the url is a reclamation @qweerhet - Tumblr Blog

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reading list requests take about 10x longer to fulfill than other asks as i'm multiply disabled. if you send a request for reading recs, i will most likely get around to it eventually, but it may take several months.

this is an anonymous sideblog where i dump my political & discourseposting. i will probably not argue with you in reblogs, but i may respond to good-faith challenges in reblogs. i appreciate healthy & constructive discussion. my inbox is generally open, but i don't respond to about 50% of anons i get, so you're taking a risk by attempting to contact me that route.

i cannot tag consistently as i use this blog as a "dumping ground." however i do attempt to tag in-depth discussion of csa as "cw csa"

if you ask me for information regarding my personal life, i am going to assume you are a cop.

if there's a political opinion that is so disgusting to you that you feel the need to write callout posts about people who have it, do us both a favor and just assume i have that opinion before following this blog.

you may be interested in following this blog if you like:

post-left anarchism

youth liberation

prison abolition & transformative justice

radical disability liberation

the psychiatric survivor movement & antipsychiatry

transfeminism

radical sex positivity

this blog has a high likelihood of making you incredibly angry if your opinions on any of the above happen to include:

anarchoprimitivism

pro-child-molestation ideology

physical vs. mental disability separatism

transfem separatism

belief in the validity of the sex binary and/or utility of CASAB language

carceral solutions to mental health issues (including paraphilic disorders)

belief in the utility of callout posts, harassment campaigns, or other forms of en masse unpersoning/shunning

belief in the validity of thought crime of any form

stay safe and don't talk to cops.

#pinned

artemisiasea

Excerpt from The Trouble With White Women: An Interview with Kyla Schuller Author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

gatheringbones

[“NA: One of the fiercest arguments you make in the book is that womanhood is a very recent fiction created for very specific purposes. You write, “Woman’ represents a tactic of risk management”— can you explain what you mean by that?

KS: I’m building on arguments that black feminist theorists made in the 1980s that gender is a racial structure. Womanhood is not a universal category, but instead is an aspect of whiteness that was positioned by definition as unobtainable for nonwhite women, specifically black women. I looked at the scientists who were inventing and codifying the idea of sex difference in the 19th century— not just the cultural role of gender, but the idea of physiological and anatomical sex difference, the binary of a male and female body. Those folks argued that full sex differentiation was only achieved by whites. No other races have achieved the level of evolutionary specification where they were able to differentiate between the distinct roles of men and women.

This is super-surprising, because we assume that the idea of male and female as two opposing categories is universal— at least in Western thought. But before the 19th century, male and female bodies were described as more alike than different. For example, in the 18th century, the vagina was often described in medical textbooks as an internal penis. It’s not arguing that bodies are identical, but it’s arguing a fundamental similarity.

In the 19th century, one of the things that emerged was the idea that male and female were fully different capacities and bodies at every level. It’s helpful to imagine the idea of “male” and “female” as racial categories— not just as gendered roles but as actual physical, anatomical, physiological difference. This suddenly makes projects like white feminism in the 19th century extra-suspect, because many white women were only arguing for the rights of white women— “woman,” in that sense, is part of an overdetermined category of whiteness. Of course, there were white feminists who were arguing against that, and black feminists were trying to expand the category of womanhood itself, but it helps explain some of the reasons why liberal feminism still does such a terrible job accounting for race, because to some degree their idea of woman itself has always been elaborated as a quality of whiteness, not a universal quality of people.“]

#to read

exxos-von-steamboldt

delicatefury

I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Thank God someone bothered to check.

beardedmrbean

>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un

Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though

That should be enough

#WHAT #to read

qweerhet

unformed thought i need to put somewhere: the term "misandry," prior to all the incel-specific cultural baggage it picked up in the 21st century, could have potentially had a place within feminist theory as a term for the way marginalizations can intersect with being (coercively) gendered as male to produce a unique way a male-gendered class is denied access to male privilege.

probably sounds a bit obtuse; as an illustrative example, consider how brown men with refugee status are, among imperial core nations, narrativized as brutish rapists intent on impregnating white women. their status as men is, in fact, integral to the way society narrates their existence and the systemic violence enforced on them; if they were not gendered, both by society and by themselves, as men, then it would not be possible for these societal narratives to exist. the traits being ascribed to this violent narrative are traits uniquely reserved for men within patriarchy; while racialized women are cast as violent and brutish in different ways, their presumed role in reproductive labor means they simply are not cast by the patriarchy, broadly speaking, as threats to the sanctity of white women's reproductive capacity. racialization makes the experience of being male-gendered by society inherently violent, in this context; the traits that are reserved for men within patriarchy are recognized in you, but they are not rewarded, they are seen as fundamentally dangerous and animalistic; in patriarchy, traits that bring white men closer to enlightenment make brown men savage and violent.

that got super in-depth on one specific example but there's a lot of intersections like that out in the world. disability is one that's criminally underlooked; the way being coercively gendered as male intersects with developmental disability results in a pattern of malgendering and degendering that seems awfully familiar. i see it all the time; once i learned to stop seeing "male" as "default" and automatically start seeing "male-gendered experiences" as unique and separate from ungendered or gender-agnostic experiences, i started seeing the ways that society constructs manhood to punish specific types of men everywhere.

