#capital radio interview

[jbaileyfansite]

Jonathan Bailey and Cynthia Erivo on Capital Radio (November 22, 2024)

[sbrown82]

RARE interview with Marsha Hunt and R&B singer Doris Troy on the "Black is Beautiful" music chat show for Capital Radio, London (1973).

[dailyanarchistposts]

TFSR: So I’m very happy to be speaking with anarchist author Peter Gelderloos. Peter’s latest book, The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below is just out from Pluto Press, I just got my copy in the mail. Super stoked to get it. But welcome back to the show, Peter.

Peter Gelderloos: Thanks for inviting me, again.

TFSR: Facing the challenges of increasing climate chaos and its impact on life on Earth, feels really, really fucking daunting. Without thinking through the idea of like some centralized grand and technocratic response – which is kind of how I feel like I’ve been trained to think about big problems as big solutions – and not that that seems likely when countries at the industrial core aren’t even able to hold themselves to, you know, self imposed limits of cutting back on producing greenhouse gases, or even coordinating and distributing free vaccines to stop a pandemic.

So I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s head is kind of spinning when I try to think about the looming and existent climate disaster. How does this book kind of help to challenge that framework and mindset of expecting big centralized solutions to the problems that we face?

PG: Well, when you look at the history of how states have been dealing with ecological crisis, first of all, they’re very reductionist. They reduce a complex, multifaceted ecological crisis, which ties into so many problems – social and environmental – they tend to reduce it to emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, only to climate change. And they do that in large part not only because they don’t want to recognize many of these other problems, but also because technocrats need to simplify problems in order to reduce it to data that can be plugged into their machine, right?

So even though they’re they’re reducing it just to climate and they’ve been aware of the danger of climate change – like the US government recognized it as a national security problem already back in the 1960’s – their responses have been militarizing borders and increasing the deployment of militaries for, you know, so called disasters, natural disasters, and things of that nature. And then also making big agreements that have done exactly nothing to slow down greenhouse gas emissions.

So even within their reductionism, they don’t do a good job of dealing with the one part of the problem. And the other part of the problem that they recognize is actually bad for us: increasing militaries, militarizing borders and all that. So they are viewing the problem with interests that are diametrically opposed to the interests of living beings like ourselves. The larger part of it they have to ignore, and then of the part that they look at, half of it they don’t get right, and the other half they deal with in a way that that actively harms us.

We’ve also seen in a lot of these so called “natural disasters”, that the most effective responses for saving lives are responses that happen on the ground. It’s not the militaries, its neighbors, its regular people organizing themselves spontaneously with the logic of mutual aid. That’s what saves the most lives, we’ve seen that time and time and time again.

And absolutely, we are totally conditioned to rely on on the government to solve things for us, or, you know, major corporations, techno wizards like Elon Musk, or whatever. And that’s in large part because we’re forced into a situation of dependency and passivity and immobilization. Which is a very depressing position to be in normally, and it’s an even more depressing position to be in when we see the world dying around us. And so it’s completely coherent and consistent with that forced dependency and forced immobility to just either look the other way, or cross your fingers and hope and pray that, you know, some big godlike figure will come along and solve it for us. But it’s this big godlike figure that caused the problem and that is continuing to aggravate the problem.

So, actually, you get more intelligent solutions to problems from people who have on the ground knowledge, from people who are familiar with their territory, know that the resources they have. And it’s equally global, it’s just coming from the territory, it’s coming from below, rather than coming from either you know, boardrooms or situation rooms, where they’re not looking at the territory, they’re looking at maps. And they’re above all looking at their own interests of maintaining control. Because their ability to do anything in response to the problem is, in fact, predicated on our immobility, on our dependence, and our enforced passivity.

TFSR: So there’s almost like a sort of Stockholm syndrome that a lot of us – through the socialization from the state – have where we identify the the methods and the impulses of government in scary situations as being somehow salvatory, as opposed to sort of counterinsurgency constantly being operated for the continued extraction of resources.

PG: Absolutely. And I’m glad that you brought up counterinsurgency because that is one of the most important theoretical lenses to use to understand both ecological crisis and government, corporate and NGO responses to that crisis.

TFSR: A thing that kind of refreshing about this book is the radical critique of Western civilization as the vehicle for many of the woes that we experienced today. I appreciate that you attempted to undercut the misconception, right off the bat, that human nature is the cause for the destruction that we’re experiencing around us, or that there are too many of us or too many of certain kinds of us on the planet. Can you talk about the ideas of the Anthropocene or arguments around overpopulation, and why they present kind of a misdirection when seeking causes of anthropogenic climate change and resolutions of finding balance with the world?

PG: Yeah. Human beings have been around for a really long time, depending on you know, when exactly you identify the beginning of anatomically-modern human beings, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. Hominids with similar capabilities for longer. And the problems of destroying the ecological basis for life on this planet, for a great many species is a recent problem. And even the problem of causing ecological collapse in just one bio region is, in the broader timeline, a recent problem with maybe like four thousand years old, some of the earliest examples. And, again, some people – because we’re taught to view human history in this way that ends up being very white supremacist but focusing on the history of States – some people take that to mean “Oh, well, for the last four thousand years human beings have been destroying the environment. So you know, that’s what’s relevant.” No, for the last four thousand years humans have not been destroying the environment. A very small number of human beings have been doing that in a very small part of our overall territory until much more recently. And all across the world people fought against getting forcibly included in this new western model of being human. We do have examples of non-western cultures also destroying their soil or destroying their forests, destroying their ecosystem, but they weren’t nearly as good at it as Western civilization is, and that’s the dominant model, that’s the most relevant one to talk about.

So you know, that other question is relevant for the theoretical exercise of like, “okay, what exactly are the more destructive, or the healthier, forms of social organization?” but in the current media environment most people will bring up this kind of somewhat trivial fact at this point that maybe two thousand years ago, or one thousand years ago on another continent, a completely non-western society also caused major erosion. And that’s just an instance of deflection away from the fact that the problem that’s currently killing us is Western civilization.

So, you know, there are works that, for example: Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan that try to define what the problem is more broadly, but in the situation where we’re in right now, where species are going extinct at an accelerating rate, where millions of of humans are already dying every year because of the effects of this ecological crisis, and so many people are losing their homes, losing their land, losing their access to healthy food. The problem is the civilization, the modern state, the capitalist system that arose – centered in Europe – but also simultaneous to this process of mass enslavement in Africa and mass invasion, colonization and genocide in the Americas, in Africa and in Asia and Australia. That’s the problem.

If you take any criteria beyond just greenhouse gas emissions, it becomes very clear what’s the social model that is putting us all at danger. And even if you reduce it just to greenhouse gas emissions, you kind of avoid looking at the historical roots of the social machine that’s causing so much death and destruction. But it’s still very clear that Western civilization and the economic model that it forcibly imposed on the rest of the globe is the problem.

TFSR: So, one thing in the book you also say is that it’s necessary for us to critique science because it’s so shaped by those institutions who wield it, fund it and command it. Can you talk about this and how it differs from an anti-rational rejections of science for the sake of faith structures, or antimodernist frames of some anti-civ perspectives? And maybe speak about how you’ve observed our movements, or movements that you find inspiring in this framework, how they’ve been making and imagining their own science?

PG: Yeah, I mean, first off, maybe this is more semantical but like, I do think a critique of rationalism as a worldview is important. But then again, different people would mean very different things with that.

So just to focus on your question: in practice, in the real world, the scientific method cannot be divorced from the scientific institutions that currently control or manage the vast majority of knowledge production via the scientific method in this world that we inhabit. You know, I love science fiction, we can imagine other worlds but that’s the case in the one that we inhabit.

One thing that I think is important to recognize is that the scientific method is a very valid method for knowledge production, for falsifiable objective data. I think it’s also important to recognize that that’s not the only kind of knowledge. That there are many other kinds of knowledge that cannot be produced by the scientific method and that we run into… First of all there’s been no social system in the history of the world that I’m aware of that has ever relied only on that kind of knowledge. And our current “rationalist” society – speaking about rationalism as a sort of mythical worldview – uses a great deal of like non-falsifiable and subjective information, but they pretend that they don’t as part of this mythology. Which is very, very important to certain people, academics and whatnot.

So it’s important recognize, I think, that that’s not the only form of knowledge. And like, so a brief example of this: we can even see this when we get beyond the importance of, for example, emotional knowledge. How to deal with people, with other people in groups, how to take care of people, you know, this is something that’s actually incredibly important. And it’s amazing how easily it can be dropped by the wayside because it’s not reduced to numbers.

But for example we can look at health care. So there are forms of healthcare that are much easier to evaluate using the scientific method. And there are forms of healthcare that are much harder to evaluate using the scientific method. Finding out what happens when you dump some drug in a human body is much easier to evaluate, because the person who’s administering the drug doesn’t need to know anything about it. And they don’t need to know anything, or barely anything, about the person that they’re administering it’s to. And that’s sort of like the point of that whole methodology of treatment. Whereas other forms of treatment require much more subjective approach, a much more modeled approach, to the specifics of the person who’s being treated and they require a much more developed skill set to be able to deliver the therapy in an effective way.

So that’s not the fault of the therapy, that it can’t be evaluated as well by the scientific method. That’s a limitation or fault in scientific method. But we live in a society that’s so mechanized and that loves to be able to have – it’s in fact built up on – knowledge forums that can be plugged into the machine, and spit out the numbers. So it’s a society very much based on mechanical reproduction. That kind of society is going to favor the treatments that can be evaluated by the scientific method, and it’s going to disfavor or discourage or hide the treatments that can’t. And a year does not go by without us finding out about how damaging some form of medication was, or how damaging this blindness towards certain forms of therapy and care were.

And that doesn’t that doesn’t invalidate scientific knowledge production, but it does certainly speak to the question of social machinery. That it goes beyond just the question of, like, “Can we test this? Is it valid or not?” It’s that in fact, in practice, we can’t separate it from the question of social machinery.

What does that have to do with the ecological crisis? I already mentioned the reductionism of a multifaceted, very broad, very complex ecological crisis to climate change. That’s symptomatic of what I’m talking about. Climate change is something that’s more easy to quantify. We can measure it in temperature, we can measure it in parts per million carbon dioxide, we can measure it in emissions. Whereas things like what I know about the place where I live, what I know about the health of the soil in the place where I’ve lived for the past seven or eight years, is not something that I can quantify. But I know it, I think much better than someone who might come by and take a sample from a laboratory and test it but then not have any further relationship with the land. Someone who’s not out there taking care of these olive trees or planting a garden, year after year, and wondering when the rain is going to come and feeling it in their bones how this territory is desiccating. And how we actually need to start doing things now and fast as this climate becomes more of a desert. Because there are dead deserts, and they’re living deserts. And this land right here, where I live is going to become one or the other depending on what we do.

And the people in the laboratories are way behind the game and they have a lot less to offer. They do have things to offer, like there are certainly moments in which my gardening and other people’s gardening can be complemented by having access to that chemical test from the laboratory. And you know, that would be great to have that kind of complementarity, to have even solidarity at that level. But usually you don’t have that because our systems of knowledge are gaslit, we’re excluded from the resources that we would need to be able to access that and the people in laboratories generally have no idea what they’re talking about and think that they have access to some absolute, an all encompassing truth. And that’s problematic.

So yeah, there’s absolutely a possibility – I mean there should be a great deal of dialogue between different kinds of knowledge, including knowledge that’s produced through the scientific method – but we don’t have a lot of that now. And when you we look at how history has actually unfolding, the data produced by powerful scientific institutions regarding climate change has not been wrong, per se – the broad strokes of it have been correct, like for a while now they’ve been predicting what’s going to be happening, and it’s been happening – but it’s been quite conservative. Time and time again they’ve been way too optimistic in their predictions, and the kind of red lines or warning marks or benchmarks or whatever that they set are getting exceeded, they’re getting past years and decades in advance of their particular predictions.

So in terms of the precision of their predictions, they have high precision predictions. Like, me looking at the soil and the rain clouds or you know, someone who’s actually lived there their whole life and has access a lot more ancestral knowledge that I don’t have access to, they’re not going to be able to come up with like a high precise prediction of like “Okay in 20 years this is going to happen” but I think they will get a much more accurate prediction. Whereas the scientific institutions have had high precision and low accuracy. So they’ve actually been wrong in a dangerous way again and again and again. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence, given their proximity to and affinity with the institutions that are most directly responsible for the destruction of the current global ecosystem.

TFSR: So yeah, I guess that’s a good clarification is like systems of knowledge rather than sciences. And as you say that seems like the need from the Western civilization, or the organizations that are working within it, to have crunch-able numbers and quantities that they can put into their figures. Seems like it would also not only would it limit the output information but it probably blinds the people that are making the measurements, even if they’re trying to make the right measurements to see the actual outcomes.

The approach of looking systemically and trying to say that, in fact, all of these systems and how they correlate to each other can fall under one umbrella that we call “Civilization” and its colonial impulse, or “Western Civilization” and its colonial impulse, when people see a critique that is that large, oftentimes people will say, “Ah, but there are things that we have gotten from this system”, they will say that. They will say that capitalism has driven innovation and the creation of certain kinds of knowledge or certain kinds of technology that have benefited human life in a lot of ways. For instance one thing that they can point to is around medical science. And as you said, there are some treatments that have proven to be not so much treatments as poisons. It’s not a like an assured thing that medical science will resolve issues, but there are a lot of technologies that have been developed and applied over the centuries that are positive. And I could see someone saying, “well do I choose between the current structure and like small reforms within it, or supporting a sort of revolutionary alteration in the productive models, the distribution of resources and capacity to produce these technologies that are saving my life, or making it so that I can be mobile, or extending life” for folks that have very serious medical issues for instance?

There has been critique, for instance, of criticisms of modern civilization that came out of Earth First at its beginnings, or other pro-ecological movements that look at not human beings as the problem necessarily, but technological development as being – and the sciences and the knowledges that come out of that, not to say that they’re just produced from that, but that are applied there. Saying “if the government fails, for instance, or if the economy scales back, I’m not going to be able to get my medication and I may die”. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of reticence that someone would have of trying to approach a degrowth of the economy and the government, because they’re afraid that what safety nets exist for them currently would no longer be there, and they wouldn’t survive it?

PG: Yeah, that’s definitely a very legitimate way to address questions of social change. And I think it’s actually super important when we inhabit our own bodies, our own experiences and needs when we’re talking about proposals of widespread social transformation, and struggle, generally.

I think it helps to primarily consider two different things. One is that if we break out of an individual’s framework – which, like I said, that concern that you’re posing is very important, there’s also an iteration of that concern which is very dangerous. Because if we make a critique of Western Civilization on the basis of how many people it’s killing, how many millions of people are starving to death because of this model, all of the forests and ecosystems that are getting destroyed, it can be dangerous. You definitely don’t want to go into a framework of “it’s us or them, someone has to die in this situation”.

