People who are anxious about surveillance capitalism shift blame to trans people

Our ignorance

Regarding our "ignorance" of how the modern internet works, Shoshana Zuboff wrote in 2020 that surveillance capitalists "know things that we cannot know" yet must "conceal their intentions and practices." And: "It is impossible to understand something that has been crafted in secrecy and designed as fundamentally illegible. These systems are intended to ensnare us, preying on our vulnerabilities bred by an asymmetrical division of learning and amplified by our scarcity of time, resources, and support."

Strict behaviorists, like Meyer and Skinner in the 20th century, believed that human freedom was an illusion. There was no free will. For them, regarding "the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance," Zuboff says: "I think of Dickens's Scrooge when he first encounters the doleful, chain-dragging ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley and denies the apparition, saying, 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.' So it is with freedom: an undigested bit of fear, a crumb of denial that, once metabolized, will dispel the apparition and deliver us to reality. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom.'"

The market aspires to "fabricate predictions, which become more valuable as they approach certainty," Zuboff says. Surveillance capitalists need massive, complete data sets, and so they've "hijacked the division of learning in society. They command knowledge from the decisive pinnacle of the social order, where they nourish and protect the shadow text: the urtext of certainty. This is the market net in which we are snared."

Conspiracy theories

In 2023, Naomi Klein explained that many of today's conspiracy theorists (generally on the right wing) are personally motivated by trying to make sense of a profoundly confusing world. Using environmental destruction as an example, Klein says:

"That ecofascist thought would surge in our particular historical moment is, sadly, predictable. We live in a time when having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and many of our governments consider bulldozing homeless encampments to be a viable policy solution. Meanwhile, every day brings us closer to a future of climate breakdown that, if it is not slowed and reversed, will surely lead to the culling of large parts of our and other species, hitting the most vulnerable first and worst. The process is already well underway. Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it, while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality."

There's a common narrative in which some nameless "they" are trying to control us through vaccines, 5G, and so on. "Snide" comments from those who are left-leaning tend to be "sublimated into ironic humor, like 'Wait until they hear about cell phones.'" Klein reminds us: Cell phones are exactly what the conspiracy theorists are trying to figure out. She explains:

"They know all about cell phones. They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata...). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” And [Naomi] Wolf, with her 'Five Freedoms' campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do. She is telling them that it’s not too late to get their privacy, and their freedoms, back."

Transphobia

In my view, this is also where a lot of transphobia comes from. Certain modern forces are taking advantage of the general population and, to use Zuboff's phrase, they are indeed "crafted in secrecy and designed as fundamentally illegible" — in response to which, some people, rather than trying to understand surveillance capitalism which pragmatically can't be understood, shift blame to transgender people as if we (trans people) were mascots and puppetmasters for some inscrutable self-interest and for incomprehensibility itself.

The books

Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Image of elf ornament from Wikimedia Commons. Taken by Jelene Morris. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Atlas Network: Pursuing oil profits

Important ideas from an investigative article earlier this month in the New Republic: Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters

Background

In 1955, Antony Fisher founded a U.K.-based think tank called the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Funded by corporations whose identities they didn't disclose, they distributed articles to universities that supported the corporations' interests. The IEA "help[ed] spread conservative free-market ideology in British politics throughout the 1960s and ’70s" and grew into "a global network of more than 500 member think tanks advocating for 'free market' policies."

In 1981, he founded the Atlas Network, which "initially only included the first dozen or so think tanks Fisher had helped to found himself." He then set his sights on other countries, "particularly in Latin America, where oil executives were concerned about leftist movements. One of the first investments Atlas made was in Venezuela, where it funded the launch of the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information, or CEDICE, in 1984." The Atlas Network "quickly expanded to include hundreds of like-minded member organizations, including all the Koch-affiliated think tanks in the U.S. (The Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council—some of the most influential forces shaping U.S. conservative politics—are all members.)" Today the Atlas Network is "a global network of more than 500 member think tanks advocating for 'free market' policies."

For more, see this book, mentioned in the New Republic article:

In 2018

The New Republic goes on to explain:

"When [Alejandro] Chafuen left his position as Atlas Network president in 2018, he went on to run one of the most prominent Atlas Network member think tanks: the U.S.-based Acton Institute, which has long pushed a Christian-flavored brand of climate denial. Acton also incubated the Tennessee-based Cornwall Alliance, an association of Evangelical think tanks with close links to another Atlas member, the Heritage Foundation. In a 12-part DVD series called Resisting the Green Dragon, released in 2010, the Cornwall Alliance described environmentalism as 'spiritual deception' and warned of 'dangerous environmental extremism.'"