and like. do i think that we're really losing anything by not using the term "misandry" for this topic? not really. i'd like us to come up with better language any day now (meaningfully tapping my watch), but i'm not too fussed about us needing to come up with better language to begin with; i'm sure we could come up with something that much more effectively communicates "this is not an equal-and-opposite force to misogyny, by any means, and is in fact an inevitable outcome of systemic misogyny." i'm just thinking about the concept itself, and the broader queer discourse's difficulty overall with adopting some of these lenses.

qweerhet

honestly, this post feels like i was one of three blind men describing an elephant. apparently "black misandry" is already a theory term in this space and i did not hear it before because i was not engaging rigorously enough with black studies. (and because white feminist studies are incredibly hostile toward its usage.)

fascinating to me that the previous reblog chain included this subtle implication that the responder read "poor rural white from the southern usa who realized white supremacy is horrifying" to automatically not include any of the "worst things a person can do." i... i don't have the energy to unpack that in depth. i'll just say that i've met deradicalized-decades-ago activists from the rural south whose method of action is using their experience to deradicalize current fucking klan members.

#want to save this thought somewhere

standwithdaanes

having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."

if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.

vexwerewolf

Okay, but are they willing to take the biggest risks to make things right?

Like, if these people have done the most damage to society, to the safety and dignity of minorities, to the basic decency upon which the world functions, are they willing to stand at the front of the effort to fix that damage?

As a trans person, I'm not particularly inclined to forgive transphobes unless they've put themselves in harm's way instead of us.

magicrainbowkitties

Part of the issue is for that sort of thing to happen, people have to want to change and do better.

Many don't.

standwithdaanes

And many do. Why would we waste that desire? Just because many people don't? It's a pessimistic perspective that only hurts the goal of meaningful progress. Progress will not happen because all the Bad People just stop existing.

I am genuinely begging people on this post to realize that our current system CREATES the issues y'all come onto this post to use as proof restorative justice won't work. There are many reasons people resist change, but one very relevant one is that a system where accountability is inherently tied to suffering does not motivate people to put in the effort to change. A deeply hurt person who has developed a lot of very toxic habits, who struggles to imagine a life for themself where they don't rely on those habits to have a sense of identity and safety, may seem like someone who "doesn't want to change." If we assume that is true, then no one tries to help, then there is no reason for that person to believe change is possible or that they could ever be cared for by society given what they've done, so why try?

I am truly fucking begging y'all to talk to like. Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is, and becomes extremely personally invested in fighting that in their community. This is not some abstract hypothetical. & there are MANY people who would very much be willing to change, if change actually seems feasible. If you see yourself as unforgivable, because everyone around you seems to see you as unforgivable, is it not easier to just dig your heels in?

We NEED!!!!!!! people to be willing to come over to our side and that simply will not fucking happen if your every reaction to "we need to have a process that allows people to make amends and which incentives meaningful change" is "ohhhhhh but that's hard tho :("

Compassion is a practical revolutionary necessity. It's not a thought experiment. Yes, it will be hard, and complicated, and cause a lot of discomfort for everyone on a lot of levels. It will take a hell of a long time to get where we actually want to be. We will fuck it up a lot along the way. There is still no other choice. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it does nothing for anyone.

vexwerewolf

You're moving the goalposts and I'm starting to lose my patience. Your original post started with this premise:

having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left

Then, when me and @magicrainbowkitties rightfully pointed out that people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right.

You then promptly shifted entirely to

Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is

Motherfucker, I'm not fucking talking about some guy from Biloxi who said slurs a couple of times - and neither were you, until it became useful to completely misrepresent our caveats.

standwithdaanes

"people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right."

That is literally what this post is saying we need to have a process for. What exactly are you caveating here????????????

I'm not moving any goalposts. I didn't say "someone who said slurs a couple of times." In the notes of this post, I have elaborated on how this post was prompted by reading about a woman who worked as a fucking drone operator for the US military. I have also responded to people talking about child rapists.

I am really frustrated and annoyed by your "caveats" because they make no sense. I do not fucking understand what you people think I am saying with this post. Like, genuinely, what the fuck did you think I meant by this section:

I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.

Did you think I was just fucking around and smashing random keys when I wrote this? By "process" and "there is no shortcut" I meant "people who did the worst things don't need to accept they've done anything bad and don't need to accept that making amends means accepting a great amount of risk"? Is that what you think I meant?

Its not just y'all. Other people keep coming on this post and adding "caveats" because, as far as I can tell, y'all cannot see a person talking about restorative justice without immediately assuming that they don't understand that bad things require actual effort to amend. The point of this post is that it is necessary to have systems for people to make amends, that actually facilitate and incentivize people to do that hard work, rather than providing zero support or clear pathways to actually go about doing that.

