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a-room-of-my-own · 3 years ago

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A while before the latest hoo-ha about Judith Butler, I had just been reading her again. Though she claims her critics have not read her, this simply isn’t the case. I read Gender Trouble when it first came out and it was important at the time . That time was long,long ago. She was just one of the many ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers I was into. I would trip off to see Luce Irigaray or Derrida whenever they appeared.

I got an interview with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian but they didn’t know who he was so its fair to say I was fairly immersed in that world of theory. For a while, I had a part time lecturing job so I had to keep on top of it. Though Butler’s idea of gender as performance was not new , it was interesting. RuPaul said it so much more clearly in a quote nicked from someone else “Honey ,we are born naked, the rest is drag”

What I was looking for again , I guess is not any clarity – her writing is famously and deliberately difficult- but whether there was ever any sense of the material body. She wrote herself in 2004 “I confess however I am not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language” .

Butler from on high ,cannot really think about the body at all which is why they (Butler’s chosen pronoun) are now the high priestess of a particular kind of trans ideology. The men who worship Butler are not versed in high theory. The fox botherer had a “brain swoon” at some very ordinary things Butler said. Mr Right Side of history nodded along in an interview. Clearly neither of these men are versed in any of this philosophy and would be better off sticking to tax law and the decline of the Labour Party. Butler is simply a totem for them.

Butler said in the Guardian interview for instance “Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us.”

So yeah? That’s a fairly basic view of the social construction of gender though I take issue with the assigned at birth thing ,which I will come back to and why I started reading her again in the first place.

This phrase “Assigned sex at birth” is now common parlance but simply does not make sense to me. I am living with someone who is pregnant. I have given birth three times and been a birthing partner. I know where babies come from. There is a deep disconnect here between language and reality which no amount of academic jargon can obliterate.

Babies come from bodies. Not any bodies but bodies that have a uterus. They grew inside a woman’s body until they get pushed out or dragged out into the world.

The facts of life that we are now to be liberated from in the form of denial. Only one sex can have babies but we must now somehow not say that. The pregnant “people” of Texas will now be forced into giving birth to children they don’t want because they are simply “host bodies”. The language of patriarchal supremacy and that of some of the trans ideologues is remarkably close, as is their biological ignorance.

There is no foetal heatbeat at six weeks for instance. When a baby is born , doctors and midwives do not randomly assign a sex, they observe it and they do it though genitalia.

There is a question over a tiny percentage of babies ,less that one percent with DSDs but even then they are sexed with doctors having difficult conversations with parents about what may happen later.

Somehow, though when I read the way in which this is now all discussed it is clear to me that the people talking have never been pregnant, never had a foetal scan, never been near a birth , never miscarried, do not understand that even with a still birth babies are still sexed and often named.

If you want to know the sex of your baby you can pay privately and know at 7 weeks ((*49-56 days from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual cycle). A 12 week scan will show it. That is why so many female foetuses are aborted . I have reported on this.

Talking to paediatricians about this is interesting because they do indeed have to think through these things that we are being told are not real eg. that sex is just a by-product of colonialism for instance. Sometimes pre-conception , geneticists will be looking at chromosomes because certain diseases are more likely in men or women. Males have a higher risk of haemophilia for instance.

One doctor told me “When babies are premature, the survival advantage of females over males is well known throughout neonatology. This is sometimes something we talk about with parents when there is threatened premature labour around 23 weeks' gestation and options to discuss about resuscitation and medical interventions. In fertility treatment (or counselling around fertility in the context of medical treatments) it is pretty inherent to know whether we need to plan around sperm, or ova + pregnancy.”

She also said that if she involved in a birth that “assigning” isn’t the word she world use. “Observed genitals a highly reliable observation, just like measuring weight or head circumference which is also done at this time. “ Another doctor said that anyone involved with a trans man giving birth would be doing the best for the patient in front of them.

Sex then is biological fact. A female baby will have all the eggs she will ever have when she is first born which is kind of amazing. It is not bio-essentialist to say that our sexed bodies are different nor is it transphobic to recognise it.

Except of course in my old newspaper ,The Guardian who are now so hamstrung by their own ideology they have got their knickers in such a twist they can barely walk. They completely misreported the WiSpa incident , basically ignored the Sonia Appleby judgement at the Tavistock. Appleby was a whistle blower ,a respected professional concerned with safe guarding. She won her case. The cherry on the cake this week was an interview with Butler, themselves (?) in which they went on about Terfs being fascists and needing to extend the category of women.

Does anyone EVER stop to think that most gender critical women are of the left, supporters of gay rights, often lesbian and that this is not America? We are not in bed with the far right. This is bollocks. Just another way to dismiss us.

As we watch Afghanistan and Texas ,to say Butler’s words were tone deaf is to say the least. But they didn’t even have the guts to keep the most offensive stuff in the piece and overnight edited it out without really explaining why : the bits where Butler described gender critical people as fascist. Perhaps because the person their “reporters” had defended against transphobia at WiSpa turned out to be a known sex offender, perhaps because someone pointed out that Butler was throwing around the word fascist rather like Rik Mayall used to do in the Young Ones.

All of this is rather desperate and readers deserve better. When I left that newspaper I said that I thought and expected editors to stand up for their writers in public. Instead they go into some catatonic paralysis. I may have not liked this interview but it should never have been cut. Stand by what you publish or your credibility is shot.

But this is about more than Judith Butler and their refusal to support women . Butler is not really any kind of feminist at all. What this is about is the large edifice of trans ideology crumbling when any real analysis is applied. Yes, I have read Shon Faye’s book and there are some interesting points in it and I totally agree that the lives of trans people should be easier and health care better . I have never said anything but that.

What Faye does in the book is say that there can be no trans liberation under capitalism so there will be a bit of a wait I suspect.

Yet surely it is the other way round and what we are seeing is that trans ideology (not trans people – I am making a distinction here ) represent the apex of capitalism .

For it means that the individual decides their own gendered essence and then spends a fortune on surgery and a lifetime on medication to achieve the appearance of it. Of course lots of people spend a lifetime on medication but not out of choice. Marx understood very well that the abolition of our system of production would free up women.

Now it is all about freeing up men. Who say they are women. Quelle surprise.

Nussbaum’s famous take down of Butler is premised exactly on the sense of individual versus collective struggle “ The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. “

Such thinking now dominates academia. There is simply an unquestioning rehearsal of something most of know not to be true thus Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex “At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

What does ‘sorted’ mean here? A tiny number of intersex babies are born. A tiny number of people are trans and decide to change their bodies. The feminist demand to challenge gender norms without mutilating any one’s body no longer matters. What matters now is this retrograde return to some gendered soul. This is not something any decent Marxist would have any truck with . Of course one may change over a lifetime and of course gender is never ‘settled.’ We are complex people who inhabit bodies that often don’t work or appear as we want them to.

But not only is there a denial of basic Marxism going on here , what becomes ever more apparent is that there is a denial of motherhood. Butler said “Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.”

Self-assignment is key . One may birth oneself. No longer of woman born but self -made. This is a theoretical leap but it also one that has profound implications for women as a sex class. We are really then, just the ��host bodies to a new breed of people who self-assign.

Maybe that is the future although look around the word and there isn’t a lot of self-assignment going on. There are simply women shot and beaten in the street, choked to death or having their rights taken away. There is no identifying out of this , there is no fluidity here . This is not discourse. It is brutality and do we not have some responsibility to other women to confront male violence ?

Instead the hatred is aided and abetted by so called philosophers describing other women as Terfs. It is utterly depressing.

The sexed body. The pregnant body. The dying body. The body is in trouble when we can’t talk about it . I thought of Margaret Mary O’Hara’s beautiful and strange lyrics and what they might mean. I await my child’s return from the hospital as hers is a difficult pregnancy and thank god they are on the case. The sex of the child she carries does not matter to me at all .

It simply exists. Not in language but within a body.

Why is that so difficult to acknowledge?

#gender critical #feminism #transgender #judith butler #suzanne moore

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allisondraste · 3 years ago

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Death and Other Things That Should Have Been Fatal

Fandom: Mass Effect

Pairing: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian

Word Count: 4715

Summary: A follow up to Cockroaches and Other Things That Just Keep Living, Shepard wakes up after destroying the Reapers and copes with the fallout. Thankfully, she doesn't have to do so alone.

[Click Here for AO3]

“Shepard?”

The voice was little more than static in her ear, jarring her back into excruciating consciousness, head throbbing, extremities numb. Spears of pain coursed through her chest with each and every breath, and she didn’t know whether it was the several broken ribs or the sight of Anderson's lifeless body slouched next to her. She tore her gaze away from the closest thing she’d ever had to a good father figure, eyes fluttering closed as she attempted to focus only on the person speaking to her.

“Garrus?” His was the first name that rolled off her tongue, the only person in the galaxy she wanted that disembodied voice to be.

“No.” Came the stern reply. There was a long pause as any hope for comfort in her final moments came crashing down around her. Then the voice spoke again. “It’s Hackett.”

A jolt of resentment toward the Admiral coursed through her at his introduction. What more could he possibly want from her? Had she not already done enough, sacrificed enough for just a ghost of a chance to stop the reapers. Surely someone else could take it from there. Why did everything fall on her?

Because someone else would have gotten it wrong.

She shook herself out of her head and back to the present. She would have been mortified under normal circumstances, but she couldn’t bring herself to give a damn now. “I apologize sir, I’m— What do you need me to do?”

“The Crucible is docked, but is not activated,” he explained, “We think there’s something that needs to be done on your end. Is there a trigger? Some sort of terminal?”

His words clung to the air around her, and her eyes locked onto the terminal the Illusive Man had used earlier. It was just a few feet in front of her and still so far away. She tried and failed to bring herself to her feet, legs buckling beneath her and sending her plummeting to the floor. Hot tears burned in her eyes as a new array of pain shot through her body, and she groaned in agony.

“Shepard?”

“I’m here, sir,” she growled, forcing herself up onto an elbow and dragging her body to the terminal, vision beginning to blur at the corners.. Not yet , she pleaded with her consciousness as she reached up toward the terminal, hand sweeping clumsily across the haptic display. Not. Yet. “I’m at the terminal but I… I don’t— I can’t find—”

Her vision went dark, supporting arm trembling and giving out as her consciousness faded. Hackett’s voice called out to her repeatedly, further and further away until it was gone entirely.

She awoke to bright, burning light, buzzing in her ears, sensations anyone else would have associated with death. But Shepard had been dead before, and this was nothing like the last time. She’d never forget that dark, quiet empty.

“Shepard,” shouted a voice, both familiar and foreign, “Wake up.”

“What?” Blood dripped into her eyes from a wound she couldn’t feel. “Where am I?”

She scrubbed her face with the back of her hand, blinking until her vision cleared. Her body screamed in protest as she rose to her knees, louder still as she brought herself to her feet and searched for who—or what— had spoken to her.

“The Citadel,” came the reply, “It is my home.”

She snapped her head in the direction of the voice, it’s owner a glowing, translucent entity in the shape of a ghost. Her heart slammed against her aching ribs, and a name rushed to her mouth before she could stop it. “Kaidan?”

The entity examined her for a moment that felt more like an eternity, long enough for her initial relief to fade, consumed by dread as she awaited its answer.

“No,” it stated in a cold, matter-of-fact way Kaidan could never have managed, “I am the Catalyst.”

Rage ignited in her stomach and chest at the sound of him twisted and distorted by a chorus of synthetic echoes, and she growled. “I thought the Citadel was the Catalyst.”

“The Citadel is part of me,” it explained, then paused, tilting its head in examination of her again, “My appearance disturbs you.”

Shepard let out a derisive snort. “Yeah. You could say that.”

“I apologize,” it said, “I chose a form that I believed would help us communicate. You had fond memories of this one.”

“Too fond.” She looked down, unable to meet its vacant eyes. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Is this one more suitable?” It’s voice shifted registers and when she glanced up Thane stood before her.

Hot tears burned in her eyes but she held them back and shook her head. “No.”

“Perhaps you would prefer this?” This time it’s tone was higher pitched, clipped. Mordin.

