[A monthly link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, toots … you name it]
[Videos]
Paris Olympics Slammed for “Social Cleansing,” Mass Displacement, Militarization & Greenwashing [democracy now] – “Just hours before Friday’s opening ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympics, a series of apparently coordinated arson attacks were reported on France’s high-speed rail network. No one has claimed responsibility yet. Before the games, protests highlighted the displacement of thousands of migrants, unhoused people and other vulnerable communities as “social cleansing.” We go to Paris for an update with Jules Boykoff, former professional soccer player, author and scholar focusing on the Olympic Games, and Paul Alauzy, Paris-based activist with the collective Revers de la Médaille (Other Side of the Medal).” The articles mentioned in this interview are listed bellow.
Tim Pool: World’s Worst Guesser – The Timbah on Toast videos are better, but i still need to boost this video debunking Tim Pool, because many years ago i actually watched and promoted him during Occupy Wall Street.
Why is EVERYONE more SICK? A great video you can send to all the people who still do not understand #LongCOVID
E. Roig: “Is anti-Zionism antisemitic? About the weaponization of antisemitism in current debates.“ I admire Roig for her bravery in taking on German philosemitism.
Physics Girl LIVE with long Covid – “Dianna is Live streaming a day in her life as someone suffering from long COVID and ME/CFS. The purpose of the Livestream is to raise money and awareness for those suffering from the disease. All funds will be going to the Open Medicine Foundation (OMF), a non-profit research organization dedicated to finding effective treatments for ME/CFS” Watch this please. And donate.
[Music]
Hors sujet 18: Joey Glüten – ANTI NAZI
[Podcasts]
Tested [apple podcasts] – “Who gets to compete? Since the beginning of women’s sports, there has been a struggle over who qualifies for the women’s category. Tested follows the unfolding story of elite female runners who have been told they can no longer race as women, because of their biology. As the Olympics approach, they face hard choices: take drugs to lower their natural testosterone levels, give up their sport entirely, or fight. To understand how we got here, we trace the surprising, 100-year history of sex testing.” Good idea to listen to this at the start of the Olympics. Who defines what defines what counts as woman.
Mark Bray on Anarchist Revolution In Spain & Lessons for Today [igd] – “In this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak again with historian Mark Bray about the anarchist movement in Spain as well as the Spanish Civil War and Revolution that broke out in 1936 against a fascist coup. We discuss how the movement grew, in all its complexities, and Bray describes the discussions and tensions over tactics and methods of struggle contemporary anarchists with find many similarities with. We then discuss what was achieved during the period of the revolution, from the taking over of industry in some cities, to the communization of land and agriculture in rural areas, to attacks on patriarchy and class society within everyday life.” Anarchist history.
The Third Information Crisis | Naomi Alderman [bbc] – “In this wide-ranging series, award-winning novelist Naomi Alderman, author of The Power and The Future, argues we are living through the third great information crisis. Following the invention of writing, and then printing, we now have digital communications technology. In what she describes as a ‘speculative historical project’, Naomi traces the parallels between these moments, asking if we can learn from the past to help us cope with the ‘enormous wave of information’ from the internet and social media that we are all faced with today. Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, she explores the way new technologies open up new ways of thinking and their enormous impact on our society.” On the whole this is rather both-sides-ish, but it’s still quite interesting.
How Solidarity Falters Amid Repression and How We Can Do Better [truthout] – “This system was actually designed to do exactly what it is doing and has been doing: concentrating wealth and facilitating racial capitalism and colonialism and extraction. These talking points often hang on free speech and freedom of assembly. And people will be like, “This is a terrible instance in which our rights to free speech and free assembly are being undermined.” And sometimes the way that people talk about that makes it sound as if they believe that those things are real.” Dean Spade <3
[Toot Threads]
[Pandemic Roundup]
Pandemic Roundup: July 25, 2024
Pandemic Roundup: July 18, 2024
Pandemic Roundup: July 11, 2024
Pandemic Roundup: July 4, 2024
[The Must Read[s] This Month]
Joe Biden’s COVID Hubris is the Nail in His Re-Elect Coffin [thegauntlet] – “The truth is that to the DC machine, Joe was, just like the rest of us, ultimately disposable. He served his purpose by serving capital; his maskless face as an elderly man in public was the ultimate propaganda for the disappearance of the virus that ended his career as surely as he claimed to have ended it. He gave his career, his body and his mind to advance the interests of the ruling class, to the detriment of us all. They say life’s a beach, Joe. I guess it is for you, now.” The missing context.
