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inscapeblog · 4 years ago

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Design in context: Sustainability and sustainable design Darrel Bitema

Introduction

Sustainability as a concept entered the academic lexicon around the 1980s, and from that time on has gone to evolve substantially (Portney, 2015). Sustainability may broadly refer to economic development activity that accomplishes the needs of today without jeopardising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Portney, 2015). At its core, sustainability as a concept refers mostly to the preservation of the Earth’s biophysical environment with particular respect to the depletion and use of natural resources (Portney, 2015). This essay will explore multiple definitions behind sustainability, its characteristics, foundations, and importance. This essay will also make special references to sustainable design and its impact and applications in the world.

Defining Sustainability

Sustainability while often argued to have roots in conservation, it is not the same as environmental conservation (Portney, 2015). It refers more to finding a sort of steady-state so the Earth or at least a fragment of it can support the human population and economic growth without eventually threatening the health of humans, animals, and vegetation (Portney, 2015). The basic premise of sustainability is that Earth’s resources cannot be used, depleted, or damaged indefinitely; not only will these obviously resources run out at some point, but their exploitation largely undermines the ability of life to persist and thrive (Portney, 2015).

Perhaps the biggest difference between traditional ideas of environmental protection and sustainability is that the former tends to focus on environmental remediation and preventing very certain environmental threats while the latter tends to be far more proactive and holistic, focusing on dynamic processes over the long term (Portney, 2015). Multiple concepts and definitions of sustainability have been used to portray the many different expressions of environmental priorities, with each emphasizing a specific set of results that should be sustained. These concepts consist of ecological capacity, resource/environment, critiquing of technology, biosphere, Ecodevelopment, and no growth-slow growth (Portney, 2015). When elaborated upon ecological capacity hopes to promote the maximum and optimum ability of the Earth to support human life and systems, resource management promotes economic growth only to the extent that it does not deplete natural resources, critiquing and rejecting technology involves the rejection of the notion that science and technology will protect save and protect the world, mentions of the biosphere refers to concerns regarding the human population’s impact on the Earth’s natural resources, Ecodevelopment helps adapt businesses and economic development activities towards the realities of environmental limits and finally no growth-slow growth speaks of the limits of the Earth’s ability to support the health and wellbeing of the ever-growing human population (Portney, 2015).

Sustainability, however, does not equal responsibility. A very good example may refer to corporate social responsibility as it does not require any trade-offs (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014). Ethics, norms, and morality often permeate or pervade corporate social responsibility (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014). There is no such moral imperative that dictates what a firm should do or not do to support sustainability. No specific system is judged as right or wrong, nor are individuals ever assumed to be morally responsible to society. A sustainability lens can also be as likely applied to understanding the operations of the Mafia as to the Catholic Church (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014). While sustainability scholars can comment on excess greenhouse gas emissions creating change in climate systems, they do not have the adequate tools to judge whether the new climate regimes are relatively good or bad (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014).

Sustainability and responsibility often come face to face with the result not often being good. A prime example could refer to mining companies that create shared value when they build local schools and hospitals, a healthy, educated local workforce helps generate the profits, which are eventually redistributed back into the community (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014). However, these responsible actions may not always be sustainable, especially if the surrounding environment is degraded and traditional lifestyles are disrupted (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014). This can happen even if the local community participates in the initial decision-making.

The significance of sustainability in identifying and solving a design problem

Sustainability when relating to design can be expanded upon in terms of sustainable design. While meaning many things to many people, it can be viewed as the process of planning, contemplating, or creating in ways that maintain resources and preserve the environment for future generations (DeKay, 2011). Preservation of resources merely to minimize resource use is insufficient for sustainability. The maintenance of resources requires critical thinking in cycles and considering both resources and the outputs/pollution and their ability to be absorbed into environmental sinks such as the atmosphere or rivers (DeKay, 2011). This brings us directly to consider natural ecosystem processes, which is one perspective critical to the preservation of the environment (DeKay, 2011).

To understand how sustainability in design or, more specifically, sustainable design helps solve design problems, a brief overview of the major perspectives behind sustainable design should be discussed. These consist of behaviours, systems, experiences, and cultures. Behaviours help reduce our levels of resource consumption (to sustainable rates), creating more internal loops in our building economy and reducing our waste products and pollutants to zero for non-renewables and an absorbable rate for renewables (DeKay, 2011). Thus less is more and more becomes more in regards to less consumption and more recycling (DeKay, 2011). When referring to systems, the environment is seen as a living system (DeKay, 2011). Sustainability is concerned with keeping the living systems of the planet locally, regionally, and globally, in good health for future generations (DeKay, 2011). Sustainable Design asks us to think, contemplate, plan, and make patterns with our intelligence in ways that will fit human settlements to their ecological contexts (DeKay, 2011). Patterns can’t be measured in the same way as a more straight forward unit of measurements such as kilowatts and gallons. This requires high and new levels of creativity and consciousness, with the good news being, next to many professionals, designers are actually good at the pattern (DeKay, 2011).

The experience perspective requires us to reach far further into the capacities of being a human and to consider the physical world (the exterior) of the built and natural environment but also to consider the artistic skill behind the design and its relation to ecological aesthetics (DeKay, 2011). Cultures ask us to design our built environment as operating within the context of natural systems; at the same time, it transcends these whole systems view to embrace the cultural context of the building community and the cultures at large (DeKay, 2011). Language, stories, customs, and meanings are all around us all the time and they are constantly evolving (DeKay, 2011). To further discuss the relationship between sustainable design nature and culture, we have to understand that design requires a complex state of mind and the development of many lines of skill and thought by the designer (DeKay, 2011). We are also interested in our collective values and understanding. This helps us take action today for future generations, which is an ethical perspective only available in the context of a community, where all ethics begin (DeKay, 2011). This allows one to enter “the realm of culture” (DeKay, 2011). This realm is specifically portrayed in the relationships of human to nature. It requires us to examine how what we create has something to say or mean, which can also carry a purpose (DeKay, 2011).

These four perspectives help us understand how sustainable design performs, is an ecosystem, creates beauty and human feeling, and also conveys cultural meanings (DeKay, 2011). Performance refers to technological sustainability, which ensures applied principles of empirically-based knowledge are used to reduce resource use and pollution (DeKay, 2011). This is a design committed to “less is more” concept. The ecosystem section refers to expanding the design to include ecological patterns as design is an ecological is a literal or figurative participant of the ecosystem (DeKay, 2011). Using fewer resources or even having fewer sick days for workers does not contribute to a healthy ecosystem. Finally conveying cultural meanings helps to expand and include rich human experiences (DeKay, 2011). This is because one of design’s roles is to reveal and express sustainable technology, so people have the direct and indirect experience of the cycles and forces of nature with which design interacts (DeKay, 2011). Sustainable design can also expand to include meaning-making stories as it can embody specific myths, stories and beliefs about how society and nature are related (DeKay, 2011). When Sustainable Design manifests, reflects, and expresses ecological processes, it gives people the opportunity to become more aware of living processes and our relationships to them (DeKay, 2011).

Examples of successful application of sustainability/sustainable design in spatial design

In current years there has been an unprecedented, exponential growth in distinct academic programs especially related to the environmental dimension of sustainability in higher education, especially in this last decade (Henderson, 2012). Environmental, sustainability studies, and graduate programs are in every major scientific, engineering, and social science discipline, as well as in design, planning, business, law, public health, behavioral sciences, ethics, and even religion, are abundant and continue to grow (Henderson, 2012). Progress on campuses modeling sustainability has grown at an even faster rate. Higher education has finally embraced programs necessary for energy and water conservation, renewable energy, waste reduction and recycling, green buildings and purchasing, alternative transportation, and growing organic foods, and sustainable purchasing, which saves both the environment and money (Henderson, 2012).

Sustainability with specific reference to spatial design has given birth to what can be referred to as “green building professionals” (Henderson, 2012). All building professionals such as architects, engineers, etc., can be considered green building professionals in that they incorporate sustainability in their designs and enhance their knowledge with green ideals and techniques (Henderson, 2012). Sustainability and green building consultants take their jobs further by completely centering their expertise on integrating the environmental friendly with companies and buildings. One tool that helps overlap specialists with green building is “BIM,” or building information modelling. This global tool holds all of the pertinent data in one place, which can be used in tandem with other tools such as energy modelling (Henderson, 2012).

BIM can be referred to as a digital representation of the literal (physical) and functional characteristics of a facility; thus, it serves as a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions from the beginning, during its life cycle and inception onward (Henderson, 2012). If BIM is implemented properly, nearly every piece of information an owner needs to know about a facility throughout its life cycle can be made available digitally. One key aspect of BIM is that it allows for energy modelling to be easier and faster, providing the chance for multiple iterations of a project and the ability to make minor tweaks in the architecture that will eventually result in significant energy savings (Henderson, 2012).

Figure 1

The Randselva Bridge, which has often been described as the world’s longest bridge without drawings, is an example of BIM at its finest (“The world’s longest bridge built without drawings a reality”, 2020). To put into context of how impressive this is, the bridge was nominated for the Teklas structure award in the infrastructure category and has already won the awards for Best BIM Project and Best Infrastructure Project (“The world’s longest bridge built without drawings a reality”, 2020).

Figure 2

Another prime example of sustainability and or sustainable design’s applications in design, specifically spatial design, is “LEED,” or more specifically, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design is a green-building rating system created by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) (“What is LEED? | U.S. Green Building Council”, n.d.). Available for virtually all types of buildings and building phases, including new construction, interior fit-outs, operations and maintenance, and core and shell (“What is LEED? | U.S. Green Building Council”, n.d.). LEED provides a framework for healthy, efficient, and cost-saving green buildings. LEED certification is thus a globally recognised tool (“What is LEED? | U.S. Green Building Council”, n.d.).

In today’s current market, LEED has developed to become a household word (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010). More projects have been registered and continue to be registered, while LEED ratings increasingly ﬁnd their way into marketing brochures distributed by developers, building owners, architects, and contractors (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010). Accredited professionals proudly add “LEED” to their titles, and, most signiﬁcantly, numerous federal agencies and state and local governments now require some form of LEED certiﬁcation. Green architecture is no longer a fringe phenomenon (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010).

LEED provides numerous environmental benefits, as compared to typical building construction, LEED-certified buildings use lower percentages of material with high levels of toxicity, use less water and energy, and have a lesser overall impact on the physical landscape (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010). Another prominent benefit of building rating systems is increased commitment by owners and clients once a project is registered in a building rating system (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010). The greatest impact of green building rating systems is the increase in dialogue about sustainability, sustainable design, and green building (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010). With clients pushing designers and builders to become more educated on these issues and students are demanding much more sophisticated discussion within institutions of higher education, the result of the increase in green building, there are much more resources available both online as well as on the ground than ever before (Parr & Zaretsky, 2010).

Conclusion

In this essay, based on the evidence presented, the importance of sustainability and sustainable design was successfully argued and discussed. Special reference was specially made to its effects on architecture and green-building while also providing visual examples.

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vavuska · 4 years ago

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AUGUST 9, 2020

Body positivity and false myths about health.

Introduction

Today, the revered ideal body consists of a tall, slender physique known as the thin-ideal. This idealized image that has been constructed by the media via magazines, movies and advertising campaigns is having adverse effects on the lives of many women, such that more than half of the women are troubled by certain aspects of their appearance and are not accepting of their bodies as a whole. The preoccupation or obsession with their physical appearance has trapped Western women into subscribing to unhealthy narratives such as "I must be thin to be accepted and loved", "A thin body will make me happy", "Dieting will help me lose weight" or "Thinness equals beauty". These nagging voices often overrun women's lives and are linked to various psychological disturbances such as depression, eating disorders, anxieties, countless addictions, BDD, as well as low self-esteem (Rieves & Cash, 1996), relationship difficulties, and sexual dysfunctions (Dworkin & Kerr, 1987).

In addition to noting that people with perceived obesity (again, not medically diagnosed, just perceived) will experience microaggression, bullying, discrimination in housing, employment, education, and healthcare, Phelan notes that their interactions with healthcare professionals is directly affected by size bias.

In these studies by the Mayo Clinic, primary care physicians reported spending less time with obese patients, less communication, and open belief in stereotypes: this patient is lazy, undisciplined, and less likely to adhere to medical advice.

These negative interactions statistically raise a patient’s chances to: delay cancer screenings and routine care, avoid routine check ups, and are more likely to have unreported diagnostic errors.

This isn’t healthy. This isn’t saving or changing any lives. This is having the opposite effect, and it is happening precisely in the places where we are suppose to be receiving “help.”

What is body positivity?

Body Positivity is a social movement rooted in the belief that all human beings should have a positive body image, in doing so it challenges the ways in which society presents and views the physical body. The movement advocates the acceptance of all bodies no matter the form, size, or appearance.

I personally like the 4 Principles of Body Positivity conceptualized by Body Positivity Activist:

ACCEPTANCE OF WHAT IS: Our bodies as is (healthy, sick, skinny, fat, missing a leg, cancer survivors, and black, white, purple, blue and everything else,) deserve respect, visibility, acceptance and have intrinsic value.

REJECTION OF “BEAUTY” STANDARDS: Body-shaming of all types has been shown to yield detrimental long-term psychological effects such as negative body image, depression, anxiety, and a multitude of eating disorders. It serves no benefits, so we reject it entirely.

ACCEPTANCE OF CHANGE: Changes to our bodies—sickness, ailments, aging, pregnancy, surgery, accidents/trauma, putting on weight, losing weight, ALL of it—should be accepted, and should not diminish the value, respect, visibility of our bodies.

TOTAL INCLUSIVITY: Body positivity is inclusive of all bodies, not just those considered to be “fat” or obese,considering most humans are socialized to have negative perceptions of their bodies.

In short, body positivity and its principles are about acceptance, inclusivity, and respect. First aspect to notice: these are all social ideas, not medical ones. Why naysayers of body positivity consistently bring up the promotion of obesity when fat bodies are displayed is a mystery to me.

The second aspect of its definition one must notice: body positivity does not “promote” any body type. It is simply stating that all body types have intrinsic value. We certainly agree with this as a society. If you intentionally hurt someone’s body--again, regardless of the look, age, or state of that body--we consider that a crime. Body positivity simply concurs with this logic.

Lastly, body positivity by definition does not purport that evolution, change, and/or a healthy lifestyle is unacceptable. You can be body positive and be healthy. In fact, body positivity promotes taking care of yourself.

1 - “Your weight is entirely within your control, you are just being lazy”

As a random guy wrote on Facebook: “Body positivity is appreciating things that are beyond your control, like the colour of your eyes, skin colour, hair texture, height, etc. Weight is entirely within your control...if you eat a lot, you will get fat. Body positivity enables gluttony which is a slap to the face for underprivileged people everywhere in the world.”

That's not entirely true: gaing wight could be caused by hormones (pregnancy, menopause, ecc), genetics (for e.g. Peter Will syndrome) other medical condition linked to endocrines such as Cushing's syndrome or a malfunction of thyroid (hypothyroidism).

The involvement of genetic factors in the development of obesity is estimated to be 40–70%. Some of these obesogenic or leptogenic genes may influence obese individuals response to weight loss or weight management.

To date, more than 400 different genes have been implicated in the causes of overweight or obesity, although only a handful appear to be major players. Genes contribute to the causes of obesity in many ways, by affecting appetite, satiety (the sense of fullness), metabolism, food cravings, body-fat distribution, and the tendency to use eating as a way to cope with stress.

The strength of the genetic influence on weight disorders varies quite a bit from person to person. Research suggests that for some people, genes account for just 25% of the predisposition to be overweight, while for others the genetic influence is as high as 70% to 80%.

Obesity or overweight is not concerned about gluttony. It could depend on a lot of factors: physical and psychological. It is proved that people with depression or anxiety may experience weight gain or weight loss due to their condition or the medications that treat them. Depression and anxiety can both be associated with overeating, poor food choices, and a more sedentary lifestyle. Over time, weight gain may eventually lead to obesity.

Body positivity is about being conformable in our skins. Appreciating what we are and what we have. Body positivity does not promote any form of body, differently of what our media do.

2 — “You cold loose some weight, if you put in some dedication”

This one deleted the previous comment in which he used abused, starving people in Auschwitz to promote a diet, but I have his second one: “I meant that the problem with losing weight is just calories you eat vs calories you burn, of course the amount of calories you burn depend on hormones and a lot of other things. However, everyone can burn more calories by exercising. The Auschwitz prisoners were just an example that it is possible to lose weight, no matter the circumstances, if you REALLY put your mind to it. How you go about increasing the gap between the calories you consume and the ones you burn is up to you. Also, long term, even a 100kcal deficit per day can help you lose weight. You dont have to starve yourself to lose weight.”

Loosing weight is not always a good thing and it is not as easy like those people think.

Muscle does weigh more than fat because it is a denser product. On average, the density of fat is 0.9g/ml. The density of muscle is 1.1 g/ml. Using the averages, 1 liter of muscle weights 1.06 kg or 2.3 lbs., while 1 liter of fat weights .9 kg, or 1.98 lbs. An easier way to think of it might be: if you have an equal volumn of fat and muscle, fat is going to weigh about 80% of what the muscle weighs. This can vary due to numerous factors including race, being extremely lean or being extremely obese according to “Exercise Physiology” by William D. McArdle, et al.

