#that pulling out of it would be politically unsustainable. but anything that gets results is too lib and that's why italy has

[winterbirb]

Analysis: in the US-Italy power dynamic, the US is the senior partner. However, in the opaque etiquette rules of US Diplomacy(tm), it's considered deeply taboo to remind someone of their status as the junior partner. Thus, the culturally specific technique called the American Smile(tm) is used, wherein the American acts friendly in public.

However, no cultural analysis is complete without recognizing the inter-national history of the two participants. The U.S. and Italy have a long historical relationship, notably including World War 2, where one of the major war theaters was against Italy in Africa; with the combined efforts of the Allies, this ultimately led to the public execution of PM Meloni's fascist idol. According to generational analysis, Joseph Biden, born in 1943-ish, is definitely aware that the U.S. whooped Italy's ass. In Africa.

As the current circumstances of the meeting are about potentials for joint U.S.-Italy policy in Africa, it's quite probable that either one or both leaders were aware of this previous joint U.S.-Italy engagement. As with the senior-junior partner dynamic, the arcane rituals of American Diplomacy make vocal acknowledgement a taboo. But the American Smile(tm) acts as a sort of noticeable negative space, saying things through what's left unsaid.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met at the White House on Thursday, vowing to deepen economic ties and strengthen cooperation on challenges posed by China, while skirting differences [sic] over LGBTQ rights.[...]

Meloni and her right-wing coalition have staked out positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights sharply at odds with those of Biden, a Democrat who used last year's Italian election results as an occasion to warn fellow liberals about dangers facing the world's democracies. On Thursday, Biden welcomed Meloni and said they had "become friends," and Meloni later told reporters that neither he nor the several U.S. lawmakers with whom she met brought up LGBTQ rights. "Nobody asked me anything on this," she said. Meloni said she had a clear preference for Republicans, but that would not stop her from having "a great relationship" with Biden.[...] During a small portion of the meeting open to reporters, Biden complimented Italy on what he said was its strong stance on Ukraine. Meloni said she was proud that Italy has helped defend international law. [...] Meloni must decide in coming months over whether to maintain Italy's membership in Beijing's Belt and Road (BRI) infrastructure plan, a program which Washington has been working to counter. [...]

The Biden-Meloni meeting took place less than a week after she hosted an international conference on migration in Rome, as Italy tries to cope [sic] with a high volume of migrants arriving by boat from North Africa. Italy was planning to discuss with the U.S. how to support [sic] the development and stability of Africa, Meloni's office said.

27 Jul 23

[dustedmagazine]

Ian Mathers’ 2020: We’re stuck inside our own machines

I’ve had a song I loved in high school and haven’t thought much about since stuck in my head. The song “Apparitions” by the Matthew Good Band is a fine example of the alt rock of the late 90s; if you grew up then but somewhere down in the states (or elsewhere) instead of my southern Ontario you may well have your regional equivalents, and like this one they may not resonate terribly strongly outside of their time and place. It popped back into my head after a long time recently and of course 2020 has changed it a little. A song that as a teen I felt keenly as about loneliness (albeit also about how technology can feed into that) of course now plays on my nerves as another small piece of art about the way that most of us (those scared and/or responsible anyway) have only that relatively narrow, technologically mediated connection to the people we love. All of us, artists and listeners alike, are trying to fit our feelings and art and selves down these little connections, with some success.

On a personal level, 2020 wound up being stressful in ways we couldn’t have predicted even after the pandemic hit. In circumstances that could have seen governments on this continent support those unable to work (and those who shouldn’t have to), support those workers who are truly essential, support workers and renters and even landlords and small businesses, instead we got a near-total abeyance of those governments using the resources we provide them with to save any of us. On a personal level my wife and I were lucky enough to be able to work from home (not that it didn’t come with its own forms of stress, and now that I’m off until January I have several work/stress-related illnesses to recover from) but still saw friends and loved ones lose good, used-to-be-sustainable livings overnight, saw family businesses succumb to a near-total absence of effective government support after months of trying to keep above water, etc.

It is probably no surprise that this is not a situation conducive to listening to music, let alone writing about it; I have deliberately and happily kept busy on behind the scenes stuff at Dusted that I could still manage but looking, at the end of the year, at the amount I managed to actually create is demoralizing if not at all shocking. I’m not sure I think next year will be ‘better’ in many important ways, although at our job there is a growing feeling among coworkers that next year has to have some work/life balance because 2020 was, maybe more than anything else, unsustainable.

That’s not to say I didn’t spend a lot of time and emotion on music this year, and if nothing else constant sleep deprivation, stress, and panic meant I was probably open to being deeply moved by all sorts of art even more than normally (it’s gotten to the point where I can’t even read a sad or moving twitter thread out loud to my wife without getting teary, which is kind of… nice?). Funnily enough the band that did the most to keep me sane didn’t really put out anything in 2020. Personal favorite, Low, instead started, in early April, getting on Instagram with something they called on whim “It’s Friday I’m in Low.” With one brief break they have now done by my count at least 35 shows (catalogued here, by the way), every Friday at about 4 my time.

Admittedly it’s easier for Low to pull this off than some bands, since the 2/3 of the trio that sing are a married couple (they’ve had a couple of socially-distanced backyard shows with bassist Steve Garrington, but he’s mostly been isolating elsewhere). These shows have seen the band’s Alan Sparhawk take a mid-set break to do follow-up phone interviews with the acts featured in the COVID-curtailed touring bands series Vansplainingthat they started on YouTube, or just to give a tour round their vegetable garden and talk tips. It’s seen Alan and Mimi Parker draw on their impressive, 25+ year body of work (averaging 4-5 songs a set, I don’t think they’ve repeated themselves yet) and talk a bit between songs about pandemics, politics, song choices, and whether Alan should grab his bike helmet this time.

