Now is the time for it to fall in its hell, since today it experiences the collapsing of the system which it faithfully prayed to all these years.

The ambassadors of the modern way of life speak of the savior of economy through corrective changes and development programs, while the ideologists of the left beg for the cleansing of institutions. Unfortunately, in Greece the tension of bureaucratic social anarchy also joins the dance of the absurd and fantasies the revival of dead ideologies speaking of self-management of the production means and workers collectives.

Thus the socialist anarchists, while refusing the system, instead of destroying class identities and economy, speak their language. They speak of the overthrowing of the existent, without however uprooting from inside them the economic-centric logic. For us, as anarcho-individualists and nihilists, economy is not the key for liberation. Economy is a part of the problem and the problem itself. The only way to strike the heart of the problem is to destroy the economy and its distinctions and speak of human relations. The world will not become prettier or more free if we collectivize work but only if we blow up the relation of work and destroy its mentality, its ethics and culture. The same will happen with friendship, love, pleasure, the meaning of life itself.

On the road for continuous anarchist insurrection we do not keep anything which holds us down on the past. We tear down the myths of the revolutionary subject, of the proletariat, of the eternal wait for the right objective conditions, the social likeness towards the population, this slow moving mass which with its inactivity stops us from breathing….

Therefore, looking back in time, we recognize as our own prints, the traces left behind by some lone wolves, who walked then against their time. It is all those conspiratorial anarchists illegalists who made the anarchist insurrection their only home land. It is those who chose to stay away from the glory of the dead ideologies and bureaucracy of the social anarchism which awaits the masses in order to begin its insurrection. Lone and unique they armed their desires, out aside the pathetic rot of the mob and went on to the storming of heaven.

Their star fills our eyes, the fire floods our thoughts, the vendetta of revenge beats in our hearts and, our hands embrace the guns and dynamite which they inherited to us. We live for an endless explosion of actions, thoughts, feelings, desires, which reaches the edge of the world.

There is no nostalgia, there is only today, while tomorrow is already late. Today is our turn, our life, our time.

Anarcho-individualism and nihilism, the gates of the new anarchy, invite us. In the era of generalized crisis, the sun of the new anarchy continues to rise. Now that the global economy is ill, we do not look for the “just” social cure, but on the contrary we seek the poison for its final death.

As we wrote above, life, before being strangled biologically from the economic crisis, had already been cut in its desperation, the illusions and the loneliness of modern society.

It is important therefore, to think, to feel and attack against anything which glorifies the empire of authority, against anything which preserves the religion of economy, anything which carries the death of silence and immobility. And if sometimes we seem like lone crazy people, the sure thing is that we are not alone. We live in a home full of voices, dreams, desires, laughter, melancholies, actions… Our home has no hosts and guests; it belongs to all of us. In our home we do not speak just one language but many and we always communicate with our eyes.

The basement of our home is full of weapons, explosives, plans, communiques, whatever the enemy snatches from us, our hands and desires will never remain unarmed. At the table of our home there are always spaces and glasses of wine for new friends and comrades who we never met before. There are as well some empty places for the brothers and sisters who are absent, for our dead, for the wanted, for the imprisoned, but their glasses are always full because they are always next us too. Our home has no doors, no rooms, not even walls. Our home has no roof because it would hide the sky and stars. Our home has no windows because it would stop the wind. Our home has no street or number. Our home has no name and lives in our hearts.

Our home is FAI-IRF and we will never abandon it, neither in the easy moments nor the tough times.

FAI-IRF is the lost Atlantis of the practical theory. It is the meeting point of thought and action, imagination and the present, violence with poetry, desire with decision, the ‘I’ with the us…

This moment it is important that there are many dozens of anarchist individualities and cells participating in the network FAI-IRF. FAI-IRF is an illegal anarchist union of egoists which despises the gather-ism of Marxist organizations and the bureaucracy of the anarchist reformists.

There is no protocol or rules. Our only compass is our values: direct action, anarchist critique towards the social silence, international solidarity, constant insurrection… At the same time all of us anarchists of praxis preserve unquenchable the desire to continuously recreate the formation of FAI-IRF with as an epicenter the human desires. We do not even feel the need to propose to society some ready-made recipe for happiness. Our life does not need ready-made solutions. Besides, experimentation even a mistake is the best way for the discovery of freedom. From the still waters of traditional ideologies you can expect only poison.

The insurrectionist-nihilist anarchist thought remains alive, not as a flawless and final ideology, but on the contrary when it seeks the dialectic confrontation either in order to try itself by overpassing the disagreements it has to confront, or when it discovers its gaps and re creates itself with beginning point evolution. Thus, also FAI-IRF is not the end of the road of final utopia but one of the roads for the constant course towards anarchy.

This is why when someone reads the dozens of responsibility claims of the cells of FAI-IRF internationally they will locate some differences, even some disagreements. This is the beauty and uniqueness of the new anarchy. Besides the basic values shared by us the conspirators of the Black International, there are the specificities of each one of us which promote the constant search of our existence.

Because we will always discover independent areas of ourselves, unknown passions, unlimited desires which arm the bet of Existence, replacing the misery and correctness of economic equations which are praised by the overgrown revolutionary ideologies.

Today FAI-IRF is not simply an idea, just as the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire is not limited to the land of the Greek state. Our desire is to not drain ourselves at making our existence known. Our spreading to dozens of countries transfers us to an asymmetric threat for the interior of the states. The CCF of Mexico transforms the words into fire, in Russia and Belarus the Conspiracy transforms the frozen rooftops into lava, and in Italy the Olga cell of FAI writes its own poetry with bullets. At the same time dozens of conspirators in Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Spain, England, Poland, Greece, Indonesia, Australia conspire with chaos and transfer the fire of anarchy into the foundations of the existent.

This is why we constantly create new invisible crossroads of meeting and communication in order to talk about the death of the existence and the storm of new anarchy. We want our fire to be written in all languages. Tireless comrades constantly translate prisoners texts, books, responsibility claims, while at the same time solidarity is internationalized and the FAI-IRF network becomes the Lernaen Hydra of the new anarchy. For every arrest of a cell, two new ones are ready to attack.

Thus we enter the land of continuous anarchist insurrection. In our uncontrollable course for the destruction of authority, we meet across us the enemy and its conservative powers, but besides them there is still a lot of excuses, inhibitions and dilemmas which attempt to make our feet heavy, bothering our walk. Often these camouflaged cowardices disguised as theoretical analysis live in the bureaucracy of the circles of social anarchism which hopes for the mass awakening of society. Thus the words “anarchy” “direct action” “anarchist insurrection” get confused, they lose their sharp content and remain handicapped going around like harmless blabbering in student amphitheaters… This is why we see in Bolivia that there is an “anarchist organization” which states its conformity to the state authorities and is indifferent to the imprisoned Bolivian comrades accused of being part of FAI, in Italy parasitic anarcho-hippies who with a text of theirs condemned and slandered the action of the Olga cell of FAI, in Germany a part of the anarchists forget and slander the imprisoned comrades (e.g. Aachen4 case) while in Greece many from the anti-authoritarian movement discuss about whether or not they will vote for Syriza (left party) in the elections and generally there being a turn towards collectivization through workers and “white” democratic assemblies.

