#and still as non-viable as it has been for decades it is SO not viable anymore

[jyndor]

who the fuck seriously believes a two state solution is viable in the year of our whatever 2024

keep deluding yourselves it's not going to happen

[par2n2]

Donoùsa /do.núː.sa/ [Δονούσα, Δενούσα, ή Δόνουσα]

Very recently I had the chance to revisit Donoùsa, the easternmost and most unapproachable island of Mikrès Kyklàdes after 20 years since my last trip. This small island has become extremely popular for backpackers and youngsters, many of whom free camp in its sheltered southern sandy beaches. The island still possesses its isolated and secluded nature, however in the peak of the touristic season in August it becomes crowded and nearly swarming with colourful visitors.

Most backpackers set their lodgings in the small clearings of lentisks, tamarisks and olive trees that form dense groves in the fields behind the shore of Livàdi, filling them with tents and hammocks. The small sandy beach is crammed with sheds, umbrellas, jammed with tanned visitors with flashy and harlequin-like pareos. A remarkable community, or more accurately an actual makeshift village, is formed for the few summer months, inhabited by Greeks and foreigners alike, striving to enjoy the luminous Mediterranean sun and crystal clear sea. The fact that free camping in public areas (as all coasts and beaches in Greece are) is fully banned throughout the country, particularly in protected areas, and that hefty fines are imposed to perpetrators, discourages few backpackers, in Donoùsa at least, from this practice.

This over-visitation of still untouched and inaccessible islands and shores by the so-called "free campers" has peaked over the last decade in Greece. The still precipitating repercussions of the Greek financial crisis of 2010, the ever increasing cost of living in contrast to low wages, and the excessive and unethical, super profits of the tourism sector, Greece's "heavy" industry, have left few if any alternatives for generation Z, that has paid a huge toll, and still bears the immense debt burdens left by their parents. For most Greeks between their 20s and 30s, only a few days of holidays in the Greek islands, may require more than 2 monthly salaries or even more to be spent on ferry tickets, accommodation and subsistence costs, making the whole endeavour non viable. Staycation in Athens or in other main cities has become a mainstream for most, otherwise free camping is the sole option for enjoying the once common "people's swim" in the summer.

However, "free camping" is not without consequences, particularly for nature. Pristine, protected and sensitive sites (such as the idyllic sandy beaches with coastal dunes in small islands of the Aegean Sea) constitute the home for important, endemic and threatened species and habitats. Even the most aware and careful free-campers constitute a major threat, resulting in serious deterioration in wild and vulnerable natural ecosystems. Ignorance is the main cause, since most, if not all, campers presume that only litter and waste left behind are the cause of degradation, while strongly maintain that their "natural" free stay has no repercussions for the coastal dune ecosystems. According to researchers, it has been estimated that during the last thirty years, almost 75% of Mediterranean coastal dunes have been damaged or destroyed, principally by tourism. Anthropogenic impacts combined with natural coastline retreat accelerate the destruction of the dune vegetation, ultimately leading to dune destruction.

This was the case for Donkey-island, [Γαϊδουρονήσι], or Chrysì, an uninhabited secluded islet, south of Crete which was nearly destroyed by over-visitation and human induced degradation of its unique dune ecosystem. Propitiously the Greek state enacted an effective management plan and put into force protective measures for this natural gem, banning free camping and strictly regulating access and stay on the islet. Hopefully recovery of the much affected dune habitats will not be very far away.

Sadly, tourism and seasonal over-visitation, even free camping, of small and vulnerable islands that lack resources, but host important and threatened natural habitats and species, take a grave toll, that may dispossess insular and coastal communities from their most valuable assets, natural environment.

[jcmarchi]

Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble Preview - Bringing Monkey Ball Back In 2024 - Game Informer

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/super-monkey-ball-banana-rumble-preview-bringing-monkey-ball-back-in-2024-game-informer/

Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble Preview - Bringing Monkey Ball Back In 2024 - Game Informer

Last month, I had a chance to play Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble, the first all-new entry in the Super Monkey Ball (SMB) franchise in more than a decade. While I went into the demo skeptical that the series, which experienced its best years in the early-to-mid 2000s, could feel like a modern experience in 2024, I emerged from the demo impressed by the gameplay improvements, single-player level design, and the game’s approach to multiplayer (you can read my full preview here). 

Shortly after the preview, I had a chance to dig deeper into Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble with several of the developers behind Ryu Ga Gotoku’s franchise that isn’t about the seedy underbelly of the Japanese organized crime to learn how the team worked to modernize the franchise while still remaining true to its roots.

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Recently, we’ve received some remakes and remasters, but no new entry for many years. Why did the franchise take such a long break?

Nobuhiro Suzuki, Producer: We believe this is the result of a combination of factors. Whether it was due to development resources being refocused towards other large titles, the creators leaving the company, sales numbers, and more, the SMB development line disappeared and there was a period of time when production came to a halt. However, after releasing two remakes, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD in 2019 and Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania in 2021, and after receiving positive feedback from our fans, we decided to release a completely new title, Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. We hope fans are excited to play this first brand new entry in over a decade!

With that unique position in mind, what were the primary goals of Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble?

NS: Following the release of those two remakes, Banana Blitz HD and Banana Mania, our goal is to firmly establish the revival of the SMB franchise with this completely new title. To that end, we set out to make a new entry that firmly inherits or captures the best qualities of past SMB titles while also feeling like an all-new game with 16-player online battles, refined game and character designs, and the addition of new characters and storylines. 

With such a big gap between the last all-new, non-remake/remaster release, were there any updates to the design and gameplay best practices that needed to be applied to this latest entry to ensure it feels modern in 2024?

Daisuke Takahata, Director: Based on the data we pulled, such as the number of people who cleared each world of Banana Mania and comments from various playtests, we updated the game with a level of challenge that new players (as well as longtime fans) will enjoy. Compared to the past titles, the difficulty level of the early worlds is now milder (in previous games, things were too difficult right from the beginning). We also made it so that the first time you boot the game, you will be taken to a tutorial that will help you learn how to play the game and use the controls. The same goes for the camera, where we made some small adjustments to the default settings to help make things feel smoother. Players will also be able to fine-tune these settings in the Options menu, which we think longtime fans will appreciate.

The physics in Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble feel good. How did the team go about overhauling the physics, and how did you know you got them just right?

Jack Ko, Programmer: Banana Rumble’s physics actually builds upon those in Banana Mania, which in turn was based heavily on the original GameCube version’s physics. We made special adjustments to the movement in the previous game to make it viable as a remake, but thanks in part to comments from fans, we were made aware of a few elements that might contribute to some of that unintuitive behavior caused by the physics in Banana Mania. With Banana Rumble being a new entry to the series and having its own new stages, it means that this time around, we were able to focus on making the movement feel simpler and more intuitive.

Additionally, the physics system is extensively parameterized, meaning that designers can make adjustments to different parts of it on the fly. With internal testing happening at least once a week during development, tweaks were made incrementally and whenever needed. We knew we had it right when anyone could just pick it up and be able to immediately roll out like a pro.

Why was the Spin Dash such an important inclusion in this entry? What do you think it most adds to the experience?

NS: In creating this all-new game, we wanted to add the right technique that would give users a wider range of play and challenge. Also, in order to implement the 16-player battles, we needed something that would really emphasize the user’s technique so they can overcome the competition. As a result, the Spin Dash was implemented. While the Spin Dash is simple to perform, we believe it adds a lot to the game; for beginners, it’s an exhilarating element that allows them to sprint and bounce off obstacles, and for advanced players, it can serve as a way to find shortcuts and quickly reach the goal. We are very pleased how players have been responding to it.

This question may be better asked to the localization team, but with the Super Monkey Ball franchise so reliant on puns and wordplay related to bananas, did the team ever consider calling it “Peel Out” instead of “Spin Dash?”

NS: To be honest, we didn’t think about it at all. [Laughs] We wanted to make it easier for users to understand just by looking at the name, so we made it straight out “Spin Dash.”

When creating a level in Adventure mode, what factors must be considered to create an effective stage?

Yukio Oda, Designer: As for “what elements,” our basic idea is to combine “various elements” in a complex and effective manner. For example, if we break down a stage into smaller pieces, you can see that the “path” includes various elements such as “thickness,” “curve,” “slope,” “moving path,” and so on. Depending on how these parts are combined, the stage can be easy or difficult, interesting or boring. The Monkey Ball team has a lot of expertise in these combinations, all accumulated over many years with the series, and we always aim to create an interesting stage based on that know-how. But the first step in creating a single stage starts with the inspiration of the stage designer.

How does the team balance fun with challenge when designing stages?

YO: The stages created by our stage designers are regularly playtested by dozens of people inside and outside the team. Not only do we pick up a variety of opinions, but we also analyze data such as the percentage of clear rates and times, and we are constantly making adjustments to make the stages even better. We are also strongly aware that the Monkey Ball series has been characterized by its contrast between having very easy stages and very challenging stages. Sometimes, even if a playtester finds that a stage is deemed “too difficult,” there are cases where we end up leaving it the way it is. However, we are always pleasantly surprised when, after launch, we see users uploading videos showing how they were able to complete extremely difficult stages with ease. 

The stages I played were very enjoyable and sometimes over-the-top, but they were just in the first two worlds. How wild should players expect the challenges in Adventure mode to become?

DT: We are glad you enjoyed the early stages of the game! As we announced, there are 200 all-new stages to be found in Banana Rumble’s Adventure Mode, all spread across different worlds. The final world, in particular, has a variety of exciting gimmicks waiting for players, which will prove challenging even for fans who started with the previous titles. Stay tuned for a “very wild” challenge!

Can you talk to me about the process of designing the Battle modes? They bring such enjoyable twists on the Super Monkey Ball formula, and I’ve always found the minigames/side modes to be as enjoyable as the main Adventure mode.

YO: Thank you very much! When it comes to the game design of Battle Mode, we paid close attention to how “control” and “sense of speed” were expressed during gameplay, as they are key characteristics of this series. We also took care to ensure that the skills players learned and improved upon by playing through Adventure Mode can be utilized in Battle Mode as well. One of the main features of this game is its emphasis on “ease of understanding” – basically, we made sure not to make the rules overly complicated when adding any twists and turns, so players are able to enjoy themselves.

Where would you like to see the Super Monkey Ball franchise evolve from here? Do you think there is a place for multiple releases in a shorter time window than we’ve seen in recent eras?

NS: First of all, as a basic premise, we will continue to carry on the fun and originality the SMB series is known for, and make sure SMB fans can fully enjoy their time with it. On top of that, we would like to evolve the series to a level that offers something that incorporates a variety of exciting new ways to play that is altogether unique to Sega. With the support of our players, we believe we will be able to continue to release new games on a regular basis. We would really appreciate everyone’s support for Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble and the Super Monkey Ball series!

Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble arrives on Switch on June 25. For more on the upcoming series revival, head here to read our full, hands-on impressions.

[militantinremission]

Ok, Donald Trump's Indicted... Now What?

So Mainstream Media & their Democratic Shills R celebrating the 37 Count Indictment against Donald Trump- R they being premature? What exactly R the odds of Donald Trump getting convicted of a Felony Act, let alone dozens? Government & Mainstream Media have been busy keeping The Masses 'Emotional' over the last 20Yrs; all the while, giving up Our Freedom as Citizens for empty promises of Security. This fearfulness has led to an American Society where there are more incidents of Mass Shootings & Mass Killings, than Days of The Year.

