nothing here but corey jae

issue 263 - 4th August, 2024

CJW: It finally happened, gang. We came close a handful of times over the years, but this issue is all Corey Jae from beginning to end. Marlee and Dan are on holiday, and I can only assume Lidia is doing her Indiana Jones-style catacomb exploration.

So, welcome, glad to have you here.

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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. Currently detoxing, middle-aged goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, girl of the year.

Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Monday was hottest recorded day on Earth: ‘Uncharted territory’ - Anna Betts at The Guardian

World temperature reached the hottest levels ever measured on Monday, beating the record that was set just one day before, data suggests.

Something tells me these articles are gonna become regular features in newspapers that care to print it.

CJW: Documents, Whistleblowers, and Public Comments Are Clear: Oil Companies Know Carbon Capture Is Not a Climate Solution - Amy Westervelt at Drilled

The EPA rule “was going to mandate either using CCS on a power plant in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to take some action that would be equivalent to adding CCS, and the response from industry was ‘hey the tech is really not proven,’” David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis for IEEFA, said. “Many, many comments from oil companies and utilities, in response to both the initial EPA rule and the current one, were saying this tech really doesn’t work.”

When they're talking about Carbon Capture and Storage in marketing materials it will save the world, but when they're trying to convince the EPA not to introduce new regulations, the tech just doesn't work… which is it?

Whatever the potential or solarpunk dream scenario for CCS, the reality is that fossil fuel companies are using it to a) Sell the public on the (incorrect and at this point extinctionist) idea that fossil fuel extraction can be green, b) Get more fossil fuel out of the ground in a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (which not only leads to more fossil fuels being burned, but also leaks up to 40% of the previously-captured carbon), and c) Steal from the public through tax credits and other subsidies, because their already exorbitant profits aren't already costing us enough.

Must-read.

The Secret, Magical Life Of Lithium - Jacob Baynham at Noema - CJW: Far-reaching piece on the history and uses of lithium, as well as questions concerning our use and extraction of it.
Plants and their pollinators are increasingly out of sync - Jennie Durant at Grist

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Netanyahu’s Speech Is a Gift to Future Genocide Historians - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

Speaking through unending applause, Netanyahu asked Congress for more funds and weapons and a license to massacre more Palestinians. In a tacit nod to US complicity in the Gaza genocide, Netanyahu told Congress, “Our fight is your fight.” He vowed a “total victory,” praised IDF soldiers despite their numerous war crimes, and cast anti-genocide protesters as “Iran’s useful idiots.” He claimed, amid roars of cheers, that the number of civilians who have been killed in Gaza is “practically none,” echoing the genocidal mantra “There are no innocents in Gaza” that Israel has repeated throughout the war. Emboldened by the unquestioning crowd, Netanyahu told lie after debunked lie.

Utterly disgusting.

CJW: Israeli Soldiers Accused of Rape and Torture of Palestinians - Seraj Assi at Jacobin

Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, praised the soldiers as “heroic warriors,” demanding their immediate release. Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has hailed the soldiers as “our best heroes” and denounced their arrest as “nothing less than shameful.” Knesset members from the Likud ruling party are stating openly that it’s “legitimate” to rape Palestinian detainees. An Israeli mob has descended on the Sde Teiman concentration camp in a mass protest in solidarity with the rapist soldiers, while dozens of Israeli officials have stormed the camp to protest the arrests.

We might just see Israel descend into civil war because of Zionists demanding the right to rape Palestinian prisoners. It would be a farce if it wasn't a fucking tragedy for Palestinians (and the notion of human rights and international law).

This piece also summarises things quite well: Civil War in Israeli Army, Parliament as MPs detain Soldiers for Gang Rape of Palestinian Prisoners at Vault of Horrors

How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza - Dan Owen at +972 Magazine
An Investigation Shows How the IDF Killed Hind Rajab - Jan Altaner at Jacobin - CJW: In case you needed any convincing.
"It is unlikely that their bodies will ever be repatriated to their families. They will rest in French soil, permitted a small corner of Europe only in death." - Migrants Die at Sea Because Governments Let Them Drown - Tyler Antonio Lynch - CJW: An aid worker in Calais writing about the ways political decisions made in France and the UK are killing migrants in the Channel.

Just the headlines:

EU admits it has hypocritical 'double standards' on Israel, Ukraine, Iraq, climate change - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report

Tech & Design

How to Quickly Remove Bloatware and Invasive Apps From Your Computer - Justin Pot at Wired - CJW: You can skip reading the article and just download the tool at privacy.sexy

Society & The Culture

CJW: Curating Colonization: On Sharing Visuals of the Dead - William C. Anderson at Logic Mag

The social media timeline’s power to normalize images of genocide, police killings, abuse, and more may seem exceptional, but our society is casually filled with similar visuals. Slave owners, imperialists, and presidents who exterminated Indigenous nations have been turned into monuments. […] Lynching photos appear regularly in exhibitions and history books. Curated by the state in its institutions and recalled as important history, colonization comes back to us. So long as Western hegemony and the white supremacist nature of US society remain intact, so too can the oppressive intent behind the imagery. It’s imperative to remember as much when we share visuals of violence in hopes of undermining the dominant mode of how these visuals are interpreted.

A great read on photography and propaganda used as colonialist and white supremacist tools.