This kind of rhetoric is exactly what we see today in countries moving swiftly to criminalize environmental and climate protest. While industries and governments around the world had plenty of their own reasons for categorizing environmentalists as extremists separate from the think tank influence, Atlas Network organizations have capitalized on that framing for decades. In recent years, they’ve packaged it in ways that have been turned into anti-protest legislation.

Today

Today, the Atlas Network organizations are portraying Indigenous-led environmental protests — in places like Guatemala, the U.S., Canada, and Australia — as terrorism.

This is also happening in Germany. For example:

In 2014, Frank Schäffler, a hard-right member of the German Parliament, founded a think tank, "Prometheus: Das Freiheitsinstitut," that joined the Atlas Network. Since early 2022, Schäffler "began describing them [the German climate organization Letzte Generation (Last Generation)] as terrorists, calling the group a 'criminal organization' and publicly demanding it be investigated for organized crime. Media outlets, including conservative publisher Welt and the more mainstream Der Spiegel, soon echoed Schäffler’s framing."

In early 2023, young Letzte Generation activists "obstructed streets in an effort to draw attention to the German government’s inaction on climate," per the New Republic. The police response was unusually harsh: "A young woman, with her hand glued to the asphalt, was ripped off the road by her hair; a young man was run over by a truck driver; a passerby punched protesters and was cheered on." A few months later, in May, police raided the homes of these activists across Germany and froze their bank accounts, alleging "the group was 'a criminal organization that was fundraising for the purpose of committing further criminal action.' It was almost exactly the response to Last Generation that Schäffler had recommended."

The Atlas Network has succeeded in persuading media outlets to frame climate activism within

"stories that discuss whether it’s 'appropriate' to throw tomato soup at the display case of a famous painting or glue oneself to a road — and whether these tactics endear climate activists to the public or not — rather than on what the protesters are actually trying to accomplish.

Media Matters’ analysis found that fewer than half of U.S. media stories on climate protest included anything about the scientific basis for climate change or the political stalemate driving the surge in protests. Meanwhile, the study found that Fox News has run four times the combined coverage of its competitors CNN (27 segments) and MSNBC (9 segments); all of the network’s 144 segments on the topic have painted climate protesters as dangerous radicals."

Source

Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters For decades, the Atlas Network has used its reach and influence to spread conservative philosophy—and criminalize climate protest. Amy Westervelt and Geoff Dembicki, New Republic, September 12, 2023. The article says: "Neither the Atlas Network nor any of the other member think tanks mentioned in this piece replied to requests for comment."

USA: The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is anti-LGBTQ

"The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) sent out a request for public comment on Thursday calling for parents, educators and other interested parties to write in and share their concerns and “best practices” around internet usage of kids and teens."
* * *
The request urged parents, educators, caregivers, technologists, advertisers and online creators to submit comments. To comment, go to the regulations.gov website, search for NTIA-2023-008 and select 'comment now.'"
— "Got an idea for protecting kids online? You can now take action" (unpaywalled gift link) The federal government wants you to weigh in on potential laws and guidelines around social media and young people" Tatum Hunter, September 28, 2023

On ntia.gov, you can see their press release:
NTIA Seeks Comment on Protecting Kids Online which links to their request for comment:
Kids Online Health and Safety Request for Comment
It gives the same instruction for commenting.

Unfortunately, the comment page doesn't seem to be available yet on regulations.gov as of 11:30 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 28.

Previously:

"KOSA: A Nationwide Anti-Trans/LGBTQ+ Bill in All but Name" And What You Can Do to Stop It, Julia Serano, Medium, September 13, 2023. At least at the moment (Sept. 28), it appears this isn't paywalled. If you hit Medium's paywall, try the same post on Substack.

Serano says:

"...the language regarding what constitutes 'harm' is written in an extremely broad way, applying to anything that might impact 'anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors' in minors.

And who gets to decide whether minors are being negatively impacted in these ways? State attorneys general. You know, people like Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who earlier this year announced an emergency rule banning gender-affirming care for most trans people of all ages. Or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who last year declared that gender-affirming care for minors constitutes 'child abuse,' leaving trans children susceptible to being removed from their parents’ custody."

Serano quotes Senator Marsha Blackburn admitting that this is KOSA's purpose. Blackburn referred to "protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture and that influence" in the same breath with KOSA when asked for "the top issue that conservatives should be taking action on."

Serano adds: "And it’s not just LGBTQ+ content that is likely to be targeted. Republican state attorneys general could also target information about abortion, or 'CRT,' or basically anything they oppose that can be flimsily tied to children’s mental health issues."