We on our side want to avoid such misunderstandings and make this confusion untouchable. Therefore it is necessary that we make a clear separating line between the insurrectionist-nihilistic circles and the refuges of reformism. This is why we would like every text and act of ours to be immediately recognized, adopting our own stigma. The stigma of continuous anarchist attack.

But it is not enough to speak about the attack, on the contrary we desire to be a part of the attack. This is why through this text we want to throw a proposition into the fire of the battle. a proposition which is being discussed for some time now in the circles of the new anarchy in Greece. We mean the transmission of technical knowledge and experiences for the construction of explosive and incendiary devices and for the spreading of other forms of sabotage. Through small printed practical manuals or through digital form on the internet we can share information, patents, technical points, ideas, applications, diagrams and enrich our arsenal. When knowledge and experience are shared, they become dangerous. First of all it brings down the separation between theory and practice and the myth of the “specialists” of violence is abolished. At the same time the fetishisms of Marxist ideological rigidities about the avant-guard of “armed struggle” are withdrawn and the illusions of the hierarchy of the means cease. Between the bullet in the head of a cop and the rock in window front there is an invisible line connecting them.

We want to make this line visible. Everything is for everyone, there are not specialists of violence, there are individualities and choices…

We do not share our choices only by speaking and writing texts against the state and its society but also when we offer each other possible practical ways.

To make our theory practice. This is why we propose to the comrades of the FAI-IRF that we proceed to the publication of manuals which describe i.e. the way to construct an explosive mechanism, the wiring of a time bomb, the assembling of a parcel bomb, the use of a home-made system of time-delaying in incendiary attacks, the strengthening of the destructive power of a molotov, the synthesis and mixtures of ingredients for the creation of explosive materials… also our “work” in the chaotic arts of sabotage can open its thematology from the destruction of cameras, the blocking of ATMs and the construction of home-made smoke bombs up to burgling and stealing cars and motorbikes and the conservation and use of weapons.

All this knowledge which is conquered everyday and cannot and shouldn’t be a privilege of an initiated elite of veterans of praxis. On the contrary we want to acquire a common arsenal with all anarchists of praxis where we will share ideas and practices in order to strengthen the constant anarchist insurrection against the Existing. Thus, comrades which carry inside them the wolf of praxis, but have not yet acquired technical knowledge in order to intensify their attacks against the social structures of the system, now with this proposition get access to an endless stock of destructive and chaotic ingenuity which will strengthen their fire.

Of course these practical manuals will not be considered the “holy bible” of the anarchists of praxis since they will be constantly renewed and enriched, since the experimentation and searching never stops.

Also we stress that because of the public character of the spreading of the techniques and the forms of sabotage, it is sure that the eyes of the police will constantly be on our attempt.

This is why this letter is made with special attention. Not only so the enemy cannot track us, but also so we don’t give them information they don’t know, helping them without meaning to, “neutralize” our attacks. For example in the presentation of a time bomb, there will always be variations so the police are confused and it is not easy to deactivate it without the danger of blowing up their bomb disposal team.

This way we strengthen the union of anarcho-individualists - nihilists promoting the constant clash with the world of authority and the social mass. It’s the new way of the new anarchy to attack without relying on the vague sympathy for the proletariat and the economism of classes, but instead abolishing the classes themselves. Neither rich nor poor, neither bosses nor workers, but autonomous individuals with anarchist values and choices.

At the same time we abandon the victimized image of the “social fighter”, who is being attacked by the state. Several comrades of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and nuclei of FAI are now in prison, from where we write this text. Not for a moment however do we beg for our “rights” from the state, nor do we invoke its laws. When we chose to arm ourselves and to assassinate social peace, we knew the consequence of the choice we made. The fact that we are in the prisons of the enemy does not make us harmless. We are creating and organizing 10, 100, 1000 cells of the Informal Anarchist Federation and the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire. Neither will we become “anarchist writers” who will publish our theories from inside prison. Our words are our thoughts which were anxious to become actions. Every day, every night we breathe for them. We still have some scores to set with the existent and we keep the knife between our teeth. Our strategy is to make chaos our friend. That is where all forces of the negative are liberated. Conventions, hypocrisies, ethics, cowardices are abolished there.

Brothers and Sisters let’s dare everything. Political executions, blowing up government buildings, bank robberies, arsons of symbols of authority, molotov on the cops, knifes in fascists, communiques, texts, discussions and whatever promotes the spreading of the new anarchy and the progression of the Black International of the Anarchists of Praxis.

DIRECT CONSTANT ANARCHIST INSURRECTION

P.S. The text “Lone wolves are not alone… FAI/ IRF/CCF” is dedicated to our brothers and sisters all around the world, to the dead, the prisoners and those wanted…

In this difficult time we send our most warm greetings to the wanted comrades in Greece: G. Mihailidis and D. Politis, who are accused for participation in the CCF, the wanted comrade in Mexico, FR, and the imprisoned comrade Mario Lopez who was injured by an incendiary device he was transferring.

At the same time our thought and heart is next to the comrades in Italy who are experiencing repeated oppressive operations.

Strength comrades.

#ccf #Conspiracy of Cells of Fire #anarcho nihilism #anarchy #attack #individualism #individualist anarchism #insurrectionary anarchism #insurrection #nihilism #post left #post left anarchy #greece

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queermediastudies · 5 years ago

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Defending Gay Rights: A Hard and Lasting Fight

Milk is a biographical film, telling the story of gay politician Harvey Milk, released in 2008. This film received eight nominations for the 81st Academy Awards, and Sean Penn (act as Harvey Milk) won the Best Actor.

This film tells the story of the 1970s, Harvey Milk met Scott Smith on the subway and they fell in love at first sight. They decided to move to San Francisco and started a photography equipment store together. Gradually, their store became a gathering place for gay couples. With more and more gay people came, Milk and Scott found that people in the U.S. are still conservative and discriminatory toward homosexuality, and the government and police were really rude to gay people, so Milk decided to run for city supervisor to change the unequal situation. Because he spent all his time on politics, Scott finally left him. Milk was defeated many times, but with the help of a lesbian assistant, he was elected as a city supervisor and became the first openly gay politician in the U.S. history. Milk used media and public speeches to express his political views and got the support of the mayor. Since Milk took office, he constantly fought for gay rights and promoted the act of legalize homosexuality. Soon after, Milk was murdered by conservative member Dan White. His death awakened local gay people and made them start to fight for their own rights.

