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Happy birthday to Georges Bataille, connoisseur of Eros, born on September 10, 1897, a simpler time he took it upon himself to complicate. Actually, to call him an erotic connoisseur grossly understates what so many readers find, uh, gross about him. Suffice it to say his work revels in varieties of sexual expression that remain taboo today; a given Bataille text presents you with a veritable cavalcade of the debauched and the proscribed, and, worse still, makes all of it seem terribly worth investigating. Even his fellow Continental philosophers - not exactly vanilla adherents of the missionary position - thought he was something of a degenerate. Jean-Paul Sartre said Bataille "incarnated human sexuality in its most degraded form"; André Breton described him more succinctly as a "sick and dangerous pervert."

- Dan Piepenbring, "The Solar Anus"

#dan piepenbring #bataille #history #literature #philosophy

If "no one is above the law," that means the law is above all of us. It means that the law - any law, whatever law happens to be on the books - is more valuable than our dearest desires, more righteous than our most honorable aspirations, more important than our most deep-seated sense of right and wrong. This way of thinking prizes group conformity over personal responsibility. It is the kiss of death for any movement that aims to bring about change.

- CrimethInc., "Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom"

#crimethinc.#anarchism #politics

Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated. "The declaration says there is “strong scientific support” that birds and mammals have conscious experience, and a “realistic possibility” of consciousness for all vertebrates — including reptiles, amphibians and fish. That possibility extends to many creatures without backbones, it adds, such as insects, decapod crustaceans (including crabs and lobsters) and cephalopod mollusks, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish.

- Evan Bush, "Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient"

#evan bush #animals #philosophy #science

Fires on large-scale animal farms, or factory farms, are surprisingly common. Over the last decade, at least 6.5 million farmed animals, mostly chickens, perished in barn fires in the US, according to Washington, DC-based nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI). The fires are part of a broader pattern of mass casualty events on factory farms, where 99 percent of America's meat, dairy, and eggs are produced. Some are the result of human or mechanical error, but many stem from natural disasters, such as hurricanes, blizzards, and extreme temperatures, like last summer's scorching heat wave in Kansas that killed thousands of cows who were subsequently dumped in a landfill. Disease outbreaks, too, result in mass death or culling on farms.

- Kenny Torrella, Marina Bolotnikova, and Julieta Cardenas, "A fire killed 18,000 cows in Texas. It's a horrifyingly normal disaster."

#kenny torrella #marina bolotnikova #julieta cardenas #animals #veganism

For decades, programs providing tax breaks and incentives to a few high-profile black entrepreneurs have sucked all the air out of policy conversations addressing racial economic inequality. These dialogues focused on upper-middle-class black entrepreneurs obscure the plight of everyday black folks living in segregated areas. They ignore poor and working-class people, who need direct investment the most. For example, when publications like Complex run stories describing Nipsey's Opportunity Zone funds as the "Economic Version of Black Lives Matter," they miss the point. Black Lives Matter - a movement focused on radical redistributive policy for all black people - is the economic version of Black Lives Matter.

- Aaron Ross Coleman "Black Capitalism Won't Save Us"

#aaron ross coleman #economics #racism

Polygyny is unusual, but that does not necessarily make it abusive. The conditions that facilitate abuse - poverty, isolation, patriarchal family structures - are not unique to Mormon fundamentalist communities. Neither sexual nor religious difference make abuse any more or less unlikely to occur. Under the Banner of Heaven and its pulp nonfiction ilk attempt to bring stories of abuse to light, presumably to stop ongoing abuses and prevent future ones. And the voices of abuse survivors absolutely deserve to be heard.

So too, though, do the voices of women who willingly enter into the covenant of plural marriage. Krakauer’s work is laudable for its attempts to make women’s suffering visible, but the silence of Mormon fundamentalist women throughout his work is deafening. Listening to women requires hearing voices that disrupt as well as confirm our suspicions.

- Megan Goodwin, “Abusing Religion: Polygyny, Mormonisms, and Under the Banner of Heaven”

#megan goodwin #feminism #religion

The interviews I conducted with EVD (Ebola virus disease) patients, survivors, and their close contacts [in West Africa] provide different ways of understanding the vocabulary employed by epidemiologists to describe Ebola virus transmission. For example, after discussing the concept of “superspreader” with a number of people affected by the outbreak, not one agreed using the term to describe individuals was appropriate. Some felt their national governments should be deemed superspreaders because of endemic corruption; others felt foreign corporations were to blame. In Liberia, one man remarked, “Firestone was the superspreader, since their efforts prevented us from getting a tire factory”; others discussed the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade or Maafa.