Serano's call to action:

"...contact your senators and representatives ASAP and tell them you strongly oppose the bill. You can do so via the website StopKosa.com — just enter your information and they’ll send a letter to your lawmakers or provide you with what you need to call them yourself. The Electric Frontier Foundation has set up a similar webform."

Jude Ellison Doyle says:

"..discussions are being held about how to make the Internet safer — but those conversations don’t hinge on finding legislative means of stamping out Internet-crowdsourced violence. They hinge on stamping out trans people.

The Kid’s Online Safety Act, a bill with broad bipartisan support and the vocal backing of Joe Biden, is nominally intended to shield children from “harmful content” or content that encourages self-harm (like, say, pro-ana content that encourages eating disorders). In fact, conservative lawmakers, including Senator Marsha Blackburn, are already celebrating the fact that KOSA will allow them to ban content by and about transgender people."

KiwiFarms Went Down. Now Everything is KiwiFarms. It’s been a year since the famous hate forum went down, and the Internet is more hostile than ever to marginalized groups. Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Medium, September 7, 2023

"U.S. Senator: 'Kids Online Safety Act' will target trans content" The lead sponsor stated in a video that it will be used to 'protect minor children from the transgender in our culture'. Erin Reed. LA Blade. September 3, 2023.

"Congress Is Pushing An Online Safety Bill Supported By Anti-LGBTQ Groups" Advocates say the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) will be weaponized to censor LGBTQ content. Janus Rose, Vice, August 3, 2023

"Senators revive kids online safety push as states bypass Washington." (subscriber paywall) Analysis by Cristiano Lima with research by David DiMolfetta. Washington Post. May 3, 2023

Kids Online Safety Act would target trans content, senator confirms "There's this giant censorship machine that also is privacy invasive." Anna Iovine, Mashable, September 4, 2023

The Internet Is About to Get a Lot Worse Happy Dancing #109, Charlie Jane Anders, August 22, 2023.

"Elizabeth Warren Just Backed an ‘Online Safety’ Bill That Will Harm LGBTQ Youth": The Kids Online Safety Act has gained support from right-wing groups that want to crack down on LGBTQ content, and now Senator Elizabeth Warren. Evan Greer. Vice, October 6, 2023.

Heads up

A proposed Minnesota Kids Code for internet restrictions. Oregon recently suffered a similar proposal.

Florida House Approves Bill Banning Social Media For Kids Under 16 The bill, which passed the House in a vote of 106 to 13, will now go to Florida's GOP-controlled Senate for a final vote. Sebastian Murdock, HuffPost, Jan 25, 2024

KOSA

Back in play, January 2024.

Does the government care about your internet privacy?

"The National Security Agency has been buying Americans’ web browsing data from commercial data brokers without warrants, intelligence officials disclosed in documents made public by a US senator Thursday.

The purchases include information about the websites Americans visit and the apps that they use, said Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, releasing newly unclassified letters he received from the Pentagon in recent weeks confirming the sales.

The disclosures are the latest evidence that government agencies routinely buy sensitive information about Americans from commercial marketplaces that they would otherwise be required to obtain via court order."

The NSA buys Americans’ internet data, newly released documents show Brian Fung, CNN, January 26, 2024

This has been a rotten bill since the word go. When I was a reporter, I had several Dem Congressional aides and tech lobbyists call me — some berating me — telling me I had become an activist for saying so. I hadn't, the bill is just a speech nightmare, and its primary target is trans people.

[image or embed]

— A.D.D. Sulzberger (@bencollins.bsky.social) Jul 30, 2024 at 6:24 PM

Make sure you have the most updated version of the bill (Oct 19, 2024)

Washington Post: 'A crown branded onto bodies'

Important history which I share:

"A crown resembling the iconic St. Edward’s headpiece from British coronations sat atop the letters S and C, apparently a stylized reference to the slave-trading South Sea Company. The accompanying text, written in 1715, declared that this was “the Mark henceforward, to be put upon the Bodys of the Negros to be sold & Dipos’d of in the Spanish West Indies,” under a contract between Britain’s late Queen Anne and Spain’s King Philip V.
* * *
Hot-ironing initials into the flesh of captives was a horrid but common practice in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. These brands were used to establish ownership claims, as a means of identification, for accounting purposes and to regulate sales.
* * *
[Brooke] Newman said she will reveal evidence in her upcoming book, “The Queen’s Silence,” that some enslaved Africans were branded with “RACE” to denote the Royal African Company of England."
— "A crown branded onto bodies links British monarchy to slave trade," by Karla Adam, Washington Post, September 28, 2023

"The reference would have been to the British crown," as the article explains, although "the interlocked Cs here also could have represented the agreement between the Spanish and British crowns." Some captives were branded twice: once with the SSC mark and once with a Spanish mark.