They’re not the only musicians out there speaking love and sanity (and playing music) into the strange digital interzone filled with hate and disinformation where we’ve all been forced to gather while locked down, but they were and the most consistent and steady signal being emitted each week. No matter how tired I was from work or what new symptoms I’d developed or what horrific thing I read into the news, even if I had to take an emergency nap while it was actually airing, every Friday the show was there. Once things do return to something more like normal, it’s one of the few things I’ll unambiguously miss about this weird-ass year.

So if that makes an argument for Low as my band of the year (admittedly again… it’s not like Double Negative has aged poorly, either), that does a disservice to those 2020 records I did connect with; even if there are still literally dozens I have to go through, many of which I expect to love, my top picks this year (if as unrankable by me as always) hit me as hard as any top pick in recent years did. So here I present a quick and informal top 5, which the rest of my top 20 following in alphabetical order. Here’s hoping for more time and space in 2021 for music, and even more than that, for more support for those who need it from those who could have been providing it all this time. (The Matthew Good Band, incidentally, always did best with their ballads. “Strange Days” is another I’ve had in my head these days; the image of moving “backwards, into a wall of fire” has stuck with me since the 90s and it’s never felt more grimly appropriate.)

Greet Death — New Hell

New Hell by Greet Death

This one is, in some sense, cheating; it came out November 2019. But that just means it’s the latest winner of my personal Torres Prize for Ian Being Late to the Party (so named because becoming slightly obsessed with Torres’ Sprinter just after I sent in my 2015 list was the first time I noticed that one of my favorite records of each year tends to get picked up by me just after I call it quits on the year, no matter how long I try to wait). This very doom and gloom slowcore/metal/(whatever, just know it’s heavy) trio at first felt very much like my beloved Cloakroom (whose Time Well has also won a Torres Prize) but sure enough nuances revealed themselves. Back in February it felt almost a little too negative, but then the rest of 2020 happened. And the extended burns of “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and the title track remain searing.

Holy Fuck — Deleter

Probably the record I’ve been trying to write about the longest in 2020, and the one I’m most disappointed in myself that I just couldn’t get the requisite paragraphs together. It’s a wonderful effort from the consistently great Toronto resolutely human-created (and —mediated) dance music quartet, one that both feels like a summation of everything they do well, and with the addition of some outside voices (including strong turns from the singers of both Hot Chip and Liars) a step forward at the same time.

Spanish Love Songs — Brave Faces Everyone

Brave Faces Everyone by Spanish Love Songs

As the year got worse, this roar of defiance only got more crucial for me to hear every so often; I was a big enough fan of it, even after writing it up for Dusted, that when they solicited fan footage for a subsequent music video you may just be able to get a glimpse of me in it. (I’m the one in a “No Tories” t-shirt.) My punk rock-loving twin brother was the one who introduced me to Spanish Love Songs and we were supposed to spend an evening in June screaming along to them live in a packed, sweaty room. I need that in my life again.

Julianna Barwick — Healing Is a Miracle

Healing Is A Miracle by Julianna Barwick

It’s a sign of what 2020 has been like here that even just this album title leaves bruises, and while I privately worried Barwick would have a hard time following up 2016’s sublime Will (probably my favorite record that year), it seems that continuing to take whatever downtime she needs to keep focusing and refining her particular muse has once again yielded amazing results. Anyone who thinks they know what a Barwick track sounds like should really check out, say, “Flowers”, but much of this record absolutely sounds like Barwick, just even better than before. She also boasted my wife and I's favorite streaming concert of 2020, an absolutely gorgeous rendition of this album with Mary Lattimore showing up.

Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher

Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers

I joked on Twitter recently that I have far too nice a dad (and far too good a relationship with him) to be as obsessed as I am with Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kyoto”, but here we are. Like most of her generation, Bridgers’ social media presence ranges from shit-posting to inscrutable, but even though things are often just as hard to figure out in her beautiful songs (as they often are in life), there’s an emotional clarity to them that can just grab you deep down. Couple that with seriously impressive songcraft and the progress from her already astounding debut Stranger in the Alps and more than anyone else in 2020 I’m excited to see just where the hell Phoebe Bridgers is going to go, because it feels like she’s talented and hardworking enough to go just about anywhere and drag a lot of our hearts with her.

Other Favorites

Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis — Invisible Cities II

Anastasia Minster — Father

Deftones — Ohms

Hum — Inlet

Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song

Mesarthim — The Degenerate Era

Perfume Genius — Set My Heart On Fire Immediately

Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today

Rachel Kiel — Dream Logic

The Ridiculous Trio — The Ridiculous Trio Plays the Stooges

Sam Amidon — Sam Amidon

Shabason, Krgovich & Harris — Philadelphia

Stars Like Fleas — DWARS Session: Live on Radio VPRO

Well Yells — We Mirror the Dead

Yves Tumour — Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Five Reissues/Compilations/etc.

Aix Em Klemm — Aix Em Klemm

Bardo Pond — Adrop/Circuit VIII

Charles Curtis — Performances & Recordings 1998-2018

Coil — Musick to Play in the Dark

Hot Chip — LateNightTales

Ian Mathers

[qqueenofhades]

So dare I ask what the nightmare in detail is regarding Brexit right now?

@tollers-and-jack said: I’m asking for the rant…

@rhymeswithtessa said: I’m a big fan of your rants gimme your thoughts on brexit

@onlymorelove said: Ahem. I am interested in your rant. If you feel like sharing. 💗

Ahaha wow. Apparently this is something the people really want to hear about. Disclaimer, just remember that you asked for this, and that this is, as Captain Holt would say, a trigger for me. So if this periodically devolves into incoherent screaming/application of capital letters and exclamation marks, and what have you, just know that.

