Video: Thought Slime on “AI Art”

This whole “AI” art fad has always felt reminiscent of the crypto/NFT stuff, possibly because it seems to be pushed by the same or similar people. It’s a thing that could, in theory, be interesting and beneficial, but within our current system, all it ends up being vapid and harmful. It’s like automation – it’s framed as taking jobs away from people, but that’s only a problem because jobs are how people earn the right to exist, and the folks in charge are constantly trying to find new ways to not pay people.

What bothers me most, at this moment, is how these programs are allowing rich assholes to profit off of artistic work that I guarantee would be deemed worthless within our society. “You don’t deserve a living wage for doing that work because nobody wants to pay for it, now excuse me while I take it and use it to make money”. The problem isn’t the new thing that’s “taking jobs”, it’s the rules built around that new thing that ensures only a few people get the benefit.

 

Video: Fake News in the Great War

I find propaganda to be phenomenon that’s simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. I view myself as a propagandist, of a sort, in that I try to use rhetoric and evidence to influence people. But the vast majority of propaganda that’s out in the world is created or boosted by extremely powerful people and governments, all with their own agendas. They also seem to all be some degree of malicious, working to hide truths and spread lies, in amongst the facts they choose to recognize. Someone’s lying about everything so loudly and with so much conviction that it makes it incredibly difficult to tell what’s going on in the world. Often the best we can do is try to find sources we can trust, and keep a close eye on what they choose to ignore, or how they misrepresent things. My personal go-to has been to look at how a source talks about issues on which I believe I have enough expertise to tell fact from fiction, but that’s far from foolproof. It’s a vexing problem, and it’s one that will not be going away any time soon.

Another general rule I have is to consider historical parallels. I’m in the “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes” camp, and my hope for changing the kind of poem we’re in relies on understanding the structure of things as they have been. That’s why I’m grateful to people like Dan of Three Arrows, for digging into history on topics like this

The video goes over the use and abuse of propaganda leading up to, and during World War 1, covering lies countries told their own people, lies people and publications told each other, lies they told everyone else, and the corrupting effect those lies had not just directly, but also indirectly on people’s ability to believe in future reporting. In particular, this video frames WW1 as the first media war, in which global communication networks spread lies to global audiences, and  fabricated false realities for large segments of humanity. That has been more or less the norm ever since, and from what I can tell it’s only gotten worse in my lifetime. Hindsight isn’t flawless, but it can provide a perspective that I think is extremely important in dealing with the world as it is.

The horrors of mass incarceration demand abolition.

Over the last couple years, I’ve learned to expect good things from Teen Vogue. I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the bulk of their material, but they’ve put out a number of excellent and insightful articles on political and cultural issues, often providing perspective and analysis that put more “serious” publications to shame. Over the last few months, I’ve learned to expect good things from a commentator named Olayemi Olurin, who seems to be building a reputation as someone who’s willing and able to push back against conservative bullshit. With their powers combined, we get an excellent article about the cruelty, greed, and incompetence (deliberate or otherwise) of mass incarceration in the self-proclaimed “Land of the Free”.

If how many police we hire, prisons we construct, people we incarcerate, and billions of dollars we invest in the prison industrial complex translated to public safety, the communities with the highest police presence would be the safest, and America would be heaven on Earth. But it’s not — especially not according to the politicians who fearmonger about rising crime, all while asking us to keep investing in the same failed approach to addressing it.

This American system is a vehicle for maintaining racial, social, and economic inequality by criminalizing poor Black and brown communities, using them for labor, and saddling them with debt, trauma, and rap sheets with lifelong consequences that can rarely be outrun. This is deliberate and immoral, but the call to divest from police, prisons, and mass incarceration is about more than morality; it’s about results, and mass incarceration has failed to produce them.

Of course, it’s arguable that mass incarceration has produced the desired results of its architects, it’s just that they’ve been lying about their goals all along. We can acknowledge that clear material incentives that go into building and maintaining a system like the one the U.S. has, while also looking at the rhetorical façade that maintains popular consent for this ongoing crime against humanity. While the recent rise in open fascism and open white supremacy in the U.S., it’s getting easier to find people who will openly support discriminatory policies and practices, but the pretense of “solving crime” and “keeping people safe” remains, and while we have to dig into the deeper issues, it’s important to engage that rhetoric at face value at the same time.

In America, police arrest someone every three seconds, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. A 2020 review from University of Utah professor Shima Baughman, however, found that police solve just 2% of all major crimes. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  A 2020 report from the American Action Forum found that this country spends an estimated $300 billion on policing  and prisons yearly, a figure that has continued to increase despite record drops in crime. Political leaders and the media continue to sensationalize and manufacture crime waves to scare the public into feeling unsafe, so that we continue supporting inflated police budgets, militarized police departments, and incarcerating residents of the most under-resourced communities.

