Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    <scribbled by af Sun 10 Jan 21 22:04>
  

    
[ scribble : The well has no edit-a-post ...  clarification ]


There was never (ISTR) any talk of abolishing Police forces.

DE-funding is the wrong concept.

RE-funding (for short) is closer ... (RELIEF-funding for long)   ..
relieving them of all the mental illness/social services foo that
Reagan et al
dumped on them. 
  

    
Cutting political donations seems like an attempt to control, a bit
of stick (or more accurately removal of carrot). But hopefully it
will set a precedent and raise the question of why banks are
donating (and to both parties) in the first place...
  

    
Those Christopher Brown Field Notes are genuinely moving and
insightful.  He's long been interested in the pastoral aspects of
science fiction, but during a pandemic lockdown, as he's wandering
in almost a John Muir fashion through these empty lots in a
fast-growing city, there's a compelling nonfiction sense-of-wonder
to his diaristic experiences.

It's like early '70s Whole Earth hippie-back-to-the-landism, but
rehearsed all over again under Anthropocene skies.  Chris Brown
doesn't have enough disciples to be a subgenre yet, but if I was a
young science fiction writer I'd be paying a lot of attention to
this.


<https://edgelands.substack.com/p/midwinter-in-the-tropic-of-kansas>
  

    <scribbled by bruces Mon 11 Jan 21 08:35>
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

>>>  The talk about abolishing police seems to have died down for
some reason?

Give it time, the people talking with much concern and furrowed
brows about abolishing police have got a bit of a backlist of other
pressing issues that they really need to misrepresent right now.

So worry not. I am absolutely sure that multitudes of pundits
fishing for clicks shall shortly resume misrepresenting the ‘defund
the police’ people as the ‘abolish the police’ people, as soon as
they have drawn enough Nero point energy from the moral vacuum in
order to continue the conflation.

One thing that has those folk kinda busy right now, with all the
festive spirit of a tribe of incestuous cannibals who have just
discovered a hidden and extensive branch on the family tree, is
trying to find anyone amongst Trump’s acolytes who can potentially
be accused of being an anti fascist infiltrator. Ashli Babbitt,
being usefully far too dead to argue, is currently receiving most of
the finger pointing on that, from what I have seen, but I am sure
they’ll extend the accusations to some of the living in fairly short
order.

That said, given that the crowd did pretty much exactly what they
were told to do by the President, as well as by some police and some
politicians, I am not sure that pointing the finger at infiltrators
helps all that much. 

I mean, they could have been massively infiltrated by several coach
loads of lost and drunk Australian tourists, and it wouldn’t have
noticeably improved the optics here.
  

    
Fellow Plutopian Suzy Shelor just sent me this link - I had read it
before, and should have linked it when I posted about Q Anon as an
alternate reality game...
<https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-58097
2548be5>

"QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented
in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come
to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe 'guided apophenia' is a
better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly
involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have
pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player
lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning
for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.

"There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world.
Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from
actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It
works very well because when you 'figure it out yourself' you own
it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the
rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects
you. Because you were convinced to 'connect the dots yourself' you
can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived
at."
  

    
I posted that upstream at <22>, Jon.
  

    
Oh, right - sorry, I knew I had seen it before but didn't think it
was here. I'll leave my post for the excerpt.
  

    
Maybe people will click on it now, post-fiascoup.
  

    
I hope so.

An intelligent and well-informed friend posted a concern that senior
military and law enforcement officials might have been involved in
the  coup attempt, and are still around to do (or support, or look
the other way while others do) more damage.
  

    
So, to be clear I don’t know what the many people who took up the
“abolish the police” slogan (and other, darker slogans) might have
been thinking. I am sitting at home in a pandemic, don’t have any
strong connections into the various parts of social justice
movements, and worse, half of what I read online seems to have been
written by their enemies. It’s not a good way to get a real grip on
the range of opinion in a social movement, and I am not curious
enough to investigate further.

I’m a bit skeptical that anyone could have the perspective needed to
figure it out, beyond their own circle of friends and follower
lists. It seems like surveys might help? But see the article I
posted in <72> for all the ways they can go wrong. So I’m inclined
to distrust the statements of people who speak confidently about
this.

It seems plausible, though, that the people who took up this banner
didn’t all agree on what it means, and that while some were
explaining that it doesn’t mean what it says on the tin, others were
enthusiastically proclaiming that they meant every word?

When we lack evidence we are reduced to comparing priors, talking
about what seems plausible rather than what’s real. In that spirit,
I read a plausible post by some random Redditor that introduced to
me a term, “sanewashing,” for what might happen when there are
extremists and people with more mainstream views in the same
movement.

