[A monthly link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, toots … you name it]
[Videos]
A49 Protest: 49 PROBLEMS (and my future is one) – The full film available to stream for free.
The Rule and Ruins of Trump | Shuli Branson [antimídia] – “Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency and his anti-trans policies are the topic addressed by Shuli Branson in the 15th episode of Anarchist Voices. Shuli Branson is part of the anarchist writers’ collective CAW (www.cawshinythings.com) and hosts the podcast The Breakup Theory.”
Was Nietzsche MAGA? | Philosophy Tube – Follow up to the video asking if Nietzsche was woke.
Relax with the Cornell Lab’s 21 Favorite Bird Videos from 2024 – Team Black Heron
Farming is Medicine | Rupa Marya [substack] – “Understanding that soil is alive and soil holds memory, I started to understand that a society cannot be well if it is eating food grown in soil that holds the memory of genocide, in land that misses the people and animals who were there for tens of thousands of years, living in reciprocity with the land. I started to wonder what it would be like to create a culture where we worked together to heal what happened here and to build another way of being together in this land, not through violence and domination but through mutual support, cultural exchange, kinship and healing.”
[Music]
He hopped off his bike to drop INSANE flow 🔥 | ARIatHOME – This guy asks people on the street to create music with him. More on his channel.
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke – This Conversation is Missing Your Voice – Album coming in May
Ecce Vabdal – CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE
[Podcasts]
Still Here, March 29: Links and transcript [the sick times] – This podcast is great every week. Please like and subscribe etc.
Beyond long COVID — how reinfections could be causing silent long term organ damage [cbc.ca] – “David Putrino, who’s been studying COVID’s long term effects at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, says even mild or asymptomatic COVID infections can lead to a wide range of silent long term heath impacts — compromising our immune, vascular, circulatory, renal, metabolic, gastrointestinal systems and even cognitive function.” Putrino never reduces the complexity and i am grateful for that.
Episode 62: AI Slop and the New Fascist Aesthetic with Roland Meyer [rss.com] – “Why have our new right-wing overlords taken such a shine to chintzy, shiny AI slop? What is persuasive about these phony, artless, slightly desperate images? How do they originate, and how do they circulate? For this episode, Moira and Adrian are joined by Roland Meyer, who is a professor of digital cultures and arts at the University of Zurich and the University of the Arts in Zurich, Switzerland.” AI as one more right-wing trick to “trigger the libs”. It’s getting old, guys.
[Toot Threads]
Macht aus dem Staat Gurkensalat
[Pandemic Roundup]
Covid: March 27, 2025
Covid: March 20, 2025
Covid: March 13, 2025
Covid: March 6, 2025
So much love to Violet!
[The Must Read[s] This Month]
Daniela Klette: Es geht um die Abrechnung mit dieser Widerstandsgeschichte [junge welt] – “Wir leben in einer weltweit sich zuspitzenden Situation – in der kapitalistischen Krise kämpft der Westen gegen den drohenden Niedergang seiner weltweiten Hegemonie und um die erneute Machtverteilung. Europa soll unter Führung der BRD hochgerüstet und kriegsfähig werden. Aktuell reißen die täglichen Schreckensmeldungen über Milliarden von Geldern, die die neue Kriegstreiberregierung für Rüstung – d. h. für riesige Gewinne der Rüstungsindustrie sowie für Infrastrukturmaßnahmen bereitstellen will. Wer bei letzterem auf die Reparatur maroder Schulgebäude, eingestürzter Brücken, auf Klimaschutzmaßnahmen, sozialen Wohnungsbau, auf Frauenhäuser zum Schutz vor fast täglich stattfindenden Femiziden, auf den Ausbau der Gesundheitsversorgung oder des öffentlichen Nah- und Fernverkehrs hofft, wird sich irren. Das Militär braucht fette Straßen, Energie, Telekommunikation, KI und keine Brücken, über die auch Straßenbahnen tuckern. Was hierbei herauskommen wird, ist »Verelendung durch Militarisierung«. Die Gesellschaft soll auf Kriegstüchtigkeit und Verzicht eingeschworen werden. Dafür werden täglich Kriegsängste vor »den Russen« geschürt, als stünden diese schon waffenstarrend vor Berlin. Es wird ein Denken propagiert, jeder Konflikt könnte nur durch militärischen Sieg, den Gegner zu Boden ringen beziehungsweise zu »ruinieren«, gelöst werden. »What ever it takes«, und sei es der Tod von Millionen von Menschen. Denn hier geht es um Krieg mit Massenvernichtungswaffen, KI-gestützt bis hin zum atomaren Super-GAU.” The trial statement by Klette, the ex-RAF-terrorist, who has recently been arrested, is taking the wide view. Must-read.
