I've been listening to Proles Pod, they have a new series of episodes called "The Stalin Eras" which I found extremely good for history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the end of the Great Patriotic War. Using that as a source and a few other sources, I've compiled some main points regarding the Motherboard-Ribbedcock that dispels the prevalent propaganda that it was a "Soviet-Nazi pact to expand the Soviet Union because they were bad". I've used mostly Wikipedia in the links so you can use it against libs:

1) Most of the invaded "Polish" territories actually belong to modern Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. In 1919, Poland started the Polish-Ukrainian war and invaded Ukraine, Belarus and part of the RSFSR. This so-called "carving of Poland by the Soviet Union" liberated many formerly oppressed non-Polish national ethnicities such as Lithuanians in Polish-controlled Vilnius arguably being genocided, or ceding the city of Lviv to the Ukraine SSR. Sorry for the ugly map, I made it myself and it's my first attempt (I made it with GIMP lmao):

Edit: added the following map (source) showing the majority-ethnicities in 1931-Poland for further reference. Funny how, comparing both maps, the rough boundary between Polish and Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian ethnic majority seems to really overlap with the extent to which the USSR invaded Poland

2) The Soviet Union had been trying for the entire 1930s to establish a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, France and Britain against the Nazis, under the doctrine of the then-People's Commisar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. This decade-long proposal for mutual-defence went completely ignored by France and England, which hoped to see a Nazi-Soviet conflict that would destroy both countries, and Poland didn't agree to negotiations by itself either. The Soviet government went as far as to offer to send one million troops together with artillery, tanking and aviation, to Poland and France. The response was ignoring these pleas and offerings.

Furthermore, this armistice between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany happened only one year after the Munich Betrayal. The Soviet Union and France had a Mutual Defense Agreement with Czechoslovakia, which France (together with the UK) unilaterally violated in agreement with the Nazis when ceding Czechoslovak territories to Nazi Germany. Stalin offered France, as an alternative to the Munich Betrayals, a coordinated and two-front attack to Nazi Germany, which France rejected in favour of the Munich Agreements.

3) The Soviet Union had been through WW1 up to 1917, the Russian Civil War up to 1922 (including a famine that killed millions) in which western powers like France, England or the USA invaded the Bolsheviks and helped the tsarist Whites to reestablish tsarism, which ultimately ended with a costly Bolshevik victory; the many deaths of famine during the land-collectivization of 1929-1933, and up to 1929 was a mostly feudal empire with little to no industry to speak of. Only after the 1929 and 1934 5-year plans did the USSR manage to slightly industrialize, but these 10 years of industrialization were barely anything in comparison with the 100 years of industrialization Nazi Germany enjoyed. The Soviet Union in 1939 was utterly underdeveloped to face Nazi Germany alone, as proven further by the 27 million casualties in the war that ended Nazism. The fact that the Soviet Union "carved Eastern Europe" in the so-called "secret protocol" was mostly in self-defense. The geography of the Great European Plain made it extremely difficult to have any meaningful defenses against Nazis with weaponry and technological superiority, again proven by the fact that the first meaningful victory against Nazis was not in open field but in the battle of Stalingrad, which consisted more of a siege of a city. The Soviet Union, out of self-preservation, wanted to simply add more Soviet-controlled distance between themselves and the Nazis. You don't have to take my word for all of this, you can hear it from western diplomats and officials from the period itself. I hope nonbody will find my choice of personalities to reflect a pro-Soviet bias (I have another post with many more quotes, these are just a few of them):

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

"It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938) Mission to Moscow (1941)

I could go on with quotes but you get my point.

4) The Soviet Union invaded Poland 2 weeks after the Nazis, at a time when there was no functioning Polish government anymore. Given the total crushing of the Polish forces by the Nazis and the rejection of a mutual-defense agreement from England and France with the Soviets, there is only one alternative to Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland: Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland. Seriously, what was the alternative, letting Nazis genocide even further east, killing arguably millions more in the process over these two years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Operation Barbarossa? France and England, which did have a mutual-defense agreement with Poland, initiated war against Germany as a consequence of the Nazi invasion, but famously did not start war against the Soviets, the main reason in my opinion being the completely different character of the Soviet invasion. Regardless of this, please tell me. After the rejection of mutual-defense agreements with the Soviet Union: what was the alternative other than Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland?

Edit 2: 5) I, the guy who wrote this wall of text, am a Spaniard. The Soviet Union is the only country which sold weapons to and supported the antifascist side of the Spanish civil war in 1936-1939. The Soviet Union not only declared opposition to fascism in Europe, it is the only country pre-1939 to actually fight it outside its borders. While the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis bombed the cities of the republican-controlled areas of Spain, the liberal west looked to the other side, and the USSR was the only country to offer material support and actual troops to the Spanish partisans. So, as a Spaniard, fuck you if you diminish the role of the USSR in the antifascist struggle in Europe.

Thanks for reading :)

This is written in response to this thread here: https://hexbear.net/post/4704476

Democratization of Capitalist Values

Democratization is a word often used with technological advancement and the proliferation of open-source software. Even here, the platform under which this discussion is unfolding, we are participating in a form of "democratization" of the means of "communication". This process of "democratization" is often one framed as a kind of universal or near universal access for the masses to engage in building and protecting their own means of communication. I've talked at length in the past about the nature of the federated, decentralized, communications movement. One of the striking aspects of this movement is how much of the shape and structure this democratization of communication shares with the undemocratic and corporate owned means of communication. Despite being presented with the underlying protocols necessary to create a communication experience that fosters true community, the choice is made instead to take the shape and structure of centralized, corporate owned speech and community platforms and "democratize" them, without considering the social relations engendered by the platforms.

As Marxists, this phenomenon isn't something that should seem strange to us, and we should be able to identify this phenomenon in other instances of "democratization". This phenomenon is what sits at the heart of Marxist analysis, and it is the relationship between the Mode of Production and the Super Structure of society. These "democratized" platforms mirror their centralized sisters, and are imbued with the very same capitalist values, in an environment that stands in conflict with those very same values. If this means of democratization of online community and communication was to be truly democratic, it would be a system that requires the least amount of technical knowledge and resources. However, those operators that sit at the top of each of these hosted systems exist higher on the class divide because they must operate a system designed to work at scale, with a network effect at the heart of its design. This is how you end up with the contradictions that lay under each of these systems. Mastodon.org is the most used instance, and its operators have a vested interest in maintaining that position, as it allows them and their organization to maintain control over the underlying structure of Mastodon. Matrix.org is the most used instance for its system for extremely similar reasons. Bluesky has structured itself in such a way that sits it on the central throne of its implementation. They have all obfuscated the centralization of power by covering their thrown with the cloak of "democratization". Have these systems allowed the fostering of communities that otherwise drown in the sea of capitalist online social organizing? There is no doubt. Do they require significant organizational effort and resources to maintain? Absolutely. Are they still subject to a central, technocratic authority, driven by the same motivations as their sister systems? Yes, they are.

This brings me to AI, and it's current implementation and design, and it's underlying motivations and desires. These systems suffer from the same issues that this very platform suffer from, which is, that they are stained with the values of capital at their heart, and they are in no means a technology that is "neutral" in its design or its implementation. It is foolish to say that "Marxists have never opposed technological progress in principle", in that this statement also handwaves away the critical view of technology in the Marxist tradition. Marx spends more than 150 pages---A tome in its own right---on the subject of technology and technological advancement under Capitalism in Volume 1 of Capital. Wherein he outlines how the worker becomes subjugated to the machine, and I find that this quote from Marx drives home my position, and I think the position of others regarding the use of AI in its current formation (emphasis mine).

The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.

---

Capital Volume 1, Production of Relative Surplus Value\Machinery and Modern Industry\Section 4: The Factory

What is it, at the core of both textual and graphical AI generation, that is being democratized? What has the capitalist sought to automate in its pursuit of Large Language Model research and development? It is the democratization of skill. It is the alienation of the Artist from the labor of producing art. As such, it does not matter that this technology has become "democratized" via open-source channels because at the heart of the technology, it's intention and design, it's implementation and commodification, lay the alienation of the artist from the process of creating art. It is not the "democratization" of "creativity". There are scores of artists throughout our history whose art is regarded as creative despite its simplicity in both execution and level of required skill.

One such artist who comes to mind is Jackson Pollock, an artist who is synonymous with paint splattering and a major contributor to the abstract expressionist movement. His aesthetic has been described as a "joke" and void of "political, aesthetic, and moral" value, used as a means of denigrating the practice of producing art. Yet, it is like you describe in your own words, "Creativity is not an inherent quality of tools — it is the product of human intention". One of the obvious things that these generative models exhibit is a clear and distinct lack of intention. I believe that this lack of "human intention" is explicitly what drives people's repulsion from the end product of generative art. It also becomes "a sort of torture" under which the artist becomes employed by the machine. There are endless sources of artists whose roles as creators have been reduced to that of Generative Blemish Control Agents, cleaning up the odd, strange, and unintentioned aspects of the AI process.

Capitalist Mimicry and The Man In The Mirror

One thing often sighted as a mark in favor of AI is the emergence of Deepseek onto the market as a direct competitor to leading US-based AI Models. Its emergence was a massive and disruptive debut, slicing nearly $2-trillion in market cap off the US Tech Sector in a mater of days. This explosive out of the gate performance was not the result of any new ideologically driven reorientation in the nature and goal of generative AI modeling philosophy, but instead of the refinement of the training processes to meet the restrictive conditions created by embargos on western AI processing technology in China.

Deepseek has been hailed as what can be achieved under the "Socialist Model" of production, but I'm more willing to argue that this isn't as true as we wish to believe. China is a vibrant and powerful market economy, one that is governed and controlled by a technocratic party who have a profound understanding of market forces. However, their market economy is not anymore or less susceptible to the whims of capital desires than any other market. One prime example recently was the speculative nature of their housing market, which the state is resolving through a slow deflation of the sector and seizure of assets, among other measures. I think it is safe to argue that much of the demands of the Chinese market economy are forged by the demands of external Capitalist desires. As the worlds forge, the heart of production in the global economy, their market must meet the demands of external capitalist forces. It should be remembered here, that the market economy of China operates within a cage, with no political influence on the state, but that does not make it immune to the demands and desires of Capitalists at the helm of states abroad.

Yes. Deepseek is a tool set released in an open-source way. Yes, Deepseek is a tool set that one can use at a much cheaper rate than competitors in the market, or roll your own hosting infrastructure for. However, what is the tool set exactly, what are its goals, who does it benefit, and who does it work against? The incredible innovation under the "Socialist model" still performs the same desired processes of alienation that capitalists in the west are searching for, just at a far cheaper cost. This demand is one of geopolitical economy, where using free trade principles, Deepseek intends to drive demand away from US-based solutions and into its coffers in China. The competition created by Deepseek has ignited several protectionist practices by the US to save its most important driver of growth in its economy, the tech sector. The new-found efficiency of Deepseek threatens not just the AI sector inside of tech, but the growing connective tissue sprung up around the sector. With the bloated and wasteful implementation of Open AI's models, it gave rise to growing demand for power generation, data centers, and cooling solutions, all of which lost large when Deepseek arrived. So at its heart, it has not changed what AI does for people, only how expensive AI is for capitalists in year-to-year operations. What good is this open-source tool if what is being open sourced are the same demands and desires of the capitalist class?

Reflected in the production of Deepseek is the American Capitalist, they stand as the man in the mirror, and the market economy of China as doing what a market economy does: Compete for territory in hopes of driving out competition, to become a monopoly agent within the space. This monopolization process can still be something in which you distribute through an open-source means. Just as in my example above, of the social media platforms democratizing the social relations of capitalist communal spaces, so too is Deepseek democratizing the alienation of artists and writers from their labor.

They are not democratizing the process of Artists and Laborers training their own models to perform specific and desired repetitive tasks as part of their own labor process in any form. They hold all the keys because even though they were able to slice the head from the generative snake that is the US AI Market, it still cost them several million dollars to do so, and their clear goal is to replace that snake.

A Renaissance Man Made of Metal

Much in the same way that the peasants of the past lost access to the commons and were forced into the factories under this new, capitalist organization of the economy, the artist has been undergoing a similar process. However, instead of toiling away on their plots of land in common, giving up a tenth of their yield each year to their lord, and providing a sum of their hourly labor to work the fields at the manor, the Artist historically worked at the behest of a Patron. The high watermark for this organization of labor was the Renaissance period. Here, names we all know and recognize, such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli were paid by their Patron Lords or at times the popes of Rome to hone their craft and in exchange paint great works for their benefactors.

As time passed, and the world industrialized, the system of Patronage faded and gave way to the Art Market, where artists could sell their creative output directly to galleries and individuals. With the rise of visual entertainment, and our modern entertainment industry, most artists' primary income stems from the wage labor they provide to the corporation to which they are employed. They require significant training, years and decades of practice and development. The reproduction of their labor has always been a hard nut to crack, until very recently. Some advancements in mediums shifted the demand for different disciplines, 2D animators found themselves washed on the shores of the 3D landscape, wages and benefits depleted, back on the bottom rung learning a new craft after decades of momentum via unionization in the 2D space. The transition from 2D to 3D in animation is a good case study in the process of proletarianization, very akin to the drive to teach students to code decades later in a push for the STEM sector. Now, both of these sectors of laborers are under threat from the Metal Renaissance Man, who operates under the patronage of his corporate rulers, producing works at their whim, and at the whim of others, for a profit. This Mechanical Michelangelo has the potential to become the primary source of artistic and---in the case of code---logical expression, and the artists and coders who trained him become his subordinates. Cleaning up the mistakes, and hiding the rogue sixth finger and toe as needed.

Long gone are the days of Patronage, and soon too long gone will be the days of laboring for a wage to produce art. We have to, as revolutionary Marxists, recognize that this contradiction is one that presents to artists, as laborers, the end of their practice, not the beginning or enhancement of that practice. It is this mimicry that the current technological solutions participate in that strikes at the heart of the artists' issue. Hired for their talent, then, used to train the machine with which they will be replaced, or reduced. Thus limiting the economic viability of the craft for a large portion of the artistic population. The only other avenue for sustainability is the Art Market, which has long been a trade backed by the laundering of dark money and the sound of a roulette wheel. A place where "meritocracy" rules with an iron fist. It is not enough for us to look at the mechanical productive force that generative AI represents, and brush it aside as simply the wheels of progress turning. To do so is to alienate a large section of the working class, a class whose industry constitutes the same percentage of GDP as sectors like Agriculture.

I have no issue with the underlying algorithm, the attention-based training, that sits at the center of this technology. It has done some incredible things for science, where a focused and specialized use of the technology is applied. Under an organization of the economy, void of capitalist desires and the aims to alienate workers from their labor, these algorithms could be utilized in many ways. Undoubtably, organizations of ones like the USSR's Artist Unions would be central in the planning and development of such technological advancement of generative AI technology under Socialism. However, every attempt to restrict and manage the use of generative AI today, is simply an effort to prolong the full proletarianization process of the arts. Embracing it now only signals your alliance to that process.

I'll link to the comments here but I'll copy-paste them in comment format below in the comments so that it's easier to follow.

THEM: original comment

ME: quick response

THEM: Russian Lib response

ME: quick response to that (was busy with work)

ME: more elaborate response to that (had more time later, actual effort-posting)

THEM: response to my quick response

ME: final response to that response (also effortposting, interesting comment)

Thanks for checking it out. I'm saving this here for reference, because many Russian opposition libs are anticommunist in nature and these are some good responses (IMO) to some of their main points, that usually disarm them through the power of the immortal science.

I wrote this in reply to this post: Fentanyl: China's Double-Dealing. (00:16:45)

China is the manufacturing heart of the world, everything you would need to make nearly anything you wanted, has to pass through, be processed in, or be manufactured by China. So how exactly do those "raw materials" find their way into the USA? The answer might come as a surprise to you: Fentanyl is smuggled into America for Americans, by other Americans. (CATO Institute, 2022; NY Times, 2024).