In the 1970s, the U.S. was in a turbulent time, under cultural, commercial and political reforms. Many traditional ideas were questioned, and people started to rethink about homosexuality. The lesbian and gay movement that seemed to appear “spontaneously” across the country shortly after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City (Gross, 2001. p.21). Several years later, in 1977, San Francisco politics was taken by storm when gay rights activist Harvey Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors. Milk was the pioneer of gay politics, he woke up the street, the city, even the nation, and gave gay people powerful voices. His election was a triumph over anti-gay stereotypes and inspired a new generation of civic activists across the U.S. However, the process was extremely tough and he even lost his life. Until nowadays, there are still lots of prejudices and abuses on gay people, and only 28 countries in the world recognize same-sex marriage. The fight for gay rights has never stopped. The issues Milk fought for forty years ago are still being fought over today, it’s a hard and lasting struggle.

There were countless people who devote their lives to gay rights movements, and also sacrificed for it. They held beliefs, fought against political machines and tried hard to change society. Milk was never discouraged after campaign setbacks. He didn’t only focus on win and rights, instead practicing his belief "equality before the Constitution". He believed that homosexuals should not just rely on liberals, but should bravely "step out of the closet" and insist bottom-up struggle. They have to support each other, strengthen their momentum and fight against all discrimination and inequality. When several States passed the proposition that dismiss homosexual teachers in schools, Milk blocked this proposition in California through his own efforts. He spoke to the public, “All men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights”. The film ends in tragedy, but the scene that countless people walking on the street, lighting the candle to memorize Milk really moved me. The bullet shouted on him also destroyed every closet door. It was not an end. “The movement would continue, because it’s not about personal gain, not about ego or power, it’s about the ‘us’ s’ out there.” Milk's death symbolized the irrational retaliation of the conservatives for the change of ideas and society. The director combined Milk's murder and Jack’s suicide, setting off the tragic atmosphere of the ending, while metaphorizing the inevitable outcome of resistance to power or mainstream society.

Harvey Milk’s Speech

youtube

In the film, the director Gus Van Sant used a lot of real interview materials and news clips of the 1970s, and the color of the whole movie was blue and gray, many scenes were made with retro effects. Harvey Milk uses his life to fight for Proposition 6, which was about equal employment of gay people. Milk was released in 2008, and in the same year, California passed Proposition 8, which prohibits gay marriage. Over 30 years, society seems to have improved a lot, but gay right is still an unsolved problem. There is no compromise between religion and politics, and homosexuality is the biggest victim between them. It's a tragedy that the most basic civil rights of gay people still need to strive for. Although Proposition 8 was quickly overturned shortly after its entry into force, this incident still hurt many gay people. The U.S. always claims to be free and equal, but sometimes, it’s just a name, because they’re only for those who have enjoyed the “freedom and equality”.

Castro Street in San Francisco is the most famous gay community, all people can live openly and enjoy their life. When I was in New York, I saw lots of stores hang on rainbow flag, gay couples can hug and kiss on street. After almost fifty years fight, the U.S. indeed make lots of changes, and become more inclusive about queer people. Of course, such open-mindedness does not apply to the whole country. For many gays and lesbians, coming out of the closet still risks familial banishment, the loss of friendships, or even violence. In many places it’s still dangerous to be gay. Homosexuals continue to face higher rates of depression than heterosexuals, and gay teenagers attempt suicide more frequently than their straight peers (Kirchick, 2019).

The situation is much worse in worldwide. For non-western countries, “queer” lacks social recognition and understanding, and for religious countries, same-sex love is still considered as taboo, and some even have death penalty about homosexuals. In Kenyan, homosexuals mean abnormal, confused, and depressed, and same-sex desire is tied to perversion, inverted natural desire, and unnatural compulsion. From a religious perspective, resistance to identity is further complicated by the sedimented narrative that homosexuality is seen as a mental disorder in need of treatment (Goltz et al, 2016. P.112). In China, only 3% of gay and bisexual men and 5% of lesbians and bisexual women identified themselves as ‘completely out’. I have several Chinese friends who are gay. I know how hard for them to struggle against the mainstream culture and family pressures.

Go back to the U.S, despite the rapid progress of the gay rights movement, members of the LGBTQ community continue to be targets of violence and hate crimes. The Trump administration has rolled back a number of transgender protections at the federal level and emboldened a conservative base pushing for religious liberty. Haider Markel said, “Even for the gay and lesbian community, rapid progress in a short period of time doesn’t mean victory, and attitudes about same-sex marriage have remained mostly frozen since 2017” (Schmidt, 2019).

Lots of people devoted their lives to fight for gay rights over the past fifty years. Challenging traditions and mainstream culture are really hard and I appreciate that things are go toward to better direction, but there’s still discriminations and prejudices about queer exits in different fields. Many great activists like Milk have made a good start, we cannot just stop here. In addition, I feel that the film Milk is not just about gay civil rights movement. Milk’s experience has brought inspiration to all minority and disadvantaged groups. It’s not an end, but a start. Milk passed down his hope, brave and idealism, more and more people will join in this hard and lasting fight.

References:

Goltz, Dustin Bradley et al. (2016). “Discursive Negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI Identities: Cautions in Cultural Humility.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, 104-121.

Gross, Larry (2001). “Ch 2: Coming Out and Coming Together.” Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America, 21-39.

Kirchick, James. (2019). “The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over.” The Atlantic. Retrieved October 31, 2019, from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/battle-gay-rights-over/592645/

Schmidt, Samantha (2019). “Americans’ views flipped on gay rights. How did minds change so quickly?” The Washington Post. Retrieved October 31, 2019, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/americans-views-flipped-on-gay-rights-how-did-minds-change-so-quickly/2019/06/07/ae256016-8720-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html

#queer studies #queer movies #queer media #harvey milk #gay rights #gay movement #Castro #gay politicans

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years ago

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“It’s submission to fear. It’s a submission to intimidation.”

▲ From an FFWPU presentation given in 2019 to push members to liberate their ancestors. LINK

Updated October 16, 2019

Peter B Collins spoke with Ford Greene on his September 28, 2012 podcast.

Ford Greene: A good response [to the accusation of brainwashing] is certainly, “Well, Gee, all religions brainwash”. But that is just a glib response when you really look at what the techniques of brainwashing are, and what the consequences of brainwashing are, meaning the type of control that can lead to either suicide or homicide as it has in many cases, of course most notable being Jonestown in 1978. Then it is a little bit different. Although certainly you can go back to the Spanish Inquisition and the types of absolute beliefs that were inculcated into sectarian Catholic minds there that had a consequence of employing torture and all kinds of just really horrendous practices on people who were non-believers. But the communist Chinese form of brainwashing, which is what Moon really has used for decades, that’s a lot different from the colloquial use of the term to describe a set of beliefs [with] which somebody disagrees. And spin masters for the Moon church and for other cults know that. Part of their charge is to mainstream a cult, and is to make the organization not seem as strange as it really is.

So if you don’t have a good grasp of what the subject matter is, as in any situation when you’re dealing with a psycho-politician, you are going to get cooked because you don’t have the detail and you don’t have the facts to confront them and put them on the spot.

Peter B Collins: How did you become deprogrammed? What did it take?