Nearly 2 million people are incarcerated in America, over 400,000 of whom have not had a trial or been convicted of any crime, according to the Prison Policy Institute (PPI). Nearly 60% of incarcerated people are Black or Latino, per PPI’s most recent numbers. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says that research shows some 65% of the US prison population has substance abuse issues. The vast majority of incarcerated persons earned wages below the poverty line before their arrest, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, and 43% of state and 23% of federal prisoners have a history of a mental health issue. Add to that, hundreds of people die in federal and state prisons each year. The leading cause of death? Suicide.

Our society constantly dehumanizes people deemed as “criminals”, and none more so than Black criminals. Even leaving aside dubious cases like the “suicide” of Sandra Bland, suicide is not a particularly surprising response to finding oneself in that trap. The U.S. carceral system has become famous for miserable and often lethal conditions, with rampant abuse from guards, debt traps, and little recourse for those who’ve been abused. It seems that the default is to believe that if the government has deemed someone to be a “criminal”, then they have no right to humane treatment, meaningful due process, safety, or any hope of a future.

These profoundly grim statistics extend to what the US asks of incarcerated people while they’re locked away. Incarcerated people, in public and private prisons, produce over $11 billion in goods for almost no income. A 2022 ACLU report found that, on average, most states pay incarcerated people between 13 and 52 cents an hour — of which the government claims as much as 80% — and seven states skip the pretense altogether and pay absolutely nothing for most jobs. Often, incarcerated people can’t afford the basic necessities for which they are charged, their families spend over $2.9 billion in commissaries each year, in addition to another $14.8 billion in costs associated with moving, eviction, and homelessness brought on by these cases.

And the debt doesn’t end there. Many people think “you do the crime, you do the time” and have no idea that criminal convictions also come with fines and fees. We are not only policing and incarcerating the poorest people in our society, we’re billing them for it. Per the Fines and Fees Justice Center, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people owe at least $27.6 billion in fines and fees nationwide.

Let’s introduce another definition for this practice: Slavery is a system of bondage in which a person is treated as property, deprived of their freedom and personal liberty, and forced to perform labor for another’s gain. Mass incarceration is slavery. Not “modern-day slavery” or some other euphemism, just slavery.

It almost seems like it’s a system designed more for profit and social control than for “solving crime” or for keeping anyone safe. More than that, it’s a system for social control that has been shown repeatedly to have an extreme bias against non-white people, and especially Black people. It’s a simple fact of history that the modern law enforcement system not only has its roots in slavery, but also has maintained slavery to the present day with the explicit endorsement of the U.S. constitution. I also think it’s important to dwell on that last point – forced labor is not a necessary component of slavery, only ownership of humans. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like “forced labor” has been the focal point in most discussions of slavery that I’ve encountered. I’m a little ashamed to admit that that had, to some degree, supplanted “ownership of/bondage of a human” in my mind. It’s a good reminder that propaganda works on all of us, no exceptions.

Perhaps you think that holding people in bondage would be necessary at times, even in a perfect society. Perhaps you think that taking away a person’s freedom as a punishment is somehow part of building that perfect society. I don’t agree, but even if that were the case, I think it’s important to confront what it is that you’re supporting, rather than trying to obscure it with rhetoric. The U.S. has made progress over its history, but it still has a system of social control and subjugation that, when you look at outcomes, is largely based on race. Is that part of your notion of justice? If not, why make excuses for a system that manifestly does not serve the purpose for which we’re told it was created? The reason I support police and prison abolition, is that the current system is unjust to its core, and efforts at reform pretend otherwise. Abolition requires us to shift our focus to building something new that is just, rather than trying to whittle away the “bad bits” of something thoroughly rotten.

If you were confronted with the total abolition of police and prisons, what would you want to replace it? What roles do they really serve that you feel would need to be filled? If we recognize that poverty is, itself, largely caused by injustice, then clearly the first step should be to remove the incentives for crimes of desperation. We know that prohibition hasn’t worked to reduce drug consumptions, we know that the drug war was basically a project of destroying lives for political gain, and that the dangers posed by law enforcement are the root of the violence of the drug trade. We should decriminalize all drugs, an invest those resources in treatment, and meeting people’s basic needs. Assaulting, kidnapping, and stealing from unhoused people doesn’t reduce the number of people who can’t afford shelter under our system, so maybe we should focus on providing good housing instead.

There’s no question that that building a different system would be a slow and difficult process – of course it would. There’s no question that a different system would have its own problems and failures. “Perfect” is a conceptual goal to work towards, not an actual way of being. There are surely some things that need tweaking and reforming, rather than replacement, but with such a corrupt, cruel, and bloodthirsty system, focusing on reform merely delays necessary change, and during that delay, more and more lives are destroyed.

We need to stop being so afraid of big changes, especially when the people warning us of “danger” are those who profit most from the horrific way things are.

The U.S. is about to freeze. Stay warm, and help others if you can!