The ‘take away’ points are:

Yes, muscle weighs more than fat. But….. do not assume because you started working out and you are not losing weight it is because you are increasing muscle.

The higher percent muscle you have on your body the smaller your clothing size because muscle takes up less space than fat.

On the other hand, if you are loosing weight, don't presume you are necessarly loosing fat, you could also lost muscles and this is not a good thing.

For that guy, don't eat is the solution to every weight problem. This leads to a thing called anorexia (which is one of the most painful consequences of the idealization of a “perfect body shape” myth portrayed by media). And, again, this guy really thinks that abused starving people are a good example to promote a diet. He seems to doesn't know how work human body and that if you don't eat as much to sustain your body, you will begin to feel always tired, weak and such because your body doesn't have enaugh energy to consume. We will see this in the next point.

3 — “You better have a diet”

I use the word "diet" in this context to refer to any set of restrictive food rules (barring true medical and ethical concerns). If you are feeling guilt and shame about your food choices, it is likely that you are approaching the experience of eating from a "diet mentality."

The word "diet" often has a negative connotation, so many people prefer to say they are making a “lifestyle change.” But if your lifestyle change entails rigid food rules that invoke guilt when broken, you are probably on a diet, even if in disguise. And the truth is, the diet industry wants us to "fail" so that we will continue to purchase their products. When you jump on the latest fad bandwagon, you support a multi-billion dollar industry that profits by convincing us we are inherently flawed.

Diets do not help you maintain weight loss long-term. The idea that people fail at diets because of a lack of willpower is a myth perpetuated by the diet industry. Powerful biological factors essentially ensure that your attempt at dieting will fail. Researcher Traci Mann, who has studied dieting for more than 20 years, found that there are metabolic, hormonal, and neurological changes that contribute to "diet failure."

According to Mann, "When you are dieting, you actually become more likely to notice food. . . But you don't just notice it—it actually begins to look more appetizing and tempting." Mann also stated that as you begin to lose weight, "the hormones that make you feel hungry increase" and "the hormones that help you feel full, or the level of those rather, decreases."

For the average adult in a resting state, the brain consumes about 20 percent of the body’s energy. The brain’s primary function — processing and transmitting information through electrical signals — is very, very expensive in terms of energy use.

The exact percentages are difficult to ascertain, but we have pretty good estimates of where that energy is going, though it varies by the area of the brain. In the cerebral cortex of mice, about a quarter of the brain’s energy goes to maintaining the neurons and glial cells themselves — the processes that all cells go through to remain alive. The remaining 75 percent is used for signaling — sending and processing electrical signals across the brain’s circuits. These numbers seem to be very similar in humans.

The brain is an energy-hungry organ. Despite comprising only 2 percent of the body’s weight, the brain gobbles up more than 20 percent of daily energy intake. Because the brain demands such high amounts of energy, the foods we consume greatly affect brain function, including everything from learning and memory to emotions.

Just like other cells in the body, brain cells use a form of sugar called glucose to fuel cellular activities. This energy comes from the foods we consume daily and is regularly delivered to brain cells (called neurons) through the blood.

As Mann explains, when you diet, "Your metabolism slows down. Your body uses calories in the most efficient way possible... When your body finds a way to run itself on fewer calories there tends to be more left over, and those get stored as fat."

Thus, it is no surprise that studies show that 95 percent of people will "fail" at diets. Most people can lose weight in the short-term; however, over time the majority will regain the weight they lost—and potentially gain even more. Working to suppress your weight below your natural body weight is ultimately a fruitless effort—in fact, it's an utter waste of time.

4 — “Being overweight or obese means being unhealthy”

Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at them from across a room.

According to an article in The Nutrition Journal by Dr. Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor, "Most epidemiological studies find that people who are overweight or moderately obese live at least as long as normal weight people, and often longer."

So, you can be under or normal weight, but that's doesn't make necessarly much more healthy than a overweight people. You can't say that a person is not "healthy" by judging on their physical appearance.

Some feminist points of view

Now, aks yourselves why so many cisgender etherosexual men are so upset from seeing plus size models in media? Do they really care about stranger's women heath?

NOPE!

Oh. Maybe is because they are the ones who lose something in seeing women considered not attractive for their physical appearance being accepted and admired?

YES.

Female beauty standard in media are designed for heterosexual male consumption.

As women gain economic and political power, their beauty should matter less.

Feminist scholars have contended that cultural norms and expectations encourage girls and women to be attentive to and psychologically invested in their physical appearance, which can undermine their well-being and contribute to eating dysregulation, depression, and other psychological difficulties (Cash, Ancis, & Strachan, 1997). Mary Wollstonecraft (1792), who is considered to be the founder of feminism, asserted that women's preoccupation with appearance was due to impoverished education, domestic subjugation, and vain pursuits toward which women were directed by their culture. The feminist perspective reaffirms the declaration that a woman's self-worth, ability, and livelihood are not centred on her physical appearance.

Wayne Dyer (1976/1995) elaborated on this: “many women have accepted the cultural dispatches and behave in ways that they are supposed to when it comes to their bodies. Shave your legs and underarms, deodorize yourself everywhere, perfume your body with foreign odours, sterilize your mouth, make up your eyes, lips, cheeks, pad your bra, spray your genitals with the appropriate bouquet, and falsify your fingernails. The implication is that there is something unpleasant about the natural you, the essentially human you, and only by becoming artificial can you become attractive.”

Peterson et al. (2008) posit that feelings of powerlessness may lead a woman to rely on external evaluations of her body as well as to control her eating behaviours. In contrast, feelings of empowerment may decrease the likelihood that a woman will internalize society's messages regarding attractiveness and hence develop schemas that highlight the importance of appearance. Overall, what is suggested is that feeling empowered in one's life may translate to reduced self-objectification and, in turn, to a decrease in negative evaluations of body image.

As this gross guy said:

“Those women aren't thin they look healthy, your problem with them is that their not grossly obese, I've got news for you, most men don't find grossly obese women attractive. Women decide what they want to look like and that happens to be appealing to men, the media has nothing to do with it, women have been beautifying themselves in order to attract men for millennia.”

Young-Eisendrath (1999) elaborates on the psychological damage done by this: “the belief that we must be thin in order to be successful results in feelings of insecurity about ourselves and our abilities. Obsessive control of the female body leads not to power but to shame, self-consciousness, confusion, illness, even death by eating disorders. Longing to be reassured of our worth and validity, we submit to humiliating advice from experts who tell us what and when to eat, and how to exercise, as if we were children.”

In summary, the obsession with physical appearance often distorts reality, making individuals vulnerable to a host of psychological difficulties, including depression and anxiety, and even abuse (Hooks, 1995). Seeking the ideal body type, which is thinner genetically than 95% of women, is also harmful, as the anxiety it creates about weight is focused upon unnatural thinness rather than health (Williams, 1998).

Body positivity protects women from negative feelings about their bodies: women are encouraged to refute the message of the importance of thinness and develop more empowering self-definitions based on other attributes such as their intelligence or creativity. Feminist ideology thus emphasizes that a woman's self-worth should not be determined by her physical appearance.

This male obsession about our weight, saying that we are not "healthy", is just another way to cotrol our bodies, girls!

Lisa Turner, a food writer and nutrition consultant, summed it up best: “Losing weight is not your life's work, and counting calories is not the call of your soul. You surely are destined for something much greater, much bigger, than shedding 20 pounds or tallying calories. What would happen if, instead of worrying about what you had for breakfast, you focused instead on becoming exquisitely comfortable with who you are as a person?”

Some final conclusions

So telling to every people "you are fat, lazy, ugly and need to exercise for your own health" is not only harmful but not even ever correct for all the reason above.

The person you are insulting online could be “overweight” because has a condition, is highly depressed for past suffering experience (I know girls with past of sexual abuse who used to eat to find comfort for a pain that her cannot express in other ways). Or maybe not. To make it easier for you to understand, you must stop to judge people we don't know on their physical appearance, body shape or weight and we must try to be polite, so you will not get yourselves into embarrassing situations saying stupid things like "oh, sorry... I didn't know you had this thing...", after giving unrequested health suggestion to strangers or insulting them?

Have you ever consider how harm can do on others your “caring about strangers” health? What YOU are doing is causing eating disorders and low self-esteem on others. Body positivity helps to accept ourselves and not to spend our time into stupid considerations about our bodies.

THAT'S WHY WE NEED BODY POSITIVITY!

A little list to summarize:

Don't give unrequested health suggestion: they don't ask and you are not their doctor;

Every person need to be accepted and respected as they are;

Obesity bias adversely affects a person’s likelihood to get help;

Your body works better when you thinking happy thoughts about yourself;

Negative body image DOES promote obesity. And anorexia. And a lot of other bad stuff.

#vavuskapakage #body postivity #my body my rules #my body my rights #self acceptance #self acceptation #self worth #intersectional feminism #feminismart #feminism is for everyone #everydayfeminism #inclusive feminism #everyday feminism #benevolent sexism #sexism

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didanawisgi · 4 years ago

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by Robin Koerner

“Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor of psychology who in the last year has become North America’s most popular public intellectual, has spent many decades studying tyranny and its antecedents. As a result, he frequently warns his audiences of the unparalleled destructive power of “ideological possession.”

As someone who has long been writing about the threat posed by this all too prevalent epistemic disease, I am delighted to see the attention that is now being paid to it.

Ideological possession is to healthy political discourse as scientism is to science.

Any ideology has the potential to be deadly.

The most important thing to know about diagnosing ideological possession is that you can’t do it by looking at the content of the possessing ideology.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s not the content of your belief that makes you dangerous, it’s the way you believe it.

Any ideology has the potential to be deadly when advanced by those who are so sure of their own knowledge and moral outlook that they would impose it against the protestations of those affected by it. To the ideologically possessed, the imposition can always be justified because “it’s the right thing to do,” “it will start working if we keep at it,” “the complaints are coming from bad people,” and so on. (Yes. The logic is as circular as it seems.)

So, with apologies to Dr. Peterson and an open invitation to him to amend and augment the following (he is the clinician, after all), here, for diagnostic purposes, is a list of symptoms of ideological possession—that most fatal of epistemic diseases.

Cautions and Caveats

The symptoms of ideological possession manifest differently according to the possessing ideology.

So, for illustrative purposes, the following list of symptoms is presented with example manifestations, labeled to indicate their association with so-called “progressive” (P), so-called “conservative” (C), and so-called “libertarian” (L) possessing ideologies.

For instance, the fact that someone believes the world is out to get them doesn’t necessarily mean they are paranoid.

To be fair, it is not the case that all people who present with manifestations similar to those listed below are exhibiting symptoms of ideological possession. It is, after all, quite possible to hold apparently simplistic or radical views that are very carefully arrived at with an open mind, good data, and intellectual honesty.

For instance, the fact that someone believes the world is out to get them doesn’t necessarily mean they are paranoid (B does not imply P). More interestingly, as the old saw goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that the world isn’t out to get you (P does not strictly mean B is false).

Nevertheless, believing the world is out to get you is a very good diagnostic marker for paranoia (B is highly causally correlated with P).

So with that caution, the manifestations below are offered because I have witnessed each one, and when I did so, had reason to believe it was symptomatic of at least the early stages of the onset of ideological possession.

List of Symptoms for Diagnostic Purposes

Major Symptoms

The possessed insists that anyone who disfavors a specific view or policy must also reject the basic moral value that, to the possessed individual, justifies that view or policy. This is the fallacy of the assumed paradigm. (L: “If you won’t let mothers protect their children with guns, you’re a misogynist.” C: “People who favor gun control don’t value freedom.” P: “People against regulating firearms don’t care about violence against children.”)

The possessed uses one-dimensional labels for people they’ve never met and who clearly aren’t one-dimensional as a means of dismissing the value of all their beliefs or actions. (L: “Churchill was a mass-murderer.” C: “Gandhi was a pedophile.” P: “Thatcher was a witch.”)

Related to the above, the possessed will regard a few quotes or actions by an individual as proof that the individual is evil without regard to context, appreciation that everyone is a product of his time, recognition that people change over time, or consideration of other quotes and actions that provide evidence against the claimed ill intent of the individual in question.

The possessed advocates worse treatment of people within a specified group than others. (P: “Straight white men have privilege and so should have their opinions discounted or suppressed.” L: “People who work for the state initiate violence, and it is ok to use violence against those who initiate violence.” C: “People who burn the flag are traitors and should be punished as such.”)

The possessed believes that a single principle provides answers to most important moral and political questions, disregarding reasonable moral intuitions to the contrary (precisely because they are to the contrary) and any uncertainty regarding the precise meaning or application of the principle. (P: “Equality.” L: “Non-aggression.” C: “Biblical authority.”)

When the results of an ideologically justified action are the opposite of those intended or used to justify that action in the first place, the possessed is convinced that not only is the action not the cause of any resulting problem but that more of the same action will eventually solve that problem. (P: “Venezuela needs more socialism.” C: “We need more unprovoked military involvement in conflicts that don’t involve us.” L: “Europe should open its borders immediately to everyone.”)

Minor Symptoms

The possessed enjoys opportunities to defend what he believes more than opportunities to make his beliefs more accurate.

The possessed collects data that support her beliefs instead of seeking data that would help her correct false beliefs.

The possessed offers unsolicited opinions without any empathic engagement with the recipient or any interest in whether she is in any state to be positively influenced by them.

The possessed would rather reform society’s institutions to better serve his ideology than reform his ideology to better serve people.

Immunity, Pathology, and Cure

Fortunately, the epistemic immune system of most mentally healthy people protects them from ideological possession. The core of the immune response—and indeed an effective cure—is Love of Truth, specifically the holding of Truth as the highest moral value.

Love of Truth, in fact, provides a near-perfect protection against ideological possession.

Pathologically, ideological possession may even be understood as the substitution of that highest value by another.

Love of Truth, in fact, provides a near-perfect protection against ideological possession because the disease, while deadly, has no defense against the honest admission by the afflicted of his or her symptoms.

Nevertheless, the most pernicious and subtle feature of the disease prevents the possessed from seeking treatment or treating himself: ideological possession can disguise itself in the mind of the afflicted as that very same Love of Truth that, in its authentic form, would cure it.

What conditions, then, enable those in the grip of ideological possession—whose love of Truth may have already been replaced by a counterfeit—to cure themselves?

To answer that, it is important to understand the symbiotic relationship of the disease with its host.

Although epidemics of ideological possession can be fatal to entire societies, the disease provides immediate benefits to the individual who is afflicted, such as intellectual certainty and stability, feelings of moral superiority, an apparent simplification of life’s difficult decisions and questions, avoidance of true moral responsibility, and a sense of belonging among others similarly afflicted. All of these tend to prevent self-treatment.

The painful shock activates the Love of Truth long enough to locate the cause of the pain.

Accordingly, the cures for ideological possession tend to be external and unsought. They nevertheless exist and fall into two broad categories—fast cures and slow cures.

Fast cures tend to be triggered by a catastrophic failure of one or more of the above benefits to the afflicted individual. This may occur when, despite the highly motivated perception and reasoning of the possessed individual, she experiences an unexpected, painful, and shocking outcome of an ideologically motivated action. The painful shock activates the Love of Truth long enough to locate the cause of the pain, forcing the afflicted to admit the symptoms, and therefore identify the disease for what it is, effecting the rapid cure.

Slow cures tend to involve a rising awareness by one afflicted individual of the same disease in friends or others with whom she identifies. This can be induced when the individual sees inconsistencies in those others’ words and actions that cause direct harm to others and to the stated goals of the possessing ideology. (In theory, this slow cure could be induced by observations of one’s own actions under ideological possession, but this is prevented by the self-righteousness that is felt when one acts in the grip of the disease.)

Maintaining Good Epistemic Health

To protect oneself from the terrible epistemic disease of ideological possession, epistemic nutrition and exercise are extremely effective.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.

With respect to the former, the regular consumption of great thinkers like J.S. Mill (“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”), George Orwell (“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”), and Dostoevsky (“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him”) will keep you in good epistemic health. Supplement these basics with a more varied diet of thinkers with whom you disagree on things that matter, and you’ll be in even better shape.

With respect to the latter, a comfortable regime of epistemic exercise—which takes a little time and effort but is immediately rewarding—involves maintaining real friendships with people who have very different assumptions, experiences, and declared moral and political priorities from your own.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.”

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tiakennedy-beecher · 4 years ago

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Article

The Politics Of The Hoodie

Why are some people criminalised for dressing a certain way?

The hoodie is a symbol of counter-culture involving hip hop culture, skateboarding culture and various others. It has served as a contested symbol and a battleground for identity that has been appropriated and reappropriated by different communities and individuals to signal different and distinct messages.

In 2012, images of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dressed in a black hoodie pitching Facebook’s IPO to investors had been widely distributed throughout the internet and traditional media sources. He claims that dressing the same way allows him to focus his energy on more important decisions at work.

“I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Zuckerberg.

That same year, the hoodie became a focal point of Black Lives Matter after the killing of Trayvon Martin. While Martin’s black hoodie was shown as evidence at the trial of George Zimmerman (his killer), members of BLM wore hoodies in solidarity while carrying signs with images of a hoodie.

