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yunamedkostobot · 4 months ago

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Jacegan Week 2024: Day Six. Historical

1910-1920s silent cinema AU

TW: period-typical racism and homophobia, “Birth of the nation’s” cinema success, implied radium poisoning, mentioned Red Scare

In this au, Jace and his brothers(and a little sister Visenya) actually grew up in the whole-acting family. Their mother, whose family got poor after losing all of their money during the Long depression, started her vaudeville acting career and became the family's breadwinner from the tender age of eight and rose up to the second highest paying actress(after Lotta Crabtree). Their father is a famous musician coming from a wealthy family, their paternal grandmother is a former actress by herself and their aunt is the costume maker for the theaters. They are not really in touch with their maternal side of the family, since they did not approve of their mother's acting career.

Meanwhile, Cregan comes from the farmer’s family of Norwegian second-geheration immigrabts. His family went bankrupt in the panic of 1907, so he and his sister were left with almost no money. Cregan was forced to turn to seasonal worker, while Sara started to work at the clock fabric.

Cregan met Arra Norrey at the mill at Lawrence. They married and later had a baby Rickon together. However, since Arra was forced to work even when she was ill and pregnant, she died of influenza not so long after Rickon’s birth. It happened not so long before the Lawrence strike of 1912, where Cregan actually took a huge part: from helping to evacuate the kids to standing up against the strikebreakers.

Cregan and Arra actually loved to go to cinema to watch movies(and Arra especially loved Max Linder’s and Roscoe Arbuckle’s comedies), but after the strike is won, Cregan feels some type of rage against the cinema that it does not depict the life in its full nightmare and even the social films mostly concentrate on such things as imprisonment and abortion(he understands it’s significant though) and the films about the labor focus more on the redemptions of masters which is not the part of workers ordinary lives. He decides that no matter what, he will wear his IWW red card proudly.

He is lucky though and after the long season of season work he, with Sara’s help he gets a clerk job at one of the “ Radium Luminous Material Corporation” offices in New York. In his spare time, he writes scenarios for different studios and walks a lot with Rickon.

Meanwhile, Jacaerys is living his best life: he lives with his mother, father, four brothers, cousins and little sister, they all star in the feature films at their director-grandfather’s studio with his family, and now is set to marry his cousin Baela, who is an actress too(since it is a pre-Code times, she legally still can play any role). Her sister Rhaena, meanwhile, helps her mom as costumer.

Meanwhile, Corlys gets the news about his rivals in a Biograph(corporate spies, you know) that D.W.Griffith has left them, founded his own company and now is adapting “The Clansman” by Dixon. No need to say both he and Rhaenys are infuriated by it. They decide to start to make a counter-move and make another period drama movie to beat it(they’ll fall in beating in the box-office, but a good movie will be made).

Sadly, they did not find a good scenario for a long time. Come the winter of 1914, and only there they found the scenario written by Cregan: which tells the early life of Samuel Gridley Howe, the famous abolitionist, friend of John Brown and the founder of the Perkins’s Institute for the disabled. More precisely, it tells about his participation in the Greek Revolution and arrest in Poland.

They buy the scenario from Cregan, and Corlys, seeing that this young man has the potential of a good scenarist, gives him a two-year contract. Cregan agrees and starts to refine the scenario alongside Rhaenys.

Both young men meet each other at the stairs, when Jace and Baela accidentally stumble on Cregan, who is going out of Rhaenys’s room with a lot of paper in his arms, cause Rhaenys has a tendency to write every scene in detail.

They cross their ways simultaneously. They see each other on the set, when Cregan sometimes approaches cameraman Elmo Tully while Jace and his screen partner are waiting for them — the partner is an actor who played young Greek Howe meets in his travels. Daemon, who is playing the older lead, does not even attempt to hide total disinterest.

They cross their path at the costume shop, when Jace sees his cousin Rhaena disciss costumes with Cregan, and his voice with norwegian accent strikes something in him does not understands.

They cross the way during the lunch break, when Jace with his stuntman and younger brother Luke are discussing something funny, and Cregan suddenly thinks how it may look like on the screen and attempts not to listen to them, but to read on their lips, but it fails miserably, since he stares on someone else’s faith without even noticing.

Their first conversation happens when Cregan sees Jace dragging ten books about Howe Rhaenys asked about and another five illustrated books about clothes of this time for Rhaena. They talk a lot about their favorite books and Cregan mentioned he would love to read «Martin Iden» by Jack London, but he does not have a strength to go to the library after the whole work day and spending time with his son. Jace is surprised by learning that their new scenarist has the son and urges him to bring the boy to the work.

Next day Cregan finds the book he asked nearby the set.

Baby Rickon absolutely loves the studio, especially playing hide-and-seek with kid Aegon, Viserys and Visenya. Sometimes, Luke and Rhaena playfully join them. Even lesser times, Laena coo over new boy and secretly give them a lot of sweets to both Cregan and Rhaenyra’s chargrin.

During the filming and writing there are not so many incindents that may cause anybody harm. However, one day the decoration falls on the set, when Luke is making the stunts, and it takes both Jace's and Cregan's fast reactions to drag him from the dangerous zone. After this, they merely look at each other and start to laugh — to everybody's confusement.

At this moment, they are just happy men, and oh gods, they are sure that the film they are making will be great.