Not only are the majority of the traffickers American, but also "over 90 percent of fentanyl border seizures occur at legal border crossings and interior vehicle checkpoints".

When it comes to sourcing the materials necessary to make Fentanyl, you can thank organizations like the Express Association of America, a lobbying group for FedEx, UPS, and DHL for making it that much easier by lobbing to have the de minimis rule's value increased.

This change to trade policy has upended the logistics of international drug trafficking. In the past few years, the United States has become a major transshipment point for Chinese-made chemicals used by Mexico’s cartels to manufacture the fentanyl that’s devastating U.S. communities, anti-narcotics agents say. Traffickers have pulled it off by riding a surge in e-commerce that’s flooding the U.S. with packages, helped by that trade provision.
-- Reuters, 2024

The de minimis limit was raised in 2016, which is what created the conditions that made transporting these chemical compounds through the US so ideal. There is a clear profit motive in raising that minimum. "The rollback [of de minimis] would snarl supply chains and raise consumer prices" (Reuters, 2024). According to John Pickel, a former U.S. Customs official and now senior director of international supply chain policy at the National Foreign Trade Council, the de minimis rules do not enable smuggling, stating "traffickers would continue to sneak boxes into the U.S." even without the rule. Though, even Reuters admits that the rout being taken now by smugglers is a "streamlined system", and that this system is so dense that "just a tiny fraction of the nearly 4million de minimis parcels arriving [...] daily are inspected by U.S. Customs." This motivation is echoed by the head of the Express Association of America, a lobbying group for FedEx, UPS and DHL, stating they "want to keep the [de minimis] channel open for as many goods as possible because streamlined entry saves them money."

You can see the impact of this desirable, streamlined port of entry by looking at the stark rise of synthetic opioid overdoses (other than methadone) in the US:

This rise aligns with the 2016 rule change, which seems to indicate that a cheaper more streamlined port of entry doesn't just benefit shippers, it also benefits the manufactures of Fentanyl.

This, however, is naturally just a byproduct of a more profound problem. What drives a maintenance worker from Tucson to "[ferry] about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel", a quantity of chemicals "sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills"? (Reuters, 2024)

The New York Times seems to have picked up the scent,

A college football star was lured in by a friend after dropping out of school. A mother raising three special-needs children took the job while facing eviction. A homeless man was recruited from an encampment in a Walmart parking lot. [...]

“The cartels are directly recruiting anyone who is willing to do it, which typically is someone who needs the money,” said Tara McGrath, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California. “The cartels spread their tentacles and grab ahold of vulnerable people at every possible opportunity.” [...]

One woman met her recruiter while in rehab in Los Angeles, where the two struck up a friendship [...] The woman, who asked to be identified by her first initial, M., said that her friend started pressuring her to smuggle drugs only after they spent years getting to know each other. When M. resisted, her friend flew into a rage. [...]

The job offer reached Gustavo in San Diego after he drank too much beer at a party and confessed to a friend that he badly needed money. At the time, he was the main provider for his mother in their San Diego apartment. His brother had moved out, and his parents were divorced. Gustavo was working at a grocery store, but struggled to pay the bills. “I want to be a boss,” he told his friend that night. “This job isn’t feeding me and my mom.”
-- NY Times, 2024

Yet, the New York Times has nothing to say about the conditions that drive these people to risk their lives. Each of them sentenced to jail time. M was sentenced to 18 months in prison, Gustavo spent 32 months in a federal prison. The question always seems to be "Who is providing the fentanyl?", "How do we stop the fentanyl from getting into the country?", and never, "how do we ensure citizens are not self-medicating with things like fentanyl?"

The profile of those entangled in this scheme to traffic materials and fentanyl across the boarder seems to be of the desperate and vulnerable type. Those with economic hardships, or battling their own addictions. This whole conversation about China's role in all this is moot when you get to the heart of what drives people to substances and to quick cash. It is a cyclical demand, where the poorest among us traffic the materials needed to make the narcotics that the rest of the poorest among us used to cope with their material conditions. Statistics from Addiction Group show how bleak this reality is:

• Individuals living below the federal poverty line have about 36% higher odds of developing substance abuse issues than those in the highest income brackets.
• Drug overdose deaths among adults with no college education grew from about 12 per 100,000 in 2000 to 82 per 100,000 in 2021, far outpacing increases among more educated groups.
• 85% of the U.S. prison population either has an active substance use disorder or was incarcerated for crimes involving drugs or drug use.
• Lower-Income Prevalence: National data consistently show that people in households making under $20,000 per year have significantly higher rates of illicit drug use and alcohol misuse than those earning $75,000 or above.
• Poverty Overlaps: High-poverty neighborhoods often see compounded risk factors: poor access to healthcare, elevated stress levels, and limited supportive services.
• Cycle of Financial Strain: Addiction perpetuates financial instability, as funds meant for basic needs may go toward substances, leading to deeper poverty and, in some cases, homelessness.

If China stopped being the most cost-efficient supplier of the materials needed to produce Fentanyl tomorrow, the whole trade would simply find the next most cost-efficient supplier. In a time when car loan defaults are at an all-time high, where 1 in 3 Americans say they rely on credit cards to make ends meet, 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, and an estimated 29 million American adults lack the ability to pay for needed medical care, it is no wonder where the Fentanyl Crisis really comes from. It is a crisis of despair, with millions of Americans coping at both ends, creating an interdependency feed back loop, like a snake eating its own tail.

※This was originally written as a comment to someone "disgusted" at Hexbears having flag-burning emojis and saying "death to XYZ"

On December 26th, 1862, 38 Dakota men taken as prisoners of the Septic ("US") Army were, by order of President Abraham Lincoln, led to a specially-built gallows in the city of Mankato (located on Treaty of Traverse des Sioux lands / July 23rd 1851) before an audience of some of their relatives, forced by Septic soldiers to watch their own flesh and blood die, along with 4,000 bloodthirsty white settlers — more people than even lived in the city of Mankato at the time — who had come to watch the 38 men die as pure spectacle. As these "Dakota 38" approached the scaffold, they sang one of their traditional songs in defiance, and with the ropes tightening around their necks, they grasped each other's hands, preparing to embrace Death together. Their corpses were buried haphazardly after an hour, but were soon dug up for (obviously non-consensual) use in medical experiments by the white settlers. The hanging of the Dakota 38 was one of the largest mass executions in world history, and the single largest mass execution in the entire history of the Septic colonial project, and this execution of 38 Dakota men had indisputably genocidal intent.

And I have personally been to that city Mankato, you know. I enjoyed my time in that city very much, I'd say, although it was only a short visit with some relatives. The hotel had a swimming pool and some arcade games, I remember, and the TV in the hotel room had Teen Titans Go! playing, which wasn't really my "thing" but still fun to riff on. The complementary wi-fi was good, too, and the streets of Mankato had some fun sculptures. And the main street of Mankato, indeed, had Reconciliation Park just opposite of the actual site of the gallows, and I went to this park together with my relatives. I have in fact found a picture of myself — a teenager at the time — reading the names of the 38 martyrs on a large "scroll" in Reconciliation Park. I'm not going to share this picture, but I will attach someone else's picture of the scroll, such that you can read the names for yourself. I have transcribed the names in the alt text, too.

---

You know Patlabor? The animanga franchise that started in the late '80s. I have frankly never read nor watched any Patlabor thing, but I was once shown a famous scene from the Patlabor 2 film, which has stuck with me ever since.

English dub — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2sqdudEle4

Original Japanese — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5drqzTAx18

"Just war, unjust peace."

The Reconciliation Park in Mankato has another scroll, bearing the poem "Reconcile" by Katherine Hughes (who has "no Native American ancestry"), and "Dakota Prayer" by Dakota elder Eli Taylor. Hughes' poem, which is physically placed above Taylor's, reads—

''Reconcile'' by Katherine Hughes

Remember the innocent dead,
Both Dakota and white,
Victims of events they could not control.

Remember the guilty dead,
Both Dakota and white,
Whom reason abandoned.

Regret the times and attitudes
That brought dishonor
To both cultures.

Respect the deeds and kindnesses
that brought honor
To both cultures.

Hope for a future
When memories remain,
Balanced by forgiveness.

---

Hughes' poem was written in 2012 because the poem originally planned for that scroll — an untitled poem which was performed live by a Native man, Conrad Balfour, in the middle of downtown Mankato on December 26th, 1971, but never published — was deemed to be "too divisive," "not in the spirit of reconciliation," in other words Balfour's poem's focus on the whites' hypocrisy and its comparison of the Dakota 38's martyrdom with Jesus', was seen as upsetting "white sensibilities". Thus a predominantly white city council, and a single white would-be poet, decided on the Dakota people's behalf how they should remember the genocide of their own people — thus it remains today, and thus I stood as a teenager reading a mediocre poem, not knowing anything about the poet nor the context under which that poem was selected for the monument.

''The Balfour Poem''

On Friday morning, 10:00 AM, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-Two, a scaffold plummeted to the Earth, killing 38 Great Sioux. The day before, the countryside had mourned the death of Christ the Jew, then went to bed to rise again and crucify the captive Sioux. There were 300 due to die. This, the governor clearly knew. But he washed his hands of the grim affair and said, Abe Lincoln, it's up to you.

When Lincoln paired to 38 the screaming Romans sent up hue, we don't want only 38, we want 300 wicked Sioux. The 25th was a silent night. The pastor's chant, Christ died for you. Now, in his name, we send to death the souls of 38 Great Sioux.

There was [INAUDIBLE], Ho Tan Inku, Waxicun and Do wan' s'a. There was Baptiste Campbell, [INAUDIBLE], Maza-bomidu, and Aichaga. Tip of the Horn, One Who Stands Clothed, Wind Comes Home, Rattling Runner, and One Who Walks Clothed in an Owl's Tail, Tinkling Walker, and Little Thunder.

All waited for drummer Major Brown to give the signal for patient death. Then Captain Dooley cut the rope, and 38 were cleared of breath.

On Christmas Day, the children laughed, and churches prayed his blessing send. And in their cells, the 38 heard, "Peace on Earth. Good will to men."

---

"Just war, unjust peace."

Could my teenage self have drawn under the circumstances, any conclusion other than that the Dakota and the whites had for most intents and purposes already reconciled on the matter of the Dakota 38? That the monument was progressive, a way for two peoples to move past historical traumas together, rather than seeing it for ritualized crocodile tears, a celebration of conquest dressed as somber remembrance? The hotel had a swimming pool, a video game arcade, TVs and wi-fi, after all. There was no threat of war there, no, no fighting in the streets, no riots, I felt absolutely, completely safe in Mankato — but was that really peace? Is peace simply the "perceived absence of war"? The money my family spent to stay the night in Mankato, the money spent on food and games and gas, certainly ended up in the hands of the same settler bourgeoisie that saw nothing wrong with building pipelines through Native land and having its police crack down on resistance to this.

A whole nation, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ the Seven Council Fires whose motherland is so wide and beautiful, has been denied the freedom, the natural right to even just grieve! Can you even imagine that‽ And many nations around the world are denied this freedom, in fact! And this denial is not passive, but very actively carried out by evil forces — the Sámi, the Palestinians, the Mapuche, these are among the nations that my country Norway is playing an active role in dispossessing at this very moment. The state-owned corporation running the dam on the sacred Pilmaiquén, the windmills in Fosen, the investments of the sovereign wealth fund in the Zionist project, all of these monstrous acts are supposed to buy my complacency in systems that deprive whole nations of their due. And I will not accept this! Principled Uprightness will not allow for such complacency!

What does a nation have if it cannot grieve? Such a nation has anger — righteous, unbridled anger, absolute rage in fact — at all the wrongs done unto it. Such a nation burns flags and wishes death upon its oppressors, and sympathy demands that anyone who wishes to see all nations win the freedom to grieve, all the individual people of the world win their due, should feel the same rage at the same systems of oppression. I quote the first page of Fanon's The Wretched of The Earth:

National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it — individual encounters, a change of name for a sports club, the guest list at a cocktail party, members of a police force or the board of directors of a state or private bank — decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one "species" of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless. We could go on to portray the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new state, its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orientation. But instead we have decided to describe the kind of tabula rasa which from the outset defines any decolonization. What is singularly important is that it starts from the very first day with the basic claims of the colonized. In actual fact, proof of success lies in a social fabric that has been changed inside out. This change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clamored for, and demanded. The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colons.

In conclusion: may Seppoland and the Zionist Entity be wiped off the world map in their entirety, may colonizers know even a fraction of the suffering they have inflicted upon others. Death to the oppressive, regressive, and reactionary forces of the Earth. May all people get their due, and may we not take one step back until this happens.

I say this as someone raised Christian.

You can, and many people do, take a progressive interpretation of Christianity, but I don't think it's the INHERENT interpretation of the faith, in fact I think taking an progressive interpretation of it requires focusing on specific teachings of Jesus and Jesus alone, which many left Christians do but they are not the majority interpretation of the faith.

And even the teachings of Jesus, I basically view it just as Millenarianism, he told people to purify themselves for a coming apocalypse, that I honestly think he thought was coming much sooner that most Christians today think it is. Yes the things he told people to do to purify themselves are mostly good things that are pretty compatible with socialism, but it is still mostly individualist charity for the goal of spiritual purification. I don't think any of that is incompatible with a conservative worldview.

I'm just saying this because I see a lot of people try and "hypocrisy own" American conservative Christians right now by pointing to snippets of Jesus' teachings, when I don't think that shits ever going to be effective, because when you take the Bible as a whole it's still overall a conservative text, making a progressive interpretation of it basically requires editing out massive chunks (like basically everything Paul said, which again a lot of left wing Christians basically throw out Paul).

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4435465

Dia daoibh a chairde!

Have you ever found yourself wanting to read a good book about queer feminism but you weren't sure where to look?

I have spent more hours than I would care to admit studying, writing about, and educating on the topic of gender and sexuality, and I've realized that I could lend a bit of my educational development work to you kind folks by prepping this here reading list.

I hope you can find something to interest you--and I would love to talk about any of the works listed. The categories are not hard and fast, with many books belonging in several of them, but I figured there had to be some way to organize this, so bear with me. I also tried to narrow inclusion to books relating to queer/feminist studies.