The hood — provides a sense of anonymity by creating a shadowy cave for the face — makes the hoodie distinctive. Hooded figures from the innocent Little Red Riding Hood we meet as children to the Grim Reaper we meet later in adolescence have been present throughout history.

Beneath the aesthetic components of the hoodie lies a greater battle for identity, status and individuality in an increasingly complex and networked age. The garment has become directly involved in the normalisation of counter-culture and growing liberalisation of what is and is not deemed acceptable. The hoodie’s profound success and increased visibility cannot be discussed, without the drastic and dramatic proliferation of social media usage and online media content.

The hoodie’s normalisation cannot be erased from its roots in Black culture and its a stigma when worn by a Black individual. When thinking of the hoodie and its place in the new digital era, one must confront the cultural and stigmatic baggage when it is worn by members of different communities. What are the different cultural assumptions when looking at Trayvon Martin versus Mark Zuckerberg? Little Red Riding Hood versus The Grim Reaper? Who carries these assumptions? How do these assumptions have life and death implications? At the intersection of race and class, how has such a garment facilitated a rallying cry and a growing divide? What is the function of the internet in the proliferation and construction of the hoodie as such symbols?

The visual symbol of ‘thug’, being associated with wearing a hoodie, became reappropriated by BLM as a symbol of resistance, injustice and racial stereotyping. A study titled “All Lives Matter, but so Does Race: Black Lives Matter and the Emerging Role of Social Media,”, carried out by Nikita Carney, found that “social media allows users to actively engage and shape the discussions” offering youth from minority backgrounds “an opportunity to contest dominant ideologies”. Youth from minorities backgrounds changed their profile pictures to self-portraits in hoodies to represent a declaration of affinity and identity in the digital space.

In Silicon Valley, a predominantly white male-dominated composition of the tech industry’s leadership, the symbolic importance of the hoodie is a message of superiority. Silicon Valley has appropriated the hoodie as a symbol of identity and resistance. The hoodie represents the rejection of traditional corporate culture and the values it espouses. Harvard Business School found that nonconformity signals increased status. Explains why Facebook CEO Zuckerberg wore a hoodie during Facebook’s IPO to investors. Additionally, the use of the hoodie — traditionally seen as a symbol of the working class — by tech billionaires suggests that many social groups will create identity in opposition to other established identities.

Luxury fashion brands have slowly begun to appropriate the hoodie, and streetwear fashion in general, into its collections and major releases. The appropriation of the hoodie, traditionally seen as a symbol of the working class, by luxury consumer brands represents a shift from traditional notions of haute couture and opulent, handmade garments. How much would you be willing to pay for a hoodie?

A study titled “Online Behaviour of Luxury Fashion Brand Advocates” based around the online activity of luxury consumers found that luxury fashion and accessories “are strongly related to the self-concept because consumers use these consumer products to convey their identities, personalities, and image”.

“Luxury fashion accessories also provide opportunities for respondents to express how they want to be seen in societies and in context to societal groupings” the study found.

The origin of the hoodie is in hip hop culture. Hip hop intimately tied to Black culture and the Black experience. The appropriation of the hoodie illustrates a deeper rift. However, as hip hop has been appropriated by suburban, white teenagers so too goes the hoodie. (Risqué, I know. But true.)

The classic sweater thrown over the shoulders and tied at the chest has long been associated with country clubs, wealth and influence but, now the look is usually seen as a negative sign of elitism. Denim jeans seen as Western working wear have become so accepted that presidential candidates wear them on the campaign trail. So why is it that certain garments are acceptable on specific individuals and not on others, especially when it comes to garments that originate within communities?

Why is it that when Black individuals, specifically youth, wear hoodies, they are labelled as having ‘sinister motives' but, their white counterparts do the same they are often labelled as ‘stylish’? Why is it that when Black individuals do anything, it is labelled as ‘not good enough’ but, as soon as their white counterparts do the same thing, it is labelled as ‘revolutionary’? How is that fair? The real question is, why are Black people so different from other races? Why are Black people always found at the bottom of the barrel? Yet no, one seems to care enough to make a change.

“Loud in our laughter, silent in our sufferin’”.

I have chosen to use a casual tone for my article. The focus of my article is quite political as I have included facts as well as my own opinion. I have also provided two main different perspectives for the focus of my article. As the subject is an important matter I have kept the language quite formal in certain areas so I could get my point across. I also wanted my article to be interesting to read as well as informative so I have added links. The article is quite long so it will most likely be displayed over several pages. I would have linked to the focus of my article to current situations, such as how stop and search in the UK is based upon “fitting a description” which is often racially motivated, wearing a mask due to COVID-19 restrictions along with other topics, however my article is quite long as it is.

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okbyokaybye · 5 years ago

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Kill the Cop in Your Head

Authoritarian Leftists: Kill the Cop in Your Head

By Lorenzo Komboa Ervin - Black Autonomy, April 1996.

It's difficult to know where to begin with this open letter to the various European-american leftist (Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, in particular) groups within the United States. I have many issues with many groups; some general, some very specific. The way in which this is presented may seem scattered at first, but I encourage all of you to read and consider carefully what I have written in its entirety before you pass any judgements.

It was V.I. Lenin who said, "take from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements; we take them only and absolutely in opposition to the bourgeois culture and bourgeois nationalism of each nation". It could be argued that Lenin's statement in the current Amerikkkan context is in fact a racialist position; who is he (or the Bolsheviks themselves) to "take" anyone or pass judgement on anyone; particularly since the privileges of having white skin are a predominant factor within the context of amerikkkan-style oppression. This limited privilege in capitalist society is a prime factor in the creation and maintenence of bourgeois ideology in the minds of many whites of various classes in the US and elsewhere on the globe.

When have legitimate struggles or movements for national and class liberation had to "ask permission" from some eurocentric intellectual "authority" who may have seen starvation and brutality, but has never experienced it himself? Where there is repression, there is resistance...period. Self-defense is a basic human right that we as Black people have exercised time and time again, both violent and non-violent; a dialectical and historical reality that has kept many of us alive up to this point.

Assuming that this was not Lenin's intent, and assuming that you all truly uphold worldwide socialism/communism, then the question must be asked: WHY IS IT THAT EACH AND EVERY WHITE DOMINATED/WHITE-LED "VANGUARD" IN THE UNITED STATES HAS IN FACT DONE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT LENIN PROCLAIMS/RECOMMENDS WHEN IT COMES TO INTERACTING WITH BLACKS AND OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR?

Have any of you actually sat down and seriously thought about why there are so few of us in your organizations; and at the same time why non-white socialist/communist formations, particularly in the Black community, are so small and isolated? I have a few ideas...

I. A fundamentally incorrect analysis of the role of the white left in the last thirty years of civil rights to Black liberation struggle...

By most accounts, groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican Independence Movement "set the standard" for not only communities of color but also for revolutionary elements in the white community.

All of the above groups were ruthlessly crushed; their members imprisoned or killed. Very few white left groups at the time fought back against the onslaught of COINTELPRO by supporting these groups, with the exception of the smaller, armed underground cells. In fact, many groups such as the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Union (now known as the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA) saw the repression of groups they admired, and at the same time despised, as an opportunity to assert their own version of "vanguard leadership" on our population.

What they failed to recognize (and what many of you generally still fail to recognize) is that "vanguard leadership" is developed, it doesn't just "magically" happen through preachy, dogmatic assertions, nor does it fall from the sky. Instead of working with the smaller autonomous formations, to help facilitate the growth of Black (and white) self-organization (the "vanguard" leadership of the Black masses themselves and all others, nurtured through grassroots social/political alliances rooted in principle), they instead sought to either take them over or divide their memberships against each other until the group or groups were liquidated. These parasitic and paternalistic practices continue to this day.

The only reason any kind of principled unity existed prior to large-scale repression is because Black-led formations had no illusions about white radicals or their politics; and had no problems with kicking the living shit out of them if they started acting stupid. Notice also that the majority of white radicals who were down with real struggle and real organizations, and were actually trusted and respected by our people, are either still active...or still in prison!

II. The white left's concept of "the vanguard party"...

Such arrogance on the part of the white left is part and parcel to your vanguardist ideas and practice. Rather than seeking principled partnerships with non-white persons and groups, you instead seek converts to your party's particular brand of rigid political theology under the guise of "unity". It makes sense that most of you speak of "Black/white unity" and "sharp struggle against racism" in such vague terms, and with such uncertainty in your voices; or with an overexaggerated forcefulness that seems contrived.

Another argument against vanguardist tendencies in individuals or amongst groups is the creation of sectarianism and organizational cultism between groups and within groups. Karl Marx himself fought tirelessly against sectarianism within the working class movement of 19th century Europe. He was also a staunch fighter against those who attempted to push his persona to an almost god-like status, declaring once in frustration "I assure you, sir, I am no Marxist". It could be argued from this viewpoint that the "vanguardist" white left in the US today is generally ,by a definition rooted in the day to day practice of Marx himself, anti-Marx; and by proxy, anti-revolutionary.

Like your average small business, the various self-proclaimed "vanguards" compete against each other as well against the people themselves (both white and non-white); accusing each other of provacteurism, opportunism, and/or possessing "the incorrect line" when in fact most (if not all) are provacateurs, opportunists, and fundementally incorrect.

The nature of capitalist competition demands that such methods and tactics be utilized to the fullest in order to "win" in the business world; the white left has in fact adapted these methods and tactics to their own brand of organizing, actively re-inventing and re-enforcing the very social, political, and economic relations you claim to be against; succeeding in undermining the very basic foundations of your overall theory and all variants of that theory.

Or is this phenomenon part and parcel to your theory? In volume four of the collected works of V.I. Lenin, Lenin himself states up front that "socialism is state-capitalism". Are you all just blindly following a a dated, foreign "blueprint" that is vastly out of context to begin with; with no real understanding of its workings?

At the same time, it could be observed that you folks are merely products of your enviroment; reflective of the alienated and hostile communities and families from which many of you emerge. American society has taught you the tenets of "survival of the fittest" and "rugged individualism", and you swallowed those doctrines like your mother's milk.

Because the white left refuses to combat and reject reactionary tendencies in their (your) own heads and amongst themselves (yourselves), and because they (you) refuse to see how white culture is rooted firmly in capitalism and imperialism; refusing to reject it beyond superficial culture appropriations (i.e.-Native american "dream catchers" hanging from the rear-view mirrors of your vehicles, wearing Addidas or Nikes with fat laces and over-sized Levis jeans or Dickies slacks worn "LA sag" style, crude attempts to "fit-in" by exaggerated, insulting over-use of the latest slang term(s) from "da hood", etc), you in fact re- invent racist and authoritarian social relations as the final product of your so-called "revolutionary theory"; what I call Left-wing white supremacy.

This tragic delemma is compounded by, and finds some of its initial roots in, your generally ahistorical and wishful "analysis" of Black/white relations in the US; and rigid, dogmatic definitions of "scientific socialism" or "revolutionary communism", based in a eurocentric context. Thus, we are expected to embrace these "socialist" values of the settler/conquorer culture, rather than the "traditional amerikkkan values" of your reactionary opponents; as if we do not possess our own "socialist" values, rooted in our own daily and cultural realities! Wasn't the Black Panther Party "socialist"? What about the Underground Railroad; our ancestors (and yes, even some of yours) were practicing "mutual aid" back when most European revolutionary theorists were still talking about it like it was a lofty, far away ideal!

One extreme example of this previously mentioned wishful thinking in place of a true analysis on the historical and current political dynamics particular to this country is an article by Joseph Green entitled "Anarchism and the Market Place, which appeared in the newsletter "Communist Voice" (Vol#1, Issue #4, September 15, 1995).

In it he asserts that anarchism is nothing more than small- scale operations run by individuals that will inevitably lead to the re-introduction of economic exploitation. He also claims that "it fails because its failure to understand the relation of freedom to mass activity mirrors the capitalist ideolgy of each person for their self." He then offers up a vague "plan of action"; that the workers must rely on "class organization and all-round mass struggle". In addition, he argues for the centralization of all means of production.

Clearly, Green's political ideology is in fact a theology. First, anarchism was practiced in mass scale most recently in Spain from 1936-39. By most accounts (including Marxist-Leninist), the Spanish working class organizations such as the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and the FAI (Federation of Anarchists of Iberia) seized true direct workers power and in fact kept people alive during a massive civil war.

Their main failure was on a military, and partially on an ideological level: (1.) They didn't carry out a protracted fight against the fascist Falange with the attitude of driving them off the face of the planet. (2.) They underestimated the treachery of their Marxist-Leninist "allies" (and even some of their anarchist "allies"), who later sided with the liberal government to destroy the anarchist collectives. Some CNT members even joined the government in the name of a "united front against fascism". And (3.), they hadn't spent enough time really developing their networks outside the country in the event they needed weapons, supplies, or a place to seek refuge quickly.

Besides leaving out those important facts, Green also omits that today the majority of prisoner support groups in the US are anarchist run or influenced. He also leaves out that anarchists are generally the most supportive and involved in grassroots issues such as homelessness, police brutality, Klan/Nazi activity, Native sovereignty issues, [physical] defense of womens health clinics, sexual assault prevention, animal rights, enviromentalism, and free speech issues.

Green later attacks "supporters of capitalist realism on one hand and anarchist dreamers on the other". What he fails to understand is that the movement will be influenced mostly by those who do practical work around day to day struggles, not by those who spout empty rhetoric with no basis in reality because they themselves (like Green) are fundementally incapable of practicing what they preach. Any theory which cannot, at the very least, be demonstrated in miniature scale (with the current reality of the economically, socially, and militarily imposed limitations of capitalist/white supremacist society taken in to consideration) in daily life is not even worth serious discussion because it is rigid dogma of the worst kind.

Even if he could "show and prove", his proposed system is doomed to repeat the cannibalistic practices of Josef Stalin or Pol Pot. While state planning can accelerate economic growth no one from Lenin, to Mao, to Green himself has truly dealt with the power relationship between the working class and the middle-class "revolutionaries" who seize state power "on the behalf" of the latter. How can one use the organizing methods of the European bourgeoisie, "[hierarchial] party building" and "seizing state power" and not expect this method of organizing people to not take on the reactionary characteristics of what it supposedly seeks to eliminate? Then there's the question of asserting ones authoritarian will upon others (the usual recruitment tactics of the white left attemping to attract Black members).

At one point in the article Green claims that anarchistic social relations take on the oppressive characteristics of the capitalist ideology their rooted in. Really? What about the capitalist characteristics of know-it-all ahistorical white "radicals" who can just as effectively assert capitalistic, oppressive social relations when utilizing a top-down party structure (especially when it's utilized against minority populations)? What about the re-assertion of patriarchy (or actual physical and mental abuse) in interpersonal relationships; especially when an organizational structure allows for, and in fact rewards, oppressive social relationships?

What is the qualitative difference between a party bureaucrat who uses his position to steal from the people (in addition to living a neo-bourgeois lifestyle; privilege derived from one's official position and justified by other party members who do the same. And, potentially, derived from the color of his skin in the amerikkkan context) and a collective member who steals from the local community? One major difference is that the bureaucrat can only be removed by the party, the people (once again) have no real voice in the matter (unless the people themselves take up arms and dislodge the bureaucrat and his party); the collective member can recieve a swift punishment rooted in the true working class traditions, culture, and values of the working class themselves, rather than that which is interpreted for them by so- called "professional revolutionaries" with no real ties to that particular community. This is a very important, yet very basic, concept for the white left to consider when working with non- white workers (who, by the way, are the true "vanguard" in the US; Black workers in particular. Check the your history, especially the last thirty years of it.); i.e.- direct community control.

This demand has become more central over the last thirty years as we have seen the creation of a Black elite of liberal and conservative (negrosie) puppets for the white power structure to speak through to the people, the few who were allowed to succeed because they took up the ideology of the oppressor. But, they too have become increasingly powerless as the shift to the right in the various branches of the state and federal government has quickly, and easily, "checked" what little political power they had. Also, we do not have direct control over neighborhood institutions as capitalists, let alone as workers; at least white workers have a means of production they could potentially seize. Small "mom and pop" restaurants and stores or federally funded health clinics and social services in the 'hood hardly count as "Black capitalist" enterprises, nor are any of these things particularly "liberating" in and of themselves.

But white radicals, the white left of the US in particular, have a hard time dealing with the reality that Black people have always managed to survive, despite the worst or best intentions of the majority population. We will continue to survive without you and can make our revolution without you (or against you) if necessary; don't tell us about "protracted struggle", the daily lives of non-white workers are testimony to the true meaning of protracted struggle, both in the US and globally. Your inability or unwillingness to accept the fact that our struggle is parallel to yours, but at the same time very specific, and will be finished successfully when we as a people, as working-class Blacks on the North American continent, decide that we have achieved full freedom (as defined by our history, our culture, our needs, our desires, our personal experiences, and our political idea(s)) is by far the primary reason why the white left is so weak in this country.

In addition, this sinking garbage scow of american leftism is dragging other liberating political vessels down with it, particularly the smaller, anti-authoritarian factions within the white settler nation itself and the few [non-dogmatic and non- ritualistic] individuals within todays Marxist-Leninist parties who sincerly wish to get away from the old, tired historical revisionism of their particular "revolutionary" party.