This fearfulness has also been weaponized to cause the equivalent of Human Stampedes over Non- Issues, like The Debt Ceiling & Donald Trump. America was NEVER going to default on Its debts; the unnecessary game of Chicken was a waste of Time. The Issue of Donald Trump is an ongoing Saga. Democrats have used Trump to scare their voters to The Polls, but Dems haven't offered a viable alternative. Joe Biden has created hundreds of thousands of (Part Time) Jobs that still don't pay The Bills. His Administration has fostered a steady rise in The Cost Of Living, but Mainstream Media's attention is focused on Donald Trump.

For The Record, I don't see Donald Trump getting convicted. He may finagle a continuance that allows him to campaign throughout the 2024 Election Cycle, but I don't know if he will need to go that far. People are so quick to put Trump in Leg Irons, that they forget the precedent ANY CONVICTION of Donald Trump will set. If American Courts see fit to convict a former President, what will stop The World Court from going after American Politicians, Diplomats, & their Aides for an assortment of War Crimes? Afrikan Governments are expressing frustration over watching their Leaders Tried, Convicted, & Imprisoned, while European & American Leaders commit atrocities, yet remain free.

Lindsey Graham's tone towards George Stephanopoulos on 'This Week' may have been a Tell of sorts. Despite obvious bad behavior by Donald Trump, Republicans appear to be Circling The Wagons around him. Chris Christie, John Bolton, & Bill Bar are getting their 'shots' in, but they also sound like they're hedging their Bet. Does anyone believe that Trump could serve Decades in Prison? In a Case tried by a Judge that he appointed? I feel like saying 'The Fix is In', is an overstatement... I have more concern for his former White House Valet & current Personal Assistant, Walt Nauta.

Mr. Nauta is reportedly seen On Camera moving boxes to Donald Trump's Residence from a storage room, during the same period that The National Archives requested the Presidential material. When asked, Mr Nauta denied moving the boxes. His Indictment may be more worrisome. Donald Trump is keeping Walt Nauta close for now, but Michael Cohen can attest to the length of Donald Trump's Loyalty... Walt would be wise to keep a couple dollars stashed for his own Attorney.

-Just Saying

[intrauterine-copper-t]

Why Aren’t More Women Talking About the Silver IUD?

The IUD (intrauterine device) is one of the most effective forms of contraception available today. Yet, despite its growing popularity, the silver IUD—a non-hormonal option—remains surprisingly under-discussed. As more women seek alternatives to hormonal birth control, many are unaware that the silver IUD could be an ideal solution. In this blog, we’ll explore the reasons why the silver IUD isn’t a common topic of conversation and discuss why it deserves more attention in today’s contraceptive discourse.

What Is the Silver IUD?

The silver IUD is a small, T-shaped device made from silver and copper. Unlike hormonal IUDs, which release hormones to prevent pregnancy, the silver IUD is a non-hormonal option. It works primarily by interfering with sperm mobility and creating a uterine environment that is inhospitable to fertilization. The silver IUD is a long-term solution, providing protection for up to 5 to 10 years, making it an attractive choice for women seeking reliable and durable contraception without the side effects of hormones.

The Lack of Discussion Around the Silver IUD

So, why aren’t more women talking about the silver IUD? Here are a few reasons:

1. Lack of Awareness

One of the main reasons why the silver IUD isn’t more widely discussed is simply lack of awareness. Many women still aren’t familiar with non-hormonal IUD options. Most people’s understanding of IUDs is limited to the copper IUD or hormonal IUDs like Mirena or Skyla, which are more commonly advertised or talked about in the media. The silver IUD doesn’t have the same visibility, even though it offers distinct advantages for those seeking an effective, hormone-free option. As a result, women may not consider it as part of their birth control options.

2. Misconceptions and Myths

There are still many misconceptions about IUDs in general, and the silver IUD is no exception. Some women fear the insertion process, thinking it’s painful or invasive. Others mistakenly believe that IUDs—especially non-hormonal ones like the silver IUD—can cause long-term health issues, such as infections or infertility. While these concerns are valid, research shows that the risk of complications is low, and many of the issues surrounding IUDs are often linked to misinformation.

Furthermore, the silver IUD is sometimes confused with the copper IUD, which is known to cause heavier menstrual bleeding and more cramping in some women. However, the silver IUD has been reported to result in less severe cramping and a lower risk of heavy bleeding compared to the copper variant. This difference, while significant, isn’t widely discussed, which may lead women to overlook the silver IUD as an option.

3. The Dominance of Hormonal Birth Control Options

In the realm of contraception, hormonal birth control methods, such as the pill, the patch, or hormonal IUDs, dominate the conversation. Hormonal birth control has been a mainstream solution for decades, making it the go-to option for many women. Unfortunately, many of these methods come with side effects such as mood swings, weight gain, or acne. For some women, these side effects are significant enough to affect their overall quality of life.

While non-hormonal options like the silver IUD can provide effective contraception without these hormonal side effects, the hormonal methods are still the most widely prescribed and talked about. The silver IUD’s low profile in discussions may be attributed to the popularity of hormonal birth control, despite the fact that non-hormonal IUDs offer a viable alternative for many women.

4. Insertion and Aftercare Concerns

Another factor that contributes to the lack of conversation around the silver IUD is the insertion process. While the procedure itself is quick (usually about 10 minutes), some women are understandably apprehensive about the experience. Additionally, post-insertion cramping and spotting can occur, which may deter some women from choosing this option.

However, many women find that the discomfort associated with the silver IUD insertion is manageable, and cramping typically subsides after a few days. Plus, the long-term benefits of using a highly effective, hormone-free contraceptive make the temporary discomfort worth it for many women.

5. Medical Professional Bias and Lack of Information

Another contributing factor is that some healthcare providers may not be as familiar with the silver IUD, which can limit its promotion to patients. Many doctors may lean toward prescribing hormonal IUDs or oral contraceptives due to familiarity, availability, or their own biases. As a result, women may not even be presented with the silver IUD as an option.

Why the Silver IUD Deserves More Attention

Despite the barriers to discussion, the silver IUD offers numerous benefits that make it an excellent choice for many women. It’s highly effective, long-lasting, and free from the side effects of hormonal contraception. The silver IUD provides an option for women who may be sensitive to hormones or are seeking a more natural form of contraception. It’s also a great alternative for women who want to avoid the heavier bleeding and cramping sometimes associated with the copper IUD.

[nunuisancenewt]

Something I’ve complained about awhile back, and will complain about again, Is what I called the Nerd Solution,

There is a sort of person who doesn’t like doing advocacy, they think activists and protesters are cringy, they consider Politics a muddy mess that they are above, and they are convinced we can solve all our important problems through inventing our way out of them, without ever addressing policy or changes in consumer behavior

To be clear, If something already exists at non-experimental commercial scale, It isn’t a Nerd Solution, solar panels and wind turbines were once nerd solutions, we already have Solar Panels and Wind turbines, and they haven’t been a panacea despite being cheaper than fossil fuels. There is progress to be made in new technologies in the space sure ( and maybe some specific new designs someones rallying around qualify as Nerd-Solutions themselves) , but simply inventing solar panels and wind turbines wasn’t a complete solution, and we still have to play politics to shrink and hopefully one day eliminate the fossil fuel industry

The appeal of Nerd-Solutions is based on this Idea of Progress As some fundamental force of society, that since the dawn of Homo Sapiens, There has been some sort of steady all-encompassing progress in which the median person got materially better off, was less diseased, the world got more peaceful, and society got more egalitarian and less bigoted ( across all forms of bigotry) , all in unison and as facets of some vague core idea of progress, down stream of technological innovation, and that if we just keep inventing things we’ll get steadily closer to utopia , ( I could speed forever deconstructing this idea, but this gay vegan thinks it self evidently falls flat on its face, and the Steel Man that There was a fundamental positive change in average Human quality of life after the industrial revolution goes without saying and has no modern political implications )

Liberals like this story because they get to gloat about being on the side of history future people will praise, conservatives like this story because it allows them to exaggerate their cultural power in the Good Old Days and use patriotic nostalgia as a rallying cry for societal change, and also to pretend they are doing a chesterson’s fence.

The Nerd-Solution I think about the most are Clean-Meat and new Nuclear Reactor designs ( fusion but also novel kinds of fission reactors) , but Mostly Clean-Meat

I’m skeptical of Clean-Meat, for a-lot of reasons ( we’ll get to them in a second), but part of it is that it is a Nerd-Solution, the people who are loudest in favor of It Hate Vegans, Especially Activists, they consider us cringey and overly emotional for having committed principles , they shit on our lame bland food to promote their alternative, and though they can rationally understand that killing animals for meat is morally wrong, they can’t internalize that animals meaningfully morally matter, and so see Clean-Meat not as an alternative to killing animals for food, but to vegan activism and the Animal Rights movement , As a way to get us to shut up

The thing is There is no reason to believe Clean-Meat is a solution

- The closest equivalent we have, of a identical replacement for a status-symbol consumer commodity, is lab-grown Diamonds, the industry though commercially viable, failed to take any meaningful bite out of the industry for decades ( before weirdly making very rapid progress in the 2010’s? I really wish I could find good sources explaining the why of this change)

- Research from the UK has found no correlation between a rise in plant-based-meat sales and I remember similar pre-covid( shutdown altered things cause people eat more meat at restaurants) data from the US showing plant-based meat and animal meat both rising in consumption, Plant based meat isn’t the same of course, but people who are big proponents of Clean-Meat tend to be also for “ plant meat innovation” ( Even if it means killing hundreds of rats) and do some garbage reasoning that one plant burger sold equals one fewer meat burger sold to justify it.

- People Mostly Eat Meat because it is a status Symbol, Rice and beans and bread and cabbage soup is for poor people, Meat is for Rich People. Men also eat meat as a larger share of their diet then women also for cultural Masculinity, Man The Sadist Hunter reasons, Cultured Meat advocates refuse to Engage with this, They stubbornly insist that if they managed to get Clean-Meat as cheap or cheaper, Indistinguishable from Animal-Meat, and just as convenient to access Everyone will switch, because they take consumers at face value and don’t interrogate societies relationship with meat, because that would be politics, and require advocating to people to change their values, Clean-Meat can’t substitute Animal-Meat because it can’t give people what they value.

- Most Rhino Horn today on the market is fakes made of Wood or Buffalo Horn, There were projects to make “ lab grown” rhino horn, pitched as an environmentalist thing, but they were shot down by actual Rhino Conservationists because it would make it impossible to tell real from fake and to enforce bans on Rhino Horn, we have this problem currently with Ivory, where fresh Ivory is often sold illegally as “ Antique” , If we are optimistic a far future society is Vegan at all, We Do Not want this society to have cultured-meat, as it would make enforcement against fishing hunting and animal farming impossible

- Commercial Animal Agriculture is heavily subsidized, Cattle Ranching and the Dairy industry especially, There is a reason the US has a national Cheese reserve and a Got Milk Campaign, 90% of the money from grazing livestock in the UK is from subsidies It also acts as a subsidy itself on the corn and other crop industries because of its inefficiency, Even if Clean-Meat completely took over commercially politics would still be necessary to stop paying farmers to torture and kill animals

- the commercial market will never be able to produce substitutes for all the species people eat, Animal Right Advocates already are tarred and feathered as racists for advocating against Non White cultural practices , Imagine how much worse “stronger” this accusation would be if they could be munching on lab grown chicken fingers and thanksgiving turkey roasts, while advocating against eating dog/cat/monkey/seal/whale/ etc

Any way, what I was getting at is I can’t be arsed to complain about Rond De Santis’s Clean-Meat ban, Clean-Meat isn’t a panacea and so it getting shot down isn’t a big deal, also If Clean-Meat is ever commercially successful enough to he an existential threat to the Animal-Meat industry the ban will be overturned, it won’t last forever, advocacy will still he needed, we will keep having to play politics, even if it switches to advocating for lab-grown-meat one day instead of veganism, it’s not a substantial difference

@random-thought-depository ( just cause I talked about this before and I know you don’t follow me)

[mariacallous]

In 1967, the French sociologist Henri Mendras published La Fin des paysans. Translated as The Vanishing Peasant, the book’s argument was as iconoclastic as it was irrefutable. Marshaling more than a decade of meticulous fieldwork and data collection, Mendras concluded that France’s “traditional civilization,” exemplified by the peasant, was dying out. The economic benefits of the postwar Marshall Plan and Common Market, combined with the many scientific and technological advances ranging from mechanization to fertilization, had transformed not just the nature of agriculture, but the rural civilization on which it was founded. France was witnessing, Mendras declared, the “final battle of industrial society against the last patch of traditional society.”