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_defund_the_police_
stop_meaning_defund_the/

Maybe that’s just another article written by their enemies, but the
term seems useful.

I would guess there is sanewashing in every broad movement. It’s
probably a good idea not to apologize for or repeat approvingly
other people’s slogans unless you really mean it literally. (Try to
convince the kids of that, though?)

The social media trend towards hyperbole and edginess should be
resisted, though it’s hard and as you can see, I backslide
sometimes. [Stops to delete edgy, distracting paragraph.] It’s a
natural way to write these days, as we imitate headlines and witty
remarks that get reshared widely.
  

    
The European Union has just deployed its first all-European armed
and uniformed service.  They're called "Frontex," and, as one might
expect, they're European border-guards and coast guards.

Their purpose is to beat the bounds of Europe and keep illegals from
getting in.

The Europeans didn't have much taste for a post-national imperial
armed-forces before the USA and Britain both went nuts, but they
seem discreetly pleased about it now.

Also, truck drivers from Britain into Europe are having their ham
sandwiches confiscated by border inspectors.
  

    
wrt #109 --- nick johnson was a friend of mine. i remember reading
his 1970s works on communications/mass media/privacy/policy --- and
he had it all nailed, then.
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

What pisses me off most about QAnon is that they are delegitimizing
actual cases of organized pedophilia and ephebophilia, even though
the QAnon Shaman, who is now under arrest for his actions in DC, can
be seen spouting fairly accurate figures about sex slavery and
children on Youtube.  They use just enough factual evidence to make
their wilder conspiracies plausible but the reality gets lost as
they spin out into paranoid fantasy.

Most of the abuse of children and teens comes from “respected”
members of the community like teachers, coaches, doctors, ministers
(priests)….  One of the NYTimes’ best books of the year is Lacy
Crawford's memoir, Notes on a Silencing, about her abuse at St.
Paul's boarding school in New Hampshire.  Great Is the Truth:
Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann
School by Amos Kamil and Sean Elder details the over 30 years of
abuse by teachers, administrators, and staff at William Barr’s alma
mater.  William's father, Donald Barr, was the principal of the
Dalton School and hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach there.  When the
elder Barr was, evidently, forced out of Dalton he became headmaster
at MY alma mater, the Hackley School, where, I have read, he was
sometimes known as Chester the Molester. 

When I was a 7th grader at Hackley, there was an adjunct teacher
there by the name of Lee Barnes who turned out to have a lifelong
career as a molester.  His come-on was “I can teach you how to fly
an airplane” and he approached me at one point.  Luckily, I smelled
something fishy about this crewcut “macho” guy and declined.  Later,
he ran a summer  flight camp which became his own personal "game
preserve" and was named “flight instructor of the year” by a
national flying organization, partially, I imagine, for his work
there.  To my knowledge, he never spent a moment in jail but he
distorted a lot of young lives.

So this is personal to me.

Then there is Denny Hastert, former Speaker of the House, now in
prison, and Rep Jim Jordan who is credibly accused of turning a
blind eye when he was a collegiate wrestling coach to the abuse of
wrestlers by the team physician.  And there’s this NYTimes story
about another well-known sports doctor who abused UMich football
players for years:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/sports/ncaafootball/michigan-football-sex-a
buse.html>
And then there’s Dr Larry Nassar who abused so many US Olympic
gymnasts.  And Jerry Sandusky.  And…..

Jimmy Savile of the BBC was real as was Rolf Harris, who was doing
more than tying kangaroos down.  If you really want to get the
willies, read about the abuse on the Isle of Jersey at children’s
homes there: 
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/03/haut-de-la-garenne-house-of-ho
rror-investigation-brought-jersey-abuse-to-light>

But now I sound like a conspiracy theorist.  Thanks QAnon.

Fact is, Marc Dutroux, the child sex pimp and multiple murderer who
helped collapse the Belgian government in the 1990s, was real too. 
Some of the most important political and business figures in Belgium
had dealings with him.  I’d still like to know if Jeffrey Epstein
and Robert or Ghislaine Maxwell ever had anything to do with Dutroux
as they all were active at the same time.  Odd that I’ve never seen
Dutroux’s name come up in reference to QAnon though his case is
closest to their narrative.

There is something deeply rotten in this apparently rampant sexual
abuse of children that lays and lies just below the surface of
society.

QAnon makes it into a joke, while ripping off plot elements from
_Bug Jack Barron_, an old science fiction novel by Norman Spinrad,
Elizabeth Báthory, the “blood countess” of Hungary, and Gilles de
Rais, who fought with Joan of Arc and then went on to a child murder
career.