This seemingly "fixed position", along with many other fixed positions in their "thought", help to reveal the white left's profound isolation and alienation from the Black community as a whole and its activists. Yet, many of them would continue to wholeheartedly, and retardedly, assert that they're part of the community simply because they live in a Black neighborhood or their party headquarters is located there.

The white left's isolation and alienation was revealed even more profoundly in the criticisms of the Million Man March on Washington. In the end, the majority of the white leftist critics wound up tailing the most backward elements of the Republican Party; some going as far as to echo the very same words of Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who commented on the day after the march that " You can't seperate the message from the messenger." Others parroted the words of House majority leader Newt Gingrich, who had the nerve to ask "where did our leadership go wrong?"

Since when were we expected to follow the "leadership" of white amerikkka; the right, left, or center without some type of brutal cohersion? Where is the advantage for us in "following" any of them anywhere? What have any of them done for us lately? Where is the "better" leadership example of any of the hierarchical political tendencies (of any class or ideology) in the US and who do they benefit exclusively and explicitly? None of you were particularly interested in us before we rebelled violently in 1992, why the sudden interest? What do you want from us this time?

Few, if any, of the major pro-revolution left-wing newspapers in the US gave an accurate account of the march. Many of them claimed that only the Black petit-bourgeosie were in attendence. All of them claimed that women were "forbidden" to be there, despite the widely reported fact that our sisters were there in large numbers.

"MIM Notes" (and the Maoist Internationalist Movement itself) to their credit recognize that white workers are NOT the "vanguard" class: yet because they themselves are so profoundly alienated from the Black community on this side of the prison walls they had to rely on information from mainstream press accounts courtesy of the Washington Post. And rightfully alienated they are; who in their right mind actually believes that a small, "secret" cult of white campus radicals can (or should) "lead" the masses of non-white people to their/our freedom? Whatever those people are smoking, I don't want any! I do have to say, however, that MIM is indeed the least dogma addicted of the entire white left millieu that I've encountered; but dogma addicted nonetheless.

I helped organize in the Seattle area for the Million Man March. The strong, Black women I met had every intention of going. None of the men even considered stopping them, let alone suggesting that they not go. Sure, the NOI passed on Minister Farrakhan's message that it was a "men only" march, but it was barely discussed and generally ignored.

The Million Man March local organizing committees (l.o.c.'s) gave the various Black left factions a forum to present ideas and concepts to entire sections of our population who were not familiar with "Marxism", "anarchism", "Kwame Nkrumah", "George Jackson", "The Ten-Point Program", "class struggle", etc.

It also afforded us the opportunity to begin engaging the some of the members of the local NOI chapter in class-based ideological struggle along with participating community people. Of course, it was impossible for the white left to know any of this; more proof of their profound isolation and alienation. At the time, despite our own minor ideological differences, we agreed on one point: it was none of your business or the business of the rest of the white population. When we organize amongst our own, we consider it a "family matter". When we have conflicts, that is also a "family matter". Again, it is none of your business unless we tell you differently. How would you like it if we butted in on a heated family argument you were having with a loved one and started telling you what to think and what to do?

This brings me to two issues that have bothered me since January, 1996. Both comments were made to me by a member of Radical Women at the International Socialist Organization's conference at the University of Washington. The first statement was: "I don't recognize Black people as a 'nation' like I do Native people."

My first thought was "who the fuck are you to pass judgement upon a general self-definition that is rooted in our collective suffering throughout the history of this country?"

She might as well join up with the right-wing Holocaust revisionists; for this is precisely what she is practicing, the denial of the Black holocaust from 1555 to the present (along a parallel denial, by proxy, of the genocide against other non- white nations within the US). Our nationalism emerged as a defense against [your] white racism. The difference between revolutionary Black nationalists (like Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party) and cultural nationalists (like Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) is that we see our nationalism as a specific tool to defend ourselves from groups and individuals like this ignorant person, not as an exclusive or single means for liberation.

We recognize that we will have to attack bourgeois elements amongst our people just as vigorously as we fight against white supremacists ("left", "center", or "right"). The difference is that our bourgeosie (what I refer to as the "negrosie") is only powerful within the community; they have no power against the white power structure without us, nor do they have power generally without the blessing of the white power structure itself. Our task, then, is to unite them with us against a common enemy while at the same time explicitly undermining (and eventually eliminating) their inherantly reactionary influence.

The second stupidity to pass her lips concerned our support of Black-owned businesses. I pointed out to her that if she had in fact studied her Marxism-Leninism, she would see that their existence goes hand-in-glove with Marx's theory that revolution could only ensue once capitalism was fully developed. She came back with the criticism, "Well, you'll be waiting a long time for that to happen".

Once again, had she actually studied Marxism-Leninism she would know that Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had to deal with this same question. Russia's economy was predominantly agricultural, and its bourgeois class was small. They decided to go with the mood and sentiments of the peasantry and industrial workers at that particular moment in history;..seize the means of production and distribution anyway!

Who says we wouldn't do the same? The participants of the LA rebellion (and others), despite their lack of training in "radical 'left-wing' political theory" (besides being predominantly Black, Latino, or poor white trash in Amerikkka), got it half right; they seized the means of distribution, distributed the products of their [collective] labor, and then burned the facilities to the ground. Yes, there were many problems with the events of 1992, but they did show our potential for future progress.

Black autonomists ultimatly reject vanguardism because as the white left [as well as elements of the Black revolutionary movement] has demonstrated, it errodes and eventually destroys the fragile ties that hold together the necessary principled partnerships between groups and individuals that are needed to accomplish the numerous tasks associated with fighting back successfully and building a strong, diverse, and viable revolutionary movement.

The majority of the white left is largely disliked, disrespected, and not trusted by our people because they fail miserably on this point. How can you claim to be a "socialist" when you are in fact anti-social? How do you all distinguish yourselves from the majority of your people in concrete, practical, and principled terms?

III. Zero (0) support of non-white left factions by the white left.

I've always found this particularly disturbing; you all want our help, but do not want to help us. You want to march shoulder to shoulder with us against the government and its supporters, but do not want us to have a solid political or material foundation of our own to not only win the fight against the white supremacist state but to also re-build our communities on our own behalf in our own likeness(es).

Let white Marxists provide unconditional (no strings attached) material support for non-white factions whose ideology runs parallel to theirs, and let white anarchist factions provide unconditional (again, no strings attached) material support for factions in communities of color who have parallel ideologies and goals. Obviously, the one "string" that can never be avoided is that of harsh economic reality; if you don't have the funds, you can't do it. That's fair and logical, but if you're paying these exorbitant amounts for projects and events that amount to little more than ideological masturbation and organizational cultism while we do practical work out of pocket or on a tiny budget amongst our own, it seems to me that a healthy dose of criticism/self-criticism and reassessment of priorities is in order on the part of you "professional revolutionaries" of the white left.

If the white left "vanguards" are unwilling to materially support practical work by non-white revolutionary factions, then you have no business showing your faces in our neighborhoods. If you "marxist missionaries" insist on coming into our neighborhoods preaching the "gospel" of Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc, the least you could do is "pay" us for our trouble. You certainly haven't offered us much else that's useful.

To their credit, the white anarchists and anti-authoritarian leftists have been generally supportive of the Black struggle by comparison; Black Autonomy and related projects in particular. Matter of fact, back in October of 1994 in an act of mutual aid and solidarity the Philadelphia branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) printed the very first issue of Black Autonomy (1,000 copies) for FREE. One of their members actually got a little upset when I asked how much we owed them for the print job. In return (and in line with our class interests), we allied ourselves with the Philly branch and others in a struggle within the IWW against the more conservative "armchair revolutionary/historical society" elements within its national administrative body.

Former political prisoner, SNCC member, Black Panther, and Black autonomist (anarchist) Lorenzo Komboa Ervin credits the hard work of anarchist groups in Europe and non-vanguardist Marxist and anarchist factions in the US for assisting him in a successful campaign for early release from prison after 13 years of incarceration.

In no way do we expect you or anyone else to bankroll us; what I am offering is one suggestion to those of you who sincerly want to help; and a challenge to those who in fact seek to "play god" with our lives while spouting empty, meaningless rhetoric about "freedom", "justice", "class struggle", and "solidarity". To those people I ask: Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you? Actually, a better question might be: do you think at all?

IV. Bourgeois pseudo-analysis of race and class.

It only makes sense that the white left's analysis of race and class in amerikkka would be so erroneous when you're so quick to jump up and pass judgement on everyone else about this or that, but deathly afraid of real self-criticism at the individual or collective level; opting instead to use tool(s) of self- criticism as a means to reaffirm old, tired ideas that were barely thought out to begin with or by dodging real self-criticism altogether by dogmatically accusing your critics of "red- baiting". Clearly, it is you who "red-bait" yourselves; as the old saying goes, "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones!" Action talks, bullshit walks!

Some of the more backward sections of the white left still push that old tired line "gay, straight, Black, white, same struggle-same fight!" Nothing can be further from the truth. Sure, we are all faced with the same "main enemy": the racist, authoritarian state and its supporters; but unlike white males (straight or gay) and with some minor parallels to the experiences of white women, our oppression begins at birth. This is a commonality that we share with Native people, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, and Asians.

As we grow up, we go from being "cute" in the eyes of the larger society, to being considered "dangerous" by the time we're teenagers. As this point is driven home to us day in and day out in various social settings and circumstances some of us decide, in frustration to give the white folks what they want to believe; we become predatory. This dynamic is played out in ghettos, barrios, chinatowns, and reservations across the country. Even those of us who choose not to engage in criminal activity, or aren't forced into it, have to live under this stigma. In addition, we as individuals are still viewed as "objects" and our community as a "monolith".

We then enter the work force...that is, if there are any jobs available. It is there that we learn that our people and other non-whites are "last hired, first fired", that our white co-workers are generally afraid of us or view as "competition", and that management is watching us even more closely than other workers, while at the same time fueling petty squabbles and competition between us and other non-white workers. Those of us who are fortunate enough to land a union job soon find out that the unions are soft on racism in the workplace. This only makes sense as we learn later on that unions in the US are running dogs of capitalism and apologists for management, despite their "militant" rhetoric.

Most unionized workers are white, reflective of the majority of unionized labor in the US; who constitute a mere 13% of the total labor force. This is why it is silly for the white left to prattle on and on about the labor "movement" and about how so many of our people are joining unions. That's no consolation to us when Black unemployment hovers at 35% nationally; many of those brothers and sisters living in places were "permenent unemployment" is the rule rather than the exception, and many more who find work at non-union "dead end" service industry jobs. One out of three of our people is caught up somewhere within the US criminal "justice" system: in jail, in prison, on parole, on work-release, awaiting trial, etc as a direct result.

In addition, many white workers are supportive of racist Republican politicians, such as presidential candidate Pat Buchannan, who promises to protect their jobs at the expense of non-white workers and immigrants. What is the white left or the union movement doing about all of that?

It shouldn't be suprising that the white left still preaches a largely economist viewpoint when it comes to workers generally, and workers of color in particular. This view is further evidence of not only your own deviation from Marx, but also from Lenin, by your own varied (yet similar) definitions.

Lenin recognized why the majority of Russian revolutionaries of his time put forward an economist position: "In Russia,...the yoke of autocracy appears at first glance to obliterate all distinction between the Social Democrats organization and workers' association, since all workers associations and all study circles are prohibited; and since the principle manifestation and weapon of the workers' economic struggle, the strike, is regarded as a criminal (and sometimes even as a political) offense."

In this country, the distinction between the trade unions and revolutionary organizations is abundantly clear (even if some groups like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) still fail to make the distinction themselves) and the primary contradiction within the working class is that of racial stratification as a class weapon of the bourgeoisie and capitalists against the working class as a whole.

Yet, the white Left (along with the rest of the white working class) fails to see its collaborationist role in this process. And this goes right back to what I said earlier in this writing about the need for a serious historical and cultural critique amongst all white people (and not just the settler nation's left-wing factions) that goes beyond superficial culture appropriations or lofty, dogmatic proclaimations of how committed you and your party is to "racial equality". To even consider oneself "white" or to call oneself "white" is an argument FOR race and class oppression; look at the history of the US and see who first errected these terms "white" and "Black", and why they were created in the first place.

I remember last summer, around the fourth of July, I had a member of the local SWP try to tell me that the American War of Independence was "progressive". Progressive for whom? Tell us the truth, who were the primary beneficiaries of the American Revolution? You know the answer, we all do; only a total, unrepentant reactionary would lie to the people, especially on this point.

Howard Zinn, in his work "A People's History of the United States", points out how early 20th century historian Charles Beard found that of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the US Constitution "a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most were men of wealth, in land, in slaves, manufacturing, or shipping; that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty- five held government bonds, according to records of the [US] Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds.

Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups." (Zinn, pg.90)

Come to terms with your white skin privilege (and the ideology and attitude(s) this privilege breeds) and then figure out how to combat that dynamic as part of your fight against the state and its supporters. Your continued backwardness is a sad commentary when we uncover historical evidence which shows that even before the turn of the century some of your own ancestors within the white working class were begining to take the first small steps towards a greater understanding of their social role as the white servants of capital. A white shoemaker in 1848 wrote:

"...we are nothing but a standing army that keeps three million of our bretheren in bondage...Living under the shade of Bunker Hill monument, demanding in the name of humanity, our right, and withholding those rights from others because their skin is black! Is it any wonder that God in his righteous anger has punished us by forcing us to drink the bitter cup of degradation." (Zinn, pg.222)

We can even look to the historical evidence of Lenin's time. Prior to the publishing of Lenin's "On Imperialism", W.E.B. DuBois wrote an article for the May, 1915 edition of the Atlantic Monthly titled "The African Roots of War" in which he vividly describes how both rich and poor whites benefit from the super- exploitation of non-white people:

"Yes, the average citizen of England, France, Germany, the United States, had a higher standard of living than before. But: 'Whence comes this new wealth?'...It comes primarily from the darker nations of the world-Asia and Africa, South and Central America, the West Indies, and the islands of the South Seas. It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor." (Zinn)

Yet, the self-titled "anti-racists" of the left continue on with their infantile fixation on the Klan, Nazis, and right-wing militias. Groups that they say they are against, but in fact demonstrate a tolerance for in practice. Standing around chanting empty slogans in front of a line of police seperating demonstrators from the nazis in a "peaceful demonstration" is contradiction in its purest form; both the police and the fascists must be mercilessly destroyed! As the Spanish anarchist Buenventura Durruti proclaimed back in 1936 "Fascism is not to be debated, it is to be smashed!" There is no room for compromise or dialogue, except for asking them for a last meal request and choice of execution method before we pass sentence; and even that is arbitrary!

True, tactical considerations must be examined, but if we can't get at them then and there, there is no "rule" that says we can't follow them and hit them when they least expect it; except for the "rule" of the wanna-be rulers of the Marxist-Leninist white left "vanguard(s)" who only see the fascists as competition in their struggle to see which set of "empire builders" will lord over us; the "good" whites who regulate us to the amerikkkan left plantation of "the glorious workers state", or the "bad" whites who work us as slaves until half-dead and then laugh as our worn out carcasses are thrown into ovens, cut up for "scientific purposes", or hung from lamp posts and trees. You people have yet to show me the qualitative difference(s) between a Klan/Nazi- style white supremacist dictatorship and your concept of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the context of this particular country and its notorious history. So far, all I have seen from you all is arrogance in coalitions, petty games of political one-upmanship, and ideological/tactical rigidity.

Let's pretend for a minute that one of the various wanna-be vanguards actually seizes political power. In everyone of your programs, from the program of the RCP, USA to even smaller, lesser known groups there is usually a line somewhere in there about your particular party holding the key levers of state power within a "dictatorship of the proletariat". Have any of you actually considered what that sounds like to a community without real power? Does this mean that we as Black people are going to have fight and die a second time under your dictatorship in order to have equal access to employment, housing, schools, colleges, public office, party status, our own personal lives generally?

Look at our history; over one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclaimation (the 1960's) we were still dying for the right to vote, for the right to protest peacefully, for the right to live in peace and prosperity within the context of white domination and capitalism. Today, after all of that, it is clear that the masses of our people are still largely powerless; we stayed powerless even as public schools were being desegregated and more of our elites were being elected to Congress and other positions. The same racist, authoritarian state that stripped us of our humanity was now asserting itself as our first line of defense of those hard-won concessions in the form of federal troops and FBI "observers" (who watched as we were beaten, raped, and/or killed) sent to enforce The Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As we have seen since that time, what the white power structure grants, it can (and will) take away; we can point to recent US Supreme Court decisions around voter redistricting as one part of our evidence. We can also look to the problem of mail and publication censorship in the US prison system (state and federal) that has come back to haunt us since the landmark 1960's first amendment legal challenge to the state of New York that was won by political prisoner and Black/Puerto Rican anarchist Martin Sostre. And then there's the attacks on a prisoners' right to sue a prison official, employee, or institution being made by the House and Senate. Give us one good reason to believe that you people will be any different than these previous and current "benevolent" leaders and political institutions if by some fluke or miracle you folks stumble into state power?

