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canchewread · 4 years ago

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Editor’s Note: our Book Blog feature combines a shareable quote from, and a short review of, an important left wing or left-leaning work of nonfiction I’ve read and would like to share or expound on.

Terminal Point

A little while ago, I published a lengthy piece about how corporate media coverage of the so-called “migrant crisis at the U.S. border” uniformly conformed to the dictates of the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model; regardless of the ideological bent of the outlet publishing that coverage. Towards the end of that essay, I discussed the difference between describing how America created the crises driving migration, and what is actually happening on the ground in relation to those crises; before recommending readers who wanted to know more, check out “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the mind of America” by Greg Grandin.

As longtime readers of this blog may remember, I’ve always been a big fan of Grandin’s work; in particular his scholarship on U.S. imperialism in Latin America is absolutely first rate. Given these factors, today I’d like to return to that portion of the discussion by offering a quote from (see above,) and a brief review of “The End of the Myth” here on Can’t You Read.

Frankly, for a guy whose writing is so accessible, Greg Grandin remains an extraordinarily complex thinker whose historical analysis explores a sometimes overwhelming number of “variations on a theme” in the larger scope of his primary thesis. Given the sad state of the term intellectual in our society, I won’t burden professor Grandin with the title, but as scholars go this guy genuinely fulfills his obligation to present the facts, and challenge established assumptions vigorously where warranted.

In that vein, the author opens The End of the Myth with a fundamentally sound, but deceptively simple thesis; that America has always resolved the staggering contradictions between its stated ideals, and its horrifying practices by projecting its identity, and even its very conception of the term “freedom” through the lens of an endless expansion across a wholly mythical, and ultimately metaphysical, frontier. Indeed, as Grandin notes quite early on in The End of the Myth, the contradiction between the colonial enterprise that eventually became America, and escaping the crushing poverty and violence of the old world was resolved by a genocidal project to claim the frontier before early-American settlers even had a word for the frontier. The story outpaced reality, right from the beginning.

Tracing the line of history from the foundation of the colonies, through the American Civil War, and into the modern era of Pig Empire dominated globalized trade, Grandin demonstrates that at each phase American society resolved the deferred promise of freedom inherent in its foundational mythos, by projecting the violence and conflict inherent to its settler-colonial, hyper-capitalist nature, outward and against a constantly-shifting “other.” From Manifest Destiny, to the Monroe Doctrine and on through our modern War on Terror, the solution to America’s problems has always been found in the destruction of an external enemy, and the expansion of the mythical “frontier.”

Where Grandin’s work really starts to get interesting however, is when he meticulously dissects the internal conflicts a settler colonial project of genocide and slavery created; conflicts that a romanticized vision of endless frontier expansion both rationalized, and reinforced. It is in this analysis that the author exposes the myth of freedom for those who can claim it on an endless frontier, as the skeleton key for understanding the increasingly critical flaws in Pig Empire society. After all, all wars, even an endless war based on the myth of infinite growth, have casualties, and the unrelenting legacy of violence, dehumanization, and ruthless exploitation of the eternal other have fundamentally altered American society in ways no idealized frontier could ever heal. In a wholly disturbing way then, the very existence of marginalized nonwhites inside “the nation” becomes a taunting reminder of a faltering white supremacist legacy the Pig Empire has never made any attempts to reconcile with, let alone end.

These consequences are the dark, unspoken truths of both American history and America’s present; and they are rarely if ever exposed to the public eye. In doing so, Grandin lays bare the roots of American imperialism, white supremacy, colonial exploitation, and even U.S. dominated “borderless capitalism” in the modern era. Like a cancerous tumor, the myth of the American frontier has fueled the endless growth of a Pig Empire capitalist class that threatens to unleash fascist violence to maintain control now that the frontier thesis has run into the hard walls of both history, and reality. By exposing the catastrophic fallout of worshipping frontier mythology in America’s past, Grandin does much to reveal how “the land of the free” has never really stopped being “the home of the slave.”

Importantly however the author does not remain entirely in the past. Grandin also draws stark attention to the fact that although the myth of the frontier has lost its power to obscure America’s horrifying contradictions, it has done nothing to satiate the greed and arrogance of the primary beneficiaries of those contradictions in modern life:

“The fantasies of the super-rich, no less than their capital, have free range. They imagine themselves sea-steaders, setting out to create floating villages beyond government control, or they fund life-extension research hoping to escape death or to upload their consciousness into the cloud. Mars, says one, will very soon be humanity’s “new frontier.” A hedge-fund billionaire backer of Trump who believes “human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make” and that people on public assistance have “negative value,” a man so anti-social he doesn’t look people in the eye and whistles when others try to talk with him, gets to play volunteer sheriff in an old New Mexico mining town and is thereby allowed to carry a gun in all fifty states. Never before has a ruling class been as free - so completely emancipated from the people it rules - as ours.”

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth.

Of course, given that The End of the Myth was published in 2019, a certain percentage of the book is focused on specifically what Trump, Trumpism, and Trump’s promise to build a border wall mean for modern American politics. Even this seemingly contemporary discussion however, offers timeless insights on both the past and future of an America that continues to embrace nativist ideas and ideology. Although Grandin never uses the term, he subtly notes that in many ways Trumpism itself represents an explicit ideological rejection of endless growth along an infinite frontier, and even offers a horrifying “solution” to our present day climate crisis - white nationalist infused eco-fascism.

Look, you probably don’t need me to convince you a Pulitzer-prize winning book by a celebrated American historian is “a good read.” What I’d like to add here however is that Grandin’s book isn’t just a guide to understanding American nativism, immigration policy, and right wing fantasies of migrant invasions; this book is a guide to understanding both American political thought, and rising Pig Empire fascism - which in a lot of ways, are very much the same thing.

I don’t know if this is the best American history book ever published, but frankly I suspect it’s in the running. Even though I don’t agree with everything Grandin says in The End of the Myth, I’d still ultimately give it an enthusiastic five star rating. More importantly, I would strongly suggest this work as a must-read volume for folks looking to understand why the Pig Empire works the way it does.

Additional Resources:

Infinite Frontier (The Nation review)

America can no longer run from its past (Guardian review)

A Monument to Disenchantment (Jacobin review)

Slavery, and American Racism, Were Born in Genocide

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

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tinyshe · 3 years ago

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The Great Reset Demands Firing All Unvaccinated Employees Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Story at-a-glance

The Great Reset has been called a conspiracy theory by many, despite specific plans published on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website and partnerships between the WEF and global organizations like the United Nations and World Health Organization

An investigative report asserts that the ongoing restructuring of processes that control food and data are upending traditional practices so private corporations have more control and influence than democratically elected government

A part of the Great Reset is a reset of the economy, including jobs. Many across the U.S. are facing unemployment if they do not choose to take a genetic therapy experiment in the form of a COVID-19 vaccine

Employees of six major hospitals in Cincinnati, Ohio, have filed a lawsuit, hoping to stop the mandated vaccine, which health experts are promoting with inconsistent messages, first claiming it does not stop community transmission; yet, requiring it for employment under the guise of preventing the spread of infection

Over the past year and a half, I’ve written many articles detailing the evidence supporting the claim that the COVID pandemic is a ruse to usher in a new system of global centralized governance by unelected leaders, the so-called Great Reset.

The recent release of the House Foreign Affairs Committee report1 entitled, “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” presented solid evidence that many of the “conspiracy theories” about the virus were in fact true. For example, using some intelligence reports and other public documents, the committee found that:2

“… we now believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak. We also believe the preponderance of the evidence proves the virus did leak from the WIV and that it did so sometime before September 12, 2019.”

They presented evidence of genetic modification and wrote this:3

“This report also lays out ample evidence that researchers at the WIV, in conjunction with U.S. scientists and funded by both the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government and the U.S. government, were conducting gain of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV …

In many instances, the scientists were successful in creating 'chimeric viruses' — or viruses created from the pieces of other viruses — that could infect human immune systems.

With dangerous research like this conducted at safety levels similar to a dentist’s office, a natural or genetically modified virus could have easily escaped the lab and infected the community.”

The idea of the Great Reset may feel like a conspiracy theory, especially if life as you know it where you live has not dramatically changed. You still go to work, buy food, go to the gym, go out to eat and attend events. There may be people wearing masks, and you may see or hear news reports about vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, but it hasn’t reached your employer and you may not be personally affected … yet.

But, make no mistake, unless we all do our part to peacefully protest the changes being planned, write to our legislatures, and talk to our neighbors and friends, what is happening in New York,4 France,5 Germany6 and Israel,7 will soon be knocking on your front door.

Does ‘Great Reset’ Sound Like a Conspiracy? It May Be Worse

An article titled, “Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy and Life Has Never Been Better” appeared in Forbes Magazine8 in November 2016. It was written by Ida Auken, a member of the Denmark Parliament9 and agenda contributor at the World Economic Forum (WEF).10

The article was frightening in the simplistic way it describes the dissolution of society as we know it. And, as time marches forward, we see more evidence of what the WEF has proposed as “perfect sense”11 coming true.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested in September 2020 what other world leaders have also promoted12 — that the COVID-19 virus, that has killed and devastated the health of many people, provided the world is an:13

"… opportunity for a reset ... our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change."

More than 20 world leaders came together to suggest, "At a time when COVID-19 has exploited our weaknesses and divisions, we must seize this opportunity and come together as a global community for peaceful cooperation that extends beyond this crisis."14 And while that sounds noble, altruistic and humanitarian, it is the plan for the future that is in stark contrast to the statement.

Ivan Wecke, a journalist from Open Democracy, did a deep dive into some of what lies behind the WEF’s Great Reset plan and found what he called something “almost as sinister hiding in plain sight. In fact, more sinister because it’s real and it’s happening now. And it involves things as fundamental as our food, our data and our vaccines.”15

Although Wecke discounts the plans of the Great Reset to abolish private property, use the virus to solve overpopulation and enslave the remainder of humanity as “nebulous and hard to pin down,” he goes on to illustrate in detail how the fundamental structure of the world that controls food and data, and ultimately humanity, is being upended and restructured so that private corporations have more control and influence than governments.

WEF Calls It ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’

It comes down to “stakeholder capitalism,” which are the magic words that Klaus Schwab, WEF chairman, has been promoting for decades, and is a central theme in the organization's Great Reset plan.16 The concept as Wecke describes it is to transform global capitalism, so corporations create value for stakeholders.17

These stakeholders can be consumers, employees, communities and others. This will be carried out through multi-stakeholder partnerships of governments and private-sector businesses across the globe. As he dug deeper into the concept, it became more apparent that this means giving corporations more power and taking that influence away from democratically elected institutions.