“No,” she spat through clenched teeth, “I’d prefer if you’d just pick a nightmare and tell me whether you can help me or not. ”

“Very well,” it said, Kaidan once again as it motioned for her to follow after it toward the beam of light before them. “Perhaps we can help each other.”

She limped after it, listening as it spoke, as it explained its creation, it’s function, the purpose for its very existence. It was nothing the Leviathan had not already revealed to her, but spun in a way that painted the Reapers as innocent pawns simply fulfilling their duty, wiping out entire civilizations to ensure galactic balance, to protect organic life from its own chaos.

Bullshit , she thought as flashes of destruction played behind her eyelids with each laborious blink. She remembered the sinking void in her gut as she fled Earth, watching it burn beneath Reaper hands. She thought of Palaven, the harrowed Turian faces as their military and government collapsed, the anger and disbelief that vibrated in Garrus’ voice and beneath his skin. She recalled Thessia, the most advanced civilization in the galaxy reduced to rubble before her eyes and she, helpless to even salvage one artifact, Liara’s anguished sobs as she trembled in her arms.

The Catalyst and its Reapers were responsible for every lost colony in Batarian space that Shepard had shouldered instead. Every single face on the memorial wall at the Citadel, every orphaned child and refugee, every life touched by this goddamn war, and the lives of those in every cycle that came before— it was all their fault. They had corrupted and indoctrinated some of the greatest minds of her time, broken some of the strongest wills. She wondered what had been said to convince Saren and Benezia. What had the Catalyst become to take hold of The Illusive Man?

The echoes of Sovereign’s boasts of supremacy and Harbinger’s threats of annihilation rang out in her ears as clear as the days they’d been spoken. And this entity, this artificial intelligence with the power and capability to stop it all, expected her to believe they were simply creatures bound to a purpose. The Catalyst truly believed she would help it achieve its pinnacle of evolution.

No, just because it was in a shark’s nature to eat her, did not mean she would allow it to do so. Despite the original intent behind their creations, the Reapers were monsters, and they had to be stopped. The galaxy deserved justice. She took one lumbering step toward the trigger on the right, one step closer to settling things once and for all.

“It will happen again,” the Catalyst called after her, “Machines will be rebuilt, and chaos will continue. Organics and synthetics cannot coexist separately.

“That’s…not true,” she grunted, and took another step, “The geth and the quarians have brokered peace.”

“It will not last.”

“You don’t know that,” she shouted, fists clenched at her sides, “The beauty of chaos is that you can’t know that.”

The entity fell silent, briefly considering what she said, then continued. “Perhaps not; however if you choose to destroy the Reapers, the geth will be destroyed as well. The two will not have the opportunity to disprove your hypothesis.”

A pang of guilt pierced her and she halted in her tracks.“All of them?”

“Yes. The Crucible’s beam is powerful but unfocused. It will be unable to distinguish between Reaper technology and other forms of synthetic life.”

Another pang of guilt as realization dawned on her. That meant EDI would die, too. Someone who was every bit a friend and member of her crew as anyone else, someone who had put herself on the line multiple times to protect Shepard, to make certain she could get the job done. EDI, who confessed just before the battle that she finally felt alive. Now, Shepard was forced to weigh her newfound life and the newfound intelligence of the geth race, against the destruction of the Reapers.

What was it Garrus had called it? Ruthless calculus, that brutal math that awaited anyone who spent enough time at war. Shepard had done plenty of those calculations, had made more than her fair share of difficult decisions, and she’d dealt with the consequences, good and bad.

This time, it was different, more final. And she was entirely alone. The future of the galaxy lay upon her weary back, and she was far past the point of compromise.

Shepard wanted the Reapers to pay for what they had done for millennia, wanted to watch them disintegrate in space as the cheers of her fleet rang out over the comms. She wanted to know with certainty that the war was over.

More than anything, however, and most heavy on her mind, she wanted to survive. It was a potent wave of selfishness that overwhelmed her as she thought of her friends back on the Normandy, of the relationships she’d forged and that had forged her. Her heart ached at the thought of never seeing them again, never hearing their voices. She was sick at the possibility that her last moments with those who had carried her through every storm were hurried and spent in a war torn camp on Earth.

Knowing that they were worried and waiting for her to return, remembering Garrus’ desperate plea that she come back alive, it was more than she needed to motivate her to do so. For the first time in her three decades of life, she had something to go home to. She had given so much of herself to save the galaxy, and she had more than earned the right to live in it.

There was no certainty that destroying the Reapers would ensure her survival, but it was the only choice without the certainty that she would die. She was willing to take her chances. She had to. With a trembling arm she raised her pistol, aimed at the glass case guarding the trigger mechanism, and fired.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as the glass shattered and her vision faded to white. “I’m so sorry.”

Shepard had been dead enough times to know that sound always came first, the discomforting beeping of medical equipment and garbled chatter ringing out in the darkness as her nervous system attempted to orient itself. Smell and taste came next, a package deal. This time the antiseptic and the metallic tang of blood barely masked the rank of burnt flesh.

Then the pain set in, dull but constant and everywhere, numbed only slightly by neural blockers and local anesthetic. She did not need to see her injuries to know how serious they were, how fatal they should have been. Yet there she lay, once again waking up from something that would have killed anyone else.

And she was alone. Again.

She began to panic as her eyes opened to the empty, sterile room, setting off the many monitors she was hooked up to. Her heart pounded violently, each breath she took sharp and shallow as she yanked herself free from the dozens of tubes and IVs constraining her. How long had she been out this time? What covert operation for which secret, extremist organization had found and resurrected her for their benefit? How much more could one galaxy ask of her?

There was a hiss of opening doors and an unfamiliar asari entered the room urgently, arms extended out in front of her. In one breath she reassured Shepard that everything was going to be all right and in the next called for a medical restraint, a sedative. She stepped slowly toward Shepard as one would approach a frightened, feral animal, and two more uniformed aliens entered the room. Shepard stood tall, despite the ache in her bones and glared at the three of them.

“Ma’am, I know you must be very disoriented right now, and I am happy to answer any and all of your questions,” the asari said, holding her hands up, “But you are in no shape to be out of bed. I need you to calm down before you hurt yourself further.”

Shepard glanced from the asari to the two salarians on either side of her. They all wore generic attire that was standard for medical professionals across the galaxy, but their uniforms had no indication of their names or who they worked for. She crossed her arms and winced through the pain as she argued. “How about you start by telling me where I am, then I’ll decide if I want to calm down or not.”

Just as she finished speaking the doors opened again, this time to faces she knew, and the subsequent wave of relief that washed over her nearly knocked her back into the bed on it’s own. On the right stood Dr. Michel, who she remembered helping out on several occasions during the Reaper War. A bit sweet on Garrus, if she remembered correctly. On the left, wearing a smirk and a raised eyebrow, was none other than Miranda Lawson.

“Sit down, Shepard,” Miranda asserted in her trademark tone. She flashed the hint of a smile and continued, “The residents aren’t being paid enough for you to harass them.”

Shepard’s eyes flicked over to the three aliens who’d been tending to her just moments before. They were now speaking nervously with the doctor, who muttered something about tests they needed to run followed by some other medical jargon that Shepard couldn’t decipher. She did as her friend directed and eased herself back down onto her bed, offering a sheepish grin as she did so. “I feel like such an ass.”

“Don’t,” Dr. Michel chimed in as she approached the bed, and began to scan Shepard with her omni-tool, “You have been in a coma for almost a month. It was expected that you would be agitated when you awoke, especially considering everything you’ve been through.”

Shepard’s chest swelled with something like gratitude. A month . She’d only been out for a month, and she had woken up in what she could now tell was Huerta Memorial under the care of a physician she trusted and one of her closest friends. This was nothing like the last time she died. She looked up at Miranda and asked,“Had to put me back together again, I see?”

“I only helped this time,” Miranda explained as she worked to reconnect some of the IVs Shepard had ripped out, “Dr. Michel contacted me a few weeks ago for a consultation about your cybernetic augmentation. I was already on the Citadel, so I came in person to oversee the repairs.”

“Is everything working?”

“Mostly,” Miranda shrugged, “Not quite up to specifications, but your injuries are still healing. With time, you should be fine.”

“And hopefully far away from any more life-threatening battles, yes,” remarked Michel, moving to a terminal near the wall and transferring data collected from her omni-tool scans.

Shepard let out a huff, and let herself recline onto the bed, walls crumbling away at the comforting conversation. She took a breath and let her eyes flutter closed for just a minute, and said, “If I can. If the galaxy will let me.”

“The galaxy’s going to have to,” announced an unmistakable voice from the door, and Shepard bolted upright to face it. To face him .

She hadn’t even heard the door open, and yet there stood her turian, with all that easy confidence he’d always carried himself with and a bouquet of indistinguishable gift shop flowers in each hand. Her pulse jumped, a fact the vitals monitor in the corner was quick to inform her and everyone in the room about. She would never live that one down.

“Garrus!”

“Is that cardiac arrest—“ he motioned toward the screen with one of the bouquets— “Or, uh… are you just happy to see me?”

Shepard just rolled her eyes, unable to stop the grin that twitched at the corners of her mouth as he sauntered up to the bedside.

“I wasn’t sure which you’d like better,” Garrus explained, glancing with uncertainty between the flowers in each hand, “So I got both. There’s also some chocolate and a few books of hanar poetry back at the gift shop if you just absolutely hate the flowers. I can run back down and—“

She laughed and shook her head at him. “They’re perfect.”

“Are you sure?” He examined each bouquet again. “You might need the poetry to bore you back into a coma.”

“I thought that anthology was quite beautiful and romantic, myself,” Michel remarked, amused. She approached Shepard again and administered something that relieved the throbbing pain in her head she’d barely noticed in all the commotion. “There, that should keep you comfortable for a time. I will come and check on you in a few hours ”

“I’ll be going as well,” Miranda said, eyeing Shepard and Garrus knowingly. “Call me if you need anything.”

She turned to follow the doctor out of the room but stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, and Shepard? I’m glad we got to see each other again “

Shepard nodded. “So am I.”

With that Miranda left the room, the door sliding shut behind her. Shepard turned her gaze up to Garrus who was already looking at her, pale eyes scanning every inch of her face intently. His mandibles twitched and flared in the very specific way they always did when he was agitated or worried. He shook his head, discarded both bundles of flowers onto the nearby bedside table, and sat down on the edge of the bed next to her, staring off at the wall in silence.

“Shepard I— I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up,” he said finally, turning to look at her and placing a hand on her leg, “I’d just gone to get some air…I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“It’s okay,” she reassured him, reaching for his hand and wondering just how many sleepless hours he’d sat by her bed waiting for her to come to. “You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”

He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to hers, lingering there for several long moments. She brought a hand up to trace the rough ridges of scarring along the right side of his face. His eyes fluttered closed at the touch, and he let out a heavy sigh, as if she’d lifted some invisible weight off of him with just the tips of her fingers.

“You know,” she spoke up, breaking the powerful silence between them, “I think I finally have some scars that’ll give you a run for your credits.”

Garrus laughed, but it was quiet—almost sad— and he pulled back to examine her.

“How bad is it,” she asked, “There aren’t any mirrors in here.”

He laughed again, this time with more enthusiasm. “Hell, Shepard, I don’t know. You always were ugly, so it’s hard for me to say.”

“Okay,” she admitted with a smirk, “I had that one coming.”

The room went quiet again, with the exception of the buzzing and whirring of the equipment around them. It wasn’t uncomfortable, though— nothing had ever been uncomfortable with Garrus— but it was heavy with unspoken pain and unasked questions for which Shepard wasn’t sure she wanted answers.

“How’s everyone else,” she ventured.

“Recovering,” he answered with a sigh, “Joker tried to outrun the blast, but even the Normandy wasn’t quick enough. Crash landed on some human colony world. Everyone made it except—“

“EDI,” she said, name bitter on her tongue. She’d hoped the catalyst had been lying about the Crucible’s effect on synthetic life.

“Yes… how did you—“

This time, she was not able to dam up the wave of emotions that crashed into her. Tears rushed to her eyes, shame and remorse tightening her chest like a vice. She was a soldier, and she knew that sacrifices won wars, but that did not make it any easier.

“It’s a long story,” she said with a sniff, looking away from him and attempting to wipe away the tears before he could see them, as if he hadn’t already.

