nothing here but the hideousness of super yachts and private jets

issue 272, 10th November, 2024

CJW: Welcome! A big issue today, so I hope you take the time to scroll through and pick out some links that speak to you. Bugs, space, space marines, mutual aid, and so much more.

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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. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, fallen empress.

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

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: The deadly environmental toll of superyachts and private jets - Climate & Capitalism

Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets and yachts in just over an hour and a half than the average person does in their entire lifetime.

At this point we’re talking about survival. The wealthy need to be taxed into oblivion. (I wouldn’t care if they were also killed, because I honestly believe the world would be a better place without the people who have consistently and continually put their own wealth above anything and everything else. But maybe that's just me.)

DCH: Oxfam says $41 billion of the World Bank’s climate spending ‘effectively unaccounted for’ - David Kenner icij.org

The Oxfam report, titled “Climate Finance Unchecked,” alleges that poor record-keeping practices at the World Bank make it “impossible” to verify its expenditures and impact on climate finance. The international lending institution publishes assessments of a project’s budgeted spending on climate finance, not how much money is actually spent. The report estimated the difference between budgeted and actual expenditures amounted to tens of billions of dollars over six years.

An appalling–but sadly maybe not shocking–scandal. Just how badly is the World Bank greenwashing a new grift? Read the link and the report to find out. Shared via backchannels from one of my fave Nothing Here readers. Thanks its an eye-opener for sure.

Tiny Forests: Australia's Green Revolution in Urban Spaces - Matters Journal (via Sentiers)
"The study’s authors argue that “wide-scale re-integration” of cultural burning practices, in combination with western fire management techniques, is “crucial” at a time when wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense due to the climate crisis." - Indigenous cultural burning managed Australia’s bushfires long before colonisation. It’s needed now more than ever, a study says - Donna Lu at The Guardian

Just the headlines:

The Long Defeat? Or The Advent of Planetary Intelligence? By Nathan Gardels at Noema (DCH: Building on the long defeat jag from last newsletter)

Geopolitics & Empire

DCH: If Trump Wins, Blame the Billionaires By Steven Greenhouse at Slate + Election 2024: How Billionaires Torpedoed Democracy By David Sirota at Jacobin

As Elon Musk’s rabid pro-Trump mania makes clear, billionaires are wielding their financial might in this year’s presidential election far more than in any previous campaign—and far more openly, too. More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy.
But even before the country selected its new White House occupant, the era of big-money politics was already enshrined by the transformation of this election into “Billionaire: Endgame” — a Marvel-esque battleground that was open only to billionaires and that rendered the rest of us nearly powerless. It was a cinematic spectacle with an objective: limiting the horizon of policy possibility mostly to initiatives that either enhance — or at least do not fundamentally threaten — the financial and political power of the donor class that’s fleecing everyone else.

Not if at this point regrettably. I don’t want to litter the newsletter with me processing my dismay (but not shock) but this is a point I want everyone to remember amidst all the finger-pointing that’s already happening at the multiracial working class. Billionaires are the real threat. They are apex predators on a planetary scale. Democracy doesn’t matter to them.

I hope the pretence of Silicon Valley billionaires somehow being allies has fallen away as they got everything they wanted out of this election result. Elon Musk and his antics were cover for a right-ward lurch from his entire cohort.

The market rewarded them by adding $64 billion to the richest of the lot. Meanwhile wages have dropped and food prices are still too damn high for everyone else.

Bernie was right. And the DNC is clueless. Biden, it turns out, got lucky in 2020.

The only solace I take is that when progressive issues like abortion are on the ballot, they win. People want positive change–they just don’t trust the democratic leadership to deliver it

“Then, as now, the BBC has served as a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda and a means to manufacture consent for its future crimes. Last November, they helped to justify Israel’s systematic targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system and hospitals – a policy so viscerally apparent when we saw burning bodies, some still attached to IVs, in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Today, it is setting the foundations for further, indiscriminate attacks on the Lebanese people.” Generating consent for genocide: The BBC’s complicity in Israel’s crimes in Palestine and Lebanon By Sharaiz Chaudhry at Mondoweiss
“But beyond Biden’s personal commitments and biases, he, Harris, and the Democratic establishment personify a wider liberal strategy: the duplicitous embrace of international humanitarian law and the selective enforcement of the so-called “rules-based” world order.” Why the Democrats were Israel’s perfect partners in genocide By Tariq Kenney-Shawa 972mag
‘The Arabs will disappear’: emboldened Israeli settlers eye return to Gaza | Israel-Gaza war - Bethan McKernan, Ruth Michaelson, and Quique Kierszenbaum at The Guardian - CJW: Further proof of genocidal intent (if anyone still needs it).

