nothing here but intentional ecocide

issue 266 - 15th September, 2024

CJW: Bit of a short one this issue, but I think you’ll probably be thankful for that with all the bumper issues we’re often dropping in your inbox.

As ever, if you’re in a position where you’re able to support us, you’ve got a couple of options:

Both give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. Another thing you can do to help spread the word is forward this email to someone you think might enjoy it.

The Team

Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Barely engages with the internet at all any more.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, on the bound.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: Pacific islands submit court proposal for recognition of ecocide as a crime - Fiona Harvey at the Guardian

Three developing countries have taken the first steps towards transforming the world’s response to climate breakdown and environmental destruction by making ecocide a punishable criminal offence.
[...]
If successful, the change could allow for the prosecution of individuals who have brought about environmental destruction, such as the heads of large polluting companies, or heads of state.

Let’s goooooo.

“It’s been said before but the second Greta started making connections between climate change and capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism the media coverage came to a screeching halt.” - Greta's Growth - Joshua P. Hill - CJW: On Greta Thunberg’s growth as an activist, and the way the media turned on her as soon as she started pointing out the obvious connections between climate change and capitalism.

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Is Israel intentionally attacking aid workers? - Stephen Semler at Responsible Statecraft

Popular deconfliction mechanisms used by aid groups in Gaza include clearly marking their assets, arranging their movements with Israeli authorities, and sharing their location with the Israeli military.
However, a disturbing pattern has emerged: Aid groups share their coordinates with Israeli authorities and then are attacked by the IDF at those same coordinates.

Emphasis mine.

No shit, but at least we're seeing these facts appearing in more publications. In this piece they detail 14 separate incidents where it appears the IDF deliberately targeted aid workers.

Israel’s West Bank Attacks Fuel Its Annexation Plans - Jonah Valdez at The Intercept
War on Gaza: Massive Israeli strike on Palestinian tents kills at least 40 - Ahmed Abd el Aziz and Nader Durgham at Middle East Eye

Tech & Design

MJW: The Downfall of WishTender: Where Do We Go From Here? by Miss Mirage at Petit Mort

As a sex worker, I feel that there is a tightening ligature around my community in the world of online commerce—one which keeps growing tighter with every passing year. It feels like there is an ongoing buildup towards complete repression of our ability to work online. An inability for adult content creators or in-person sex workers to receive gifts and tips safely online could result in many workers being forced out into the streets for work, with higher risk.

The stranglehold that payment processors have on sex workers is ever-tightening and should concern us all.

CJW: An Age of Hyperabundance - Laura Preston at N+1

I was an extraterrestrial taking notes on the problems of Earth. Finding pizza in your area was a problem. People being mean to you because you were wearing your AirPods at dinner was a problem. Going on vacation was a problem because the hotels would force you to find the light switches. Elders were a problem. (They never took their medicine.) Loneliness was a problem, but loneliness had a solution, and the solution was conversation. But don’t talk with your elders, and not with the front desk, and certainly not with the man on the corner, though he might know where the pizza is. (“Noise-canceling is great, especially if you live urban,” said the earbuds guy. “There’s a lot of world out there.”) Idle chitchat was a snag in daily living. We’d rather slip through the world as silent as a burglar, seen by no one except our devices.

A really great read - a tech critic is invited to give a speech at a Chat AI conference, and writes up the whole event for our reading pleasure. A long read, but worth the time.

Features the horrifying anecdote about an AI convincing a woman to put down her dog, which you may have seen floating around social media.

Scientists Grew a Mushroom Into This Robot to Act as Its Brain - Noor Al-Sibai at The Byte - CJW: I, for one, welcome our new mushroom robot overlords.
"These batteries are much safer, lighter, and smaller compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries. They also come with a 20-year lifespan, take only 9 minutes to charge, and can run up to 600 miles per charge." - Samsung Unveils Solid-State Batteries with 20-Year Lifespan and 9-Minute Charging Time - Krishi Chowdhary at Tech Report

Society & The Culture

LZ: Hex, a witchcraft and witch trials museum in Ribe, Denmark

I recently learned that there is something called Copenhagen Occult Club and that they were organizing this field trip to Ribe, where they have a small museum called HEX, dedicated to witch trials history and a focus on Scandinavian history. After traveling for almost 4 hours from Malmö, we were greeted with an overview lecture about the particularities of Scandinavian witch trials and then headed to this small museum founded in a more than 400-year-old house.

