#watching everything become increasingly fascist and like not being able to do much about it bc you live in a very red state

[vertebrates-and-pieces]

✨Fun things to do with your f/o(s)!!!!✨

🌟OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT🌟

🌟OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT🌟

🌟OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT🌟

[canmom]

pls make a post abt how textual trans girl zuko is, it's everything to me but i haven had the strength to write it out for years 🙇‍♀️

lol i deleted that post bc i didn't want to get in a fight with the friend who reblogged that post about transmasc zuko but sure, ok

it's not super complicated really. like i don't think when it comes to 'trans headcanon' there is like, a 'reality' out there, zuko isn't a real person who can be definitely 'trans' or not, he's a symbol who we fill with our own ideas of personhood when we encounter the story. rather it's whether a reading is resonant or not, which is going to depend on the reader and what they can project on a character. I expect my reading will be more sympathetic with trans girls ;p

all the same... zuko is portrayed as being raised in a fascist society (seemingly most modelled on Imperial Japan, as interpreted by a couple of American liberals writing for a kids' TV network) which values military bravado and individual displays of skill, and exercises corporal punishment for 'dishonourable' behaviour; all of these are part of the construction of masculinity in our world. and we watch Zuko try very hard to live up to the values of this society (despite being, well, very bad at it, to the point he increasingly becomes an ineffectual joke villain), since he has been cut off from all kinds of affection outside of Iroh since his mother was exiled. Zuko is pressured to believe that this will earn the love denied by his evil father who very publicly and sadistically scarred his face. this is all pretty straightforwardly textual.

now these values aren't necessarily portrayed as intrinsically masculine in what we can 'learn' about the fictional Fire Nation, at least insofar as Azula is able to embody them. but it's not out of the question for fascist and nationalistic societies to provisionally accept cafab gender nonconformity in a limited number of cases, as examples like Violette Morris indicate; if we look further back we get things like the medieval 'one sex' model and occasionally beliefs that like, sexual anatomy would somehow follow behaviour. so we could say Azula is probably an exceptional case - the footloose-pastiche and beach episodes illustrate that the Fire Nation definitely has some pretty conventional gendering going on, and the vast majority of authority figures in the Fire Nation are men. iirc they establish that descent is not rigidly patrilineal but the Fire Lord can name an heir; that said all the Fire Lords we see have been men.

so. it's not automatically that Zuko's arc of struggling to reject the values of the imperialist Fire Nation must be read as a struggle with gender given the text; however it is obviously quite resonant insofar as like, the common egg experience of like, trying desperately to live up to the hell of death cult masculinity before eventually it breaks you and you have to figure out another way to be. zuko's 'crime' in his father's eyes, the thing that dishonours him, is not merely speaking out of turn but doing so to advocate for something other than "maximum death all the time"; essentially, acting too effeminate! Fire Lord Ozai has to very publicly burn his 'son' because otherwise the generals would be like, wow boss, your son is such a fag, must be something up with the royal line.

(meanwhile Azula succeeds on the terms of the 'male' power structure, she's a prodigy girlboss etc.; but perhaps part of her issue is that she knows her power is fraught, she's aware of the abyss if she ever steps out of line especially after seeing what happened to Zuko (with her willing assistance). we could easily imagine the suspicion that would exist if military authority is considered men's domain; that's why she works so hard to terrify everybody around her. she's also desperate for recognition; as much as it's not fully convincing, her breakdown in the final episode comes when she's named Fire Lord only for her dad to put himself on a new higher rank of 'Phoenix King', leaving her out of the big showy genocide he's about to perform, and she realises she's just a tool to him rather than someone he truly sees as a successor.)

now let's go to the first season, when zuko is chasing the gaang all around the map and failing to catch them constantly, and dressing up at night to do things that his society wouldn't sanction (ok it's a ninja outfit not like a dress or something but still, i'll take what i can get), while getting in fights with a big buff guy like Zhao for whom living up to the standard masculinity is assured and easy. the idea of trying to express femininity in some tentative way and having the door viciously slammed shut on your fingers and like, flinching back and going for tryhard masculinity in the wake of that traumatic experience is one that's gonna be viciously familiar for too many camab gender variant people.

later we see zuko's arc in the tea shop in Ba Sing Se - ok, it is on one level just like, learning to be a decent person and there's a somewhat unconvincing hetero romance subplot in there, but you can absolutely read zuko's struggle there in gender terms. like. it would be so easy to imagine him trying out a maid outfit during that arc, right? ...no? oh huh.

later still, you have his failed relationship with Mai while living in the Fire Nation in s3... Zuko's trying so hard to do a heterosexuality bless him, and he just has no idea. it's like, papering over the 'break' from society that has developed, so obviously doomed to failure.

but it's also kind of the case that i just see an angsty bishie-adjacent (tbf zuko is merely anime, not especially bishie) 'male' character and i'm like mmhmm, nice egg you got there. ultimately it doesn't really matter whether you read Zuko as trans woman or a gay femboy or just an angsty sorta guy; it's a narrative that simply resonates with like, stuff we experience around the crazy contradictory construction of gender we have to live under - it's material that's very easy to pick up and run with if you're in the mood.

so the impetus for the deleted post was like, if (in my reading) zuko's arc is so obviously about rejecting the values we associate with masculinity at great personal cost to define a narrative on 'his' own terms; sure, that's totally something the transmascs gotta struggle too with from their own particular zone and with its own difficulties, i can't speak to that, and ultimately these gender categories are totally incoherent and fake; but like, 'zuko is a trans guy' is not the obvious reading that suggests itself to me! and i think if Korra had the guts to just be like oh yeah and Zuko's a girl now that would be based as hell, but bryke would never be that cool in a million years, so it's just something you gotta insert yourself if you're in the mood.

[waynedunlaptheorgandonor]

watched s11ep1

i will provide you with a quick review before i disappear back into the ether of twd avoidance

lots of spoilers under the cut. also i wrote way too much and i worked all night and haven’t slept so i didn’t bother to reread literally any of it, so it might be completely nonsensical, tho if you don’t expect that from me by this point idk whose blog you’ve been reading

enjoy:

hokay, first off, i’ll start by saying that i enjoyed it more than i expected to. i’ve been avoiding any sort of discussion about stuff, but my google algorithm is so fucked at this point that i still get recommended articles and stuff every now and then, so i was already pretty aware of what i was walking into, and was expecting it to be eh, but actually i prob enjoyed it more than i enjoyed the finale

(don’t get too excited tho, the finale was rly boring lmfao)

anyway

episode starts off with a tense scouting mission

it takes .005 seconds into the episode for caryl to exchange a look of longing, establishing that they are still having weird conflict and are both too fucking stubborn to do anything about it even tho they hate it desperately

i imagine that will continue for a while

rosita, kelly, carol, maggie, what’s her face with the bad hair, and lydia (i think that’s everyone?) lower down to some army bunker or something, where a bunch of walkers are taking a snooze, and the girls are very respectful of walker naptime, and do their best not to wake them up

obviously they eventually wake up, but i’ll get to that in a sec

as they’re tiptoeing through the walker tulips, there’s this split second where carol spots a machine gun, and looks at maggie with a face like, “can i plzzzz, i am mad horny for that machine gun,” but maggie tells her no. (i 110% expected her to defy orders and accidentally wake up all the walkers, but she actually behaved herself for once. well. mostly)

never fear, tho, after the girl gang collects a bunch of MREs they go back to wait for the dudes waiting up top to pull them up, and bc men ruin everything, one of the ropes break, and daryl catches it before it falls, but then a slow motion drop of blood falls on a walker’s face, and just like that, walker naptime is over, and carol uses her bow and arrow for two seconds before she is like “fuck this” and whips out the machine gun

yes, she is super hot using it

yes, daryl watches her do it

anyway, all the other girls get rescued, and carol is about to be pulled up, but bc she is a #girlboss, she first makes a beeline for one more crate full of MREs. daryl covers her while she gets the loot, and when she gets back up top they have another charged moment as carol hands him back his knife

just fuck already, jfc

titles!

cut to alexandria where everything is still not smilestimes

BUT, we do get to see uncle daryl run and hug rj and judith (and dog), and FUCKING HERSHEL JR, LIGHT OF MY LIFE is also there

istg, they could not have casted a better child, i a d o r e him

oh, and some friends of maggie’s show up too, idk

cut to a staff meeting where everyone is like, whomp whomp, we’re all gonna starve to death unless we figure out something quick

cue maggie going, “oh, i know where food is, but it requires me to tell you my tragic backstory, in case anyone didn’t watch my bottle episode”

she tells her dramatic backstory about all her friends getting slaughtered by the reapers for no apparent reason, and then she’s like “anyway, let’s go back there!”

no one thinks it’s a great idea, but a group of people decide to go anyway, including daryl and gabriel. rosita is super pissed that gabriel is going, and carol doesn’t go, probably partly bc it’s a shitty fucking idea, and also bc they have to keep caryl apart bc otherwise they’ll fix their problems ahead of schedule and they won’t be able to drag out the needless angst

daryl looks kind of annoyed that carol doesn’t volunteer to go 

bitch, i thought you wanted her to stop putting herself in the line of fire! make up your damn mind!

moving on

cut to a thunderstorm, where, if you look closely, you’ll notice daryl is wearing the STUPIDEST hat i’ve ever seen. just get an umbrella, jfc

for some reason negan is with them, bc ig he knows his way around washington dc, and no one in six years has bothered to figure out how to get around the city and/or get a map, and he is like “hey guys, maybe we shouldn’t try to walk in this fucking hurricane,” and everyone is like “FUCK YOU NEGAN, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US!!!” 

this will be a common occurrence 

but eventually daryl is even like “actually, it’s rly unpleasant out here, and my hat is mad stupid, can we go inside plz?”

