nothing here but a witty title

issue 265 - 1st September, 2024

CJW: Welcome back. Let’s go.

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The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Middle-aged goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, bitch.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.

Climate Change & The Environment

Turning Brownfields to Blooming Meadows, With the Help of Fungi - Richard Schiffman interviewing Danielle Stevenson at Yale Environment 360 (via Sentiers)
How the Heat Is Changing Us - Slate Staff Slate

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Bombed hospitals, buried children: we have become numb to Gaza’s destruction - Hala Alyan at The Guardian (via Ed Yong)

The actions of the last 10 months show a state that clearly believes in its immunity and right to external protection. We have seen a relentlessness on Gaza that is multidimensional, both militarily and psychologically, showing a tactical understanding of what induces hopelessness, burnout and psychic numbing: incessant bombing, blocking of aid, continuously shuffling civilians around in countless evacuation orders, and, perhaps most insidiously, dehumanizing Palestinians through policy and narrative. Gaza is cited as the most dangerous place to be a child. Gaza has the highest number of pediatric amputees in history. Gaza is the deadliest place to be a journalist since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data. In 10 months, in the gestational period of human life, Gaza has become one of the most uninhabitable places on this planet.

It was hard to pick a pull quote from this piece because it's incredibly powerful and on-point from beginning to end. I implore you to read it.

Related: Israeli society’s dehumanization of Palestinians is now absolute - Meron Rapoport +972 Magazine

CJW: U.S.-Led Ceasefire Talks Are Just Buying More Time for Israel’s Genocide - Sunjeev Bery at The Intercept

The bad-faith terms of the latest proposal are just the beginning. Hamas is unlikely to agree to the terrible new conditions that Blinken has put on the table, and that rejection will in turn enable Biden, Harris, Blinken, and Netanyahu to further blame Hamas for “rejecting peace.” This will then buy Netanyahu more time to continue bombing, starving, and killing Palestinians. Then the cycle will repeat itself again, with Blinken soon returning to the Middle East for yet another round of so-called ceasefire negotiations, while the U.S. continues to send Israel even more weapons for its war.

The state (or in other cases, capital) will always co-opt progressive ideas for their own ends.

More on Netanyahu sabotaging ceasefire talks: Netanyahu's ceasefire doublespeak: Dovish with U.S., hawkish with negotiators - Barak Ravid at Axios

CJW: Second Sin - Charlotte Shane

Harris’s statement made me cry because the reality it confirmed makes me cry, makes me choke. There are so many layers of malevolence and dishonesty within it. It is insidious, uncompromisingly vile, malignant. Nothing in it indicates an amenability to life, dignity, decency. “The most lethal fighting force in the world” she shouted from her stage. A force for fighting what? More babies. More pregnant women. More little boys with birds, girls hugging their cats, elders in tents, fathers with no children left, teenagers with no legs, orphaned newborns, the water, the trees, the air, the dust, the protestors with their hands up, the college kids in tents.

A powerful piece on Harris and the Democrats' complicity in the genocide in Gaza, but also the US as a force for/of tyranny the world over.

CJW: A Legal Justification for Genocide - Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon at Jewish Currents (via Ed Yong)

Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether. Indeed, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs has argued that “the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted” does not mean “that an attack was unlawful,” since these seeming civilians or civilian objects may actually have been human shields. The rationale here is that Palestinian homes are not homes, hospitals are not hospitals, mosques are not mosques, schools are not schools. They might “seem” to be, but they are not what they seem.

An important piece on how Israel is manipulating the idea of, and international laws around, human shields to facilitate their genocide in Gaza.

“In under a year, nine new nations have announced formal recognition of Palestine, and last month the ICJ issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s occupation and settlement of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank illegal.1 These developments advance the notion that a Palestinian state exists de jure, albeit under belligerent occupation by Israel.” The Nakba and the Law - Jack Gross at Phenomenal World (DCH: A great interview that shines a light on the tangled history of the very notion of Palestinian statehood over the last century)
“Martin Luther King once called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That formulation may be controversial, but no one denies that the US is by far the world’s biggest arms dealer, with a 42 percent share of the global arms export market.” Selling American Bombs - Tim Barker Phenomenal World

Tech & Design

DCH: AI poses no existential threat to humanity – new study finds at bath.ac.uk

Professor Gurevych added: "… our results do not mean that AI is not a threat at all. Rather, we show that the purported emergence of complex thinking skills associated with specific threats is not supported by evidence and that we can control the learning process of LLMs very well after all. Future research should therefore focus on other risks posed by the models, such as their potential to be used to generate fake news."