This winter of rural discontent in France reminds us that the final battle announced by Mendras is still being waged more than 50 years later. Last month, French farmers launched a series of protests across the country, ranging from blocking highways with their tractors to dumping rotting vegetables (or worse) in city squares or outside supermarkets. Toward the end of January, these protests threatened to climax with tractors, rolling toward Paris from several directions, threatening to form what some farmers called a “siege of Paris.”

After days of feverish speculation in the media about the coming stand-off between farming tractors and police armored cars—“Could Paris be starved?” asked more than one newspaper��the siege did not take place. President Emmanuel Macron’s recently formed government, led by the 30-something Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, accepted nearly all the principal demands of the unions leading the protests. Not only did the government, despite its previous commitment to budgetary restraint, promise an additional 400 million euros to boost the flailing income of cereal and livestock farmers, but it also shelved plans to phase out the tax break on diesel fuel, as well as its plans to ban the use of certain pesticides.

No less important, while Attal was meeting with farmers alongside their tractors, Macron took time from meeting with his peers in Brussels to vow that France would refuse to sign a free trade agreement between the EU and the South American trading bloc Mercosur, whose cheaper produce would undercut French farmers. Not surprisingly, Arnaud Rousseau, the head of the FNSEA, the largest farmers union, declared that he was satisfied by these gestures. The grievances of the members, he announced, “had been heard.”

Of course, farmers in several other European countries have also been heard by their governments on many of the same issues that spurred French farmers to threaten a siege of the nation’s capital. Whether expressed in Portuguese or Polish, Dutch or Deutsch, the reasons for this continent-wide mobilization often are the same. From the threat of cuts to agricultural subsidies from their governments to the threat of cheaper produce imported from non-EU countries like those represented by Mercosur, European farmers find that as their numbers and output dwindle so too does the prospect of a viable future.

Yet there is something exceptional to farmer protests in France—a quality that sets them apart, if only in cultural and historical terms, from the protests that have erupted elsewhere on the continent. To this point, Attal last week couched his government’s unconditional surrender in terms that were peculiar to France. Agriculture, he declared, was a fundamental element to the “French identity,” one that required a “French agricultural exception.” This new exception is “not a budgetary matter,” Attal insisted, but instead based on “pride and identity.” In fact, as the response to the protest suggests, the claim of “French exceptionalism” extends as far as the country’s extreme right and its response to the protests.

The place of la terre—the soil or earth—has long been central to the French identity. It is not an accident that the third and final volume of Pierre Nora’s landmark work of history Les Lieux de mémoire (“Sites of Memory”), which is devoted to traditions, begins with an entry on la terre. The author, geographer Armand Frémont, argues that the late arrival of industrialization in France has meant that the genealogical trees of French families “are rooted in soil of the countryside” more commonly than elsewhere in Europe.

So, too, for the very notion of “peasant.” Though Mendras concluded that the paysan had been replaced by the agriculteur and that France’s “thousand-year-old peasant civilization” was dying out, many French farmers never surrendered the word, much less the death sentence announced by Mendras. One prominent member of the (tellingly labeled) Confédération Paysanne, Christian Boisgontier, recalled that when he first read Le Fin des paysans as a young man, he gladly described himself as an agriculteur. But no longer. To identify as a peasant, he observes, is to identify with “a tradition that respects the soil, the grains, and the animals.”

However, it is also to identify with a tradition that, if not yet dead, is on life support. Agribusiness is one of France’s biggest businesses, accounting for nearly two-thirds of agricultural production. The approximately 1 million men and women indirectly or directly employed by these huge firms do not plow fields or raise cattle, nor do they identify as peasants, much less lead lives that resemble the fading images of sowers and harvesters of the 19th-century painter Jean-François Millet.

Rather, it is the 400,000 or so small farmers, representing about 1.5 percent of the nation’s workforce, who confront an existential crisis. They have been whipsawed between the compounding and, to their eyes, often punitive regulatory demands from Brussels and the government’s plans for a green transition. At the same time, they fear that the quality of their products is undermined by the intensifying land consolidations by the agribusiness sector and widening market control of large distribution chains. A recent poll reveals the French public sympathizes with the farmers on both counts, with nearly 40 percent blaming EU regulations and 32 percent the large supermarket chains like the aptly named Géant Casino and Hyper U.

Moreover, as the influential sociologist (and former student of Mendras) François Purseigle notes, the population of farmers has been shrinking at an unprecedented rate in France. From 500,000 farmers 10 years ago, there are fewer than 400,000 today. Even more worrying, Purseigle argues, is that another 200,000 farmers will have reached the age of retirement by 2030. Most of them will not be replaced. The consequences are vast: “The world of farming today has nothing at all in common with that of yesterday, and this world will be no less different come tomorrow. A revolution that defies description is unfolding.”

While the relationship between the soil and those who work it may be revolutionary, the idea of the soil has also long proved fertile ground for French reactionaries. Since the late 19th century, individuals and ideologies on France’s right and far-right have staked claims to la terre as their lieu de mémoire. This claim extends from the nationalist (and antisemitic) novelist Maurice Barrès who believed “la terre et les morts” (the soil and the dead) was the foundation of the French identity, through the fascist (and antisemitic) Henri Dogères and his interwar agrarian movement, the Green Shirts, to the authoritarian Philippe Pétain, the head of the collaborationist (and antisemitic) Vichy regime, who declared that “la terre ne ment pas,” or “the earth tells no lies.” (A line coined, ironically, by the Paris-born and Jewish writer Emmanuel Berl.)

Enter stage right, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. As rural unrest neared critical mass last month, the party founded half a century ago by the populist (and antisemitic) Jean-Marie Le Pen pulled on its collective rubber boots and descended on farms across the country. Jordan Bardella, who will head the party’s list for the upcoming European elections, seemed drawn to the farming life—as well as the cameras recording his rural rambles. In an open letter to the farmers, Bardella praised them as the representatives of a country which “wants to live in dignity on and from its soil and proudly pass on the fruits of their labor to their children.”

For Bardella and Le Pen, the rural protests are a gift in the lead-up to the elections. Their party portrays both the bureaucrats in Brussels and the politicians in Paris as the enemy. And “enemy” is not too strong a word. On Jan. 28, as the tractors approached Paris, the vice president of the National Rally deputies in the National Assembly, Sébastien Chenu, declared that “they” sought to “efface our farmers and rurality itself because a life rooted in the soil does not correspond to their model of society.”

Less than four months remain before French choose their country’s representatives in Brussels. Given that the European elections are most often the occasion for voters to express discontent, it is time for the French left to make the case that France’s future lays in respecting not just the soil, but the men and women who work it. As Armand Frémont would remind them, “the values of the soil in France are the oldest but also the freshest as long as there are still peasants to till it.”

[sizablelad]

i used to be dogmatically opposed to a two-state solution primarily because i perceived it through a (probably north american liberal democracy) inspired fear of nationalism=bad, therefore a two-state solution, which inherently endorses BOTH israeli and palestinian nationalism means more nationalism in the world, so according to a utilitarian framework, two-state=bad.

but something i've learned a lot during this era of the conflict by listening to a lot of grassroots peace activists/movements is to kind of abandon that framework because it's simply not that simple. i feel like the root of a lot of the political disagreements (actual political disagreements, not "hummus is israeli, no hummus is arab" dumbass discourse) i have at this point is with people who view political polities, whether it be people or governments themselves, as immutable, as fixed. a two-state solution doesn't need to be a final goal (though maybe it is, i'm not a policy expert and this post is more about recognizing a flaw in my own political worldview), but it is a viable solution (like a GODDAMN CEASEFIRE) that could potentially address security concerns and extreme national sentiments that exist and just can't be ignored. like. they are there. there's no point in pretending that they don't, that far-right israeli nationalists aren't going to say BUT HAMAS every time you critique the israeli government response, that hamas isn't powerful because of decades of subjugation and trauma. solutions that have been discredited as non-viable in some hypothetical future because they aren't "the perfect solution" or whatever can and SHOULD be a method of triage in the current absolutely devastating human rights abuses that are occurring.

the issue though, once the triage has been completed and there's room for more nuanced political discussion, is when we as a people decide our work is done, look away, and allow propaganda from ruling powers to convince us that "actually...... no more change is necessary, the system is okay as it is" and allow what is supposed to be a temporary framework for peace and the alleviation of human suffering become the norm instead of constantly working to better the system. the people that allow this are those that benefit from the current system, and then as the distance widens between those that benefit and those that don't it allows for extremists to take advantage of polarization, sticking their feet in the door and stoking extremist sentiments. i don't know the history as well as many and i'm not a political commentator so take this with a grain of salt, but this appears to be what happened with the oslo accords. they have their flaws (BOY do they have their flaws), but it was a start at triaging the conflict in a less extreme time. but the negotiations were allowed to stagnate with no followup to address the structural and nationalist concerns that were still VERY REAL. and look how that worked out.

so on another note, THIS is what activists from that region mean when they say you're exporting politics from another region that is just different than yours, THIS is what they mean when people say the conflict is complicated. layering USAmerican racial tensions over a region that literally isn't the US, doesn't have US socio-political history, is just inaccurate and is gonna lead to misinformation when you try to force a conflict that is fundamentally not North American into a North American narrative. it's honestly kind of imperialist in it of itself. you're just being naive at that point and it's going to lead to dangerous conclusions.

this epiphany was inspired by palestinian activist Khalil Sayegh's episode on Babel: Translating the Middle East. his interview is really insightful and important, so go listen to it (it's very accessible). and, as always, extremism=/=radicalism, there are always 50 caveats that i'm not mentioning so don't think you Know Me based on this one random essay, peace and coexistence should be our ultimate goal, and secondary to everything is prioritizing the sanctity of human life. none of us are free until all of us are free.

[marlasomething]

(my) Mag a Week: Natural Destruction

Before anything: next week there won’t me another “chapter” of these, I am going on holiday.

Hello there!

I am participating in the "a mag a day" idea which is BRILLIANT and I decided to do "statement a week", rolling dice with the characters and fears that were ftw that week in the episodes I have listened.

This week I am a bit late, sorry, life. For today I rolled Archivist!Martin Blackwood and The Extinction (Eps. 147-155).

As usual, please do forgive my quick tipper and non-native speaker mistakes, Marla

Allons-y!

CW: mentions of murder, self-harm, swearing, toxic family  dynamics

Also on AO3!

 Statement of Mary Cage, regarding the re-appearance of her twin children, almost a decade after they disappeared in the first place.

 Audio recording by Basira Hussain; The Archivist.

 Statement begins.

  I never wanted children; all I ever wanted was a legacy and children were the easiest way of getting one. If you ask me, the best option is to have three kids, so at least one will be worth saving , even if it just because he or she wants to prove to be less of a disappointment than the other siblings.

I know it sounds harsh, but it is what it is. One of my children needed to outlive me in a manner in which I would never be completely forgotten; it is not an affair to let completely to luck and randomness.