Organization, Continuity, Community | Peter Gelderloos [substack] – “Anarchism poses the questions that sit at the heart of abolition and of transformative justice, which in their best form are simultaneously goals and practices that have grown up alongside a resurgent anarchism. And anarchism provided both the method and a good deal of the analysis that motivated land defense and other ecological movements, a rekindled global anticapitalism, new iterations of neighborhood and housing struggles, as well towards efforts community health, harm reduction, and mutual aid.” If you only pre-order one. Another pamphlet by Peter Gelderloos.
Work Will Set You Free [acab] – “And once the owners and bosses and politicians were convinced they’d survived the pandemic, they focused on one thing: back to work, back to work, back to work, because without work we became not only unprofitable but unruly, with material support and with reason to fight we quit our jobs en masse and we rioted in the streets and we stopped paying rent and they were suddenly facing a world where they couldn’t live off our backs and sweat where we would fight back against their police and spit in the eye of their landlords, much better that millions of us die of plague and tens of millions be maimed and disabled then even one of us begin to imagine such a world, so we had to get back to work.” Priority has been to force us back into work, never our health.
[Lolympics in Paris]
Bread, Circuses, and Medals: The Olympics as Late Capitalism’s Swan Song [substack] – “Let’s not kid ourselves: the Olympics have always been a tool of imperialism. Born in the crucible of 19th-century European colonialism and industrialization, they’ve evolved into a showcase for the “superiority” of Western liberal capitalism. The medal table isn’t just a tally of athletic achievement; it’s a proxy for economic and political power.” Every word is true in this angry essay. Sadly i can’t get myself not to watch this time.
The Paris Olympics Are a Lesson in Greenwashing [scientific american] – “The biggest portion of greenhouse gas emissions for major sports events—approximately 85 percent, by some estimates—derives from travel to the event by fans, journalists and athletes. Paris organizers’ reliance on notoriously misleading carbon offsets can enable “carbon colonialism”—offloading dubious projects on the Global South that service the eco-ledgers of the Global North.” The ecological aspect.
The Appalling Social Cleansing of Olympic Paris [the nation] – “The contradictions of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics are clear as soon as one steps off the plane. Corporate sponsors blare cheery ads for the Olympic Games while the French military—armed with weapons more at home in a war zone or bombastic action flick—patrol the grounds. There are 50,000 police and military in the streets aided by AI-powered video surveillance technology, which the French National Assembly legalized in 2023 with the Olympic Games Law.” The surveillance and police control aspect.
Predictive Policing and the Paris 2024 Olympic Games: Security vs. Freedom [unicorn riot] – “As Paris prepares to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games from July 26 to August 11, 2024, the French government is implementing unprecedented surveillance measures to ensure safety. However, these measures have sparked fierce debate over the potential erosion of civil liberties, with opposition groups claiming that these systems automate social injustice.” Police shock doctrine.
We are Volunteers for Paris 2024 and we resign due to the lack of Covid-19 measures [le club] – “Covid-19 pandemic threat denial is not an antidote to contamination We wholeheartedly wish to take part to the Games, and in order to so so, expect strong and immediate action from Paris 2024, to secure the competiton : performing tests, reducing the influx of visitors, encourage the participants to get booster-vaccines, install air purifiers, implement ventilation, impose compulsory FFP2 masks… Preventiv actions exist and have been validated by the scientific community.” A group of volunteers protesting the lack in protective measures.
Inside the struggle to stop the ‘social cleansing’ of Paris for the Olympics [waging nonviolence] – “With the approach of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, organizers and aid groups are working to ensure the continuation of social services in the city. They are also trying to stop the evictions of over 12,500 of the city’s most vulnerable people, who often face the destruction of their dwellings, belongings and documents.” The social cleansing aspect.