CJW: Why sexual violence prevention programmes don’t work - Josephine Lethbridge at Les Glorieuses (via Jane Rawson)

For decades, social scientists have presumed that if you change people’s attitudes or ideas about sexual violence, then this will lead to a change in behaviour, and therefore a drop in violence. And so the vast majority of sexual prevention programmes around the world have targeted the mind: what people think and believe about sexual violence, why it occurs, the kinds of people who perpetrate it and are victimised. One central target of such programmes are so-called “rape myths”, such as the ideas that “some women deserve to be raped”, or that “when women say no, they really mean yes”.
Many of the interventions analysed in the recent study were successful at countering these rape myths. But a corresponding decrease in violence wasn’t found. Where there was any evidence of violence reduction, it was miniscule compared to the change in people’s ideas. The assumption that our thoughts are the primary cause of our behaviour has guided sexual violence reduction since the beginning of the field. But according to this new research, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

An interesting piece about sexual violence prevention programmes and the effects they do and do not have, and where the field might go next.

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: Beyond Trans Archives, Beyond Trans Medicine - Os Keyes at Logic Mag

That mismatch—between trans people and the medical gaze, between trans lives and the archival focus—is the other reason this story matters. As mentioned earlier, the question of whether trans medicine makes for better lives is today a hot topic, and much of the conversation revolves around data with the same limits as the archives—data gathered by (predominantly cisgender) doctors with a normative (and normalizing) imperative. But trans lives—as is true of all lives—cannot be circumscribed by such data.
Whatever the specifics, every story—every life—I ran into had something in common: they were not, and could not be, captured by medical records. What people’s lives mean to them, or what people mean to each other, always overflows, whatever version of a person (or a community) medical records record. And, partly in consequence, they quickly and clearly overflow attempts by medical data alone to neatly gauge the goodness of someone’s life or their experiences of medicine.

A really great read on the focus on trans medical records over the lives of trans people - what can and can't be recorded, and what's then left out of the literature and the (ugh) "debates". Also asks the now-obvious question of whose stories are recorded in the archives - who is it that's capable and allowed to seek gender affirming healthcare.

If that sounds too dry, it really isn't, and even drops a claim that D.B. Cooper was a trans woman (who is still incredibly loved by her fellow small plane pilot friends 13 years after her death).

Labour & Economics

CJW: Business of poverty: How Ukrainian refugees are being exploited throughout the EU - Miglė Krancevičiūtė at VSquare (via Foreign Exchanges)

The struggles Ukranians face in European labor markets range from missing wages and illegally low pay to unlivable housing conditions, psychological violence and a complete disregard for the wellbeing of workers and standards set by employment law.
Eva Malá from the NGO People in Need summarizes the situation like this: “The war stirred up the business of poverty. Companies can make money at the expense of Ukrainians in three ways: charging rent, receiving subsidies for refugees and exploiting them through agency work.”

Europe opened its arms and borders to Ukrainian refugees while simultaneously killing non-white refugees attempting to reach Europe via the Channel or the Mediterranean, but even these "welcome" refugees can't escape exploitation at the hands of disgusting EU capitalists of various stripes.

Unsurprising that employment agencies are at the head of the pack here. They're scum.

Newsletters

CJW: When the Doll Speaks - Talia Bhatt

Plenty of people choose to subscribe to the collective delusion that [trans femmes] occupy a hegemonic male positionality at any point in our lives, an expression of cissexist faith in the naturalization and immutability of sex that does not waver even in the face of contradictory evidence. That we are slandered sometimes with male forms of address is pointed to as a paltry, paper-thin rationalization for ignoring how we are treated instead of what we are called by those who wish to monster us. The tranny is a “man” only when she can be painted as a brutish, deluded, or perverted one. She is constructed as a threat in every instance, one so existential that her very presence justifies all manner of violence against her—all in self-defense, you see.
This is compounded by the reality of the mechanism—trans women are degendered, regarded as some kind of heinous, aberrant, nonhuman thing that must never be countenanced, only rectified. Our expressions of pain are manipulations, never sincere. Our wounds are only ever self-inflicted, likely for attention—for who would even want to sully their hands with us? Assaulted—what do you mean? Who could ever want a thing like you? You were obviously the one who tricked them. How dare you let your misshapen form be inflicted on a poor soul with their hand around your throat? You’re lucky he didn’t just kill you—and he would have had every right to, too, given what you did.

I hadn't come across Talia Bhatt or her writing before, but this piece is powerful and covers a lot of ground - starting with a sort of broad look at the violence trans femmes experience, before focusing on the Global South experience, then getting even more personal from there.

If you're trans or consider yourself an ally, read this piece and consider signing up.

CJW: Can We Be Kind? - Charlotte Shane

Charlotte first shared this in 2017, and I'm sure I shared it at the time, but this is an incredibly powerful essay and should be read by any animal lover. This is also the latest iteration of her newsletter if you want to sign up.

Art

CJW: Share the Sky with Someone Far Away with These Cyanometer and Sunset Postcards - at Colossal

A white hand holds up a postcard with a round cut out in the center and various shades of blue surrounding it. the blue sky shines through the middle.

>Artist Macarena Ruiz-Tagle created a new version of the 18th-century tool for the 13th Annual Architecture Venice Biennale. Whereas the original cyanometer was geared toward personal use, Ruiz-Tagle’s design is outfitted as a postcard. Users hold the work up to the sky, mark the corresponding hue, and share a thought or two before dropping it in the mail. The artist also designed a sunset iteration with brilliant pink, orange, and yellow rays, both of which capture the current conditions and remind us that even though we may be physically separate, we all exist under the same sky.

I love this idea so much. If you’ve read my bonus about On Kawara, you won’t be surprised.