Don Quixote's Abortion

lapsed academic somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard

[machinedesirante]

this blog is going to be mostly dead from here on out; if you want to keep in touch I’ll be over @freakatrice

[machinedesirante]

this blog is going to be mostly dead from here on out; if you want to keep in touch I’ll be over @freakatrice

[just-shower-thoughts]

The generation that forcibly put soap in the mouth of children for using “dirty language” weighing in on the tide pod situation.

[mehreenkasana]

The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act Singles Out Asian-American Women

Ever since Donald Trump took office in January, nearly 2,000 bills have been introduced in the Congress. While it's impossible to keep track of each and every one of them, some can't afford to go unnoticed. Among them is a bill called HR 147, or the

If you’re a woman of color in America, especially if you’re Asian American (East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Central Asian, what-have-you), you might want to read this.

I took some time to gather the information for this report and now it’s up. Here’s what I found out and wrote about HR 147 - the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act - that can potentially render our choice as women of color to get abortions entirely obsolete. I spoke with Aliya Khan of NAPAWF who laid it out for me. And it’s not a pretty picture.

[arahir]

i’m reading a very manly 1950s account of a hunt for el dorado but i’m thirty pages in and the narrator has already described his traveling companion as “handsome” 4 times, “extremely handsome” twice, “exceedingly handsome” once, his voice as “quietly husky” and “a husky whisper,” his fingers as long and deft, his body as “tall and cat-like,” and his eyes as some variation of ice-blue at least three times.

just men being dudes. dudes being pals. it’s great. this is great.

[arahir]

“Ever since he had aimed that gun at my throat, I had liked him immensely. And now I liked him even better.”

oh my god

[arahir]

“I awoke when a beam of light fell across my eyes. Jorge had come into my room carrying a lighted candle.

‘I’m going with you,’ he said quietly.

‘I can’t pay you.’

He smiled. ‘I thought I was a partner?’”

OH MY GOD

[hashtagloveloses]

according to apparently every adaptation of a search of el dorado, i think we can conclude that maybe the real el dorado was the homosexuality we found along the way

[waffilicious]

#i’m adopting this as a term for someone working to understand their sexual orientation #‘oh megan dated dudes exclusively in college but these days i hear she’s on the road to el dorado' ( @buetterfliege )

[dareargentum]

From now on, every person figuring out their sexuality is on the road to el dorado

[classicantics-deactivated201712]

the real treasure was the gay we found along the way

[machinedesirante]

[new-aesthetic]

““It’s a bit dehumanising, never being able to get through to an employer,” says Robert, a plumber in his 40s whom I met at a weekly jobs club in London. He uses job boards and recruiters to find temporary work. Harry, 24, has been searching for a job for four months. In retail “just about every job opening” requires a test or game. He completes four or five a week. The rejections are often instant, piling up without a word of feedback. Every time you start again from zero. […] A fightback against automation has emerged, as applicants search for ways to game the system. On web forums, students trade answers to employers’ tests and create fake applications to gauge their processes. One HR employee for a major technology company recommends slipping the words “Oxford” or “Cambridge” into a CV in invisible white text, to pass the automated screening.”

— How to persuade a robot that you should get the job | Guardian

[thirdworldist-deactivated201603]

On the "Holodomor"

In light of recent of events, I see fit to make a post on the “Holodomor” so as to clear up some misconceptions because holy shit there are a lot of them.  First off, denial of the “Holodomor” is not denial of the famines that occurred in the USSR between 1929 and 1932.  The word “Holodomor” has an implicit connotation of “man-made” or “deliberate” starvation imposed upon the Ukrainian people by Stalin.  These famines cannot be understood as “an intentional action by STALIN” as there is a plethora of evidence to the contrary, and most of the evidence in favor of the “Holodomor” narrative can be traced to dubious sources.  Consider for example, that William Hearst’s NAZI-BACKED NEWSPAPER, which published articles relying on “eye witness” testimonies from people who admitted to never setting foot in the fucking Ukraine (Thomas Walker/Robert Green) and used “photos of the famine” that were fakes dating back to the 1920s, was the one to put the “Holodomor” notion forward in the early 1930’s.  Now then, with regards to Stalin committing a Holodomor, that is, intentionally killing off Ukrainians in droves for shits and giggles, allow me to post a slew of evidence that proves how utterly fucking bullshit that is: 