So… I wrote these posts soon after Brexit in 2016 explaining what a spectacularly stupid idea it was even then. If I said anything optimistic in those posts, in a sort of grasping-at-straws-maybe-this-will-work sort of flailing way, please disregard it. We have had empirical evidence of how this played out. Spoiler alert: it failed. It failed so comprehensively on every possible level that it seems almost ludicrous for a supposedly modern political system, but this is 2019, the world is dogshit, and we are all retreating into our little late-capitalism xenophobia bubbles with our right-wing strongmen and our populist rhetoric and the UK is now a global laughingstock. Which believe me, the ex-British Empire richly deserves, especially given the part that anti-immigration paranoia played in this whole debacle, but also, I live here and really would Rather Not.

I do not even know how to sum up the ridiculousness of the past few months, where – almost at the end of the two-year period of triggering Article 50, with just a very short amount of time to the original exit date (29 March 2019) – the UK finally managed to secure a withdrawal deal. Mind you, it was a shit deal that both sides hated, but by golly, It Made Brexit Happen, and since the Theresa May-bot has only been able to repeat over and over that she will Make Brexit Happen, there you have it. Not surprisingly, it proceeded to be comprehensively defeated in Parliament by the largest majority ever seen since World War II. It then was subject to surface-level makeovers and cosmetic tinkering about the backstop in Northern Ireland (since among many other things, the ardent Brexiteers forget that oh yeah we share a land border with an EU country and peace in Ireland is kind of a thing that should be paid attention to). The DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) of Northern Ireland, whose 10 MPs prop up the minority Tory government, absolutely hated it and would not support it, since it would effectively introduce different regulations for NI than the rest of the UK and thus jeopardise the, you know, United Kingdom. Plus it would require the EU’s assent to end the arrangement, and also we can’t have that. Because reasons.

The deal was then thumpingly defeated for a second time, people got worried because uhhhh aren’t we supposed to leave the EU in like a week, Parliament had to institute emergency measures and hold a series of votes on Brexit alternatives, those also got defeated and May would not even commit to honouring the will of the House, 6 million people signed a petition asking for Article 50 to be revoked and the Brexit process cancelled (the biggest in parliamentary history) and got ignored. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage led a pathetic procession of 200 diehard Leavers against literally 1 million people in London calling for a new referendum, the deal got defeated for a third time after they had to do all kinds of fancy-dancing to get it back for yet another vote, they got the EU to agree to a crunch extension to 12 April, and now that that is three days away with absolutely no consensus in sight, have sent May back to Europe to beg Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to extend the deadline to 30 June. They actually had to pass a bill (by one vote) forcing her to do this in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit. The EU is justifiably exasperated with this utter, unbelievable incompetence, the fact that the hard right wing of the Tory party pulled this absurdly irresponsible jackshit without any clue how to do it, and the way the UK still thinks it can just pick an a la carte deal where we’re great and the EU sucks and blue passports and blah blah Great Britain is Great!!! And there has been absolutely no collective awareness from either major party that maybe, just maybe, trying to undo a legal and political and cultural alignment that has existed since at least 1973 when we were a founding member of this project, in two years, with no idea how, to please a xenophobic lying campaign, WAS A STUPID FUCKING GODDAMN IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!

(we pause while the blogger breathes and drinks heavily)

Anyway, that is the short version of Nobody Still Knows What The Fuck Is Going to Happen. Technically if we stayed in the bloc past 22 May, we’d have to hold elections to the European Parliament, which bitch bitch whine whine, the Brexiteers don’t want to do. Maybe we think we’re entitled to more special treatment (no scratch that, we definitely do) because we can’t sort our heads from our asses and have been so wildly and bogglingly arrogant and incompetent that it would almost be funny if people’s lives and livelihoods and futures weren’t at stake. And we have the goddamn European Research Group (aka the hard Brexit wing) yapping about how no deal wouldn’t be that bad and we should just take it on the chin because Blah Blah Blitz Spirit, Nationalism Patriotism Our Freedom From The Tyrannical EU. (Sidenote, if someone just punches Jacob Rees-Mogg in the elitist Little Britain face, you don’t know where I was, God I hate him so much.) Every single business, manufacturer, industry, finance, medicine, food, education, you name it outfit has been warning that no, actually, no deal would be catastrophic and the UK is not remotely prepared for it. To the point we have the military on standby to deliver basic goods if it happens??! How. How is this acceptable??!?!? I don’t understand??!?!

(And the Brexiteers who are like “this is Britain let’s all just hunt hares and grow food in our back gardens,” which, yes, is something I heard actually said, are out of touch to a truly stupendous degree. Yes I’m sure that a modern first-world country wants to resort to subsistence farming to feed its 66 million people. Do they. Even. Hear Themselves. Racism is a hell of a drug, my friends! And if you want to be like “oh no it’s not about racism/anti-immigrant sentiment, it’s about the economy,” let’s just say that the newsreader covering a Brexit march said that he’d never seen so many white people in one place and was forced to apologize, because racist white people don’t like it being pointed out to them that they are racist white people. That tells you a lot. And the Leave campaign has been convicted multiple times for breaking electoral law and just flat-out Lying to the public, so the people who voted Leave thinking they were in fact getting a better economic deal were deceived outright and have indeed often expressed regret that they were so wildly and deliberately deluded. So anyway. Fun!)

I cannot emphasise enough the sheer, staggering arrogance and delusion of the people who proposed this project and then forced it through, because the British public has believed throughout its entire history that it’s better than the whole world (see again: imperial nostalgia and Oh No The Foreigners Are Coming and etc) and has been fed for a good 25 years on this point on a lot of bullshit stories about how terrible and Liberal and Anti-British the EU is, because the British popular press is a flaming dumpster fire (you think Fox News is bad, and it is, but so many of the tabloids are basically Fox News UK). So the Brits feel as if they’ve been so unfairly repressed by the EU and need to Take Back Control (once again, there is a very long history of this  rhetoric of the English being supposedly attacked and repressed by foreigners, dating back to the idea of the “Norman Yoke” resulting from the Conquest, which became a big deal in the 19th century – I am a historian, I can pull receipts for days on this). Once again, they think they can just do whatever they want, the EU is the bad guy for not giving it to them, that we should set ourselves on fire and jump out the window rather than sit at the table like grownups with the rest of Europe, and just take our ball and go home and yet still think we are entitled to preferential treatment.