[Articles English]
Public Work by Cosmos – “Public Work is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.” Specific and practical search engine.
State of Emergency. How do you document colonial abuses when archives have been destroyed? [wmmna] – “Photographer Max Pinckers collaborated with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities to give a visual existence to the fight for independence from British colonial rule in the 1950s. With most of the colonial archives deliberately destroyed, hidden or manipulated, they used reenactments, or “demonstrations,” to fill in the blind spots in British colonial history. The work also includes fragmentary colonial archives, photographs of architectural and symbolic remnants from the past (mass graves, execution sites, detention camps, trees that stand as memorials) and the testimonies of people who experienced and survived the war. Called State of Emergency – Harakati za Mau Mau kwa Haki, Usawa na Ardhi Yetu, the work is part documentary, part archive, part collective re-writing of history.” These photos made me cry.
Air pollution makes it harder for bees to smell flowers [ars technica] – “A growing body of research suggests that pollution can disrupt insect attraction to plants—at a time when many insect populations are already suffering deep declines due to agricultural chemicals, habitat loss, and climate change. Around 75 percent of wild flowering plants and around 35 percent of food crops rely on animals to move pollen around, so that plants can fertilize one another and form seeds. Even the black mustard plants used in the experiment, which can self-fertilize, exhibited a drop of 14 percent to 31 percent in successful pollination as measured by the number of seedpods, seeds per pod, and seedpod weight from plants engulfed by dirty air.” And guess what, to all these people dozing themselves in perfumes, that does not help the bees either.
‘Last Supper’ wasn’t Olympics Opening Ceremony inspiration [outsports] – “Prominent French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon had written in a blog post that he “didn’t like the mockery of the Christian Last Supper,” referring to Leonardo da Vinci’s famous 15th-century mural depicting Jesus with the Twelve Apostles. But referring to the painting, Jolly insisted: “It’s not my inspiration.” He continued: “There is Dionysus (Philippe Katerine painted in blue) who arrives on this table. He is there because he is the God of celebration in Greek mythology. The god of wine, which is one of the jewels of France.” It was not even inspired by the last supper.
The daughter of Elon Musk sets the record straight – “This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this. He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness. Obviously he can’t say that, so I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype f*g-ing along to use at his discretion. I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general.” The simple fact that she posted this on Threads is gold. (Even better would have been to post it on Mastodon)
Mask Bans Insult Disabled People, Endanger Our Health, and Threaten Our Ability to Protest [teen vogue] – “There are days when I am overwhelmed with grief and rage at the regressive attitudes toward public health and disabled people. In my opinion, the ableist, fascistic, and eugenic nature of proposed mask bans under consideration in New York City and Los Angeles is bleak. But what is happening now is not new or surprising; the hate is more explicit, that’s all.” We are watching–passively–the spread of fascism. They always come first for the disabled, chronically ill. Learn your lesson, fools. We are the canaries in the coalmine.
COVID-19 origins: plain speaking is overdue [the lancet] – “SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that found its way into humans through mundane contact with infected wildlife that went on to cause the most consequential pandemic for over a century. While it is scholarly to entertain alternative hypotheses, particularly when evidence is scarce, these alternative hypotheses have been implausible for a long time and have only become more-so with increasing scrutiny. Those who eagerly peddle suggestions of laboratory involvement have consistently failed to present credible arguments to support their positions.” The perfect article to send to all the edge lords spreading the lab leak theory.
This is what it feels like: Artist visualizes Long Covid symptoms [the sick times] – “Energy permitting, Mir encourages other people with Long Covid and related diseases to try processing their emotions and symptoms through art or other creative efforts. “I think it’s a really good way to try to get in touch with the heavy emotions and experiences that we’re all having.” Powerful images.