so they go inside an old metro station, which is actually a rly cool cinematic choice. i rly like the idea, and they executed it rly well

speaking of executions

there are some fucking RULL CREEPY walkers. idk why they bothered me so badly, but they were what they at first assumed were corpses wrapped up in tarps, but turns out none of them had been properly put down, so they go through killing these rotted bodies that had supposedly been there since The Fall, and it’s very gross and cool

this entire time, btw, negan is like “hey, i know i’m a shitty person, but i have some rational arguments about why we shouldn’t be doing this right now,” and everyone is like, “FUCK YOU NEGAN, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF US!!!” and he’s just like “god fucking damnit”

(i forgot to mention that at one point, when they’re headed into the metro station, negan is trying to warn ppl of the potential danger, and everyone is ignoring him, and he tries to talk to daryl, and daryl is like “fuck you, you think we’re BUDDIES?” and negan is like “oh, ok, so you’re gonna be like that too? fanfreakingtastic” and it’s very funny)

anyway. a fat monster zombie escapes its tarp at one point, and tries to eat some npc, and negan saves him, again is like “hey, anyone else realize that this is a FUCKING BAD PLAN?”, and everyone is like “we don’t care, you’re still shitty and we’re not listening to you, and you don’t actually care about random npc i would literally not be able to pick out in a lineup bc his face is so generic, you’re not the boss of us!!!”

it’s at this point that negan finally is like, “why am i even here? bc i know how to get around washington dc? do none of you have a map?” and i was like, “right?! that’s what i said!” 

it’s then revealed that maggie only brought negan along to murder him under the guise of “oops, he got hurt in the line of duty, it wasn’t my fault,” and daryl has this look on his face that says, “i seriously need to stop hanging out with lethal women bent on revenge bc it’s gonna give me high blood pressure,” and maggie has a badass moment where she points a gun she has for some reason at negan and is like “i have like, one shred of human compassion left inside of me, and if you keep pushing me i will fucking kill you without a second thought, so shut the hell up”

(in her defense, negan had just dropped glenn’s name to purposely antagonize her, which was rude as hell)

(for the record, i’m completely on maggie’s side here, but negan still is right that trapping themselves in a metro station is a bad call)

anyway, moving away from that briefly

i think this jump cut happens sooner, i don’t actually remember, but whatever who cares, point is, we get to the part of the show that actually matters, and that’s anything involving my love, juanita “princess” sanchez

and also eugene, yumiko, and ezekiel

they are being asked increasingly invasive questions by commonwealth ppl, some of which i wish they actually would of answered (what do they use to wipe their asses with?? surely toilet paper has long since become extinct)

zeke, who is so much more tolerable as a character now that he’s not larping as a king, has this incredibly weird and sort of sexually charged moment with a dude in an orange stormtrooper costume, where he’s like, “i bet you were an asshole cop back before The Fall, you stupid fascist, #fuckthepolice, mb literally? idk, this moment has a lot of pent up aggression that could easily translate to hate sex, it might just be the intense eye contact, but w/e, let’s just move along,” and then he has a coughing fit to remind the audience that he’s currently dying of cancer, and orange stormtrooper is like “lolz, loser, drink some water you dumb piece of shit”

cut to the wholesome foursome sitting at a picnic table in a guarded courtyard eating gruel, and yumkio, who finally has a personality, and princess are like “hey, this place fucking sucks, can we leave?” and zeke is like, “yeah, i met this orange stormtrooper who i think might be dtf and/or murder, so we should probably bounce”

but eugene is like, “but i want some hot stephanie ass, and also some bullshit excuse about how mb commonewealth will save alexandria” which, they left before things went super downhill, right? idr. it was after hilltop fell, but they don’t know alexandria got fucked either, if i recall? w/e, not important

two seconds after he says this, they talk to some people who are like “we’ve been here for four months, or maybe it’s been nine, i don’t actually remember, i’ve stopped processing the passage of time,” and the wholesome foursome takes this as a bad sign, tho that’s just the life i’ve lived as a night worker during a pandemic, so i was like #mood

but then they watch some guy get dragged away screaming to get “reprocessed” and eugene is like “ok, nvm, let’s bounce”

(my theory on what “reprocessing” is, is that they’re stuck in a room and have to watch hours and hours of customer service training videos on vhs from the 90s)

i definitely got my jump cut scenes mixed up bc i think the negan accusing maggie of a murder plot thing happened in between this scene and then the next commonwealth scene, but w/e, i’ll just finish what happens in the commonwealth arch

the wholesome foursome are trying to hatch a plan to escape, except princess, my love, is distracted watching some stormtroopers flirt, and the other three are like “wtf, dude, how can you even tell any of them apart?” and princess then tells them every stormtroopers backstory bc she is brilliant and pays rly close attention to shit, and the other three are like, “this is useful information, thank you for being an insane person”

their plan involves yumiko and eugene dressing up as stormtroopers and leading princess and zeke out of the place, which works fine actually, except on their way out they come across the Depressing Wall of Probably Mostly Dead Missing Loved Ones

they’re about to leave, when princess is like, “wait, yumiko, you’re on here, that’s weird huh?”

sure enough, yumiko  is on the wall, with a note from ig her sister 

the scene ends with yumiko going, “guys...i can’t leave...i have tragic backstory to unveil”

tragic backstory to be continued ig

back in murder metro town, npc and some other npc have stolen all the supplies, there’s a train blocking the track, and a horde of walkers are coming towards them, so things are not going fantastic

they horde is too big to take down, so they start to climb on top of the train car to get away

but dog runs away!

and daryl, being every pet owner ever, is like “gotta go get my dog, guys, try not to get killed while i’m gone, c u soon!” and he ducks under the train and disappears

#priorities

the episode ends with maggie climbing up the train car but getting grabbed by a walker and dangling off the edge, and negan is there and they have a lion king moment where maggie is like, “scar! help me!” and negan is like “long live the king, bitch” and walks away into the shadows, leaving maggie to a potential death

which, while i know isn’t actually going to happen, would be a really fucking funny move on the writers’ part

like, “look, lauren’s back! and now she’s dead, bet you didn’t expect that!”

anyway

my assumption is negan will actually end up helping her up or something, continuing his ambiguous morality bullshit that actually isn’t ambiguous bc he BEAT GLENN TO DEATH WITH A FUCKING BAT WRAPPED IN BARBED WIRE IN FRONT OF HIS PREGNANT WIFE

the maggie/negan arch is kind of dumb, but whatevs, i’ll tolerate it, as long as my boy glenn gets justice in the end

anyway, cue credits!

final assessment: good episode. i’m much more interested in commonwealth than the reapers, tho i am hoping that daryl’s personality-less ex turns out to be a monster killing machine with no conscience, that’ll be fun. princess is a gift from god. hershel jr needs his own tv show. needs more carol (and caryl)

the end! going back into my walking dead free chamber! see you next episode!

-diz

[zelvyth]

 From a very young age it was reinforced that my ADHD was a disability I was meant to overcome rather than a tool I could use to better myself. I didn’t even know that I had been diagnosed, and that my mother had chosen not to medicate me, until I was partway through highschool. By that point I had already begun to give up on ever truly “making it” in life. The hurdles I needed to overcome had demoralized me to the point of near total apathy. Between my sexuality and early coming out in a small town highschool, and my various mental health problems, I felt like no one in the world saw things from my point of view. The last blow to my self esteem came when my grade 12 english teacher, the true decider of fate to any young person, told me my final thesis on Lady Macbeth being one of the greatest example of the flaws in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was brilliant, but due to formatting and scattered grammar issues, she could give me no higher than a 60%. After years of getting consistent high 90’s in my english classes as well as other subjects, I had failed this extremely crucial essay due to the idiosyncrasies of the most frustrating language known to humankind. I passed that class with a 68, and felt like my fate was sealed. No chance at getting into any University in the country without redoing 5 months of work because one person believed that following the rules was a more important indication of intelligence than original ideas and the ability to make an argument. It crushed me. I admit that I didn’t put in the effort, but I had spent my entire life being told I was incredibly intelligent. It was the one thing I held onto. I felt betrayed by the education system. Though it was also due to many other factors at the time, this contributed to the second of my four suicide attempts. Today, I reject that philosophy. 

    When a person with ADHD is thinking, they connect ideas in their heads much faster than the average person. It can be confusing and disorienting to the people around them. I constantly have to explain how I got from point A to point B because the points connect automatically in my head. It’s exhausting, so I frequently do not bother to try. It’s extremely helpful when crafting an argument, however it can be debilitating in many aspects of modern life. Things the average person doesn’t think about, can be crippling for me. Without a true passion towards something, my ability to focus becomes hazy and my thoughts become scattered. I spend the majority of the day stuck in my head having conversations with myself instead of doing “normal” things with my time. I have spent my life being told that ADHD is my weakness, today I can tell you with the utmost certainty that it is my greatest strength.

    When the international pandemic of the respiratory disease “Covid-19” truly began and the world went into full nationwide lockdown, the bistro that I had, for the most part, happily been employed at shut down. After 8 years of honing my culinary craft certain that my skills, though undervalued, would always be needed somewhere, I was out of a job. Indefinitely. So was most of the country that worked with their hands or, in some capacity, physically with other people. Unless you were able to conduct business through zoom conferences or were a suddenly “essential” employee like a fast food worker, you were left with little to do but sit and think or try desperately to distract yourself from the increasingly troubling world around you. Luckily, to my surprise, the conservative government had pledged to keep us all fed and watered as best they could. What deeply worried me was the knowledge that my friends south of the border, through no fault of their own, and already mostly furious with their government, were not being treated with the same bare minimum of respect. I knew it was a recipe for true disaster and widespread civil unrest as early as march.