The Skynet fear mongering by the Effective Altruist lot was always a criti-hype fuelled PR pitch to lazy journalists and politicians to distract from the real risks.

No one’s ready for this - Sarah Jeong at The Verge - CJW: Rob Horning did some deeper writing about this a while back, but I don't know how long ago, or if I shared it back then…
"Zuckerberg isn’t an open source champion or a reformed tech billionaire; he’s an opportunist who will say and do whatever is necessary to win." Zuckerberg wants to control the next platform—no matter what it is - Paris Marx
What comes after the AI crash? - Paris Marx
How US Big Tech monopolies colonized the world: Welcome to neo-feudalism - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy

Just the headlines:

Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators - Winston Cho at Hollywood Reporter
Video shows Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other at 4 a.m. in parking lot By Emily DeLetter at USA Today
Elon Musk said he’d eliminate bots from X. Instead, election influence campaigns are running wild - Russell Brandom at Rest of World

Society & The Culture

CJW: Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the Straights - @waskurttrans (via Peter Hollo)

We know things now, Chuck. We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are. We know what it does to people. How eggs think. How eggs act. How eggs die. But we pretend we don’t. We still pretend. We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal. We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them. And they don’t, Chuck. We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did. It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves. We aren’t allowed to recognize each other. Individual choice or social contagion. Those are the options we’re given. And neither of them are right. Neither of them are who we are.
Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do. I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words. We know our own. We recognize each other.

There is so much to this piece - if anything from the piece Maddison shared last issue about Kurt Cobain and his life, or the trans experience interested or resonated with you, I wholeheartedly recommend this as a follow-up.

Thanks to Peter for sending it in. In case you didn’t realise, you can always hit reply on these emails to send us a note. They go to me, but if they’re for someone else on the team, I’ll forward them on.

CJW: The Homeless are not Alone - Joshua P. Hill

Last week Gavin Newsom responded to the court’s ruling by sending a clear, disturbing message to local governments: “Clean up homeless encampments now or lose out on state funding next year.” Then, as we know, he immediately took it upon himself to have a photo shoot where he took part in destroying an encampment himself.
That distinction between “clean up” and “destroy” is crucial here. There’s been an alarmingly successful push to frame stealing the extremely limited belongings of people without housing as merely “sweeping” or “cleaning up” an area. We can look at the sinister semantic play here, where removing people and destroying their possessions is equated to tidying up a space, and immediately see how the adoption of this language requires us to see the human beings who are being displaced and hurt and less than, subhuman, undeserving and more. This rhetoric and these thought processes are part of the paradigm we need to reject.

We've discussed before how the increasing violence (and, honestly, fascism) of border security arrangements is a sort of warm-up for dealing with climate refugees in the coming years and decades - both the physical actions of turning back boats etc, as well as the dehumanization of refugees.

With the increasing violence (and, honestly, fascism) of the policing of homeless people, I think we're seeing the other side of the same coin. We're going to see more people made homeless due to extreme weather destroying homes and due to accelerating economic factors, and the state wants us to get comfortable with forgetting that these people are people, and that they deserve support instead of punishment.

“What’s new is that today’s fans aren’t looking for a fleeting chance to feel close to an artist they love—they’re seeking confirmation of the closeness they already assume exists.” - Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom - Kelsey McKinney at Defector
“There was a truth in the air that floated above us all: this would never happen to a white woman.” - Disappeared again - Amy McQuire

Health, Cooking, and Related

DCH: Missouri Outlawed Abortion, and Now It’s Funding an Anti-Abortion Group That Works in Other States - Jeremy Kohler at Propublica

The tax credit has led to a growing financial cost to Missouri taxpayers, with over $11.2 million in tax credits authorized in the past year alone. Before the change, the tax credit had been capped at $3.5 million a year. When combined with the $8.6 million the state directly allocates to pregnancy centers, Missouri has become a leader in per capita investment in anti-abortion centers.

A law ostensibly aimed at helping pregnant women in Missouri is being used to fund anti-abortion activists in multiple states.

“The researchers found that 24 of the brain samples, which were collected in early 2024, measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.” Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched’ by Sedat Gündoğdu at The Guardian
Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure? - Matthew Shaer, James Patrick Cronin, Joel Thibodeau, Krish Seenivasan at The New York Times
The Plan to Take Down the Hyde Amendment - Lucy Tu at The Atlantic

Just the headlines:

America Is Doubling Down on Sewer Surveillance - Helen Ouyang at The Atlantic

Labour & Economics

DCH: Workers to gain right to a four-day week - Ben Riley-Smith at The Telegraph

The Telegraph understands the system of “compressed hours”, which lets an employee work their contracted week’s hours in four days rather than five, will be included in the package of new rights for workers.