(It would not be great, but good nontheless. Like many films they will do after it, but this time will be remmebered as the happiest one).

(Neither Jace, nor Cregan doesn't know know, where we'll ther relationship go, and how many moments, both good and bad, they will share together. There would be a twelve movies(most of them a hystoricals, one based on personal tragedy and one of them a mix of socialist propaganda and action), temporarily break-up, not really happy marriages to women(similiar to their partners, but not actually them), arrests during the Red Scare, Luke's injury and his marriage to Rhaena, adaptation of «Martin Iden» they made together, Cregan's sister being Radium Girl, scandal based on rumours overblown by Hedda Hopper, serving as historical consultants, the world travel, La Olimpiada Popular and death — one at Madrid, and another at Jarama. So many things).

But now, at this moment, they are happy.

#au #cregan stark #hotd #house of the dragon #jacaerys velaryon #jace x cregan #jacegan #jacegan week 2024 #fire and blood

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dailyanarchistposts · 25 days ago

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Is it better to be nice, or to be remembered?

In Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s haunting, beautiful movie of last year, Colin Farrell’s character Pádraic and Brendan Gleeson’s Colm go to war over this question. (And it is such a beautiful movie, for the love of god, don’t read this newsletter until you’ve seen it. Seriously. You will make me very sad.)

Because one day, Colm, the older of this pair of lifelong friends, decides he doesn’t want to waste one more minute of his life talking to Pádraic. He is getting old, he’s starting to feel it, but he has a rare talent with the fiddle. He wants to compose a song, just one song that might have a chance of being remembered.

And everyone knows that Padraic might be one of the nicest fellows on the island (he regularly lets his beloved donkey in the house, because why should he have to stay all bored outside?), but, though no one will say it to his face, he’s a bit dull. And Colm decides he doesn’t have anymore time for dullness.

Padraic just can’t get his simple little mind around this, he keeps challenging and questioning Colm’s decision until the older man lays down, and begins to carry out, an ultimatum: every time you talk to me, I will cut off one of my own fingers.

In one defiant riposte at the pub, when Padraic drunkenly challenges his obsession with legacy, Colm points out that no one remembers if Mozart was nice, they remember him because he did great things, and that’s what’s important.

And here we come across a question anarchists grapple with. Because there are historical figures we celebrate, and whose work still inspires us, but—because of our troublesome insistence on finding an agreement between ends and means—we also wonder, and hope, were they nice people?

One of the most eloquent explorations of this need, and this contradiction, can be found in the tragically under-distributed book, The Unquiet Dead: Anarchism, Fascism, and Mythology by anonymous. What does it mean when people who champion ideas of freedom, respect, and dignity for all don’t put those ideas in practice and treat people poorly in their own lives (often their intimate partners, their children…)? The author of Unquiet Dead embraces the complexity to be found in the tension between both stories. Carlos Tresca, the Italian anarchist featured in the book’s opening was a heroic revolutionary motivated by a love for freedom, dedicated to the cause and willing to risk himself again and again. He fought for downtrodden workers in the IWW, campaigned to save Sacco and Vanzetti from the electric chair, and organized to stem the rising tide of fascism in the Italian-American community, for which he was eventually executed by the mafia. He also beat his wife, left her and their child to be with his lover Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, but then got Elizabeth’s sister pregnant. He caused immense harm to the people he should have taken care of the best. Both of these facets of him are true.

The point is not to tolerate harm as inevitable nor draw up balance sheets between someone’s good deeds and bad deeds as though we had Ma’at’s feather in our back pocket. The point is to recognize that every goddamn person on this planet walks around all day with the capacity to do good and the capacity to do harm and we all do both. Of a completely different nature, however, are the institutions and structures with the most power to shape the entire planet. They are not people, they are not lovable damaged little packages of complexity. Rather, they are social machines that produce harm and exalt harm and metastasize harm and they grind it in to us every fucking day and their only chance for reproducing themselves is to get us to cause harm or to look away every fucking day. Our only single moonshot hope of coming together and generating enough power to destroy them once and for all so we can finally get on with healing is to recognize our potential for harm and for care and do our best to be better. Because otherwise, every time we reach towards liberation, we will be the most effective ones at tearing ourselves down.

I really believe that’s true: I have seen us beat the police, I have seen us outsmart the universities, I have seen us outmaneuver the military, I have seen us drown out the media, and I have seen us create abundance that not even the corporations could buy out or drain dry. But one thing I have never seen us do, as a movement, is to fully adopt lasting practices of conflict resolution and collective, transformative responses to harm. Though some corners of the movement have been working at it harder than others.

Urgently, we cannot support people who have been harmed without cultivating in our social circles and movements a lifelong commitment to healing. Because otherwise, we’ll expect healing to fit within a simple process, we’ll tend towards large, quick gestures that are more designed as loud advertisements that we’re with the good guys than they are designed to create space for hard feelings and messy processes that never entirely go away. Because trauma chooses its own timeline, and we can’t be present to it as long as we stick to the normative, ableist, and neurocompliant ideas of “being okay,” as long as healing continues to be an extra, a marginal space of exception rather than a central feature of everything we do. (And dear god let no one read this as a call for nonviolence. With all the force of Colm suckerpunching policeman Peadar when he starts to run his mouth in that great scene in the pub, we need to insist: fighting institutions of power and the people who choose every single day to be their mercenaries is an integral part of healing.)