Therefore, that is exactly what I did: I had three children, my beautiful precious Rosalind and her older brothers, Charles and Jack. I recall thinking for a very long time I got lucky, since I had two thirds of the work done at once…now, I am not so sure, perhaps I will still have one viable child if they hadn’t been that close…Maybe they wouldn’t have disappeared at all.

  It wasn’t long before I knew Charles and Jack wouldn’t make it in this world in any significate way. It wasn’t that they were bad, or stupid, or especially clumsy; they just weren’t enough of anything. It was so, that I started to feel laziness towards them, as if they weren’t worth my time. And, then, Rosalind was born and, even though she was the blandest baby I have ever seen, she brightened up my life. After all, her emptiness meant that she had all the potential to be moulded into anything. Not only that but, as she grew older, she proved to have absolutely no mind of her own, yet a brain so powerful she was quickly to understand everything, memorise almost all data and even be sensitive with people in a manner not even mental health professionals can be.

In other words: I have my child and, also, two other kids who also happened to share my blood.

Since the only complain I used to have about Rosalind was how fragile her health was in summer (and only summer, we still don’t know the reason behind this), this was the part of the year where most annoying I found those other two needed mouths.

I wanted them so badly not to be there, to not keep occupying space and oxygen and even part of my capacity of loving …but I couldn’t, at least, not directly.

Perhaps leaving the door open before taking Rosalind to the hospital wasn’t that incidental, maybe, only contacting the authorities, no PI mixed on trying to get them back…maybe I was glad they were gone.

Maybe, now, like this, I could work more and better in the perfect offspring I had always deserved.

  The next nine to ten years were uneventful. Rosalind was growing into the very exact person I wanted her to be, my husband was just a presence that did his part (and I make no illusions he thought any other way about me) and things were…as they were supposed to. I made a world for myself and, yes, that can become rather tedious from time to time, but the overall is safe, nice. A perfect design in which the faults of our reality mattered no more.

With, of course, the extra-safety of knowing that, no matter what, everything I was would be carry on thanks to my wonderful only daughter.

Then, her siblings re-appeared.

  If there was any doubt it was the teenage version of the boys that had gone missing almost a decade ago, it was corroborated by the DNA test my husband and I almost violently insisted to be done to them the moment it was legally allowed to do so.

At first, they were silent, and we were afraid they had become some simpletons with more animal than human instincts, but we were wrong: they were just shy, scared of being pushed into the streets…just as I should have done.

Their story was quite simple, actually: the twins had gone lost in the woods, where they had found a couple determined to live without the poison that is Western Civilization (their words, not mine), the pair had adopted them, turned out to be far more literate than most teachers we could have found for the pair and eventually died. So they had chosen to come out, arguing that “even we like what we were taught, we want to believe there can still be hope for our species”. We couldn’t do nothing and, after all, all they did was to eat more expensive (and healthier, according to them) than before and speak certain nonsense to whomever was there to listen.

However, one day, their audience was different than the usual.

One day, the audience was Rosalind.

I just wished she had cut her ears off beforehand.

  I know that, deep down, the twins meant nothing with what they said. They did believe their charged rhetoric, but that was it: there were no brainwashing shady second intentions to their speech.

Still, they should have realised that Rosalind wasn’t the ideal person to listen to a fiery discourse without taking out the most dramatic conclusions and how to act upon them.

The entire concept of the human species destroying a place that is not own by us more than a flower or the oceans infuriated her up to the point that she actively refused to take any means of transportation other than one of her three bikes or her very own feet.

This only affected her, but then she started to interfere with her father and I, trying to throw away or donate those clothes that we had tailor-made for one concrete event, changing our daily menus and even meal times, calling to cancel all our television subscriptions…I don’t know how she did it so efficiently in so little time, but before we could even began to react, we were in the most Spartan house I could even begin to conceive in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, the monster of teenagers my oldest children had become just kept a perpetual smug face, as if they were proud of their influence in their baby sister. They weren’t so high and mighty when Rosalind decided ( found out , according to her) that she wasn’t doing enough.

And so she went to her next phase.

  I recalled the disgust I felt when I saw my beautiful perfect Rosalind staring at a mirror, at her beauty untarnished and simply started to scratch her face. First almost gently, then with such fervour pieces of skin were falling to the floor, right next to a mirror.

I gasped and tried to stop her without being harmed in the way (she was much stronger than she looked and my bones are fragile), to what she only reacted by lowering her arms and calming me, saying that she had had enough, that it was just “not fair” that someone like her got so much when other people were being condemned just for the factions they got at birth.

I immediately sent her to her room and called her father and siblings to the living room. It would be shameful, but I was completely willing to put her in an asylum if that could help. Yes, sorry, that word is not politically correct but, if you see your life project mutilating herself out of some nonsense her estranged brothers muttered without even being firm believers (they are already back to the sports team and playing X-Box every other day, for fuck’s shake!)….you wouldn’t care either about what should be said.

However, what was so clear to me wasn’t to my useless husband and even more dead loss children. They began to say I was being “too much myself” (whatever that meant) and we spent hours arguing. By the time I had managed to convince them, we went upstairs…

…to find the lifeless body of Rosalind, who had been mutilating herself until she had died. Apparently, of blood loss.

With some…I hope it was just blood, she had written in the floor “that is what Humanity deserves”.

  At first, I thought it was bit too extreme. I could understand the pressure getting to her, her weak mind falling for certain moralities and even the self-harm. After all, it isn’t as if I hadn’t been her age…the message, though? That was beyond worrying, my child hadn’t been that crazy, been that wrongly made. She was a vision, not a nightmare; she shouldn’t have believed that.

So, as I mourned the empty casket we buried (there was a break in the funerary the night before and the bastards that did it took a few corpses apart from every single item of value), I started to wonder how she could have come to that conclusion, to the almost stated fact that Humanity deserved ugliness and annihilation…then, I understood it.

It wasn’t my daughter who had been at fault, not even my now also deceased stupidly insidious twins; it had been this rotten planet of ours. This place is ungrateful to us, the species who managed to turn it from a jungle filled with irrational parasites to the garden of refinement and progress it is today.

I will avenge my daughter and, with her, also myself. I am making my personal mission to scorch this world to the ground; I am even making sure no remains of those I might end in my path can be used by the Earth as its personal fertiliser.

Please, if I am writing to you it is because you are people of thought and intellect and I wish nothing but to spread my word to those who could understand it.

Help me consume this planet.

   Statement ends.

   The more time I spend as The Archivist, the most certain I am this whole classification of fears is pure bullshit that we had turned real after inventing it. Yes, I know that our new director that doesn’t have at all Elias’ eyes and speaks just like the bastard Jon went to jail for rightfully murdering him is giving me this statements about The Extinction as this new threat that is rising from the shadows but, in all honesty? If it is real, it is just re-contextualizing other elements that people following these alleged Fears.

 About the statement itself, I could look into it, even look into it properly; but I would rather go have a drink with my equally doomed mates, taking advantage of our new director curiously connecting so quickly with Lukas…

 End recording.

[jess-the-vampire]

personally, i'm on the theory that belos is phillip's descendant, not phillip himself

and that's still a very viable option, but i think when it comes to belos himself there's reasons as to why people assume he has to be phillp rather then an descendent.

For one, Belos came outta complete nowhere, there's no explanation for him and where he came from. Phillip apparently just vanished without a trace so the implication of belos begin some grandkid of his means not only did Philip have kids, but belos actually HAS an origin of some kind and there’s no reason people shouldn't know about it for any reason.

So that idea kinda ruins the whole "Belos just popped outta nowhere" thing they established because now he has a backstory and place he came from. And it’s a little harder to believe Philip had kids, and the family lived on for generations and yet somehow no one knew about this or knew belos was in said family. (Not even Gwen’s great grandma who knew him personally???)

It's much easier to accept the idea "Phillip went missing and came back with a new identity years later" since that fits better with belos's origin.

Then there's also the whole "Magic thing".

Since Phillip was the first human here, it's fair to assume anyone he had kids with was well, not human, but a witch. Therefore belos at this point should be biologically....a witch, having a magic sack and everything.

It's been enough decades, he'd be more witch then human from Phillip, he shouldn't even have an accent at this point as well for the record considering non of the other witches do.

So then...in that case....why does belos not do magic like other witches? It's well pointed out, but belos never does the whole "Circle" thing regular witches do, next to his mechanical staff he kinda just....moves around and things happen. He doesn't operate by witch rules.

If belos is not human, then like...what's the point of this? He could just do magic like a witch and they could make a  twist out of this whole decedent thing and it'd be more shocking because belos is a witch so you wouldn’t think he had relation to humans.

So this twist would make LESS sense because of what they already did with belos’s magic.

It’s again, easier to accept belos does magic this way because he’s not a witch biologically and found his own method, because the other option is that he’s just choosing not to for some reason? Which only makes him more suspicious?

The idea isn't out of the realm of plausibility, but you have to currently jump through a few hoops to explain some of these details to have it work.

Even if belos is like....100+ years old, him still being Phillip currently fits a whole lot cleaner for now.

[woman-loving]

I don’t identity as a “bi lesbian,” but I feel there is room for a woman to identify as both bisexual and gay/lesbian, and I don’t agree with the arguments I’ve seen against “bi lesbian” identity.

One thing that annoys me about detractors of the identity is the occasional claim that it is basically an internet phenomenon that arose within the last five years or so. Actually, women have been claiming both bisexual and lesbian identities for decades. There have constantly been debates about how bi women fit within lesbianism, lesbian identity, and lesbian community since the gay/lesbian movements have been active. This isn’t something that has ever been universally agreed upon, and there never will be universal agreement on it.

Just for reference and historical interest, I’ve compiled a few selections from articles and books, mostly from the 80s and 90s, that are by or about lesbian-identified (or gay-identified) bisexual woman, or that at least mention them. Inclusion doesn’t indicate my approval of the author’s perspective or argument; this is to provide a bit of history on the discourse.

What is a Lesbian? To me, a lesbian is a woman-oriented woman; bisexuals can be lesbians. A lesbian does not have to be exclusively woman oriented, she does not have to prove herself in bed, she does not have to hate men, she does not have to be sexually active at all times, she does not have to be a radical feminist. She does not have to like bars, like gay culture, or like being gay. When lesbians degrade other lesbians for not going to bars, not coming out, being bisexual or not sexually active, and so on, we oppress each other.

--Trish Miller, "Bisexuality," Lavender Woman, Vol 2 Issue 5, August 1973.

*

The definition of lesbian that I suggest, one that conforms to the two methodological considerations above, is the following:

5. Lesbian is a woman who has sexual and erotic-emotional ties primarily with women or who sees herself as centrally involved with a community of self-identified lesbians whose sexual and erotic-emotional ties are primarily with women; and who is herself a self-identifed lesbian. 

My definition is a sociopolitical one; that is, it attempts to include in the term lesbian the contemporary sense of lesbianism as connected with a subcultural community, many members of which are opposed to defining themselves as dependent on or subordinate to men. It defines both bisexual and celibate women as lesbians as long as they identify themselves as such and have their primary emotional identification with a community of self-defined lesbians. Furthermore, for reasons I will outline shortly, there was no lesbian community in which to ground a sense of self before the twentieth century, a fact which distinguishes the male homosexual community from the lesbian community. Finally, it is arguable that not until this particular stage in the second wave of the women’s movement and in the lesbian-feminist movement has it been politically feasible to include self-defined lesbian bisexual women into the lesbian community.

Many lesbian feminists may not agree with this inclusion. But it may be argued that to exclude lesbian bisexuals from the community on the grounds that “they give energy to men” is overly defensive at this point. After all, a strong women’s community does not have to operate on a scarcity theory of nurturant energy! On feminist principles the criterion for membership in the community should be a woman’s commitment to giving positive erotic-emotional energy to women. Whether women who give such energy to women can also give energy to individual men (friends, fathers, sons, lovers) is not the community’s concern.