I just…. I don’t even. I DO NOT EVEN. I seriously lack the words. 

So we may get another rolling series of short-term extensions, we may not, nobody can come to any agreement on what should be done, May promised to resign to get the deal through, the deal did not get through, the whole setup is so unsustainable that it feels like a general election is an inevitability, and the obvious solution would be another referendum to see if the people even still goddamn want this. But the Brexiteers, for all they bluster about upholding the will of the people to leave, resist this with all their might (what are you fucking afraid of? If you’re so confident that you’re still the majority, you should WANT another referendum to confirm it, but you’re cowards and you know you’d lose and you’re tied to this stick of dynamite for Ideology Reasons, god damn it). The message has been always that We Must Deliver Brexit and This Is What The People Want, while the people are breaking records saying that no, actually, we’d like another say, because everyone has now seen that this is an absurd shitshow that cannot be accomplished (and ONCE AGAIN WAS NEVER! FEASIBLE! IN THE FUCKING FIRST PLACE!!!!) and it hey, actually was not a bad idea to be in the EU. 

This is again, the alignment of the entire post-WWII political and legal world. It confers countless benefits, freedom from tariffs, the single market, a customs union, visa-free travel, no roaming charges, the right to live and work in 27 other countries, etc. But because the ex-British Empire (which really wishes it was still the British Empire) has its fragile racist panties in a bunch about other people coming to live here (when as ever, the problem isn’t immigrants, it’s austerity budgets and the Tories absolutely gutting government and NHS funding and social programmes and thinking that the solution to knife crime is to punish teachers for not noticing their students getting into it), they have decided this is actually the best course of action. Because we don’t want those Non British People telling us what to do. Ew gross.

As people have said, it’s like trading a gourmet three course meal for a bag of crisps and feeling self-satisfied about it, because boy we sure showed them. It has been bungled to a degree truly stupefying to everyone who isn’t a marching Brexiteer ideologue, Labour have…. really not inspired any confidence whatsoever that they’d be able to handle it better (since they have wildly see-sawed between what they will and won’t support, if they’d revoke Article 50 or support a new people’s vote or so on) and the Prime Minister has failed on an utterly fundamental degree to build cross-party consensus or engage with other European leaders or display any ability to consider alternatives. The Tories have truly felt that they can ram this through without any reference to anyone or anything else, and fuck consequences, I guess. The British economy has already lost approximately £66 billion as a result of Brexit uncertainty and loses more every day, every major firm is moving its headquarters to somewhere they can take advantage of EU law, this will leave us poorer, more isolated, less secure, with fewer options, and generally a worse deal in every imaginable way, and yet, because again, racism and xenophobia is a hell of a drug, there are still some factions who feel like yes, this is absolutely what we should do. 

It is truly a slow motion car crash of nightmares, it’s completely avoidable and yet nobody has the backbone to do that, Parliament and the PM have completely broken down, nobody is listening to the British people for whom they are supposedly doing this, and once again, the British Empire absolutely 100% deserves this. But as someone who lives here and would actually kind of like to get a job here, Jesus Christ. Jesus. Christ. JESUS. CHRIST.

[cryptodictation]

The LGTBI Persecuted | Future Planet

“We do not exist before the laws but we are. We do not exist for society but nevertheless society uses us: we are in the industrial estates, in the middle of Calle Montera in Madrid or in Casa de Campo but we are invisible. I am a transsexual, a woman and a migrant and I suffer that triple discrimination ”, this is how Fabiana denounces her daily life, invisible to a society that prefers to look the other way. She was part of the project Pride of the Brave, an exhibition organized by La Merced Migraciones, which can now be seen in this photo gallery. The images make visible the situation of those who are forced to flee their country due to their sexual orientation or gender identity and ask for refuge in Spain.

Fabiana is Mexican and for more than a decade she has been fighting for the defense of the rights of LGTBI + people so that in their country of origin equal marriages are recognized in other states beyond Mexico City and denounce the constant harassment suffered by their trans comrades arrested and forced to remain in the cells without having committed any crime.

“When I was in Spain on vacation, they entered my house twice, searched and destroyed everything. At that time my family told me not to come back because they were afraid they might do something to me. Because this is how we work in Mexico, the leaders of the movements are eliminated to instill fear and prevent others from manifesting, ”he says. That happened in 2016, and since then he has been unable to return to his country due to the constant threats he receives. Mexico is the second most violent country against the LGTBI + community, second only to Brazil. “I am from a state in northern Mexico where people are very conservative. When you leave the capital, it is when they begin to assassinate leaders like my colleague Agnes Torres and the threats to those who defend the rights of the collective, ”Fabiana acknowledges.

see photo gallery

Manuel with antacid liquid with which he defends himself from the gases that the police use to quell the protests in Venezuela. Cheché Díaz

In the world, 72 countries continue to criminalize the LGTBI + collective and in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, homosexuality is punishable by death. For feeling and loving differently, they face arbitrary detention and violence, they are denied the rights to assembly, expression and information, they suffer discrimination in employment, health and education. According to the Organization for Refugee, Asylum & Migration (ORAM) More than 175 million LGBTQ + people live in dangerous or violent conditions worldwide, but it is estimated that less than 3,000 receive international protection each year.

One of the assumptions under which asylum and protection can be requested in Spain is to have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for belonging to a certain group, as defined by sexual orientation or gender identity. Many of these people come to Spain seeking to live their sexual condition in freedom, but there are many barriers to overcome, such as problems finding a job or renting a home, which increase for transsexual people.

Three years ago, a La Merced Migraciones project was born with the aim of supporting people from the LGTBI + collective seeking asylum and refuge. “Many of these people when they arrive lack support either because pulling the supports they have from their own community in Spain means going back to the closet or because many times they arrive alone and don't know anyone. When you have suffered rejection by your community in your country and you get to another place and you have to take refuge again, it means to suffer rejection again ”, says Josué González, social worker of the project. For these reasons, they decided to create a specific project that supports this group.