“Well—” Garrus reached out and grabbed her chin, gently, giving it a tug until she brought her gaze back to him. “It’s a good thing I cleared my afternoon schedule, then. Tell me everything.”

And so she did. With a shaky voice, she recounted everything that happened from the time she called the evac for Garrus and Liara to the moment she was struck by the Crucible’s blast. She told him about The Illusive Man, Anderson, the Catalyst who wore Kaidan’s face, and the impossible choice she was given. He listened to every word, offered her his hand, and didn’t complain as her grip grew tighter and tighter with each devastating revelation.

When she was finished, eyes swollen and head throbbing, she looked at him and said, “I fucked up, Garrus. I had a chance to save EDI and the geth, but I just… couldn’t do it. I was so angry and… scared , and—“

“Shepard,” Garrus interrupted her, laughing and shaking his head.

“What?”

“You’re about the only person I know who could save the whole damn galaxy and feel guilty because you didn’t save it better.”

“My life isn’t worth more than EDI’s was, and it definitely isn’t more important than the entire geth race,” Shepard argued.

Garrus blinked back at her a few times, then responded. “It is to me.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but the words didn’t come, so she clamped it shut and frowned. Her entire argument fell apart in the wake of his blunt confession. How the hell was she supposed to respond to something like that?

“It was selfish,” she finally managed past the lump in her throat, “It was genocide.”

“Maybe,” he answered, firmly, “Maybe not. We have no way of knowing that anything the Catalyst told you was true.”

“Why would it lie?”

“I don’t know, maybe to save it’s own ass?” His words were pointed but not directed to her. “It was clearly trying to get in your head, Shepard, using Alenko like that.”

“But—”

“No,” he snapped, “You made the right call, and no one is going to fault you for it except you.”

“ Garrus …” she began, but trailed off when she noticed him looking down at their intertwined fingers, shaking his head and seeming to struggle with his emotions.

When he spoke up, his voice was hoarse. “You’ll forgive me if I say I don’t think you owe anyone—not EDI, not the geth, not the Alliance, not the rest of the galaxy— any more than you’ve already given.”

He paused for a beat, then added in a lighter tone, “Except me. You owe me a long retirement on your fancy Alliance pension.”

Shepard snorted out a laugh, despite everything, and reached up to take his face in her hands. She pulled him closer to her, just so that she could press a kiss against the side of his mouth.

“I’ll think about it,” she whispered.

Just as they pulled apart, the door opened and they both turned to see who had entered. Dr. Michel stood at the threshold smiling at them apologetically. “I am sorry for the interruption, but—”

“Someone tell Garrus to quit hogging the Commander,” complained an all too familiar voice as he pushed past the doctor and into the room. “The rest of us have been waiting just as long as he has.”

“Joker,” Shepard exclaimed, nearly jumping up out of the bed to greet him.

“The one and only,” he said proudly then held up a small plastic crate to show her, “And I brought you something. Basically had to wrestle the Alliance brass for it when they declared you dead.”

“What—,” she asked as she squinted at the box, noticing movement in the corner, “Is that my hamster?”

He sat the container down carefully on the table next to the flowers Garrus had tossed aside, “It’s not two bouquets of useless flowers or anything, but, well…you know.”

“We can’t all be as romantic as you,” Garrus said sarcastically as he stood up and stepped away from the bed, allowing the other man space to approach Shepard.

“Thank you, Joker,” Shepard said with a nod as she sat up in the bed, “And about EDI, I—“

He cut her off with the shake of his head, clearly not ready to discuss it. “Not your fault, Commander.”

Shepard just nodded, sorry, but not wanting to force the issue. Joker puffed his chest out and saluted her, just as more commotion rang out from the door. She darted her eyes across the room again to see the flood of other people pouring in from the hallway.

Ash was the first to rush to the bedside, throwing appropriate Alliance protocol out the window as she threw her arms unceremoniously around Shepard. The embrace was firm, but not so forceful that it caused her aching body any extra pain, and when Ash pulled away, Shepard could see the tears glistening in her eyes. She stiffened up and saluted just as Joker had done, and said “Ma’am.”

Much to Shepard’s surprise, Ash then approached Garrus and embraced him briefly as well, pulling away and then giving him a pat on the arm.

The others followed suit after that, offering words of gratitude that she had saved the galaxy, and relief that she’d managed to pull through. Tali and Liara had followed Ash’s example and hugged her. The others didn’t but greeted her with enthusiasm all the same. Vega mentioned how “epic” it was when the fleet realized she’d made it to the Citadel and got the arms opened while Traynor and Cortez nodded along. Javik, in his typical fashion stood quietly in the corner but nodded at her with a look of admiration she had yet to see from the Prothean. Dr. Chakwas and the crew from engineering squeezed themselves in the now cramped space as well. Chakwas approached the bed and gave Shepard’s hand a firm squeeze.

Humbling was not a strong enough word to describe the experience of seeing everyone who’d been on the Normandy with her in that final journey to Earth gathered around celebrating her survival. They had all meant so much to her, and only now did she realize that she’d meant the same to them.

She’d grown accustomed to being a sole survivor, watching her own back and carrying on alone with each of her mistakes strapped to her shoulders. She was used to blaming herself with the voices of those she lost, of nightmares and flashbacks and consoling herself back to sleep in the middle of the night. She had trained herself to be numb because she could not bear feeling guilty.

Now, she didn’t have to. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she had people who cared about her, people who she trusted, and they had survived. For the first time, she wasn’t alone with her grief and she didn’t have to be numb. She had friends who would hold her together while she sorted herself out, just as she had done for each and every one of them.

“You okay,” Garrus asked as he approached the bedside again, letting a hand tousle her hair gently before falling to her shoulder.

“Yeah.” She nodded and glanced around the room slowly, taking it all in. “I really actually am.”

#mass effect #mass effect legendary edition #garrus vakarian #femshep #shakarian #angst #hurt/comfort #fanfic #my writing

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useless-catalanfacts · 5 years ago

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Im not trying to be offensive but do you really think independence is what’s best? I understand the police brutality is unacceptable but can Catalonia really survive on its own? A complete separate country? If this happens that means that FC Barcelona can no longer play in La Liga and it would have to build a league of its own. I know some people don’t care about that part but I think it’s worth mentioning

No offense taken on your question or on your having a different opinion, of course, but I hope you realise that the last part is very offensive (the considering the fact that foreign people can watch a football match twice a year more important than a whole country not having rights). I don’t take offense because I know you didn’t mean it and it’s probably something that bothers you as a football fan, but please do not say this. It feels horrible to see people care more about watching a match that if your friends and family are in jail for nothing (I personally know people in, so yeah).

Also, Andorra FC, a team that is obviously from Andorra, and not from Spain, participates in La Liga. So it isn’t closed to Spain necessarily.

Catalonia can survive without Spain. Any economical study shows that Catalonia would be much richer without all the colonial taxes we have to pay to Spain. But we are not doing this to be richer. In fact, it was said as part of negociations that Catalonia offered to pay compensations to Spain for a long time.

And this is not to say Catalans are rich. Not at all. Catalonia as a land is richer than most Spain because there are businesses and some rich people with make the stats get higher, but the people as a whole are not richer than Spaniards at all. And because of the taxes we have to pay for being Catalan that never come back, we are even poorer. For example, we don’t have a good public transport system, new highways we need, etc because Spain doesn’t want to invert money here. Meanwhile in Madrid and Andalucía some highways and trains are expensive to maintain while nobody passes there ever because they already have so many highways that some are just not needed at all.

Or how we have to pay about 2000€ per year (sometimes even more) to be in a public university while in other places like Andalucía it’s free with our taxes. We don’t complain that it’s free (it should be free for everyone), but we say that the decision on wether you get something for free or not should not depend on “are you from Catalonia or from x place” but on your socioeconomic background. A rich person in Andalucía gets free university with our taxes. A poor person in Catalonia cannot go to university because we don’t have enough scholarships. We have no problem with sending money to someone who needs it in Andalucía, or Syria or Palestine or Mexico or wherever. What we say is that “because you’re from Catalonia” should not be the reason for people to not get things, and that when it comes to inside a State there should be a distribution of aid to people who need it based on how much they need it.

So yes, economically we would be very well without Spain. In fact, so well that Spanish media uses this to pretend we only want independence for the money we would get.

And no country is “completely separate on its own”, especially not in Europe. And obviously we want to be part of the European Union, though we know Spain would veto us, there’s legal ways that can be tried to go around that. And with the economic power that is Barcelona, it’s for the interest of all Western Europe that we would be part of the EU.

The police brutality is not the problem alone. The problems are so many that it feels asphixiating to be under Spanish rule. At this point, we have to do this for our mental health’s sake.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, my mother is a teacher. She teaches Catalan language in the adults’ school. Fascists call her on her job’s phone to insult her and threaten her for teaching Catalan. They don’t even know her political views (which she never mentions in class and at her job there are obviously no symbols or anything, she just teaches the language). The adults’ school of Catalan language in the city next to mine had to be evacuated because some fascists threw gas bombs in it (here is a link to the local newspaper reporting on it).

And it’s worse for others. I have some family friends who have a printing place and anothers who work in a bookshop in our town, and they’re known independentists. Besides the constant threats over phone, their workplaces keep getting vandalized with spray-paintings of swastikas and white supremacy crosses and fascist slogans.

When my aunt hang the independence flag from her balcony, some days later someone prayed swastikas around our quarter. They sprayed one on the door of my grandmother’s house (she lives in the ground floor and my aunt lives on the 1st floor). My grandmother’s father was killed in the gas chamber of the Mauthausen extermination camp. Believe me when I say this “paintings” have a direct effect on people, even if “just” emotional.

But Spanish law doesn’t do anything to protect people who are victims of this. It didn’t even jail neonazis who murdered people for being Valencian Catalan independentists like Guillem Agulló. The police force, the juridical system and the State as a whole constantly give their support to neonazis.

We want independence from Spain because we have a different project. Spain is anchored on its fascist past (remember that Spain was a fascist dictatorship from 1939 to 1978, until the present “democratic” Constitution was written by the fascists). In Catalonia we have so many ideas, but we cannot do them because Spains blocks us always.

We want to do things differently. The Catalan government wanted to let refugees come, and Spain didn’t let us. There was also a plan to combat climate change and by 2022 rely only on renewable energy, Spaind didn’t let us either. They also didn’t let us pass the law to end the gender pay gap. Nor the laws for “historical memory” (what we call rememberance of the crimes of fascism). Nor the law to stop evictions. Nor protection for Aranese (a minority language). Nor help to migrants. Nor the numerous attempts at a law so that companies can’t cut water and light to poor families who can’t pay. Nor many more. (A while ago I talked about some of those, check it out in this post).

When people put their bodies in front of police knowing what they’re capable of, we do it because living under Spanish rule is so unbearable that we are willing to risk it. Just the thought of continuing to live like this is depressing.

So not only can Catalonia live without Spanish rule (it’s not like they are helping us in any way, we don’t rely on them for anything), but we can do so much better than now because we are a more progressive country with initiative to do something about problems.

Now, to the part about football…

Iberian people are crazy for football. Including us Catalans, and including Spaniards. You can take away their rights and most won’t do anything about it, but touch their football and they will riot. That’s why I don’t have any doubt that they will find a solution.

Besides the fact that Barça and Madrid would play matches every year nonetheless in the European league, as I said before Andorran teams can take part in La Liga. This is not even an issue because football is such an important thing in the Iberian Peninsula, and especially in the economic sense, that it would be solved without any problem, because everyone wants Real Madrid and Barça to have more matches. My guess is that they would make La Liga an Iberian league, maybe Portuguese teams could come too.

If you care about football, respect what Barça has historically meant to us. During the dictatorship, when being Catalan was illegal, Barça was the only way Catalan people had to express themselves. That’s why dictator Franco forced it to lose on purpose matches against Real Madrid. That’s why Barça is “més que un club”. Please respect that.

#sorry i went a bit on a tangent #but i think people who don't live this situation don't realise how strong it is and how different it could be #independence is not a caprice it's a real life decision for real life reasons #ask #liftlower

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sgtbluebacon · 6 years ago

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What are Sovereign Citizens?