Just the headlines:

Witnesses say the Israeli army is using facial recognition technology in its assault on north Gaza By Tareq S. Hajjaj at Mondoweiss
Israeli Digital Intelligence Firm Aims to Become Top U.S. Contractor By Georgia Gee at Drop Site News
US & Israel oppose entire world in UN vote to end Cuba blockade - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report
Trump Wants to End Gaza’s War on Israel’s Terms - Steven A. Cook at Foreign Policy
Is Israel using depleted uranium to bomb Lebanon? - Anis Germani at Mondoweiss
Israeli army says it is staying in north Gaza and won’t let residents return - Qassam Muaddi at Mondoweiss

Science & Space

CJW: The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology - Max G. Levy at Quanta

This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.

Really interesting piece on insect use of electrostatic charges for a variety of different effects.

CJW: Space Exploration Logo Archive

Does exactly what it says in the tin. For fans of typography, logography, and space.

Tech & Design

CJW: The thought doesn't count - Rob Horning

Since the U.S. election, I’ve been thinking about this ad a bit more and trying to resist my impulse to dismiss it as simply weird and off-putting. I realized it reminds me a lot of the barrage of “Kamala’s for they/them; Trump is for you” ads, for which I also couldn’t grasp the intended audience or why it would find the ads persuasive. But it is perhaps as simple as that tagline in its most abstract form. A Democrat-led government thinks you should be concerned with other people, whereas a Republican-led government gives you permission to think only about yourself. The Trump regime promises to normalize selfishness so you won’t have to feel guilty about it anymore (if you were weak enough to be susceptible to guilt in the first place). In fact, it won’t seem selfish but savvy, like the wife pulling one over on “them,” her dumb, sappy family.

Some interesting thoughts from Horning on the purposes of AI as told by a recent Apple ad - a tool to help you pretend to care about the people in your life while actually being a solipsistic POS, and the ways that extends into our political climate.

“The big bump came mostly from a single deal: a $1.5-billion funding round for Costa Mesa-based defense technology firm Anduril Industries, the report said. The deal, which was announced in August, was led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital. The round valued the seven-year-old business at $14 billion.” AI startup funding hit a record in L.A. area last quarter. Here’s who got the most money By Wendy Lee at The Los Angeles Times

Just the headlines:

Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity Are Promoting Scientific Racism in Search Results - David Gilbert at Wired
Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves - Jason Koebler at 404 Media
Meta’s plan for nuclear-powered AI data centre thwarted by rare bees - Financial Times - CJW: As if you needed another reason to appreciate bees <3

Society & The Culture

MJW: We Are The Relief: How Queer Appalachian Mutual Aid Showed Up After Helene - Basil Vaughn Soper at Them

Long before FEMA had any presence in Western North Carolina, Pansy Collective distributed six truckloads, two trailers, and a box truck filled with non-perishable food, water, cleaning supplies, diapers, gas and gas cans, toiletries, batteries, and hygiene products to various hubs, including remote mountain locations where residents were unable to leave.
[...]
He recounts how two tattooed trans folks set out to deliver water and insulin to someone stranded on a mountain in Clyde. When they needed help, a group of local “good ol’ boys” on ATVs offered them a ride without hesitation. These moments remind us that Southerners often unite, understanding what it means to be marginalized, and come together in times of need, regardless of politics.

This is the future. No one is coming to help our communities, we gotta take care of each other. And that might mean people you don’t agree with, because mutual aid includes alllll of us.

LZ: The universal belief in witches reveals our deepest fears - Aeon

Interesting piece on how the belief in witches is something that can be treated as universal. The author mentions how Asian, African, and American societies share similar understandings of what a witch is – or at least the bad witch, the one that aims to harm others. Apparently, it is a common thing that witches will use invisible means for that, but they may also engage in immoral acts like cannibalism and sexual deviance (from the classic sex without reproduction as an end to pedophilia), as well as animal and human sacrifice which will take the role of whoever they want to cause harm.