Ford: Getting out of the environment where there is the constant reinforcement that Moon is the messiah, that the individual comes from a Satanically tainted blood lineage and therefore any questions you have with respect to the orders that you get, and accepting the messianic assertions of Moon, are evidence of your spiritual defectiveness – being out of that atmosphere, sure that helps. But the game is not over there because those absolute type ideas are deeply inculcated into one’s psyche, and generally inculcated along the lines that they came in in the first place. And those lines generally have to do with whatever the psychological weaknesses were of the person who was indoctrinated. So the deprogramming part of it isn’t just being taken out of the soup. It’s confronting how one has been cooked in the soup and reasserting one’s own independence and ability to think independently. Add two and two and come up with four, rather than come up with five as the training gets you to do [when you are] inside an ideologically remolding regime like what the Moonies do.

Peter: Now you have participated in, or led, the deprogramming of many individuals who left the Unification Church. Is there a routine process or, as you said, do you have to learn about people’s own psychological make-up in order understand what their attraction and bond was to the coercive persuasion.

Ford: It is both. There again, language is so important because it is not an attraction and it is not really a bond. It’s submission to fear. It’s a submission to intimidation. The idea, in a vacuum, that you are dealing with somebody who’s got absolute authority of goodness, of God, of love, of moral character, and you are on the other end of the spectrum. You are coming from Satan, coming from defectiveness. When you take that context over [a period of] time, the depth of the psychological intimidation that can result is really huge and that’s why in the brainwashing process it’s necessary to remove points of reference, to remove prior relationships, to remove prior relationships with one’s own ideas and one’s own thinking and replace those with what the cult wants you to do. So, to answer your question, is there a regular protocol when it comes to deprogramming, yes and no. Because all persons who have been programmed have been programmed according to a certain structure and there is a consistency in terms of what their lifestyle has been; how they have been bullied and intimidated; how they have been scared, and how they have submitted. So in that regard, yeah, there is a consistency. But in terms of how personally what it is that’s made them submit, whether or not they had a childhood of sexual abuse, and the real reason they became involved with the cult was because the cult promised to be able to help them heal from the consequences of that. Then those more personal factors come into play too. So you’ve really got to play it by ear and go where the getting’s good based on one’s judgement in the moment.

Peter: Archbishop Stallings and other apologists for Moon essentially claim that first of all the term Messiah is overblown; that he was a Messiah and not the Messiah.

Ford: Talking about the meaning of the word messiah, it is sort of “Oh, Gee, I guess we are all messiahs.” (laughter) And personally that is the point that I prefer. But when you’re in an organization that places all power, all influence, all spiritual authority in the person of one living human being, and then specifically remove any sort of authority from other people, that kind of objectification is what helps set up what Robert Jay Lifton characterized as an atrocity producing situation where you’ve got complete objectification on one side and you’ve got the total exercise of power on the other side. More often than not what happens in that context is the expression of sadism that’s inherent in just about every human being. And so the use and utility of the term messiah assumes much broader meaning than the watered-down version that it sounds like Stallings tried to promote.

https://www.peterbcollins.com/2012/09/28/ford-greene-attorney-and-moonie-de-programmer-on-the-death-of-rev-moon-gary-chew-reviews-the-master-maxine-doogan-tells-californians-no-on-prop-35/

________________________________

George Augustus Stallings Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Augustus_Stallings_Jr.

________________________________

Total Living Offering, 2003: Agree to sign over your house, land, etc.

The way the Japanese membership are exploited by the Moon family is an example of sadism.

“As you know, our Japanese Church has been selling their houses and all their assets to support our activities” – Sun Myung Moon

Shocking video of UC of Japan demanding money

Atsuko Kumon Hong “suicide / murder” of August 2013

“Sell your house if you love Japan” – members squeezed dry just after March 2011 disaster.

Japanese woman recruited and sold by FFWPU to a Korean farmer

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members

6,500 women missing from FFWPU mass weddings

FFWPU / UC of Japan used members for profit, not religious purposes

#Ford Greene #FFWPU #fear #exploitation #Sun Myung Moon

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whiterosebrian · 4 years ago

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Letter to President Joe Biden

First and foremost, I simply wrote this letter to add my own bit of pressure, however small it might be, on a mainstream politician to go beyond business as usual within a liberal-democratic state. I did consider posting this to my webpages, but I was also aware that doing so could come off as performative—or legitimize right-wing sneers at “virtue-signaling”. Ultimately, I decided to go ahead and do so for two reasons. First, I wanted to publicly stand with indigenous peoples. Second, I wanted to offer a template for other people to write similar letters to President Biden. The letter that I will mail as a hard-copy is as follows.

Mister President,

I congratulate you on your election as President of the United States of America. In light of an attempted coup, I also congratulate you on a successful inauguration. I for one voted for you in hopes of preventing a potential neo-Confederate fascist dictatorship from taking hold and endangering even more lives. I for one also have openly talked on social media about the need to address deeper issues than a wannabe strongman. Donald Trump’s administration was simply a symptom of a very bad system. That system is a system of putting profits over people and environment.

I understand that you passed an order stopping the construction of a particularly controversial pipeline. That is a step in the right direction—but nothing more. I understand that other pipelines have still been approved. I understand that they will cut through the lands of indigenous communities and potentially wreck their environments.

Particularly since I’m not indigenous, I know that writing about indigenous spirituality risks falling into the stereotype of the Magical Indian. I will still write about what is evidently common across the spiritualities of indigenous peoples. That should provide further context for the need to protect their lands. Furthermore, I follow a number of indigenous activists, artists, and spiritualists on social media from different nations, so I am confident that I have at least a decent grasp on generalized indigenous spirituality.

Many indigenous peoples have animistic beliefs—to simplify, they view their world as teeming with spirits, often embodied in the land itself. Indeed, the land itself is seen as a precious gift from the Earth, with some sites being especially sacred. The most prominent example is Six Grandfathers; Lakota have objected to carving big fat heads on it and want it back. I bring up animism to point out wisdom which indigenous activists are more than eager to share (even if they keep their specific religious practices to themselves to protect their cultures in the face of attempted extermination and ignorant appropriation). They want all of us to regain respect and even honor for the lands on which we live so that all of Earth’s denizens can live.

More than once I have seen a figure cited on the internet regarding indigenous peoples and biodiversity. Indigenous peoples make up a very small percentage of the total population of the world. However, the vast majority of the world’s biodiversity is in their hands. That in itself should be a compelling reason to cooperate closely with indigenous people. They know their lands more deeply than the settlers. They know the cycles of life and processes of life and intricacies of life very deeply as well. Their cultures, which have been imperiled by imperialism past and present, are tied to their lands. Upholding indigenous rights goes hand-in-hand with protecting the environment.

Furthermore, you should recall that indigenous voters were crucial to your electoral victory. They knew that an extended Trump administration could possibly be an existential threat. They put themselves through trials almost as harsh as Black voters who navigated the various means of voter suppression. They expect you to help them.