Image: A fleuron from the book A proposal for the relief of the new proprietors in the South-Sea Company, 1721. Wikimedia Commons

Newman's book is under contract at Harper Collins. Her two previous books are on Bookshop.

If you like, you may read my recent personal essay, "Transphobia is a bellybutton mirror" (unpaywalled "friends link"). It'speaks in/directly about branding, both in the original sense of the term as a tool of enslavement and in the modern sense of a professional image. This essay is an 18-minute read on Medium.

Proposed Alabama congressional maps are due to court today

Supreme Court Protects Voting Rights In Racial Gerrymandering Case: The court sided with plaintiffs who argued that Alabama’s district maps were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Paul Blumenthal, HuffPost, Jun 8, 2023

Nonetheless:
"Alabama passes redistricting map that defies Supreme Court ruling," NBC News

So:
The Supreme Court will decide if Alabama can openly defy its decisions: Alabama’s racially gerrymandered maps are back before the Supreme Court, this time with a dollop of massive resistance. Ian Millhiser, Vox, Sep 20, 2023

The proposed maps are due today:
Court-ordered Alabama congressional district maps due as Supreme Court weighs case, Mike Cason, AL.com, Sep 25, 2023

Oh:

SCOTUS tells Alabama it meant what it said the first time, Analysis by Joan Biskupic, CNN Senior Supreme Court Analyst, Sep 26, 2023
Supreme Court rejects Alabama’s attempt to avoid creating a second Black majority congressional district, by Ariane de Vogue and Fredreka Schouten, CNN, Sep 25, 2023

See also: Child custody in Alabama

While you're here:
Child custody in Alabama — parenting plans, child support, laws and more

Alabama GOP Candidate Who Attended ‘Segregation Academy’ Pushes For Defunding Public Schools: Monroe Academy was founded in response to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. Philip Lewis, HuffPost, Aug 8, 2024

DeSantis silent on coral bleaching

"...coral reefs throughout the Florida Keys have turned ghost white and perished in recent weeks amid a record-breaking, relentless marine heat wave..."
— There’s A Crisis Unfolding In Florida's Waters. DeSantis Hasn’t Said A Word. The GOP governor and presidential candidate has touted his environmental and economic credentials. He’s ignoring an environmental and economic disaster at home. Chris D'Angelo, HuffPost, Aug 4, 2023

DeSantis is now saying (September 20, 2023) that humanity is "safer than ever" from climate change, a phenomenon he does not outright deny but mainly discusses in terms of "resilience."

"...scientists are increasingly focusing on an emergency plan: collecting coral specimens and safeguarding them onshore."
One way to save coral reefs? Deep freeze them for the future, NPR, September 6, 2023

"For nearly two decades, ever since the levees in New Orleans broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, my research, writing, filmmaking, organizing, and public speaking had focused almost exclusively on aspects of the deepening climate crisis. And most of it followed a very particular narrative arc, one to which I had grown quite attached. The story went like this: Things are bad. They are about to get a lot worse. But we can avert that “a lot worse” if we embrace a Marshall Plan/New Deal/World War II–scale mobilization that will transform our entire economy so that it is largely powered by the wind and the sun, while giving us a historic opportunity to battle pretty much every form of inequality under that sun.

The catch was that we had to do it fast. “Decade Zero” was what they were calling it when I first went to a United Nations climate conference in 2009. By 2014, when This Changes Everything came out, we were already nearly halfway through it. Then Decade Zero came and went. In 2020, based on the best available science, we said that, while it was too late to stop dangerous warming, there was still time to avert catastrophic climate change, but, once again, we would need to cut global pollution in half in a decade. The good news was that, by then, there was a surging, intergenerational climate movement, along with a rapidly expanding understanding that system-scale change was the only credible path forward."

* * *

"That’s when I made the odd decision to follow my doppelganger down her various rabbit holes. More than anything, I think it was to distract myself from having to write about what I could no longer deny: that we appeared to be blowing our last best chance to change. I couldn’t face writing that, not me. And so I found something else.

Yet, the further along I have gone on this journey into a world of doubles, the more it led me back to where I began. The more I looked at doppelgangers and the messages they carry, both personally and politically, the more relevant that knowledge seemed to our prospects of becoming the kinds of people capable of getting off our treacherous path."