The author tries to understand how that is possible, that so many cultures share the same belief, and how this has occurred for such a long time. On the one hand, it is assumed that the witch is basically a representation of inversion, of evil as a force that can be channeled or incarnated. On the other, witches can represent a way to regulate societies as it is "easier" to blame someone or something for bad things that simply happen and then go on with daily life – burning the witch is just a detail.

Dark jokes aside, what I liked the most about this essay was how the author brought a psychological interpretation to witches: are they the representation of the otherness that we build as children? When we realize that our caretakers are separate entities from us and that they may frustrate us, we start to hate them. Curiously enough, our caretakers are often our mothers, and thus women are those more commonly accused of being witches – not only in Western society but elsewhere too, it seems, with a few exceptions.

Also, I am now almost finishing the book Satanic Feminism by Faxneld (holy shit, what a long read), and one interesting point that he raises is about the satanic panic (something also brought up in this article). How that was something that happened at the beginning of the 18th century, but also came back in the 19th, and then at the beginning of the 20th century, though at this point satanism or witchcraft was turned into a proto-feministic act to incorporate the image of the witch and the satanist to protest against society, sexism, and moralism – think about Sarah Bernhardt, Theda Bara, Luisa Caseti, and so on.

That's one point not raised in this article, on how some women or people will willingly associate themselves with witches, not the good ones, but the wicked because that means you are opposed to the status quo. Borrowing the wickedness of some symbols is therefore not only a means to empower yourself but also to communicate your dissatisfaction with society – thus the idea of Lucifer as the bringer of light, or Lilith as the liberator of humanity/women. But that's something else for another time… :)

“Inoculation, also called “prebunking,” is just one of several techniques researchers are testing to stop people from falling for misinformation and spreading it further. Others have focused on fact checking and debunking falsehoods, educating people about news sources’ trustworthiness, or reminding people periodically to consider that what they’re reading may be false.” You won’t believe this by Etbykai Kupferschmidt at Science (DCH: Misinformation is a topic long-term readers will know is dear to me but I also think we really need to stop pretending that waves hands frantically all this is just an info diet problem. It’s not. People are willingly accepting the lies.)

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: ‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? - Jenny Kleeman at The Guardian

If you hear voices, clinicians don’t generally ask what they’re saying to you, beyond whether they are asking you to harm yourself or others. “There’s been a reluctance to engage much with the content of voices,” Ben Alderson-Day, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University who specialises in psychosis, told me. “That’s in part because of a concern that if you ask voice-hearers to elaborate, you might engage in ‘collusion’: you may make [the voices] more real for people.” A clinician may diagnose a patient with psychosis, and prescribe them medication or CBT, without knowing what the patient’s voices say to them.
This new therapy demanded that voices were listened to closely, and responded to as if they were spoken by entirely real external beings. Trial participants would create an avatar of their voice: a moving, three-dimensional digital embodiment that looks and sounds like the persecutor inside their heads. They would be guided by a therapist to have a dialogue with the voice – and the hope was, through doing so, gain control over it.

I don't hear voices as described here, but my inner monologue/dialogue can be fucking nasty sometimes, so seeing people be able to wrangle the voices in their head and gain control had me tearing up.

Really encouraging new form of therapy, but of course this is in the UK where the government doesn't want to spend money on anything actually useful, so for the next trial they're going to try and use AI to replace the experienced therapists that have been conducting the therapy so far…

“But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.” Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said - Garance Burke at The Associated Press

Just the headlines:

Tobacco companies may have found a way to make vapes more addictive By Nicholas Florko at The Atlantic
A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work By Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic (DCH: hopeful news for people struggling with Lupus)

Labour & Economics

DCH: The Problem With AI Is About Power, Not Technology By Jason Resnikoff at Jacobin

AI, in other words, is not a revolutionary technology, but rather a story about technology. Over the course of the past century, unions have struggled to counter employers’ use of the ideological power of technological utopianism, or the idea that technology itself will produce an ideal, frictionless society. (Just one telling example of this is the name General Motors gave its pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair: Futurama.) AI is yet another chapter in this story of technological utopianism to degrade labor by rhetorically obscuring it. If labor unions understand changes to the means of production outside the terms of technological progress, it will become easier for unions to negotiate terms here and now, rather than debate what effect they might have in a vague, all too speculative future.