The initial plan was drafted after the 2008 economic crisis and included the vision that governments around the world would be only one influencer in a multi-stakeholder model. When he asked himself who would be the other nongovernmental stakeholders, Wecke only had to look at the WEF partners that meet each year in Davos, Switzerland.

These partners are some of the biggest companies in oil, food, technology and pharmaceuticals. In other words, the companies that could ultimately restructure society and control the supply chain are those that provide everyday necessities. These proposed concepts appear to have started taking shape in a strategic partnership agreement which the WEF signed with the United Nations in 2019.

Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the Center for Governance and Sustainability from the University of Massachusetts18 calls this move an inroad to creating a place for corporations inside the United Nations.19

The WEF is using the concept of multi-stakeholders to change the current system that countries use today to work together. This multilateral system may not always be effective and may have too many layers of bureaucracy, but Wecke says it is “theoretically democratic because it brings together democratically elected leaders of countries to make decisions in the global arena.”20

Big Tech May Run the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation

What’s really happening here, though, is the move toward placing unelected stakeholders in positions of power does not deepen democracy but, rather, puts decision making in the hands of financially focused corporations. As Wecke points out, this will have real-world implications for how medications are distributed, food systems are organized and how Big Tech is governed.

Under a democratic rule of law, six corporations already control 90% of the news media consumed by Americans. Tech Startups calls this an “illusion of choice and objectivity.”21 How much more propaganda will be thrown in the face of consumers when Big Tech is monitoring and controlling Big Tech?

The year 2030 holds significance for the WEF’s vision22 which is to scale technology and facilitate “inclusive growth.” In the fall of 2021, the UN will bring together the Food Systems Summit to achieve sustainable development goals by 2030.23 Yet, Sofia Monsalve of FIAN International, a human rights organization focused on food and nutrition, told Wecke:24

“’Abandoning pesticides is not on the table. How come?’ asks Sofia Monsalve of FIAN International, a human rights organisation focused on food and nutrition.

'There is no discussion on land concentration or holding companies accountable for their environmental and labour abuses.’ This fits into a bigger picture Monsalve sees of large corporations, which dominate the food sector, being reluctant to fix the production system. ‘They just want to come up with new investment opportunities.’”

Wecke also dug into a long list of participants in the 2020 Roadmap For Digital Cooperation25 and found influencers included Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the WEF.26 The functions for the group appear to be vague, but if the group comes to fruition, it will be a decisive victory for those Big Tech companies that have been pushing to expand their power,27 are fighting antitrust rules28 and are facing accusations of tax evasion.29

The move by the UN and WEF has not gone unnoticed. A group of more than 170 civil organizations have signed an open letter30 detailing why they oppose the plan. At a time when stronger regulations are needed to protect consumers, it appears that the new UN digital roadmap may be seeking less.

Firing the Unvaccinated Is the Start of the Great Job Reset

Finally, Wecke addresses the issue of global vaccine distribution.31 Instead of the World Health Organization, which is “the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system,”32 being responsible for vaccine access, another initiative was created called COVAX. According to the WHO, COVAX is co-led by the WHO, UNICEF, CEPI and GAVI.33

As a quick reminder, GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance) and CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have strong ties with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the WEF and are connected with large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca and more.34

The influence these groups have on the global distribution of the COVID vaccine may have been best illustrated when South Africa and India requested a temporary lift on the rules governing intellectual property to increase manufacturing and distribution to developing countries. Wecke reports35 that although the WHO director-general publicly said that he backed a proposal, others in the COVAX initiative strongly opposed it, and it didn’t happen.

There appears to be enough vaccines available in industrialized nations for the WEF to support any and all employees being fired if they choose not to take the vaccine. The National File36 published a tweet the WEF made in May 2021 which said, “Get your COVID-19 jab — or you could face consequences from your employer #COVID19 #JobsReset21.”

Additionally, the WEF had posted an article37 on their website that made a variety of claims about the percentage of companies that would require employees to be vaccinated and juxtaposed mental health concerns and burnout through the pandemic with being unvaccinated in the article.

After intense backlash, the tweet was deleted and replaced with a question, “Will employees be required to get the COVID-19 vaccination?”38 The new post quickly filled with screen shots of the original post.

Two Cities Promising to Fire Employees

Even before the FDA announced their approval of the Pfizer vaccine,39 Cincinnati, Ohio, area hospital systems had announced that starting October 1, 2021, all health care workers and volunteers are required to be vaccinated. Among those participating in the vaccine mandate are the University of Cincinnati Health, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the Christ Hospital Health Network.40

Health care workers in Cincinnati have now filed a lawsuit against six of the hospital systems saying requiring vaccines for employment is unlawful and violates workers’ Constitutional rights. The lawsuit says, "When there was no vaccine, the workers had to go to work. They were heroes. Now that there is a vaccine, they have to get the vaccine or be fired. Now they are ‘zeros.’"41

April Hoskins is a lab assistant at St. Elizabeth Edgewood who has worked for 20 years in family practice and hospital oncology. She told a reporter from WLWT5,42 "You've trusted us this whole time to take care of these patients, unvaccinated, without the proper PPE. And now out of nowhere, you have to get it or you're going to be terminated? Like, something is wrong with that picture.”

August 23, 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all public school teachers and staff would be required to have at least one dose of the vaccine by September 27, 2021, or they would no longer have a job. Not soon afterward, the United Federation of Teachers union issued a statement from union president Michael Mulgrew reiterating their desire and priority to keep the students and teachers safe. He went on to say:43

“While the city is asserting its legal authority to establish this mandate, there are many implementation details, including provisions for medical exceptions, that by law must be negotiated with the UFT and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration."

It Is Important to Point Out the Inconsistencies

This was the second announcement from de Blasio, who first mandated vaccinations for approximately 400,000 employees in the Department of Education, New York Police Department and the Fire Department of New York.44 In tandem with New York, California Long Beach Unified School District also announced mandatory vaccinations, as has Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for all Chicago Public School employees by October 15, 2021.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy also announced mandatory vaccinations or twice-weekly testing requirements for all state employees, effective October 18. It is clear that as different states and municipalities add their own mandates, it’s essential to be aware of what is happening in your local and regional areas, as well as to speak up at public meetings and demand public hearings on the matter.

The mayor of Orland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, describes an example of how decisions behind closed doors can have a different outcome than those in public.45 He also says what is happening now is about “our processes, Constitutionality and the rule of law.”

The inconsistencies from health experts are deafening. Even the World Health Organization advises people who are vaccinated to continue wearing masks due to the Delta variant because “vaccine alone won’t stop community transmission.”46 Simultaneously, the public is told that everyone needs the vaccine to prevent spread of the infection47 and if you have the vaccine, you can still spread the virus and put others at risk.48

Each person has a responsibility to speak up, share information and ensure that as people make up their minds about vaccination, vaccine passports, civil liberties and the right to free speech, they have all the information they need and not just what’s shared in mainstream media.

To that end, I encourage you to share my articles with your friends and family. As you know, they are removed from the website 48 hours after publication. Please copy and paste the information, with the sources, and share it!

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crossguild · 2 years ago

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i think the point people miss when they think of 'imperialist' as 'the mean guy' is that the hephaestus crew aren't the victims experiencing imperialism, they're just a lower tier of the goddard futuristics imperialist machine. it's gringo george who's in costa rica for poverty tourism on a trip to find himself and the dole company exploiting cheap labor and land to export pineapples to the USA.

but since there's no colonialism (successfully) happening in w359, given the lack of a colonized civilization, the crew dynamics are fundamentally about capitalism and the point THERE is that unless you're at the very top, even though you might reap some tangential benefit from participating in the machine, ultimately your life and value as a person are secondary to profit and the people at the very top don't really give a shit about anyone but themselves.

imperialism is not a core theme of this series, nor is it a major source of conflict in this series between the main characters, but it does inform the story & its narrative. it's not a concept that's interchangeable with capitalism, but it is a buzzword of the day so people who have never experienced imperialism and colonization sure will just throw it around lmao

thinking about wolf 359 & imperialism and the thing is that, like any media about capitalism and space exploration, it unavoidably is also commentary on imperialism and settler colonialism (whether or not it's intentional is maybe up for debate). recognizing the series as written by a costa rican-american lends it a bit more complexity in that sense

Keep reading

#wolf 359 #imperialism is a very specific thing

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lunaescribe · 4 years ago

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A Christmas Carol 2019 ★★★★½

Rewatched Dec 25, 2020

MariaSar’s review published on Letterboxd:

A RESTORATION OF THE BOOK’S SOCIAL JUSTICE This is not another adaption which seeks to be family friendly whimsy and sanguine lightness on harsh realities. When Dickens described a character in the 1840s who said “Then let them die and decrease the surplus population”, he was not summoning an over the top miserable monster from his imagination. Capitalism boomed in this period, poverty thrived and many did die in the streets in the age of industry as Monopolies and Robber Barons were born and the 1% as we still know it today struck their roots into the ground. And they did it on the back of many POC and lives of workers. Dickens work was attacking their success and exploitive practices in his story, while creating a story that could be emotionally related to by many readers.

Over the last nearly 200 years much of the book lost its bite to warm fuzzy film adaptions loosing the ghost story angle, as Dickens begins the book with, in their retelling. This adaptation returns the gothic to the story. This version is a viscous attack on capitalism and an updated version of how much our understanding of human psychology has grown in 200 years.

This version goes into Scrooge’s psyche like we’ve never seen before, and I will do my best to explain without giving spoilers. It builds on the underlying sprinkles of abuse Dickens’ writings hinted at, and crafts a version of the storys themes free of any societal censorship in the 1840s. It breaks down the mind of money obsession of the extreme capitalist and asks what turns a person to delve so deeply into that mindset.

Much like the original story this version allows sympathy for Scrooge however unlike nearly every other version it does not excuse his behavior in favor of sympathy. This version highlights the exploitive practices of business men in the 1840s and today, especially how it fell on women and POC of color. And POC indeed finally! A version showing a diverse London as it historically was! Astonishingly it is one of the first versions to include Ali Baba as a character even though he does feature in the book as a vivid piece of Scrooge’s childhood. This version finally confronts the white supremacy of past adaptions and men like Scrooge did and today still do commit.

The biggest change and update to the story is how it uses its women. It’s common knowledge Dickens was not particularly kind to women, most of the 19th century wasn’t, however this version is good enough to realistically and thematically build up the prominent women in the original story creating a more balanced and nuanced story. Mary Cratchit’s outburst in the book of loathing Scrooge even more than her husband is heavily built on and she finally get to be a person instead of just a device. The same can be said of Scrooge’s sister without going too much into spoiler territory. And almost every addition is paired with a common motif or occurrence to women in the 19th century, making them all fit smoothly into the narrative.