Has It Been 20 Years? | Peter Gelderloos [substack] – “This late in the game, it’s so frustrating to see people still trying to reform a tool without seeing the exact purpose it was created for, whether that’s the climate framework or democratic government. So say it loud, say it proud: democracy is a militaristic system of government that innovates new methods of social control, that was founded the first time by elites whose power came from slavery and commercial empires, and founded the second time by elites whose power came from chattel slavery, commercial empires, and modern colonialism. It has never been anything else. It has never belonged to us, so talking about “reclaiming it” is either naïve or dishonest.” I usually shiver in shame when i read old stuff by myself.
Biden Resigns While Sick With Covid, Says We Overcame Covid | Nate Bear [substack] – “For Joe Biden, the vast majority of Democrats, and to be honest the vast majority of politicians everywhere, we overcame the pandemic by absorbing thousands of new deaths weekly around the globe. By absorbing thousands of new cases of chronic illness triggered by the virus. Deaths and illness that mostly wouldn’t have happened in 2019.
We overcame the pandemic by believing the lies we were told and the lies we told ourselves.
We overcame the pandemic by breathing a sigh of relief when it was no longer in the headlines.
We overcame the pandemic through the normalization of extra suffering and death.
We overcame the pandemic by turning away.
We overcame the pandemic by accepting a worse world.
We overcame the pandemic by pretending our responsibilities to each other ended with a vaccine.
We overcame the pandemic by trampling on the vulnerable.” In short: We did not actually overcome the pandemic. We just pretended we did. I hate everyone who participates.
I was a bestselling recipe writer – then burnout killed my appetite for food, and life. This is how I found my way back| [the guardian] – “Cooking and eating was everything to the author and Guardian columnist. But when she found herself at breaking point, she had to go back to basics” I love her books, but this story is a bit hard to take because of the huge blind spot. I sure sounds to me like Meera had Long COVID.
The New American NatC Party [acab] – “There is nothing left to be said with regard to their intentions. The Republican Party has gone full Nazi. They even call themselves Nazis, or at least, NatCs, National Conservatives (which, we are assured, is very different from National Socialists, very different indeed).” This is great, NatC sounds exactly right.
Donald Van Gogh – The only meme you need to see about the T®umπ shooting attempt.
My Thoughts On the Attempted Trump Assassination – “Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like resistance movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience, especially strikes, and non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, rather than Trump, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals, feminists, gays and others” The state is the problem.
Swiss right seeks to block Eurovision’s ‘celebration of satanism and occultism’ [the guardian] – “The Eurovision song contest is a ghastly propaganda occasion”, the EDU said in a social media post on Tuesday. “A country that provides a stage to such disgusting trash won’t elevate its image but merely showcase its own intellectual decline.” Samuel Kullmann, a senior EDU politician, told the Swiss broadcaster SRF his party was disturbed by Eurovision’s increasing “celebration, or at least tolerance of … satanism and occultism”. “More and more artists present openly occultist messages and underline them with respective symbols,” he said.” What a dickwad. What an embarrassment.
June 2024 Global Climate Report [ncei] – “June 2024 was the warmest June on record for the globe in NOAA’s 175-year record. The June global surface temperature was 1.22°C (2.20°F) above the 20th-century average of 15.5°C (59.9°F). This is 0.15°C (0.27°F) warmer than the previous June record set last year, and the 13th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. This ties with May 2015-May 2016 for the longest record warm global temperature streak in the modern record (since 1980). June 2024 marked the 48th consecutive June with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average.” Don’t look up.
We Must Fight Repression With Solidarity — Not by Replicating Carceral Logic [truthout] – “Using terms like “peaceful” and “nonviolent” to describe protests perpetuates the fiction that following restrictive rules and norms laid out by the very systems we seek to dismantle could ever be the correct way to resist” Dean Spade <3
How conspiracies took root in our culture [science] – “Fort was considered an intellectual by some and a crackpot by others. He claimed to “have about seventeen selves”; believed all reality is flux; and thought that each person should be at liberty to devise or embrace whatever theories they preferred. One reviewer of a book penned by Fort wrote: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”.” That’s where this conspiracy crap started.