    I watched while the culture of social media, at least from my own lgbt bias, slowly started to shift and I picked up a lot of the big picture through memes and personally shared anecdotes. Celebrities were being ripped apart as they tried to get our attention again from their huge mansions while people sat at home worried about how to feed their children. Using insensitive phrasing like “we’re all in this together” when they undeniably weren’t. It quickly became a social caste system. The desperately poor trying to creatively make money any way they could. The often needlessly endangered. And the upper class for whom, little had changed besides the inability to do whatever they want at any given time. The lines were very clearly drawn. While the rich bemoaned their accessibility to haircuts, the poor argued with landlords about rent. All the while another group was frequently paid minimum wage to work on the proverbial front lines; flipping hamburgers, being yelled at by the rich because you were out of everything with the supply chain so damaged, or literally saving peoples lives. The anger and frustration quickly took over nearly every form of social media. Subtly, but day by day it grew. There was only so much one could do from inside their apartments, and globally, the havenots found solace and comfort with one another. The narratives of meme culture, which had matured and specialized far beyond the early days of “lolcats” and “trollface” comics, became almost exclusively about mocking the rich and their inability to deal with slight inconveniences.

Nearly every month of 2020 was a new major nationwide crisis and people had little else to do but talk about it or ignore it. The year kicked off with serious threat of a third world war because Donald Trump was tweeting intentionally inflammatory remarks towards the fascist leader of North Korea. All while nearly the entire country of Australia was ravaged by forest/bush fire. January saw a clearly corrupt president unbelievably not be impeached. Sparking outrage among, in my humble opinion, any sane individual. This also exposed, to anyone who knew all the facts, that the systems to hold those in power accountable was clearly broken and corruptible. Towards the end of January, beloved basketball player Kobe Bryant died in a horrible helicopter accident involving his daughter. Late February leading into early March was when global fears over Coronavirus began to be taken extremely seriously by every government in the world, the exception being the United States and the Trump administration. By late April, the country had over a hundred thousand dead, and nearly a quarter of its population out of a job. The irony of this, is that the calls to reopen the country didn’t come from those that had lost their jobs, but the upper class that had grown restless deprived from their usual comforts. Meanwhile we openly mocked them on instagram, tumblr, and twitter. Trying desperately to make light of a horrible situation and bring at least a little levity to their lives. News that a new breed of dangerously fatal hornets had migrated to North America was derided as a filler episode. One of my personal favourite takes on the year as a whole so far was a comparison to the four horseman of the apocalypse. January representing War, February representing Pestilence, March representing Famine, and April representing Death. In fact a lot of meme culture started to take on an extremely apocalyptic vibe. The message for many was clear, and depressing.

Then things started to happen really fast, so fast that for many it would make your head spin looking at it from the outside. It began with a video featuring a white Canadian woman from Waterloo named Amy Cooper that went viral across the globe. In the Ramble area of Central Park in NYC, this woman was filmed by a clearly peaceful, yet insistent, black man named Christian Cooper, no relation, asking her to leash her dog. This is a bylaw of the area. The woman refused and began to become very distressed, roughly handling her dog by the collar. She started dailing 911 and accused the man of assaulting her to the dispatcher. What many understood about this act, and rightfully called her out in outrage over, is that she was using her knowledge of how police handle black people in America to threaten this mans life over leashing her dog. She has been fired, and the shelter has taken her dog back.

Two days later, as I was travelling to my family’s cottage to “get away from it all and unplug”, a friend sent me a snapchat video from Minneapolis. It was on fire. I immediately did everything I could to try to find out what had happened. That, is when I saw the video of 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a police officer with his knee on the neck of another human being. This did not shock, nor suprise me. I had followed the many accounts of police killing people on video since 2014 when I was 16. When the Ferguson protests over Michael Brown’s killing by police officers were broadcast over most of the developed world. I had seen little change, despite Barrack Obama being President. This continued to happen for the next 6 years, though there were no more protests. Some of the people of those original protests that started the Black Lives Matter Movement, went missing over the next several years. Mainly those that had been photographed.

George Floyd’s death, I feel, was the straw that broke the camels’ back. Which is how anyone who has personally experienced police mistreatment and injustice would understand watching that video. A societal contract had been broken. And Minneapolis started to burn down the city that would let this happen to their friend, their neighbour, their father, their brother, and most importantly, their son. The words that chilled me to my very core… And continue to make me cry when I think about. Continue to make me want to punch every cop I run into.The words that have caused me to continue having this argument every day with everyone I know. The words that make me want to scream and rage and burn that country to the ground….  “Mama”

In his dying breaths this man called out to his mother. Who had died 2 years earlier. Who could not come save him. The police officer casually, with his hands in his pockets, knowing he could get away with it, murdered that man while he called out for his dead mother. Suffocated him to death in the middle of a global pandemic driven by respiratory disease. If I had been in Minneapolis that night, I would have helped burn it to the ground.

Something I didn’t expect happened then. Something I didn’t expect when I saw the fires and the rage from mostly black citizens of the city. As I watched Fox News try to turn the story into a conversation about rioting and looting rather than Police accountability. Other peaceful protests started up in other cities. My entire social media feed from multiple sources was filled with people discussing their anger and vowing to protest it. I don’t like to admit that I didn’t see this coming. But on May 26th, as I ravenously tried to keep up from the comfort of a cottage on Crystal Lake Ontario, a spark of hope for humanity that I had lost a long time ago started to ignite.

Something interesting happens when you get most of your information from social media. It either makes you hyper critical of everything you’re told and willing to research anything important, or it makes you willing to believe anything your friends tell you. As the protests kicked off in major cities across America, after months of inactivity, my ADHD kicked into high gear. I used every neuron of my brain power to follow the protests from as many different angles as I could. Most importantly, I followed the story from the people who were at them. That’s what growing up in modern society makes you do. After months if not years if not decades of being lied to for personal gain constantly. It makes you pay attention to the people who have nothing to gain.

I got back to my appartment from my cottage a day later, still glued to my phone. Barely talking, barely eating, barely sleeping. I watched police officers in riot gear throw tear gas into peaceful protests in every city in America. Tear gas, by the way, is an international war crime in combat situations. I watched media with an implicitly right wing bias condemn the protests. Convincing people that looting was worth a war crime. I watched it work. It worked with my own father. It did not work for me. I watched the news from political biases of both sides but took most of it with a grain of salt. That’s what I had been taught to do from as young as 14 by the world I grew up in. The news could give me general information. However, the story was on the ground and I knew from experience that people would try to bury it so I had to watch it as quickly as possible. I watched friends of mine in the states get tear gassed and beaten while exercising their first amendment rights. I watched the news condemn the protests. I was horrified. I watched the peaceful protesters of police brutality in New York get beaten and gassed from a minimum of 30 different perspectives of the people I knew and trusted, and those I didn’t. I watched the peaceful protestors in LA get beaten and gassed from the same amount of perspectives. I watched them throw flash bombs and shoot rubber coated bullets into the faces of my friends in every city in America. I watched the President of the United States order the peaceful protestors in front of the White House to be beaten and gassed so he could have an awkward photo-op with a fucking bible. I watched this for a week straight from every angle available. Day in and day out. Every hour I was conscious, I watched fascism try to grab power in in every city in America. I watched people in powerful positions deny it.

It wasn’t just paying attention to the protests and the news of them explicitly. I wasn’t just filled with horror. I was also watching something wonderfully unexpected happen. I watched my black friends, my gay friends, my asain friends, and my intelligent friends, begin to weaponize social media. I watched them beg all of their friends to do the same. So did I, even though I felt like there wasn’t anything I could really do from cozy liberal Waterloo. I watched us all turn the algorithms against the people who made them. I did everything I could to make sure you couldn’t turn away. I told my gay white friends condemning the actions of protestors that his rights came from a riot. I watched them shrink in fear of my voice. My father told me I was getting caught up in left wing rhetoric. I tore his arguments to shreds. He told me broad angry statements don’t do anything. I told him broad angry statements create the conversation we’re having. Resistance is a highway with many lanes, and I knew my lane.

You grow up, especially in my age, especially when you’re gay, especially when you are exposed to a lifetime of stories of rebellion against tyranny, hearing about the power of resistance. As I marched in Waterloo with over thirty thousand people I didn’t know, I realized that I have never truly understood that power. How it surges through your body like electricity as you scream until your voice is hoarse. It’s a high better than any drug known to man, than any pride parade where I was pandered to by corporations for hours. It took my fear, and my anger, and my helplessness and turned it into raw power exploding from my body. I continued to watch people I knew deny reality. 

The protests grew. They spread across the world like wildfire. I went to facebook, a place I avoid because I don’t agree with the majority of people on it, and told anyone who would listen to me that this is what Pride means. What it truly means to be proud of your community. Not a rainbow flag in a store window, not a corporation asking you to buy it’s rainbow backpack. But turning apathy in face of evil into raw unbridled electricity. I watched the protests spread to Montreal and Toronto, I watched the police mishandle things there too. I watched violence perpetuated by the state against my friends, people I’ve known for years. The power I felt merely grew. It grew with every flash grenade and bullet and tear gas canister shot at my friends. It will not subside till this is over or until I die. I’m going to spend the next decade giving up the comfortable life of good food, great drinks, and fantastic company that I found in the restaurant industry. I’m going to spend a decade getting my Law degree to fight for every last one of us in the courtroom because that is a place I can make it count. 