To give you the full picture, I have to take you back in time. The original intent of this essay was to be a foundation for future sovereign citizen videos on my Youtube channel, and before I began my research, I thought they were harmless and ridiculous. I didn't expect it them to have such a dark history, or such dangerous members.

We begin in 1776. A group of influential men have been secretly writing one of the most important documents in American history. On the 4th of July, after almost a year of war with Britain, delegates from the 13 Colonies vote to approve the Declaration of Independence. In 1781, all thirteen states ratified the Articles of Confederation, which outlined an early system of Government. Two years later, the war with Britain ended, and in 1788, the Articles of Confederation were replaced with our current Constitution.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified, stating: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, shall exist within the United States."

In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified, stating: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, are citizens of the United States."

In 1909, the 16th Amendment was ratified, stating: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, "

This is important, because these documents and amendments are the basis upon which the original Sovereign Citizen arguments were built. Modern Sovereign Citizens use different documents or parts of the Constitution, but I’ll discuss those arguments in future essays.

In 1946, Wesley Smith formed the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which promoted the idea that only white people were the children of God.

In the 1950s, a right-wing movement was formed, called the Tax Protest movement. They claimed the 16th Amendment was in violation of the 13th Amendment. Forcing someone to pay taxes was involuntary servitude. This movement continued for decades without any real success.

At least, until the arrival of William P. Gale, a former officer in the US army who had reportedly served as General MacArthur's aide during WWII. In the 1960s, he became a disciple of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, alongside his friend, Richard Butler, who would later form the Aryan Nations. In 1969, Gale formed the Posse Comitatus group, and using a combination of biblical ideology, racist beliefs, and legal knowledge, claimed the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified to strip power away from sovereign citizens, forcing them to submit to the government. By refusing to pay taxes, or accept government identification, one could free themselves from government control. His preaching was widely accepted thanks to regular radio broadcasts, not only by white supremacy movements, but by the tax protest movement, which had gained traction during the Farm Crisis of the 70′s and 80′s. With multiple organizations backing him, Gale formed a platform from which he spread his sermons, encouraging citizens to use vigilante justice against government officials who did not support their beliefs.

In 1978, William Luther Pierce, the former editor of the American Nazi Party's quarterly journal "National Socialist World," and co-leader of the National Alliance, an organization designed to help white nationalists overthrow the federal government, wrote a novel titled "The Turner Diaries." The book was about a future race war, where homosexuals, jews, and others, were ethnically clensed in an "absolutely necessary" war by a group of white nationalists known as The Organization.

In the early 1980s, the Posse Comitatus movement changed into the Sovereign Citizen movement, and it became brutally violent.

1983 Gordon Kahl became involved in a shootout with the police, after failing to pay his taxes, violating his parole for, you guessed it, not paying taxes.

For those of you who don't know, parole is basically a prison sentence outside of prison. You get to live your life, and are expected to not break the law. If you do, your prison sentence gets completed inside of prison.

Two police officers died in the shootout, and Kahl fled. For four months, police hunted him down, until they finally caught and killed him in a second shootout, during which one more officer died.

Also In 1983, Robert Jay Matthews, a member of the Aryan Nations and the National Alliance formed a group called "The Order," an anti-government militia named after the inner leading circle of The Organization from William Pierce's novel. They financed themselves by creating counterfeit money and by robbing armored cars throughout the 80′s. They protected themselves through violence and even murder. Their goal was to bring about the creation of a white supremacist society.

In 1994, the Montana Freemen, a variation on the Sovereign Citizen movement, seized a courthouse in Garfield County, offering bounties as high as 1 million dollars for the county judge, attorney, and sheriff to be brought to them, dead or alive. A year later, police would stop an armed attempt to kidnap the same judge that the bounty had been placed on.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols parked a truck full of home-made explosives under the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City. The detonation destroyed the north side of the building, and damaged over 300 buildings nearby. 168 people died in what is currently the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in the United States.

McVeigh and Nichols were actually taken to trial wearing bulletproof vests because it was believed the public might try to kill them. The only Terrorist attack on American soil with a higher body count occurred on September 11th.

In 1996, the Montana Freemen made news again when, after failing to leave property they had been evicted from, 3 members were arrested by FBI agents. Other members of the Freemen barricaded themselves in the property's residence, and the FBI began an 81 day standoff, waiting for them to surrender.

Looking at their history, its clear why the FBI classifies the Sovereign Citizen movement as domestic terrorism. They might currently lack the organized leadership of the 70′s and 80′s, but they remain dangerous as individuals.

In 2010, a man who is believed to be a sovereign citizen, and at the very least a member of the anti-tax movement, flew a plane into the Austin Texas IRS building.

In 2012, Four sheriff's deputies in Louisiana were shot in an Ambush. Two died. The attack was carried out by four sovereign citizens. Searches of their residences revealed multiple illegal weapons and pipe bombs. It was also discovered that two of the attackers were on domestic terrorism watch lists.

In 2016, an ex-marine identifying as a Sovereign Citizen shot and killed three officers in Baton Rouge.

Technically he was Moorish American, and I'll be explaining what they are in another video. Those examples are just the premeditated murders. There are plenty of other reports of officers being killed in the line of duty by sovereign citizens. Their influence is growing again. The FBI is devoting more resources to tracking them again. If you are a sovereign citizen, it didn't work then, and it won't work now.

#Sovereign Citizen #History

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sataniccapitalist · 6 years ago

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The True State of the Union

“All the pomp and circumstance of the State of the Union speech was present last night — the introductions, the stage-managed applause, the honored guests — and this: Donald Trump giving the crowd his profile like Nero, sneering and gesticulating at the Democrats, clapping and clapping and clapping into his own microphone to keep the applause lines going like some starving seal in a two-bit circus. Standing under the lights last night, he looked like a new penny at the bottom of a truck stop toilet bowl, all copper sheen and the stink of ammonia.”

I wrote that a year ago about the last State of the Union address, and I have no reason to doubt tonight will prove to be any different. These addresses have been, by and large, wildly overwrought exercises in fiction, ego-inflation and ersatz patriotism since Ronald Reagan decided to go big with them four decades ago. Now that Donald Trump has lumbered onto the scene, however, the charade has become quite completely surreal, a festival of lies, bombast and full-throated nonsense that beggars likeness.

They will stand, they will sit, they will clap, they will leave, and nothing of substance or import will have been imparted to the people. Therefore, my colleagues and I at Truthout have endeavored to compile a collection of facts about the actual state of the union, and indeed the world, as a companion piece to the speech.

What follows does not cover every topic and crisis worthy of attention. The ongoing calamity of for-profit health care, attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, racist police violence, Yemen, the Forever Wars and other vital subjects will be discussed in a variety of articles to come. Here is an incomplete yet all-too-necessary look at a few of the most pressing concerns we face. Here is the truth, as best as we can state it, about the state of things. It is not pretty, not without hope, and exactly what you deserve to hear.

— William Rivers Pitt

The Climate Crisis Grinds On

Since the Trump administration began, it has launched a wholesale war against any legislation, laws, or other actions aimed at regulating, mitigating or stemming the tide of runaway climate disruption. At a time when governments around the world should be making managing the impacts of climate change their highest priority, given that the very survival of the human species could well depend upon it, they have instead:

Withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate accord;

Waged a war against climate science by cutting budgets for data and analysis on the subject;

Eased carbon emission rules for new coal plants;

Issued an executive order calling for a sharp increase in logging on public lands;

Nominated coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency;

Rolled back Obama-era coal rules that served to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants;

Delayed a climate change lawsuit brought forward by 21 youths;

Approved the first offshore oil wells for the Arctic, and so much more.

All this, despite the fact that the Trump administration has also predicted a seven degree increase in global temperatures by 2100.

— Dahr Jamail

The Racist Underbelly of Immigration

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has continued its campaign of anti-migrant violence unabated, deporting record numbers of people in 2018. In only the past week, we’ve learned that the agency created a fake university in order to incarcerate over 100 immigrants. ICE has confirmed that it is force-feeding at least nine detainees.

We’ve also recently observed the second anniversary of the shameful executive order known as the “Muslim ban.” Meanwhile, the administration’s assault on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which protects approximately 700,000 immigrants from deportation, is momentarily halted by various court orders.

Although Trump has not deported nearly as many people as did Obama — the deporter-in-chief — the current administration has laid bare the depths of racism that underpin our immigration system.

The US tortures migrants. It traumatizes children and their families. It allows private prisons to exploit them as slave labor. It lets them die in detention.

Our nation’s immigration policy will not attend to what matters most — human lives — until it starts from the roots of the crisis: decades of US invasions and interventions throughout the Middle East and Latin America, including the 2009 US-backed coup in Honduras; and a neoliberal trade policy that displaces, dispossesses and immiserates workers and Indigenous communities. We must also ask what another US-backed coup, such as the ongoing attempt in Venezuela, would do to deepen the crisis.

The two parties continue to approach immigration from the point of view of security, but fail to address the far greater threats — or actual threats — posed to our lives, such as fossil fuel executives, white supremacists,nuclear weapons and Wall Street.

Our nation’s immigration policy will not attend to what matters most — human lives — until it starts from the roots of the crisis.

The truth is that caravans will continue to come to our borders for years to come. The construction of walls, whether in the form of Trump’s “vision” of actual barriers, or the Democrats’ Silicon Valley wet dream, will not address the crisis. The movement of peoples spawned by capitalism and empire will not end with a fence or “comprehensive immigration reform.”

This past month, the Trump administration used federal workers as a bargaining chip in its quest to fund a racist border wall, which is nothing more than a monument to anti-immigrant racism. Millions of workers have suffered, and millions more might not be paid for their labor. But when workers threatened to withdraw their labor, they shut down the shutdown.

As we’re likely very soon to hear about a “state of emergency” at the border that once again renews the attacks on immigrants, herein lies the real power to fight back — the organized masses of workers and oppressed communities. Only together can we demand the most humane immigration policy: Let them all in!

— Anton Woronczuk

The State of the Prison Nation

This past year, the state of prison reform reached peak hypocrisy. Donald Trump signed the First Step Act — a much-celebrated bill that offers meager reforms and an expansion of mass surveillance — the day after implementing a draconian new anti-refugee policy and affirming he wouldn’t sign a budget bill without wall funding. Congress rallied around the First Step Act with bipartisan cheer. Trump is likely to mention it in tonight’s State of the Union address.

Meanwhile, it will do practically nothing to alleviate mass incarceration, and will deepen the reach of racist, insidious prison-like mechanisms like electronic monitoring. This type of tinkering around the edges does not address our shameful reality: The state of our “union” is a state of pervasive imprisonment, both inside and outside the walls and bars. Almost 2.3 million people are trapped in prisons, jails (including immigration jails, Indian Country jails and youth jails), military prisons, civil commitment centers and psychiatric hospitals.

At least 80,000 of them are held in solitary confinement — a practice widely recognized to be torture. Immigrant jails saw a record highpopulation this year. The impact of incarcerative punishment reaches far past the prison walls: More than half of the people in the United States have a family member who is or has been incarcerated.

Meanwhile, about 4.5 million people are under “correctional control”: parole or probation. About 438,000 children (and increasing) are ensnared in the foster care system — another branch of the prison nation, as criminology scholar Beth Richie has pointed out. And 3.2 million children have been caught up in often invasive, and even abusive,child “protective” services investigations.

The prison, policing and surveillance systems are not only a feature of our society, they saturate it.

Police are nearly everywhere in our society. Approximately 10.6 million arrests take place each year, and last year, cops killed 1,166 people. More than 40 percent of schools have police on site. Moreover, an increasing number of people are being placed on surveillance devices, such as electronic shackles,that stretch the reach of the prison nation even further.

The prison, policing and surveillance systems are not only a feature of our society, they saturate it.

Black and Brown people, as well as other marginalized groups, are overwhelmingly impacted by these systems. The relevance of race and marginalization is not just a question of disproportions. The prison and punishment systems are built on a foundation of white supremacy, born out of slavery and colonialism, fueled by anti-Blackness and racism. These are systems that punish people for their poverty, their disabilities, their addictions. These are systems that persecute and torture trans, nonbinary and queer people.