“Many suffer blockages because it is not easy for them to respond to asylum interviews by recounting their lives because they are afraid. Many of them do not know that in our country homosexuality is not only not criminalized but that there are a number of rights and freedoms constitutionally guaranteed, ”says Josué, denouncing how in many cases professionals working in the field of asylum and refuge are largely unaware the particularities of the LGTBI + collective.

When you have been rejected by your community in your country and you get to another place and you have to take refuge again, it means to suffer a rejection again

Manuel had to flee Venezuela due to the political persecution he suffered for being a member of an opposition party. He lived in Madrid for a few years and returned to Venezuela to work, but was forced to return to Spain and request asylum because the situation was unsustainable. “If in addition to being an opposition you are gay, there is a very important viciousness on the part of the security forces. More than half of the attacks against LGTBI + people in Venezuela are committed by agents of the security forces, ”declares Manuel. Although he acknowledges that on a social level the situation in Venezuela had improved compared to a few years ago, he missed not being able to hold hands with his partner or publicly express affection. “After living in Spain, when I returned to Venezuela I had to go back to the door closet outside my house.” Between June 2015 and May 2016, there were a total of 18 murders and 75 attacks on people from the LGTBI + community in the South American country. Although there are no official government data, since hate crimes against people from this group are not recognized in the country.

Manuel and Fabiana are just some of the people who are part of the exhibition directed by the photographer Cheché Díaz who, after a participatory process, was photographing what each participant wanted to transmit. “They have been very brave to face stigma, to go out on camera, feel free and show themselves as they are. There were many fears and uncertainties but the result is that they took a step and wanted to tell their stories and make them visible. And they want to fight from out there and not locked up feeling like they are not part of anything, “explains Díaz.

For Fabiana, participating in this exhibition meant having the opportunity to fight xenophobic discourses and to be able to tell her story. “What I have experienced as a migrant transsexual living in Madrid I do not want for another partner. That is what motivates me to continue working. My dream would be that there was no discrimination and that everyone was as they wanted to be. ” A dream that will be possible someday thanks to brave people like them.

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[davidmkelly]

New Post has been published on David M. Kelly

New Post has been published on http://davidmkelly.net/2019/04/30/lunacy-back-in-style/

Lunacy-Back In Style!

Last week China announced its intention to establish a base on the Moon within ten years. Exciting news for sure, conjuring up images of a lunar colony (dare I say Moonbase Alpha?), and certainly an idea set to warm the cockles of any sci-fi fan.

The timeline would have to be described as aggressive, though. Certainly, NASA’s Apollo program managed to land astronauts on the moon in that time-frame, but that was only a “simple” land-and-return mission. Still, China has demonstrated many times that it is willing to spend money to achieve big results, so they probably have as good a chance as any.

Launcher

And now, barely a week later, we hear that under direction of the Great Cheeto, NASA plans to do the same, and they’re going to do it in five years. This timeline isn’t aggressive, it;s insane and quite possibly suicidal. There are three things necessary to envision a lunar mission, and here’s where things start to falter right-away.

First of all, you need a launcher capable of taking a large payload (by space standards) to the moon. In the Apollo days, this was the mighty Saturn V rocket. But now? The US doesn’t have anything currently capable of such a mission. NASA says it’s looking for partners in the industry, which basically means either the United Launch Agency (ULA), the SpaceX Dragon Heavy, or Boeing’s Space Launch System (SLS).

ULA Delta IV Heavy

The ULA currently has the Boeing-built Delta IV Heavy rocket. This is probably NASA’s best option as it is NASA Launch Services Program (LSP) certified (but only for non-crewed launches). The SLS hasn’t carried out a single launch yet, and delays in the program presently put the first launches in 2020, at the earliest and, according to some observers, the program may even get scrapped entirely.

The only other possibility would be SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. This rocket has only launched once, and future launches are all listed as TBD. Plus, the system has no LSP certification (crewed or uncrewed). The Falcon Heavy program is also suffering from delays, and the company recently had to defer what would have been the rocket’s first commercial launch.

So, for any of these options to be viable, they would have to go through NASA LSP certification–not an easy or short program, although possible given the five-year timeline, if resources were thrown at it.

Capsule

SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule

To get people to and from the moon, you need some form of capsule. Again, the US doesn’t have one. SpaceX has the Crew Dragon, and Boeing is developing the CST-100 Starliner, but neither is close to being ready. The Crew Dragon has a slight advantage because it’s based on the Dragon capsule used to deliver cargo to the ISS, but it isn’t LSP crew certified and recently suffered a setback when it exploded uring ground testing, seriously delaying its certification chances.

So the question here becomes “Is NASA going to rush testing both the launcher AND capsule?”

Lander

Lunar Lander (visualization)

Now we get to the real kicker in all of this. Forgetting the issues of the launcher and capsule, the US has no lander–not even a design on the table. And here, even the commercial options fail. Neither SpaceX, Boeing, nor the ULA has a lander even on the drawing board. The only people who (maybe) do are the Chinese, and I’m pretty sure they won’t be rushing to help the US. It’s worth remembering that it takes somewhere around three years to design, certify, and build a new car–and all that has to do is sit on the ground. Building a craft capable of landing a crew safely on the moon is several orders of magnitude more difficult.

Bigelow Moon Habitat (visualization)

So far I’ve not discussed the idea of creating a station for the astronauts on the moon. Both Bigelow and Sierra Nevada Corporation have expandable units that might work, but again, none of these have been tested or validated for crew use, plus they’re more designed for operation in orbit rather than on the lunar surface. And if the plans don’t include setting up some kind of station, that would make the whole exercise pretty much a win for the Chinese efforts. Let’s face it, we don’t need another mission to the Moon just to leave dusty footprints.