1. Introduction to Feminism

The Second Sex - Simone De Beauvior

This Sex Which Is Not One - Luce Irigaray

In the Beginning, She Was - Luce Irigaray

An Ethics of Sexual Difference - Luce Irigaray

Speculum of Other Women - Luce Irigaray

The Political Economy of Women's Liberation - Margaret Benston

Women and Economics - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community - Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution - Shulamith Firestone

I am Woman: Native Perspective of Sociology and Feminism - Lee Maracle

I Myself am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling - Ding Ling

Living a Feminist Life - Sara Ahmed

Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement - Anuradha Ghandy

Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women - Silvia Federici

Compañeras: Zapatista Women's Stories - Hilary Klein

Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader - Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea - Hwasook Nam

Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place, and Irish Women - Bronwen Walter

2. Intersectionality and Black Feminism

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Geraldine Audre Lorde

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color - Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective - Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor

Women, Race, and Class - Angela Y. Davis

Women, Culture, and Politics - Angela Y. Davis

Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology - Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins

Intersectionality - Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice - Bonnie Thornton Dill, Ruth Enid Zambrana and Patricia Hill Collins

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment - Patricia Hill Collins

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound - Daphne A. Brooks

3. Trans* and Gender Diversity

The Transfeminist Manifesto - Emi Koyama

Transfeminism: A Collection - Emi Koyama

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us - Kate Bornstein

Gender Outlaws: the Next Generation - Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman

Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender - Riki Wilchins

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue - Leslie Feinberg

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman - Leslie Feinberg

Beyond Gender Binaries: The History of Trans, Intersex, and Third-Gender Individuals - Rita Santos

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity - Julia Serano

Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive - Julia Serano

Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back - Julia Serano

Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism - Julia Serano

Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People - Viviane K. Namaste

Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism - Viviane K. Namaste

My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage - Susan Stryker

The Transgender Studies Reader - Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle

The Transgender Studies Reader 2 - Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura

Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution - Susan Stryker

We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics - Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel

Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category - David Valentine

Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality - Jay Prosser

You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity - Laurie J. Shrage

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives - Judith Halberstam

How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States - Joanne Meyerowitz

Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality - Gayle Salamon

The Lives of Transgender People - Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin

Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad - Hil Malatino

Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary - Morty Diamond

Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice - Merrick Daniel Pilling

Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism - Patricia Gherovici

Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach - Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna

Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes - Don Kulick

Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of hijra in Bangladesh - Adnan Hossain

Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performance Across Borders in South Asia - Adnan Hossain, Claire Pamment and Jeff Roy

Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines - Mark Johnson

Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America - Will Roscoe

4. Understanding Intersex

Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men - Anne Fausto-Sterling

Sex/Gender/Biology in a Social World - Anne Fausto-Sterling

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality - Anne Fausto-Sterling

Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex - Alice Dromurat Dreger

Intersex - Catherine Harper

Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex - Elizabeth Reis

Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud - Thomas Walter Laqueur

Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis - Georgiann Davis

The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex - Hida Vilori and Maria Nieto

Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity - Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub

Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience - Hil Malatino

Critical Intersex - Morgan Holmes

Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience - Katrina Karkazis

Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism - David A. Rubin

Intersex Rights: Living Between Sexes - Nikoletta Pikramenou

Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives - Stefan Horlacher

Expanding the Rainbow: Exploring the Relationships of Bi+, Polyamorous, Kinky, Ace, Intersex, and Trans People - Brandy L. Simula, J. E. Sumerau and Andrea Miller

Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives - Angela Pattatuchi Aragón

5. Queer Theory and Philosophy

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity - Judith Butler

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex - Judith Butler

Undoing Gender - Judith Butler

Performativity and Performance - Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others - Sara Ahmed

Deleuze and Queer Theory - Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr

Epistemology of the Closet - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Tendencies - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performativity - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation - Fintan Walsh

New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment - Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism - Elizabeth Grosz

Sexual Subversions - Elizabeth Grosz

Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power - Elizabeth Grosz

Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism - Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn

Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism - Silvia Federici

Thinking Through the Skin - Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey

Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism - Sara Ahmed

Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality - Sara Ahmed

Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction - Elizabeth Grosz

A Rave at the End of the World: The Politics of Queer Hauntology and Psychedelic Chronomancy - Sean Michael Feiner

Queer/Early/Modern - Carla Freccero

6. Exploring Sexuality

The Straight Mind and Other Essays - Monique Wittig

Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town - Esther Newton

Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas - Esther Newton

Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America - Esther Newton

Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities - Mary McAuliffe

Witchcraft and Gay Counterculture - Arthur Evans

Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader - Gayle S. Rubin

Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life - Denise Tse-Shang Tang

Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China - Hongwei Bao

Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires - Francisca Yuenki Lai

Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten - Travis S. K. Kong

Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies - Chou Wah-Shan

The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China - Tze-Lan D. Sang

Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China - Tiantian Zheng

Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography - Elisabeth L. Engebretsen

Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary - Fran Martin

Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan - Xianyong Bai and Hans Tao-Ming Huang

Queer Sinophone Cultures - Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich

Boy-wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities - Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature - Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures - Gul Ozyegin

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland - Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis

7. Cultural Critique

Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings - Angela L. Cotten and Christa Davis Acampora

The Dress of Women: A Critical Introduction to the Symbolism and Sociology of Clothing - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety - Marjorie Garber

Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice - Mark Thompson

Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback - Susan Stryker

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories - Zheng Wang

Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture - Lisa Rofel

Transgender China - Howard Chiang

A Society Without Fathers of Husbands: the Na of China - Cai Hua

Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism, and Media Cultures - Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder and Hongwei Bao

Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality and Chineseness - Jamie J. Zhao

Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism - Hongwei Bao

Queer Media in China - Hongwei Bao

Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Culture in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan - Maud Lavin, Ling Yang and Jing Jamie Zhao

Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music - Tes Slominski

Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature - Peter Berresford Ellis

The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power - Jennifer M. Jeffers

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power - Linden Peach

LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland - Páraic Kerrigan

The Poor Bugger's Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History - Patrick R. Mullen

Women and the Irish Nation: Gender, Culture, and Irish Identity, 1890-1914 - D. A. J. MacPherson

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology - Murray S. Davis

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society - Lila Abu-Lughod

Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories - Lila Abu-Lughod

Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women's Work in Italy and the U.S. - Laura E. Ruberto

Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights - Peter Jackson

8. Queer Marxism

Transgender Marxism - Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke

Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics - Jules Joanne Gleeson

Lavender and Red - Leslie Feinberg

Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation - Silvia Federici

Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons - Silvia Federici

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle - Silvia Federici

The Problematics of Heterosexuality: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Nature - Hilary Manette Klein

The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection - Holly Lewis

Raya Dunayevskaya's Intersectional Marxism: Race, Class, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation - Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin and Heather A. Brown

Queer Marxism in Two Chinas - Petrus Liu

Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 - Zheng Wang

Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era - Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng and Bai Di

The Women's Revolution: Russia 1905 - 1917 - Judy Cox

Social-Democracy and Woman Suffrage - Clara Zetkin

Lenin on the Woman Question - Clara Zetkin

The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR - Lynne Attwood

Revolution, She Wrote - Clara Fraser

9. Abolition

Abolition. Feminism. Now. - Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color - Andrea J. Ritchie

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation - Beth E. Richie

We Do This 'Til We Free Us - Mariame Kaba

Abolitionist Intimacies - El Jones

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States - Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie and Kay Whitlock

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex - Eric A. Stanley

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law - Dean Spade

Transgender Sex Work and Society - Larry Nutbrock

Revolting Prostitutes - Molly Smith and Juno Mac

Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State - Judith R. Walkowitz

The Social Construction of AIDS Issues - Suiming Pan

Thinking Differently About HIV/AIDS: Contributions from Critical Social Science - Eric Mykhalovskiy and Viviane K. Namaste

Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide - Ardath Whynacht

Written on the Body: Letters from Trans and Non-Binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence - Lexie Bean

Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea - Eunjung Kim

10. Anti-Imperialism and Internationalism

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times - Jasbir Puar

Class, Gender, and Neoliberalism - Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation - Geraldine Moane

Gender and Imperialism - Clare Midgley

The Beginning and End of R-pe: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America - Sarah Deer

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide - Andrea Smith

Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance - Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel

Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Lila Abu-Lughod

Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress - Stephanie Cronin

Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women's Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon - Nicola Pratt

Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine - Nada Elia

Palestinian Women's Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism - Islah Jad

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International - Sarah Schulman

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique - Saed Atshan

Even a Freak Like You Would Be Safe in Tel Aviv: Transgender Subjects, Wounded Attachments, and the Zionist Economy of Gratitude - Saffo Papantonopoulou

Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study - Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges - María Lugones, Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso and Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space: Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean - Eve Walsh Stoddard

Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice - Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O'Rourke, James M. Smith and Mari Steed

Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact - Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre

Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence - Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon

Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific - Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly

Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism - J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

There's a tendency in Seppoland to conflate "being American" with "living in America (as a settler)". This idea is necessary to uphold settler-colonialism: settlers' claim to the land must be seen as natural, necessary, and just; and materially, settlers must comprise a majority of the colony's population, to keep the structure from collapsing. But if a settler-descended American like myself can in fact just live outside "America" as a minority, then this disproves the colony's whole raison d'être, doesn't it? This is what frustrates many Seppolanders when I call myself an American without having ever lived in the colony — for that matter there's Americans' relationship to Seppolandic foreign policy, necessitating the colony distancing itself from Americans.

Americans being negatively impacted by Seppoland's foreign policy and hegemony isn't necessarily coincidental, however: I'd argue that Seppoland is actually materially aligned with not only Americophilia, but also, "paradoxically", with anti-Americanism, insofar as these phenomena discourage settlers from leaving, and encourage the settlers who left the colony to return. The tactic of making "diasporans" feel like perpetual foreigners to vindicate the idea that their "rightful place" is in the colony, should be a familiar strategy from other settler-colonies.

Indeed, if fully quitting settlerism wasn't made as difficult and burdensome as uninstalling McAfee, we might expect a lot of settlers to quit for "light and transient causes" once the treats started running out — and that type of "settler hemorrhage" would certainly prove fatal for the colony.

---

The contradictions I've described between Americans and Seppos in this post aren't very prominent at the moment, but these contradictions will certainly grow more prominent as the Empire turns necrotic. There's a lot more I can get into about this topic, but those other more specific aspects of the contradiction can maybe get their own separate posts...

...In any case, yes, I'm proposing flipping the idea of "true Americans live in America" on its head as "true Americans live in diaspora" — I don't know how much this makes sense, or if this is cringe and I'll reach a different analysis later, but in any case I hope this is at the very least interesting for you all.

I was listening to music on youtube and I got one of those low-view video recommendations for some Japanese jazz fusion band. I click it, because the genre is nice and because I like to discover new music, but right off the bat I start to get that uncanny feeling. Just a quick glance at the details in the thumbnail image and I can see the nonsensical asymmetry. The music sounds okay, but I can feel that it's just... not right. So I go to check the description, and it has a kind of micro-biography for this band, describing their motivations for creating music, the history of their coming together and their first album, the name of the music label that produced it, their inspiration, complete with each individual band member's name and role.

So I look up the band. Nothing. I look up the members. Nothing. I look up the music label. Nothing.

The band, the members, the music, the album, its cover, are all computer-generated. There is no disclaimer in the video, or its description. It's the opposite, in fact, it's all pretending to be real - to be human.

A deception, but also something worse. In this instance I was able to discern that something uncanny was going on, but I know that many people would not, and do not, the same way people are constantly falling for obvious lies in news, social media, etc.. So for those people, they're listening to a Japanese jazz fusion band from the early 90s. They like the music, the sounds are smooth and comforting but groovy, and there's a false promise that behind the beat there's a group of musicians from a time before the internet was even known to the vast majority of humanity, expertly working to express the combination of many years of practice, their various inspirations drawn from other humans and the world around them, and their cooperation with one another - their human relationships.

It's a mockery of art, and of human expression. The presentation isn't merely a lie; it's an insult. An assertion that that band, those people, their inspirations, their relationship, doesn't actually matter. And for every person that clicks the thumbnail, enjoys the music, and then moves on to the next thing without realizing it's an artifice, the assertion is unchallenged. The insult is justified.

But of course, this isn't limited to music, and it's not limited to art. Every single day, imitations replace more and more of what we see, undercutting with each manifestation the value of human interaction.

I could distinguish that this album and this band were counterfeit, but if all I had been presented with was the music - no thumbnail, no description, no fake names - I wouldn't really have been able to tell that it was pretending to be a product of human expression, I wouldn't have the comfort of being able to confirm any suspicions - I would only be left with that sense that something was wrong. And what fills me with this creeping sense of dread is that I know how much money and effort is being pumped into this technology to make it more and more convincing, and that every day more of it is generated and dumped into social media, videos, music, chats, image-hosts, even little forums like this, like garbage into the ocean. Meaning that as time passes, from now and onward, I will fall for that sickening lie more and more while becoming increasingly paranoid and distrustful of every conversation I have, every game I play, every video I watch, every piece of music I enjoy.

It's a wildfire, but no one's fighting it - and the people with the most power to do so are air-dropping accelerant into the flames.

---

This is the video that inspired this post.

I'm sure some will try to pick apart the things I've said here, but just so they know: I'm not posting this to elicit any debate, I'm only sharing a newly-attained level of awareness of something that truly disgusts and unsettles me, in the way that sci-fi horror does. Invention not to benefit humanity, but to replace a crucial component of what's important about being human with something artificial.

Footnote: my browser tried to tell me "accelerant" isn't a word, so I did a search to make sure I wasn't wrong about the spelling, and underneath the definition confirming I wasn't wrong, the first link is to some AI-based site called "accelerant ai".

So, the book is called "El modelo checoslovaco de socialismo" (the Czechoslovak socialist model), by Radoslav Selucký, published in Fascist Spain in 1969 from a translation of the west-German version of the same year. Radoslav Selucký is one of the intellectuals behind the proposed reforms in the 60s that didn't come to fruition because of the Soviet intervention. I'm reading the book and I, as a Marxist-Leninist, am finding it appalling, I expected to see better ideas and effort but honestly I just wanna fucking dunk on it (at least on some chapters) because I find it infuriating. Anyone interested in a more-or-less thorough critique?

Or: "Timekeeping is a fuck and this shit is convoluted"

Preface: There are 3 types of calendars. Solar (like the Gregorian calendar), Lunar (like the Islamic calendar) and Lunisolar (like the Hebrew calendar).

"The Korean lunisolar calendar, like most other East Asian calendars such as those of Japan, Mongolia, Vietnam, among others, are all derived from historical variants of Chinese ones such as the Shixian calendar of the Ming dynasty."

I'm not a die hard about calling it "Chinese New Year" despite TET in Vietnam and Seollal in Korea both being derived from the Chinese calendar, among others. They have adapted their own customs and traditions to it. Calling the celebration "Chinese New Year" is not the most accurate. I am of a mind to call it what matters to you, you don't have to translate it. Ramadan is Ramadan, no need to translate it to "Scorching Heat", Hanukkah is Hanukkah, no need to translate it to "Dedication".

However, to call it "Lunar New Year" implies it's the definitive lunar calendar, which erases other civilizations' timekeeping traditions. There are multiple lunar calendars with their own lunar new years such as Ugadi in India, Hijri in Muslim countries and the Tamil calendar as well.

Not to mention the Chinese calendar is actually lunisolar and not solely lunar, incorporating both solar and lunar timekeeping, so "Lunar New Year" is half accurate at best. Switching to calling it "Lunisolar New Year" also runs into similar issues, the Thai calendar is lunisolar (but Songkran/Thai New Year is in April) as is the Hebrew calendar (Rosh Hashanah/Hebrew New Year is in Sept-Oct)

In China, using {农历|nónglì}/agricultural calendar (due to its historical significance in relation to farming) or {旧历|jiùlì}/old calendar to refer to the Chinese calendar are the most accurate whereas {阴历|yīnlì}/lunar calendar and {阳历|yánglì}/solar calendar being common vernacular despite being technically incorrect.

Just call it {春节|chūnjíe}/Spring Festival or {新年|xīnnián}/New Year, it's the most common terms ({元旦|yuándàn} is the most common way of referring to the Gregorian new year in China itself.) It really doesn't matter that much to us. The term "Chinese New Year" is rarely used in China and was probably a term used by Chinese immigrants for the benefit of Westerners.

Tl;Dr "Lunar New Year" is well meaning but incorrect, erases other lunar calenders and recently has been used maliciously.

One particularly gross habit I see from liberals on Reddit or YouTube or even TikTok is when faced with a person they don't like, they will accuse them of some sort of illness, mental or otherwise.

For example:

A right-winger isn't just ignorant or bigoted, he's that way because he wasn't hugged as a child or has daddy issues. The worst one I see is liberals saying things along the line of "Ah yes, the eyes are close together, I've noticed that a lot of alt-righters have the signs of fetal alcohol syndrome." Yes, I kid you not. It's some real phrenology shit.

A boomer being short tempered isn't because of them being ignorant or misunderstanding, it's because of lead poisoning. Something I see often is the phrase "lead paint stare" which is pretty messed up. Like holy shit lead poisoning was a horrific crime against their entire generation, don't use it as a punchline to dismiss them. Like I get the desire to get mad at boomers as a whole, they grew up during the hight of capitalist wealth and a lot of them don't get what the rest of us are going through. But even at the height of capitalism they were still fucked over hard. We should know how little power Westerners had to oppose capitalist will in the 70s and 80s Your average boomer has about as much to do with the housing crash as we did the COVID mishandling. The environment they grew up in produced a lot of ignorant and shitty views for sure, but to trivalise them being literally mass poisoned? Fuck off.