Today is June 8th of the year 2020 and I began writing this piece at Noon, it is now 4:11 P.M. I have done zero editing and I refuse to. I submit this as my revised final essay. I want to know when you got behind the protests. Because if it was as you were reading this, I deem you unworthy to judge my critical thinking skills. If it was yesterday I think you should be ashamed of yourself. I was with them from hour one. You should have been too. How dare you spend years teaching children about racism and oppression. How dare you tell me that I’m not worthy of higher education in any form. Telling children that wikipedia is unreliable as a source is idiotic, it’s one of the most peer reviewed encyclopedia’s to ever exist. How dare you tell me and the young adults you teach that you don’t give out scores higher than ninety percent. What is the point of forcing teenagers to write in cursive. Why must I live the experiences you write about in your precious properly formatted essays. In this country a 68 is two percent shy of getting into any University.  It’s sentencing an intelligent person with an array of disabilities a life of believing they have no power. Despite my own mistakes at the time and the amount I have grown as a person since, I will hold you personally accountable for that. 

As a closing statement, to every English teacher in this province, no, to every English teacher in the great country of Canada. Think very hard about when exactly you put your full support behind this movement. Because your curriculum is outdated, and absolutely useless in the real world. And your racism is showing.

Post Script.

There is no bibliography of unbiased sources because all sources are biased. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and this should all be public information. Look it up.

[lehdenlaulu]

Reylo

Oooh, someone dared to ask me this! I commend you, anonymous stranger!

But yeah, in case someone is new here and isn’t yet aware: I do NOT ship it.

I get, on a theoretical level, why someone else might, but let’s break it down:

First of all, the entire idea didn’t even enter my mind while watching The Force Awakens. Which might be because a) it’s not a ship pattern that generally appeals to me anymore b) I went in already believing Rey is a Skywalker, and became increasingly convinced of it during the course of the story. So all I saw was an interesting if twisted family relationship. And in order for me to consider something seriously shippable, I have to believe it could realistically happen. I know, I’m boring like that.

Continuing on from that, I sincerely believe cousins is the most interesting thing they could possibly be in the story. It would give them both common ground and cause for animosity – or even to ultimately reconcile. Their interactions would be IMO that much more meaningful if they’re part of the same family tree. Like, there could still be some subtextual stuff etc. (and I can’t even really fault anyone who ships them as cousins, honestly), but also conflicting feelings of jealousy, envy, protectiveness. Righteous fury warring with desire to connect with family etc. You know? And maybe it’s just me, but something like that is always a million times more interesting than a romance based on physical attraction or whatever.

This is the real dealbreaker: she deserves better. Again, I can’t see a realistic scenario where they would end up being a happy couple, or even a scenario that wouldn’t be unfair or downright harmful to her character and arc. First of all: if he’s a Skywalker and she’s not, that makes the narrative power balance between them inherently skewed. It would pretty much automatically make her a love interest and secondary character in his story. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not here for that.Secondly, well. He’s mentally and emotionally unstable, violent and well, actually kind of evil. And I don’t believe that’s something that will just go away if someone gives him a hug. And Rey doesn’t deserve to be his therapist or the outlet for his emotional volatility (and violence, let’s face it). Which she would be (and already has been, to a degree). I mean, maybe I’m too old and cynical, but Romantic Love And Forgiveness Magically Fixes Everything is just not something I’m able to believe in anymore. I just… know better.

And going off on that, I can see why he would be drawn to her. But why would she ever be into him is the big question. And what would she get out of the relationship? Even if she found him attractive, she really doesn’t seem like the shallow kind of girl who’d let a pretty face distract her from everything else. And again, he’s frankly a violent, evil asshole who serves a fascist regime and hurt her and her friends and killed someone who had become a father figure to her in front of her. And even if she wasn’t such an inherently good and moral person, I feel something like that would be a bit of a dealbreaker romantically. You know. Like, maybe if they pulled a Revan on him and put him through an extensive Force-reprogramming and he came out a completely different person. But ehh, she’d still remember, and I bet that girl can hold a rather un-Jedilike grudge.

TL;DRIt’s not my vibe, he’s an evil crackpot, she deserves better and they’re probably related anyway.

So, yeah. In the context of the story we currently have, I find Reylo quite unshippable romantically. Hope this answered your question. :D

[drawingconclusions]

You really don't need me to summarize what's been going in politics recently, but unfortunately, some of you have been exclusively getting your news from less than truthful liberal news sources, so here goes. As the past several days of public hearings in the Impeachment Inquiry have shown, the Democrats have not conducted an honorable or fair process as a result of their now infamous Halloween vote. Unfortunately, Adam Schiff has denied President Trump the right to have his legal counsel present during the hearings, Schiff has blocked the Republicans in the House from calling some of their own witnesses to the hearings, and Schiff has also at times prevented Republicans from asking certain questions of the witnesses. If you were in the right, you wouldn't be afraid of the truth and you wouldn't try to shut it out. I'll admit I didn't watch more than a few minutes of the live hearings on TV, and I can't say I regret that. Despite the fact that Democrats bludgeoned due process and attempted to make this a one-sided affair, many of their witnesses helped make this an increasingly strange public spectacle. There were witnesses called by the Democrats who held up their own assumptions & presumptions, as opposed to facts, as the basis for parts of their testimony; some civil servants (who are not policy-makers) who used the time to lecture us on what they firmly believe should be U.S. foreign policy in regards to Ukraine; some who gleaned their information from hearsay or statements by untrustworthy newspapers; others who weren't even working in the White House during the time of the phone call in question; and one who supposedly developed the X-Men ability of being able to hear a call between Trump and an ambassador even though the phone wasn't on speakerphone, and all while being seated in a restaurant with other people talking. Now I'm starting to see why Democrats were so intent on continuing to have private hearings & only selectively releasing to the public the bits of information that would benefit their agenda. You know I don't agree with everything President Trump does. (I'm troubled that Congress & Trump can speedily pass a law making animal abuse a federal crime, while we still have homeless people on our streets in such dire need and while some are still advocating for things like infanticide. I don't support animal cruelty, but I always believed we should put people above animals. And I do have questions about a few of Trump's foreign policy decisions, but I'm an artist for crying out loud and not a foreign policy expert, so I'll put that on hold for now.) But any objective observer can see that this Impeachment Inquiry is a travesty of justice and just another attempt by the Left to depose President Trump. Perhaps if liars and false witnesses were held accountable in our society instead of being lauded and hailed as heroes, then we wouldn't be at this point. Ecclesiastes 8:11 (NIV) states, "When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong." There have to be legal and financial consequences for those who lie and give false testimony. Otherwise, they'll continue to indulge in the same behavior again and again & also embolden those who see it actually pays to distort facts and assail an innocent person's character. It's interesting how in our society elderly Trump supporters like Roger Stone (who I'm not a big fan of) are given the heavy by prosecutors, the FBI, & a judge, while others who have committed some of the same crimes are allowed to go free, become liberal news analysts, and sue the government for firing them. And yes, I'm quoting Bible verses again, because apparently some of you live your life without any type of moral compass to guide your life choices, and it results in glaringly corrupt and reprehensible behavior. With another recent school shooting, with senseless murders of American citizens in Mexico, with continued violence in the streets of our cities, I hope all people realize that we can't go on living lives without the right foundation. Or else everything we build internally will just eventually fall apart. I had been sorely tempted to fiercely comment on continued corruption in other areas, as this impeachment fiasco comes at a time when my confidence in government is at an all-time low. (And no, that doesn't mean I'm going to become some kind of anti-government threat or violent resister. Read the end of my post last month about being personally opposed to anarchy.) Yes, I applaud the House Republicans who have stood up for decency and who conducted much-needed cross-examinations during the hearings. But I also realize that the warped leftist & fascist mentality of seeking to silence differences of belief or thought at any costs is spreading to nearly every aspect of society. It's mind-boggling to me how some of you think your brazen evil deeds will never be exposed. (Are we destined to be at each other's throats here in America until God shines his light on us and supernaturally intervenes?) There's a principle in God's Word making it clear that you will reap what you sow. If you spend your days and nights seeking to ruin the lives of innocent people, at some point God will cause you to face sudden ruin and humiliation. Again, I could sit here and elaborate on all this in detail, but with the holidays coming up (figgy pudding prep and what not), I'd like to keep this as short as possible. For those of you involved in such obvious corruption and lies and falsehoods, I'd like to challenge you to make a clean break from all that. As tough as I may sometimes be on our culture, you may come to think that the Christ I serve is a merciless and heartless taskmaster. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, God believes in justice and one day will judge each of us for our actions & motives, but Micah 7:18 tells us that God is a God who delights to show mercy. In the here and now, God loves it when people see the error of their ways, turn away from them, and turn to Him. Isaiah 55:6-7 (NIV) says, "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon." I make this appeal, knowing full well that some of you have crossed the ethical line too far and for far too many times, and you will still have to be held accountable for that according to our nation's laws. There's no escaping that. Everyone of us will be broken in some way and at some point in our lives. As a result, some become controlling & abusive monsters, some become even more dedicated to evil, and some become despondent shells of their former selves. But here's hoping that you find spiritual salvation in the midst of whatever you face in life. Know that if you take that first step towards Jesus in prayer, he will run, and not just walk, towards you.