Even as Donald Trump endorses (extremely limited) reforms, he’s enthusiastically supporting the capture, confinement and punishment — in one form or another — of many millions of oppressed people. Regardless of what Trump says tonight during his speech, he is presiding over a “union” whose veins pulse with torturous punishment, whose lifeblood is oppression, and whose bones are bars of steel.

— Maya Schenwar

Strange Days on the Media Front

It’s been something of a best of times/worst of times situation on the media front. The media landscape has never been so vast and infested with landmines. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has killed net neutrality for the moment. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) are hurting more people than helping. Corporate media continue to revel in corporate-media-ness (the wall-to-wall coverage of a coffee chain billionaire taking his ego for a walk serving as a sample platter). Journalists are losing jobs left and right — Buzzfeed reminded everybody on hard news shortly before laying off 200 employees in the name of profits.

Even when it’s good — even when it’s great! — much of blockbuster cinema perpetuates authoritarian, reactionary and monarchical narratives. The threat of a certain kind of magical thinking spilling over from pop entertainment into real-life decision-making can be overblown in many arenas, but it can be unnerving to consider wealthy tech brosmistaking themselves for Tony Stark and mistaking that for a good thing. It’s not reassuring that our most popular narratives extol the message that “only a handful of ‘better’ people can save us, if only we didn’t hold them back with pesky rules.”

One could feast exclusively on free (often donation-funded) video essay content endlessly on YouTube. The rise of BreadTube and the like has led to massively entertaining and educational content receiving a larger audience and support. Just a tiny sample from this past year: Shannon Strucci’s illuminating work on parasocial relationships; Lindsey Ellis’sdocumentary-length treatise on The Hobbit films making a surprising pivot toward labor concerns; Donoteat explaining why highways never solve the problems they’re prescribed for; Contrapoints, raising the aesthetic bar for the rest of YouTube with her videos, including those on incels, Jordan Peterson and capitalism… the list of amazing essays released in the past year is intimidating.

A downside: it’s become impossible to spend any amount of time on YouTube without having “alt-right”/anti-feminist/white supremacist/conspiracy garbage force-fed to your stream. Let one slip through on an auto-play and all of a sudden, the algorithm’s decided it’s true love and opened the sluice gates.

The networks we build offline and online between each other remain essential.

It’s another sign of the undeniably strange times we’re living in. While many are trapped in information bubbles formed by culture as well as by algorithms, the possibilities of media have reached weird and inspiring heights. For instance: H. Bomberguy’s Donkey Kong 64 stream in support of Mermaids, a group that helps out trans youth, was both heartwarming and surreal. Who could have expected to see some of the most entertaining, left-leaning YouTubers on the same stream as Chelsie Manning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the guy who made DOOM, all cheering on trans rights and a sleep-deprived YouTuber playing a 90s video game?

The messages that support progressive causes and human empathy may win out in value, but if they are not communicated well enough, far enough and often enough, they will lose out to messaging that preys on fear, hatred and greed bankrolled by billionaires. It is both a thrill and a relief to see more effective progressive messaging reach larger audiences through a growing, more diverse and more empowered chorus of voices. However, platforms are not our friends, and we need to be prepared when the ground beneath us shifts. From platforms to platform games, there are helping hands there for the taking. The networks we build offline and online between each other remain essential.

— Jared Rodriguez

The State of the Unions Is (Surprisingly) Strong

While Trump touts the economy, the most recent jobs report reveals that the new jobs being created under his administration pay much less than existing ones and are less likely to be unionized. Wage growth has just barely ticked up to 3.2 percent over the last year — remaining lower than where it was before the Great Recession. Further, many of the 800,000 federal workers who spent more than a month locked out of their workplaces during the longest partial government shutdown in history have yet to fully recover, with the recent rise in unemployment being attributed to furloughed workers who reported being unemployed in January.

It’s clear workers still aren’t reaping the rewards of their labor since Trump took the White House, and these conditions are increasingly driving worker militancy under an administration determined to crush organized labor. In fact, labor has seen a stunning resurgence under Trump even after the passage of Janus v. AFSCME, which gutted unions of their ability to collect “fair share fees.”

Teachers are on the front lines of this labor resurgence.

Teachers are on the front lines of this labor resurgence. Building on the momentum of historic teacher strikes last year, teachers are wasting no time in 2019. Educators in Los Angeles launched a successful six-day strike in January, as teachers in Denver and Oakland are now gearing up to follow their lead with strikes of their own in the coming weeks. These “Red for Ed” educators are leading the labor movement, showing unions how to push back against tax cuts for corporations and privatization efforts that hurt communities. The state of the unions looks strong, despite the administration’s tremendous efforts to quell worker dissent.

— Candice Bernd

The State of the Fascist State

Disturbingly, the psychological impacts of the Trump administration’s more fascistic policies seem to have diminished in the last year. One need only examine the difference between the public upheaval over child separations in 2018 and the far more subdued condemnations we witnessed over the weekend, as word broke that the Trump administration has disclosed that there are thousands more separated children than was previously acknowledged, and argued that locating the children may not be “within the realm of the possible,” since authorities did not track where the separated children were being placed.

A similarly subdued public reaction was on display during the government shutdown, when Trump threatened to circumvent Congress by declaring a state of emergency in order to build the wall. While furloughed federal workers protested the shutdown, and grassroots efforts opposing the violence of the immigration system have been ongoing, these efforts were not met with the high level of public participation we saw in earlier protests of the Trump administration’s policies. Even as some warned that an emergency declaration could have major authoritarian consequences, the country did not erupt in the kind of protests we witnessed earlier in the administration. This process of normalization is symptomatic of fascistic politics, and should be viewed as an alarming symptom of the United States’ social and political decline.

Our success or failure in proclaiming that right and wrong exist may be the defining struggle not simply of our times, but of all of human history.

The Democrats’ newfound dominance in the House, coupled with a focus on 2020 Democratic candidates, has fueled complacency, with many liberals viewing Trump’s agenda being hampered by Democratic gains. While some Democrats believe Trump is on the ropes, with the Mueller investigation, yet again, supposedly nearing its end, we would be remiss to see the threat Trump poses as diminished by Mueller or recent Democratic gains. As Trump has repeatedly established, he is willing to act unilaterally in his attacks on the environment, civil liberties and the social safety net — and the cultural impact of his racist, xenophobic rhetoric has not been lessened by the trials he has faced.

If anything, attacks on Trump appear to rally his base. The valorization of white rage continues unabated by his followers, and escalations should be expected from Trump’s supporters as Democratic attacks on Trump’s presidency and agenda continue. While the House may be able to push back against Trump’s legislative impacts, the culture war between white supremacy and those who oppose it has been accelerated past the point of legislative interruption.

While some continue to speak to a need for unity, the need for further polarization in response to the global rise of fascism continues, and with climate change on the table, our success or failure in proclaiming that right and wrong exist, and that evil must be opposed, may be the defining struggle not simply of our times, but of all of human history.

— Kelly Hayes

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earlyandoftenpodcast · 7 years ago

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(From here, a conjectural drawing of what Boston’s First Town-House might have looked like. This building served as the center of government from 1658 until it burned down in 1711.)

We conclude this first series of episodes on New England with a look at the broader sweep of history from the 1630s to the 1670s, including the Restoration and King Philip's War, the deadliest war per capita in American history.

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Transcript and Sources:

Hello, and welcome to Early and Often: The History of Elections in America. Episode 13: In Adam's Fall, We Sinned All.

Today, we’re going to close out this series of episodes with a look at the broader sweep of New England’s history from the late 1630s to the 1670s, bookended by two wars against the Indians, the Pequot [PEE-quat] War and King Philip’s War, which was possibly the deadliest war in American history, at least in per capita terms.

But first, the Pequot War. The story begins in 1636, around the same time that the Antinomian controversy of Anne Hutchinson was breaking out. In the Connecticut Valley the Pequot tribe began to aggressively expand its territory outwards and violent encounters with the Puritans increased. One English trader was flayed and dismembered alive by the Pequot. Towns came under attack and residents were killed or taken captive.

After John Winthrop became governor of Massachusetts again and dealt with the Antinomians, the colony began to move against the Pequots. Plymouth and the Connecticut colonies joined in as well.

It didn’t take long for them to inflict a major defeat. In May 1637, Puritans attacked and set fire to a fortified Pequot town along the Mystic River, burning the inhabitants alive and shooting anyone who managed to escape the flames. According to one Puritan soldier at the massacre, “We were like Men in a Dream, then was our Mouth filled with Laughter, and our Tongues with Singing; thus we may say the Lord hath done great Things for us among the Heathen, whereof we are glad. Praise ye the Lord!” At least four hundred Indians were killed, which horrified the Puritan’s Native American allies, who were used to a style of warfare based around raids rather than massacres.

The Pequot fought on a little while longer, but the Mystic Massacre had been enough to break their spirits and they soon surrendered. Those who didn’t were hunted down and killed or captured. Within a few years Puritan supremacy in New England had been established.

The Pequot War is also responsible for the first confirmed instance of enslaved Africans in New England. The Indians had been enslaving each other since well before the Pilgrims arrived, but this was something new. The men and boys that had been captured by the Puritans during the war were considered by the colonists too dangerous to be left in Massachusetts. So they were instead enslaved and shipped down to the Caribbean in exchange for African slaves who were sent back to New England, which was an almost certain death sentence for the Indians, given the high mortality rates in the Caribbean. This sort of exchange became common practice for a time. Because Boston became a center for merchants and trade, many New Englanders became intimately involved in the slave trade and slaves were often carried across the Atlantic on New England ships.

Slavery was by no means condemned by the Puritans. In fact, they found specific Biblical sanction for the practice and the laws they passed authorizing and regulating slavery specifically cited “the law of God, established in Israel concerning such people”. There was even a supposed Biblical justification for racial slavery: the curse of Ham. If you’re familiar with the Bible, you may remember Ham as one of Noah’s sons. There’s a story about Ham which takes place after the waters of the Flood have receded and Noah and his family have left the ark and returned to dry land. At some point after this Ham sees his father Noah drunk and naked and tells his brothers about it. For this act, Noah curses Ham and some of his descendants. It’s a rather peculiar Biblical passage and that’s all there is to it. But later on, scholars sometimes interpreted this curse as blackening the skin. Africans were thus the “sons of Ham”, cursed by God to have dark skin and to serve the other races. There’s no real Biblical support for any of this, but it was a common enough idea a few centuries ago, although not universally accepted.

There was some unease with the practice here and there, but there was nothing like an abolitionist movement. In 1652 Rhode Island passed a law limiting enslavement to a period of 10 years rather than for life, but it wasn’t enforced.

Every colony in New England had at least some slaves. But although they were happy to profit from the slave trade, New England itself never became a full-on slave society in the way that the Southern colonies did. Without big plantations, it just made less economic sense. In the 1670s for instance there were fewer than 200 slaves in Massachusetts. However, those numbers did grow over time, thanks to the slave trade and also to the slave ownership of middle class men like lawyers, doctors, and ministers. Rhode Island slowly came to dominate the slave trade in New England and so the enslaved population was highest there, peaking at 11.5% of the population in the 1750s. However, that was atypically high. In Massachusetts the highest number was 2%. But for comparison, in South Carolina at the same time, two-thirds of the population was enslaved.

Because Massachusetts had less to fear from slave revolts, their slave laws were less harsh than those in the South, though they were hardly gentle. There were strict punishments for anyone transporting slaves out of the colony without permission. Even just buying from or selling to a slave could be harshly punished.

Free blacks were also discriminated against. In Connecticut any black who tried to hit a white would receive 30 lashes. Curfews were imposed on both blacks and Indians. In Connecticut there were special restrictions placed on blacks buying land and running businesses. Massachusetts in 1705 passed laws against sexual relations between blacks and whites, punishing both parties with whippings and shipping any slaves involved out of the province to a likely death in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

There are apparently no records of blacks voting in colonial New England, though it can’t be totally ruled out.