So first off, I think we need to break out of any kind of individualist or competitive conception of this problem. And if we look more systemically, or if we look at health as a collective good, the healthiest possibilities for human society are ones in which people have a healthy reciprocal relationship with their environment. They have access to the commons, they have access to a very diverse and healthy diet that is locally adapted. And that is, in fact, based on brilliant technologies that were thousands of years in the making, that existed in every territory before colonialism, which is a technology without whirring gadgets and lights and bells and whistles but it’s the technology of how we build up our survival mutually with the other organisms around us, with the other living beings around us. Many of those technologies still exist. And so without colonialism, with access to that commons, with access to that kind of rooted, territorial, popular and ecological technology, that is the best hope that a human community has for health. For the healthiest lives possible for all their members. So that’s one thing that I think is really necessary to acknowledge. That we live in a system that produces a disease, that produces death and that’s a huge problem that we can’t sweep under the carpet.

The other good thing is that when we destroy governments and capitalism, everything that they own, everything that they think is theirs, everything that they blackmail us with – because they control access to it and we have to spend our lives working to try to get a small piece of it – it’ll be ours. And so once all the rich people are gone, and once all the cops and all the politicians are gone, all of that will be ours. And we can decide to get rid of it, we can decide to keep it, we can decide to make it ourselves in under much better circumstances. So things like medicine we’ll obviously keep making and we’ll find ways to make it that are healthier, we’ll find productive processes that are less damaging for the environment. And we’ll also be changing our living conditions so as few people as possible need access to those technologies, but those who do need that access will get it.

And then we’re also forced to deal with other other technologies, like nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs that the state has saddled us sadly with the necessity to mediate those in the best way possible, because they’re not going away for, you know, forever. Some of those radioactive substances will be around for billions of years, so “thank you, government!” But we will do a better job of handling that than they do. Because we care about us. And because we’re actually good at organization when we get the chance. In the US every single nuclear waste storage facility has leaked at one time or another. So they’re crap at it and they’re also to blame for it. On my worst days, I definitely fantasize about, you know, locking them all in the nuclear storage facility, there’d be certain poetic justice to that.

But thinking about it more realistically, and in the question of our needs, all of it will belong to us for better and for worse, and we’ll figure out how to take care of us. And we’ll do a much better. Even though lately in our movements, it’s pretty depressing, because we’re I think learning a bit too much from the system we live in, and we’re doing, frankly, often a pretty terrible job of taking care of us. But we can do much better than the state or capitalism ever could.

TFSR: Yeah, and they’ve had the opportunity to prove that already. And there’s tons of people that, you know, in as far as distribution of treatment methods for things, or COVID vaccines, or whatever, like, they have proven that it is not in their interest, it is actually in their interest to deny large swaths of the population any number of these things so that they can mark up the price and make more money off of less.

PG: Yes.

TFSR: So some of the most inspiring parts of the book, for me, were the examples of resistance to mega projects, to the expansion of colonial extractivism as well as to some of the alternative movement experiments and infrastructures that you highlight and that you get voices from, which is great. Were there any that you wanted to include but you just didn’t have time to fit that you might share with the audience?

PG: Um, there are definitely some. There are some cases where I was looking for interviews and I wasn’t able to get in touch with the comrades who would be able to speak from personal experience about those struggles, or I was able to get in touch but they were in the end too busy to do interviews, because things are pretty difficult. And so I can name some of those, maybe for people to look at the more, but I won’t go into them precisely because I wasn’t able to learn enough about them.

So, for example, in the movement in Kurdistan, an ecological focus is a large part of the analysis. And it’s a territory that’s been very damaged by war, by desertification, by forced impoverishment coming from the various countries, the various states, that control Kurdistan. And so I know, in fact yeah some friends helped put out a book about some of the experiences in trying to helped make that desert bloom. But yeah, the comrades, it’s been, of course, a rough time over there so the comrades weren’t able to give an interview about that. So that didn’t make it into the book.

Let’s see… There are many, many very interesting struggles in India. I mentioned some of them on the basis of already published research, but I wasn’t able to arrange any interviews with comrades there. India’s interesting because there are very, very different experiences of reforestation, that demonstrates, again, just how we can’t really trust the media, how we can’t trust governments when they talk about this. Because reforestation means completely different things depending on on who’s saying it, and a lot of forms of reforestation are very, very bad for the environment. They’re basically things that, say, like a government like Chile will do to be able to get counted as like a negative carbon emission country, so then they can make money with carbon trading. When, like, in Chile the reforestation is very much an industrial activity which is which is bad for the environment, very bad for the soil, bad for the water table. And it’s very much a colonial activity, because it’s taking place on the lands of Indigenous peoples who are in the process of trying to recover their lands. And a huge part of that process is trying to win back their food autonomy.

So forests are important. And forests can also be edible forests. These pine plantations, these mono-crop pine and eucalyptus plantations that are being planted by the official institutions, are definitely not food forests. No one can feed themselves off of them. But also agricultural fields are important for a lot of people’s to feed them selves. And the official reforestation happening in Chile is often used as a weapon against Indigenous struggle, against the struggle, for example, of the Mapuche for food autonomy, for getting their land back and being able to feed themselves off of their land using traditional technologies and whatever modern or Western technologies that they feel like adapting. That’s up to them. And to the extent that they can do that, to the extent that they have food autonomy, they have a vastly increased ability to fight back against the colonizing state because they’re no longer dependent on global capitalism. And they’re no longer dependent on the state that they colonizes them.

And so in India there’s some really great examples that really contrast how ineffective and also how damaging state-led efforts for mass reforestation are, how they just respond to this technocratic impulse to produce numbers on paper – when on the ground it’s a completely different story – versus communities, many of them Indigenous communities, that have been undergoing very, very effective, large scale forms of reforestation that improve soil health, that increase the possibilities for food autonomy, the increased quality of living, and that, you know, helped create more robust ecosystems with habitat for other species and in addition to just humans. So I would love to one day meet comrades who are participating in that because there’s some really powerful struggles happening there.

TFSR: Well, you do put the invite in the book for a longer extended, like, sequel if folks had more stuff inspired along those lines. So if any listeners are out there and want to write that book, I would love to read it.

Over the years, we conducted a couple of interviews with Anne Peterman from a group called “No GE Trees”, who was talking about that struggle in Wallmapu and – because they were similarly trying to build solidarity with resistance to that sort of mono crop forestation that damages the soil, that depletes the water tables, that denudes the landscape of the vitality and the variation that’s required for native species to exist in it throughout actually the US South – so people were protesting in the Asheville area in solidarity with not only resisting GE Tree plantations in the southeast, but also in Chile.

And a lot of those trees, they’re not good for a lot of things, they’re not good for making lumber out of, especially eucalyptus. Growing up on the West Coast…they’re not good for windbreaks, they got planted for windbreaks, they’re not good for railroad ties, that’s what they got planted for at one point, but they get chopped up after a couple of years of growing, so not even creating a mature forest, and processed down into wood pellets, and then sent to Europe so that European governments can claim that they’re using a renewable source of energy production. It’s just this game of shells with carbon and basically pollution and degradation. It’s a continuation of the extractivism of neocolonialism.

PG: Absolutely.

TFSR: We’ve already seen a measurable connection between climate change, the disruption of food production, exacerbating conflicts, and being used as a weapon against Indigenous communities as you’ve noted, and resulting in increased refugee movements and displacement. As a result, right wing tendencies have welcomed an escalation of conflict and inequality, the building and buttressing of physical and metaphorical walls, and the acceleration of fossil fuel extraction to suck out every drop of profit that can be withdrawn before it’s too late. And to be fair, I say, “right wing”, this also goes for centrist neoliberal regimes as well but the rhetoric looks more actively genocidal oftentimes, and facilitates extraparliamentary violence when it comes from the far right, usually.

Would you talk a bit about the importance of the increasingly, in some ways, difficult project of fostering internationalism and inner communalism against this, nationalist tendency as the climate heats up?

PG: Yeah, obviously the far right, and neoliberal centrist more so, have a lot of advantages because they have access to resources, they get a lot more attention. They’re taken seriously. So even a lot of centrist media that pay attention to the far right in a disapproving way still help them out more than the way that they treat like truly radical transformative revolutionary movements by just ignoring them. Because we’re kept in this in this permanent place of either not existing or being infantilized and we have, as you pointed out, we have a lot of work to do on this front.

And we can also talk about forms of internationalism that are very damaging. This is a kind of internationalism, which is completely under the thumb of, you know, colonial or neocolonial institutions. It’s this worldwide recruitment that takes place, largely through universities of – sometimes in a limited fashion it’s been analyzed as a Brain Drain, but I think it goes beyond that. Basically training and recruiting people from all over the world to participate in this system – whether it’s under the auspices of the United Nations, or under the auspices of some prestigious university in the Global North – to create an internationalism which is a completely monistic, technocratic, simplified worldview that builds consensus about what the world looks like, what the problems look like, and what the solutions are, within elite institutions that are completely cut off from all of the various territories of the world, even as those institutions increase their recruitment to a global scale. So that they have representatives or spokespeople from all the different continents from all over the world but they’re brought together in a sort of epistemological, technocratic space, which is completely a reproduction of colonialism, and makes it flexible but furthers the dominance of Western civilization, of white supremacist civilization.

And so that’s the kind of internationalism, which is very, very present, and it has access to a great deal of resources. And on the other hand, in the Global North, we’re not doing a nearly good enough job to create a very, very different and subversive kind of internationalism. And the comrades who are doing the best job of that tends to be migrant comrades, comrades who have who have migrated, who have crossed borders. I think a lot of folks who grow up with the privilege of citizenship in the Global North, if they do travel, if they do try to get like a more global perspective, it’s often still done in this individualist way that has a lot more to do with tourist vacations than with the needs of revolutionary struggle. And so we don’t have – I mean we don’t really have communities in the Global North, because the triumph of capitalism is so complete – but we don’t have radical groups that are attempting to be communities that pool resources in order to intentionally create global relationships of solidarity with communities and with struggles in the Global South that they could actually be supporting, and that they could actually be creating dialogue with to develop the rich, detailed, global perspectives that we actually need, as well as the possibility for global solidarity.

So, yeah, in the book, towards the end, I do this exercise of imagining what if we’re actually able to do what I’m talking about. Or what I’m trying to argue in the book is like a real model for a revolutionary transformative response to the ecological crisis. And so since I’m talking about the need to root ourselves in our territory, I imagine “Okay, here we are in Catalunya, what does this look like over the next few decades?” And one of the first things is in Barcelona and Tarragona we have these big ports with these big old ships that are currently moving merchandise all around the world. And that’s something that on the one hand it needs to stop because of how much that’s based on fossil fuels and on unnecessary consumption and all the rest. And the later timeline, in that chapter of the book is, you know, maybe much more beautiful and romantic, imagining there’s no more borders and people can traverse the world in sailboats, which are sailboats that have been expropriated from from the wealthy, who of course no longer exist. And and I think that’s a beautiful thing to imagine.

It’s really nice to think about a world that we’re actually allowed to live in, and that people all over the world can travel and go where they want. But right now we have the ugliness to deal with. And so in those ports, there are fuel reserves that have already been dredged up from the earth and there are these big ocean-going cargo ships. So there’s a part that talks about expropriating those cargo ships, getting in touch with revolutionary comrades in the Global South that we already have a relationship with and finding out what they need.

There’s the example of early on in the pandemic, both in Catalunya and another territories, workers taking the initiative to re-purpose their factories to make parts for respirators in a way that was faster and more agile than the capitalist were able to do. So kind of taking a cue from that I imagine this process of, okay, instead of sending merchandise, which is just furthering a relationship of dependency – I was speaking with this one comrade from Venezuela, other comrades from from Brazil, like a major thing is their economies and their material environments have been intentionally structured in a way so they don’t have a lot of very basic things that they need, that in Europe or North America would be easier to find. So for example, like basic machine parts for the machines that would be needed to process food. Not even talking about some hyper industrial and unnecessary endeavor, but basic things like harvesting, threshing, and milling grains, for example. So instead of, you know, a relationship of dependence, where this really fertile territory, like Venezuela, gets grain imports of European grains that Indigenous and Afro Indigenous populations have not been traditionally consuming and that are certainly less healthy – so, basically supermarket food. Instead of importing supermarket food, this short term process of exporting those cargo ships, re-purposing factories from the automotive industry to make some of these simple machine parts, and then using the existing fuel reserves to send off these cargo expropriated cargo ships, so that in these other territories that are colonized, neocolonized territories, that we have a relationship and solidarity with, they can create their own material autonomy and break that dependence once and for all. And then we’re also not just navel gazing and thinking “how are we going to survive the climate apocalypse and making sure that our bunkers are well stocked?” But we’re actually thinking about collective survival in a way that is solidaristic, in a way that is realistic, in a way that is global, and in a way that recognizes our responsibilities, given the past and present of colonialism and white supremacy.

TFSR: Yeah and I would say that the one group that I’m familiar with that really has continued doing a good job on the subject of building or continuing solidarity across the borders is Zapatista structures. In the US there is still, despite the fact that the Zapatista revolution happened 30 years ago, and there are still active, six declaration Otra Compaña groups or whatever that are around all sorts of parts of Anglo dominated North America, Turtle Island. Like, it’s just astounding, and I wish – but people did it really well during that period of time. And I think that that’s something that’s been lost is these clear lines of communication, and the building of inspiration, the sharing of knowledge, of experience across that border to the south of the nation state that I live within the borders of. There’s so many overlaps, and labor struggles that happen. There’s so much cross border transit of goods and I have so much more in common with people across that border than I do who fucking run those corporations here.

PG: Yup.

TFSR: Another point that I really liked in the book – and you approach this in a number of different ways, or I read this in a number of different places – talking about the importance of territorialization. And maybe that’s the wrong term, but being rooted in the land base that you’re in, listening to it, trying to understand what it teaches and how to live with it. Recognize how other people have done that, and like rooting your struggle in a sense of place. And this is one of the reasons that some of these anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance movements in different places around the world look so different is because they’re rooted in different legacies and practices, religions, languages, and experiences of colonization. And I really appreciate the fact that you point this out and you say, “Look, don’t expect everyone around the world to circle their A’s, or to use the term ‘autonomy’ necessarily for what they’re doing. But just recognize similar traits among people that you can have solidarity with in the struggle against global capitalism and colonization”. Can you talk a little bit about some of these similar traits, how you kind of identify these like versatile strategies?