Just as urgently, we cannot accompany people who have caused great harm so that they stop causing harm and are present for healing if we cannot see the good in them, and this is a central tenet of transformative justice, no matter how many *white people have started using that phrase when they mean cancellation. Not only because it is scary to admit we have hurt people we care about and we need support in those moments, but because if we cannot empathize with someone else’s ability to cause harm we probably cannot empathize with our own, which means that when we harm someone we will probably not let ourselves see it.

*I wrestled with the possibility of linking to some of the leading white voices totally perverting the concept and disrespecting the legacy of transformative justice, but I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable flame war and I certainly can’t position myself as someone who understands it all better. So please, if you’re white, whether you have a large platform or not, try to spend some time understanding the abolitionist struggle, the extreme violence of the State stealing away so many Black people and locking them up in prison. Maybe instead of bickering and posturing, we could give more support to the struggle against the prison system and white supremacy, and as a part of that insist that our harm is our own and being a community means calling it in rather than casting it out.

I’ve been learning a little about this as I reflect on one of the various miserable stories that have brought me close to the edge these past few years. A young anarchist in my neighborhood was accused of abusive behaviors by three former partners, and also spent an afternoon trying to convince a nonbinary person that their existence wasn’t real, with transphobic arguments he’d gotten off the internet. I volunteered to talk with him, hoping to offer critical support through some kind of dialogue that would hopefully be transformative for him and supportive for the people he had harmed. It didn’t go very well. Actually, it turned into a dumpster fire. I gave him about five minutes of patience and when he didn’t drop his defensiveness, his proud belief that he was right and innocent as he quoted “radfem” websites and ignored the suffering of his former partners, my ego kicked in and I focused, ever more belligerently, on proving him wrong. As though I were right, as though I were one of the good ones, as though I haven’t also hurt people I care about or clung to wrongheaded beliefs that erased other people’s experiences of pain and oppression.

It didn’t help that his defenses were already up and he had reasons for feeling unsafe. Turns out, the feminist working group in the organization he was a part of knew to use transformative justice lingo but spared themselves the effort of actually learning the practice and the experiences of struggle behind it (they generally haven’t bothered reading or translating Black feminists over here in Catalunya, but then again, the same can be said of too many white anarchists in the States). As their first or second step in the “process,” they published this kid’s name and photo on the internet and demanded his exclusion from everywhere. They also excluded some of the people he had harmed from their decision-making so they could maintain control over the process. The man with the most power in the organization, who has built up his entire identity around being a good feminist ally, didn’t dare contradict them even though it was clear they had no idea what they were doing, so he stayed on the sideline instead of offering resources.

The guy’s former partners, in general, didn’t get support. An internet communiqué and cancellation campaign gets priority, but not their emotional wellbeing. One feminist in the neighborhood offered support, but didn’t have much energy. Other feminists stayed away, because the situation was too conflictive and they were still feeling drained from being exploited or burned playing support roles for other conflicts. I prioritized confronting the dude. It ended up in an actual brawl when I found out he’d been spreading rumors against me, anything to portray his abuse as something else, including twisting information about my mental health to present me as psychotic.

I don’t know where that kid is now. If he’s abusing his current partner or if he’s learned something. All the bridges are burned. The people who published his name and photo don’t follow up on it though. He long since disappeared from their safe spaces so everything’s resolved for them.

Rewatching Banshees, Padraic’s pathetic insistence that kindness was more important than legacy reminded me of a tough fight: someone I love very much, maybe exaggerating a little the staying power of my writing, asking whether when I died people would remember me for my books or for failing to live up to my ideals, for being shitty to people I cared about. That takes me to questions of trauma as an intergenerational legacy, and how mental health and accountability intersect with patriarchal conditioning. Those essays are on a low simmer, as I grapple with how to write them (write from the scar, and not the wound, as Glennon Doyle says). For now, let me underline how anarchism asks us to be our best selves as we move through the world, while at the same time that world as it currently exists, with its layers of harm stretching back millennia, ensures that very few of us will act as our best selves, no matter what ideas motivate us.

***

Ironically, I got on Twitter to help distribution of my writing. I hate social media and all that 21st century noise, but friends kept telling me it didn’t make much sense to put so much effort into writing and none at all into the technologies by which writing is distributed nowadays. So at the end of 2019, never having developed the adequate filters or immunities, I dove in. A couple months later the pandemic started, and I fell hard. In no time, I was fighting with the best of them, disrespecting and insulting people for talking nonsense, or maybe just for not expressing themselves well in two-hundred-odd characters, or maybe for going around with the same kind of arrogance or aggressiveness that I was. Many of you were right there with me, cheering me on. I was also flirting with people, not thinking about how a platform based on algorithms takes status inequalities and amps them up. Not thinking about it because that’s how privilege works: if you don’t do the work to see it, you’re allowed to live like it doesn’t exist.

I usually felt pretty awful after those bitter Twitter fights, but I wouldn’t have gotten to whatever transformation I’m in the midst of now without the loving criticism of feminist comrades who have done the work that transformative justice asks of us. They didn’t think I was a bad person just because I was acting like an asshole. They knew that social media are structured to encourage alienation and polarization along superficial, acrimonious lines, something that on a large scale has injected new life into rightwing politics. They also know that we are the only ones who are responsible for our actions. Making some kind of change, then, requires an analysis of the power structures that condition our behavior balanced with an analysis that centers our own choices.