It looks like the U.S. is headed for another devastating cold snap driven by the increasingly distorted polar vortex. I’ve seen no indication that places like Texas are any better prepared to deal with this than they have been for such events in the past. As is usual for this sort of thing, anarchist groups on the ground are doing what they can.

 

 

The infuriating reality is that even people with shelter are going to get hit by this, and I’m willing to bet a lot of people didn’t have the resources to do much preparation. In this age of endless recovery those with the means to make a difference at the systemic level clearly have no interest in doing so, and so it’s left folks on the ground with the time, energy, and tools to help both neighbors and strangers.

Try to stay safe and warm, and help others if you can. Remember to *always* run generators outdoors, even if that means you have to crack a door or a window for the cable. Far too many people die of carbon monoxide poisoning when cold weather hits and the power goes out, and we need you – yes you – to be alive, so no gassing yourself! I’ve always found enjoyment and a degree of beauty in cold weather, but that’s because I’ve always known I have the means to get warm. I want a world in which that’s the default (and *not* because of global warming), but we’re not there yet.

If you want more updates on this sort of thing, you can follow It’s Going Down on Mastodon.

Ancient shipwreck points to sophisticated material supply chain 2,000 years ago

I’ve been having a little trouble figuring out what the scale of our overproduction problem is. I know it’s big, between food waste and planned obsolescence, but how big? Or, put another way, how much could we scale back on resource extraction and general production, if we were running things based on the needs of a post-capitalist, degrowth/steady-state society? To my knowledge, most of the metals and other such resources that were easy to access were consumed long ago, but if we account for the amount of stuff in dumps and landfills around the world, would there even be a need for supply chains anywhere near the current scale? My goal, ideally, is to have a state of material abundance for everyone, in the sense of “rather luxurious caves, with high-efficiency facilities“, but I’m not sure what that would actually require.

The reason I’m wondering, is that last month, some research was published about an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck that’s been a subject of study since the 1980s:

More than 2,000 years before the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean, another famous ship wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern shores of Uluburun — in present-day Turkey — carrying tons of rare metal. Since its discovery in 1982, scientists have been studying the contents of the Uluburun shipwreck to gain a better understanding of the people and political organizations that dominated the time period known as the Late

Now, a team of scientists, including Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have uncovered a surprising finding: small communities of highland pastoralists living in present-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia produced and supplied roughly one-third of the tin found aboard the ship — tin that was en route to markets around the Mediterranean to be made into coveted bronze metal.

The research, published on November 30 in Science Advances, was made possible by advances in geochemical analyses that enabled researchers to determine with high-level certainty that some of the tin originated from a prehistoric mine in Uzbekistan, more than 2,000 miles from Haifa, where the ill-fated ship loaded its cargo.

But how could that be? During this period, the mining regions of Central Asia were occupied by small communities of highlander pastoralists — far from a major industrial center or empire. And the terrain between the two locations — which passes through Iran and Mesopotamia — was rugged, which would have made it extremely difficult to pass tons of heavy metal.

Frachetti and other archaeologists and historians were enlisted to help put the puzzle pieces together. Their findings unveiled a shockingly complex supply chain that involved multiple steps to get the tin from the small mining community to the Mediterranean marketplace.

“It appears these local miners had access to vast international networks and — through overland trade and other forms of connectivity — were able to pass this all-important commodity all the way to the Mediterranean,” Frachetti said.

“It’s quite amazing to learn that a culturally diverse, multiregional and multivector system of trade underpinned Eurasian tin exchange during the Late Bronze Age.”

Adding to the mystique is the fact that the mining industry appears to have been run by small-scale local communities or free laborers who negotiated this marketplace outside of the control of kings, emperors or other political organizations, Frachetti said.

“To put it into perspective, this would be the trade equivalent of the entire United States sourcing its energy needs from small backyard oil rigs in central Kansas,” he said.

Interesting…

Very interesting. I’m assuming that the backyard oil rig metaphor is a bit of an exaggeration, but the reality is that I don’t know by how much. Even the scaled-back system I think we should be aiming for would still require a much more complex system, by the sheer diversity of resources required, right? At the same time, we’ve got tools available that they didn’t have 2,000 years ago, and honestly, we’ve had tools that could get the job done for decades. I can’t say anything for certain, but I feel like maybe the Kansas backyard oil rigs aren’t as hyperbolic as it first appeared.

I’m in the business of imagining what the world could look like, and this glimpse of what it did look like makes me wonder to what degree a supply chain like that could work in a more high-tech society.

For one example, if we continue on the current trend of finding ways to make all sorts of interesting carbon-based stuff out of processed plant material, would it be possible for a region to “make a living” with a few thousand small-scale operations that practice coppicing, or that grow and harvest hemp. It seems plausible that that would be more viable in a less growth-obsessed society. Maybe the biggest difference would be that instead of all those concentrated resources being used to power imperial expansion and the like, they’d be re-distributed back through the supply web.