PG: Yeah. So yeah, I think I do use the word “territorialization” or “territorialized” and that’s largely coming from Catalan and Spanish. In English “territorial” tends to be an ugly word because it’s associated with possessiveness, with drawing borders. I find it a very useful concept that’s used here so I just started using it in English. I would just encourage people to look at the roots of that word, “terra” or “tierra”, like the earth. A relationship with the earth not as like this big, abstract blue planet floating in the void but the earth under our feet.

So it’s interesting because you’re asking about similarities – oh god this is gonna sound like some cliched bumper sticker or something like that – but my first response is to say that the similarity is in the difference. Because in an act of war against this world of supermarkets and Amazon and smartphone screens which impose this secretly white supremacist homogeneity, when you territorialize you are becoming part of a long historical tradition that is so so so specific to the exact place where you live and nowhere else. So that means eating different food, cooking it in a different way, pruning different trees, it means speaking a different dialect of a different language. It means things that at first glance are maybe more defined or marked by their difference, but when you when you see like gatherings of peasants from different countries around the world, or gatherings of gardeners, gatherings of revolutionaries who very much believe in being territorial in this sense that I’m trying to talk about it, who believe in having their roots in the ground beneath their feet, and fighting from that relationship and understanding themselves within that relationship…

One thing that strikes me is how much pleasure there is in sharing “This is how you do it? This is how we do it. Oh, this is what you eat? This is what we eat.” And so even on the face of it, the color of that, the texture of that seems to be bringing out differences but I think that really what’s the conversation that happens there – and it feels this way to me like insofar as I’m this alienated exsuburbanite who is engaging in relatively later in my life, to a limited extent has felt this way – that like, beneath the words, there’s the sort of language of love which is completely an exercise in sameness. Not the sameness of homogeneity, but the sameness of “We’re living beings in this earth and we love the Earth, it gives us our lives, we love the other living beings around us.” And so really people all across the world who are living in autonomy and calling it different things and using very, very different technologies and eating very different foods, and all the rest, are on a deeper level doing the same thing, and I think can often recognize ourselves in one another.

TFSR: I guess jumping back to a reference that you made a little bit ago, I was very moved by your chapter, A Very Different Future, where you were describing – this isn’t the primary part of it, the first part of it at least you were describing – an alternative view of where we might be if we go down this path and sort of a best case scenario of how reframing and healing the world could look. I feel like though there is a lot, lot of doing needed to change the course that we as a species are on – or that we who live under the civilization, are forced to live another civilization live in… One of the primary challenges that we face is one of imagination. Because imagination feeds the soul, it’s a playful creativity, it’s a necessary part of, I think, what it is to be alive. Can you speak about this, and sort of point to any projects or movements or people that you think listeners might appreciate in terms of having a radical imagination, and being brave enough to share that out with other people?

PG: Huh. Yeah, I’d start off underscoring how important I think imagination is, like you said. I think it’s, I don’t know, maybe I think it’s more important than hope. Sometimes it’s just really not possible to access hope. But it’s nice, even in those moments, to be able to look out your window or look at the street and see a completely different world filling up that space, even if you don’t think you’ll ever live to see it. So that I think is extremely important. And I don’t think that we can, I mean, obviously the world that we create is going to surprise us. It’ll be born and dialogue with us and it will also insist on certain things and impose itself in certain ways. But at the same time, I don’t think we can create a society that we’re unable to imagine. Even though the caveat that I was trying to trying to communicate is that it will still be different from how we imagine in, but the imagining it is a hugely important part of creating it.

And I think it’s extremely, extremely important to make a very, very clear analytical and strategic distinction between imaginings and blueprints. Creating blueprints is just a furtherance of the war against the planet. It is an extremely colonial act to impose a blueprint on the world. And actually, this reticence towards imagination is probably the biggest criticism I’ve ever had of insurrectionary anarchism. Like this general refusal to imagine. Which isn’t even really well supported by the theoretical bases of insurrectionary anarchism. I think it’s just more often manifests as a fear, like an insistence of focusing on the present, which has some important strategic elements to that insistence. Like we’re gonna focus on the present. But then there’s also I think this fear of actually going beyond that.

Who is doing a good job of sharing these imaginings, these imaginations? So okay, there’s this one group that I interviewed in the US for the book. I keep their location anonymous, but basically they get funds and divert theirs, or they take advantage of some financing that’s intended for other purposes. Basically it’s intended to help large scale industrial farmers buy trees for windbreaks and whatnot. And this is a radical anticapitalist group that buys massive amounts of trees, like tens of thousands of trees in order to help neighborhoods move towards food autonomy. And I haven’t seen them do anything that’s explicitly propagandistic works of imagination. Like “we can imagine this area that we live in being an abundant orchard, where you can grow our own healthly food and not rely on wage labor to get low quality food”. But I think on the material level, there’s a great deal of imagination in what they do.

And I think also a lot of it refers back to peasant and Indigenous imagination from Latin America, because a lot of the neighborhoods where what they do is most effective are neighborhoods with with a large number of Central American migrants who have a lot of experience with growing their own food and with combining residential and agricultural spaces in a way that is generally not done in the Global North. And so if not on the level of like written propaganda, at the very least on the material level, there is a thriving imaginary in that project of neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, working class neighborhoods that increase their quality of life by growing healthy food. And this is one small group that’s doing this, if this were done across the US, then you’d be creating like an atmospherically significant amount of carbon reduction, of carbon being brought down from the air by reforestation. It’s done in a complex healthy way and not in like a mono cropping, genetically engineered way, and it also gives working class neighborhoods access to healthy food.

Also, most of the trees that they’re planning are autochthonous, how do you say that in English? They’re native, they’re native species, most of which have been neglected by industrial agriculture because industrial agriculture imposes a lot of needs, that are divorced from the needs of human and environmental health. Like transportability: apples are great because they can be they can be hard, they can be harvested early, and then they can be shipped around the world. Pawpaws, for example, are a very, very important native tree food from North America they’re kind of too mushy, they don’t work so well being transported so they don’t work so well as a supermarket food. And so it’s a very healthy food, which is a part of Indigenous cultures, Indigenous histories, Indigenous technology, which is just removed from the equation by how it’s done. And so it’s it’s really awesome to see a group that’s bringing back a lot of those native species and increasing biodiversity and increasing human health in working class neighborhoods.

Aside from more material projects, there’s something very, very important that anarchists have actually been doing for a long time, and that is experiencing a very, very exciting rebirth, which is anarchists speculative fiction. Whether science fiction or fantasy, there is increasing attention being being paid to some of the greats from the recent past, like Octavia Butler who’s a radical, not an anarchist but someone I’ve learned a lot from, someone that, it doesn’t matter that she’s not an anarchist, she’s a really great writer and really great thinker. So yeah, Octavia Butler, Ursula K Le Guin, over here [in Spain and Catalunya], for example, they’ve even been republishing and reprinting some of the anarchists who are engaging in some speculative fiction from out of the workers movement in the late 19th century. And then you also have a lot of current writers who are putting out anarchist speculative fiction, and that’s something that we really need to support and we need to try to spread beyond just the movement. Get it into our libraries, get it into our local bookstores, because that’s generally more effective in spreading anarchist ideas and anarchist imaginaries then, you know, then a lot of our nonfiction writing.

TFSR: Yeah, plus, it’s fun.

PG: Oh, yeah.

TFSR: [giggles] I’ve seen warnings on social media and in some recently published books such as Climate Leviathan – which honestly, I have not finished yet, just haven’t had time – but of ideas of eco-Leninism, or eco-Maoism, an ostensibly leftist authoritarian state response to climate destabilization, then I’ve got a feeling that it’s not just about Derek Jensen anymore. Can you talk a little bit about this tendency, and if you see this as an actual threat with actual adherence, like an actual threat to liberty?

PG: Yeah. Probably most significantly Andreas Malm took it into a new territory, well beyond, for example, like Derek Jensen, with that group. And so this is something that is getting us lot of attention in anticapitalist academic circles. I’ve never seen anywhere where it has any implantation on the ground, like directly in real struggles or in social movements. So from that perspective, it would seem just like a very out of touch, elite, making kind of wild arguments that are fairly ridiculous and irrelevant. Except I think we’ve seen dynamics before, where when the official centrist practices and ideologies flounder, and are unable to produce solutions that the system needs in order to correct and survive – and that’s definitely, we are entering that that period of history right now- where authoritarian elements in social movements that seem to be very, very tiny and not very relevant, all of a sudden go really big, really fast.

That happened in a huge way in the Spanish Civil War, where the authoritarian Communists were completely irrelevant and tiny, and the anarchists had so much influence in the revolutionary movement. And then in less than a year, because of outside funding and because of elite power structures making alliances of convenience, all of a sudden authoritarian revolution – supposedly revolutionary methodology because in fact the Stalinist were quite explicit in saying that they weren’t trying to fight the revolution in Spain – where those authoritarian currents gain ground really, really, really rapidly. And so we need to learn from history, we need to prepare ourselves for that eventuality or inevitability, and we need to be making the arguments now about how these authoritarian ways of looking at the problem are completely detached from people’s needs and the needs of actual ecosystems, and how they are completely unrealistic given the nature of the problem.

That also means being more vociferous about talking about our methodologies, our solutions, and the victories or partial victories that we have. In the case of Andreas Malm, he made it a little bit easier to beginning with some pretty obviously racist, anti-Indigenous statements that he made. I mean he’s very much… he has trouble seeing past the needs of the reproduction of Global North white supremacist society. But I think later iterations of that kind of authoritarian, Eco-Leninist thinking are going to be more sophisticated and they’re going to do a better job at hiding their colonial and white supremacist dynamics. And so I think we need to, yeah, we need to be conscious of that danger while it’s still small.

TFSR: Does it seems strange to you that AK Press just published a book by him last year? How to Blow up a Pipeline.

PG: Um I mean, yeah. There are anarchists publishers that take the approach of only publishing books that they feel affinity with, and I think some really, really important literature that is not commercially viable has gotten circulated that way and that’s really important. And then there are other other radical publishers, like AK that take the approach of being a very broad platform. And there’s some things that AK publishes that I wouldn’t have found out about or gotten access to that both have a broader appeal or like a less radical appeal, and that are also exactly the things that anarchist, especially in North America, need to be thinking about that address things that we historically ignore and do a terrible job of. And then there are things that AK or similar publishers have published that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole, or that I would touch to burn maybe?

TFSR: [chuckles] Yeah, and I’m not meaning to put AK Press on the spot specifically, but like, that book, and then like, Nick Estes-

PG: The same thing applies, like PM, like all these larger platform publishers. I think I as a person would tend more – just because of I don’t know, my personality, or whatever – would tend more to the sort of small affinity kind of oriented model. But I’m also able to recognize that the way a broader publisher does things has advantages, and it puts us in contact with texts and ideas that we really need to be in dialogue with, and that if we’re just focusing on affinity we’ll never get out of our little echo chamber.

So, yeah, and then some of the Marxists who I respect who are closer to anarchism, say that Andreas Malm’s earlier, big seminal book was important and useful. Like about climate capitalism, about looking at the intersections between climate change and capitalisms earlier development. So, you know, evidently he’s put out things that are theoretically useful, but I think he’s kind of a clown when it comes to direct action. Like he’s coming from this highly privileged, Scandinavian social democratic vantage point where he can talk about his flirtation with direct action from a few years ago without the risk of going into prison, which is [laughing] another planet for the rest of us. And then he, with How to Blow Up a Pipeline, it just seems so like vapid and fatuous. Like this highly privileged academic talking really tough about “yeah, we’re gonna take this thing down” when he really has no idea what he’s talking about and he tends to talk about it in very irresponsible and unrealistic ways.

TFSR: Available at a bookstore near you…

PG: [laughs]

TFSR: [laughing] So, one of my favorite answers to the question of “How can listeners offer solidarity from where they’re at?” that I’ve asked guests in the past, one of the best answers that I’ve gotten consistently from people that are doing anti-megaproject work, or blocking pipelines – megaproject I guess – anticolonial struggles, is to do that work where we’re at, against the oppressive dynamics here to destabilize the capitalist core, so that autonomy can flourish here, as well as at the peripheries. And I feel like that was really echoed in the conclusion of your book. What would you tell people a good next step is after reading the book? [laughs] Leading question?

PG: I mean, in tandem with developing a global perspective, that’s real, that’s based in actual relationships of solidarity with the people and with struggles in other parts of the world, I would say that taking steps, at least baby steps towards food autonomy, is something that can be done anywhere, needs to be done anywhere. And that it’s also an interesting exercise or an interesting line of attack, because it can kind of give us new perspectives on what are the structures that get in the way of our survival? You know, what are the structures that really need to be identified as enemies? And sharing food is is a really powerful activity on every level. And so moving beyond more superficial practices of affinity, towards practices of solidarity with people who are, you know, don’t think the same way as us, as a step towards actually creating like a community worthy of the name, food is extremely important. Being able to share food, being able to decrease dependence on capitalism, that aspect. If I had to give a shorter answer I would highlight that for special attention.

TFSR: So start a garden. You heard it here first.

[both crack up together]

PG: Housing! Housing is really important.

TFSR: Totally.

PG: Taking over housing, anyways, yeah. To answer properly you’d have to talk about so many different things.

TFSR: I guess intervene where you can and have some imagination. I really liked the fact that a couple times in the book that you challenged the the readership to “no, really, stop reading. Please take a moment, close your eyes or look out the window and just do some thinking”. Yeah, that’s good.

Peter, are you working on anything else right now or just kind of like, taking care of business between between books?

PG: Uhhhhh, right now just trying to stay alive and yeah. I think we’re doing a very bad job generally in our movements of taking care of ourselves and taking care of each other. And so I’m trying to look at that more. Yeah, trying to get off my ass to actually plant my garden once it’s spring. And yeah, we’re still working on the infrastructures gatherings, anarchists infrastructures gatherings here in Catalunya. Whenever I find the motivation to start working on the next book, the next one will probably be a critique of democracy, both representative and direct. And then I’d also love to get to this research project about the invention of whiteness in the Spanish colonial experience, since it’s been mostly studied in the English experience of the invention of whiteness through through colonialism.

TFSR: Cool. Well, thanks for this lovely book. I really enjoyed the read and thank you for taking the time to talk.

PG: Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to talk and thanks for, thanks for reading, thanks for the conversation and, yeah. Thanks for being in touch.

TFSR: Of course.