“The decree is narrowly tailored to target specific labor shortages in sectors where the need is particularly pressing. While the flow decree outlines regular immigration procedures, its primary focus is filling labor market gaps in transportation, construction, hospitality, fishing, domestic assistance, and agriculture.” Italy’s Government Wants Migrants as Workers Without Rights By Giuliano Fleri at Jacobin

Just the headlines:

What Does Trump’s Win Mean for the NLRB? By Matt Bruenig at Jacobin (DCH: The NLRB was one of the few lights in Biden’s tenure. As with the FTC, it’ll be a shame to see that all extinguished)
‘Tis the Season to Organize Amazon By Benjamin Y. Fong at Jacobin (DCH: A short, sharp read and how the holiday season represents a unique opportunity for labor to put pressure on Amazon)
UAW members push their union to divest from Israeli genocide By Dawnya Ferdinandsen at Mondoweis

Books

CJW: How To Read A Trans Fem Writer - Kai Cheng Thom and Maya Deane

Over and over, the pattern reasserts itself: trans women storytellers are scrutinized, shunned, and vilified. As comic artist and children’s novelist Sophie Labelle observes, “The violence that transfeminine people get for putting themselves out there has been so normalized that people are numbed to it.”
We are here to say: No more.
Given the recent publication of Kai Cheng’s latest book, Falling Back In Love With Being Human, we decided to write this article. Readers need a guide, a roadmap: For engaging skillfully with our work, for resisting their own transmisogynist conditioning, for reading us with curiosity and love.

This is an incredibly important read, and I would have said so before my own transition. Please read and consider it.

Movies + TV

MJW: Speak No Evil

Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis play an upper middle class couple with a kid who decide to take a mini-break long weekend at the country house of another upper middle class couple with a kid they met on holiday. Madness ensues. This movie was equal parts creep and cringe. The trust that one upper middle class couple can have in another due to their assumed status is glaring. Watching the danger they put themselves into by convincing themselves to be nice and polite is so cringe it’s almost impossible. Watch if you like James McAvoy with a West Country accent.

Podcasts

DCH: The Palestine Laboratory Podcast | Episode 4: After October 7 by Anthony Lowenstein at Drop Site News

In this final episode, Loewenstein examines the fallout of October 7, exploring the devastating aftermath in Gaza, Israel’s live-testing of AI-enabled weapons, and the West’s support of Israel’s military expansion. Featuring eyewitness accounts from Gaza, he asks: what does a post-October 7 world look like for Palestine and Israel? The Palestine laboratory isn’t inevitable.

Part 4 in a great 4 part series. Go back and give them all a listen once you’re done with this one.

Games

CJW: Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine - Edwin Evans-Thirwell at Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The appeal of the Space Marine fantasy is that it takes the alienation, misogyny and misery of being "man-made" and flips it into a rigid gasmask of pride and belonging, of indestructible and unquestioning purpose. In return for all the mutilations it deals and expects, it promises calm and some degree of togetherness - and this is why it doesn't really operate, in the bulk of Warhammer 40,000 art I've encountered, as parody or satire. It's too heartfelt. In service to the Master of Mankind we transmute anguish into serenity. We find purpose in the mutual example of our battle-brothers, and in the reassuringly permanent suspicion of subversion. We are proofed and plated against the wiles of the exotic and the effete. We find peace in the fact of being already dead, already sacrificed and cannibalised by the glowing image of the elder patriarch.

A really great read on how the anti-fascism of early Warhammer 40K has evolved into merely a fascist aesthetic lacking in satire. I mean, I still play Spice Maureen Too making fun of the self-serious space marines and all the other associated religio-fanatical wank, but it's clear that that's my reading of a straightforward power fantasy about brotherhood and power and purity and other concepts that easily feed into fascist ideology.

The above also links to this: Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places - Tim Colwill

At best, Games Workshop is guilty of muddled and mixed messaging; corporate custodian of a narratively top-heavy fictional universe, trying its best to plot a course through almost four decades of social change. But at its worst, the company is carelessly complicit in the open laundering of fascist ideologies and aesthetics — a slick marketing machine uncritically promoting the talking points and perspectives of the totalitarian right, in crass pursuit of greater profits.

Worthwhile read if you want more (specifically more of 40k's history) after the above piece.