[neuroticfishbish]

Everyone I know is broken-hearted

All the genuinely smart, talented, funny people I know seem to be miserable these days. You feel it on Tumblr more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art where you pretend to be a hip, urban person with the most awesomest friends and the best relationships and the very best lunches ever. Facebook is surface; Tumblr is subtext, and judging by what I’ve seen, the subtext is aching sadness. I’m not immune to this. I don’t remember ever feeling this miserable and depressed in my life, this sense of futility that makes you wish you’d simply go numb and not care anymore. I think a lot about killing myself these days. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it and this isn’t a cry for help. But I wake up and think: fuck, more of this? Really? How much more? And is it really worth it? In my case, much of it stems from my childhood experiences and the collapse of the many relationships I had. But that’s not really the cause I think that those relationships were bulwarks, charms against the dark I’ve felt growing in this world for a long time now. When I was in love, the world outside didn’t matter so much. But without it, there is nothing keeping the wolf from the door. It's not to say I do not have good or kind people in my life, because I do. More than I deserve. It always used to be like this. Life sucked when I was young and I was unhappy then too. But there was always the sense that it was just a temporary thing, that if I stuck it out eventually the world was going to get better — become awesome, in fact. But here I am, and things aren't getting better I'm just getting older. I became an adolescent at the time Music was ushering in a decade of “slacker” ideology, as the pundits liked to put it. But the reality is that I didn’t know a whole lot of actual slackers in the until my early 20's I did know a lot of people who found themselves disillusioned with the materialism of the 1990s and what we saw as the failed rhetoric of the Sixties generation, who were all about peace and love right until the time they put on suits and ties and figured out how to divide up the world. I knew a lot of people who weren’t very interested in that path. The joke, of course, is that every generation kills the thing they love. The hippies became yuppies; Gen X talked a lot about the revolution, and then went and got themselves some venture capital and started laying into place the oversaturated, paranoid world we live in now. A lot of them tried to tell themselves they were still punk as fuck, but it’s hard to morally reconcile the thing where you listen to Fugazi on the way to your job where you help find new ways to trick people into giving up their data to advertisers. Most people don’t even bother. They just compartmentalize. And then the World Trade Center went down. And all of a sudden calling yourself an “anticapitalist terrorist” was no longer a cool posture to psych yourself up for protest. It became something you might go to jail for — or worse, to one of the Black Camps on some shithole island somewhere. Corporate capitalism became conflated somehow with patriotism. And the idea that the things you own end up defining you became quaint, as ridiculous spoken aloud as “tune in, turn on, drop out”. In fact, it became a positive: if you bought the right laptop, the right smartphone, the right backpack, exciting strangers would want to have sex with you! It’s no wonder that Gen X began seeking the largely mythological stability of their forebearers; to stop fucking around and eating mushrooms at the Rage Against The Machine show, and to try and root yourself. Get a decent car — something you can pass off as utilitarian — and a solid career. Put your babies in Black Flag onesies, but make sure their stroller is more high tech than anything mankind ever took to the Moon, because that wolf is always at the door. And buy yourself a house, because property is always valuable. Even if you don’t have the credit, because there’s this thing called a “subprime mortgage” you can get now! But the world changed again. And kept changing. So now you’ve got this degree that’s worth fuck-all, a house that’s worth more as scrap lumber than as a substantial investment, and you’re either going to lose your job or have to do the work of two people, because there’s a recession on. Except they keep saying the recession ended, so why are you still working twice as hard for the same amount of money? We started two wars, only one of them even marginally justifiable, and thousands and thousands of people died. Some of them were Americans, most of them weren’t. The world hated us again. It’s psychically oppressive to realize you’re the bad guy. Of course, for a lot of the world, America had always been the bad guy…but we didn’t really know that before, because we didn’t have the Internet in our pocket, to be pulled out at every lunch break and before the meal came and when the episode of Scrubs on TV dragged a little, and before bed. We were encouraged to immerse ourselves in the endless flow of information, to become better informed, because knowing more about the world made us better people. And maybe it did, but it also made us haunted people. Yesterday morning, when I woke up, I clicked on a video in my Tumblr feed that showed mutilated children being dragged from the streets of Gaza. And I started sobbing — just sobbing, sitting there in my bed with the covers around my waist, saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” over and over to the empty room. Dead children, torn to bits. And then it was time for…what? Get up, eat my cereal, go about my day? Every day? So you’re haunted, and you’re outraged, and you go on Twitter and you go on Facebook and you change your avatar or your profile picture to a slogan somebody thoughtfully made for you, so that you can show the world that you’re watching, that you care, that it matters. But if you’re at all observant, you begin to realize after a while that it doesn’t matter; that your opinion matters for very little in the world. You voted for Obama, because Obama was about hope and change; except he seems to be mostly about hope and change for rich people, and not about hope at all for the people who are killed by American drones or who are locked away without trial in American internment camps or who are prosecuted because they stand up and tell the truth about their employers. There does seem to be a lot of hope and change in Fort Meade and Langley, though, where the NSA and CIA are given more and more leeway to spy on everyone in the world, including American citizens, not for what they’ve done but what they might do. And the rest of the world? They keep making more dead children. They slaughter each other in the streets of Baghdad and Libya and Gaza and Tel Aviv; they slaughter each other in the hills of Syria; and, increasingly, they slaughter each other in American schools and movie theaters and college campuses. And when you speak up about that — when you write to your Congressperson to say that you believe in, say, stricter control on the purchase of assault weapons, or limiting the rights of corporations to do astonishing environmental damage, or not sending billions of dollars to the kind of people who think it’s funny to launch missiles filled with flechette rounds into the middle of schools where children huddle together — you’re told that, no, you’re the fascist: that people have the right to defend themselves and make money, and that those rights trump your right to not be killed by some fucking lunatic when you’re waiting in line at Chipotle to grab a chicken burrito, and your right to not be able to light your tapwater on fire with a Zippo because of the chemicals in it, or not to end up in a grainy YouTube video while some demented religious fanatic hacks your head off with a rusty bayonet because your country — not you, but who’s counting — is the Great Satan. And the music sucks. Dear God, the music sucks. Witless, vapid bullshit that makes the worst airheaded wannabe profundities of the grunge era look like the collected works of Thomas Locke. Half the songs on the radio aren’t anything more than a looped 808 beat and some dude grunting and occasionally talking about how he likes to fuck bitches in the ass. The other half are grown-ass adults singing about their stunted, adolescent romantic ideals and playing a goddamn washtub while dressed like extras from The Waltons. The music sucks. The movies suck — I mean, they didn’t suck the first time they came out, in the 1980s, but the remakes and gritty reboots and decades-past-their-sell-by-date sequels suck. Indiana Jones is awesome, but nobody needs to see a geriatric Harrison Ford, lured out of retirement by the promise of building another mansion onto his mansion, running around with fucking Shia LeBeouf in the jungle. And besides, we’re all media experts now; we can spot the merchandising nods from the trailer all the way to the final credits. There’s no magic left. It’s just another company figuring out a way to suck the very last molecules of profit out of the things we cherish, because that’s what corporations do. Everything is branded. Even people. People are “personal brands”, despite the fact that, by and large, you can’t figure out what most of them are actually even good for. They just exist to be snarky and post selfies and demand that you buy something, anything, with their picture on it. You actually know who Kim Kardashian is. In an ideal world, you’d be as unaware of her existence as you are of the names of the Chinese kids who made the futurephone or featherweight laptop you’re almost certainly reading this on. In an ideal world, Kim Kardashian would have spent her life getting sport-fucked anonymously by hip-hop stars in some Bel Air mansion, ran a salon, and either died of a coke overdose or Botox poisoning. There is no reason that her face and her life and her tits and her deathless thoughts needed to be foisted upon the world outside of the 90210 ZIP code. Except that somebody figured out that you could make money off showing people the car accident in slow motion, that people would watch that. Sure they will. People love to watch stupid people do stupid things. It makes them feel less stupid. And the Internet. We built this thing — and was part of the generation who took to the new medium like water and have made the majority of our adult lives creating it, to a greater or lesser degree — because we believed it would make things better for everyone. We believed it would give voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless, bring us all together, help us to understand and empathize and share with one another. We believed it could tear down the walls. And in a lot of ways it has. But in just as many ways, it has driven us all insane. There’s an old story — I have no idea if it’s true — about monkeys who had the pleasure centers of their brains wired up to a button. Push it, Mr. Monkey, and you have an orgasm. And the monkeys did. They pushed the button and they pushed the button, until they forgot about eating and they forgot about drinking and sleeping and simply fell down and died. What do you do when you first wake up? What do you do as soon as you get into work? After work? Before bed? Hell, some of us wake up in the night and check our feeds, terrified that we’ve missed out on something. We do it because we are given that reward, that stimulus that tells us oooh, a new shiny! It’s the fourteenth Guardians Of The Galaxy trailer, with 200% more Rocket Raccoon! Some fucking null node in Portland made a portrait of every single character from Adventure Time out of bacon and Legos! And, maybe most poisonous, maybe most soul-crushing: somebody said something I don’t like that makes me feel frightened and threatened! It’s time to put on my superhero costume and forward unto battle! Except it doesn’t matter. Because you’re not really changing anybody’s mind. How often does that little skirmish end with anybody changing their mind at all, even a little bit? Or does it just end with one of you invariably either blocking the other or saying something like “You know what, I’m going to stop now, because this is getting out of hand.” Getting out of hand? Everything they told you about how to live in the world when you were a kid is a lie. Education doesn’t matter, not even on paper. Being ethical doesn’t matter. Being a good person doesn’t matter. What matters now is that you’re endlessly capable of the hustle, of bringing in that long green, of being entertaining to enough people that somebody will want to give you money or fuck you or fund your startup. We’re all sharks now; if we stop swimming for just a little too long, we die. We lose followers. We’re lame. We’re not worth funding, or fucking. Because all that matters is the endless churn, the endless parade, the endless cycle of buying and trying to sell and being bought and sold by people who tell you that they’re your friends, man, not like those others. Microsoft is evil and Google is not evil, except when they are, but that’s not really important, and if you decide that maybe you’re tired of being reduced to nothing more than a potential lead for a sales pitch, like something out of a fucking David Mamet play, then you’re a hater and irrelevant and a Luddite. And besides, what would you do with yourself if you weren’t checking Facebook or playing Candy Crush Saga or watching some teenage dumbass smash his genitals on the side of a pool on YouTube? What the fuck would you even do, bro? The comedian Bill Hicks used to do a bit where he invited the advertisers and marketers in his audience to kill themselves. He imagined them turning it into an ad campaign: “Oh, the righteous indignation dollar, that’s a good dollar, Bill’s smart to do that.” He laid out the futility of trying to escape: “I’m just caught in a fucking web,” he’d say. And that’s where we are. You, me, we’re trapped, between being nothing more than consumers, every aspect of our lives quantified and turned into demographic data, or being fucking Amish cavemen drifting into increasing irrelevancy. Because it really does feel like there’s no middle ground anymore, doesn’t it? There’s no way to stay an active, informed citizen of the world without some motherfucker figuring out a way to squirm into your life to try and get a dollar out of you. Only fools expect something for free, and only bigger fools believe they’re anything other than a consumable or a consumer. We didn’t get the William Gibson future where you can live like a stainless steel rat in the walls between the corporate enclaves, tearing at the system from within with your anarchy and your superior knowledge of Unix command lines. Now it’s just pissed off teenagers who blame you because their lives are going to suck a cock and billionaire thugs trying to sell you headphones and handbags, all to a soundtrack of some waterhead muttering “Bubble butt, bubble bubble bubble butt” over and over while a shite beat thumps in the background. I know a lot of people who privately long for an apocalypse of some kind, a breakdown of the ancient Western code, because then they’d either be dead or free. How fucking horrifying is that? But nobody pulls that trigger, because now we’ve all seen what apocalypses look like. We saw Manhattan in 2001 and New Orleans in 2005 and Thailand in 2004 and the Middle East pretty much any given day. Nobody wants to hate, because we’re pummeled with hate every day, by people who are too fucking stupid to understand that the world has passed them by as much as it’s passed by the dude in the Soundgarden t-shirt who still drives around singing along to “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” on his way to his dead-end job. The best lack all conviction, and the people who are full of passionate intensity? Fuck them. We’re all sick of their shit anyway. And that’s where we are, and is it any goddamn wonder at all that the most profitable drugs sold in America for like a decade running have been antipsychotics? The world seems psychotic. I feel like I need to figure this out, like figuring all of this out and finding new ways to live has become the most important thing I could possibly do, not just for myself and the people I love but for the entire human race. I don’t mean me alone — I’m far too self-loathing to have a messiah complex — but I feel like, for me, this is the best use of my time. Because the world is making me crazy and sad and wanting to just put a gun in my mouth, and it’s doing the same thing to a lot of people who shouldn’t have to feel this way. I don’t believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech, or even awareness. I think the only thing that can save us is us. I think we need to find ways to tribe up again, to find each other and put our arms around each other and make that charm against the dark. I don’t mean in any hateful or exclusionary way, of course. But I think like minds need to pull together and pool our resources and rage against the dying of the light. And I do think rage is a component that’s necessary here: a final fundamental fed-up-ness with the bullshit and an unwillingness to give any more ground to the things that are doing us in. To stop being reasonable. To stop being well-behaved. Not to hate those who are hurting us with their greed and psychopathic self-interest, but to simply stop letting them do it. The best way to defeat an enemy is not to destroy them, but to make them irrelevant. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know some truth that I can reveal to everyone. All I can do is hurt, and try to stop hurting, and try to help other people stop hurting. Maybe that’s all any of us can do. But isn’t that something worth devoting yourself to, more than building another retarded app that just puts more nonsense and bullshit into the world? Just finding people to love, and healing each other? I think it is. Until I know more, I’ll just keep holding on. I won’t put the gun in my mouth. Because all of this sadness is worth it if there’s still hope. And I want to still have hope so badly. I still want to believe, in myself, and in you.