Allow me to offer an aside. Since you clearly take right-wing extremism far more seriously than the previous president (which may be an understatement in regards to him), you may have heard fleeting references to racist neo-pagans who call themselves Odinists or something similar. They claim a spirituality of upholding their twisted vision of the natural order. I myself am a neo-pagan who opposes the likes of Odinists. I don’t want to make this letter about me—I mention that to further contextualize where this letter is coming from. Traditional spiritualities around the world place a stress on reverence for nature and see divinity and mysticism within it—such is evident even in dead religions that have only recently begun to come back to life. Addressing the white-nationalist appropriation of pre-Christian spiritualities is far beyond the scope of this letter. For now, I’ll simply mention the many neo-pagans who venerate nature and want to care for it even as they reject fascism.

You have stated intentions of working with progressives on the Green New Deal, or massively transitioning from fossil fuels to solar and wind energy. That in itself may be a worthy cause, as climate change is the most pressing environmental problem. However, that transition needs to be handled carefully. The process of mining for materials to build a new energy infrastructure could severely damage the lands where such mining takes place and displace their peoples.

I can accept that railing against “big government” is too often a smokescreen for a callously pro-corporate agenda. I do know that there is a place for “big government” in protecting people. That’s the thing—government should serve people on the ground, not corporations. Corporations are willing to do whatever they think will enhance their bottom lines. Corporations can very easily capitalize on a Green New Deal to fatten their profits as much as possible when that becomes feasible. Yes, I know that rightists will cynically (and lazily) ape anti-corporate rhetoric when companies promote anything and everything remotely liberal, but the danger of relying on corporations remains.

Many activists desire to rebuild their communities to be more livable, more inclusive, and in greater harmony with nature. The government should enable them to do so. Infrastructures should serve human living, not the other way around. Humans are not meant to be ripped apart from plants, animals, and landscapes, but rather relations should be repaired. Doing so will require massive reviews of economics, industry, urban planning, and government. That task is far beyond any one well-intentioned governing body.

Progressives voted for you reluctantly because they consider you a garden-variety politician serving capitalistic and colonial interests. I challenge you to prove them wrong. I urge you to do more than just return to a liberal-democratic normalcy (which is understandable after Trump and his fellow-travelers destabilized a liberal democratic state). I urge you to pay closer attention to the original inhabitants of Turtle Island. They cry out for restorative justice. They warn of the dangers of business as usual under the dominant system, which is unsustainable. They invite all of us to reconcile with them and the Earth itself.

No, I dare not pretend to have solid proposals. That is something for you to figure out in direct collaboration with indigenous activists. I am simply a common man on the street trying to make myself helpful to vulnerable people and the environment. I hope that I am doing my part by pointing you to indigenous activists, their lands, their pains, their spiritualities, their voices, and their desire to see the whole Earth thrive.

#us politics #support indigenous people #indigenous sovereignty #indigenous people #environment #nature #joe biden #politics #spirituality #animism #land back #environmentalism #president biden #indigenous rights #president joe biden

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thequeerafrican-blog · 5 years ago

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Queer History in Uganda

I want to begin by focusing on an East African country that has long been in the news but is still wildly misunderstood and misrepresented: Uganda. It is a beautiful nation that I am proud to come from, known for its hospitable people and gorgeous wildlife; but I am not here to promote tourism. Instead, I want to shed light on how Uganda has been known for other less beautiful things, such as the blatant hostility expressed by government officials and religious leaders toward sexual and gender minorities. But Ugandan history as it stands shows that their moral arguments against queer identities are unfounded, and I want to explore some of the facts that contradict their ideas that queerness is a Western construct foreign to Uganda.

Uganda is infamous for its staunchly homophobic government. Every now and again, videos of preachers or parliamentarians will make viral rounds on social media, discussing their disillusionment or disgust with same-sex relationships, particularly when those relationships involve two men. Perhaps most recently known is the video of a 2012 television news interview with Ugandan human rights activist Pepe Julian Onziema, who also identifies as a transgender man. In the beginning, the host boldly asks Onziema, “Why are you gay?”. The interviewer is obviously making a grave mistake by confusing gender and sexuality, something many people everywhere conflate, and his pointed question has turned into a renowned meme.

But the interview takes a very dark turn when Onziema is bombarded by the violently homophobic guests that attend and call in to the show, questioning his humanity and mental health because of his gender identity. But although this video has brought many laughs to those who may or may not have seen it in its entirety, it is a prime example of pure ignorance toward Onziema’s identities and others in the LGBTQIA+. I believe that this ignorance, when coupled with power in politics, turns into a blind hatred that has manifested itself through homophobic legislation and a c against queer Ugandans.

Ignorance is a scary thing that yields even scarier outcomes.. Within the last six years in Uganda, there has been a rise in anti-LGBT+ sentiment mostly propagated by religious leaders that disavow gender nonconforming people and sexual minorities. An article written by the South African theological professor Dr. Jaco Beyer highlights how in 2010, prominent Ugandan tabloids released lists containing the identities of those accused of being queer, with calls to incite physical violence and legal penalties against them. Moreover, reports of assaults increased from 12 in 2009 to 300 in 2004 in the capital city of Kampala. Public shaming, physical violence, evictions, and threats are all results of this deep-seated ignorance. Many Ugandan politicians began to blame “Western values” as endorsing queer behavior and threatening the nuclear family model (Beyers 154).

However, many historians have questioned whether or not this is something truly inherent to the African continent, as many people believe it is. Besides, representation of queer African people outside of activist circles is relatively hard to find and news of legislation to ban same-sex practices crops up constantly. But is queerness inherently “un-African”? The answer: of course not.

Accorting to the scholars Therese Migraine-George and Ashley Currier, a number of indigenous and exogenous factors have led to the status of queer Africans on the continent today. Colonialism, for example, has superimposed the idea that the histories and customs of European imperialists are superior to those of the African people they colonized. Colonial homophobia brought about by British anti-sodomy laws has obscured the same-sex practices that have occurred in indigenous societies.

These values hold true today and are still being propagated by leaders in places like Uganda, which has motivated activists, artists, and intellectuals to engage in queer archival work to produce the evidence that queer identities have existed in Africa for centuries. Moreover, scholars have not only highlighted same-sex practices in indigenous African societies, but have also shown that colonization is hugely responsible for creating a culture of homophobia in Africa.

Pre-colonial Uganda was a much different place than it is in the present day. British colonialism brought with it a new penal code for ethics which believed that Ugandan society was not on par with its ideas of what was morally acceptable or unacceptable, particularly with regard to sex. Ugandan activist and academic Dr. Sylvia Tamale states in a 2003 essay that the patriarchy plays a huge role in the suppression of same-sex relationships and queer identities . She elaborates that these relations and identities undermine mainstream “male power bases” by challenging what it means to be a “man” or a “woman”, reconfiguring the concept of a “family”, and disrupting the patriarchal order. But in pre-colonial times, homosexuality was neither suppressed nor condoned. Many practices that correspond with today’s understanding of same-sex relationships were even institutionalized and accepted.