Often, we can inhabit architectures of power like barbarians, refusing to use them the way they are designed. The same person I mentioned earlier is on sex worker twitter more than anarchist twitter and says that people there are nearly always kind and supportive, while also practicing the forms of security culture obligated by the criminalization of their income, sharing resources in a way certain old Russian geographers might call “mutual aid,” and engaging in the sort of theoretical debates you would expect from smart people who inhabit contradictory spaces created by the hypocrisies in society’s moral norms and who are frequently thrust into a blinding spotlight as props in various debates around patriarchy, harm, criminalization, capitalism, and the State. Yet another reminder that anarchists frequently don’t make the best anarchists.

***

Our many collective failings around accountability and harm should also be a reminder that even an emphasis on acting in accordance with our values can become the front lines of a new war. In Banshees of Inisherin, it is shortly after Pádraic cements his identity as a nice fellow that he stops acting nice. After confirming with his sister, and the bartender, and his young friend Dominic that he is in fact kind, he proves to himself that Colm is in fact unjustified in ending their friendship, and therefore he must be justified in continuing to violate the boundaries that Colm, however unreasonably, is trying to lay down. Justification in hand, he sets out to sabotage Colm’s newfound pursuit of musical composition.

The moment he is the one holding the flag of kindness, he no longer has to be kind.

Some people have vastly misunderstood Banshees as an allegory for the Irish Civil War, and it is true that Inisherin, the fictional island the movie takes place on, translates as “island of Ireland.” Instead the Civil War, which is occurring on the mainland as Pádraic and Colm’s feud plays out, is a foil to the movie’s plot.

I think it could be argued that the sounds of artillery bombardment coming across the channel, and then the staccato report of executions—traitors killed by the victorious side—and then the silence of a troubled peace, herald the three acts of the movie’s dramatic script. Rather than an equivalence, Mcdonagh has drawn poetic contrasts between the civil war on the mainland and the civil feud between the two ex-friends.

The feud is frivolous, coming down to Colm’s vanity and Pádraic’s stubbornness. I would be a little scandalized by anyone implying that the causes of the war were also frivolous; everyone knows it was caused by British imperialism and the forms of oppression that become inevitable when people confide in a new state for their liberation. No one on the little island understands the reasons for the war, but neither are they held up as paragons of discernment capable of even noticing injustice. On the contrary, island society is portrayed as conservative, moribund, and incapable of fixing itself. Its solutions are escape, whether through emigration or suicide. Furthermore, the maximum exponent of the idea that the difference between the two sides is meaningless is the cop, Peadar. And the movie’s most eloquent explorations of morality, in the confessional dialogues between Colm and the island priest, make it clear that non-human animals deserve compassion, whereas cops do not. Like I said earlier, cops were people who have instead decided every single day they wake up to be mercenaries for a system that makes life impossible.

The war best expresses itself as a foil to the feud in the uneasy peace of the conclusion. Standing side by side looking out over the channel to the now quiet mainland, Colm offers a truce which Pádraic flatly rejects. The audience will watch the scene in a present in which Ireland is bound fast to a moldering peace process that we can trace back to 1923, the year Banshees takes place, agitated by Brexit and every year’s new revelations of brutal tactics employed by the British and their lackeys. Peace, nowadays, does not have an immaculate reputation and it is on that stage that Pádraic insists, heart full of love and hate, that some things cannot be forgiven.

And yet, even though he says they will never have peace, even though he has just burned Colm’s house down and tried to kill him (though he gave fair warning), both of them still commit to a minimum of decency. Pádraic takes care of Colm’s dog when he sets the house on fire. Colm picks Pádraic off the ground and silently takes him home after the copper beats him up. Colm also accepts the legitimacy of Pádraic’s arson, given that he had accidentally killed Pádraic’s dear little donkey.

Those minimums of decency, of course, were lacking in the Irish Civil War, just as they are absent from most political conflicts. And that’s the world we live in. The banshees that haunt us no longer wail and cry over the tragedies of this life. They grin wickedly, jaded, pointing out each lifeless body as we drag it out of the lake.

***

Banshees, actually, does not present us with a simple dichotomy between legacy and kindness, though a tendency to recognize male protagonists would lead us to that conclusion. That would be a false contest, stacked so that everyone, performing, would say of course kindness is more important, even if we will rarely live that way. Instead of a dichotomy, it is actually a triangle holding up legacy, kindness, and the ineffable. The latter, of course, is represented by Siobhán. She is the only one who is capable of understanding the other two, in their intractable conflict.

She prizes her brother’s kindness and for the most part she is kinder than he is, though she can also call bullshit in the face of nonsense (and we have to understand her hostility to young Dominic in light of the gendered way he, himself damaged and friendless, projects and presumes rather than respecting her boundaries). But at the same time she feels the ineffable pull of that spirit Colm tries to satisfy with his music, and eventually she follows it off the island. In her case, though, it does not manifest as something as vain as legacy. I think what keeps her awake at night is the burning need not to just move unthinkingly through life, satisfied and inert, but to be nourished by the world and to also give something back.