--Ann Ferguson, “Patriarchy, Sexual Identity, and the Sexual Revolution,” Signs, Autumn 1981.

*

Individuals who came together a month ago to discuss bisexuality and its relationship to radical feminism decided recently to begin a serious, regular study group on human sexuality and its social/political/psychological manifestations in our culture.

There are eight of us in the group. For all, understanding bisexuality, both in our own lives and and in our society, is a primary goal. To this end, we decided on a format of readings and discussion, with a facilitator for each meeting, that would bring us through the range of sexual options available in the United States today, from male-identified heterosexuality to lesbianism, to a final informed examination of bisexuality in the context of all that we had learned. Throughout our exploration, feminism will provide both a point of departure, and a point of return.

We started by trying to define some terms, specifically "feminism," "gay-identified bisexual," and "bisexual". Alot of us were amazed to see how many different interpretations each term, especially "gay-identified," could have. Is someone "gay-identified" because they devote a majority of their time, energy and emotion to the gay community? Or does an individual's radical critique of heterosexuality make them "gay-identified"? And does "gay-identified" also imply "women-identified"? Some people felt that one could be gay-identified, and still not be woman-identified. And exactly how many Meg Christian concerts make you "lesbian-identified"?

We didn't reach any conclusions, but had fun realizing that being bisexuals, we are dealing with a whole realm of experiences that can be classified in any number of different ways; and that the variety of possible bisexual lifestyles is as varied as the women who are in the Network.

--Barb H, “Study Group,” BBWN, Vol. 2 No. 4, July-Aug 1984

*

I recognize that homophobia is at the root of biphobia. I came to lesbianism long before my sexuality was clear to me. I lived an open lesbian lifestyle for four years. I cannot deny the importance of this experience, nor do I want to. For me lesbian identity is more than, and/or in addition to sexuality; it is a political awareness which bisexuality doesn't altar or detract from. 10 years ago when I left my husband and full-time role of motherhood, it didn't make me less conscious of what being a mother means. In fact, it gave me a deeper understanding. I am still a mother. That experience cannot be taken away from me. In much the same way, my lesbian awareness isn't lost now that I claim my bisexuality. When I realized my woman-loving-woman feelings, and came out as a lesbian, I had no heterosexual privilege; yet there were important males in my life, including a son. I am bisexual because it's real for me, not in order to acquire or flaunt the privilege that is inherent in being with men. My political consciousness is lesbian but my lifestyle is bisexual. If I keep myself quiet for another's sense of pride and liberation, it is at the cost of my own which isn't healthy--emotionally, politically or medically. Not only is it unhealthy, it's ineffective.

Since I have come out I have triggered many lesbians to blurt in whispered confidence--"I have a man in the closet. You're brave to be so open. What am I going to do?" These are not easy times. AIDS has given biphobia free reign in the lesbian community (and admittedly with much less destructive effect than how AIDS is fueling homophobia in society at large), it is all right to trash bisexuals, not to trust us for fear of AIDS. Bisexuals are untouchable to some lesbians.

We have to deal with oppression in a constructive way or we will be factionalized forever. Time is running out. We have to see the whole and the part we play in it. Forming family communities with people who share your sexual identity is important, but trashing is nonproductive. The sexual choices we make are equally valid for our individual experiences. AIDS is not a gay disease; it is a human tragedy, a plague that doesn't recognize boundaries. I urge bisexuals to take a political stand, and to become a visible, viable energy force. It is important and timely to open this dialogue in each of our communities. Nobody belongs in the closet. The only way to get a sense of "our" community is for us to begin to speak out and identify ourselves. When we verify the connections and the networks of our oppression, we build a unity that avoids the, "I'm more oppressed than you" syndrome

--Lani Kaahumanu, “Bisexuality & Discrimination,” BBWN Vol. 3, No. 6, Dec 1985-Jan 1986; Reprinted from the 1985 Gay Pride March magazine, San Francisco

*

What makes the Third Annual Northeast Conference on Bisexuality what it is? The breakfasts and dinners--the entertainment--the excitement of meeting others who feel like family. My first event of the conference was stumbling onto a cocktail party just around the corner from the Registration Desk, which turned out to be part of the Woman's History Week! A bit embarrassing after greeting many people with wine glasses in hand, asking them how they heard about the bisexuality conference!

I'll skip now to describe my experiences at the lesbian-identified affinity group and the two workshops I attended. Why do women who identify as lesbians go to a bisexuality conference? There were about 10 of us in the room, each with a different answer. Most of our relationships at the present time were with women; after that the similarity ended. One woman had affairs with men when not seriously involved with women. Another, in a non-monogamous long-term lesbian relationship, had recently begun a sexual involvement with a man. one woman, now involved with a bisexual woman, was here to discuss her feelings about the situation. Some of us had led exclusively lesbian lives for a number of years and were wondering if we'd closed off important parts of ourselves. Whether or not we would act on our sexual attractions for men, acknowledging them were important to us.

Our personal herstories contributed to our diverse opinions. For some, coming out was relaxed and easy and relationships with women refreshingly egalitarian. Others found sexual awakening and coming out difficult, and lesbian relationships fraught with many of the same difficulties as straight ones. We also discussed reasons lesbians don't accept bisexual women, such as fear that she'd leave for a man or desire to preserved woman-only space. We questioned the reality of "heterosexual privilege," wondering whether any women could really have it. We discussed the sorrows in our lives, such as family histories of alcoholism, incest or physical abuse, and the joys of our relationships, our work and our lives.

--Stacie, “Lesbian-identified Affinity Group Workshops: Lesbian Sexuality & Politics of Sexuality,” BBWN, Vol. 4, No. 2, April-May 1986

*

[Robyn Ochs]: What is your current sexual identity?

[Betty Aubut]: I call myself a "bisexual lesbian." I will always politically identify as bisexual, which to me means opposing restrictive categories. Some days I feel real separatist, and other days I feel that I want to be involved with men. Being bisexual to me means that I see men and women whom I'm attracted to. A man would have to be very special for me to want to get involved with him but I will fight for bisexual rights whether or not I'm sleeping with men. I see the bisexual community and movement as a very important bridge between gays, lesbian and straights. As long as gays and lesbians are considered completely 'other' from the mainstream, we'll never have any power. I consider myself gay. I think bisexuals are gay and gay liberation is our liberation. I don't consider myself 100% straight and 100% gay; I am 100% gay. That doesn't mean I won't sleep with a man every now and then--some lesbians do that. I never used to identify as lesbian out of respect for women who made the lifelong choice never to sleep with men, but then I realized that was a lot of bullshit. Calling yourself lesbian does not necessarily mean you have made that lifelong decision. Now I mostly identify as a lesbian--so I call myself a bisexual lesbian. I don't sleep with men right now, but I have male friends whom I spend time with and cuddle with. I've even become socially involved with some of the men from the men's network. I'm proud of where I am now because it's been so hard for me. People who have known me for a long time can't believe the change.

--Robyn Ochs, “Bi of the Month: Betty Aubut,” Bi Women Vol. 5, No. 2, April-May, 1987

*

Sharon Sumpter is a bisexual lesbian activist and psychotherapist who works with women survivors of abuse, institutionalization and sexual oppression. Her book-in-progress, In Pieces, is dedicated to opening the closet doors for former "mental patients." "I went into my work to undo the criminal things that were done to me and that I saw done to other women." She thanks Deena Metzger and Asherah for this, her first published work.

--Contributors' Notes, Sinister Wisdom, Issue 36, Winter 1988/89

*

Representatives of lesbian-feminist separatism may feel singled out as special targets of our anger and distress. To the extent that this is true, the seeds of anger lie in lesbian separatism as a politic: In this reading of feminism, specific sex acts take on politicized meaning. These are said to have consequences for the consciousness of the person performing them. Lesbian feminism is arguably the most proscriptive gay or lesbian politic, generating in its adherents the greatest tendency to judge others' (especially sexual) behavior. Gay men, for example, seem more likely to cite personal antipathy or simple stereotypes about bisexuals as a source of their chagrin. A great many bisexual women, particularly those who are feminist and lesbian-identified, have felt both personally and politically rejected and judged by the separatist sisters. Even those with no such experience may feel wary having heard of other bisexual women's stories. No one like to feel attacked, even politically.

----Carol A. Queen, "Strangers at Home: Bisexuals in the queer movement," Out/Look, Vol. 4, Issue 4 (16), Spring 1992

*

Closer to Home successfully deals with these and other problems of self-identification. As most of the writers are "lesbian-identified bisexuals" (one of several labels used for the sake of convenience), the definition of lesbianism is also reevaluated. Is a lesbian a woman who relates emotionally and erotically with women or a woman who does not relate emotionally and erotically with men? Must a woman fit both criteria to be considered a lesbian?

The "Principles and Practice" section expands these main course theories of identity with side dishes of memories and personal feelings--feelings of not being queer enough; of breaking all the rules, even the gay rules; of being dissatisfied with the waste of energy from political infighting. It's odd for lesbian-identified bi's to find themselves viewed as politically incorrect. It's maddening to have one's past feminist work invalidated by the inclusion of a man (or men) in one's life. It's frustrating to find oneself faced with a choice of being honest or potentially losing support of women's groups. It's confusing to work for the freedom to come out of one closet only to be asked to stay in another. As Rebecca Shuster write:

"If we choose a lesbian identity, we are subject to systematic oppression and internalize that oppression in a package that includes marginality; invisibility; isolation...; and countercultural rules about how to relate to women and men. If we choose a bisexual identity, we are subject to systematic oppression and internalize that oppression in a package deal that include a feeling of not belonging or having a home; defensiveness; isolation...; and countercultural rules about how to relate to women and men. Precisely because bisexuality represents freedom of choice, society ensures that the identity comes with its own package of mistreatment and constraints."

----Beth Herrick, "Bisexual Women Pushing the Limits," Sojourner, Vol. 18, Issue 10, June 1993

*

The first step is to move toward building alliances within our bisexual communities. Many communities are united by a commonality of the oppression. This is not so in our community, partly because of the different ways people identify as bisexual: gay-identified, queer-identified, lesbian-identified, or heterosexual-identified. Some people are bisexual in an affectional manner only; some are bisexual both affectionally and sexually; and some are bisexual only sexually. Since there are so many ways to express our bisexuality, the first step toward alliance-building is to work internally to accept all members of our own community. It is imperative that we build alliances across our own differences; otherwise, alliance-building will fail. Acceptance of the diversity of bisexual labels within our community will allow us to pursue alliance-building with decisive strength in the heterosexual community and what many of us consider our own lesbian/gay community.[3]

--Brenda Blasingame, "Power and Privilege Beyond the Invisible Fence, in  Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions, 1995

*

Personally, I am unable to separate out the various ways that I am oppressed (as a woman, as an African American, as a bisexual lesbian, as an impoverished single mother) and say that one oppression is worse than the other, or that I desire one form of liberation more than another. I do not want to experience threats to my life, my child custody, or my job security because of racism or homophobia. I don't want to be oppressed for any reason!!!

--Dajenya, "Which Part of Me Deserves to Be Free?," in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, & Visions, ed. Naomi Tucker, 1995

*

A good deal of criticism has been written about heterosexuals who are surprised when they find out the true sexual orientation of someone who they didn't think "looked gay." These criticism assert what is of course true--that there is no such thing as a gay or lesbian "look," since of course, everyone who is gay, lesbian or bisexual, looks that way.

Unfortunately, many of my experiences as a lesbian-identified bisexual woman have said to me that having an appearance or demeanor that diverges from the expected means I will not be accepted as truly belonging in the lesbian community. Despite my attendance at gay pride parade, dollars spent at gay resorts and in support of gay causes, and numerous attempts to participate in gay and/or lesbian groups and volunteer events, I have often felt unaccepted by this community.