As a matter of fact, one of Uganda’s prominent tribal kings, Kabaka Mwanga, was known to be a gay man. Ugandan human rights lawyer Adrian Jjuuko explains that the story of the Uganda Martyrs, or the young men known as the king’s pages with whom he had sexual relationships with, is such that the young men began to practice Christianity and deemed his advances to be unacceptable, leading to their execution. Moreover, ethnic languages have long used words expressing the action of same-sex relations. In essence, Uganda has a long and diverse history of queer identities and practices that was hindered and erased by colonial imperialism that deemed it unacceptable.

Kabaka Mwanga of Buganda

The world should be aware of this history of queer identities that have existed long before British colonialism. I hope that more people begin to realize that even though countries like Uganda are censured for their queerphobic governments, this does not mean queer people and their history have never existed in Uganda and other African countries. But alas, the effects of imperialism are very difficult to reverse. In the future, I hope Western activism highlights the roles of advocates and queer people in Uganda rather than just highlighting the egregious statements of political and religious figures. Additionally, I hope that further education about queer identities in Uganda and the rest of the continent continue to shift the conversation on queer liberation and rights the world over.

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alienobservations · 3 years ago

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The Detransition Manifesto

All that glitters is not gold. Which is something to keep reminding yourself as our society's psychic forces blast us with propaganda in the name of self-help and sickness in the name of cure. The sheer cacophony of voices bashing upon our feeble, fragile and highly susceptible mental states could turn even the strongest man or woman against themselves lest they not develop the adequate means by which to propogate their own preservation. The ultimate triumph of life is to follows one's will but we live in a time in which the will is easily molded by corporations, organizations, advocacy groups and shady characters who wish only to validate and benefit from the propagation of their own flawed and diminished sense of self-worth. A market is formed by the perhaps naive and perhaps malicious intentions of a elite cabal of planners, social engineers, agenda makers. Instead our capacity to discover our authenticity of the soul we are pushed down, frail, weak and upturned by the pressures of this agenda that cares not for the happiness of its subjects, the social upheavel that it brings, but only that it paves the way toward the next step in what appears to be a ill-intentioned transhumanist reformation where all people are told to embrace their uniqueness by making us all the same. For it is easier to control the masses when the distinctions of race, sex and creed are but archaic concepts that when spoken issue a mental breakdown in anyone who hears them. We live in dark times, a sad fact for those who do not have the discipline or the preservation instinct to rise above the tremendous weight, the pathways of pain promoted by those who do not know nor care for the harm they are doing. Just as one should not advocate for doing a deed which they have not themselves done, for thinking a thought that they have not thought, these progress grifters, these sex vultures which have taken up mantle in our governments and our schools have evolved to enjoy a sadistic kind of pleasure from curing and fixing that which is not broken. Caring more for their naive sense of self-worth and in a desire for an elevated status among a deranged and morally depraved subculture turned mainstream cult, we see otherwise well-intentioned people promoting dysgenics and ultimately a long-form method of suicide. They do this with a smile, unaware or perhaps unaffected by the consequences.

While the average liberal promotes such a concept of “transgenderism” they do so less because they have a firm understanding of what it is or its validity but to save themselves the public backlash for its opposition. When the voices of a tiny fringe are amplified by both politicians and corporations, who otherwise seem to not benefit from such an ideology's propagation, this should be a manner of concern. For if nothing else the turning of the whims of a tiny minority into the duty and obligations of the majority is not only foolish but disturbed. To take a subculture, such as that of the transgender community and to amplify the pain, promote its cries so that all men may hear them, only serves to increase the societal backlash upon such a group as well as subject vulnerable people to this otherwise benign subculture in the guise that it is normal, healthy and a practical solution to what otherwise may be deeply rooted psychological problems, issues of confidences or ill-formed philosophical dispositions. I do not claim that transgender people do not exist, for to claim such a thing one would have to deny my own experiences, human desire as invalid and to assert that human sexuality is just a two-way street. The issue is not in that whether such states of mind or being exist, or whether such convictions are valid, but to analyze and understand that detransitioning is a valid decision and that there are alternatives to all of life's problems if one goes looking.

Since time immemorial the concept of children and teenager was met with the overarching idea that such people are on the pathway to becoming adults. From this we developed concepts such as age of consent, implying that children and young teens are ill-suited to make big decisions regarding their body and sexuality. Our current day has served to upturn such a notion and now it has become fashionable to encroach upon these very basic tenets of development. Men and women, but overwhelmingly women, seem to enjoy dressing up their male children and subjecting them to all manner of hyper-stimulating hobbies and events sure to instill in them the idea that “cross-dressing is normal and accepted” and being a girl is “more fun”. We have to understand that a child does not have the capacity to understand the deep ramifications of such an upbringing or lifestyle and the level of social isolation that such endeavors may see for them in the future once they leave the protective bubble which has been manufactured. Yet let us also not forget that we do not know what kind of world such children will grow up in, as the pendulum may very well swing in an opposite direction as public opinion coagulates against this exploitation. Let kids be kids, a quite common idea has been made obsolete by a culture in which many compete at subverting, distorting and manipulating children and their otherwise normal development cycle. It is probably too much to ask for an absence of propaganda, but could we at least let the children make their own decisions and provide their own legitimate and authentic motivations on these matters, when they are older and more prone to rational thinking?

Trust the science, its something that we hear constantly since the first mention of Coronavirus. Yet is it not peculiar how science seems to be weaponized, politicized and then stream-lined so as to drown out all opposing voices? Science is not some monolithic voice of truth that we should kneel and obey, its a process of discovering information and there are always exceptions, outliers and controversies. There may be agreement, but agreement upon what? The term gender itself was coined in 1955 by John William Money (8 July 1921 – 7 July 2006) who's failed ideas and experiments led to two suicides. And yet modern sexual theory is built upon his concept of gender. Remove his intangible social construct and suddenly the entire system falls down. Anyone can, given the power to do so, define reality in such a way as to make themselves infallible. I could choose to to redefine women as an adult who is under 5 feet tall. There may be some truth to it, as women are often shorter than men and we could create an entire society that bases the notion of sex not upon genitals, gender or chromosomes but upon height. We could then see society coming to reject this notion, declare it heightism and ask for a new system of classification. But we could sit upon our chair with desk and gavel and declare “No, we are the authority and sex is a deduction of height! Only a fool would consider anything else a true qualifier of sex. Society would then persecute those who had the alternative opinion, telling them they are delusional, bigots and out of touch with The Authority. But just because an authority has hijacked truth, does not mean the people must or should obey for words and definitions can and do change all the time, but only if the people allow it.