When you write a book, you realize it may well survive longer than you do. If you write many books on revolutionary theory and practice, people might start to assume you embody those ideas better than they do, when all you know how to do is write them down, and you’re just describing things you’ve learned from people around you, or people you’ve had the good fortune to correspond with, or people who died long ago and have been preserved by these mischievous little publications.

In a couple decades and change in the anarchist movement, I have lived through moments when the enemy really was the systems of power that are killing all of us, slowly or quickly, and the mercenaries whose very sense of self is based on defending those systems with whatever weapons, whatever cruelty, they can muster. Other times, the people on the other side of a line of conflict were people little different from me, but whom I had decided—with some justification, but probably not enough—were representatives of the ideas of power that animate the systems that are destroying us. So if they were the bad guys, as I was telling myself to justify fighting them, I must have been telling myself I was a good guy.

But how many people would have an easy time of putting me on the other side of that line? After all, I’m a settler who hasn’t found the resources to ameliorate his traumas nor the time to check his privileges, stumbling through a world created by people who look a lot like me. What I know is that people who have put me there, who have treated me like an enemy when I’ve messed up, haven’t helped me grow or make amends, they were usually an obstacle to those things, and the ones I’ve gotten to know have messed up just as bad as I have. It’s the people who have treated me like a person who might want to live in a world together with other people who I have learned the most from. And it’s thanks to those brave enough to have shown me love when I’ve messed up that I’ve survived. And they’ve helped me realize that there are many different versions of ourselves. That we live in some hellish architecture that keeps encouraging the worst versions of ourselves to rise to the top, and they will unless we specifically choose otherwise. And that fact alone warrants some kindness.

I probably shouldn’t think of myself as a good guy, because I honestly haven’t been successful at much in my life. I have been lucky, though, to be there a few times in electrifying moments, to hear ghosts who have a lot to say, and maybe to pass a little of that on in ways others have found helpful.

I think I no longer want to win. I think what I want to do is to tell stories about our failures, and my failures, but tell them with compassion. To tell stories about people I admire. About battles that were worth fighting, and peaces that weren’t false. And to try, impossibly, to strike the exact note of that ineffable music that calls on us, every day, to be better.

***

Unending thanks to R, who took me out to see Banshees, and held my hand through many of these realizations, most of them ones I should have come to a long time ago. For much of these last few years, I was dangling over the edge. Because I hadn’t done the work of putting my ideals into practice, I almost dragged her over with me. She’s also, not coincidentally, the person who taught me about memoir as a tool for healing the past, which has an eerie parallel with the vision of history set forth by Walter Benjamin, one of the favorite theorists of the author of The Unquiet Dead, who launches into Benjamin immediately after sharing the heartbreaking story about Carlos Tresca.

Get on her newsletter here if you’re not already reading her, and check out her first book: https://beltpublishing.com/products/rust-belt-femme

(The original quote from Glennon Doyle is alternately “You need to write from a scar, not an open wound,” or “if you’re going to share widely – make sure you’re sharing from your scars, not your open wounds” and in the interview where it seems to have first come up, she attributes the phrase to a friend of hers, but it’s been made more aerodynamic as feminist writers share the aphorism back and forth. All of which is a lovely counter to the white and patriarchal notion of knowledge in which the truest expression is singular in its source, traceable back to an original utterance, and written down.)

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

anonymous, The Unquiet Dead: Anarchism, Fascism, and Mythology

Kai Cheng Thom, “What to do when you have been abusive”

Alex Gorrion, “Kafka Reloaded: Redefining Apparatus in a Series of Government Waiting Rooms”

Henry McDonald, “Revealed: Five British spies inside the IRA” - Just a note that Scappaticci admitted to being a spy in the years since this article was published.

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tips-from-a-tech-worker · 10 months ago

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On radio silence...

Howdy folks,

Been a little quiet as of the last few months. Basically, I was made redundant / quit my job and have been unemployed since February.

Honestly, I am not too bothered about it. It was a fairly mutual agreement, and from the sounds of it, I was lucky to get out when I did!

Since then I've been getting as involved in IWW organising as I can whilst also applying for jobs. It's been quite enjoyable! But... It would be nice to have some money...

I'll be trying to keep this account active, but if I go silent then now you know why!

Also, and I am bracing myself for this, I am happy to give advice in terms of union organising with folks. I am no expert, but I can tell you what has worked for me and others I know, and what hasn't!

Otherwise, hope everyone's been doing well!

Stay safe and solidarity folks!

#me #personal #iww #union organising #union advice

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fairiedance · 1 year ago

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Wildcat Wearing Keffiyeh

This one was inspired directly by my Palestinian friend, he's a labor activist and he has done some incredible work in various unions (and non-union movements) over the years. He's nice enough to have put some serious time into labor organizing for free for employees of organizations he doesn't even work for just because he hates seeing people being treated unfairly. When I tell you he is the nicest person I have EVER met I really mean it. I actually met him through his labor activism.

As usual ALL PROCEEDS from these will go to this wonderful man to help him afford to bring his girlfriend over to America and to help his other loved ones around the Levant who are being hurt directly and/or financially by the attacks on Gaza, the increasing Israeli raids in the West Bank and the collateral damage in surrounding countries. The cat is found here and here (on shirts, stickers, notebooks, etc). All designs found HERE (click on each to see more product options).