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

"Charlie Veron, a legendary coral scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the Great Barrier Reef, now in its death throes, describes the journey of his life as one of de-centering himself so that he has the headspace to truly see other life-forms, human and nonhuman alike. It was a hard-won lesson, which began with losing his young daughter Fiona, or Noni, to drowning, a tragedy that made him realize that her life was more important to him than his own. Leveled by personal and ecological grief, he aspires to dissolve into the reef he studies, to 'feel like a coral or a fish.' ...the climate crisis can be understood as a surplus of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere; it can also be understood as a surplus of self — a result of all the literal and figurative energy it takes to perform and perfect the selves fortunate enough to live outside the Shadow Lands.
* * *
We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human. Some are coral. Some are whales. And they are there to connect with, if we can get out of our own way for long enough."
— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

See also: The Philippines accuses China’s shadowy maritime militia of destroying coral reefs in South China Sea, Kathleen Magramo, CNN, September 22, 2023

Extreme heat might have been the ‘nail in the coffin’ for these critical Florida coral, by CNN Meteorologist Derek Van Dam and Eric Zerkel, CNN, October 8, 2023

Coral reef scientists return species following deadly heat wave, Axios, October 31, 2023

"The coral reef declared a major event to protest the warming waters, and expelled the algae living in their tissues. They could no longer sustain an endosymbiotic relationship due to the rising temperature in the water. It is a phenomenon called coral bleaching and it shut down ocean cities into underwater ghost towns. The reef went from lush green algae to frozen skeleton bones, and 89% of the new coral has collapsed in the Great Barrier Reef. This is a stress signal that can be seen from space. The corals reached beyond our human animal intelligence to call out to their lunar in betweener friends in space. One of my favorite teachers, Bahati, says that you can't ask the power system permission to protest. The coral bypassed the anthropocentric humans who explode fireworks into the atmosphere, because our systems of racial capitalism and earth exploiting are the source of the problem. Instead they reached out to those who can remember. It is a hopeful thing, how we humans, even in designing our wildest visions for travelling to other worlds and communicating through explosions, combustions, nuclear disruptions, that we believe we are the brave ones making the bridge, calling out in the darkness. We build aeronauting hero centered mythologies of Man starring as the brave molecule propelled into space migration. I am writing today to confirm that the Other Side Deep Space in the Darkness are laughing at us."
— "Proxima Centauri," Banah el Ghadbanah, La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc, 2022. p. 127.

"When I first got to know Kim [Cobb], she was studying past climate conditions, using coral to track changes in sea surface temperature over time. However, she was overcome with grief after witnessing firsthand the wholesale loss of the coral reefs on Kiritimati Island in the Republic of Kiribati, during a 2016 marine heat wave linked to the largest El Niño event on record. This grief propelled her towards shifting both her life and her career to focus on climate solutions."
— "Climate impacts and action with Dr. Kim Cobb." by Katharine Hayhoe, LinkedIn, November 28, 2023

See also: 3D-printed 'Cajun coral' project aims to boost Louisiana's fish and oyster habitat: Artificial reefs take shape on a sunken island near Port Fourchon. Tristan Baurick, The Advocate, December 2023

A new paper in Frontiers in Marine Science (December 8, 2023) reports that the water around Bermuda has changed from the 1980s to the 2020s: it's warmer, saltier, more acidic. Prof. Nicholas Bates, an ocean researcher at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, explained that "the surface ocean in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean has warmed by around 1°C over the past 40 years. Furthermore, the salinity of the ocean has increased, and it has lost oxygen. In addition, ocean acidity has increased from the 1980s to the 2020s." (WION)

A Record-Sized Deep Sea Coral Reef Was Mapped in The Atlantic, And It's Breathtaking sciencealert.com

In the Pacific too

Titouan Bernicot grew up "on his family’s pearl farm on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe." Then: "At just 18 years old, Bernicot set up Coral Gardeners, an organization focused on restoring local reefs, and in the seven years since he has gathered a team to restore and plant more than 100,000 resilient corals at atolls across the Pacific Ocean." (CNN, December 22, 2023)

See also

Climate change effects hit marine ecosystems in multiple waves, according to marine ecologists: A Brown professor and two Brown-trained scientists co-authored a research review proposing a ‘more realistic’ conceptual model for understanding current and future changes to marine ecosystems in the wake of climate change. Brown University, November 15, 2023

"The new most extreme category, Bleaching Alert Level 5, signals near-complete coral mortality, when at least 80 percent of corals in an area are experiencing mortality due to prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures." — "Coral bleaching is now so extreme, scientists had to expand their scale for it." Amudalat Ajasa, Washington Post, February 14, 2024

Corals are bleaching in every corner of the ocean, threatening its web of life: It’s possible the overall percentage of reefs experiencing heat stress may soon pass a record, Amudalat Ajasa, Washington Post, April 15, 2024

Report confirms Great Barrier Reef has suffered worst summer on record, CNN, April 20, 2024

Underwater Atlanta railcars create new coral reef off Georgia coast, Sara Gregory, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Aug 8, 2024

Read on Medium

My article: "Climate change is expensive, but that's not the point". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.