Beyond slavery, the end of the Pequot War wasn’t enough to eliminate threats to the Puritan colonies. There were other, powerful tribes like the Mohawk further out, not to mention the French up in Quebec and the Dutch down in New Netherland, all of whom could threaten New England. And so the colonies began to consider some sort of union. There aren’t too many details of how it was formed, but in 1643, they created the United Colonies of New England, also known as the New England Confederation. Rhode Island and Maine, which was still independent at this time, were both excluded, because their religion and culture were too dissimilar. So the New England Confederation wound up consisting of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven.

But the Confederation wasn’t a political union, it was just a close military alliance. The four colonies agreed to pool their resources in proportion to their population. A commission of two men from each province would oversee wars and peace treaties, that sort of thing. If six out of the eight commissioners couldn’t reach agreement, then the matter would be referred to the General Courts of each colony. No colony was allowed to start a war on its own.

In practice though the Confederation never really did much. There wouldn’t be another big war for decades, and so the machinery of the Confederation was allowed to rust. Massachusetts just ignored it when convenient, and that pretty much rendered the whole thing null. The colonies would remain allies, just in a more informal sense. Still, the relative unity is a stark contrast with the persistent discord between Virginia and Maryland. Two centuries later, John Quincy Adams called this alliance “the model and prototype of the North American Confederacy of 1774”, which is probably an exaggeration, but it is still a noteworthy start to formal cooperation between the colonies.

It was around the time of the creation of the New England Confederation that the English Civil War was breaking out. Whereas the Chesapeake was strongly Royalist, New England was, unsurprisingly, just as staunchly Parliamentarian. They watched with glee as Parliament gradually gained the upper hand. These victories also had the effect of stopping the flow of Puritans out of England. Why struggle in some foreign land when you can fight for the True Faith here at home? In fact not only did the Great Migration stop, it went in reverse. 20,000 migrants had come to New England in the 1630s, but in the 1640s thousands went back to the mother country, some to fight for Parliament, some because the war was harming the economy of Massachusetts. Few of the Puritans yet had much of an attachment to America, other than as a refuge from the iniquities of the Old World.

The creation of Cromwell’s republic didn’t change much in New England. The colonies went on governing themselves much as before. They could breathe easier knowing that an ally ruled in Britain, that’s all.

But the happy times of Cromwell’s Protectorate came to an end soon enough. The Restoration of Charles II shocked New Englanders the same way the beheading of Charles I had shocked the Southerners. But as it turns out they didn’t have that much to worry about. We’ve already seen how Connecticut and Rhode Island managed to secure recognition from the Crown. There was some interference in the way things were done, but only some.

In Massachusetts, according to Paul R. Lucas, the Restoration split politics into three factions. The first was a small group of Royalists. These were merchants and newcomers to the colony who disliked the way things were run and weren’t members of a Puritan church. They were few in number and they had no votes and little power. But the two main groups were, in his terms, the “commonwealth faction and [the] moderate faction”, of about equal size. The commonwealth faction wanted as much independence from England as possible, arguing that the charter of Massachusetts had made them more or less fully autonomous. The king owned the colony, but that was the extent of their allegiance. The moderate faction on the other hand wished to balance the independence of Massachusetts with respect for the Crown. They worried that the commonwealth faction’s more extreme language would actually lead to a harsher crackdown from England. Apparently there were no particular social distinctions between the two groups in terms of wealth or things like that, just ideological differences.

Right after the Restoration the Delegates to the General Court were mostly commonwealth men, as was Governor John Endecott, while the Magistrates were mostly moderates. The two sides tussled over the proper response, but the moderates came out somewhat on top and the mission they sent to Charles II was conciliatory. They mollified the King somewhat, but he still sent a series of demands back to Boston.

Rumors flew throughout the colony that the King might take over their militias or install a royal governor. The actual demands were less extreme than that. For one thing, he wanted Massachusetts to allow proper Anglican worship to those who wanted it. Most importantly, he wanted changes to the voting laws, so that non-Puritans could vote.

But this still reopened the commonwealth-moderate divide. The moderates tried to stop all the rumors of royal takeover by having the King’s demands read in public, but the commonwealth faction blocked this, in order to keep people agitated. The moderates hoped to compromise with the Crown’s instructions, but the commonwealth faction rejected any actions which acknowledged that the King had any power over them beyond what was stated in their charter.

The debate between the two sides was ultimately about sovereignty, an issue which will only become more important throughout the rest of colonial American history. The Puritans were intensely concerned with who was actually in charge, even if the specific issues at hand were relatively minor. The settlers could live with tweaks to their voting system, but acknowledging the King’s authority to do as he pleased might invite worse changes in the future. That’s what the real debate was about.

Anyway, some time passed without any action being taken and in 1664 a few supporters of the commonwealth faction were elected to the Magistracy, giving them full control of government.

The Crown then took more forceful action. Charles sent a force of several hundred troops to Boston, partly to help in the conquest of Dutch New Netherland, but also as a threat to the colonists of Massachusetts. This was enough to cow even the commonwealth faction into submission. They certainly knew they couldn’t win any war against the King. So the General Court complied with the King’s demands. Sort of. Now, non-Puritans could get a certificate from their local minister confirming that they were properly religious and morally upright, and thus be admitted as freemen. But in practice, very few men got those certificates and so the real impact was limited.

But then they made a bunch of symbolic gestures aimed against the King, threatening the death penalty for anyone supporting “the alteracon and subversion of our forme of Polity or government”, for instance. But this went too far.

The commonwealth faction was in the ascendant, but not for long. Although the people of Massachusetts were fearful of royal intervention, they were also fearful of provoking said royal intervention. The arrival of a very threatening letter from the King, which threatened to reconsider their charter, turned things around. In the election of 1665 the moderates became a majority of Delegates. Normal turnover in the General Court was about a third each election, but this time the turnover was over half, indicating a significant change.

The moderates tried to come up with some compromise position that was properly submissive to Charles while maintaining their sovereignty. They had a hard time of it. Commissioners of the King protested that the laws were still unfair and biased against non-Puritans. They demanded that further changes be made. It appeared that the colony was about to get squeezed, but other wars drew the King’s attention elsewhere and the demands were eventually dropped with no further action taken. So things in Massachusetts were mostly left as they were.

With the issue resolved, both the moderate and commonwealth factions dissolved, since there weren’t any other concerns to hold them together. Neither group was a formal political party. There would have been cliques and friendships and temporary political alliances, but none of it was institutionalized yet, here or anywhere else. Factions just came and went.

The English authorities also made similar demands on the other New England colonies, who also begrudgingly only sort-of complied. In particular, the King wanted them to move towards having property restrictions for voting, rather than religious ones. Things were slowly shifting in that direction, but it would take a few more decades for the change to play out.

By the way, as property qualifications became more common, so did fraud to bypass those qualifications. For instance, one common trick was to temporarily buy some land in order to meet the requirement and then give it back as soon as the election was over. The colonies had various statutes to prevent this. In Rhode Island you had to swear an oath that you hadn’t bought land just so you could vote. In Massachusetts the value of your estate had to be signed off on by the selectmen of your town. Which shows at least that elections had become important enough to be worth cheating for.

But, overall, the Restoration hadn’t changed the voting system all that much.

So that brings us to the 1670s and King Philip’s War.

In the five decades since the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth, the lives of the Puritans and the Native Americans had become thoroughly intertwined. Peace had generally prevailed, at least after the Pequot War. Trade between the two groups was brisk and the Indians quickly became adept at hunting with English rifles. Puritans hired Indians to work as farmhands. The Bible was translated into the local Massachusset language and printed. A few thousand Native Americans lived in towns set up by missionaries, but most were still unconverted. Harvard had set up a college to teach the Indians, though few attended. They were still two very separate peoples -- there was no real intermarriage, for instance -- but their cohabitation had gone better than in the Chesapeake. Or at any rate tensions were manageable.

And yet there were problems. For instance, wampum. Wampum was a currency made from shells which were turned into carefully crafted beads. The Indians in the region had long used wampum and after their arrival the Puritans started using it as money themselves. Previously, the supply of wampum had been naturally limited by the difficulty of making it, but the introduction of iron tools made it much easier to produce wampum in greater quantities, which lead to an increase in the supply and thus to inflation, causing economic woes.

And the English settlers kept buying up native land. Unlike further south, the Puritans actually often made sure to pay the Indians at least some amount of money for their land, but the end result was still the same: marginalization. Europeans now outnumbered Indians in the region by perhaps five to one, and the disparity was growing. Land kept getting sold off and the Indians kept getting forced into smaller areas. The problem was especially acute in Plymouth, the tiniest of the colonies and the one with the least room for expansion. Plus recent governors of Plymouth had been less sympathetic to the plight of the Indians than their predecessors, now that they had the upper hand. More than anywhere else, the natives there found themselves squeezed with nowhere to go.

Enter Metacomet, or King Philip as he was known to the English. Metacomet was the son of Massasoit. Massasoit was the guy who had made an alliance with the Pilgrims and come to dominate the tribes in the region as chief of the Wampanoags, all the way back in the 1620s. That alliance had dissolved, but Metacomet was still the sachem, or chief, of the main tribe of the Wampanoags, the Pokanokets.

Metacomet greatly resented the English presence in Plymouth and in New England. The Indians were still losing land at a prodigious rate. The Pilgrims humiliated him personally and repeatedly, weakening his position as leader. Plus his older brother had died in mysterious circumstances and Metacomet blamed the English for his death. In the early 1670s he began to consider taking action. He felt out other tribes for alliances and sold off more land, using the proceeds to buy weapons. He probably still hoped to avoid a conflict, but he was preparing for one.

In the event, war was kicked off by the death of an Indian interpreter named John Sassamon who had adopted Christianity and was friendly to the English. He had even gone to Harvard. In 1675 Sassamon tried to warn Josiah Winslow, the governor of Plymouth, that Metacomet was planning an attack, but his accusations were dismissed. A few days later Sassamon’s body was found under the ice of a frozen pond. No one was sure what had happened, but a single dubious witness accused three Indians, including one of Metacomet’s main advisors, of murder. They were found guilty by a jury of both Pilgrims and Indians and executed.

This offense prompted Metacomet to begin his long-considered attack. He launched a series of raids on Puritan towns, killing, burning, and taking captives. Many different tribes joined in the fighting, though not under Metacomet’s central leadership. In response to these attacks, the Puritans revived the New England Confederation. Rhode Island remained officially neutral although it came under attack a few times. The Puritans also had the support of a good number of Indian tribes as well, including the Pequots this time. Very quickly, all of New England was at war.

Even one of the old refugee Parliamentarians got in on the fighting. You remember them, they were the three men who had fled to Massachusetts and then to New Haven to escape the King’s wrath. Well according to David Hackett Fischer one of those men, William Goffe, was back in Massachusetts, living in hiding in the town of Hadley, his presence kept a secret even from most of the townsmen. During the war, Hadley came under attack from a band of Indians. Goffe, seeing their approach, raced out to the meetinghouse where the townsmen were assembled, crying out, “I will lead. Follow me!” They did. Goffe, who was now in his late 60s, took charge of an old cannon, firing it at the Native Americans and sending them fleeing. Then, as quickly as he had appeared, he vanished back into hiding, leaving the befuddled townsmen to wonder what sort of divine intervention had just saved them.

Unfortunately, the rest of the war was less whimsical than that particular anecdote. Atrocities were committed on both sides. The Indians flayed people and cut captives apart piece by piece. Over the course of the war twelve Puritan towns were completely destroyed and a full third of them had to be abandoned. When the town of Sudbury was hit by a surprise attack, almost 30 militiamen were killed. And the Puritans slaughtered Indians in great numbers. One such incident resembled the Mystic Massacre during the Pequot War. After an Indian fort was overrun, the survivors fled into a nearby swamp where the New Englanders hunted them down. Again, hundreds of people, most of them non-combatants, were killed in what became known as the Great Swamp Fight.

The fighting went back and forth, but the English eventually got the upper hand. Within a year or so the Indians were pushed to the point of starvation and Metacomet’s forces slowly dwindled. In late 1676 some soldiers from Plymouth led a group of native warriors to hunt down King Philip. After several close escapes, Metacomet was finally killed in August, just two months before the death of Nathaniel Bacon. His body was dismembered and his severed head was placed atop a watchtower in Plymouth, where it became a tourist attraction for decades. His wife and young son were sold into slavery and never heard from again. This mostly ended the war, although fighting continued for a few more years up in Maine.