--Amy Wyeth, "Don't Assume Anything," Bi Women Vol. 13, No. 4, Aug/Sept 1995

*

Joan Tollifson relays her struggle to make sense of her life and her spiritual awakening in Bare-Bones Meditation. Born with only one hand, she grew up feeling different, found identity and purpose as a bisexual lesbian and a disability rights activist, but struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. She first embraced Zen Buddhism then a very bare-bones form of spirituality that has no form. This exuberant and amazing testament is for the many people who don't fit into the conventional molds of existing religious traditions.

--"And on Publisher's Row," complied by Jenn Tust, Feminist Bookstore News, Vol. 19, Issue 4, Nov-Dec 1996

[narraboths]

How do you think they will end this season? And what ending would you be happy with?

My predictions are either:

She ends up depowered (ew)

She goes to the future (ew)

She lives on Argo, (is that even a thing anymore but also ew)

I don’t think she’ll die, And these predictions are just based off the interviews and also the explanations of her not being around to help, although they never usually feel the need to explain that with regards to the other superhero’s. I think my ideal ending would her just being shown to go off and fight a crime, as in showing she’s still a superhero and carrying on.

i really don’t think most of these are viable options tbh; i definitely think that Kara’s death had to be the thing that Melissa Benoist expressly requested not to happen and that the writers assured her of not even being on the table.

reasonably thinking, i doubt she’d be depowered (it might have been a passable option for 50-yo Smallville!Clark after three decades of heroing, but for Kara, who has been at this for half a decade max? it would be a very ugly end) and i doubt she’d go to Argo because it has been such a non-entity in her life, even (and especially) with Crisis. the future is, unfortunately, an option, not because it makes so much story sense but because i absolutely don’t put it past them to pull ugly shit like that last minute lol, though given the overall arc of the series, i very much hope it’s not their chosen ending.

ideal thing they could very easily pull & i’d be very happy with: just showing everyone striving to do their best, being at peace/finding their strengths, living a happy life; something that showcases Kara’s found family and her importance to National City and Earth in general. the ending scene being everyone huddled together for game night at Kara’s place just laughing and having fun until an alert sounds and they all suit up and shoot out into the sky, hovering over the city with the setting sun on the horizon & then fade to black with the S symbol and a To be continued card coming up. or perhaps just Kara flying over the city, basking in the sun, listening to all the clamor below; a glimpse at the Supergirl statue; a sudden distress call – and then Kara is dropping down at her baby niece’s birthday party and we get a real picture of Stronger Together.

(PS. also like ideal ideal thing: Kara kisses Lena on the lips and calls her ‘love’, but.)

(PS. 2. with how detached SM&LL has been of the universe, and how little the likelihood is for any huge crossover to happen, i don’t think “Gotta Explain Things For Future Appearances” would be high up on the writers’ list of motivations for possible endings, but perhaps this is only hope talking lol.)

[diegamerdie]

What you described as Russian imperialism was colonialism (a form of imperialism but not the only one)

Nato is still an imperialist force. Like yeah it enters other nations consensually but if it did so non consensually they would be it's colonies not allies.

Imperialism is when nations/blocs exploit the weaknesses of smaller/weaker nations to expand their spheres of influence.

I'm not gonna shame Ukraine for aligning with nato against a historical threat but the problem here is that NATO, an organisation dominated by countries with intrests extremely diffrent from that of Ukraine is the only viable solution to the very specific problem of defense against Russia when there are nations with very similar problems it would be more benefited by aligning with but can't.

NATO has a long history of going to countries, creating endless wars and leaving that country in a state of unrest for the next 10+

You can't really equate people fearing that nato will do what nato has consistently been doing for decades to "gay people/feminism are a western invention"

One is a rational fear of something that actually happened multiple times and another is conspiracy theories that have no grounding in reality.

NATO's history of creating biblical horrors is what makes the "west wants to distroy us" propaganda so convincing because it already did it to others so why wouldn't do it again?

Also i want to talk a little bit about all the craze about NATO's expansion, which is brought up with "witty smirks" when i start talking about Russia's expansion. To say very briefly, NATO's expansion has been based on the country's consent, whereas Russia's expansion has been based on taking away country's sovereignty (no consent). Countries join nato willingly, whereas Russia expands by forcefully occupying land of other sovereign nations. NATO is not a fucking country, its an international organization, it expands without taking other countries' independence (duuh), whereas Russia is a country and it can only expand at the expense of another independent and sovereign country.

The irony of Russia's insecurity of NATO expansion is that, if Russia followed international norms, if it respected the independence and sovereignty of neighboring nations, they would not feel the need to join nato, hence, nato would not expand. Russia is the cause of nato expansion. The reason Russia whines so much about it is because Russia knows this but Russia sees its expansionism as natural, as if these countries belong to Russia.

NATO expands only because Russia keeps violations international norms. Russia keeps violating international norms claiming fear of NATO expansion. This is a very simple logical fallacy and a lot of people are failing to see it.

[exeggcute]

'"La Culte du Prochain Train," often translated as "The Cult of the Next Train," is known to have originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration among the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what was then extreme southwest Quebec. The chilling game's competition and its upspringing cult soon spread throughout the network of non-ionized and pre-Interdependent railroad lines which carried raw minerals south to Ottawa and the United States' Great Lake Ports.' Over Struck's little desk hangs a model airplane made entirely from different parts of beer cans. While Inc was keen on the whole lurid mirror-across-highway terrorism thing of early O.N.A.N., and Schacht's paper's focus was the violent French-Catholic protests against municipal fluoridation under Mulroney, Struck had picked the A.F.R.-and-Russian-Roulettish-train-jumping-cult-thing connection, and was sticking to it with the same tenacity that kept him on the 18's A-squad despite a serve that deLint described as resembling a debutante's curtsy. The plane's got flattened cans for wings, smunched-flat cans for wheels, part of a tallboy for fuselage and snout.

'As with many games, Le Jeu du Prochain Train was itself substantially simpler than the organization of the competition.' A cool smile from Struck. 'It was played after sunset at specified sites, specifically les passages a niveau de vote ferrée that marked every rural Quebecker road's intersection with a railroad track. In the Year of the Whopper, there were over two thousand (2,000) such intersections in the Papineau region alone, though not all saw heavy enough flow to accommodate the complexities of true competition.

'Six boys, miners' sons, ages ten to roughly sixteen, Quebecois French speaking boys, line up on six railroad ties' juts just outside the track. Two hundred sixteen (216) boys—never either more nor less—are involved in a night's opening rounds, organized into sixes, each group of six taking its turn with a different train, standing on consecutive juts just outside one track, waiting, doubtless tense, awaiting the procession of a fearsome bride, indeed. The night's heavily travelled crossing's schedule of trains is known to Le Jeu du Prochain Train's episcopate of les directeurs de jeu—older, post-adolescent boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or—for the sons of asbestos miners, many orphaned and desperately poor—on crude rolling boards. No timepieces are permitted the players, who are under the absolute discretion of the game's directeurs, whose decisions are final and often brutally enforced. They all are silent, listening for the sound of the engine's whistle, a sound which is sad and cruel at the same time, as the sound approaches and begins to subtly undergo Doppler Effects. They tense palely muscled legs beneath hand me down corduroys as the next train's one white eye rounds the track's curve and bears down on the game's waiting boys.’

Struck keeps bogging down in these parts where it seems like the guy just totally abandons a scholarly tone, and even probably starts making up or hallucinating details which there's no way Jim Struck could represent himself as having been there to see, and he's blue-delete-looping all over the place, plus grinding his eye and picking at his forehead, his two more or less constant responses to creative stress.

'Le Jeu du Prochain Train itself is simplicity in motion. The object: Be the last of your round's six to jump from one side of the tracks to the other—that is, across the tracks—before the train passes. Your only real opponents are your six's other five. Never is the train itself regarded as an opponent. The speeding, screaming train is regarded rather as le jeu's boundary, arena, and reason. Its size, its speed down the extremely gradual north-to-south grade of what was then southwestern Quebec, and the precise mechanical specifications of each scheduled train—these are known to the directeurs, they comprise the constants in a game the variables of which are the respective wills of the six ranged along the track, and their estimates of one another's will to risk all to win.’

Struck transposes clearly nonadolescent uptown material like this into: 'The variable of the game isn't so much a matter of the train, but the player's courage and will.’

'The last few instants, vanishingly small, when the player may hurl himself athwart the expanse of track, across timber ties, creosote stench, gravel and scarred iron, amid the ear splitting scream of the whistle almost overhead, able to feel the huge push of terrible air from the transport's cow catcher or express train's rounded nose, to go sprawling in the gravel past the tracks' other side and roll to see wheels and flanges, couplings and driving rods, the furious back and forth of transverse axles, feeling the whistle's steam condense to drizzle all around—these few seconds are known, familiar as their own pulse, to the boys who assemble and play.' Struck's now progressed to grinding the whole heel of his hand into his eyesocket, producing a kind of ectoplasmic pinwheel of red in there. Did like even pre-bullet railroad engines have flanges and cowcatchers and whistles that steamed?

In a disastrous lapse, Struck copies hurl himself athwart, a decidedly un-Struckish-sounding verb phrase, verbatim into his text.

'...that the true variable which renders le Jeu du Prochain Train a contest and not merely a game involves the nerve and heart and willingness to risk all of any or all of the five waiting beside you at the track. How long can they wait? When will they choose? Their lives and limb worth how much Queen-headed coin this night? More radical by far than the American youth automobile game of "Chicken" to which its principle is frequently compared (five, not one, different wills to comparatively gauge, in addition to your own will's resolve, and no motion or action to distract you from the tension of waiting motionlessly to move, waiting as one by one the other five quail and save themselves, leap to beat the train...' and then the sentence just ends, without even a close to the parenthesis, though Struck, with a canny sense for this sort of thing, knows the analogy to Chicken'll ring just the right bell, term-paper-wise.

'Le Jeu's historic best, reportedly, however, ignore their five competitors completely, concentrating their entire attention on determining the last viable instant in which to leap, regarding the last, final, and only true opponent in the game to be their own will, mettle, and intuition about the last viable instant in which to leap. These nerveless few, le Jeu's finest—many of whom will go on to directeur future jeux (if not, often, to membership in Les Assassins or its stelliform offshoots)—these nerveless and self-contained virtuosi never see their opponents' flinches or tics or the darkenings at corduroys' crotches, none of the normal signs of will faltering which lesser players scan for—for the game's finest players frequently close their eyes entirely as they wait, trusting the railroad ties' vibration and the whistle's pitch, as well as intuition, and fate, and whatever numinous influences lie just beyond fate.' Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering this Wild Conceits guy's lapels together with one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other—forehand, backhand, forehand.

'The cult's game's principle is simple. The last of the six to jump before the train and land intact wins the round. The fifth through the second to leap have lost, but acquitted themselves.

'The first in a round to quail and jump walks home from there, alone under the moon, disgraced and ashamed.

'But even the first to quail and jump has jumped. Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To "perdre son coeur" and not jump at all is outside le Jeu's limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in le Jeu du Prochain Train's extensive oral history, has a miner's son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round's train passed. This player later drowned. "Perdre son coeur," when it is mentioned at all, is known also as "Faire un Bernard Wayne," in dubious honor of this lone unjumping asbestos miner's son, about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau Region vulgate.' Disastrously, Struck blithely transposes this stuff too, with not even a miniature appliance-size bulb flickering anywhere over his head.

'The game's object is to jump last and land still fully limbed upon the opposite embankment.