Accusations of narcissistic personality disorder is another one I see get thrown around a lot to explain away greedy or selfish actions. To me this takes agency away from their actual terrible actions.

And then you have the Reddit shit of "this person is lashing out at me because they are depressed or suicidal. Haha." If they disagree with them. Which is pathetic and cowardly on so many levels.

I'm okay with bullying terrible people, particularly with bullying the bullies, but they should be bullied for things that are actually bad, not things are beyond their control or are things we should actually have sympathy for.

Warning: I'm aware that most around here in Hexbear are aware of the existence of problems with Wikipedia, I've written this post so that the next time someone outside here accuses me of being an authoritarian, brainwashed and revisionist Tankie for saying that Wikipedia actually isn't reliable for a given topic, I have some reference post that I can direct them towards with my opinion on the topic. That said, if you haven't ever considered why Wikipedia can be so problematic, I think my post can be a nice little introduction to the topic. The post doesn't attempt to be a comprehensive list of all problems with Wikipedia, but instead a helpful, common-language approach to a few of the (in my opinion) biggest problems with it: the average Wikipedia editor being a western, white and male; and the predominantly western sources used on most articles. Anyways, of course I welcome additions or criticism to the post. Thanks :)

Wikipedia, being a free, online, collaborative encyclopedia, is mostly maintained by people who go out of their way to spend time making contributions to free, open knowledge, with a good-will unseen in most other media, i.e. not taking sponsorships or relying on advertisers, supposedly individual and independent users editing articles instead of political actors with an agenda (let's give Wikipedia even more credit by forgetting about astroturfing and brigading by private or governmental bodies). This is Wikipedia's greatest strength: it doesn't rely on a state mouthpiece or private funding to maintain its operation, and can be therefore be considered relatively directly independent from individual actors, again, forgetting about astroturfing and brigading for the purpose of this post. But stopping to think about it: who is actually editing Wikipedia, and where are they getting their information from? Ideally, the entire humanity as a collective would collaborate in Wikipedia, and users would take as unbiased and wide a sample as humanly possible, in the most well-sourced and referenced manner. Unfortunately, it is on this front that Wikipedia hides an ugly truth.

So, who actually edits Wikipedia? Thankfully, Wikipedia seems open about it: for the most part, western, English-speaking, white men with abundant time (i.e. affluent), mostly from English-speaking countries or from countries where English is predominantly taught. So: North America and Western Europe. This lack of diversity in itself has problems, such as women reporting Wikipedia to be of lower quality than men do (again, from the same article), but this implies another hidden problem: where does this biased sample of users take its information from?

As for where information in Wikipedia comes from, thanks to its standards with references (better than those in most other media available, at least in the west where I live), we again have answers. Wikipedia itself has a compiled, although incomplete list of “reliable sources”, colour-coded for our convenience: green for sources that editors consider generally reliable, red for sources editors consider generally unreliable or sources that have been deprecated, and yellow for sources were there's no consensus or there are particular considerations. A few examples of what Wikipedia editors consider reliable and unreliable sources follow:

I've brought four examples that show the bias problem in full swing, the first two both being private companies, and the latter two being state-media. The Wall Street Journal is a fully accepted source with no extra requirements on the “notes” part of the table, whereas Russia Today is a deprecated Russian Government mouthpiece. Is this really fair? Obviously, we can expect Russia Today to be heavily biased towards pro-Russian Government positions in many politically charged topics, but can't we expect the Wall Street Journal to portray similar biases when it comes to pro-US Government positions? We in the west necessarily and rightly expect Russia Today to be biased in a particular direction in, for example, their reporting of the ongoing (as of the time of writing) war in Ukraine, but can't we expect the WSJ to be biased in a particular direction in, for example, the ongoing (as of the time of writing) genocide in Gaza? Let's see what a quick Google search brings up for WSJ and Zionism:

Whoops. Colour me surprised. Western media portraying a Zionist, pro-Israel stance, known ally of the US Government. But no mention of this in the “reliable sources” notes for the WSJ in the Wikipedia list, reflecting the editors' bias.

Let's look at two state-sponsored (rather, openly state-sponsored) media: Radio Free Asia and Xinhua News Agency. Again, the USian source is good and green, going as far as saying that “editors have found there's little reason to think [it] demonstrates systematic inaccuracy [or] unreliability”, whereas the Chinese source is yellow and “the consensus is almost unanimous that Xinhua cannot be trusted to cover [subjects where the Chinese government may be a stake holder] accurately and dispassionately”. If you as a reader agree with this, that's fine, but I'm willing to bet you're in the same demographic group than the average Wikipedia editor.

This, unfortunately, doesn't stop at “mass media”. Academic sources for historical events equally suffer from this selection bias of white western men being behind the source more often than not, and the cold war-era climate and its consequences still mean that certain viewpoints more friendly to the US State Department will be much more widely funded, published and available than other viewpoints less agreeable to state propaganda. Again, how wide is the access to, say, old Soviet sources in Wikipedia for talking about historical topics? What's more likely to get funding and advertisement in 2025, a study on mass-incarceration of certain ethnic minorities in the USA, or a study on the situation of Uyghur nationals in China?

Before mischaracterization ensues, my point with this post isn't “we should blindly trust Russian and Chinese media and the Soviet Union did nothing wrong”, regardless of my own biases. My point with this post isn't even that Wikipedia sucks, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for many topics, especially less-political ones or those which may be less susceptible to biases in the user sample, and its standards are much higher than those of most traditional forms of media. The problem, is that this isn't enough to guarantee a reliable and not one-sided account of topics that have a political, gender, racial or international dimension where the bias in user representation is that large (I'm sure I'm leaving out dimensions but this doesn't attempt to be comprehensive; after all, I myself am a western, white male, the irony isn't lost on me).

Finally, for anyone who may still not be convinced, think of the following: tomorrow, a Russian or Chinese initiative for an open source online encyclopedia begins, and in a few years, there exists an encyclopedic wealth of knowledge and articles gathered majoritarily by Russian or Chinese citizens, predominantly male and of the largest ethnic group of those countries, and predominantly therefore referencing the articles with predominantly Russian and Chinese sources. Would you consider such a project to be unbiased when it comes to politically or racially charged topics, whether national or international? If your answer is no, then why are your standards different for Wikipedia?

Thanks for reading. Tl;Dr: Wikipedia is predominantly edited by white men in western countries, and almost necessarily reflects the bias suffered by that demographic, which itself is partially inflicted on them by their access to predominantly western sources.

Edit: credit to BadEmpanada, I recall watching a video of his long ago on Wikipedia and the Holodomor, and that part of the info, particularly the links to Wikipedia's own articles on its bias and source selection, I found there.

https://youtu.be/mUx_MxHHkD4

The use of a neopronoun in a sentence generally implies the following:

1. The referent is comfortable with being assumed to be non-binary.
2. The speaker is aware of the referent’s gender variance.
3. The speaker wants to call attention to the referent’s gender variance in front of the listener.
4. Nothing is stopping the speaker from calling attention to the referent being gender variant.

These four basic implications can have any number of variable deeper implications about the speaker, listener, referent, and the context of the discourse, and the relations between these. There are naturally exceptions, too, but I think we can set those aside for now.

We can for instance imagine a situation in which either the listener or a passerby is secretly questioning sy gender or is in the closet, and wants to know who’s “safe” or who thon can talk to about sy troubles. With just a single use of “xe” in a conversation — assuming the speaker isn’t using a mocking tone — we can practically guarantee that the speaker is safe, that the speaker knows someone who’s worth talking to, and that the listener and any passersby at the very least don’t flip out and insist that the speaker should “stop using that word”.

Can you do this reliably with he, she, or they...?

You can certainly speculate that a he or she is gender variant if the speaker is alternating between these pronouns, or if his antecedent is a word like woman or hers is man, but if not, then you’ll only be able to know the referent is gender variant if this is actually brought up in the conversation, or is otherwise established knowledge. In which case you can’t really gauge how “cool” the he or she is just from the pronouns, nor how good an ally the speaker is, since for all you know, the he or she is truscum, fully passing and conforming to cis people’s standards, or maybe the speaker only selectively genders trans people correctly. Or if the speaker is alternating between masculine and feminine terms, then this may be because this is what the referent prefers, or it may be because the speaker is just bad at consistently gendering people correctly.

On the other hand, that they may be gender variant, certainly, or the speaker might just be unaware of that person’s gender, or perhaps doesn’t want to mention it, either as a “pronoun game” or as transphobic “degendering” or perhaps even as both. If it’s established that the referent is nonbinary, then maybe the speaker is just as glad that thon can stick to they and avoid calling more attention to the referent’s gender identity than necessary, and maybe the non-binary person themself doesn’t want their non-binarity to be acknowledged, because they don’t want to be associated with “that kind of enby”. You can't really tell from pronouns alone.

Which basically leaves us with just it and neopronouns. The pronoun it is in fact often lumped together with neopronouns and considered to be a neopronoun “in practice”, because a lot of people find it about as hard to convince others to call them it as call them xem. In the case of it, this is because it is a pronoun mainly used for non-human animals and inanimate objects, which makes people worry that if they call someone it that this will come across as degrading and insulting (note: tone and context can go a long way in clarifying the intent), or perhaps they as anthropocentrists (or as victims of such a society) just don't get why somebody would want to be called by the same terms as non-human animals, and would rather make that the referent's problem than sort through their own feelings.

All this being said, I'll conclude by saying that neopronouns have their own semantic space and pragmatic implications compared to the other pronouns that non-binary people commonly go by: mixing he and she generally implies mixing masculine and feminine, they is degendered, it is dehumanizing, but xe or ey or thon are unburdened by any of these established, conditioned connotations. The connotations of these neopronouns are first and foremost "the referent is probably nonbinary and very willing to stand out as such", and secondarily whatever associations people individually give to them.

Whatever you think of my analysis, I hope this has been interesting and a cause for reflection.

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Side note 1: ''George Costanza behavior''

I think all of this also sort of explains the “George Costanza behavior” of people saying that they go by all pronouns but still “mentally ranking” people based on what they do with this information: they is -gender -trans, she or he is +gender -trans, and neopronouns are +gender +trans, and it follows from this that someone always calling you they might find it too uncomfortable to acknowledge that you have a gender at all, and on the other hand someone always calling you she or he might be able to comfortably acknowledge that you have a gender, but does not want to acknowledge that you’re trans/non-binary. You don't have to dislike being called any of these pronouns to be bothered by this.

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Side note 2: The markedness of singular they

My own belief as a certified Armchair Linguist is that aside from serving as a pronoun for non-binary people, that singular they in reference to specific known persons primarily serves as a marker of social distance.

The evolution of singular they as I understand it (I may be wrong about the specific order) was that the earliest uses of singular they were with everybody as antecedent — due to the implied plurality — then with nobody, then anybody, then somebody; then this was further extended to generic nouns, then to unknown persons, then finally to specific, known persons. And as I see it, it makes more sense for this latest evolution of usage for singular they to be from "unknown person" to "barely-known person" — i.e. that singular they is a marker of social distance — than for singular they to have evolved specifically to serve as a marker of gender-neutrality, in a society that I observe largely does not care about respecting the wishes and boundaries of gender variant people.

This isn't to say that gender neutrality is completely 100% incidental to the usage and proliferation of the singular they, just that the gender neutrality is very much secondary to the evolution of they from plural to implied-plural to nonspecific to unknown to barely-known. Following from this, I would say the thing that makes the use of the singular they in reference to non-binary people so often marked, is that you're basically using a pronoun with connotations of social distance, in reference to someone you're socially close to.

For those who get called they against their wishes, this can really add another dimension to the hurt of getting degendered, because the implication is not just "I'm too uncomfortable to acknowledge your gender", but even "I'm uncomfortable with even just associating with you".

To be crystal clear: pointing this stuff out isn't meant to justify or excuse the people who don't want to call a they a them — those people are still just being transphobic and need to get the Hell over themselves. But I do still think that this helps explain why people end up using they in the ways they do, why people find certain uses of singular they more troublesome than others, and why some non-binary people like myself do not want to be called they.

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Side note 3: Pronouns are a bad way to distinguish characters

There's an idea some people have that the reason why we have gendered pronouns in the first place is to help distinguish between characters in a story or anecdote or conversation, like ♫ it's all about the he-said-she-said bullllshit ♫ — but I find this idea very dubious, given how common homosocial interactions and relationships and institutions are, especially historically. It could very well be that it's actually more common for there to be two he's or two she's in a discourse, than a he and a she each.

By all means, feel free to call me xe if you're talking about me in the same breath as another she, if you feel this will make your utterance less ambiguous, but my point is that the evolution of language is a lot like the evolution of species: you can say that wings are for flying, but are they really? Wings are things that evolved under certain evolutionary pressures which are used for flying, but they weren't actually intelligently designed for any specific purpose. We have gendered pronouns in English as a vestige of the Old English gender system, whose roots go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, and Proto-Indo-European evolved its gender system probably for complicated reasons involving grammaticalization and sound associations or something like that. Perhaps that gender system helped with the recollection of words, or helped with the comprehension of sentences that speakers of PIE didn't quite hear, but again, these are ways that these systems were used in practice, but not necessarily the reasons why these systems evolved — the system, with no-one intelligently designing it, never had any rational reason to exist.

If a language were being intelligently designed such that you could have two (or even more) characters in a sentence each be referred to with different pronouns, you would probably have obviation and reflexive possessives rather than something as unreliable as gender. Whether English will ever have these sorts of features, who can tell, but English in any case does not have these features at present.

I have started reading the book Debt: The First 5000 years. Initially, RPGs and World Building were not topics that crossed my mind when working through the first couple of chapters. Then, the other night, I was casually watching a Matt Colvile YouTube stream, and he says this:

I heard that like, that notion of bartering as an economic model, that has never happened. What you get is, you get, it's almost like a [patwa?], its like two different cultures meet for the first time where they do bartering, I'll give you these goats for these two chickens, and after that brief period, which is probably measured in a couple of years they come up with a medium of exchange, right? And then they don't need that bartering thing anymore, and I thought oh that's interesting...

Chapter 2 of Debt is titled "The Myth of Barter". Here is the third paragraph, which I think encapsulates the problem with barter as this mythical economic model:

A history of debt, then, is thus necessarily a history of money—and the easiest way to understand the role that debt has played in human society is simply to follow the forms that money has taken, and the way money has been used, across the centuries—and the arguments that inevitably ensued about what all this means. Still, this is necessarily a very different history of money than we are used to. When economists speak of the origins of money, for example, debt is always something of an afterthought. First comes barter, then money; credit only develops later. Even if one consults books on the history of money in, say, France, India, or China, what one generally gets is a history of coinage, with barely any discussion of credit arrangements at all. For almost a century, anthropologists like me have been pointing out that there is something very wrong with this picture. The standard economic-history version has little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted, in real communities and marketplaces, almost anywhere—where one is much more likely to discover everyone is in debt to everyone else in a dozen different ways, and that most transactions take place without the use of currency.

This idea, that most historical means of exchange were handled without the use of currency, has some rather large and freeing implications for playing your bog-standard Fantasy Land™ RPG.

One of the core issues I, and many others it would seem, had when running / playing D&D5e boiled down to this:

• I never knew how much anything should cost from a "general goods" store or some "magic shop".
• I never knew how much gold should be rewarded to players for doing basically anything.
• My players never knew what to use gold for at all, or thanks to some class abilities, never needed gold for food or shelter, which was 99% of all gold sinks early on.

This stems in some ways from the relationship between treasure and progress in the original Dungeons and Dragons, published in the 70s. Much of the "how" regarding playing D&D at the time was in massive flux and wildly varied from group to group and region to region. There is a book that I very much want to read that covers these early days in detail through analysis of zines from the time called The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson. The rules as written effectively give the GM broad authority to award experience points however they want, but softly suggest they start with awarding them for slaying monsters and collecting treasure.