[disco-vampire-thing]

Gothoughts - 3.15, How the Riddler Got His Name

SO!

I’ve decided to do a bit of a review for the newest episode of Gotham, along the lines of my comics and movie reviews.  Spoilers, unsolicited opinions, and undignified squeeing behind the cut. :)

As far as I’m concerned, Gotham’s return with “How the Riddler Got His Name” is a home run.  I know some fans were worried, looking at the earlier promos, that Oswald would be too quickly forgotten or we wouldn’t see the emotional fallout from his murder.  Instead, what we get really surpassed my expectations, with some fantastic interplay between Ed and his hallucination of Oswald, as Ed struggles both to come to terms with what Oswald really meant to him, and to take the next step into truly embodying the Riddler.

Speaking of which, I love the fact that Ed knows who he is, but is struggling to become that.  I love that, for him as it was for Oswald, the birth of the legend as we come to know him is not easy.  I think that’s one of Gotham’s real strengths.  While most supervillains do get their own origin stories in comics, I’ve found that a lot of versions then skip straight from the origin story to the villain as a fully-fledged threat, as if the decision to become a criminal meant you got a welcome basket with a pre-tailored costume and a starter pack of henchmen.  I know that it’s often done to make the villains seem more mysterious and, therefore, more threatening, but I think there are a lot more storytelling opportunities in letting us see, not only Batman’s training and struggles and failures, but those of his rogues’ gallery, too.

Something that’s interesting about Ed’s origin story in particular:  Okay, so Gotham always kind of rides this line between gritty deconstruction and comic book show, and sometimes teeters a little too far in one direction or the other. When I first heard Ed describe what he’s doing in this episode as “becoming a villain”, it made me wince.  “Villain”, in this sense, is basically a metafictional concept, and it’s not one that people would generally apply to themselves.  You know the saying, “Everyone is the hero of their own story”?  When you make yourself a villain, you’re essentially making yourself an obstacle in someone else’s story, and in real life, people don’t tend to do that.  

And Gotham is usually fairly realistic in this respect.  I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone in this show has called themselves “a villain” unironically.  Mobsters like Carmine Falcone or Fish Mooney wouldn’t think of themselves that way – they’re powerful, ambitious businesspeople. Even someone unhinged like Jerome or Barbara would probably only say it in an ironic echo of how they think the world sees them.  I don’t think Oswald, in real life, would have said it about himself.  His path hasn’t been driven by the urge to become a villain, it’s been driven by the urge to rule Gotham. Even his becoming “the Penguin” was kind of unintentional.  He claimed that persona, but he didn’t set out to construct it.  (And hallucination!Oswald even unpicks this onscreen: he didn’t teach Ed to be a villain, he taught him to be Edward Nygma, “a man who could run the underworld and hide in plain sight”.)

But I have to say, this episode won me over in this respect.  I came to realise that out of all the rogues in Gotham, Ed is the one for whom this explicit “becoming a villain” shtick actually works.  I can see Ed deciding, “I recognise myself as a villain/recognise the villain in myself, and I will set out to embody him.”  It’s a reflection of how Ed tends to approach life and interactions with people in general:  it’s this attempt to apply high symbolism and abstract systems of rules to the real world. Which, incidentally, is also a pretty good description of how riddles work.

As for the way this episode explores Ed’s relationship with Oswald, I basically have nothing to offer but delighted shrieking. :)  I was expecting Oswald’s “ghost” to be tormenting Ed, the way Kristen’s has in the past; the fact that Ed takes such genuine pleasure in seeing him (even to the point of thanking Oswald for being there, as if he’s real) and is even taking drugs to be able to see him – a pretty big departure for someone who’s as invested as Ed is in control – came as a pleasant shock.  The moment where he finally says goodbye to Oswald, and admits how much he cares about and misses him, is genuinely heartwrenching.  And hallucination!Oswald is a delight throughout, from his eating popcorn to his exasperation with Ed selecting Jim as his archnemesis. :)  He’s wonderfully salty (as with his line about how he’s “not really a fan” of the view from the docks), but he also knows exactly where and how to slide the knife in under Ed’s defences.  Robin Lord Taylor is a tour de force in this episode – his performance as hallucination!Oswald is an exaggerated version of Oswald (because this is Ed’s mental reconstruction), but still nuanced, and he’s just fantastic to watch.  And holy shit, but that serenade makes me happy.  Ed actually hallucinates Oswald, dressed in gorgeous clothes, singing him a sexy ballad under a red spotlight.  I’m not only really pleased that the creators took it that far (making it pretty undeniable that Ed at least has some attraction towards his friend), I’m also impressed that they pulled it off. That scene could have so easily tipped over into being silly, but it’s executed with a deft hand and grounded in two really strong performances, making it erotic and eerie instead.

(Also it seems somehow cosmically unfair that anyone is as good looking as RLT, just saying.)

I’ll admit, I was underwhelmed by how the reveal of Oswald’s survival was handled. Granted, I don’t think anyone was actually going to be shocked, but I was hoping for something a bit more dramatic than him waking up in bed in an admittedly charming chintzy sweater.  What, no surge upwards out of the water of Gotham bay, mirroring the first episode?  Not even a scene of Oswald being discovered washed up on shore?  Just, oh, hey, you’re awake, isn’t it handy that gunshot wound and the accompanying near-drowning weren’t fatal?  I realise the episode packs a lot in and the creators probably didn’t want to spend too much time on the mechanics of how Oswald survived, but it still felt like a bit of a letdown. (However, pretty much the only letdown in a stellar episode, so I’m not too fussed.)

Speaking of Oswald’s survival:  Ivy was also absolutely nowhere on my list of prospective rescuers.  I assumed, as I think a lot of fans did, that the most logical person to pulls Oswald out of the harbour would be Fish.  She believes in his potential, so she might well think he could be useful to her long-term; she may also feel like she owes him for sparing her; she’s got access to Hugo Strange’s revival technology; and it would open up some pretty heady symbolism (Fish fishing – hee – Oswald out of the water after he pushed her in, the maternal imagery of her bringing him back into the world). Jim was also a possibility, as was Gabe, or the Court of Owls (who’ve shown an interest in Oswald before), or even Selina. I never would have thought of Ivy, though, and it seems somewhat out of character for a woman (a girl, really) who’s never really shown much of an altruistic streak.  (This wasn’t just a spontaneous moment of kindness, either – she’s apparently nursed him and hidden him for weeks!) However, I’ll admit that I’m intrigued.  Oswald and Ivy make an odd pair, but one with a lot of potential.  Both shunned as children for being different, both grown ruthless largely out of necessity, and both (as we’ve now learned about Ivy) with the capacity to be selfless, even self-sacrificing.  I can see them as a team.