The biggest commonality in all these great feats of the past, and the massive achievements of the present, is people working together. That’s how pretty much everything cool we’ve ever done has happened. Continent-spanning trade doesn’t require either the economic systems of the present, or the impressive technology we’ve developed. Having billions more people is a valid consideration, but that’s also billions more workers able to cooperate on creating and transporting stuff. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that this story from the deep past sparks just a little hope for the future.

Rebecca Watson debunks Santa’s shroom-tripping origin myth

A while back, I encountered a proposed origin for the Santa character as we understand him today. Basically, the idea was that shamans in Siberia would make use of a hallucinogenic mushroom as part of their practice, and there was a myth of a particular sort of over-shaman who would ride on the back of a flying reindeer and give visions to the more earth-bound folks. I think I recall hearing that he did wear red, but I didn’t hear any reason why, beyond the fact that dyed fabric tends to be valuable in pre-industrial settings. From there, it was mixed with St. Nicholas and probably other things, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Rebecca Watson encountered a considerably less-plausible (in my estimation) version of the story, and done a debunk that does cover what I’d heard as well:

Okay, so here’s the “evidence” for the connection between Siberian shamans and Santa Claus, and it’s the kind of evidence that a lawyer might call “circumstantial” but I’m just going to call “pathetic:”

1.) Siberian shamans consumed the Amanita muscaria for both healing and spiritual purposes. This is the quintessential “magic mushroom,” with a bright red (or orange) cap with white spots on it. This is true.

2.) Siberian reindeer also consumed the mushroom. Drinking their milk or piss would result in people getting the hallucinogenic properties without most of the “making you barf everywhere” properties. This is also true.

That’s it, that’s the evidence. From here on out we are in the “citation needed” zone:

3.) The Shamans dressed up like the mushrooms in red and white and then went door to door by sleigh handing them out to people, but with all the snow they couldn’t get in the door so they had to drop down the chimney.

No one has any evidence any of this is true. No one has any evidence to suggest shamans got around via sleigh, that they randomly gave away their sacred herbs, or that they tumbled down chimneys because indigenous people didn’t know how to clear a driveway. There’s certainly no evidence they dressed up LIKE A MUSHROOM. In fact, if that were the case then we would see a very clear throughline in which Santa always wears red and white, which anyone who has ever had one of those “1 weird fact-a-day” calendars knows. Santa and his relatives like Father Christmas spent a long time without any particular color scheme (when I was a kid in the 80s I was always partial to Father Christmases in deep blue velvet), and the fact that we think of Santa as being dressed in red and white is mostly thanks to Coca Cola for making Santa their mascot in 1931 and giving him THEIR BRAND’S colors. That’s right hippies, it wasn’t drugged up shamans, it was CAPITALISM.

The version I encountered had no sleighs, and no going down chimneys. If memory serves, the connection to that that I heard was that the mushrooms themselves were stored in a little sack over/near the fire, to keep them dry/preserved. I think Watson may be overstating the degree to which the modern Santa is due to Coca Cola, but they certainly played a role. I’ll also mention that I can’t find a credible source for the version that I heard, and Watson, as we’ll see, found what’s probably the origin of the myth. There are also a number of other claims that go beyond the small similarity I heard, and a better explanation for the stocking thing:

4.) We hang stockings up by the chimney because that’s how the shamans dried out the mushrooms to prepare them for ingestion. Again, no evidence for it: yes mushrooms are better dried out, but it has nothing to do with your socks. Historians by and large accept that stockings date back to a myth of a wealthy St. Nick feeling bad for a guy who couldn’t afford his daughters’ dowries and tossing coins through the window, which landed in one girls’ socks that were drying by the fire.

5.) We put presents under the tree because that’s where mushrooms grow. Yes, seriously, that’s one of the claims. Again, if it were true then we could trace this tradition all the way back to contact with Arctic shamans but we can’t: there’s a reason why, as Thomas Hatsid points out over at ProjectCBD, A Visit From Saint Nicholas doesn’t even mention a tree but does mention stockings: because before CAPITALISM got out of control, Santa would put a few treats and shiny objects in the stockings and call it a night. Now he’s bringing us Playstations, which don’t fit in socks or “ON” the tree, as in the song “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” which was written in 1943 when presents were small enough to go there. Now they don’t, so they go at the bottom of the tree.

And that’s it, that’s all the “evidence” for this connection.

Her conclusion, which is worth reading or watching, discusses how cultural interchange actually works. It’s a bit more complicated than this kind of one-to-one transfer of characteristics. I also like how she goes through the chain of analysis by examining midwinter/Christmas traditions in those cultures that actually interacted with the shamanic groups in question. The TL:DR is that getting closer to Siberia sees the Santa-like characters and traditions getting less like the just-so story of shamans, chimneys, and gifts. And speaking of just-so stories:

But the real source of a lot of this, I think, is revealed in this NPR piece from 2010 about Donald Pfister, biology professor and curator of Harvard’s Farlow Reference Library and Herbarium (and his colleague Anne Pringle):

“Add it all up and what do you get? Pringle connected the dots: “People are flying. The mushroom turns into a happy personification named Santa.”