Not a SINGLE part of this implies anything remotely like "you should just forgive anyone whose done anything horrific even if they have done nothing to make amends simply because they said sorry." In fact I LITERALLY included a part of the original post where I explicitly said that's not what I'm saying. So why do people keep feeling the need to come onto this post and just restating the things I already clearly said as if its something that I left out of the post? Why is there this need to keep reiterating, on a post about how it is important to provide mechanisms for people who caused harm to make amends, that people who caused harm need to make amends?

luckyladylily

I have considered for a long time how to best and most simply explain the critical elements of intersectionality, because I think it is among the most critical of ideas and so many people get it wrong. So here we go.

Intersectionality, at it's core, asserts that identities can not be broken into what we see as their individual parts, in particular when discussing the oppression and prejudice a person faces. Identities are more than just the sum of their parts.

The theory was originally laid out by a black woman to explain her own oppression. In short, she claimed that her oppression as a black woman could not be simply explained as black oppression + woman oppression. She also experienced black woman oppression.

Now, the nuances of the situation are much more complex, but this is the very basic idea. You always have to account for a person's identity as a whole, and not just the individual parts.

Black women are not just "black" + "women"

Black men are not just "black" + "men"

Trans women are not just "trans" + "women"

Trans men are not just "trans" + "men"

You always have to consider the identity as a whole, which may mean there are non obvious aspects of the whole identity that are not readily explained by the sum of the individual parts.

That is the basic explanation. Now let's get into one particular application I think is very important, at least on Tumblr, because on tumblr it has become extremely controversial.

A consequence of intersectionality is that specific kinds of oppression cannot be divorced from maleness. A black man's oppression cannot be explained as "black" + "male" oppression. There are aspects of the oppression black men face that cannot be separated from their identity as a whole. Even if you believe "men" suffer no unique oppression, intersectionality means you can't deny the possibility that "black men" suffer oppression that cannot be divorced from them being men.

This application of intersectionality is fundamental and the application of intersectionality to black men has been accepted for basically as long as intersectionality has been around.

A similar application can be made to trans men.

Now if you don't agree with this model, sure. Im not going to say it is fine because I think you are wrong, but no social model is above criticism. What you can't do is claim that intersectionality is anything else. You either accept that aspects of oppression can be tied to maleness, or you do not accept intersectionality. There is no secret third thing. This is a fundamental consequence of intersectionality as a model.

I think it is important to note that intersectionality did not start as queer theory. The roots of the model are in the study of sexism and racism. This is black feminist theory. And to put a point on it, trans feminist theory has no business trying to warp intersectionality to fit preconceived ideas about how queer identities and queer oppression works.

I believe that twisting well established black feminist theory into an unrecognizable form and then stealing the credibility of that well established black feminist theory by labeling your new theory "intersectional" is racist. We do not get to borrow their credibility while spitting on their work.

Again, if you do not believe intersectionality is correct, or that it does not apply to queer identities, that is an argument you can make. I would recommend you have a lot of very well sourced data backing up a radical claim like that, but no model is above criticism. But don't try to trade on the credibility of black feminists while disregarding their work.

sigynpenniman

mikeyfuckinway

A jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster operated as a monopoly in its dominance of the live events and ticketing industry, validating comp

sugar-and-spite

But fans won’t see ticket prices or fees tacked onto their bills drop anytime soon. Judge Arun Subramanian will now hold second trial to decide what remedies are warranted, including whether to grant the states’ request to break up the company or make other structural changes such as ordering the sale of businesses.

more deliberation still to come, with a settlement in the works that caps fees, allows competitors to do business, and dissolves exclusive agreements ticketmaster has with certain companies. article says nothing has been decided for sure yet, and even once it is, it may take a while for consumers to notice any effects.

this is very good news, still! let's all celebrate the impending death of ticketmaster, while maintaining reasonable expectations for what that will look like!

#to read

genderkoolaid

getting down & structuring some vague thoughts i've been having, would love to hear people's thoughts:

there is an ideal feminist subject (the thin white middle-class pretty gender-conforming-but-not-too-feminine cis perisex woman). this ideal feminist subject is who much of mainstream feminism has been build around protecting, supporting, defending, and theorizing on her experiences. she isn't real; she's an idea, a trope, a story used to ground feminism in a certain story. feminism uses a lot of stories in order to develop and communicate certain ideas & webs of ideas, which allow us to see the world differently, realize the different options we have to react to our experiences in the world, and connect with others to support one another and act collectively.

people who wish to engage in feminism narrate their experiences through feminist stories. this can be very useful, as it allows people to make sense of their experiences in a way that can actually empower them: there is an important difference between telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because i was a dumb slut, and i disappointed everyone" and telling the story of "i got pregnant as a teen because our sex ed was worthless and i didn't have a good understanding of consent and my boyfriend felt like he owned my body, and my community betrayed me because they held misogynistic beliefs about my body and my role in society."

but there are a lot of people who could seriously benefit from being able to apply those feminist stories to themselves, who cannot, because they struggle to narrate themselves as the feminist subject. this not only limits their ability to make sense of their experiences in an empowering way, but also has real material impacts. the ideal feminist subject is also the ideal feminist victim of domestic abuse, the ideal feminist survivor of date rape, the ideal feminist victim of the gender pay gap, the ideal feminist recipient of feminist support. if you can't fit yourself into these stories defined by the ideal feminist subject, you are far less likely to have your suffering recognized as real or urgent. resources that you may desperately need will not recognize you as a potential client. feminist movements to fight for social change will not consider how society needs to change for you to not suffer needlessly.