Sustainability

Lunar Orbital Gateway (visualization)

There are no new funds for this project. NASA is already operating at a shoestring level compared to the Apollo era and in fact their funding peaked in 1966! The Apollo lander alone cost $11 billion–half the current estimated allocation for 2020. So, in order to do this, NASA would have to cut back on almost every other program it operates, and that would include the planned Lunar Orbital Gateway.

The Gateway is an international project with the goal of building a space station in lunar orbit. Building this would offer untold scientific opportunities and also act as a staging post for lunar operations, as well as missions to other planets such as Mars. I talked about this idea in a previous post discussing sustainable approaches to space travel. Essentially, any mission that works on the idea of traveling directly from Earth to another celestial body can only ever be a glorified publicity stunt.

The cost in terms of resources and hardships involved make such ventures so risky and unsustainable that they really aren’t worth contemplating. So, returning to the idea used on the Apollo program to rush through yet another badly thought-out lunar flag-waving exercise is not only a step backward, but also, given the potentially disastrous short timeline, precipitates an unconscionable risk.

Unfortunately, this is a continuation of the space pissing contest that has plagued NASA from its early days. First, they were in a competition with the Soviets. Now its China (or maybe Space ISIS…). All its major programs and missions were designed to push political goals with any scientific ones entirely secondary, and sustainability and safety have always been compromised. As a result, less viable missions have been pushed forward, while better ones that would have supported sustainable strategies have been notoriously underfunded or defunded entirely.

Certainly the certification process could be rushed, but I hope that won’t happen–that kind of approach almost inevitably costs lives. As my character Joe Ballen says “space is always dangerous, and a single mistake can easily kill you.” The big problem with all of these systems is that this is rocket science, and that isn’t easy.

I’d love to see the US pull this off. I’d be overjoyed to see humanity developing its first permanent off-world base. But with this timeline, such a program will only likely puts people in danger, and no one wants another tragedy in space. It will be interesting to see how this story develops.

[theconservativebrief]

We are living in an era of unprecedented protest.

There have been more than 20,000 protests since President Trump took office, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, involving close to 21 million people total from nearly every part of the country. In absolute terms, that likely surpasses the amount of activity we saw even at the height of the Vietnam War.

But what difference has all this made? Are these movements putting real pressure on the Trump administration? Does the so-called “resistance” have the right strategy?

L.A. Kauffman has spent more than 30 years immersed in protest movements, as an organizer, strategist, journalist, and observer. She helped coordinate the mass demonstrations against the Iraq War in 2004 and has been actively involved in the various anti-Trump protests since 2017.

Her new book, How to Read a Protest: The Art of Organizing and Resistance, focuses on the 2017 Women’s March and all the movements it helped spawn. It’s an interesting look at how protests work in this new digital era, and why so many of our conventional views of protests are just wrong.

I called her to talk about the misconceptions we have about protest movements and what she thinks the anti-Trump resistance can do to meaningfully change our political reality.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

You open your book by saying that protests work, but not the way people think they do. What is the biggest misconception people have about protest movements?

L.A. Kauffman

There are two big misconceptions, and they’re related. The first one is that protests are primarily a short-term pressure tactic and should be evaluated as such. So a million people marched for gun control all over the country, but the Republicans control Congress and there hasn’t been immediate gun reform. So the protest must’ve failed, right? This idea that protests are first and foremost designed to create short-term policy or legislative change and should be assessed based on how well they did that is just wrong.

The second misconception is that all protests are more or less the same thing. People tend to look at protests or read about protests and there’s very little nuance about what kind of protest it was, who organized it, what the aims were, how it came together, and what it was seeking to achieve. And so there’s a sort of a flattening that happens a lot of times in the reporting about protests that contributes to that first misunderstanding.

Sean Illing

Let’s try to clear up that first misconception. In the book, you argue that it’s a mistake to view protests as a direct means to change, and that instead, we should see protests as events that alter the climate and make possible all the other kinds of organizing that are necessary for change. Can you say a bit about that?

L.A. Kauffman

The way that social, cultural, and institutional change happens is very complex, and it unfolds over long periods of time. For instance, if you’re talking about going from a state where homophobia is just the baseline condition of our culture to a moment where gay marriage is legalized and gay relationships are widely accepted — that’s a long, slow change.

And it’s very difficult to pinpoint how any particular protest works. You have moments where you have very focused protests that are looking for a specific remedy or protesting a very specific injustice. And those could work very well as pressure tactics, but a lot of what is happening is more like movement-building, which is what changes the terms of the conversation.

It’s absolutely critical to reframe the public debate around an issue. Creating a sense of possibility that certain kinds of reforms that were once considered unthinkable are now possible. Protests, especially mass protests of the sort we saw in 2017 with the Women’s March, help to do this, and it’s an essential part of their success. It gives people a sense of their own collective power.

Sean Illing

You mentioned the Women’s March — I’m curious what you think about its overall significance. There are some who thought it was a purely symbolic victory, that because it wasn’t tied to specific policy goals, it didn’t accomplish anything. I take it you disagree with this view?

L.A. Kauffman

I think the Women’s Marches proved extraordinarily consequential. We’re having this conversation on the eve of a midterm election, so we don’t know what the election results are going to be on Tuesday. But there are times when these protests do seem like they’re a moment when people get out and express their views and maybe influence public opinion, but then they just go home and it doesn’t build to something more.

What was so striking about the Women’s Marches was how much they contributed to the creation of this massive, sprawling, decentralized grassroots resistance to Trump. In the period after the Women’s March, 6,000 new locally based resistance groups formed.

Most of them were led by women volunteers and populated overwhelmingly by women, and they were located all across the country. One of the things that was really different about the 2017 Women’s Marches from other national protest mobilizations we’ve seen in the past was just the geographic spread. We haven’t seen anything quite like that in the history of this country.