“[The Soviet government] did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus, Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food. Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933. It appeas to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, and 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.” [1]

“The harvest decline also decreased the regime’s reserves of grain export. This drop in reserves began with the dought-reduced 1931 harvest and subsequent procurements, which procured grain to those areas in 1932. The low 1931 harvest and reallocations of grain to famine areas forced the regime to curtain grain exports from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million in 1932; they declined to 1.68 million in 1933. Grain exported in 1932 and 1933 could have fed many people and reduced the famine: The 354,000 tons exported in the first half of 1933, for example, could have provided nearly 2 million people with daily rations of 1 kilogram for six months. Yet these exports were less than half of the 750,000 tons exported in the first half of 1932. How Soviet leaders calculated the relative costs of lower exports and lower domestic food supplies remains uncertain, but available evidence indicates that further reductions or cessation of Soviet exports could have had serious consequences. Grain prices fell in world markets and turned the terms of trade against the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, its indebtedness rose and its potential ability to pay declined, causing western bankers and officials to consider seizure of Soviet property abroad and denial of future credits in case of Soviet default. Failure to export thus would have threatened the fulfillment of its industrialization plans and, according to some observers, the stability of the regime.” [2]

What’s more, in reference to a pronouncement made by the Ukrainian Politburo that called for intensified grain requisitioning during the Famine (which is cited by many a shithead like Timothy Snyder as evidence that Soviet policies actually played a decisive role in causing and exacerbating the famine), Grover Furr points out in his book Blood Lies, that, 

“Not only is Snyder wrong here – in fact, he has it exactly backwards.  Not the Soviet, but the Ukrainian Politburo did approve a document allowing for confiscation of seed grain, though only under extreme circumstances.  It was Stalin and the Moscow Politburo that cancelled this decision!  As a result Ukrainian First Secretary Kosior apologized for drafting the document in question.  This is the opposite of what Snyder claims!” [3]

Specifically addressing the conditions of children in the famine (since everyone loves to point to the alleged Famine photograph of a young girl holding a starving infant as evidence in favor of the Holodomor narrative, even though it is actually from the Russian Civil War), Furr cites Davies and Wheatcroft, who note that

“Considerable efforts were made to supply grain to hungry children, irrespective of their parents’ roles in society.  The Vinnitsa decision of April 29, insisting that most grain should be distributed to those who were active in agriculture, also allocated grain specifically to crèches and children’s institutes in the badly-hit districts.  On May 20, the USSR Politburo [in Moscow, led by Stalin – GF] issued a grain loan to the Crimea specifically for children in need and aged invalids… (Emphasis added)” [4]

So it’s pretty clear that the famine was not intentional, and that Soviet policies were geared towards remedying the situation.  What’s more, it’s not like ONLY the Ukraine was hit.  Much of the USSR, from Belorussia to Kazakhstan to Siberia, was stricken by famine.  So what then was the cause of this horrible catastrophe?  Mark Tauger, leading academic expert on this subject, considers environmental conditions to have played the decisive factor.  Allow me to quote him yet again,

“According to a Soviet study of droughts published in the Khrushchev period, precipitation in the drought region in 1931, which the study defined only as the central and lower Volga and portions of Bashkiria, the Don basin, Ukraine, and the North Caucus, had rainfall ranging from 10 percent to 48 percent below normal in winter 1930-1931, and 10 percent to 66 percent below normal in the spring growing season.  Since these regions normally had rainfall ranging from twelve inches to twenty inches a year, declines on this scale could e extremely serious.  some local reports suggest, moreover, that these data may have understated the 1931 drought’s severity. In the main spring-grain maturation period of mid-April to mid-June, precipitation in the southern Urals and Western Siberia was one-fourth of the amount that agronomists there considered necessary for normal plant growth.” [5]