I usually don't take the audioguide, so I'm not sure if that's common practice, but they used a narration that kind of told fictional stories based on historical facts about witchcraft, witch trials, and specific cases in Denmark. There were also two animations telling the stories of Maren Spliid and Lamme Sidel, very touching ones and with some immersive resources like projection over a stone ground that showed shadows and the changes of the seasons. There were several props imitating artifacts used in witchcraft practices, as well as some actual objects like a rusty stone that could have been used to cut heads off during the trials.

The shop was also pretty interesting. Several books in Danish, English, and German, and some witchy items like felt familiars, candles, soaps, herbs, stones, tea, and more. I only bought a book on demonology which I hope to review here at some point.

Despite being somewhat in the middle of nowhere in Denmark, it's worth visiting the museum if you are interested in the topic. Very didactic, children-friendly, and you can easily spend more than 2 hours following the audioguide through the rooms.

CJW: The Third Sex - Talia Bhatt

The hijras’ material conditions, positionality under a heterosexual regime, or even their activism and resistance to their society’s stigmatization come second to the navel-gazing solipsism of cissexual academics, rendering judgment from on high. It is a thoroughly hegemonic gaze, a fetishistic view in the original sense of the term, where the hijras’ symbolic value as either “gender-insurgents” or “upholders of patriarchy” matters more than their literal humanity, dignity, and survival. This parasitic, extractive impulse towards a marginalized population is frankly sickening, to say nothing of the sheer temerity required to postulate that people who are so thoroughly rejected and repressed by their society might be active agents in reinforcing the very institutions depriving and dehumanizing them—a conclusion only an academic could dream up.

Bhatt on the many, many failures present when cis academics discuss the hijras in India, undermining how they describe themselves, and reinforcing transmisogynistic views in other parts of the world.

What it all boils down to then is the patriarchy and male-supremacy:

The existence of a third sex does no more to challenge societal male-supremacy than does the existence of a fourth, fifth, or even second sex. Every sex that is not the First Amongst Sexes, that is not the Most Vaunted, Most Esteemed, and Most Adored Sex, simply becomes another sexual resource to be exploited.

I also enjoyed this sentiment:

There is no salvation awaiting us in a glorified past that does not exist. If we are to advocate for our humanity, our legibility, and our liberty, it will be as a part of something new, something unprecedented, something we do not as yet have names for.

CJW: How the psychiatric narrative hinders those who hear voices - Justin Garson

The point is, not long ago, there was a host of alternative frameworks for making sense of these extreme experiences. People with paranoid beliefs weren’t trapped between the broken-brain narrative and the literal persecution narrative. Within this broader range of narratives – a trauma response, a mirror of a broken society, a spiritual awakening – some were able to find real healing. The answer wasn’t always to give people stigmatising labels and pummel their brains with antipsychotic drugs.

A really interesting piece about Targeted Individuals (people who believe they're being gang-stalked, etc) and the failures (and/or lack of imagination and flexibility) of treatments available to them.

Movies + TV

CJW: Unbreakable / Split / Glass

I’m hardly going to be introducing anyone to these films, especially when Unbreakable came out around the peak of M. Night Shyamalan’s popularity, but after recently revisiting these films back-to-back, I think the trilogy is highly under-rated, likely because of how horribly uneven the rest of his filmography is.

I actually think that Unbreakable might be the weakest of the three films, and Glass the strongest, but it relies on the viewer being invested in the whole trilogy.

It’s a small but thoroughly interesting superhero cinematic universe, and I kind of want more of it after the ending of Glass, but I also recognise that would undermine what’s already been done here.

MJW: Killjoy

Killjoy is a Stan original about a pal of mine that I worked with around 20 years ago. Kathryn Joy grew up in Northern NSW in a house where their father had killed their mother. After serving 2 years in jail, he was released and gained custody of his children, like nothing had happened. This documentary is about domestic violence, the ‘provocation’ defense, and the fallout that these events had on Kathryn’s life. Even though these events took place in the eighties, with the current wave of women’s murders at the hands of their partners in Australia, it’s just as relevant. Warning: obviously, it’s heavy.

Music

LZ - Drudkh - Blood in our wells

This is no release or anything, but I have been addicted to this album and listening on repeat. I love how it combines heaviness with melodic parts, a folk feeling, including samples in Ukrainian. The album art is also quite nice and cozy.

The Process

MJW: So I finally managed to finish the edits/rewrites on my novella - I basically rewrote most of it. I was able to accomplish this mostly by quitting smoking weed, so please let me remember this lesson (I won't.) It's called The Forgetting Navigations and you can find it early next year through Interstellar Flight Press.