5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic: The response of the World Socialist Web Site [wsws] – “Five years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world stands at a critical juncture. The pandemic has accelerated all the contradictions of global capitalism: the growth of social inequality, the intensification of imperialist tensions, the assault on democratic rights and the radicalization of the working class. It has confirmed the Marxist understanding that capitalism is incompatible with the most basic requirements of human life and social well-being.” They use “anarchy” the wrong way and they toot their own horn a bit much. But among all the 5 years COVID articles it still stands out. I am sad to admit this, but many socialists did react much better to the pandemic than most anarchists did. And in theory it should be the other way around.
“All sounds have an effect” | The Politics Of Dancing [substack] – “I think the first thing I would want to think through is the definition of “revolutionary power” in your question. What does that mean? I think I would broadly define it today as the power to structurally transform the various interlinked systems — of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchal and misogynist education, carceral-border-military industrial complex, extreme resource extraction — that violently oppress people and land. With that definition in mind, I think that most dance music today does not create structural transformation on its own. I think the culture industry can be, at times, quite narcissistic and self-serious about the amount of change it thinks it brings about in the world. That being said, all sounds have an effect. How people digest different things is impossible to really quantify, so it’s hard to tell the effect a song can have on someone or on a movement, just like it’s hard to say how a tree changes the way a conversation goes if you sit under it.” Nicolas Jaar is not only one of my favorite electronic musicians, he also has his politics spot on.
[Articles English]
A few observations on the assault on higher education | Adrian Daub [substack] – “The present historical moment reminds us what these lists also always were: reminders that, once conditions are right, once the people who have been watching the campus all this time are in charge, it’ll be our turn. We’ve lived with that knowledge, we’ve accepted it as the cost of doing business. We’ve pointed it out, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Now the people who have been watching us are in charge.” Shocking in its realism, this assessment draws the only possible conclusion. Academic freedom can at best be temporary under capitalism.
Tesla Takedown Sticker Pack [caw magazine] – “Today there were pickets, protests and direct actions at Tesla showrooms, factories and super charger stations all across the globe, in a massive day of action that saw tens of thousands in the streets, taking it to Elon Musk and his eco-fascist car company. This was part of the growing decentralized protest movement called #TeslaTakedown.” Stickers!!!
Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online [teen vogue] – “No, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I mean, I’ll see things about [Elon Musk] in the news and think, That’s f**king cringe, I should probably post about this and denounce it, which I have done a few times. The Nazi salute sh*t was insane. Honey, we’re going to call a fig a fig, and we’re going to call a Nazi salute what it was. That sh*t was definitely a Nazi salute. The crowd is equally to blame, and I feel like people are not talking about that. That crowd should be denounced.” Must be horrific to have Musk as a father, but Vivian does an amazing job (why call it job?).
Capitalis | Napkin Manifestos [substack] – “Capitals as in counting heads. Cattle and chattel. As in heads of state, severing heads from bodies. As in cultural accounting, whose eyes roll off faces and whose faces have no place in the polity, except for their labor keeps everything running. Capital as in punishment or unpaid labor for capital offenses. Accruing debts by design unpayable. Not hypocrisy but ambivalence makes us guilty. Festive pleasure in executing eroticized aggressive drives inflict categorical cruelty. Ineradicable violence between the prison as a model of social debt and the penalty of death.” A poem with a MF Doom flow.
Long COVID data are being erased, again [the sick times] – “The federal government has clearly abandoned us — us being people with Long COVID and related diseases and disabilities, and their allies. Death Panel podcast cohost Beatrice Adler-Bolton told me in November: “The state will not save us. If that’s not something you got from the last four years, you should certainly be getting it from the incoming administration.” We are getting erased, after never even getting fully acknowledged.
Trauma Romantic | Peter Gelderloos [substack] – “Trauma can become a part of our self-image, we can imagine we carry it romantically, like a wound that makes us interesting, that makes us worthy of love and support, but that cosmetic change is still a renunciation of agency, of empathy, and of fuller awareness of ourselves as part of much larger collective beings. It’s a renunciation of what healing and transformation actually look like: a million people starting in a million different places, choosing the tiniest of actions and then choosing to follow up, at every waypoint in the journey identifying what we need to do next; connecting with others who are also in it, supporting and learning from one another; trying and accomplishing things that previously we weren’t capable of when we were alienated, underresourced, hurting; transforming and learning as part of the process, including changing our understanding of the process and where we’re going and why and how.” Peter found a way to see therapists, by compartmentalizing. I voiced my concern in the comments to this powerful piece.
The History of Political Authority [existential comics] – “The media is now just an algorithm designed to sell adds on youtube” Now?