There are still at least 5,000 of those groups active. And that’s where a lot of the grassroots mobilization around the midterms is coming from. It’s not coming from the Democratic Party apparatus — it’s coming from all of these independent, decentralized, locally based groups, in many cases. That’s hugely important and stems directly from the Women’s March.

Sean Illing

What do you make of the broader resistance to Trump right now? Is it succeeding? And if not, how should people who are alarmed by Trump’s behavior respond?

L.A. Kauffman

The most powerful way for people to protest Trump is by not focusing on him. I wish the marchers in New York, instead of going to Trump Tower, would go to [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s office and hold him accountable for the ways in which he has been a really very weak leader for the resistance.

I think the Democratic Party is clearly not going to save us from this authoritarian onslaught. It’s going to be grassroots mobilizing, forcing Democrats to take bolder positions than they would otherwise, and keeping the heat up on the Trump administration as well. But there’s a certain point at which protesting outside Trump Tower is just shouting into the wind.

Sean Illing

It’s very hard to measure the impact of a protest movement in real time, for reasons you’ve already outlined, but you seem to think the resistance to Trump is having a real impact.

L.A. Kauffman

I think it has. When you’re talking about protests over a major phenomenon like a Trump presidency, it’s hard to pin down because we will never know what might have happened if we hadn’t been out protesting. We will never know how much worse things would have been. There could have been many more egregious policies that would’ve been adopted if we weren’t out there protesting. The Trump administration would have felt much more emboldened had there not been this enormous opposition.

Sean Illing

I often hear people complain about the disruptive nature of protests — that they’re too aggressive or that they inconvenience the very people protesters are seeking to persuade. But disruption is precisely the point of protesting; it’s about making the status quo uncomfortable and unsustainable. How do you respond to these sorts of complaints?

L.A. Kauffman

Well, this goes back to something I was saying early on about there being many different forms of protest in America. There are disruptive protests that bring the disruption directly to whoever is doing the harm. If you’re having a sit-in in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) office — that’s disrupting business in Lindsey Graham’s office, and I can do nothing but applaud that.

There are other kinds of disruptive protests where people, say, block traffic on a bridge or a major thoroughfare. People usually call those “direct action” protests, and they can be very powerful. But that is a tactic that I think needs to be used very sparingly, because the people that are inconvenienced are not necessarily people who are part of creating whatever the problem is that you’re looking to address.

I always prefer a disruption that interrupts the business of those who are enacting the policy that you want to see change rather than interrupting daily life for ordinary folks who may in fact agree with you; but there are moments in which that kind of protest is one of the most powerful ways of conveying a sense of a state of emergency around an issue.

Sean Illing

How has social media and the internet changed the dynamics of organizing and protesting?

L.A. Kauffman

That’s a key question. I’m old enough that I was doing mass mobilizing before we really had the internet, so I’m less inclined than some people to see the internet as having been this magical advance that makes it so much easier to get the word out. But there’s no doubt that it helps facilitate grassroots organizing.

I think the internet has really helped people who are in communities that are small and maybe not predominantly liberal or progressive find each other connect and do organizing work. We had lots of ways of connecting and mobilizing before the internet, but the internet has radically improved our ability to connect and organize and spread information.

But I continue to believe that one of the most important facets of protesting is getting people together in the same physical space. Having people together where they don’t belong normally, even if it’s an orderly protest that’s not blocking traffic, matters. And getting people together in a room matters.

Sean Illing

I want to pull on that thread a bit. Why is it so powerful to put your body on the line with other people in defense of a common cause? What is the psychological significance of that?

L.A. Kauffman

It’s similar to why people come together in physical spaces in houses of worship. There is a bodily experience of community and of connection that is transformative. There are people who can go to a march and just feel bored and annoyed and go home. But we’re not just disembodied lives, and we don’t just form our views through what we read and see.

We also are people who live in a community, and there’s something about the way in which a protest reinforces the sense of the collective and gives people a palpable, bodily sense of collective power that really matters and really has lasting consequences.

Sean Illing

What do you say to people who think that rallying or marching is too passive or too gradual and that more direct action like sit-ins or street blockades is necessary? In other words, what’s your advice to those who are tempted to take more extreme measures?

L.A. Kauffman

I wouldn’t use the word “extreme” for nonviolent direct action.

Sean Illing

That’s totally fair. Maybe “escalate” is a better word, but in any case, you get my point.

L.A. Kauffmann

Of course. So my first book was called Direct Action, and it came out during the initial response to Trump. We saw massive numbers of people in the street and actually almost no direct action at all.

This new book is coming out when we still have mass mobilizing, but what we have been seeing — and we saw it with the family separation policy and then the Brett Kavanaugh fight — is a steady increase in the numbers of people engaging in nonviolent direct action. Mass marches usually do not work as pressure tactics. Well-crafted campaigns of strategic, nonviolent direct action often do.

Right now, everyone is sort of putting everything on hold to focus on the midterms, and rightly so. But I think with whatever outcome we have, nonviolent direct action is going to become an increasingly important and prominent tool used by the resistance going forward. It’s going to be one of our most powerful ways of trying to leverage power to turn around some of the damage of the last two years and hopefully lay the foundation for really major change.

Sean Illing

Looking forward, is there some constitutional red line that might be crossed — like, say, Trump firing Robert Mueller — that would change the dynamics such that a different sort of protest action would be justified?

L.A. Kauffman

Yes, there are red lines which, if crossed, would justify bringing everything to a halt with our bodies in the streets. And there are an extraordinary number of communities poised to take action. If [special counsel Robert] Mueller is fired, there are something like 900 communities where there are people poised to react. Those protests are planned as legal rallies at this point.

But part of what has made the resistance to Trump so powerful is that people haven’t waited for permission to form their own resistance groups, haven’t waited for permission or direction from a specific leader to just dig in and do the work and figure out where they can be most effective.

And if those red lines are crossed, I hope to see people recognizing that we’re in another moment where people will have to think big and step up and nonviolently interfere with business as usual, or risk calamity.