Affirmations from the book 'Surviving Transphobia'

Affirmations from Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.

"I was not at fault for the shortcomings of others, and neither are you. Don’t forget self-discipline and accountability, but don’t confuse them with a society coercing you to be someone other than who you are."
— Pooya Mohseni, “Them, Me, You”

"I have spent 30 years in the body of a woman, and 16 years in the body of a man. (The man is catching up, but the woman had a head start.) This bridge, this liminal space, is something I feel in my body. When we go to war with each other in the world, I feel it inside of my body. 'Us and them.' I can find no easy 'us' and 'them' divisions within my body. Everything is woven together. There is no division without ripping the threads that bind us together, that bind me together."
— Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, “Liminal Spaces"

"Being trans is a magical way of existing in the world that allows me to tap into a force that is beyond what most people can even imagine. My strength and confidence come from knowing that I am living my truth. Owning my identity has given my life meaning and purpose. And it’s something that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world."
— Chris Mosier, “Running, Away and To”

"So much of being trans involves holding multiple things that may not obviously go together, but each can be true. There’s a humanization here. I am both Catholic and trans. I am both a psychologist and a physician. I am both binary and nonbinary. I can have a Two Spirit guide even when outsiders may not understand. None of these cancels another out. I sometimes intuitively tell myself, ‘You can’t be this because you're that.’ But where did I get that notion? These limiting ideas come from colonization and the politics of fear and run contrary to many Indigenous teachings that trans, nonbinary, and Two Spirit people are sacred. We do not owe anyone an explanation of our truth, and our truth does not have to make sense to anyone except ourselves."
— Colt St. Amand, "Both/And"

"We need community for reflection, for the mess, and for the reminders of words still unknown. And whenever you do find your words, whatever they may be, you will always be more than them. You are vibrant, alive, and always changing."
— Lexie Bean, "When I Didn’t Have the Words"

---

I read Surviving Transphobia the day it came out, and I appreciated it.

I write essays about transphobia.

Why 'Surviving Transphobia' matters

Surviving transphobia is what we have to do.

An overview from Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.

Why is this book important? Jacobs writes in an introduction dated June 2022:

"Legislative and physical transphobia have spiked since the 2016 election and the subsequent attempts to undo all pro-LGBTQIA+ regulation, transgender and gender nonbinary protections first. The New York Times article '‘Transgender’ Could be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration' documented that regime's strategy to classify gender by chromosomes alone, denying gender identity altogether, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s so-called 'How to Spot a Trans Woman' memo was disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda."

Jacobs continues:

"Since President Biden’s inauguration, those states plus others have continued this brutal campaign through a similar pattern: define mental health and medical care to transgender and gender nonbinary youth as child abuse, then criminalize supportive doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, teachers, clergy, and school coaches. Threaten severe fines, loss of professional licenses, incarceration. Demand all mandated reporters inform on anyone who provides assistance or face the same punishments themselves. List parents as sex offenders. Have 36 states draft laws in 2021 alone to limit trans participation in sports, despite clear research documenting that we have no special advantage and that participation in team sports provides exercise, yields better grades, and leads to improved self-esteem.

They have also renewed calls for anti-trans 'bathroom bills' citing 'the need to protect women and children,' though these manufactured arguments are just thinly veiled bigotry. The opposite is more accurate; trans people are regularly victims of violence in public bathrooms, and there have been more accounts of cisgender male conservative lawmakers committing misconduct in bathrooms than of trans people. But still they would limit our access, knowing that if we cannot pee in public, we cannot be in public."

The first essay, "Recognizing the Existential," is by Jamison Green, who says that transphobia is rising today and that it isn't merely an illusion due to trans people's increased visibility:

"I’m very uneasy about the steady rise in antagonism being fueled by religious and right-wing extremism in the United States and elsewhere. Even before 2016, trans people had disproportionately suffered from violence, unemployment, poverty, lack of access to healthcare, racial and socioeconomic disparities, the transphobic policies of biased institutions, and the legislative assaults from governmental entities. Now it’s worse."

M. Dru Levasseur says in "Your Authenticity Is Your Power — Tales from a Trans Lawyer":

“According to LGBTQ Funder, trans communities receive only three cents to every hundred dollars spent on overall LGBTQ issues. Meanwhile, anti-trans groups are well-organized, well-funded, and fueled by hate and public ignorance.”