So, that takes care of the Nygmobblepot elements (the Nygmobbleplot, if you will) – what about the rest of “How the Riddler Got His Name”?

I think one of the standout elements, for me, is the rivalry that’s shaping up between Ed and Lucius Fox.  We’ve seen them square off a few times before, providing a foundation for their evolution into archnemeses here, and I’m really glad that the show went in the direction of making Lucius Ed’s foil, rather than Gordon.  It helps break up the recurring theme of “Jim Gordon is the central figure in everyone’s life”, which made some sense in the first season, when Jim was the only honest cop in the city (and therefore naturally the most likely to be complicating the life of your average Gotham rogue), but has started feeling increasingly forced.  More than that, Lucius fits the role perfectly.  He’s a lot more willing to pursue Ed through all the labyrinthine twists of his games than Harvey or even Jim would be.  He’s as frighteningly brilliant as Ed, and (as Chris Chalk confirmed on Twitter), Lucius recognises a similarity in the way both their minds work.  (Hell, they’ve also both scientists who’ve been on the receiving end of what Lucius has called the GCPD’s “fascistic meathead culture”, so I suspect Lucius may understand all too well some of the forces that shaped Ed.)  And Lucius hasn’t given up on Ed, which I think is fascinating – especially as Ed seems shaken, at least temporarily, by Lucius’s sympathy.  I’m so looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Their confrontation on the stairs, playing mind games for Harvey’s life, is just brilliant.  It’s a shining moment for Lucius – not just for the way he solves Ed’s puzzles, or even because he manages to best him at the riddles game by coming up with an answer Ed hadn’t thought of.  It’s the fact that Lucius actually pieces everything else together just from the few, tortured fragments that Ed lets slip.  And ohhhh, that moment where Lucius picks up that something’s wrong, that Oswald’s gone and Ed is coming unglued without him, that something happened.  So good.  

I also like how the riddles tie into the wider themes of the episode.  Ed’s answers are all solitary, in keeping with his mindset (loneliness, an individual, a reflection), whereas Lucius’s are more upbeat.  But Ed’s insistence that, “You have to come up with my answer,” mirrors what he’s been doing for the entire episode.  He knows, deep down, that he killed a part of himself when he killed Oswald, he knows he can’t really replace him, but he’s still pushing to get an answer he likes better, to get his answer.  (And of course, the answer to the third riddle being “a reflection” is fitting, as it’s normally a bit of poetic licence to say that your reflection “knows your every thought” because it mimics your expression, but for Ed, his reflection really does know – and is a manifestation of – his thoughts.  And then the “reflection” imagery becomes terrifyingly literal in the next scene when Bruce spots his clone in the mirror.  I love it.)

Incidentally, you could also call this episode “How Harvey Bullock Flirted Shamelessly with Lucius Fox for the Entire Length of an Investigation”, and it is glorious.  I’m not saying I don’t love Jim Gordon, but I’m starting to wonder if we really need him back in Gotham, at least right away.  I would watch the shit out of a show that was nothing but Lucius being a jaw-droppingly brilliant investigator and conducting Interrogation Via Weirding People Out, and Harvey, as his partner, showering him with fond looks and ten-dollar words (“Did you see how I used that word, ‘allocate’?”), fishing for compliments on his suits, and generally failing at pretending he doesn’t fancy Lucius rotten and also getting tied up occasionally because hello kink I didn’t realise I had.

I can’t wait to see where all this goes next week.

Random points:

I do have legitimate questions about why all scientists in Gotham work in big glass cages, but that’s by the by.

Robin Lord Taylor isn’t the only one showing off his acting chops here by playing with different versions of a character.  David Mazouz is amazing at getting across the subtle distinctions between Bruce, clone!Bruce, and clone!Bruce pretending to be Bruce.

You have to wonder if Harvey ever just flops down at his desk and contemplates what his life has come to, that he’s now in charge of frantically dredging the river for the guy he once arranged to have shot and dumped in the river.

Speaking of which, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Harvey (presumably) first interviewed Ed after Oswald disappeared.  Neither of them is all that keen to find him, but they’re both forced to pretend that they’re desperate to – and on top of that, they both loathe each other. That would have made for some interesting viewing.

There is no limit to my love for Ed’s fruit messenger. (Why IS he a bunch of grapes?  Who knows?  It’s brilliant.)

It’s probably a testament to how many gimmicky serial killers Gotham has that not one of the people who used to work closely with Nygma, know him as the riddle/puzzle guy, and know he’s murdered people connected him with this rash of puzzle-related murders.

It is pretty comical how much shabbier Harvey’s nicest suit is than anyone else’s suit.  It’s also a little bit heartwarming.  Remember when Harvey had a few Italian suits that had just wandered into his closet after they were confiscated during a bust?  Now, his nicest suit is clearly something he bought on his un-supplemented, honest cop’s salary, and takes good care of.  It’s this bit of meta sweetness.

This is such a weird thought, but – how did the Court duplicate Bruce’s clothes?  Do they have an entire wardrobe based on his wardrobe (how?), and when he left the house some surveillance van called in to say, “It’s the black turtleneck and the three-quarter-length black coat today”?  Or did someone run out and try and buy those clothes based on a photo, and dress clone!Bruce in them, all in about half an hour?  How do you go out shopping in a city the size of Gotham for ten minutes and manage to exactly match clothes that could have been bought a year ago?  Am I overthinking this?  (The answer is yes.)

Is it just a thing in Gotham that when you want to test someone’s loyalty and maybe kill them, you take them to a cabin in the woods?  At least Jim’s uncle isn’t trying to hold his hand romantically over the breakfast table.

[communistrupture]

Anti-Trump United Front

By Gregory W

This piece will highlight some forms of struggle that have become important since the election of Trump, and which appear to be interfering with the new administration’s attempts to unilaterally set the agenda. I am selecting a few examples that could help us think through types of resistance and how those are shaping-up currently. I will focus on efforts within the U.S., while briefly discussing emerging international opposition.

My concern is to get a sense of the overall dynamics of the conjuncture, so that those of us committed to a revolutionary left project—to communism, in whatever sense—can think about the strategic possibilities opened up by the rise of Trump and the global insurgent right. The question is: How might a revolutionary left orient itself to emerging mass movements with the goals of

     1. Encouraging the broadest possible unity of popular forces to defeat the far right, and

     2. Locating those forces likely to push furthest, creating the basis for a politics that breaks with the parameters of the neoliberal era

Framing the conjuncture

From the outset, we should insist on framing the current situation within the long-term processes of neoliberalism. Some—like those in the Democratic Party establishment—will speak about the dangers of Trump as if he were a total aberration within a basically sound political system. This interpretation is implicit in much of the discourse, e.g., statements that the Muslim Ban “goes against everything America stands for.”

It is important to unite with people in their efforts to resist Trump, while thinking critically about how we articulate problems. We should be clear that Trump and the global insurgent right share deep continuities with the preceding political trajectories (e.g., the Bush-era War on Terror, Obama’s drone assassination program and record deportations), while also representing a massive new threat. The open alliance with ethno-nationalist forces is especially alarming; this is an emergency situation, long in the making.

The very fact that previously-fringe forces of reaction are taking center stage speaks to the severity of the situation. Samir Amin has recently argued that these are “all manifestations of the depth of the crisis of the system of globalized neoliberalism” which is “imploding before our very eyes.” Whether or not the neoliberal order as we know it is coming to an end, we are witnessing a massive geopolitical shake-up characterized by uncertainty, worthy of the designation interregnum.

                                                            * * *

“…everybody recognises that the war of 1914-18 represents an historical break, in the sense that a whole series of questions which piled up individually before 1914 have precisely formed a ‘mound,’ modifying the general structure of the previous process.” – Antonio Gramsci, Notes on Italian History

The contradictions of the previous period have piled-up in a novel way, and in a way that is very obvious. In that regard, it may be useful to look back at other ruptural moments. A salient example from U.S. history is the consolidation of the Confederacy as a discrete political, economic, and military entity in 1861. This process concentrated the most thoroughly-rotten elements of the existing society, producing a new formation that was dangerous yet vulnerable—vulnerable because it was something that could be, and was, struck down.

There are major differences between the lead-up to the U.S. Civil War and the current period. But it seems that—in well-earned fashion—the Trump administration now represents the most glaring excesses of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and anti-LGBTQ sentiment. They are also poised to unleash an onslaught against workers and obstruct any attempts to deal with the ecological crisis. The massive anti-Trump protests indicate that many people perceive this exemplary rottenness. The radical left could benefit from the fact that the forces of reaction have concentrated in such a stark way; add to that the deficiencies demonstrated by the Trump administration and we may discern a strategic advantage.

Consider that George W. Bush went into office with a far more sophisticated inner circle. These neoconservatives had experience, connections, and a coherent intellectual basis, exemplified by the detailed policy designs of the Project for a New American Century. The climate of fear which prevailed in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks also made opposition difficult. Trump’s administration, by contrast, appears isolated and brittle.

                                                        * * *

From a communist standpoint, we should, again, work to achieve the broadest possible unity of popular forces in the fight against Trump. We should do this with the aim of consolidating a new societal consensus that rejects racism, xenophobia, complacency about inequality, and all of the other problems exemplified by the regime. Obviously, this has existed to a significant degree already, but we have the opportunity to re-build that consensus on a stronger foundation, and to push further than before. In order for that to happen, it seems necessary that there be near-constant waves of militant mass mobilizations capable of striking major blows.