“She said it with a laugh, but the connection between psychedelic mushrooms and the Santa story has gradually woven itself into popular culture, at least the popular culture of mycology, mushroom science.

“So every year, when Christmas draws near, Pfister gathers the students in his introductory botany class, and, no doubt with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, tells the tale of Santa and the psychedelic mushrooms.”

This was clearly a fun fluff piece that isn’t super subtle about the fact that this is just a fun yarn – it’s a modern myth about an ancient myth. But we can’t have nice, fun, eye-twinkling things like this today. As the story gets passed from outlet to outlet, the “subtle” playfulness gets dropped. What is actually a story about a biology professor goofing around with his students with a fun lecture every Christmas becomes the SECRET TRUTH OF SANTA CLAUS, which leaves it to annoying buzzkills like me to pipe up and say “well actually that’s not true.”

Yeah, that tracks. It seems to take very little for some ideas to enter popular consciousness, and a few years of one professor at a prestigious university telling a compelling story? That could plant the notion not just in the heads of a lot of people, but people who, by virtue of being Harvard graduates, will be taken seriously. I used to play around with convincing people of things that weren’t true, as a child. I think I got close to convincing a neighboring kid that I was a ghost once, and that a local albino skunk was my ghost pet. In high school I would sometimes try to persuade people that A Field Guide To Little Known and Seldom Seen Birds of North America was real, or that Rhinogradentia was an actual order of island-dwelling mammals. As I got older, and saw the damage that lies combined with people’s credulity could do, I guess the game lost its charm for me.

Still, I’m glad to know where that story came from. It’s interesting to see how we develop mythology about mythology, in a way that almost makes me think of tales of divine regime change, like the way the gods of ancient Greece overthrew their titan parents/predecessors. As ever, it makes me wonder how many religions began with misunderstandings that could have actually been resolved, had things gone just a little differently. It sometimes feels like, among all the deliberately created and promoted propaganda, some stories just escape and spread like an invasive species, taking advantage of the rich, safe environment in which they find themselves.  I wonder what other new “explanations” will arise for Santa and other such things, in the decades to come.

The land defenders of the world are right: To save ourselves, we must protect the forests.

I have to say, I really enjoy the metaphor of a Jenga tower, for the way the world is going. Blocks are being removed to build the top to new heights, with no concern for the overall instability being created. Sea level rise, chemical pollution, habitat destruction, extreme weather, fascism, decaying capitalism, new diseases – things are feeling pretty unstable right now. To extend the metaphor, a lot of what we are trying to do is to add blocks at the bottom to re-stabilize things. Some of that is social – adding new “stabilizers” like universal healthcare, free mass transit, reliable access to power, housing, food, and water, and so on. And some of it, as we so often discuss here, is ecological – actively working to add new “blocks” through things like rewilding, while also working to prevent the blocks that remain from being taken like so many others to add to the top.

Specifically, to disentangle ourselves from the metaphor, we need to preserve existing, and especially old wilderness. This is not some kind of “it was better before humans messed everything up” nostalgia or something. As I’ve written about before, ancient trees bring resources and stability that younger forests simply lack. The research we’re looking at today underscores the importance of old-growth trees when it comes to drought resistance:

A new analysis of more than 20,000 trees on five continents shows that old-growth trees are more drought tolerant than younger trees in the forest canopy and may be better able to withstand future climate extremes.

The findings highlight the importance of preserving the world’s remaining old-growth forests, which are biodiversity strongholds that store vast amounts of planet-warming carbon, according to University of Michigan forest ecologist Tsun Fung (Tom) Au, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Global Change Biology.

“The number of old-growth forests on the planet is declining, while drought is predicted to be more frequent and more intense in the future,” said Au, lead author of the study published online Dec. 1 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Given their high resistance to drought and their exceptional carbon storage capacity, conservation of older trees in the upper canopy should be the top priority from a climate mitigation perspective.”

The researchers also found that younger trees in the upper canopy—if they manage to survive drought—showed greater resilience, defined as the ability to return to pre-drought growth rates.

While deforestation, selective logging and other threats have led to the global decline of old-growth forests, subsequent reforestation—either through natural succession or through tree planting—has led to forests dominated by increasingly younger trees.

For example, the area covered by younger trees (<140 years old) in the upper canopy layer of temperate forests worldwide already far exceeds the area covered by older trees. As forest demographics continue to shift, younger trees are expected to play an increasingly important role in carbon sequestration and ecosystem functioning.

“Our findings—that older trees in the upper canopy are more drought tolerant, while younger trees in the upper canopy are more drought resilient—have important implications for future carbon storage in forests,” Au said.