No "guarantees" againt counter-revolution or revisionism within your "revolutionary" party/government you say? There are two: the guns, ammunition, organization, solidarity, political consciousness, and continuous vigilance of the masses of non- white people and the truly sympathetic, conscious anti-authoritarian few amongst your population; or a successful grassroots- based revolution that is rooted in anti-authoritarian political ideas that are culturally relevant to each ethnicity of the poor and working class population in the US. Judging by the general attitudes and theories expressed by your members and leadership, we can be rest assured that it is virtually guaranteed that the spirit of 'Jim Crow' can and will flourish within a white-led Marxist-Leninist "proletarian dictatorship" in the US. It's clear to me why you all ramble on and on about the revolutions of China, Russia, Vietnam, Cuba, etc; they provide convienient cover for you all (read: escapism) to avoid a serious examination of the faults in your current analysis as well as in the historical analysis of the last thirty years of struggle in the US.

These are the only conclusions that can be drawn when you all are so obviously hostile to the idea of doing the hard work of confronting your own individual racist and reactionary tendencies. When your own fellow white activists attempted to put together an "Anti-Racism Workshop" for members of the Seattle Mumia Defense Committee, many of you pledged your support (in the form of the usual dogmatic, vague, and arguably baseless rhetorical proclaimations of "solidarity" and "commitment to racial equality") and then proceeded to not show up. Only the two initial organizers within the SMDC and two coalition members (neither affiliated with any political party) were there. Make no mistake, I have no illusions about white people confronting their own racism; but I do support their honest attempts at doing so. Here we have a situation in which an ideological leap amongst the white left in Seattle may have been initiated; yet, the all- knowing, all-seeing "revolutionary vanguard(s)" of the white left were too busy spending that particular weekend picking the lent out of their belly buttons. Are we saving our belly-button lent for the potential shortages of food that occur during and shortly after the revolution [is corrupted by the mis-leadership of your particular rigid, dogmatic, authoritarian party]?

V. The bottom line is this: Self-determination!

For most white leftists, this means that we as Black people are demanding our own seperate nation-state. Some of our revolutionary factions do advocate such a position. Black Autonomists, however, reject nation-statism [For more on that, refer to page 15 of any copy of Black Autonomy newspaper].

Regardless of whether or not the Black masses opt for a seperate homeland on this continent or in Africa, we will be respected as subjects of history and not as objects that the state, its supporters, or the white left decides what to do with.

The answer to "the Black question" is simple: It is not a question; we are people, you will deal with us as such or we will fight you and the rest of the white settler nation...by any and all means necessary! We will not be cowed or dominated by anyone ever again!

Too many times in the course of American (and world) history have our people fought and died for the dream of true freedom, only to have it turn into the nightmare of continued oppression. If the end result of a working-class revolution in the United States is the continued domination of non-white people by white "revolutionary leaders" and a Left-wing [white supremacist] government, then we will make another revolution until any and all perpetrators and supporters of that type of social-political relationship are defeated or dead! Any and all means are completely justifiable in order to prevent the defeat of our revolution and the re-introduction of white supremacy. We will not put up with another 400+ years of oppression; and I'm sure our Native and Hispanic brothers and sisters won't tolerate another 500+ years of the same ol' shit.

Ultimatly, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure"; that's the main reason I decided to publish this, as yet another humble contribution to the self-education of our people. The second reason is to, hopefully, inspire the white left to re- examine your current practices and beliefs as part of your process of self-education; assuming that you all in fact practice self-education.

Reject the traditions of your ancestors and learn from their mistakes; or reject your potential allies in communities of color. The choice is yours...

"It is a commentary on the fundementally racist nature of this society that the concept of group strength for black people must be articulated, not to mention defended. No other group would submit to being led by others. Italians do not run the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Irish do not chair Chistopher Columbus Societies. Yet when black people call for black-run and all-black organizations, they are immediatly classed in a catagory with the Ku Klux Klan." -Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), Black Power; Vintage Press, 1965.

via IWW

#kill the cop in your head #anarchist #anti racist #acab #racism #america #abolition #abolish

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thevividgreenmoss · 5 years ago

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Because of the way they are structured, social media urge us to continually devise ingenious new solutions to our identity, which is suddenly cast in sharp relief as a particular kind of recurring problem, one that needs solving by replenishing social media’s various channels with fresh content. Our presence in social media doesn’t reflect some pre-existing self; it depends on our deploying signifiers of the self, recontextualizing them and promoting them as attention-worthy. This prompts us to develop what Paolo Virno called “communicative competence” and habits of voluntary collaboration in elaborating cultural meanings—this can be seen in the programmatic interactions Facebook orchestrates around the various cultural materials it encourages users to supply.

Euphemistically described as “sharing,” this sort of work is that which advertisers have traditionally performed in consumer societies—generating or augmenting affective meanings for goods and allowing those meanings to float free. Social media seek to corner the market on the expression of individualism. Facebook wants to be the place where you feel most yourself, with the most control over how you are regarded. The online repository becomes a privileged site of the self, the authorized version that redeems the provisionality of work life and that can correct the errors and discourtesies we commit in our confrontations with the everyday in the physical world. But in return, it wants you think of yourself only in terms of what you can share on the site, what can feed its databases. It implements freedom of self-representative choices as a mode of control; our identities are “unfinished” but contained by the site, which ensures that more of our social energy is invested in self-presentation there—selling objectified fragments of ourselves as though we are consumer goods.

Through social media, a fashion-like imperative of constant, superficial self-reinvention begins to govern more and more of social life under the guise of facilitating connection and permitting ongoing self-discovery. Our Facebook updates don’t allow us to express ourselves so much as allow consumerism to express itself through us while we provide the labor that sustains it as a communication system. We are produced within that system, with an identity that is expressed through what Baudrillard labeled the “code”—consumerism’s systemized set of signifiers. On social media, we leverage the code to enhance how we are perceived, thus replenishing that code for further cycles.

Social media archives these identity-making gestures as a collection we can continually fawn over and curate. The archiving makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it makes it more tenuous. Our identity can never be so strong as to render any particular recorded gesture completely negligible; the self becomes cumulative at the same time as it is discontinuous. This has the effect of making whatever is shared through social media seem deeply significant to who we are and unsettlingly irrelevant at the same time.

...Through social media, our consumerist satisfactions are captured and fed back into the production cycle as a component of the manufacturing process, regulating supply and furnishing innovation ideas. Maurizio Lazzarato described this sort of productive communication as immaterial labor, work that “seeks to involve the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value.” This is labor that “produce[s] the informational and cultural content of the commodity.” He associates this labor generally with “audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, etc.”—jobs once typically associated with the “metropolitan” creative class, whose suitability for this sort of work came not from mastering specific skills so much as from having an appropriate taste-making habitus.

But this group’s apparent monopoly on social creativity, if it ever existed, serves only to structure immaterial labor itself as glamorous, as being somehow its own reward. The capacity to perform creative labor is naturally inherent to sociality, a fact on which social media has capitalized. Being able to build a personal identity is labor we all can perform. Everyone can express themselves—even if it’s just by clicking a thumb’s-up next to a status update. In social media, everyone can “share” their off-the-cuff thoughts and moods and secretly dream of their universal relevance, their impact.

Through immaterial labor, one’s entire being and sensibility, including one’s ability to find suitable collaborators, is enlisted in innovating and circulating cultural meanings, Rather than suspend the sense of self in the midst of work, as Fordist labor discipline demanded, immaterial laborers indulge and develop it. If, as Virno claims, post-Fordism’s great breakthrough is in how it “placed language in the workplace” and made linguistic ingenuity exploitable, it also means that work is no longer contained to the workplace or to working hours but instead takes place anywhere we happen on something to share. “Labor and non-labor,” Virno writes, “develop an identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties: language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning.” In other words, communication, consumption, and sociality serve simultaneously as work and nonwork, while substituting freely for one another. Social media supply the infrastructure for this free exchange.

...But personal brands also represent the total breakdown of the possibility of collective identity. The structure of social media encourages us to reject that possibility in favor of a pseudo-autonomy of self-creation contained entirely by commercial networks and fully subsumed by capital. The personal brand grows itself on a balance sheet, and it is not limited by any particular context. Like capital itself, it is theoretically infinite and can be represented as preferable to intersubjectivity, which is seen as constraining, an inconvenient evil.

Thus the transformational potential of the enhanced social cooperation on which the economy increasingly depends is neutralized, frittered away in ostentatious narcissism. The self-interested acquisitiveness and insatiability that capitalism encourages remain posited as natural conditions, as inescapable human nature. Our collaborative nature is expropriated, and we ourselves regard it as weakness unless we can turn it to account and make it personally advantageous. We will come to know ourselves in the same way we breathe life into brands through what marketers call “co-creation.” We will ourselves be co-created.

#*#essays

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years ago

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Smashing the Petri Dish: Abbreviated Inquiry Into Abandoning the Concept of Culture

The following are questions I have recently asked myself:

Why abandon culture? There are countless reasons to begin to challenge, seriously realign our relationship with, and perhaps abandon the concept of culture — the historic, contemporary, and projected assemblage of social dynamics and features by which we define ourselves and which collectively frame us as social groupings. Culture contains the all-tofamiliar civilized notions of expectations, projections, customs, taboos, values, morality, and rituals, as well as being anthropocentric in nature, and in general, limited as it defines the human condition of a place, time, and context only in terms of human relationships or how we use other things. The human-animal, unrestrained by such an understanding of reality, and in tune with applicable concerns of connected subsistence and curious play, needs not for culture as something to belong to or to be guided by. Instead, they are what they are, a composition of all they are connected to, yet unique unto themselves. And if relationships are fluid, unbounded by artificial concepts, and based on mutual desire, than what use or need is there for culture, except to define and confine these relationships. It might be proposed then, that our search for liberation may fall outside the parameters of the concept of culture, and in fact, may be in contradiction with its very existence. Culture, whether ethnic, religious, national, tribal, pop, alternative, or counter, acts as a definer rather than minimalizer of the borders within and between ourselves, each other, and the rest of life.

Can we challenge the current basis of our relationships to each other? For many, to abandon culture seems a project too daunting, shocking, and counter to what we may have always believed. But when we talk of undoing the entirety of civilization, are there questions too colossal to ask and material too compact to cut through? To dispute culture itself, and the physicality of its politicized manifestation, society, is to question civilization’s very premise, that we are controlled and manipulated by external forces that have an agenda ultimately incompatible with that of the individual, regardless of their desires (although there may be illusory moments of adaptability). Whether there are direct lines drawn to individuals or groups in power, or the rigid formation of patterns and textures over time, culture controls. It must, or it ceases to exist. Culture can be viewed as the summation of who we are as social beings, or the parameters we live within. Both are unsatisfactory for one attempting an uncivilized and unrestrained existence. If we are to live entirely different, than what seems foundational and what binds all of this (civilization) must be unglued. The imprint must be erased. The structures must be shattered, so as to open up the space for our unimpeded wild selves to roam.

Is there an intrinsic element of cultivation that leads to the formation of rigid socialization? The cultivation of crops and tillage of the earth created a different context in which we dwell then that of the human-animal in a pre-civilized context. With the domination of the land, stratification of society, accumulation of power, creation of economy, and religious mystification of the world, culture takes root as an all-encompassing means of control. To put it simply, when there are things to keep in order, an orderly society is preferable. With this comes the standardization of society, the suggestion of values, the implementation of codes, and the enforcement of regulations, be they physical, intellectual, or spiritual. Overt force is always adjacent (at least the allegation of it), but to convince people they are a part of an abstract grouping, and that it is superior to any other, cultural identity is a much more effective means of control. And, to convince them of their need to view contrary or deviant inclinations of the belief system as an Other, also sets the ground for the defending of culture. The abstraction of unmediated relationships might be where we start to see concepts of culture as necessary. Before (or outside this perspective) what purpose would it serve?

What about the process of domestication is inevitable in culture? Development of humans as individuals and societies in general through education, discipline, and training, seems to require obedience to societal norms, recognized largely as cultural. The goal, as with any other form of domestication, is to obtain a uniform and productive crop or yield in as efficient means as possible. Individuality and fluidity are seen as hazards to be reigned in or plowed under. Possibly, depending on how bumper a crop that season, or how much power the domesticator has accumulated, some unruly weeds are allowed to exist on the periphery, but even they are still largely controlled, if only due to the proximity to the disciplined ones.

Are socialization and control implicit in the perpetuation and acceptance of culture? Culture attempts to express and prescribe meaning to our world. This meaning is typically, and I would argue inevitably, used to obtain and maintain power and control. Culture regularly has both a conservative and progressive character to it. Both securing society and pushing it forward stability and innovation. Traditional cultural values which sustain the contemporary aims of a society’s influence and momentum are often supported while the proposed future for that society is often portrayed as intrinsic trajectories for that culture. The tension between them keeps things moving. At any particular stage of advancement in a civilization, the characteristic features of such a stage are described as its culture. So that what is described as permanent, is never so, and that which is promoted as temporary is often an illusion of change. The bottom line is, the path of a society, and the cultural aspects of it, are quite arbitrary, yet presented as predetermined. To not be acquiescent in this set-up places one, for all practical purposes, outside of cultural reality. But the rejection of culture is certainly not a rejection of social interaction. The isolated human, rarely a healthy, connected, and successfully functioning being (by any standards), is typically the product of extreme alienation and trauma. Anti-social behavior, as a specific description, is relative to the context of the society, but it describes more of a disconnect from the ability to interact then a rejection of that society’s values. One can be positively a social being (and possibly they must be) and still attempt to dismantle that society and its social characteristics, especially if their processes of social interaction are from outside that society. As interaction and relations removed from the alienated and mediated civilized methods tend to be more direct, fluid, and intuitive, without the clunky dominating, and often insincere methods we are instilled with, it seems key to any sort of positive alternative.

Ever notice the “cult” in culture? Socially, there is great pressure, from authoritarianism to tension between “civilians”, to create a mindless following that is pervasive throughout society. There develops an affiliation of accomplices who adopt complete and societal belief systems or faiths. Those who move too close to the margins are regarded and handled as outsiders, which strictly maintains the definitions applied to a culture. In addition, the progressive linearity of cultural enlightenment and refinement through intellectual and aesthetic training occurs at all levels, from fashion to philosophy. Details and motivations of our actions that are obtained, recorded, and remembered through vastly different perceptions and bias perspectives, acquired through a cultural context and individual views, are filtered, averaged, and distilled to create a prevalent, repeated response system.

But what about primitive people and useful traditions? There is probably more from the past that we have carelessly discarded than we have critically shed, especially concerning earth-based peoples from gatherer hunters to horticulturists to pre-technological agriculturists and homesteaders (in my opinion, there is less to appreciate as we move onward in domestication, but from where we are located in history, there is still some value in critically assessing small-scale cultivators for some useful aspects). Examining the dynamics and methods of these various types of groupings for everything from food procurement to social organization (not that they aren’t inevitably linked) will reveal a great diversity between peoples and the strategies and patterns that have developed, and typically, unfortunately, formed into a culture. This investigation can also reveal common threads in how situations, needs, and problems are dealt with, which we can filter through our own unique and communal desires and contexts to apply to our lives, without adopting cultural parameters and definitions. Techniques are valuable, cultural explanations are useless, unless they reveal a relationship between things that can be utilized without socializing.

Life contains some underlying stability of circumstance, yet within it is an infinite and intricate shifting, fracturing, and supporting over time. A never-ending improvisation of reinforcing and interfering, but never repeating. Even the seemingly firmly structured parts are composed of limitless variables. We might be inspired by the way the Kaluli tribe of the Papuan Plateau perceive and interact with the world. For instance, they do not hear singular sounds in the rainforest, but instead an interlocking soundscape they call dulugu ganalan, or “lifting- up-over sounding”; millions of simultaneous sound cycles, starting and ending at different points. People’s voices layer and play off of this reality, as drums, axes, and singing blend together in rhythms and patterns creating an instinctual vocabulary understood by the group.

So what might living outside of culture look like? To start with, it would be free from moral and social frameworks that limit our freedom to explore, experience, and connect. We would still be “bound” by certain biological and geographical limitations, but not those determined by any experts or leaders. Instead we would experience directly these limitations, and along with shared experiences with others, develop our own unique understandings. Collective experience would not fit into any prearranged formation or contain any unified meaning. It would be the infinite intersections of support and divergence that make up the rest of what we call life. Rather than thinking in cultural terms, perhaps we can look at other social animals for inspiration. Flocks, herds, and packs can be contemplated for their manifestations and dynamics of living patterns. Instinctual rather than intellectual in motivation and stable yet flexible in an organic manner, rather than enforced or altered through mechanistic and projected means. Is this not closer to how humans live(d) outside of civilization?

Can we smash the petri dish and abandon the stifling concept of culture for an unobstructed reality? If we are content with the role of microorganisms in a prepared nutrient media or the product of such cultivation, then life as part of a culture is acceptable, even desirable and beneficial. If we are not satisfied as bacteria, segments of tissues, or fungi in a scientist’s test tube or observation dish, then we need to begin to seriously review how we relate to, coordinate, and view ourselves, each other, and the world around us. We can trade the abstraction, symbolic, efficiency, control, and completeness of superimposed culture for the connected, direct, dynamic, openness of unalienated existence.