[londonspirit]

another radio interview

(skip the last two or so minutes if you want to - the rest is rather nice)

[thejaguartour]

Victoria Monét LIVE NOW on Capital Xtra Breakfast! 11/16 🤎

[nando161mando]

Intervista sul Gruppo di supporto psicologico per I familiari dei detenuti morti in carcere, su Radio Onda Rossa

Interview on the psychological support group for the families of prisoners who died in prison, on Radio Onda Rossa

[stxrvel]

disclosure (6)

series summary. the holy grail of the seven men who ruled the country's entertainment used to be your friends at school. now, ten years later and between successes and failures, what reason would they have to want to come back into your life? pairing. platonic ot7 x f!reader for now content. first of all, english is not my first language so sorry for any mistakes! curse words, angst, reader becomes sus, fighting (in the wrong way), angry and mean jin? self-doubt. a/n. hi guysssssss!!! sorry it's taking me this long always, but i finally finished this part! i actually just finished it and it's almost 2am and i have to go to work in fivehours. i'm publishing this part as it is and maybe tomorrow if i have the time i'll look at it again, bc i'm really exhausted right now. and also please forgive me if there are any mistakes in the text;((((. but i hope you guys enjoy this 7k monster of a chapter and i'll see you next time!!

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The fourth book of your saga was a reflection of everything you had gone through when you moved with your family to the capital. You finished the third book when you had barely been in the city for a month and maybe that's why it didn't have a happy ending and why everyone who had read the trilogy had been devastated with that ending. It wasn't something you had planned from the beginning, but it wasn't something that ruined the plot either. It was actually much better than you had planned.

And when you finally finished with the trilogy, starting to write again wasn't hard, especially with so many mixed emotions and so much repressed pain coming back to the surface uninvited.

Maybe you hadn't been in connection with your strong feelings since then, when the city constantly reminded you that you had lost the only people you considered your true friends and the pain of their absence and the harsh reality was a knife burying itself in your chest over and over again. You hadn't felt this much since the moment you realized that they were able to live their lives without you, but you had to go through the mourning of losing them.

You hadn't felt this much since then, until that moment when, having been just a day since you had decided you would take the path of healing, you had to reopen the draft of your fourth book and find all those angry paragraphs, spit out words, piled up letters and whole pages filled with pure rage and pain; of disappointment and realization… of betrayal.

“Are you going to start again already? Don't you think you deserve a break?”

The words Yuna had spoken to you that morning were echoing in your head from the moment you read the first words of this draft and the memories began to well up, emotions making your hair stand on end and your throat close up.

It was almost funny to remember how incredibly angry you were when you first arrived in the city.

The city, with posters of Jungkook's face on every corner, with his performances on some screens or just teenagers talking about him and whispering about his music, it was practically impossible to escape it. The city, with radios blaring Yoongi's songs, in a cab or on public transportation, interviews blaring on TVs in shopping malls. The city, with the international news, which echoed so much, about the spectacular promises of modeling. The country couldn't be prouder to have representatives of that caliber, because the moment Taehyung and Jimin overtook the West and broke the international barrier, it was only a matter of time before the others followed suit and completely changed the idea of entertainment and media in the country.

The first months in the city were nauseating, when you had to get used to and overcome your emotions the hard way, fighting against the aggressive tide that all the time tried to drown you, and that was noticeable in every word and every scene of that book, and you were almost sure that if any of them read it, they would know immediately. If they wanted to know anything about you, if they were really interested, there would be no better way than through your books; in no other situation would you be so vulnerable.

You wondered, for a moment, if any of them would have read any of the books by now. If Namjoon would remember when you asked him for strange words to describe emotions and now they were captured in those impressions, or when you asked Jin and Hoseok for their opinion about the complex construction of your world and each of their peculiar and crazy details can be found in those pages. Just as your books had all the pieces of you, it also had crumbs of them, and you wondered if they would notice if they read it.

Don't you think you deserve a break?

Maybe you do. That's why you had decided to close that cycle once and for all, and there was no better way to do it than to finally start with the edition of this book. Of this fourth book, so strong in its toughness and determination, so vulnerable in its rage and palpable pain.

It was the cleanest and purest and truest version of you.

But as much as you deserved it, it felt more like punishment. Reliving those emotions and evoking those memories caused you more anguish and you didn't know if you could face a kind of shock therapy like that to finally let go.

“The editors said you'd be here.”

You saw Choi Dohyun standing, leaning against the door frame above the computer screen that still displayed the title of the first chapter of your fourth book. On a Wednesday at barely eight o'clock in the morning, the great CEO decided to set aside a few minutes of his busy time to gratify you with his presence.

His calm, serene and carefree expression was the contrast to the swirl of emotions that ran through that room, rising from the crown of your head. You could almost tell he wasn't venturing into the office because he could feel the tension radiating from your position at the desk. He must have even seen it on your face.

You sighed and barely waved at him, running your hands over your face, trying to ease your tense muscles a little.

“Is there a specific reason why you don't want the editors to read the book?”

Choi Dohyun was a mystery. You only knew about him from the three-hour conversation you had the day before, besides the strange looks he cast at Yoongi from his office entrance. He had shown himself to be a very open person and it was clear that he was an expert at making things work his way. You knew he had agreed to many of your conditions because what he would get in return was bigger than what it would cost him, which really wasn't too much, just enough to maintain a level of creative freedom that would allow you to access editorial support when you saw fit —because you knew that once you handed it over, it would no longer be entirely yours—and often businessmen reflected their own personalities in how they negotiated a deal.

Dohyun tried to come across as a fairly personable person; he tried to be understanding, communicative and open-minded, so much so that he reminded you of the comfortable security of an older brother. However, you could tell in that meeting that he held back too much; that he had hated the way Yuna used to interrupt him to ask him questions or how your brother would put too many buts in his mouth and try to get information out of him that he shouldn't give away. You could tell he was impatient, that he really expected the meeting to last less than twenty minutes because he was sure you would sign the contract blindly as soon as you saw the profits you'd gain from the distribution and sale of your books. You also noticed, in case it wasn't obvious already, that he preferred to be in control as long as the situation and the people around him allowed it, for his convenience. If he gave in on several occasions, you knew it had been because he was very, very aware of everything that benefited him.

There were two options: Choi Dohyun wore a mask constantly, or Choi Dohyun was a fraud.

“I just wanted to read it one more time… before handing it over. I won't take long.”

“It's okay. No problem.” Dohyun finally walked into the room, the office he had handed you for whenever you decided to go to his publishing house. You didn't even know writers had that option; you didn't know if it was common, but he allowed it. He had also offered you a writing kit that included a typewriter that looked quite expensive, and although you hadn't accepted it, there it was in one of the corners of the office. Dohyun sat across from you, glancing at the few things you had brought from home to make the place a little more pleasant. “I understand that sometimes it's hard to separate yourself from your work. It's a part of you, after all. A kind of vulnerability that not everyone sees.”

That was the kind of thing that kept Dohyun's true nature a mystery. His stoic expression as he blurted out words of comfort. It almost felt like running sandpaper over cement. Not that you needed to figure him out, because at the end of the day he was a boss of sorts and you two were bound by a contract with mutual economic benefits —technically, you were each there for a benefit of your own— but it was something you wanted to be aware of, watchful of, informed of, because you had no way of knowing this guy wouldn't try to take advantage of some situation later, in any possible scenario.

“Yes…”

“Take as much time as you need. The demand for the trilogy is still pretty high, after all.”

You nodded at him in response, wary of his attempt to lighten the mood. If he was the kind of person you thought he was, he surely knew you didn't feel an ounce of trust towards him.

“In just two days you must have quite a bit of work to do with that,” you tried to continue the conversation, interspersing your gaze over the letters on the screen and his dark eyes.

“But it's a very welcome work. Aren't you glad your books were so well received?”

“Yes,” you answered without hesitation, momentarily remembering the proud look on Yuna and your brother's face when they finally got you to see the reactions and opinions of your books on social media. “It's comforting. For your work to be appreciated, recognized… moreover, that it allows you to make a living from it. It's amazing and a very great privilege.”

Dohyun shook his head in assent, interlacing his fingers over his abdomen. From his nonchalant way of taking a seat across from you, slumped over the chair almost as if he was an old friend from college and not practically your boss, and from how his voice reflected that sense of calmness and confidence, you could almost tell he was perfectly selling the facade of the most trustworthy person in the world.

But ultimately it was your feeling and your need to automatically distrust anyone you met because you didn't know at what point they would try to take advantage of you or turn their back on you, and maybe Dohyun wasn't as bad a person as you wanted to paint him in your head. Maybe you would even accept that his presence was a bit comforting and that he actually reminded you of someone you used to know in the past and of whom currently, if you knew he was still alive, it was by sheer luck. That personality, that sense of security he conveyed and that way he had had of expressing himself to you in that meeting that showed a different and more mature kind of wisdom, indeed reminded you of someone else.

Dohyun was very, very much like Jin.

“Can I… ask you something?” you hesitated, alternating your gaze between the screen and his dark eyes, not quite sure if you wanted to go down that path, but aware that you would get something in return if you did, and perhaps the risk would be worth it. “But it's not related to… this.”

As you pointed to your computer and the rest of the office, you couldn't decipher what expression Dohyun sketched. Trying to read him like you did everyone else, it seemed he entertained a specific train of thought in his head and was sparked by your question, but you couldn't probe much further because he agreed, tilting his head to invite you to ask bluntly.

“How do you know Min Yoongi?”

Dohyun then lifted his chin and his lips curved into a sort of small smile that could more accurately be described as a grimace. With his eyes on the window, with the beautiful view of the city and its busy streets, Dohyun took his time to answer and his pleased and almost satisfied look gave you to understand that your question was not a surprise at all. Dohyun could take it simply as healthy curiosity, for after all Yoongi was a celebrity and there weren't many people around the country who couldn't recognize him and you literally saw him face to face.

However, of course, there was something about his attitude that felt different. He wasn't surprised by your question, it was true, but maybe not for the reason you thought.

“He's a friend of my best friend.” Dohyun finally answered, returning your gaze, a glint of amusement highlighting his dark eyes. “I met him a couple of years ago through him, who is also his best friend. Otherwise, I doubt we would've ever met.”

Ah, Dohyun had a best friend who was best friends with Yoongi. That could only mean one thing.

“Ah. Then your best friend is part of the seven kings.”

Dohyun raised his eyebrows, clearly amused by your choice of words and the permanence of that haunting smile and the glint in his eyes should've been warning enough. He had the posture, demeanor and speech of a person who knew he was in control of the situation. Whatever his purpose was in entertaining this conversation, you already knew you were involved in that reason, indirectly.

Dohyun knew something about you that you had no idea about.

“Yes, indeed. It's Kim Seokjin. We met in college.”

As you guessed, of course. That's where the similar traits you could find in his personality came from.

But then Yoongi wasn't directly friends with Dohyun, and they couldn't be that close because of the nonchalant way he referred to him, so the question of why he was here yesterday, precisely when you came, would remain unanswered. It could be a coincidence? Of course, and you could remain in doubt, or you could…

“Wow. You two really are a powerful duo.”

Dohyun let out a laugh, nodding, looking so comfortable with himself, as if you were asking all the questions you should be asking.

“I love my job and I know I'm good at what I do, but Jin is simply on another level.”

You nodded, getting into his game of pretending, with a half smile on your face.

You knew that if Yuna knew what you were doing she would shake her head and tell you that you were crazy; that you should try to be less hard on other people and that's why you had never been able to hit it off with the other co-workers in Sol's cafeteria.

“Yes. I hear he's a great surgeon. He was top of his class, wasn't he?”

“That's right.” Dohyun nodded, determined not to look away from you. “But you're close to them too, aren't you? I saw Taehyung's Instagram stories when he uploaded your books.”

You blinked. Once. And again. He had already figured you out, and now he wanted to reverse the table and get some kind of reaction or information from you that you didn't know what kind of mystery it would solve in his head. The best option was to feign a bit of surprise, which was what you did, as if you didn't expect him to suddenly bring that up.

“Well, we studied together in school, but we were never that close.”

You lifted a shoulder, trying to downplay the subject, as if on cue, and Dohyun nodded slightly processing the information, averting his gaze over the dark carpet on the floor. He seemed to be tying up loose ends in his head and had more questions, the way he squinted his eyes as you gave him his space to think.

You had no idea what he was getting at. You had already brought out to him that he was close friends with Kim Seokjin and that, basically by extension he knew Yoongi. You could almost say it was a bit of an ordinary, almost trivial topic, not overly suspicious. Unless, of course, he knew something else that raised his curiosity and made you look suspicious in his eyes for asking such questions.

It seemed the most certain theory.

“And through him you must have met the others sometime, right?”

And it seemed you were right, too.

You had to deny his assertion, you knew, but it seemed you had taken half a second too long because he beat you to the word, shaking his head in a nod, and then said:

“That explains a lot.”

“Huh?”

Play dumb, play dumb.

Dohyun cracked a big grin, looking almost like a predator in the midst of its hunt, and from that alone you knew he'd already put his puzzle together.

“Well… actually, now that we're being honest, Jin was the one who recommended me to read your books.”

Wow.

Okay.

Jin… told Dohyun about you? About your books?

That doesn't explain anything. In fact, more questions popped up in your head than you could control and you were sure Dohyun could see the question marks moving over your irises.

“He told me that there could be a great opportunity if I published you and he was really right. I don't regret sending you that offer.”

Dohyun leaned back against the backrest and stretched one of his arms over the chair next to him. His posture was a little more relaxed than before and you couldn't help the feeling of anger that ran through you because you had given him just what he wanted, but you couldn't concentrate too much on that because you were too surprised by what he had just blurted out, as if it was nothig.

Of all the things you could've imagined, you would never have considered that this huge and prestigious publishing house had offered you a contract just because one of the CEO's great friends had recommended it to him. I mean, if Jin had never talked about it, would you have had any chance of getting this offer? Of signing this contract? Would you have been recognized on your own merit and not because you were linked to the mouth of a close friend?

None of that made any sense. Why had Jin told Choi Dohyun about you? His best friend being the owner of the most prestigious publishing house in the country, clearly knowing the implications of his actions, why would he do that? Maybe he didn't count on his friend throwing him overboard someday for gossiping and because he has an ego bigger than his own head? Maybe he thought it would be an anonymous job forever? And for what reason? On what grounds? What kind of emotions moved him to make that decision? Maybe it was simply an altruistic desire. Maybe he was moved by the same thing that moved Taehyung, the one who started all this. But was it something premeditated or not? Was it something he had previously discussed with Namjoon? Would the others know about it? Would they have agreed? Would they not have cared?

In the midst of that mental stupor, the very idea of healing seemed stupid to you. The immense confusion and anger that was coursing through your blood had no place for this group of fools to continue to meddle in your life as if they were playing a fucking election game on their computer. Why? Why? Why?

You wanted to get out of a simple doubt with Dohyun, to know what kind of connection he had with Yoongi and that everything that had happened was a coincidence, and you had ended up with a thousand more questions, with a hundred confusions and even more mixed emotions.

And Yoongi… would he have been in his office yesterday for something related to that?