Lastly and most importantly is how this film handles the climax and Scrooge’s redemption. In most films Scrooge’s is so horrified by a future of dying alone it drives him to change. I won’t reveal the way they do it in this film but it is jaw dropping and the truest most informed and perfect example of character redemption I’ve ever seen. It shares focus on those who have been abused by Scrooge, not sweeping over their pain or anyone’s pain. It is the most sincere authentic portrayal of true remorse as opposed to selfish fear of consequences.

This is a version of a Christmas Carol that embodies the phrase “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. This is a version that challenges what it means to seek redemption and feel remorse, and offers comfort to those who have been abused of how to forgive themselves and the ill that was done to them-and break their own cycle of abuse. It is strikingly brilliant artistically and acted, and if you can let go of what you think a Christmas Carol should be-it will offer you deep epiphany, hope, and potentially righteous anger. I beg you to watch it, it is now one of my most favorite pieces of media ever, and I believe destined to become an adult classic.

#a christmas carol #christmas carol fx #2019 #BBC #Guy pearce #Scrooge #film review #my writing

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years ago

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Book Review

Confessions of the Fox. By Jordy Rosenberg. New York: One World, 2018.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Genre: historical fiction, queer fiction

Part of a Series? No

Summary: Set in the eighteenth century London underworld, this bawdy, genre-bending novel reimagines the life of thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard to tell a profound story about gender, love, and liberation.

Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Is Confessions of the Fox an authentic autobiography or a hoax? As Dr. Voth is drawn deeper into Jack and Bess’s tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: sexual content (as in sex acts, not the mere presence of lgbt+ people), blood, graphic depiction of top surgery, violence, racism, gender dysphoria

Overview: I didn’t know what I was expecting when I picked up this book, but something about it just hit all the right angles for me. I adore historical fiction that not only aims to imitate the aesthetics of the period, but also focuses on underrepresented identities, such as queer, non-white, and working or poverty class people; thus, it was inevitable that I would find Confessions of the Fox would be so engrossing. I do understand that this book might not be for everyone, as Rosenberg plays with a lot of academic ideas that usually fall in the realm of theory, but personally, I loved that this book wasn’t just about trans identity. While gender and identity and queerness were at the heart of this book, Confessions was also about archives and policing and commodities and so much more - things that were related and engaged the more academic part of my brain, but somewhat complicated for casual reading. Nevertheless, it was ambitious and smartly-constructed, so I’m giving it a high rating, even if I have quibbles here and there.

Writing: As a former academic and lover of history, I very much enjoyed Rosenberg’s approach to genre, form, and writing. It would have been easy to simply write a story using modern aesthetic tastes, but Rosenberg goes out of his way to imitate the prose style of the 18th century. I loved the richness of the vocabulary and the complexity of the sentences, as well as the juxtaposition of the sacred and profane. It was refreshing to read such beautiful prose that the author clearly put a lot of love into, and if you want to be so immersed in a story that you feel like you’re reading a historical document, I think Rosenberg does a wonderful job.

I also really loved the way Rosenberg wrote about trans identity in the 18th century. There are passages, for example, where Jack’s attention wanders while being dead-named, where Jack expresses feelings of confusion or freedom when talking about his physical body, where he talks about the process of coming into being when he heard Bess use his name, etc. I thought these passages were the most beautifully written and impactful, and they stayed with me the most after I finished the book.

These 18th century “confessions” are accompanied by a number of footnotes, written by a character named Dr. Voth in the present day. In these passages, Rosenberg shifts his tone and style, thereby differentiating between past and present without having to constantly remind the reader that Jack and Bess’s story is told through something of a frame. I think the choice to have footnotes instead of chapters where Voth’s POV takes center stage was a good one - it more effectively created parallels between the 18th century story and Voth’s personal story, and reminded the reader that history (especially trans history) evolves as a result of a kind of archival work, collected in pieces by many different people. In that sense, form matched function, which I am always delighted to see in my novels.

That being said, I can’t say I enjoyed Voth’s voice all that much. This criticism is probably a personal preference rather than anything Rosenberg did wrong - I just think Voth’s voice felt a little too conversational, like he was talking to someone instead of writing.

Plot: Most of Rosenberg’s novel follows Jack Sheppard and Bess Khan as they discover Jack’s identity, evade arrest, and disrupt a horrifying commodity trade (so to speak). In my opinion, the plot points surrounding Jack’s personal journey were incredibly well-constructed; I felt that the evolution of Jack’s gender identity, the romance between Jack and Bess, and their evolution as criminals were all very compelling and touched on a number of engrossing themes, from gender to poverty to anti-capitalism. Granted, there were some areas where I think the pacing dragged, but part of me thinks this was due to the 18th century style and genre conventions, more than anything Rosenberg was doing wrong.

In Voth’s footnotes, we also get something of a personal story which includes Voth being coerced into working for an exploitative publishing company at the direction of his university administrator. As we go through the footnotes, Voth recounts conversations he had with these figures while also disclosing details about his failed relationships - with one ex in particular. While I did like the parallels that exist between the manuscript and Voth’s own life, there were some things that challenged my suspension of disbelief. For example, I would never expect an academic to record personal anecdotes and intimate confessions in footnotes for an academic project. Maybe that happens in academic circles outside mine, and I understand it needs to happen for plot reasons (just reading references to critical theory or secondary sources would be boring for most people), so this criticism is coming from a place of being too close to the setting surrounding the text, in a way.

I also think that there were some passages where sexual activity would be mentioned where it was not needed. I do understand, on some level, that sex and sexuality is an important topic in trans studies (and queer studies as a whole), and I don’t want to appear too prudish. However, I think random references to a character masturbating, even if they were making a point, were a bit egregious. I was especially put off by the story of a 15 year old masturbating (in the present-day footnotes), and though I understand the story was illustrating an academic concept and books should acknowledge that (many) teens do have sex drives, it was also a bit much for me, personally.

Characters: Jack, our primary protagonist, is interesting and complex not just because he struggles with his identity as a trans man, but also because he struggles with acting in ways that are not out of self-interest. Though he is a thief and thus acts in self-interest in understandable ways, he eventually uncovers an operation which involves the production of a drug-like substance (or something - that’s the best I can describe it). Bess demands that he destroy all samples so that the substance can’t be reproduced by others, but Jack wants to confiscate the samples for himself to make a huge profit. I liked that this conflict existed, not only because it showed Jack as having other challenges in his life other than his gender identity, but it also spurred character growth and emotional turmoil.

Bess Khan, a prostitute and Jack’s lover, was written in a way that respected sex work and provided commentary on race and policing. I really liked that she had a strong set of principles and desires that were larger than herself, and I liked that she was confident and forceful where Jack could be meek and unsure.

Other rogues were equally loveable and admirable. Jenny, another prostitute, was a nice example of women forming networks of support within the criminal underworld while also showing how white women (even prostitutes) are treated differently than non-white women. Aurie, a black queer man, was also a supportive friend to Jack who is frequently instrumental in his survival. There is also a wide variety of named and unnamed rogues who were non-white and/or queer in some way, providing a rich array of characters that dispels the assumption that 18th century England was homogenously white and straight.

Our main antagonist, Jonathan Wild, is a bit less interesting in that he’s mainly just corrupt. I personally didn’t care for the chapters from his perspective, though I do understand that he functions as an important, symbolic figure that embodies all the things Jack and Bess work against (capitalism, police corruption, etc.).

Voth, our modern day commentator, has his moments, but sometimes, I would waffle back and forth between finding him engaging and finding him pretentious. I understand that he is supposed to be flawed, and I sympathize with a lot of his plights - mainly the pressure from his university and the anxiety he suffers from. But also, I found his voice to be somewhat combative, and if the point was to make a complicated, likeable-sometimes-unlikeable-other-times character, then I think Rosenberg succeeded.

TL;DR: Confessions of the Fox is a beautiful debut novel that engages with trans identity and history, though it does so in a way that may be a bit too academic for some readers. But while it definitely demands much of your attention, Rosenberg ultimately delivers a rich, engrossing story that reaches beyond the historical and textual boundaries of the page and invites the reader to see themselves as part of a vast network that is constantly “making” and “becoming” itself.

#book reviews

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jyndor · 4 years ago

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Cop-thing-anon here again (yeah I check the hashtag quite a lot..perks of covid homeschooling I guess)

Wow, I don't even know what to say

I knew what/who inspired the nations from atla but I had no idea that everything was deeper than that. I guess I thought atla's message was bad guy = ozai & sozin I guess and taking over the nations = bad. I also had no idea that azula ever said that

Makes sense the way you put it, I didn't think the creators would put in this much thought, like having the message run deeper than it usually is and taking real life events and shaping them kid friendly

You got me there.. actually convinced me. I'm still bummed, sorry

hey anon, I don’t want you to feel bad about not knowing some shit especially if you are a minor (which I am assuming because homeschooling). like I’m 29 and I didn’t know all of that when I was first watching avatar. at all. no one starts fully educated, that’s kind of the point of unlearning and growth.

also like, atla’s message is many messages - whether intended by the creators or unintended. and I don’t even agree with all of them. that’s the thing about media. there’s no such thing as ideologically pure content - there’s always going to be progress to make. and if you’re talking about atla’s creators (like bryke etc) then yeah they put a ton of thought into atla. I have issues with bryke but no one can say they didn’t do an amazing job researching for this world they wanted to build. and I just scratched the surface - there are so many other cultural influences on atla, from the sun warriors (pulling from aztec/incan/mayan cultures) to the foggy swamp tribe (probably related to people of the mississippi delta, or like the bayou) to the dai li being named for general dai li who was a top chinese government official and a fascist leader, etc. now it’s not perfect, like I said these peoples are not a 1 to 1 match for their real life influences.

I do believe that kids are smart and capable of digesting a lot. I was 14 or 15 when I first saw atla, and even though I was super anti-war (now I would categorize myself as anti-imperialism) avatar still taught me a lot. and when I rewatch the show I get so much more out of now that I understand more about these themes that they were pushing in the show.

like for instance, the episode where katara becomes the painted lady to save the fire nation town that is being poisoned. I was so mad at those townspeople for not accepting her because of her waterbending. like, how dare they? now... I still find it abhorrent but I understand why the writers made that choice. first off, those towns people were so poor and exploited I’d be shocked if they’d ever seen a waterbender before. so they probably didn’t know what waterbenders look like. and also, it’s a real thing that happens. poor communities can be bigoted and also exploited by corporations and business interests. that episode is not just about katara having empathy for poor people (even if they are people who have benefited in some small way from her people’s oppression) it is also about the toll that imperialism and the war machine have on the people who are supposed to benefit from those systems.

if you look at the united states, people like to say fuck america it should all drown etc, and yeah fuck the united states I agree, but the us is full of people who are dying from poverty and hunger and cancer from industry, and I’m not even talking about black americans who do not benefit from imperialism at all, but like... west virginia. skid row in california.