The choice really is ours.

#A. Morefus #anti civ #communism #anarchism #green anarchy

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the-caribbean-society-blog · 5 years ago

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Geographically speaking, the Caribbean consists of the Americas and a collection of islands surrounded by the Caribbean Sea. In theory, though this may sound simple in definition, the Caribbean space is much more complex. It is a region that many shares experiences through the encomienda system, slavery, and indentureship schemes. These heavily oppressive times, despite being a horrific period for our ancestors, gave way for creolisation and hybridisation to occur and form the “melting pot” that the Caribbean space is known for. However, this has not been an easy accomplishment for the West Indian people. Due to the influence of the colonial powers, it has been ingrained in the minds of Caribbean civilisations that European culture held superiority over all other cultures that existed. This not only led to the detachment with our own roots but also created a divide in the Caribbean society. The influence of the colonial agenda has completely shaped the way individuals think and societies function in the Caribbean. This has led to various forms of prejudice such as racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia. With this in mind, this article seeks to address the extent to which the Caribbean space is characterized by grave intolerance and mistrust at all levels.

To begin, racism can be defined as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. The origins of racism can be traced to slavery. Slavery was not an invention of the the Europeans. In fact, it had existed long before during times of the Amerindians but became a more organised system towards the end of the fourteenth century when the demand for sugar was high. This led to the European capturing Africans against their will and forcing them to work on the plantations (Plummer-Rognmo) Europeans had always held the belief that their own culture and belief systems were superior. Upon the discovery of the New World and the indigenous culture, the Europeans made it their mission to “civilise” our ancestors. This led to the preconceived notion that those who were not “light-skinned” were inferior. In the past, it was strictly forbidden for those of various races to be associated with one another. Interracial marriages and relationships were heavily punished, while some were even killed for the “offence”.

This led to the formation of racial prejudices and stereotypes which resulted in the most destructive type of discrimination because it affects a wider cross section of Caribbean society than any other form while also inhibiting development. As the lower economic stratum of society is largely made up of people of African descent, race and class discrimination are in many ways inextricably linked. For instance, black culture (literature, music, language and religious forms) has been discriminated against in the Caribbean because it emerged from a race that was historically thought to be intellectually and biologically inferior. Indigenous or creole languages based on Amerindian or African culture are secondary to the primary European based languages spoken on the islands. European dress is mainly seen as acceptable in formal settings, such as for work or Christian worship, while traditional African, indigenous, East Indian and Chinese clothing is usually worn as costumes during cultural festivals or holidays. There is also the implicit acceptance of a historically enriched association of Caribbean people of African descent with criminal activity, violence and deviance which has discouraged many from examining further and remedying the causes of their disadvantaged economic situation and destructive behaviour among black communities. Many conflicts in the Caribbean, starting with the Morant Bay Rebellion and continuing with the Caribbean- wide riots of the 1930s were as a result of racism and classism and led to considerable economic loss among Caribbean economies. Racial Tensions resulting from racist views have led tot the political divisiveness in the Caribbean countries, such as Guyana where the electorate has tended to vote along racial lines rather than for the most qualified, proven leader. Prior to the oil boom of 2019, Guyana was considered to be among the poorest, least developed Caribbean islands (Hookumchand). Despite this, the great strides made by organisations such as the Black Power Movement (1968 – 1970) has created a greater appreciation for our local cultures and has motivated the African communities to fight for their culture and their rights through the promotion of religious festivals, food, clothing and dance (Leslie). It is a stepping-stone for our society in defining our own identity and leaving our colonial roots in the past.

Additionally, another form of stereotyping and prejudice heavily present in the Caribbean is gender discrimination. “Gender discrimination is unequal or disadvantageous treatment of an individual or group of individuals based on gender.” (Langston University). Sexist prejudices extend to both men and women, however, in Caribbean societies women are usually the target of this form of prejudice. The outcome comes of sexism include sexual discrimination, sexual harassment and domestic violence, issues which are heavily present in the Caribbean space. Studies show that most sexist and gender-biased remarks are directed towards women. This is because Caribbean men have historically viewed women as the weaker sex in the European, East Indian and West African traditions. The Caribbean is usually characterized by a patriarchal society led by matriarchal households. Other sexist notions directed at women usually stem from the idea that men are scientifically stronger than men – this is evident where women are rejected as potential employees in industries where the work is physically demanding. Further to this, the labour force is where women feel the effect of sexual discrimination. Men dominate the higher paying jobs and are often denied access to equal pay for equal work. Entire families are affected as most families are single parent headed by a female. As a result, women are faced with a figurative glass ceiling that makes it difficult to attain upward social mobility and thus are faced with a lower quality of life. Sexist attitudes can deter women from starting their own businesses as many Caribbean people are of the view that male doctors, lawyer, engineers, for example, are superior to their female counterparts. This is highly evident in Trinidad and Tobago where many of the flourishing businesses in the country are spearheaded by men. Further to this, the expectations of men that women should be docile and submissive have led to the physical, sexual and verbal abuse of women at home (domestic abuse) and in the workplace. In the Caribbean, an IDB study showed that one in every three women in Trinidad and Tobago experience some for of Intimate Partner violence (Doodnath). Consequently, even in today’s contemporary society, it is evident that women are still heavily disadvantaged. Sexist attitudes infused with patriarchal values aimed towards women who refuse to the sexual stereotypes expected of them in the workplace and wider society result in many highly qualified and capable women failing to achieve their true potential and therefore, their true potential contribution to the economy.

In addition to this, the Caribbean is space has also been known to marginalise members of society based on their age. According to the World Health Organisation, “ageism is prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age”. It is an institutionalised form of discrimination that is often overlooked in many areas of work and society. Firstly, ageism in the workplace is common. It is widely accepted that the older members of the workforce are laid off and put on early retirement before other staff members. Also, work advertisements are often phrased such that it associates youth with value and potential, for example by a company stating it is “seeking young, energetic and dynamic individuals for the part of…”. In addition to this, the aged are also often blamed for the static growth or the lack of new ideas within an organisation. Younger employees are often used to attract younger customers, thus, assuming that the elderly are not appealing. A prime example of the is within the tourism industry where youths are used to advertise the Caribbean islands as an exotic destination filled with excitement and sexual appeal. Ageism can also appear within other contexts such as social or cultural aspects of life. Older people are often excluded from social activities because of the notion that they will not appreciate current music, games and dress. Additionally, many governments focus on researching illnesses and providing healthcare solutions for the young “productive” members of society (Feasley). The concept that the “geriatric generation” will eventually be afflicted with diseases and disabilities is generally accepted as a natural part of aging that cannot be ameliorated. As a result, in the Caribbean, many old age homes are established where the elderly is placed since they have become burdens on their families. Many of them remain there until there last days where their contributions to society is wasted.

As a result, the failure to recognize the contributions that older people bring to not only the workplace but also greater society excludes potential, expertise and connection. Older generations have years of experience that often surpass years of studying at prestigious universities. In a cultural setting, these older generations form the foundations of our culture. They pass along essential life lessons, traditions, cultural practices, dress, food, religion and other important elements of culture. Consequently, these older generations are a direct link to our ancestors and cultural roots which allow us to create and pass our own, unique Caribbean cultural identity. The cultural heritage of the Caribbean is of utmost importance to the Caribbean economy as it is a major attraction for tourists and locals who pay to attend various shows featuring traditional music, dance and art. Neglecting the oral traditions and other contributions the aged can make to this sector can be to the detriment of many tributary industries that may rely on it.

Finally, homophobia in the Caribbean has become a major issue. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the emergence of free thought and free will has led to those in society to become more comfortable and open about their sexual orientation. Also, an increase in the number of NGOs and support groups such as the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians All Sexuals and Gays (JFLAG) which attend to protecting gays rights has also facilitated this movement. Sexual orientation is a person's sexual identity in relation to the gender to which they are attracted. Sexual orientations include gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, and asexual (Planned Parenthood). Caribbean governments face problems in dealing with these issues because territorial laws (for example the Buggery Act of Jamaica) and many Caribbean citizens who are conservative Christians Muslims, or Hindus are against any act of homosexuality. For instance, in Jamaica, once known as the most homophobic Caribbean island, heavily promotes anti-gay prejudice. This Caribbean island has become notorious not only for its anti-gay laws, political rhetoric and murders, but also for its broad societal acceptance of severe sexual prejudice and openly hostile music (Faber). Homosexual persons are often victims of discriminatory employment practices such as bias in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination and compensation. In many islands, same-sex marriages, adoption and even inheritances are prohibited by law. Such basic human rights are infringed upon, thus, placing these individuals at a disadvantage in society. They are unable to live their lives freely when compared to the rest of society. Moreover, they may experience a lower quality of life due to the fact they are presented with a glass ceiling within the workforce so they may never be able to escape poverty. Lastly, society must also consider that sexual orientation does not completely define a person. A person’s sexual orientation has no effect on a person’s ability to excel in school or in the workplace. Despite the great strides made by the Caribbean today, the Caribbean mindset still has not accepted homosexuals as valid members of society and continue to ostracise these individuals since they do not meet societal standards. In this respect, the Caribbean can still be characterized as a region of grave intolerance as they continue to ignore the impact their oppressive views have on the lives of others

In retrospect, the Caribbean is a highly diverse space with influence from Amerindian, European, African, East Indian and Asian influences. Despite this however, it is this diversity which has created a great divide between the West Indian people. Over time, this gap has developed a mindset of grave intolerance for any issue which conflicts with the views and standards of our society. In recent times, however, the power of activism has led to the break down of these boundaries in an attempt to create an open, more accepting contemporary Caribbean space. Though, much more work is yet to be done as prejudice against persons based on their race, class, gender, age and sexual orientation still lingers within our society.

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vagabondphilosopher · 4 years ago

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Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical ‘Rerum novarum’ - 130th anniversary --- Kevin O‘Higgins, S.J.

This year marks the 130th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s ground-breaking encyclical, ‘Rerum novarum’, published on May 15, 1891. The title translates as ‘of new things’, and the encyclical itself represented a new way of presenting the Church’s teaching on social matters. It has always been the case that the Church has had plenty to say regarding the practical implications of Christian faith, especially how we ought to treat those most in need of our help. The Gospels make clear that love of God and love of neighbour go hand in hand. Even prior to Christianity, throughout the Old Testament there is a recurring reminder from the prophets that professions of faith in God must be matched by the practice of justice, showing special concern for vulnerable people, such as widows, orphans or strangers in need of hospitality.

19th Century Context

The novel aspect of Rerum novarum is the fact that it takes general principles and values found throughout Scripture and the Church’s Tradition and applies them to a very specific social context. Following the example set by Leo XIII, later pontiffs have similarly issued encyclicals addressing pressing social issues of their own particular time. In the early 1960s, for example, in the aftermath of global war and faced with the threat of nuclear confrontation, Pope St. John XXIII wrote about the need for the peaceful resolution of conflict (‘Pacem in terris’). More recently, heightened awareness of the threat posed by environmental degradation prompted Pope Francis’ encyclical ‘Laudato si’. In every instance, these encyclicals seek to show how perennial truths gleaned from Scripture and Tradition can be brought to bear on contemporary challenges.

By the late 19th century, especially in parts of the world undergoing rapid industrialisation, profound social change was the order of the day. Spectacular advances in science and technology accelerated the demise of the medieval social order. Old certainties and traditional sources of authority were being questioned and discarded. The transition from a predominantly agricultural economy to one based on industry meant, inevitably, that populations tended to concentrate in large urban settings, heralding the steady decline of a traditional rural way of life. By the time Leo XIII writes Rerum novarum, there was already an abundance of commentary on the emerging socio-economic order. Its champions highlighted the extraordinary expansion of industrial production, accompanied by an enormous increase in wealth. Critics like Karl Marx and other socialist commentators decried the concentration of much of the new wealth in the hands of the owners of industry, while workers frequently survived on meagre wages and lived in miserable conditions.

Response to new Challenges

As Pope Leo III surveyed these ‘new things’, he saw the need for a two-fold response. On the one hand, glaring inequities and injustices generated by the emerging ‘capitalist’ socio-economic order were clearly unacceptable from the perspective of Christian morality. Rerum novarum insists on the need to respect the dignity of each and every person, irrespective of the place they happen to occupy in society or the economy. He underlines the essentially social character of human nature. Even 130 years ago, it was possible to discern a tendency to absolutise individual rights and minimise social obligations. This tendency was particularly clear where property rights were concerned. While defending the right to private ownership of property, Leo XIII situates this right within the context of a prior obligation to respect the basic human rights of all members of society, especially workers and their families. The right to possess property or money does not amount to a right to use them without reference to the needs of others. The common good always has priority over the satisfaction of individual desire.

Rejecting False Solutions

The second strand in Leo XIII’s response to the new socio-economic reality is his critique of what he regards as erroneous remedies. More specifically, he rejects suggestions by 19th century socialists that private ownership of property should be entirely abolished. He also warns against those wishing to divide society into hostile classes, since the violent fragmentation of society would end up hurting everyone. Clearly, Leo XIII understands that, left unaddressed, the injustices inherent in unbridled ‘capitalism’ could provoke a revolutionary reaction that would prove even more damaging than the ills it sought to remedy.

Rerum novarum, in common with subsequent papal teaching on social matters, seeks to steer a careful course between the two extremes of atomising individualism and anonymising collectivism. The Church views society as a delicate fabric of relationships, reflecting the essentially social character of human nature. We should be wary of an increasingly intrusive State that seeks to dictate the conduct of all social relations. The State and the economy exist in order to help individuals to flourish. Any tendency to reduce human beings to the status of servants of a State or an economy must be rejected. Between the individual and the State, there are many intermediate levels of association, beginning with the family. The State must respect subsidiarity, avoiding interference in matters that are best addressed at more local levels.

Evolution of Church’s Social Teaching

These and other central themes in Rerum novarum have been developed and refined over the past 130 years, and the process continues. For example, more recent papal encyclicals, informed by advances in the human sciences, show a clearer grasp of the manner in which inequity and injustice become embedded in social structures and institutions. Whereas Rerum novarum may appear to reflect a conservative 19th century view that each individual’s place in society is preordained, nowadays we are more familiar with the notion of social mobility and the need to remove discriminatory barriers to advancement. Increasingly, such insights lead the Church to engage also in self-critique as a precondition of credibility when seeking to teach secular society how to order its house correctly.

#Rerum novarum #Pope Leo XIII #Catholic

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jeffersoneverestcrawford · 4 years ago

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On catching glimpses...

.. this piece was published on Ultra Dogme...

https://ultradogme.com/2021/02/27/on-catching-glimpses/

Welcome to the future. We ride on the last of many train cars, which is the present, traveling forward through the past, or the future. In our daily life the past may as well be the future. As we move ahead we glance around, behind, parsing glimpses of what was, what is, and what might be. Neatly enough, each calendar year acts as a container for our progress - in particular, the ends and beginnings become moments to find our bearings within an otherwise endless stream of time. So I force myself into the present, stretch my arms out, steadying the flow, just for an instant. What I notice shocks me, invigorates me beyond belief. I catch glimpses of a ‘new’ new. Even faintly, I imagine I see a new cinema, a minor and marginal cinema.

I concluded last year with a reading of Jonas Mekas’ Movie Journals, which solidified my position on the precarious nature of ‘freedom’ in amateur or personal filmmaking. The truth is that amateur movie making has not been allowed to thrive. It has instead been conglomerated by the same institutions that once supported it. And yet there are moments in which I glimpse the future of the new. Moments in which clearly, institutions and checkpoints have as little value as money - which is the mark of real freedom.

I might be imagining it, but I feel as if I am catching hints of a return to freedom. This past year I have seen and enjoyed films by the freest of artists. These are artists working without institutional support, gathering online rather than in school or at a film society. These are artists casually restructuring networks of production and dissemination, who will soon radically restructure the use of the moviemaking apparatus itself. Which would cause a minor uproar, if anyone were there to notice. I’m sure these makers will continue on their paths, embracing their freedoms, and I will continue shouting about them, in the hopes that some heads will turn. When we turn our heads, we change how the future looks.

A quote from Jonas Mekas rings around my head, a refrain, as I think about these works, about the possibilities in them: "we need less perfect but more free films”. It appears on the first page of his Movie Journals. Mekas wrote that in 1962, and it appears again here, at the start of a new year, a new decade, a limitless horizon.

The free films, the really free films, are what I hope to talk about this year. Work that is minor and on the margins. Minor and yet major, marginal and yet central. These films are a respite amid the onslaught. Films that are poems, in which we may contemplate the momentary, the fleeting, the beautiful.

I shouldn’t pretend that the characteristics which knot these works together justify a movement, or some similar nonsense, but there are characteristics which seem to justify the apparent freedom and personal nature of the works, more than anything else.

There is a freedom in the obviousness of their making, in the ways reality is woven into them - a reality which takes on the tint of dreams, of visions. This obviousness comes from the clarity with which image and structure are used, an honesty which belies any apparent obscurity. No matter how altered, these works are realities - either on screen, or in the maker's vision. They encompass meaningful daily exchanges, or life - the true substance of reality.