“Reports written by the Canadian agricultural specialist Andrew Cairns after extensive travels through the USSR in 1932 provide stark evidence of the effects of the 1931 drought on agricultural production.  In Novosobirsk, the chief agricultural official of Western Siberia (which was an important grain-producing region) told Cairns that 38 of the 124 districts in the krai had total crop failures in 1931.  The director of the Omsk grain institute told him that the crop around Omsk had average grain yields of 1.8 and 2.5 centners per hectare in 1931, as opposed to 9.3 and 13 centners on average in 1930.  In the Middle Volga, spring wheat had yields 2.5 centners on average in 1931, and officials in Samara told Cairns that the krai had lost 3-3.35 million tons of grain to drought.  Drought also reduced grain harvests in Ukraine.   The fact that the 1931 cropped area exceeded that of any year between the revolution and the late 1920s, yet resulted in an extraordinarily small harvest, further evidences the significance of drought that year.” [6]

“The most important infestation in 1932 came from several varieties of rust, a category of fungi that can infest grains and many other plants…Although in some cases rust will kill grain plants, rusted grain ordinarily will continue to grow, form ears, and in general appear normal; but the grain heads will not “fill,” so that the harvest will seem “light” and consist of small grains, or of fewer normal-sized grains, and disproportionately of husks and other fibrous materials.  In other words, a field of wheat (or barely, rye, oats, or other grain, all of which are susceptible to rust) could appear entirely normal and promising, and yet because of the infestation could produce an extremely low yield. One Soviet study showed that a 100 percent infestation reduced the weight of 1,000 grains of wheat from 39.7 grams to 14.1 grams, or more than 60 percent.” [7]

“Other weather conditions quite distinct from drought affected the 1932 crop.  In January 1932, a sudden warm spell in the southern regions of the Soviet Union caused fall-sown crops to start growing, after which winter temperatures returned and killed a portion of the crop.  In Ukraine this winterkill destroyed at least 12 percent of fall-sown crops, more than double the long-term average; in one district 62 percent in winter crops failed.” [8]

That is to say, a wide array of environmental calamities out of the control of the Soviet government caused the famine.  Did Soviet policies exacerbate the famine to some extent?  Most certainly.  High requisitioning and grain exporting prior to 1932, along with errors in planning and misallocations by the state, certainly played a role.   There is no sense in denying that.  However, that does not equate to the famines being caused by Soviet policies.  If anything, Soviet policies (the main one in question being large-scale, forced collectivization) averted future crises.  Indeed, the USSR had experienced waves of deadly famines prior to collectivization, most notably in 1917-1918 (Russia), 1920-1923 (Volga, North Caucasus, Ukraine, Western Siberia), 1924-1925 (Volga, Ukraine), 1927-1928 (Ukraine), and 1928-1929 (Ukraine).  Collectivization, despite all of the shortcomings in its implementation, put an end to these famines, with the exception of one in 1946-1947.  However, to quote Furr, “Wheatcroft, author of the most recent study of this famine, has concluded that this famine too was due to environmental causes” [9].  I could also point to the sabotage of crops and slaughter of cattle by kulaks (who would rather see their assets destroyed or immediately consumed rather than hand them over to collective farms), which although grossly exaggerated by the Soviet government, did occur and play a role.

So in conclusion, we have learned three things:

If you legitimately believe a “Holodomor” occurred, you are acting as a mouth-piece for Nazis

The Famines, while very real, were caused in the main by adverse weather conditions

The Soviet government played an active role in alleviating the crisis 

NOTES:

1. Mark B. Tauger. “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933.” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 70-89. http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/Tauger, ‘The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933, SR 91.pdf.

2. Ibid.

3. Grover Furr. Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False. (New York: Red Star Publisher, 2014), 76.

4. ibid, 121.

5. Mark B. Tauger. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933. Pittsburgh, PA: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2001.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Grover Furr, Blood Lies: The Evidence That Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False, 72.