I read this un report on poverty in the us that fucked me up for a while:

“The evidence is everywhere. On Skid Row in Los Angeles, 14,000 homeless persons were arrested in 2016, including for urinating in public and other "quality of life" offenses, while overall arrests in the city were declining. For those wondering what the problem is, the answer is not hard to find. In 2016 there were only nine public toilets available for some 1,800 homeless individuals on Skid Row. The resulting ratio of one public toilet per 200 individuals would not even meet the minimum standards the UN sets for Syrian refugee camps.”

so like, not to bum you out further anon, but that is why critically engaging with media is so important. because if you just watch that episode and say “well fuck those poor fire nation people for probably being at least xenophobic if not racist” um I mean I get it I am sympathetic to that point. but it also brings up the lie of american exceptionalism that people around the world did actually believe. like that coming here would be better for people. idk maybe it is. but that episode was also saying that being a poor person, even a poor citizen who has privileges in their imperialist country, is at risk because of imperialism and capitalism lbr.

you can argue that that episode makes the case against there being a clear race factor in the show, but I’d argue that most people are willing to deal with someone’s differences until those differences are explicit. they’re totally cool with katara until they see the proof of her foreignness, and then they hate her. even when she put her neck at risk for them.

as far as the fanart goes, I’d be shocked if they were like “haha I’m fucking over indigenous people and supporting cops and police brutality” but it is a matter of not unlearning harmful things. like I know that the artist said they wanted to make sokka the cop first, but that is also a common thing in cop propaganda in shows. so like, have you ever seen the cool black cop or the gay cop or the woman cop? or the gay black cop with a cool corgi? that is making cops look progressive. that is a common ploy. it’s used by countries and companies to seem progressive (pinkwashing - israel does this, pretends to be gay friendly and woman friendly but they’re still harming palestinians so they’re not gay or woman friendly) and it works. people love brooklyn 99. but it’s still doing heavy lifting to present police departments in the united states as decent when they just are all complicit by nature.

so chances are that artist was not thinking about the messages they sent. and that art had over a thousand notes, so clearly people didn’t really think about it either. I saw a couple of comments saying it was gross but... shrug idk.

anyway, I don’t want you to be bummed out because of this. you didn’t do anything wrong, you just didn’t understand why I was mad about it. <3

#anons #asks #racism tw #fandom racism #not from anon lol #imperialism tw #atla #copaganda #always happy to throw shade at brooklyn 99

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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The Violence of Demanding “Peaceful” Protest

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, dozens of U.S. cities have be rocked with unrest, ranging from small protests to open rebellion and riots. In watching coverage of the protests over the last week, several predictable issues and themes have emerged in how these protests are being framed by city and state leaders, police, and mainstream media outlets. I think that those of us who are committed to anti-racist politics need to directly grapple with some of these frames if we are going to shift how our collective efforts to challenge racism and injustice are understood going forward, for the wider public and for ourselves:

1.) “Outside agitators” Both the governments and the media are going all in on dividing the good vs bad, legitimate vs illegitimate protesters, in order to control the unrest by turning people’s sympathies against it. They will say they support the cause but not the methods, but these are crocodile tears. They will cite MLK as a weapon against black protest, but it was MLK who said that his biggest enemy was the white moderate who valued order over the struggle for justice. It is these same moderates who condemn rioters rather than blame those in power who make riots inevitable.

The city government leaders are just lying, point blank, saying that the people who are doing anything other than quietly praying in their Sunday best are outside agitators. They have no evidence of this at all, and there is actual evidence from arrest records that most people vigorously protesting enough to be arrested are locals. This is an old tactic, and is used around the world by those in power seeking to discredit energetic social and political movements.

MLK felt compelled to condemn this rhetorical tactic, since it is the same one that was used by Jim Crow mayors and sheriffs against him and other civil rights protesters. The most important of his numerous criticisms here is that *it does not matter* if someone comes from elsewhere to stand with those protesting injustice. Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere: the logic of domination and oppression breeds and spreads, and produces further domination and oppression, while insensitivity to injustice anywhere breeds insensitivity to other injustices. We are all woven into a single garment of destiny, and cannot pretend that any injustice could (or should) stay parochially contained.

2.) Violent vs peaceful protests Those who condemn property damage during protests should reflect on a few specific points:

First, tactically, riots and the damage they cause raise the economic and political cost of continuing with the everyday violence of business as usual, and have been an integral part of successful struggles for democracy and equality throughout history. This increase in cost can force elites to make concessions, and shift what counts as an acceptable policy bargain to buy peace again. Polite tactics have not worked whatsoever to ease the systemic racial and class inequalities and violence of places like Minneapolis. What else is left, besides people of color opting to die without a fuss?

Second, the human costs of continuing business as usual, from the early deaths and sicknesses imposed by police violence, racism, poverty, lack of healthcare, environmental racism, stress, etc, are incomprehensibly massive. They are far higher than any costs from these riots, at a minimum producing hundreds of thousands of early deaths in the U.S. a year.

This means that if you are opposed to “violence”, then you must prioritize ending these systemic conditions over the flash in the pan of any riot damage. It also means that if you truly oppose violence, then you must consider what given tactics *do* about this systemic and state-enforced violence. If your “peaceful” tactics don’t pose a threat to the continuation of a violent status quo, and even help sustain it by institutionally channeling, containing, and de-fanging challenges to it, then those measures are *more violent* in what they produce than riotous street clashes or mass strikes that compel actual concessions and change.

3.) Property damage as “violence” Conceptually, calling broken windows, burnt cars and looting “violence” is extremely dubious in it’s implications. It puts unexpected forms of damage to or destruction of things as such in the same moral continuum as human suffering, and conveniently only those things that pose a direct threat to the people who own the world. Legal material destruction, of course — such as through a manufacturer shuttering and offshoring a factory (and with it a community’s ability to thrive), or a developer destroying poor people’s housing to put up empty luxury condos for investment, or a company spilling pollutants into the environment and our bodies — is never really framed as “violent”, even though it is more widespread and destructive.

Calling property damage violence also ignores the violence entailed simply by the state-backed imposition of particular rules and distributions of property. Property isn’t just stuff, it is also the rules for deciding who will be denied the right to use that stuff, and how that denial will be legitimized. If you’re concerned about looting, consider it in light of this.

The current distribution of resources is the result of racist state violence, centuries of openly white supremacist policies, imperialism, and exploitation. No honest person can disagree. It cannot be considered just or moral. Even in market terms, it cannot be considered a result of consent or fair competition. The pitifully low wage exploitation perpetuated by retail outlets in these areas are a product of these violently imposed unjust conditions and systems, and is itself a looting of the time, sweat, and well-being of people who are not truly free to do otherwise.

What, then, justifies condemnation of people’s attempts to grab goods that alleviate conditions of violently imposed and flatly unjust conditions of inequality and poverty? If just distributions are blocked politically, then how can we condemn what essentially amounts to material self defense against illegitimately imposed conditions?

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4.) On looting during protests Charges that people looting are acting opportunistically, or without pure enough motives make the mistake of thinking that pursuing material enhancement amidst unjust conditions is at odds with, rather than a central component of the demand for dismantling systemic racism. This isn’t separate from the fight against police brutality, since policing as such, as well as police brutality in particular are historically and tightly connected to state efforts to maintain racial and class inequalities and property rules under American capitalism. Demanding saintly selflessness from rioters is a dehumanizing double standard, and itself undercuts the legitimacy of demands for material justice and restitution.

Insofar as looting contributes to raising the cost for elites to ignore an unjust status quo, we can consider looting to be a useful element in producing an actually status quo-threatening pressure for concessions and change. Depending on the target (or Target), we may even say that it is ethically obligatory, if we take the struggle against violence seriously.

*** Ultimately, whenever those in power attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate protesters during times of social unrest, this should be interpreted as nothing more than a classic divide and conquer tool designed to make the unrest more manageable and to divert a fraction of the less demanding participants towards the least costly (to those in power) concessions. It means they are scared. It also means we should investigate what it is that they are truly scared of losing — and what we stand to gain.

The world.

by Justin Mueller

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crimethinc · 6 years ago

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Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill An Interview

Since 1997, when it ceased to be the last major colonial holding of Great Britain, Hong Kong has been a part of the People’s Republic of China, while maintaining a distinct political and legal system. In February, an unpopular bill was introduced that would make it possible to extradite fugitives in Hong Kong to countries that the Hong Kong government has no existing extradition agreements with—including mainland China. On June 9, over a million people took the streets in protest; on June12, protesters engaged in pitched confrontations with police; on June 16, two million people participated in one of the biggest marches in the city’s history. The following interview with an anarchist collective in Hong Kong explores the context of this wave of unrest. Our correspondents draw on over a decade of experience in the previous social movements in an effort to come to terms with the motivations that drive the participants, and elaborate upon the new forms of organization and subjectivation that define this new sequence of struggle.

In the United States, the most recent popular struggles have cohered around resisting Donald Trump and the extreme right. In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement drew anarchists, leftists, and far-right nationalists into the streets against Macron’s centrist government and each other. In Hong Kong, we see a social movement against a state governed by the authoritarian left. What challenges do opponents of capitalism and the state face in this context? How can we outflank nationalists, neoliberals, and pacifists who seek to control and exploit our movements?

As China extends its reach, competing with the United States and European Union for global hegemony, it is important to experiment with models of resistance against the political model it represents, while taking care to prevent neoliberals and reactionaries from capitalizing on popular opposition to the authoritarian left. Anarchists in Hong Kong are uniquely positioned to comment on this.

The front façade of the Hong Kong Police headquarters in Wan Chai, covered in egg yolks on the evening of June 21. Hundreds of protesters sealed the entrance, demanding the unconditional release of every person that has been arrested in relation to the struggle thus far. The banner below reads “Never Surrender.” Photo by KWBB from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

“The left” is institutionalized and ineffectual in Hong Kong. Generally, the “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers have a chokehold over the narrative whenever protests break out, especially when mainland China is involved.

In the struggle against the extradition bill, has the escalation in tactics made it difficult for those factions to represent or manage “the movement”? Has the revolt exceeded or undermined their capacity to shape the discourse? Do the events of the past month herald similar developments in the future, or has this been a common subterranean theme in popular unrest in Hong Kong already?

We think it’s important for everyone to understand that—thus far—what has happened cannot be properly understood to be “a movement.” It’s far too inchoate for that. What I mean is that, unlike the so-called “Umbrella Movement,” which escaped the control of its founding architects (the intellectuals who announced “Occupy Central With Love And Peace” a year in advance) very early on while adhering for the most part to the pacifistic, citizenist principles that they outlined, there is no real guiding narrative uniting the events that have transpired so far, no foundational credo that authorizes—or sanctifies—certain forms of action while proscribing others in order to cultivate a spectacular, exemplary façade that can be photographed and broadcast to screens around the world.