“At first I thought Taehyung had asked him, but Jin is quite careful about such things. He wouldn't hint something like that to me even because his brothers ask him to, unless it was someone he could vouch for. So you knew Jin too, right?”

You didn't try to deny it, but you didn't give him the reason either. Amidst a sea of questions and confusion, incredulous and angry, you just shook your head and crossed your arms.

“I'll bring the first draft tomorrow.”

Dohyun took his time, drumming his fingers on the wood of the chair, sending you a look as if he wanted to get more answers out of you because your attitude raised more doubts than he initially had. Maybe you let go of a wolf's leash or this would be a one-time occurrence, you had no idea. But he said nothing more. Finally he got up, said goodbye and left.

Don't you think you deserve a break?

You should've listened to Yuna.

-

The next day, when you finished editing the draft of your fourth book amid tears, several cups of coffee and an excruciating pain in your wrist, you finally handed it in to the editors with a heavy heart and an hour of sleep in your body. It had officially ceased to be yours. The revelation that Dohyun had actually offered you all of this because Jin had asked him to do so kept going round and round in your head and made you revise and edit that draft more harshly than you would've done before.

Maybe you added a few extra curse words.

“If you don't finish that pasta, I'm going to steal it from you.”

Yuna hadn't even finished her own plate and was already eyeing yours, her brow furrowed and her own fork stabbing the ceramic of the deep dish you'd served your friend in as she crossed the threshold of the front door. You had been stirring the food with your fork for a while, thinking, reflecting, theorizing, trying to figure out what you really wanted; trying to recognize and accept the emotions inside you that were upsetting you.

Your parents had left early and Seojun was back in his college dorms, so you invited Yuna to lunch because you knew she loved the pastries your mom made and because you thought it would do you good to have some company after turning in the draft of your book. But, really, you were more overwhelmed than before. Yuna's presence didn't stop the thoughts in your head from racing, nor did it erase from reality what had happened.

“Y/n?”

You raised your head.

“Are you okay?”

You nodded, and tried to focus on eating lunch before rambling on.

“Is it because of the book?”

“No, no. Everything's fine. I was just thinking.”

“Do you think you should've waited a little longer to turn it in?”

You shook your head. “No.”

It wasn't an order from Dohyun or anything like that. You decided to get started on editing the next book because it was a bit desperate to have nothing to do. Before you could focus on the whole operational and logistical process of delivering the books, but now that was taken care of by a separate company and all you had to do was verify that the money was coming into your account and that was it. Not that it was bad, but you were not used to just sitting idly by. So you thought that continuing with the pre-publication editing of the next books might be a good way to pass the time.

You didn't expect, of course, the statement you heard the day before, let alone that it would knock down your motivation like the wind to dry leaves. After that conversation with Dohyun, you decided that the best thing you could do was to turn in that draft and give them as much work as possible as a distraction so that you wouldn't have to go back to that building for at least a couple of weeks. It wasn't a healthy activity, of course, because at the time you were only functioning to keep Yuna from questioning if there was something wrong with you. Well, she probably did, but she preferred not to comment on it, because you hadn't been giving her too many answers to her questions lately.

Having decided that Dohyun was an expert manipulator, you could only worry about the possibility that he might decide to comment something about that conversation to Jin or just stir up a conversation about the possible existence of a friendly bond with him during school time. You didn't know what could trigger that; with everything that had happened up to that point you could no longer be sure of anything or trust anything.

“No. I thought I'd turn it in now so I'd have more time to read the next books. I know that one isn't too bad. I revised it too many times while I was writing it and even after.”

“And it's pretty long, isn't it?”

You nodded, finally tasting another mouthful of pasta. “Seven hundred pages.”

“Holy Christ,” Yuna put a hand to her forehead and sketched a worried expression. Then her excited exclamation echoed throughout the house. “What a thrill! I can't wait to read it!!!!!!”

Yuna returned to work an hour later and you spent the rest of the afternoon between shifts of lying down staring at the ceiling and watching more videos about your books on social media, which you hadn't been able to leave since you saw them with your whole family in the living room. It still seemed surreal to you that you could search the name of your books on the internet and you would indeed get the results you expected. Clearly not all the opinions were praise, but you were willing to take all of that and learn, implement and consider it for the next stories you were willing to tell. For now, you were going to focus on keeping the editors busy enough that they wouldn't have to ask about it or demand your presence for any reason. This trilogy really was quite a lengthy saga, so when they finallt finish editing the fourth book, you'd have the fifth waiting, and so on. At least until you had another amazing idea for a new story.

Now, on the slightly more disturbing topics, you still had more loose ends to tie up than you had initially thought. As you still had those particles of anger running through your body and you were still convinced that there was still no room for healing and overcoming, you could only think about what Yoongi's presence in Dohyun's office was about and if it had to do with what Jin had done.

That was the first line of thought. The second one sounded more like Yuna with her serious voice trying to talk some sense into you and tell you that you were seeing into it too much, that surely it was all just a coincidence and that Yoongi's presence was just some kind of crossfire.

But… yet… how many more times did something like this have to happen before you stopped chalking it up to coincidence? How many more times would you say it was a coincidence until everything started to connect to a purpose? Did they even have a purpose? Did they have a reason for all this, for all this unnecessary drama? And was their reason worth it to compensate for the instability you were going through? Having pent up emotions, confusion, lots of doubts and zero answers was about to drive you crazy.

However, maybe seeing things from another approach would allow you to understand.

Because, honestly, you saw it as too complicated to be able to leave them behind in this way, when it seemed that, on purpose or not, you would keep finding them in your soup. Adopting a slightly more objective approach, even though your emotions were always running high when it came to them, could give you the resolution you were looking for and the answer to the questions you were asking yourself. And there would be nothing more than that, because it would be impossible to restore the friendship you once had. Perhaps the truth would be painful, but you would accept it as it was and move on. Now, as old as you were, it would not be as hard as it was ten years ago when in the midst of confusion and desolation you could only cry.

Now, you had already gone through the mourning and made peace with the distance, the absence and the betrayal.

Maybe, if you tried a little harder, you could bring real closure —and soon, hopefully— by finding the answers on your own.

-

Kim Namjoon used to believe that he was good at dealing with any kind of problem. In his head, which he was spinning around like a huge sphere and he was a hamster, Namjoon was sure that he could fix any situation and solve any misunderstanding, any fight or at least come to an agreement that would make everyone feel comfortable enough to move forward.

In his head, Namjoon was a three thousand dollars conflict-solver. Seeking solutions from reason and objectivity was basically how he kept his company afloat, that company he had inherited from his parents and had turned into the economic juggernaut it was today. All that success was summed up in the capacity for resolution that Namjoon had in his super head and, of course, his strategic capacity that allowed him to read his opponents and know exactly what they wanted, how they wanted it and when they wanted it.

However…

The whole table was still silent.

And Namjoon could only look at the faces of each of his friends, his best friends, practically his brothers, while they shied away from his gaze or directly ignored him, while he clasped his hands on the edge of the chair and tried to keep his composure because he no longer knew what to do.

Kim Namjoon, the three-thousandth troubleshooter, had a factory defect and could not fix the one thing he had always been able to fix with ease.

When Hoseok had walked into his office two nights ago with that stern and serious expression, Namjoon knew that there would be more problems to solve. But if he had to be honest, even before that moment he knew it wasn't working out well. Maybe it was because of the delicacy of the subject or the crudeness of his friends to address it, but Namjoon was losing the important ingredient of patience and that was something that hadn't happened to him before.

But then again, how could they all be so insensitive?

“Doesn't anyone have anything to say?”

Hoseok had been the only one to be spared from this discussion, though his presence was required at the table and tension radiated from his body in equal amounts. The others were directly attacked by the three thousandth (broken) problem-solver and despite Namjoon giving them a space to try to explain the situation, the table was still silent and with each passing second the pressure cooker containing Namjoon's anger was beeping louder and louder.

“I don't think there's much to say.”

It was Jin who finally broke the silence and Namjoon let out some air.

“Ah, thank you, Jin. Why do you think so?”

With his arms crossed, the older sent him an incredulous look.

“We've had this conversation three times already, Namjoon. Why do you think it's necessary for us to keep repeating ourselves?”

Hoseok had told Namjoon that he was concerned about the coexistence in the pent-house and that perhaps the elephant in the room was not being addressed in the right way; that more and more misunderstandings were being created between everyone and that it was making for an untrustworthy environment for the youngers. Namjoon agreed halfway through; if he had to be honest, none of it would've gotten to that point if none of them had been so irresponsible and daring to do all that they had done. And Jin had the least right to dismiss the issue as he had.

“Because you all don't seem to have listened to me at all, especially you.”

Jin snorted and turned his head away. Jungkook beside him barely winced at the hostile exchange.

“And what did I do?”

“What did you do? Jin, how can you be so inconsiderate?”

“I only rushed an exchange that was eventually going to happen, what the fuck is wrong with that?”

Namjoon tried not to look so surprised by the fact that the conversation he had had with him two nights ago and Yoongi had basically gone in one ear and out the other. Namjoon had no idea if it was an occupational hazard or a personality trait, but Jin was having a kind of stubbornness that bordered too much on his pride and desire to be right.

And right now it wasn't about who was right or wrong. It was about the fact that they had all made a promise and now they were breaking it as if it was worthless. Worse, as if the only ones affected by it were them and not a third party.

“Didn't you stop to think how she would feel if she found out that was how things went down?”

Jin rolled his eyes, but didn't answer him.

“Why do you all do all these things without believing that they will have consequences beyond your own feelings? That's all I'm asking you to consider!”

Taehyung and Jungkook at least had the decency to actually look embarrassed, avoiding Namjoon's gaze. Jimin was still convinced that he had done nothing extremely wrong and Yoongi simply demonstrated his sorrow through indifference. Namjoon knew that Yoongi was just as frustrated as he was with the way things were going, because they were the only ones trying to fix the messes the others had been thoughtlessly causing. And Jin… well, it was obvious that he didn't see any big implications beyond having to be scolded by Namjoon.

“Guys…” Hoseok started, sitting to Namjoon's right with a tired and defeated expression. If Namjoon and Yoongi were looking out for the integrity of the third party concerned, Hoseok was the one who was most concerned about the bonds that were breaking between them and that was why he had gone to Namjoon to have a group meeting again and set the boundaries once and for all. “You guys know that Namjoon is not just talking for the sake of talking. Jin, you don't need to get defensive. I understand that you tried to make the connection in good faith, but you have to understand that it was a very high risk. And while Dohyun is your friend, you know he's not very trustworthy.”

Jin grunted then, despite the kind tone Hoseok used to address him, and the others at the table only sent him a surprised look.

“Sure, now it's all my own damn fault. Not only do I have to deal with the stress of work, now I have to come to my supposed time off to deal with this too?”

“Hyung,” Yoongi called after him and frowned at the rude tone the older had used. “No one is saying it's your fault. We all have a part in this.”

“I don't care, Yoongi. Whatever's going on right now you know who's really to blame. And there's nothing you can do about it anymore.”

“Jin,” Namjoon called back and the aforementioned turned to look at him with daggers in his eyes. “You made the promise too.”

“Yes, one I never agreed to and you know it.”

Hoseok sighed and ran his hands over his face. “This is not the time to apportion blame, okay? I only wanted this space because I want us to fix this lack of communication and all this hostility that is affecting our living together.”

Namjoon turned to look at the table, finding the younger ones sealed in silence. None of them raised their heads and they showed signs of nervousness and anxiety, even if they tried to hide it under the tablecloth on the table.

There were too many things Namjoon wanted to control; there were too many things he wanted to solve; there were a number of other things that drove him mad and others that made him feel hopeless. Understanding all these emotions, his own or others', was wearing him down and perhaps that was why he was increasingly losing an ounce of patience. However, no matter how hard it was for him, Namjoon had to be sure that his priority was right in front of him. He had chosen to do so a couple of years ago and he could no longer turn back time.

“Hey, I'm sorry, okay?” Namjoon started once again and although Hoseok tried to shush him to calm down, he continued, “I know how I've acted during these days since everything started and I have not been very open to dialogue. For me it was… it was like crossing a forbidden boundary and I couldn't understand how you guys could jump over it without a second thought. It made my hair stand on end and I didn't… I didn't… I didn't know how to contain those emotions, I didn't know how to control them and clearly I didn't know how to express them. And the truth is that it worries me. I understand that you don't, because otherwise you wouldn't have done any of that, but I would like you to try to do that because this is not a unilateral action that will only affect you and will only be in your memories. You are affecting her too, and very much so. We were not good, not even friendly or cordial, so I need you to understand that all these things she will not see them as you think. Jungkook, you experienced it first hand. She hates us.”

Jungkook jerked on the chair and Taehyung was the one who reached over the table to take his intertwined hands. Jin sighed, finally letting the anger dissipate and Yoongi mimicked him, a little calmer as he watched his elder relax. Hoseok shook his head in assent, noticing the tension at the table dissipate a bit and how the young men held each other.

“And rightly so, because we made an inexcusable decision. And not only that, but she will now believe that it was a simple Tuesday for us and it's not. We made the promise for a reason and anything related we were supposed to consult first as a group. Sure, life happens and we get busy with a lot of things and have too much on our minds, but this was all inexcusable and we owe her more than forgiveness. We probably owe her our lives.”

“Hyung, I'm sorry…”

Jungkook was the most regretful. Since that harsh encounter, for which he dared to risk his presence in public and for which he believed it would be worth a try, Jungkook had never regretted something so much since the day of the promise. He still remembered the hatred your voice exuded and shivers ran down his spine. He had been unconscious, that was true, and he didn't know what he had let consume his body to have made that decision or to have simply acted without thinking. The possibility of seeing you again simply…blinded him. But that was never an excuse.

And Namjoon knew that. It was Jungkook who acted worse than everyone else, but he also couldn't deny to himself that had he found himself in the same predicament, with the same opportunity, he wouldn't have done the same. Maybe that's why he was so demanding of others, because that's how he reminded himself that he had no right to even think about it, much less act on their emotions, when they had taken away your choice as if they had any say in it.

“We can't erase what has already happened and what you have already done. All I ask is that you don't make it worse.” Namjoon implored, closing his eyes in silent prayer. “At this point there is no way to fix anything, and if every day we do things like this we are only inflicting pain on someone who doesn't deserve it. So please, for the love of God, leave her alone.”

The whole table was still silent, but this time Namjoon could clearly see everyone's face and notice their emotions right away, as he had always been able to do. He still didn't understand what had moved them to do all that; to Taehyung, to Jungkook, to Jin, to Jimin, despite everything they had discussed before, and he didn't understand how he hadn't been able to foresee their intentions from the beginning. But he could no longer focus on what had happened, but on what was happening and what he could still fix.

For that which had already been broken for years, Namjoon doubted too much that any of it could ever be fixed, no matter how hard he tried. And boy, would he have wanted to try.