“These results imply that in the short term, drought’s impact on forests may be severe due to the prevalence of younger trees and their greater sensitivity to drought. But in the long run, those younger trees have a greater ability to recover from drought, which could be beneficial to the carbon stock.”

It’s good that younger trees are able to bounce back, and it shows the validity of re-foresting, but the unique properties of old-growth forests are another reason why, as I said last time I wrote about this, it’s important to defend what we have. The work that land defenders are doing in Atlanta, and other places around the world, benefits all of us, even if we never, ever actually walk under those trees, or have to deal with the cops that want to cut them down. When it comes to ecosystems on the other side of the world from you, think of them like your city’s water treatment plant, or the power plant, miles and miles away, that’s generating your electricity. The way those ecosystems affect the air and water does actually impact your life, albeit indirectly.

The one upside of inheriting a world that’s been ravaged by greed for the last couple centuries, is that there are so many ways we could start improving things. Some of that can be done directly, right now, and I have immense respect for those who put their bodies between our environment and destruction, as well as those that provide them with material support. It’s also worth noting that in some cases, their work puts them in clear, immediate danger, especially when they’re indigenous.

We’ve been fortunate, in that the “Jenga tower” of our world had a lot of blocks to remove, so it’s taken a while, for the instability to become obvious. It’s also very good that, while much has been lost, there’s still a fair amount of land out there that’s relatively “untouched”, in addition to the various “younger” ecosystems. It sometimes bugs me that I keep coming back to the need for political change, but at the end of the day, most of the big problems in the world lead back to our political and economic status quo. Support land back, support land and water protectors, and do what you can to build collective power and move other people to the left. We’re blessed with an abundance of opportunities for making the world better, but a lot of them are time-limited, so there’s no time to lose!

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Potions and politics: How to change the world?

The novel on which I’m currently working is a fantasy, set in your standard quasi-medieval world, following the adventures of a young mage as he is a witness to, and participant in Historical Events. I’ve got a few different motivations for writing this story. The first, and most important, is that pretty much the entire plot just sort of came to me over a period of a couple weeks, and I wanted to see how it would actually turn out. The second is that I’d been looking to try out a different approach than the one I took with Exits and Entrances, to make for a more enjoyable read.

The third motivation is political. Well, sort of. Making a good story is my primary goal, but is it even possible for a writer to avoid putting anything of their own opinions into their work? Maybe, but I doubt it would be good. No, my writing is a part of me, so much of me will probably show up in it. Of particular relevance today, is the notion of regime change in fiction. I think it’s fairly common for a novel of this sort to tell the story of some sort of political crisis, by the end of which the world has either gone back to a desirable “normal”, or has changed for the better. The most common version of that that I’ve seen is replacing a bad monarch with a good monarch, and pretending that solves things.

I get why – it’s easy, it’s familiar to the reader, and it’s just how things have been done in the history we were taught. It doesn’t sit well with me, though, and I don’t particularly want to write a story that ends with “good” authoritarianism, so part of my work in writing this is studying the history of political change. How does it happen? We tend to think of revolutions, wars, and coups, all of which tend to have their own hierarchies, but are there other options?

Well, in my fantasy world, there will be, but while there will be magic, monsters, and mysticism, I find that that sort of thing goes best when it’s tethered to our day-to-day lives by threads of realism. Some of that lies in the sensory experiences of life, but I’m far from the first writer to include machinations of politics and power that resemble those of the real world in some ways.

All of that is why I’m glad we have people like Andrewism, exploring the ways in which a fictional society might go through major political change:

The history of policing and mental health show the pointless cruelty of forced “treatment” policy in NYC

I find it hard to trace a timeline of my views on mental health. I had a phase, in my teens, in which I viewed antidepressants and the like as bad, though I’m not sure I could have explained why. I also think there was a time when I just accepted “insane asylums” as just being a necessary part of life, and assumed the people running them and working at them were there to provide the best care they could. At this point, I consider that part of modern “mental health treatment” to be a part of the prison system, at least in the United States.

Some of the change comes from reading The Day the Voices Stopped, by Ken Steele, in college. I think there’s a degree to which, because we only ever experience the world from our own perspective, growing up requires gaining a real understanding of the fact that everyone else is a person, just like we are. In some ways, I feel our society discourages that form of personal development, and actively encourages us to see other people as not fully human, when they fall outside of “normal”. This absolutely includes the politics of race and gender, whether it was pathologizing Black people’s desire for freedom as “Drapetomania”, using the diagnosis of hysteria to medicalize and control women, or declaring queer people to be mentally ill. As well-meaning as I was, in hindsight there was a degree to which I saw people with some mental illnesses as being somehow broken, or less fully human. I don’t think I ever actually supported institutionalization – I had some awareness that there were problems there – but I don’t think I would have had a real answer for people who framed mentally ill people as a “burden on society”, or other such eugenical shit. I probably would have focused instead on a somewhat condescending view of having a duty to care for them. I also think that extended into other forms of disability, but again, I find it hard to remember exactly what I used to believe on this stuff.