so many people re-narrate their experiences in order to present themselves as, in some vital way, close enough to the ideal feminist subject to count. people can take different tactics, but one of the most popular is emphasizing one's womanhood in order to counter-act the distance caused by being fat, non-white, lower-class, not conventionally attractive, gender non-conforming, trans or intersex. the narrative used often goes that feminism is for women, I am a woman, therefore feminism should include me. this isn't always successful, but it is one of the most influential, because feminism is centered around gender, it is most concerned with thinking about gender and people as gendered subjects. with all the words i listed above as describing the ideal feminist subject, the final word is not an adjective but a noun: "woman." the ideal feminist subject has many traits, but she is a woman.

trans women narrate themselves very similarly to other marginalized women, emphasizing that their identity as women is what allows them to step into the role of the feminist subject and use those stories and be integrated into feminism at large. trans women in particular can struggle with this process because "cis" (and "perisex") are fundamentally gendered (and sexed) terms, making them part of the same category as "woman," and so it is extremely hard to separate the ideal feminist subject's womanhood from her cisness and her perisexuality. we can see this in how, traditionally, these terms were not used at all; a woman was presumed to be a cis and perisex woman, so much so that "cis" and "perisex" didn't exist as defined concepts. transphobic feminists zero in on this to argue against trans women's inclusion. but, in popular strains of trans-inclusive feminism, gender identity is re-imagined as the location of womanhood (as opposed to the cis-perisex "female" body), which helps to de-couple cisness and perisexuality from womanhood.

but this is where feminism continually fails transmasculine and nonbinary people, and where transfeminism has continually disappointed. even if cisness and perisexuality are de-coupled from womanhood, they are still working behind the scenes to define it. you don't have to check those specific boxes, but you need to pass the vibe checks.

a trans man is systemically oppressed on the basis of gender, affected by misogyny and transphobia, and in need of the support and resources offered by feminism. but if the ideal feminist subject is, fundamentally, a woman, then he must narrate himself as a woman. and, crucially, even transfeminism rarely meaningfully questions the frameworks of oppositional sexism and exorsexism which define womanhood around being the opposite of, and excluding of, manhood. nonbinary people, even if they aren't men, are similarly excluded. even if someone identifies as a woman in some way, they can only re-narrate their experiences effectively if they downplay the parts of themself that aren't "woman." this also affects many trans women who, for a variety of reasons, are not comfortable or able or willing to re-narrate their experiences on the basis that their womanhood is just like cis women's.

and, even worse: the violence and misogyny experienced by trans men, by nonbinary people, by many other kinds of trans and GNC people, is fundamentally tied to their rejection of cis womanhood. yet they must try to narrate these experiences with misogyny as being fundamentally born from existing as a woman-as-defined-by-cisness. this creates an intolerable paradox which was well-explained by C. Jacob Hale in his 2009 essay "Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency":

Those of us who are dislocated from already given gender categories, both normative and nonnormative ones, are dislocated in that we cannot fully inhabit any of them. We place ourselves and are placed by others in the margins of any number of gender categories, never close to the paradigmatic core of any but also never falling fully outside all. [...] I do not ﬁt the paradigms of any already given gender categories. I ﬂit about the margins of each of these categories. Since some of these categories share unions with one another, I ﬂit through overlapping border zones constituted by the margins of several gender categories. Flitting about the margins is not a refusal to own my location, nor is it valorization of gender play or gender ﬂuidity. Flitting is a type of movement proper to ghosts: creatures abjected from full social existence who, instead, have only partial, limited social existence. For reasons as personal, various, and idiosyncratic as the personal, various, and idiosyncratic connections border zone inhabitants draw between our embodiments, self-identiﬁcations, and subjectivities, already given discourses offer us little else than indeﬁnite sequences of indiscriminate erasure. Already given discourses may elide the speciﬁcities of those with ﬁrm locations within already given categories, but not to the same degree that they elide the speciﬁcities of the dislocated. Those of us who live in border zones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot ﬁt ourselves into extant categories without denying, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally signiﬁcant aspects of ourselves. The price of committing such violence against ourselves is too great, though our only other option is also very costly for the dislocated have fallen through the cracks in the structure of the gendered world. Having slipped off all the handholds we have ever tried to grasp, we have fallen between the cracks of language and life. Unintelligible to ourselves and to others, we are driven to search for new category terms, since category terms are the signal-ﬂags of social ontology, and we desperately long to reenter the world.

this is the source of trans in-fighting within feminism. some trans men desperately try to use the idea of a "female body" to narrate themselves as a feminist subject and downplay gender identity (which will inevitably be used by cis-feminists to ignore their transmasculinity entirely, leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse), while some trans women use woman-identity and downplay the body. nonbinary people, too, engage in this. the core issue here is that all trans people, in order to re-narrate themselves to get closer to the ideal feminist subject, must downplay their transness. transness implies the inter-mixing of different gendered experiencs, different sexed bodies. it implies the blurring and crumbling of a solid, objective, unifying identity as females or as women. so the trans community is pulled in various different directions, tearing us apart as we try to cut off different pieces of ourselves to justify to cis women why we deserve whatever scraps of allyship they are willing to give us.