Our goal would also be to create a strong revolutionary pole within that milieu. It seems unlikely that any of the existing left organizations in the U.S., leftover from the upsurges of past decades, would be able to balloon in size and play a leading role in the period ahead. In the U.S., the organizational far left is made up of small sects. This presents a situation very different from that of India, for example, which has a mass communist movement (including a growing Maoist insurgency), which stands a chance of dramatically shaping events if the ruling regime were destabilized.

It is difficult to plan a way forward in the U.S. context. On the other hand, one possible reading of the ongoing mass protests is that the U.S. left has come a long way in the years since the Occupy movement (still largely outside the bounds of the older revolutionary organizations).

To recap: Black Lives Matter has emerged as a consistently militant mass movement with an impressive duration. The indigenous resistance at Standing Rock may be the most acute confrontation with the repressive forces of capital and the state that the U.S. has seen in decades. The national prison strike of 2016 represented a major breakthrough. Ideologically, many things seem to have cohered through online discourse (i.e., things have been tried out over a significant period of time, and the “social justice warrior” generation is coming of age). Growing numbers of millennials have favorable views of socialism and communism, and conversely, unfavorable views of capitalism.

If there is a possibility for building the foundations for a revolutionary movement over the coming period, those who identify with such a project will have to connect up with the most radical edge of the emerging mass forces, engage in a process of fusion, and attempt to push beyond the existing parameters.

I will not attempt to explore the organizational forms that a new revolutionary movement would require. For now, I will say that most resistance which has occurred historically, and is occurring now, in the U.S., tends to push things in the orbit of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Currently, there is no significant, alternate center of gravity. That is the hard problem facing any would-be revolutionaries.  Nevertheless, there is no way to answer the question of building a revolutionary movement if we assume that every tendency toward mass movement is simply liberalism, because then there is no way to dig in and find a fault line that would constitute a starting point; and at any rate the revolutionary people must themselves be forged in the struggles ahead.

 Promising examples of resistance

1.       Protest at the site of policy implementation

The response to Trump’s executive order banning entry from seven Muslim-majority countries was swift. Protesters poured into airports in the days following the order. The response in major cities was unsurprising. But we should note the sheer scope of the mobilizations, which included many cities not usually known for protest.

In San Francisco, demonstrators actually blocked all security entrance points at the FSO international terminal. Seeing militant direct action so early during Trump’s term is suggestive. We may expect increasingly-militant action (and popular receptiveness to that) – a tendency not just to protest at the sites of policy implementation, but to disrupt. We should think in advance about how disruption can be carried out in the future. It is possible that similar tactics can be used around other policy areas, e.g., deportation.

2.       Economic Boycotts

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance called a strike during protests in New York. As Uber continued to offer service, a #DeleteUber campaign went viral. Uber was compelled to respond. Over the coming days, Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, denounced the immigration ban in increasingly stronger terms, set up a $3m legal defense fund for affected drivers, and left Trump’s Economic Advisory Council.

The case of Uber sets a precedent that companies which are seen as collaborating with the regime could face major losses. Because of the swiftness with which this unfolded, we can speculate that economic boycotts may prove to be an effective tactic. The mood in Silicon Valley, which is known for being diverse, is overall hostile to Trump. At any rate, we should watch how the bourgeoisie respond to pushes in a neo-fascist direction, and use all tools at our disposal to prevent the formation of a pro-fascist bourgeois bloc. Though recent overtures of resistance from major companies suggest that there is significant—and perhaps growing—discontent among the bourgeoisie.

 3.       Disrupting sympathetic, extra-regime forces

Debate continues about the threat of the Alt-Right (an internet-based reactionary milieu, containing significant white supremacist currents). According to some analyses, the Alt-Right is relatively fragile. Nevertheless, the movement has gained significant public exposure at a time when the far right is resurging internationally, and no doubt played some role in Trump’s election. Steven Bannon is now the Chief Advisor to the president. This is a man who headed Breitbart News, which Bannon himself described as “a platform for the alt-right.”

  Some sectors of the left (e.g. Antifa organizations) maintain that the appropriate response to white supremacists and neo-fascists is to radically disrupt their activities, denying them a platform by whatever means. This tactic was used when Milo Yiannopoulos attempted to speak at UC Berkley.

 An active subset of protesters engaged in property destruction, with damage being reported on the campus and at 15 businesses downtown. Debate has raged across the political spectrum about these actions, including on the far left. It remains to be seen how these kinds of actions will be received over the long-term. However, we may acknowledge that the protesters—including those who engaged in property damage—accomplished their immediate goal of shutting down Yiannopoulos’ talk. The Berkley example will inform decisions made by Alt-Right and related figures regarding public activity, one way or another.  

 4.       Sowing the seeds of a new armed left

The right-wing militia movement has grown in recent years. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 276 militia groups, which is a 37% increase from 2014 (202). The 2016 occupation of a national wildlife reserve headquarters in Oregon garnered significant media attention. Dramatically, armed militants led by rancher Ammon Bundy held the site for over a month.

 It is clear that there is nothing comparable on the left, which today lacks even the basic gun culture typical of the right. Nevertheless, there are some signs of a left-wing gun culture developing in the U.S.

 In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory, articles appeared reporting minorities buying guns in record numbers. After white supremacist Dylann Roof massacred 9 African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (June 17, 2015), one activist and blogger launched the #WeWillShootBack campaign, which trended in 2016; admittedly this was prior to Trump’s election, but perhaps part of an interrelated set of processes. Although much of the media attention has focused on African Americans and armed self-defense, it should also be noted that the Pink Pistols—a national organization “dedicated to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community”—has also reported recent growth. As of February 6, 2017, the organization has 45 chapters across the U.S.

 5.       The women’s march

Before considering anything else it should be stressed how large this protest was. Much attention focused on the Washington D.C. march, but some researchers have estimated that demonstrations were held in 654 U.S. towns and cities, with over four million marchers. These same researchers estimate that there were over 300,000 demonstrators abroad. This was the day after Trump’s inauguration. There are claims that this was the largest protest in U.S. history. Whether it was the absolute largest, it was undeniably big, and is likely to be seen as historic in years to come.

 The size of the march suggests that various conceptions of women’s liberation will play a major role in the struggles ahead. As with other areas, the rise of Trump does epitomize certain things—in this case the most misogynistic currents in present society. With good reason, Trump himself is seen as particularly sexist, and it is clear that sexist currents are a major component of the Alt-Right (e.g., Milo Yiannopoulos’ history of attacking feminists), as well as other sectors of Trump’s base, such as white evangelicals.

 The women’s march also comes at a time when women’s rights have been substantially under attack. Much of the focus has been on the anti-abortion political bloc’s attempts to disrupt funding to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions among other health services. We may reasonably assume that this fight will continue to intensify and that a resurgent global feminist movement will be necessary not only to combat Trump, but also to build a new revolutionary left.

6.       Exploiting the fracturing of the state

The Trump administration has not yet demonstrated an ability to build bridges to effectively leverage the state bureaucracy. In fact, the failure in this regard has constituted a key feature of the regime so far.

 We have seen “rogue” government agency Twitter accounts (the National Parks Service, NASA, and EPA); a showdown between the administration and the U.S. Deputy Attorney General, Sally Yates, over implementation of the immigration ban; polemics between the administration and municipal governments and even the Los Angeles Police Department.

 If this pattern continues, we may see an increasing fracturing of the state. That is to say, the state’s relative tendency to coalesce in its effects and overall functioning may break down, as various levels of the bureaucracy pursue diverging agendas. We are used to seeing deadlock between the Democratic and Republican parties in terms of passing legislation, and so on. But the pattern emerging under Trump (agencies in open contradiction), suggests a new dynamic.

 Resistance may often take the form of intervening at some of these sites of fracturing. For example, if the administration moves to up the ante on deportations and a city’s sanctuary status is jeopardized, it would be necessary for movement forces to focus in there, creating massive, disruptive pressure for the municipal government and involved agencies to refuse compliance. Such interventions would arguably have a high chance of success, compared to interventions against federal action conceived broadly, and would also provide experience to build up movement capacity.

 7.       International opposition

Resistance to Trump has not been confined to the U.S. We can expect that if the administration continues its current trajectory, international opposition will grow, especially considering the important role that the U.S. continues to play internationally—even if the U.S.’ hegemonic position is slipping as a multipolar set-up emerges.  Something like the international anti-Apartheid movement could develop.

 At a recent African Union summit, A.U. Commission chair, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, strongly criticized the Trump administration’s immigration ban, framing the current policy within the history of colonization and slavery: “The very country to which many of our people were taken as slaves during the transatlantic slave trade has now decided to ban refugees from some of our countries.”

Likewise, the House of Commons Speaker in the U.K. Parliament, John Bercow, is attempting to block Trump from speaking in Westminster during his upcoming state visit.

 Bercow’s maneuver comes amid anti-Trump protests across the country. This fact is significant for us. As far as the radical left is concerned, our primary orientation to international resistance must be to link up with mass forces abroad, increasing our understanding of shared struggles and developing movement cooperation. Trump has become a focal point not only for activists within the U.S. but abroad—also to the extent that comparable scenarios are playing out elsewhere, for example, in Brazil, where a radical austerity regime is attempting to dismantle the social safety net.

 Another point to consider is that the Trump administration’s performance is a de facto test case for the insurgent right, globally. These forces have been able to gain discursive support. Both Brexit and the election of Trump, however, are giving them a chance to become real players. It is not clear to what extent Trump, for example, will be able to steer the U.S. government and popular perception. But it is likely that Trump’s performance will have some bearing on the future careers of insurgent right politicians such as Marine Le Pen.