Reading Steele’s autobiography changed my perspective, and made it impossible for me to ignore the horrors of mental institutions. I didn’t have an alternative in mind, but I no longer had any doubt that the way things had been done was bad. That was the point at which I began to understand the need to empower people with mental disability and/or illness to make decisions in their own lives. It feels bad to say that it took me that long, but I don’t think it occurred to me that someone with schizophrenia, for example, might have valid thoughts, opinions, and requirements for their own care and lives.

I’m far less sure at what point I came to understand how mass incarceration and white supremacy intersected with psychiatry, but I do remember the point at which I realized that it was so much a part of the fabric of reality in the United States that it barely got reported on. I was having a discussion-turned-argument with acquaintances who shall remain anonymous, and we were talking about racism in the U.S. criminal justice system. I brought up a case that I’d recently heard about, and the other person insisted that if it had really happened, they would have heard about it. After all, we live in a free country, right? People don’t just get locked up for not fitting a profile, and for stating plain facts about their own identities, right? Can you even imagine? It would be a national outrage if the cops just grabbed a “sane” person, locked them up, and drugged them against their will without even checking whether their claims were true.

Right?

Well, sort of. There was some coverage of it, because it really was a sensational story. In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy. I could only find two articles online that followed up on Kam Brock’s story, and I needed a VPN to read them because they’re geo-restricted to the U.S., like so much other “local news” that’s not considered worth a larger platform. How can this be?

Well, I suspect that, aside from the ever-present white supremacy in our law enforcement system, it’s because it’s considered perfectly acceptable to do all of that to “crazy” people. Solitary confinement, assault, sexual assault, some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs available – all are just routine parts of how our society deals with mental illness, to the point where all of this can happen, triggered by some cop deciding to hassle the black woman in the expensive car, and it’s barely newsworthy that a court, as Brock said, ruled that she was “crazy”.

It’s even more horrifying when you consider what this means for the rest of Brock’s life. It’s now a legal fact that she’s “crazy”. The torture inflicted on her was ruled by the courts to be just fine. That means that if this, or something like this happens again, there is legal precedent that it’s OK to imprison and torture this woman. Any legal dispute she’s in in the future will have this hanging over it. Any time she has a negligent or vindictive landlord, or a dispute with a neighbor, or is wrongfully fired, it could make that nightmare happen again. Crying seems like a pretty reasonable response.

Remember how we saw, over the last few years, the way white women have been able to weaponize white supremacy to sic cops on black people? Brock now has to deal with that, plus the legal declaration that she’s crazy. Practically anyone has the power to get her locked up at any time, for any reason, because some cop decided to pull her over. That doesn’t mean it will happen, but the fact that it can says very bad things about what sort of “freedom” people in the United States really have.

It’s made worse by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, mental health has always had a political dimension to it, and just as white supremacy didn’t end when the Civil Rights Act was passed, the politicization of sanity and the stigma against people with mental illness – sanism – is also very much alive and well within the systems that govern the people of the United States.

All of this is worth talking about in its own right, but I also wanted it to set the scene a little. Our society dehumanizes people with mental illness, portraying them as anything from pitiable to demonic, so long as it’s not fully human. I think this is one of those prejudices that exists within all of us, at least a little, because of the society in which we live. It doesn’t help that the way the world is set up can make life extremely difficult for some neurotypes, making them into disorders or disabilities by context. This is very similar to how non-white races are often treated, and I think that establishing that connection, and giving the example of Kam Brock, is useful in going into this next story:

Rights groups are sharply condemning New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Tuesday directive requiring local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to the intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with involuntary hospitalizations.

“If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation,” states a city document.

I don’t know how useful evil is, as a concept, but I’m finding it hard to think of a better description for this. Our society routinely and deliberately denies people access to their basic human needs, for money. An economic advisor who is respected in the U.S. government actually said that they should try to increase unemployment to curb “inflation” that seems to be mostly caused by outright greed. This is the context in which law enforcement and mental hospitals will be judging whether people who have been forced to live on the streets are mentally well enough to be allowed any say over their lives. “Evil” seems about right.

There are efforts to push back against this, but it often feels like the governing philosophy in the U.S., when it comes to those at the bottom, amounts to “the beatings will continue until morale improves”. The notion – put forward by Mayor Adams – that this is about helping people would be laughable if it weren’t so cruel. Being forcibly committed, drugged against your will,  and “treated” by people who will call you delusional for telling the truth, won’t make anyone’s health better, mental or otherwise. Part of me feels like that shouldn’t need to be said, but I know that I used to think it was at least somewhat OK.

I think it may even be that a majority of people still take the view that “sometimes it’s necessary”, but who decides what’s necessary? Why is mental illness – a category that we know has been, and continues to be politicized – something that can remove someone’s right to autonomy? If someone is a danger to others, then sure, the community can take steps to defend itself, but if they’re incapable of not being that way, then what’s the point of punishing them? And if they are capable of change, why the fuck would we think that incarceration and torture would help?