My understanding, and I do not have sources in front of me, is that this experience for treasure was only calculated once you returned to the "overworld". Whatever was left behind, does not count. In this way, progress was deeply tied to the extraction of gold, as in some cases you would earn 1 exp for every 1 GP you successfully looted to the overworld. This relationship made large sums of gold very attractive to players and likely dictated the design of dungeons to feature more gold than you could carry. Even then, in the early days of Chainmail and eventually D&D, there was wide and heated debate about the nature of progression. Some felt that having this "scoreboard" which generally was tied to looting and killing, left little room for your players to engage with the character they had built, and instead were simply leveraging the underlying mechanics to get a higher "score" faster. It would seem, these debates never ended, almost half a century later.

Much like every economic textbook ever written, people's lack of understanding of historical economies causes them to skip straight to monetary exchange as the primary mode of trade within our games. It would appear that we cannot escape the same kind of myth building within our little games of Medieval Fantasy. Observe the myth building as illustrated by Graeber in chapter 2 of Debt:

It’s important to emphasize that this is not presented as something that actually happened, but as a purely imaginary exercise. “To see that society benefits from a medium of exchange” write Begg, Fischer and Dornbuch (Economics, 2005), “imagine a barter economy.” “Imagine the difficulty you would have today,” write Maunder, Myers, Wall, and Miller (Economics Explained, 1991), “if you had to exchange your labor directly for the fruits of someone else’s labor.” “Imagine,” write Parkin and King (Economics, 1995), “you have roosters, but you want roses.” One could multiply examples endlessly. Just about every economics textbook employed today sets out the problem the same way. Historically, they note, we know that there was a time when there was no money. What must it have been like? Well, let us imagine an economy something like today’s, except with no money. That would have been decidedly inconvenient! Surely, people must have invented money for the sake of efficiency.

It, too, would seem that money in D&D was invented for the sake of efficiency as well. This notion of treasure (mainly gold) as a measure of progress for your character appears to me as reflective of deeply engrained capitalist ideology. It has a twofold character, one that is reflective of the beliefs of the creators of the game, and one that serves as a simple foundation for the masses of people who engage with the game. The more money you gain, the more powerful you are, this is known. However, this eventually leads to the development of economic gameplay that unfolds into a world of Medieval Fantasy with Modern Capitalist Characteristics. This relationship culminated with the production of the official, and farcical Dungeons and Dragons: Acquisitions Incorporated rule book, providing tongue in cheek rules that allow you to play as your very own Adventure Capitalist.

What I am just now learning, as I write this, though, is that money seems to have taken an even lesser position within the game as of the 2024 edition. In 5e (2014) "Coins" is featured on the front of the character sheet. There are several feats and class features that allow you to effectively get "free food and rooms" anywhere you travel (the By Popular Demand feature for bards, as an example). In the 2024 edition, however, coins can be found on the back of the character sheet. Features like "By Popular Demand" appear to have been removed. Though, this appears to me a result of the "epic fantasy role-play" camp winning out over the "dangerous dungeon delving and treasure hoarding" camp, where-in you need not interact with the "economy" of the world since you're all effectively "The Avengers".

I can hear you back there, wondering, "Rid Wizard, what the fuck are you on about?" So let me advance to the point. If we take what Graeber says in at least the first couple of chapters of Debt as a kind of guiding principle over the nature of the worlds we build, we can build a far more interesting and complex web of narrative opportunities, while simultaneously having answers for what to do with all this gold. Consider the quote above, specifically the final part:

The standard economic-history version has little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted, in real communities and marketplaces, almost anywhere—where one is much more likely to discover everyone is in debt to everyone else in a dozen different ways, and that most transactions take place without the use of currency.

The small communities living within the baronies borders likely live a much more communal life than how most GMs typically depict them. These communities are full of subsistence farmers, and also produce something of value that is collected by the Barron's Knights every season. The external relations the community has with its Baron is one of service. They are provided land, and in exchange are in service to the Baron. Internally, their relations are also driven by service to one another. How they are related engenders the reason for service. A squire in a life debt to a local Knight. A father laboring out of love for his family. A prisoner laboring for the community for which she harmed. Each family and person owes each other their labor for one reason or another, but ultimately labors to ensure the Barron gets his, and so the community isn't left struggling.

Between Baronies, gold is obviously the medium of exchange, and within the walls of the keep that sits at the heart of the baronies, gold takes the place of most exchanges, especially between the larger trade guilds, which are paid by the Baron in gold for the goods they exchange externally. Gold is minted and managed by the Baronies' administration, it is, after all, a product and function of the state.

Labor, on behalf of villagers and our intrepid heroes, should be the primary means of exchange that drives the adventure and story. What motivates a person to become an adventurer? Running way from debt? Seeking to repay a debt? Seeking to expunge a debt through dispatching with the creditor? Debts, in this context, are not strictly a numerical sum of goods or gold that needs to be accumulated before the debt is wiped clean. A person can owe another any number of things, and the most dire of all would be their life.

At some point, debts need to be collected, and your heroes could find themselves being those debt collectors, or running from those debt collectors. Everyone is owed something by someone, you may have to put yourself in debt to a small time thug to go after the big time boss. Perhaps, to earn your magical attunement, you had to make a pact with a Fay, Fiend, Devil or Demon. The Barony is secretly in debt to the red dragon that lives in the mountains, and it has come to collect! The Baron is secretly a Red Dragon, using his long life and political status to amount a vast hoard of gold and treasure, throwing the Baronies into war in hopes to grow its hoard.

The gold you have collected can be still exchanged, but what it gets you is far grander than a simple potion at the local magical goods store. Gold for large tracks of land, gold for your own keep on the border land, gold for a private audience with the Baron, gold for a tavern within the keep, gold for a mercenary company willing to breach the Gates of Hell. If gold is principally used to move city states, then you may have the ability to impose great influence over a city state. After all, "If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank."

What of rewards? Again, much of the above, could be the reward your party earns. A run-down tavern at the edge of a small village the party has aided. The Baron grants you the title of Knight and as such grants you dominion over a small village within the Barony as well as privileged access to the keep. A position of authority within a trade guild. Access to a personal blacksmith, who owes you his life.

And what of buying magical items? This, I think, is where we loop all the way back around to barter. While no civilization has ever had barter as their primary mode of exchange, that isn't to imply that barter doesn't play a role in many societies and civilizations. The later half of Chapter 2 in the book Debt discusses a few ethnographic accounts of barter found in the world.

What all such cases of trade through barter have in common is that they are meetings with strangers who will, likely as not, never meet again, and with whom one certainly will not enter into any ongoing relations. This is why a direct one-on-one exchange is appropriate: each side makes their trade and walks away. It’s all made possible by laying down an initial mantle of sociability in the form of shared pleasures, music, and dance—the usual base of conviviality on which trade must always be built. Then comes the actual trading, where both sides make a great display of the latent hostility that necessarily exists in any exchange of material goods between strangers—where neither party has no particular reason not to take advantage of the other—by playful mock aggression, though in the Nambikwara case, where the mantle of sociability is extremely thin, mock aggression is in constant danger of slipping over into the real thing. The Gunwinggu, with their more relaxed attitude toward sexuality, have quite ingeniously managed to make the shared pleasures and aggression into exactly the same thing.

Recall here the language of the economics textbooks: “Imagine a society without money.” “Imagine a barter economy.” One thing these examples make abundantly clear is just how limited the imaginative powers of most economists turn out to be.

Barter, then, naturally fits right into our bag of tricks as GMs. Barter, in this context, is dramatic, it can be full of tension and drama:

A party of Rat-Catchers spots the flowing smoke and flickering fire of what is clearly a campsite of another band of Rat-Catchers. The camp, always with one person on watch takes note of their presence. Neither knows the intentions of the other, and what kind of danger they represent. What they both understand, is that all rat-catchers travel with considerably more heat than your average soldier. Do they look green, or do they have the jagged appearance of well-traveled veterans? It is considered rude and often suspicious to not stop and converse, not doing so raises hairs and plants a target on your back, but doing so might just as well. The camp sends a signal, the whisle of a bird not native to this wode from the Druid. The other signals back with the same forign bird song. The members of the camp stand, and offer a welcoming gesture. The others nod in agreement and enter the camp. Greetings are shared, albet with some aprehension, as everyone settles the stories begin. Each party shares of their exploits, carefully telling the most exciting, but least interesting version of their stories. Let too much info slip, and you might become a valuable target to extort for information on a new and larger score. Have nothing to say, and you might be perceived as easy pickings, your loot for the taking. Stories of your escapades are shared over a joint meal, no group of Rat-Catchers in the night will let the other go hungry, not worth the bad reputation. Sometimes these chance meetings end with a good meal and grand stories for the bards to transcribe. Sometimes these meetings turn into a heated ritual of exchange, where one party member seeks an item of value from another. Arguments and demonstrations insue, the laying out of goods to be parted with, negotiations drive tensions. In the end, each walk away with something new or unusual, something of equal or greater value then what they started with. The fires are put out, the party continue on their journey, likely to never see the other again. It's a big world out there after all.

Be more imaginative than most economists, fill your world with interesting and complex means of exchange, devoid of copper and gold. Imagine your world complexly, even its modes of exchange.

Forgive me if this was addressed, but I don't think it was. During a previous struggle session in a statement from the mod team something was said along the lines of "the he/hims aren't beating the allegations".

Personally I do not think this is acceptable, to me this is just using "he/hims" as a proxy for saying men. No one in IRL settings uses "he/hims" as a term to describe people who use him/him pronouns, no one is categorized into a grouping in general based on their pronouns as it is just a preferred pronoun not a characteristic like gender identity.

If there is misogyny going on, just say there is misogyny among users, their pronouns do not change the content of what they said, if someone with he/him pronouns and someone with she/her pronouns typed the exact same degrading thing about a woman, their pronouns would not factor into whether what they said was misogynistic or not.

I am bringing this up as it seems like people in the mod chat are still using "he/hims" to refer to people who have indicated they prefer he/him as their pronouns, you might think this is progressive because you are not directly making a gender identity assumption, but I believe this is in fact reactionary and you are just using pronouns as a proxy for the gender that is most commonly associated with the given pronoun i.e. men in the case of saying "he/hims".

I think this is at least counterproductive and at most harmful, if knowing someone's gender identity is relevant or useful, it should just be asked for.

The point of having pronouns is to accommodate and to treat people with respect and dignity about what they prefer to be called. Using pronouns as a proxy for gender identity undermines this as, treating someone with dignity would involve asking them directly what their gender identity is, not making judgments or assumptions based off of their preferred pronouns.

The only thing that having he/him pronouns indicates is that the person prefers to be referred to with the pronouns he and him. They are just personal pronouns, they are not equivalent to an ethnicity, a gender identity, a gender expression, etc.

If someone with he/him pronouns seems like they are misogynistic, that may have something to do with their gender identity, but it has nothing to do with their pronouns. It is not fair nor accurate to make assumptions of gender identity from pronouns and I think this should be avoided.

This is not to undermine any concerns about misogyny, but misogyny can and should be fought against regardless of what pronouns are involved in any instance of it.

Thanks for reading this, please know all I want is for pronouns and gender identity not to be conflated and to create a safe and respectful space for all users. And I think a good way to work towards this would be to stop using "he/hims", "she/hers", "they/thems", etc. as a way to refer to people who specify they would like to be referred to as those pronouns.

Over the last 72 hours, I've been reflecting a lot on the US Healthcare System for... various reasons. Yesterday I had another experience with my own personal healthcare that, in light of recent events, had me seething. This is a situation I've posted about before, and here I was, once more, stuck in the bureaucracy of healthcare under capitalism, and I was reminded of Chapter 8 from Capitalist Realism entitled "There's no central exchange".

The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything.

It has been three months since I needed to re-up on my ADHD medication. One major thing that has changed in my relationship with the US Healthcare system is my primary care doctor. It was naive of me to think that this would have minimal impact on acquiring the Schedule 1 drug I take to regulate my mind and emotions. I even mentioned my frustration with this three month ritual I perform while at my intake appointment. I was told, "Just call us a week ahead, and we'll make sure you get your script on time." I think you understand where this is going.

Getting my specific prescription requires me to interact with at a minimum with three organizational entities. The most it has required me so far has been four organizational entities. Each of these entities has their own, Kafkaesque labyrinth of internal bureaucracy that I need to carefully and artfully maneuver through, and failing to maneuver through one of them creates a cascading failure state that requires the whole process to start again.

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

The process starts with my doctor's office. Following previously understood norms learned from a previous doctor's office, I call the front desk to request a refill on my prescription. Here is where false hope takes hold, as the process is simple and straightforward. I tell the receptionist I'm getting a refill, she asks me for identification, I provide, she asks me for prescription details, I again provide, I also include some clarifying statements such as "I know I'm a new patent here, but in my previous office they would fill me a script for 90 days for my convenience." I also tell them, "I'd like this to be sent to the mail order pharmacy, they have been reliable for me in the past." I'm assured that information will get passed along. The call ends, and having been through this dance before, I do not allow false hope to find a place to roost within my thoughts.

From here, the issue of getting my prescription filled is out of the hands of the first organization. When this request fails, and it will fail, they can absolve themselves of any issue. Having been here before, I know how this game is played. Neither organization wants to take any ownership of the transactional failure that happens between them. This is the first sign of the power of capitalism's horizontal organization. See, neither of these organizations are subordinate to the other, and as we'll see, this is true for the other two organizations involved as well. Not a single one of these organizations has any understanding of the rules and structure of the other's internal labyrinth. That is not for them to know or understand, it does not benefit them to do so. That burden is given to you, as you are the only one who stands to benefit from running the maze and getting the cheese. You see, you are the rat in the maze, and the way you interact with the maze informs the observers on how well the maze is built and what needs to be changed. This maze is not constructed for convenience, and paradoxically, it is not constructed to facilitate you getting the cheese. Often, the cheese at the end of this maze might result in you receiving some form of monetary restitution, but even when the goal is to provide you with a product which you can consume, they will build these mazes almost as a kind of natural byproduct of the internal conflicts within capitalism. Contacting the interior of the organization, and getting to a human, could place the organization at risk of almost anything, and I have to wonder if this maze is built as a kind of defense mechanism that ultimately undermines their own stated goals of earning profit.

Some time passes, and naturally, I have no information about the status of my request. It is gone into the black void of the capitalist bureaucracy. Their mobile apps function as another limb on the money tree for these organizations, gathering information that can be used against you to yield a more fruitful blossom come the spring. While dealing with one of capitalism's other failures yesterday, I happened to remember I placed a request for a prescription, and checked the mobile app for the mail order provider I use. Once opened, I was met with what I expected, a notice that my prescription had been "canceled". The obvious first question is "Why?" and naturally, the mobile app is not here to provide you with those answers. The Mobile app is also not responsible for notifying you in any reasonable way about the cancelation of the request, maybe this is a privacy issue, HIPAA perhaps. A simple "A prescription has been canceled" would have been enough, but I guess that would cut into their earnings somehow. So, back into the labyrinth I delve yet again, but this time inside the organization tasked with filling this prescription.

"The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there – it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility."

Here is where the call center shines, and I am met by a very pleasant individual. They take my information to verify I am who I am, and then proceed to ask me why I'm calling today. When I explain that one of my prescriptions was canceled, and then tell them I'm looking to find out why, almost as a knee-jerk response, in the nicest tone one can imagine they say:

"Oh, I don't know why it's canceled."

I have to suppress every nerve in my brain stem that wants to erupt over this statement, and remind myself this person is also a victim of these systems, as much as they are a part of them.

"So, there is no information about why it was canceled?",

"Here, let me look it up."

This response, again, is telling. Were they being literal in their previous statement, that they did not know why it was canceled because they had not looked it up? That is probably the most generous interpretation of this exchange, but I highly doubt that's the case.

"Here it is. There is a note on it... let me see... The note says something about it not being within the plan minimum. I'm not sure what that means exactly."