Masks off: The lessons we didn’t learn from COVID [salon] – “The concentration of wealth has escalated through and since COVID. By the time the Omicron strain first turned up in South Africa in Nov. 2021, its current most famous son, Elon Musk, was already $293.7 billion richer than at the start of the pandemic. Collectively, America’s billionaires gained $1.8 trillion over that same interval, even as rents skyrocketed and 28.2% of lower-income adults lost their jobs, compared to just 7.8% of upper-income workers.” The ones who gained wealth during the pandemic are the problem.
Antisemitism Hurts [igd] – “Antisemitism hurts.
It hurts in the innumerable ways that other racist logics or patriarchy hurt. Deep-seated, pernicious ways. It hurts in everyday ways, like a leaky faucet.
Drip … drip … drip … Slow, steady, persistent.
Drip … drip … drip … Torturously louder with each drop.
Drip … drip … drip … Impossible not to hear, impossible not to go crazy.” A fantastic text by Cindy Milstein.
The Pandemic Never Ended [newrepublic] – “Those of us who want to take any extra steps to protect ourselves have been largely abandoned. Wearing masks in crowded spaces is rare, mocked, and in some cases even banned. Any kinds of commonsense precaution like air filtration have been shoved on the back burner or worse. The vulnerable are on their own—and there’s little reason to believe that our ranks won’t grow.” Consider me flabbergasted by all this revisionism and anti-public-health crap.
Global Climate ReportFebruary 2025 [ncei] – “The global surface temperature was 1.26°C (2.27°F) above the 20th-century average of 12.1°C (53.8°F), making it the third warmest February on record. This is 0.15°C (0.27°F) below the previous record set in 2024 and marked the 46th-consecutive February (since 1980) with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average.” Why do these reports no longer show up in my RSS feeds?
Labour is gaslighting disabled people – and that should terrify us all [the guardian] – “What the government delivers instead is a narrative that sounds bland, but is actually gaslighting on a large scale. It describes a country in which poverty is caused by low aspiration and disability is a choice, by people who simply aren’t robust enough to be well. This country doesn’t exist. It describes a world that can’t afford for people to be chronically ill or disabled, when the opposite is true: we cannot wish away those things.” The culture war was lost, when labour (and social-democrats around the world) went meritocratic. Fuck you Blair etc.
‘Dogequest’ Site Claims to Dox Tesla Owners Across the U.S. [404media] – “The site also has information on Tesla dealerships and members of DOGE. “At DOGEQUEST, we believe in empowering creative expressions of protest that you can execute from the comfort of your own home.”” Interesting.
“Antisemitism” and Antisemitism [substack] – “Jews in the United States are being instrumentalized in an effort to build a more authoritarian American system. The real and continuing history of the oppression of Jews is transformed into a bureaucratic tool called “antisemitism” which is used to suppress education and human rights — and so, in the end, to harm Jews themselves. As the word “antisemitism” becomes the cover for aggression, we lose the concept. And then, when actual antisemitism manifests itself, there will be no way to describe it, since “antisemitism” will have come to mean something like “the power of arbitrary rulers to suppress freedom of assembly and freedom of speech under cover of disinformation and propaganda.” When even Snyder says it.
The Age of Christiane F. — Part III | Adrian Daub [substack] – “Katheryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child points to the fact that what makes the child a “queer” figure, requiring control and sanction, is in part its ability to form attachments and intimacies unforeseen of and destructive to the (biological) families in which they first appeared. The children of the Zoo Station are queer in exactly that sense: they are children finding intimacy, kinship and a momentary abeyance of exploitation in a society that seems rife with bad intimacy, familial restriction, and exploitation.” Part 3 of an excellent series, that brought back many memories for me.
I Don’t Know Anyone With Long Covid | Disabled Ginger [substack] – “We are normalizing being sick, fatigued and in pain. People seem incapable of remembering that before Covid most of these symptoms would result in a trip to see a doctor. They wouldn’t be easily blamed on aging or menopause or ‘working too much’. We blame serious physical symptoms on these things so we don’t have to face the truth… it might be Long Covid. We will even blame illnesses on lockdowns that ended four years ago. There’s no end to the wild and ridiculous rationale we will use to avoid considering that someone might have Long Covid.” You do know many people with Long COVID. And the way it’s going you will know even more soon.
Five years on, the right’s Covid narrative has been turbo-charged into the mainstream | Laura Spinney [the guardian] – “Five years on from the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s the masked passenger who is suspect, nobody notices the scuffed distancing lines and trust in vaccines has taken a tumble. A different narrative has invaded the conversation: it wasn’t the virus that ruined our lives, but the response.This narrative was always there, but for a long time it stayed on the fringes. Now it’s becoming mainstream, turbo-charged by the recent successes of its political champions who typically gravitate towards the populist right. Public health experts have watched its advance with a gathering sense of doom.” Yup. COVID-19 deniers and normalisers have won.