This new policy in NYC is horrific, and the more you know about the history and practices of the system carrying it out, the worse it looks. These are people. People who’ve been forced into about the worst situation it’s possible to be in, by a society that treats poverty as a moral failing. These are people who are routinely discussed as sub-human monsters. These are people who are routinely treated as sub-human, and this law is making that worse.

Yesterday, I talked about how each step on the path I want us to take involves making life better for humanity in the short term. This is an example of that. We’ve been taking the punitive/carceral approach to mental illness for centuries, and it has not worked. Likewise, relying on the grinding misery of poverty to get people to “do better” has never worked. A housing first policy, on the other hand, treats people as people, focuses on meeting needs, not demanding that people prove themselves worthy of existence, and it works.

Housing First Improves Lives
Study participants who were housed through HFCM showed substantial improvements across multiple dimensions of their lives:

High Housing Retention. Housing Retention was high overall (73%), but highest for those in housing first permanent supportive housing (HF PSH) (80%). HF PSH secures housing through a permanent subsidy and builds stability through the ongoing availability of wrap-around services.

Better Quality of Life.  Quality of life scores improved 30% after housing.

Fewer Mental Illness and Trauma Symptoms. Mental health symptoms decreased 35% and trauma-related symptoms decreased 26% after housing.

Reduced Substance Use. Housing first does not require sobriety or abstinence. However, after housing, the percent of housed participants that used any drugs fell 37%; and the number of days in the last month that housed participants used alcohol to the point of intoxication fell an average of 3 days more than it did for unhoused participants. Other substance use measures did not change, challenging criticism that housing first and harm reduction encourage substance use.

Making this approach the default in the U.S. would not solve all of our problems, but unless you view the maintenance of this hierarchy, complete with those being crushed at the bottom, as a good in its own right, then this is an obvious step to take. This isn’t some kind of “too good to be true” con, it’s just a way to do things that is, quite simply, better. Would it cost more money, when you account for all the long-term impacts of the policy? Who the fuck cares?

It’s not like we’re short on resources. Congress just increased the Pentagon’s budget again, and we’re going to pass one trillion dollars per year soon, not even including the less direct ways money is funneled into the military-industrial complex. Elon Musk is currently burning billions of dollars in an apparent effort to prove the meritocracy wrong, Bezos is trying to get infrastructure rebuilt to fit his “super-yacht”, and Bill Gates screwed with the education system because the arrogant jackass thought he knew better than people who study education.

We are not short on money. We are not short on resources. We know how to make the world better, it’s just that the people in power don’t want it to get better. Not if it threatens their power. Why should we care how cost-effective it is to meet people’s basic needs? Why is that treated as a valid question, in the face of society as it exists, not to mention the money that will be spent kidnapping, assaulting, and drugging unhoused people in NYC?

But, since it’s relevant in the world as it is, I’ll also mention that there’s evidence that a policy of doing the right thing also happens to be “economically sound”, in that it won’t cost rich people anything.

I’m angry about this, in case you couldn’t tell. Everywhere you turn, there’s another way in which the world is set up to cause immense suffering for no damned reason, other than the shitty ideas of shitty people. There are folks fighting back, of course, mostly through local organizing. Sometimes it’s standing up to the cops to stop them from “sweeping” an encampment, sometimes it’s feeding people, but a key part is listening to the people in question, not making decisions for them.

The current political momentum in our world is pushing us towards a future that is both much worse than our present, and also much worse than it needs to be. Policies like this are, of course, an attack on both unhoused people, and mentally ill people, but it’s more than that. It will also almost certainly hurt black people more than other groups, and non-white people more than white. It will be weaponized against trans people, who are more likely to be unhoused because of bigotry that cops tend to share. It will be used, to justify horrific abuse of anyone the cops don’t like, just as they’ve done with every other tool, weapon, and policy they’ve been handed. It seems designed to “solve homelessness” by warehousing people, and using drugs to make it easier.

I wouldn’t call the Democratic Party fascist, the way I do the GOP, but bipartisan U.S. policy around houseless people has always leaned towards eugenics (when not just going there outright). Combine that with the current fascist movement, and this feels similar to the detention immigrant detention facilities that were set up under the Obama administration, and expanded and made worse under Trump. This new policy is bad, but it can get much, much worse, and instead of trying to avoid that, Democrats like Eric Adams seem to be trying to move things farther in that direction.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Imagine being Ben Shapiro

I’m working on something fairly grim right now, so I revisited this old video for the entertainment value. It’s an interesting breakdown not just of Ben Shapiro’s ludicrous critique of John Lennon’s Imagine, but also of the song itself, and what makes it unique. I also like this because it makes me think about how my own political journey, thus far, has changed my perspective of the song, and my understanding of how it relates to the world.