Sculpture of Virgin Mary in Labor Beheaded in Austrian Cathedral [hyperllergic] – “A sculpture depicting the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus was beheaded at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz, Austria, days after it went on display as part of an exhibition exploring women’s roles in faith and tradition. Created by Austrian artist Esther Strauß, “Crowning” drew intense ire from some conservative Christians who viewed the work as “blasphemous” and “scandalous” before an unknown party took matters into their own hands and sawed off Mary’s head on Monday, July 1.” Pathetic.
It’s no surprise a Newsweek writer panned Taylor Swift for being single and childless [the guardian] – “Poor Taylor Swift. The pop star is a billionaire and one of the most successful people on the planet. She has an army of devoted fans who happily bankrupt themselves to follow her on record-breaking tours around the world. A German city just temporarily renamed itself Swiftkirchen in her honour. The Federal Reserve has credited her for boosting the economy. And yet, when it comes to the most important metrics of success, Taylor is a tragic failure: she is an ageing, unmarried wench who hath not brought forth a child into this world.” Fascism attacks childless women.
On Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism [substack] – “The imprecision of language is liberating—there are no walls around our words and therefore our ideas—but it can also be confusing. Quite regularly, people argue about something (like socialism or anarchism or capitalism or fascism, as examples) without ever realizing that each person is arguing about a different concept while still using the same terms.” Usable definitions.
Take a Deep Breath and Think About What You Need to Do [organizingmythoughts] – “Whatever community defenses we must mount on behalf of unhoused and other criminalized people, whatever fascist edicts we must resist, will require us to be organized as we have never been organized before. To defend our lives and to defend the planet, we will need resilient networks of people who are more invested in each other and our collective survival than they are in the systems that would destroy us. We need to build power, block by block, within our schools, in our workplaces and churches, and anywhere else where we can build connections around our shared values and survival. We need tight-knit communities and strong bonds of fellowship. We need to sharpen our skills to address the common problems that tend to rip our movements apart, such as conflict, unprocessed trauma, and a lack of political education. We need to rise above the alienation and individualism that keep us isolated and afraid so that we can find strength in each other.” This is what we need now.
Every counter-revolution is a throw of the dice [all cats are beautiful] – “Watching these folks, often pretty cynical and pessimistic but ultimately confident about the possibility of working within the system, be finally confronted with the fact that no one is going to save them, that the law is no more bulwark against the fascist creep than any other part of the state, indeed it is one of the leading edges of the fascist putsch, has been as hard as it has been to watch every group of (predominantly white) folks that has had to go through this over the last ten years.”
[Articles German/French]
Das Foto als Orakel – Die Medien feiern im ‚ikonischen‘ Bild Donald Trumps sich selbst [54books] – “Die Kritik verliert damit zumindest ihre aufklärerische Funktion: Falls das Foto durch seine allzu effektive Bildrhetorik unausweichlich dazu beiträgt, einem verurteilten Kriminellen eine zweite Amtszeit zu verschaffen, wäre es ethisch geboten, es schlichtweg nicht abzudrucken. Falls seine Kraft, genug Menschen zur Wahl Trumps zu überzeugen, nur bedingt ist – die Autor:innen dieser Artikel scheinen jedenfalls sich und ihre Leser:innen davon auszunehmen – wäre wichtig, die Bedingungen dafür zu erfahren. Pragmatisch betrachtet wird der ‚ikonische‘ Status dieses Fotos nur dadurch belegt, dass es in der diesen Status behauptenden Presse immer wieder abgedruckt wird. Zynisch betrachtet handelt es sich um eine Machtdemonstration der Medien, gewissermaßen autopoietisch ein Ereigniszu schaffen, hinter das selbst das reale Attentat zurücktreten muss.” Image analysis.
[Older articles, still great]
Howard Zinn was mentioned here.
10 postcards showing the Russian Revolution as a children’s game [russia beyond] – “In 1917 a series of funny postcards was issued depicting different political movements during the Russian Revolution as images of innocent rosy-cheeked children. It was funny until the true nightmare of terror and civil war started.” Team Bundist.
R.I.P.
[If you care to receive more regular updates, please follow my diigo (feed: rss) for all of my saved links or mastodon for an edited choice of them]
Header Photo: How has your summer been? Here a construction screamed into his phone.