my solution to this problem is to define a new feminist subject, one based around shared suffering under patriarchy and shared resistance to gender-sex-sexuality oppression. this has already been done and will continue to be done until it sticks on a broad (ha) level; bell hooks' Feminism Is For Everybody comes to mind. just because re-narrating yourself to align with the ideal feminist subject is a popular method does not mean it has been the only one, and many people (particularly Black women) throughout the history of feminism have simply rejected the idea that the ideal feminist subject should be the ideal feminist subject. this is important for not just trans people but also the question of where cis men fit into feminism. feminists have long discussed men of all kinds being engaged in feminism, but if the feminist subject is always defined as a woman, then we will always struggle to conceptualize a multi-gendered approach to the goals of feminism, and feminism will continue to be used to turn gender-oppressed people into ghosts and make us tear each other apart for a seat at a very small table, never built to hold us, much less feed us.

ms-demeanor

As much as I understand and sympathize with your concerns, it's hard not to look at that entire list and not feel like it's being held up solely by Slippery Slope thinking. There's a lot of dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, but without some serious evidence the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.

the last thing anyone needs is fearmongering that makes it sound like lawmakers are so idiotic can't even, for example, ban CSAM without making it illegal to share ANY images online.

I have extremely bad news for you about our lawmakers.

This is NOT a slippery slope argument, it is an argument with very clear precedents and lots of evidence of harm done. There isn't dangerous stuff going on in tech right now, there has been dangerous stuff going on in tech since "tech" has existed.

SESTA/FOSTA, passed by lawmakers to prevent human trafficking, is why it's so easy to get trans women on tumblr banned for posting 'mature content'. It has also made human trafficking worse, made sex work more dangerous, and sanitized the internet to the point that it's difficult to post photos of classical sculptures or instructions on how to perform a breast self-exam on most platforms.

The DMCA, passed by lawmakers to protect copyright holders online, is frequently used to censor criticism, cover up reporting on corporate malfeasance, and prevent buyers from having true ownership of digital purchases.

Lawmakers are CONSTANTLY attempting to use "But this would protect children/prevent the sharing of CSAM" to attack Section 230, a legal provision that prevents platforms from being held liable for the content they host. The proposed changes lawmakers idiotically present actually would drastically erode your ability to post ANY images online, would not make anyone safer, and would further consolidate the power held by platforms like Google and Meta while making it harder for smaller online platforms to exist.

The original sin of all of this (in the US at least) is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 to regulate charges and sentences for computer-based crime and has been used since to prosecute security researchers and activists, and has been responsible for tremendously disproportionate sentences levied against people charged with computer-related crimes.

The people who write and pass laws about computers and the internet don't understand computers or the internet. The people who advocate for these kinds of laws either don't anticipate the second-order consequences or anticipated the consequences and wanted fallout like the sanitation of the internet or the criminalization of downloading journal articles.

I am not fearmongering, I am someone who has been aware of the disastrous outcomes of legislating the internet for decades pointing to the specific ways that the sorts of rules people are proposing have demonstrably been fucking people over forever.

#to read

genderkoolaid

the thing about "trans guys have it easier" is that when you look into it its really more of a folk myth than anything. people come up with all sorts of stories to explain this "fact." people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that's why trans guys have it easier. but you'll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that's why trans guys have it easier.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. and this isn't necessarily something that's done maliciously, which is key. its not about people twiddling their fingers and thinking about how to contribute to a massive conspiracy against transmascs. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

this is why anti-transmasculinity theory is so important. all kinds of people come to this conclusion, and the best explanation for why this strange thing happens and why no one talks about it is anti-transmasculinity & erasure as a social force which people internalize.

genderkoolaid

also note that both lines of logic above come from trying to use traditional cisfeminist thinking to make sense of transmasculine experiences.

even though the explanations are entirely flipped (one relies on male gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people assigned male more than those assigned female, the other relies on female gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people transitioning towards femininity more than those transitioning towards masculinity), they are both trying to take the model of "women suffer because they are women and men benefit because they are men" and contort it to explain transmasculine experiences.

this is why these explanations make very little sense when you really look at them. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you can only analyze gender through a cissexist lens, everything looks fundamentally cis.

cisfeminism struggles greatly to actually deal with social hatred for androgyny and intersexuality and transness, because you can make feminist arguments and feminist theory that can explain many (though clearly not all) women's experiences without ever questioning the binary.

but you fundamentally cannot do that for trans (especially nonbinary) people or intersex people, and so the framework has to bend and break itself into a contradictory and often reactionary mess in order to try and explain our experiences without giving up the binary. once again, y'all are always on that damn exorsexism and it makes your feminism shitty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

standwithdaanes

#'coerced or forced' is a little too unnuanced for me you are accountable for your actions#but yes everyone needs to have an opportunity to get better#even if that person wasn't coerced or forced in any way actually. yes even then.

to explain what i mean by "coerced":

i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.

this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.

now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?

and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.

does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.

the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.

i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.

this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.

