briefly

For the past month and the next and the next, I am in a far away place, doing the school run, laundry, gardening, cooking, shopping and lots more in a household where one person goes to school, nature school, gymnastics, swimming club, music and art clubs as well as bath, hairs, teeth etc maintenance not forgetting reading and drawing and playing, another person is about to publish a book with all the deadlines and let's not disturb stuff going on, a third person is organising and chairing a major science conference while on day three after my arrival she sufferef a freak accident resulting in substantial injury to her right hand which means I do a lot of wound care, typing and accompanying her to various medical appointments trying to ease her load because conference is imminent and important to her - and there is the dog and a cat and much more, so no, I don't really read or comment or look for comments on a regular basis. Bear with me if you can. If you can't,  sorry.

Women have very little idea of how much men hate them (Germaine Greer)

The absurdity of being asked to justify the need for feminism in a world where men in positions of extraordinary power were humiliating themselves for access to a convicted pedophile sex trafficker is almost hard to process. 

In that context, the question isn’t whether feminism went too far. It’s how anyone can still pretend it went far enough. It’s difficult to take critiques of feminism seriously in a world where male solidarity routinely outranks basic moral judgment. 

Liz Plank

 

One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.

The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.

The Epstein files (and we should remember that millions of documents are still being withheld, presumably to protect the guilty) are the underground waste disposal system of a very open and massive construct: the backlash against feminism. These are secret histories of a counter-revolution. Epstein and all those within his astonishingly expansive sphere of influence – bankers, speculators, political players, but also scientists, intellectuals and artists – are culture warriors. The war is being waged on women. What we see in the files is a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against one of the great revolutions of history: the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.

Fintan O'Toole

 

It’s not all men. It’s not all billionaires. It’s not all power brokers. But it’s a lot of the ones that have been dictating a lot of the terms about the place. It’s not even that it’s a lot of men, it’s the fact that the slippery networking, covering-up, the leveraging and assumed exclusivity of what was a men’s club cult seems so normal, so familiar, so assumed for them all. Like it’s what they do all day, in their outside lives.

Sarah Wilson
 

Kia ora koutou

 

Here I am, where birds the size of a child's fist make the loudest call, where butterflies the size of my hand surround me on my morning walk, where you greet the bus driver when you enter and say thank you and goodbye when you step off, where the sun is hot and dangerous and the sea is freezing, where the coffee is black and stronger than anywhere I can remember, where the wind can be relentless and overpowering, where the city is really a maze of walkways and trails and where every walk involves steep slopes, thick bush, amazing vistas and seemingly endless stairs and every encounter is on first name basis.

 

courage

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a student of Plato, another Greek philosopher who himself had been a student of Socrates, who is often refered to as the first moral philosopher, talked about a concept called hexis. I was first introduced to this when I was, maybe, 15 years old as it was part of the school curriculum to read ancient Greek texts - something I disliked greatly and therefore failed most of the time - add to that that the teacher was a veteran of WWII who, while he never spoke about it and nobody did anyway at the time, was highly suspect to us resulting in various boycotts and other so-called rebellious acts. Anyway, hexis indeed stood out and made me wake up in class as it is actually a reassuring concept if you feel you are stuck and unable to get on with life, something I had experienced as a teenager repeatedly - but who hasn't.

Hexis is more than a habit, more than a skill. Hexis is something we, if we put our mind to it, can cultivate as a state of being. We get there if we stick to an action or an concept, a plan, again and again, not merely as repetition but despite internal resistance until this resistance becomes less and less and the wish to do whatever it is you set your mind to becomes more compelling and eventually a skill set and a part of who you are. Or in the words of Jiminy Cricket to Pinocchio, if at first you don't succeed, try and try again.

The above-mentioned Aristotle said that we can become courageous by doing courageous things.  And to develop courage, we all start without it, we may be terrified, we may be doubtful, but if we just behave like someone with courage then we will eventually become a courageous person. Add to that Jiminy Cricket's wise words, always let your conscience be your guide.

(Fun fact aside: Socrates never wrote a single sentence, no texts, books nor pamphlets. What is refered to as Socratic thinking is what his student Plato wrote down in the shape of his dialogues. Having to read and struggle to translate these dialogues made my teenage life quite miserable.)