Some of the problems are within health research and the providing of healthcare. Asa Radix says in “A Call for Trans Providers and Researchers":

"...nearly half of trans medical students were misnamed or misgendered during placement interviews. This is blatant discrimination, creating a hierarchy of safety and opportunity in which trans medical students are inherently disempowered and viewed with skepticism whatever the setting, and where trans patients are the modern ‘Hottentot Venuses,’ objects to be examined and subject to the will of the providers.

* * *

We have no need for a test to determine if someone is 'genuinely' trans, nor for a scale to document 'how trans' someone is. Someone’s word is enough. Thankfully, many of these proposals fail because they lack willing participants. Often, I will be asked to refer people; however, we need not contribute to research so divorced from our realities."

Everything in this book is important for cis and trans readers alike to be aware of and think about. Not everyone has the same experience. Understanding that diversity is part of understanding the challenges that trans people face, which for any individual may be predictable or not.

I write my own essays about transphobia, but if you want a very clear overview from a variety of voices, you should check out Surviving Transphobia.

Klein's 'Doppelganger': 'The thing that becomes unfamiliar is you'

A few takeaways from Naomi Klein's Doppelganger:

To start with, the doppelganger is an individual: "the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you." The double is "an unwelcome kind of mirror, showing the protagonist a vain and venal version of themselves." One's own double “represents the most repressed, depraved, and rejected parts of ourselves that we cannot bear to see — the evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll," such that "the person encountering their double is invariably pushed to their limits by the frustration and uncanniness of it all.” Emilio Uranga called it zozobra in 1952; Alfred Hitchcock called it ‘vertigo’ in 1958.

In literature,

“doppelgangers consistently signal that the protagonist’s life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends and colleagues against them, destroying their career, or framing them for crimes, and — very often — having sex with their spouse or lover. A standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a long-lost twin? Worse, is the double a figment of the protagonist’s imagination — an expression of an unhinged subconscious?”

Socially:

"There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness. That’s the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the confusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people’s minds."

It tells us that "no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control."

But it's more than just a personal or even social event. It tells us about the culture. “When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself," Klein says, "it often means that something important is being ignored or denied — a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see — and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.” Watching Wolf (the Other Naomi), Klein felt "as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well."

During the “time of great loneliness” during the pandemic, “a lot of us were watching the world go by with our mouths hanging open.” Klein’s speechlessness wasn’t only “the result of my own highly specific Naomi-Naomi problem.” Rather, her feeling was more profoundly rooted in “a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them." Of all the meanings of the doppelganger, she's especially worried about "the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies."

Topics that progressives fail to address (successfully, or at all, in words or actions) are ripe for distortion in the right-wing conspiracy theorist Mirror World. That's a "larger and more dangerous form of mirroring — a mimicking of beliefs and concerns." That's what Wolf represents to Klein.

And so:

"all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other — whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang — well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived."

The book

Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

My story

Read my own doppelganger story, inspired by Klein's: "Transphobia is a bellybutton mirror" (unpaywalled "friends link". It's an 18-minute read on Medium.

Science: 'Forest carbon offsets are failing'

Brazil's President Lula has reduced the rate of rainforest deforestation, although deforestation is still occurring:

"Since taking back the Brazilian presidency, Lula has worked quickly to position himself as a climate progressive and global leader on the issue, bringing Amazon deforestation levels this summer to the lowest rate in six years — a remarkable reversal after the environmentally damaging policies of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

'The whole world has always talked about the Amazon. Now the Amazon is speaking for itself,' he said Tuesday.

Lula urged rich countries to complete their clean energy and international climate funding goals, arguing that a $100 billion funding plan had already become an 'insufficient' sum.

* * *

In remarks earlier Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted that G20 countries, among them Brazil, are responsible for 80 percent of greenhouse emissions."

— "‘The Amazon is speaking for itself’: Brazil President Lula puts climate and inequality at the center of UN address," David Shortell, CNN, September 19, 2023

Some people once placed faith in carbon offsets

Rewind two years: "The carbon offset market could be worth $200 billion by 2050. But what is it?" Ed Scott-Clarke and Max Burnell, CNN Business, October 18, 2021

But no:

Forest carbon offsets are failing: Analysis reveals emission reductions from forest conservation have been overestimated. Julia P. G. Jones and Simon L. Lewis. Science. 24 Aug 2023. Vol 381, Issue 6660. pp. 830-831

These projects aren't actually offsetting emissions when seen from certain angles:

"'Misleading offsets carry negative consequences for the climate because they are not offsetting the emissions released, for forest conservation because they are not reducing deforestation as much as claimed, and for the future finance of forest conservation because the reputational risks of being tainted by accusations of greenwash may deter future investments,' she wrote."
— Julia P. G. Jones, Ph.D., a professor of conservation science at Bangor University in England, quoted in Salon, August 24, 2023

AJ Sadauskas says on Bluesky (Feb 16, 2024): "I'm increasingly of the view that the whole net zero/net negative framing of emissions is often just a distraction from real action." You have to actually stop emissions, not just calculate "net zero with a bunch of carbon offsets."

