yaymukund

mukund 27 they/them london ♥

[yaymukund]

[four drawings, clockwise: a monkey w a beautiful mane, another monkey hanging between two branches of a tree, a goat smiling to the side, and my friend's silly cat ♥ ]

[yaymukund]

[ballpoint portrait of my friend Vanessa of BUTANNA (facebook, bandcamp) holding up a mic at a concert]

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[ballpoint drawing of onyx, my friend’s cat]

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[image of ballpoint drawing of my friend Eli standing on one leg]

[yaymukund]

[image of pen drawings of three animals, each with text surrounding them: a king eider duck: property damage by protesters concerns me less than the racist police a saki monkey: property damage by protesters concerns me less than outing undocumented immigrants a bonobo: p̶̷l̶̷e̶̷a̶̷s̶̷e̶̷ fight respectability politics]

[yaymukund]

[image of monkey surrounded by text: property damage by protesters concerns me less than outing undocumented immigrants]

[yaymukund]

[image of duck surrounded by text: property damage by protesters concerns me less than the racist police]

[yaymukund]

[ top, pen drawings of a sad doggie, bird, and dax <3

bottom, ink sketch of grumpy vulture pacing ]

[yaymukund]

[goat sketches, mapped to emoji, in order:

😌 satisfied goat

😃 smiling goat

🐰 bunny goat

😼 determined goat

😐 neutral goat

😗 kissing goat

😏 smug goat

😔 sad goat

😊 happy goat

😉 winking goat]

[yaymukund]

[image of pen drawings. on the top, a wallaby, hornbill, cottontail rabbit, and a stern baboon. on the bottom, Max​ walking their puppy bandit in a snowy park with trees that turn into a giant black-tailed deer]

[yaymukund]

so which animal are u?

(photo of ballpoint drawing of happy bunny chewing leaf, a normal cat with curly hair, cutest sad kitten in a sweater, grumpy cat who just woke up, sneaky goat trying to trick you, unimpressed rhino who obviously thinks they are too cool for this drawing, graceful vulture, the friendliest goat with hair over their eyes, adoring dog with flower in their hair, badger deep in thought, an alert koala keeping watch from the tree, capuchin (monkey) babe (← thats me) and their baby, an angry komodo dragon, and noble wolf who may or may not be a spirit)

[yaymukund]

[image of marker sketches of an orange/grey cat, a green/blue goat, and a purple/pink cat]

[yaymukund]

Something that Republican presidents love to do on their first day of office which is reinstate something known as the “global gag rule,” which is that agencies around the world which receive US support for their health programs are not allowed to provide abortion of contraception services or even talk about them— hence the name “gag rule.” We love when we talk about foreign and national security policy to focus on the high geopolitics— “what does it mean the Kurds versus versus the Shia versus the Turks?”— but that global gag rule is gonna affect the lives of as many women and families as anything else Donald Trump does his first hundred days in office. Their lives are always on the line when Americans vote and it’s not something we ever talk about or think about but it’s a very real consequence of what happened last night.

Heather Hurlburt on Global Dispatches, “The Foreign Policy of Donald Trump” (25:07)

[yaymukund]

This past January, when I started [teaching the post-emancipation African American history survey], Obama was running in the primary against Hillary Clinton. Many of us still presumed that Clinton was going to be the nominee and then Obama became a movement over the next several months. I was watching this transpire in my course. I told my students in the beginning of the course I would not be talking about the election until the end of the course because this is a class of history. But I guaranteed them that there would be themes every week in the election in the primary battles that linked what happened in January 31, 2008 to discussions of what's happening in Reconstruction America. These narratives that Glenda [Gilmore] has already alluded to— white womanhood, the threat of the black male— these are long, long narratives and I simply can't believe that those narratives are going to disappear. Maybe. Maybe— I doubt it— but maybe they've altered somehow. Let's just see what happens once maybe the economy gets better or maybe once middle east strife becomes less confusing. I think that role of the racial specter can come up much more easily when we're not all hurting so much.

Jonathan Holloway in Three Yale Historians Discuss the Election of Barack Obama (soundcloud, 2008)

[yaymukund]

Working-class politics had so little room to maneuver in hard times that racial sympathy was shoved aside. In a famous 1844 public correspondence with the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, labor reformer George Henry Evans spoke for many labor leaders when he declared himself “formerly” an advocate of abolition: “This was before I saw that there was white slavery.” […] Workers on the very bottom may have negotiated the cementing of their class position beneath the artisan class by denying that position through celebrations of their free-white status as well as embracing it through unseemly— and unrepublican— activities such as racist mobbing and other forms of public racial antagonism. Thus did popular racism aid the formation of the white working class: “whiteness” was capacious enough to allow entry to almost any nonblack worker, and resilient enough to mask the class tensions that were worked out in the modality of race.

Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) by Eric Lott

[yaymukund]

It may surprise you or not surprise you that when we went to Iraq in 2007, General Petraeus and I said, “Do you know why these people fighting? Show us the data,” no study like [the Vietcong Motivation & Morale Study (1966), pdf] had ever been done. That was the period when the Secretary of Defense and military commander on the ground used to describe the enemy as “evil-doers” and say that “the evil-doers hate us because they hate who we are, not because of what we do.” And we said, well, let’s look into that. […] Based on [a survey of 24,000 people in detention]— which was partly quantitative and partly based on interviews— we determined that 70% of the people were fighting us primarily for economic reasons. Another 20% were fighting us because they had belonged to a former regime group for a formerly dominant social group that had been dispossessed by what happened in Iraq after 2003. They were fighting us to reestablish their position of social or political ascendancy. Less than 10% of the people that we were fighting were motivated predominately by religious motivation or ideology associated with Al-Qaeda. And in fact, a high proportion those 10% were foreigners; they weren’t even from Iraq. So that’s the sort of data set for Iraq and we did similar surveys in Afghanistan later the tended to show that basically what you have on on the ground in most cases is a very, very small number of irreconcilable fanatics who draw their power from their ability to intimidate, manipulate, and mobilize a much larger group of people who are fighting us primarily because we’re in their space and feel like they need to defend themselves rather than because they naturally support that small extremist clique.

David Kilcullen on Accidental Guerrilla Warfare in the Midst of War (youtube)

[yaymukund]

[image of marker drawing of Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin from Stranger things]