[thesovietbroadcast]

The term “holodomor” itself was popularized by expatriated Ukrainian nationalists years after the actual occurrence of the famine. The full-scale pushing of the genocide narrative began after OUN, UPA, and SS (such as those 2,000 from the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division) veterans found refuge in Canada after the war, escaping justice for their crimes in Eastern Europe.

The main originator of this narrative [in the west] was the Ukrainian World Congress (originally known as  the World Congress of Free Ukrainians), which incorporated (and still incorporates) several organisations which are headed by Ukrainian reactionaries and fascists. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress, for instance, was founded by former Ukrainian SS that were given asylum in Klanada. Nowadays these receive funds from the Klanadian government to spread the holodomor myth.

The contemporary neo-nazi narrative that the 1932-1933 Soviet famine a “Jewish genocide against Christians” has partial origins with those exact same nationalists, who aimed to compare the famine to the Holocaust, and in-part to justify their own participation in the mass murder of Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish Jews. The genocide narrative held considerable pull in the West, pushing several governments to recognize it as such over time, though still relatively few. The worst nightmare for the nationalist expats and those who remained in Ukraine itself came with the opening of the Soviet archives, which threw considerable doubt on the traditional narrative. From these archives, the famine was confirmed to have struck hardest in East Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Central and South Ukraine, and the Caucasus. Grain seizures were found to have been limited to hoarders, to have been redistributed to starving peasants, rather than being held by the authorities as the genocide-narrativists claim. In truth, as many as half of the victims of the famine weren’t Ukrainians, but ethnic Russians, Kazakhs, and other nationalities. Paired with all of this was the complete lack of documented evidence that the famine was intentional, that the Soviet leadership used it to “control” Ukraine, or that it was intentionally worsened by the Soviet state. Not a single order suggesting malicious intent was found. What was found was documentation of some of the issues that resulted from the attempted implementation of collectivization, such as resistance to it from landowners (who, despite the belief of some, made up a small minority of Ukrainians, and who were typically the “employers” of the bulk of the population), alongside migration and other smaller factors complicating the logistics of the agricultural restructuring. They also found orders from various levels of the state, up to the politburo, ordering the provision of aid, and moves to prevent the famine from worsening. A common famine control tactic is the restriction of movement, as this complicates the distribution of food aid, can allow diseases to spread to less effected region (including those which effect crops, such as rust), and can put strain on the grain reserves of less effected regions. Despite this, proponents of the genocide narrative claim that this stands as evidence that the famine was genocidal, that there was intent behind it, when in truth such measures prevented the famine from worsening. Something else to note is that it was the Ukrainian communist party primarily carrying out the collectivization and later the famine control efforts within Ukraine. If the famine truly were a genocide against ethnic Ukrainians, this would imply that Ukraine was committing a genocide against itself. There was actually no purge of Ukrainians from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not during the famine, nor during any other period, which would (to say the least) make the “holodomor” an extremely unusual case compared to other genocides. During the famine, the Politburo was made up of 2 Ukrainians, 2 Georgians, 1 Latvian, 1 Pole, and 6 Russians. The next politburo was made up of 3 Ukrainians, 2 Georgians, 1 Pole, 1 Armenian, and 5 Russians, an increase in Ukrainians! It’s also worth noting that the question of the “holodomor” within contemporary Ukraine remains controversial as well, despite what Banderite expats would have you believe. In 2006, when the vote was being held to declare the famine a genocide (and criminalize its denial), only 233 of the 450 members of the Ukrainian parliament voted in favor. A considerable portion of the parliament boycotted the vote rather than by legitimizing it by taking part. Polls continue to show that in Ukraine today, the bulk of those who consider it a genocide reside in West Ukraine (which was not part of the USSR at the time and was largely unaffected by the famine), and Central Ukraine, while the issue is much more divisive within South {60/40 split} and East Ukraine {50/50}. 

Oddly enough, Ukrainian reactionaries - who seem very invested in their narrative and very concerned with history - do not recognise the Armenian Genocide. One wonders why.