*to be clear, this is what people often feel when they are told they did smth racist; that is itself a racist reaction, but one that people do have & i try to think about how practically to get people to get over that reaction & focus on the actual issue at hand

crypticpatterns

i 100% agree with all of this. to be clear, my tags weren't meant to deny anything about how society is coercive and systematically pushes people into doing bad things. only that i still think the choice to get better needs to be accessible even to people who could have chosen better, for one reason or another. (whether someone is allowed to be accepted should not be predicated on whether they were 'enough of a victim,' whatever that means.) and we shouldn't conclude that no one is responsible for their actions--they are. but society as a whole is responsible for the coercion and violence done against them, and the solution to that responsibility is not punishment, but restoration.

standwithdaanes

#eh.#full disclosure: I am Black and queer and poor#and I have had the immense displeasure of being the victimized party during such attempts at “restorative justice”#my experience was basically a room full of breathless white people demanding my public forgiveness#because their transgression became public knowledge when I refused to protect them#and all anyone wanted to talk about was the reputational damage of these whites#there was vague lip service about policy changes#but mostly I was just so mean for not keeping the situation “private” (read: secret)#I'm willing to humor the idea of restorative justice when y'all can implement it better#because too often it requires the transgressed upon to forgive and the transgressor to...what?#guess what op! some racists mean it#MOST racists mean it#YOU can feel free to throw your titty in their mouths if you want#my Black ass will be cutting losses#I'm too fucking old and I've been in this shit too long to keep playing house with white radicals#sorry this a really sore topic for me because I've experienced the worst version of it#and I don't trust radicals who wanna put all of their eggs in the restorative justice basket#very white very low effort very exploitative of marginalized laborrrrrrrrr#this was a neat read but I'm not holding hands with you bitches anymore#if someone calls me the N word I do not immediately think “oh they've been coerced!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”#notice who makes the effort there!#once again putting the onus on the transgressed upon to do all of the work

^ wanna add these tags to the post if you don't mind because this is a vital issue to restorative justice being restorative and just and not just a smokescreen for further violence, and I want to give my thoughts on how we might navigate this (pre-emptively sorry for the very long post incoming, I'm incapable of making a succinct point when it comes to this topic).

I don't think restorative justice should be thought of as a fundamentally white thing, frameworks of restorative justice built by white people are frequently shoddy and poorly thought out. The idea of restorative justice being "a brand new radical theory invented by white leftist intellectuals" turns it into a hypothetical that fundamentally emerges from European culture, when restorative justice was initially introduced to modern Europe through centuries-old existing practices of various Indigenous nations. Restorative justice has been done better, by Indigenous people in the Americas and around the world.

I include some quotes in this reblog of this post about the Wendat nation's traditional framework for justice (which is only one version of restorative justice, ofc). I also touch on the justice system of DAANES / Rojava, a modern autonomous administration in Syria which uses restorative justice. Rojava is a Kurdish term, and the Kurds are an Indigenous ethnic minority that has faced intense oppression throughout West Asia, and as a result their model for governance in Rojava is built around being explicitly multiethnic.

Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.

Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.

It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.

The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).

Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.

If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).

& to be clear: when I say "coerced" I don't mean "people don't really mean it when they are racist." I definitely think they mean it. The fact that racist thoughts and desires and actions are socially constructed by systems of power and taught to people to maintain power, rather than being natural expressions of inherent badness or entirely neutral objective observations about the world, don't make them any less real. My point with describing this as coercion is to emphasize how integral socialization & culture is to people's choice to do harmful things, not to say they don't really believe in those harmful things or are simply tricked into doing them. People's racist thoughts and feelings can be as intense and genuinely held as they are the result of people socialized into a certain way of thinking. My goal is to make it more obvious to the racist people that the things they feel and think and do came from somewhere, because somebody is benefiting from them feeling and thinking and acting that way. They don't just coincidentally happen to believe racist things because they are such smart independent thinkers from such an objective superior moral culture; powerful people made them racist to facilitate their own greed and power, and they should be angry at those people for socializing them into immoral beliefs instead of getting angry at non-white people for pointing out that their beliefs are immoral.

probablyasocialecologist

As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profit

Verifying a workers’ income for government health insurance, and Equifax’s capture of that function, is just one illustrative component of the Rube Goldberg machine that comprises America’s rigorously means-tested safety net and its vulnerability to corporate capture. Complex eligibility rules and administrative hurdles to determine who deserves coverage and who does not are fractured across government agencies and jurisdictions. Many research studies, magazine spreads, and books have documented how this complexity keeps millions of eligible people from accessing billions of dollars in benefits they are entitled to – the unemployed are locked out of their unemployment insurance, the uninsured are never enrolled in their health coverage, and the hungry are denied food assistance. Vice President Harris’ announcement of “a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities” is perhaps the best recent caricature of how increasingly complex eligibility rules have failed to deliver for millions of Americans. And this labyrinth of eligibility rules doesn’t just fail the intended beneficiaries – the administrative complexity they create presents an enormous opportunity for profit by government contractors. After the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency was ended by Congress in 2023, I led a government team at the United States Digital Service to help fix state Medicaid systems that had fallen into crisis. As we rushed to put out fires in Red and Blue states alike we encountered the same problem – entrenched government contractors like Deloitte had charged millions to build error–prone systems that state governments had no capacity to fix. Billing by the hour, growing the complexity and incomprehensibility of these systems proved profitable. Changes that my team could make in minutes were quoted as requiring hundreds of billable hours. When we discovered that nearly 500,000 children had lost their health coverage improperly because of software errors, many system contractors were painfully slow to reinstate coverage for those children and fix the errors.