The short answer to your question, then, is… yes, thus far, nobody is authorized to speak on behalf of the movement. Everybody is scrambling to come to terms with a nascent form of subjectivity that is taking shape before us, now that the formal figureheads of the tendencies you referenced have been crushed and largely marginalized. That includes the “scholarist” fraction of the students, now known as “Demosisto,” and the right-wing “nativists,” both of which were disqualified from participating in the legislative council after being voted in.

Throughout this interview, we will attempt to describe our own intuitions about what this embryonic form of subjectivity looks like and the conditions from which it originates. But these are only tentative. Whatever is going on, we can say that it emerges from within a field from which the visible, recognized protagonists of previous sequences, including political parties, student bodies, and right-wing and populist groups, have all been vanquished or discredited. It is a field populated with shadows, haunted by shades, echoes, and murmurs. As of now, center stage remains empty.

This means that the more prevalent “default” modes of understanding are invoked to fill the gaps. Often, it appears that we are set for an unfortunate reprisal of the sequence that played itself out in the Umbrella Movement:

appalling show of police force

public outrage manifests itself in huge marches and subsequent occupations, organized and understood as sanctimonious displays of civil virtue

these occupations ossify into tense, puritanical, and paranoid encampments obsessed with policing behavior to keep it in line with the prescribed script

the movement collapses, leading to five years of disenchantment among young people who do not have the means to understand their failure to achieve universal suffrage as anything less than abject defeat.

Of course, this is just a cursory description of the Umbrella Movement of five years ago—and even then, there was a considerable amount of “excess”: novel and emancipatory practices and encounters that the official narrative could not account for. These experiences should be retrieved and recovered, though this is not the time or place for that. What we face now is another exercise in mystification, in which the protocols that come into operation every time the social fabric enters a crisis may foreclose the possibilities that are opening up. It would be premature to suggest that this is about to happen, however.

In our cursory and often extremely unpleasant perusals of Western far-left social media, we have noticed that all too often, the intelligence falls victim to our penchant to run the rule over this or that struggle. So much of what passes for “commentary” tends to fall on either side of two poles—impassioned acclamation of the power of the proletarian intelligence or cynical denunciation of its populist recuperation. None of us can bear the suspense of having to suspend our judgment on something outside our ken, and we hasten to find someone who can formalize this unwieldy mass of information into a rubric that we can comprehend and digest, in order that we can express our support or apprehension.

We have no real answers for anybody who wants to know whether they should care about what’s going on in Hong Kong as opposed to, say, France, Algeria, Sudan. But we can plead with those who are interested in understanding what’s happening to take the time to develop an understanding of this city. Though we don’t entirely share their politics and have some quibbles with the facts presented therein, we endorse any coverage of events in Hong Kong that Ultra, Nao, and Chuang have offered over the years to the English-speaking world. Ultra’s piece on the Umbrella Movement is likely the best account of the events currently available.

Our banner in the marches, which is usually found at the front of our drum squad. It reads “There are no ‘good citizens’, only potential criminals.” This banner was made in response to propaganda circulated by pro-Beijing establishmentarian political groups in Hong Kong, assuring “good citizens” everywhere that extradition measures do not threaten those with a sound conscience who are quietly minding their own business. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

If we understand “the left” as a political subject that situates questions of class struggle and labor at the center of its politics, it’s not entirely certain that such a thing even properly exists in Hong Kong. Of course, friends of ours run excellent blogs, and there are small grouplets and the like. Certainly, everybody talks about the wealth gap, rampant poverty, the capitalist class, the fact that we are all “打工仔” (jobbers, working folk) struggling to survive. But, as almost anywhere else, the primary form of subjectivity and identification that everyone subscribes to is the idea of citizenship in a national community. It follows that this imagined belonging is founded on negation, exclusion, and demarcation from the Mainland. You can only imagine the torture of seeing the tiresome “I’m a Hong Konger, not Chinese!” t-shirts on the subway, or hearing “Hong Kongers add oil!” (essentially, “way to go!”) chanted ad nauseam for an entire afternoon during recent marches.

It should interest readers from abroad to know that the word “left” in Hong Kong has two connotations. Obviously, for the generation of our parents and their parents before them, “Left” means Communist. Which is why “Left” could refer to a businessman who is a Party member, or a pro-establishment politician who is notoriously pro-China. For younger people, the word “Left” is a stigma (often conjugated with “plastic,” a word in Cantonese that sounds like “dickhead”) attached to a previous generation of activists who were involved in a prior sequence of social struggle—including struggles to prevent the demolition of Queen’s Ferry Pier in Central, against the construction of the high-speed Railway going through the northeast of Hong Kong into China, and against the destruction of vast tracts of farmland in the North East territories, all of which ended in demoralizing defeat. These movements were often led by articulate spokespeople—artists or NGO representatives who forged tactical alliances with progressives in the pan-democratic movement. The defeat of these movements, attributed to their apprehensions about endorsing direct action and their pleas for patience and for negotiations with authority, is now blamed on that generation of activists. All the rage and frustration of the young people who came of age in that period, heeding the direction of these figureheads who commanded them to disperse as they witnessed yet another defeat, yet another exhibition of orchestrated passivity, has progressively taken a rightward turn. Even secondary and university student bodies that have traditionally been staunchly center-left and progressive have become explicitly nationalist.

One crucial tenet among this generation, emerging from a welter of disappointments and failures, is a focus on direct action, and a consequent refusal of “small group discussions,” “consensus,” and the like. This was a theme that first appeared in the umbrella movement—most prominently in the Mong Kok encampment, where the possibilities were richest, but where the right was also, unfortunately, able to establish a firm foothold. The distrust of the previous generation remains prevalent. For example, on the afternoon of June 12, in the midst of the street fights between police and protesters, several members of a longstanding social-democratic party tasked themselves with relaying information via microphone to those on the front lines, telling them where to withdraw to if they needed to escape, what holes in the fronts to fill, and similar information. Because of this distrust of parties, politicians, professional activists and their agendas, many ignored these instructions and instead relied on word of mouth information or information circulating in online messaging groups.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the founding myth of this city is that refugees and dissidents fled communist persecution to build an oasis of wealth and freedom, a fortress of civil liberties safeguarded by the rule of law. In view of that, on a mundane level, it could be said that many in Hong Kong already understand themselves as being in revolt, in the way they live and the freedoms they enjoy—and that they consider this identity, however vacuous and tenuous it may be, to be a property that has to be defended at all costs. It shouldn’t be necessary to say much here about the fact that much of the actual ecological “wealth” that constitutes this city—its most interesting (and often poorest) neighborhoods, a whole host of informal clubs, studios, and dwelling places situated in industrial buildings, farmland in the Northeast territories, historic walled villages and rural districts—are being pillaged and destroyed piece by piece by the state and private developers, to the resounding indifference of these indignant citoyens.

In any case, if liberals are successful in deploying their Cold War language about the need to defend civil liberties and human rights from the encroaching Red Tide, and right-wing populist calls to defend the integrity of our identity also gain traction, it is for these deep-rooted and rather banal historical reasons. Consider the timing of this struggle, how it exploded when images of police brutalizing and arresting young students went viral—like a perfect repetition of the prelude to the umbrella movement. This happened within a week of the annual candlelight vigil commemorating those killed in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, a date remembered in Hong Kong as the day tanks were called in to steamroll over students peacefully gathering in a plea for civil liberties. It is impossible to overstate the profundity of this wound, this trauma, in the formation of the popular psyche; this was driven home when thousands of mothers gathered in public, in an almost perfect mirroring of the Tiananmen mothers, to publicly grieve for the disappeared futures of their children, now eclipsed in the shadow of the communist monolith. It stupefies the mind to think that the police—not once now, but twice—broke the greatest of all taboos: opening fire on the young.

In light of this, it would be naïve to suggest that anything significant has happened yet to suggest that to escaping the “chokehold” that you describe “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers maintaining on the narrative here. Both of these factions are simply symptoms of an underlying condition, aspects of an ideology that has to be attacked and taken apart in practice. Perhaps we should approach what is happening right now as a sort of psychoanalysis in public, with the psychopathology of our city exposed in full view, and see the actions we engage in collectively as a chance to work through traumas, manias, and obsessive complexes together. While it is undoubtedly dismaying that the momentum and morale of this struggle is sustained, across the social spectrum, by a constant invocation of the “Hong Kong people,” who are incited to protect their home at all costs, and while this deeply troubling unanimity covers over many problems,1 we accept the turmoil and the calamity of our time, the need to intervene in circumstances that are never of our own choosing. However bleak things may appear, this struggle offers a chance for new encounters, for the elaboration of new grammars.

Graffiti seen in the road occupation in Admiralty near the government quarters, reading “Carry a can of paint with you, it’s a remedy for canine rabies.” Cops are popularly referred to as “dogs” here. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

What has happened to the discourse of civility in the interlude between the umbrella movement and now? Did it contract, expand, decay, transform?

That’s an interesting question to ask. Perhaps the most significant thing that we can report about the current sequence that, astonishingly, when a small fringe of protesters attempted to break into the legislative council on June 9 following a day-long march, it was not universally criticized as an act of lunacy or, worse, the work of China or police provocateurs. Bear in mind that on June 9 and 12, the two attempts to break into the legislative council building thus far, the legislative assembly was not in session; people were effectively attempting to break into an empty building.

Now, much as we have our reservations about the effectiveness of doing such a thing in the first place,2 this is extraordinary, considering the fact that the last attempt to do so, which occurred in a protest against development in the North East territories shortly before the umbrella movement, took place while deliberations were in session and was broadly condemned or ignored.3 Some might suggest that the legacy of the Sunflower movement in Taiwan remains a big inspiration for many here; others might say that the looming threat of Chinese annexation is spurring the public to endorse desperate measures that they would otherwise chastise.

On the afternoon of June 12, when tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves assaulted by riot police, scrambling to escape from barrages of plastic bullets and tear gas, nobody condemned the masked squads in the front fighting back against the advancing lines of police and putting out the tear gas canisters as they landed. A longstanding, seemingly insuperable gulf has always existed between the “peaceful” protesters (pejoratively referred to as “peaceful rational non-violent dickheads” by most of us on the other side) and the “bellicose” protesters who believe in direct action. Each side tends to view the other with contempt.