For those not familiar, this is the black cat/wildcat/sabo-tabby, an old union symbol likely designed by IWW member Ralph Chaplin. It is associated with sabotage, wildcat (unprotected) strikes and other radical labor actions.

By the way, did you know that Israeli trade unions have historically fought against the Arab workforce?

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poppyandzena · 10 months ago

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The It's Not Therapy podcast did an interview with Poppy and Zena about Noeh, and Poppy says that SHE initiated sex with Noeh. Poppy's tone instantly shifts as soon as she realized what she just said and that she just fucked up. Poppy knows she wasn't raped, but im guessing that's one reason why she is pulling her "i couldn't consent because of the mentew iwwness" shtick.

I'll say it again: BPD does not deprive you of autonomy and consent. Poppy initiated. Noeh left. Poppy accused her of rape.

#poppy #nf

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alwayschasingrainbows · 1 year ago

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Tangled Web Readalong Chapter 1.7.

another long post, so sorry about it, but I have so many thoughts about one, incredibly short paragraph...:

"Peter, being notoriously and incurably left-handed, had not been accepted for overseas service." (Tangled Web).

It appears that Peter Penhallow did not fight on the front lines of World War I. Didn't he enlist in the infantry after being rejected for overseas service? Was he unable to take part in the fight because he was left-handed? I haven't heard about such cases of exclusion from combat, but maybe one of you has such knowledge?

By the way, in this novel World War I is presented in a very negative light, which is surprising in Montgomery's novels. You can see how much her bitterness has grown over the years. In Rilla of Ingleside, the war is presented as a fight for a better world: bloody, yes, but glorious nonetheless. The soldiers returned wounded and aged, but in the glow of the glory of sacrifice for a better cause.

In Tangled Web, however, we see a completely different face of war: Naomi's husband does not recognize her and does not love her as before; Donna and Virginia lose their husbands, and their grief is shown in a mocking way; one of the men dies of pneumonia before he even has a chance to leave a training camp; the other experiences a "moment of glory", but it is described ironically and without due respect.

It seems to me that Montgomery no longer believes in fighting for a better world.

In Rilla, war is presented as consuming many lives, tragic, but in a way also... glorious and not without meaning. Pacifists are portrayed as ridiculous and harmful.

In Tangled Web, however, so far none of the main characters has commented on the war as a "great victory" or "a glorious fight for the homeland." In fact, it seems that none of the characters whose adventures we have seen so far took part in it (aside from Naomi's husband).

We know absolutely nothing about Hugh's reasons not to join (or did he?). Peter did not- although given his temperament and adventurous spirit he ought to have been the first to enlist. Left-handedness seems like Maud's hastily concocted explanation. Maybe Maud believed that war robs people of everything - including their energy and love for living on the edge? Maybe she didn't want Peter to stop being Peter?

I wonder how the war might affect the characters in other of Montgomery's books. Would Barney be able to love forests and write books about them if he had to fight for survival for four years? Would Teddy be able to paint if he had to come face to face with another man - perhaps a writer, a doctor, a father - and had to choose between his life and that man's? Or Walter, with his love of beauty - would he have been able to write poetry if he had survived?

One might say that Andrew Stuart continued to live, got married and started a family. True. But he himself claimed that the war aged him ten years. We don't know the trauma he underwent. Perhaps his too quick marriage to Robin, his inability to be a good husband to his young wife and a good father to his newborn baby was the result of war trauma? Who knows what was left of Andrew-of-the-years-before in Andrew who returned in 1918?

In her later novels, I think Maud doesn't specifically mention the war in relation to her characters (except Andrew). She even creates worlds in which there is no mention of war… Emily's Quest's ending, for example never mentions the war even though it should have happened there, especially as something about the war is mentioned in Emily Climbs: "one stormy night in a February of the olden years before the world turned upside down."

Similarly, there is no mention of the war in The Blue Castle (IWW) or Mistress Pat (IIWW) - at least as far as I remember - if I am mistaken, please correct me :).

I find it so interesting how Maud's change of heart is portrayed in her novels.

#lm montgomery #blue castle book club #the blue castle #lantern hill book club #lantern hill spoilers #emily of new moon #rilla of ingleside #tangled web #tangled web book club #blue castle spoilers

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uyu-boba · 22 days ago

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Someone people got upset with me on Twitter a while back because I said Revachol reminded me of my own city, even though I live in the Americas.

I took a drive near the Detroit river today. It was frozen over with a bunch of birds sitting on the ice. On the other side I could see the tall buildings of Detroit, and on our side I saw abandoned buildings, distilleries, big piles of asphalt, and so many cranes.

If I stood on the frozen beach and looked a little to the right I would begin to see… absolutely nothing. The snow is white, the sky is white, and the river is white. It looked like my world was still loading in. That’s the pale. When I played Disco Elysium for the first time it was February 2023, and the game looked exactly like it did outside.

Windsor, Ontario is the automotive capital of Canada, most people I know work at some sort of assembly plant, my husband has worked at several tool and die shops. Unfortunately because of this, a lot of the city is not walkable, public transportation is severely lacking, and… it is also known as one of the unemployment capitals of Canada. During the time that I was playing the game, I had just left my position in the IWW, which seemed to be the final straw in the entire union crumbling into dust.