[...]

Again, new work requirements for Medicaid highlight the profits to be made from adding complexity to the safety net. Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in.

28 January 2026

#to read

digsdigsdigs

On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

precise writing about "AI" as a bureaucratic problem as well as some military history of precision bombing

digsdigsdigs

i usually try to share articles with a pull quote because i know a lot more people will read it than will click through. but Baker writes in a densely argued way with a bunch of references to other writers and all my pull quotes were like a thousand words long. let's try something else since it's getting more reblogs than expected. my brief summary:

large language model ai like Claude and chat-gpt has been taking up all the attention around discussions of AI technology, but there are other kinds of AI too, that can't be understood by the discussion of LLMs.

Maven is an example of a technology that uses AI that is not large language model AI. it's a tool made by Palantir for the US military to conduct operations more "efficiently." He cites that the volume of strike coordination decisions that took two thousand people during the war in Iraq in 2003 can now be done with 20 people using Maven.

Maven is the tool being used right now to bomb Iran.

Baker goes into some detail about the history of how making bombing decisions more quickly became a priority of the US military, and criticizes how prioritizing speed means de-prioritizing anything that might slow those decisions down, like checking information for accuracy, or checking whether it was a good idea to bomb at all.

Baker explains how the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was enabled by this type of "efficiency." He criticizes the media for discussing this as a case of "AI error," as if it were similar to an incorrect chat answer from Claude, and letting the people responsible for these decisions go unchallenged.

#to read

jesterattack

From The Intercept

"The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine"

"Daniel Sanchez is facing federal charges for what free speech advocates say is a clear attack on the First Amendment."

By Seth Stern

November 23 2025, 6:00 a.m.

Daniel Sanchez is facing federal charges for what free speech advocates say is a clear attack on the First Amendment.

nonbinary-jakey

a follow-up article now that the trial has concluded

What does [Daniel's conviction] mean? * the physical act of moving literature (transporting a box from one house to another, or potentially from a print shop to a post office) can be charged as "concealing evidence" if the government claims you knew an investigation was underway or imminent. * Normal distribution activities (shipping, relocating stock) could be reinterpreted as "flight of evidence" if law enforcement decides the materials are linked to a crime. * "Protected Speech" Can Be Reclassified as "Contraband": * The zines in the box included crimethinc, anarchist library, little black cart, and titles from many more distributors. is there a complete list? * Prosecutors successfully argued that because the zines contained the same ideas as the "Antifa terrorist enterprise" (per the government's theory), the zines themselves became "instrumentalities of a crime" This bypasses First Amendment protections by treating the published anarchist texts as "tools" of terrorism rather than speech.

ryzomeriseup

Holy shit. More people need to read this

#to read

dostoyevsky-official

For most of history it was obvious that one should schedule conflict so as to avoid clashing with the agricultural cycle. Autumn, when the harvest was in, was the ideal moment for big battles. That was why major military maneuvers were generally held at that time of year. Even as late as 1914 the harvest timetable may have played some role in the war planning of combatants.

The current war is disastrous from the point of view of the modern agricultural cycle.

The gulf region handles about one third of the global trade in inorganic nutrients and in terms of the agricultural cycle this is the key moment for shipments to be steaming out from the Gulf towards the major agricultural zones of the world.

[...] “The politicians are saying this is a war that’s going to last for weeks, not days, and when you look around at the world within four weeks, we’re in the middle of [the Northern Hemisphere’s] spring season applications and if these ships don’t go through the Strait of Hormuz today, they’re not going to arrive in time. … You’re talking about either having to switch your planting to a crop that is much less intensive for nitrogen use,” he said, or see yields fall. In Australia, while much of the fertilizer needed for sowing has already been bought, farmers around this time start looking to buy urea for dressing cereal crops beginning in September, said Stephen Annells, chief executive of Fertilizer Australia, a group representing the industry.”

[...] To see who will really pay the price however, look not to the developed world or big emerging markets like India, but to the weakest links in the chain - the poor, agrarian, smallholder economies of Africa.(x)

/// The global fertilizer market focuses on three main macronutrients: phosphates, nitrogen, and potash. [...] Potash and phosphates are both mined from different kinds of natural deposits; nitrogen fertilizers, by contrast, are produced with natural gas. QatarLNG, a subsidiary of Qatar Energy, a state-run oil and gas company, said on Monday that it would halt production following drone strikes on some of its facilities.