[machinedesirante]

If we are going to have even the foggiest chance of defeating a system like capital, we will need to develop praxis that is much nimbler than what we currently have, and if we rely exclusively on theoretical tools developed prior to the second world war we cannot do that.

[cannibality-deactivated20250227]

‘drones are queer because they subvert the expectation that you, personally, will kill the person you’re trying to kill’ is the argument that paper makes and like… that’s not a useful point. that’s not…….. good………. that doesn’t contribute to our politics against imperialist drone warfare, doesn’t help us find new ways of relating to the use of drones in warfare, doesn’t actually do or achieve anything. people are mad at queer theory for being obfuscatory and confused/ confusing, and i agree with them to an extent, but what i absolutely agree with is that the scorn heaped on this useless text is 100% justified.

[machinedesirante]

She read Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, and then did the least useful possible thing with it. 

The problem is that people on this site aren't saying, "this is a hacky extension of useful theory.” Instead they’re saying, “here is an example of why queer theory is garbage.” Like, they’ve picked a deeply uninspiring paper worded in a way that’s massively inflammatory to the naïve reader in order to give people false justification for dismissing a bunch of essential theory before they’ve even read it. It’s a straw man tactic.

[prokopetz]

Hm. Apparently Tumblr just pushed out a style/layout change such that if a reblog contains text accompanied by a full-width image, the text in the reblog is inadvertently hidden in some circumstances. Fantastic!

[oligopsoneia-deactivated2018051]

tumblr’s strategy of incompetently flailing around at random is still 5000% preferable to Facebook’s strategy of hypercompetently A-B testing every possible facet to engineer user behavior in the most profitable way

[arterialtrees]

[machinedesirante]

says the woman who wrote After Kathy Acker

[markvomit]

[androxibot-deactivated20190428]

Jewish privilege means we’re funnier than any one of you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

[morphodyke-blog]

for all that people talk about man-hating lesbians, you will never find someone as directly man-hating as a normie straight woman who is very smart and observant and has spent her life under the thumb of a man who is very stupid and callous.

[morphodyke-blog]

like a lesbian says she doesn’t like men and everyone freaks out meanwhile aunt virginia over there with her fifth bloody mary talking about how if women had any self-respect they would execute all men like the insects they are

[xenosagaepisodeone]

Hundreds of Canadian doctors demand lower salaries. (Yes, lower.)

Quebec physicians insist they already make too much money, according to a petition to cancel the pay raises and redistribute the money throughout the province's health-care system.

“We, Quebec doctors who believe in a strong public system, oppose the recent salary increases negotiated by our medical federations,” the petition reads in French.

The physicians group said it could not in good conscience accept pay raises when working conditions remained difficult for others in their profession — including nurses and clerks — and while patients “live with the lack of access to required services because of drastic cuts in recent years.”

A nurses union in Quebec has in recent months pushed the government to address a nursing shortage, seeking a law that would cap the number of patients a nurse could see. The union said its members were increasingly being overworked, and nurses across the province have held several sit-ins in recent months to push for better working conditions.

In January, the situation was encapsulated in a viral Facebook post by a nurse in Quebec named Émilie Ricard, who posted a photo of herself, teary-eyed, after what she said had been an exhausting night shift. Ricard said she had been the only nurse to care for more than 70 patients on her floor; she was so stressed that she had cramps that prevented her from sleeping, she added.

“This is the face of nursing,” Ricard wrote, criticizing Quebec Health Minister Gaétan Barrette, who had deemed recent health-care system changes a success.

“I don’t know where you’re going to get your information, but it’s not in the reality of nursing,” the nurse wrote. She later added: “I am broken by my profession, I am ashamed of the poverty of the care that I provide as far as possible. My Health system is sick and dying.”

[aly-semi-archived-deactivated20]

Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism—because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself— and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular

Xenofeminism - Laboria Cuboniks

[cannibality-deactivated20250227]

“If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour”

— Xenofeminism - Laboria Cuboniks