'Expresses are 30 k.p.h. faster than conventional transports, but a transport's cow catcher mangles. A boy struck head on by a moving train is shot as from a cannon, knocked out of his shoes, describes a towering, flailing arc, and is transported home in a burlap sack. A player caught beneath a wheel and run over is frequently spread out along a hundred red meters or more of reddened track, and is transported home in a number of ceremonial asbestos and nickel mining shovels provided by the Jeu's older and frequently dismembered directeurs.

'As happens more often, purportedly, a boy who has dived more than half way across the tracks when he is struck and hit, loses one or more legs—either there on the spot, if lucky, or later, under surgical gas and orthopedic saws applied to what are customarily violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat.' The paradox here for Struck as plagiarist, who needs something with sufficient detail to be able to basically just rehash, is that this thing here has almost too much detail, much of it purple; it doesn't even seem all that scholarly; it seems more like the Wild Conceits Bayside C.C. guy seemed to get more and more tipsy as the thing went on until he felt free to make a lot of it up, like e.g. the contuded meat bits, etc.

What's interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Pemulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism—whether it's dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what—Hal hasn't developed much of any sort of take.

'It is frightfully simple and straightforward. Sometimes the last of the six to jump is struck; then the second to last leaper becomes the last and victor, and advances, each winner literally "surviving" into the game's next round, a sort of sextupled semi final, six rounds of six Canadian boys each: the, quote, "Les Trente-Six" for the evening. the initial rounds' boys—those who have been neither the last nor the disgraceful first to leap—are permitted to stay at the le passage a niveau de vote ferree, assembled to become the semi finals' silent audience. The entire Le Jeu du Prochain Train is customarily conducted in silence.' In a disastrous and maybe unconsciously self-destructive set of lapses, Struck rehabilitates the prose but keeps a lot of the hallucinatory specific descriptive stuff in, unfootnoted, though there's obviously no way he could pretend to have been there.

'The surviving losers from among the Les Trente-Six then swell the ranks of the silent gallery as the six nerveless winners—the finalists, this night's "attendants longtemps ses tours"—some bleeding or gray with shock, survivors already of two separate long delayed leaps and hairbreadth escapes, eyes blank or closed, mouths working in savored distaste, await the nightly 2359 Express, the ultra ionized "Le Train de la Foudre" from Mont Tremblant to Ottawa. They will jump athwart the tracks in front of its high speed nose at the final moment, each trying to be the last to leap and live. It is not rare for several of the le Jeu's finalists to be struck.' Struck tries to decide whether it'd be unrealistic or unselfconsciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb—would a man with anything to camouflage use his own name as a verb?

'...that several among the La Culte du Prochain Train's survivors and organizational directorate went on to found and comprise Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents is beyond sociohistorical dispute, though the precise ideological relation between the B.S. era's simultaneously chivalric and nihilistic Cult of the Train's savage tournaments and the present's limbless cell of anti-O.N.A.N. extremists remains the subject of the same scholarly debate that surrounds the evolution of northern Quebec's La Culte de Baiser Sans Fin into the not particularly dreaded but media savvy Fils de Montcalm cell credited with the helicoptered dropping of the 12 meter, human waste filled, pie shell onto the rostrum of U.S. President Gentle's second Inaugural.

[davidmann95]

now that it's over, thoughts on Bendis' Superman as a whole?

pretenderoftheeast said: So, thoughts on Bendis' Superman and Action Comics' tenure altogether and separately now that it's over?

Anonymous said: Best and Worst things about Bendis' Superman run

Anonymous said: Now that it is over, what are your thoughts on Bendis' runs on Superman and Action Comics as a whole?

Anonymous said: Retrospective thoughts on Bendis' Superman as a whole now that it's, I guess, done?

Anonymous said: Hey so since Bendis’ Superman stuff seems to be done, what did you think of the run as a whole?

I decided to hold off a bit on writing on this one, if only so that I could reread the Action Comics side of it since Superman stood out in my memory a lot more. But now I have, and as we’re heading into a bold new era of Superman (and it’s coming in fast - just since I made my Superman in 2021 predictions we’ve gotten Ed Pinsent finally reprinting his legendary bootleg Silver Age Superman, Steve Orlando announcing his Superman analogue book Project Patron, an official shonen Superman redesign for RWBY/Justice League, PKJ’s Super-debut turning out far better than I ever expected, Superman & Lois’s first proper trailer largely taking people pleasantly by surprise, and my learning that there’s a Sylvester Stallone Old Man Superman analogue movie titled Samaritan coming out this summer) we’re ready to take a look back with at least a touch of perspective. I’ll lead with complaints, so everybody who’s been waiting for me to say that Bendis on Superman was Bad, Actually, savor this because it’s as close as you’ll get.

The Bad

* I hate to say it, but rereading that side of the run there’s no two ways about it: the structure of Action Comics as a whole is a mess. It baffled me from day one that it was the more acclaimed of the two books for so long - I guess people are hardwired at this point to think of ‘street’ stuff as where Bendis is supposed to be - because it was immediately clear that Superman had a well-defined story he wanted to tell, while Action was the usual Bendis off-the-cuff improvisation. It’s barely even a story in the same way, and it’s certainly not the ‘Metropolis crime book’ people took it as: it’s 28 issues of Superman and his supporting cast stuffed a pinball machine with the Red Cloud pinging off of each other as we wait to see who falls in the hole at the bottom, and partway through Leviathan and the Legion of Doom and 90s Superboy are tossed into the mix to keep it going a little longer. On an issue-to-issue basis it’s frequently really good, but the core plot of the book is *maybe* six issues stretched out over two and a half years.

* I’ve gone into this some before, but structure-wise Unity Saga also has problems: Phantom Planet rules but either it needed to be cut or the back half needed to be a year all its own in order to accommodate the scale of what it’s attempting. It’s got an interstellar civil war leading into the formation of the United Planets, family drama, Rogol Zaar’s whole deal, and Jon’s coming of age, and I’d say only that last one is really properly served. Even Jon forming the United Planets, while contextually somewhat justified in terms of 1. The situation being so far gone he’s the only one who’d even think in those terms, 2. Things being bad enough that these assorted galactic powers would be willing to try it, and 3. Him having the S on his chest to sell it, isn’t at all built up to within the run itself.

* Rogol Zaar sucks. He’s made up of nothing but interesting ideas - he’s an ersatz warrior ‘superman’ of a bygone age of empires up against the new model, he’s the sins of Krypton as a conservative superpower come home to roost, he’s while not outright said to be definitely Superman’s tragic half-brother and the culmination of everything this run does with Jor-El - but none of them manifest on the page, he’s just a big punchy dude with a dumb design who screams about how you should take him seriously because he’s totally the one who blew up Krypton. Even a killer redesign by Ryan Sook for Legion of Superheroes can’t fix that. There are lots of bad villains with good ideas who are redeemed with time and further effort, but I can’t imagine Zaar getting that TLC to become a fraction of whatever Bendis envisioned him as.

* The second year of Action Comics, after establishing itself in its first as one of the most consistently gorgeous books on the stands, leads with Szymon Kudranski’s weak output and then concludes with John Romita Jr. turning in some career-worst work. The latter is particularly egregious because for that first year Bendis writes a really collected, gentle Superman so him getting pushed into being more aggressive should have an impact, but Romita draws such a craggy rough-looking Superman in the first place that it mutes any sort of shock value.

 * WE NEVER LEARN WHAT’S UP WITH LEONE’S CAR, WHAT THE HELL. You don’t just DROP THAT IN THERE and then NEVER FOLLOW UP.

The Good

* Superman got his real clothes back after 7 truly ridiculous years.

* Bendis fundamentally gets Clark’s voice in a way unlike almost any other writer - even all-around better writers of the character almost never approach how spot-on he is with having Superman speak and act exactly how Superman should.

* Supporting cast front and center! He writes a dynamite Lois, Perry, and Jimmy (even if many of Lois’s more out-there decisions in the run don’t end up retroactively justified the way you’d hope), Ma and Pa are more fun than they’ve been in decades in their brief appearances, he manages to turn having Jor-El in the mix into a positive, and the Daily Planet as a whole has an incredibly distinctive vibe to it like never before that I hope is taken as a baseline going forward.

* The non-Rogol Zaar baddies? All ruled. Invisible Mafia and Red Cloud are both brilliant ideas executed solidly if overextended. Zod as Kryptonian Vegeta, Mongul as a generational perpetual bastard engine primed to be incapable of self-reflection, and Ultraman as “what if Irredeemable but he’d never been a good guy and also he was a Jersey mobster” are the best versions of those characters by numberless light-eons. Lex is on-point in his sparse appearances. Xanadoth as a mystical cosmic monster older than time who still talks like a Bendis character is however unintentionally a hoot. The alt-universe Parasite is a more intimidating Doomsday than Doomsday ever was. And Synmar as an alien culture’s attempt at creating their own Superman and messing up the formula when they make him a soldier can and should be a legitimate major ongoing villain coming out of this run.

* Pretty much all the art other than what I mentioned already. Fabok does a good job bookending The Man of Steel and Ivan Reis does the work of his career anchoring Superman (special props to Reis as well for drawing the first ever non-Steve Rude interesting-looking take on Metropolis), and meanwhile you’ve got Jim Lee, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Doc Shaner, Steve Rude, Kevin Maguire, Adam Hughes, Patrick Gleason, Yanick Paquette, Ryan Sook, Brandon Peterson, and David Lafuente doing their own parts.

* Closely related to the art, all the little flourishes with the powers. Super-speed having a consistent visual with the background coloring changing, Clark internally putting numbers to the degrees of force behind his punches and what situations which numbers are appropriate for, ‘skidding to a halt’ mid-flight before crashing through a window, the shonen-ass major throwdowns as portrayed by Reis, how his super-hearing is handled as a prevalent element. Lots of clever bits that added flavor to what he does.

* While Unity Saga has problems, the whole of what Bendis does in Superman as a means of forward momentum for Clark and his world is excellent. The sort of three-act structure of: 

** Clark is led to question his place in things over the course of a few adventures

** Involvement in the larger cosmos and the impact it has had through and on his family makes him realize the answer to his questions is that he needs to step up in a bigger way because there’s no benevolent larger universe to welcome Earth with open arms, nor a cosmic precedent for everything turning out for the best without some help

** As a consequence of the lessons learned by this change in the status quo Clark is inspired to make his own personal change in revealing his identity (with Mythological basically being an epilogue showcasing a ‘standard’ standalone Superman adventure while simultaneously highlighting his new status quo and how it fits in as a summing-up of Bendis’s take)

…does a great job of shepherding through ideas that lend a lot of forward momentum to Superman of the kind he hasn’t seen in a long time. Not perfect, but far lesser stories with far lesser ambitions have made huge impacts, so I’d certainly hope at least some of this sticks around even if, say, regardless of any retcons to the main line there are always going to be stories with Clark as a disguise and Jon as a kid. Oh, speaking of whom,

* KISS MY ASS, EVERYTHING WITH JON KENT RULED

Ahem. Probably a less confrontational way of putting that.