“I'm sorry,” Jin mumbled, and it almost seemed like he had ripped the words from the back of his throat, but Namjoon took it with all his being and considered it the first victory on this new path.

When he finally dispatched everyone, Jimin remained seated to his left.

“Is there anything else you want to talk about?”

The blond looked disgruntled, and though it was clear that the tension was gone from his shoulders, in his gaze was that longing that Namjoon hadn't seen in years and certainly didn't allow in himself for all that he had previously exposed.

“Do you really think it's impossible to fix it?”

Namjoon hated knowing that the gleam in Jimin's eye had no future. At least not the one he wanted to believe. Namjoon, like everyone else, had spent sleepless nights thinking, remembering, reflecting and considering that they were never brave enough nor necessarily tough enough to earn that friendship once again. It had all gone to waste and it had been because of them.

“Yeah, I don't think that's possible.”

Jimin passed his saliva harshly, as if his mouth was dry, but he had to control and keep his emotions in check. Namjoon knew his every emotion and mainly knew how sensitive this whole issue was for Jimin, who from the beginning never agreed with him on anything and never hesitated to let him know. In fact, it took a couple of years before Namjoon could finally have this close relationship with Jimin again, until the blond decided to forgive him.

“It's silly to hope at this point, right?”

Namjoon also knew that Jimin struggled a lot to stop pointing blames, as Jin still did. He knew that, had Jimin had the opportunity in his hands several years in the past, he would have taken it and perhaps left them behind if he could. It was an extremely complex and long process to get the blond to trust Namjoon and those on his side again, which was one of the reasons why Hoseok was so insistent on talking and communicating and keeping everyone on good terms. It had cost them so much to re-form their trust that he couldn't allow it to crack once again.

Jimin nodded at his words when they were met with silence, for there was nothing Namjoon could say to comfort him. It was simply a heartbreaking situation.

“Tae and I will be with Jungkook.” Jimin assured Namjoon as he stood up. “Thank you… for trying.”

Namjoon only nodded, pressing his lips together in an attempt at a smile. Things would not automatically go back to the way they were before, as Namjoon's sternness in dealing with this issue on previous occasions was what initially caused this whole fiasco of miscommunication and hostility. He was heartily grateful that likewise Jimin took him into consideration, because he didn't know if he would be able to sleep knowing that everyone in that pent-house hated him. He didn't know if being the reason for the constant discord would allow him to have a respite of peace of mind at some point, when he was simply trying to do what he thought was best for everyone and what suited them on a sentimental level.

Kim Namjoon used to believe that he was good at dealing with any kind of problem. In his head, over which he circled as if it was a huge sphere and he was a hamster, Namjoon was sure that he could fix any situation and provide a solution to any misunderstanding, any fight or at least come to an agreement that would allow everyone to feel comfortable enough to move forward.

However, at that moment, the past tense wording was the most accurate.

Namjoon used to believe.

Jimin stopped halfway up the stairs, transfixed, and Namjoon watched him curiously. Then, the blond half-turned on his heels and Namjoon got front row view of Jimin's pale face and his exaggeratedly expanded eyes as he looked at his phone.

“Hyung…”

Namjoon came striding over, intrigued as well as concerned by the expression on the blond's face.

Jimin had his Instagram open, specifically his direct messages. There was the message there that had made Jimin stop dead in his tracks and all blood dropped to his feet, but Namjoon didn't understand what the reason for his surprise was until he saw the sender, and then his eyebrows disappeared into his hair.

y/n Let's meet

--

omg🙊🙊

tag: @rinkud@futuristicenemychaos@pastelpeachess@parapiop7@11thenightwemet11 @yoongznme @queenbloody @lynnettys-world @darlingz99 @dreamerwasfound @chaotickyrith @kokoandkookie @midiplier @thunderg @lizzymizzy-blogg @ladymorrie @butnotmontana @lovelgirl22 @jjeonjjk7 @aurorathi @ot7stansthigs @kunacat @borahaetelevision @mylovingstars @ghostlyworld @talyaaas-blog @slowlyshycomputer @jjk174 @maynina @kariningss @juju-227592 @zippaur @v4ksk4tz @kookierry @idk179634 @canarystwin @jincapableoflove @notrustfratedjin @elliott-calls @devilzliaison @ismelllikechlorine247 @19yearoldjstryingtolivelife @thatgirliehan @yuuuumii @welcometomyworld13 @sugarbaby69x @whoa-jo @cerulean1riz @kawennote09 @angelfuzzy2 @themoonsblueside @damn-u-min-yoongi @drenix004 @dhanyasri @borahaetelevision

[artemispt]

For my own reference -> Lando boxing (right at the beginning of the 2021 season, right when Carlos left)

"some guys" - it's ok lando, you can say carlos xoxo

[odinsblog]

Patrick Braxton became the first Black mayor of Newbern, Alabama, when he was elected in 2020, but since then he has fought with the previous administration to actually serve in office. (Aallyah Wright/Capital B)

NEWBERN, Ala. — There’s a power struggle in Newbern, Alabama, and the rural town’s first Black mayor is at war with the previous administration who he says locked him out of Town Hall.

After years of racist harassment and intimidation, Patrick Braxton is fed up, and in a federal civil rights lawsuit he is accusing town officials of conspiring to deny his civil rights and his position because of his race.

“When I first became mayor, [a white woman told me] the town was not ready for a Black mayor,” Braxton recalls.

The town is 85% Black, and 29% of Black people here live below the poverty line.

“What did she mean by the town wasn’t ready for a Black mayor? They, meaning white people?” Capital B asked.

“Yes. No change,” Braxton says.

Decades removed from a seemingly Jim Crow South, white people continue to thwart Black political progress by refusing to allow them to govern themselves or participate in the country’s democracy, several residents told Capital B. While litigation may take months or years to resolve, Braxton and community members are working to organize voter education, registration, and transportation ahead of the 2024 general election.

But the tension has been brewing for years.

Two years ago, Braxton says he was the only volunteer firefighter in his department to respond to a tree fire near a Black person’s home in the town of 275 people. As Braxton, 57, actively worked to put out the fire, he says, one of his white colleagues tried to take the keys to his fire truck to keep him from using it.

In another incident, Braxton, who was off duty at the time, overheard an emergency dispatch call for a Black woman experiencing a heart attack. He drove to the fire station to retrieve the automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, but the locks were changed, so he couldn’t get into the facility. He raced back to his house, grabbed his personal machine, and drove over to the house, but he didn’t make it in time to save her. Braxton wasn’t able to gain access to the building or equipment until the Hale County Emergency Management Agency director intervened, the lawsuit said.

“I have been on several house fires by myself,” Braxton says. “They hear the radio and wouldn’t come. I know they hear it because I called dispatch, and dispatch set the tone call three or four times for Newbern because we got a certain tone.”

This has become the new norm for Braxton ever since he became the first Black mayor of his hometown in 2020. For the past three years, he’s been fighting to serve and hold on to the title of mayor, first reported by Lee Hedgepeth, a freelance journalist based in Alabama.

Incorporated in 1854, Newbern, Alabama, today has a population of 275 people — 85% of whom are Black. (Aallyah Wright/Capital B)

Not only has he been locked out of the town hall and fought fires alone, but he’s been followed by a drone and unable to retrieve the town’s mail and financial accounts, he says. Rather than concede, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, the former white mayor, along with his council members, reappointed themselves to their positions after ordering a special election that no one knew about.

Braxton is suing them, the People’s Bank of Greensboro, and the postmaster at the U.S. Post Office.

For at least 60 years, there’s never been an election in the town. Instead, the mantle has been treated as a “hand me down” by the small percentage of white residents, according to several residents Capital B interviewed. After being the only one to submit qualifying paperwork and statement of economic interests, Braxton became the mayor.

(continue reading)

[astonmartingf]

CHASE ; MV1

max verstappen x streamer!reader

. . . you find yourself in a predicament between max's request and your conscience, so you ask charles for help in your game of chase with max verstappen

amgf mention of dnf and written portion in at the end. i am capitalizing on the ausgp, which is the same for wyh hahaha

previous: what if we met?

next: call me max verstappen

This was the first race you watched live in a long time. Charles tried to invite you multiple times, the last time you watched was during his debut back in 2018.

You could barely remember the difference then and now, sitting in the Ferrari garage with other members of the team you situate yourself in the corner, not really knowing what to do.

It was more chaotic than you remember, seeing Max especially going to the pit lane, his wheel burning, leaving a trail of smoke for every garage to see. It alarmed you a little bit, but hearing his voice through the radio, calmed you down.

You meet his gaze as he walks by the Ferrari garage, probably on the way back to their motorhome, or the media pen. Charles gave you a tour of the track at the start of the weekend, but you still find yourself getting lost in the middle of Albert Park.

You flash him a small smile, followed by a wave which he returned. He must be not in the mood to talk, knowing the situation that happened, it caused them the gap to tighten between drivers.

As Charles' friend it definitely filled you with hope knowing that he might have a chance to pull some points to get ahead of the championship ranks.

But as someone who recently knew more about Max, it was definitely an unfortunate moment for him. You watch the screen as they interview Max regarding what happened with his car.

You stare at the screen, fully realizing then that this is the first time you two met outside the shared video games you played together.

As much as you tried to keep your cool alongside Charles' insistent teasing, you admit that you're nervous forming a conversation with him.

Just like after the second practice session, they planned to eat dinner together. Obviously you came with Charles, but what you didn't expect was for Max to be there as well. And safe to say it wasn't the same as your conversations online.

You remember Charles recalling your conversation with him word for word the whole night, teasing your awkwardness.

And in his words, he thinks, "it's cute that you're both awkward together, like two little nerds catching feelings for each other"

How appalling. And the day before the race when you bumped into Max, who happily helped you on your way back to the Ferrari motorhome. Which led to even more incessant teasing from Charles, you don't understand how Max keeps his cool whenever Charles keeps making fun not just of you but of him as well.

Maybe he's more used to Charles, they did race each other for a long time. But that's a story for another time, it's the first time you saw both of them and it seems like the fans are right when they say they sense chemistry between those two.

Your phone pings, receiving a message from Max.

Max the Builder: You want to go out on a little walk for a while?

YN: Where are you?

Max the Builder: I'll meet you at the back of the Ferrari garage.

You look around, everyone's eyes are glued to the screen watching Carlos and Charles closely. Glancing back and forth to the screens on the garage and your phone, you make your way behind the exit, where Max stood waiting for you.

"Have you been waiting for a while?" You watch Max jump, catching him off guard as he whips his head in your direction.

"I just got out of interviews, I'm free for the rest of the race. Want to spend it with me?" There he goes again asking you those questions, you know he speaks out of malice, but his genuine expression makes it hard to say no to him.

Before you could reply, you feel that Max has sensed your hesitance, thinking where he got things wrong again, immediately cutting off your reply. "But if you want to watch Charles we can do that as well. Or you just don't want to hang out with me?"

A soft gasp left your lips, quickly shaking your head left and right, "Max, you know that's not true. But I guess you could say I was avoiding you for the last day..."

Max tilts his head before nodding slowly, trying to hide the evident disappointment in his face, "So that wasn't me just overthinking it... You were purposefully avoiding me?"

"Not like that Max, I guess I was just overthinking as well. We've only talked online until now. I guess I got intimidated seeing you in real life, because we're not on Minecraft? Maybe I just got used to that, hence I kept avoiding you."

Max thinks in silence before raising his finger, "If you're uncomfortable talking at the moment we can play Minecraft and talk there?"

His suggestion catches you off guard, "What? No, we don't have to play Minecraft just to talk silly. That is a good idea Max, but I think we just need more conversations outside discord. My name is YN LN, nice to meet you." Extending your hand in front of him, which he happily shook back.

"Hello YN, I am Max Verstappen. I guess now I won't have to chase after you yeah?"

You laugh, shaking your head disagreeing, "You can't just tease me immediately Max, then I'll have to run away again."

Max shrugs putting his hands in his pocket, feeling more comfortable and finding the flow in your conversations, just like you did back on Discord.

"Well, run all you want, I'll have to let you know— I'm known for being fast."

You nod your head playing along, it's seems like the grooves have connected, like gears shifting in connection. "Well, your engine seems to disagree."

You watch Max' face freeze, "Too early?" your thoughts buzz around, thinking how you messed up the conversation in less than a minute.

A record breaking time.

But your worries halt hearing the sound of Max' laughing at your statement. "That's a good one YN, you're catching up quick."

This time it was your turn to shrug your shoulders, "What can I say, I learned from the best." bumping your shoulders into him.

You walk with Max as the race comes to a close, feeling confident and content as your friendship with him grows.

amgf i think there's one final chapter, the twitch stream hahahaha max is getting desperate but i would too

amgf ★ superstars: @namgification @lpab @the-untamed-soul @xjval

[jbaileyfansite]

Everyone doing the 'Defying Gravity' battle cry on Capital Radio

[221bees]

It has long been a dream of mine to make a compilation of the hysterical stylings of Clive Merrison as Sherlock Holmes. History relates that the BBC actually received letters of complaint regarding this Laugh-with-a-capital-L, and such outbursts of amusement were tragically kept to a minimum after the first series.

The first short interview clip is from ep. 202 of the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere podcast. The following, in airdate order, are from BBC Radio 4's Sherlock Holmes (1989-98) dramatised mainly by Bert Coules, with the exception of the final clip from the last episode of the extracanonical Further Adventures, which aired in 2010.

[reasoningdaily]

NEWBERN, Ala. — There’s a power struggle in Newbern, Alabama, and the rural town’s first Black mayor is at war with the previous administration who he says locked him out of Town Hall.

After years of racist harassment and intimidation, Patrick Braxton is fed up, and in a federal civil rights lawsuit he is accusing town officials of conspiring to deny his civil rights and his position because of his race.

“When I first became mayor, [a white woman told me] the town was not ready for a Black mayor,” Braxton recalls.

The town is 85% Black, and 29% of Black people here live below the poverty line. 

“What did she mean by the town wasn’t ready for a Black mayor? They, meaning white people?” Capital B asked.

“Yes. No change,” Braxton says.

Decades removed from a seemingly Jim Crow South, white people continue to thwart Black political progress by refusing to allow them to govern themselves or participate in the country’s democracy, several residents told Capital B. While litigation may take months or years to resolve, Braxton and community members are working to organize voter education, registration, and transportation ahead of the 2024 general election.

But the tension has been brewing for years. 

Two years ago, Braxton says he was the only volunteer firefighter in his department to respond to a tree fire near a Black person’s home in the town of 275 people. As Braxton, 57, actively worked to put out the fire, he says, one of his white colleagues tried to take the keys to his fire truck to keep him from using it.