Grow faster, trees:

Could turbocharging trees help solve the climate crisis? [Video] Hear why start-up Living Carbon believes bioengineering faster-growing trees is one of the better nature-based solutions for sucking more carbon out of the atmosphere. CNN Business, July 7, 2022.

Third time's a charm: What are *you* to make of SHORT FILM?

September 20 is the 1-year birthday of the novel Most Famous Short Film of All Time. Thank you, today and every day, for your time.

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"Stop. I saw you about to click away from this review. I promise you, this will make sense.

Or rather, you will make sense of it when you experience the book. The sense you make may vary from the sense I have made — the senses I have made, really, forming a new one each of the three times I’ve read Short Film.

As I read, what sorts of ideas come ricocheting in? Sheesh — the nature of time, the nature of reality, being trans, being Jewish, storytelling, logic and its limits, pop culture, evil… yadda yadda, I could list themes ad absurdum, and what would you have? A boring list-review that would likely scare you off of the book. “What,” you’d ask, “am I to make of all this?”

That’s the point."

— Dale Stromberg, Most Famous Short Film of All Time: A Review, Medium

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Cover art by Cel La Flaca

A few book titles spotted on preorder

As background, Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey (published 2018)...

...and her translation of the Iliad comes out in a week.

Published last week: Cecilia Márquez's book Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation

Will be published tomorrow: Ross Gay's book The Book of (More) Delights: about "the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us"

On pre-order to ship March 2024: Garrett Bucks's book The Right Kind of White: a memoir of self-understanding of white identity to support "racial accountability."

It could happen (and is happening) here: Transphobia is fascism

Naomi Klein wrote:

"As the transnational extreme right — from Giorgia Meloni to Jair Bolsonaro — landed on anti-trans fearmongering as a powerful adhesive to bind together its Frankenstein of “inclusive nationalism,” many of the same people in the wellness world who railed against the unnaturalness of Covid vaccines have begun to speak more openly about the supposed naturalness of the gender binary, and of traditional family roles. Far from the unlikely bedfellows they first seemed to be, large parts of the modern wellness industry are proving to be all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority, and disposable people."

— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

More from Naomi Klein in Doppelganger:

"Similar attempts at diversifying the hard-right base can be seen in Australia and France. These movements are still built around hate and division — on scapegoating migrants; on pathologizing trans youth; on bashing teachers trying to support these students or tell a truer story of their nations’ past; and on scaremongering about communists and Islamists. “Inclusive nationalism” just means that they have found some new blocs of voters who are also looking for scapegoats, and not all of them are white, or male.

The endgame is not hidden. Bannon tells his posse that they are going to “run this country for one hundred years, [for] every ethnicity, every color, every race, every religion — that’s an inclusive nationalism.”

[Speaking of France, in May 2024, over 10,000 people protested anti-trans legislation.]

And Klein again:

"As recently as 2020, Wolf had strongly pushed back against the attacks on trans rights by some feminists of her generation, hinting they had become tools of the right. Now she was making common cause with the very women who linked all-gender bathrooms with sexual assault. The results of this 'huge victory' showed, she said, the 'gigantic plutonium weapon” represented by “suburban women who will do anything for their children' — parents who had become aware that 'there are dark forces arrayed at their kids ... all kinds of weird abuse of children going on.'"

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Both of these tweets are referenced in "GOP Congressmen All But Declare War After Trump Indictment", Matt Shuham, HuffPost, June 9, 2023

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In the replies, another person recommends "the chapter "Antifascism through the Lens of Transgender Identity" by Emily Gorcenski in ¡No pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis."

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“The GOP’s obsessive focus on punishing trans people is, in every way, a feminist issue — it arises from fascism’s predictable and eternal obsession with white fertility and ensuring “traditional,” patriarchal gender roles.“ Read this story from Jude Ellison S. Doyle on Medium (friend link)

"It’s definitely been getting worse. A lot of people who have been out since the '70s and '80s are saying that this is an unprecedented level of public hate. Even if there's been progress around rights for a lot of people, there's a whole lot more hostility."
— Florence Ashley, interviewed by OpenMind, April 2024

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See also: "This Novel Imagines Fascism in the 1930s USA". It's a 4-minute read on Medium.