Protesters transporting materials to build barricades. The graffiti on the wall can be roughly (and liberally) translated as “Hong Kongers ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit’.” Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

The online forum lihkg has functioned as a central place for young people to organize, exchange political banter, and circulate information relating to this struggle. For the first time, a whole host of threads on this site have been dedicated to healing this breach or at least cultivating respect for those who do nothing but show up for the marches every Sunday—if only because marches that number in the millions and bring parts of the city to a temporary standstill are a pretty big deal, however mind-numbingly boring they may be in actuality. The last time the marches were anywhere close to this huge, a Chief Executive stepped down and the amending of a law regarding freedom of speech was moved to the back burner. All manner of groups are attempting to invent a way to contribute to the struggle, the most notable of which is the congregation of Christians that have assembled in front of police lines at the legislative council, chanting the same hymn without reprieve for a week and a half. That hymn has become a refrain that will likely reverberate through struggles in the future, for better or worse.

Are there clear openings or lines of flight in this movement that would allow for interventions that undermine the power of the police, of the law, of the commodity, without producing a militant subject that can be identified and excised?

It is difficult to answer this question. Despite the fact that proletarians compose the vast majority of people waging this struggle—proletarians whose lives are stolen from them by soulless jobs, who are compelled to spend more and more of their wages paying rents that continue to skyrocket because of comprehensive gentrification projects undertaken by state officials and private developers (who are often one and the same)—you must remember that “free market capitalism” is taken by many to be a defining trait of the cultural identity of Hong Kong, distinguishing it from the “red” capitalism managed by the Communist Party. What currently exists in Hong Kong, for some people, is far from ideal; when one says “the rich,” it invokes images of tycoon monopolies—cartels and communist toadies who have formed a dark pact with the Party to feed on the blood of the poor.

So, just as people are ardent for a government and institutions that we can properly call “our own”—yes, including the police—they desire a capitalism that we can finally call “our own,” a capitalism free from corruption, political chicanery, and the like. It’s easy to chuckle at this, but like any community gathered around a founding myth of pioneers fleeing persecution and building a land of freedom and plenty from sacrifice and hard work… it’s easy to understand why this fixation exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination.

This is a city that fiercely defends the initiative of the entrepreneur, of private enterprise, and understands every sort of hustle as a way of making a living, a tactic in the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival. This grim sense of life as survival is omnipresent in our speech; when we speak of “working,” we use the term “搵食,” which literally means looking for our next meal. That explains why protesters have traditionally been very careful to avoid alienating the working masses by actions such as blockading a road used by busses transporting working stiffs back home.

While we understand that much of our lives are preoccupied with and consumed by work, nobody dares to propose the refusal of work, to oppose the indignity of being treated as producer-consumers under the dominion of the commodity. The police are chastised for being “running dogs” of an evil totalitarian empire, rather than being what they actually are: the foot soldiers of the regime of property.

What is novel in the current situation is that many people now accept that acts of solidarity with the struggle, however minute,4 can lead to arrest, and are prepared to tread this shifting line between legality and illegality. It is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the appearance of a generation that is prepared for imprisonment, something that was formerly restricted to “professional activists” at the forefront of social movements. At the same time, there is no existing discussion regarding what the force of law is, how it operates, or the legitimacy of the police and prisons as institutions. People simply feel they need to employ measures that transgress the law in order the preserve the sanctity of the Law, which has been violated and dishonored by the cowboys of communist corruption.

However, it is important to note that this is the first time that proposals for strikes in various sectors and general strikes have been put forward regarding an issue that is, on the surface of it, unrelated to labor.

Our friends in the “Housewives Against Extradition” section of the march on September 9. The picture shows a group of housewives and aunties, many of whom were on the streets for the first time. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

How do barricades and occupations like the one from a few days ago reproduce themselves in the context of Hong Kong?

Barricades are simply customary now. Whenever people gather en masse and intend to occupy a certain territory to establish a front, barricades are built quickly and effectively. There is a creeping sense now that occupations are becoming routine and futile, physically taxing and ultimately inefficient. What’s interesting in this struggle is that people are really spending a lot of time thinking about what “works,” what requires the least expenditure of effort and achieves the maximum effect in paralyzing parts of the city or interrupting circulation, rather than what holds the greatest moral appeal to an imagined “public” watching everything from the safety of the living room—or even, conversely, what “feels” the most militant.

There have been many popular proposals for “non-cooperative” quotidian actions such as jamming up an entire subway train by coordinating groups of friends to pack the cars with people and luggage for a whole afternoon, or cancelling bank accounts and withdrawing savings from savings accounts in order to create inflation. Some have spread suggestions regarding how to dodge paying taxes for the rest of your life. These might not seem like much, but what’s interesting is the relentless circulation of suggestions from all manner of quarters, from people with varying kinds of expertise, about how people can act on their own initiative where they live or work and in their everyday lives, rather than imagining “the struggle” as something that is waged exclusively on the streets by masked, able-bodied youth.

Whatever criticisms anybody might have about what has happened thus far, this formidable exercise in collective intelligence is really incredibly impressive—an action can be proposed in a message group or on an anonymous message board thread, a few people organize to do it, and it’s done without any fuss or fanfare. Forms circulate and multiply as different groups try them out and modify them.

In the West, Leninists and Maoists have been screaming bloody murder about “CIA Psyop” or “Western backed color revolution.” Have hegemonic forces in Hong Kong invoked the “outside agitator” theme on the ground at a narrative level?

Actually, that is the official line of the Chief Executive, who has repeatedly said that she regards the events of the past week as riotous behavior incited by foreign interests that are interested in conducting a “color revolution” in the city. I’m not sure if she would repeat that line now that she has apologized publicly for “creating contradictions” and discord with her decisions, but all the same—it’s hilarious that tankies share the exact same opinion as our formal head of state.

It’s an open secret that various pro-democracy NGOs, parties, and thinktanks receive American funding. It’s not some kind of occult conspiracy theory that only tankies know about. But these tankies are suggesting that the platform that coordinates the marches—a broad alliance of political parties, NGOs, and the like—is also the ideological spearhead and architect of the “movement,” which is simply a colossal misunderstanding. That platform has been widely denounced, discredited, and mocked by the “direct action” tendencies that are forming all around us, and it is only recently that, as we said above, there are slightly begrudging threads on the Internet offering them indirect praise for being able to coordinate marches that actually achieve something. If only tankies would stop treating everybody like mindless neo-colonial sheep acting at the cryptic behest of Western imperialist intelligence.

That said, it would be dishonest if we failed to mention that, alongside threads on message boards discussing the niceties of direct action tactics abroad, there are also threads alerting everyone to the fact that voices in the White House have expressed their disapproval for the law. Some have even celebrated this. Also, there is a really wacky petition circulating on Facebook to get people to appeal to the White House for foreign intervention. I’m sure one would see these sorts of things in any struggle of this scale in any non-Western city. They aren’t smoking guns confirming imperialist manipulation; they are fringe phenomena that are not the driving force behind events thus far.

Have any slogans, neologisms, new slang, popular talking points, or funny phrases emerged that are unique to the situation?

Yes, lots, though we’re not sure how we would go about translating them. But the force that is generating these memes, that is inspiring all these Whatsapp and Telegram stickers and catchphrases, is actually the police force.

Between shooting people in the eye with plastic bullets, flailing their batons about, and indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at peoples’ heads and groins, they also found the time to utter some truly classic pearls that have made their way on to t-shirts. One of these bons mots is the rather unfortunate and politically incorrect “liberal cunt.” In the heat of a skirmish between police and protesters, a policeman called someone at the frontlines by that epithet. All our swear words in Cantonese revolve around male and female genitalia, unfortunately; we have quite a few words for private parts. In Cantonese, this formulation doesn’t sound as sensible as it does in English. Said together in Cantonese, “liberal” and “cunt” sounds positively hilarious.

Does this upheaval bear any connections to the fishball riots or Hong Kong autonomy from a few years ago?

A: The “fishball riots” were a demonstrative lesson in many ways, especially for people like us, who found ourselves spectators situated at some remove from the people involved. It was a paroxysmic explosion of rage against the police, a completely unexpected aftershock from the collapse of the umbrella movement. An entire party, the erstwhile darlings of right-wing youth everywhere, “Hong Kong Indigenous,” owes its whole career to this riot. They made absolutely sure that everyone knew they were attending, showing up in uniform and waving their royal blue flags at the scene. They were voted into office, disqualified, and incarcerated—one of the central members is now seeking asylum in Germany, where his views on Hong Kong independence have apparently softened considerably in the course of hanging out with German Greens. That is fresh in the memory of folks who know that invisibility is now paramount.

What effect has Joshua Wong’s release had?

A: We are not sure how surprised readers from overseas will be to discover, after perhaps watching that awful documentary about Joshua Wong on Netflix, that his release has not inspired much fanfare at all. Demosisto are now effectively the “Left Plastic” among a new batch of secondary students.

Are populist factions functioning as a real force of recuperation?

A: All that we have written above illustrates how, while the struggle currently escapes the grasp of every established group, party, and organization, its content is populist by default. The struggle has attained a sprawling scale and drawn in a wide breadth of actors; right now, it is expanding by the minute. But there is little thought given to the fact that many of those who are most obviously and immediately affected by the law will be people whose work takes place across the border—working with and providing aid to workers in Shenzhen, for instance.

Nobody is entirely sure what the actual implications of the law are. Even accounts written by professional lawyers vary quite widely, and this gives press outlets that brand themselves as “voices of the people”5 ample space to frame the entire issue as simply a matter of Hong Kong’s constitutional autonomy being compromised, with an entire city in revolt against the imposition of an all-encompassing surveillance state.

Perusing message boards and conversing with people around the government complex, you would think that the introduction of this law means that expressions of dissent online or objectionable text messages to friends on the Mainland could lead to extradition. This is far from being the case, as far as the letter of the law goes. But the events of the last few years, during which booksellers in Hong Kong have been disappeared for selling publications banned on the Mainland and activists in Hong Kong have been detained and deprived of contact upon crossing the border, offer little cause to trust a party that is already notorious for cooking up charges and contravening the letter of the law whenever convenient. Who knows what it will do once official authorization is granted.

Paranoia invariably sets in whenever the subject of China comes up. On the evening of June 12, when the clouds of tear gas were beginning to clear up, the founder of a Telegram message group with 10,000+ active members was arrested by the police, who commanded him to unlock his phone. His testimony revealed that he was told that even if he refused, they would hack his phone anyway. Later, the news reported that he was using a Xiaomi phone at the time. This news went viral, with many commenting that his choice of phone was both bold and idiotic, since urban legend has it that Xiaomi phones not only have a “backdoor” that permits Xiaomi to access the information on every one of its phones and assume control of the information therein, but that Xiaomi—by virtue of having its servers in China—uploads all information stored on its cloud to the database of party overlords. It is futile to try to suggest that users who are anxious about such things can take measures to seal backdoors, or that background information leeching can be detected by simply checking the data usage on your phone. Xiaomi is effectively regarded as an expertly engineered Communist tracking device, and arguments about it are no longer technical, but ideological to the point of superstition.