Along with Metacomet’s family, over a thousand Indians, men, women, and children, were enslaved and shipped off to the Caribbean, a policy of purposeful ethnic cleansing.

The war had been a disaster for both sides. Plymouth lost 8% of its residents, the most of any of the colonies. But the Indian population plummeted even further. Between death, enslavement, and refugees fleeing the region, the native population in New England had been reduced by over half, in just a few years. According to Nathaniel Philbrick, “There were approximately seventy thousand people in New England at the outbreak of hostilities. By the end of the war, somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand were dead, with more than three-quarters of those losses suffered by the Native Americans. In terms of percentage of population killed, King Philip’s War was more than twice as bloody as the American Civil War and at least seven times more lethal than the American Revolution.” And remember, disease had reduced the population by an even greater amount only a few decades ago.

The war also marked the end of New England’s unique relationship with the Indians. Whereas before the two peoples had been somewhat intermingled, afterwards the policy of the colonists was more like that of the English elsewhere in America: containing the Indians to small patches of land while the frontier moved ever-westward. Harvard’s Indian College was torn down and even those tribes who had allied with the Puritans were in a worse position than before. Most of all, the demographic dominance of the Europeans was now total.

But that didn’t mean that the New Englanders were more in control of their destiny. Far from it. There would still be major Indian wars throughout the next century, often launched with the backing of the French who had settled in Quebec a few hundred miles to the north. But more important was the loss of their autonomy from England. You’ll recall that the English authorities took the opportunity of Bacon’s Rebellion to assert greater control over Virginia. Well, something similar was happening up north. In 1679 New Hampshire, which had been independent until its annexation by Massachusetts, was made independent again, as a royal colony controlled directly by the King. In the next decade there was an attempt to abolish the colonies’ independence altogether, but we won’t be getting to that for a while. Just know that the monarchy was tightening its grip up and down the coast.

King Philip’s War also increased the power of the provinces relative to the power of the towns. It was now clear that the defense of the colonies required greater centralization. While New England towns remain pretty independent even to this day, in a sense they had already passed their high water mark as separate centers of power.

The Puritan way of life was already waning. The zeal was hardly gone, but it was weakened. Time, dissent, and the absence of real religious opponents had all taken their toll. Children were naturally less fervent than their parents. New arrivals came for economic rather than religious reasons. The power of the church lessened as the power of the secular state grew. The Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s would be a further shock. The old guard tried to hold the line, attributing the various calamities afflicting New England to this religious backsliding, but ultimately to no avail. The Puritans had built a new culture yes, but it wouldn’t stay a Puritan culture. Instead, New Englanders became Yankees. But that’s for later episodes.

In England itself the Restoration proved to be a permanent defeat for the Puritans there. They were a spent force. But they weren’t gone for good. The Puritan impulse was channelled into other Nonconformist religious groups like the Methodists, which would themselves have an impact on religious history. But that is definitely outside the scope of this podcast.

I’d like to close this episode by summarizing the New England model of government as it existed from 1630 to the 1680s, when there were substantial changes.

For comparison and just as a reminder, the Chesapeake model of government was as follows: There was a governor who was appointed back in England, in Virginia by the King and in Maryland by the Lord Proprietor. The governor then appointed men to serve in the upper legislative house. The lower house was elected at first by the freemen and later by just the freeholders of the colony. The lower house’s approval was required for all taxation and legislation. Local government was entirely in the hands of appointed officials, who generally had to be informally approved by the notable men in their district. The delegates to the lower house were the only elected officials in the colony, and those elections weren’t strongly contested. So on the whole popular participation was only a moderately important part of government in the Chesapeake.

The New England model, which was mostly based on how Massachusetts did things, was substantially more representative. Deputies, magistrates, governors, and deputy governors were all elected. Sometimes, a few additional positions such as treasurer and admiral at sea were elected as well. Only Massachusetts had a fully bicameral legislature during this period, thanks to that runaway pig. Perhaps in the other, smaller colonies, there was just less of a difference between the deputies and the magistrates. But, however they were divided up, a similar model where the governor was above the magistrates who were above the deputies prevailed.

Local government, which was in the hands of towns rather than counties, was totally controlled by the popular will. The freemen of each town would meet and could pretty much do as they wished, within reason. In practice, power was delegated to elected officials such as the selectmen, but they served at the pleasure of the town.

There were temporary factions rather than political parties. And elections weren’t usually closely fought, but in times of discontent people could lose their offices.

Voting was often done by ballot rather than by show of hands or by voice, which was at least somewhat more secretive. There were often religious restrictions on voting, whether de facto, as in Connecticut, or de jure, as in Massachusetts. Church membership and religious propriety were both intimately tied up with political rights. I haven’t mentioned it before, but it was possible to lose your status as a freeman, and hence the right to vote, for criminal or unseemly behavior. For instance in Connecticut you could even lose the right to vote for “scandalous walking”. Still, in such a religious society many citizens did qualify as freemen and overall participation remained high, especially at the local level.

So that’s where things stood by the end of the 1670s. New England had created its own culture, one that would persist. Although the migration had stopped, the population kept growing. For one thing, the mortality rate was quite low, thanks to the climate. Plus the birth rate was one of the highest ever recorded in human history, in some towns over 9 children per married woman. And that’s average remember, so half the women would have had even more. Those 20,000 migrants grew into a population of nearly a hundred thousand by the end of the century, larger than in the Chesapeake. (That’s compared to over 5 million in England.) The American colonies were finally beginning to matter in their own right. And lucky for them, because they’ll be facing their fair share of challenges over the next century.

Phew! Well, that’s 6 out of the original 13 colonies down. We’re almost halfway there! Next episode, we’ll jump back down south for the creation of the unruly colony of North Carolina in the 1660s and ‘70s. So join me next time for “Culpeper’s Rebellion”, here on Early and Often: The History of Elections in America.

If you like the podcast, please rate it on iTunes. You can also keep track of Early and Often on Twitter, at earlyoftenpod, or read transcripts of every episode at the blog, at earlyandoftenpodcast.wordpress.com. Thanks for listening.

Sources:

The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England; May 19, 1643

The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn

The Controversy over the Franchise in Puritan Massachusetts, 1954 to 1974 by B. Katherine Brown

Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America by Joseph A. Conforti

English Colonies in America Volume II: The Puritan Colonies by J.A. Doyle

King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676 by James D. Drake

Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer

Slavery in the North by Douglas Harper

Colony or Commonwealth:Massachusetts Bay, 1661-1666 by Paul R. Lucas

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town by Sumner Chilton Powell

Puritan Conscience and New England Slavery by Bernard Rosenthal

America's First Anti-Slavery Statute Was Passed in 1652. Here's Why It Was Ignored by Olivia B. Waxman

Slavery by Ted Widmer

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ramrodd · 5 years ago

Text

Republicans like me built this moment. Then we looked the other way.

Republicans have long been anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-education. Now the bill comes due.

COMMENTARY:

Here's the thing, Stuart: Wiliam F. Buckley, Jr., is the source of the problem. He made Fascism charming and white supremacy ideologically attractive. Everything you say about movement conservatives is both true and understated, and, since 1981, it has been Joe McCarthy Conservatives like you and Roger Stone and Newt Gingrich and Steve Bannon who have been committed to creating exactly the state of incapacity on display with America's Hovid-19 response.

Gore Vidal got it exactly correct: William F. Buckley, Jr., was a crypto-Nazi with serious homoerotic sensibilities which were probably nurtured as opposed to incubated by Yale's Skull-and-Bones. His mode of debate originates from the ad hominem perspective of his effete elitism and is the prototype for all the clever crypto-Nazi fast talking career activists, such as Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and white supremacists like George Gilder and Antonin Scalia, who aren't so interested in ferreting out the "Truth" as in demonstrating how clever they are and why you shouldn't be allowed to reproduce.

That's why Donald John Trump* is so popular with his MAGA hat white bigots: there are few things more fun than going to a football stadius and chanting "nigger, nigger, nigger" for four hours.

In 1971, there were two agendas in the GOP: Nixon's critical path that was on course with Affirmative Action for the transformation of the Military Industrial Complex to the Aerospace-Entrepreneurial Matrix necessary to create the infrastructure necessary to support a moon colony over a 100 year capital trajectory, beginning with a NASA-Soyuz lab by 2001, like the movie; and

A deviant path defined by Public Choice economics that has been implemented by Joe McCarthy Conservative activists like you committed to blowing up Affirmattive Action.

As I write this, Norah O'Donnell just reported that America has the most reported Hovid-19 cases in the world. Everytime you encounter a statistic like this in regards to the incapacity of the federal government to respond to any similar challenge, pause for a moment and consider the figure of William F. Buckley, posed in the conceit of the Romantic Hero (like John Galt), standing on the wave of the future shouting "STOP!"

Here's the thing: Nixon-Moynihan's Affirmative Action was a precursor to the Green New Deal and Paul Krugman's dynamical modeling in "Selling Prosperty" reflects the process theology of the Nixon-Moynihan legislative package that was designed to catch the global synergies wave from the public investment in Apollo 11. If either Carter or GHW Bush had been re-elected, the chances are we would have put humans on Mars by now. Silicon Valley is just one legacy of the Apollo 11 global synergies wave.

The opportunity costs of all things William F. Buckley are the 19 years delay on establishing a permanent moon colony in 2001.

Speaking as an Eisenhower Romney Republican, if I was to identify a domestic conspiracy committed to Vladimir Putin's alleged agenda to destablize America, I'd start with William F. Buckley's farm system for recruiting, training and nurture crypto-Nazi career activists, the Young American's for Freedom.

Back in the day, when I was an ROTC cadet and Firing Line came on after the libraries closed, I used to watch Buckley perform his patented Fascist sophistry. I didn't hear the Buckley-Gore cat fights during the Chicago Police Riots nor Gore's perfect "crypto-Nazi" characterization until the 80's or 90s, but, back in the day, that would have fit my own evaluation, perfectly.

The core technology of Nixon-Moynihan "Affirmative Action" is Democratic Socialism, which, of course, is the core technology of the US Constitution.

The core technology of Public Choice is John Locke's Tory Capitalism which originated with the Magna Carta: life, liberty and property.

Thomas Jefferson posited the moral basis of Democratic Socialism as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" that is the economic engine of American-British constitutional capitalism.

Mitt Romney is the only competent business executive in the Republican Congressional Caucus. Moscow Mitch, like Donald John Trump*, is a useful idiot for Putin's agenda and the same sort of Libertarian hypocrite as Rand Paul.

Speaking as an Eisenhower-Romney Republican, Mitt Romney is the last of the adult leadership from the Nixon-Moynihan "Affirmative Action" agenda who saved the 2002 Winter Olympics and created the template for Obamacare. As the only Congressional Repbulican to vote to convict, he is the only reliable patriot opposed to Putin's disinformation and destablization agenda. Repent of your Joe McCarthy Conservative brain washing and rally behind him.