I’ve spent some time over the last year looking and thinking about
these issues and it is my conclusion that the elite prep schools
have been hotbeds of abuse since forever and probably still are. 
Part of it comes out of the English boarding school tradition and
the hierarchy built into it.  It’s Tom Brown’s School Days and Percy
Byshe Shelley getting beaten up at Eton day after day translated to
today.

My conclusion is that the ruling class of USAmerican, consciously or
unconsciously, uses child sexual abuse as a rite of passage and it
chills me to the bone.

Incidentally, NY Military Academy was part of the athletic
association that included Horace Mann and Hackley.  I’ve
corresponded with a scholar of the American right whose brother was
in the same NYMA class as Trmp and the sexual abuse there was,
according to my source, also between the students with, of course,
the usual pecking order in a HS, upperclass students abusing the
younger students.  Trmp was supposedly a BMOC and, I believe, a
barracks commander.  You can just imagine what he got up to in his
high school days.

But we can no longer approach this history, this present day reality
without being confused with QAnon.  Perhaps that was one of the
purposes of that strain of propaganda anyway and it makes me
furious.
  

    
One  unusual thing about MMMXI is its lack of fashion.  Just, a year
with no signature clothes style.

Living in Italy has sensitized me to clothing, especially many
visits to Milan, a city with a stern dress-code. The Milanese gaze
at you in despair when you fail their standards.  Ibiza is nowhere
near so stylish as Milan, because Ibiza lacks a thriving catwalk
industry with branded lifestyle-packaging, but Ibiza is intensely
fashionable because so many young, sexy people dress up to party.

At least, when there were parties, young, trendy people used to do
that.  Not now.

Dress is about semiotics and class signifiers, and there are many
small demographics on little Ibiza.  Many native Ibizans are
blue-collar support personnel for the global tourist trade, so they
dress like maintenance people, infrastructure people and hotel
staffers. Personally, when in Ibiza, I dress like them.  It's my
victory condition when the locals start asking me for directions.
They didn't when I first got here, but now they do.

In Ibiza I wear strange Ibiza gear that I'd wear nowhere else, such
as Spanish nylon cargo pants, striped sailor-shirts and wooly
berets, but nobody looks twice at me.   In Ibiza, the people look
twice at the dance-clothes. Ibiza abounds in spangled tube-tops,
miniskirts, patterned tights, disco-ball raver-girl gear.  Dance is
the engine of all Ibiza fashion.  It's a dance island where young,
libidinous people come to strut-their-stuff.

In a highly contagious plague that scene just doesn't happen.
  

    
In Ibiza the weird absence of dance fashion is painfully obvious. 
Half of downtown is fashion shops, all the chains one would expect,
Yamamay, Intimissimi, Oysho, Zara, Desigual, Mango, Tezenis, the
youth-centric European boutiques, and quite a few local Balearic
boutiques too.  But their basic reason for existence has been
cancelled.  There's an epidemic.  There's just no good reason to
dress up and show off.  Why do it?

I wouldn't say that the Ibizans have become "drab" exactly — they're
not wearing rags, they wear reasonable clothes to walk around in and
they look much like other Spanish people, like, say, suburban
Valencians (ouch).  But they're just not *performing.* They're not
hip and with-it, because they lack any target to be with-it at. 
Normally they're all performance, because there's so many tourists
on-the-make among them.  So many glam celebrities hopping off yachts
and jets.  Ibizans are accustomed to glamour, it's like Vitamin C
for them.  They can eat all you've got with a smile.

Now there's no objective reason to have any glamour.  Nobody would
be impressed by it.  The effort to be a pretty jet-setter obtains no
reward.
  

    

The Spanish fashion chain called Oysho is doing okay, but their
pajama business has taken over half the local store.  Ibizan women
are cooped up at home, and so they're wearing lounge pajamas.  And
their men dress even more indifferently, because why would you get
taut, sharp and on top of your game? Where is the loose, willing
woman you're supposed to court and impress?  She's in quarantine!

In your glum male despair you can't even HIRE such a woman (a common
practice on Ibiza, which abounds in globe-trotting call-girls). 
When there's no tourism, there's no sex-tourism.  So there's no
décolletage, no Mardi Gras, no tawdriness, no sleaziness, and none
of the impressively large infrastructural and commercial practices
that back up the oldest profession.  