This “post-truth” dimension of this struggle, compounded with all the psychopathological factors that we enumerated above, makes everything that is happening that much more perplexing, that much more overwhelming. For so long, fantasy has been the impetus for social struggle in this city—the fantasy of a national community, urbane, free-thinking, civilized and each sharing in the negative freedoms that the law provides, the fantasy of electoral democracy… Whenever these affirmative fantasies are put at risk, they are defended and enacted in public, en masse, and the sales for “I Am Hong Konger” [sic] go through the roof.

This is what gives the proceedings a distinctly conservative, reactionary flavor, despite how radical and decentralized the new forms of action are. All we can do as a collective is seek ways to subvert this fantasy, to expose and demonstrate its vacuity in form and content.

At this time, it feels surreal that everybody around us is so certain, so clear about what they need to do—oppose this law with every means that they have available to them—while the reasons for doing so remain hopelessly obscure. It could very well be the case that this suffocating opacity is our lot for the time being, in this phase premised upon more action, less talk, on the relentless need to keep abreast of and act on the flow of information that is constantly accelerating around us.

In so many ways, what we see happening around us is a fulfillment of what we have dreamt of for years. So many bemoan the “lack of political leadership,” which they see as a noxious habit developed over years of failed movements, but the truth is that those who are accustomed to being protagonists of struggles, including ourselves as a collective, have been overtaken by events. It is no longer a matter of a tiny scene of activists concocting a set of tactics and programs and attempting to market them to the public. “The public” is taking action all around us, exchanging techniques on forums, devising ways to evade surveillance, to avoid being arrested at all costs. It is now possible to learn more about fighting the police in one afternoon than we did in a few years.

In the midst of this breathless acceleration, is it possible to introduce another rhythm, in which we can engage in a collective contemplation of what has become of us, and what we are becoming as we rush headlong into the tumult?

As ever, we stand here, fighting alongside our neighbors, ardently looking for friends.

Hand-written statements by protesters, weathered after an afternoon of heavy rain. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.

In reflecting on the problems concealed by the apparent unanimity of the “Hong Kong people,” we might start by asking who that framework suggests that this city is for, who comprises this imaginary subject. We have seen Nepalese and Pakistani brothers and sisters on the streets, but they hesitate to make their presence known for fear of being accused of being thugs employed by the police. ↩

“The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries.” –The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends ↩

Incidentally, that attempt was a good deal more spontaneous and successful. The police had hardly imagined that crowds of people who had sat peacefully with their heads in their hands feeling helpless while the developments were authorized would suddenly start attempting to rush the council doors by force, breaking some of the windows. ↩

On the night of June 11, young customers in a McDonald’s in Admiralty were all searched and had their identity cards recorded. On June 12, a video went viral showing a young man transporting a box of bottled water to protesters who were being brutalized by a squad of policemen with batons. ↩

To give two rather different examples, this includes the populist, xenophobic, and vehemently anti-Communist Apple Daily, and the “Hong Kong Free Press,” an independent English online rag of the “angry liberal” stripe run by expatriates that has an affinity for young localist/nativist leaders. ↩

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philosopherking1887 · 7 years ago

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Philosophy in “Infinity War” Part I: Thanos vs. Ultron

As promised, I’m going to start talking about some of the philosophical issues raised in Avengers: Infinity War, and this first one gives me an opportunity to discuss something I’ve meant to for a while: why I find Ultron so interesting. Spoilers and long discussion are under the cut.

We find out in IW that Thanos wants to kill half of the living things in the universe because of his views about overpopulation and scarcity, which align with those of Thomas Malthus: that populations will always tend to expand beyond the means of society to provide for them, resulting in poverty, disease, and conflict. Malthus, of course, never proposed mass murder as a way to prevent these terrible outcomes, though he did think that famine and war, as the natural consequences of overpopulation, were God’s and/or nature’s way of correcting the problem -- and of (futilely) cautioning humanity against reproducing beyond its means. We also find out that Thanos arrived at these views based on harsh experience: his home planet, Titan, experienced ecological catastrophe as a result of overpopulation. Thanos warned his people as the catastrophe approached and proposed his solution -- random culling of the population -- but he was, of course, dismissed as a madman. He now lives (sometimes) on the lifeless, desert-like ruins of Titan, applies his solution to planets that he thinks are reproducing beyond their means -- including Gamora’s home planet -- and seeks the Infinity Stones so that he can apply it to the universe as a whole.

It seems obvious to me -- and should be obvious to him -- that this is only a temporary solution. He claims that the standard of living on Gamora’s home planet improved dramatically after he halved its population; but if that’s the case, then unless Thanos was also distributing free birth control and family planning education, people would just take advantage of their new prosperity to have more children. Maybe with all the Infinity Stones in the Gauntlet, he envisioned himself or one of his disciples doing The Snap every few centuries?

I’ve seen some commentary suggesting that Thanos’s outlook is only comprehensible or even remotely sympathetic from a very pro-capitalist standpoint which ignores the fact that capitalism generates artificial scarcity. There’s certainly something to that criticism; “Malthusian” views are usually dismissed in the same breath as “social Darwinism” as artifacts of 19th-century and/or mid-20th-century elitist, racist, greed-driven ideology. I think there’s a reason Titan’s demise was depicted as an ecological catastrophe, considering the looming threat of climate change. Burning fossil fuels was a major part of how humanity harnessed the energy resources to be able to overcome natural scarcity, and now it’s biting us in the ass. That said, the technological advances that were enabled by the burning of fossil fuels for energy would probably enable us to stop burning fossil fuels if not for vested financial interests. And since population growth declines dramatically as societies become better educated and have more gender equality, it seems like it should be possible to stabilize a planet’s population so that it never exceeds the ecosystem’s ability to sustain it without resorting to mass murder. So yes, Thanos’s perspective and imagination seem extremely limited, and he’s drawing the wrong lesson from what happened to Titan. I guess he’s just really pessimistic about any society’s ability to overcome greed and education inequality...?

Thanos’s philosophical reasons for supporting mass murder of course call to mind another villain with philosophical reasons for mass murder (indeed, specicide, if that’s a word): Ultron. Predictably, I think Ultron makes much better points than Thanos does because they’re founded on observations about human nature rather than speculation about economic necessity. From looking at all of recorded human history, Ultron concludes that humanity has no moral right to exist because human beings have always, everywhere, been horrible to each other. If we solved all the scarcity problems that motivate Thanos, that would probably cut down on violence, but it would not eliminate it. I’m not at all sure that it’s possible to civilize human beings to the point that violence, small-scale or large-scale, never happens. That’s why Ultron says that humanity “needs to evolve”: human nature would have to change fundamentally in order to prevent the horrors that have littered human history.

Of course there’s a moral question here: is it morally right to eliminate a kind of being whose existence is, on the whole, an evil, or does it incur rights simply in virtue of existing? Pretty clearly, Ultron (like Thanos) is making a utilitarian calculation: cause a moderate amount of suffering in the short term in order to prevent a greater amount of suffering over the long term. But is that an acceptable trade-off, when those who enjoy the benefits are not the same as those who bear the costs? This issue -- consequentialist vs. deontological (i.e., rights-based, rule-based) ethics -- is the same one that’s explored in Watchmen, where Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias represents consequentialism and Rorschach (Mr. Black and White) represents deontology. In the MCU, Tony seems to represent the consequentialist perspective while Steve represents the deontologist; this is especially clear in IW with all that “we don’t trade lives” stuff (which I’ll have to discuss in more detail later). I myself don’t come down on either side all the time; I think it depends on the scale of decision-making. When you’re in a position of authority over large numbers of people, you’re going to have to make some consequentialist calculations; but in small-scale interpersonal interactions, you should operate like a deontologist. Tony thinks on the large scale and in the long term; Steve treats everything like an interpersonal interaction. But even on the large scale, there are times when consequentialist calculations lead to (what seem to us like) horrific conclusions. Tony has a human moral compass that allows him to avoid those; Ultron represents Tony’s consequentialist instincts writ large, with no human emotions to keep them in check. But there’s another question here: are our emotions a moral correcting mechanism, or do they impair our judgment? Would machines actually be better moral reasoners than human beings?

Ultron’s conclusion also raises a couple of interesting issues from a specifically Nietzschean perspective: one (meta)ethical and one metaphysical. (I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence that Ultron quotes Nietzsche: “Like the man said, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.’”) The (meta)ethical issue (I’m calling it that because it doesn’t fit cleanly into either normative ethics or metaethics as practiced in contemporary philosophy, which is clearly a limitation of contemporary philosophy) is the one that motivates Nietzsche’s main philosophical project: If the (Christian-descended) morality of compassion and altruism -- a morality that says that suffering and domination are the most terrible things, constituting an argument against the existence of anything that perpetuates them -- leads us to the conclusion that humanity, or life in general, ought not to exist, then why should we buy into the morality of compassion? One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens -- which, in English, translates to: one person who sees that a set of premises leads to a conclusion will just accept the conclusion; but another, finding the conclusion unacceptable, will instead reject one of the premises. Ultron, it seems, does not know how to reject the premise of the morality of compassion -- and that is almost certainly because it’s part of what Tony and Bruce programmed into him. His purpose was to protect human beings from suffering and domination by preventing alien invasion; the assumption that violence, war, and conquest are bad is fundamental to his very existence. Put in the facts of human history -- which make the prospects for an end to these things seem very dim -- and consequentialist reasoning rules, and you get the conclusion he in fact comes to.

Vision seems to express a quasi-Nietzschean attitude in his conversation with Ultron toward the end: “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites, and try to control what won’t be. But there is grace in their failings. ... A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” It’s interesting to me that Vision uses aesthetic terms in defense of humanity rather than moral ones. That’s another theme you find throughout Nietzsche’s writings. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he claims (under the influence of Wagner), “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”; by The Gay Science (1882), he has retreated to “As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us.” The world is not and cannot be good by the standards of the morality of compassion; suffering and exploitation are woven into its very fabric. The same is very likely true of humanity (and Nietzsche also thinks we wouldn’t like the result if humanity ever became entirely “good” in that sense...). If we judge them only by the standards of morality, they will always fall short; we must conclude that they are, on the whole, bad things, things that should not be. But humanity and existence can still be aesthetically interesting, even beautiful, in their mix of good and evil, smart and stupid, order and chaos.