Find purpose in community outside your job & play a role in the revolution | Ayesha Khan [substack] – “These system are NOT broken. They are operating exactly as they were designed to. Pain & death is the expected outcome of a healthcare system that profits off of sickness. If anything, the act of providing survival resources & non-predatory care for free is criminalized in most contexts. Desperate patients most often walk out with a lifetime of crippling debt rather than with cures for their ailments— especially given that these chronic ailments are caused by chronic oppression, instability, poverty and/or generations of capitalist/ colonial/ state violence.” Thank you for your optimism.
Half a decade of Long COVID [the sick times] – “The pandemic — and the world’s failure to respond to it adequately — has led to an unsafe society for disabled and immunocompromised people. Many experience deep grief: the loss of friendships, family relationships, marriages, and bodily safety in a hostile society that ignores the ongoing pandemic.” My grief eats me up so much, all i hope for is to die soon.
Kids keep getting sicker as evidence for COVID immune damage builds | The Gauntlet [substack] – “It’s worth asking, as we exit the fourth winter since lockdowns: how many more winters will go by before parents ask questions? How many years will pass before “immunity debt” slides off the tongue a little less easily? How many children must die of flu, strep A and pneumonia before the public demands action? Because we live in an era with technological solutions at our fingertips, yet apparently no will- as of yet- to pursue them.” We gotta be thankful for any article that does not deal in denial about COVID-19. Most parents are such eugenic assholes.
The Anti-Empathy Revolution of Elon Musk | Kelly Hayes [ghost] – “This is a time to invest deeply in mutual aid and community defense. Lately, I’ve noticed a shift among some progressives—away from prioritizing the protection of vulnerable people and toward a singular focus on protests aimed at stopping DOGE. Protest is necessary, but scattered demonstrations alone will not build the solidarity needed to survive the months and years ahead. To counter the forces of alienation and animosity that seek to divide us, we must build a culture of care.” When a person like Musk, who clearly is incapable of feeling any empathy, declares empathy to be the problem, and everyone falls for the provication, then we have reached peak clusterfuck communication.
We Need Mandatory Masking in Healthcare, and We Need it Now [substack] – “Healthcare facilities should set the tone when it comes to masking. They should help patients protect themselves from Covid and other threats. Instead they push droplet dogma and put lives at risk.” We do need that. But we won’t get it. We are fucked. But thanks that you keep trying, disabled ginger.
‘The basis of eugenics’: Elon Musk and the menacing return of the R-word [the guardian] – “Advocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.” Musk will meet his Luigi.
The Age of Christiane F. — Part II | Adrian Daub [substack] – “There is a tendency in German media to interpret anything and everything that happened after 1968 as a verdict on 1968. I can’t tell exactly when exactly this started, but Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is certainly at the beginning of that process. This impulse has become more and more identifiable as a weird and ahistoric compulsion in recent years, where you get people blaming phenomena on “the 68ers” that involve people who were negative 20 years old in 1968.” Crucial point, much of this was a backlash against the optimistic potential of the student revolt in the 60s.
[Articles German/French]
Die vergessene Geschichte der Roten Steine [woz] – “Linksradikale der siebziger Jahre zwischen Drogenabstürzen und Klassenkampf” I think i met some of these people later.
Grippewelle: Wäre ein bisschen Infektionsschutz wirklich so unzumutbar? [taz.de] – “Klar ist Maske tragen lästig, und auf Impfarm hat auch niemand Lust. Aber sie kurz in der Bahn oder dem Supermarkt aufzusetzen, tut echt nicht weh. Tagelang mit einem Infekt flachzuliegen ist definitiv lästiger. Maskentragende werden oft für verrückt und paranoid gehalten. Aber vielleicht ist es auch ein bisschen verrückt, sich ungeschützt in eine U-Bahn voller hustender Menschen zu setzen und zu rätseln, warum irgendwie alle krank sind.” Just a little bit. Please. We are forced to plead. I am so sick of this situation.
[Older articles, still great]
Masking and Social Obligations in a 21st Century Pandemic – “Being Covid-cautious is not a lifestyle choice or a personality or an obsession. The folks committed to decreasing their exposure and staying Covid-free are sensible, caring people with families and hobbies and jobs who take the time to wade through the misinformation, peer pressure, and defeatism to assess and adapt to the reality we now find ourselves in. We’re making social sacrifices to preserve our physical health as best we can in the face of multiple daily catastrophes.” This is a very well written account of when and how the pandemic response went off-kilter. From 2022.
R.I.P.
Hossam Shabat as well as way too many others in Gaza and the West Bank
Peter Bichsel
Roy Ayers
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Header Photo: Find more photos of the fantastic antifascist Carnival in Lausanne here