I only moved to this city six years ago. I came from a much smaller town in southern Ontario, one that wasn’t very diverse in terms of anything. A lot of people who live in Windsor aren’t from here. A lot of them aren’t from Canada, either. They’re just kind of stuck here, living paycheque to paycheque and hoping one day they can afford to move to Toronto where there may be better opportunities (cue Fallen Leaves by Billy Talent). A lot of people blame the immigrants and international students for the high unemployment rate and the housing crisis. Of course, you have to understand that the reason they are getting jobs is because employers are legally allowed to pay them less than minimum wage, and a lot of the buildings that aren’t totally abandoned have been renovated to accommodate too many international students in a basement that isn’t up to fire code. My husband knew a kid in his engineering class that died in a fire because of this reason. Our landlord is actively trying to coerce us to move out of our small apartment so he can add more bedrooms and charge more. I cannot get the mold fixed unless I agree to him getting rid of our kitchen.

But as I said, I am from a small town, and I love Windsor. I love the people in it, I love how I get to meet people from so many different aspects of life. I would have never met my husband or my best friend had I not come here. I never had anything to do in my hometown, I was the only nerd, the only queer. I feel like my D&D friends are my family, I feel loved. I want to make this place better. I look over at the beautiful buildings of Detroit and think of all the Americans terrified of the new presidency and what it will bring and I want to hug them, I want to make things better.

Playing Disco Elysium and being in Revachol for me was refreshing. Instead of a lively bustling city, or a quiet little countryside, I got to see an industrial town that was struggling, but beautiful in its own way. One that had a rich history and people who weren’t giving up on it. The things I saw on my screen; the big cranes and the sea ice and the pale… they were outside my window.

I’m not going to understand the experiences and relationships European people have to this game. I hope someday I won’t be too impoverished to explore the world, but I’m not sure I ever will. Still, a lot of this game meant something to me, and this is one of the aspects. I won’t be apologetic about it, (sorry? 🇨🇦) and I hope maybe you will open your mind to the possibility that someone across the world does have something in common with you.

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iww-gnv · 1 year ago

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Did you know you can join the Industrial Workers of the World even if you aren't traditionally employed? Check out IWW.org/join for more information on finding a local branch today!

[Image description copied from alt text: A square graphic with an illustration of a person sitting at a table with a laptop, looking at the screen with confusion. Text on the graphic reads, "Freelancer? Self-employed? Between jobs? You can still unionize! Find out how at IWW.org/join." The IWW logo is included in the bottom right corner. End description.]

#originals #the iww #iww #industrial workers of the world #join the iww #unionize #unions #union strong #labor #labor unions #labor organizing #labor rights #worker rights #workers rights #smash capitalism

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greekedtext · 3 months ago

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In no particular order:

Fuck you thrice to anyone who voted for him in 2016.

I refuse to believe he won the popular vote. The electoral college? Could be, we all know that's fucked.

But the popular vote? Come on, Repubs have been blatantly cheating while accusing Dems of wanting/trying to cheat for at least as long as I've been paying close attention to politics (IOW since 1999).

Also, direct foreign interference. Since we do know Russians have called in bomb threats this time.

This doesn't even touch on disinformation campaigns originating inside and outside the country, because what I'm saying is that we may not know the true results for days, weeks, or ever.

Fuck you nine times to anyone who voted for him in 2020.

Doomerism begets doom. Though it goes against the grain of my brainweasels, I pledge to be aggressively, zestfully optimistic about everything from now on.

I'm not afraid. I'm not sad. I'm on my brainweasel-suppressant medication and my coworkers appreciate me and the fascists cannot win.

Never pin your hopes on the idea that anything specific will happen at a specific time. That way often lies disappointment. Keeping your hopes on a hand-wavy timeline is how you mentally gear yourself for the long haul.

If you're struggling:

Rest when you need to. Ask for help when you need to. (People love to be asked for favors.)

Stay alive.

Don't believe the supposed election results. Yes, there are a lot of fascists and dupes who genuinely did vote for him (all fascists are dupes but not all dupes are fascists) but see above.

Build your networks. Talk about your lives and concerns.

Look for opportunities to help others.

I'm not mad at leftists who sat this out. They got duped, but we're on the same side now.

We're on the same side now.

If you're in the US or are a citizen abroad:

Join or start a mutual aid network. Build power locally by working with people who see themselves as your equal -- not just your electeds. Speaking truth to power is merely one tool in the toolbox.

Write to your electeds at the local, state, and federal level about the issues that concern you.

Join or start a labor union. Make sure they are a movement union such as the IWW, not just a "we only care about our members" union -- and if your only option is to join the latter type, then organize a movement-oriented takeover.

This is not your burden alone; don't stretch beyond your sustainable capacity.

Do stretch a bit sometimes to develop greater capacity, but also rest. If you're trying to do it all alone you're replicating the mistakes that the authoritarian elements of society have trained us to make.

Rest when you need to. Make lists of things that give you joy, gratitude, hope, a sense of meaning.

Read David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything to reset your imagination about the possibilities of societal structures. Then read Graeber's The Democracy Project to cement the way Dawn changed you. There's a thing toward the beginning of The Democracy Project that may ping you as racist or gross, but don't let any flaws you perceive in Graeber or his ideas stop you from mining his writings. Same goes for any other dead author.

