#Sarah Kendzior

[noxaeternaetc]

"As the US lurches to autocracy, I turn to geology, because it is an honest broker. It retains every painstaking detail: rocks that grow an inch each millennium, fossils encased in stone. Every rock is a coffin, every coffin is a book.

Geology is an ally at the end of the world. It assures you there was a world, there is a world, and you are part of it."

Sarah Kendzior, The great unconformity: on heading to a future with a deleted past, July 4, 2024.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Read more at: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com

[imkeepinit]

[thatstormygeek]

Technically there is less than a month until Election Season ends, but that’s a lie. It will stretch beyond November 5 because there is no longer a firm winner, only contestation and violence and profiteering, swirling like storm water in a sewer.

We have been in Election Season for a decade. The season has no predictable pattern other than its steady series of disasters. It is like climate change, with each catastrophe first denied and then weaponized. We know the roots of the crises, but no one is held accountable. We know how to mitigate the damage, but the powerful insist it is ordinary people’s fault. “You should have voted the hurricane out,” they scold. “It’s your job to evacuate before fascism arrives!” Maybe I got that backwards. It’s hard to keep messaging straight in Election Season, when authority holds no sincerity and time loses all meaning. There are no sweet summers or crisp autumns or cool winters or lush springs in Election Season. There is only the memory of a bygone era when things changed, instead of dragging on and on. Once there were four seasons and now there is one: climate chaos. Once there were rotating four-year presidencies and now there is one endless campaign, a pale horse race whose rider is Death, and Hell follows him. Hell follows you too, on social media, and demands you follow Hell back. Hell follows your phone and your car and your right to privacy and asks you for a donation.

The 2024 campaign discourse was a rerun in which pundits gave the same warnings about Trump’s autocratic aims that I gave in 2016 but ignored that he has since held office and carried many of them out, including sedition, yet was unpunished and allowed to run for president again. That is the real story of the 2024 election: sanctioned illegality. Impunity countenanced by all sides. No one in power takes the sovereignty of the US seriously and now they don’t even bother pretending.

[maaarine]

theguardian.com

apnews.com

twitter.com/sarahkendzior

[beyond-far-horizons]

For anyone that wants some insight into the recent US election and what might happen next, I recommend the excellent American journalist Sarah Kendzior. It makes for grim reading (as you'd imagine), but there is some practical tips and insights. Also spoilers for the end of Attack on Titan.

Just Answering (Many) Questions!

[gravity-rainbow]

They want the country to collapse. A depopulated, partitioned US is easier to exploit and control. To them, the state is just something to sell. They do not care if the buyers are foreign or domestic. -Sarah Kendzior - They Knew (How a Culture of Conspiracy keeps America Complacent)

[readingsquotes]

....it's very unfortunate that Israel is a model for world governments, and you can see its influence in places like Hungary, Russia, the Brexit UK, the United States, or any other country that has descended into mafia state autocracy, often directly in conjunction with Netanyahu, who's largely been in control of Israel since 2009, with occasional departures. But also, with the backing of a lot of the same donors and plutocrats and supporters. And Israel has, in this time, become a far-right autocratic state. It was always an apartheid state. It was never a true democracy. You cannot be a true democracy when you are colonizing and abusing a population that is living in subjugation, right beside you – which has historically been the case with Palestinians. But even for Israelis themselves, it has become an autocratic state with protests suppressed, with journalists, as you mentioned, threatened. And also, major outlets, like Haaretz, that have done a lot of brave investigative reporting. They are being threatened and the situation is dire. And I think that Israel should be listed when people put together lists of authoritarian states. It should be there. People will mention Russia, China, Turkey, and others, but they'll neglect to list Israel because Americans have always been taught that Israel is the lone democracy in the Middle East. And that is simply not the case.

Authoritarianism, Dehumanization, and the Fight Ahead "It's so important that folks stick together and recognize each other's struggles as a unified struggle," says author Sarah Kendzior. Kelly Hayes Dec 5, 2023

[willowreader]

I am Canadian, and have read Sarah Kendzior's books and her substack articles. If you are American I implore you to read her along with Heather Cox Richardson. She is a treasure.

[alanshemper]

In the late 20th century, American dads played a Black female folk singer’s poignant anthem of a dead American Dream, and their children took note.

My dad wasn’t trying to teach me anything with “Fast Car”. He just liked Tracy Chapman.

But I listened, wide-eyed, as it described the country I was learning to fear to love.

“Fast Car” is not a relic of its time but tragically timeless. Combs’ cover could stay faithful because nothing in this country got better. That “Fast Car” can be passed down through generations without requiring explanation is both a songwriting triumph and a grim indictment of America.

A song about Reagan-era struggle became a song about 21st-century survival. When my teenage children hear “Fast Car”, they do not wonder why the narrator cannot escape poverty or why a person with a job still has to live in a shelter. Those things happen all the time.

[...]

The music industry has been dying since the advent of digital media. But now the destruction seems purposeful: top-down, vengeful, intended to destroy music’s political power. The 1980s and 1990s songs I describe would never be sanctioned by executives or travel so widely. We would never be allowed such cohesive outrage.

5 Feb 2024

[impromptu-manifesto]

Sarah Kendzior writes about social media, autocracy, and the attempt to eradicate memory.

Full article here: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/out-of-words

@sarahkendzior -twitter

[thatstormygeek]

"When there is a genocide, the priority must be stopping it immediately, not ruminating on how it affects an election a year from now."

Is a choice between a genocide abettor who screams demagogic tirades and a genocide abettor who pays lip service to international law really a choice? Where is the anti-genocide choice? Where is the choice if you believe Palestinians are human beings deserving of rights and freedom? Why is that considered a radical proposition by US elected officials, but not by ordinary Americans? There are many reasons for the US government’s unwavering support of Israel no matter how authoritarian it becomes. I explain some of them in this article, which examines Israel as an object of apocalyptic fanaticism, with many of our top officials believing they were personally selected by God to serve it.

The 2024 election is not a horse race and pundits should stop covering it like one. It is a pale horse race, packed with apocalyptic responses to immense crises – genocide, climate catastrophe, pandemics – countenanced by both parties. It is a dead horse race, and the dead horse is America, beaten and bleeding, worn from trampling and being trampled. Whether it is the tacit approval of Democrats or the overt approval of Republicans is irrelevant: the combined force is what makes grave injustice palatable to an array of partisans. There are abusers and there are enablers. There is an overt authoritarian death cult and a soft-focus death cult. The two parties are not the same -- and that's the point. They work in tandem to create this nightmare. How they do that should be a point of inquiry. Personality cults, polls, political feuds: these are irrelevant in the face of existential threats that transcend term limits or parties. When there is a genocide, the priority must be stopping it immediately, not ruminating on how it affects an election a year from now. We all deserve so much better than this.

[writteninchicken]

"It is better to be free than to be cheap, as a matter of character." -Sarah Kendzior

[caiariel]

"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how idealogies justify punishing the sick ang the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatized those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."

-Sarah Kendzior