The first step in such a rejection is to deny the concept of gender. Declare it a null and void, frought with errors and social dilemmas, more harm than it is good. You do away with such a concept and you come to find the can of worms slowly closing itself rather quickly. Suddenly in the absence of gender, notions of a binary world return into being, a world with exceptions, but binary nonetheless. The evolution of these terms was due to what many would have perceived as a kind of Frankensteinian science. Having created hybrids, having created exceptions to the rule, the scientific community desired to validate these exceptions, no doubt as a sense of self-aggrandizement. For let us not forget that science is what created transexualism, thus normalizing transgenderism in the first place. Just as the definition of “death” was changed when new manners of resuscitation were discovered. The biological reality of sex did not change upon the developments in science, instead, terminology changed, perceptions changed, but to the average person why should we be subjected to these forms of classification? This is very similar to the day in August 24, 2006 when NASA declared that Pluto had been demoted to an exoplanet. What does this mean to the average person? Nothing. It changed nothing with our lives, as it shouldn't. For we are not astronauts, nor are we doctors, nor are we biologists. We are but simple people wishing to live in a clear and understandable world hoping to uphold and spread a sense of order. Yet, terms such as gender, and its associating ideologies, have done nothing but cause chaos and confusion and normalize the whim of a tiny cabal of social engineers who no doubt seek the overthrow of the modern world and everything that makes it sacrosanct.

The most clear and pressing issue with transgenderism is in its philosophical and psychological failings. Trangenderism promotes the idea that somehow someone can know their gender, which again is a contemporary concept. The sheer irony is that these same people promote such vast and extended understandings of gender and identity that they irregardless rely upon stereotypes they themselves dismiss in order to validate their own states of being. This state of being is then perceived to be a gender. Yet anyone who has any basic understanding of psychology or philosophy would be quick to point out that one's state of being, one's internalized sense of self and one's desired identity are all different manifestations. To be transgender one must have a rupture between their actual identity in physical space along with their actual attributes and their perception of themselves. With any other condition we would call this a delusion, discourage the behavior and attempt to find a way to reintegrate the person into a healthier state of consciousness. And yet, this notion has been rapidly shifted and this is seen as a normal and acceptable states of inner chaos. But how is the average person supposed to know whether these inclinations are legitimate expressions of transgender behavior and not the expression of a confused, psychologically hurt individual that may actually need treatment? Surely there are some who may benefit from the lifestyle and pursuit of transgenderism, but what of those who are only harmed by it, who see no benefit from it? The system does not account for them lest they have the power of will and intuition to drown out the sea of voices and say to themselves, “This isn't making me happy. I should stop while I am ahead”. And that is the true audience that I wish to expose, those lost within the crashing waves of propaganda, under the care of those claim well-intention but may very well be packing us deeper into the barrel of the gun.

Let us suggest that every 9 out of 10 transgender people succeed and are happier than before and live long, healthy lives. An obvious exaggeration, as evidence shows us this is not the case. How do we know that the person that we are encouraging, promoting, supporting into this lifestyle is one of the 9? What if this pressure, even out of one's own good intentions was harming the individual? What if the lifestyle was forcing them to focus upon such issues as their weight, their attractiveness or desirability and what if those very factors were issues of poor confidence? To harp and harp upon an individual to focus upon these shallow and largely immovable realities could very well cause a person to feel suffocated and trapped, unable to meet the high bar of expectations. And what happens when someone feels like they are trapped and unable to meet the obligations set before them? Social isolation, depression and suicidal ideation. For Buddhism says, “Desire is the root of suffering” and yet what is transgenderism but an unrealistic desire, made possible by experimental science and amplified by a morally bankrupt, hedonistic and narcissistic society? Thus it is not difficult to understand the rates of suicide if only due to the cult that has surrounded and encouraged such vulnerable people and encouraged them to the brink of utter collapse, believing no alternatives exist and that one is not capable of finding a healthier disposition toward life.

How weak have we become that we can look upon pictures of our ancestors working in coal-mines, visions of the holocaust, the aftermath of all manners of horror and atrocity but a fit adult of otherwise sound mind feels the need to end their own life because they were “born in the wrong body”. What does this even mean? This line of thinking generally seems to infer that we are all obligated to be happy without effort and we are all deserving to be models or porn stars or celebrities. Life is not a box of pleasures, it is a journey of will through the navigation of setbacks, hardships and pain. If your genitals are somehow the most important factor of your life, perhaps you should seek to reprioritize as such is a rather sick caricature of all that life is capable of providing. The world is not made for our enjoyment and it requires work and dedication to find and make it worthwhile for not only ourselves but for others. There is more to life than sex and thus there is more to life than genitals. Likewise, fashion is merely a web of fabrics meant to entice the opposite sex and assert our identity and place in society. Identity is a flux and meaningless thing, created by our mind to serve basic functions of motivation, as it is easier to motivate ourselves when we have a self to motivate. Yet even the concept of identity or self need not restrain us, for we can make them whatever we wish and whatever fields bestow us suffering and pain, we can simply go another direction and find the place where our will is most harmonious and satisfied. How ironic that those who peddle such ideas as the multitude of genders do not consider the vast realms of consciousness itself, wherein all modern terminology and idealogy are voluntarily subscribed. The mind is a canvas, our bodies are not. Yet we don't have to live in an escapist void. We need only find a way to navigate the obstacles, compromising as we go and not feeling as though we are entitled to the luxuries of beauty or fitness. Clearly much of the transgender illness, and by illness I mean those who are only harmed by its association, seem to be distorted by a combination of eastern and western cartoons. The western cartoons serving to normalize and entrench the individual in modern queer theory and the eastern cartoons serving to further blur the distinction between male and female, child and adult. These things clearly amplify the condition, giving someone a complex in which they begin to only be able to express themselves through the animated caricature, often with matching avatars on social media. Thus the line between an amusing subculture and a den of sick and depraved individuals gets blurred as roleplay comes to replace the person's sense of self-identity, instead living as a proxy through a puppet of pixels.

If we allow our desire to dictate who we are, we may all very well throw out this idea of humanity altogether and come to find what species of dolphin we most feel a sense of kinship with, or go about life puffing cigars and pretending to be a wise mystic from a far off land. At what point does the subjective interpretation of the self lose validity? One can claim to be a member of the opposite sex yet one try to claim to be another race and they will be met with almost universal condemnation. Where is the line and who has the authority to draw it upon the sand? We could normalize all manner of groups and play into their desires and delusions, for is it not our mind which creates gender and is it not gender which allows for the existence and validity of transexuality? If our minds bestow truth merely by holding a belief or disposition than one should be respected when declaring they are a wolf, child, or Jesus Christ himself. What is the difference? Its either all on the table or none of it is on the table. Either our personal desires and dispositions make reality or its subjective and erroneous.

There is beauty in the subjectivity of reality. To some intent subjectivity is all that we actually experience, as we cannot truly know if there is a world outside of our senses. So to some extent we are all a ship in the fog believing that the light ahead is a lighthouse. Yet the personal understanding of self is much more complex than most like to believe and our subjective journey is often one of bizarre and confused manners of perception. For example, one may see themselves in any manner of ways, not necessarily in any true sense, yet subjectively having basis in feeling and emotion. Feelings and emotion are fleeting and temporary dispositions, attempts to realign with new circumstances, such as the death of a loved one or the acquisition of a spouse, wealth or a secure source of income. There are many things which make us sad, yet if they continue to make us sad we are ceasing to adjust to the situation. If a manner of thinking causes us pain or discomfort, address it fully in your mind until there is nothing to be gained from doing so, and then let it go. There is no strength or knowledge to be gained from such rumination. And thus the hyper-focusing upon notions of passing and beauty, if they do not give you pleasure but pain, realign and find healthier pursuits. Digging deeper into the hole will not save you from your suffering but the reinterpretation of your perceived dilemmas will.