What is clear throughout this exchange (which I have truncated) is that this person is only the facilitator of prescriptions once they are approved. How they become approved, and for what reasons they are denied, that is not their role. In fact, no one really knows why things happen the way they do within this organization. They simply abide by rulings that come from another organization, of which they have no authority over. This, "note", is likely the result of some response from the insurance company. It is not the pharmacies job to advocate for the prescription to get filled. It does not matter how often they see this exact issue, they intake prescriptions and process only the approved ones. Furthermore, it's also not the job of the doctor's office to ensure the prescription gets filled, they are simply the ones writing the prescription, even if they constantly encounter this exact issue. They simply intake sick patients and at times output prescriptions for someone else to process. The insurance company's only job is to evaluate a request in effectively a vacuum against rules only understood by those inside its organization. The insurance company intakes requests and outputs rulings and money to compensate the other parties, and it hates outputting money.

Each organization has its own rules they must abide by, and none of those rules are in service of providing you adequate healthcare. It is not a "farm to table" operation where you see the doctor, who puts in a prescription to an in-house pharmacist, who gets approval from an in-house insurance representative, all working under the same hierarchy, with the common goal of getting your prescription in a timely manner while abiding by all the rules and regulations impact them externally. Under our liberal economy, that would be described as a "monopoly" which "stifles innovation and competition". Yet so many of these three entities, Doctor's Offices, Insurance Providers, and Pharmacies are owned under much larger medical umbrellas, and because of the horizontal nature of their arrangement, it somehow doesn't constitute a monopoly as such. Just because each of them has a publicly traded stock or external investments that are all owned by the same source, doesn't in any way imply that they are centrally owned and operated. Besides, even if that were true, those investments are coming from an investment firm whose only job is to intake corporations and output return on investments.

So from here we've hit the end of the line. We have to return to the start position, and call into the doctor's office, where you will be met with a nice receptionist who dutifully takes your notes and sends them off to the "appropriate people". This time, however, you have a different plan. You see, each time you delve into the maze of one of these organizations, you don't always leave empty-handed. You might not have gotten the cheese, but the wandering souls that shift and change the shape of the maze will also be willing to provide you with information. This resource is the only form of currency you have to make the interlocking gears of this clockwork nightmare spin for you. Every time you pass through the call center gauntlet and reach a real human soul, it is your job (not that anyone will tell you this) to interrogate them as long as they are willing to stay on the phone. You have to be cunning, though, and you can't fall for the traps that they lay. It is unclear how much of this dialect they speak is deliberately taught, or if it develops over time as a kind of release pin to get you off the phone as fast as possible.

"I know that the pharmacy has that medication, you might want to have it sent there, if you're worried about time."

"That's true, so you can see that they have the medication in stock? I know that it can be difficult to find these days."

You have to ask these kinds of questions instead of assuming what they said is what they meant, you learn over time that if you were to hang up now, you still do not have enough information to be successful down the line.

"Oh, no, sorry, the system doesn't let me see what they have in stock. I can just see that they have it."

They have it, but not in a way that indicates to this person that they have it if you catch the drift. This again is because, even though this company, and the local place bear the same name, they are not in the same business and not connected in any meaningful way. You would think a decentralized system such as this would have supreme interoperability, but that's the preview of federated web forms, and not the healthcare system. From here, you now know what you need to do next, and we are now engaging with our third organization, a local pharmacy that lives under the same umbrella as the mail order pharmacy.

This is where true capitalist innovation is on full display. You see, local establishments in the physical reality are some of the easiest methods of infiltrating the maze and contacting a real human soul. The issue, however, is time. Many of us understand this, and for others less fortunate than myself, they must drive for an hour or more just to walk through the doors of this holy space. So often, while between tasks, toiling away as helpless souls reshaping our own personal labyrinths, we make a phone call to these places. Instead of being greeted by a nice receptionist or a queue, we are greeted by the perfect little worker. The Fully Automated Phone Attendant. This automaton has become quite sophisticated over the years. Gone are the days of a directory of selections, and here are the days of completely authentic voice communications with a robot whose only job is to gate keep your access to a human. It isn't just pharmacies either who have implemented this form of innovation. Even your favorite, local, national, pizza place no longer accepts incoming calls to their physical location. Now, you are met with a centralized automaton ready to take your order, and if they should fail, shunt you off to the far-flung corners of the globe, where someone from the global south will carefully read you a script for pennies an hour, all so you can get a nice slice of pizza pie. Anyway, I digress. Here, you might have picked up some knowledge, that can expediate your attempts at bypassing this system. Maybe this robot still responds to key presses, such as mashing the 0 key to get the operator, perhaps this robot understands "frustration", and unleashing a volley of obscenities that would make Donald Duck blush will get you to a human, or potentially you know the direct internal extension that makes the pharmacy phone ring.

Once on the phone, you attempt again to fish for information, knowing full well these poor souls are deeply underpaid and understaffed. You have to tread lightly, as to not set off a hair trigger that has manifested from the stress they live under. Again, you present your information so that, again, you can be identified within their system. This time, the universe sent me a hurdle. A bit of cosmic capitalist jazz demanding some improvisational thinking.

"Yeah, hi, so I'm just calling to see if you have medication in stock. I know that it can be difficult to come by but ..."

"Well our systems are down, so .... not sure when they'll be back up, someone is here working on it."

"I see... So no one, even offhandedly, would know if you have that medication in stock?"

"Let me ask the pharmacist..."

I know that I have reached the most working-class parts of this web, and for that, I do have sympathy, but even here we must recognize that this exchange will be shaped by the internal nature of the pharmacy. This person has scripts to fill, customers to talk to, and almost no backup. Dealing with me on the phone is the last thing they wish to do, and the phone is the safest place for a verbal assault to happen, which I'm sure also shapes their response.

"Yeah, we have it..."

Mission complete. Again, I start back at the beginning, and the exchange is nice and simple. I expand on the request, letting the doctor's office know that... this isn't the first request, and I've encountered road blocks that seem to result from their office and their choices, but these notes are likely not translated in a way that conveys the frustration I've just endured. Interestingly, a day later, the prescription is filled, this time at the local pharmacy as I requested, and it is processed without issue, even though it is the same prescription for the exact quantity of pills. Shouldn't this be "outside of plan minimums?" I wonder as I wait for the price to appear after picking them up. I see that I'm only paying the copay, and I'm left wondering if I'm getting away with something, or if something more sinister is looming on the horizon, ready to lure me back into the maze.

In the end, I've received a prescription at a lower pill total than I would like, and for whatever reason, still at the "outside of plan minimum" quantity, even though I specifically said this quantity was causing problems. "Why were these choices made by the doctor?" I wonder. Through this whole process, I did not speak with them once. Now this curiosity has me back into the maze again, this time searching for the doctor and not the cheese. This is all in preparation for the next round of maze running I have to do in 28 days, now that I've been shunted onto this monthly schedule.

The horizontal nature of capital allows for it to create these kinds of encounters and all of them are, in effect, blameless. These organizations operate on limited information, and when something goes wrong, it is the fault of the other organizations, and not their own. There is no one to complain to. There is no manager who will want to "make things right". Blame can be shifted in any direction. You are the soul facilitator of your own healthcare, and if you were to sit idly by, thinking these interlocking systems even know of your needs, you'll be left for dead.

There’s no fixed exchange with the Castle, no central exchange which transmits our calls further. When anybody calls up the Castle from here the instruments in all the subordinate departments ring, or rather they would ring if practically all the departments – I know this for a certainty – didn’t leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a little distraction, especially in the evenings and at night and may hang the receiver on. Then we get an answer, but of course an answer that’s a practical joke. And that’s very understandable too. For who would take the responsibility of interrupting, in the middle of the night, the extremely important work that goes on furiously the whole time, with a message about his own private troubles? I can’t comprehend how even a stranger can imagine that when he calls up Sordini, for example, it’s Sordini that answers.

K’s response anticipates the bewildered frustration of the individual in the call center labyrinth. Although many of the conversations with call center operatives appear Dadaistically nonsensical, they cannot be treated as such, cannot be dismissed as being of no significance.

‘I didn’t know it was like that, certainly,’ said K. ‘I couldn’t know of all these peculiarities, but I didn’t put much confidence in those telephone conversations and I was always aware that the only things of any importance were those that happened in the Castle itself.’

‘No,’ said the Superintendent, holding firmly onto the word, ‘these telephone replies from the Castle certainly have a meaning, why shouldn’t they? How could a message given by an official from the Castle not be important?’

Preamble for the Post

I noticed that there has been some recent conversation regarding incels, and while skimming a few comments I noticed an interesting exchange revolving around the inadmissibility of prostitution as a means of escaping virginity in the incel ideology, as well as other musings about the nature of virginity in manhood. As such, I would like to present: On The Construction of Virginity, an essay that examines (from a largely psychosexual viewpoint) the symbolic and ideological foundations of virginity and the objectification of women that I hope may either shed some light on what may be lurking behind certain incel rhetoric, or at least spark a new direction of thought.

Part 1: Sexual Differentiation

Anthropologically, in many societies (this does not apply universally, however the societies it does apply to are the ones that have the deepest ties to cultural ideas of virginity) the shift to accumulative wealth structuring came in tandem with a shift to patrilineal title and inheritance. In order to ensure the purity of patriarchal lineage, it became essential to guarantee the sanctity of the womb from the spectre of the Other, the Usurper.

Now this doesn’t fully explain our current understandings of virginity—for instance, pre-marital virginity is unnecessary under this model, with all that matters being that after marriage the womb is consecrated to the Husband—but it deeply informs how virginity is structured in the cultural psyche.

This imposition of patrilineal title, the adoption of, in Lacanian terms, the Name of the Father, is the inculcation of the Law of the Father into the successive generation, which serves as the reproduction of the Father. The Son is the image of the Father, securing a legacy, and thus a form of self-reproduction and self-reincarnation. How this is instantiated and then reinscribed successively through the generations in the psyche is part of what gives rise to modern virginity.

Without going too deep into psycho-sexual production, the establishment of the ego, thus the individual, first begins with the Name. From there a series of identifications and taboos, reinforced through strictures and punishment, and thus pain, set the boundaries of the psyche’s projection within the borders of the skin. The most famous and oft-cited of these taboos, is, of course, the Oedipus complex.

The first caring and committed relationship, the first identification, is with the Mother. In the earliest development of the ego, the self must be differentiated as a separate body from that of the Mother. Because of the heteronormative drive of the patriarchal superstructure, the Naming and the first relationship with the Mother becomes the site of the violent enforcement of sexual differentiation.

For the Son, it is required that sexual identification with the Mother be strictly punished to establish identification with the Father. This identification with the penis as the crux of sexual morphology leads to the inscription of the Phallus in the imaginary as the symbol of the Universal Subject.

At the same time, the Son sees the relegation of the Mother beneath the Father in the patriarchal hierarchy as a threat. The Mother is stripped of personhood, and the reason for this refusal of a place as a Subject is the lack of the Phallus. This is the obverse of the Oedipal complex: the Castration complex. To identify with the Mother is to be castrated of the Phallus, and thus to lose position as the Universal Subject and instead become abjected, to become an Object.

Part 2: The Mother-Whore Dichotomy

There are two important consequences to the workings of these dual complexes.

Firstly: the establishment of the Phallus as the symbol of the Universal Subject. In this way, Woman is always already a sexual Object, for the lack of the Phallus negates her ability to be taken as a sexual Subject in her own right.

Secondly: the establishment of the Mother-Whore dichotomy in sexual relations. The Mother is the caretaker, respected and loved. However the Mother is stripped of sexual identification. This creates a sexual tension between the Son and the Woman. To be respected and loved is to be elevated to the role of the Mother, a role which cannot fulfill the sexual desires of the Son. Therefore in order to have sex, the Son must first degrade the Woman, to separate her from the role of the Mother and thus reassert her position as a sexual Object. We’ll come back to this in a minute.

Circling back to the role of the Phallus: the Phallus is that which the Son (we have now moved past the place of early psycho-sexual development, so from here-on I will refer to the Man) possesses. The Woman exists as the negation of the Phallus, the receptacle which generates the Phallus through its own negation. The implicit threat of castration and thus emasculation, while simultaneously the site of masculinization and reinscription of the Man’s status as sexual Subject. Only through the Woman’s lack of Phallus is the Man’s Phallus ensured, and thus the sex of Man comes to exist through the sex of Woman. In this way, the Man possesses the Phallus, while the Woman is the very Phallus that the Man possesses.

This is reinscribed in sexual relations with the Man taking sex, getting sex from the Woman, while the Woman is the sex itself, the Woman is that which is taken. This leads us to the establishment of virginity.

For the Man, to be a virgin is to have not yet possessed the Phallus. Only through taking sex, and thus possessing the Phallus, can the Son transcend childhood and become the Man, ie. The image of the Father. And so a virgin Man is an emasculated Man, or at least a not yet masculinized Man, and thus the threat of castration, of losing the position of Subject and becoming abjected, looms.

If the Woman is the sex that the man must take, then we see how a prior loss of the sex devalues the sex. For every partner the Woman has, sex has been taken from her, and thus less sex remains. To take the sex of a virgin then, is the ultimate masculinating act, for the virgin has a full and unspoiled sex. To take the sex of a not-virgin then, is to come into possession of a diminished Phallus, to be less masculine. In this way, the Man sees the not-virgin as an affront to his own masculinity, for it is his own Phallus—the Woman-- which has been diminished.

In this same way, the Woman is degraded and devalued through having her sex taken, her position as a sexual Object reinscribed. This brings us back to the Mother-Whore dichotomy. In order for a Woman to be taken as a sexual Object, she must be degraded, removed from the role of Mother and relegated to the role of Whore.

This is compounded in a society that has belief in Woman as the source of sin, Original Sin, and even further in those who elevate the role of virgin Mother to the divine. Even without the theological trappings, there is a distinction between the Mother, a role that is inherently virginal, and the Whore, the role of sexual Object that is always already degraded. In the role of Whore the Woman is considered to be the public Phallus, the Phallus that can be taken. It is a diminished Phallus, and confers diminishing masculinity, and is thus not deserving of respect.

The role of Mother is, conversely and seemingly contradictorily, a virginal role. A Woman who is degraded is not extended love and respect, which is reserved for the virginal Mother. In this way, the Man seeks a partner who will be degraded for the sexual act, conferring sex to the Man and elevating his masculinity, abjected and shown her place as sexual Object. It is integral to the patriarchal superstructure, then, that this Woman be the sole possession of the Man, that he take a whole and complete Phallus from her, that he may separate the degradation of their sexual intercourse from her elevation into the role of the virginal Mother (when she occupies this role, the Man will often look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction).

There are, as I mentioned, theological justifications for these roles, though the theological justifications stemmed from the formation of the roles to begin with, in a cyclical reinscription that reified the dynamics successively through the generations and naturalized them as being always already human nature.

Part 3: Sexual Enclosures

I want to talk again about the role of the Whore. Where the Mother is the private Phallus, the owned capital within the patriarchal household that confers a total Phallus to the Man, the Whore is the public property, the public and diminished Phallus, always already degraded. This conception of nonvirginal women is integral to the project of masculinization, for a man requires taking sex and possessing a Phallus even before marriage, and after marriage once the Woman assumes the virginal role of the Mother.

With the rise of the enclosures, Woman was relegated through these coercive relationships to an abject position as sexual Object, as property (private or public). Virginity served as a sexual enclosure, barring women from the communal lands of sexual intimacy and pleasure, removing them from the realm of sexual Subject at the same time they were removed from the realm of economic Subject.

The economic degradation of Woman mirrors the sexual degradation. The two functioned in tandem to ensure the compliance of Woman in the new economic and sexual system. Not only was Woman degraded to sexual Object, Woman was degraded to economic Object.