There are the daily sort of images that one sees everyday: the trees one passes, or the river, or a goose. Images which become our actions, a walk, a drive - a walk or drive leading to soul-crunching existential horror. There is a rawness of emotion, often personal details are strewn throughout, references to friends, family, daily life. This diary-like quality, no matter how distorted, suggests honesty in the work. This is not only amateur but specifically personal filmmaking, on a mental, emotional and physical level. The brilliant (SYN/ANTI)THESIS challenges the viewer to enter into a mental state conducive of transformation, using manipulated diary-like materials alongside a careful attention to pacing and composition. I think it shows a rare mastery of these manipulations for such a personal and hand-made film.

The technique may be all about transformation. The films themselves are about transformation, even of transformation. One may find that they are less about something and more of something. Of feelings, of faces, friends, or of trees or buildings or times of the day. They are minor observations of the soul.

The films of Lucy Hanson show a mastery of observation, and an understanding that to observe is not only to grasp at the world through our senses but also to feel it through our moods. We are porous and fragile, as are these little films. This slight mastery is displayed in Hanson’s a road trip leading nowhere, which deposits us alone, staring into the dark, left to listen to a forlorn song. This work counters common films of observation in that it pulls us into a mood rather than into a view - in fact, the view is totally obscured by night. We are pulled along into a moment, made to feel stuffy and stranded for a glimpse, stuck listening and staring into the dark for an instant. Often this is what stuns me, how complex a little work might be with so few elements. These pieces are patterns, songs, memories - and they instantly evoke happenings, rememberings, dreams.

There is consistent emphasis placed on what these things have done to us, the impact they may have had on our psyches, our bodies, our minds and hearts, how they have shaped us, even in small ways - rather than how we shaped them. I find this again in Lucy Hanson’s work, such as gliding along the river, or a sudden change in seasons. I feel so lovely as I drift beyond this lonely shack, but also drifted, and lonely, and oddly changed. I am made to understand something new about myself. Even if a change is so miniscule as to be undetectable, it still changes us. The landscape changes in dips and whirls through Nature Symphony, a little film I found right at the start of this year. It is another song of change, that bleeds into the imperfections it encapsulates. Change is personified, albeit by a hauntingly mobile mannequin in Blank Slate, another short tune of nature, of living, of coming to terms with transformation, by a great young filmmaker, Jamie Jarvis-Stores. I also sense the bleeding heart of change in the work of Enrico Alchimim, whose materials feel as if they are pulled from experience itself, more raw than real. I feel this most about Esperando Siri (Waiting for Crab) and O Espaço Entre O Céu E A Pedra (The Space Between the Sky and the Rock). These films are as scratchy as the seaward facing rocks and as calming as a breeze.

Other senses are sometimes made more active in an amateur work, as if the haptics of its personal making can place us in that experience so fully that our taste or smell is awakened. It might be because the making seems so familiar, or that the way the images are framed is more natural, less technical, less mechanical and modern. But these works are modern, in that they represent modern ideas. Still, they reject modernity, or more precisely they reject modernization. They are human in a way which modernized things cannot be. This is what makes them “amateur,” in the full, Latin, sense of the word - amatorem, a lover, made for love.

I find these makers playing with form in such sophisticated and yet un-studied ways, with an ingenuity which might reveal itself to some as amateurism in the derogatory, unprofessional way. To these degradations the works are apparently nonplussed, as steadfast as anything made with love. These films are drastically untethered and personal, and demonstrate the roving eye, ‘unruled by laws of man,’ then 90% of avant-garde or ‘non-commercial work.’ Especially when seen together, or in context, it becomes clear that these minor works are more vibrant, with purer ideas than most work that graces the screens of whatever festivals, even ‘unconventional’ ones (nevermind that ‘unconventional’ festivals have become their own traditions).

The amateur and radical movie maker need not stop at minor on the way to marginal. In fact, of late these lovers seem to trend toward ambition, their films becoming longer and longer. Creating a feature film as an individual artist, releasing it on your own, on Youtube, is no small feat. Which is why Eden Poag’s Everywhere at the End of Time, which runs over 100 minutes, can be considered anything but minor. Poag’s work deals with dementia, and uses the album of the same name by The Caretaker, as its foundation. Regarding the film itself I can echo notes I made earlier, that the form is manipulated in very natural, but also sophisticated ways. On the strength of the penultimate section alone it is hard to believe that Poag is 13, and a completely independent artist, working for herself.

I recently basked in the sickly red glow of Cecil Selwyn’s new 50 minute film Centuries of Boredom. Selwyn films themself as the pasty stranger, who sings, giggles, transforms into several iterations of an awkward daemon - seemingly all but shitting themself and masking their pasty face in excrement. A metric for me moving into this new decade is to ask “who would play this movie 10, 15 years ago?” If Anthology film, or SF Cinematheque, or Ann Arbor FF or whomever else wouldn’t have screened this without some name recognition behind it then we might deduce it is either truly bad or exceptionally radical. Horrible and radical enough to not fit in at the very institutions that consummated the original sins of the underground cinema.

Form is malleable to the free artist. Conceptions of editing and composition become more like wind in the leaves than of the tree itself, grasped at as one grasps at beauty, with an eye for passion, rather than perfection. Freedom allows one to understand that perfection is only technical achievement rendered pure in the mind of the commercially driven. The free artist has no need for perfect expression, because expression is perfect.

There is the same radicality in (SYN/ANTI)THESIS, in which Kevin Ostrica, himself the maker and protagonist, undergoes a series of ambiguous transformations. The camera becomes the stage itself, a proscenium busy transferring the vision of the filmmaker to the perspective of the viewer. The camera acts in an almost unconscious manner to direct our mental processes. The way Ostrica frames his surroundings, the lakefront, the factory or refinery, the average-seeming intersection, beckons from us a mental transformation. It is a method at once totally simple and totally radical. It might seem that I attach too much import to such a basic practice, but that’s the point, that something as fundamental as framing a shot is all it takes to transform reality. This is in direct correspondence with a phrase by Maya Deren, a master of personal moviemaking, that cinematography is the “creative use of reality.” Which is what making art is: a use of reality, putting reality to use - rather than using reality, which is advertising. This will always be the constant, brilliantly destabilizing force of amateur creation, of creation for the sake of love, that the cynical dis-use of reality, in the name of commerce, needn’t heed - that instead, for once, love actually prevails in the realm of the real.

(SYN/ANTI)THESIS and Centuries of Boredom are the boldest new films I have seen, and both are long, bogglingly intricate, neatly crafted, sensuous works, especially as works made by individual artists. Transformations of the self are presented to us as transformation of the form - that is what art does.

Let us take the moment, even briefly, to grasp at this destabilizing of the moving image. These pieces, as utterly democratic in their production as they are broad in their subject matter, represent a shedding of heavy, theatrical pretense for the personal filmmaker. No longer must the purely amateur filmmaker either toil in obscurity or learn the proper techniques and conventions. Now, they demonstrate the full spectacle of their tiny, homespun brilliance for the world, without having it crowd sourced or focus grouped. This is a revolution for everyone! Freedom for the maker! Freedom for the audience! How tiring to be constantly wary of convention, prepared to jump out and catch the unwary charlatan in the act of “rule breaking.” Now, the audience can rest, relax into a slumber of pure vision, unfiltered vision - vision so palpable one might reach out and grasp it…

This is where I leave, and push off into narrow, beautiful waters; courses set for the margins. I will resurface and correspond as often as possible to throw some light on shadowy patches, to call forth some much-needed attention to the minor and marginal cinema. These works offered me much inspiration last year, and as I intend to seek them out more actively this year, and continue to revel in their micro-cosmic delights, I think the least I can do is attempt to point them out, and to document as honestly as I can my thoughts on them.

#Movie Journal

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didanawisgi · 4 years ago

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The Diagnosis and Treatment of Ideological Possession

The Diagnosis and Treatment of Ideological Possession | Robin Koerner

by Robin Koerner

As someone who has long been writing about the threat posed by this all too prevalent epistemic disease, I am delighted to see the attention that is now being paid to it.

Ideological possession is to healthy political discourse as scientism is to science.

Any ideology has the potential to be deadly.

The most important thing to know about diagnosing ideological possession is that you can’t do it by looking at the content of the possessing ideology.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s not the content of your belief that makes you dangerous, it’s the way you believe it.

Cautions and Caveats

The symptoms of ideological possession manifest differently according to the possessing ideology.

So, for illustrative purposes, the following list of symptoms is presented with example manifestations, labeled to indicate their association with so-called “progressive” (P), so-called “conservative” ©, and so-called “libertarian” (L) possessing ideologies.

For instance, the fact that someone believes the world is out to get them doesn’t necessarily mean they are paranoid.

Nevertheless, believing the world is out to get you is a very good diagnostic marker for paranoia (B is highly causally correlated with P).

List of Symptoms for Diagnostic Purposes

Major Symptoms

Minor Symptoms

The possessed enjoys opportunities to defend what he believes more than opportunities to make his beliefs more accurate.

The possessed collects data that support her beliefs instead of seeking data that would help her correct false beliefs.

The possessed offers unsolicited opinions without any empathic engagement with the recipient or any interest in whether she is in any state to be positively influenced by them.

The possessed would rather reform society’s institutions to better serve his ideology than reform his ideology to better serve people.

Immunity, Pathology, and Cure

Love of Truth, in fact, provides a near-perfect protection against ideological possession.

Pathologically, ideological possession may even be understood as the substitution of that highest value by another.

What conditions, then, enable those in the grip of ideological possession—whose love of Truth may have already been replaced by a counterfeit—to cure themselves?

To answer that, it is important to understand the symbiotic relationship of the disease with its host.

The painful shock activates the Love of Truth long enough to locate the cause of the pain.

Accordingly, the cures for ideological possession tend to be external and unsought. They nevertheless exist and fall into two broad categories—fast cures and slow cures.

Maintaining Good Epistemic Health

To protect oneself from the terrible epistemic disease of ideological possession, epistemic nutrition and exercise are extremely effective.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.”

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zenosanalytic · 7 years ago

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Reply-Reply to NatasNocturn: Voting and the Citizen

natasnocturn replied to your post: Link

Dafuq is a protest vote? A vote for the candidate of your choosing is an expression of democracy.

Except elections are popular contests, not popularity ones. They aren’t about who we like, they’re about getting the closest we can to the policies we want. Voting for people who we know have no chance of winning, or refusing to participate, because we don’t like people who more or less agree with us and do have a chance of winning doesn’t accomplish that. By definition it can’t.

And choices have consequences. Which, yes, is a very banal thing to write and there’s basically no way to write or say it that doesn’t sound condescending but causality is A Thing and this is important to keep in mind at all times. A person may like cheesecake more than they do, say, oatmeal, but if they, for the purposes of this exceedingly limited Model, eat cheesecake every morning for breakfast and never eat oatmeal they’ll ruin both their health and their budget. So, even though they don’t like it that much and maybe even hate it, they mostly eat the oatmeal because its cheap, lasts forever, can be bought in bulk, is easy to change up, and is better for their health. And other people will call them responsible for doing that because it displays an awareness of the consequences of their choices and that’s what “responsible” means; being aware and accepting, precisely, how much control, and the nature of it, that you have in a given situation.

So what’s a protest vote? A protest vote is voting for a candidate with no consideration given to the strategic aspects of that choice, or the potential consequences of it on your society and the sort of society you want it to be. In some sense a protest vote could be said to be an irresponsible vote; a vote that rejects the precise nature of the control one has as a voter in a democracy, choosing instead to treat a vote as a personal declaration rather than a political act. Every vote matters, but they matter through addition. Their importance is cumulative. “One vote” can decide an election, but only because innumerable other “one vote”s boost it over the top. Politics is a communal field(it literally means “of the people/polis/community”) and a vote is a collective act; committed by individuals, but measured by its multitude.

You frame voting as the personal act of an individual choosing between individuals; as discrete and personal and individual in both cause and effect, and you call that an “expression of democracy”, but this is mistaken. That is a conception of voting stripped of its essentially collective nature, stripped of its consequences and policy/social context; that attempts to strip it from “politics” completely and render its meaning entirely moral. It is a conception that pretends to place voting and democracy outside of politics, of collective action and society and community life and the lives of others, and place them instead within a self-contained, limited, individualist, consumerist model of the world, where voting is not defined by its empirically likely outcomes, nor the constituencies and institutions it empowers, nor democracy by its plurality and breadth, but both by the internal -unknowable to others- intentions of each Individual voter. The vote’s consequences are erased, and how well it defines and expresses the ineffable “Meness” of the Voter is given primacy in their stead. It’s not a surprising development because this is how voting is sold to the public, just like clothes and cars and foods and everything else is. As a Brand, and not just any Brand, but Your Brand. The vote transmogrified from political choice, from “rule by the people”, to a personal Statement.

But voting is Not a Statement, anymore than those candidates are Products(even alienated from their personhood as they are by elections), regardless of how the powers that be present and attempt to sell them. Those candidates are not just actors but standins -representatives- of larger social institutions -Political Parties- with clearly defined ideologies, goals, histories by which they can be judged, and constituencies which they serve and answer to. This, behind the anger and despair, is Eichenwald’s point: that elections aren’t a choice between Candidates Red, Blue, Green, and sundry, but between whether poor children will be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick, or Not. Between whether rural communities will have cheap, reliable, land-line access to the internet, or instead be denied any access beyond their cell-phones, and be absolutely fleeced by the telcos paying for these grossly subpar and overpriced services by the minute and megabite, as a result. Between a Consumer Protection Board that protects Consumers, or one that helps Merchants cheat them; Between an Environmental Protection Agency that protects the People through Protecting the Environment, or one that actively helps to Poison both; Between a Justice Department that prevents voter-disenfranchisement and investigates civil rights violations, or a Justice Department that encourages and abets both. A vote may be attached to a candidate’s name, but what it is really for, what it really decides, is the goals to be pursued and the sorts of people to do the pursing. The constituencies to be served, and the constituencies to be ignored; or, in the case of Republican victories in the US, actively persecuted.

A “Protest Vote” denies that politics is a communal field and that political actions, while committed by individuals, are collective acts with collective consequences. A protest vote is one cast thinking it is about saying what you think rather than actively creating the society you want. As such it is one that actively undermines the practical enactment of your declared values, while simultaneously asserting that it(and you by extension) is Truer to those values and More Noble than Compromise votes for Compromise Candidates who, while less satisfying personally, still represent most of the constituencies, values, and goals you wish to promote and protect.

So what’s a protest vote? A “protest vote” is bad and counter-productive praxis, based on conservative distortions of “personal liberty” and “politics” that, by divorcing individual behavior from “responsibility” and its inescapable social, political, and causal context, hides an essentially aristocratic and reactionary agenda and worldview within the language and values of liberalism.

#natasnocturn #Politics #Society #The Individual #Voting #Protest Votes #Followups #reply replies #zA's Inveterate Politicism #zA's Pompous Philosophizing

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archiveofprolbems · 4 years ago

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The Potency of Images: Reading David Joselit’s After Art*

*David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). David Joselit’s book takes up the current condition of an accelerated and uncontrollably proliferating circulation of images, and specifically the implications of this condition for the practice and theory of art. Freed by technical forms of reproduction from being tethered to a specific medium, images of various provenances can no longer be reliably mapped into the categorial and institutional space of “Art” or, mutatis mutandis, excluded from aesthetic consideration, as being definitively “not-Art.”

In Joselit’s account, we should rather think of images—whether originating in the artworld or outside it—as something akin to monetary “currencies,” which can take mutable material and immaterial or informational forms depending on their context and function, and which foster transactions between human agents across various degrees of geographical, institutional, and cultural spaces. “Our first task in assessing what kind of currency art might be, or become,” then, he writes, “is to understand the dynamics of its circulation since by definition currencies are constituted through exchange” (3). Joselit identifies two current views of these dynamics, the “fundamentalist” and the “neoliberal.” The former ties the images of art and architecture to a specific space, site, or creative individual while the latter conceives of their status as a token indifferently engulfed by the all-inclusive circulation of goods and services through global markets. It is easy to recognize behind this pairing an underlying political argument that suggests that these are mutually reinforcing positions, with the fundamentalist view of the art-image as a reactive backlash against the nihilistic leveling of the art-image to the status of any other commodity among commodities, its whole value being equated to the price tag it garners in the gallery, at auction, or as a tax-deductible donation to a non-profit cultural institution.

Joselit, as one might expect, seeks a third way between these two antipodes: he embraces the conceptual metaphor of “currency” with a twist, without the implication of reducing art to money. How, then, might the art-image partake in, and even contribute further to the acceleration and rationalization of exchange, without simply becoming a quasi-monetary asset and token of essentially financial transactions?

Joselit’s main response focuses on the effective power of images, which shifts the value proposition for art from a unitary valuation in commodity-terms (or its unitary resistance to monetization, as in the fundamentalist position) to a diverse bundle of force-potentials to produce effects and affects. Joselit’s argument is at root Nietzschean, though mediated through more recent and intellectually fashionable French avatars such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. He puts at the center of the value-economy of circulating images their ability to serve as vehicles of power within networks and on multiple planes, to affect the bodies and emotions of the various recipients and consumers of them, and to produce effects and connections across a variety of contexts on a massive and distributed scale, inscribing themselves over and over across the body of the earth.