Rest when you need to.

Increasingly throughout my adulthood, I have felt that my schooling and all of the "realistic" fiction that I was exposed to in childhood (regardless of medium) did not prepare me for the truth of the world, which is much more chaotic than I expected, much more capable of grim twists and turns.

Fuck you forever to anyone who voted for him this time.

Here is the eternal truth:

The fascists cannot win.

#us politics

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anti-workshop · 1 year ago

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SHAKY HANDS STICKER CLUB

Hey friends! I alluded to a big thing coming and THIS IS IT!

Patreon sucks ass but it's sort of the name of the game for fundraising things, and we need to raise funds, so here we are!

Do you like stickers? Do you like buttons? Do you like queer leftist shit as well as unique pieces of art you can adhere to the world or wear on your person? Please join our sticker club! You get stickers every month and maybe button/s if you want!

Check it out here -> STICKER CLUB

Also! More short designs will be coming soon! So stay tuned!

Read more below if you wanna know why we're doing this. Warning, it's long and sort of sad.

We started screen printing from one of our basements in 2020. It was, needless to say, the worst possible time to try and start a business. We barely survived and were able to move into the basement of the Milwaukee IWW's new union hall so we could all split the rent and make it affordable.

That was back in 2021. We were still struggling, but through word of mouth we got jobs and kept the lights on. We weren't really able to pay ourselves, but we all had second or third jobs so it was (mostly) fine.

We printed from that basement for about a year (and I hit my head on the ceiling and doorways hundreds of times) when a fellow wobbly and co-op enthusiast invited us to join his co-op as a DBA (doing business as). He sold us on the idea by offering to subsidize our workers' comp, general liability and book keeping expenses so we could try and grow sustainably. After some meetings we agreed to join as a DBA and we put our faith in this fellow worker whose intentions seemed pure and generous. We'll call him G.

Throughout the co-op's history some of our worker-owners' personal lives have been pretty chaotic. Working multiple jobs is stressful enough as a lot of you know, and so is navigating the continued stress of covid, having kids who are dealing with being bullied for being trans, all of us having major depression, adhd, etc. etc. We relied on each other, kept the lights on and just forged ahead, but there were some jobs that we delivered late or very late because of the chaos. G was understandably frustrated by these setbacks, as was I.

Because of the chaos, for about 5 months I was literally the only person working at the shop, performing literally every task from emails to quotes and mockups to invoices to pre-press, press, post-press and fulfillment. The Goncahrov shirts y'all purchased literally paid our rent, and I cannot thank you enough for that.

Then a fellow worker we'll call Z joined the co-op and saved my life. Z is amazing and I love him and owe him so much. He and I just kept at it and did what we could to care for our fellow workers who were struggling while away from the shop.

For about a year we've been trying to get an equipment loan to improve our processes because our little 4-color press and our flash and conveyor dryers suck ass. They're functional, extremely difficult to use, and they make our final product inconsistent and screen printing is a nightmare on them. It was all we could afford so we made the best of it and pursued a loan from a really cool cooperative lender that lends to other co-ops.

After a year of paperwork, making reports of our revenue and costs, analyzing our processes to improve them and show we were a viable business, they finally granted us the loan! We got a new press, better dryer, more screens and an incredible water-based digital printer/plotter combo that allows us to do stickers and decals and banners and buttons and other cool shit like that.

While we were applying for the loan, we were also pursuing a Collective Bargaining Agreement with the PPPWU (formerly the GCC) because we would be the only worker-owned co-op in our region (and maybe the US) to have the allied label, the most coveted union bug for printing. The local president was amazing to work with and we finally got awarded our union label and started paying dues.

It was around the time we began seeking the loan that G was doing and saying things we were a little confused by. He unilaterally fired two worker-owners in his co-op after months of mediation on my part to try and address interpersonal conflict. It's my fault for not seeing the writing on the wall then, but because he had done so much to help us, we justified his actions to look past our concerns.

Then, when those workers were gone he started to get abusive in text threads towards me and the other print folks, and we still looked past it because he had a lot going on in his life and that kind of stress can bring out the worst in anyone.

Well, a few weeks ago it came to our attention that we don't own our print co-op anymore, and we functionally stopped owning it once we signed on as a DBA. We thought we were all worker owners, but it turns out only I am, because I paid in at the time when I had the money. The abuse has escalated to the point that Z has quit, leaving only me the original creator the our co-op who we'll call M.

We're sort of trapped now. We're on the hook for rent at the shop until 2025, as well as the payments for our $30k loan, in a business that's been swept out from under us by someone we trusted who has become toxic and plainly cruel in his treatment of us.

Despite the stress and never really paying ourselves, I've enjoyed learning water-based screen printing and making garments people actually wear! It's been amazing! As the anti-workshop, we've been able to fund programs for our local IWW, the local tenants union and the local pro-palestine, anti-war committee. That has felt so good.

We've made our space an extremely queer, worker-focused spot for folks to learn the ins and outs of design and printing, which I am so proud of.

We're still here. We're still printing. We need to raise the funds to buy our equipment back by paying off this loan, so we can stop being a DBA of G's co-op and be our own entity again.

Failing that, we'll see what happens.

#sticker club #shaky hands #worker cooperatives #antiworkshop

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