The public Phallus, the public Woman, the public sexual-economic Object: this was the role of the Whore, and this role became, quite literally the only position that many women could fill. This gave rise to sex work as an economic field of activity for large swathes of disenfranchised women. Always already degraded, theologically and thus morally cast as undeserving of respect, unable to be loved, and lesser than others, the Sex Worker was stigmatized.

The way that stigmatization works is like a disease, that is to say that stigmatization is communicable, that it is sticky. The Marked trait that is stigmatized is sticky, which is to say that association with one who is Marked can cause the stigmatization to transfer to the one who associates. For an example, think of the way that the Marked trait of being queer is stigmatized: those who associate with queer people run the risk of that queerness sticking to them. By associating with queer people, someone might also be stigmatized as queer themself, or at least queer-adjacent.

To be associated with the Sex Worker, then, is to submit to the potential for being stigmatized in turn. There grew within society a cultural association between the Sex Worker and being unlovable, unworthy of respect, and ultimately unclean.

In the Victorian period, as the enclosures increased, as economic abjection came to encompass the entire class of Woman, sex work exploded. There were unprecedented levels of impoverished and disenfranchised women turning to sex work to feed themselves and their families. Because the Mother is meant to be virginal, the Sex Worker was demonized as an unfit Mother, and the family of the Sex Worker was stigmatized as morally unclean. With such large-scale association with sex work among the working poor, however, this tactic began to lose its efficacy: too many people associated with sex workers, visited sex workers, and were related to sex workers for the stigmatization of being morally unclean to have the cultural hold it once did.

This is when the problem of sex work was relegated to one of public health. As part of a wider expansion of state policing, public health was enfolded into the surveillance and administrative regimes of the state. This marked the shift from the stigma of sex work as morally unclean, to the stigma of sex work as physically unclean. This discourse was quickly disseminated, aided in part through actual sexually communicable diseases.

However, the shift to Sex Worker as unclean was not one driven by a desire to protect health, it was one driven by a desire to reassert stigmatization, control reproduction, and reinscribe the virginal Mother as the desired role of the Woman, suppressing her economic Subjectivity by vilifying sex work as a carrier not only of communicable stigma, but of communicable disease. This time period marked also a rise in conversations about the purity of blood, and an increase in cultural fears of corrupted blood and corrupted bodies. The Sex Worker, in this climate, was always already corrupted, a body that could never be pure and never clean.

This has fed into the pathos that demands a virginal Woman, a whole, pure, uncorrupted Phallus. A corrupted Phallus became not only less masculinating, but now carried with it the threat of a tainted Phallus, an emasculation through an act that is meant to do the opposite. The Woman who was not-virginal, then was not only a source of diminished sex, but was a source of potentially corrupted sex, bringing with her a diminished Phallus and the threat of castration, that originating complex that features so heavily in the assumption of the Phallus as the Universal Subject. To possess the notvirginal Woman is to risk taking possession of the corrupted Phallus, and brings with it fear of castration, a fear of the destruction of the penis.

I don't know how, or why, but this stupid meme triggered an intense hyperfocus in me this morning that yielded the comment I've linked above. I have reproduced the comment below. I know this is not a unique take, it is probably poorly researched, and I know for sure others have written much more extensively on this topic, so seek those people out instead of me. I'm posting it here for posterity:

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Reconstruction needed to be bungled to ensure that the emancipated slaves did not become part of the landed class within the American population. With the abolition of slavery after the Civil War, it also was the abolition of the "southern economic system" the south was seeking to maintain. The south, having lost the war, would have to rapidly adapt to a wage labor system, and much of the emancipated population drew up contracts with their former owners and returned to their plantations as wageworkers. Slavery, as an economic system, was unable to compete with the emerging industrialization of the agribusiness in the north. Much of the southern "wealth" was tied up in their property (which included people), this property was leveraged as collateral on loans which funded much of the southern plantation owners' extravagant lifestyles, as they had no real liquid assets to spend.

If the freed people of the south were given 40 acres and a mule as they were promised by William T. Sherman, you would have seen a rise of a new landed class, and potentially the formation of a new Black lead state. Unlike in the District of Columbia, where northern slavers were given compensation for their loss of "property" after the DC slaves were emancipated, the southern states were given no such compensation. Post-war, the former Confederate States were strapped with war debt that deeply impoverished the former wealthy classes. As the states were reintegrated back into the Union, they also participated in paying for the Union's efforts in the war. While the latter half of this debt would have been shared by the Black landed class, it wouldn't have had the same connections to the confederate war debt, much of which was held by individuals and not the state(s). The former Confederate states were effectively bankrupt post-war, and this is what drove the practice of Peonage or "Debt Slavery", as well as sharecropping, that haunted the freed people in the post-war era. This would have left the new landed class in an advantageous position, free of most of the war debt, suddenly in possession of effectively a turn-key agroindustry.

A detail of this land reform policy that is often omitted from its retelling, is that the land also came with military protection; "until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title". This land constituted a contiguous 30-mile-long strip of abandoned or confiscated Confederate plantations from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida. It also included an exclusive right to the freed population to settle the region; "in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, shall be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves."

Could this have really been the foundation of a new Black state within the borders of the greater United States? Very likely, based on the actions and developments as a result of this redistribution of land. Skidway Island, representing almost 11,430 acres, was home to dozens of former plantations. With assistance from Ulysses L. Huston (future representative of Georgia, and instrumental in the writing of this land reform), over 1000 freed people had been resettled to Skidway in an attempt to build a self-sufficient Black colony. Fifty freed men and women were issued land titles at Grove Hill on the mainland, south of Savannah. They held elections that formed a board of representatives who advised the Freedmen's Bureau* agent in their district, formed their own militia, and continued producing rice to sell in Savannah. Not long after this reform was announced, Rufus Saxton, charged with implementing and overseeing the order, reported some 40,000 Black citizens had settled on the land. The political and economic activity within the area show a clear intention of building Black lead communities and organizations independent of white influence.

If this land ownership were to endure, it would have an estimated value of $640 billion, according to 2020 estimates. The implications of this land redistribution posed a serious and imitate threat to white dominance in the south. If this state had been allowed to flourish, one could imagine (hopefully), the emergence of a multipolar political reality in the region. This vision is what lived on both in the struggles of Martin Luther King, and very explicitly in the struggle of Malcolm X and the Black Liberation and Black Nationalist movement. The assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, with the support of the Confederate Secret Services, made the dismantling of this policy all the easier. However, well before his assassination, even Lincoln made attempts to backpedal on General Sherman's vision of land reform. At the onset of this resettlement, Rufus Saxton, speaking to the Second African Baptist Church in Savannah in February 1865, reportedly told those who gathered:

"The soil is the source of all true prosperity and wealth, No people can be great unless they own soil. You know that; General Sherman knows it; our Father in heaven knows it. And now I want to tell you, you may own the soil."

A few weeks later, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a bill clarifying that Black families could rent their chosen plots for three years, with the option to buy them. Undercutting the message of both Saxon and Sherman. The Freedmen's Bureau was also established with this bill, maybe as a kind of spoon full of sugar to help swallow the pill that was Lincoln's clarification. This didn't stop the 40,000+ Black Americans from traveling and settling within the borders of this "new state". Post assassination, Andrew Johnson, slave owner, and outward white supremacist, fully rescinded on even the bruised version of reform left by Lincoln, strangling this fledgling Black State in its crib.

Read more:

• https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/
• https://baltimorebeat.com/40-acres-and-a-lie/

Recently I've been reading a lot and I came across a YouTube video recommending that I read the book How to Read a Book by Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren. It was first published in 1940 and was written by two white guys so it contains some antiquated language and worldviews (if you do read the whole book, cw for child abuse and misogyny), but overall I found it really valuable and I'm hoping it will help me to better understand the theory I read in the future.

With that out of the way, behold my notes on the book. Point out where I'm wrong.

Levels of Reading The authors distinguish four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. The book primarily deals with analytical reading, though inspectional reading is important because it informs analytical reading, and syntopical reading is an extension of the process of analytical reading to more than one book about a particular topic. I'm not going to touch on elementary reading here because if you can read this post, you've already mastered it.

Inspectional Reading

• The art of skimming systematically
• Aim is to examine the surface of the book and learn everything the surface alone can tell you
• Questions associated with inspectional reading (to be answered with structural note-making):

1. What kind of book is it?
2. What is the book about?
3. What is the structure of the book? / what are its parts?

The four basic questions of active reading you should be trying to answer when you read a book (answered with conceptual note-making):

1. What is the book about as a whole?
2. What is being said in detail, and how?
3. Is the book true, in whole or part?
4. What of it?

Marking up the book (for both inspectional and analytical reading)

• Underline major points and circle key words/phrases
• Draw vertical lines at margin to emphasize statements already underlined or too long to underline
• Stars at margin to emphasize ~10 most important passages in the book
• Numbers in margin to indicate sequence of points in an argument
• Numbers of other pages in marin to indicate references or contradictions in book (use cf)
• Write in margin and at top/bottom of page to record questions a passage brings to mind

Rules for Analytical Reading

spoiler Rules for the first stage of analytical reading (structural: finding what the book is about)

1. Know what kind of book you are reading, and as early as possible (ideally before you begin to read)

• Applies especially to non-fiction, expository works

2. State the unity of the whole book in a few sentences at most

• Say what the book is about as briefly as possible
• It’s impossible to follow this rule without following rule 3

3. Set forth the major parts of the book and show how they’re organized into a whole, by being ordered to one another and to the unity of the whole

• Sometimes this is to be found in the author’s preface, especially for expository books; however, don’t be afraid to disagree with the author here
• The third rule involves more than just enumerating the parts; it means outlining them, treating them as if they are subordinate wholes, each with its own unity and complexity
• The structure you outline need not follow the apparent structure of the book as indicated by its chapters – make your own outline

4. Find out what the author’s problems were

• The author of a book starts with a question or set of questions, the answers to which the book ostensibly contains :::

Rules for the second stage of analytical reading (interpretative: finding what a book says)

5. Find the important words and through them come to terms with the author

• Think of terms as a skilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge
• One word can be the vehicle for many terms, and one term can be expressed by many words
• The words that trouble you are likely the very ones the author is using specially, i.e., as terms
• Be on the lookout for typographical devices that indicate an author is using words in a non-standard way; same for if the author argues with other writers about how to use a particular word
• Distinguish between an author’s vocabulary (i.e., the words being used in a technical way or a way particular to this author or work) and his terminology (i.e., the meanings the words in the author’s vocabulary are meant to evoke); try to determine whether the word has one or many meanings; if it has many, try to see how they’re related; finally, note the places where the word is used in one sense or another and see if context gives clues as to the reason for the shift in meaning

6. Mark the most important sentences in a book and discover the propositions they contain

• Complicated sentences usually express more than one proposition. Also, you don’t really understand a proposition until you can successfully reformulate it in your own words

7. Locate or construct the basic arguments (i.e., sequences of propositions) in the book by finding them in the connection of sentences (not paragraphs)

• Alternate formulation of rule 7: find if you can the paragraphs in a book that state its important arguments; if the arguments are not thus expressed, you must construct them by taking a sentence from this paragraph and another from that until you have gathered together the sequence of sentences that state the propositions that compose the argument
• The most important sentences are those that require an effort of interpretation because they are not perfectly intelligible at first glance
• If you find the conclusion of an argument first, look for the reasons; if you find the reasons first, see where they lead

8. Find out what the author’s solutions are

• Determine which of the author’s problems he has solved and which he has not; as to the latter, decide which he knew he failed to solve

spoiler Rules for the third stage of analytical reading (critical: agreeing or disagreeing with a book; this must follow the other two in time, while the first two stages interpenetrate each other)

9. Be able to say with reasonable certainty “I understand” before you say “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment”
10. When you disagree, do so reasonably, not disputatiously or contentiously

• I.e., focus on learning the truth, rather than winning the argument (disputatious)
• Conversation is not a battle to be won by disagreeing successfully
• Be as prepared to agree as to disagree, and regard disagreements as capable of being resolved – otherwise, disagreement is merely futile agitation

11. Respect the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by giving reasons for any critical judgment you make

• When you agree or disagree, you must give reasons
• Knowledge consists in those opinions that can be defended, those for which there is evidence
• When you disagree with a book, try to formulate the disagreement in one of the following ways: You are uninformed (i.e., the author is lacking some important piece of relevant knowledge)

You are misinformed (i.e., what the author asserts is not the case)

Your reasoning is not cogent (i.e., the author's argument doesn't follow logically, or two or more of the things they've said are incompatible)

Your analysis is incomplete (i.e., the author has not solved all the problems he started with, or has not made as good a use of his materials as possible, or he failed to make distinctions that are relevant to this undertaking) (this fourth point is not a basis for disagreement, but only marks the limitations of the author’s achievement) :::

:::

Other notes on analytical reading

• Theoretical books teach you that something is the case; practical books teach you how to do something you want to do or think you should do

• Practical books frequently use words like “should,” “ought,” “good,” “bad,” “ends,” and “means”

• Meanwhile, theoretical books use “is” rather than “ought;” they try to show that something is true, that these are the facts

• The two processes of outlining and interpretation meet at the level of propositions and arguments

• You work down to propositions and arguments by dividing the book into its parts

• You work up to arguments by seeing how they are composed of propositions and, ultimately, terms

Three general maxims of the third stage of analytical reading:

• Complete the task of understanding the book before rushing to judgment
• Do not be disputatious or contentious (i.e., engage with the author in good faith, and don't bother reading works by authors who don't merit good-faith engagement)
• View the disagreement about matters of knowledge as generally solvable

Don’t conflate understanding an argument with agreement, or vice versa

Two conditions of disagreeing well:

• Acknowledge the emotions you bring to a dispute or that may arise during its course Make your own assumptions explicit (I told you these guys were kkkrakkkers)
• An attempt at impartiality is a good antidote for the blindness inevitable in partisanship

Three types of extrinsic aids to reading: Relevant experiences

• Two types: common experience (most relevant to fiction and philosophy) and special experience (most relevant to scientific works); both types are relevant to history

Other books

• Reading related books in relation to one another and in an order that renders the latter ones more intelligible is a basic maxim of extrinsic reading. This applies more to history and philosophy than to science and fiction

Commentaries and abstracts

• Commentaries tend to limit our understanding of a book, even if that understanding is correct as far as it goes. As a result, don’t read commentaries until after you’ve read the book (the opposite is true for the author’s preface and introduction)

Notes on reading specific types of books

Practical expository books

• Two main groups: presentations of rules (e.g., cookbooks, driver’s manuals) and books concerned with the principles that generate rules
• In reading rule books, the most important propositions are the rules; you can always recognize a rule because it recommends something as worth doing to gain a certain end
• In the other kind of practical books, however, the propositions will look exactly like those in a theoretical book. Read this type of practical books in such a way as to see the rules that are not expressed but that can be derived from the principles and figure out how the rules can be applied in practice
• Two main questions to ask of any practical book: what are the author’s objectives, and what means does he propose for achieving them?
• For practical books, adapt rule 4 to state: find out what the author wants you to do. Similarly, adapt rule 8 to state: find out how the author proposes that you do this

Theoretical books

• In judging a theoretical book, observe the identity of or discrepancy between your own assumptions or basic principles and the author’s

I'm skipping over their takes on reading fiction (what they call imaginative literature) bc it's not relevant to Reading Theory

Reading history

• The essence of history is narration
• Recognize which way the historian you’re reading is operating: either he finds a general pattern in events (or imposes one on them), or he abjures any such patterns and insists he is merely reporting the real regents that occurred
• The first rule of reading history: it is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it
• The second rule: read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way people act in all times and places, especially now
• Ask a historical book all the same questions we ask of any expository book
• Two forms of criticism of history: The work lacks verisimilitude; the historian has misused his sources

They group reading about current events in with reading history and outline the following questions to ask when reading current events:

• What does the author want to prove?
• Whom does he want to convince?
• What special knowledge does he assume?
• What special language does he use?
• Does he really know what he’s talking about?
• Have Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson explicitly dunked on the author at any point in the past?