In another incident, Braxton, who was off duty at the time, overheard an emergency dispatch call for a Black woman experiencing a heart attack. He drove to the fire station to retrieve the automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, but the locks were changed, so he couldn’t get into the facility. He raced back to his house, grabbed his personal machine, and drove over to the house, but he didn’t make it in time to save her. Braxton wasn’t able to gain access to the building or equipment until the Hale County Emergency Management Agency director intervened, the lawsuit said. 

“I have been on several house fires by myself,” Braxton says. “They hear the radio and wouldn’t come. I know they hear it because I called dispatch, and dispatch set the tone call three or four times for Newbern because we got a certain tone.”

Not only has he been locked out of the town hall and fought fires alone, but he’s been followed by a drone and unable to retrieve the town’s mail and financial accounts, he says. Rather than concede, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, the former white mayor, along with his council members, reappointed themselves to their positions after ordering a special election that no one knew about. 

Braxton is suing them, the People’s Bank of Greensboro, and the postmaster at the U.S. Post Office. 

For at least 60 years, there’s never been an election in the town. Instead, the mantle has been treated as a “hand me down” by the small percentage of white residents, according to several residents Capital B interviewed. After being the only one to submit qualifying paperwork and statement of economic interests, Braxton became the mayor.

Stokes and his council — which consists of three white people (Gary Broussard, Jesse Leverett, Willie Tucker) and one Black person (Voncille Brown Thomas) — deny any wrongdoing in their response to the amended complaint filed on April 17. They also claim qualified immunity, which protects state and local officials from individual liability from civil lawsuits.

The attorneys for all parties, including the previous town council, the bank, and Lynn Thiebe, the postmaster at the post office, did not respond to requests for comment.

The town where voting never was

Over the past 50 years, Newbern has held a majority Black population. The town was incorporated in 1854 and became known as a farm town. The Great Depression and the mechanization of the cotton industry contributed to Newbern’s economic and population decline, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Today, across Newbern’s 1.2 square miles sits the town hall and volunteer fire department constructed by Auburn’s students, an aging library, U.S. Post Office, and Mercantile, the only store there, which Black people seldom frequent because of high prices and a lack of variety of products, Braxton says.

“They want to know why Black [people] don’t shop with them. You don’t have nothin’ the Black [people] want or need,” he says. “No gasoline. … They used to sell country-time bacon and cheese and souse meat. They stopped selling that because they say they didn’t like how it feel on their hands when they cuttin’ the meat.”

To help unify the town, Braxton began hosting annual Halloween parties for the children, and game day for the senior citizens. But his efforts haven’t been enough to stop some people from moving for better jobs, industry, and quality of life. 

Residents say the white town leaders have done little to help the predominantly Black area thrive over the years. They question how the town has spent its finances, as Black residents continue to struggle. Under the American Rescue Plan Act, Newbern received $30,000, according to an estimated funding sheet by Alabama Democratic U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, but residents say they can’t see where it has gone. 

At the First Baptist Church of Newbern, Braxton, three of his selected council members — Janice Quarles, 72, Barbara Patrick, 78, and James Ballard, 76 — and the Rev. James Williams, 77, could only remember two former mayors: Robert Walthall, who served as mayor for 44 years, and Paul Owens, who served on the council for 33 years and mayor for 11.

“At one point, we didn’t even know who the mayor was,” Ballard recalls.  “If you knew somebody and you was white, and your grandfather was in office when he died or got sick, he passed it on down to the grandson or son, and it’s been that way throughout the history of Newbern.”

Quarles agreed, adding: “It took me a while to know that Mr. Owens was the mayor. I just thought he was just a little man cleaning up on the side of the road, sometimes picking up paper. I didn’t know until I was told that ‘Well, he’s the mayor now.’” 

Braxton mentioned he heard of a Black man named Mr. Hicks who previously sought office years ago.

“This was before my time, but I heard Mr. Hicks had won the mayor seat and they took it from him the next day [or] the next night,” Braxton said. “It was another Black guy, had won years ago, and they took it from.”

“I hadn’t heard that one,” Ballard chimes in, sitting a few seats away from Braxton.

“How does someone take the seat from him, if he won?” Capital B asked.

“The same way they’re trying to do now with Mayor Braxton,” Quarles chuckled. “Maybe at that time — I know if it was Mr. Hicks — he really had nobody else to stand up with him.”

Despite the rumor, what they did know for sure: There was never an election, and Stokes had been in office since 2008.

The costs to challenging the white power structure

After years of disinvestment, Braxton’s frustrations mounted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he says Stokes refused to commemorate state holidays or hang up American flags. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the majority-white council failed to provide supplies such as disinfectant, masks, and humidifiers to residents to mitigate the risks of contracting the virus.

Instead of waiting, Braxton made several trips to neighboring Greensboro, about 10 miles away, to get food and other items to distribute to Black and white residents. He also placed signs around town about vaccination. He later found his signs had been destroyed and put in “a burn pile,” he said.

After years of unmet needs of the community, Braxton decided to qualify for mayor. Only one Black person — Brown Thomas, who served with Stokes —has ever been named to the council. After Braxton told Stokes, the acting mayor, his intention to run, the conspiracy began, the lawsuit states. 

According to the lawsuit, Stokes gave Braxton the wrong information on how to qualify for mayor. Braxton then consulted with the Alabama Conference of Black Mayors, and the organization told him to file his statement of candidacy and statement of the economic interests with the circuit clerk of Hale County and online with the state, the lawsuit states. Vickie Moore, the organization’s executive director, said it also guided Braxton on how to prepare for his first meeting and other mayoral duties. 

Moore, an Alabama native and former mayor of Slocomb, said she has never heard of other cases across the state where elected officials who have never been elected are able to serve. This case with Braxton is “racism,” she said.

“The true value of a person can’t be judged by the color of their skin, and that’s what’s happening in this case here, and it’s the worst racism I’ve ever seen,” Moore said. “We have fought so hard for simple rights. It’s one of the most discouraging but encouraging things because it encourages us to continue to move forward … and continue to fight.”

Political and legal experts say what’s happening in Newbern is rare, but the tactics to suppress Black power aren’t, especially across the South. From tampering with ballot boxes to restricting reading material, “the South has been resistant to all types of changes” said Emmitt Riley III, associate professor of political science and Africana Studies at The University of the South.

“This is a clear case of white [people] attempting to seize and maintain political power in the face of someone who went through the appropriate steps to qualify and to run for office and by default wins because no one else qualified,” Riley added. “This raises a number of questions about democracy and a free and fair system of governance.”

Riley mentioned a different, but similar case in rural Greenwood, Mississippi. Sheriel Perkins, a longtime City Council member, became the first Black female mayor in 2006, serving for only two years. She ran again in 2013 and lost by 206 votes to incumbent Carolyn McAdams, who is white. Perkins contested the results, alleging voter fraud. White people allegedly paid other white people to live in the city in order to participate in the election and cast a legal vote, Riley said. In that case, the state Supreme Court dismissed the case and “found Perkins presented no evidence” that anyone voted illegally in a precinct, but rather it was the election materials that ended up in the wrong precincts.

“It was also on record that one white woman got on the witness stand and said, ‘I came back to vote because I was contacted to vote by X person.’ I think you see these tactics happening all across the South in local elections, in particular,” Riley said. “It becomes really difficult for people to really litigate these cases because in many cases it goes before the state courts, and state courts have not been really welcoming to overturning elections and ordering new elections.” 

Another example: Camilla, Georgia. 

In 2015, Rufus Davis was elected as the first Black male mayor of rural, predominantly Black Camilla. In 2017, the six-person City Council — half Black and half white — voted to deny him a set of keys to City Hall, which includes his office. Davis claimed the white city manager, Bennett Adams, had been keeping him from carrying out his mayoral duties. 

The next year, Davis, along with Black City Council member Venterra Pollard, boycotted the city’s meetings because of “discrimination within the city government,” he told a local news outlet. Some of the claims included the absence of Black officers in the police department, and the city’s segregated cemetery, where Black people cannot be buried next to white people. (The wire fence that divided the cemetery was taken down in 2018). In 2018, some citizens of the small town of about 5,000 people wanted to remove Davis from office and circulated a petition that garnered about 200 signatures. In 2019, he did not seek re-election for office.

“You’re not the mayor” 

After being the only person to qualify and submit proper paperwork for any municipal office, Braxton became mayor-elect and the first Black mayor in Newbern’s history on July 22, 2020.

Following the announcement, Braxton appointed members to join his council, consistent with the practice of previous leadership. He asked both white and Black people to serve, he said, but the white people told him they didn’t want to get involved.

The next month, Stokes and the former council members, Broussard, Leverett, Brown Thomas, and Tucker, called a secret meeting to adopt an ordinance to conduct a special election on Oct. 6 because they “allegedly forgot to qualify as candidates,” according to the lawsuit, which also alleges the meeting was not publicized. The defendants deny this claim, but admit to filing statements of candidacy to be elected at the special election, according to their response to an amended complaint filed on their behalf.

Because Stokes and his council were the only ones to qualify for the Oct. 6 election, they reappointed themselves as the town council. On Nov. 2, 2020, Braxton and his council members were sworn into office and filed an oath of office with the county probate judge’s office. Ten days later, the city attorney’s office executed an oath of office for Stokes and his council. 

After Braxton held his first town meeting in November, Stokes changed the locks to Town Hall to keep him and his council from accessing the building. For months, the two went back and forth on changing the locks until Braxton could no longer gain access. At some point, Braxton says he discovered all official town records had been removed or destroyed, except for a few boxes containing meeting minutes and other documents.

Braxton also was prevented from accessing the town’s financial records with the People’s Bank of Greensboro and the city clerk, and obtaining mail from the town’s post office. At every turn, he was met with a familiar answer: “You’re not the mayor.” Separately, he’s had drones following him to his home and mother’s home and had a white guy almost run him off the road, he says. 

Braxton asserts he’s experienced these levels of harassment and intimidation to keep him from being the mayor, he said. 

“Not having the Lord on your side, you woulda’ gave up,” he told Capital B.

‘Ready to fire away’ 

In the midst of the obstacles, Braxton kept pushing. He partnered with LaQuenna Lewis, founder of Love Is What Love Does, a Selma-based nonprofit focused on enriching the lives of disadvantaged people in Dallas, Perry, and Hale counties through such means as food distribution, youth programming, and help with utility bills. While meeting with Braxton, Lewis learned more about his case and became an investigator with her friend Leslie Sebastian, a former advocacy attorney based in California. 

The three began reviewing thousands of documents from the few boxes Braxton found in Town Hall, reaching out to several lawyers and state lawmakers such as Sen. Bobby Singleton and organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. No one wanted to help.

When the white residents learned Lewis was helping Braxton, she, too, began receiving threats early last year. She received handwritten notes in the mail with swastikas and derogatory names such as the n-word and b-word. One of theletters had a drawing of her and Braxton being lynched. 

Another letter said they had been watching her at the food distribution site and hoped she and Braxton died. They also made reference to her children, she said. Lewis provided photos of the letters, but Capital B will not publish them. In October, Lewis and her children found their house burned to the ground. The cause was undetermined, but she thinks it may have been connected.

Lewis, Sebastian, and Braxton continued to look for attorneys that would take the case. Braxton filed a complaint in Alabama’s circuit court last November, but his attorney at the time stopped answering his calls. In January, they found a new attorney, Richard Rouco, who filed an amended complaint in federal court.

“He went through a total of five attorneys prior to me meeting them last year, and they pretty much took his money. We ran into some big law firms who were supposed to help and they kind of misled him,” Lewis says. 

Right now, the lawsuit is in the early stages, Rouco says, and the two central issues of the case center on whether the previous council with Stokes were elected as they claim and if they gave proper notice.

Braxton and his team say they are committed to still doing the work in light of the lawsuit. Despite the obstacles, Braxton is running for mayor again in 2025. Through AlabamaLove.org, the group is raising money to provide voter education and registration, and address food security and youth programming. Additionally, they all hope they can finally bring their vision of a new Newbern to life.

For Braxton, it’s bringing grocery and convenience stores to the town. Quarles wants an educational and recreational center for children. Williams, the First Baptist Church minister, wants to build partnerships to secure grants in hopes of getting internet and more stores.

“I believe we done put a spark to the rocket, and it’s going [to get ready] to fire away,” Williams says at his church. “This rocket ready to fire away, and it’s been hovering too long.”

Correction: In Newbern, Alabama, 29% of the Black population lives below the poverty line. An earlier version of this story misstated the percentage

[jokeroutsubs]

[ENG SUB/translation] JokerOutSubs x Radio Celje collab: Joker Out on Radio Celje (24.10.2024)

Big thanks to Radio Celje who collaborated with us on this one!

Bojan, Jan, Kris, Jure and Nace were on Radio Celje to talk about the new single ‘Bluza’ and the new album.

Get a taste of the interview in our trailer:

and watch the full video with English subtitles on their Youtube channel:

Transcript and translation by drumbeat and @chaosofsmarty, review and subtitles by @kurooscoffee, proofread by X klámstrákur.

Accompanying article translated by IG 10_anja, reviewed by @weolucbasu, proof read by @flowerlotus8.

You can read the accompanying article and find the ENG SUB video, as well as the whole conversation in transcript form, under the cut.

What do JOKER OUT, bras and ikebanas have in common?

(Article posted on radiocelje.si website on the 24th of October 2024).

Joker out are announcing the release of their third studio album 'Souvenier Pop'!

At Jutranji ritem (Morning Rhythm) on Radio Celje we were visited by the members of the Slovenian band Joker Out - Bojan, Kris, Jan, Nace and Jure. The boys, who won the hearts of Slovenian and foreign fans with their unique style and energy, shared with us their interesting stories and moments from European stages, where they have enthralled at festivals, such as the legendary Sziget.

We talked about the impact that Eurovision had on their further creation, and how their dreams about big stages became a reality. They unveiled to us some fun adventures from abroad including an unusual moment in Finland that made one of their hits go viral.

You can hear what do they have in common with bras and ikebanas in the video.

On the 15th of November we are expecting their new album 'Souvenir Pop', which will offer musical hits in Slovene, Serbo-Croatian and English alike. In the capital city there are also two concerts scheduled with the release of the new album. You can also hear their new song 'Bluza' on Radio Celje.

-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

📝Video Transcript:

Host: With us today are Bojan, Kris, Nace, Jure, and Jan, the most popular Slovenian band, Joker Out. Welcome to Radio Celje.

Joker Out: Hi! Hello! Hey, hey, hey!

Bojan: Thank you very much!

I knew it, I said it wrong. You’re not the most popular Slovenian band…

Bojan: Absolutely, yes.

…but European band. A band known world-wide.

Joker Out: Wooow.

Now tell me, did Eurovision leave an impression?

Jure: No.