The metaphysical question is: in what sense does the replacement of carbon-based human animals by robots count as an “evolution” of humanity rather than simply its extinction and the ascendance of something completely different? The movie encourages us to think about inheritance and legacy in nonstandard ways, most obviously by framing Ultron as Tony’s “child”: Ultron has learned some things from Tony and inherited some things from him via programming -- and we are now accustomed to thinking of genetics as a kind of natural “programming.” Tony even calls Ultron “Junior” and says “You’re going to break your old man’s heart.” By extension, then, AI is the “child” of humanity in general, its “brainchild” -- an expression that reflects how common procreation and childbirth metaphors are in talk of intellectual creativity (that’s all over the place in Nietzsche’s writing, btw). But the extreme difference between biological humanity and its AI “descendants” highlights a distinctively Nietzschean theme: the idea that success, for a species, is not a matter of its persistence in the same form, but of its “self-overcoming” (that’s an ideal that comes up a lot, for individuals as well as cultures and species). Often this means that the majority will have to perish, while only an unusual few survive: the mutants, the evolutionary vanguard (LOL, there’s another Marvel franchise...), the ones who are better adapted to changing conditions rather than the old environment that the species had previously been adapted for. The successor species might look very different from its progenitor species, even unrecognizable, but the former is still the legacy of the latter. What’s important is the survival of a lineage rather than the persistence of a type.

#avengers infinity war spoilers #infinity war spoilers #infinity war discussion #thanos in infinity war #thanos #ultron #thanos vs. ultron #thanos and ultron #avengers age of ultron #age of ultron discussion #age of ultron #aou #nietzsche #mcu #consequentialism vs. deontology #consequentialism #deontology

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vincenzojfrosolone536jdl · 4 years ago

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Annotated Bibliography #5

Vincenzo Frosolone

Professor Moeller

EDUC-536J-DL

8 November 2020

Annotated Bibliography

YA Universal Theme: Classism

1: Hennigan, B. (2019, September.) Why is homelessness criminalized?. Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/homelessness-criminalization-capital-wage-labor-exploitation-welfare-laws

Lexile Level: 1210-1400L

Short Summary of the Highlights: Over the last four decades, cities across the United States have discriminated more harshly against homeless individuals, passing stricter laws of criminalization against sleeping in public places, sitting or lying down on sidewalks, panhandling, loafing, and loitering. As a result of deindustrialization, cities have increased their gentrification efforts to make them more attractive for tourism. Theories have shown that people discriminate against homeless individuals because of their disheveled appearance as well as their unorthodox standard of neither owning nor renting private property. More and more homeless shelters have instilled work rehabilitation programs to increase the capital of the area.

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2: Quart, Alissa. (2017, July 19). ‘Lunch shaming’ and other humiliations: How can we teach our kids about class?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/19/social-class-wealth-inequality-children-parenting

Lexile Level: 1210-1400L

Short Summary of the Highlights: All across the country, there have been laws and measures that ultimately discriminate and openly humiliate and segregate children and families of a lower socioeconomic class. Those schools argue that embarrassment gets debts paid sooner. Not all families in lower income brackets are eligible for free or reduced school lunch programs, and those families who are just on the outside of the demarcation get disgraced. One popular solution is to introduce lessons about economic disparities to school curricula, even to pre-Kindergarten students.

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3: Murphy, H. (2019, May 20). Why high-class people get away with incompetence. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/social-class-confidence.html

Lexile Level: 1010-1200L

Short Summary of the Highlights: Studies have shown that individuals from wealthy backgrounds tend to inflate their achievements and abilities due to their affluence even though they may be average. Researchers of social class have had difficulties determining how much weight to put on wealth and socioeconomic background. Overconfidence has the side effect of damaging stock markets and provoking wars.

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4: Singletary, M. (2018, November 20). Why banning students from wearing $1,000 coats won’t prevent ‘poverty shaming’. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/20/banning-students-wearing-coats-wont-prevent-poverty-shaming/

Lexile Level: 1010-1200L

Short Summary of the Highlights: In 2018, a school in Great Britain banned students from wearing overtly expensive coats in order to minimize the stigmatization of students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. This author argues that wealthy parents have the right to buy their children whatever clothing they desire because it is more a problem with emotional and psychological humiliation than physical appearance.

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5: Allyn, B. (2019, November 7). Las vegas bans sleeping, camping in public places. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777356656/las-vegas-bans-sleeping-camping-in-public-places

Lexile Level: 1210-1400L

Short Summary of the Highlights: To deal with public health concerns in a high tourist area and aid the process of gentrification, city officials in Las Vegas passed a law in 2019 making it illegal for homeless individuals to sleep or lounge in public areas as long as there are open beds available at homeless shelters in the area. Violators pay up to a $1,000 fine and face up to six months in jail. Public outrage ensued. However, officials reiterated that they are not out to get homeless individuals. They are only enforcing this law while there are available beds and would not enforce it otherwise.

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defendourhoodz · 8 years ago

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UnBARlievable, Rainey Street, and the Long Road Against Racism and Gentrification

Weeks from now, when the facebook comments fade and the tweets die down, how many people will brush off the drama around Unbarlievable? Was owner Brandon Cash’s empty apology enough for them to move on? Or will they just head to another bar on Rainey Street, and ignore the fact that all of Rainey Street is built in the shell of a displaced working-class Mexican-American barrio?

Unbarlieveable and every other establishment on Rainey is a business built on racism. They were all made possible by segregation against the Mexican-American community that used to occupy the homes now converted into bars and restaurants. That racism drew its power from the capitalist system which values certain people over others, stealing value from the less powerful to create profits for the few. A community was removed so Brandon Cash and his employees could act like fools and insult people of color, Jewish people, women, and more in their bubble of ignorance. Until the screenshots came out that is.

But apart from Unbarlievable, the investors, banks and business owners behind the transformation of Rainey Street have always operated from the playbook of white supremacist capitalism. It's only when these exploiters express it out loud, in the socially taboo forms shown by Brandon Cash, that people find the time to be outraged. When it’s in the form of daily capitalism, like the systemic displacement of the Rainey Street barrio, it is mostly ignored and no action is taken.

We see a marked difference in the response to online racism and symbolic acts of gentrification like mural whitewashings compared to the reaction to the daily displacements and systemic processes that are destroying our working-class communities. While the more outrageous stories generate facebook traffic, the stories about community members fighting to stay in their homes, apartments or mobile home parks are often met with rationalization and excuses why what’s happening to them is a natural process.

We don’t shy away from calling out the symbolic acts of gentrification, but our outrage at the ongoing attacks on our communities must translate into action and long-term goals. For Defend Our Hoodz, the injustice against Jumpolin became a motivation to follow through with holding businesses like F&F and Blue Cat Cafe accountable for their ongoing profit from the violent displacement of community members. While the story of Unbarlievable continues to generate outrage, the community as a whole takes long-term fights like our boycott of Blue Cat Cafe and landlords Jordan French and Darius Fisher for granted, even though the incident that occurred at their site was more violent than anything UnBARlievable’s Brandon Cash has said or done. Tearing down a Mexican immigrant business and calling them ‘cockroaches’ wasn’t enough for some Austinites to stay away from landowners Jordan French and Darius Fisher, as Blue Cat Cafe showed when they crossed the picket line. And now, even literal Nazis, brought by Blue Cat to attack our lawful picket, are shrugged off by many, even when one of those Nazis is Paul Gray, the brother of former Blue Cat owner, Rebecca Gray.

Don’t spend your money at gentrifier businesses, donate it to those facing displacement: Save single mom and two kids from homelessness.

Engaging in long-term, anti-gentrification, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggle means making big sacrifices for what are still uncertain gains. But we are not deterred. We must dare to struggle and dare to win. We know that Blue Cat Cafe, UnBARlievable and all the gentrifier businesses in our city are not permanent, that someday we can build communities that actually serve the working-class. That doesn’t mean more capitalist businesses paying poverty wages, and more housing for the highest bidder, but a cooperative society that allows all cultures and people to flourish, and housing every person is a priority.

With all that said, it may seem contradictory for us to say that we can’t officially endorse the protest occurring today at Unbarlievable. While we stand behind the community's outrage at Brandon Cash - we believe that the message of the protest is not conducive to building long-lasting power against racism and gentrification. This is apparent when the organizer of Friday's action says that he is working with the police and is seeking the support of the other gentrifier bars on Rainey Street.

This shouldn't be news, but the police are full of racists, Trump supporters, and yes, actual Neo-Nazis. They kill black, brown and poor people in our cities with impunity. They are the primary enforcers of gentrification and protectors of the property of the rich. They infiltrate our movements and spy on us. Defend Our Hoodz will never work with the police or seek their permission to protest, especially not for an anti-racist action. We don’t need permission to demonstrate in our community on our own terms. We hope the organizer of this protest and others will reconsider their engagement with the police for future actions.

Rainey St. in the Past, Photos courtesy of Anita Quintanilla

Just as concerning is the fact that this organizer considers the other Rainey Street bars as allies. All these bars have profited from the total erasure of a Mexican-American community. It’s ironic that after a rally against racism, some people may grab a drink at one of the other bars that owe their entire existence to systemic racism that displaced primarily Mexican-American families. If that’s not enough, some of the bars now on Rainey have also had reports of assaults against women and discrimination against disabled people. Unbarlievable isn’t the only trash pit on the street.

“I'm extremely saddened and outraged about what has happened to my peaceful Mexican neighborhood.” - Displaced Resident of Rainey St.

If you attend the rally on Friday, keep these facts in mind. No matter what happens, we still have a long way to go until Austin’s working-class brown, black and other oppressed communities reclaim what is theirs. Incidents like UnBARlievable’s outrageous behavior highlight the sad state of things, but more and more people are waking up to the hypocrisy of our capitalist system that rewards slimeballs like Brandon Cash while too many hardworking Austinites are kicked out of the city.

Cinco de Mayo at UnBARlievable

Rainey Street’s transformation into a bar and dining district was built on white supremacy and capitalism. These systems displaced the working-class brown families who used to ride bikes down the street when it was a landscape bursting with green, their homes shaded by towering trees fed by Town Lake (not Lady Bird). In those times, they were ignored by Austin’s white supremacist city government and denied resources. But, at least speculative investors and racist, yuppie bar-owners hadn’t yet descended on Rainey Street. Sadly, the intentional, systemic neglect of Austin’s elites sowed the seeds for their arrival.

This is how oppression and processes like gentrification are normalized and embedded in our ruling-class institutions and history. It’s all just another day under capitalism, where people sit down and raise their glasses in a circus theme bar, run by a racist white dude who ridicules brown children, on a street where brown children used to happily play.

We fight for the day when the working people decide the fate of our communities and Brandon Cash and UnBARlievable will just be a bad memory. Our streets won’t belong to those who insult us and only seek profits, but will belong to the people and the generations to come.

Rainey St., 1964 - Courtesy of Anita Quintanilla

#gentrification #austin #eastaustin #displacement #racism #ftp

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