It's like they're living in  backless hospital gowns — you can see
how much they're missing, their frail humanity, their painful
unease, is laid bare — but they've also been sedated.  They're
surviving in a cultural blackout.  They're not dying as fast as they
would have died without the quarantines, but there's next to nothing
going on, no scene to make, no concerts, films, festivals or even
museum shows.  Every day is much like the last.
  

    

Ibiza has a demographic class of  traveling celebrities who choose
to show up in Ibiza — supermodels, music people, athletes, antique
movie stars and newfangled influencers.  None of them are here. 
Also, when one look at older pictures of these fashionistas, busy at
their craft, they look increasingly archaic.   They're just not
"stylish."  They're dusty.  They're not modern.

There will be some "mode" on the far side of this, but I don't think
it can look like any earlier mode.  There was nothing much wrong
with that earlier mode, it didn't die because fashion was bad or
lacking in commercial efficiency, but that won't be what fashion is,
on the far side of this great global trial.

What was sexy once is not sexy now.  Everything from the pre-Covid
world any lacks healthy sex-appeal, it has a pre-AIDS look about it.
You wouldn't WANT to be in a big sweaty rave with those pre-masked
people, for their whole value system has been invalidated,
disrupted.

Fashion will re-appear, and some new style will dominate the 2020s,
but the longer it takes to emerge from its morgue-like shadow, the
more radically different it will look.
  

    
On the sex abuse theories, what gets me is that it's so fantastical.
You'd think you'd link up the Democrats to the Catholic Church, to
the Boy Scouts, to Jeffrey Epstein, but no, there's some place with
a basement.  A place that doesn't have a basement in real life.  But
it seems to be a psychological basement - a fairy tale.  Not the
princess and unicorns kind of fairy tale, but the nasty original
ones that the Grimm brothers documented.  

Perhaps it's a natural outcome of the Q-Anon "game" both (jonl) and
I pointed to, to pull in the material from Jungian shadow.  You'd
think just having enemies bent on destroying your government would
be sufficient, but no.
  

    
If you look at the world news right now, the headlines are
Covid-related. The unpredictable virus is more powerful than Trump,
more powerful than Biden, more powerful than Boris Johnson, more
powerful than Putin, more powerful than Jinping. Everybody's talking
about it, thinking about it, trying to figure out how to control it.
What else is more compelling? How do you make sense of it?

Following Bruce's fashion riff - the latest trend in fashion is with
branded high-fashion face masks. Now we have face mask trends:
<https://medium.com/@AyeeshaAbk/face-mask-trends-2020-59696836e502> 

Check out this mask from Collina Strada:
<https://collinastrada.com/collections/frontpage/products/fashion-face-mask-wit
h-bows-nepal-meadowland-rose-sylk> "MADE FROM ROSE SYLK DEADSTOCK MATERIALS FROM COLLINA STRADA COLLECTIONS. EACH MASK IS UNIQUE DUE TO LIMITED FABRIC AND INHERENT VARIATIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE USE OF DEADSTOCK FABRICS."

Or these masks from Dolce & Gabbana:
<https://us.dolcegabbana.com/en/men/accessories/masks/neoprene-face-mask-with-b
aroque-and-polka-dot-print-multicolor-FY349TGEQ18HN2UI.html> "For its new project, Dolce&Gabbana is seeking to meet the mandatory and indisputable need to wear a protective face mask, yet in an utterly personal and unique way. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have created a Men’s/Women’s face mask project, in printed neoprene with 100% cotton lining, featuring our iconic prints: polka dots, leopard, majolica, carretto, the bold DG logo plus heart, the baroque logo and the latest of our prints that distinguished the Sicilian Jungles collection. This is an idea designed to help us return to our everyday lives and to put our own personal touch on our style, yet with the proper precautions, all in the spirit of Dolce&Gabbana."
  

    
Checking in from Londonistan with new years greetings, from ed and
all of us at GreenNet (<https://gn.apc.org> UK's oldest ISP and
storied contemporary of well.com)

We're bemused and giddy from a year of relentless current affairs,
our cartoon politicians enacting a daily pantomime over our
knackered political system. Brexit day arrived, just preceded by the
last minute "Deal" - our divorce from Europe, our government playing
the role of the conniving abuser, bad faith and broken promises,
stalling and brinkmanship. Nobody seems to know how we will fare but
it's possible that now the negotiations are done a more pragmatic
approach might emerge, but that seems unlikely and there are already
jokes about fish war on social media. the endless dithering and
shocking nepotism exhibited in the pandemic response bodes ill, as
they say.

Meanwhile civil society thrives, the pandemic has driven us online
and after a year we're seeing some notable events taking place, like
the influential Oxford Real Farming Conference <https://orfc.org.uk>
which has been able to open its virtual doors to an international
audience for the first time (meanwhile the toxic government is
re-introducing neonicotinoids).