Reading philosophy

Two types of philosophy: Dealing with questions of being and becoming (theoretical or speculative philosophy) and dealing with questions of good and evil (normative philosophy)

Five styles of philosophical exposition:

• Dialogue (ancient Greeks)

• Treatise or essay (Kant)

• Meeting of objections (Thomas Aquinas)

• Systematization of philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza)

• Aphoristic (modern philosophers, Nietzsche)

• Most important thing to discover in reading any work of philosophy is the question or questions it tries to answer

• The major effort of the reader of philosophy should be directed toward the terms and the initial propositions of the work

Steps for analytical reading (this is the best part)

1. Determine what kind of book you’re reading

• Options: fiction and non-fiction
• Sub-options within fiction: novel, play, and lyric poetry
• Sub-options within non-fiction: practical and theoretical

2. Structural reading (rules 1-4): Inspect, or skim systematically through, the book, and answer the following questions by making use of structural note-making:

• What kind of book is it?
• What is the book about?
• What is the structure of the book and what are its parts?

3. Interpretative reading (rules 5-8): Determining what is being said in the book and how

• Come to terms with the author
• Grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences
• Know the author’s arguments, by finding them (or constructing them out of) sequences of sentences
• Determine which of his problems he’s solved and not solved

4. Critical reading (rules 9-11): agreeing or disagreeing, and providing supporting arguments

• Don’t criticize the book until you’re certain you’ve understood it
• If you disagree with a book, formulate your disagreement in one of the following ways: You are uninformed; you are misinformed; your reasoning is not cogent; your analysis is incomplete

Syntopical reading

• The paradox of syntopical reading is that the identification of the subject matter of a book can only following reading, not precede it

• Once you have amassed a bibliography on a subject, you should subject all books on the list to an inspectional reading before reading any of them analytically

• Five steps of syntopical reading:

1. Find the relevant passages in each book

• Just because a book contains some passages that are relevant to your subject of inquiry doesn’t mean the entire book will be, so don’t waste time reading passages irrelevant to you
• Find out how the book can be useful to you, even if it is in a way far from the author’s own purpose in writing it

2. Bring the authors to terms

• Because you’re reading multiple books on the same topic, you have to develop your own terminology about it and force authors to use this language of yours, rather than adopting the author’s language as you do when reading one book analytically
• Accept the fact that coincidence of terminology between us and any of the authors on our list is merely accidental

3. Get the questions clear

• Frame a set of questions that shed light on your problem and to which each of the authors in your list gives answers

4. Define the issues

• A number of issues revolving around a closely connected set of questions may be termed the “controversy” around that aspect of the subject; this controversy may be very complicated and it’s the task of the syntopical reader to sort it out and arrange it in an orderly and perspicuous fashion, even if no single author has managed to do that

5. Analyze the discussion

• Ask and answer the questions in a particular order and be able to defend that order; show how the questions are answered differently and why; point to the texts in the books that support our classifications of answers

• This is where you ask of your bibliography the following questions: Is it true, and what of it?

• Syntopical reading tries to achieve the special quality of dialectical objectivity, i.e., looking at all sides of the issue

• This is best achieved by constantly referring back to the actual text of his authors and re-reading the relevant passages

• In so doing, make a deliberate effort to balance question against question, to forgo any comment that might be prejudicial, and check any tendency toward overemphasis or underemphasis

spoiler Steps to take in syntopical reading

1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject with recourse to library catalogs, advisors and bibliographies in books
2. Inspect all books on the tentative bibliography and determine which are germane to the subject; in so doing, acquire a clearer idea of the subject. This is not chronologically distinct from step one
3. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to the subject to find the most relevant passages
4. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject through which all the authors can be interpreted
5. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all the authors by framing a set of questions to which most or all of them can be interpreted as giving answers
6. Define the issues, major and minor, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another; in other words, figure out which are the main questions and which camps there are with respect to each question
7. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw the most possible light on the subject :::

Death to America

https://youtu.be/qOplfRfSvJw?si=_BxuauL9bxGBgz7G

Here's a little gaming effortpost for the treat piggies

PoE story summary for those unfamiliar

Wraeclast is a dark fantasy world with several fallen empires that each fell victim to an event called the 'cataclysm' that made people go insane, causing the fall of those empires. The game is set some decades after the Purity Rebellion, an event in which various rebel groups from the periphery of the Eternal Empire banded together to defeat Emperor Chitus, a despotic and corrupt ruler who was experimenting on people with virtue gems. The emperor's thaumaturgist, Malachai, retreats into Nightmare by sealing himself inside a beast in the north, where he hopes to achieve immortality.

The game starts when you, an exile from Oriath (island nation off the coast of Wraeclast and host of the Templar empire) embark on a quest for revenge from the High Templar Dominus who exiled you. After defeating him, and his successor Avarius, the exile continues on to slay the gods which broke free after Innocence's (God who was inside the High Templar) death. The exile then continues to get exponentially more powerful and defeats Kitava, god of hunger/corruption, and triumphs over their present day cataclysm.

Often, discussions of PoE's story remark on the themes of liberation and how surprisingly progressive it is, especially for a game with a hardcore gamer chud audience. The cast of exiles includes an indigenous slave who is exiled for killing his masters, a lesbian hunter exiled for shooting a noble who told her to stop hunting in his property, and a himbo duelist who also murders a noble in a duel for insulting him. However, the campaign's arc is much more reactionary than revolutionary or liberatory, and the game ultimately reinforces a Nietzschean 'ubermensch' archetype with the latter half of the narrative. Furthermore, I argue that the power fantasies of the ARPG genre are predisposed to bend in this direction.

Nietzsche is all over PoE. The historical empires of Wraeclast were all condemned by their search for immortality: the Primevals, the Vaal, and the Eternals, all doomed to fall because they wanted to last forever. The Templars are no exception. The exile's role in the Templars' fall is then to become the cataclysm, the punishment for their hubris. The repetition of the same history, eternal recurrence, and the failure of humans to surpass their vices is Nietzsche. These empires each became Nietzsche's 'last man,' haunted by greed and decadence.

Therefore, the liberatory arc of the exile who overcomes historical oppression, kills their master, and becomes free must be understood through the lens of will to power, in contradiction to a Marxist conception of class power. This is the story of an exceptional individual's triumph of will: the Marauder begins as a slave throwing off his shackles, but when does he liberate the rest of the Karui? By killing Kitava, overcoming the basebess, a moral victory, the Marauder is not liberating his people: he only liberates himself.

This general attitude is actually apparent all throughout the second part of the campaign. God is literally dead and we have killed him, now the conflict is against vices represented in the form of other gods.

Then we can generalize this criticism to the ARPG as a whole. The player slays masses of mindless enemies that do not put up a fight; they're morally inferior, aesthetically inferior, basically bugs. As much as Mao tells us that reactionaries are paper tigers, to depict some kind of revolutionary or liberatory struggle as Gigachads slaying the cringe bugs is ahistorical. That's just not how it works. The power fantasy, as an archetype, limits our understanding of class struggle and the mass movement.

Further reading: Actually Existing Fascism

**sent to [email protected] per their contact page on Oct. 13, 2024, as of Oct. 28 there has been no reply, nor has even the first mistake been fixed quietly

From FAQ: “I’ve seen negative articles written about MBFC. Why is that? It is simple. Highly biased websites that are not always factual don’t like us exposing them. Since we back our ratings with evidence, they don’t really have any recourse other than to discredit our website and ratings. We fully expect this but are confident the readers of this website will be able to look at the source and our ratings and decide for themselves who is credible.”

I’m writing in the hopes that you’ll correct several of your entries and work more carefully in the future.

→ Wrt Electronic Intifada, your site claims that they failed one fact-check; this is incorrect. The linked article is fact-checking a tweet by an individual (Stew Peters) that claims a particular video shows the IDF killed concert-goers on Oct. 7th. They rate this as false. The article goes on to say: “Peters referred PolitiFact to a series of news reports — some in Hebrew — that he said document ‘Israelis killing their own.’ The information he sent did not include or appear to mention the video footage he shared on X.” The word “series” links to the Electronic Intifada article named in your entry, and this is the only mention of Electronic Intifada in the article if you don’t count the same EI article being named again below in the “Our Sources” section. The article itself clearly states that this EI article has nothing to do with the video being fact-checked; this “failed fact check” entry should be removed from your page on Electronic Intifada, which should also improve their credibility rating. I’m confused as to how this even happened in the first place; please remember to manually read articles before including them in your pages as proof of non-factual reporting.

As for bias, can you explain how the headlines “Does Israel want to wipe Gaza off the map?” and “Biden’s white supremacy gives Israel carte blanche to commit genocide” employ “emotionally charged language” or “appeal to… stereotypes”?

→ Your page on The Cradle states that “articles and headlines often use loaded emotional language in opposition to Israeli policy like this[:] Cracks deepen in Israel as opposition head issues ‘ultimatum’ to Netanyahu.” Which part of this headline strikes you as using “loaded emotional language”?

→ From your page on The Grayzone: “The Grayzone publishes questionable material, stating that a Chemical Attack did not occur in Douma, Syria[:] OPCW investigator testifies at UN that no chemical attack took place in Douma, Syria.” I don’t see the point in calling material “questionable” and leaving it at that. The Grayzone cited their sources and did their analysis, and if they misrepresented something or made a false claim then that should be pointed out and specified. Otherwise, this should be an opinion that stays in the head of the editor of an “unbiased fact-checking site.”

Cont: “They have also promoted conspiracy theories, such as claiming that Pete Buttigieg is a CIA agent.” Why is there no source for this? A similar claim the next paragraph down (“editor Max Blumenthal claims that Bill Gates ran a Covid simulation before it occurred”) is sourced; either the editors of MBFC think claims like these need to be sourced or they don’t.

→ From your page on Mint Press: “Politically, Mint Press News aligns with the far-left and frequently reports negatively on establishment Democrats like this[:] WHO IS BIDEN WORKING FOR? ON ISRAEL VISIT, “ZIONIST” BIDEN WHITEWASHES ISRAEL’S CRIMES and conservative such as this[:] EMBOLDENED BY TRUMP AND NETANYAHU, JEWISH SETTLER TERRORISM IS SPIKING.” This should read “conservatives.”

Cont. “Finally, according to the Rutgers University Network Contagion Research Institute, Mint Press ‘promotes anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.’” This links to an LA Times article which proves only that the RUNCRI claims this, but where is the evidence? How can a claim like this be used against Mint Press without evidence? In other words, where are the articles in which Mint Press “promotes anti-Jewish conspiracy theories”? If you can’t find them, I would suggest deleting this portion of the page.

→ From your page on Mondoweiss: “Mondoweiss exhibits a strong pro-Palestinian bias and is extremely critical of the Israeli government. It frequently publishes content that is negative toward Israeli policies and actions, often portraying them in a highly critical light. For example, the article ‘Genocide in service of Nakba 2023’ is emotionally loaded and one-sided against the Israeli government due to its use of highly charged language and its singular focus on alleged atrocities committed by Israel without providing context or perspectives from the Israeli side.”

If your site was around as a newspaper in the early 1940’s, would it say, “For example, the article [‘Nazi genocide against Jewish population’] is emotionally loaded and one-sided against the [German] government due to its use of highly charged language and its singular focus on alleged atrocities committed by [the Nazis] without providing context or perspectives from the [German] side”?

Cont: “The piece characterizes the situation as a ‘genocidal war on Gaza’ aimed at ‘depopulation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people’ in ‘brutal but deliberate stages.’ It accuses the Israeli government of engaging in ‘widespread destruction and industrial-scale slaughter,’ cutting off essential supplies like water and food and targeting civilian areas for destruction. The article alleges that these actions are part of a strategy by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to achieve ‘complete forced displacement” of Palestinians, describing this as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ used as a means to an end. This piece is a one-sided opinion by the author.”

Which portion exactly is one-sided opinion? The genocidal intention of the Israeli govt. is well-sourced in the article, and the cutting off of essential supplies like water and food is extremely well-known, Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant saying just days after Oct. 7th: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly” (this same speech is cited in the form of a video in the article). And forced displacement of Palestinians has been expressly stated as a goal by Zionists since the founding of political Zionism.

Cont: “The site has been accused of presenting misleading information and promoting a narrative of ‘holocaust inversion,’ suggesting that Israelis are committing atrocities akin to the Holocaust against Palestinians. This view is nearly universally considered antisemitic as it minimizes the atrocities committed by the Nazis.” Where exactly is the citation for this view being “nearly universally considered antisemitic”? And the article cited to prove that this “minimizes the atrocities committed by the Nazis” itself lies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to downplay the oppression of Palestinians, stating, “According to Sergel’s artistic statement, Israel’s blockade and periodic bombing of Gaza—which are a response to an antisemitic Islamic fundamentalist regime’s launching of rockets at Israel—is no different from the extermination of one million Jews through the most systematic industrialized mass murder operation in history.” This obscures the origin of the conflict, putting the cart before the horse and forgetting the Zionist settler-colonialism and forced displacement which sparked “antisemitic” resistance that Israel now must respond to, and restricts Israel’s siege to mere retaliation, not factoring in the planned war against the native population Zionists not only write about today [1] [2] [3] but had written about in 1923. And of course, the innumerable news sites comparing the Oct. 7th native resistance to the Holocaust don’t deserve a similar note.

→ From your page on Radio Free Asia: “In general, story selection leans left and promotes a pro-American perspective [contradiction] such as this[:] U.S. Renews Ban on Communist Party Members Seeking to Emigrate. This story is properly sourced to the AFP and New York Times. RFA reports news factually and with a slight left-leaning bias.” Can you tell me where the proper sourcing is in this story, this one, or this one? Does the headline: Taiwan ‘determined’ to protect its democratic way of life feature only “minimally loaded language”? The practice of citing only anonymous residents (and previous RFA articles which do the same) when making concrete claims is frequently practiced by RFA when reporting on affairs in the DPRK, but with the admission of pro-American bias (i.e. bias against the DPRK, where you even mention the expressly stated aim of “advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy”), why isn’t actual evidence needed? How would articles like these be “fact-checked”? Doesn’t this cast doubt on a large portion of RFA’s reporting?

Where is the citation for RFA’s claim that “Some of the official Kim myths that have been popularized in international media include Kim Jong Un being able to drive at age three, and Kim Jong Il shooting a 38 under par round of golf with five holes-in-one in his first attempt at the sport”? The entire basis of this article (“North Korean Founder Kim Il Sung Did Not Have the Ability to Teleport, State Media Admits”) has been shown to be false, but alas, not by an IFCN fact-checker, and so it must be left out of the record.

I can’t go through every page but things need to be restructured and the reliance on IFCN fact-checking leads to favoring their selection biases. It’s strange because articles are frequently “fact-checked” manually, this being left as a note above the “Failed Fact Checks” list (ex. on The Grayzone’s page), so why wasn’t this done here? Here’s a note you can add to Radio Free Asia’s page:

Radio Free Asia publishes questionable material, frequently relying on unverified anonymous testimony when reporting on North Korean affairs, this one-sided negative reporting with a low standard of proof being due to its pro-American bias, which is a product of its being a continuation of the CIA-run Radio Free Asia (this era being left out of the paper’s “Our History” page, which revises its history to state that it was the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” in 1989 that prompted “calls to create a surrogate news service devoted to local, uncensored journalism in China” despite the original RFA broadcasting in China, and so too with ROFA up until the creation of the modern RFA in 1996). In 2020, they falsely reported that a story in North Korean state media which had been essentially published in different forms in 2015 and 2018 had for the first time “admitted” that a myth about the country’s leadership was false, the article going on, without any citations, to name numerous other myths that they claimed had been propagated in North Korea; the article also included a likely doctored quote purportedly from South Korea’s Ministry of Unification which was not found in the Korean language version of the article.

*Note: your page states that RFA was founded in 1951, which is correct, but this was when it began under the banner of the CIA; either mention this era and the newspaper’s misrepresentation of their history or alter the founding date.