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therealjambery · 8 years ago

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White women: we can do better

I'm seeing a lot of positivity from this weekend, but also a lot of ways we can do better. And by we, I mean white women. Many women of color and women who identify as lgbtq ended this weekend without the warm fuzzies and pats on the back that we had. They did not feel welcomed. They did not feel heard. And they did not feel empowered. As they unpack and post about their experiences, I'm seeing, overwhelmingly, four different kinds of responses from white women. I find all of these responses problematic. Fun game - which of them have been used on you by Trump supporters? How did that make you feel? Let's talk about this. It's up to us, white women, to educate ourselves and do better. 1. Oh no! That's terrible! But you know most of us aren't like that, right? Ever heard the phrase 'not all men' when trying to talk to someone about sexual assault, domestic violence, or just the day to day oppressive experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society? Congratulations! You just did the same thing to someone else! You just minimized and silenced someone while she was trying to talk about her personal experience with oppression. You know how that makes her feel? Like you are more concerned about your fragile white feelings than hearing her legitimate criticism. What would be a better response? Read this thread. https://twitter.com/sydnerain/status/823380546973814784 Then read this one. https://twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/823405652395573248 2. I'm sorry about slavery/stealing native land/ choose your oppression, but I had nothing to do with that. Okay. Again, you are minimizing and silencing someone. You are making it about you instead of listening with empathy. This is uncomfortable. This is supposed to be uncomfortable. There is nothing you can do about it except hear it, accept it, and do better. Acknowledge that because of the history of white supremacy and colonialism, people of color have no reason to trust you, believe you, or show concern about your feelings. Give them the respect they deserve as human beings and let the conversation be about their experiences instead of assuaging your feelings. Don't sweep history under the rug. It happened, and it's still affecting people today. 3. I'm feeling defensive and I think we all just need to put aside our differences and start working together. Ever had someone say 'give him a chance' to you? Remember how frustrating that was? Now look at what you just said. Don't say that. Women of color and women who identify as lgbtq have been organizing, agitating, and suffering for it for a lot longer than you have. No, votes for women doesn't count. Go look up how long it took for white women to accept women of color in the movement. Oh wait, they didn't. Native people didn't get the right to vote in their own country that we stole from them until 1948. (Check out more voting and citizenship history here http://massvote.org/voterinfo/history-of-voting-rights/) Yes, we need to work together. That means you might need to be quiet and listen while others take the lead. Working together, for some people, might mean working separately, using different tactics, toward the same goal. Often, what I read between the lines when people say they want a middle ground with everyone respecting one another is that they are feeling uncomfortable with what the other person is saying, and they don't really want to hear it. Don't silence people. Respect goes both ways and it's your problem if you feel uncomfortable and defensive, not theirs. Sit down with yourself and really examine why you're feeling that way before you ask people to 'stop being divisive'. 4. Please educate me. (This includes asking Native people for info on their tribe, others to explain their culture to you, for book or article recommendations, or simply 'what can I do?' in a well meaning but misguided attempt to seem caring and/or interested. Basically you just asked someone to Google, go to the library, and then summarize for you.) No. Educate yourself. Do not ask some stranger on the internet to do your work for you. Some of you might have friends who are open to the idea and willing to help you. That's fine. But also understand that this is work you are asking them to do. Work that is hard, and work that you need to be proactive about yourself. *** I understand this is difficult. I have definitely had all of these knee jerk responses before. Remember that no one is perfect. We're all in the middle of our process, and we all can be better. Approach the work with empathy - for yourself as well as others. Let's be allies. Let's show up for each other. Let's make our feminism truly intersectional. Thanks.

#politics #kate has a lot to say #i guess #intersectional feminism #racism #social justice #activism

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Activists Splatter Red Paint on Roosevelt Monument at American Museum of Natural History

The defaced Teddy Roosevelt statue outside the American Museum of Natural History (all photos courtesy Monument Removal Brigade)

A group calling itself the Monument Removal Brigade (MRB) has claimed responsibility for today’s early morning defacement of the controversial Theodore Roosevelt monument that stands outside the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The base of the 10-foot-tall equestrian statue was splashed with red paint around 5:30am, creating a grisly scene at the bottom of the museum’s steps. MRB, whose members remain anonymous, described the action to Hyperallergic as a “counter-monumental gesture that does symbolic damage to the values [the statue] represents: genocide, dispossession, displacement, enslavement, and state terror.” It marks the latest in a string of rogue acts around the country to eradicate controversial statues and monuments, which spiked in number after white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to stop the removal of a Robert E. Lee monument.

The defaced base of the Teddy Roosevelt statue outside the American Museum of Natural History

“Now the statue is bleeding,” the group of anonymous protestors wrote in a statement sent to Hyperallergic. “We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation. This is not an act of vandalism. It is a work of public art and an act of applied art criticism. We have no intent to damage a mere statue.

“The true damage lies with patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism embodied by the statue,” the statement continues. “It is these forms of oppression that must be damaged again and again … until they are damaged out of existence.”

Tom Finkelpearl, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs — under whose jurisdiction the monument falls — disagrees with the group’s tactics. In a statement sent to Hyperallergic, he said: “There’s no place for vandalism in this conversation.”

MRB goes on to highlight Roosevelt, the white supremacist and imperialist — as opposed to Roosevelt as defined by inscriptions on his statue’s base and along the terrace’s parapet wall: explorer, scientist, conservationist, naturalist, ranchman, scholar, statesman, author, historian, humanitarian, soldier, patriot. MRB specifically calls out his role in the Spanish-American War, which led to the US’s annexation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines as well as his staunch endorsement of eugenics.

The scene outside the American Museum of Natural History this morning

“The monument not only embodies the violent historical foundation of the United States, but also the underlying dynamics of oppression in our contemporary world,” MRB writes. The action is intended as a salute to other movements “struggling against the values epitomized by Roosevelt: past, present, and future,” from those against gentrification in the Bronx to the uprisings in Ferguson to crusades against nationwide immigration raids. As many people have noted, the violent power relations of the present day are entrenched in the physical form of James Earle Fraser’s 1939 statue: the former president rides ahead of stereotypical portrayals of a Native American and an African American man who follow subserviently on foot.

This morning’s action was executed in solidarity with the Second Annual Anti-Columbus Tour, which occurred on October 9. As Hyperallergic’s Elena Goukassian reported, over 500 protestors showed up that day to demand that the museum remove the Roosevelt statue as well as overhaul its colonialist displays of indigenous histories and artifacts. The tour (which you can revisit or do yourself thanks to an online brochure) was organized by Decolonize this Place, from which MRB distinguishes itself. MRB notes that the two groups’ tactics “must be different.” In its statement, it also pays tribute to the six indigenous activists who marked the Roosevelt statue in 1971 with red paint to protest its presence.

Decolonize This Place expressed its support of MRB’s action in a statement sent to Hyperallergic. “It’s no surprise that a statue like this — arguably the most hated monument in the city — would provoke strong public sentiment and that creative actions like this one would be the result,” the group wrote. “At a time when the mayor’s commission is reviewing all monument of hate, and when the city is spending taxpayer money to protect symbols of white supremacy, this appears to be a very useful expression of protest.”

Detail of the defaced base of the Teddy Roosevelt statue outside the American Museum of Natural History

Announced in September, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Commisson City Art, Monuments, and Markers launched its city-wide survey yesterday, calling for public feedback about potentially hateful monuments. While the commission has not yet announced any specific landmarks it will review, a spokesperson for AMNH previously told Hyperallergic that the museum expects the Roosevelt statue to be considered.

In its statement, MRB argues that separating the statue and the museum is merely a “technicality. The museum itself is an expanded monument to Roosevelt’s world-view, and the statue is what visitors first see upon approaching the institution.” It also dismisses De Blasio’s advisory commission as another process burdened by bureaucracy that will ultimate have “no binding authority,” despite its good intentions.

“We take matters into our own hands now to kickstart the removal process,” it writes. “While the Mayor’s Commission trudges forward, the Monument Removal Brigade hereby announces itself. Our membership is already legion, from Charlottesville to Durham to New York and beyond.”

The post Activists Splatter Red Paint on Roosevelt Monument at American Museum of Natural History appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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her-culture · 7 years ago

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The Colorism Problem in Bollywood

Amongst the bejeweled silks and the impressive dance numbers scattered pleasantly throughout Bollywood movies, one of the simplest things that is missing is also one of the most noticeable: the implementation of deeper complexioned brown women. Colonialism, although dated back to thousands of years ago, has effects that continue to reign in South Asian communities to this very day. The idea that fairer skin is superior in terms of beauty is a concept that lives vigorously throughout South Asian minds and media, with a constant need to confine to the terms of Eurocentric beauty standards in order to feel a sense of societal and self acceptance. Although it started off with South Asian cultures brainwashed into seeing white as superior in all aspects, these narrow-minded ideals have found a home in South Asian media, where they continue to dwell and grow.

These movies are wildly popular in South Asia, because they are a reflection of the emotional complexities and intriguing events that make up a dramatized version of people’s lives and are bound together by the riveting beauty of South Asian cultures. Through their ability to effectively reach into the hearts and minds of viewers everywhere, they are able to use this influence to push a whitewashed agenda into cinematic successes.

Women in Bollywood are usually the ones to comply to these standards. How many times have you seen a high budget, successful Bollywood movie cast a dark skinned female lead, or one where she is darker than her male counterpart? To be light skinned is symbolic of feminine beauty: fair complexioned, small nosed, and bonus points for brown hair and eyes that are any color other than brown. Sound familiar? You’ve most likely seen these features on many successful Bollywood actresses. It is a four-step process to a higher success rate as a woman in this industry. Many of the actresses starring in newer films as love interests work alongside men darker than them, and older than them. While a man can hold onto his Bollywood career even through his fifties and a darker skin tone, a woman must prepare to find ways to stay in the game, lest she become an admired memory of a once successful star. This is not to deny the struggles that men face through societal pressures, but rather to draw attention to the double standards faced for decades by women in the industry. Double standards that have the power to end a woman’s career, or not allow it to begin in first place. For a woman in this industry, much of her success relies on her ability to be physically charming, especially in terms of confining to Eurocentric standards. Unless she exudes an ageless and Eurocentric facade which is encompassing all that it is to be a master of femininity and beauty, her cinematic success will have to take a seat in the back.

Seeing fair as the only synonym to beautiful is not the only problem. It pushes an anti-black sentiment. There is a reason that throughout many Asian cultures in general, darker skin is ignored while light skin is put on a pedestal and showered with love. Anti-blackness is etched deep into South Asian cultures. Although many South Asians are the same shade or merely a few shades lighter or darker than someone who is black, they will scrub that fact off their skins and delve into a world of film where they can be reminded that they can always lighten themselves until they are as close to beautiful as they can get, where they can resemble a white person as much as possible. While even many extras are typically light to medium skinned or white women, black people are hardly ever incorporated into these films. Black beauty is continuously ignored. Big noses, dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair. They are all painted into lighter shades in relentless efforts to resemble European features, for they are the epitome of beauty.

Bollywood actors have also been used to promote items that give into this message, through advertising for products such as Fair and Lovely. This is a popular skin lightening cream and by associating this product with Bollywood stars, it sends out the message that Bollywood does support the idea of fair skin being “lovely.” It further popularizes these products, which aim to spread this problematic message, creating a system of perpetual, unrealistic, whitewashed ideals and images of beauty, especially towards women. It’s an example of how various aspects of the entertainment industry are interconnected and work together to produce creative ways of spreading the same message of fair skin over dark skin.

The implication that white is the most attractive exhibits white supremacy, where white is seen as the most superior. It creates a system of white supremacy in which white skin is valued above all the rest, invalidating the beauty and even humanity of those who are darker skinned through constantly ignoring their existence or misrepresenting them. Through colonization and slavery, white people were able to hold their status of superiority and power over people of color. The blatant unwillingness to have dark skin is a manifestation of the internalized racism carried within South Asian cultures, stemming from a past brimming with white supremacy.

Through its immense influential power, Bollywood’s willingness to continue to support these ideals creates a society that basks in its ability to detach itself from its racial heritage and ignore the various shades of beauty that are a part of their identity. Self-hatred due to colorism has become a prominent issue, as industries with influential power go to no end to push this idea on to young girls until self-hatred becomes the norm. Insecurity continues to build up within them with each word spoken against their ethnic features; a product of their racial identity. The shade of their skin is a part of their identity, and something that they are born with that they should not aim to change. It is not healthy to be constantly told by influential figures that you are not good enough the way you are. This results in a society of young girls who are propelled towards self-hatred. Even with bleached skin and smiles plastered across their faces, the true yearning to be loved as they are will always remain.

For too long, Bollywood and other forms of South Asian media have chosen to forgo the appreciation of brown skin, rather erasing these people from their exclusive world and disassociating themselves with their racial identity. It is important to incorporate diversity of skin tones to show more representation and avoid an abundance of regional cultures that practice self-condemnation, especially amongst women. It shows the power that lies in various forms of beauty, and the strength of diversity. To be able to admire all women for the people they are and all the forms of beauty they can bring is to create an uplifting society. It will bring forth the power of diversity. It is to defeat a hateful past that forced South Asians to instill centuries of self-loathing and inferiority into their minds. Through more representation, we can pull out the weeds that are white supremacy. It will be a message that, even with our color, we are still beautiful. We are still human. We will not stop seizing our identities and loving ourselves shamelessly. We will liberate the definition of beauty in our cultures.

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