- Eugene T. Richardson, “On the coloniality of global public health”

#eugene t. richardson #anthropology #economics #medicine

Recognizing, and making restitution for, the harm done, primarily to the Palestinian people but also to others … involves a major moral challenge to the international community, and particularly to the West, which bears a grave responsibility for helping to engender this conflict. Moreover, it has become clear in recent years that this is an issue that deeply moves major elements of international opinion, even if the bulk of public opinion in the United States appears indifferent to it. However, achieving any serious understanding of this poignant conflict, which has for decades rent the Middle East and has had such a wide-reaching political and moral impact outside it, requires a broad comprehension of Palestinian history in its own terms, and in its own context, which includes but cannot be subsumed by or subordinated to Jewish and Israeli history. Just as one cannot understand the history of France without taking into account its conflicts with Germany and Britain over the past three centuries, it would be unthinkable to reduce French history to these conflicts, or treat it as an addendum to the history of its erstwhile rivals.

- Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

#rashid khalidi #history #palestine

Of more than five hundred Arab villages in the territory of what became the state of Israel, by the end of 1948 over four hundred had been conquered by either pre-state Zionist militias (such as the Hagana, the Palmach, the Irgun, and the Lehi), or the Israeli army into which the militias were later incorporated, their populations were driven out or fled in terror, their land was confiscated, and they were forbidden to return. The Israeli government subsequently destroyed nearly all of these empty villages. The 120,000 residents of one hundred Palestine villages that remained within Israel, as well as tens of thousands of Bedouins in the south of the country, were thereafter subjected to martial law for nearly two decades. These disruptions constituted massive and long-lasting changes: in the 78 percent of Palestine that became part of the state of Israel in this fashion, the end result was the creation of a sizable Jewish majority. Most of the new country's land was now owned - or at least controlled - by the Israeli state or its para-state agencies, such as the Israel Lands Authority or the Keren Kayemeth Lisrael, the Jewish National Fund. The basic demographic contours (and the property relations) created by this seismic event are extant to this day, whether inside Israel, in the Palestinian territories Israel occupied in 1967, or in the Palestinian diaspora.

- Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

#rashid khalidi #history #palestine

Before the Second World War, non-human primates were already the subject of international western interest, with research stations and conservation areas fostered by France, Belgium, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Literally and figuratively, primate studies were a colonial affair, in which knowledge of the living and dead bodies of monkeys and apes was part of the system of unequal exchange of extractive colonialism. Primate bodies grounded the discourses that rested on a flow of value from the lands where monkeys and apes lived to the lands where they were exhibited and textualized. Nonhuman primates were a fundamental part of the apparatus of colonial medicine. Part of the ideological framework justifying this directed flow of knowledge was the great chain of being structuring western imperial imagination; apes especially were located in a potent place on that chain.

- Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

#donna haraway #animals #history #politics

When Blau wrote his pioneering work [in 1898], it was still customary to begin a study on magic - if one chose to write one at all - by apologizing for the choice of such an "unseemly" topic and for dealing with "superstitious" and "irrational" practices. Moreover, both before and after his time, any study on Jewish magic was written within the framework of ... the ongoing debate, not to say Kulturkampf, within the Jewish people, between the rationalist reformers and modernizers on the one hand, and the tradition-bound conservatives on the other. This cleavage is especially apparent in many of the earlier scholarly discussions of how "contaminated" the Jewish tradition (and especially the Talmud) really was by magic and superstition, with the ancient sources used as ammunition in modern debates, and the modern debates shaping the reading of the ancient sources.

- Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History

#gideon bohak #academia #bible #history #jewish #magic #religion

If the eighteenth-century Swedish "father" of modern biological classification, Linnaeus, is cited at all by twentieth-century scientists, he is noted for placing human beings in a taxonomic order of nature with other animals, i.e., for taking a large step away from Christian assumptions. ... But there is quite another way to see Linnaeus's activity as the "father" of a discourse about nature. He referred to himself as a second Adam, the "eye" of God, who could give true representations, true names, thus reforming or restoring a purity of names lost by the first Adam's sin. Nature was a theatre, a stage for the playing out of natural and salvation history. The role of the one who renamed the animals was to ensure a true and faithful order of nature, to purify the eye and the word. The "balance of nature" was maintained partly by the role of a new "man" who would see clearly and name accurately, hardly a trivial identity in the face of eighteenth-century European expansion. Indeed, this is the identity of the modern authorial subject, for whom inscribing the body of nature gives assurance of his mastery.

- Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science

#donna haraway #animals #history #religion #science

Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or "retro" games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they're liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix's now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by downloading them via Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel, which shut down in 2019.

But time keeps marching on and a more recent era of games now needs to be attended to if we still want those games to be accessible: indies from the late aughts to mid twenty-teens. That's right. Fez, an icon of the era and indie games scene, is now more than a decade old. And while we don't think of this type of work until we need it, Fez, which most PC players booted on Windows 7 when it first came out, is not going to magically run on your Windows 11 machine today without some maintenance.

- Emanuel Maiberg, "Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port at a Time"

#emanuel maiberg #media #technology

Why am I particularly happy about the "end" of "anti-Semitism?" Because, as far as I know, it is the only example of a hater actually inventing the term for that hatred. In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet with a title that translates as "The Victory of the Jewish Spirit Over the Germanic Spirit." He used the term Semitismus interchangeably with the term Judentum - meaning both "Jewry," "Judaism," and "the Jewish spirit." Subsequently, "semitismus" became "antisemitismus" - opposition to Jews as a people. Marr then founded the Antisemiten-Liga, the league of antisemites. By 1881, the term had become the lingua franca of opposition to Jews and Judaism.

- Jeffrey Salkin, "It's antisemitism. No hyphen. No capital S."

#jeffrey salkin #history #jewish #politics #religion

Allow me to be blunt: It is a waste of time to respond to this issue [of gentrification] by transforming the socioeconomic phenomenon into a rhetorical weapon that progressively loses its sting the more it's used. Gentrification is not an abstract moral failing - a kind of transplant's original sin - or an imported aesthetic worked into the fabric of a neighborhood. It is a result of money and power - of the landlords, developers, real estate flippers, and investors who have it, and everyone else who does not. Most of the folks living in a neighborhood, transplants or not, are neighbors. Many are tenants whose ability to stay in one place is at the mercy of their landlords, regardless of whether they are on a fixed income, work at McDonald's, or have a cushy work-from-home job. Many, like the working-class people on my street in Chicago, own their homes and can attribute their economic stability solely to that fact. Even if they are sitting on a house-shaped mountain of cash, that cash will disappear the moment they sell their home and try to buy another one as investment-minded strangers close in around them, squeeze out their neighbors, and toy with the value of their property. Or these homeowners lose their only asset and become renters, a sadly common fate that is the by-product of our terrible, broken housing industry. Meanwhile, especially in Chicago, speculative buyers - companies like Blackstone, and even developers - take the existing stock, often two-flat apartment buildings, and convert it into palatial urban McMansions. The people who move into those houses have more money than the majority of the people in the city can fathom, and often fight any attempt to distribute that wealth more evenly. They are not good neighbors.

- Kate Wagner, "On Gentrification, We Don't Know What We're Talking About"

#kate wagner #economics #politics

Burning Man has countercultural roots and, once upon a time, it was a celebration of creativity and a counterpoint to mindless consumerism. Over the past few years, however, it has become massively commodified and started attracting some of the worst people on earth. Nowadays, it is an excuse for influencers and Silicon Valley types to take a bunch of drugs and party in the desert while pretending they are doing something meaningful that elevates the world's consciousness. Burning Man is supposed to be about "radical self-reliance" and yet a number of attendees appear to be flown in on private jets and shacked up in luxury accommodation with air conditioning. I don't care how exotic the drugs or how interesting the art is: once people such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk show up to your party, there is no longer anything countercultural about it. You are not rebelling against the man. You are the man.

- Arwa Mahdawi, "Why all the Burning Man schadenfreude? Where do I start..."

#arwa mahdawi #environment #music

According to data published by Communities Count, a resource offered by Public Health-Seattle & King County, nearly a third of Black Seattleites over the age of 18 experience food insecurity. By partnering with local food banks, Black-led mutual aid networks and other community groups, the collective [Small Axe Farm] distributes the food it grows to those most in need. ... Beyond that, Small Axe is a space where Black food entrepreneurs can grow their businesses and prepare to one day own their own land. Getting land into the hands of Black farmers is crucial to the collective's mission because of centuries of dispossession: Despite being the soul, spine and driving force of the early American economy, formerly enslaved African Americans struggled to acquire and hold onto land post-Emancipation.

- Syris Valentine, "Seattle's Black Farmers Collective nurtures communities and crops"

#syris valentine #food #history #racism

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