That shutdown puts supplies of urea, a popular type of nitrogen fertilizer, particularly at risk. On Tuesday, Qatar Energy said that it would also stop production of downstream products, including urea. Qatar was the second-largest exporter of urea in 2024. (Iran was the third-largest; it’s also a key exporter of ammonia, another type of nitrogen fertilizer.) Prices on urea sold in the US out of New Orleans, a key commodity port, were up nearly 15 percent on Monday compared to prices last week, according to data provided by Josh Linville, the vice president of fertilizer at financial services company StoneX. The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz is also preventing other countries in the region from exporting nitrogen products.

“When we look at ammonia, we're looking at almost 30 percent of global production being either involved or at risk in this conflict,” says Veronica Nigh, a senior economist at the Fertilizer Institute, a US-based industry advocacy organization. “It gets worse when we think about urea. Urea is almost 50 percent.”

Other types of fertilizer are also at risk. Saudi Arabia, Nigh says, supplies about 40 percent of all US phosphate imports; taking them out of the equation for more than a few days could create “a really challenging situation” for the US. Other countries in the region, including Jordan, Egypt, and Israel, also play a big role in these markets.

March is traditionally the start of planning the spring planting season in the US, which starts in earnest in April. US fertilizer buyers would normally be placing orders now, Linville says, in order to have the barges arrive in the US by early April. “If we lose several weeks here, we are talking about limiting the number of tons that arrive in our most important month,” he says.

Nigh says that most fertilizer demand in the US—around three-quarters—goes to large row crops grown in the Midwest, like corn, soy, wheat, and cotton. These farms are large operations; most farmers, she says, have made decisions about what types of fertilizers their crops will need and would be unable to pivot despite changes in global supply. “It’s a very critical window right now,” she says.

When energy markets are tight, the US has some reserve supplies—the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the largest emergency supply of oil in the world—that it can release to help meet demand. But there’s no similar buffer for fertilizer, Nigh says.

[...] If the war keeps going, both Nigh and Linville say that US farmers—especially those growing cash crops like corn and soybeans—will most likely see increased prices for fertilizers of all kinds. US farmers are already facing big losses after the trade war with China. (x)

/// “We shouldn’t underestimate what this potentially could mean for global food production,” said Svein Tore Holsether, chief executive of Europe’s largest fertiliser group Yara.

He added that the focus on oil and gas was “overshadowing” the impact on the fertiliser industry. “If you’re not getting [fertiliser] into the field of the farmers, yields could go down by up to 50 per cent in the first harvest,” he said.

If the disruption continues, consumers could see higher prices for bread within six to 10 weeks, eggs within a few months and pork and broiler chicken within six months, estimates Raj Patel, food system expert at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

[...] Analysts say the disruption could prove even more damaging than the food shock triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when energy and fertiliser costs surged and global food prices hit record highs.

“When prices spiked in 2022 it was extraordinary, but the market was able to adjust because Russian exports continued,” said Chris Lawson, head of fertilisers at CRU, adding that the “big difference” this time was that a blocked Strait of Hormuz was a physical barrier.

The impact on food in 2022 was more immediate because Ukraine was a major wheat exporter, said Patel, but “this time around the impact will be far more widespread”. (x)

/// Fertilizer manufacturers in India are beginning to cut output after Qatari supplies of liquefied natural gas, a key feedstock, were suspended due to hostilities in the Middle East.

[...] Rising prices of other raw materials used to make fertilizer, such as ammonia and sulfur, are adding to fears of higher production costs.

Pakistan’s Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Ltd. has also informed customers it will be unable to supply regasified LNG to their fertilizer plants due to the Middle East conflict, according to a company notice seen by Bloomberg. The country receives most of its LNG from Qatar and the suspension takes effect from midnight Wednesday.

“We are very much optimistic that the war may end soon,” Suresh Kumar Chaudhari, director general of Fertiliser Association of India said in an interview on Tuesday. “If the war continues, it will be matter of concern for us,” he added, without elaborating.

If the cuts last, India could be forced to step up costly imports ahead of peak agricultural demand during the monsoon season that begins in June. The country is the world’s biggest grower and exporter of rice and No. 2 producer of sugar, wheat and cotton.

/// Asia-based traders of dry sulfur are rushing to substitute supplies stranded in the Middle East as an intensifying regional conflict threatens access to the chemical used in fertilizer and nickel processing.

[...] About half the global seaborne trade of sulfur — roughly 20 million tons a year — originates in the Gulf and must transit the Strait of Hormuz to reach world markets. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Iran are among the main exporters.

Middle Eastern suppliers account for more than half of China’s sulfur imports, according to a note released Tuesday by consultancy SMM Information & Technology Co. With spring planting season approaching, sulfur demand remains firm as phosphate fertilizer plants run at high rates and step up restocking, the note said. (x)

/// Markets might not yet have fully ⁠priced in the possibility of a long war, according to Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein, who estimates that nitrogen prices could roughly double and phosphate prices rise 50% from current levels.

"If the supply shock lasts more than a few weeks, I wouldn't be surprised to see prices go back to the highs of 2022, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict began," Goldstein said. (x)

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