Indeed, their function as connective links seems, in Joselit’s account, to be the most important value-mechanism—notably, an “extramoral” form of value, since as Nietzsche famously explicated in The Genealogy of Morals, cruel and violent connections, direct forms of domination and indenture, are also value-producing (even if Joselit himself predictably celebrates mostly socially critical and progressive examples of connection through images). “I wish to look at connection as itself an affirmative object of study,” he writes. “This is what I mean by asserting that there can be a currency of exchange that is not cash, but a non-monetized form of transaction: translation between, for instance, different systems of value, or different cultures” (61). With his argument for images as a currency of human transaction, Joselit refreshes here a long-standing argument for the de-reification of art (indebted to both Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse in earlier art-critical epochs), in favor of an idea of art as an open ensemble of transactional processes of connection, with images serving as the connective tissue.

We should, however, sound a cautionary note that de-reification and the theater of process are always accompanied by their double: Kafka’s “Harrow” (“In the Penal Colony”), a torture-machine for writing the law into the flesh of prisoners, is also a de-reification and a demonetized transaction, in which the value of justice shines, like a radiant flash of gold, from the dying prisoners eyes: “How we all took in the expression of transfiguration on the martyred face! How we held our cheeks in the glow of this justice, finally attained and already passing away!” An intriguing historical point of reference for Joselit’s argument for connection-as-value, interesting above all because it is generally treated in contemporary art criticism as discreditable, is the historical employment of art for the ends of cultural diplomacy—or the subtle anti-communist propaganda—of the United States Information Agency during the Cold War.

Even if, however, this specific instance is disreputable, cultural diplomacy provides Joselit with an important example in which the images of art were made to circulate as tokens of value that were not neo-liberal and monetary but value-laden, ideological and ethico-political, and not only, as the case of abstract expressionist works that traveled abroad shows, because of their explicit “message,” but also and above all because they embodied and aesthetically communicated those value-connotations of freedom, individuality, tolerance, expressivity, and creativity that communist society was said to have suppressed and driven into the shadows. Accordingly, Joselit offers a “modest proposal” to museums that hold vast numbers of artworks, only to keep them in storerooms and vaults, like monetary treasure withdrawn from circulation and even directly serving as collateral in the complex asset portfolios—including collections, real estate, endowment investments, and interlocking relations with corporate and individual donors who have built vast fortunes through finance and other asset management: “We could take image diplomacy seriously and attempt to imagine how art can function as a currency without falling into monetization. This would involve making cultural politics a serious dimension of foreign policy” (21).

Joselit extends this basic argument by proposing an alternative to the beaux-art and modernist notions of medium (preserved even when the artist or critic articulates a rejection of “medium specificity,” as with the conceptual art of the 60s and 70s, or takes up a “post-medium condition” as the starting point of critical or creative work): the concept of format. “Formats,” Joselit writes—are dynamic mechanisms for aggregating content… [F]ormats are nodal connections and differential fields; they channel an unpredictable array of ephemeral currents and charges. They are configurations of force rather than discrete objects. In short, formats establish a pattern of links or connections. (55)His focus on format, in turn, brings in its train a refocusing of artistic image-creation from the production of new objects to new modes of formatting, of aggregating contents in circulation: “what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting” (55-56). He relates this refocusing on format, retrieval, and redeployment of images to the condition of image saturation in the contemporary world and the corollary breakdown of “Art” as a privileged means of disposing over the cosmos of images:

Under the conditions of ubiquitous images saturation, modern art’s purpose as a vanguard for the promotion of and research into how images constitute secular knowledge—and particularly self-knowledge or the anthropological knowledge of others—lost its urgency since everyone who inhabits contemporary visual culture assumes the complex communicative capacity of images to be self-evident. (88)

Under these conditions, art must be seen as a modal difference within the continuum of image circulation, not a fundamental distinction of objects, approaches, or effectiveness—as a view of art, for instance, defined by its privileged relation to certain media, or to a certain special class of “aesthetic” experiences, or to an intrinsic resistance to commodity-status and an inextirpable relation to the residues of the sacred in the modern world, would imply. “Art,” Joselit writes, “now exists as a fold, or disruption, or event within a population of images—what I have defined as a format” (89).

Joselit emphasizes that this condition of “art after Art” is not the “end of art,” a break from it in favor of other spiritual forms, as Hegel would have it, but a modulation—a new modality—of art within the cosmos of images and their embodied values. “After posits continuity and reverberation, rather than rupture,” he writes. “What results after the ‘era of art’ is a new kind of power that art assembles through its heterogeneous formats” (91). He ends on a note of aspiration rather than abandonment, projecting an ongoing critical task of tarrying with art beyond its loss of potency as a culturally privileged form of image-circulation. “One need not exit the art world or denigrate its capacities,” he concludes, “Instead, we must recognize and exploit its potential power in newly creative and progressive ways. Our real work begins after art, in the networks it formats” (96).

Source: https://crosspollenblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/21/the-potency-of-images-reading-david-joselits-after-art/

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years ago

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Really Though, Not All "Black" People Give a Fuck About "White" Dreads

“And these rhymes ain’t tight, they’re terrorish

And that girl’s not white, she’s anarchist

And we float like kites to get turbulence

Born with our throats slit

Self stitched

raised to aim over it

Soldier with no king

War with the war on me

I am more than this world lets me be"

- P.O.S “Weird Friends (We Don’t Even Live Here)"

Note: In this essay I use quotations around all idenitity categories and ideologies (for example “black” people or “white supremacy”) for the purpose of calling into question their assumed legitimacy as universal truths rather than fictitious constructs that benefit social control.

1. N.W.A (Nihilists With Attitudes)

Despite being biracial, my skin tone is socially recognized as “black” (or dark brown compared to some). Some of the music I listen to is found in, and stereotypically associated with, “black culture”. The combination of words I learned to use, inspired by my environmental upbringing, are stereotypically associated with living in “the hood”. Racialized tension and state violence follows me everywhere I go. When I walk into a store, my baggy black sweat pants and pullover black hoodie leads people to assume the worst; I have a criminal past with the potential to cause trouble. But check this out, I’m not “black”. This society assigned me this “black” identity at birth and with social pressure expects me to embrace it. But I refuse. The very concept of race has no biological or genetic validation. It is nothing more than a social construct used as a tool of oppression. The complexity of my individuality can not be represented by “black” identity nor “cultural blackness”. Identities are fixed, generalized representations of people and dictated by social norms, expectations and stereotypes. They are standardized by capitalism and industrial civilization and assumed to be universal and beyond questioning. When I walk into a store I get the stares, all based on the shared concern that I just might steal some shit. But to be honest, they’re probably right. I just might. Because the social placement of my assigned identity is located near the bottom which means my access to resources is limited. So illegalism is how I create access to resources without vote-begging for equality. Under capitalism, equality can not exist. And I gotta' survive, so I’m gonna' do what I gotta do. And that doesn’t mean pushin’ poison and enabling intoxication culture. The dope game is a trap set up by the state, so I just gotta' be more creative and determined.

The socially constructed groups (“black", “man") that society identifies me as are ones assigned to me at birth by a system that benefits from my identity categorization- a system I reject all together. This is the same system that constructs “black” as inferior to “white", “female” as inferior to “male”, “animal" as inferior to “human". I will not deny the very real experiences of sexism and racism that people face, nor the reality of institutionalized racism and sexism that wages poverty and war on those of us racialized and/or gendered as “inferior”. “White supremacy”, “male supremacy”, and this capitalist society as a whole needs to be destroyed. And I refuse to embrace any of its identity mechanisms of division as personal forms of resistance.

Instead, I embrace criminality against the laws of identity, as well as the agents of identity reinforcement responsible for normalizing the rigid boundaries of identity. I reject the liberal narrative that I, as a “black man”, deserve rights in this country equal to the “white man”. “Black man” doesn’t represent me, and I refuse to assimilate into those roles. I want to see them destroyed, as well as the logic that creates them. My existence embodies the negation of social assimilation and of the prison of identity-based representation, recognizing individuality without measure as the sincerest form of anarchy. “Black man” identity ain't got shit on me.

2. Keep Your “White” Dreads. Keep Fuckin’ Shit Up.

I don’t care about your culturally inspired dreads. And I don’t care about “white” people's dreads neither. I got better shit to do than chasin’ people around with a pair of scissors tryin' to give them a free haircut. And skin tone doesn’t necessitate conformity to any particular culture, let alone culture at all. As a matter of fact, fuck culture. I never had a say in being assigned this “black” culture that I am assumed to be represented by. Is knowing my African roots gonna save me from attacks by armed, “white supremacist” militias? Or the state? And it seems that children are often coerced into cultures at birth by people who assume they know what’s best for them. That, in and of itself, constitutes a form of hierarchical authority that can also burn in a fire with socially coerced identity and assigned roles.

Like race and gender, culture is also a social construct only maintained by those willing to validate it with their own subservience to it. And some folks are never permitted to know anything outside their culture - except maybe all the problems with other cultures. This sense of nationalism seems immune to critique from leftists and most anarchists. “White supremacy” and nationalism are widely called out and confronted but since when did “black supremacy” and nationalism become acceptable? Don’t get me wrong, “black supremacy” and “black power” are not backed up by the state, and came as a legitimate response to white power and supremacy.

But reproducing more identity-based supremacy is counter-productive and reformist..“Black power” limits itself to identity-based empowerment without confronting the foundation of assigned identity to begin with. And don’t act like “black nationalist” tendencies don’t exist within some anarchist circles. I'm side eyein' y’all wack-ass identity politicians who power play “white” anarchists with guilt. Y’all got them policing others- promoting the liberal, rights-based narrative of all “black” people as victims.

I ain't tryin' to waste time reforming shit. I ain't tryin' to embrace the establishment’s prescribed identity and then demand rights for it. I demand nothing from this system- I wanna' destroy everything that gives it validation, including the identity assigned to maintain its class binary. “Black nationalism” is not a solution to eliminating racism. It reinforces racism as a cultural and institutionalized system by validating the “white” and “black” racial and class binary. And if we tryin' to all get free, why embrace the same identities that were constructed to divide and stratify us? And how we gonna' take back and determine our lives if we still stuck in the shackles of internalized victimhood?

Those who maintain cultures on a traditional basis are in positions of power which constitutes a hierarchy between those who embrace that particular culture and those who refuse. I not only refuse “American culture” and all its social constructs and values, but all cultures that govern the mind. Cultures discourage freethinking and limitless exploration of one’s individual potential in life. Rather than allowing individuals to interact with the world and develop an opinion based on their own independent experiences, a preconceived narrative of life is imposed and justified as “truth” by those in positions of manipulative power. To exist, cultures rely on the subjugation of a group of people homogenized based on socially constructed roles and characteristics. I not only find cultures and their desire for control and domination personally undesirable, but I have learned that their power drops anchor in the mind of the subservient. Those who either don’t have the courage or accessible inspiration to think for themselves, or who actively promote culture and nationalism always turn to manipulation tactics like shaming and guilting others who refuse to assimilate. These cultural-based nationalist type groups do not reflect a universal truth or reality, nor do they represent all the people they claim to.

So hey “white” reader, “white dreads” are not culturally appropriating. No culture holds a monopoly on a hairstyle. Culture is a state of mind that can only manifest materially with rigid boundaries of essentialism which are protected by the laws of identity and those who enforce them. Are your dreads out of bounds with the laws of identity? Did the identity police come and charge you with disrespecting the laws of essentialism? Did you reject their self-appointed authority? Then you might be a criminal worth knowing. In the context of capitalism, if you tryin' to sell dreaded hair as a fashion commodity, that’s not culturally appropriating. But you still might get your windows smashed for being a fucking capitalist. Capitalism aside, if your dreadlocks are smelly, dried-sweat strands of tangled and/or matted hair, rock that shit. My dreads are too. Fuck conventional beauty standards, capitalism, and those who defend both.

3. Another Word for “White Ally” is Still “Coward”.

I don’t care if you identify as/call yourself a community-approved “white ally”. But I will assume that: 1. You are incapable of thinking for yourself. 2. You are a coward. 3. You will hesitate under fire when I ask you to hand me a molotov cocktail- fearful that you will be doing “the community” a disservice. Assuming you will be beside me in the streets or somewhere where tensions are high, I don’t want you to stand behind me and ask me what you should do. I don’t want to be your leader. Leadership- isn't that the hierarchical complex we are fighting against in the first place?

As my friend, will we hang out and have discussions freely or will you spend your time hesitating and stumbling over your words trying to keep your PC terminology in check for fear of offending me? If you say something fucked up, am I incapable of being considerate of the world you live in and calmly asking you to think about what you said? Will you police my other “white” friends with your expertise on anti-racism, in hopes of gaining my applause and approval? Will you police the boundaries of identity and reduce me to a mere “marginalized voice” incapable of taking space against white supremacy? If so, then you suffer from “white guilt” and are more of a conformist with some personal work of your own to do. I don’t want what liberal social justice warriors and some wack-ass anarchists call “allies”. I want accomplices. I am fine on my own, but I would enjoy the lawless company of those with ideas and strategies that aren't always my own, and with experiences and histories that differ from mine. Do you refuse societal submission and instead embrace life as daily attack on capitalist society and everything in between? Cool. I do too. Despite socially constructed categories and assigned identities, this is our bond. This is our affinity.

4. Gettin’ With the (Anti)-Program.

There is no use in making demands. It is pointless asking those in positions of power to stop their quest for control and domination. I can’t ask liberal POC organizations, academics, and social justice warriors to stop pretending they represent me and my interests. I don’t have time to spend hours explaining to them that not all people they identify as “black” can be “saved” by the church of social justice. Some people just want money and the power to dominate others just as any “white” bank owner or corporate executive. I can’t plead with them to stop invisibilizing my existence as an individual acting out of bounds with their political programs. I can’t vote beg leftists and anarcho-leftists into realizing their plan to “organize the masses” ultimately discourages a vitality of anarchy- individuality. I can’t change or reform their system that they operate within and attempt to dominate the political terrain with. I am anti-political in that all programs derived from politics are doomed to fail because they all have one thing in common- representation. None of these people represent me, my personality, nor the anarchistic actions of my individuality. I am anti-political in that my actions of revolt do not constitute a politicized occupation separate from my daily life. Anarchy is not my activist hobby. My individual existence is a nihilistic, transformative expropriation of a life that was never intended to be my own in the first place.

So if you are “white” and are reading this, you have already defied the police in your head who tells you to never read anything critical of “black” liberalism, identity in general, and allyship or culture. Just like when you walked away after being scolded about your dreads from a “black” activist, and under your breath mumbled “go fuck yourself." Or in the streets when they called you an “outside agitator” for trying to smash a bank window- and then you did it anyways. You do you. The liberals, anarcho-liberals included, will continue to attempt to police everyone with politically correct terminology that changes every year. They will continue to guilt you for having “white” skin. They will guilt you when you stand up and act out against the authority of their studies and academic jargon. They will continue to threaten you with call out statements, ostracizing, and maybe even physical violence as long as you refuse to psychologically submit to their program. To the “black” reader, nobody can represent the totality of your individualism because despite their assumptions of you, your intellect and experiences are not fixed into place. Your existence can not be confined to a mere social position on a ladder. Do you feel the shackles on your imagination while operating within the confinement of your assigned identity? Can your identity as a “black” person ever truly liberate you or does it secure you in place with an internalized sense of victimhood that comes with that racialized assignment? Do you feel coerced to surrender yourself to “black liberation” in fear of feeling alone and isolated? That fear is legit. And that fear is what keeps one submissive. This essay was written in hopes of inspiring the criminal in you. If you recognize the prisons that “community leaders” place our imaginations in, perhaps you will escape from the liberal confines of sign holding, endless meetings, chanting, and marching for “justice”.

Fear is their weapon for “organizing the masses” and discouraging individual determination. But that’s OK. I don’t need their masses or programs to know when and how to attack. Do you? And do all the other “black” people who feel they have to join these liberal or radical identity- based groups and organizations to remain loyal to “blackness” as a cultural identity? The shared experience of being “black” under capitalism is only limited to identity. Just 'cus people share the same institutionalized form(s) of oppression don’t automatically mean they share the same visions and objectives on how to destroy it. These are important differences that shouldn’t be flattened. While these groups continue their mind-numbing attempts to create a new system of race essentialism within the shell of the old, some of us are having fun destroying all the systems. My anarchy is an existential expansion of individuality beyond the limitations of racial (and gendered) social constructs. When they say “black and brown” unity against racism and fascism, some of us have been sayin’ every body against racism and fascism, as well as the fixed identities that makes them functional. Where chaos blooms with emancipation and the limitless potential that follows, individuality becomes a weapon of war against control and categorical confinement. While they scold you “white” people and chant “Cut Your Dreads!”, I am saying really though, not all “black” people give a fuck about “white” dreads. Stay ungovernable. See you in the streets when the night is lit by fire.

#anarchism #identity politics #pc #anti civ #cultural appropriation #dread locks #race nihilism #nihilism #whiteness

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