Do I think there was more gas in the tank for Jon as a kid? Totally, making him likeable and viable was the one really good thing the Rebirth era accomplished for Superman and I expect we’ll continue seeing more of it in the future one way or another. But whether or not him being aged up was Bendis’s decision, or working with marching orders to set up the eventually-(kinda-)discarded 5G, the coming of age narrative here is fire. He keeps the essential Clark Kent kindness and bit of Lois Lane cheekiness that reminds you he’s still their kid, which is a combination Bendis is basically precision-crafted to write, but his trials by fire give him a background entirely unlike the by-the-numbers “and here’s how Superman’s great kid grew up to be a great superhero too” narrative you’d expect while still arriving at that endpoint. If superheroes live and die by metaphors then Jon in here is what it means to grow up written as large as possible: leaving home for the first time (and seeming to shoot up overnight!), getting into the muck of how the real world works, being beaten down by authority wearing faces you’ve been taught to trust, scrambling to get through with the whole world against you, and in the end getting through by learning to rely on your own strength while keeping your soul intact and your head held high, and even managing to speak some truth to power. It gives him a well-defined life story with room to go back to and explore the intricacies of each leg of for decades to come in a way Superman hasn’t had since the original Crisis - someone someday is going to write a The Life & Times Of The Son Of Superman miniseries and it’s going to be one of the greats - and negates any question that he’s earned his stature as the heir apparent.

* Coming out of this, Superman’s world is fascinating. He’s out but rather than giving up his day-to-day life he’s openly spending part of his life as CLARK KENT: SUPER-REPORTER and part of his job on the cape-and-tights side of things is now KAL-EL: SUPER-SPACE-DIPLOMAT, Lois Lane coruns a foundation helping people whose personal continuities have been fucked over by Crisis shenanigans, Jimmy Olsen owns the Daily Planet but is still doing Jimmy Olsen stuff because that’s how he gets his kicks, and Jon Kent is going to college in the future. I’m not anywhere near naïve enough to think that’s how things are going to be forever, or shortsighted enough to think there’s no value left in the traditional setups, but god I hope these developments stick around for a long, long time to come and potentially become the new ‘normal’ as far as the ongoing shared universe stuff goes, because it all feels like the right and promising next steps to take for the lives of these characters. However it got here, for all the pluses and minuses along the way even if I maintain the former very much outweighed the latter as a reading experience, Bendis has a lot to be proud of if that’s the legacy he leaves on these titles.

* The recap pages at the desks!

[mariacallous]

Last year, climate action was all about declaring dates for achieving net-zero carbon emissions. At the 2021 UN’s climate change conference in Glasgow, COP26, India pledged that it would reach net-zero by 2070, a date just 10 years behind China, despite its per capita emissions being some 30 years behind China’s and only half the present world average. COP27 is just days away, but this year many countries are distracted with energy security issues, instead of upping their game for more aggressive emissions cuts.

This COP, we must shift the conversation from futuristic net-zero ambitions toward practical and equitable emissions trajectories. The rich and overall high emitters have to reduce emissions aggressively, while the low-emissions poor must lower their growth rate of emissions on a credible path toward zero.

Development from a very low base inevitably means the poor must increase their emissions in the short term. The good news is this should still fit within global emissions targets if high emitters reduce emissions quickly up front. Unfortunately, the push toward zero has been interpreted as a prohibition on public support for new unabated fossil fuel energy. This is both unfair and unviable.

Developing nations need energy, which may require a little fossil fuel

Developing countries are being asked to “leapfrog” to renewable energy (RE). However, if we don’t allow any new fossil fuel investments, then RE is difficult to scale because it’s intermittent. How do you meet the evening peak electricity demand with solar power? Batteries are still very expensive. Today’s optimal electricity grid design may maximize RE by relying on minimal fossil fuels for occasional peak needs. Batteries should soon be able to meet much or even most of the peaks cost-effectively, but if one designs for zero fossil fuel, then it’s very expensive.

The good news is that simply having some fossil fuel capacity doesn’t mean it will get used much – the marginal cost of RE (and a battery) is virtually zero, once built. As my research group modeled for India in detail, an optimal design focuses on high RE first, without worrying about storage just yet. The cost savings from not over-ambitiously getting down to zero carbon can be spent on accelerating up-front decarbonization, which lowers cumulative emissions.

For the poorest of the poor, the real need is electricity access, regardless of fuel. Sub-Saharan Africa is where most people lacking modern energy services live. Giving 250 million homes electricity connectivity, with 35 kWh/month usage (enough for a TV, refrigerator, and fan), even entirely from coal, would only be 0.25% of global emissions. And most new builds don’t rely on coal – solar is already far cheaper, at least for the daytime.

A push towards RE-only has created pressure to not finance natural gas in poorer countries, despite them being told for decades that natural gas was a bridge fuel to a cleaner future, and one that would avoid the use of coal. This pressure hurts not just energy security but also food security. Recently, there was global pushback against a natural gas fertilizer plant planned in Bangladesh that would be three times more efficient than older designs. This isn’t climate justice.

Developing regions want to minimize their use of fossil fuels, such as India’s ambition to achieve 500 GW of non-fossil electricity capacity by 2030. This would quadruple India’s current RE capacity (excluding hydropower), and more than double its current total installed capacity. But rising RE doesn’t mean switching off coal prematurely before viable alternatives emerge, more so because India’s cumulative emissions from all sources would still be modest. In reality, India’s 2019 per capita coal consumption was only half the world average when we adjust India’s tons consumed. This is because of its lower energy content per ton, which means lower emissions.  In contrast, India used only about 22% of the world average of oil and gas per capita.

Globally, total oil and gas emissions were 25% more than from coal, even after factoring in coal-based emissions from cement. Thus, it is inconsistent to focus disproportionally on lower coal use instead of lower total emissions. It is also inconsistent to focus on emissions created by new builds in developing regions, instead of emissions from already built infrastructure that is overwhelmingly in high-emissions regions.

The poor need more energy, and much of it will be clean energy which is already viable. It’s the last fraction of energy that is hard to keep fossil-free. It can be done – at a cost. That cost should disproportionally be borne by the rich, first as they go full zero and pay the early adopter premium, and second, through financial support for developing nations. The premium is important, not just to cover the cost of developing batteries, but also for green hydrogen to avoid industrial emissions.

Such support should be part of promised aid or concessional finance and certainly not more traditional debt. At COP15 in 2009, there was a pledge to provide $100 billion of annual climate support for the poor by 2020, but the form such support would take was never specified. Sadly, the pledged funds haven’t yet fully materialized, and the date has since been pushed back to 2023.

Many developing countries are asking for funds due to climate-related “loss and damage.” How much materializes remains to be seen. Regardless of what form it takes, all climate finance support should be flexible, allowing recipients to not just mitigate their emissions, but also pay towards adaptation and resilience.

Present net-zero plans are not just unfair – they are insufficient

The focus on ��net-zero” also brings with it many other problems, including of accounting and fairness. Today’s offsets are often accounting tricks, whereby an entity helps avoid emissions elsewhere, often in a developing country, and claims that as negative for them. Financiers discussing offsets have repeatedly told me “All carbon is equal.”  John Kerry recently told African leaders “Mother nature does not care where those emissions come from”.

These physical realities miss several issues. First, if all carbon is equal, then we cannot ignore historically accumulated carbon. Second, when considering offsets, paying to avoid future emissions elsewhere doesn’t negate emissions – it simply avoids growth. Not to mention a lot of “carbon finance” is just a label. It’s often not additional money and, even worse, is routinely debt funding for things like solar projects which would find funding anyways. Third, avoiding all carbon isn’t equal. Cheaper low-hanging fruit like offsets in poorer countries must not absolve the rich from aggressively ending their emissions from hard-to-abate sectors like home heating, industry, and transportation. The recent U.S. Inflation Reduction Act was a step in this direction by focusing on increasing the supply and use of clean energy.

Keeping the world within 1.5°C maximum average temperature rise needs aggressive steps and while most countries are doing more than in the past, their targets don’t add up to staying within 1.5°C. Even worse, their policies and actions don’t match the targets. Countries like the UK and the United States tout lowered emissions, but that’s from a very high base, and they also benefited from a one-time shift from coal to cheap gas, which isn’t available to many poorer countries. Another issue is many developed nations import a large fraction of their emissions as embedded carbon, which doesn’t show up in national emissions accounting. The UK imported 41% of domestic emissions as embedded carbon in 2019, growing from 11% in 1990.

The rich already have saturated development: the cars, refrigerators, roads, and homes they need to build are mostly replacement stock, although they will also need infrastructure to support the clean energy transition. However, poorer countries’ growth needs are far more than just replacement of fossil fuels with zero-carbon infrastructure. Given such high growth can’t be met easily by zero-carbon solutions, their emissions will need to rise in the short run. But the poor’s rise in emissions will be less than the likely failure in reduction by high emitters in the coming decade.

Rich countries must reduce their emissions faster

Achieving net zero emissions by 2050 requires a 3.3% reduction each year from 2020, assuming a constant annual decline. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s special report on staying within 1.5°C maximum average temperature rise stated we need a faster reduction up front: a 45% decline by 2030 from 2010 levels. Unfortunately, global fossil CO2 emissions grew by 10% from 2010 to 2019. Thus, in this decade, we need to accelerate the decline and also get to zero sooner to make up for the extra emissions in the previous decade. This means that to achieve the 1.5°C goal, the annual decline must be more than twice as fast as the IPCC report suggests. And the decline must be even greater from richer high-emitting countries.

Unfortunately, high emitters have collectively never reduced their emissions over a decadal timespan. The UK, the top performer out of the G7 countries, reduced its domestic CO2 emissions by 35% from 1990 to 2019. But this is only an 1.2% annual reduction, falling short by more than 2% annually compared to the 3.3% target. And this is ignoring imports of embedded carbon.

Not only do we need high emitters to aggressively reduce emissions, but buried in the details of the IPCC report and far less publicized is IPCC’s finding that virtually all pathways within a 1.5°C temperature rise or with limited overshoot also require significant Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). While planting trees is one technique, it doesn’t scale well, more so for developing regions where land pressures are higher. Plus, we have the risk of trees and their stored carbon going up in smoke with forest fires.

Many CDR plans involve literally sucking carbon dioxide out of the air for long-term storage, an expensive prospect through direct air capture. The volumes that must be removed are enormous. Taking a mid-range IPCC estimate, 500 Gt of CO2 removal means 10 Gt/year for the second half the century, or about a quarter of present annual emissions every year. This burden must also not fall on the low emitters of today, the poor, even if they represent a high­­­­­ share of global emissions post-2050. This is because the need for CDR is overwhelmingly due to over-emissions by today’s high emitters. Also, expectations of future CDR should not become a rationalization for not mitigating today.

What do developing regions need?

RE is already viable at large scale, but its deployment in many developing regions lags its potential. This is where developed countries can help through improved finance (especially cheaper capital). While many cross-border projects carry risks, some of the risks could either be shared by developed countries or mitigated by multilateral agencies who can provide counter-guarantees or other risk-reduction mechanisms.

At COP26, a coalition of financiers announced $130 trillion was available for the transition, but this money is the gross total funding pool, and not necessarily incremental money available to pay a premium for becoming carbon-free. The good news is that financial help as climate support is only required for the incremental cost of going green, akin to viability gap funding, and not all the costs.

In addition to finance, access to state-of-the-art technology is also important. While much of this may be owned by the private sector, government nudges and incentives can help.  As well as technology, countries need secure supply chains. Given many of the global minerals for clean energy are concentrated or controlled by a handful of countries, developing countries need help to ensure they aren’t last in line or forced to pay a premium. COVID-19 and Russia’s war in Ukraine showed how the poor became the last to get access to vaccines or global supply chains.

Growing RE is one part of the solution. But given existing fossil fuel plants in developing regions (especially new ones) aren’t going away any time soon, we need to make them cleaner, more efficient, and flexible. Unfortunately, a global finance model of “don’t touch any fossil fuel project” means a missed opportunity to reduce local air pollution and make the transition less expensive.

COP27 is an opportunity for countries to not just ratchet up their ambitions, but also give credence to their ambitions. We need aggressive targets for all countries – but the targets won’t be the same everywhere. Poorer countries already face the brunt of climate change, but they want to do their fair share of mitigation. They may even do some amount of unfair share. But this cannot mean climate absolutism.