Original Source -> How to protest Trump

via The Conservative Brief

[jonboudposts]

On Modern Nazism: The Problem is You

The following is a little guide for this increasingly witless land to help you pull your head out of your rear-end and understand the difference between a gaggle of white western extremists hell-bent on attacking anything they perceive as different enough to threaten them – and those who are noble enough to stop them.

1. Opposing Fascism is a Morale Obligation

It was in the 1930s and 40s; it is now.  Quite simply there are those of us who care enough to stand up against intolerance and oppression and then there are the rest of you who stay home.

Also, there is no such thing as the Alt-Left.  Please find me this incredibly dangerous ‘far left’ that wants to control society and make us all look like Lenin.  You cannot because it does not exist.

In fact, neither is there an Alt-Right.  They are all just fascists and white supremacists, a grievance movement for the least-aggrieved people on earth; simple.

2. There is no Reduction in Freedom of Expression by Opposing Fascism

For far too long, extremists have been allowed to hide behind free expression, fashioning their hate speech around the idea that their opponents are all left-wing ‘extremists’ who want us all to be nice to each other.

Let me put this argument to bed once and for all:

If you express your opinion, then I can express mine.  If you say untrue things about Muslims or gay people or any other group, I will counter your lies with the truth.  If you arranged a march to attack and threaten a community, I will arrange a counter-demonstration to prevent you from doing so.

That is freedom of expression – end of story.  The main difference is my side is much bigger than yours and much more dedicated.  The right lose so they claim victim hood when really it is a combination of unsustainable beliefs, weak dedication to a cause and being a complete failure.

That is it.  There is nothing to say about being offensive or the right to be; nothing to debate about your freedom of expression or mine. This is not under threat; the beliefs of the far right are threatened because they are a load of crap and impossible to realise.

I do not give a fuck about upsetting the right; far, middle, alt or light.  Further, grow up and stop whining about any violence at these events; because if a bunch of fascists (for whom violence is central to their beliefs) kick off, what else can you do but defend yourself?  So what if someone’s hate flag gets ripped?  When I have finished my emotional outpouring for those beaten and killed by white extremists, I will see if there is anything left for your piece of cloth.

3. There is No Moral Equivalence Between the Left and Right

The basis of fascism is placing people of difference via very slim criteria in a position of inferiority, to the point that their lives are of less worth.  Violence is a central tenant of this and actively encouraged to achieve the social cleansing they desire.

At some point it becomes unavoidable to deny that to achieve any of the things the far right want, then genocide would be necessary.

There is nothing like this on the left.  There is no official justification or praise of violence and no criteria by which people are judged superior or inferior.  There are many failures within left politics but none that set out to destroy people like fascism did and still wants to.

4. Much of This Weak Response to the Far Right is a Result of Privilege

One of the things the far right have always managed to play on is the grievance culture of the best-off people.  That is an article (or more) in itself but to comment on one effect, the biggest block on progress here is how little the actions of fascists touch the majority of people in both Britain and the US.  White people are not likely to be randomly attacked in the streets by one of these flag-welding marching mobs.  If they are, it is usually because of some perceived difference (such as ‘looking gay’ or ‘weird’).  For the majority of you however, there could be a fascist march happening down the road while you read this and you would never notice.

We have a cultural problem with how we treat issues like this.  We make assumptions about others and ourselves to different degrees.  Young white men are just as likely as anyone to be radicalised.  Along with the easily-accessible websites, we have the mainstream press and political class which is full of people making fact-less claims and promoting hate speech against minorities.  Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had connections to the English Defence League and a collection of Daily Mail cuttings, with particular love for Melanie Philips.  Thomas Mair was a white supremacist who was photographed with members of Britain First (although a BBC insider claimed to me they could not find any evidence of connection between him and the group).

We simply do not treat this kind of extremism the same as the Islamic verity, along with paedophilia (one of the whitest crimes there is).  It does not get racially categorised, condemned or generate the same level of hateful reaction.

Instead we get people with now face threats to their lives by the actions of marching fascists coming out in defence of concepts like free speech which are never under threat in the first place and they have ultimately no belief in anyway.

One contributor to a Five Live phone in on 16 August commented that the demise (the ‘doing’) for the BNP was the moment that former leader Nick Griffin was fully mainstreamed by appearing on BBC Question Time.  While his performance was a coffin nail, it was only one of the last after a powerful and dedicated campaign to stop a group that included holocaust deniers and those inciting violence against immigrants.

Use some thought here people; do you really think that just showing up on a worthless TV programme was the only thing it took to destroy this Nazi in the political spectrum?   What did you do after you saw him on the show?  Same as before no doubt – sat on your arse while someone else took on the responsibility of fighting fascism.  If it had not been for the dedicated effort over years by brave anti-fascists, I have no doubt the BNP would still be around, with their white power message chiming well with modern America.  Plenty of people have had disastrous appearances on QT and still have careers in politics, including the UKIP (well, just about still have careers).  In fact another reason for the demise of the BNP is because UKIP did their politics much better to a mainstream audience happy to embrace them.

But ultimately it was the actions, campaigns, talks and protests of the anti-fascist movement that broke the BNP and UKIP.  

Anti-fascism is seeped in a great history that more people should embrace ant take forward; for we need it so much today.

Lastly, an additional point:

For all the usual shouters who obsessively go on about World War 2 all the time, it might be worth remembering that the very people marching through Charlottesville (check spelling) are modern examples of the very evil that ‘the greatest generation’ fought and died fighting. Your lax reactions and opinions of moral equivalence between left and right are unbearable enough, but to support anything done by Nazi scum like this just shows how little the war generation and the history you cling to like a shipwreck really means to you - you are historically-illiterate

Fascism exists in the modern world because you are scared and lazy.  It will continue while you make excuses and hide behind abstract concepts. But one thing is for sure; the anti-fascist movement will never relent in fighting this evil, while you sit back and watch.

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