Bojan: Eh, no, nothing much, really, I think. Eurovision really made the 180 degree turn for us. Before it, we didn’t have any concerts abroad, or we played a concert in Croatia but for a Slovenian audience. Eurovision has brought us the opportunity to suddenly be performing all across Europe and we’re performing for foreign audiences, which is crazy.

Because you’re made for the big stages. At a festival in the middle of Budapest you really caused a stir, right? But you’ve always been dreaming about this stage.

Kris: That’s true. You are talking about the Main stage at Sziget. It’s a stage, for which we always said that if there was one thing we would never be able to achieve in our lives, it was Sziget main stage. I was there for the first time as a listener in 2018, watching all of my favourite artists up there and it was… I tried to imagine what it was like to look at the crowd from the other side, but I just couldn’t. Now I know what it’s like. And it’s quite a weird feeling. Still.

Weird?

Kris: Good, but weird. It’s never the way you imagine it.

Cool, we’re really happy that we caught you in our area, too, because you, you don’t stop. You’re a Band with a capital B. You travel…

Bojan: Just superlatives.

Yeah, just superlatives. You weren’t just in Budapest. You were also in Romania, in Slovakia. Where have you been and where else are you going?

Bojan: We’ve been to Finland, Poland, Great Britain, and Spain the most.

Kris: The Netherlands.

Bojan: In the Netherlands. We were in Lithuania twice, once in Latvia, once in Estonia.

Kris: Six times in Germany.

Bojan: Six times in Germany, three times in Sweden.

Jan: Have you said Great Britain and Ireland? Belgium, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia.

Bojan: Croatia absolutely.

Nace: Italy.

Bojan: Macedonia.

Kris: We’ll name all the countries in the EU now.

Jure: Yes.

Kris: Every single country.

Bojan: Austria.

Jan: You’ve said Norway and Sweden?

Alright, alright.

Bojan: No, I didn’t, Norway, well, I’ve mentioned Sweden.

And you also mentioned Finland.

Bojan: Finland, I did.

We heard something unexpected happened in Finland, which affected your recognisability. Actually, how viral one of your hits went.

Bojan: Yes! Okay, that was quite the genius moment. Namely, I finished ‘Šta bih ja’ before the Stockholm concert. No, what am I saying, sorry, in Helsinki and I wasn’t 1000% sure I’d sing the chorus correctly, so I wrote it on a piece of paper, in a big font, and gave it to our technician Kiki, and asked if he could please stick it onto the front monitor speaker so that I could look at it. And I asked him 35 times. “Did you stick it on?” “I stuck it on.” “Okay, great.” I get on stage, darn, I can’t see the paper anywhere. I look at the monitor on the left, the one on the right, nothing. I’m checking, if he might’ve mixed it up and hung it on a speaker somewhere, the sheet is nowhere to be found. And two songs before 'Šta bih ja’, I step to the very front part of the stageand I look down, and I see that when the champ hung it up, he did it on the other side of the monitor, so the audience was reading the lyrics, not so I could see it. And then what happened? People thought it was on purpose, a 'sing along’ moment, karaoke. Everyone took pictures, filmed it, posted it online, the lyrics of a new song that was yet to come out. Anyway, we finished the concert. I remember we ran to the van from backstage, I opened my phone, and the lyrics were already on Genius. So, all the lyrics were already written out: the original, in Serbian, translated into English, and it was an hour after the concert ended. And from that concert on, already the very next day, because we performed in Helsinki again the next day, the whole crowd was already singing the song. It was crazy. It went viral on TikTok, totally, so Kiki, hats off to you. Of course, because I looked at that and told Kiki, “Give me my lyrics back.” and it was so much worse, because Kiki then took off the lyrics in front of everyone and put it on the correct side of the monitor, so I was able to read it.

Kris: You know, the craziest part about it to me is that the Finns, because the crowd was majority Finnish, they realised the lyrics were in Serbian, that it was something they hadn’t heard from us yet. To me that’s, you know…

Bojan: Yeah, of course.

Kris: Imagine you read something in Finnish, how will you know it’s something you haven’t read yet, or heard?

Bojan: Well, if it’s not… ♪ Rankka viikko ja paljon pitkii päiviä takan ♪

Kris: Yeah, yeah. That’s just, that’s so crazy to me.

Jan: It’s actually funny, that some fan probably knew the lyrics to the song before you did. No.

Bojan: It’s definitely possible.

Jan: It wouldn’t be impossible.

Kris: It’s not impossible.

You have tons of fans, what is the most unbelievable, or most awesome thing that a fan did for you?

Bojan: There’s a lot of things like that.

Jure: I think about those hoodies we got.

Jure: Those were nice. Everyone got their own hoodie.

Kris: In their own color.

Jure: Their own color, I just know I had Captain Maček written in the front here and SSF airlines in the back.

Bojan: Everyone got an embroidered, hand embroidered, signature, what’s the word…

Kris: Personalised.

Bojan: A personalised shirt.

Nace: Although, among all of these fan gifts, the most beautiful was the one in Stožice, where the fans had planned amongst themselves, and before the concert, they handed out these colorful triangles with instructions to to put it over the phone flashlight during 'Novi val’. And suddenly, the whole arena was in colorful lights.

Jure: And we didn’t know that.

Bojan: It was, it was… Amazing. Because we, I remember, that when 'Novi val’ started, the whole arena lit up in colorful lights and then we got off stage and started asking everyone in the crew who did it, because it’s a massive project, to hand 12,000 people colorful lights, which we thought they did. And really, it was the fans, walking around before the concert, and handing out these papers actually, and the instructions to put these ligh… I mean, there’s been a lot of these beautiful fan projects. With 'Metulji’ they made paper butterflies and handed them out, so everyone lifted their butterflies up. And that was also abroad.

Jan: In Warsaw.

Bojan: It happened in Warsaw. I mean, we have awesome fan projects, we have this group, Joker Out Subs, which is a group of fans that actually, in already a very organised way, translate all the Slovenian content into, Idon’t know, dozens of languages, worldwide. And they actually go online, find the interviews, conversations, guest appearances in shows, whatever, and they spring into action. And in a couple of days it's… I’m also sure that… It’s not impossible that this interview, for example, will be translated into 10 or 15 languages with subtitles.

What was an unusual, wild thing, that you got on stage during a concert? And let’s not say just bras, now.

Bojan: A bottle of blueberry liquor… To the knee.

Jure: …to the knee.

Bojan: That was still… That was…

Jure: But years ago.

Bojan: …in Žiri. It happened in Žiri.

Bojan: Our bassist was hit by a bottle of blueberry liquor which is a lot better than the hammer that hit the previous band. I’ll never forget that.

Jure: Or was it an axe?

Bojan: Axe, hammer, something, I mean, bizarre. I got an ikebana. And that was awesome. I think I’ve already told this story. But that happened because a guy, from the middle of the tent, in Koper, if I’m not mistaken, held up that ikebana and pushed through the crowd and everyone was getting out of his way and he got to the front rows and gave me that ikebana.

Now, I won’t ask about which performance was most memorable because there’s probably so many that you wouldn’t know or be able to pick one out. So I picked one. And I’m interested in how it came to be that Ringo Starr’s grandson joined you on stage?

Bojan: Yeah, we met him in a pub, like how I’d assume, in London, you meet many people casually. And he’s really an awesome guy. We clicked immediately, his name is Louis. A great drummer, he also has his own band. Anyway, when we were talking about what to do at Shepherd’s Bush, which is a truly eminent venue in London, we kind of said, darn, it would be nice if someone could join us on stage, and that it’s casual, natural. So we asked Louis if he’d jump on stage. He said: “Yeah, let me get on with a tambourine.” So he happily hopped on stage, tambourine-d his part and went on his way.

Kris: They even had a drum battle.

Bojan: Even a drum battle, dude.

Kris: Percussion, percussion drum battle I’d say.

Bojan: On the congas.

Today, we’ll hear your new song, 'Bluza’. I got asked by a fan of yours, a friend of mine, to ask you if it’s conjugated correctly, this word, 'bluza’. Because in the song, Bojan says: “Noćas ti si moja muza, ja u ritmu tvoga BLUZA ću da plešem bez prestanka.” How’d you land on that?

Bojan: Yes. So the word “bluza” isn’t even connected to a blouse, like a shirt, a piece of clothing. “Bluz” (blues) is just blues as a musical genre.

Okay. Honestly, I don’t know, this whole time we’ve been… Was the name of the song a somehow natural progression from “bluza, bluza”, or what?

Kris: Yeah, it was muza bluza (blues muse).

Jure: I think it was “muza” (muse).

Bojan: It was “muza”, it was “muza”. Then we settled on “bluza”, so yeah, kind of a silly name if you think about it, but…

Kris: It doesn’t make sense, but somehow it makes sense.

But it’s cool, because you ask, right, what’s the point, really?

Bojan: Who or what is “bluza”?

Who among you is the laziest?

Bojan: Nobody in the band is lazy, definitely, as a personality trait, nobody’s lazy. But I feel like we all have these particular moments when everyone, how should I say… You know, when you have a phase, when it hits you, and then you’re the most… Personally, when everything gets too hard, I’d… I’m the laziest then. But like, I choose to be the laziest, because I just don’t want to, I refuse to move.

Jure: I could say just the opposite. I know Kris is the least lazy, or even when he should be lazy, he can’t be lazy, I believe.

Bojan: That’s for sure. Kris is a walking Excel timetable.

If you had to pick someone, and send him to a quiz show, I don’t know, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Who would you pick, who’s the smartest?

Kris: It’s not about smarts, it’s more like who has the most knowledge, in my opinion.

Knowledgeable. Yeah, exactly.

Kris: I wouldn’t pick myself, for sure.

Jure: The Millionaire?

Kris: I bet Jan would know the answers.

Nace: Yeah, I’m leaning towards Jan as well.

Jure: I think I’d rely on luck.

Kris: I think I’d ask the audience for help. Jan would take his time to answer the question, but the answer would be correct, I think.

Jan: Why wouldn’t you pick yourself? I can totally see you.

Who’s the best cook?

Bojan: Jan.

Kris: Yes.

Jan: Or Jure.

Kris: Jure too, especially if it’s a barbecue, Jure. If it’s more like kitchen stuff, some risotto or pasta, I’d trust Jan.

Nace: But we’re all pretty decent cooks, to be fair. None of us…

Bojan: None of us would leave anyone hungry, let’s put it that way.

Jure: We love to cook and eat our own food.

November 15th?

Jure: A new cooking show.

Nace: Cooking with Jokers!

Bojan: On November 15th, our third studio album comes out, called 'Souvenir Pop’. It’s our third studio album, and fourth album overall, because last year we released the Live album from Stožice. This album will have ten songs, four of which you’ve already heard, which are 'Carpe Diem’, 'Everybody’s Waiting’, 'Šta bih ja’, and Bluza.’ So the remaining six are a mystery, for now. It’s an interesting album, we see it as a collection of memories from the last year and a half that we’ve gathered. And just like places and people are different, and everything else we’ve seen is different, the songs are different as well, so it’s a really diverse album, without, I’d say, a prominent common thread. There are three languages on it, Slovenian, Serbian, and English, so it’s really colourful.

This will be a perfect Christmas gift or for the New Year.

Bojan: Yeah, exactly, exactly. For Christmas, you should all be singing this instead of ‘Last Christmas.’

A music video tomorrow? On Friday?

Joker Out: Yes.

Kris: Yes, it’s true, the video is coming out for the single ‘Bluza,’ which has been released three weeks ago already, but we decided it deserves a music video as well, and we took a little more time, but I think we really put in the effort, and made a really unique video, something you haven’t seen from us yet, you haven’t seen anything remotely similar from us, and I doubt you’ll see anything like it again. And we have some cool hidden guests, in the video, well, for now they’re still hidden.

It will also be pinned on radiocelje.si. Bojan, Kris, Nace, Jure, Jan - Joker Out, thank you for visiting Radio Celje.

Bojan: Yes, first of all, on behalf of all of us, thank you for the invitation. We hope to be back soon, or as soon as possible. Take care, and stay safe!

[nando161mando]

"Our latest interview with Matthew N Lyons, antifascist researcher, on the political legacy of US red-brown maverick, Lyndon LaRouche on MAGA, tankies, antisemite leftists and more."

[victusinveritas]

A friend who is much better with words and not to my knowledge on Tumblr wrote this:

"Greatly appreciated this interview w Patrick Blanchfield on The Dig Radio (in comments) for locating the shooting of the UHC CEO w/in a broader field of late capitalist mass death, violence and human disposability.

While it’s clear Blanchfield and the host, Denvir, sympathize w Mangione and his reasons for killing a CEO, I liked that they also situated the act w/in a context of both mass shootings and state violence: what is remarkable is not that an American was shot - tens of thousands of Americans are gunned down by other Americans every year - but as Mark Ames points out, it was for once not the working class shooting each other, but a CEO who was targeted. In what often feels like a senseless culture of mass death - for once a murder wasn’t random.

That such culture is a part of our accepted daily life was expressed to me w great clarity as i negotiated w my university as an AAUP rep over pandemic safety protocols several years back. The admin said quite calmly and reasonably, you accept you might die in a car accident going to work, as tens of thousands of Americans do, or in a mass shooting, what makes dying of a virus in a classroom any different? That this passed for enlightened management rather than sociopathic indifference says all one needs to know about our historical moment

In that sense the killing of a CEO is in William James phrase, a “live option” in the way Medicare for All is not or mass politics is not. I am reminded of a thought experiment I often do as an ice breaker on the first day of class: imagine you could have 100 million dollars or a society w no money but your needs are met? Which would you choose? A significant number of students choose the money bc they say, a society w no money in which our needs could be met could not happen. But I am giving you the choice to make it happen, I say. But it can’t they respond. You also don’t have 100 million dollars, I counter. But we *could they say. But you won’t. But *someone will, they reply.

It’s hard to know if Mangione’s assassination of a CEO will help bring M4A. Ofc it is the role of politics to help produce out of our contradictory common sense a program, to cathect desire into a demand on the state or the boss. Obvs it’s what we have to do. Yet it also occurs to me a society that cannot imagine M4A is also a society that delights in gunning down CEO: the passage to the act both reveals poltical desire as much as it disavows its possibility. The figure of the social bandit is notoriously ambiguous, proto revolutionary but also existing in a social structure (colonial California, feudal Europe) in which a mass organized revolution is impossible

Well, it remains to be seen if Mangione is a 21st century Unabomber or maybe, a 21st C John Brown. Mangione faces the death penalty so perhaps the state is making our decision for us. I am sure Brown was far less popular than Mangione in his day, if also, just as feared by the ruling class, even if he hardly acted alone. But it was not up to Brown to make his death matter, it was up to the ppl."