The primary step is in the understanding that for the past several decades in particular is that they subjected the youth to increasing levels of propaganda. We were deceived by the gay lobbyists who claimed that they merely wanted gay marriage. In fact only 10.2% of LGBT Adults are married. Instead this attempt at normalizing homosexuality was a deliberate intent to mold and change the masses. We believed we were giving a tiny defenseless minority a modicum of power to join society “in union with God's sacred institution” but instead we were merely opening the flood gates for the rapid abuse of our children. The promotion of homosexuality as a norm onto the hetero-normative masses is grooming. And so we had an entire generation subjected to increasing levels of grooming to normalize homosexuality and from that they only desired to compound upon the conditioning by way of expanding what it means to be gay, by extending the LGBT to absurd and comical amounts so as to promote and encourage every potential social and sexual deviant as a unified mass to wage war against the cultural psyche. The amount of ground that they have made speaks only to the weakness of conservatives and moderates who should now come to realize how little power they actually have and where the world is heading. The key is realizing that we are the victims of malicious propaganda. The key is in understanding that we are the product of this conditioning and that had we existed only a decade or two before, our desires, longings, whether good or bad, naive or well-founded would not have been at the mercy of this transhumanist agenda. Likewise, the path in life that we saw as most befitting to us may not have been one that sex revisionists and pseudo-intellectual gender-hustlers promote. For maybe in such a potential reality we were ignorant of ourselves, but maybe we were happier that way. Is not our every day a denial of desires, passing thoughts from which we dismiss as glimpses into the deranged and morally devoid potentialities? An argument turns violent and our thoughts soon go to visions of bloodshed, our eyes look upon a woman fate ensures we will never have and our desire turns into a dark manifestation, a passerby in an expensive car awakens within us a sense of justice. We are met with an overwhelming amount of daily interactions which make us question our good intentions, our moral worth, and yet these desires are not promoted by the sea of misplaced voices, the ocean of toothy grins, “You can do it's” and “You go girl's”. Life is composed of many desires, and if we can deny some, can we not deny all? What is particularly unique about transgenderism that one feels particularly seduced by its awareness, that the bizarre obsession is somehow more valid than any other potential and unrealistic whim? Societal pressure.

While there is clearly a lot of negative reinforcement encouraging people to not pursue transgenderism, it has only served to further encourage both those are vulnerable to that manner of thinking and the groups which benefit from the proliferation of these ideas. Instead of acting out of sheer will alone, the average transgender person is now set up with a finishing line and millions of happy cheering fans awaiting their societal rebirth. It does seem a little convenient that we would see such a movement after the “rights of women” were established, as if the game had suddenly changed and now womanhood has become the winning team. And it is not surprising that we would see men wishing to live as women for nothing other than the fact that despite all of the complaints and demands made by feminists, their quality of life is clearly much better than that of the average man. One could argue that the system intentionally holds women back or infantizes them, but many men would love to be able to work from home with a loving partner or have the sexual power so as to seduce large amounts of people, play dress up and avoid expectations of hard labor or military recruitment. The life of a woman is in vogue, they are celebrated merely for living and yet men, particularly white men, are portrayed as the villains of modern day. This alone has a huge impact on susceptibility of this desire for transexuality. This idea that you are trading up, that despite being a socially ostracized and misunderstood minority that you are able to acquire the power of women merely by consuming its components.

Yet look at another culture like that of Islam and you will see the rights of women and transgender individuals is highly lacking and it begs the question how much social reinforcement plays in the proliferation of these desires and ideas, namely whether homosexuality can be created and by extension whether transexuality is an innate characteristic of human beings or an expression of an ill-formed disposition toward childhood development, a lack of peer support, bullying, social pressure or mental illness. My assumption is that all manners of people are susceptible to trends and propaganda and where there may be a certain percentage of people who are biologically homosexual or transgender, lets say by some nature of brain wiring, that there also exists a multitude of other individuals who are merely participating in the activity of “homosexuality” or “transgenderism.” In that sense, what percent are, as the kids may have once said, are posers, merely trying to fit in or subjecting themselves to the lifestyle because of its dangerous counter-culture allure. Perhaps as a way to offend their grandparents or to feel like they are unique and interesting, fashionable or morally upstanding.

Despite this, the cabal which proliferates and normalizes this does not seek to make sense or to detangle the web of sick, confused or vulnerable individuals. It seeks only to encase them in the net and subject them to interrogation from a peer-group that only has one solution to any of these questions or whims: acceptance, encouragement and normalization. But under what authority does the average Discord chat room, College safe-space or Reddit message board have to imprint and proliferate these radical messages and beliefs and push people ever deeper into the chasm of their own delusions? Why have we allowed such a fringe issue of psychology to be unleashed onto the masses so that the sick may treat the well? Why is there no shepherding, no policing of ideas and power so as to avoid, if nothing else the grooming of children into this new religious institution? So that perhaps even the mentally ill may be shielded from its inclusion so as to not hasten their psychosis? The individuals who play with souls and imprint their own hatred of their bodies onto others, create congregations around themselves, declaring healthy people with self-doubts to be eggs, ready to crack and discover their queer potential. Maybe the egg didn't crack because it was supposed to, maybe there was no wisdom gained or expansion of knowledge, perhaps you merely conditioned and hurt someone and gave them a complex that will harm them until the day they die? Where is the court? Where are the ramifications for inverting the perception of a child's identity so as to give them a suicide complex? Why is there nothing being done to protect the vulnerable, for even the one percent that is clearly not meant to associate with such anti-human revisionist thinking. Who is there to protect those vulnerable individuals? These are issues of psychology and those who groom children in this manner should be subjected to criminal investigation. It is our moral duty to push these communities underground, discourage the normalization of these harmful messages and relegate these hard and complex decisions to adults in the care of professional psychologists. It is my view that this ideology is more harmful than terrorism, as the effects of this demoralization last way after the act of harm has been done.

It is time that we hold the proliferators of this propaganda accountable and find a way to shut out their incessant noise. The rainbow flag should be seen not as a symbol of fun and exciting self exploration but as a symbol of exploitation of the weak and vulnerable and as a battle flag against Apollonian values. These organizations and individuals cannot breed and so their very nature is parasitic and envious, seeking to destroy and subvert normal, functioning society to satisfy their own desire for justice. A community which smiles as it pulls children into its clutches, totally unmoved by the dangers therein, of STDs, prostitution, poverty, social rejection or suicidal ideation. These problems are never addressed, for it is only important that the numbers increase, the sickness grows and the cacophony of voices swell to such an unspeakable degree that such basics of truth and beauty cannot be discerned at all.

#philosophy

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