A bit of sleight-of-hand here since its still a full work week but this is better than nothing. The added flexibility could help a lot of working class and other people and families. Shocked that Labour actually did something for labour.

“The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis.” Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis By Alexander Saeedy and Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal (DCH: Imagine a world where the new global financial crisis is thanks to this fuckwad)

Movies + TV

MJW: Alien: Romulus

I hadn’t even known that there was a new Alien movie coming out up until a week before seeing it. This is what happens when you largely avoid the internet. I didn’t bother reading up on it, and went into the cinema cold. Imagine my surprise when I saw old tech in the style of the 1979 Alien! Amazing! Romulus imagines a story in between Alien and Aliens, which you probably already know if you actually pay attention to anything. Cailee Spaeny’s Rain wants to leave her mining outpost home for a newer colony, and I found the detail of Weyland-Yutani changing the requirements of her indenture just as she’d met them to be très modern. What followed was a reasonably predictable, and sometimes silly, but ultimately fun and a touch horrifying Alien film that I enjoyed a lot. There’s something to be said for watching an Alien movie at the cinema with a fellow fan of the franchise. Watch if you love red and orange lit-up buttons on spaceship panels, chucks as future fashion footwear, and the old acid-for-blood. Points off for AI Ian Holm, who just didn’t look right.

Music

LZ: Malmö Massacre

From the 23th to the 25th of August, Malmö hosted its most famous festival for extreme metal. It was my first time, even though I got an idea of it two years ago when I was at the venue to see Frontline Assembly instead. It was kinda funny seeing rivetheads and cybergoths together with metalheads, not a very common sight I would say. Anyways, it took me a while to attend the festival because they mostly focus on death and thrash metal, two subgenres that I don't like very much… but this year they had some bands I wanted to see live for a while, so it was worth it (despite the absurd price for the tickets).

So here is a short list of the bands I saw live and my impressions:

Black Birch: local black metal band that has grown popular internationally. I have seen lots of people wearing shirts with the logo, which is a symbol rather than the words or even those black metal distorted letterings. Due to technical issues, the concert started over 30 min late, and they only played for 45 min, which was a real bummer.. However, female-fronted black metal bands are really rare, and not all of them are good or with a distinctly female voice. That's the case for BB and Gina's vocals are just amazing, even live. Highly recommend listening to their top track, Fallen.

Vazio is a Brazilian black metal band. Funny that I only managed to see them play in Sweden, when they come from the city where I lived (São Paulo). Really unique vocals combining throat-chanting, which is that technique usually associated to Tibetan monks, and the regular guttural technique. The lyrics in Portuguese are also a plus. Love when bands use their main language instead of going for English only!

Paradise Lost is the classic metal band that you need to see live in case you like the genre. They played several older tracks like Gothic, but didn't play Smalltown Boy, which made me very mad because it's my favorite and they played in every other, previous concerts. Anyways, good energy, solid vocals and great band performance.

LZ: Astarte

My bad, I only recently learned about Astarte or Maria Tristessa Koloukori. Her band is considered the first female-fronted band recognized in the black metal scene, and much deserved. Her music is fucking rad. I guess Asagraun tries to emulate a bit of what Maria did, but she is way superior in my opinion. Her vocals are also great, especially because they don't emulate male guttural vocals, you can still tell it's a woman – it almost reminds me of Cadaveria, but the instrumentals are different and close to classic black metal.

Unfortunately, Maria passed away in 2014 of cancer. Fuck cancer. I wished she could see the scene these days, with more women and queer people, both playing and enjoying black metal. I'm not sure if she was ever engaged with politics and feminism, but well maybe that's what it would take for her. The band ended when she died, and I think that's the right thing to do. Many times bands keep on without their frontmen/women and it just doesn't make sense anymore – Tristania and Theatre of Tragedy are the worst examples for me, but Nigthwish too despite Floor being an amazing singer.

Anyhoo, the fact is that I learned about Tristessa from a meme (of course) which I couldn't agree more:

Ah another detail is that she was Greek and came from Athens. Having spent a week in the Kassandra peninsula, near Thessaloniki, with temperatures reaching 38C, I respect her even more for being able to make black metal – or maybe that's one of the reasons why she chose this genre after all!