 

Anti-fascism is the concept and antifa is the courageous stance. It evolved in Germany in the 1920s as a direct response to the fascist threat and it is self-evident in any democracy. Without anti-fascism, there can be no democracy. If you want to live in a free society, a constitutional state and a democracy, you must be an anti-fascist. Fascism is not simply an opinion within the democratic spectrum of opinions.

Fascism is the opposite of humanity, brutalising and dehumanising not only its victims, but also its followers. That is why it must be opposed and all areas of our society must be protected from it.  You can't allow a little bit of fascism and watch what happens. Fascism is like lead in drinking water, even a little bit destroys everything.

 

The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in ‘cyberspace’. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing world-views and alternative visions of the future.

    Marshall McLuhan (Culture is Our Business, 1970) 

We have long memories. We remember what it means to be human, beyond our economic function as a consumer or voter. We have the wild world as our ally and our ancestors stand behind us. 

Charlotte du Cann 

 

And now for the final bits of packing, I am once again looking forward to experience the amazing wall-to-wall carpeting of Changi Airport.

I'll be gone for a while. 

. . . if at some point your eyes look at a video of someone getting murdered in broad daylight and your mind’s first instinct is to say but what if or but what about, I would urge you to stop, because I want you to be a person who understands that you are the only person who loves the way you do, which means that every person you see, whether in a video or in the broad daylight just outside the reach of your outstretched hand, is the only person who loves the way they do, and, honestly, if you refuse to see that, and if you choose instead to attempt to justify rather than mourn the death of someone whose love is a shiny, remarkable gem polished under the light of the same sun where you and I both stand, you are just like the millions of others who have abandoned the radical and wildly special individuality of their love to instead become people who hate other people in exactly the same way.

 

Devin Kelly (please read all of it here) 

concentrate on our ethical muscles

 

Dangerous pavements.
But  this year I face the ice
With my father’s stick.

Seamus Heaney 

 

There is snow, quite a lot of it, something that doesn't happen often here in this big fat river valley. It will all be gone by tomorrow but not before a night of heavy frost and ice. Looking outside, I can only see white and grey and black. 

Yesterday, I had the last of a string of medical exams and imaging tests and have been given the all clear for the long haul flight. Tomorrow I will start packing, summer clothes and bicycle helmet and the high SPF sunscreen lotion. Yesterday, I also deleted my instagram account, my social media activities are now reduced to reading a small number of writers on substack, a couple of blogs and mastodon, where I keep in touch with a group of scientists and climate activists. How weird it now seems, that initial excitement about social media and finding old friends from another lifetime and what has become of it, this strange addiction to scrolling and schadenfreude.

I want to continue exposing myself to the real world, and I know that - like the people whose homes are threatened by rising sea levels - I cannot do this without accurate information and that this involves a struggle with a great deal of dullness and nastiness in today's media world. 

It is so important to avoid seeking comfort in resentment, but instead have confidence in what people can achieve as long as they preserve their humanity as a core value. 

Because ultimately we have no choice but to love our world. We can follow our cynicism and our despair until the cows come home. But in the long run, that will neither change anything nor make us feel better. Seriously, there is no alternative to lovingly helping to shape the world. Otherwise, people who do not love the world will take over.

So, as a always, this means to pool my resources and energy with others to help rescue people from their agony of resignation, from their apathy born of despair - something I myself have known and continue to experience. But instead and without moralising, concentrate on our ethical muscles and our sense of community.

And remember, progressive movements have never been unified movements. We don't need to wait until everybody agrees or is convinced. Debating and arguing is part of the process.

To paraphrase Erich Fromm, without the practice of love of life, societies simply cannot survive.

 

I do wish there was less harshness to endure, less hardness for my soft body to push against, but what they all have in common in their endurance and adaptation is that they remain soft. I, too, plan to remain human, wide open to the heartbreak and despair of the harm being done . . . Let me not harden myself against all this hurt. Let me be owl down, seal fur, nudibranch flesh. Let me bend, give, flex. I plan to endure, and to turn towards cooperative efforts to right the overwhelming amount of wrong in the world.

 

Mary Beth Rew Hicks