Local support groups that started up at the beginning of the
pandemic are persisting and fostering community activism using
ubiquitous whats and fb which along with zoom have generally proved
to be up to the task of keeping us connected, despite being dodgy
corporates. Schools jumped straight onto google classroom, so now a
generation of UK kids are on gmail :(  like it or not.

Digital Access has been an issue, but energetic grass roots groups
like Refugee Action
<https://www.ragp.org.uk/guidance/digital-inclusion/home> and
amazing projects like Good Things Foundation launched successful
digital inclusion campaigns early on in the pandemic. Schools are
closed again now and the homeschooling/remote learning/WFH
combination is becoming the norm, even as online participation is
becoming possible for crucial public functions like courts and
tribunal service hearings. 

So tech has had to step up, and people have got used to zoom calling
to the extent that where conversations used to be about how amazing
it is to all be together online, if you could even get past
interminable rounds of 'i can see you, can you hear me' amazing
initiatives like <https://coma.org> are making the most of it. The
winter holidays were a big test of whether this new mode of being
together is tolerable, and it seems a lot of folk just popped in to
see their loved ones while a lot of others shared the joy remotely -
the next few weeks could see the capacity crunch on our health
services that we seemed to just miss on the first wave.

We look upon the antics of our anglosphere big sibling fondly, it
all seems like a big and impressive performance which we can't help
be enthralled by, to the extent that we've spent decades on
disastrous militarism in the shadow of the US. While there are
parallels in the deep prejudices that sometimes animate our politics
and the effects from our atrocious middle eastern wars -
re-militarisation, the cult of veterans and a blowback played out by
violent right wingers on the streets.

It feels like our vibrational frequencies both online and offline
are increasingly febrile, we're flocking and murmurating, forming
mobs and cancelling witches wherever we find them - if we can just
direct all that energy at the fat politicians who are revelling in
impunity! Maybe the osint movement is showing us the way, the wise
comment above about collusion and tipping points cuts both ways!

Anyhow, thanks for another year of thoughtful provocations and big
perspectives, this place is always a new years treat, if you're ever
passing <https://dissensus.com> or GreenNet please feel free. 
  

    
That's a reposted email?
  

    
The deplatforming meme continues to spread. Apparently AirBnb hosts
are getting in on it [1].

I just spent some time arguing on another system (tildes.net) that
private coordination is unnecessary when public coordination does
everything you need. But the urge to conspiracy-theorize seems
irresistible? Many of us shrug it off like a cold,
compartmentalizing off our speculations, but I've seen Facebook
friends come down with a bad case of it. A high school classmate
dropped off the net last year. I hope he's okay.

I read a blog post [2] suggesting that conspiracy theories are
endemic everywhere and, if anything, we're less susceptible than
most. Apparently they are common in Mexico and China?

With respect to memes, we are a plague-ridden world and social
networks are like cities or the airlines. Most public health
measures are barely invented. There is no CDC for conspiracy
theories. A few pump handles have been removed. Maybe that will
help? Departing for the countryside seems like a good idea, but then
you'll miss the fun stuff.

[1]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/01/12/airbnb-inauguration-dc-ren
tal/
[2]
https://www.econlib.org/theres-nothing-weird-about-conspiracy-theories/
  

    
One of the really challenging things about this forum at this moment
is the "State of the World" that we're talking about is going to
substantially change a week after this conversation ends.

Of course it's a mistake to center this conversation on the US, but
the current occupant has taken such a singular approach to
international affairs that many of the major players (and minor
players) have been going for the gusto while the going was good.
Players like the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and Israel cut their
deals now, because they knew that deals that sweet were unlikely to
come around again. China, Russia, and Turkey have been making their
moves across Africa and Asia with breakneck speed, for similar
reasons - under the normal circumstances the default neoliberal
stance of the the two US political parties wouldn't book the types
of opportunism they've gotten away with over the last few years.

Certainly there are plenty of countries who have (covid aside)
simply gone about their business as though this administration was
like any other - e.g. much of South America and Southern Africa. But
the dynamics in beleaguered areas that are weak and are within
contested spheres of global power competition are about to see
likely escalation in those competitions. From my position as an
occasional contractor for some of the US foreign policy shops, the
scuttlebutt seems to indicate that the Biden team will be taking a
rather ambitious approach to foreign policy  - despite featuring
more than a few faces from the notoriously cautious Obama
administration - and will be less inclined to be quite as
circumspect in their efforts.